You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Tuesday September 15, 1903
Editorial from the Rocky Mountain News: "BELL SHOULD BE REMOVED"
Adjutant General Sherman Bell should be relieved and removed from command of the troops at Cripple Creek. His mental characteristics are such as to make him an unsafe and even dangerous person to hold that position. This has been shown by his conduct since he went to the district in his disregard of the law and the most ordinary rights of citizens.
The troops have been used to make domiciliary visits, to enter peaceable meetings by force of arms and to make arrests without warrant or indictment and without giving information to the persons arrested or to the public of the reasons of the arrests. Some even are being held forcibly in durance without charge of any kind against them.
Granting that the governor was sincere in the belief that the troops were necessary in the district, his first great mistake was to consent that the cost of sending them should be paid by one of the parties to the controversy. The officer in command looks upon himself and his troops as in a sense the employees of that party, and it is not to be doubted that the mine owners have driven Bell to do illegal acts which have marked his sway. He and they protest that there is no martial law; while martial law prevails in fact almost to the last extreme. When men are arrested and place in confinement without charges against them, solely by the order of the general commanding, it is martial law.
The troops of the state when called out on such occasion, should act solely as assistants to the civil authorities in preserving the peace. The officer in command has no right whatever to undertake to set aside civil authority and make his own whims the sole law.
The officer in command in Cripple Creek should be calm, self-controlled and responsible, and as Bell is not qualified in any of those particulars, the governor should repair, so far as possible, the harm already done by removing him at once. A man of demonstrated unfitness should not occupy a place of such great trust at a time when so much is involved as is the case in the Cripple Creek district at the present time.
SOURCE
The Cripple Creek Strike
-by Emma F Langdon
(Part I, 1st pub 1904)
NY, 1969
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Monday September 15, 1913
Trinidad, Colorado - District 15 of U. M. W. of A. Meeting in Special Convention
The Special Convention of District 15 of the United Mine Workers of America begins today in Trinidad, Colorado. All efforts to negotiate with the mine owners has been exhausted, and it is expected that a strike call will be issued which could shut down the coal mines of the entire state of Colorado. Delegates from Huerfano County have made their way into Trinidad despite the declaration by Sheriff Jefferson Farr that not a single miner from his district would make it to the convention. Apparently, Farr and his 326 deputies were no match for the determined union coal miners.
Mother Jones is in Trinidad and will address the Convention tomorrow.
SOURCEs
Out of the Depths
Barron B. Beshoar
(1st ed 1942)
CO, 1980
The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones
-ed by Edward M Steel
U of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
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Sunday September 15, 2013
From Working In These Times: "Labor’s Makeover"
Reporting from the AFL-CIO Convention, David Moberg addresses the question of alternative forms of worker organization and the response of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka to those organizing efforts:
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, told the federation’s quadrennial convention in Los Angeles on Monday that he wants the federation of unions to broaden itself into a new movement that includes all working people, not only those in traditional labor unions. And he wants that working-class movement to be the cornerstone of a more closely knit, broadly based progressive movement....
"To turn America right-side-up,” he said, “we need a real working-class movement.” That would be a movement of “the 99 percent,” he said, as opposed to the 11 percent now in labor unions, most of whom work under negotiated collective bargaining agreements.
Any worker could—and every worker should—join this new movement, Trumka continued. Neither the government nor employers, both of whom now heavily influence who forms unions, should be able to decide whether a worker can join this movement....
Read the full article here:
http://inthesetimes.com/...
Working America:
http://www.workingamerica.org/
Workplace Rights:
http://www.workingamerica.org/...
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Better World A-Comin' - Woody Guthrie
There's a better world that's a-coming
Tell you why why why
Better world a-coming I'll tell you why
Out of marching out of battling
You can hear the chains a-rattling
There's a better world that's a-coming
I'll tell you why
-Woody Guthrie