You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Sunday October 25, 1903
From the Appeal to Reason: "The Appeal Unionized"
The dear old Appeal, champion of many a labor struggle, has been through a struggle of its own as Comrade J. A. Wayland explained in the latest issue:
It takes a long time to get some people to realize what a proposition means. The Appeal has been preaching unionism and urging the working class to organize for years, and only just now has its own employees taken its advice. The printers would not have organized here but for my urging them to do so, but I waited for the other employees to organized or not, as they saw fit. I have repeatedly written that "liberty cannot be given but must be taken," and that men and women who would not make an effort to free themselves were not fit for liberty.
The employees in every factory, workshop and farm should organize a union, just as employers are organizing, and study and prepare for the day when labor shall take possession of the world and operate its industries for its own benefit. Labor will gain much by the social contact of organization-will gain lessons that it MUST know before it will ever be able to meet the cunning of capitalists and conquer them in the political and economic fields.
I hope to see every employee in Girard [Kansas] organized this winter, and with the organization now started there is no reason why they should not be able to dictate hours, wages and conditions of labor.
SOURCE
"Yours for the Revolution"
The Appeal to Reason, 1895-1922
-ed by John Graham
U of NE Press, 1990
Photo: Socialist Newspapers in Kansas
http://www.kshs.org/...
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Saturday October 25, 1913
Southern Coalfield, Colorado - Mine guards and deputies continue reign of terror.
Forbes Tent Colony-A few days ago, at dawn, under sheriff Zeke Martin and fifty deputies, some of them deputized company gunthugs, brought the Death Special back to the small colony. They surrounded the colony with four machine guns pointed at the terrified residents. The men were rounded up and held at gunpoint. The women and children were forced from their beds. The tents were torn apart, trunks, beds, and floorboards, in a search for guns. Four of the striking miners were arrested and taken away for the death of Luca Vahernick, the striker who was murdered by the gunthugs that ambushed the colony on the 17th.
Walsenburg-Thirty heavily armed company guards and deputy sheriffs rode their horses into town yesterday. They came to escort a scab's wife into the stockade of the Walsen Mine. Strikers along with their wives and children gathered and began shouting and jeering, "Scab herders, scab herders!" Some of the children threw dirt clods. Without warning, the deputies opened fire. They fired several times, and then rode off leaving three dead strikers in the street behind them. Kris Kokich, Andy Auvinen and Cisto Croci join Gerald Lippiatt, Mack Powell, and Luca Vahernick as the martyrs, thus far, of the miners' strike in the southern coalfields of Colorado.
Sheriff Farr and 50 deputies barricaded themselves in the courthouse as strikers and sympathizers in the town of Walsenburg picked up their guns and called for vengeance. The Sheriff called to Trinidad for assistance. Judge Northcutt, A. C. Felts and ten heavily armed guards arrived by train but were unable to rescue the Sheriff. The Sheriff remained barricaded in his fortress until strikers and town's people gave up the siege.
SOURCES
Out of the Depths
The Story of John R. Lawson, a Labor Leader
-by Barron B. Beshoar
(1st ed 1942)
CO, 1980
Buried Unsung
Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre
-by Zeese Papanikolas
U of Utah Press, 1982
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Friday October 25, 2013
More on the Appeal to Reason:
Appeal to Reason was founded by Julius Wayland in 1897. The socialist journal was a mixture of articles and extracts from radical books by people such as Tom Paine, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, William Morris, Laurence Gronlund and Edward Bellamy.
Julius Wayland moved to Girard, Kansas, and in 1900 employed Fred Warren as his co-editor. Warren was a well-known figure on the left and managed to persuade some of America's leading progressives to contribute to the journal. This included Jack London, Mary 'Mother' Jones, Upton Sinclair, Kate Richards O'Hare, Scott Nearing, Joe Haaglund Hill, Ralph Chaplin, Stephen Crane, Helen Keller and Eugene Debs. By 1902 its circulation reached 150,000, making it the fourth highest of any weekly in the United States.
More about the
Appeal here:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
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The Death of Lawrence Jones-raymondcrooke
Oh a miner's life is fragile
It could shatter just like ice
But those who bear the struggle
Have always paid the price
There's blood upon the contact
Like vinegar in wine
And there's one man dead
On that Harlan County line
-Si Kahn