I stand facing the far east* sounding the voices of the babes of Ludlow.
I stand here bringing their tears, their wasted hopes to you,
the heartaches of the mothers, the screams and the agonies
of those who gave up their lives there; but they did not die in vain.
They stirred the nation from end to end and you never again will see
such a condition of slavery in Colorado.
-Mother Jones
*Reference to Rockefeller HQ in NYC.
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Sunday June 20, 1915
From The Day Book: John D. Rockefeller Jr. Found Guilty of Murder by Noted Writers
The Day Book of June 18th reports that thirty famous editors, writers, cartoonist and lectures have sent a letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr. informing him that he has been found guilty of murder in the first degree before the "bar of humanity":
JOHN D., JR., IS FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER IN
LETTERS SENT HIM BY NOTED WRITERS
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., whose father is one of the chief owners of Chicago street car lines, is held "guilty of murder in the first degree" and indicted " before the bar of humanity" in a letter signed by thirty magazine writers, cartoonists and social justice agitators.
The letter which was delivered to young Rockefeller yesterday is signed by two former Chicagoans, Floyd Dell, former editor of the Evening Post literary review, and Prof. Chas. Zueblin, former lecturer in the economics department of the University of Chicago.
Among others who deliberately point to Rockefeller, Jr., as a murderer are Hutchins Hapgood, labor editor of the New York Globe, brother of Norman Hapgood, editor of Harper's Weekly, and Daniel Kiefer, a Cincinnati business man and single taxer, chief backer of The Public, a weekly single tax magazine published in Chicago.
Harvey J. O'Higgins, who made William J. Burns famous through a series of stories in McClure's Magazine, also signs his name to the positive declaration that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is a murderer in the first degree.
They point to John R. Lawson starting in life as a pitboy in the mines at the age of 8, becoming a labor organizer and winning "the confidence and love of his own people."
We know him to be no murderer, but a man of unselfish soul. He has been tried and convicted before a judge and a jury in a purchased state. We, the undersigned men and women, having watched the course of events and made up our minds concerning them, declare our conviction that the guilt lies elsewhere.
We hold you, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., guilty of murder in the first degree and we here indict you before the bar humanity.
Realizing that there are fanatical and violent persons who might consider it proper that you should pay with your life for such crimes, we wish to add that we do not believe in capital punishment for any crime, however atrocious. We should not even wish to punish you as you seek to punish Lawson with confinement in a prison hell for life.
Algernon Sidney Crapsey, Louis Untermeyer, Art Young, Ryan Walker, Will Levington Comfort, Paul Kennaday, Donald Lowrie, Upton Sinclair, W. D. P. Bliss, George Strerling, Leonard D. Abbott and Clement Wood are other signers
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The Text of the Letter
AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR.
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JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, Jr., 26 Broadway, New York City:
Sir—A year ago when the strike of the Colorado miners was at its crisis, the Colorado protest committee addressed to you a series of communications, pointing out what had been done under your authority in that state. We implored you in the name of humanity to change the policy of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co., the destruction of the unions of the miners. We declared that if this policy were persisted in, if the strike were crushed with out compromise, we would hold you personally responsible before the civilized world. We declared that we would not permit you without protest to enjoy the financial profit of such a series of public crimes.
Since these letters were printed and published, not merely has the strike been crushed without compromise, but another crime has been added to the list: the conviction for murder and the sentence to life imprisonment of John R. Lawson, member of the executive board of the United Mine Workers, whose offense was that of the leader of the miners in their resistance to your company. And yet other wrongs are upon your program; for 82 other miners' officials and miners are under indictment, and are to be railroaded to prison by the corporation controlled courts and juries of Colorado. We feel, therefore, that the time has come for enlightened people who have taken the trouble to follow this situation closely, to speak their opinion concerning your course of action.
In April of last year you appeared before an investigation committee of Congress and assumed, under oath, responsibility for the policy of the Colorado coal companies. Soon afterwards came the Ludlow massacre, and for the first time the truth about the strike situation was forced into the press. You then endeavored to evade the responsibility you had admitted, and in a statement to the President of the United States, and in your testimony before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, you professed ignorance as to what had been done, and lack of power to prevent it. But since then we have been given the opportunity to read your correspondence with the president of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co., and we know, beyond possibility of doubt, that you directed the policy of the companies, and are personally responsible for all they did. It is true that the situation in Colorado is the result of a long series of acts of cruelty committed before you came into control, but these acts you have made your own, and the policy of oppression and violence has been adopted whole-heartedly and completely by you.
This policy bases itself upon a high ethical principle—the rights of the independent free laborer. But under the conditions of large scale capitalist industry prevailing in the Colorado mines, this claim is a bitter mockery to the workers who are its victims, and an insult to the intelligence of social students. The miners in Colorado live in towns owned outright and managed autocratically. They live in company houses, they worship in company churches, they trade in company stores with company money. They have no redress for any grievances through political methods, be cause the mayor of the town is a company clerk, the Justice of the Peace a company boss, the Sheriff a company superintendent. For 30 years you and your associates have banished American institutions from the coal counties of Colorado, and have reduced the mining population to utter slavery. You kill 12 times as many men in accidents as are killed in similar mines in Austria; your control of Justice is such that in most cases there has not been even a coroner's inquest—there has not been a cent of damages paid in some districts for ten years.
And when these slaves revolt, you decree the destruction of their last hope of redress, their union; and you decree it in the name of liberty! In the name of liberty you send in thousands of desperadoes and ex-convicts, called company detectives and mine guards, to terrorize helpless women and children. When these women and children appeal to the authorities and the State Militia is summoned, you enlist these desperadoes and ex-convicts in the militia; you clothe them in the uniform of the State, arm them with the weapons of the State, put the American flag over their heads and the money of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. into their pockets, and turn them loose with machine guns and torches to destroy a tent city inhabited by women and children. And when you are branded with this infamy before the civilized world, your published defense is that only one child was shot, that all the rest were suffocated by smoke in the underground refuge to which they had been drive.
And when miners, goaded to madness by the murder of their wives and babes, take up arms in defense of their homes, you use the machinery of the law, which you have owned and managed for 30 years, to sentence to a prison hell for life a man whose offense was—not that he killed any one—not that he had arms in his hands—but that he was the miners' leader, the moral and intellectual power which kept alive their resistance to your tyranny!
Colorado Justice
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John R. Lawson entered your mines as a pit-boy at the age of eight. He has educated himself, he has won the confidence and love of his own people. The American public was given an opportunity to judge him when he appeared before the Commission on Industrial Relations, a day or two after you yourself had testified. We know him to be no murderer, but a man of sterling character and unselfish soul. He has been tried and convicted before a judge and jury in a purchased state. We, the undersigned men and women, having watched the course of events and made up our minds concerning them, declare our mature conviction that the guilt lies elsewhere. We hold you, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., guilty of murder in the first degree, and we here indict you before the bar of humanity.
Realizing that there are fanatical and violent persons who might consider it proper that you should pay with your life for such crimes, we wish to add that we do not believe in capital punishment for any crime, however atrocious. We should not even wish to punish you as you seek to punish Lawson, with confinement in a prison hell for life. It is for profits that your crimes were committed, and it is by depriving you of profits that they must be punished—and at the same time prevented for all future time. At a meeting of 700 people, men and women of all classes, held last June upon the estate of Mrs. Charles J. Gould, in your home village of Tarrytown-on-the-Hudson, your own neighbors unanimously voted that your management of the Colorado mines has been such as to prove you unworthy of the responsibility, and that it was the sentiment of the meeting that the United States government shall confiscate these properties. This is the sentence we suggest for you; we call upon the voters of our country to carry it into effect—and we venture to express the opinion that it will not be many years before the call is heeded and the sentence carried out, to the last share of stock and the last penny of dividends.
Now We Will Talk by R. K. Chamberlain, from The Masses of March 1915
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Leonard D. Abbott,
Jessie Ashley,
W. D. P. Bliss,
Will Levington Comfort,
Sada Cowan,
Algernon Sidney Crapsey,
Floyd Dell,
George Allen England,
Herman Epstein,
Hutchins Hapgood,
Paul Kenneday,
William Balfour Ker,
Daniel Kiefer,
Sinclair Lewis
Donald Lowrie,
John G. Neihardt,
Harvey J. O'Higgins,
Frank Shea,
Mary Craig Sinclair,
Upton Sinclair,
George Sterling,
Louis Untermeyer,
Allan Updegraff,
Maude Davis Walker,
Ryan Walker,
Joshua Wanhope,
James P. Warbasse,
Clement Wood,
Art Young,
Charles Zeublin
[Photograph and drawins added.]
~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCES
The Day Book
(Chicago, Illinois)
-June 18, 1915
(Also source for image within article.)
http://www.newspapers.com/...
The Painter and Decorator, Volume 29
Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America, 1915
https://books.google.com/...
P&D Journal of July 1915
https://books.google.com/...
The Letter
https://books.google.com/...
IMAGES
John D Rockefeller Jr 1915
http://en.academic.ru/...
The Masses, JDR Jr Caught Red-Handed,
John Sloan, July 1914
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
The Masses June 1914 Ludlow Pancoast
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
Detail from drawing by K R Chamberlain.
The Masses. November 1914.
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
The Masses June 1914 Rockefeller Groping for the Light
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
The Murder of little Frankie Snyder during Ludlow Massacre.
A soldier referred to the boy's body as "That Damn Thing"
http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/...
Colorado Mine Owner Instructs Judge re grand jury investigation.
By K R Chamberlain. The Masses. November 1914.
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
The Masses Cover of June 1914
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
Now We Will Talk by R. K. Chamberlain, from The Masses of March 1915
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
Ludlow Massacre, Crucified
http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/...
See also:
"Hellraisers Journal [of April 7 1914]: Rockefeller Declares Open-Shop a "Great Principle," Is Ready to Sacrifice Lives" by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/...
"Hellraisers Journal [of April 18, 1914]: Rockefeller Stands Ready to Sacrifice Wealth & Lives to Protect "Free" Labor" by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/...
"WE NEVER FORGET April 20, 1914 The Ludlow Massacre" by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/...
DK Search: John D Rockefeller Jr + Ludlow Massacre +JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/...
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They'll Never Keep Us Down-Hazel Dickens
Well we've been shot and we've been jailed, Lord, it’s a sin
Women and little children stood right by the men
But we got that union contract that keeps the worker free
And they’ll never shoot that union out of me
They’ll never shoot that union out of me, oh no
They’ll never shoot that union out of me
Got a contract in our hand signed by the blood of honest men
And they'll never shoot that union out of me
-Hazel Dickens
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