Page:Van Cise exhibits to the Commision on Industrial Relations regarding Colorado coal miner's strike.djvu/19

Rh attacked at dawn, burned to the ground, nine killed, Japs shut up in a house and burned to death. And all this done under the "excuse and provocation" representations of the agitators that women and children had been deliberately killed at Ludlow by soldiers! If this was true, why were any rescued?

Who killed these Innocent sacrifices? Not the soldiers, because they were not struck by bullets, the militiamen had not dug the pits, and rescued all occupants of the colony found therein. Then it must have been the strikers who dug the pits for their families to seek safety when they started hostilities. The majority of the women and children rushed for the arroyo. All were dressed, as the battle began after 9 in the morning. These few hid in the colony, and were used as the excuse for anarchists and black-hand assassins to commence an era of rapine and destruction unheard of before in America.

What an opportunity was missed by union leaders! Instead of sympathy the strikers now have the opprobrium of all good citizens. Instead of trying to win by truth they rest on falsehood and violence. Only May 18 the three most prominent union leaders in Colorado, McLennan, Doyle, and Law-son, sent out telegrams that "barrel-house bums and gunmen militia destroyed Forbes and Ludlow." Does this invite confidence?

Now, about the National Guard. Its condition is serious. Compelled to remain silent under abuse, hampered in the field by constant truces made by the governor with armed forces in rebellion against the State, its spirit is broken. How would you like to arrive in Ludlow, to hear the purr of a machine gun, the rattle of small arms, be down there to maintain order and uphold the laws, see hundreds of armed men in the hills shooting in your direction, and be told, "No; you aren't able to handle this situation, so the lieutenant governor has made a 48-hour truce in Denver"'? Them to have these men slink away from the hills and break out in other parts of the State? Again, to have a company in the battle at Walsenburg surrounded by scores of strikers, fighting for its life, and have the other troops forbidden by the governor to go to its rescue or even to fire if fired upon? Or to know the night before that Forbes was to be wiped out, to implore the officer in command to be allowed to go to its aid, only to hear that the governor would not allow a movement in that direction? Then to be awakened at dawn with a horrible din of small arms, the crakle of a machine gun, to hear the latter cease its roar, the rifle tire diminish and die away, and see smoke come over the hill? And you sit in camp, damned as cowards? And the men who did the deed of death and destruction march gleefully back to Trinidad and openly boast in the streets of their exploits. Do you wonder the guard is ashamed of its governor, has no espirit de corps, and wants to quit a game of vacillation?

But give this same guard (eliminating the mine guards and Company B, Second Infantry, and giving it a different chief) an absolute order, "You go into the district and keep the peace, and do it under martial law," and to a man the National Guard will respond, the situation will be taken over from the Regulars, and quiet maintained.

But law and order is no solution to the strike itself. The laws must be enforced and the violators punished. So much for the results of the strike and the needs of the State.

Now, for the merits of the strike. There are two sides to every controversy. When two men fight in a back alley with no onlookers they usually settle their difficulties. But when two large factions of society fight the State or the Nation must step in and end the conflict. Under martial law strikers can be deported or the mines closed. Neither is fair, yet each side cries for this remedy to be applied to the other. Compromise must be brought about. Both sides must win a little, lose more, and shake hands. But it should be understood that a settlement does not exempt law breakers on either side from punishment.

Recognition of the union is the main issue with the strikers. The right to run their own business in their own way is the contention of the operators. They further claim, and the evidence before the congressional commission bore this out, that the strike was called by a convention of delegates from the various camps, many of whom had worked in them for only a day or two, and that others were paid to attend. In other words, that the convention was not representative of the working miners of southern Colorado, and hence did not state any claim of their employees. The strikers object to the Baldwin-Felts men, but the operators have every right to object as much to the one hundred or more Greek soldiers whom they -claim were brought in by the strikers to act as gunmen on that side.