Thursday May 10, 1906
From the International Socialist Review: A. M. Simons on Justice for W. F. of M.

Striking union miners being deported from Cripple Creek..

In this month's edition of the Review, A. M. Simons examines the motives behind the persecution of the Western Federation of Miners by that band of Capitalist Criminals known as the Mine Owners' Association. It appears that the M. O. A. would like to cap its long list of crimes committed against the unionized miners of the west by the murder of the men who have led the miners through their long struggle with true courage and conviction.

Simons calls on all Socialist to stand with the leaders of the W. F. of M. who are now facing the gallows in Idaho, accused of murder in connection with the assassination of ex-Governor Steunenberg by the cold-blooded murderer, Harry Orchard.

From the International Socialist Review of May 1906:

The Western Federation of Miners.

AT THE present time it appears that the trial of the officials of the Western Federation of Miners will begin about the first of June. The intervening time should be crammed with efforts to educate the laborers of the United States to the character of the murderous conspiracy which is being hatched against these men.

It is well, just at this time, to sum up the evidence that exists concerning the guilt of the parties concerned that we may be the better able to meet those whose minds are filled with the tales of the capitalist press.

Although the records of the court have entered this case as that of "The State of Idaho vs. Haywood, Mover, et al," yet if that record told the truth it would read "The Standard Oil Co. alias the Mine Owners' Association vs. the Western Federation of Miners." At the bottom it is a civil, not a criminal case. The object of the persecution is not the punishment of crime, but the increase of profits and the decrease of wages.

In such a case as this the record of both parties is pertinent to the merits of the case. I shall not go back into the story of the Standard Oil Co., but shall deal only with its western representative,—the Mine Owners' Association. Neither shall I attempt to do more than enumerate the crimes of which it is so notoriously guilty that no denial can be offered.

What, then, has been the record of these two parties? During the decade that the battle has been going on between these contending forces it is a matter of common and undisputed knowledge that the Mine Owners' Association has displayed an absolute disregard for all law, justice and decency. Its members have corrupted elections or defied the will of the voters when corruption did not suffice.

The present acting governor of Colorado was placed in his position with a violent disregard of the will of the electors of that state. In other cases legally elected officials, who have not shown themselves sufficiently subservient to the will of the Mine Owners' Association, have been forced to resign at the point of the revolver or with nooses about their necks. Mobs of thugs, "bad men," gun fighters and toughs have been imported to terrorize workingmen who dared to ask for a larger share of the wealth they were digging from the mountains, or some slight improvement in the conditions under which they labored.

Miners' Co-operative stores have been looted and their stocks destroyed or thrown upon the streets to waste. Men whose only crime was organizing for the protection of themselves and their class have been rounded up like wild beasts by brutal soldiers and herded in open stockades, forced to work upon the streets with ball and chain, without being convicted, or indeed charged with any crime, and finally deported from their homes and the states of which they were citizens, under the guard of soldiers paid by the Mine Owners' Association.

Newspapers that dared to defend the cause of the men so outraged have been looted and their property destroyed. A telegraph and mail censorship was established to prevent the news of these deeds escaping to the outer world. Courts have been defied, when they have not been rendered completely subservient. All these things have been done openly and defiantly, and are not to-day denied by any one living in the locality where these battles have been waged.

General Bell, who had charge of the militia while they were thus outraging justice and decency, showed his respect for "law and order" by declaring, "To hell with habeas corpus, we'll give 'em post mortems," while another official engaged in the same work announced his platform to be, "To hell with the constitution." And these are the ones who are invoking the machinery of law in the name of justice.

All this says nothing of the bribery of legislatures to defeat the will of the voters for an eight-hour day, which was the first blow in the Colorado battle. No reference is made to the buying and selling of the states of Montana, Idaho and Colorado as geese are bought and sold in the market, by the warring forces of copper, gold, silver and cattle. Enough has been told, however, to show that one side in this controversy comes into court as Marx has told us Capital came originally into the world "dripping with blood and dirt at every pore."

How about the other side of the controversy? What is the character of the Western Federation of Miners? This is no ordinary organization of labor. This will be admitted at once. To begin with, it has a breadth of character and depth of outlook unknown to the average eastern trade union. It does not look upon every member of all other labor organizations as interlopers, nor is it even indifferent to their efforts.

It is the only labor organization in America that welcomes to its ranks as full-fledged members any man who can show a card of membership in any other union, and who is employed in or about a mine or smelter. No additional admission fee is charged. This union makes no restriction upon output, places no obstacle in the road of any man who wishes to enter the trade of mining. It asks no assistance of the employer in collecting dues, signs no contracts, demands no closed shop.

At first sight it would seem to be the "model union" for which preachers of capitalist morality to workingmen have long been looking. But we find that this union has another characteristic which, in the eyes of the exploiting class, damns all its other virtues. It refuses to be humbugged, intimidated, bought or cajoled. It insists that there is no common ground between the capitalist and the laborer but a battle ground. The officials of the W. F. M. did not sit at scab banquets with Standard Oil magnates, and so Standard Oil having found it impossible to bribe, corrupt or crush them, seeks their blood.

Worst of all, from the capitalist point of view, they recognized their brotherhood with the working class of the world and joined with them to secure the victory of their class. They refused to deliver their ballots into the hands of their masters, but insisted upon using them in their own interest. They demanded that the machinery of government should be controlled by those who do the work of the world, and that the instruments of wealth production should be owned by the producers of wealth. In short, they recognized the truth of the socialist philosophy, and urged those truths upon their membership. This was the culminating crime that loosed all the bloodhounds of capitalism upon their track.

Yet this acceptance of socialism is in itself one of the strongest proofs that they are not guilty of the crime with which they are now charged. As socialists they impute no responsibility to individual tools of capitalism, such as Steunenberg was. On the contrary, they direct all their attacks upon the system which produces such as Steunenberg. They know full well that the killing of any individual would have no effect upon the great struggle in which they are involved, and they would have been the first to have denounced any suggestion of assassination.

It has been an old rule of fighting tactics with capitalism to impute all its own sins to its enemies. So it is that capitalism which has reduced present family relations more nearly to a basis of promiscuity than society has seen since the primitive horde, shrieks about socialism "destroying the family"; after having turned men into cogs in a machine it accuses socialism of attacking "individuality," and so on. Consequently we are not surprised to learn that the Mine Owners' Association has sought to cover up its own criminality by shouting "stop thief" at the Western Federation of Miners.

Having at its disposal the entire executive and judicial machinery of the community it would have been an easy task for the Mine Owners' Association to capture and convict any members of the W. F. M. who should commit any crime. Indeed conviction under such circumstances would be but slight proof of the commission of a crime.

When we recall the frontier conditions of the society in which this struggle was waged, and that every deed of violence naturally committed in a frontier society has been charged against the W. F. M. and that their officials have been arrested literally hundreds of times, and considering the conditions, the character of the work, the society in which the events took place and the courts before which they were tried, it would have occasioned no surprise to learn that a large number had been convicted.

But the records show that while the courts are in the hands of their bitterest enemies, and the juries generally drawn from a non-mining population fiercely hostile to the miners, not one single conviction has ever been secured of a member of the Western Federation of Miners for any crime committed in connection with that organization.

So much for past records establishing the natural imputation of suspicion. On the one side we have a band of convicted and confessed criminals,—the Mine Owners' Association. On the other side we have an organization whose principles and method of organization are impossible of reconciliation with murder and assassination. Moreover their record shows that the most merciless and powerfully prejudiced prosecution and persecution has failed to fix the slightest taint of criminality upon them.

In determining guilt the question of motive always plays an important part. Who would gain by the murder of Steunenberg? To be sure some members of the W. F. M. had suffered at his hands. He was the principal tool utilized by the Mine Owners' Association in the perpetration of a series of horrible outrages upon the Miners of the Coeur d'Alene district in 1899.

It may be possible that some man who had been brutally beaten or bayoneted by the beastalized negro soldiery at that time, whose home was destroyed, or wife insulted, or who saw his comrades shot down like dogs because they had dared to be men, might have revenged himself upon the man who directed the conduct of these outrages. But the W. F. M. as an organization was little injured by these criminal abuses. The men who suffered in the Coeur d'Alene, and who were driven out from their homes in that locality, became active missionaries preaching the gospel of organization, while the story of their wrongs served but to illustrate and emphasize their preaching.

Moreover Steunenberg had been defeated for re-election, largely through the efforts of the W. F. M. He no longer held any official position, but had become a sheep owner, and was engaged in an armed battle with the cattle men for the right to use land which neither owned, and it is easily possible that he was but another victim added to the thousands that have already fallen in this fight between cattle and sheep rangers. One thing is certain—while he lived he was not only powerless for further harm to the W. F. M., but he served as a shining example of the political power of that organization.

The Mine Owners' Association, on the other hand, had used him and cast him aside. While he lived there was always the danger that he might reveal the criminal secrets of that organization. He might sometime dare to tell the truth concerning the powers responsible for the murders and outrages of the Coeur d'Alene. He could not under any conditions be of any further use to them since he was politically powerless. But if his death could be made to throw suspicion upon the W. F. M. it might be possible to judicially lynch the officials of that organization.

To sum up on this point of motive. Living he was of value to the W. F. M. as an illustration of their political power. He was powerless to do them further evil. He had really done no injury to the organization as such. To the Mine Owners' Association, on the other hand, he was a constant menace while living, powerless to longer serve them and might prove of great value dead if a means could be found to throw the odium of his death upon officials of the W. F. M.

So much for the indirect evidence which might go to show probable guilt. Now for what has been offered as direct proof of the guilt of the men under arrest. This consists almost exclusively of a confession of one "Orchard," who claims to have committed a score or more of murders, including that of Steunenberg, at the behest of the W. F. M. It is pretty fair to assume that a professional murderer is also a liar, and a slight examination of the published portions of his confession shows this assumption to be true, and that the "confession" is a tissue of lies.

One of the murders which "Orchard" boasts of having accomplished by means of a dynamite bomb was said to have been committed in San Francisco. "Orchard" described the character of the bomb at length, told how and when it was made, how he placed it in the place where it exploded and who was the intended victim.

Unfortunately for the coherency of his "confession" he had not read the later San Francisco papers, subsequent to the ones describing the occurrence of the explosion. Had he done so he would have found that the owner of the apartment house in which the explosion took place, having no particular interest in arranging events to fit "Orchard's" confession, had demanded damages of the gas company, and that the latter, after an examination by their own experts, at once admitted that the explosion was due to a leaky gas main ignited by a lighted cigar, and in accordance with this report of their expert the gas company paid the owner of the building $10,000.

Another crime to which he "confessed" as having been instigated by the W. F. M. was a train wrecking, which had already been proven in open court to have been the work of a spy in the employ of the Mine Owners' Association. This spy, by the way, has never been punished for this crime, a fact that incidentally throws a strong light upon the character of the courts of that locality.

It was upon this flimsy evidence that the last step in the affair was taken. This step, like all others taken at the instigation of the Mine Owners' Association, was marked with a complete disregard of all the forms of law. The men were taken at dead of night, denied all right of extradition proceedings and all benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, loaded upon a special train, furnished by railroad companies, controlled by the same Standard Oil forces that dominate the Mine Owners' Association, and hurried away to Idaho, into a locality where a jury could be secured whose minds had been filled with hatred for the threatened men by the press of the Mine Owners' Association.

It was thought that in this wav these men could be judicially assassinated, and thereby the W. F. M. would be crippled when wages could be reduced, the cause of industrial revolutionary unionism and political socialism would receive a deadly blow, and profits be increased and the system of exploitation granted a new lease of life.

But there was one element in the situation which the conspirators failed to take into consideration. This was the existence of a widespread solidarity of revolutionary labor, that refused to submit quietly while this black deed was being consummated.

The daily press was prostituted to the purpose of the murderous capitalist band, but a host of socialist papers sprang into the breach, and, as always with a working class movement, drawing strength from the very excess of the terrible demand upon them, made the country ring with denunciation of the conspirators. Thousands of Socialist locals and labor organizations sent out calls for great protest meetings.

Every day that passes sees the tide of protest rise higher, sees new periodicals forced to give utterance to the truth, new localities stirred with the sound of protesting voices. Now the Socialist Party has sent out the call to transform the great May Day celebration, the international holiday of labor, into a demonstration against this proposed judicial lynching.

Tens of thousands of leaflets and copies of periodicals have been poured into the county where the trial is to take place, that the men who are to act as jurors may at least know something of the truth along with the mass of poisonous falsehoods that are being poured into their ears by the plutocratically controlled press of the locality.

The battle, however, is not yet won. Capitalism does not yield so easily. The untold millions which are at the disposal of the prosecuting side of this case will not surrender without a fight, unless it is absolutely certain that a fight spells ignominious defeat. For these reasons there must be no relaxation of effort on our part. As the time for the trial draws near there comes especially a pressing need for funds. To tell a lie, or even to swear to it, is cheap and easy. To disprove it often means long and expensive investigations. This is particularly true in this case, where the nature of the evidence which will finally be submitted in court is carefully kept secret by the prosecution.

Up to the present time the sums that have come in have been painfully inadequate to do the work that must be done. It must not be said that these men were murdered for lack of the few dollars necessary to adequately defend them. Such a disgrace must not rest upon the working-class of America. Let special efforts be put forth in the next few days to collect the needed funds. If they are forwarded to the National Headquarters of the Socialist Party they will be promptly transmitted to the proper authorities.

There is but little time now to act. The trial will probably begin the first of June. Every moment between now and then should be filled with agitation and action. Let mass-meeting succeed mass-meeting, with parades and propaganda material telling the truth of this proposed outrage.

No argument, no quoting of law, no preponderance of evidence alone can prevent this legalized, blood-thirsty mob from glutting its vengeance. The only thing that will stop them in their murderous purpose and save the lives of our imperiled brothers is evidence that the hanging of these men, so far from stopping the organized revolutionary movement of the workers, will but give it new impetus. It is this alone that they fear.

It was because these men were socialists, because they were demanding that the workers legally and peacefully through their ballots take possession of the powers of government, and through this of the wealth of the earth which the workers create, that they were feared and hated. Because they were Socialists they were tireless, incorruptible, uncompromising, intelligent champions of working-class interests. Because they were Socialists they recognized the solidarity of their interests with those of the entire working-class. For that reason the entire working-class is interested in their fate. Their battle is our battle, their cause our cause, their murder would be a deadly blow at the heart of every labor organization in America.

For these reasons their lives can only be saved by the action of the laborers of America. If from one corner to the other of the United States there arises a cry of protest, a demand for justice coupled with the vow that their judicial murder will mean the beginning of the end of capitalism—if the industrial kings of America are made to realize that they will buy the blood of these our fellow-workers only at the price of losing all industrial and political rulership, and with it the opportunity for exploitation of the producers, then our brothers will be saved.

IT IS FOR US TO DECIDE.

A. M. Simons.

[Photographs and paragraph breaks added.]

SOURCE
The International Socialist Review, Volume 6
-ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company, J
July 1905-June 1906
https://books.google.com/books?id=d1dIAAAAYAAJ
ISR of May 1906
"Western Federation of Miners" by A. M. Simons
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=d1dIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...

IMAGES
Cripple Creek Strike of 1903-1904, WFM, Deportations to Kansas
http://www.rebelgraphics.org/wfmhall/rastall18.html
International Socialist Review, May 1906
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=d1dIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcove...
A. M. Simons, Editor of International Socialist Review
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algie_Martin_Simons
WFM Button
https://www.nps.gov/kewe/learn/historyculture/museum-guide-5.htm
SPA Button
http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/spa/socialistparty.html
Harry Orchard, Jan 1906, Darrow Collection
http://darrow.law.umn.edu/photo.php?pid=368
May Day Haywood-Moyer Protest Meeting, SPA, NYT May 2, 1906
https://www.newspapers.com/image/20300625/

See also:

C99 Tag: Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone Case
http://caucus99percent.com/tags/haywood-moyer-pettibone-case

The Darrow Collection, Haywood Trial
http://darrow.law.umn.edu/trials.php?tid=3

The Cripple Creek Strike
-by Emma Florence Langdon
Denver, 1904-05
http://www.rebelgraphics.org/wfmhall/langdon00.html

"Hellraisers Journal: Gen. Bell Promises "One Deportation After Another" from Cripple Creek District" by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/6/11/1306102/-Hellraisers-Journal-Gen...

NYT of May 2, 1906:
"THE RED FLAG CHEERED AT MAY DAY MEETINGS; Socialists Denounce Treatment of Moyer and Haywood."
Note: This meeting was reported in newspapers from coast to coast.
Note: The Times was often not careful with the names of radical organizations. Haywood and Moyer were leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, not the "Western Labor Federation." The Western Federation of Miners supported the Socialist Party of America, not the Socialist Labor Party. Most of those mentioned in the article (Spargo, etc) were members of the SPA, not the SLP. The two parties were supposedly at peace with each other at this time since the cooperation displayed at the founding convention of the IWW in June & July of 1905, but that truce (if it ever truly existed) was about to end (stayed tuned to Hellraisers for further developments.)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C00E5D8113EE733A25751C0A...