Debs, Eugene V. (Eugene Victor), 1855-1926; United States. Supreme Court
"Now, where there is exploitation there must be some form of militarism
to support it. Wherever you find exploitation you find some form of
military force. In a smaller way you find it in this country. It was
there long before war was declared. For instance, when the miners out in
Colorado entered upon a strike about four years ago, the state militia,
that is under the control of the Standard Oil Company, marched upon a
camp, where the miners and their wives and children were in tents. And
by the way, a report of this strike was issued by the United States
Commission on Industrial Relations. When the soldiers approached the
camp at Ludlow, where these miners, with their wives and children, were,
the miners, to prove that they were patriotic, placed flags above their
tents, and when the state militia, that is paid by Rockefeller and
controlled by Rockefeller, swooped down upon that camp, the first thing
they did was to shoot those United States flags into tatters. Not one
of them was indicted or tried because he was a traitor to his country.
Pregnant women were killed, and a number of innocent children slain.
This in the United States of America,--the fruit of exploitation. The
miners wanted a little more of what they had been producing. But the
Standard Oil Company wasn't rich enough. It insisted that all they were
entitled to was just enough to keep them in working order. There is
slavery for you. And when at last they protested, when they were
tormented by hunger, when they saw their children in tatters, they were
shot down as if they had been so many vagabond dogs.
"And while I am upon this point, let me say just another word. Working
men who organize, and who sometimes commit overt acts, are very often
condemned by those who have no conception of the conditions under which
they live. How many men are there, for instance, who know anything of
their own knowledge about how men work in a lumber camp--a logging camp,
a turpentine camp? In this report of the United States Commission on
Industrial Relations, you will find the statement proved that peonage
existed in the state of Texas. Out of these conditions springs such a
thing as the I. W. W.--when men receive a pittance for their pay, when
they work like galley slaves for a wage that barely suffices to keep
their protesting souls within their tattered bodies. When they can
endure the condition no longer, and they make some sort of a
demonstration, or perhaps commit acts of violence, how quickly are they
condemned by those who do not know anything about the conditions under
which they work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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