The Bemidji daily pioneer., 1911-12-21
ROOSEVELT on MCNAMARA CASE.

1u0OuOIc ICOOSCVcAC Ids oil tu1COI-
ial article in the current issue of the
Outlook relating to the Mcnamara
case, entitled, Murder Is Murder"
The article says:
"Not only laboring men, but busi-
ness men, capitalists, have at times
shown the worst form of class con-
sciousness of sinister and bru-
tai class selfshness in standing by
criminals simply because they were
of their own class. This has been
done by capitalists in the case of
capitalists who have been guilty of
brazen corruption, and by laborers
in the case of labor leaders who have
been guilty of murderous violence.
The two ofenses stand on par
from the standpoint of damage to
the community. In San Francisco
in one municipal contest the capital
lists who desired to be free from all
check on corruption and the labor
leaders who desired to be free from
all check on lawless violence struck
hands and elected their ticket; and
this proved in the end to be a last
ing misfortune to San Francisco, to
the cause of honest business, and to
the cause of honest labor.
''Since the startling outcome of
the McMamara trial certain apollo
gists of these men have made them
selves CONSPICUOUS by asserting that
these depraved criminals, who have
on their scared souls the murder Of
so many innocent persons-all of
them laboring people, by the way
are 'victims,' or at worst fanatics,
who should receive sympathy be-
cause they were acting in what they
regarded as a war on behalf of
their class! The plea is monstrous
in it's folly and it's wickedness. 1t is
precisely the kind of plea sometimes
advanced on behalf of a crooked
man of great wealth caught bribing
Legislature-that he has to do it
to protect his business. We are not
here dealing with any of the kinds
of offenses incidental to the sudden
and sweeping changes brought about
by modern industrial conditions into
which capitalists or labor men are
sometimes drawn without any very
great conscious moral turpitude on
their part.
"We are dealing with crimes as
old as the lawgiving from Sinai,
with crimes-murder and theft
that have been prohibited ever
since the decalogue was formulated.
The murders committed by men like
the McNamaras, although nominally
in the interest of organized labor,
differ not one whit in moral
culpability from those committed by
the black hand or by any band of
mere cutthroats, and are fraught
with an infinitely heavier menace to
society.
"Yet, great though the menace is
to the community, the menace to the
cause of honest organized labor is
still greater, and no duty is more
imperatively laid on the leaders of
labor than the duty of affirmatively
freeing themselves and their follow
ers from the taint of responsibility
for such criminals and such crimes.
The labor leaders who by their loud
championship of the McNamaras -
as previously of Meyer and Hayward
have succeeded in identifying
them with the cause of labor in the
eyes of the public, have rendered an
evil service to that cause. Mr.. Debs
and the extremists of his type
among the so-called political So
cialists- 81 say so-called because
Debs and his followers of the Emma
Goldman kind, are not socialists at
all in any true sense of the word but
mere inciters to murder and preach
ers of applied anarchy-and the la
Dor leaders affiliated with them have
always boasted of the part they play
ed in the trial of Meyer and Hay
wood; and in this case they repeat
ed their familiar tactics, and held
mass meetings and scattered broad
cast papers and addresses in which
they furiously denounced the effort
to bring wrongdoers to justice, and
sought to arouse every evil class in
stinct against all who upheld the
cause of law or sought to put stop
to assassination and murderous vio-
lence"