Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1911-12-17


 Roosevelt has an editorial article in Z the current issue of the Outlook re. | lating 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 brut- al class selfishness in standing by criminals simply because they were of their own class This has been done by capitalists in the case ot capitalists who have been guilty o1 brazen corruption and by laborers in the case of labor leaders who have been guilty of murder violence The two offenses stand on a par from the standpoint of damage to the con- municipal contest the capitalists 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 ter ticket; and this prov ed in the end to be a lasting misfo'- tune to San Francisco, to the cause of honest business and to the cause of honest labor
 .'Snce the startling outcome of the MsNamara trial certain apologists of these men have made themselves conspicuous by asserting that t:ese depraved criminals. who have on the.r scared souls the murder fl so many innocent persons-all of them la5o"- ing people, by the way-are victims. or at w t. fanatics, who should re- ceive S. ni9,athy because they we.e acting in what they regarded as war on behalf of their class. TA plea is monstrous in it's folly and it's wickedness. It is precisely the kind of plea sometimes advanced on be half of crooked man of great wealth caught bribirg a leg slature-that he has to do it to prosect his business. We are not here dealing with any ot the kinds of offenses incidental to the sudden and sweeping changes brought about by modern industrial cond'- tions into which capitalists or labor men are sometimes drawn without any very great conscious moral tur- itude on their part. We are dealin5 with crimes as old as the law giving from Sinai, with erimes-murder anu theft-that have been proh bited ever since the decalogue was formulated. The murders committed by men like the McNamaras, alt ough nominal'F in the interest of organized lapot, differ not one whit in moral eulpao1- lity from those committed by tA" black hand, or by and baud of me:a cut-throats, and are fraught with all infin tely heavier menance to s3c'ety Yet, great though { e nenace is to jhe community, the menace to the cause of honest organized lahor is Sl'l 
 greater ard no duty is more lmpara- lively laid on the leaders of labor than he duty of aftirmatively free ing themselves and their followe. from the taint of responsibility fo. such criminals and such crimes. The labor leaders who by tseir loud championship of the McNmaras-as previously of Mover and Hayw cd - have succeeded in identifying thera with the cause of labor i'll the eyes of the public, have rendered an evil sery ce to that cause Mr. Debs and the extremists of his type among the socalled political socialists--l say sa- called because Debs and lis foll overs of the Emma Goldman kind are not Socialists at all in any true sense oi the word, but inciters 50 murder and preachers of applied anarchy--and the labor leaders affiliated with them, have always boasted of the part they played in the tr.al of Mover and Haywood; and in this case they re- heated their familiar tactics-and held mass meetings and scattered broadcast papers and addresses ir which they furiously denounced tn, effort to bring Wrongdoegs to justica 9 and sought to arouse every evil clas! instinct against all who upheld th' cause of law or sought to put stol to assass nation and murderous yio lence It is worth nothing that sine. aIcNamara confessed his guilt, MT Mover, the head of what purpolts !. be a labor .rganizasion. is renor'e in the press as commenting upon it not by denouncing McNamara for hay irg committed the murder, but by de nouncing jim for having confessed t