The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1914-04-17
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About nineteen hundred years ago |
a carpenter came down to Jerusalem |
from the province of Judea He had !
recently gained fame as a great lead
er and emancipation. His mission was
to instill into the downtrodden work |
ing class of his time self-respect,
wherein each and all would refuse to
be slaves to any one.
He was gaining followers every day
and the Roman rulers decided to get
rid jof him. He could not be allowed
ttcOntinue to awaken his fellow work
ers. This was purely business prop
osition, as the Romans saw it.
One of his followers, Judas Iscariot,
was bribed to betray Jesus, and he
was arrested and crucified. Labor has
been crucified in various ways ever
since. and it has always been a purely
I business proposition.
Coming down to our own times, will
refer briefly to the so-called Chicago
anarchists. The knights of Labor
made wonderful strides in the sos in
organizing labor, and many sharp con-
4 fiicts with capital (the modern Romeo
resulted. In the spring of 'S7 the
Knights were organizing in Chicago,
I especially the Deering and Mccormick
implement plants. Something had to
be done. May 4 a meeting had been
held in a number of places about Chi
cagO and after one of these had al
most dispersed about two hundred po-
licemen charged into the remaining
crowd. A bomb was thrown from
somewhere, no one knows to this day
who threw it, the policemen were
scattered in much the same way they
would have scattered the crowd and
, as a result eight of the leaders of the
|, Knights were arrested and charged
with the crime.
They were hanged in the fall and
the world was told and still believes
that they were anarchists.
AS matter of fact, they were
, prea ching the doctrine of selfrespect
l trying to unioniZe the plants of the i'm
r plement concerns, which later became
/ the International Harvester company
a firm which today has many Rich
: mond workingmen by the throa
through control of local factories.
= With these firms pulling the neces
? sary strings in the city hall was pure
Iva business proposition.
In '92 our old friend Andy Carne
o gle fell out with his steel mill EN-
plOyoS DIT I1OIlSSledu, lcy wei
e protesting against the socialistic pol
icy of dividing up, dividing with And,
on Andy's terms. So Andy, who tell
}, today that he never had a strike, hiret
n a few hundred PinkertOns who flOate'
into Homestead on a barge and shO
some common sense into the strikers
Of course this was purely bushes
proposition from Andy's viewpoint.
In '94 the American Railway Unio
was forced into strike at Pullman
q and Chicago, and after they had wo
the strike and did it peaceably the raj
u ways in desperation pulled the string
r. in Washington and Grover Clevelan
sent the Federal troops into Chicag
s over Governor Altgelts protest, an
~ they shot common sense into som
more strikers.
n Debs was imprisoned in Woodstoc
h Jail for six months, and thousands {
good railroad men were blackllste
e forever, because they listened to tn