It is a privilege and a duty even by sacrifice to advance our priceless cause.
-John R Lawson
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Saturday April 24, !915
From the Chicago Day Book: William MacLeod Raine on the Lawson Trial
John Lawson with Louie Tikas
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From the late edition of yesterday's Day Book comes a piece on the trial of the Colorado strike leader, John R. Lawson, by William Macleod Raine in which Raine stresses the vital issues at stake in this trial:
Upon the result of this trial hinges the question of whether citizens have a right to organize, to gather on ground legally their own, and to defend their property and their lives against the attacks of oppressors.
The legal battle is not one between the state of Colorado and Lawson, with the death of Nemo as the point of dispute. There is no pretense that Lawson actually shot Nemo. It is charged that he was the nominal leader of a large body of strikers, some of whom are suspected of having shot Nemo during one of the many strike battles.
Through their hired attorneys the coal companies and the influence back of them mean to get the last pound of flesh from the men who fought them to a finish in the recent strike.
The desire is not to convict the man who shot Nemo but the man in command of the Ludlow tent colony.
From The Day Book of April 23, 1915, Late Edition:
GREAT LABOR TRIAL ON IN COLORADO!
MINERS' LEADER CHARGED WITH MURDER
BY WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE
(Author of "The Vision Splendid," "The Highgrades," etc.)
Trinidad, Col, April 23.-Colorado's great coal strike is over but the Rockefeller's are busy rubbing the salt of persecution into the wounds it left.
The trial of John R. Lawson of the Colorado Miners' Strike Policy committee, which began here April 21, is the crux of the legal end of the strike and the most important labor trial since the McNamara cases.
Nominally the labor leader is to be tried for the murder of a mine guard named Nemo, on Oct. 23, 1913, but the real issue at stake cuts far deeper.
Upon the result of this trial hinges the question of whether citizens have a right to organize, to gather on ground legally their own, and to defend their property and their lives against the attacks of oppressors.
The legal battle is not one between the state of Colorado and Lawson, with the death of Nemo as the point of dispute. There is no pretense that Lawson actually shot Nemo. It is charged that he was the nominal leader of a large body of strikers, some of whom are suspected of having shot Nemo during one of the many strike battles.
Through their hired attorneys the coal companies and the influence back of them mean to get the last pound of flesh from the men who fought them to a finish in the recent strike.
The desire is not to convict the man who shot Nemo but the man in command of the Ludlow tent colony.
Lawson was one of the three strike leaders received by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in his office at Wall st. during the industrial relations commission hearings.
The trial of the labor leader follows three or four others in several counties of the state. It comes immediately after the two trials necessary to convict Louis Zancannelli of killing George W. Belcher, a Baldwin-Felts detective, who was under a $10,000 bond on a murder charge at the time he was shot on the main street of this city in November, 1913.
The case of Walter Belk, another Baldwin-Felts' detective, free under bond on a murder charge, was continued and those of four miners dismissed clear the ground to reach Lawson.
The manner in which the prosecution of these cases is being pushed shows what a great effort is being made to fan the smoldering embers of the labor war. The fact that $100,000 of the $100,000,000 Rockefeller foundation fund is being spent in this state cannot prevent expression of the grave dissatisfaction felt at the conduct of these cases.
The first trial of Zancannelli was before Judge Granby C. Hillyer, Hillyer had just been appointed by Gov. Carlson to assume an additional judgeship created by the legislature early in its recent session. The chairman of the senate judiciary committee having this bill in charge was Charles Hayden, the Rockefeller attorney at Walsenburg, the county seat of Huerfano county.
The bill was denounced by the press as a scheme to give the Rockefeller interests a district judge who would go to any limit to satisfy the demands of those who wanted to show the world by legal results that the Colorado coal barons were right and the miners wrong.
Before his appointment Hillyer was an attorney for the coal companies. He made speeches during the campaign, according to affidavits presented by Hawkins at Zancannelli's first trial, denouncing the strikers as outlaws undeserving of any mercy at the hands of the state. These affidavits, made to show why another judge should be called to preside at the trial, were ignored by Judge Hillyer, who proceeded to try the case himself.
Ruling after ruling was made against the attorneys for the defense which astonished even the spectators. Yet in spite of this the jury disagreed, voting 8 to 4 for acquittal. The second trial followed at once. The county commissioners are required by law to certify 300 names as jurors. After only 30 of these had been exhausted it was suggested by Northcutt, who loomed large for the prosecution in this case too, that the judge summoned an open venire from the streets.
This was done, against the protest of the lawyers for the defense, and a jury was finally selected which had three members who were mine guards and a fourth who was a coal company doctor.
It was brought out in the evidence that Zancannelli had been in the union less than three weeks at the time Belcher was killed. He had not had time to acquire hatred enough to induce murder. Yet Zancannelli was convicted.
Of the open venire chosen for the Zancannelli case, composed largely of mine guards and others prejudiced against the miners, 33 remain as possible jurors in the Lawson case. A motion of the defense to secure an entire new panel has been overruled by Judge Hillyer.
More from The Day Book:
TABLES ARE TURNED IN THE JOHN LAWSON TRIAL
Small white coffins of children murdered at Ludlow Tent Colony.
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Trinidad Colo., April 23-The "tables were turned" on the prosecution in the trial of John R. Lawson, when demand was made upon local district attorney to proceed against the presidents of the Colorado Fuel Companies for the deaths of strikers during the recent strike.
Lawson, international officer of the miners' union, is being tried for murdering a mine guard, although it is admitted he did not take any part in the pitched battle.
The defense claimed that in the same way the heads of the fuel companies should be charged with murder for the killing of union miners. District Attorney Hendricks would not state what action he would take on the demand. The work of selecting a jury was continued today in the Lawson trial, with the state renewing its demand for the death penalty.
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[Photograph added.]
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SOURCE
The Day Book
(Chicago, Illinois)
-April 23, 1915, Last Edition
(Also source for Lawson with his wife and child.)
http://www.newspapers.com/...
http://www.newspapers.com/...
IMAGES
John Lawson with Louie Tikas
http://www.palikari.org/
Small white coffins of children massacred at Ludlow.
http://www.du.edu/...
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Ludlow Massacre - Woody Guthrie
I never will forget the look on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.
-Woody Guthrie
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