You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Saturday June 12, 1915
From The Masses: Max Eastman Condemns the Conviction of John Lawson
From this month's edition of The Masses:
ANOTHER COLORADO CRIME
My friend John Lawson, for being the best and finest-hearted of men, has been found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life imprisonment.
This is the first fruit of a series of criminal legal conspiracies against the life and liberty of strike leaders in Colorado.
It is being frankly so discussed, so grinned over, by the officials of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in Denver and Trinidad. It is being so discussed, if with a more detached polish, in the offices of 26 Broadway. Chairman Walsh's discovery of letters from Rockefeller to the Denver officials during the strike leave little doubt of this.
In one of those guerrilla skirmishes between gunmen and striking miners along the wooded foot-hills above Ludlow, a year ago last October, John Nimmo, among other professional shooters, was shot. That is all any body knows about it , from Rockefeller's detectives, to the man who must have shot him.
But John Lawson is found guilty of murder.
Why? Because a man of his integrity and restraint and clear-headedness is a danger to the interests that own the courts and hold a sword over the juries of Las Animas County.
His conviction of murder his sentence to life imprisonment, is a tribute to his virtue and intelligence. To the owners of Colorado, and to every conscious citizen who holds his peace now, in the face of this conspiracy, it is a seal of infamy. M. E.
[Max Eastman, editor of The Masses]
More from The Masses of June 1915:
Colorado Justice by K R Chamberlain.
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John Lawson's Return
A LITTLE knot miners and mine union officers stood in the Union Station at Denver and met John Lawson as he stepped off the Trinidad train. He was returning from his murder trial at which a verdict of guilty with a sentence of penitentiary for life had been returned against him in a court presided over by a Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. Judge.
Among the crowd that greeted him were two women. One threw her arms about him and kissed him, crying out that he was a victim of capital. The other quietly waited and shook his hand, saying that she hoped he'd win out.
Then a miner stepped up and seized his hand, saying, "It's a damn shame, John."
Another asked what the union was likely to do. But Lawson seemed to have something else on his mind. At length he said:
"At the industrial relations commission's investigation in New York John D. Rockefeller, Jr., shook hands with me and remarked, 'I am sincere.' I wondered what he meant."
"Just stand around this way and smile a little," broke in a newspaper photographer.
"I am smiling." Lawson replied.
CHARLES GREY.
[Drawing added.]
Samuel Gompers Condemns the Conviction of John R. Lawson
From the Everett, Washington Labor Journal of June 11, 1915:
"LAWSON MUST BE FREED"
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President Gompers Voices Organized Labor's Demand
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HUMAN RIGHTS ARE IMPORTANT
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Unionists' Economic Power is Forcing New Concepts
of Human Life and Liberty.
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John R Lawson at Ludlow
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"LAWSON Must be Freed!" declares President Gompers in the leading editorial of American Federationist, June issue. The causes that forced Colorado miners on strike are recorded, as are other recent events in that state.
[Writes President Gompers:]
This attempt..to hold John R. Lawson responsible in connection with the death of a man of which he had no knowledge, stands in vivid contrast to the studied efforts of John D. Rockefeller, jr., to establish his complete ignorance of the Colorado strike and hence his complete irresponsibility. John R. Lawson had nothing to gain by the death of John Nimmo. But John D. Rockefeller had profits at stake in the suppression of the Colorado strike.
Holders of property have created a tradition of the paramount importance of property and have exalted and exaggerated the part that property has in production. At the same time they have minimized and detracted from the service that the laborers render. Through their political influence gained by their economic power they have incorporated this misconception into governmental and legal theory. It is against this inequality, this injustice, that the workers are now directing the power of the labor movement.
Slowly the workers are learning to appreciate their great economic power. As producers they have the world in their grasp. Through their economic power they have been slowly injecting into political and legal thought the conception of the sacredness of human life and the paramount importance of humanity. They are trying to establish a real equality of opportunity in industrial and political affairs; they are trying to secure equal governmental protection to all human beings. This is the real revolution the labor movement is working...
The great injustice and wrong already inflicted on Lawson must be undone and righted.
John R. Lawson must be freed!
~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCES
The Masses
(New York, New York)
-of June 1915
(Also source for drawing by Maurice Becker.)
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
The Labor Journal
(Everett, Washington)
-June 11, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/...
IMAGES
Colorado Justice by K R Chamberlain.
The Masses. November 1914
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
John Lawson during the strike,
about October 1913
http://ludlowsymposium.wordpress.com/...
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Save The Hammer For The Man - Tom Morello & Ben Harper
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