Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
-Mother Jones
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Saturday July 4, 1914
From the International Socialist Review: Poem by A Paint Creek Miner
WHO IS TO BLAME?
A VOICE FROM THE PIT-LUDLOW
(Holly Grove Not Forgotten)
By A PAINT CREEK MINER
WILD volleys and volleys of murderous lead
And whirlwinds of air-leaping flame,
With hell-screaming agony writhing and red
In fields that were calm ere the yellow-legs came!
From the tattered black village Death rears up his head
And leeringly numbers the names of the dead.
"But who is to blame?" cries the voice from the pit.
And there, 'mid the embers that some one had lit,
Pale children are weeping alone;
While women and babies are strewn in the pit.
Disfigured and mangled and burned to the bone,
With red gaping wounds where the bullets have bit.
"And who is to blame?" cries the voice from the pit.
"O, "who is to blame for the shot and the flame?"
Cries the voice from the depths of the pit.
"I am covered with mud and spattered with blood;
My children have ashes and blood in their hair. . . .
O, who is to blame for the misery there.....?
In this murderous game I will find who's to blame
And shout to the whole world the fiendish name!"
Quoth Death, "I have shown their encampment before —
My own most dependable crew.
So why do you roar and plead and implore,
I have brought them from Hades expressly for you;
They are yellow-legged curs who are greedy for gore
And mine-guards who clamour for more and for more. ..."
"But WHO is to blame?" cried the voice from the pit.
"Who is to blame for the shot and the flame—
The machine-guns that sputter and spit,
What tyrant serene is directing unseen
His black-hearted cowards who kill at command—
The safe one who orders his own hellish band
To slaughter and slay with an iron-gloved hand. . . .
O, HE is to blame for the gun and the brand!''
Wild volleys and volleys of murderous lead,
And whirlwinds of air-leaping flame;
With hell-screaming agony writhing and red
In fields that were calm ere the yellow-legs came.
In the black smoking ruins does Nemesis sit
With a burned-out torch that some one had lit
"And WHO IS TO BLAME?" cries the voice from the pit.
SOURCE
International Socialist Review
-of July 1914
From:
The International Socialist Review, Volume 15
Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
C.H. Kerr, 1914
http://books.google.com/...
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Friday July 4, 2014
More on Ralph Chaplin and the Writing of "A Voice from the Pit-Ludlow"
Ralph Chaplin
In his autobiography Ralph Chaplin described his bitter mood as he wrote this and others of his Paint Creek Miner poems:
...When the smoke [from the Ludlow Massacre] cleared away, militia officers were acquitted of blame by court-martial, and the grand jury returned one hundred and sixty-three indictments for murder, not against the company gunmen who had done the killing, but against miners and union officials. Ryan Walker, Upton Sinclair, George Sterling the poet, and a small group of liberal women protested the Ludlow massacre by picketing the ritzy offices of John D. Rockefeller in New York City. Pictures of the "death watch" dressed in black or wearing black armbands appeared in all the papers. I sat up nights as reports of the violence came through, thinking violent thoughts and writing very violent verses about the affair. One poem was published subsequently in the International Socialist Review. In it I had Nemesis arising from the smoke of the pits, where women and children had been charred past recognition. It was an appeal for vengeance, another "hate poem," like "When the Leaves Come Out"
I concentrated on the theme of vengeful retaliation for indignities heaped upon wage-earners. The writing of such poems was becoming something of a fixation. Even in the pleasant and relatively comfortable atmosphere of Montreal, I continued to work on my "Paint Creek Miner" poems and to write others more bitter, more uncompromising.
SOURCE
Wobbly: The Rough-and-Tumble Story of an American Radical
-by Ralph Chaplin
U of Chicago Press, 1948
See also:
When the Leaves Come Out
-by Ralph Chaplin
OH, 1917
https://archive.org/...
IMAGE
Ralph Chaplin
http://spartacus-educational.com/...
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Solidarity Forever - Utah Phillips
All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone
We have laid the wide foundations built it skyward stone by stone
It is ours not to slave in but to master and to own
While the Union makes us strong.
-Ralph Chaplin, 1915
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