Eugene V. Debs damns the Rockefellers before the working class and all of history; vowing never to forget, and never to forgive, April 20, 1914.

‘The Rockefeller Massacre’ by Eugene V. Debs from Labor Advocate (Providence). Vol. 2 No. 41. June 6, 1914.

The Ludlow mining camp in the State of Colorado leapt into world-wide notoriety on April 20th, the day of the Rockefeller massacre.

We call it the Rockefeller massacre because the Rockefellers, father and son, are absolutely responsible for it and because every drop of blood shed there is on their guilty heads. It was the private thugs of the Rockefellers who committed the butchery of pregnant women and innocent children which will load their despised names with an eternity of infamy and execration.

Just before the massacre the pious young Rockefeller declared that he and his father would spend all their millions to crush the striking miners. He little dreamed of what he was saying or doing when he issued his silly defiance to the god of right and justice.

Today instead of a Sunday School he is confronted by the massacre of the innocents.

The ghosts of the infants he roasted alive at Ludlow haunt his walking and sleeping hours. The heavy hand of the Providence he mocked has been laid upon him. He is under arrest, a prisoner heavily guarded the same as any other arch-felon, with ten thousand crimes staring into his hollow eyes and demanding atonement.

Both the Rockefellers, the old monster and the younger spawn, are cowering like the hunted criminals they are in their guarded castles, with the curses of outraged millions ringing in their ears.

Rockefeller and Ludlow are inseparably linked together as the climax of capitalism’s criminal and bloody regime. It was the hand of Rockefeller and not that of his dumb brute hireling that set fire to the tents which roasted alive a score of women and children.

It was the hand of Rockefeller that turned the machine guns upon the terror-stricken, half-famished colonists when they attempted to escape from the cruel flames, and the hand of Rockefeller that sped the explosive bullets that tore the heads from children’s bodies.

The crime of Rockefeller and the bloody system he incarnates cry to heaven from Ludlow, and the working class have heard the cry, and swear upon their honor that its victims shall not have died in vain.

Ludlow will henceforth be the battle-cry of the millions of American toilers whose brothers and sisters and children perished there amid scenes of savage and blood-thirsty ferocity which will one day be commemorated by a shaft monument of the foulest blot upon American Civilization.

Rockefeller’s machine guns swept the tented colony of his starving victims and their agonized cries have died away in the mountains of Colorado, but from the blood of every martyr who perished there a thousand armed warriors will spring from the soil to sweep the system which murdered their comrades from the face of the earth.

Never shall the Rockefeller massacre at Ludlow be forgiven or forgotten by the working class.

To forget Ludlow would be not only rank ingratitude to the martyrs of Rockefeller’s fire and slaughter, but base treason to the noble cause for which they died.

The Rockefeller Massacre–Ludlow, Colorado, April 20th, 1914!

This ghastly event has been written in the blood of murdered mothers with babes clinging to their breasts in the industrial annals of the American nation under the robber rule of the Rockefeller dynasty.

Let April 20th be set apart by the working class to commemorate each year the Rockefeller Massacre at Ludlow and to renew the pledge never to rest and never to lay down their arms until this monstrous crime has been expiated in the overthrow of industrial despotism and the triumph of the Socialist republic.

PDF of full issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92063933/1914-06-06/ed-1/seq-1/