John Reed, on the road to becoming a revolutionary, was radicalized by experiences and events like 1914’s Ludlow Massacre and resulting ‘Ten Day War’ in Colorado.

‘Colorado Direct Action’ by John Reed from Voice of the People. Vol. 3 No. 30. August 6, 1914.

Just as the working-class has finally agreed that industry shall be socialized, and is only divided on the question of whether it shall be done by economic or political action, along comes the Colorado civil war and relegates the. discussion temporarily to the back yard. It is the kind of strike that used to happen in 1830; and to us, who thought that the birth of Syndicalism marked the close of the Trades Union period in the history of Labor, it has the effect that a Megalosaurus would have if one appeared on Washington street.

For it doesn’t belong to modern times at all. The Colorado strike was the strike of work men for the right to organize. And what is more remarkable, they had not taken the initiative in organizing; they had been driven forced into it, by the most barbarous cruelty, the most cynical disregard for the rights of human beings since the day of Robert Owen and the early English cotton-mill riots. The miners were carefully chosen by the mine owners from among those European races which submitted most patiently to oppression; in fact, the Sociological Department of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. was mainly occupied in studying the most docile races of the world, and these people were imported to fill the mines. Furthermore, in order that there should never be a chance for them to get together, each mine-superintendent saw to it that many different nationalities were employed in the same place, so that they could not communicate with each other; and they were discouraged from learning English. Whenever one nationality began to be numerous in one mine, many of them were discharged until the number equaled that of other nationalities. Racial prejudices and antipathies were encouraged by the mine superintendents; for example, after appealing to the State Bureau of Labor to aid them to enforce the law, the men of a mine would be allowed to designate a check-weighman. Suppose he was a Pole; the superintendent would say to the Italians, That Pole is cheating you fellows in favor of his own countrymen. You ought to have an Italian check-weighman.” Then he’d tell the other nationalities the same thing, and would end by fomenting such race jealousy that the workers would voluntarily give up their check-weighman and go on being cheated by their bosses.

There was nothing in the least radical about that strike. It was conducted by ignorant, peaceable men, perhaps the most patient under capitalistic wrong that there are anywhere in the world. They had been brought in as strike breakers in the great 1903 strike; they did not know what Union meant; they did not understand solidarity; they believed, even after Ludlow, that their bosses were half Gods; and they came from countries where the Law is almost divine. You can realize then that there must have been terrific pressure on them to drive these people into revolt.

Now, knowing how far the education of Labor in general has gone, we take it for granted that the master-class has also been getting a little wisdom. We know, for example, that it was the MacNamara case which scared the Bull Moose Party into Life with its talk about Social Justice. But in Colorado the master-class did things that it has not dared to do in public for fifty years the kind of things that were done in West Virginia and Michigan, where news could be carefully suppressed. In Colorado, where the mining towns are private property, and the stores, saloons and lodgings are so arranged as to cost a workman his entire wages, so that he is in virtual peonage to the company all his life, it was cheaper to kill men in mine accidents than to take the most elementary precautions for their safety. This was done so openly, so callously, that the coroners were appointed company undertakers, and officials of the companies owned stock in the undertaking establishments! The State Mine Inspector, armed with the authority of the Governor, was actually refused permission to make his inspection sometimes, and when he did succeed. Then some disastrous accident would follow, his recommendations were openly disregarded, the coroner would report that “the causes of said accident are unknown,” and the company would refuse to state even how many men were killed. Not content with bleeding the miners for every penny they ever made, in rent, taxes, charges for a doctor whom they did not use and a preacher whom they never heard, the companies actually cheated them half a ton at a time on the amount of coal they mined, and in one mine, secretly docked the cars of every union man and used the stolen to pay spies to discover union sympathizers; who were discharged. The workers had no vote; they had no right to free speech, free assembly, or even opinions that did not agree with their masters. I want to emphasize right here the fact that five out of seven of the strike demands were already guaranteed by State laws, which the operators did not obey, and never had.

It was a mere strike for better wages and conditions, and yet it was more than that. Ten thousand walked out of the mines on September 23d. They went out peaceably; but the operators had already recruited an army of gunmen and thugs, and they threw the striking miners and their families out of the company houses into a terrible blizzard, where many women and children died of exposure. They followed the strikers down onto the plain where their tent-colonies stood in the snow, and harassed them by shooting from the hills and by murders on the city streets. And when this kind of treatment finally broke down the barriers of race and prejudice, and the strikers became one people for the defence of their homes and families, the operators called the State Militia into the field to deal them a crushing blow.

I have plenty of evidence to prove that the mine-guard militia planned the arson and slaughter at Ludlow many days before, that they were, in fact, obeying orders from “higher up.” But they had a terrible surprise. For these meek and docile foreigners stiffened like steel and met them shot for shot and death for death. The fight at Ludlow ought to be called the Lexington of Labor; for there these untrained, badly-armed miners discovered that they could stand up against the ranks of trained soldiers.

Not only that. The days that followed showed that the miners could whip the militia, and if the truce had not been called when it was, the Colorado National Guard would never have left the Ludlow district alive. I think that is the first time in labor history that unskilled workers defeated the police force of the State, a thing which ought to be possible in almost every great industrial strike, the miners’ army received astonishing proofs of the revolutionary spirit throughout the ranks of labor. More than 30,000 men volunteered to march from all parts of the United States, and thousands of dollars to buy rifles were openly subscribed.

The Colorado strike will probably be lost. Because, as I have pointed out, without goading to the point of desperation the Colorado miners won’t fight. And they are under the leadership of the United Mine-Workers, who are as conservative in their demands as other members of the A. F. of L.

But the value of this demonstration of fierce resistance to oppression lies in its lesson to Industrial Democrats. To my mind, it disposes forever of the opposition to direct action as a question of tactics. It proves, as Ulster does, as even the militants prove in England, that violence is an effective, even a legitimate, way to gain immediate ends. And that Fear is the most powerful incentive to thought yet invented for the masters.

The Voice of the People continued The Lumberjack. The Lumberjack began in January 1913 as the weekly voice of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers strike in Merryville, Louisiana. Published by the Southern District of the National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers, affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, the weekly paper was edited by Covington Hall of the Socialist Party in New Orleans. In July, 1913 the name was changed to Voice of the People and the printing home briefly moved to Portland, Oregon. It ran until late 1914.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/lumberjack/140806-voiceofthepeople-v3n30w082.pdf