Debs calls the class to its colors. It is hard for us to fully comprehend the horror at the Ludlow Massacre, the mass murder of strikers and their families by the National Guard and John D. Rockefeller’s gun thugs at the Ludlow miner’s colony on April 20, 1914. Coming as it did on the crest of a rising wave of struggle, the impulse of the working class, organized and unorganized, was to repay the enemy in kind. The ‘Ten Day War’ was one result, the other was a generation of activists who no longer held illusions in the state or its reform and who dedicated their lives to the destruction of Capital. Debs gives voice to millions in words demanding redemptive historical vengeance.

‘The Hands that Lighted the Funeral Pyre at Ludlow Held the Spade that Dug the Grave of Capitalism!’ by Eugene V. Debs from American Socialist. Vol. 1 No. 2. July 25, 1914.

The hands that lighted the funeral pyre at Ludlow held the spade that dug the grave of Capitalism!

From that fateful hour when flashed the message to the workers of the world of that massacre of the innocents, the fate of Capitalism in America was sealed.

Rockefeller’s gunmen killed something besides women and children at Ludlow; they shot to death the reverential respect of the working class of America for the institutions of Capitalism.

The fire that charred the children of Ludlow consumed, once and forever that hypocritical patriotism which for generations has hypnotized the workers of America; never again can Plutocracy wrap its reeking carcass in the folds of a flag and thereby command the support, the respect and the confidence of its slaves.

In the smouldering ashes of Ludlow was consumed the last lingering vestige of respect of the working class for the hollow religious pretensions of Capitalism; the hypocrisy of a Rockefeller mouthing saintly phrases of praise to God, the while the military hellhounds in his pay ravished the wives and children of his industrial slaves, was but typical of his class.

All the stolen millions and billions of Capitalism can never again clothe the religious pretensions of Plutocracy with respectability in the minds of the workers; they are disillusioned once and forever and the cohorts of greed can never again hide their stolen plunder beneath the mantle of God and religion.

The margin by which the American Plutocracy escaped the terrors of a French revolution as a result of Ludlow was so narrow and indistinct as to be almost invisible; for the very first time in its history, organized labor boldly and openly voted its funds for the purchase of munitions of war for the defense of the lives of its members.

Did Capitalism take heed when labor showed its teeth? It did, and at this hour, weeks after the Ludlow horror, Plutocracy in America is gasping at the maw of hell which yawned for it on that quiet April morn when the working class of America gazed upon the charred and unrecognizable features of its innocent dead.

When labor growled en masse, the skulking hordes of Capitalism sheathed their claws and stood aghast; the Plutocracy of America had staged a war of conquest in Mexico and the first act of that terrible drama to be had eventuated at Vera Cruz.

The train of events which followed Ludlow put a crimp in the plans of Capitalism; with a seething volcano of revolt at home, Plutocracy dared not attempt its contemplated war of conquest abroad.

It may well be, in the years to come, that the victorious patriot peons of Mexico will, with reverential hands, lay a wreath of immortelles upon the tomb of Ludlow’s innocent dead; it is thus that labor’s sacrifices, in blood and tears, affect the destiny of all mankind.

There have been other massacres of the world’s workers in the name of Capitalism; the industrial history of America for a quarter of a century has been but a succession of massacres from Homestead to Calumet, but never in the history of Capitalism in America had the psychological moment arrived when Capitalism could plunge a dagger into its own reeking heart by striking at the innocent wives and babies of its industrial slaves. Ludlow offered that moment; all the years of our industrial history led up to it.

In the years that are gone the slaves of Capitalism were mercilessly murdered at their tasks in the mines, in the mills, in the slave pens of Capitalism everywhere; when they dared protest against the condition which enslaved and murdered them from day to day, the workers were clubbed and beaten and shot and killed en masse, until Capitalism concluded that there was no limit at which the workers would revolt.

Ludlow was that limit; all the pent-up resentment of half a century that smouldered in the soul of Labor flared into the flames of revolt.

The torch that was applied at Ludlow fused the million-tongued voice of Labor’s infinite wrongs, and the very throne of Capitalism tottered upon its rotten foundation.

Though Capitalism has sheathed its claws in very terror, and Labor for the moment appears quiescent, let not Plutocracy take unction to itself and repeat the bloody scenes of Ludlow.

Labor has learned its lesson at Ludlow, and if Capitalism heeds it not, then the pillars of the temple of Capitalist society will tumble about the ears of the American Plutocracy.

Never again can Labor be guiled and seduced by that hoary lie of the identity of interest of Labor and Capital.

Labor has paid in blood and tears for its education. It has had class-consciousness shot and burned into the very soul of it at Ludlow.

Labor sees in America today the class lines that cleave society, and it sees them with a vision that no sophistry can ever again bedim, thanks to Ludlow.

Labor realizes once and forever that all government in America under Capitalism is class government; hereafter Labor will participate in politics in America that basis.

The rank and file of Labor realizes now as never before that the politicians of Capitalism, whether labeled Republican, Democrat, Progressive, or what sot, are but the pliant tools of Plutocracy.

Without exception, these various political elements stood solidly behind the hired murderers at Ludlow and their hands are as red with the blood of the innocent as are the very gunmen themselves.

The organized Socialist movement is the sole political institution in America that came out of the Ludlow massacre with clean hands.

There, as everywhere else on earth, it stood with Labor. It alone fights Labor’s battles, rejoices in Labor’s victories, and extends sympathy in the dark hours of Labor’s defeat.

It one of American political institutions helps feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and it mingles its tears with the tears of Labor o’er the bier of its crucified wives and children.

In Socialism the working class of America finds its solace, its inspiration, and its hope, and this lesson it learned at Ludlow.

The holocaust of Ludlow seared and burned the very soul of Labor.

In the agony of that hour Labor found itself in America. For the first time in this nation’s history the mass mind of the working class was consciously moved by one impulse.

It is still moving, and ere its force is spent the hellish institutions of Capitalism will be swept from off this earth.

The American Socialist, edited by J. Louis Engdahl, was the official Party newspaper of the Socialist Party of America in the years before World War One. Published in Chicago starting in 1914, the Appeal continued the semi-internal Socialist Party Official Bulletin founded in 1904 which became Party Builder in1913. The American Socialist closely followed the SP’s electoral challenges, Engdahl was often an SP candidate in Chicago as he edited the paper, and took an early and prominent anti-war position. With a circulation of around 60,000 the paper was one of the leading anti-war voices in the run up to US entry into World War One. The paper was suppressed by Federal authorities, along with much of the anti-war left, in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/american-socialist/v1n02-jul-25-1914-TAS.pdf