The mine owners did not find the gold,
They did not mine the gold,
They did not mill the gold,
But by some weird alchemy
All the gold belonged to them!
-Big Bill Haywood
Hellraisers Journal, Monday December 31, 1917
New York, New York – Kept Press Waxes Hysterical on Big Bill
From the New York Tribune of December 30, 1917:
The article, authored by Theodore Knappen, is a long one and describes Fellow Worker Haywood’s long history of service to the working class as an effort to seek “the destruction of the existing system of government and industry by means of direct action.”
Interesting that the same author seems to hold no such outrage for the enslavement of children in mine and mill, for the thousands of men who perish each and every year in the mines, for the strikers and their wives and children murdered at Ludlow, Calumet, Roosevelt and other scenes of massacres too numerous to mention, nor for the millions thrown onto the scrap heap to face homelessness and starvation when they can no longer work or find work. One might conclude that such an “existing system” deserves to be replaced with a system which honors and respects the working men, women and children who provide the labor that keep it running.