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THE OLDEST ANARCHISM
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was deliberate and unprovoked slaughter. Recently, in
the Westmoreland mining district, no less than twenty
striking miners have been murdered, while several hundred
have been seriously injured. On one occasion deputies
and strike-breakers became intoxicated and "shot up
the town*' of Latrobe. In the recent strike against the
Lake Carriers' Association six union men were killed by
private detectives. In Tampa, Florida, in Columbus,
Ohio, in Birmingham, Alabama, in Lawrence, Massachusetts,
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the mining districts
of West Virginia, and in innumerable other places many
workingmen have been murdered, not by officers of the
law, but by privately paid assassins.
Even while writing these lines I notice a telegram to
the Appeal to Reason from Adolph Germer, an official
of the United Mine Workers of America, that some
thugs, formerly in West Virginia,
are now in Colorado,
and that their first work there was to shoot down in
cold blood a well-known miner.
John Walker, a district
president of the United Mine Workers of America, telegraphs
the same day to the labor press that two of the
strikers in the copper mines in Michigan were shot down
by detectives, in the effort, he says, to provoke the men
to violence. Anyone who cares to follow the labor press
for but a short period will be astonished to find how
frequently such outrages occur, and he will marvel that
men can be so self-controlled as the strikers usually are
under such terrible provocation. I mention hastily these
facts in order to emphasize the point that the cases in
which I have gone into detail in this chapter are more
of the
or less typical of the bloody character of many
great
strikes because of the deeds of the so-called detectives.
Brief, however, as this statement is of the work of these