_New York Worker, April 27, 1907_
This is the first and only International Labor Day. It belongs to the
working class and is dedicated to the Revolution.
Today the slaves of all the world are taking a fresh breath in the long
and weary march; pausing a moment to clear their lungs and shout for
joy; celebrating in festal fellowship their coming Freedom.
All hail the Labor Day of May!
The day of the proletarian protest;
The day of stern resolve;
The day of noble aspiration.
Raise high this day the blood-red Standard of the Revolution!
The banner of the Workingman;
The flag, the only flag, of Freedom.
* * * * *
Slavery, even the most abject—dumb and despairing as it may seem—has yet
its inspiration. Crushed it may be, but extinguished never. Chain the
slave as you will, O Masters, brutalize him as you may, yet in his soul,
though dead, he yearns for freedom still.
The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves
their freedom must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity; the
heart of their hope; the inspiration that nerves them all with sinews of
steel.
They are still in bondage, but no longer cower;
No longer grovel in the dust,
But stand erect like men.
Conscious of their growing power the future holds out to them her
outstretched hands.
As the slavery of the working class is international, so the movement
for its emancipation.
The salutation of slave to slave this day is repeated in every human
tongue as it goes ringing round the world.
The many millions are at last awakening. For countless ages they have
suffered; drained to the dregs the bitter cup of misery and woe.
At last, at last the historic limitation has been reached, and soon a
new sun will light the world.
* * * * *
Red is the life-tide of our common humanity and red our symbol of
universal kinship.
Tyrants deny it; fear it; tremble with rage and terror when they behold
it.
We reaffirm it and on this day pledge anew our fidelity—come life or
death—to the blood-red Banner of the Revolution.
* * * * *
Socialist greetings this day to all our fellow-workers! To the god-like
souls in Russia marching grimly, sublimely into the jaws of hell with
the Song of the Revolution in their death-rattle; to the Orient, the
Occident and all the Isles of the Sea!
Vive la Revolution!
The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.
It thrills and vibrates; cheers and inspires. Tyrants and time-servers
fear it, but the oppressed hail it with joy.
The throne trembles when this throbbing word is lisped, but to the hovel
it is food for the famishing and hope for the victims of despair.
Let us glorify today the revolutions of the past and hail the Greater
Revolution yet to come before Emancipation shall make all the days of
the year May Days of peace and plenty for the sons and daughters of
toil.
It was with Revolution as his theme that Mark Twain’s soul drank deep
from the fount of inspiration. His immortality will rest at last upon
this royal tribute to the French Revolution:
“The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years
of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood—one: a settlement of
that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each
hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people
in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the
like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two Reigns of
Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought
murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted
mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death
on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our
shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak;
whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with
lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What
is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the
stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief
Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and
mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by
that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in
its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
Arouse, Ye Slaves!
_Appeal to Reason, March 10, 1906_
The latest and boldest stroke of the plutocracy, but for the blindness
of the people, would have startled the nation.
Murder has been plotted and is about to be executed in the name and
under the forms of law.
Men who will not yield to corruption and browbeating must be ambushed,
spirited away and murdered.
That is the edict of the Mine Owners’ Association of the western states
and their Standard Oil backers and pals in Wall street, New York.
These gory-beaked vultures are to pluck out the heart of resistance to
their tyranny and robbery, that labor may be left stark naked at their
mercy.
Charles Moyer and Wm. D. Haywood, of the Western Federation of Miners,
and their official colleagues—men, all of them, and every inch of
them—are charged with the assassination of ex-Governor Frank
Steunenberg, of Idaho, who simply reaped what he had sown, as a mere
subterfuge to pounce upon them in secret, rush them out of the state by
special train, under heavy guard, clap them into the penitentiary,
convict them upon the purchased perjured testimony of villains, and
strangle them to death with the hangman’s noose.
It is a foul plot; a damnable conspiracy; a hellish outrage.
The governors of Idaho and Colorado say they have the proof to convict.
They are brazen falsifiers and venal villains, the miserable tools of
the mine owners who, themselves, if anybody, deserve the gibbet.
Moyer, Haywood and their comrades had no more to do with the
assassination of Steunenberg than I had; the charge is a ghastly lie, a
criminal calumny, and is only an excuse to murder men who are too
rigidly honest to betray their trust and too courageous to succumb to
threat and intimidation.
Labor leaders that cringe before the plutocracy and do its bidding are
apotheosized; those that refuse must be foully murdered.
Personally and intimately do I know Moyer, Haywood, Pettibone, St. John
and their official co-workers, and I will stake my life on their honor
and integrity; and that is precisely the crime for which, according to
the words of the slimy “sleuth” who “worked up the case” against them,
“they shall never leave Idaho alive.”
Well, by the gods, if they don’t, the governors of Idaho and Colorado
and their masters from Wall street, New York, to the Rocky Mountains had
better prepare to follow them.
Nearly twenty years ago the capitalist tyrants put some innocent men to
death for standing up for labor.
They are now going to try it again. Let them dare!
There have been twenty years of revolutionary education, agitation and
organization since the Haymarket tragedy, and if an attempt is made to
repeat it, there will be a revolution and I will do all in my power to
precipitate it.
The crisis has come and we have got to meet it. Upon the issue involved
the whole body of organized labor can unite and every enemy of
plutocracy will join us. From the farms, the factories and stores will
pour the workers to meet the redhanded destroyers of freedom, the
murderers of innocent men and the arch-enemies of the people.
Moyer and Haywood are our comrades, staunch and true, and if we do not
stand by them to the shedding of the last drop of blood in our veins, we
are disgraced forever and deserve the fate of cringing cowards.
We are not responsible for the issue. It is not of our seeking. It has
been forced upon us; and for the very reason that we deprecate violence
and abhor bloodshed we cannot desert our comrades and allow them to be
put to death. If they can be murdered without cause so can we, and so
will we be dealt with at the pleasure of these tyrants.
They have driven us to the wall and now let us rally our forces and face
them and fight.
If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million
revolutionists, at least, will meet them with guns.
They have done their best and their worst to crush and enslave us. Their
politicians have betrayed us, their courts have thrown us into jail
without trial and their soldiers have shot our comrades dead in their
tracks.
The worm turns at last, and so does the worker.
Let them dare to execute their devilish plot and every state in this
Union will resound with the tramp of revolution.
Get ready, comrades, for action! No other course is left to the working
class. Their courts are closed to us except to pronounce our doom. To
enter their courts is simply to be mulcted of our meagre means and bound
hand and foot; to have our eyes plucked out by the vultures that fatten
upon our misery.
Capitalist courts never have done, and never will do, anything for the
working class.
Whatever is done we must do ourselves, and if we stand up like men from
the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Gulf, we will strike
terror to their cowardly hearts and they will be but too eager to relax
their grip upon our throats and beat a swift retreat.
We will watch every move they make and in the meantime prepare for
action.
A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat at Chicago, or
some other central point, would be in order, and, if extreme measures
are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed
as a preliminary to a general uprising.
If the plutocrats begin the program, we will end it.