The proof of these statements is written all over the industrial
life of America. I will stop long enough to present an account of
one industry, asking the reader to accept my statement that if
space permitted I could present the same sort of proof for a
dozen other industries which I have studied--the steel-mills of
Western Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the
glass-works of Southern Jersey, the silk-mills of Paterson, the
cotton-mills of North Carolina, the woolen-mills of
Massachusetts, the lumber-camps of Louisiana, the copper-mines of
Michigan, the sweat-shops of New York.
In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of
enormously valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellers and
other Protestant exploiters. The men who work these mines, some
twelve or fifteen thousand in number, come from all the nations
of Europe and Asia, and their fate is that of the average
wage-slave. I do not ask anyone to take my word, but present
sworn testimony, taken by the United States Commission on
Industrial Relations in 1914. Here is the way the Italian miners
live, as described in a doctor's report:
Houses up the canyon, so-called, of which eight are habitable,
and forty-six simply awful; they are disreputably disgraceful. I
have had to remove a mother in labor from one part of the shack
to another to keep dry.
And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former
superintendent of the Sociological Department of the Colorado
Fuel and Iron Company:
The C. F. & I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and
dug-outs that are unfit for the habitation of human beings and
are little removed from the pig-sty make of dwellings. And the
people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty. Frequently
the population is so congested that whole families are crowded
into one room; eight persons in one small room was reported
during the year.
And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses
whom the Rockefellers employ:
The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as most uncouth,
ignorant, immoral, and in many instances, the most brutal set of
men that I have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.
Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his weights,
and applies for the protection which the law of the state allows
him. What happens then?
"When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of the
super he was getting too smart."
"And he got what?"
"He got it in the neck, generally."
And when these wage-slaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on
strike, in the words of the Commission's report:
Five strikers, one boy, and thirteen women and children in the
strikers' tent colony were shot to death by militiamen and guards
employed by the coal companies, or suffocated and burned to death
when these militiamen and guards set fire to the tents in which
they made their homes.
And now, what is the position of education in such camps? The
Rev. James McDonald, a Methodist preacher, testified that the
school building was dilapidated and unfit. One year there were
four teachers, the next three, and the next only two. The teacher
of the primary grade had a hundred and twenty children enrolled,
ninety per cent of whom could not speak a word of English.
Every little bench was seated with two or three. It was
over-crowded entirely, and she could hardly get walking room
around there.
And as to the political use made of this deliberately cultivated
ignorance, former United States Senator Patterson testified that
the companies controlled all elections and all nominations:
Election returns from the two or three counties in which the
large companies operate show that in the precincts in which the
mining camps are located the returns are nearly unanimous in
favor of the men or measures approved by the companies,
regardless of party.
And now comes the all-important question. What of the Catholic
Church and these evils? The majority of these mine-slaves are
Catholics, it is this Church which is charged with their
protection. There are priests in every town, and in nearly every
camp. And do we find them lifting their voices in behalf of the
miners, protesting against the starving and torturing of thirty
or forty thousand human beings? Do we find Catholic papers
printing accounts of the Ludlow massacre? Do we find Catholic
journalists on the scene reporting it, Catholic lawyers defending
the strikers, Catholic novelists writing books about their
troubles? We do not!
Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike, I know of
just one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre, who had a word to say
for the strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached
the strike-field was of a priest who had preached on the text
that "Idleness is the root of all evil," and had been reported as
a "scab" and made to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively,
thinking of his church superiors. My informant, a union miner,
laughed. "We made him!" he said.
I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls and
could not be interested in questions of worldly greed. Max
Eastman, reporting the strike in the "Masses", tells of an
interview with a Catholic sister.
"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people, or to
bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it the most useless
thing in the world to attempt it," she replied.
The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene, and
several clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore
testimony to the outrages which were being committed against the
strikers; but of all the Catholic priests in the district not one
appeared--not one! Several Protestant clergymen testified that
they had been driven from the coal-camps--not because they
favored the unions, but because the companies objected to having
their workers educated at all; but no one ever heard of the
Catholic Church having trouble with the operators. To make sure
on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad who
watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the
First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:
The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies very
cordially. The Church was permitted in all the camps. The
impression was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I honor
what good the Church does, but I know of no instance, during the
Colorado coal-strike or at any other time or place, when the
Catholic Church has taken any special interest in the cause of
the laboring men. Many Catholics, especially the men, quit the
church during the coal-strike.