The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of
flame; every prison a more illustrious abode; every burned book or house
enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates
through the earth from side to side. The minds of men are at last
aroused; reason looks out and justifies her own, and malice finds all
her work is ruin. It is the whipper who is whipped and the tyrant who is
undone.--Emerson.
Murder or Self-Defense?
This booklet is not an apology for murder. It is an honest effort to
unravel the tangled mesh of circumstances that led up to the Armistice Day
tragedy in Centralia, Washington. The writer is one of those who believe
that the taking of human life is justifiable only in self-defense. Even
then the act is a horrible reversion to the brute--to the low plane of
savagery. Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other
methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting.
The nation was shocked on November 11, 1919, to read of the killing of
four American Legion men by members of the Industrial Workers of the World
in Centralia. The capitalist newspapers announced to the world that these
unoffending paraders were killed in cold blood--that they were murdered
from ambush without provocation of any kind. If the author were convinced
that there was even a slight possibility of this being true, he would not
raise his voice to defend the perpetrators of such a cowardly crime.
But there are two sides to every question and perhaps the newspapers
presented only one of these. Dr. Frank Bickford, an ex-service man who
participated in the affair, testified at the coroner's inquest that the
Legion men were attempting to raid the union hall when they were killed.
Sworn testimony of various eyewitnesses has revealed the fact that some of
the "unoffending paraders" carried coils of rope and that others were
armed with such weapons as would work the demolition of the hall and
bodily injury to its occupants. These things throw an entirely different
light on the subject. If this is true it means that the union loggers
fired only in self-defense and not with the intention of committing wanton
and malicious murder as has been stated. Now, as at least two of the union
men who did the shooting were ex-soldiers, it appears that the tragedy
must have resulted from something more than a mere quarrel between loggers
and soldiers. There must be something back of it all that the public
generally doesn't know about.
There is only one body of men in the Northwest who would hate a union hall
enough to have it raided--the lumber "interests." And now we get at the
kernel of the matter, which is the fact that the affair was the outgrowth
of a struggle between the lumber trust and its employees--between
Organized Capital and Organized Labor.