CapitalismStrikeViolenceWorkers Movement

6 THE CLASS STRUGGLE NEW LABOR MOVEMENT OF THE WEST that is bound to react against them in the long run and which has already had the effect of immensely stimulating and increasing the tendency toward the new organization. As far as provoking the workers to resistance of a nature which would lead them to the employment of weapons, the use of which would certainly react upon themselves, the tactics of the employers have failed completely and the reaction against such methods is already finding an expression in the official class itself. This has been made very apparent in the recent car strike in San Francisco.
The Chamber of Commerce through its president sent a letter to the Mayor complaining that the law was not upheld by the police force and that the Mayor was not taking proper methods to put down violence in connection with the running of the company cars. To which the Mayor replied in part (and make no hesitation in quoting so much as it is so significant and will probably not find its way to the Eastern capitalist press. Doubtless you are disappointed because the police have not yet turned their machine guns on crowds in our streets and killed a few dozen strikers, including the customary number of innocent bystanders; but with all respect for your opinion, think the police do well to keep law and order as far as they have done but without any quick or wanton slaughter of the people. Violent and bloody repression has never maintained law and order so effectually as firmness coupled with moderation and common upon the movement as a whole, and none but a set of besotted idiots in a corporation owned community would ever imagine that a mere lynching could have any preventive influence upon the growth of an industrial movement. The one great danger that it might have provoked a similar kind of reprisal is now past, and there eems every reason to believe that the stormtossed and tragic labor movement of Butte, with all its grim history and violent hysterias, will at last find itself at one with the new and rational syndicalistic trend.
Bisbee marks another step in the same course. In Bisbee the movement of the irregular forces of capitalism and the industrial overlords has been more dramatic and has received greater public attention than elsewhere. That is because their operations were carried out on a larger scale and the violations of the ordinary conventions of a legal society were more strongly marked than in other less favored places. It is given to few industrial masters to be able to get the command of irregular and illegal forces to the same extent as the corporation did in Bisbee and it must be candidly admitted that they took full advantage of their opportunities. They succeeded in deporting by main force twelve hundred and sixty four men, separating them from their families, invading their houses, robbing their families, insulting their wives and in short behaving precisely like an iregular Turkish cavalry regiment in an Armenian villayet, with the one exception that they were not plucky enough to murder. These irregular levies of the industrial overlords cannot murder in the plain light of day to be really effective; they must deal with a lame man in the dead of night and be carefully and securely masked. The Sheriff, Harry Wheeler, openly took part in the lawless and indecent exhibition and the tacit approval of the Governor appears to have been bestowed upon it. But it was an irregular and extralegal movement; the industrial masters do not appear to have been able to rely on their legal and political henchmen, and so far in Bisbee, as in all other places to which attention has been called, the deterioration of the industrial masters appears to be manifest.
They are going to pieces in face of the new industrial movement and the economic changes which are undermining their position.
They will be fighting with their backs to the wall ere long. What sense. It is unfortunate that so many persons of your type in this country are so incurably stupid about business and industry, the very matters in which you are most concerned and in respect to which you deem yourself most enlightened. The world is changing all around you, and you and your kind do not know it any more than the Czar knew what was happening to him and Russia until it was all over. You still believe in Napoleon whiff of grapeshot. You still think that industrial discontent can be quelled by the policeman club. Happily, the rest of us do not need to take you or your law and order committee as seriously as you take yourselves.
The hanging of Frank Little can have no detrimental effect