VI
In New York we had found ourselves a ten-dollar-a-week apartment on Morningside Heights. One evening I went to a meeting at Carnegie Hall alone; Craig, being tired, preferred to sleep. I came back about midnight; and after that she had little sleep, because I told her about the meeting.
Mrs. Laura Cannon, wife of the president of the Western Federation of Miners, had told the story of what came to be known to the world as the Ludlow massacre. In the lonely Rocky Mountains were coal camps fenced in and guarded like medieval fortresses. No one could enter without a pass or leave without another, and the miners and their families were in effect white slaves. Rebelling against such conditions, they had gone on strike and had been turned out of the camps. Down in the valley, with the help of their unions, they had set up tent colonies; after they had held out for several months, the gunmen of the company had come one night, thrown kerosene on the tents, and set fire to them. Three women and eleven children had been burned to death; but the newspapers of the country, including those of New York, had given only an inch or two to the event.
The most important fact about the whole thing was that these coal camps were owned by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a Rockefeller concern. I told my terrified wife what I had decided to do—to take Mrs. Cannon to the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., in the morning and ask him to hear her story. If he refused, we would charge him with murder before the American public and organize a group of sympathizers who would put mourning bands around their arms and walk up and down in front of the Standard Oil Building in protest against the company’s crime.
I won’t try to portray the dismay of my bride of just one year. We had been so perfectly happy and so carefully respectable—and now this horror! “You will all be arrested,” she exclaimed. I answered, “Maybe, but they couldn’t do anything but fine us, and someone will put up the money.” We didn’t have it.
Craig couldn’t bring herself to say no—not this time. In the morning I set to work to call people who had been at the meeting, and put them to work to call others to the Liberal Club that evening. And, of course, we did not fail to notify the newspapers. Some thirty or forty people assembled—having scented publicity, which “radicals” dearly love. I set forth the proposal and called for the help of those who would agree to a program of complete silence and complete nonresistance. One man, overcome with indignation, called for a program of collecting arms, and I invited him to go into the next room, shut the door, and collect all the arms he wanted.
Craig was willing to be one of the marchers but insisted that she had to have a proper costume. She waited until the department stores opened, and then she got herself an elegant long white cape. When I arrived at nine in the morning, I found no men but four ladies, one of whom had provided herself with a many-colored banner and a loud screaming voice. I invited her to set the banner against the wall of the Standard Oil Company and to stuff her handkerchief in her mouth; we then took up our silent parade in front of the office of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (We never saw him, and I learned that he had taken up the practice of coming in by a back door.)