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 en-rolled, 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 [140] 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.