Source: The National Ripsaw, Vol. 12, No. 135, May 1915, p. 3
Online Version: E.V. Debs Internet Archive, 2025
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Zdravko Saveski
APRIL TWENTIETH is a red letter date in American annals. It was on April twentieth, 1775, that the battle of Lexington was fought.
It was in this historic fight, the beginning of the war of the Revolution, that the "shot was fired that was heard around the world."
The battle of Lexington signalized the death of king rule and the overthrow of political despotism in the United States.
One hundred and thirty-nine years later, on April 20th, 1914, the anniversary of Lexington was celebrated by Rockefeller and the ruling class in free America by the murder of working-class women and babies at Ludlow, Colorado.
The massacre of the innocents at Ludlow was as shocking and infamous as the battle of the patriots at Lexington was glorious and inspiring.
Lexington won an immortality of fame and Ludlow imperishable infamy.
APRIL 20TH, 1914, must never be forgotten by the working class of the United States. It was on that day that Louis Tikas, his arms extended, pleading that the women and children be spared, was brutally murdered by Rockefeller's gunmen while the same inhuman fiends applied the torch to the tents to which these women and children had been driven by Rockefeller's greed and barbarity and deliberately roasted them to death.
The charred bodies of babies murdered at the breasts of murdered mothers cry from the ground at Ludlow.
All the tardy confessions of guilt and professions of repentance by the Rockefellers will not bring the dead to life nor atone for the monstrous crime of their taking off.
We do not thirst for revenge. Neither do we forget our duty to the dead. On the anniversary of Ludlow we lay our blossoms of love and loyalty where they perished and resolve that they shall not have died in vain.
Ludlow, where on April 20th, 1914, the gunmen of the ruling class murdered the mothers, wives and babes of the working class, signalized the revolutionary struggle for the end of king rule in industry and the overthrow of industrial despotism in the United States.
It is clear to every seeker of the truth that Jesus of Nazareth was a labor agitator and social rebel and that this was the real cause of his crucifixion as a felon. A carpenter by trade and at a time when labor was virtual slavery, he knew the meaning of oppression and poverty and woe, and there is not a doubt that his great heart went out in deepest sympathy to his own suffering class and that his outraged soul rebelled against the system of extortion and robbery of which they were the victims.
He did not associate with the rich except to rebuke and scourge them. The suffering poor, the unfortunate, the derelict, in their poverty and misery, could commit no excess he could not excuse.
All his disciples were chosen by Jesus from his own class, the toiling class, the "lower class" in which he was born and to which he remained loyal and steadfast to the day of his death.
Jesus was accused of blasphemy and of "spreading a false religion." This was but the pious pretext of the pharisees to poison the minds of the ignorant and superstitious-against him. He was dangerous to the money-changers, the extortioners, the plunderers of the poor, and he lashed them with whips of fire, and it is they who with the connivance of their high priests and other retainers brought false charges against him and plotted his cruel death.
The naked truth is that Jesus was crucified for inciting his fellow-slaves to rebellion against the arrogant and merciless masters, and today the lineal descendants of these same masters who murdered him as a dangerous agitator, profess to worship him because he died that they might be made immaculate in the blood of the lamb.
Jesus loved the poor among whom he was born with a holy passion and fiercely hated their rich and respectable despoilers, and were he to return today and attack the gamblers of Wall street as he did the money-changers in the Temple, the very gentry who now profess to be his meek and lowly followers and worship in his name, would be the first to rise up and demand his blood, and the only mercy they would show him as the result of twenty centuries of Christian civilization would be the substitution of electrocution for crucifixion.