The Centralia Conspiracy
By Ralph Chaplin
A Tongue of Flame
The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue offlame; every prison a more illustrious abode; every burned book or houseenlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberatesthrough 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 isruin. It is the whipper who is whipped and the tyrant who is undone.--Emerson.
The Centralia Conspiracy
Murder or Self-Defense?
This booklet is not an apology for murder. It is an honest effort tounravel the tangled mesh of circumstances that led up to the Armistice Daytragedy in Centralia, Washington. The writer is one of those who believethat the taking of human life is justifiable only in self-defense. Eventhen the act is a horrible reversion to the brute--to the low plane ofsavagery. Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford othermethods of settling human differences than those of blood letting.
The nation was shocked on November 11, 1919, to read of the killing offour American Legion men by members of the Industrial Workers of the Worldin Centralia. The capitalist newspapers announced to the world that theseunoffending paraders were killed in cold blood--that they were murderedfrom ambush without provocation of any kind. If the author were convincedthat there was even a slight possibility of this being true, he would notraise his voice to defend the perpetrators of such a cowardly crime.
But there are two sides to every question and perhaps the newspaperspresented only one of these. Dr. Frank Bickford, an ex-service man whoparticipated in the affair, testified at the coroner's inquest that theLegion men were attempting to raid the union hall when they were killed.Sworn testimony of various eyewitnesses has revealed the fact that some ofthe "unoffending paraders" carried coils of rope and that others werearmed with such weapons as would work the demolition of the hall andbodily injury to its occupants. These things throw an entirely differentlight on the subject. If this is true it means that the union loggersfired only in self-defense and not with the intention of committing wantonand malicious murder as has been stated. Now, as at least two of the unionmen who did the shooting were ex-soldiers, it appears that the tragedymust have resulted from something more than a mere quarrel between loggersand soldiers. There must be something back of it all that the publicgenerally doesn't know about.
There is only one body of men in the Northwest who would hate a unionhall enough to have it raided--the lumber "interests." And now we get atthe kernel of the matter, which is the fact that the affair was theoutgrowth of a struggle between the lumber trust and its employees--betweenOrganized Capital and Organized Labor.
A Labor Case
And so, after all, the famous trial at Montesano was not a murder trialbut a labor trial in the strict sense of the word. Under the law, it mustbe remembered, a man is not committing murder in defending his life andproperty from the felonious assault of a mob bent on killing anddestruction. There is no doubt whatever but what the lumber trust hadplotted to "make an example" of the loggers and destroy their hall on thisoccasion. And this was not the first t