The Centralia Conspiracy

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The Centralia Conspiracy

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Chaplin
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Title: The Centralia Conspiracy
Author: Ralph Chaplin
Release Date: January 16, 2004 [eBook #10725]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
CENTRALIA CONSPIRACY***
E-text prepared by Curtis A. Weyant

The Centralia Conspiracy

By Ralph Chaplin

[Illustration: cover]

A Tongue of Flame
The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of
flame; every prison a more illustrious abode; every burned book or
house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word
reverberates through 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 is ruin. It is the whipper who is whipped and the tyrant
who is undone.--Emerson.

Murder or Self-Defense?

This booklet is not an apology for murder. It is an honest effort to
unravel the tangled mesh of circumstances that led up to the Armistice
Day tragedy in Centralia, Washington. The writer is one of those who
believe that the taking of human life is justifiable only in self-defense.
Even then the act is a horrible reversion to the brute--to the low plane
of savagery. Civilization, to be worthy of the name, must afford other
methods of settling human differences than those of blood letting.
The nation was shocked on November 11, 1919, to read of the killing
of four American Legion men by members of the Industrial Workers of
the World in Centralia. The capitalist newspapers announced to the
world that these unoffending paraders were killed in cold blood--that
they were murdered from ambush without provocation of any kind. If
the author were convinced that there was even a slight possibility of
this being true, he would not raise his voice to defend the perpetrators
of such a cowardly crime.

But there are two sides to every question and perhaps the newspapers
presented only one of these. Dr. Frank Bickford, an ex-service man
who participated in the affair, testified at the coroner's inquest that the
Legion men were attempting to raid the union hall when they were
killed. Sworn testimony of various eyewitnesses has revealed the fact
that some of the "unoffending paraders" carried coils of rope and that
others were armed with such weapons as would work the demolition of
the hall and bodily injury to its occupants. These things throw an
entirely different light on the subject. If this is true it means that the
union loggers fired only in self-defense and not with the intention of
committing wanton and malicious murder as has been stated. Now, as
at least two of the union men who did the shooting were ex-soldiers, it
appears that the tragedy must have resulted from something more than
a mere quarrel between loggers and soldiers. There must be something
back of it all that the public generally doesn't know about.
There is only one body of men in the Northwest who would hate a
union hall enough to have it raided--the lumber "interests." And now
we get at the kernel of the matter, which is the fact that the affair was
the outgrowth of a struggle between the lumber trust and its
employees--between Organized Capital and Organized Labor.

A Labor Case

And so, after all, the famous trial at Montesano was not a murder trial
but a labor trial in the strict sense of the word. Under the law, it must be
remembered, a man is not committing murder in defending his life and
property from the felonious assault of a mob bent on killing and
destruction. There is no doubt whatever but what the lumber trust had
plotted to "make an example" of the loggers and destroy their hall on
this occasion. And this was not the first time that such atrocities had
been attempted and actually committed. Isn't it peculiar that, out of
many similar raids, you only heard of the one where the men defended
themselves? Self-preservation is the first law of nature, but the
preservation of its holy profits is the first law of the lumber trust. The

organized lumber workers were considered a menace to the
super-prosperity of a few profiteers--hence the attempted raid and the
subsequent killing.
What is more significant is the fact the raid had been carefully planned
weeks in advance. There is a great deal of evidence to prove this