The Phelps Dodge Mining Corporation. (1919)

Editorial from the March 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

On our front page we print an invaluable report of an outrage perpetrated by the Phelps Dodge Mining Corporation, with the assistance of the local authorities, upon striking workers. Read it.

This is not the first case of a similar kind that we have given the publicity of our pages. Older readers will remember the Lawrence affair, and the ghastly firing of a camp over the heads of the trapped workers in another case, and the shooting of the poor wretches who tried to escape. We draw especial attention to these items of capitalist villiany in America at the present moment for the reason that they show with perfect clearness the hollow fraud and sham of all the drivel about the Americans entering the war to “make the world safe for democracy.”

From Peterloo to Tonypandy and Belfast in the British Isles, from Homestead to Bisbee in the United States, the same tale is to tell. All the forces which political supremacy everywhere places in the hands of the master class are and will be used to keep the capitalist world safe from democracy. There’s a difference.