Denver Morning Post Columbine Editorial

The Denver Post in its morning edition objects that I.W.W. activists dare to visit coal miners in their homes, justifies military action.

FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL
The Denver Morning Post
November 2, 1927

Colorado’s Patience
Is Wearing Thin

Patience and forbearance cease to be virtues when wasted upon those who deliberately and with calculated bad faith abuse them.

Governor Adams has “leaned over backwards” in being long suffering and restrained with the lawbreaking I.W.W. leaders who are conducting the coal strike in Colorado.

In return, they have quibbled and evaded, substituting duplicity for defiance, and finally hurling into the teeth of the governor and people of Colorado a curse and a threat.

The governor “requested” the I.W.W. to stop picketing. They appeared to accede to the request. But picketing is picketing, whether it be done at a coal mine or in the homes of miners. In the first case it is open defiance of law. In the second it is a sneaking, underhand evasion of the law.

I.W.W. pickets were ostensibly withdrawn from the southern Colorado mines, but actually they were merely transferred from the mines to the miners’ homes. The wobblies have substituted war on women and children for browbeating and bullying men.

Upon the heels of this shabby return for the governor’s patient attempt to withhold the mailed fist which is the state’s final resort against organized lawlessness, the I.W.W. has now uttered a profane defi, upon which it proposes to act today, by resuming picketing with “To hell with the state” as its slogan.

Under such circumstances, patience not only ceases to be a virtue—
IT CEASES TO BE. The governor has met and exceeded every demand of fair play and forbearance. He has withheld the troops because he, in common with other citizens of Colorado, abhors the thought of bloodshed or needless violence.

But if I.W.W. pickets again appear at the mines today, there is nothing to do but invoke the full might of the state’s authority to answer their sneering defiance. The law and good order of Colorado will be upheld, and the I.W.W. will learn that a patient man, like Governor Adams, when aroused, strikes hard and strikes swiftly.

IWW PROSE

Denver Morning Post Columbine Editorial