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But to your investigator the important subject to analyze is not the guilt or innocence of Ford or Suhr, as the direct stimulators of the mob in action, but to name and standardize the early and equally important contributors to a psychological situation which resulted in an unlawful killing.
If you were a bum without a blanket; if you left your wife and kids when you went West for a job, and had never located them since; if your job never kept you long enough in a place to qualify you to vote; if you slept in a lousy, sour bunk-house, and ate food just as rotten as they could give you and get by with it; if deputy sheriffs shot your cooking-cans full of holes and spilled your grub on the ground; if your wages were lowered on you when the bosses thought they had you down; if there was one law for Ford, Suhr, and Mooney, and another for Harry Thaw; if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic?
"Without doubt the propaganda which the I.W.W. had actually adopted for the California seasonal worker can be, in its fairly normal working out in law, a criminal conspiracy, and under that charge, Ford and Suhr have been found guilty of the Wheatland murder. But the important fact is, that this propaganda will be carried out, whether unlawful or not.
It is also obvious that the conviction of the agitators, such as Ford and Suhr, of murder, is not a solution, but is only the punishment or revenge inflicted by organized society for a past deed. The Remedy lies in prevention.
I think of the Wheatland Hop-Fields riot, or the Ford and Suhr case, which Carl was appointed to investigate for the Federal government, as the dramatic incident which focused his attention on the need of a deeper approach to a sound understanding of labor and its problems, and which, in turn, justified Mr.
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