The Lattimer Massacre of 1897 was a deadly confrontation between mostly immigrant mineworkers and a sheriff’s posse in the village of Lattimer, near Hazleton, Pennsylvania.
On September 10, 1897, the mineworkers were marching for better working conditions during a strike when the posse opened fire. Nineteen miners were killed, and dozens were wounded in one of the deadliest labor massacres in American history, marking a dark chapter in the history of labor rights in the US.
This response to the Lattimer Massacre by an unidentified Luzerne County woman provides a local view on the mass shooting of unarmed marchers in the hours of after the shooting on September 10, 1897.
It was published in the Hazleton Sentinel newspaper on September 11, 1897:
A Woman’s View.
The devil finds work for idle hands to do. We have been reliably formed the persons who committed the outrage yesterday are persons who never did a days work.
Our glorious illustrious martyred Presidents, Lincoln and Garfield were both working men, Garfield, the barefooted boy, driving miles on the tow-path. Lincoln a hired man in his youth. The King Of The World, was a tradesman’s son and himself a trades man. St. John the Divine found his revelations down in a mine. The twelve apostles were chosen from humble toilers.
Go to the battlefield of Gettysburg; view the field, two generals met there.
Go to the slaughter field of Lattimer, laboring men shot down, while climbing a hill to seek the sympathy of their fellows who had asked them to come.
If the Hungarians [came] to this land to be treated as slaves, why the sooner the people arise in their might and say we do not tolerate slavery the better for the country from East to West, North to South.
Some people maintain that the Hungarian takes his earnings back to his native land. What difference pray if it goes over, in small amounts, the result of U. S. dollars earned or whether it goes over with a few orange blossoms, and a wedding dress train…
Sheriff Martin says he valued his life. ‘As for me, give me liberty or give me death.’ – Patrick Henry.
Sheriff Martin says they called him a bad name. These Hungarians were called just such names not only once, but scores of times by understrapper bosses and they, the Huns, did not fire a sixteen shooter at the boss…
Will the company store, should it become a surety, furnish the ‘Polinka’ which the swarthy foreigners finds necessary to his comfort, and which also has times innumerable oiled the throat of his boss and American friend? I tell you these soldiers’ presence here is to intimidate the workingmen and it is wrong.
The press has frequently referred to the rich mine owners a coal kings and coal barons. We do not know a king or baron in America. When our men went to free the slaves in the South, the cause was just and the victory was won. The butchery at Lattimer will forever blot the pages of our History of the North…
Are the Americans perfectly satisfied with the wages and manner of running the mines and breakers in this region for some years past? Answer fearlessly and truthfully, and you will see the minority will predominate. View the dead bodies of the victims… see the sorrowing wives and children, are they to be paupers in our land, now the bread winner has been shot dead in an effort to give them a brighter better life than he ever knew. Requiescat in pace.
Go to the hospital and hear the groans of the suffering, bleeding forms torn and lacerated with the cruel sixteen shooters; look at the sorrowing wives and children! Is his suffering just, shall it be for naught? Citizens be not lukewarm but arise as a free people and do not let the oppressor frighten you with ten thousand uniformed men. The poor Hungarians speaks thus:
‘We came here and unknowingly made your country bad by lowering, now stand by us and we will help to make it good again.’
For ignorant…people these men have behaved in a most remarkably fine manner…
As the beautiful round moon shone with a brilliancy and splendor far beyond human expression, we viewed the bloody scene of the onslaught and we hear the command of God through his Holy Prophet Moses, ‘Thou Shalt Do No Murder.’
(Illustration: Wives identifying their dead husbands, killed in the Lattimer Massacre on September 10, 1897 – Lattimer Massacre Project)
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