Shining the Light on the "Reptilian" Rockefellers: Upton Sinclair's Non-Violent Reform Strategy

Tikas had been shot in the back. Their bodies lay along the Colorado and Southern Railway tracks for three days in full view of passing trains. The militia officers refused to allow them to be moved until a local of a railway union demanded the bodies be taken away for burial.

CF&I was purchased by John D. Rockefeller in 1902, and nine years later he turned his controlling interest in the company to his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who managed the company from his offices at 26 Broadway in New York.

Finally a couple of machine-guns had been turned loose on them, their tent-colony at Ludlow had been burned, and three women and fourteen children had been suffocated to death. I sat in Carnegie Hall, New York City, amid an audience of three thousand people, and listened to an account of these conditions by eye-witnesses; next morning I opened the newspapers, and found an account in the ‘New York Call,’ a Socialist paper, and two inches in the “New York World”�and not a line in any other New York paper.   

I talked over the problem with my wife, and we agreed that something must be done to break this conspiracy of silence.  I had trustworthy information to the effect that young Rockefeller [son of John Rockefeller and father of the reptilian David Rockefeller] was in charge of what was going on in Colorado, though he was vigorously denying it at this time, and continued to deny it until the Walsh commission published his letters and telegrams to his representatives in Denver.  Evidently, therefore, Mr. Rockefeller was the shining mark at which we must aim.  

Louis Tikas, a young Greek idealist, a graduate of the University of Athens, who had been trying to uplift his people and had been foully murdered by corporation thugs, they blackguarded as a ‘brothel hanger-on’ before his corpse was under ground.  John Reed himself they had got involved with a charming young widow in Denver; he had met her twice at dinner-parties! (In passing, to show you how far Colorado had progressed toward civil war, I might mention that this lady, upon learning what had been done to the strikers, sent to the East and purchased two machine-guns and hid them in her cellar, ready to be shipped to the strike-field for use by the strikers in case the militia attempted to return.)

“Every Socialist and magazine-writer, even every writer for conservative publications, was taken in hand upon his arrival in Denver, and fitted out with a scandal. So far as I know, the only one who escaped was Harvey O’Higgins�and this because he took the precaution to bring his wife along.  I had not brought my wife; also I was a ‘divorced man,’ and an easy victim. There was a young Jewish girl, a probation officer in Judge Lindsey’s court, whom I was so indiscreet as to treat to a sandwich in a dairy lunch-room; that was sufficient for the scandal-bureau, which had to hustle in these crowded days.  

I recollect a funny scene in the home of James Randolph Walker, where several of these ‘affinities’ learned for the first time to whom they had been assigned.  We had a merry time over it; but meanwhile, at the meetings of the Law and Order League, and other places where the ladies of ‘good society’ in Denver gathered to abuse the strikers, all these scandals were solemnly taken for granted, and quoted as evidence of the depravity of ‘foreign agitators’ and the radicals who abetted them 
 

And until we the people of the world, men, women, elderly, civilians, soldiers, law enforcement officers stand up and unite in such a manner that raping or murdering any one of us will bring our wrath into the comfort of their homes and lives, unless we succeed at just that, we will continue being both the rapist and the raped, the murderer and the murdered.”  (VN: we are seeing that already with the police shooting an unarmed illegal camper in the back and an unarmed student for being sarcastic)