SIXTEEN TONS
By Jim Rigby
Austin, TX minister
4/22/22
As a child I loved a song sung by Tennesse Ernie Ford called, “Sixteen Tons.” The lyrics of the song went:
“You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don’t you call me cause I can’t go.
I owe my soul to the company store.”
As a kid I had no idea the song had been inspired by a letter from an actual miner living in brutal conditions. It was the songwriter’s brother who wrote a letter with the lines:
“You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.”
and:
“I can't afford to die. I owe my soul to the company store.”
As a child I listened to that song, and to the lyrics of Woody Guthrie, with no sense of the history of violence against labor in this nation. I had been fed the line that capitalism had single handedly produced our standard of living. I did not know those old protest songs were memorials to brave souls that gave their lives struggling against America's robber barons to give us health benefits, worker safety and the living wages.
I did not know I was thanking the wrong people.
This week is the 108th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre where private armed guards hired by John Rockefeller Jr. opened fire on striking miners killing 26 people, including the children and spouses of the miners. When the president called in the national guard, miners assumed troops had been sent to protect them, but the national guard soon joined in the slaughter. The miners armed themselves but had no chance against such odds.
Wooody Guthrie tried to capture the horror of the massacre:
“We were so afraid you would kill our children,
We dug us a cave that was seven foot deep,
Carried our young ones and pregnant women
Down inside the cave to sleep.
That very night your soldiers waited,
Until all us miners were asleep,
You snuck around our little tent town,
Soaked our tents with your kerosene.
You struck a match and in the blaze that started,
You pulled the triggers of your gatling guns,
I made a run for the children but the fire wall stopped me.Thirteen children died from your guns.”
Walter Hedges Fink wrote of a fallen miner:
“They would have said that he was smiling, too, because of the anticipation of meeting his wife and three little children in Heaven, where Rockefeller's millions do not rule, where it does not mean death to fight for things which belong to you.”
As Americans awake to our true history of racial injustice we must also realize we have been given a false version of the labor struggle. We have been taught that capitalism has singlehandedly given us our current standard of living. In fact, it was the movement of labor AGAINST the tyranny of capital that gave living wages, medical care and worker safety to vast majority of Americans through history.
No one made this point better than Martin Luther King, Jr. who said:
“The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over the nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.”