"I shall never forget the despair and agony on the parents' faces on the awful day of the funeral when the 13 little children, victims not only of John D. Rockefeller, but of the government of the state of Colorado were buried"
About this Quote
Grief is doing political work here. Ella R. Bloor opens in the key of witness testimony, not abstraction: “despair and agony on the parents’ faces” forces the reader to stand at the graveside, then denies them the comfort of treating the dead as an accident of history. The sentence is built like an indictment, with the funeral as courtroom and memory as sworn evidence.
Her most pointed move is the phrase “victims not only of John D. Rockefeller.” Rockefeller functions less as a single villain than as a brand name for a whole system: distant capital, private power, wealth insulated from consequence. But Bloor refuses the simpler populist script where the boss alone bears the blame. The follow-up clause widens the target to “the government of the state of Colorado,” collapsing the usual boundary between public duty and private profit. The subtext is stark: the state is not an umpire; it is an accomplice.
Context matters. Bloor is writing out of the labor wars of the early 20th century, when industrial conflict routinely turned lethal and officials often sided with mine owners. The “13 little children” invokes the Ludlow Massacre’s most haunting image, making innocence the moral accelerant. Her syntax stacks outrage on outrage; the long, unbroken line mimics breathless fury, as if punctuation would soften the charge. Intent isn’t just to mourn. It’s to mobilize, to fix culpability in the public mind, and to insist that the cost of “order” was paid in small coffins.
Her most pointed move is the phrase “victims not only of John D. Rockefeller.” Rockefeller functions less as a single villain than as a brand name for a whole system: distant capital, private power, wealth insulated from consequence. But Bloor refuses the simpler populist script where the boss alone bears the blame. The follow-up clause widens the target to “the government of the state of Colorado,” collapsing the usual boundary between public duty and private profit. The subtext is stark: the state is not an umpire; it is an accomplice.
Context matters. Bloor is writing out of the labor wars of the early 20th century, when industrial conflict routinely turned lethal and officials often sided with mine owners. The “13 little children” invokes the Ludlow Massacre’s most haunting image, making innocence the moral accelerant. Her syntax stacks outrage on outrage; the long, unbroken line mimics breathless fury, as if punctuation would soften the charge. Intent isn’t just to mourn. It’s to mobilize, to fix culpability in the public mind, and to insist that the cost of “order” was paid in small coffins.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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