To Feed the Flies: The Anti-War Article Brought Down the Last Socialist Newspaper in the Grand Valley

This anti-WWI article in the local socialist paper was not popular by the new Super-Patriots at the time. The Sentinel, the Post-Master, and the Home Guard worked together to shutdown “The New Critic.” Mesa County had just sent 50 young draftees to war in the trenches. (pictured)

To Feed the Flies

\When the best manhood in community is herded together like cattle and driven off to the shambles of War, one thinks of humanity’s proud boast of being civilized and laughs with the bitterness of despair.

The majority of men do not want war and resist as much as they have the power. They go with the spirit of resentment in their hearts, they will fight with lessened love for the “Land of Liberty,” and they will die with a black and withering hate in their hearts.

And they that return, will they return with a greater love for their country?

How many hours of patient toil, how many sacrifices bitter and galling, how many pleasures missed, how many sorrows shouldered, how much pain endured, how many weeks of anxious waiting by the little sick beds, how many years of loving self-sacrificing care by the Mother of one of these men; that he might have life, that he might be the man that he is.

Think of it.

Multiply it by the fifty men who were taken, then think of it.

Multiply it again—by the thousands for cities over the nation where the same black tragedy is being enacted.

What a huge toll of human misery. For many can never return. They will leave their rotting bodies on the fields of France–

”to make the world safe for democracy.” (and they say there is a God who punishes blasphemy.)

To make the world safe for democracy? NO!

To make the world safe for the money lender.

To feed to the flies!

Sept. 1917 “The New Critic”