It is far too easy to forget nowadays that so many of the basic worker protections we take for granted in America today–Workman’s Comp, minimum wage laws, anti-child-labor laws, 40-hour work weeks, overtime pay, PTO, right to unionize, etc.–real flesh & blood human beings had to literally die for. Much like OSHA regulations, labor laws are written in blood. Labor Day, which is nowadays all too often treated as the mere last-hurrah of Summer, was originally established in the late-1800s to commemorate the very real and very bloody sacrifices that innumerable workers and activists had to make to ensure that their children at least had a bare shot at the middle-class, and all that in the face of the most appalling and sadistic repression by both corporate and statist interests.

Folk-legend Woody Guthrie—he of “This Land Is Your Land” fame—provides one such time-capsule of this era in his old 1945 protest song “1913 Massacre,” wherein he recounts a Christmas party held by some striking copper miners in Calumet, Michigan who “make less than a dollar a day,” as they take a short break from the drudgeries of both mining and labor organizing to celebrate the Holiday with their wives and children. It was Christmas, after all; certain things are supposed to be sacred.

Which is why what happened next was so sacrilegious: thugs hired by the copper mine owners are milling about outside, and they poke their head inside the Hall and sadistically cry out “Fire!” Although a few of the attendees immediately recognize this as just a vicious prank by “the thugs and the scabs” and try to warn everyone accordingly, a “stampede” and panic still breaks out, exacerbated by the thugs holding the door closed so no one can get out. This was in the long decades before housing code and fire exits (something else written in blood), so in short order their “children were smothered on the stairs by the door.” All in all, seventy-three people were trampled to death that Christmas.

The pianist at the party had been playing happy Holiday songs all evening long, but now “The piano played a slow funeral tune/And the town was lit up by a cold Christmas moon/The parents they cried and the miners they moaned/See what your greed for money has done.” Truly Paul spoke the truth when he said the love of money is the root of all evil.

Yet this very real, very horrifying, and very well documented massacre is also a round-about retelling of the Massacre of Innocents–a core part of the Nativity as recorded in Matthew 2:16-18–wherein wicked King Herod orders the murder of all male children in Judea two-years and under, in order to prevent the Christ-child from threatening his rule. It is one of the more disturbing parts of the canonical Christmas story, one that most modern recountings of the Nativity noticeably strive to avoid portraying directly. After all, isn’t Christmas supposed to be a time of peace and joy? Why must there be a massacre of children smack dab in the middle of such a faith-promoting tale? Why would God send His Son to save us, only let all of these innocent child get slaughtered?

But then, the same question persists today: why does God all so many innocent child to get continually slaughtered today? In Gaza Strip, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Syria, and in a thousand other places besides? Why did the Almighty allow all these children to be trampled to death by anti-union thugs in 1913 Michigan? Why does this same God allow children to see their parents kidnapped by ICE before their very eyes right now in America?

But then again, could not all these same questions be directed at us? Why do we permit these slaughters of innocents to rampage around us clear on down to the present moment? It was sadly thematically apropos for that child massacre to occur on that cold Christmas over 100 years ago; it happened as literally then as another 1,913 years before, as it is still literally happening now. The massacre of the innocents never stopped. Christ in his adulthood declared that “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me,” and we perhaps need to grapple with just how literally he meant it.

Now, there was some dispute at the time in 1913 over who first called out fire and triggered the stampede. Charles Moyer, the local union leader, is who first made the accusation that it was someone wearing a badge for the anti-Union “Citizen’s Alliance” who held the doors closed, a claim he refused to ever retract no matter how loudly the Citizen’s Alliance denied it. Moyer’s accusation might have gotten lost into the mists of “he-said-she-said,” save that his opponents made the tactical error of kidnapping Moyer, shooting him in the gut, and then throwing him on a train with angry warnings to never return to Michigan again. Moyer, uncowed, promptly and defiantly returned to Michigan and showed off his gun-shot wound to the press, cementing his version of events as fact.

Certainly the event fit in with anti-Union violence across the rest of the U.S. at the time. It was only five years later in 1919 that a Wobblie was famously lynched in Centralia, Washington over Armistice Day; heck, only two years later in 1915, Union organizer and folk-singer Joe Hill was executed in Salt Lake City, Utah on trumped-up murder charges (he it was who coined the phrases “pie in the sky” as well as “Don’t mourn, organize!”). This was also only a generation after state and federal governments regularly resorting to violent military oppression to break strikes, as documented during the 1886 Haymarket Affair, the 1892 Pittsburgh Homestead Strike, the 1894 Pullman Strike in Chicago, and the 1903 Colorado Labor Wars.

All of which was but the fulfillment of everything that the Christ whose birth we celebrate each December preached radically and unapologetically throughout his mortal ministry: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:24), He declared, that same Messiah who prophesied a celestial order of “neither rich nor poor” that found literal fulfillment in Acts 2:44, 3 Nephi 26:19, 4 Nephi 1:3, as well as D&C 42:30-39 and 49:20. Like Christ Himself, the workers who preached the same were brutally murdered; yet also like Christ, it is the slain who shall be justified in the Last Day.