Rebel Voices
Page 21
“I ran like mad to the furnace boss. But he said he dassent blow out the furnace. So at the last the company got back even the lead that had been eatin’ into Andy’s bones and playin’ tag thru Andy’s veins.
“I could never face a feed floor again. I was done.
* * *
“Before I got another job I was flat broke. Could I write home and tell my mother that I was already a bum beatin’ my way on freight cars to every place where I heard of a job? I ask you, fellow worker, could you do that?
“When after many months I did get some money—after I did find a place in the damnable profit makin’ machinery of business and sent for her—she was dead!
“Died of a broken heart, they said, while I was grabbin’ armfuls of box cars lookin’ for a job—at anything, for anything—except chargin’ a lead furnace.
“Did that ever happen to you? Was you ever in a fix like that? Better think it over, fellow worker—seems like somethin’ was wrong. Some said-hard luck. But I cut my eye teeth on that hard luck—I seen it from every side. It is worse than that.
“I had an instinct of solidarity! I had a feelin’ swell up inside me at a job well done. And it was these feelin’s that made a rebel out of me. I want to show my solidarity to my fellow workers at every chance by puttin’ my shoulder to the wheel and helpin’ them to make things better so that no other kid will have to go thru the mill that me and millions more like me has bucked up against. I got enough workmanship in me to know that a system that is slung together in such a haywire manner has had some damn poor mechanics on the job.
“I am Tightline Johnson and any bull of the woods will tell you that Tightline may be a hard-boiled wobbly but he wears no chinwhiskers as a fog buster and can handle a yarder with any man that walks on two legs. Just ask ’em and see. And what I can do with a yarder in the way of nursin’ it along and makin’ the parts run easy and smooth, me and the rest of us wobs has been tryin’ to do with the system of production and distribution of the things we make.
“Because I am a rebel against the slave-drivin’ system that takes all that a man produces and gives him no chance in life unless he lines up and fights—because I have shown my fellow workers how and why to line up—they have made an outcast and an outlaw out of me. Every gunman’s hand is against me. Every scab and fink hates me and all that are like me.
“They have kept me on the bum. They have driven me from camp to camp—blacklisting my name from Ketchikan to Eureka, Calif. They have thrown me into jails—hunted for me with ropes in their hands—hired an army of stoolpigeons and spies to sneak out the secrets of my organization when we have no secrets to hide. They have sent hundreds of my best friends and the whitest men that were ever born—have sent them into prison because they have ideals.
“I ask you is a man who is living such a life and fighting such a battle in a position to take on a wife? Can one whose very freedom is in jeopardy every day and every hour bring peace and happiness into a love life? Is it treating a girl fair to call up in her the tender feelings of love only to tear her heart to bits with fear and perhaps leave her weepin’ with the little ones when they send you to the big house?
“I never walked a dirty street by choice. I never went into a brothel by preference.
“I have trembled at the thought of a sweet woman’s arms clasped about me in love. I have stood with my throat choked with a string of burning lumps—outside of some bourgeois’s home, and watched a while the antics of the clean children playin’ on the lawn.
“You sit up there and tell me I am not wanted! You sit up there and say that I am a waster of my natural gifts! How would you act and what would you do? Just answer me that!”
And do you know the old geezer broke down and cried like a baby.-
* * *
And when I woke up it was mornin’
Chapter 4
Soapbox Militants: Free Speech Campaigns 1908–1916
Hanging is none too good for them. They would be much better dead, for they are absolutely useless in the human economy; they are the waste material of creation and should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion there to rot in cold obstruction like any other excrement.
Editorial, San Diego Tribune (March 4, 1912).
“Foot loose rebels … come at once to defend the Bill of Rights.” Such a call went out in the fall of 1909 from I.W.W. organizers in Missoula, Montana, a small, attractive university town midway between lumber and mining areas in the western part of the state.
The Missoula free speech fight was one of about thirty such struggles conducted by the I.W.W. from 1907 to 1916. Wobblies campaigned for the right to agitate on city streets, not to defend a constitutional principle or to attract publicity, but to publicize extortionist practices of labor agents and to recruit members in the “slave market” sections of cities where migrants gathered between jobs. Their soapbox speeches sounded seditious, unpatriotic, immoral, and threatening to business and commercial circles, and municipal authorities were quick to pass ordinances prohibiting I.W.W. speech-making on the streets.
Such was the case in Missoula when the city council aimed to squelch I.W.W. activities by making street speaking illegal. In answer, hundreds of Wobblies arrived by boxcar to assert their rights to free speech on soapboxes and street corners throughout the town. Soon the crowded jails clogged municipal machinery, and high costs of supporting extra police and extra prisoners led harassed town officials to rescind the ordinance and release the Wobblies. A pattern had developed, as historian Paul Brissenden points out, of “sullen nonresistance on the part of the Wobblies, and of wholesale jailings by authorities”1
Across the country the boldness and intransigence of the rebels exasperated town officials, aroused wrath and frequent violence from respectable town burghers, and frequently turned the free speech campaigns into bitter, bloody fights. To the Wobblies, however, the free speech campaigns were a unique direct action technique, a means of educating workers to the class struggle, and a practical necessity in countering community opposition to organizing the One Big Union.
The Missoula victory was a prelude to the I.W.W.’s major free speech fight in Spokane the following year. Spokane was in the center of the “Inland Empire” of eastern Washington and western Idaho, a region rich in agriculture, mining, and lumber. The most pressing grievance of the thousands of migratory workers who shipped out of Spokane was the way they were fleeced by employment sharks.
Beginning in 1908, I.W.W. organizers mounted soapboxes directly in front of Spokane employment agencies and urged workers, “Don’t buy jobs.” They crusaded for a boycott of agencies and demanded that employers hire directly through the union hall.
In turn, the employment firms organized themselves into the Associated Agencies of Spokane which pressured the city council to ban all street meetings after January 1, 1909. For a time the I.W.W. obeyed the ordinance which was applied to other organizations as well. When the ruling was amended to exempt religious groups such as the Salvation Army, the Wobblies decided to fight back.
On October 28, after I.W.W. organizer Jim Thompson was arrested for soapboxing, the Industrial Worker sent out a call, “Wanted—Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane.” A follow-up letter was sent to all I.W.W. locals: “November 2nd. Free Speech Day. All lovers of free speech are asked to be in readiness to be in Spokane on that date…. It is of course needless to add that the meetings will be orderly and no irregularities of any kind will be tolerated.”2
A five-month campaign defying the street ban began November 2, 1909. On that day, thousands of Wobblies marched from the I.W.W. hall on Front Avenue to court mass arrest.
Speaker after speaker mounted soapboxes to say “Fellow Workers,” before being pulled down by the police, arrested, charged with disorderly conduct, and lodged for thirty days in jail. Frank Little, an I.W.W. organizer who had also been in Missoula, was sentenced to thirty days at the rock pile for reading the Declaration of Independence from a platform. Not all th
e I.W.W. members were able speakers. Many suffered from stage fright. A story is told about the Wobbly who stood on the soapbox, started, “Fellow Workers,” and then in panic yelled, “Where are the cops!”3
By the second day, at least 150 Wobblies were in prison. By the end of the month, over 600 were herded in crowded cells on rations of bread and water. When they protested, the police closed all ventilation in the jail and turned on the steam heat. Bill Haywood later told a 1914 Senate Investigating Committee that several died from first being put into the “hot box” and then, while in a weakened conditioned, third-degreed in ice-cold cells.4
When the jail became full, an abandoned, un-heated schoolhouse was used as a prison. The Spokane Press reported:
Members of the I.W.W. who are confined in the Franklin School as prisoners were marched to the central police station yesterday for their bath. Word of their coming spread, and crowds of people lined Front Avenue, intent on getting a view of the men. On their return, the crowd had increased and citizens bombarded the prisoners with a shower of sandwiches wrapped in paper, oranges, apples, and sacks of tobacco.5
The chief of police arrived to confiscate the food, and the men returned to their prison rations of half a loaf of bread a day and no smokes.
Police brutality and treatment of the prisoners aroused protest from the community and throughout the state. All goods coming from Spokane were boycotted by the Coeur d’Alene district of the Western Federation of Miners. The Socialist Party of Washington issued a report condemning police brutality. The A.F.L. Spokane Central Labor Council unanimously voted to demand a repeal of the street ban ordinance.
One after another, eight editors of the Spokane Industrial Worker got out an issue and were arrested. The Industrial Worker was moved to Seattle after police confiscated all the copies of the December 10 issue in which I.W.W. organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who had tried to delay her arrest by chaining herself to a lamp post, reported that the sheriff used the women’s section of the jail as a brothel, with the police procuring customers and the sheriff pocketing the profits.
Early in March 1910 the struggle concluded when the mayor and law-enforcement officials, tired of using tax money to pay over $1000 a week to maintain extra police and prisoners, agreed to negotiate with an I.W.W. committee. They recognized the organization’s right to rent a hall, publish a newspaper, and organize through street meetings. The free speech prisoners were released. The licenses of nineteen of the most notorious employment agencies were subsequently revoked and later investigations into the practices of employment agencies, led to regulatory legislation.
Between 1909 and 1913, there were at least twenty major I.W.W. free speech fights throughout the country. All of them involved the right of the organization to recruit members at street meetings. The most important of these was in Fresno, California, where Frank Little, a veteran of the Missoula and Spokane free speech struggles, had organized a new local of unskilled fruit workers in the San Joaquin Valley.
According to the December 31, 1910, issue of the Oakland World, trouble started in Fresno when a contractor who found difficulty getting enough low-paid workers to construct a dam outside the city, complained to the Fresno chief of police that his labor shortage was due to I.W.W. agitators. Alarmed by the presence of Wobblies in the community, the Fresno Herald and Democrat wrote: “For men to come here with the ex press purpose of creating trouble, a whipping post and a cat-o’-nine tails well seasoned by being soaked in salt water is none too harsh a treatment for peace breakers.”6
In May 1910, Frank Little reported to the Industrial Worker that police were breaking up I.W.W. meetings and arresting members on charges of vagrancy. Three months later when Little was arrested and put in jail on a twenty-five-day sentence of bread and water, he telegraphed the national office in Chicago to send help for a free speech campaign.
“Foot loose rebels” from all parts of the country arrived to test the ban on street speaking and fill the jails. Over 150 Wobblies rode the rails from Portland to the Oregon-California state line, and then to avoid arrest by railroad police, left the train to walk the rest of the way to Fresno through a snowstorm in the Siskiyou Mountains. The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported that an army of 100 unemployed men had left that city to march on Fresno and expected their forces to number about 1000 when they reached California. The Denver Post wrote in February that plans had been made in Colorado to recruit 5000 men to start for Fresno in the spring.
As the San Francisco Call of March 2, 1911, stated about the Fresno struggle:
It is one of those strange situations which crop up suddenly and are hard to understand. Some thousands of men, whose business it is to work with their hands, tramping and stealing rides, suffering hardships and facing dangers—to get into jail. And to get into that one particular jail in a town of which they have never heard before, in which they have no direct interest.7
The Fresno jail was filled with singing, shouting rebels. At one point, to protest their bread and water diet, the Wobblies staged a soapbox demonstration through the bars of their cells, addressing an audience that had congregated outside the prison. They took turns lecturing about the class struggle and leading the singing of Wobbly songs. When they refused to stop, the jailor sent for fire department trucks and ordered the fire hoses turned full force on the prisoners. The men used their mattresses as shields, and quiet was only restored when the icy water reached knee-high in the cells.
The threat of the arrival of thousands more free speech volunteers terrified the city officials into rescinding the ban on street speaking in March 1911. The prisoners were released in small groups every few hours. They made their ways to Wobbly headquarters, collected their belongings, and went to look for jobs outside the city. Few stayed around to exercise their rights to speak on the streets. They left Fresno singing a new verse to “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum”:
Springtime has come and I’m just out of jail Without any money, without any bail.8
A few months after the Fresno prisoners were released, employers in San Diego presented a petition to their city council to prohibit street meetings and speeches in the business district of that city. In January 1912, following a period of hysteria over the dynamiting of the anti-union Los Angeles Times and the courtroom confession of the McNamara brothers, the San Diego council banned street speaking in the midtown district.
On the day the ordinance became effective, over 2000 members of a newly formed Free Speech League composed of anarchists, socialists, I.W.W. members, single taxers, and some A.F.L. union members paraded through the San Diego business district to defy the ban. Within the week, several hundred were in jail, charged with having violated the ruling. The March 4, 1912, issue of the San Diego Tribune called for the shooting or hanging of all men in the jails which, they claimed, “would end the trouble in an hour.”9 Fire department hoses were used to disperse a street meeting held in front of the prison on March 10 to protest the inhuman treatment of the jailed free speech volunteers. Arrests continued as new arrivals to the city—some 5000 in the next few months—took up the cudgels to intensify defiance.
Besides the intimidation of the prisoners inside the jails, local businessmen organized vigilante committees which terrorized community leaders sympathetic to the free speech campaign. In collusion with the police, the vigilantes would seize prisoners released from jail in the evening, load them into cars, drive out of town, and after beating and clubbing them, warn them not to return to San Diego. The editor of the San Diego Herald who opposed these actions was also kidnapped at night by vigilantes and beaten outside the city limits. Solidarity published the sworn affidavits of some of these victims. I.W.W. member John Stone testified that on March 22, 1912, after being arrested and detained at the police station for ten hours, he was released at midnight, and forced into a waiting automobile:
We were taken out of the city, about twenty miles, where the machine stopped. Then one of the escorts said to me, “Look at me, who are you?�
�� At the same time, a man in the rear struck me with a blackjack several times on the head and shoulders; the other man then struck me on the mouth with his fist. The men in the rear then sprang around and kicked me in the stomach. I then started to run away; and heard a bullet go past me. I stopped at about a hundred feet and turned around…. Joseph Marko, whom they started to beat up … stood in the light coming from the second machine. I saw him knocked to the ground several times, and he gave several loud screams. He shortly after came up to where we were and we … hid in a little gully close by until the machine went by us. After which we returned and camped for the night under a large tree close to where we had been assaulted. In the morning, I examined Joe Marko’s condition and found that the back of his head had been split open and a large amount of blood had flowed to such an extent as to cover his coat, vest, and shirt with blood.10
Anarchist Emma Goldman, who came to San Diego to lecture during this time, reported:
The Vigilantes raided the I.W.W. headquarters, broke up the furniture, and arrested a large number of men found there. They were taken to Sorrento to a place where a flag pole had been erected. There the I.W.W.’s were forced to kneel, kiss the flag, and sing the national anthem. As the incentive to quicker action, one of the vigilantes would slap them on the back which was a signal for a general beating. After these proceedings, the men were loaded into automobiles and set to San Onofre, near the county line, placed in a cattle-pen with armed guards over them, and kept without food or drink for eighteen hours. The following morning they were taken out in groups of five and compelled to run the gauntlet. As they passed between the double line of vigilantes, they were belabored with clubs and blackjacks. Then the flag-kissing episode was repeated, after which they were told to “hike” up the track and never come back. They reached Los Angeles after a tramp of several days, sore, hungry, penniless, and in a deplorable physical state.11