It well recalls the triumphs past,
It gives the hope of peace at last;
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human right and human gain.
-Jim Connell
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday February 18, 1908
The Red Flag: “Symbol of International Brotherhood.”
From the Montana News of February 13, 1908:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday February 17, 1918
Eugene V. Debs on the Coming Social Revolution
From the Duluth Truth of February 15, 1918:
Towards the Rising Sun
by Eugene V. Debs
The earth is in travail; the race is suffering from the pangs of parturition. A worldwide, humanity embracing revolution is on the calendar—in red letters—of the 20th Century. The impending social crisis is the most portentous that ever issued from the womb of time.
Historical epochs mark the growth of man, the progress of events, the rise and sweep of civilization.
Prophets and philosophers, catching the spirit of coming events, force and proclaim them; and as they approach, poets and pamphleteers, orators and agitators, dramatists and musicians, animated by the new spirit, acclaim the glad tidings of the sunrise of the morrow.
These are the heralds of the dawn; the torchbearers of progress, the evangels of advancing civilization.
Living, they are hated and reviled, crucified and damned.
Dead, they live again and forever.
Freedom is the universal shibboleth of the present age.
And as the cry for freedom surges from the soul and leaps from the lips of Labor, a thousand and million proletarians, in all the zones that girdle the globe, lift their bowed bodies from the dust, and join in the swelling anthem of the Social Revolution.
I am not conscious of having committed any crime.
The thing that I am conscious of is having endeavored
to inspire higher ideals and nobler lives.
If to do that is a crime in the eyes of the government,
I am proud to have committed that crime.
-C. E. Ruthenberg
Hellraisers Journal, Saturday February 16, 1918
Canton, Ohio – Prison Doors Close Behind Ohio Socialists
The New York Evening Call of January 17th reported that the United States Supreme Court had affirmed the prison sentences of C. E. Ruthenberg, Secretary of Local Cleveland, Alfred Wagenknecht, State Secretary and Charles Baker, State Organizer, all of the Socialist Party of America. All three stand sentenced to serve a year in Canton prison by Federal Judge Westenhaver. The statements of Ruthenberg and Wagenknecht, made before they were taken to Canton, were published this month in the International Socialist Review:
NEWS AND VIEWS
From Ohio-As the prison doors at Canton, Ohio, open to receive our comrades, Ruthenberg and Wagenknecht, for one year, they send greetings and these words to the REVIEW and its readers:
THE Supreme Court has decided we must spend a year in jail.
The “crime” of which we are convicted is truth-telling.
We believe in certain principles. We fought for those principles. We go to jail.
Ostensibly we are convicted of inducing a certain Alphonse Schue not to register. The charge is merely the excuse. Neither of us knew Schue. Neither of us heard of him until his name appeared in the indictment against us.
The ruling class is always able to find a Judas. Schue was induced to say he heard our speeches and had been influenced thereby not to register, by the promise of his freedom.
You, you miserable policemen!
What business have you here?
Your presence is and insult to
the honest workingmen
who are attending this meeting.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Saturday February 15, 1908
Mother Jones News Round-Up for January 1908:
-Found Speaking with Lucy Parsons in Chicago
On the evening of January 17th, at a meeting for the Unemployed at Brand’s Hall in Chicago, Mother Jones and Lucy Parsons were both found making passionate speeches which were most unfavorably reported by the kept press.
From Indiana’s Fort Wayne News of January 18, 1908:
THE ANARCHISTS WERE RESTRAINED
—–LUCY PARSONS THE LEADING FIGURE IN LAST
EVENING’S DEMONSTRATION IN CHICAGO.
—–
CHICAGO, Jan. 18.-The presence of a score of policemen and an equal number of plain clothes men prevented anarchy from ruling the meeting of the “unemployed” and others at Brand’s hall last night, but there was enough of it to make the occasion lively and cause J. H. Drake, who acted as chairman, to give up in disgust and leave the hall.
Not over 800 persons in all answered the call for the turnout, but it was decided to mass the unemployed next Thursday and march on the city hall to demand work. It was suggested, if no other means presented themselves, to tear down the city hall to furnish the desired work.
Mrs. Lucy Parsons, widow of the noted anarchist, Ben L. Reitman, who makes a comfortable living out of the Brotherhood Welfare association, and “Mother” Jones all took the opportunity to air their opinion of President Roosevelt and capitalists.
Hellraisers Journal, Friday February 14, 1908
New York, New York – Young Socialist Returns to Parent’s Home
For the past few weeks, the news of the arrest of the husband of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn has been published in newspapers across the nation. For example, we have this item from Alabama’s Centreville Press of February 13th:
Socialist’s Husband Arrested.
John A. Jones, husband of Elizabeth Flynn, the girl Socialist agitator, was arrested at Aurora, Minn., on a charge of incendiarism.
—–
At this time Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is in New York City and her husband, Jack Jones, is out of jail and has recently been interviewed by a reporter for the Duluth News Tribune.
From Mississippi’s Vicksburg Evening Post of February 3, 1908:
PRISON HALTS HONEYMOON OF GIRL
—–
New York, Feb. 3.-With a romance written in suffering, a lifetime crowded into a few months, through which the divine fire of a cause gleams like a beacon light, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the girl Socialist agitator whose words have at seventeen made her known across a continent, has returned ill and exhausted to her father’s home in New York City.
It is just two years ago since Miss Flynn, then a student in the Morris Heights High School, became affiliated with the Socialist movement. Gifted with a quick brain and a facile oratory, she seized upon the dramatic possibilities of the great struggle of labor and capital and spoke as one inspired.
The Flynns are New England folk, the father of a Bowdoin College man and civil engineer, whose difficulties with a company which refused him the money he had earned first aroused the thoughtful Elizabeth, eldest of a brood of four, to interest in the situation. When the Flynns left their Connecticut home to come to New York the girl, already deep in socialist literature, became associated with the leaders in this city. But she was a child, too young to become a member of the association, therefore she was permitted to speak from their platform only as an affiliated agitator.
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday February 13, 1908
New York, New York – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Stands with Strikers
Since her marriage in Minnesota, in early January, to I. W. W. organizer Jack Jones, his arrest and her subsequent return to her parent’s home in New York, we have not heard much from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But we did find this item in the New York Sun of February 7th:
GIRL SOCIALIST TO STRIKERS
—–ELIZABETH FLYNN ENLIVENS A MEETING OF MILLINERS
—–
Commends the Workers to the Socialist Trades Unions
and Describes Hearst as a Middle Class Reformer
-As for Roosevelt, What’s He to Labor?
The mantle which Thomas W. Lawson discarded when he announced that so far as he was concerned the “System” might work out its own destruction has fallen upon the shoulders of Miss Elizabeth Flynn. She wore it last night most becomingly and effectively at a mass meeting of milliners in Teutonia Hall, 66 Essex street.
Miss Flynn is 17 and slim, with big Irish blue eyes, nut brown hair and the milk white skin that betokens a Killarney ancestry. Her voice is clear, soft and coaxing, with a carrying power and a staying quality that the average Madison Square Garden orator would be glad to attain at almost any cost.
The crusader against capital spoke for one hour and a quarter and at the end of that period seemed fresher and more enthusiastic than when she began. As for what she didn’t say about the robbers who stole from the poor working man his country, the tools and materials and the finished product of his labor, and even annexed his inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it would be difficult for the most ingenious opponent of the “System” to conceive.
I have no country to fight for;
my country is the earth,
and I am a citizen of the world.
-Eugene V. Debs
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday February 12, 1918
Eugene Debs Defends the Socialist Party of America
From the Chicago Eye-Opener of February of 9, 1918:
The Campaign This Year.
by Eugene V. Debs
The Socialist Party is emerging from another struggle crowned with victory.
When the party declared its attitude toward war at the St. Louis convention [April 7-14, 1917] it was fiercely attacked from within as well as without as an anti-patriotic, seditious, traitorous organization. The chairman of the committee that framed the war resolution was indicted and sentenced to penitentiary for a term of five years. The National Secretary [Adolph Germer] was arrested upon one charge, indicted and tried upon another, and is still under bail pending further trial.
Hundreds of the party’s speakers and organizers were arrested and jailed, and hundreds of others forcibly prevented from speaking. Halls for meeting purposes were denied our lecturers, secret service agents dogged the heels of our comrades, while rowdies and strong-arm men, including not a few in the uniform of United States soldiers and sailors, were incited to raid our local headquarters, sack our offices, and break up our meetings. The party’s papers were either suppressed outright or sorely hampered by the authorities.
Hellraisers Journal, Friday February 11, 1898
Modern-Day Pharisee Prays to Save His Milk-White Hands
From the Appeal to Reason of February 5, 1898:
Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “The drudgery I would not do, O Lord, assign to others.””
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong
-Ralph Chaplin
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday February 10, 1918
I. W. W. Prepares for Greatest Labor Trial in History
From the International Socialist Review of February 1918:
The General Defense Committee of the I. W. W.
—–
THE conspiracy of the Owners of American Industry to put the One Big Union out of business by legal procedure will come to a showdown during the coming I. W. W. trials in Chicago, about the 25th of February.
It may be the greatest labor trial in the history of these United States, resulting in the conviction of the 106 workers, or the trial itself may turn into an indictment of the profit system, which will shake the thrones of the fat copper and lumber profiteers. For as Prof. Roger W. Babson points out in the Magazine of Wall Street: “There are two wars in progress today. One is between nations and the other is between classes.”
At the present time, over one thousand members of the I. W. W. are in jails across country, but there are away over one hundred thousand members on the outside. The faster they jail them the faster they grow. Tomorrow there will be more of them than today. There will never be enough jails to go around!
There came to [Boise] an array of
defense witnesses full of health and spirits,
brawny, frank-eyed men and cheerful, resolute women.
-John R. McMahon
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday February 9, 1908
Remembering the Haywood Trial: Witnesses for the Defense
From Wilshire’s Magazine of August 1907:
While reviewing the coverage of the Haywood Trial by Wilshire’s Magazine, we came across a particularly compelling photograph of the many witnesses who came to Boise in order to testify on behalf of Big Bill Haywood.
The photograph was from an article by John R. McMahon entitled “Story of the Famous Trial” wherein he had this to say about the witness:
In refreshing contrast to the State’s array of official scamps, deputy sheriffs, policemen, clerks, et al., there came to town an array of defense witnesses full of health and spirits, brawny, frank-eyed men and cheerful, resolute women. They did not have to be dragooned into comming; they rejoiced that they could be of service to their imprisoned comrades; their faces beamed with the hope and inspiration of a new day for the united workers of the land. They greeted one another affectionately and with crushing hand grips. It seemed that all the known and unknown veterans of the labor war of Colorado were gathered together. Nearly every man had been causelessly persecuted, jailed, bullpenned, deported, shot at or assaulted by mine owners’ thugs; every woman had been insulted, threatened, arrested or starved out for the crime of sheltering the homeless and giving food to the hungry. If this is the stuff that the western working class is made of, we need have never a fear. These people thrive on persecution.
