For Freedom laughs at prison bars;
Her voice re-echoes from the stars,
Proclaiming with the tempest’s breath
A cause beyond the reach of death!
-Ralph Chaplin
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday March 12, 1918
From the Cook County Jail: “Prison Song” by Ralph Chaplin
From The Ohio Socialist of March 10, 1918:
———-
And hark! An echo from the past
Rings Down through all eternity-
“Ye did it not to these my lambs,
And so ye did it not to Me!”
-Annie Q. Carter
Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday March 11, 1908
The Waif and the Petted Poodle by Annie Q. Carter
From the Socialist Montana News of March 5, 1908:
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday March 10, 1918
From San Francisco to Petrograd, Workers Fight for Life of Tom Mooney
From The Liberator of March 1918:
The Peril of Tom Mooney
By Robert Minor
THE story of the manner in which Tom Mooney’s death sentence was procured is stock conversation in American working-class homes. It has gone as far as the trenches of the European armies. There is hardly a Russian village where the name of “Tom Muni” has not been heard. Actually, the names of the witnesses in the case are spoken in Siberian villages, and a certain California district attorney is regularly cursed around the samovar.
The only evidence against Tom Mooney that a sensible man would listen to, was that of an Oregon cattleman, Frank C. Oxman, who came into the trial at the last moment, took the stand like a breeze from the prairie, swore that he was a country gentleman, loved his wife, and had seen Israel Weinberg drive Tom Mooney, Mrs. Mooney, Billings and an unidentified man to the scene of the crime in Israel Weinberg’s jitney bus, of the number of which car he had made a note on a telegraph envelope which he had in his pocket at that moment. He never made a mistake in his life in the identity of a person, as he was used to identifying cattle on the range….Mooney was condemned to die on the gallows.
Hellraisers Journal, Monday March 9, 1908
-Mother Jones News Round-Up for February 1908, Part 2:
–Found Speaking at Girard, Kansas, at Socialist District Convention
After February 19th, Mother Jones was found in the state of Kansas where she gave speeches in her usual rousing style on behalf of the Socialist Party. She was a special guest of the Appeal to Reason in Girard where she attended the Third District Convention and gave a speech which “aroused the audience to the wildest enthusiasm.”
The Dallas Morning News reported on February 28th that Mother had entered the state of Texas and was engaged to speak in Longview and in Dallas.
From the Appeal to Reason of February 29, 1908:
A GALA DAY FOR SOCIALISM
—–
The Third District Convention Stirs Things up in Girard
-Old Party Politicians Puzzled and Worried.
—–Last Saturday, in the Girard court house, delegates from the Third district of Kansas met in convention and placed in nomination for congress Comrade Ben Wilson. Under the new primary law this nomination is merely an informal expression of the party’s desire and his name will necessarily have to be voted on at the regular primary in August. In the meantime a vigorous campaign will be carried on.
There were seventy-six regular delegates present, representing nearly every county in the district. There were several hundred out-of-town visitors at both afternoon and evening sessions, and the court house was crowded to the doors. Two years ago there were eleven delegates at our congressional convention in Parsons. The old party politicians viewed the assemblage with surprised wonder. They’ll be more surprised this fall.
The feature of the night session was a stirring address by Mother Jones. As usual, her clear, resonant voice, her earnest face, in its frame of silver hair, aroused the audience to the wildest enthusiasm. The air seemed electrified with the spirit of the revolution. Turning suddenly, as she pointed to Ben Wilson, she declared:
I’m coming back to the Third district this summer and fall and I’m going to help you fellows elect the first Socialist congressman. Then I’m going down to Washington, and when Ben and I get there you’ll see something doing.
—–
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday March 8, 1908
-Mother Jones News Round-Up for February 1908, Part 1:
–Found Speaking to Unemployed in Cincinnati, Fort Wayne & Racine
On March 2nd Mother Jones was found speaking to the unemployed in Cincinnati, where, it was reported, she was met by an enthusiastic audience.
From the Cincinnati Post of February 3, 1908:
MOTHER JONES STIRS HEARERS
—–
Have you ever stopped to think that for the $12, $15 or $18 you have been earning each week for the past five or ten years, you have been producing for the man who employed you four or five times that sum?
-was the question asked an enthusiastic audience of 1500 at Central Turner Hall Sunday [March 2nd] by “Mother” Jones, Socialist worker.
Did you know that he has been stocking up for years the overplus of your production, so that he can make a clean profit from it without the expense of paying you wages?
———-
[Photograph added.]
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Hellraisers Journal, Thursday March 7, 1918
Steel Town, U. S. A. – Some Improvements Yet Long Hours Continue
From the Appeal to Reason of March 2, 1918:
Labor Conditions in Steel Trust.
There has been some improvement in the conditions of labor in the steel mills, as the figures show, but it is an exceedingly slight improvement. The Steel Trust investigation of 1911-12, made by the Stanley committee of the House of Representatives, revealed an almost unbelievable state of exploitation, of long hours, of low wages and generally servile conditions. Those revelations were subsequently confirmed by the report of the Federal Labor Bureau, then under the direction of Charles P. Neill. Thereupon a committee of the more humane stockholders of the trust (the Cabot committee) insisted upon certain changes in conditions, and some of these changes have since been slowly under way. By 1913 there had been a slight reduction in hours. There has also been some increase in wages, but the increases have not kept pace with the rise in food prices.
Bulletin 218 of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, published last October, gave a detailed study of wages and hours in this industry to June, 1915. It is shown that in the blast furnaces 59 per cent, of the employes in 1915 worked seven days a week, as against 80 per cent, in 1911. In 1909 no one in the blast furnaces on full time was working less than 60 hours per week, while 26 per cent, were working form 60 to 83 hours, and 74 per cent, were working a full 84 hours. In 1915 6 per cent, were working under 60 hours, 53 per cent. from 60 to 83 hours and 41 per cent, a full 84 hours. Even with the reduction made, these still remain inhumanly long hours.
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Hellraisers Journal, Friday March 6, 1908
Terre Haute, Indiana – Eugene V. Debs on Legislated Sabbatarianism
From the Terre Haute Tribune of March 1, 1908:
Progress by Prohibition
by Eugene V. Debs
Some well-meaning but deluded people think that all wickedness can be overcome and the millennium ushered in by prohibition. Anything they do not happen to like is bad, according to their ethics, and forthwith is put upon their prohibition list. These people strain at gnats and swallow camels. They throw a fit over a man taking a drink at 11:30 or playing a game of cards, but they are not concerned about wage-slavery, or child-sweating, which have a thousand victims where the saloon has one.
These people are not satisfied to be permitted to spend their Sundays as they choose, but they must see to it that others spend their Sundays in the same way. According to these fanatics, practically everything in town is to be closed Sunday except the churches. This means that Terre Haute is to be converted into a sabbatarian penitentiary. The gospel of gloom will then be triumphant and the spirit of bigotry and intolerance will seek other fields to conquer.
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday March 5, 1908
Josephine Conger-Kaneko on Crime of Child Labor in America
From The Socialist Woman of March 1908:
THE HORRIBLE CRIME OF CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA.
—–
Josephine Conger-Kaneko.“How long,” they say, “how long, Oh, cruel nation
Will you stand, to move the world on a child’s heart;
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?”
A little over one hundred years ago the first act was passed by the British Parliament to abate the evils of child labor.
The workhouses of London at that time were crowded with pauper children to the extent that their managers were paying a premium to the manufacturers to take them off their hands. These puny, half-starved children whom nobody owned, orphans, deserted infants, who had become a burden on the tax payers, were sent by the hundreds and thousands to supply the demand for cheap labor which was springing up in factories on every hand. They were housed in barracks, were driven long hours at hand tasks by their overseers, were fed the coarsest of food, and died by scores from disease—bone rot, curvature of the spine, consumption, and other infections produced by their manner of living.
It was this state of things that brought about the first law regulating in any way the labor of the child. This law was passed in 1802. And it was but the merest beginning. The evils of child labor were so many, so varied and so persistent, that to this day there is no adequate child labor law in the whole world. In 1833 it was estimated that in England there were 56,000 children between nine and thirteen in factories. many of whom worked sixteen hours a day. The English Woman’s Journal of 1859 gives the following account of pauper children in London:
Then we’ll sing one song of the poor and ragged tramp,
He carries his home on his back;
Too old to work, he’s not wanted ’round the camp,
So he wanders without aim along the track.
-Joe Hill
Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday March 4, 1908
“The Blanket Stiff, Product of Roosevelt’s Prosperity”
From the Socialist Montana News of February 27, 1908:
The Man Without a Country
Still on the Hunt for the Dinner Pail
—–
The Wage Slave
A little more than half a century ago a question of great interest to the country was brought up by a few men and women who saw the evil effects of slavery and its consequences. The question was agitated so persistently that it spread through the world. Not to our own country was it confined, but it became the absorbing question in Europe, and it was acknowledged that it was an evil and a disgrace to humanity and to the civilized world that beings made in the image of God should be subjected and treated like animals.
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday March 3, 1918
Helen Keller Raisers Her Voice to Defend the I. W. W.
From The Liberator of March 1918:
In Behalf of the I. W. W.
By Helen Keller
Down through the long weary years the will of the ruling class has been to suppress either the man or his message when they antagonized its interests. From the execution of the propagandist and the burning of books, down through the various degrees of censorship and expurgation to the highly civilized legal indictment and winking at mob crime by constituted authorities, the cry has ever been “crucify him!” The ideas and activities of minorities are misunderstood and misrepresented. It is easier to condemn than to investigate. It takes courage to steer one’s course through a storm of abuse and ignominy. But I believe that discussion of even the most bitterly controverted matters is demanded by our love of justice, by our sense of fairness and an honest desire to understand the problems that are rending society. Let us review the facts relating to the situation of the “I. W. W.’s” since the United States entered the war with the declared purpose to conserve the liberties of the free peoples of the world.
During the last few months, in Washington State, at Pasco and throughout the Yakima Valley, many “I. W. W.” members have been arrested without warrants, thrown into “bullpens” without access to attorney, denied bail and trial by jury, and some of them shot. Did any of the leading newspapers denounce these acts as unlawful, cruel, undemocratic? No. On the contrary, most of them indirectly praised the perpetrators of these crimes for their patriotic service!
