Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 19, 1913 New York, New York – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Leads Waiters’ Strike
From The Rock Island Argus of January 18, 1913:
New York.-Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is just a woman, but she has demonstrated her ability to lead a big strike in New York City. When the hotel and restaurant waiters decided that they wanted more pay, they asked Miss Flynn to help them. She played a prominent and successful part in the Lawrence, Mass., textile strike a year ago.
She came to New York City about the time the strike started and has been on the job ever since. She’s a good organizer and a fiery speaker. She says the best way to hit the hotel-keepers is to prove that the food they serve is unclean. Addressing a big crowd of strikers the other night she said:
I want you all to come and tell about the adulteration of food. I want you to tell how dishes which are refused by one guest because of their inferiority are sent back again to another guest; and how sauces are poured upon bad food to make it taste like good food. I want you to make affidavit to it, so we may give our information to the board of health and to the newspapers.
If the guest knew half much as you do about the food they eat and the places it comes from, they wouldn’t dare go into some of our best known hotels and restaurants.
Miss Flynn declared that of course the board of health wouldn’t do anything in the matter. All public officials, naturally, had their palms crossed with filthy capitalistic lucre when they went on “inspection.”
[She resumed:]
We want Mr. Capitalist, when he sits down to his dainty dinner, to know that its daintiness rose out of a vile spot like a lily out of a mud pool. We want to let the evil smell of your waiters’ quarters spread throughout New York.
He doesn’t care where you work, of course. But if you can impress him with the fact that you work in a vile place, and that his food comes from a vile place, you may be helped. For you will hit him square in the stomach, and that’s where all the senses of the American capitalist are located.
Miss Flynn has been trying to induce the waiters to adopt an anti-tipping resolution. In this she has been unsuccessful.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 18, 1903 “Bishop Spalding and Socialism” by Editor Algie M. Simons
From the International Socialist Review of January 1903:
Bishop Spalding and Socialism.* [by A. M. Simons] —————
[Part II of II]
Again, in [Bishop Spalding’s] recognition of the class character of our present law, he comes very close to Socialism. Speaking of punishment for crime, he says:
The delinquents who are incarcerated are chiefly the poor, who had they money to pay the fines would escape punishment. The heaviest punishment is inflicted on the most helpless, and frequently on the least guilty; and thus the morally weak, the victims of unfortunate environments, are degraded, hardened, and made habitual offenders.
I do not wish to push the matter too far and to ascribe too great a comprehension of or favorable attitude towards Socialism on the part of Bishop Spalding. But on page 58 we see some thing that reads very like a description of the rise of proletarian class consciousness. He says:
The laborers, who in proportion as their minds have been awakened, have become conscious of the hardships and limitations to which they are subject, feel this more keenly than any other class, and hence they have formed in numerable organizations to protect their rights and promote their interests.
Finally, we would seldom find a harsher indictment against the capitalist system than is to be found on pages 173 and 174:
The political and social conditions which involve the physical deterioration and the mental and moral degradation of multitudes are barbarous, and unless they are improved must lead to the ruin of the State. From this point of view, which is the only true point of view, our present economic and commercial systems are subversive of civilization. They sacrifice men to money; wisdom and virtue to cheap production and the amassing of capital. They foster greed in the stronger and hate in the weaker. They drive the nations to competitive struggles which are as cruel as war, and in the final results more disastrous; for their tendency is to make the rich vulgar and heartless, and the poor reckless and vicious. As stratagems and lies are considered lawful in war, so in the warfare of commercial competition opinion leans to the view that whatever may be done with impunity is right. The adulteration of food and drink, the watering of stocks, the bribing of legislators, the crushing of weaker concerns, the enforced idleness of thousands, who are thereby driven to despair and starvation, are not looked upon as lying within the domain of morals, any more than the shooting of a man in battle is considered a question of morality. The degradation and ruin of innumerable individuals are implications of the law of competition, just as in the struggle for existence there is a world-crushing and destruction of the weak by the strong.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday January 17, 1903 “Bishop Spalding and Socialism” by Editor Algie M. Simons
From the International Socialist Review of January 1903:
Bishop Spalding and Socialism.* [by A. M. Simons] —————
[Part I of II]
OWING to the prominence which Bishop Spalding has attained in the recent coal strike and in other matters relating to labor, his recent book on Socialism and Labor is worthy of more attention than it might otherwise merit. But the book itself is well worthy of examination. The introductory paragraphs are, on the whole, a very fair statement of the Socialist argument; and we therefore quote them at length:
The interest which all who think take in the laboring classes, whether it spring from sympathy or fear, is a characteristic feature of the age.
Their condition seems to be the great anomaly in our other wise progressive and brilliant civilization. Whether when compared with the lot of the slaves and serfs of former times that of the laborer is fortunate, is not the question. He is not placed in the midst of the poverty and wretchedness of a rude and barbarous society, but in the midst of boundless wealth and great refinement. He lives, too, in a democratic age, in which all men profess to believe in equality and liberty; in an age in which the brotherhood of the race is proclaimed by all the organs of opinion. He has a voice in public affairs, and since laborers are in the majority, he is, in theory, at least, the sovereign. They who govern profess to do everything by the authority of the people, in their name and for their welfare; and yet, if we are to accept the opinions of the Socialists, the wage-takers, who in the modem world are the vast multitude, are practically shut out from participation in our intellectual and material inheritance. They contend that the poor are, under the present economic system, the victims of the rich, just as in the ancient societies the weak were the victims of the strong; so that wage-labor, as actually constituted, differs in form rather than in its essential results from the labor of slaves and serfs. And even dispassionate observers think that the tendency of the present system is to intensify rather than to diminish the evils which do exist; and that we are moving towards a state of things in which the few will own everything, and the many be hardly more than their hired servants. In America they admit that sparse population and vast natural resources that as yet have hardly been touched helped to conceal this fatal tendency, which is best seen in the manufacturing and commercial centers of Europe, where the capitalistic method of production has reduced wage-earners to a condition of pauperism and degradation which is the scandal of Christendom and a menace to society.
The present condition of labor is the result of gradually evolved processes, running through centuries.
The failure of the attempt of Charlemagne to organize the barbarous hordes which had overspread Europe into a stable empire was followed by an era of violence and lawlessness, of wars and invasions, from which society sought refuge in the feudal system. The strong man, as temporal or spiritual lord, was at the top of the feudal hierarchy, and under him the weak formed themselves into classes. The serf labored a certain number of days for himself, and a certain number for his lord. In the towns the craftsmen were organized into guilds which protected the interests of the members. The mendicant poor were not numerous, and their wants were provided for by the bishops and the religious orders.
Then the growth of towns and the development of trade and commerce brought wealth to the burghers, who became a distinct class, while domestic feuds and foreign wars, especially the Crusades, weakened and impoverished the knights and barons. The printing press and the use of gunpowder in war helped further to undermine the feudal power, while the discovery of America, the turning of the Cape of Good Hope, and the Protestant revolution threw all Europe into a ferment from which new social conditions were evolved. The peasants who had been driven from the land by the decay of the great baronial houses, and the confiscation of the property of the church, flocked into the towns or became vagabonds. The poor became so numerous that permanent provision had to be made for them, and poor laws were consequently devised.
The master-workman, who in the middle ages employed but two or three apprentices and as many journeymen, gave way to a class of capitalists, enriched by the confiscated wealth of the church, by the treasures imported from America and the Indies, and by the profits of the slave traffic, who at once prepared to take advantage of the stimulus to industry given by the opening of a vast world market. As late as the middle of the last century, however, manufacturing was still carried on by masters who employed but a small number of hands, and had but little capital invested in the business; and the modern industrial era, with its factory system, properly begins with our marvelous mechanical inventions and the use of steam as a motive power. Machinery made production on a large scale possible, and threw the whole business into the hands of the capitalists, while laborers are left with nothing but their ability to work, which they are forced to sell at whatever prices it will bring.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday January 14, 1913 Charleston, West Virginia – Glasscock Pardons Miners Convicted by Military Court
From The Fairmont West Virginian of January 13, 1913:
GOV. GLASSCOCK PARDONS MANY MINERS —————
MEN CONVICTED BY MILITARY COURT ARE PARDONED BY THE GOVERNOR. —————
Dan Chain and S. F. Nantz Sent to Moundsville Prison on Nov 21, 1912
CHARLESTON, W. V., Jan. 13.-That Governor Glasscock has issued conditional pardons clearing the State penitentiary of all persons convicted by the military court during the recent occupation by martial law of part of Cabin and Paint Creek became known last night when 12 convicts having sentences ranging from one to seven one-half years, were allowed to take freedom from the walls of the State prison at Moundsvllle by the pardon board of January 3, but were for some reason held up until Saturday.
The greatest secrecy was maintained concerning the governor’s action. Not one of the 80 persons convicted under martial law remains in prison, many having been pardoned heretofore and a few having served their sentences. Of the 12 released Saturday 11 are miners convicted of conspiracy or similar crimes under the second occupation of martial law. Much rejoicing was occasioned in the strike zone Saturday night when it became known that the convicts had been pardoned. Troops were withdrawn from the strike zone December 12, and beginning the day after Christmas all guns taken from the residents of the martial law districts except high power rifles were ordered returned. Hundreds of miners have received their guns.
Last Wednesday night there was an outbreak of strikers on Paint creek when a freight train crew was fired upon and a mine set on fire. Farther trouble is expected in the strike zone.
Of those released Saturday, Shanklin was a mine guard and was sentenced during the first part of martial law rule. All the others were miners. Those released were the following: S. Frank Nance, five years; J. R. Shanklin, one year and $100; Dan Chain, five years; Charles Jarrel, two years; Newt Gump, five years; Rock Spinelli, five years; Angelo Billetlli, five years; Tony Stafford, five years; Grover Jarrell, three years; William Thompson, three years; Joe Raines, five years; Lawrence Cepreant, seven and one-half years.
George Book, serving a one-year sentence for malicious wounding in Logan county, was also pardoned.
[Photograph, emphasis and paragraph breaks added.]
Hellraisers Journal – Monday January 13, 1913 Washington, D. C. – Mother Jones Speaks on Behalf of West Virginia Miners
From the Washington EveningStar of January 11, 1913:
TELLS OF INHUMANITY ———- “Mother” Jones Scores Treatment of the West Virginia Coal Miners. ———-
“Mother” Jones, the “angel” of the United Mine Workers and a prominent figure in the coal mining regions for the last forty years, was the principal speaker at a meeting at National Rifles’ Armory last night, the meeting being held under the auspices of the Central Labor Union.
In her address Mother Jones pronounced conditions in the coal mining regions of West Virginia worse than that of the slaves in the darkest days of the antebellum period. She declared that she had seen twenty-one innocent men out of a party of thirty miners slain while they slept by a posse made up of deputy sheriffs and detectives, and that of her own knowledge women and children of striking miners had been thrown out of their cabins, in evil weather, by the hired officers of the mine owners and forced to seek shelter under trees and in eaves of the mountains, without food for four days and nights.
“Were these things to occur in Russia or Mexico,” declared Mother Jones, “the American people would rise up in protest, as they have done on several occasions, forcing Congress to take action to prevent further murders and violence.”
Representative W. B. Wilson of Pennsylvania, for many years a high official of the United Mine Workers, presided at the meeting, and declared that he knew personally that the things of which Mother Jones told were actually true. Other speakers were J. W. Brown of the U. M. W., and Frank Hayes, a vice president of that organization. Resolutions were adopted reciting at length the alleged conditions in the West Virginia coal fields and petitioning Congress to rectify them by adopting a pending of Representative Wilson’s calling for a thorough investigation.
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