There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday January 28, 1917
From The Survey: “The boys in jails are a cheerful lot.”
The boys in jail are a cheerful lot….When they disliked their food, says a conservative newspaper, they went on strike and “sang all night.” Sang all night! What sane adults in our drab, business-as-usual world would think of doing that? Who, in fact, could think of doing it but college boys or Industrial Workers of the World, cheerfully defying authority?
So says Anna Louise Strong in the latest issue of The Survey. The entire article from the January 27th edition can be found below:
Everett’s Bloody Sunday
A Free Speech Fight That Led to a Murder Trial
By Anna Louise Strong
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY SEATTLE COUNCIL OF SOCIAL AGENCIES
THE biggest “labor trial” in the history of the country is now on in Everett, Wash. Seventy-four men are accused of first-degree murder-seventy-four workers who participated in a conflict in which five workers and two deputies were killed. The side which lost the most men is also the side charged with murder. “Might makes right—legally,” explains the I. W. W.
Everett’s “bloody Sunday” is already a familiar word, almost a byword, throughout the labor press. Yet the occurrences in Everett are little noticed by daily papers or magazines of general circulation, much less the causes that led up to it.
Everett is a small city to the north of Seattle. Its main business is lumber. The big mill-owners control its Commercial Club. Eighteen months ago wages were reduced in the shingle mills of Everett, this in the face of the increasing cost of living. The promise was made that when the market improved wages would be raised again. Early last year shingle prices rose, but wages did not follow, and on May 1 the shingle-weavers went out on strike. The usual complications resulted: a group of employers refusing to meet the officers of the union; a picket line; imported strike-breakers, better known for their fighting ability than for their working skill; minor altercations in which the power of the law was used practically invariably against the workers. Such was the background of the I. W. W. free speech fight.
During all this time the I. W. W. organization had maintained a small headquarters in Everett, but had made little headway. It had no connection with the shingle-weavers, and had made little impression upon them. But the I. W. W. started a street-speaking campaign and leaped into public notice as soon as the police and special deputies began dragging them from their soap-boxes to jail. It is stated that the first arrest made was of a man who was reading from the United States Industrial Relations Commission report. “That sort of stuff don’t go here,” said the outraged policeman, overhearing the terrific indictment of working-class conditions in America. Arrested men were beaten and severely handled; they were made to run the gauntlet between rows of deputized citizens, and the old, old, always unsuccessful policy of suppression of speech by violence was attempted.
That happened which always happens in war. Each side stirred itself to bitterness and enthusiasm, and grew, stronger in numbers and in determination. Several hundred men were appointed as deputy sheriffs, all of them first approved by the Commercial Club, which had appointed itself arbiter of the city’s affairs. The I. W. W. sent out a call for cheerful martyrs and the supply never failed. An ordinance was passed against street-speaking in the business district, violated without comment by political campaigners, but used against every I. W. W. orator. Before long no man in overalls entering Everett was secure against questioning and search. The spirit of lawless “law-enforcement” grew.
On the night of October 30, forty-one members of the I. W. W. organization were taken from a boat as they were entering the city from Seattle. Before they had violated any ordinance whatever they were carried in automobiles to the outskirts of town, and there, near an interurban station known as Beverly Park, were made to run a gauntlet between men armed with clubs, saps, and pick-handles. The records of the Seattle city hospital show the condition in which these I. W. W.’s were left. Prominent Seattle citizens who saw them board the interurban car that night received the impression that there had been a train-wreck on some logging road. The men, they said, seemed “serious, self-contained, and in very bad shape.”
Promptly the I. W. W. organization in Seattle took up the challenge. Circulars were distributed in Everett announcing a big street-meeting the following Sunday afternoon, and inviting citizens to “come and help defend your rights and ours.” A call went out to foot-loose rebels to join in and show Everett by their numbers that they could not be interfered with. The feeling seemed to have been universal in the I. W. W. that in the broad daylight of Sunday afternoon and of the publicity created by their circulars, the tactics of preceding evenings would be impossible.
The answer of the Everett authorities was to rope off the entrance to the dock, so that ordinary citizens could not go out on to the boat which bore another load of the industrial workers from Seattle. The dock-warehouses were filled with ambushed deputies.
As the boat neared the wharf, it was seen to be lined with men waving their hats and singing: “Hold the fort for we are coming, Union men, be strong.” From this point on there are many versions of what happened. It is definitely established that Sheriff McRae notified them that they could not land. Scarcely had he finished speaking when shots rang out, and the shooting quickly became general. Before the boat drew away two were dead on the wharf and five on the boat, and it is asserted that several fell into the water from the boat and were shot down while swimming. The Verona returned to Seattle, warning on its way another boat, the Calista, not to go to Everett, as there was shooting at the wharf.
Congress Might Get the Facts
THE men on board were arrested as they landed at Seattle. Seventy-four of them are now on trial for murder in the first degree before the same county authorities with whom they were engaged in battle. It is for this reason that to impartial persons both in Everett and Seattle a congressional investigation seems the only hope of discovering and publishing the facts.
Whether the first shots came from the boat or from the dock is a matter hotly disputed. Persons who visit the dock at Everett have, however, no difficulty in observing certain facts. The two warehouses on the dock are punctured in the sides and ceiling with numerous bullet-holes made by bullets passing out, not in, as shown by the position of the splinters. Evidences of wild shooting on the part of deputies are many; at least a dozen bullet-marks leading directly from one group of deputies to their own men instead of to the boat are plainly discernible on the planking. This fact, taken in connection with the three-cornered fire directed at the boat, makes it exceedingly difficult to assert that any of the wounds received by deputies were the result of shots from the boat. Yet the I. W. W., who lost five men while attempting to assert their right to free speech in defiance of a town ordinance, are in jail for murder, and the Everett deputies, who lost two men in attempting to deny passengers the right to land from a boat, are their accusers.
The boys in jail are a cheerful lot. The “tanks” which contain them are the tanks of the usual county jail, much overcrowded now by the unusual number. Bunks crowded above each other, in full sight through the bars; a few feet of space in which they may walk back and forth for a dozen steps or more; all the processes of life open to the casual be holder. But they sit in groups playing cards or dominoes; they listen to tunes played on a mouth-organ; most of all they sing. They sing whenever visitors come, and smile through the bars in cheerful welcome. Theirs is the spirit of the crusader of all ages, and all causes, won or lost, sane or insane. Theirs is the irresponsibility and audacious valor of youth. When they disliked their food, says a conservative newspaper, they went on strike and “sang all night.” Sang all night! What sane adults in our drab, business-as-usual world would think of doing that? Who, in fact, could think of doing it but college boys or Industrial Workers of the World, cheerfully defying authority?
Yet, in spite of their cheerfulness, they are in a serious situation. They are being tried for first-degree murder in a county where all the machinery of law is in the hands of their opponents, and where, although a numerical majority is probably with them, all power and influence is against them. The men who control the press, the men who arrange jury-lists, the men who own mortgages on the homes of possible jurors, the men, in short, who, through one channel or another, can reach and affect for good or evil almost any citizen in Everett—these will spend their thousands to “clean out the nest of I. W. W.’s”; in other words, to hang as many as possible of the accused.
But it is not even acquittal that the prisoners and their counsel seem most to desire. It is publicity—publicity for the methods that have been used against them, publicity for the conditions in Everett, publicity for the right of free speech. This publicity the daily press denies them; and this publicity the labor press is giving them in full measure. Here we have again a characteristic of war. Each of the two groups of persons, engaged in conflict, receives news censored, arranged and interpreted by its own side of the struggle, and so the two are driven farther and farther away from mutual understanding.
The community spirit that formerly prevailed in Everett, famous for its civic pride and industrial activity, is gone. Suspicion and fear and bitterness take its place. Mill-owners guard their homes; workingmen attempt by subterfuges to secure halls for “forbidden speakers.”
Even the lawyers for the defense have been unable to secure offices in Everett. After learning who they were the owner of one building told them he had been warned by threats against renting.
And yet Everett is no sinner above other cities. It would seem that the right to free speech must be fought out anew in city after city and by cause after cause. We in Seattle had our own testing-time a few years ago with the Industrial Workers of the World and bloodshed seemed imminent. But we had a mayor to whom occurred the brilliant expedient of “letting them speak.” It was simple; and it worked. We hear that it has worked in other places also.
Does Might Make Right—Legally?
BUT suppression of speech was only one factor in the Everett situation; the lawlessness of law-enforcers was another. As Mayor Gill of Seattle pointed out,
McRae and his deputies had no legal right to tell the I. W. W. they could not land. When the sheriff put his hand on the butt of his gun and told them they could not land, he fired the first shot in the eyes of the law, and the I. W. W. can claim they shot in self-defense. Everett has been reduced to anarchy by their method of dealing with the situation.
In this also Everett is no sinner above all other cities. Shall we be forced at last to admit the contention of the industrial workers that “might makes right—legally”?
The labor conflict will be intense enough even if the right to free speech and fair play before the law is assured. But there are still some of us who hope that in that case it may be an evolution, not a war. Our industrial unionist friends say that this is mere softness, mere sentimental evasion of facts. They say there is no fairness of press, or speech, or law; that there is only Power, which the worker has not, and must take. And they say that the workers are tired of waiting—very tired.
[Photograph of Anna Louise Strong added.]
SOURCE
The Survey, Volume 37
Survey Associates, 1917
https://books.google.com/books?id=wKMqAAAAMAAJ
The Survey of January 27, 1917
“Everett’s Bloody Sunday”
-by Anna Louise Strong
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=wKMqAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA475
IMAGE
Anna Louise Strong, 1885-1970, Spartacus
http://spartacus-educational.com/Anna_Louise_Strong.htm