Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 6, 1912 Lake Charles Jail, Louisiana – Heroic Women Stand by Fighting Lumberjacks
From The Progressive Woman of October 1912:
THE NEW WOMAN of THE OLD SOUTH By Covington Hall ———-
Union Prisoners in Lake Charles Jail, and the Big Dinner Given Them by the Women of De Ridder, La.
IN the long and bitter struggle of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers against the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association none have suffered more or borne their part in the battle more heroically than the wives, mothers and daughters of the fighting lumberjacks of the south.
In the long and terrible lockout, lasting from July, 1911, to February, 1912, when hundreds of families were reduced to the direst want and misery by the silken savages of the lumber trust in its brutish effort to starve the men out of the union and back into submission, the women, with their babies living on cornbread and molasses, still urged their husbands, fathers and brothers to keep up the battle for “A man’s life for all the workers in the mills and forests,” no matter what the cost, no mater what Kirby, Long and their brother wolves demanded as the price of liberty.
When the blacklist was added to the lockout, when thousands of workers were hounded from state to state, when the only way a man could get a job was to dishonor himself by taking an oath of allegiance to the lumber trust, by swearing obedience and loyalty to his sworn enemies, the women took up that other battle cry of the Union: “Don’t be a peon-be a MAN!” and the desperate fight for justice still went on.
When all law was suspended, when the states of Louisiana and Texas abdicated their authority to the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association and allowed this combine of grafters and gunmen to proclaim martial law throughout the timber belt, when the worst in this scum and slum class came to the surface and the reign of terror that reached its climax in the “riot” at Grabow was inaugurated, when no one’s life or person was safe anywhere in the empire of the lumber trust, the women still urged the men on to battle and in many instances took their places beside them on the “firing line.”
When sixty-five of our best and bravest boys were arrested, thrown into jail and charged with murder on account of the “riot” at Grabow, when men were torn from their sick mothers, wives and children, taken from their homes in the dead of the night by the deputy sheriffs of the Association, still the women did not quail but shrieked defiance at their enemies, still louder rose the cry of the Brotherhood: “ONE BIG UNION, life and freedom for ALL the workers!“
This, the splendid fighting spirit shown by our women in this fight, this alone should have caused the lucre crazed lumber kings to pause and consider the demands of the workers, for the rebellion of the women, the insurrection of the home maker and keeper, has ever been the last sign preceding the bursting of the storms of SOCIAL REVOLUTION; but the stand of the women only seemed to madden the hyenas of the Association more and to increase to blinder fury, if that were possible, the lawless apostles of “law and order.”
And still and so the fight goes on. The Association through the putrid “democratic” press howling for “law and order,” yet only able to maintain its infamous peonage system because the governors of the Southern States have allowed it to overthrow all laws, all civil rights, all constitutional guarantees, even to those natural rights that are respected even by the bush men of Australia and Apaches of Paris [criminal gang of Paris].
Hiding behind the cloak of race prejudice, beating the tom-toms of “white supremacy,” the Association has murdered in cold blood, white men whose only was that they sought to organize all the workers in the mills and forests [black and white together], in which way alone they could remedy the frightful conditions under which all were forced to labor by the oligarchs of the South. Prating forever of patriotism, waving the flag on all occasions, fiercely denouncing all Unionists and Socialists as “destroyers of the home,” many of these eminently desirable citizens have not disdained to add to the wealth they “lawfully” acquired by stealing forests, by running such “legitimate” side lines as bawdy houses and “blind tigers [illegal bars],” and this, we are told, is “Christian civilization,” against which to protest is blasphemy and to revolt is high treason!
Belial, the god of lust and hypocrisy, had he set out to plan a system intended to destroy and degrade the race, or Pharoah and Joseph when they started in to skin Egypt to the soul, could have learned something in the science of making bricks without straw while feeding the workers on stones and keeping them in torment from the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association. Its whole policy has been to destroy the homes of the workers and degrade them to a level below the free beasts of the fields, and the women, in taking their places beside their men on the battle field, have but acted on that mother instinct that forever watches over and warns the race of impending danger.
And well and nobly have these women in the forests of the South done their duty. All that is in their power to do they have done and are doing. Feeding and caring for the families of the victims of the massacre of Grabow, gathering funds and pleading for the boys in jail, challenging the Association to do its worst and to do it at its peril-this is the part the women of the South have taken and are taking in the fight the forestmen of Dixie are now making against the peon kings and their infamous and degrading system. A greater battle in a nobler cause was never fought.
What answer will the women of the North, the East, the West give to the cry of the fighting forest-women of the South: “Save the lives and liberties of our boys in jail! Their only crime is that they fought for labor, for liberty and for you!”
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