You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Sunday August 9, 1908
Los Angeles – Socialist Women Raise Hell for Free Speech
From The Socialist Woman of August 1908:
SOCIALIST WOMEN IN JAIL.
Four Socialist women—Mrs. Bertha M. Dailey, Mrs. Alice Vail Holloway, Mrs. Helen A. Collins, Mrs. Cloudsley Johns—all of Los Angeles, have been spending the warm days of July in the jail of that city. This, for speaking on the streets of Los Angeles—the City of Angels.
The Los Angeles Herald asks, editorially, “Why arrest scholarly, refined, delicately nurtured, women, mothers of families, and irreproachable members of society, and allow men to exercise with impunity the right of free speech?…Salvation Army speakers, evangelists, and other reformers are not interfered with…The worst feature of all this wretched display of prejudice and lack of good judgment is in the fact that all the leading newspapers of the land—ALL—have published accounts of the arrest of the little women and the immunity of the big men, and are commenting on it unreservedly. Los Angeles may well afford to do without this kind of advertising, and we think the chamber of commerce should call a special meeting to review this whole subject, and set our city right before the United States of America.”
In the meantime, the “little women” are doing a good stroke of agitation work for the Socialist movement. They are advertising the Los Angeles movement as it was never advertised before, and are creating sympathy where it never before existed. A daintily gotten-up “At Home” card sent out by them, reads as follows:
Mrs. Dorothea Johns, Mrs. Bertha. M. Dailey, Mrs. Alice V. Holloway, Mrs. Helen A. Collins will be “At Home” in the city jail where they are temporarily staying for exercising their right of free speech as guaranteed by the constitution of the United States and of the State of California. Friends will be welcomed Thursdays and Sundays from 10 to 12 a. m. and 2 to 4 p. m. from July 14 until further notice. No refreshments served. Those unable to attend are requested to send regrets to A. C. Harper, mayor of Los Angeles, California, or the police commissioners.
Verily, the women of the Socialist movement are of the same stuff from which heroes are made; they are leading the world a pace it never knew before, and are scattering the scales from the eyes of the ignorant masses.
[Newsclip added is from San Francisco Call of July 10, 1908.]
From the Socialist Montana News of July 23, 1908:
WOMEN STORM PRISON
—–FIERCE FREE SPEECH FIGHT IN LOS ANGELES-
WOMEN ARE AROUSED.
—–
Men Refuse to Work on Chain Gang-
Threatened With Dungeons and Brutal Treatment.
—–
One hundred women Socialists stormed the city jail at Los Angeles and overran the corridors and the offices of different officials, insistently demanding to see the “dozen comrades” in cells awaiting trial on charges of speaking in the streets without permission of the police commissioner. The women sang the “Marseillaise” and waved banners bearing the legend, “Free Speech In Free America.”
They said the right to visit the men in jail had been denied them. The officials finally admitted fifty, ten at a time. When the jailers refused to allow the women to carry fruit and flowers into the cells an uproar ensued.
[Said one woman:]
We want to get a look at our future home.
We expect to be in there soon, because we are going on the streets after the Fourth and defy the police to arrest us. If our men inside there are convicted they will refuse to work on the chain gang.
The police say that if the men refuse to work outside on the chain gang they will be put in dungeons and fed on bread and water. Twenty-five of the first arrested are out on ball. Fifty volunteers, among them twenty-five women, will go to jail next week to become martyrs.
[Newsclip added is from Los Angeles Times of July 3, 1908.]
From the Montana News of July 30, 1908:
FREE SPEECH IN LOS ANGELES.
—–
As previously reported in these columns, the citizens’ alliance of Los Angeles, Cal., “Is not so many.” After fighting the trades unionist for years they tackled the socialist street meeting with a nice little made to order city ordinance.
Fifty socialists went to jail. Hundreds more had signed pledges to speak at the direction of the free speech committee, and take the consequences. At the height of the social season “At Home” cards were issued by the members of select circle, as follows:
MRS. DOROTHEA JOHNS,
MRS. BERTHA M. DAILEY,
MRS. ALICE V. HOLLOWAY,
MRS. HELEN A. COLLINSWill be at home in the city jail, where they are temporarily staying for exercising their right of free speech as guaranteed by the constitution of the United States and of the state of California.
Friends will be welcomed Thursdays and Sundays (regular visiting days), from 10 to 12 a. m. and 2 to 4 p. m., from July 14 until further notice. (No refreshments served.)
Those unable to attend are requested to send regrets to A. C. Harper, mayor of Los Angeles, Cal., or the police commissioners.
But “what’s the use,” the authorities run for cover. The ordinance was repealed—Selah!
[Newsclip added is from Los Angeles Times of July 1, 1908.]
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SOURCES
The Socialist Woman
[Later-The Coming Nation]
-March-Dec 1908
https://books.google.com/books?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ
Vol. II, No. 15 – Aug 1908
(Girard, Kansas)
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA1-PA1
“Socialist Women in Jail”
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.RA1-PA16
Montana News
“Owned and Published by the
Socialist Party of Montana”
(Helena, Montana)
-July 23, 1908
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024811/1908-07-23/ed-1/seq-1/
-July 30, 1908
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024811/1908-07-30/ed-1/seq-3/
IMAGES
LA FSF, SF Call -p9, July 10, 1908
https://www.newspapers.com/image/81000770/
LA FSF, LA Tx p17, July 3, 1908
https://www.newspapers.com/image/380187289/
LA FSF, LA Tx, -p21, July 1, 1908
https://www.newspapers.com/image/380186714/
See also:
Fellow Workers and Friends
I.W.W. Free Speech Fights as Told by Participants
-by Philip S. Foner
Greenwood Press, Jan 1, 1981
https://books.google.com/books?id=y4yxAAAAIAAJ
[From pages: 14 and 214-(notes 35 & 36)]
In 1908 the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the I.W.W. jointly waged an effective free-speech fight in Los Angeles after deliberately violating a city ordinance forbidding street meetings without police permits for all organizations except religious groups. When a speaker was arrested for speaking without a permit, “his place was speedily filled upon the soap box.” Speaker after speaker, men and women, black and white, mounted the soapbox, were arrested, and jailed. “The Jail Is Our Weapon,” the free-speech fighters of Los Angeles announced late in June [Common Sense of June 27, 1908]. “We are going to jail in numbers. That is the way the fight has been won wherever it has been really won.” Free-speech fighters so crowded the jail and clogged court calendars that the City Council was forced to repeal the objectionable ordinance. “Free Speech Is Won” was the headline in Common Sense [July 25, 1908], organ of the Socialist Party of Los Angeles, after six months of struggle.
The Arena of October 1908:
“A Notable Triumph for Free Speech in Los Angeles”
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=8WE7AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA350
Rise of the Labor Movement in Los Angeles
-by Grace Heilman Stimson
University of California Press, 1955
(search: “free speech” 1908)
https://books.google.com/books?id=w5WGbCxV7-QC
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