Hellraisers Journal – Monday July 7, 1913
Socialist Editor Fred Merrick on the Betrayal of the West Virginia Miners, Part I
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
[Part I of II]
IT WILL be hopelessly impossible within the narrow confines of this brief article to give the reader more than a skeleton of the real “inside” story of the great strike raging in West Virginia, which the greed of coal operators, subserviency of political officials, especially the courts and sheriffs, brutality of heartless degenerates known as “Baldwins” or “mine guards,” drum-head court martial of the militia, duplicity of their own attorneys, misrepresentation by newspapers, treachery of many officials of their own union and the crowning act of all, the betrayal or misrepresentation of their cause to the Socialists of America by a committee elected by the National Committee to investigate conditions in West Virginia-all have utterly failed to break.
To all the horrors which a strike of a year’s duration in tents on the bleak winter mountains of “Little Switzerland” means, was added the base conduct of those labor and so-called “Socialist” parasites who today make their living as advisors of the toilers without themselves undergoing the privations incident to toil and revolution. Volumes could and undoubtedly will yet be written on this phase of the West Virginia struggle which is far more vital than the spectacular battles which have been described again and again.
It is not unfair to say that the facts merely suggested here will never find publicity through the orthodox labor or Socialist press, but if the reader has his class conscious curiosity sufficiently aroused by this brief resume to thoroughly investigate the sordid tale of the betrayal of the West Virginia “red necks” as many of the officials and organizers of the U. M. W. of A. contemptuously refer to the West Virginia miners, the purpose of this story will have been accomplished. Before passing judgment on the harshness of some of the terms used in this article examine each statement of fact carefully and see if such conduct should not be described in terms calculated to arouse the militant toilers of America, whether the object be our formerly “beloved ‘Gene,” who seems to have fallen by the wayside, or our genial friend from Milwaukee.
The West Virginia strike may roughly be divided into three distinct stages:
1. The unorganized strike stage when the miners aided by the local Socialists made their valiant fight at a time when the officials of the U. M. W. of A. did absolutely nothing to help. Towards the latter part of this period “Mother” Jones appeared and helped her “boys” to “fight like hell.” The method of breaking the strike employed during this time was confined entirely to the physical brutality of Baldwin mine guards and the less efficient National guard or militia. The miners were able to handle this sort of “suppression” with some first-class “direct action.” During this period the miners scored a decisive victory.
[Correction: The orphan child of Cesco Estep was a son, not a daughter. ]
2. Immediately following election in November different tactics were employed. Certain treacherous officials of the union deliberately asked for martial law. Following this they attempted to compromise the strike which the militia was unable to break alone. The climax of this period dominated by the officials of the U. M. W. of A; came with Hatfield’s notorious deportation ultimatum of April 27th, which was endorsed and supported enthusiastically by the officials of the U. M. W. of A. from President White down through Frank Hayes, Thomas Haggerty and Joe Vasey. However, the tactics employed of attempting to break the strike with the machine of the U. M. W. of A. failed miserably and another trick was employed.
3. This period is marked by the advent of the Socialist National Investigating Committee which endorsed the conduct of Governor Hatfield for the most part thereby giving a clean bill of health to the officials of the U. M. W. of A. who had accepted Hatfield’s “settlement,” thereby becoming the agents through whom the operators hoped to accomplish a “settlement” which police brutality, the diplomacy of Hatfield and the treachery of U. M. W. of A. officials had failed to accomplish.Due to the splendid common sense education on Socialism the miners had received for two years through the columns of the Charleston Labor Argus, edited by fearless Charles H. Boswell, the miners and local Socialists received the committee not as heroes, but as ordinary human beings. They refused to accept the “settlement” because its sponsor had been whitewashed by the committee, just as before.
The first periodhas been adequately dealt with by the capitalist magazines where it received more attention than was ever given it by the Socialist press, who seemed afraid of it for some reason.
The second period is marked by successive steps of compromise which are a disgrace even to the black record of the U. M. W. of A., who have so often betrayed the West Virginia miners that it has become an old story. Let us get a birds-eye view of how the machine of this organization pulled the sting out of the demands of the miners so gradually that the miners themselves did not realize that it was being done.
1. In the early Spring of 1912, a convention of miners was called at Charleston, here it was understood the demands of the miners would be the same as elsewhere in the United States and were to include an EIGHT-HOUR DAY. As West Virginia coal is mined cheaper per ton than any other coal there is less reason for working more than eight hours than there is in other states.
2. Another convention of miners was held in Charleston in April, 1912. In the interim the Cleveland scale had been adopted and at this convention the local officials, with the acquiescence of the national organization, persuaded the miners to modify their demands to ONE-HALF the Cleveland scale and, from an EIGHTHOUR to a NINE-HOUR DAY.Following the strike, the miners kept up such a hot fight that the union officials were apparently afraid to attempt any more compromises until following the court martialing of “Mother” Jones, Brown, Boswell and other Socialists.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday July 6, 1913
West Virginia Coal Miners’ Victory Turned into “Settlement”-Part III
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
How a Victory Was Turned Into
a ”Settlement” in West Virginia
-by W. H.Thompson, Editor Huntington Socialist and Labor Star
[Part III of III]
The miners have been forced to return to work under the old hellish condition of virtual peonage; the precedent of military drum-head trials and convictions of agitators has been firmly established, in fact the right of Mammon to rule, to rob, to crush and kill has been more firmly enthroned than ever before, and more securely guarded.
As a fitting reward for faithful service in helping to bring about the pleasing “settlement,” today’s papers carry the cheering intelligence that the U. M. W. of A., including its principal officials, has been indicted in the Federal court here, charged with being a conspiracy in restraint of trade and a buster of the sacred Sherman Anti-Trust law.
All those working class comrades who see clearly the situation in this state are pessimistic in their utterances. Personally, I know of but one thing that could possibly turn the miners’ defeat into victory and that is to initiate these mountaineers into the mysteries of Twentieth century fighting tactics, including a thorough working knowledge of that powerful weapon-industrial unionism-One Big Union, in which the rank and file decide all questions for themselves.
Note.-Last reports say that Thomas Haggerty, U. M. W. of A. official, is suing Comrade Boswell for exposures of his methods in handling the strike, alleged libel. Comrade Boswell is back on the Labor Argus to stay, and to tell the truth no matter who gets hit.
—————
The latest telegraph dispatches state that the miners in the Paint and Cabin Creek districts have repudiated the settlement and are demanding their officials to call a general strike.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday July 5, 1913
West Virginia Coal Miners’ Victory Turned into “Settlement”-Part II
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
How a Victory Was Turned Into
a ”Settlement” in West Virginia
-by W. H.Thompson, Editor Huntington Socialist and Labor Star
[Part II of III]
Realizing that laudatory speech-making and persuasion were not going to induce these hard-headed delegates to sell the blessing of victory for a mess of burned pottage, they were compelled to resort to downright trickery and deceit.
A committee was appointed from among the delegates to draw up a counter-proposition, setting forth the terms upon which they would be willing to return to work, this to be submitted to the governor in answer to his proposal. The committee drew up the proposition which was presented to and endorsed by the convention. It was then turned over to the officials with instructions that they present it to His Highness.
The following day the convention was given to understand that Hatfield had accepted their proposal as an amendment to his proposition. The two documents were then read and a vote was taken upon what the delegates afterwards, and now, claim they believed was the acceptance of their own proposal. However, the two propositions had been juggled in such a manner, by those who are adepts in such arts, that the miners-necessarily untrained in the gentle ways of parliamentary legerdemain, had in reality voted for and accepted the original odious Hatfield offer, their own proposition having been promptly turned down by that gentleman with the remark that he “could not force the mine owners to comply with it.”
These things were not made public, of course, until after the convention had adjourned. You can imagine the surprise and chagrin of the miners upon being informed by the daily papers that they had tamely submitted to the dictator’s demands after he had spurned their own offer of a basis of settlement.
This information was followed by orders from headquarters at Charleston to the effect that the miners return to work at once. This they refused to do. Then the officials, escorted by detachments of the governor’s hated yellow-legs, visited the tented villages in the mountains and bluntly informed the rebellious strikers that their relief would be cut off at once and the tents burned over their heads if they did not submit to the settlement and return to work.
Under these circumstances there was nothing to do but obey and the strikers began to apply for work at the mines. All those known to have been most active during the strike were refused employment. These to the number of 400 are still idle, for the good and simple reason that they are very effectively black-listed at every coal mine in the valley. All others are working under the same, or worse conditions than existed before the strike began.
Of course it was thoroughly realized by the powers that be that there was one remaining obstruction in the way of a complete establishment of their neatly planned “settlement.” That was the Socialist press.
Editor C. H. Boswell, of the Charleston Labor Argus, had been approached some months before and it was insinuated that a “settlement” might be arranged. He promptly and forcefully informed the “approachers” that The Argus was fighting for victory for the rank and file and that if any crooked work was attempted something would drop. Boswell was arrested a few days later and safely planted in the bull pen. The Argus, however, had continued, and the Huntington Socialist and Labor Star had also begun to show an inquisitive interest in the happenings affecting the strikers. These two agencies must be silenced, temporarily at least; decided the three-armed combination most interested in the success of the settlement. No sooner said than done. Martial law was in effect in the coal field, so the commander-in-chief simply dispatched a detail of yellow-legs to Charleston to confiscate The Labor Argus and “jug” Fred Merrick, who was suspected of being editor pro tem. The same gentle methods of suppression were used on the Huntington Star.
With all those who would doubtless make an effective protest against the deal being put over on the fighting miners by the unholy trinity, safely “jugged,” the settlement proceeded apace. The coal operators, the prostituted press and the U. M. W. of A. officials all joined in singing hosannas of praise for the highly satisfactory manner in which His Highness, Hatfield, had settled the strike.
But the last act of despotism on the part of the trinity, the confiscation of the Socialist papers, brought on unexpected complications. The Socialist and labor papers, and hundreds of the capitalist papers throughout the country severely condemned this blundering attack upon the rights of a free press. The National Socialist organization was at last shocked into action and decided to send a committee into West Virginia to find out if we really were having a fight down here. The committee arrived, established headquarters at the most expensive hotel in the capitol city and immediately went into conference with the leaders of the U. M. W. of A.
From conferences with this branch of the triumvirate the committee naturally drifted into conferences with the other branches, Hatfield, the local politicians and the coal barons.
After a week devoted exclusively to these secretive but doubtless instructing conferences, and before they had visited the mining camps or talked with the local Socialists, members of the committee began talking-to the capitalist papers.
The sayings attributed to them had a familiar sound. They were practically the same sentences that the U. M. W. of A. officials had used, and that the newspapers themselves had used, and that Hatfield himself had used, to justify existing conditions and official anarchy.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday July 4, 1913 West Virginia Coal Miners’ Victory Turned into “Settlement”-Part I
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
[Part I of III]
To those who have been actively engaged in the epochal struggle of the coal miners in this state the present status of affairs is anything but optimistic.
The miners after having put up a fight that won the admiration of the entire working class the country over, have lost their strike and are being driven sullenly back to the Coal Trust’s subterrean hells to produce coal for their brutal masters under the same conditions which have prevailed in the West Virginia coal fields for years, and against which these miners revolted over a year ago.
It is not my intention to give a recapitulation of the stirring events of the Paint Creek strike, but rather a hurried sketch of the manner in which a well earned victory was turned into an empty and meaningless settlement, by a combination of forces against which the miners found themselves helpless.
The coal diggers of the Kanawha valley have proven themselves to be as brave and loyal a set of men as ever established a picket line. They have stoically and uncomplainingly borne the barbaric and inhuman treatment to which they were subjected by the Coal Trust and its political creature-the state government. They had by the sheer force of solidarity, and in spite of the weakness of the antiquated tactics taught them by the officials of the United Mine Workers of America, brought the coal barons to their knees. The state government, too, had exhausted its ingenuity and failed to break the strike. There remained but one hope for the masters of the mines. That was to enlist in their behalf the United Mine Workers of America.
When in the course of these remarks I use the expression ”U. M. W. of A.,” it is meant to apply, not to the men who actually dig coal, but rather to the official oligarchy known as the National Executive Board, members of which were handling the strike in this state.
Overtures were evidently made to these representatives by Governor H. D. Hatfield, acting for the coal autocracy. An agreement was reached, and the three organizations, viz: the Coal Trust, the State government and the U. M. W. of A., acting co-operatively, played the last card which won for the mine owners that which they would have never gained unaided by their last ally.
Everything being “understood” and agreed upon, Hatfield made public what he termed a “proposal for the settlement of the Kanawha strike.”
The proposalmade no mention of the three cardinal demands of the miners the elimination of the hated guard system, the right to belong to a union and the payment of the “Kanawha Scale” of wages. In fact it offered absolutely nothing in the way of concessions from the operators-merely insisting-when sheared of its luxuriant verbosity-that the miners return to work under the same conditions that existed before they struck-if the mine owners would let them.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday July 3, 1913
The Conviction of Alexander Scott, Editor of the Weekly Issue
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
The Conviction of Alexander Scott
A STATES Prison sentence of not more than fifteen years nor less than one year, with a fine of $250, was imposed, June 6th, on Alexander Scott, editor of the Weekly Issue, official organ of the Socialist party of Passaic County, who was convicted on June 3rd on a charge of “aiding and abetting hostilities to the government of the City of Paterson,” by Judge Klenert in the Court of Quarter Sessions.
No sooner was sentence announced when Henry Carless, a Socialist attorney of Newark, and Henry Marelli, both of whom defended Scott, filed notice that a writ of error had been applied for, a copy of which notice was presented to the judge. Bail of $3,000 was fixed and Scott was later released when Samuel Ginsburg, of Passaic, furnished the bond.
Scott was found guilty and sentenced under a law placed on the statute books in 1902 shortly after the assassination of President McKinley, but never before invoked in the State of New Jersey. Scott’s indictment was caused by the publication of editorials and pictures in the Issue in which the police, especially Chief Bimson, was characterized as the “boss anarchist” and the “boss strike-breaker.”
Scott’s conviction practically makes it a crime for any paper to criticize public officials, and makes the constitutional guarantee of free press a dead letter. In the prosecution of the case the state contended that the police were a part of the city government and that ridiculing the police was ridiculing the government.
“If we can’t criticize a policeman for his brutality, we might as well give up publication of newspapers in this country,” remarked a prominent newspaper man who was a visitor in court when sentence was imposed on Scott. He was highly indignant over the sentence, and said he would start a nation-wide movement to have the Scott verdict reversed.
That the authorities of Paterson have made up their minds to suppress the Issue was evidenced by the fact that they forced the sentence of Scott as soon as he was convicted. Though Patrick L. Quinlan, the silk strike leader, was convicted several weeks ago, the authorities made no move to sentence him, but they hurried the sentence of Scott.
While Scott’s case was rushed through, the authorities have made no move to prosecute the policemen who stole an edition of the Issue by breaking in the Socialist party headquarters and taking possession of 5,000 copies of the paper. The policemen are now out on $200 bail each, while Scott’s bail is fixed at $3,000.-N. Y. Call.
While the lawyers were arguing over technicalities, Scott, unconcerned, was busily engaged noting the proceedings in a notebook. “I am in the fight to win, and I am confident of exoneration in the higher courts,” said Scott. “They cannot suppress the Issue”
But the Socialists and Industrial unionists do not propose that Scott should serve one month in prison if they can help it. The S. P. of New Jersey, will appeal to the National Socialist Party to take up the Scott case and make a nation-wide fight in his behalf.
Solidarity, the I. W. W. organ has issued a call for protest meetings. “Scott has stood by the I. W. W. and the I. W. W. must stand by him,” writes Justus Ebert.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday July 2, 1913 “The Paterson Strike Pageant” by Phillips Russell, Part II
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
[Part II of II]
The New York Press the next day said:
“The Garden has held many shows and many audiences, from Dowie to Taft to Buffalo Bill, but it is doubtful if there ever was such an assemblage either as an audience or as a show as was gathered under the huge rafters last night. In fact, it was a mixed grouping that at times they converged and actor became auditor and auditor turned suddently into actor. When more than 10,000 sang and shouted within, 5,000 outside clamored for admittance and were willing to pay double the prices to get in.”
The New York Evening World said:
“Fifteen thousand specators applauded with shouts and tears the great Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden. The big mill aglow with light in the dark hours of early winter morning, the shrieking whistles, the din of machinery-dying away to give place to the Marseillaise sung by a surging crowd of 1,200 operatives, the fierce battle with the police, the sombre funeral of the victim, the impassioned speech of the agitator, the sending away of the children, the great meeting of desperate hollow-eyed strikers-these scenes unrolled with a poignant realism that no man who saw them will ever forget.”
No spectacle enacted in New York has ever made such an impression. Not the most sanguine member of the committee which made the preparations for the pageant believed that its success would be quite so overwhelming. It is still the talk of New York, most cynical and hardened of cities, and will remain so for many days.
There were times when the committee were assailed with oppressive doubts. When one sat down and thought it over in cold blood, the idea of arranging for and carrying through such a thing in two weeks’ time seemed almost grotesque. Outside of the mechanical difficulties involved, the multitudinous details to be attended to, the advance outlay of money that would be necessary seemed to present an insuperable obstacle. There was the single item of $1,000 to be put down for the rental of one night, the $750 needed for scenery, the huge sum for advertising, all to be provided.
After plunging in with enthusiasm for the first few days, a bad reaction seized the promoters. They called a meeting in which the most gloomy forebodings were indulged in. There were disturbing reports of the small advance sale of tickets and there wereserious proposals to give the whole thing up.
It was the workers themselves who stepped into the breach. Delegates from the New York silk strikers,whose cause has almost been lost sight of in the more spectacular struggle of Paterson, arose indignantly.
“What?” they cried. “Give this thing up after our people have set their hearts upon it? Never! Is it money you need? Leave it to us-we’ll raise that! We are poor. We are on strike. But a lot of us still have a few dollars left in the savings bank that we’ve been putting by through many years. We’ll get it out and lump it together. We will go to our business men and say: ‘Here, we’ve been trading with you a long time. We have helped to make your profits. Now you help us or we won’t trade with you any more.’ Never mind. You leave it to us-we will raise the money.”
And they did. Other generous people, more richly upholstered with ready cash, also came forward with contributions and in four days there was ample money with which to cover all deposits.
And it was found that the result was worth all the toil and trouble involved. The lives of most of us are sordid and grey. So tightly are we tied to the petty round of toil to which our galley-masters bind us, that most of us probably are born, live and die without experiencing one deep-springing, surging, devastating emotion. We are either afraid to feel or we have lost the capacity.
The Paterson pageant will be remembered for the sweeping emotions it shot through the atmosphere if for no other reason. Waves of almost painful emotion swept over that great audience as the summer wind converts a placid field of wheat into billowing waves. It was all real, living, and vital to them. There were veterans of many an industrial battle in that audience, though the cheeks of many still held the pink of youth.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday July 1, 1913 “The Paterson Strike Pageant” by Phillips Russell, Part I
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
[Part I of II]
JUNE 7, 1913, was a red letter day in New York. Literally, too. For when dusk fell on Madison Square, high up on the tower of Madison Square Garden, shone the giant letters “I. W. W.,” glowing red in the sky and sending scarlet beams through the smoke that drifts incessantly across the face of Manhattan Island.
It was the first time that those significant letters have ever been given so conspicuous a place. Their mission was to announce something new under the sun, a labor play in which laborers themselves were the actors, managers and sole proprietors, portraying by word and movement their own struggle for a better world.
Imagine a great auditorium, the largest in New York, filled with one of the hughest audiences that ever gathered in the metropolis, gazing on the largest amateur production ever staged, with the biggest cast-1,029 members-that ever took part in a play, enacting a life-drama calculated to raise to the highest pitch the most powerful human emotions-and one gets a faint idea of the event in Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 7.
In order to give the reader a mental picture of what happened that night on the stage-which alone cost $600 to build -it might be well to outline the six episodes composing the pageant as given in the official program, which itself made a good propaganda pamphlet of 32 pages with a lithographed cover:
Scene: Paterson, N.J. Time: A. D. 1913.
The Pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the Industrial Workers of the World (I. W. W.), making use of the general strike as the chief weapon. It is a conflict between two social forces-the force of labor and the force of capital.
While the workers are clubbed and shot by detectives and policemen, the mills remain dead. While the workers are sent to jail by hundreds, the mills remain dead. While organizers are persecuted, the strike continues, and still the mills are dead. While the pulpit thunders denunciation and the press screams lies, the mills remain dead. No violence can make the mills alive-no legal process can resurrect them from the dead.Bayonets and clubs, injunctions and court orders are equally futile.
Only the return of the workers to the mills can give the dead things life. The mills remain dead throughout the enactment of the following episodes.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday June 29, 1903
Mother Jones Speaks to Philadelphia Textile Strikers
From the Duluth Labor World of June 27, 1903:
TENDER BABES IN LARGE PARADE.
———-
BURNING DISGRACE OF PENNSYLVANIA
MANUFACTURERS.
———-
TEXTILE WORKERS FIRM FOR 55 HOURS. ———- Mother Jones Makes Many Impassioned Speeches
and Heartens Her Hearers. ———-
Philadelphia, June 26.- The events of the week here, in the textile strike, were the speeches of “Mother” Jones to crowds and the parade of the men, women and children who are heroically striving for a shorter work-day. In one day Mother Jones addressed three large meetings of textile workers, and she did much to put heart into the movement and cheer the men and women engaged in the struggle. Her impassioned addresses are just what these workers need. They hang on to her sentences, and one cannot listen to a group of strikers without hearing her terse sentences repeated.
To Strike is Honorable.
[She told them in one of her speeches:]
Americans are strikers by inheritance. The Pilgrim Fathers and the Colonists were strikers. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were the great strikers of their day, and you workingmen and women of Philadelphia need not be ashamed to strive and struggle for what is yours by right, and what must be won by you if you expect to be worthy of the inheritance handed down by your fathers.
[She continued:]
This is a city of “Brotherly Love,” indeed. There’s a whole lot of that here. Rather, it’s a city of brotherly thieves! Yes; I came here to hammer you, and I am going to do it. It serves you right that you are on strike today to get a reduction in your working hours. You elect the same old crowd year after year.
I sat in the Senate Chamber in Washington not long ago, and in one hour seven bills were passed conferring still greater powers on railroad corporations. Compare that incident with the action of some of your own representatives when the poor miners went to them to see if they couldn’t do something for the cause of labor. You should have seen the looks of cold disdain with which they were treated. They were told plainly that it was no use for them to come there and were advised strongly to go back to work.
While 147,000 miners were strike in Pennsylvania and 40,000 in West Virginia the last Congress went into the pocket of the American workingman and took $45,000-think of it, $45,000-to defray the expenses of a six weeks’ tour of a prince around the country, just because he was of royal blood! How greatly Senators Quay and Penrose and all the rest of them venerate royal blood! Fifty thousand dollars offhand for the entertainment of a prince, but not a single piece of legislation that would be likely to better the condition of the American workingman.
But it’s your own fault. Whenever you get tired of these things you’ll remedy them.
Mother Jones closed by advising the strikers to remain idle until their demands had been granted.
[She said:]
You need not fear starvation. They thought to starve the miners out, but they didn’t succeed. You are going to have plenty to eat, even if you are on strike.
Thomas Fleming, chairman of the executive committee, who, with several other strike leaders, accompanied Mother Jones to Frankford, in introducing her referred to her as “the old lady.”
Mother Jones, in reply, said:
I am not so old that I do not expect to live long enough to see you and your wives and children live as free men should, not as slaves.
Parade of Striking Children.
The parade of the strikers, Wednesday, was an object lesson that will long be remembered by those who saw it. There may have been 25,000 in line, but this was not so remarkable as was the sight of regiment after regiment of little children, some of them so small that they had to be provided with conveyances, for they could not otherwise have been in the procession. All kinds of vehicles had been tendered from the stylish coupe to the common express wagon. Many of the poor little tots were not old enough to realize what all the excitement was about. They were the living representatives of a system so cruel and merciless that future generations will wonder what sort of beasts employers were in the beginning of the twentieth century that they could for a single moment allow their machinery to be manipulated by the wan and immature flesh of what were not much better than suckling babes.
Banners That Mean Something.
The transparencies carried were plentiful and appropriate. Many touched on the question of shorter hours and of child labor. One elderly man staggered along with a banner reading:
Let God’s curses dwell with employers or parents who consign little children to the living death of factory life.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday June 28, 1913 New York, New York – Frederick Boyd Issues Financial Report on Paterson Pageant
From The New York Times of June 25, 1913:
DEFICIT OF $1,996 FROM STRIKE SHOW
———- Instead of Making Rumored $6,000 Profit, Paterson I.W.W. Lost by Pageant at Garden. ———-
MANY LOANS STILL UNPAID ———- But All Who Cannot Afford Loss Got Their Money -Good Seats Sold for Almost Nothing. ———-
Despite the statements, made after the Paterson strike pageant in Madison Square Garden, that it would net $6,000 to the strike fund, the Executive Committee of the strike announced yesterday that when all expenses were paid there would be a deficit of $1,996.45.
The greater part of this is due to sympathizers who advanced money to help the show, but the committee says that the loans still unpaid were furnished by people in comfortable circumstances who could afford the loss, while the loans from actual strikers had been paid back already.
Frederick Sumner Boyd, Chairman of the Executive Committee, had a conference yesterday with Miss Jessie Ashley, a lawyer, of 27 Cedar Street, who was Treasurer of the Entertainment Committee, and others, and a statement of the receipts and expenditures was prepared to show the Paterson strikers where all the money went to. The Socialist Party has nothing to do with the Industrial Workers of the World, but individual Socialists are members of the I. W. W., and Miss Ashley is one of these.
In discussing yesterday’s criticisms of the managers of the pageant and the questions which had been asked as to what had become of the rumored $6,000 profit, she said it was outrageous to hint that there had been dishonesty on the part of the strike leaders, unless figures could be produced to show that there had been irregularities.
Frederick Sumner Boyd, after the conference in Miss Ashley office, said for the committee:
“Miss Ashley was the first treasurer of the pageant, but becoming tied up with other duties, Mrs. Florence Wise of the Women’s Trades Union League took her place. At first it looked as if the pageant would be a source of profit, when the expenses began to pile up, and we were uncertain of a paying audience, we began to be afraid of a breakdown. At one time we had practically decided to abandon the pageant, but as we had made contracts and had incurred expenses we should have to meet in any case, we decided to pull the entertainment through.
“We had to raise $3,000 for expenses, so we called a meeting of the entire committee and of five delegates of the New York silk strikers. We told them the entertainment could not be brought off-but the delegates insisted that it must be. It was decided to raise the $3,000, and within twenty-four hours John Steiger brought in $1,600 and Miss Mabel Dodge collected $600. About $1,000 more was raised from various sources. Then we went ahead.”
Boyd then went on to explain the deficit, he said that neither Haywood, Reed, Miss Dodge, or others associated with them directly had anything to do with handling the money, except to sell a few tickets.….
————–
—————-
—————
—————
—————