The next step in the legal effort to save the life of the Rebel Songwriter will be an appeal to the Utah Board of Pardons. We have received information that that process is already underway.

Meanwhile, the office of Governor Spry continues to be inundated with letters and telegrams from across the nation and around the world pleading for the life of Joe Hill.

From the International Socialist Review of September 1915

Judge O. N. Hilton in the Joe Hill Case

The following excerpts have been taken from the able argument of Judge Hilton before the Utah Supreme Court. Joe Hill will be executed on October 1 unless enough pressure is brought to bear on the governor to stay the execution. Every REVIEW reader should write at once to Governor Spry, Salt Lake City, Utah, denouncing the infamous procedure of the courts in this case, and demanding that Joe Hill be given clemency. Do it now.

1st. We do not believe Joseph Hillstrom guilty of the crime for which he has been convicted.
2nd. We do not believe that he had a fair trial.
3rd. We have learned that the jurors were not selected in the usual way.
4th. The defendant was practically without council when he was on trial for his life.
5th. No motive was shown for the crime for which he was convicted.
6th. The conviction was found upon the flimsiest kind of circumstantial evidence.
Believing these to be the facts, we the undersigned, demand that the death sentence in the case of Joseph Hillstrom be set aside and clemency extended.

THE young man in this information named as the defendant was convicted, as the record discloses, of murder in the first degree and sentenced to be shot. He is of more than ordinary culture and intelligence, converses fluently and well, although English is not his native speech; has never in his life been convicted of a criminal offense, not even a misdemeanor; without a single vicious or bad habit, not even that of using tobacco, bright, clean in mind and alert of body he stands now in this court, as he did before the jury which condemned him, entitled to every gracious right and privilege vouchsafed him by the constitution and laws of this state, which, as I assert, were for the most part wholly denied him on trial, and a conviction obtained which shockingly violates every consideration of reason and humanity.Assuming that in this state, as in most of the others where I have had occasion to appear before the Supreme Court, that is from the oral argument that the court receives its first impression of the case, before proceeding with a discussion of the errors assigned, it will aid the court, I feel, to state the salient features of the case.

I was not present at the trial in the court below; hence I cannot as fully acquaint the court with the atmosphere of the trial, as I could through personal presence.

This disadvantage, however, is fully compensated, from the fact that I am able to take an impersonal and altogether unprejudiced view of the case, as my knowledge comes from a careful study of the abstract in the court here.

And after a most painstaking study of the facts as they appear, I feel warranted in saying to this court, and in saying with emphasis, that every element essential to conviction (1) identification beyond a reasonable doubt, (2) proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, (3) absence of motive, (4) the denial of the substantive right of personal presence and by counsel, are so wanting in the case, and the constitutional safeguards prescribed to assure a fair, impartial and unprejudiced trial-a trial that results in conviction upon guilt alone-have been so utterly disregarded, that even this cursory presentation, based as it is solely on the record, will convince this court that the verdict cannot stand and the sentence must be set aside….

Facts of the Case.On the night of January 10, 1914, the deceased, J. S. Morrison, with his two sons, was in his store, here in the city, engaged in routine duties of a tradesman. There was evidently an apprehension in the mind of the deceased, for he loaded his revolver (Abs. 86), placed it in the ice box, where the door had been removed, and where the gun would be right at hand, and about ten o’clock two men came in, exclaiming, “We’ve got you now,” and began shooting, firing, it seems, some five to seven shots, killing J. S. Morrison and his son Arling Morrison.

Such a tragedy, in the midst of a busy city, on a prominent street, could have been prompted by only one motive—REVENGE. There must have been hot anger and deadly wrath moving the assailants to this desperate deed at such a time and under such a risk.

Naturally every feeling of good citizenship is alert not only to discover the murderer, but to visit such a punishment as to deter others from such an awful crime—I say an awful crime, the highest crime known to the law of the land, the highest tragedy known to the law of nature, and the thing that even the most primitive society is organized to protect against.

But, in this crisis, we should never avenge in hot haste and add to private assassination the horrors of a judicial murder—for when an innocent man is convicted and executed the command “thou shalt do no murder,” is deliberately broken and crime stalks insolently along, unwhipped of justice.

Then the duty devolving on this court is, as I take it, to know to a moral certainty, that certainty that excludes all reasonable doubt, the identity of the criminal agent and to so connect him with the crime that there is no reasonable doubt of his guilt.

Let us consider whether or not this has been definitely fixed upon the defendant, or whether vague suspicions, prejudgments, inference and speculations have been allowed to usurp the place during the trial that should be filled with convincing and satisfying evidence.

The young son who was present, the only living witness to the tragedy, says:

Two voices shouted, ‘We’ve got you sow!’ ” (Abs. 80); the men had on red bandanna hand kerchiefs, so that the point came down over their chin. They had on soft felt hats. There was a little difference in the height of the men; the taller was leading, and nearest the father.The defendant’s height is about the same and his size compares (Abs. 92) just the same as the man I saw.

Is there any identification of any person in this evidence?The next witness to identification in Phoebe Seeley:

Going home that night, we met two men as we were crossing Jefferson street (Abs. 182). One was slightly taller than the other; the taller man turned, directing his gaze toward us and I noticed a red handkerchief on the neck of the taller man (Abs. 183). His face was thin and a sharp nose and rather large nostrils. (Abs. 185).

Recall, if you please, that at this point the defendant was without counsel, and one of the friends of the court suggested (Abs. 186), that the questions were all unfair and all leading and that the witness was receiving the answer she should make from the district attorney.And she continues:

I have seen the defendant standing since and his height is very much the same with the height of the man that turned and looked at me.

Now listen to the district attorney: (Abs. 188.)

Q. How does the nose of Mr. Hillstrom compare with the nose of the man that looked at you there?
A. Very much the same.
Q. How do the marks on the left-hand side of the face and neck correspond with the marks you saw on that man?
A. They look a good deal alike to me as on the same man I saw.

Special features arc pointed out; comparisons are invited as to detail—efforts, by suggestion, to make the witness see what she had never seen. A man fair to the defendant and to the state would never have so willfully disregarded the rule as to manufacture fancied resemblances in the excited imagination of a woman testifying in a court room. He would have said: If you notice any resemblance, state the facts on which it is based, and be so sure about it that you can state it in your own language—for remember that the life of a man depends upon it, and there must be no guesswork, no vague impressions, but facts that satisfy the conscience. Instead of that he does all but ask her directly to state that the men are the same. By all possible stretch of imagination, helped out by suggestions, her nearest guess is “that they looked very much the same.”…

Concluding, I now ask your honors frankly, if you, or anyone that is dear to you, was condemned upon the inconclusive, disjointed fragments of suspicion, misnomered by the state as evidence against this defendant, would you say that you or they were JUSTLY condemned and that the crime charged had been proved against you beyond a reasonable doubt?

Would you, or would you permit anyone dear to you to go to his death under this flimsy testimony and then say that you or he had been tried, fairly and impartially, according to the law of the land, and in accordance with the safeguards provided by the constitution.

Now, your honors, unless you can answer these queries firmly by YES, you must reverse this case. So far as the law is concerned, you must each stand in Hillstrom’s place, and standing in that place you must be able to say upon your conscience that you have been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt after a fair and impartial hearing; after a full opportunity to present and prove your defense, both in person and by counsel and that you are condemned because you are the guilty agent of the crime that the state here seeks to punish.

Being normal and just men, the members of the final tribunal of the property, liberty and life of every man in this state, you cannot concur in the sentence imposed on this man, because there is in the abstract of the record that error which commands you to say that great and manifest injury has been done to this defendant; that there has been such a disregard of constitutional safeguards in the trial, that to affirm the judgment would be to place in jeopardy every man and to have his life staked upon the conjectures, the worthless comparisons, the fancied resemblances and the prejudgments of those utterly unable to speak a single fact that could satisfy the reason: thereby establishing a precedent that would make law and decent procedure give way to the chaos that has enwrapped the great nations of Europe, where solemn obligations of high contracting nations are mere scraps of paper and where hatred and prejudice direct evil forces to the utter destruction of mankind. And no less in kind or degree, because directed against a single man, the defendant—a defenseless, almost helpless and an illegally convicted young man.

O. N. Hilton,
Of Counsel for Appellant and Defendant.

[Photograph added.]

SOURCESThe International Socialist Review, Volume 16
-ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company, July 1915-June 1916
https://books.google.com/…
ISR-Sept 1915
https://books.google.com/…
“Judge O. N. Hilton in the Joe Hill Case”
https://books.google.com/…

The Case of Joe Hill
-by Philip S Foner
International Publishers, 1965

IMAGES
Orrin N Hilton
http://darrow.law.umn.edu/…
Joe Hill, International Socialist Review, Aug 1915
https://books.google.com/…
Appeal State of Utah vs Joseph Hillstrom,
ON Hilton Appeals the Conviction of the Joe Hill
http://www.joehill.org/…

For More on the Appeal:

Appeal to Utah Supreme Court
http://www.joehill.org/…

Foner on the Appeal by O. N. Hilton
https://books.google.com/…

For more on the Decision of
the Supreme Court:

Analysis of Court’s decision by Philip Foner:
https://books.google.com/…

Report of Cases Decided in the Supreme Court
of the State of Utah, Volume 46
West Publishing Company, 1916
https://books.google.com/…
STATE v. HILLSTROM. No. 2764. Decided July 3, 1915. (150 Pac. 935.)
https://books.google.com/…

Appeal from District Court; Third District; Hon. M. L. Ritchie, Judge.
Joseph Hillstrom was convicted of murder. He appeals.
AFFIRMED.
O. N. Hilton and Soren Christensen, for appellant.
A. R. Barnes, Attorney-General, and E. V. Higgins and G. A. Iverson,
Assistant Attorneys-General, for the State.

Opinion of the Court by Chief Justice C. J. Straup:

https://books.google.com/…Associate Justice J. Frick (Concurring):
https://books.google.com/…

Associate Justice J. McCarty (Concurring):
https://books.google.com/…

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I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night-Joan Baez

Takes more than guns to kill a man,
Says Joe, “I didn’t die.”
Says Joe, “I didn’t die.”
-Alfred Hayes & Earl Robinson

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Mr. Gompers’s criticisms are contained in a letter to John Brisben Walker of New York, Chairman of the National Committee of the Friends of Peace. Mr. Gompers, in his letter, emphatically declines an invitation to associate himself with the society…Mr. Gompers’s letter follows letters from several labor leaders resigning from or refusing to join the Friends of Peace or Labor’s National Peace Council, all of which have been given out from his office. Mr. Gompers is convinced that neither of the societies is interested in peace and that neither is neutral. His associates seem to be of the same opinion.

[Says Mr. Gompers in his letter to Mr. Walker:]If it were possible for me…to regard the movement in which you are engaged as prompted in the interest of peace, I would not hesitate to pledge my most earnest and active cooperation; but from my knowledge of events it is not peace which is being furthered by your movement and your meeting; your purpose is to place the people of the United States in a false position before the world, to play into the hands of one side of the warring nations as against the other. Carried to its logical conclusion, our movement would make of the United States not only an unneutral nation, but would lead to the direst limits of militarism in every country and in its worst form.

From The New York Times of September 3, 1915:

GOMPERS DENOUNCES
‘FRIENDS OF PEACE’
—–

Pro-German Society Under False Colors,
He Writes Its Chairman, Brisben Walker.
—–
SOUGHT TO CORRUPT LABOR
—–
Some Led by Fair Words to Support Movement-
Labor Chief’s Compliments to Henry Weismann.
—–Special to The New York Times.

John Brisben Walker

WASHINGTON, SEPT. 2.-Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, today declared that the Friends of Peace, a pro-German organization, had, “by insidious and false representations attempted to corrupt financially a large number of representative men among the union workers of the United States.” While many of the workers proved themselves incorruptible, said Mr. Gompers, some had been cajoled into believing the society was really working for peace. According to Mr. Gompers, the name of the society is misleading; it works to put the United States in a false and unneutral light,he says, and has bent its efforts to lend support to one of the contending groups in Europe.Mr. Gompers’s criticisms are contained in a letter to John Brisben Walker of New York, Chairman of the National Committee of the Friends of Peace. Mr. Gompers, in his letter, emphatically declines an invitation to associate himself with the society. Mr Walker, he says, has taken upon himself to speak for labor because sixteen years ago he was invited to preside at a labor dinner. On the strength of that incident, says Mr. Gompers, Mr. Walker has ventured to stigmatize workingmen who differ from his “quaint understandings” as traitors to their fellows.

Mr. Gompers’s letter follows letters from several labor leaders resigning from or refusing to join the Friends of Peace or Labor’s National Peace Council, all of which have been given out from his office. Mr. Gompers is convinced that neither of the societies is interested in peace and that neither is neutral. His associates seem to be of the same opinion.

[Says Mr. Gompers in his letter to Mr. Walker:]If it were possible for me…to regard the movement in which you are engaged as prompted in the interest of peace, I would not hesitate to pledge my most earnest and active cooperation; but from my knowledge of events it is not peace which is being furthered by your movement and your meeting; your purpose is to place the people of the United States in a false position before the world, to play into the hands of one side of the warring nations as against the other. Carried to its logical conclusion, our movement would make of the United States not only an unneutral nation, but would lead to the direst limits of militarism in every country and in its worst form.

Mr. Gompers refers to an editorial by Mr. Walker in Your Affairs, the publication of the Friends of Peace, in which a European confederation was proposed for the preservation of the German and other monarchies against the rising tide of democracy, and then proceeds:

If you believe that the perpetuation of empires, royalties and thrones is the course which the citizens of this republic should advocate, then, Sir, it might be well, in order to be consistent, to advocate the establishment of monarchical institutions in our Republic. If you think that, after the war is over, the democratic sentiment deep down in the hearts of the German and Austrian people, when these men can and dare speak, will afford any resting place for your propaganda for the perpetuation of empires, dynasties, and thrones, you have misread and misunderstood, and now misinterpret the feelings of the people of Germany and Austria, and England, and Italy, and the other countries.The first name appearing upon your letterhead is that of Mr. Henry Weismann, a most delectable person, one whose career the men in the labor movement have closely noted for more than twenty-five years. He has been an active worker in a least a half dozen different movements each the very antithesis of the others, and in no movement with which he has been connected has he proved himself other than an apostate. If your movement were possible of growth, you had better watch out for him. Of the other persons whose names appear upon your letterhead, the world knows of their general attitude of mind.

It may not be uninteresting to call attention to the fact that paid emissaries of your “Friends of Peace” have gone from city to city and by insidious and false representations attempted to financially corrupt a large number of the representative men among  the union workers of the United States. That so many have proved incorruptible is due to their intelligence, to their honor, and to their integrity. That a number of workers have been cajoled into the belief that by attending your meeting they enlist themselves as friends of peace may be true, because they want peace, they are friends of peace, as is every humanity-loving man and woman of our country; but the false pretense will disclose itself to them not only by your meeting but by that which will inevitably follow.

The American Federation of Labor’s officers have been in almost uninterrupted communication with the representatives of the organized workers of the countries now engaged in war, and when the time shall at all seem to be ripe for any decisive move to be made in the interest of peace, all may rest assured that no effort will be left untried to accomplish peace, a peace founded upon righteousness, upon justice, upon democracy and brotherhood the world over.

[Photograph added.]

SOURCE

The New York Times
(New York, New York)
-Sept 3, 1915
“Gompers Denounces Friends of Peace”
http://query.nytimes.com/…

IMAGES
Samuel Gompers, 1911
http://en.wikipedia.org/…
John Brisben Walker
https://en.wikipedia.org/…

See also:

“ASKS U.S. TO STOP WAR SUPPLY SHIPS;
Labor’s National Peace Council Charges Government Is Violating Neutrality.
PUBLIC INQUIRY IS URGED
Gives List of Seven Liners at New York Whose Cargoes They Want Investigated.
ASKS U.S. TO STOP WAR SUPPLY SHIPS”
-Special to The New York Times.
July 09, 1915
http://query.nytimes.com/…

The Advocate: America’s Jewish Journal, Volume 50
-ed by Emil G Hirsch
Chicago, Illinois, 1915
https://books.google.com/…
The Reform Advocate-Aug 14, 1915
https://books.google.com/…
“A National Peace Convention” by Rutledge Rutherford
https://books.google.com/…

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CHRISTIANS AT WAR by JOHN F. KENDRICK, 1916

Onward, Christian soldiers! Duty’s way is plain;
Slay your Christian neighbors, or by them be slain,
Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill,
God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill,
All your acts are sanctified by the Lamb on high;
If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Rip and tear and smite!
Let the gentle Jesus bless your dynamite.
Splinter skulls with shrapnel, fertilize the sod;
Folks who do not speak your tongue deserve the curse of God.
Smash the doors of every home, pretty maidens seize;
Use your might and sacred right to treat them as you please.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Eat and drink your fill;
Rob with bloody fingers, Christ okays the bill,
Steal the farmers’ savings, take their grain and meat;
Even though the children starve, the Savior’s bums must eat,
Burn the peasants’ cottages, orphans leave bereft;
In Jehovah’s holy name, wreak ruin right and left.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Drench the land with gore;
Mercy is a weakness all the gods abhor.
Bayonet the babies, jab the mothers, too;
Hoist the cross of Calvary to hallow all you do.
File your bullets’ noses flat, poison every well;
God decrees your enemies must all go plumb to hell.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Blight all that you meet;
Trample human freedom under pious feet.
Praise the Lord whose dollar sign dupes his favored race!
Make the foreign trash respect your bullion brand of grace.
Trust in mock salvation, serve as tyrant’s tools;
History will say of you: “That pack of G.. d..fools.”

First published in the 9th edition
(Joe Hill Memorial Edition)
of the IWW Little Red Songbook, March 1916.
http://www.folkarchive.de/…

Thursday afternoon guards from the Ascher agency, of New York, reached the property of the Tidewater Company, and that evening took charge of the patrolling of the works. These men had evidently been hastily picked up, for they showed no familiarity with fire arms or knowledge of discipline. In fact, so awkward were they with the rifles that one guard accidentally shot one of his fellows in the ankle, necessitating amputation of the leg. The men were utterly irresponsible and kept on firing indiscriminately during the night, either to test their weapons or through sheer nervousness. This continual firing, of course, enraged the strikers and kept things in a ferment.The commander of the Ascher men had been one of those in charge of the guards at Roosevelt in January, when these guards killed or wounded twenty strikers. The company was so alarmed by the conduct of these men that the next day at noon they summarily discharged them and substituted men from the Berghoff agency in their place. These Berghoff men were also hastily recruited and were characterized by the Berghoff attorney as a lot of irresponsible thugs. The organization of the Berghoff Company, though, was far superior to the Ascher guards. After their substitution there were no casualties.

From the International Socialist Review of September 1915:

THE BATTLE AT BAYONNE

FIVE THOUSAND oil workers in Bayonne, New Jersey, are taking more money home in their pay envelopes on Saturday nights as the result of their spontaneous strike against the Standard Oil Company on July 14th.

They were not “free American citizens,” but mostly foreign-born Poles and Lithuanians, known on the payroll by the numbers on their brass checks.

But their splendid solidarity over whelmed all odds; lack of organization and language differences, a double-crossing sheriff and 500 Waddell thugs armed with Standard Oil repeating rifles. Solidarity won and always will.

Chairman Frank P. Walsh of the U. S. Industrial Relations Committee sent two of his ablest investigators to Bayonne, who have reported in part as viz.:

The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, although conducting an enormously profitable enterprise, pays wages too low to maintain a family on a comfortable, healthful and decent basis. In Bayonne it paid common laborers at a lower rate than those of two companies whose plants adjoin its refinery. This is in direct contradiction to the claims of the company in a statement issued at 26 Broadway, New York, that it always has paid the prevailing wage or better.

The still-cleaners, 100 strong, started the strike by asking a 15 per cent raise, which was promptly turned down and their committee fired. Their wage was $2.45 for working long hours in a temperature of from 200 to 300 degrees—scraping tar.The barrel makers demanded 10 per cent and quit work. The strike spread until every man was out. Box and can workers, pipefitters and boilermakers, case makers and yard laborers.

The Industrial Commission report continues:

On Wednesday, July 21, the Standard Oil Company began the importation of strike breakers and ordered a large number of armed guards from Berghoff Bros. & Waddell, a strikebreaking and detective agency, of 120 Liberty street, New York City. As the strike breakers were proceeding up Twenty-second street, on their way to the plant, they passed through a crowd of about 300 strikers. Trouble immediately ensued and the strikers were rapidly reinforced. A detachment of police immediately charged the strikers. Some of these police were mounted, some on foot. The charge, however, was ineffectual, as the strikers’ rocks proved more effective than the clubs and revolvers of the police. Guards of the Standard Oil Company came out with their nightsticks to help the police, but they, too, were forced to retreat. Some of the police and company’s guards were forced into a fire engine house for refuge, and others surrendered to the strikers. One of the strikers, a boy 19 years of age, was shot through the head and killed. This was known as the battle of the Black Ditch.

In Harper’s Weekly for August 7, while the strike of the Standard Oil employees was still young, Amos Pinchot said:

Last Wednesday the strikers stood around the streets. There had been no fighting till then.Then armed guards came in. They were not police, not deputies, but simply private individuals recruited by the company in anticipation of trouble. But they did not stay on the company’s property. They marched the streets and dispersed the crowd, shoving the men along, and telling the women to go home.

That started things.

“We went up in the air,” one of the strikers told me. “They’d a right to stay on the company’s grounds. Why did they come right out in the town and club us off the sidewalks? They didn’t own the streets, did they?” Fist fights started, clubs rose and fell, stones flew, pistols were drawn, and the 44 calibre Winchesters of the mine guards barked while the crowd surged toward the company’s gates…

A reporter said to me, “I have never seen anything like it—the sheer grit of these men. Twice, practically unarmed, they charged the ten-foot stockade from behind which the guards were picking them off with Winchesters. About a hundred actually scaled it, swinging and pulling each other up, while the women and children cheered them. It was like one of those cavalry drills at Madison Square Garden. Only the difference was that a quarter of them were shot down before they reached the ground on the other side. If the guards had shot better they’d have got all of them. Even the kids are in this strike. They gathered stones and sailed in with the men. A bunch of little chaps from ten to fifteen years old sneaked up to the fence and lighted a fire to burn it down. They wanted to make a hole for their fathers and big brothers to go through. I saw one youngster catch a loose police horse, crawl on its back and ride up to the stockade, swinging his cap and yelling while the men charged.”

Now for the cause of the strike. Contrary to my preconceived idea, the Rockefeller employees at Bayonne are not well treated. They are underpaid and live in greater poverty and squalor than even the workers of the fertilizer companies who struck last winter at Roosevelt. A school teacher who seemed to know what he was talking about said that from six to ten families often live in a two or three story frame house. Among the lower paid men it is a steady struggle against want. Here are some of the wage scales told me by strikers who gathered around us at the bullet scarred shanty which is used for headquarters.

Another grievance was what they called the new management. Under the old management a list of names went into headquarters three times a year of men recommended for increased pay. Since the new manager came, no such lists have gone in. Again, for the work of dumping the wax presses, Hennessy, the new manager, reduced the number of gangs from fourteen to ten. Thus about a quarter of the dumpers were laid off, and the men left on the job claimed the work was too hard. One of them told me that a man often worked 168 hours in two weeks, with one twenty-four hour shift when the night shift is changed and becomes the day shift.

These are some of the causes of the strike—there are others—which rose first to the strikers’ minds, as they talked; and then there was the feeling that the company, which they believed to be making big money just now, could especially well afford to raise wages to a living scale.

In the report made by Messrs. West and Chenery to Mr. Walsh we read that on

Thursday afternoon guards from the Ascher agency, of New York, reached the property of the Tidewater Company, and that evening took charge of the patrolling of the works. These men had evidently been hastily picked up, for they showed no familiarity with fire arms or knowledge of discipline. In fact, so awkward were they with the rifles that one guard accidentally shot one of his fellows in the ankle, necessitating amputation of the leg. The men were utterly irresponsible and kept on firing indiscriminately during the night, either to test their weapons or through sheer nervousness. This continual firing, of course, enraged the strikers and kept things in a ferment.The commander of the Ascher men had been one of those in charge of the guards at Roosevelt in January, when these guards killed or wounded twenty strikers. The company was so alarmed by the conduct of these men that the next day at noon they summarily discharged them and substituted men from the Berghoff agency in their place. These Berghoff men were also hastily recruited and were characterized by the Berghoff attorney as a lot of irresponsible thugs. The organization of the Berghoff Company, though, was far superior to the Ascher guards. After their substitution there were no casualties.

Thursday, July 22, at noon, saw the last serious clash. During that night, however, there was occasionally an exchange of shots between the company guards and the strikers, who were on roofs of houses taking pot shots at the guards….

The leader of the strike had been a young Elizabeth City Socialist by the name of Jeremiah Baly. He was a salesman employed by the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and had come to Bayonne at the commencement of the trouble. He had taken part in several discussions of the situation and had at several times addressed the crowd of strikers. Sheriff Kinkead was impressed with this young man and suggested to the strikers that they select him as a member of the Strike Committee. This the strikers did and he represented them in their committees which went to see the company officials and in negotiations with the city authorities.

The men all had back pay coming and after much dispute it was finally decided that they should go in groups inside the Standard Oil stockade and get their pay at the window. The sheriff insisted that Baly go in with the first number, as he alleges that he was not aware that Baly was not an employee of the Standard Oil Company. Baly entered with those men and then, in the presence of the armed guards and deputies, the sheriff ordered Baly to go to the window and get his money, and Baly refused. The sheriff then assaulted him, knocked him down and beat him viciously. He placed Baly under arrest and put him in the Bayonne jail.

Frank Tannenbaum, an I. W. W. leader, who was at Bayonne in the interest of the strikers, was also arrested Monday. By Tuesday many of the strikers were willing to return to work and the sheriff, who by this time had 500 deputies and 140 uniformed police, stationed them at intervals along the route to the plant, and about 1,500 strikers returned to work. The company then began to discharge their guards, and by Wednesday morning practically the entire force was back at work and during the day all of the armed guards had left for New York, with the exception of 100 at the plant of Tidewater, whom Sheriff Kinkead had arrested on the charge of inciting to riot. These men were all given a hearing before Police Recorder Kain, of Bayonne. All but ten of them were discharged. These men are out on a $1,000 bail each….

Two days after the men had returned to work the Standard Oil Company announced increases in the wages of its common laborers and proportionate increases for other groups.

SOURCE
The International Socialist Review, Volume 16
-ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company, July 1915-June 1916
https://books.google.com/…
ISR-Sept 1915
https://books.google.com/…
“The Battle of Bayonne” by L. H. M.
(Also source for illustrations by Robert Minor.)
https://books.google.com/…

IMAGE
Robert Minor
https://en.wikipedia.org/…

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The Red Flag – Socialist Victory Choir

The people’s flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts’ blood dyed its ev’ry fold.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we’ll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.
-Jim Connell, 1889

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WE NEVER FORGET
Bayonne, New Jersey-July 21 & 22, 1915

John Sterancaka-18

Nicola Iwaszkiu-19

Basil Nezsko-25

Note: I have taken the names from the descriptions of the funerals by The New York Times. Usually when reporting on the funerals, the press finally gets closer to the correct names of the fallen. More research is needed, however, and I will continue to search for better sources for the names of these labor martyrs.

The bloody revolution of a century and a quarter ago in France fills uncounted pages in the world’s history, but its terrible warning to the lords of misrule and despoilers of the people has been in vain. Today as ever the greed and avarice of the ruling class blind them to their impending fate and drive them to their inevitable doom.In the state of Colorado in “our own free America” the conditions that make for savage and bloody revolution are ripening with incredible rapidity and the lurid handwriting of fate is already upon the wall, but the Rockefellers and their capitalist cohorts, stricken blind as the penalty of their insatiate greed, are unable to see it.

Debs next describes the horrors of Ludlow and the heroic martyrdom of Louie Tikas during the Ludlow Massacre:

The tragic story of Ludlow, the hideous nightmare of the infernal regions of the Rocky(feller) mountains-written in the violated wombs of shrieking mothers and the spattered life-drops of the murdered babes-has yet to be traced on history’s ineffaceable pages. The blood of the twenty-three innocents who perished there will be the holy fount of the writer’s inspiration whose fire-tipped pen will give to the world this tragic and thrilling epic of the embattled miners in the mountain ramparts of Rockefellerado.In the story of Ludlow, Louis Tikas, the intrepid leader, the loyal comrade, the noble-hearted Greek who fell the victim of gunmen-brutes in military uniform while pleading that the women and children be spared, takes on the robes of deity and joins the martyrs and heroes of history. The rifle-butt that crushed his noble head and silenced his brave and tender heart gave his soul to the cause he loved and his name to the ages.

The lion-hearted Greek is at rest, but the cause he lived and died for goes on forever!

From the Appeal to Reason of September 4, 1915:

LOUIS TIKAS-LUDLOW’S HERO AND MARTYR

BY EUGENE V. DEBS.

“And now that the cloud settled upon Saint Antoine which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, sickness, ignorance and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence-nobles of great power all of them; but most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner…The mill which had worked them down was the the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and plowed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out to the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon the poles and lines; hunger was patched into them with straw and rags and wood and paper; hunger was repeated in every modicum of fire-wood that the man sawed off; hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the banker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; hunger was shred into atomies in every farthing hunger of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street, full of offense and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring or inflicting.”-From “A Tale of Two Cities.”

In these ghastly colors Charles Dickens painted the picture of poverty and its starving victims in France on the eve of the French revolution, and yet, “every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather took no warning.” Then the storm broke and the pent-up furies were unleashed; the day of reckoning had come at last and the crimes of the centuries, inflicted without mercy upon the long-suffering people, were wiped out in the hearts’ blood of their aristocratic and profligate oppressors and despoilers.

The bloody revolution of a century and a quarter ago in France fills uncounted pages in the world’s history, but its terrible warning to the lords of misrule and despoilers of the people has been in vain. Today as ever the greed and avarice of the ruling class blind them to their impending fate and drive them to their inevitable doom.

In the state of Colorado in “our own free America” the conditions that make for savage and bloody revolution are ripening with incredible rapidity and the lurid handwriting of fate is already upon the wall, but the Rockefellers and their capitalist cohorts, stricken blind as the penalty of their insatiate greed, are unable to see it.

That the monstrous crime of Ludlow, the fiendish destruction of the tented village, the wanton killing of the homeless, hunted, hopeless victims-half-clad, famishing, terror-stricken and defenseless-bludgeoned, bullied, shot down like dogs, and their wives and suckling babes roasted in pits before their eyes-that this appalling massacre, without a parallel in history, did not infuriate the suffering and persecuted victims of capitalism’s worse than satanic ferocity, fire their blood with the tiger-thirst for revenge, and drench the despotic and shameless state with blood is one of the miracles of patience and submissiveness of the exploited, downtrodden, suffering masses.

The tragic story of Ludlow, the hideous nightmare of the infernal regions of the Rocky(feller) mountains-written in the violated wombs of shrieking mothers and the spattered life-drops of the murdered babes-has yet to be traced on history’s ineffaceable pages. The blood of the twenty-three innocents who perished there will be the holy fount of the writer’s inspiration whose fire-tipped pen will give to the world this tragic and thrilling epic of the embattled miners in the mountain ramparts of Rockefellerado.

In the story of Ludlow, Louis Tikas, the intrepid leader, the loyal comrade, the noble-hearted Greek who fell the victim of gunmen-brutes in military uniform while pleading that the women and children be spared, takes on the robes of deity and joins the martyrs and heroes of history. The rifle-butt that crushed his noble head and silenced his brave and tender heart gave his soul to the cause he loved and his name to the ages.

The lion-hearted Greek is at rest, but the cause he lived and died for goes on forever!

Louis Tikas was educated, cultured, and refined, a graduate of the University of Athens; yea, he was more than that, he was a MAN! His heart was true as his brain was clear; he followed the truth and he loved justice; he sided with the weak and ministered to the suffering, even as his elder brother had in the days when other pharisees crucified the Son of Man for loving his despoiled and despised fellow-men.

Louis Tikas made Ludlow holy as Jesus Christ made Calvary!

He was the loyal leader of the persecuted colony; the trusted keeper of the tented village. He was loved by every man, woman and child, and feared only by the fanged wolves and hyenas that threatened to ravage the flock.

Strong as a giant yet gentle as a child; utterly fearless yet without bravado, this great and loving soul cast his lot with the exiled slaves of the pits and kept his vigil over the defenseless women and children of the village as a loving mother might over the fledglings of her brood.

Is it strange that they loved him, trusted him, and that in the hour of their deadly peril they looked to him to shield them from their brutish ravishers?

In this tragic hour Louis Tikas measured up to the supreme stature of his noble manhood. He knew his time had come and with a smile upon his lips and without a tremor in his sinews, he faced his cruel fate. He begged that mothers and babes be spared; and with this touching plea upon his lips and the love of his people in his soul and beaming from his eyes, he was struck down by the hired assassins of the Arch-Pharisee and passed to martyrdom and immortality.

[Photograph added.]

Louis Tikas at the Ludlow Colony’s well:

Louie Tikas with the Flag of Ludlow leading parade in Denver with Mother Jones:

The bodies of Louie Tikas and James Fyler after the Ludlow Massacre:

Mass funeral parade in Trinidad in honor of Louie Tikas:

IMAGES
Funeral Parade for Louis Tikas
http://greekodyssey.typepad.com/…
Louie Tikas with John Lawson at Ludlow
http://ludlowsymposium.wordpress.com/…
Louie Tikas at Ludlow Well
https://archive.org/…
Colorado Federation of Labor March in Denver,
Dec 1913, Mother Jones & Louis Tikas & detail of same
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/…
Bodies of Tikas and Fyler at Ludlow
https://archive.org/…
Funeral of Louis Tikas X2
http://www.du.edu/…
http://www.du.edu/…

See also:

“WE NEVER FORGET April 20, 1914 The Ludlow Massacre”
-by JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/…

“Hellraisers Journal: Gunthugs Attack Forbes Tent Colony with Death Special, Striker Killed” -byJayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/…

“Hellraisers Journal: Mother Jones and Louie Tikas Lead March to State Capitol with Flag of Ludlow” -byJayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/…

“Hellraisers Journal: Thousands March to Graveyard to Honor Louis Tikas, Martyred Hero of Ludlow” -byJayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/…

“Hellraisers Journal: ‘Take me out of here, daddy, there is going to be a fight.'” -byJayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/…

Tag: Louis Tikas
http://www.dailykos.com/…

Search: Tikas + JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/…

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More on Louie Tikas from Zeese Papanikolas

Zeese Papanikolas talks about the Greek immigrant, Louis Tikas. Papanikolas is the author of “Buried Unsung,” I have a signed copy of this book which I treasure. Mr Papanikolas signed this book for me at the Ludlow Memorial on June 10, 1989.

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A happy discovery! A song for Louis Tikas:
This cannot be embed but lyrics and audio are at the link.

Louis Tikas
-by Frank Manning
http://unionsong.com/…

Mourn with me, my sisters and my brothers,
For a leader lying silent in the grave,
A man who lived his whole life saving others,
And, in the end, his life is what he gave.
Louis lived his whole life saving others,
And, in the end, his life is what he gave.

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Palikari ― Louis Tikas and the Ludlow massacre

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A drawing by Art Young, listing the “Laws of Christian Warfare,” precedes Eastman’s article:

THE UNINTERESTING WAR

Max Eastman

With Sketches In Europe by K. R. Chamberlain

THE principal impression I bring from Europe is that the war is not interesting. I had felt an element of strain in all the correspondence we were served with; unconsciously I knew that as a drama the world war was not fulfilling journalistic expectations. But until I got near and saw the disillusioned millions reading their monotonous little communique’s every afternoon, and trying to find food for passion in the fact that this or that number of yards was gained or lost on a five hundred mile front, and a daily five thousand or more undistinguished heroes killed gaining or losing it, I did not realize to what depths of boredom the course of European history had sunk.

Battle used to be a word to rouse the blood with. A charge of bayonets, the bombardment of a city, the assault with hand grenades, the desperate encounter of gigantic armies—these were things that left a date and monument. War had black and crimson moments hung with fate.

Here the battle charge, bombardment, hand-to-hand encounter, all the crisis and catastrophe, everything in war that gave an eminence of meaning to some phase or instant of it, is dissolved and run together in untold unapprehended quantities, spread over a space that cannot be brought into the imagination, and kept flowing through time in an absolutely uninterrupted monotony of noise and carnage.

They shoot and kill five thousand Frenchmen every day. They shoot more Germans, and still more Russians. All these men die in bombardments, battles, assaults, reconnoitres, charges, that old-fashioned historians would leer over and detail with expert delight.
But when there is an absolute continuum of such things all over a continent for a year, and substantially nothing lost or gained on either side, how can you find anything to call interesting, and when you do find it how can you tell it from the rest?

It is startling, and indeed appalling, to have a ton of metal dropped on you from twenty-six miles away after describing a trajectory seven miles high. It has a flavor of the gigantic miraculous—it suggests the Hippodrome. But as a mode of human conflict it lacks the dramatic elements of an ordinary fist-fight.

One newspaper story of this war has made a real sensation, and that is Will Irwin’s account of the battle of Ypres, which has endeared him to the heart of the British Island forever. And Will deserves all the fame he got, for he made the battle of Ypres. Considered by old-fashioned standards of war correspondence, it wasn’t a brilliant feat of
journalism to go over there two months late and be the first one to find out there had been a battle involving hundreds of thousands of men and marking a crisis in the history of four nations. Formerly we should have thought this was a little slow. But really it took something better than a journalist to do it, because it was an act of creative imagination. Will Irwin had to go in and see that battle, as a single entity, in the middle of an absolutely fluid mass of warfare in which nobody had been able to see anything but his own gun before. The battle was there all right, and so are any God’s million of other battles, but you’ll never hear of them, because, generally speaking, they’re too common to be worth polishing out.

I don’t know how they feel at the front. One man told me the last thing they ever think about, or talk about, is the war. But I have a distinct impression that the people who are not at the front, or whose loves are not at the front, are dull about it.

Even in France I find this true, though the French are fighting in full faith that they are saving their country from the possession of barbarian hordes, and though there is no murmur or reluctance. The war is to the French simply inevitable—a dull job as well as a tragic, but a job they will do, and are doing, to the gods’ taste.Perhaps some of them were glad to fight in the beginning—the old inherited instinct is so strong. The Italians are still in that mood. In Paris, whenever a batch of them were accepted for enlistment by their consul, they would hire a taxicab and a girl, and decorate them with flags, and sail along the Boulevards yelling and arm-waving in that rather hollow extreme of glee. The instinct of belligerence is strong in all the European peoples. They love to fight. But France has had time to learn that this is not a fight, this killing industry, and her will to it is disillusioned.

I never saw a sadder thing than those troops of young new soldiers leaving the caserne opposite my window, starting off with some small plaudits and some tears from those that love them, each a flower in the muzzle of his gun—but O, so serious! I saw them three miles out, too, the flowers fading then, or fallen, and SOLEMNLY UNWELCOME BUSINESS written in the eyes of every soldier. That is what the war is, as I saw it, to all France.

And this disillusionment, this want of interest, is much more evident in England, although England has but one foot in the war. London is completely papered with unconvincing posters telling England’s sons of the glories of military service. The dullest fool would answer: “You protest too much.” I wish I could remember them all. “It is better to face bullets at the front than be blown up by a Zeppelin at home,” seemed to me the most
doubtful.

“Who dies if England lives?”

“Young men of Britain, the Germans said you were not in earnest—give them the lie!”

“Play the greater game—join the football battalion!”

“Women of Britain, say ‘Go!;”

And then that little patriotic strip which reads: “It is YOUR duty to enlist!”

It is pasted on the wind-shield of every taxicab in London, and behind it usually to be found the huskiest, heartiest big piece of soldier-meat that ever escaped from an army.

“It is your duty to enlist!”

England is having a hard time. She will see conscription if the war lasts. That is what free people think of the war.

I suppose that the German state is fighting in a relatively exalté condition, which infects the great number of her people. But I believe the fervid interest of men in the fortunes of war, as it once existed, is no more active there than elsewhere.

When we used to kill a hull on the farm, it was a great thing. John would go and put the head on the sledge-hammer and get his coat off, and the bull would be led into the barn by the nose and tied two ways, and everybody was both sad and breathless. (This is not a pleasant simile, but it’s true.) When you go into the beef factories in Chicago, and see them drive steers up into a narrow chute by the five thousand, and a man on a platform above them drops his hammer every so many seconds, and the steers roll out to be switched away, and shoved along, like mere material—why, the business of killing a bull loses every bit of drastic quality it had.I had written that much of this article, when the postman came in with a card from John Reed in St. Petersburgh, and this is what Reed says. (He doesn’t know that I have been in Europe):

DEAR MAXI:
I have some stories for you later—God! In the meantime if you are coming over on the assumption that this bazarre is interesting, don’t come, that’s all.
Don’t come!
REED

When I was in Paris, I was more interested in the relics of the Napoleonic Wars and the revolution, than I was in the daily reports of the final military climax of all European history, which was in suspension not a hundred miles away. And I am no archeologist.I gathered that either the French or Germans could break through the line anywhere for a gain of a mile or so, by massing enough men for the sacrifice, but that Germany could not afford it while she was attacking Russia, and the Allies thought it wasn’t worth while. They could gain more by just letting the armies steadily slaughter each other in equal quantities all along the line, because in the long run there are more Allies than there are Germans. Certainly nothing sportsmanlike about that. But what can you do? This war has no more sport in it than it has dramatic action. It is merely a regular businesslike killing and salting down of the younger men of each country involved—twenty thousand a day, perhaps, all told.

I am not doing justice to the submarines. I suppose that potting ocean liners from a submerged and highly delicate war canoe several hundred miles from home in hostile waters, is a way to spend one’s leisure that might be called princely sport. And as for the fishing expedition—I learn that 32,000 kinds of hook and bait have been suggested to the British Government, and I found the island literally breathless with rumors about what is happening to those “tin fish” around the shores of England. If the people who are on these expeditions love them as much as the people who stay at home and tell you all about it, there could be no sadder victory than to deprive them of their sport. It is the only thing in all the war that England has a bit of her old gallant bellicose taste for.

But, again, I do injustice to the aeroplane. A man told me about standing in a German field where a gun on an automobile was trying to bring down a French aeroplane five miles away. The gun was firing shells, and you could see the little puff of white smoke where the shell would crack in the vicinity of that soaring bird. Sometimes the shell would miss it by two miles. The man who told me this was a neutral—one of those neutrals who favor the Allies. But he told me that his instinctive zeal to see that bird-of-prey winged in mid-air at that distance was so great that after the shooting was over he could hardly hold himself up. So there is another grand sport the world has found. Let us be fair to that.

When the Zeppelins appear over Paris the entire fire department turns loose and careers through the black streets, tooting horns and yelling to the people to dive for their cellars. And with one accord the people rush to the streets, and out into the open squares, where they can get a good view of the fun. It is always a black night, and startling searchlights play back and forth on the clouds, and heaven is bombarded with shrapnel from all the high domes of the city. It is their one great taste of adventurous war, and the Parisians love it. They call it “Taube Day.” No wonder, for it flashes a little of the old color of risky and romantic life across a dull, long, weary labor of death.

There is little risk for the French soldier. He goes to the front expecting to be shot, and his family mourns him more or less, as soon as he is gone. There’s always the hope, of course, that only a part of him will be shot off, and he will come back, and sit around, and be there for a little lifetime afterwards.

I went through the American Red Cross Hospital in Paris—a strict, clean, sunny, up-to date but not very enjoyable place—a place conducted (if a swift impression did not mislead me) by the transient or expatriated snobs of American society in Paris. I was informed by my gracious guide that all the young men who run automobiles for the hospital are gentlemen! And when I took that rather quietly,“You understand they are real men, young men—gentlemen!”

“And there is always a lady present in each room all day!”

The efforts of a true American aristocrat to signify the U. S. peerage, although the language has no word that does not hold a vulgar reference to the real cause, is always appealing. But here especially, because the peerage is actually doing work. And one must have a subtle grasp of history, or etiquette, to know that work which has to do with war, is honorific, and does not soil the hands of noblemen like useful labor.

You can see there in that hospital, with its afternoon teas for the elite, and its young and elderly daughters of the first families of New York, patting the pallid cheeks of the French proletariat in humble solicitude—you can see a picture of what Veblen outlines in the preface of his Theory of The Leisure Class. The old, old title to aristocracy, prowess in the pursuits of war, mingles here—somewhat pitifully, to be sure, and as a poor relation-with the proper title of our time, hereditary wealth. And let me add that many a stern old French revolutionary lies there, moving only with his eyes perhaps, but adequately saying all that you would have him say to that new-found solicitude.

Such things are interesting, if you chance upon them. And the wounded, when they are picked out and separated from the daily pile, as here, and just the miracles of surviving life are shown to you, they too are all that war should be—a ghastly bludgeon shock of agony and human heroes laughing through their teeth, so that with horror at the gore and wonder at the soul of man, you want to fight or sing. I never saw that famous soul of man before, and when I came away from there I wrote a poem. Here it is:

AT THE RED CROSS HOSPITAL
Today I saw a face—it was a beak,
That peered with pale round yellow vapid eyes
Above the bloody muck that had been lips
And teeth and chin. A plodding doctor poured
Some water through a rubber down a hole
He made in that black bag of horny blood.
The beak revived; it smiled—as chickens smile.
The doctor hopes he’ll find the man a tongue
To brag with, and I hope he’ll find it, too.

But that is not the war—that is an isolated instant, which had horror in it for my eyes, who came there. When you kill some fifteen thousand youths a day, and rip the limbs or faces off how many thousands more nobody counts, the individual mangled hero is no longer characteristic. The color runs. There are no longer heroes—there is just the common fighting stuff of human nature, one continuous scrambled homogeneous jelly of that brave stuff. And that itself, when once its apprehended and you’ve made yourself believe that you too are a part of it, is not profoundly stimulating.There are deeper reasons why this war is dull. One is that, although it may have mighty consequences for the world, they have no connection with its causes or the conscious purposes of those who fight. A greater or a less degree of freedom and democracy for Europe, will be the result of victory for the Allies or for Germany. There is no doubt of that. But that is in a manner accidental, a by—product. It is not what the war is about.

I am not saying that anybody knows what it is about—that would be too interesting. “There is a thirty years supply of causes of war on hand,” as Kropotkin said some thirty years ago, and I suppose a dozen or two of these must have been at work. But whatever started it, and whatever may result, this war is not a war of people struggling against a tyrant for their liberty. It is a war of national invasion and defense—nationalism, the most banal of stupid human idol-worships. And the fact that liberty is more or less at stake is adventitious. One has to be historical to see it. One has to know that Prussia’s despotism was the iron heart of feudal things in Europe, that the German people, never having had their Bourgeois revolution, are peculiarly behind the march in freedom, though they lead us in so much. Or one has to remind himself, as we have tried every month to remind our readers, that there were, and are, at least four hundred thousand revolutionary socialists in Germany who opposed and still oppose their rulers’ war; and that they form the nucleus of a future revolution, that will bring at least political liberty to the German people. And that revolution will come soon if their rulers are defeated in this foreign war, and late if they are victorious. That consideration makes us tense in awaiting the result, but it is not as though the war were being fought for that.

Another consideration stirred me too when I found myself travelling one day in the same coach with a royalist. We take the republican form of government so entirely for granted over here, where we never had any other form established, that we have small realization of the peril of reckless little France, a republic there in the midst of royal Europe, with clericals and feudal reactionaries working in her own heart, ready to pounce the moment her representative political institutions prove their military weakness. A little while ago a caustic royalist wrote a book on “The French Republic Before Europe,” in which he ridiculed the figure France has cut among the nations with her changing ministers and fickle foreign policies. He quoted and made more than much of a saying by Anatole France, “We have no foreign policy, and we never can have one.” To this book the Socialist leader, Marcel Sembat, replied with another, entitled, “Faites un Roi si non Faites la Paix.” Establish peace or else establish a king—granting as an argument for internationalism, the royalist contention that a French republic cannot conduct war and military diplomacy in Europe. The titles of those books give some suggestion of a state of things in France that we, her friends in another hemisphere, little appreciate. No one would say that royalty and the church will re-establish themselves if the republican army is defeated. But the fact that the army is republican, that Joffre is a rough—hearted democrat, that no anti-republican has a hand in this campaign, is the most vital fact of the war to the internal history of France. A brilliant record and a victory of her arms will set back the forces of feudal and clerical re-action in France, as much as a victory of Prussian arms will set them forward in Germany.

France holds more of what is dear to us than any other country of Europe. And so for that, as well as the hope of the long-deferred political revolution in Germany, we want to see the Kaiser’s army smashed.

But that is not what the soldiers fight for; the passion of the war has none of that; that is an aside, a foot-note—till its own day comes. This is a war of nationalism.

The only way for an internationalist to become deeply interested in such a war is to lay aside his judgment altogether and entertain wild and fearful prophecies, and see one side or the other as the center and the soul of all things divine and sure, and the other as barbarity unveiled. That I cannot do. I earnestly desire to see the Kaiser fail. I desire this for other reasons than those rather technical revolutionary ones I have mentioned. I know, for instance, that France has not only freedom but the arts of life more nearly won than any other country of Europe. Her culture is one of superior happiness, the habits of her people are poetic, they realize more, live more, and with all that are more spontaneously intelligent than the Germans. They are at home among ideas. An American correspondent expresses surprise at hearing a Frenchman in Paris say:“I think the Germans are altogether right about the Lusitania. They do not put their case well, but their main position is unassailable. In the present state of sea war they must sink on sight a ship loaded with enemy munitions.”

That did not surprise me at all, because it is quite the character of the French people to abstract from their personal passions in making intellectual judgments. They have the rare gift of thinking with their minds. They feel with their hearts. And this is not the way of the Germans, as a glance at their great literature and philosophy, and their boobish diplomacy, reveals. If they knew how to use abstract ideas—which are the part of a discussion that is common to both parties-then they would “put their case well.”

Obviously, then, I value the culture of France high above that of Germany. And as for England—I know that England, though on the whole a land of snobs and servants, holds more people who stand up alone and unmolested, thinking and saying what they wish to think and say, than any other place on earth. England has freedoms that France lacks. Her navalism is just as military as Germany’s militarism, but its service is not compulsory. She has to pay her soldiers silver money. And what the English people have of liberty, they will hold, too. Yes—England has more of what we love than Germany.

And Russia-somehow Russia seems to have a great many people like the French. I think a Russian Czar will always have a lot to do at home. At least Russia has had her revolution, though it failed, and feudalism is less solid there, exactly because it is not linked fast with industrial and scientific and social reform progress of the highest kind, than it is in Germany. Russia is a vast quantity that, at the very worst, must appear in our calculations as unknown.

In all these points, then, I agree with those whose wishes are for German failure in the war. And more—l think that Germany is in a sophomoric stage of national egotism that in an individual, a young kid, we should call  “intolerable.” Her pseudo-religious half-grown sentimental self—worship is disgusting. It is even worse than England’s suave and hypocritical self-righteousness (speaking now of nations and the average tone their nationalism takes, as though they were individual characters). I agree to that.

Moreover, I believe the German soldiers were so trained to mere obedience that when victory let them loose they did not know how to control themselves quite so well as well-bred warfare demands.

And, finally, I agree that the German war party played a larger part among those thirty available causes of war than any other. I think the immediate opposition of four to five hundred thousand German Socialists proves it. Anti-militarism was far stronger in France than it was in Germany before the war—but in France there is hardly an anti-military murmur since the war began, whereas Germany has had her insurrectionists to suppress from the very beginning. That is more significant to me than all the many-colored diplomatic papers put together. And thus I am in accord, to some degree at least, with those who decry “German militarism” as the arch-incendiary.

But does that commit me to a monomania? Must I turn my deliberated opinions and wishes into an absolute fixation which allows no judgments of degree? That is what the mood of war-times invariably demands. That is what public opinion in this country, and its leaders, have almost unanimously done. They have made a choice between two absolutes. It has never occurred to them that they had anything else to do. But why should we have anything to do with absolutes—in war any more than in religion?

Because France is more advanced in liberty and realistic life than Germany do we have to say that  France is civilization and Germany is barbarism, and German victory would put out the light of naive idealism forever?

The civilization of France would conquer that of Germany, whether she was defeated at arms or not, because of the greater degree of happiness and human fun there is in it.

Because the French behave among ideas as among friends, while the Germans are prone to fall into silly soulful attitudes about them—do we have to conclude that truth, as well as liberty and life, are doomed if the Kaiser’s army stays across the Rhine?

Because Anglo-Saxon bullheads have a way of insisting on their individual rights, that is foreign to the bullheaded Germans, do we have to think that the whole world is going to submit to the yoke of metaphysical paternalism if this war goes wrong?

Because Germany’s nationalism has barely reached the age of puberty, and the older nations have passed that a little—do we have to think that all the world will go beneath the German yoke if the Allies do not reach Berlin?

Because the Germans, being the invaders, were atrocious, do we have to blink the fact that every invader in all history has been atrocious, and the atrocities of certain German soldiers probably were but a shade or two more numerous than ours would have been in like case?

And even if the facts convince us that the German princes, more than any other factor, perpetuated war, need we ignore all other factors, and need we lose our memory that it was their last chance; that their power was already doomed by their own people; that if the Allies succeed in driving them to their borders, and preventing the indemnities they count on, the German princes will probably never perpetrate war again?

I think it must be a desire to become interested, or rather the inability to stay out of a fight, that leads so many intelligent Americans to renounce all quantitative estimates, all judgments of degree, and make an absolute, on one side or the other, of the issue in this war. It is the one way to remain enthusiastic about so stupid an affair.

And even that way, the task grows more difficult with every month that passes. For time, it seems, is not going to make an absolute of the issue between the Germans and the Allies. It grows ever more likely that the war will see no signal victories. Servia, indeed, has won—she is, so far, a victor. I take what joy I can from that, and I hope-she will hold all she has got. But my visit to Europe has made me doubt exceedingly whether the plain folks of Russia and France and England have enough enthusiasm for this war to do much more than fight a draw with Germany. And, on the other hand, I do believe that England would surprise us all, and Germany not least, if she once got backed up on her little island and began to fight. She’d never quit. And that means that the Kaiser cannot win.

So viewing it in the friendliest way I could, I failed of interest in the European war. There’s more for me in Mexico or Bayonne, or any of these barbarous places where the people fight in battles, and for something I can want.

THE FIRST GUN
SITTING down at last to think it over—
Weary of the wrangle: It is his war, it is their war,
It is no war of mine!—
Sitting down to think it over,
To see if I can determine who it really was that broke
the peace of the Powers—
Not that any other will be innocent when one has
found the first overt act—
Seeking that act and actor none the less;

Suddenly in a flash it comes to me:
You, Glass of Perfectness and Mould of Ideality!
You, from your pedestal giving light to the world!
You, serene Arbitress that would be—
You it was that broke the peace of the World Powers,
Yonder at Vera Cruz.

ELIZABETH WADDELL.

SOURCE
The Masses
(New York, New York)
-Sept 1915
(Also source for all images with article.)
http://dlib.nyu.edu/…
http://babel.hathitrust.org/…

IMAGE
Art Young, The Masses, Sept 1915
http://dlib.nyu.edu/…

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The Workers Song – Dropkick Murphys

But when the sky darkens
And the prospect is war
Who’s given a gun
And then pushed to the fore
And expected to die
For the land of our birth
When we’ve never owned
One handful of earth?
-Ed Pickford

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LABOR SPEAKS OUT ITS MIND

Basil M Manley
““`

An insistence of industrial democracy and of a sort of military preparedness which will not menace the rights of labor marked Labor day addresses all over the country yesterday.Getting down to particulars, the labor speakers praised the Manley report of the industrial relations committee; protested with vigor the recent action of the Chicago board of education which destroyed the teachers’ union there; denounced the judicial travesty by which John R. Lawson was railroaded to conviction for murder in Colorado; and upheld the progressive modern legislation of California.

Here in Tacoma, Martin Flyzik, himself a miner, asserted that Lawson had been convicted by a picked attorney general, a picked judge and a picked jury of a murder, when it was proved he was 20 miles away at the time of the killing.

“He was convicted of the murder of a man of whom he had never heard, and whom he had never seen,” declared Flyzik in his final appeal to laborers to write letters to their congressmen and to President Wilson, demanding a fair trial.

Ernest P. Marsh, head of the State Federation of Labor, insisted that labor should see that the Frank P. Walsh section of the industrial relations committee was published to the world. He warned that the stand-pat press would carefully smother it if it could.

Already, he said, Walsh had felt the invective of this press because his report went straight to the heart of things.

Marsh also roasted the last legislature for its attempt to throttle the initiative and referendum and other progressive laws, and for its ham-stringing of the mothers’ pension law. The Times’ fight, conducted legally by Attorney Homer Bone, to correct this law, was given a strong implied endorsement.

—–JOHNSON SCORES TAFTLOS ANGELES, Sept. 7.-Gov. Hiram Johnson, speaking to a Labor day meeting, scored ex-President Taft for his recent attacks on recent progressive legislation in California.

“Taft attacks our railway commission,” said Johnson, “saying it will drive capital away. To Mr. Taft, a railway commission appointed and conducted by railway politicians is satisfactory; but a commission selected by the people themselves and treating the railroads just like other individuals fills him with dismay.”

“The ex-president,” he said, “is living in the past politically. The onward sweep of democracy has left him standing bewildered and lost.”

—-

GOMPERS SPEAKES MINDMARION, Ill., SEPT. 7.-Samuel Gompers denounced the Chicago school board’s action in denying its teachers the right to belong to a union, an action taken last week. He said it was a damnable blow at freedom.

—-WALSH URGES ACTIONSAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 7.-Before a tremendous crowd at the fair, Frank P. Walsh, head of the industrial relations commission, predicted that 1915 would see the dawn of an industrial democracy.

He said it was up to the workers to insist that the wrongs which the commission discovered should be righted.

—-CELEBRATE VICTORIESNEW HAVEN, Conn., Sept.7.-Organized labor celebrated the winning of 35 of 50 strikes where in the eight-hour day and better wages were the issue. There was a monster parade.

[Photographs added.]

From The Tacoma Times of September 6, 1915:

IMAGES
Basil M Manley, Director of Research
for the Commission on Industrial Relations,
Day Book, Aug 13, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
Frank P Walsh, Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
Feb 14, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
Labor Day Cartoon, The Tacoma Times,
Mon Sept 6, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

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Hold the Fort! by Billy Bragg

We meet today in Freedom’s cause,
And raise our voices high;
We’ll join our hands in union strong,
To battle or to die.

Chorus:
Hold the fort for we are coming-
Union men, be strong.
Side by side we battle onward,
Victory will come.
-One of our oldest Union Songs

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IMAGE
Petition to UT Gov for Joe Hill, Sept 1915
page 3 http://images.archives.utah.gov/…

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Utah State Prison
Sept 7-15Elizabeth Gurley Flynn N. Y. City
Dear Friend & F.W.

Rec. Your letter some time ago but not having anything of importance to tell you did not answer right away. I am receiving quite a few letters from all parts of the country. Some from Christian Societies and others less Christian, Wobblies and it all helps to pass the time away. Bill tells me that he is going to “run” “the Rebel Girl” and put her on the market. Hope she’ll show some speed–on the West Coast the other song “Workers of the World Awaken” is making quite a hit, they are telling me. They say “the Rebel Girl” is “a little hard to make out” and I guess it is a little more complex than the other one. The easterners have more “Kultur” than the Western roughnecks and I guess that might have something to do with it too. Yes I should swan, it would be kind of amusing to see you boil spuds, iron clothes, and sling the ink all at the same time.     I have heard that there is branch a of rebels that call themselves “impossibilists” but I’d bet a gold mine against a doughnut that you are not affiliated with that bunch at all. It doesn’t seem to be anything impossible for you.

Well I don’t know a thing about the case. My attorneys told me to leave everything to them and that makes it pretty soft for me, having somebody else to do the worrying for me. Pretty soft indeed. With Best Wishes to Everybody round the Spud-pot and also to the bunch around the Hall I remain.

Yours for the O.B.U.

Joe Hill

Did you receive the Printed “Brief” Argument of my case? It was sent to you from S.L. City.

[Photograph added.]

From Joe Hill to Sam Murray:

                                                                                                 Utah State Prison,
Sept. 9, 1915.Sam Murray
Frisco, California.
Friend and Fellow Worker:

Yours received O.K. Glad to hear that things are picking up. I see that you are employed at making bait for the German “sharks.” Well war certainly shows up the capitalist system in the right light. Millions of men are employed at making ships and others are hired to sink them. Scientific management, eh, wot?     As far as I can see, it doesn’t make much difference which side wins, but I hope that one side will win, because a draw would only mean another war in a year or two. All these silly priests and old maid sewing circles that are moaning about peace at this time should be locked up in the crazy house as a menace to society. The war is the finest training school for rebels in the world and for anti-militarists as well, and I hope that all the S.S. bills [scissorbills] in the country will go over there.

Well, Sam, I don’t know anything about my case. My attorneys told me to leave it all to them, and that makes it pretty soft for me to have someone else do the worrying for me.

I believe your good work on the coast is being felt at this end of the line, though.

With best wishes I am as ever yours,

Joe Hill.
[Photograph added.]

SOURCE
The Letters of Joe Hill
-ed by Philip S Foner
Oak Publications, 1965
https://books.google.com/…

IMAGES
The Rebel Girl, Joe Hill, Sheet Music
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/…
Joe Hill
http://en.wikipedia.org/…

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Tune: Colleen Bawn by the Wolfe Tones

SHOULD I EVER BE A SOLDIER.
By Joe Hill.
(Tune: “Colleen Bawn.”)

We’re spending billions every year
For guns and ammunition,
“Our Army” and “our Navy” dear,
To keep in good condition;
While millions live in misery
And millions died before us,
Don’t sing “My Country ’tis of thee,”
But sing this little chorus.

CHORUS:
Should I ever be a soldier,
‘Neath the Red Flag I would fight;
Should the gun I ever shoulder,
It’s to crush the tyrant’s might.
Join the army of the toilers,
Men and women fall in line,
Wage slaves of the world! Arouse!
Do your duty for the cause,
For Land and Liberty.

And many a maiden, pure and fair,
Her love and pride must offer
On Mammon’s altar in despair,
To fill the master’s coffer,
The gold that pays the mighty fleet,
From tender youth he squeezes,
While brawny men must walk the street
And face the wintry breezes.

Why do they mount their gatling gun
A thousand miles from ocean,
Where hostile fleet could never run—
Ain’t that a funny notion?
If you don’t know the reason why
Just strike for better wages,
And then, my friends—if you don’t die—
You’ll sing this song for ages.

It is not necessary for us to recount the history of the infamous Colorado mistrial which railroaded Lawson to prison. All we have to say now is that Lawson spent his boyhood days in Mount Carmel, and it is up to Mount Carmel to do all it can for him in his hour of great need.

Rev. A. W. Spooner, pastor of the First Presbyterian church of Mount Carmel has written a letter (see below) to President Wilson requesting his assistance in seeing that justice prevails in Colorado and that John R. Lawson is granted a new trial. First Presbyterian is Lawson’s boyhood church. The Reverend had this to say about the imprisonment of Brother Lawson:

It would prove a direful disaster indeed if this man should be imprisoned for life, the verdict having been rendered by a prejudiced, not to say a suborned court. By such palpable injustice the chasm will be widened between capital and labor, already wide enough-and popular confidence in the integrity of the courts rudely shaken-already trembling in the balance.

From the Mount Carmel Item of September 4, 1915:

TOWN TO HOLD MASS MEETING FOR LAWSON
—–

Mount Carmel people, acting upon the initiative of the United Mine Workers, are going to hold a great mass meeting on the evening of September 24th, in the interests of John R. Lawson, a Mount Carmel boy, who is now serving a life-imprisonment in Colorado for a crime he not only did not commit but with which he had not the remotest connection.It is not necessary for us to recount the history of the infamous Colorado mistrial which railroaded Lawson to prison. All we have to say now is that Lawson spent his boyhood days in Mount Carmel, and it is up to Mount Carmel to do all it can for him in his hour of great need.

John R. Lawson, born at Weegans, between Gilberton and Mahanoy City, came to this city when a youngster, lived in Bells Tunnel and in Mount Carmel many years. He was a member of the Presbyterian Sunday School, in the class taught by Mrs. Voris Auten. Rev. Dr. Spooner, the present pastor, has made a thorough study of this case, is convinced of Lawson’s absolute innocence, and today has written a letter to President Wilson, pleading that everything possible be done to give Lawson a new trial.

A committee of Mine Workers met last night, and decided to ask all the people of Mount Carmel to join in a great mass meeting, to be held on Town Park September 24th, at which time the community will draft a petition asking for a new trial.

International Vice President Frank J. Hayes, of the U. M. W. A., has consented to come here and deliver a speech, and there will be addresses by a number of local people.

The town should make this a great occasion. We should have a monster parade, and every band should offer its services. Not only Mine Workers, but everybody ought to get in line.

———-[Photograph added.]

From the Mount Carmel Item of September 9, 1915:

A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT
—–

1914 Strikers Policy Committee, United Mine Workers of America
John McLennan, President District 15; E. L. Doyle, Secretary-Treasurer District 15;
John R. Lawson, International Board Member from District 15; Frank J. Hayes, International Vice-President
““““““““““

On the evening of September 24th the people of Mount Carmel plan to hold a great mass meeting on Town Park, in the interests of former townsman John R. Lawson, who is now serving a life-sentence in a Colorado prison.Our people will no doubt be keenly interested in reading a copy of the letter written to President Wilson by the Rev. A. W. Spooner, D. D., pastor of the First Presbyterian church of Mount Carmel. The copy follows:

                                                                                          Mount Carmel, Pa.,
Sept. 4th, 1915Hon. Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States.
Dear Sir:

I feel constrained to address you relative to the case of John R. Lawson, whose trial, and conviction in the courts of Colorado have aroused interest of tremendous proportions, not only among the miners of Colorado, but also in the hearts of all lovers of fair play and equity.

Allow me briefly to state the reasons which prompt, and seem to me to necessitate this communication.

FIRST-I am pastor of the church in which as a lad and young man John Lawson attended Sunday School, and was universally admired and loved for his manly, unblemished character.

SECOND-Among the members of my church are relatives of this leader of men: notably Mr. Thomas Ramage, his uncle, one of our most respected citizens. Nobody in Mount Carmel acquainted with John Lawson can be persuaded that he is guilty of the crime charged against him.

THIRD-My interest in this case, prompted by the facts above stated, together with my love for fair play, influenced me this past summer to make a study of the trial, and impels me to address you with reference to it, in view of the fact that an effort is being made to secure for the condemned man a new trial.

My church is located in the heart of the anthracite coal region, where the feeling of the miners is intense, and undoubtedly reflects the sentiment of miners the entire country over.

If Lawson had been proven guilty of the crime charged against him, the case would be very different, and no one could plead his cause, but-HE HAS NOT BEEN PROVEN GUILTY!

The evidence(?) presented was not even circumstantial, not even presumptive. John Lawson was selected as the martyr-(so I fully believe) because he was a leader in labor circles, and some one must be made to suffer-some one must be hit-HARD! and of course the one hit was a leader. I plead with you Mr. President in behalf of justice, to use your great influence to insure for this wronged man a new trial.

It would prove a direful disaster indeed if this man should be imprisoned for life, the verdict having been rendered by a prejudiced, not to say a suborned court. By such palpable injustice the chasm will be widened between capital and labor, already wide enough-and popular confidence in the integrity of the courts rudely shaken-already trembling in the balance.

Among the great problems confronting your administration at this crucial epoch in our national history, this, honored Sir, is by no means the least momentous. I am speaking for thousands in this immediate vicinity and unnumbered thousands the whole country over, when I beg of you to see that John R. Lawson is granted a new trial, before a court outside the reach of “influence.”

Yours most respectfully,

Arthur Willis Spooner

Pastor of the First Presbyterian church, Mount Carmel, Pa.

———-[Photograph added.]

SOURCE
Mount Carmel Item
(Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania)
-Sept 4, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
-Sept 9, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

IMAGES
John R Lawson, 1915,
http://www.loc.gov/…
John Lawson with Olive and Fern
from Day Book of April 23, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
1914 Strikers Policy Committee,
United Mine Workers of America
https://archive.org/…

See also:
Search: John Lawson Trial + JayRaye
http://www.dailykos.com/…

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Fire in the Hole-Hazel Dickens

Daddy died a miner and grandpa he did too,
I’ll bet this coal will kill me before my working days is through
And a hole this dark and dirty an early grave I find
And I plan to make a union for the ones I leave behind

Stand up boys, let the bosses know
Turn you buckets over, turn your lanterns low
There’s fire in our hearts and fire in our soul
but there ain’t gonna be no fire in the hole

There ain’t gonna be no fire in the hole
-Hazel Dickens

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The Manly Report strongly supports the right of workers to organize and to engage in collective bargaining, and asks of the American public:

shall the workers, for the protection of their interests, be organized and represented collectively by their chosen delegates, even as the stockholders are represented by their directors and by the various grades of executive officials and bosses.

From The Labor Journal of September 10, 1915:

Some Remedies for “Industrial Unrest”

FIRST SECTION OF REPORT OF BASIL M. MANLY,
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATION,
CONTAINING FINDINGS OF FACT AND
RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE STAFF.

Report in full accepted and ordered printed by resolution of Commission.
Adopted by Commissioners Frank P. Walsh, John B. Lennon,
James O’Connell and Austin B. Garretson.

Members of Commission on Industrial Relations at Shoreham Hotel, May 1915,
John B Lennon, Frank P Walsh, James O’Connell, Harris Weinstock, R H Aishton, A B Garretson
“““““

SUMMARY OF FIRST SECTION OF MANLY REPORT
—–

Unjust Distribution of Wealth
—–

Frank P Walsh
““`

John B. Lennon
““`

James O’Connell
““`

A. B. Garretson
““`

The enactment of an inheritance tax so graded that while making generous provision for the support of dependents and the education of minor children, it shall leave no large accumulation of wealth to pass into hands which had no share in its production. The revenue from this tax to be reserved by the General government for three principal purposes:1. The extension of education.

2. The development of other important social services which should properly be performed by the nation which are discussed in detail elsewhere.

3. Development in co-operation with states and municipalities of great constructive works, such as road building, irrigation and reforestation, which would materially increase the efficiency and welfare of the entire nation.

There is no legislation which could be passed by congress, the immediate and ultimate effects of which would be more salutary or would more greatly assist in tempering the  existing spirit of unrest.

Unemployment and Denial
of Opportunity to Earn a LivingCertain measures for dealing with these conditions which are discussed elsewhere in the report need to be pushed forward with all possible vigor, but it may be confidently predicted that the unemployment situation will not be appreciably relieved until great advances have been made in the removal of the two prime causes-unjust distribution of wealth and monopolization of land and natural resources.

The most direct methods of dealing with the inequality of wealth have already been briefly discussed and will be considered elsewhere in the report. With respect to the land question, however, the following basic suggestions are submitted:

1. Vigorous and unrelenting prosecution to regain all land, water power and mineral rights secured from the government by fraud.

2. A general revision of our land laws, so as to apply to all future land grants the doctrine of “superior use,” as in the case of water rights in California, and provision for forfeiture in case of actual non-use. In its simplest form the doctrine of “superior use” implies merely that at the time of making the lease the purpose for which the land will be used must be taken into consideration, and the use which is of greatest social value shall be given preference.

3. The forcing of all unused land into use by making the tax on non-productive the same as on productive land of the same kind, and exempting all improvements.

The unemployed have aptly been called “the shifting sands beneath the state.” Surely there is no condition which more immediately demands the attention of congress than that of unemployment, which is annually driving hundreds of thousands of otherwise productive citizens into poverty and bitter despair, sapping the very basis of our national efficiency, and germinating the seeds of revolution.

Denial of JusticeWith full recognition of the gravity of the suggestions it seems necessary to urge the commission to make the following recommendations:

1. That congress should forthwith initiate an amendment to the Constitution providing in specific terms for the protection of the personal rights of every person in the United States from encroachment by the federal and state governments and by private individuals, associations and corporations. The principal rights which should be thus specifically protected by the power of the federal government are the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, the right to jury trial, free speech, peaceful assemblage, to keep and bear arms, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, to speedy public trial, to freedom from excessive bail, and from cruel and unusual punishments.

2. That congress immediately enact by statute or, if deemed necessary, initiate a constitutional amendment specifically prohibiting the courts from declaring legislative acts unconstitutional.

3. That congress enact that in all federal cases where the trial is by jury, all qualified voters in the district shall be included in the list from which jurors are selected and that they shall be drawn by the use of a wheel or other device designed to promote absolute impartiality.

4. That congress should drastically regulate or prohibit private detective agencies and private employment agencies doing business in more than one state, employed by a company doing an interstate business, or using the mails in connection with their business. Such regulation, if it is feasible, should include particularly the limitation of their activities to the bona fide functions of detecting crime, and adequate provision should be made for the rigid supervision of their organization and personnel.

5. That the militia of the several states being subject to regulation by congress, carefully drawn rules for their personnel, organization and conduct in the field should be drawn up to insure their impartiality during industrial disputes.

Denial of Right and Opportunity to Form
Effective Organizations.1. Incorporation among the rights guaranteed by the constitution of unlimited right of individuals to form associations, not for the sake of profit, but for the advancement of their individual and collective interests.

2. Enactment of statutes specifically protecting this right and prohibiting the discharge of any person because of his membership in a labor organization.

3. Enactment of a statute providing that action on the part of an association of individuals not organized for profit shall not be held to be unlawful, where such action would not be unlawful in the case of an individual.

4. That the Federal Trade Commission be specifically empowered and directed by congress in determining unfair methods of competition to take into account and specifically investigate the unfair treatment of labor in all respects, with particular reference to the following points:

a. Refusal to permit employees to become members of labor organizations.

b. Refusal to meet or confer with the authorized representatives of employees.

5. That the Department of Labor, through the Secretary of Labor or any other authorized official, be empowered and directed to present to the Federal Trade Commission, and to prosecute before that body, all cases of unfair competition arising out of the treatment of labor which may come to his attention.

6. That such cases, affecting as they do the lives of citizens in the humblest circumstances, as well as the profits of competitors and the peace of the community, be directed by congress to have precedence over all other cases before the Federal Trade Commission.

Widespread existence of living and working conditions in American industry that menace the nation’s welfare by denying proper standards of living to millions of its citizens, and by making them subservient to the wills of employers who control their opportunities for labor, are set forth in the final report of Basil M. Manly, Director of Research and Investigation for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations.

The Commission has made public the first section of the Manly report. The remaining sections will be made public as soon as they leave the hands of the printer, and the report in full will then be transmitted to congress. It was accepted and ordered printed by resolution of the full Commission, and is signed by Frank P. Walsh, chairman of the commission, and by Commissioners John B. Lennon, James O’Connell and Austin B. Garretson.

As a paramount necessity, if the nation is to remedy the evils found to exist by the Commission’s staff, the report urges action that will remove the “many existing obstacles which prevent effective organization and co-operation” by wage-earners, and that will thereby bring about a democratic organization of industry along the lines of trade union activity.

The crux of the whole question of industrial relations is declared to be

shall the workers, for the protection of their interests, be organized and represented collectively by their chosen delegates, even as the stockholders are represented by their directors and by the various grades of executive officials and bosses.

Mr. Manly’s report is based on the research and field work of members of the staff, whose point of view is that of impartial investigators, and upon testimony at the public hearings conducted by the Commission in fourteen principal cities and industrial centers of the United States. These hearing occupied in all 154 days and a total of 740 witnesses were heard. Of these 230 were affiliated with employers, 245 with labor and 265 were not affiliated with either group. Where interests are affected, statements of fact are based entirely on the testimony of those witnesses whose interests might be regarded as adversely affected.

(To be continued)[Photographs added.]

SOURCE

The Labor Journal
(Everett, Washington)
-Sept 10, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…IMAGES
Basil M Manly, Director of Research for
the Commission on Industrial Relations,
Day Book, Aug 13, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
Members of Commission on Industrial Relations
at Shoreham Hotel, May 1915
http://www.loc.gov/…
Frank P. Walsh from Harpers Weekly
of Sept 27, 1913
http://books.google.com/…
John B. Lennon
http://www.loc.gov/…
James O’Connell
http://www.loc.gov/…
A. B. Garretson
http://en.wikipedia.org/…

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The Commission on Industrial Relations was made up of nine members who were appointed in 1913 by President Wilson. Three members were appointed to represent the public, three to represent labor, and three to represent the employers.From the Everett (Washington) Labor Journal of February 16, 1917:

VALUABLE VOLUMES OF TESTIMONY
—–
(By Dante Barton)There has just been issued from the Government Printing Office in Washington the completed volumes of the Testimony submitted to congress by the United [States?] Commission on Industrial Relations of which Frank P. Walsh was chairman.

One of the first of the important industrial acts of the Wilson administration was the appointment by President Wilson of this Industrial Relations Commission with the following membership selected by him. Frank P. Walsh of Missouri, Chairman; John R. Commons of Wisconsin and Mrs. J. Borden Harriman of New York, representing the general public; John B. Lennon of Illinois, James O’ Connell of Washington, D. C. and Austin B. Garretson of Iowa, representing organized labor; and Frederick A. Delano of Illinois; Harris Weinstock of California and S. Thurston Ballard of Kentucky, representing employers. Upon the resignation of Mr. Delano, to accept a place on the Federal Reserve board, the President named Richard H. Aishton, of Illinois, who finished out the term….

[Emphasis added.]

From The Washington Post of January 7, 1915:

JOB FOR R. H. AISHTON
—–
Railroad Man Nominated to Fill Delano’s Place
—–Richard H. Aishton, a Chicago railroad official, was nominated yesterday by President Wilson to succeed Frederic A. Delano, as a member of the industrial relations commission. Mr. Delano was appointed to the Federal reserve board.

SOURCESThe Labor Journal
(Everett, Washington)
-Feb 16, 1917
http://www.newspapers.com/…

The Washington Post
(Washington, District of Columbia)
-Jan 7, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

IMAGE
Commission on Industrial Relations,
from the International Socialist Review of June 1915
https://books.google.com/…

See also:

Industrial relations: final report and testimony
United States. Commission on Industrial Relations
-ed by Francis Patrick Walsh, Basil Maxwell Manly
D.C. Gov. Print. Office, 1916

Volume 1: 1-1024
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 2: 1025-2050
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 3: 2051-3032
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 4: 3033-4096
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 5: 4097-5086
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 6: 5087-6000
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 7: 6001-6998
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 8: 6999-8014
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 9: 8015-9056
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 10: 9057-10,066
https://books.google.com/…

Volume 11: 10,067-11,260
11,225-Idex of Subjects
11,227-Index of Witnesses
https://books.google.com/…

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There Is Power In A Union-Billy Bragg

Now I long for the morning that they realize
Brutality and unjust laws can not defeat us
But who’ll defend the workers who cannot organize
When the bosses send their lackeys out to cheat us?

The Union forever defending our rights
Down with the blackleg, all workers unite
With our brothers and our sisters from many far off lands
There is power in a Union
-Billy Bragg

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[Joe Hill] is an intellectual man and a poet. As he himself says in a letter to THE TELEGRAM: “I have lived like an artist and I will die like an artist.” It will be as much of a loss and disgrace to Utah to kill this man as it would have been for Scotland to kill Robert Burns. Joe Hill’s song, “Then We’ll Sing One Song of the Poor and Ragged Tramp,” rings as true to life as Bobbie Burns’ “A Man’s a man for a’ that.”

Hermon F. Titus is the author of many articles and pamphlets on Socialism, including “Revolutionary Socialism and Reform Socialism

.”The letter written by Titus, as it appeared in the Telegram, can be found below the fold.

From the Salt Lake Telegram of September 14, 1915:

HILLSTROM PLEA RECEIVED BY GOVERNOR
—–
Spry asked to Commute Sentence
of Man to Be Shot October 1.
—–Governor Spry has received the following letter:

To Gov. William Spry of Utah:Detroit, Mich., Sept. 11, 1915.

Please allow me to name a few good reasons why you should commute the sentence of Joseph Hillstrom.First reason. Capital punishment is itself growing in popular disfavor and will soon be out of date. You have the opportunity to put your state in line with the most progressive legislation in other states by commuting this man’s sentence to life imprisonment. Only a few years hence there is little doubt his execution will be regarded as legalized murder. If you commute his sentence, as you can legally do, you will only be anticipating the people’s unexpressed will.

Second reason. There is no popular demand for Hillstrom’s execution, as there was in Georgia for the death of Leo Frank, due to the fact that Morrison’s murder had no such horrible accompaniments as that of Mary Phagan. Yet Governor Slaton courageously exercised his prerogative even in the face of popular clamor, and the calm judgment of the American people sustains his action. People have an increasing horror of executing a possibly innocent man.

Third reason. The evidence against Hillstrom is circumstantial, and there is always the possibility of innocence under such evidence. Thousands of talesmen in the last few years, under examination for jury service in criminal cases, have been rejected because they persistently refused to say they would convict on circumstantial evidence. There have been so many fatal mistakes made in the past that most men prefer to take no chance of killing an innocent man.

Fourth reason. Hillstrom’s defense was inadequate. He was too poor to secure the services of distinguished criminal lawyers, and he seems also to have been too confident of acquittal, as was natural to a man conscious of innocence. The court had to appoint attorneys for the defense, and their compensation must therefore have been only nominal. I do not know their record or ability, but it is matter common knowledge that such cases do not call out the determined, prolonged and brilliant efforts that the best lawyers are capable of. Contrast Leo Frank’s defense, or Harry Thaw’s defense, or W. D. Hayward’s  [Haywood’s] defense, with that of poor “Joe Hill.” He was not allowed to dismiss these lawyers appointed by the court, when he became dissatisfied with them during the progress of the trial. He was thus denied the privilege of conducting his own defense. To a candid observer, like myself, this trial of Hillstrom seems to much like that of the hobo in the police court; he is a nobody, anyhow, and not worth a trial, or he is a dangerous character, and guilty as such, “Away with him.”

Fifth reason. Joseph Hillstrom is a man valuable to society, and therefore his life should be spared. He is no low browed villain. He is an intellectual man and a poet. As he himself says in a letter to THE TELEGRAM: “I have lived like an artist and I will die like an artist.” It will be as much of a loss and disgrace to Utah to kill this man as it would have been for Scotland to kill Robert Burns. Joe Hill’s song, “Then We’ll Sing One Song of the Poor and Ragged Tramp,” rings as true to life as Bobbie Burns’ “A Man’s a man for a’ that.”

Sixth reason. Joe Hill’s execution will intensify the class hatred that so many American thinkers and statesmen regard as the most dangerous symptom of modern society. Whatever one may think of the “I. W. W.,” there are many thousands of them and many thousands more in sympathy with them. They gave voice to the millions of unemployed that constitute the chief menace to industrial peace. Joe Hill is their beloved song writer. I have traveled from end to end of the United States in the last three years, and everywhere I find his songs in popular use among working men. To have this man legally shot, poor, alone and undefended, because, as these working men will believe, he dared to voice their wrongs and chant their hopes, will surely arouse a storm of indignation and retaliation, such as might have followed in 1907 if Haywood had not been acquitted by the Boise jury where he stood trial for the assassination of Governor Steunenberg.

We are in the midst of crucial times, when a federal industrial relations commission, appointed to investigate the causes of industrial unrest, has just issued its report, startling the country with its revelations of distress and rebellion among the working class. In my judgment this is no time to aggravate these poverty stricken millions by shooting to death their most popular and loved song writer.

Yours sincerely, HERMON F. TITUS.

[Photograph added.]

SOURCE
Salt Lake Telegram
(Salt Lake City, Utah)
-Sept 14, 1915
http://udn.lib.utah.edu/…

IMAGES
Hermon F Titus
https://en.wikipedia.org/…
Joe Hill
http://www.freedomarchives.org/…

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Tune: My Old Kentucky Home – Paul Robeson

We Will Sing One Song – Joe Hill

We will sing one song of the meek and humble slave,
The horn-handed son of the soil,
He’s toiling hard from the cradle to the grave,
But his master reaps the profits from his toil.
Then we’ll sing one song of the greedy master class,
They’re vagrants in broadcloth, indeed,
They live by robbing the ever-toiling mass,
Human blood they spill to satisfy their greed.

CHORUS:
Organize! Oh, toilers, come organize your might;
Then we’ll sing one song of the workers’ commonwealth,
Full of beauty, full of love and health.

We will sing one song of the politician sly,
He’s talking of changing the laws;
Election day all the drinks and smokes he’ll buy,
While he’s living from the sweat of your brow.
Then we’ll sing one song of the girl below the line,
She’s scorned and despised everywhere,
While in their mansions the “keepers” wine and dine
From the profits that immoral traffic bear.

We will sing one song of the preacher, fat and sleek,
He tells you of homes in the sky.
He says, “Be generous, be lowly, and be meek,
If you don’t you’ll sure get roasted when you die.”
Then we sing one song of the poor and ragged tramp,
He carries his home on his back;
Too old to work, he’s not wanted ’round the camp,
So he wanders without aim along the track.

We will sing one song of the children in the mills,
They’re taken from playgrounds and schools,
In tender years made to go the pace that kills,
In the sweatshops, ‘mong the looms and the spools.
Then we’ll sing one song of the One Big Union Grand,
The hope of the toiler and slave,
It’s coming fast; it is sweeping sea and land,
To the terror of the grafter and the knave.
-Joe Hill

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Colorado miners continue to agitate for the arrest of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. for the part he played in the slaughter of miners and their families during the coal strike last year.

These stories can be found in full below the fold.

From Everett, Washington, of September 10, 1915

Judge Granby Hillyer
““`

LAWSON JUROR ARRESTEDTRINIDAD, Colo.-Grover Hall, a member of the jury which convicted John R. Lawson, has been arrested on a charge of perjury. The complainant is State Attorney General Farrar, who bases his action on the affidavit made by Hall and incorporated in Lawson’s motion for a new trial, in which Hall swore that he had been coerced in voting Lawson guilty by a court bailiff and by Judge Hillyer, who ordered that no food should be furnished the jury until it agreed. The arrest of Hall indicates the straits Lawson’s prosecutors are in. In an attempt to weaken Hall’s affidavit when the court was considering Lawson’s appeal for a new trial, other jurors swore that they looked upon Judge Hillyer’s order as a “joke,” although they agreed on a verdict shortly afterwards. Hall took the order seriously and in an attempt to weaken his position he is charged with perjury.

———-

PRAISE COLORADO DECISION
—–CHICAGO.-The Tribune of this city editorially applauds the Colorado supreme court’s order debarring Judge Hillyer from further consideration of strike cases. The Tribune says:

If property rights are not regarded in Colorado, they would be less so if confidence in the courts were weakened. If violence were substituted for orderly process, it would be more so substituted if it were proved that capital could command even the judiciary.If it be the intent to break down all restraints which protect a man in the possession of his own, no better way to go about it could be imagined than to give an unfair trial to men who have fought against conditions they do not like.

—–BOSTON.-The Globe of this city, in discussing the Colorado supreme court’s decision in the Lawson case, says “it would seem that the train is at last on the right track in Colorado.”

The Globe makes this comment on the court’s action in debarring Judge Hillyer from presiding at the future trials of miners:

A judge, charged with having been in the employ of the coal operators, ought never to have presided at the trial of a labor leader. The country does not feel entirely satisfied as to the personnel of the jury which found Lawson Guilty.A first step toward the course demanded by justice has been taken. Lawson is at least entitled to a trial of which the fairness cannot be doubted.

———-

More from The Labor Journal:

COLORADO MINERS ARE
AFTER JOHN D.
——

SEEK CRIMINAL PROSECUTION
OF OIL HEAD AND HIS AIDS
—–

DENVER. Colo.-Miners are after John D. Rockefeller, Jr., tooth and nail.

A militia board of inquiry is probing charges in connection with reorganization of the state militia, and it is indicated, the federal government is taking a hand.

It leaked out here that as a result of this case, and as an outgrowth of the John R. Lawson conviction, a concerted effort is under way to get criminal prosecution of Rockefeller and others in connection with the death of more than 15 strikers in the recent coal strikes.

———–[Photograph added.]

From The Wichita Daily Eagle of September 14, 1915:

ATTORNEY GENERAL OBJECTS
—–
Refuses Bail to Lawson,
Convicted of Murder.

John R Lawson and Attorney Edward P Costigan
“““““

Denver. Sept. 13.-Briefs were filed in the Colorado supreme court today regarding the proposal to admit to bail John R. Lawson, former strike leader, now in jail in Trinidad under penitentiary sentence on a charge of first degree murder. Since Lawson’s conviction the supreme court has granted a supersedeas in his case and also has issued a writ of prohibition barring Barney Hilyer [Granby Hillyer], the trial judge from presiding in future labor trials. In granting the  supersedeas the court left the amount of bail to be decided after the summer recess.Attorney-General Farrar, in a brief resisting the admission of Lawson to bail held that as the defendant had been convicted of first degree murder he should be kept in confinement pending action by the supreme court when he reviews the case on its merits.

The brief on behalf of Lawson was prepared by Horace N. Hawkins and Edward P. Costigan. It declared that the supreme court has authority to grant bail, where the defendant has not been condemned to death and that in the past it has been customary to admit to him bail when a supercedeas has been granted.

———-[Photograph added.]

SOURCES

The Labor Journal
(Everett, Washington)
-Sept 10, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

The Wichita Daily Eagle
(Wichita, Kansas)
-Sept 14, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

IMAGES
John Lawson, Mother Jones, Attorney Horace Hawkins
http://ludlowsymposium.wordpress.com/…
Judge Granby Hillyer, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
John Lawson Denied New Trial,
Coshocton Morning Tribune, OH, July 14, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
John R Lawson and Edward P Costigan, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

See also:
Tag: John R Lawson
http://www.dailykos.com/…

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Dig The Devil’s Blood by Gray

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LIVING WAGE
OR WAR

Six thousand members of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America attended two mass meetings last, night and voted for war with manufacturers within the next 10 days unless demands for a living wage and decent conditions in factories are granted. District council today confirmed the vote and prepared final notice to be served on employers within 48 hours. If the Amalgamated calls a strike 50,000 will be affected.

[Emphasis and photograph added.]

Below the fold, our readers can find several recent articles from The Day Book

which document events leading up to what appears to be final preparations for a general strike of clothing workers in the city of Chicago.

From The Day Book of September 4, 1915:

LAYING OFF CUTTERS MAY START SOMETHING

Action of the Royal Tailors, biggest special order manufacturing house in Chicago, in laying off all cutters who participated in union meeting is expected to be the spark that will start the flame of a general strike among the garment workers of Chicago. The cutters have placed before the firm a demand that the discharged cutters be reinstated and if this is not complied with action will be taken at the next meeting held under the auspices of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.Frank Rosenblum of the union says that there is scarcely a doubt but that the entire industry will be strike bound inside of two weeks, as the tailors and cutters are revolting against conditions. Four shop meetings will be held Tuesday night from leading special order houses and demands are coming into the union for more shop meetings than can be arranged.

The plan adopted by the general board to raise $100,000 to finance a strike which will include the industry in Chicago by assessing members $1 has already been adopted in Baltimore, and Chicago will hod a meeting today to act on the resolution. In the event of a strike here the tailors and cutters are in position to prevent Chicago work being done in other cities.

———-[Photograph added.]

From The Day Book of September 9, 1915:

EXPECT GARMENT WORKERS STRIKE NEXT WEEK

Sidney Hillman

A general strike in the garment workers industry that might have been called this week but for the Jewish holidays is expected next week.A mass meeting will be held Tuesday night, Sept. 14, when demands will be formulated to present to the manufacturers and if these demands are not granted a general strike will be called by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Sidney Hillman, the international president, is expected to address this meeting.

At a meeting of the employes of the Royal Tailors, where there is a strike at present owing to the discharge of six union cutters, the people enthusiastically decided to stand by the discharged men. Another meeting will be held Monday, when definite action will be taken.

Shop meetings are being held in different parts of the city and the garment workers are impatiently waiting for demands to be made to the bosses to better conditions and increase wages, which are lower now than at any time in the past ten years.

———-[Photograph added.]

From The Day Book of September 14, 1915:

SAYS TRUST PRESS IS NOT GIVING OUT CORRECT NEWS

That the trust press is misleading the public on the very eve of a strike in the clothing industry that may tie up 50,000 clothing workers is the statement of Frank Rosenblum of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, who takes exception to the attitude of the trust press that all the grievances of clothing workers will be settled by arbitration.

[Rosenblum said:]The organization affected by the arbitration agreement, the Ladies’ Garment Workers, is composed of about 7,000 garment workers…In the clothing industry, which includes about 50,000 clothing workers, the employers have adopted a very arbitrary attitude so far and the workers are clamoring for a strike to force better condition.

Two enormous mass meetings will be held tonight at 8 o’clock, one at Hod Carriers’ hall, Harrison and Green, and the other at Wicker Park hall, 2040 North av., when the demands to be presented to clothing manufacturers will be approved. They will shortly thereafter be presented and unless the employers agree to recognize these demands a general strike will be called.Among the demands to be approved tonight are a 48-hour week, 25 per cent increase in wages, abolishing the blacklisting system maintained in the Median Temple and other places, abolishing subcontracting and the fining system, granting a minimum wage of $26 for cutters and $20 for trimmers.

[Rosenblum stated:]Large meetings of the clothing workers were held yesterday in preparation for the mass meetings tonight…Thursday night the workers in shops where we have an organization agreement will meet to vote on assessment to the support of the strikers if a strike is called in accordance with the $100,000 fund for general support of strikes in clothing industries approved at the Baltimore conference.

We have never been in better condition to handle a strike situation than at the present time. The ground has been prepared throughout the country, so that no Chicago work will be done outside of Chicago.

The international will assume charge of the situation in Chicago, which is one of the worst markets today. President Sidney Hillman is here from New York and will address the meetings tonight.

[Photograph added.]

From The Day Book of September 15, 1915:

COLTHING WORKERS APPROVE BETTERMENT DEMANDS

At two mass meetings last night clothing workers approved demands to be submitted by Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to clothing manufacturers for increase in wages, 50-hour week, with overtime at pay and a half and provision for apprentices, arbitration board to settle disputes, abolition of present no notice discharge, fining systems and blacklisting agencies and recognition of the union. Manufacturers will be given a week from time demands are presented to state their decision. If they refuse to arbitrate difference between clothing workers and themselves general strike will be called. Will embrace nearly 50,000 workers.

———-[Photograph added.]

SOURCE

The Day Book
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Sept 15, 1914
http://www.newspapers.com/…
-Sept 4, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
-Sept 9, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
-Sept 14, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
-Sept 15, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…IMAGES
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, emblem
https://books.google.com/…
Frank Rosenblum about 1915
https://books.google.com/…
Sidney Hillman
http://darrow.law.umn.edu/…
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America,
membership book and constitution
https://archive.org/…
Strike Poster, International Socialist Review, Nov 1915
https://books.google.com/…

See also:
The Clothing Workers of Chicago
1910-1922
-The Chicago Joint Board
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
Chicago, 1922
https://books.google.com/…
Chapter V: The Strike of 1915
https://books.google.com/…

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Bread and Roses-Judy Collins

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!
-James Oppenheim

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From The New York Times of September 16, 1915:

SAYS UNION COUNSEL INCITED TO PERJURY
—–

Colorado Attorney General Files Charges Against
Hawkins and Clark in the Lawson Case.
—–

REPORTS HALL CONVESSED
—–
Asserts That an Affidavit Used to Get New Trial for
Miners’ Leader Was False.

Attorney General Farrar

TRINIDAD, Col., Sept. 15.-Informations charging Horace N. Hawkins, general counsel for the United Mine Workers, and Fred W. Clark, local counsel, with subornation of perjury were filed in the District Court here today by Attorney General Fred Farrar.The charges were filed in connection with an affidavit signed by Grover Hall, a juror in the murder trial of John R. Lawson, a leader to the union coal miners.

Hall’s affidavit was used in the application for a new trial for Lawson and also in connection with the petition which secured a supersedeas from the Supreme Court. It alleged that  Hall at first stood out for an acquittal of Lawson, but that he finally agreed to a verdict of guilty as the result of coercive measures employed by Frank Gooden, a Court Bailiff.

Gooden, according to the affidavit, told Hall that his wife was seriously ill, and later informed him that Judge Granby Hillyer had ordered the jurors locked up without food until they were ready to agree upon a verdict.

Lawson was convicted on May 3 of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was tried in connection with the death of John Nimmo, a Deputy Sheriff [deputized company gunthug], killed in a strike riot [strikers defending tent colony from attack] at Ludlow in the Fall of 1913. Recently the Colorado Supreme Court granted a supersedeas, and an application for Lawson’s release on ball now is pending. In the meantime the labor leader is in the county jail here. Another recent decision of the Supreme Court barred Judge Hillyer from presiding at future strike trials.

[Photograph added.]

From Pennsylvania’s Mount Carmel Item of September 15, 1915:

REPLY FROM DEPARTMENT
OF JUSTICE
———-A recent issue of the ITEM published a copy of the letter sent to President Wilson by Rev. Dr. Arthur W. Spooner, of Mount Carmel, pleading for a new trial for John R. Lawson, former Mount Carmel man who is now serving a life-sentence in a Colorado prison.

Rev. Arthur Willis Spooner, D. D.,
1220 East Fifth Street,
Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania.Sir:

The Department is in receipt, by reference from the President, of your letter of September 4, 1915, in which you ask him to aid in securing a new trial for John R. Lawson, who was recently convicted of murder in the state of Colorado.

In reply permit me to say that inasmuch as the case does not appear to be one of Federal jurisdiction, neither the President nor this Department can lawfully take any action with respect thereto.

Respectfully, For the Attorney General,
Charles Warren, Assistant Attorney General

Dr. Spooner states that he purposes to at once address an appeal to the Governor of Colorado.

———-[Photograph added.]

SOURCES

The New York Times
(New York, New York)
-Sept 16, 1915
http://query.nytimes.com/…

Mount Carmel Item
(Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania)
-Sept 15, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

IMAGES
John Lawson, Mother Jones, Attorney Horace Hawkins
http://ludlowsymposium.wordpress.com/…
Frederick M. Farrar,
Attorney General of Colorado (1913-1917)
http://www.law.du.edu/…
Rev. Arthur Willis Spooner, 1908
http://www.newspapers.com/…

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The Coal Miner Song – Jimmy Joe Lee

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Lucy Parsons
““`

Ten years after his death, the people, the plain common people, assembled in beautiful Lincoln Park, and with uncovered heads, witnessed the unveiling of the grand statue, and the beautiful group, representing the working class, the class from whose loins the governor himself had sprung, and whom in his days of exaltation, he never forgot, or deserted. He was a man before he was a politician. He was one of those rare characters who could remain true to his high ideals in spite of politics.So, now stands the statue of the immortal Altgeld, the Colossus, looking out upon Lake Michigan, with that firm, placid expression upon the face, that the writer so often observed, when he, in his matchless oratory, pleaded a better, juster future for the oppressed. Grouped around his noble form, is a proletarian family, father, mother and child, closely nestling under his outstretched protecting arm.

From the Everett, Washington, Labor Journal of September 17, 1915:

ALTGELD’S MEMORY HONORED IN CHICAGO
—–

Governor Altgeld

CHICAGO.-Organized labor joined with federal and state officials Labor Day in paying honor to the memory of John Peter Altgeld, former governor of Illinois, by unveiling a statute of this champion of common rights.

[Gov. Dunne said:]Altgeld was a friend of the common people and never feared to take a stand with them…Pre-eminently he had the courage of his convictions. He upheld the right and denounced the wrong at all times, under all circumstances, and in every place.

He believed the conviction of the anarchists was the result of the mob’s demand, although the mob was clothed in purple and fine linen. When he was elected governor he had the courage to do what was a most unpopular thing at that time-to pardon the anarchists then confined at Joliet. In so doing he gave his reasons, and the doing startled the whole community.

His moral courage was again displayed when President Cleveland without request from governor, legislature or mayor, sent federal troops into this city for purpose of suppressing riot. He protested, and protested vigorously.

Devotion to public interest compelled him to neglect his private business and during his term of office he became seriously embarrassed financially. But in spite of this, this man had the resolute honesty and iron-like integrity which made him refuse a bribe of half a million dollars. I know of no man who was more devoted to the cause of human liberty, whether it was in his own land or in the land of strangers.

[Photograph added.]

From the Duluth Labor World of September 11, 1915:

ALTGELD STATUE UNVEILED IN PARK
—–
Artistic Feuds Forgotten While Thousands
Honor Late Governor of Illinois.

William Jennings Bryan

CHICAGO, Sept. 10.-Artistic feuds were laid aside Labor Day while dedicatory ceremonies incident to the unveiling of the much discussed statue of former Governor John P. Altgeld were being held in Lincoln park.In the throng which gathered around the stature while Governor Dunne, former Secretary of State Bryan and John Fitzpatrick, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, made addresses, were men from every walk of life.

Laborers were there-thousands of them, men prominent in the business and political life of the state, personal friends of the man whose memory the statue was immortalizing; Gutson Borglum, the sculptor who carved the statute; local artists who criticized it-all mingled in the crowd of 5,000 or more.

Near Altgeld Residence.Undaunted by the threat of rain, they stood in the wet grass or sat on damp benches watching the ceremonies and listening to the addresses.

The statue stands in the north end of Lincoln Park within a few hundred feet of the Brewster apartments at 500 Diversey boulevard, the last residence of Governor Altgeld.

The uncovering of the monument, following an address by Daniel L. Cruice, member of the Altgeld memorial commission, was the signal for prolonged cheers.

Mr. Bryan was introduced as the principal speaker of the day by Louis F. Post, assistant secretary of labor, who presided over the ceremonies.

Bryan Makes Address.[Said Mr. Bryan:]

Only a few persons in a generation can earn a distinction such as Governor Altgeld earned…and yet the way is open to anyone who will learn the road to the hearts of men. He had no illustrious family name to aid him in his rise. He began at the bottom and went steadily to the top because he was always interesting himself in thinks bigger than himself.

A man cannot lift himself above the heads of other men. He must be lifted, and in order to be lifted he must attach himself to something stronger than himself. This Altgeld did in instance after instance, and thus he rose above the heads of other men and became a distinct figure in the eyes of all the nation.

———-[Photograph added.]

Lucy Parsons Pays Tribute to Governor Altgeld:

Mrs. Parson is republishing Altgeld’s explanation for why he pardoned the three Haymarket Anarchist, those three who did not hang in 1887, but were confined in Joliet Prison. The following is a moving tribute written by Mrs. Parsons for Governor Altgeld as a preface for the her publication of the Altgeld pardon message:

Preface

In publishing the Pardon of Gov. J. P. Altgeld, I am actuated by the sole desire to inform the public generally, and the present generation particularly, regarding the Anarchists’ case.The men who were hanged in Chicago on November the 11th, 1887, the Anarchists, one of them my beloved husband, Albert R. Parsons, were innocent of any crime. They were labor organizers of rare ability.

Gov. Altgeld pardoned the three men who were confined in Joliet prison, because he believed their conviction was the result of the mob’s demand, although the “mob was clothed in purple and fine linen” (from Gov. Dunne’s speech at the unveiling of Altgeld’s statue, in Lincoln Park, Chicago).

Some time ago, I published the “Famous Speeches of the Chicago Anarchists, in reply as to why the sentence of death should not be pronounced upon them.” These “Famous Speeches” have met with a large sale, and I have the satisfaction to know that their publication has done a great deal to enlighten the public mind, as to the conspiracy and the conspirators who sent my innocent husband and his comrades to the gallows.

As my life’s work is to prove their innocence, I now ask the public to carefully read these pages, especially as Altgeld had been judge before he was elected governor, consequently, he could examine the Anarchists’ case, with a calm, clear, discriminating mind, and being just and honest, he pronounced them, “Not Guilty,” unconditionally releasing the three men who had not been judicially murdered. For this noble, just and humane act, Gov. Altgeld was hounded, abused, ostracized, and boycotted, by the “mob in purple and fine linen,” until he lost his splendid property, Unity building, and other holdings, and from being a rich, honored citizen, and governor of the great State of Illinois, “The mob in purple and fine linen” forced him to die, practically a pauper.

Ten years after his death, the people, the plain common people, assembled in beautiful Lincoln Park, and with uncovered heads, witnessed the unveiling of the grand statue, and the beautiful group, representing the working class, the class from whose loins the governor himself had sprung, and whom in his days of exaltation, he never forgot, or deserted. He was a man before he was a politician. He was one of those rare characters who could remain true to his high ideals in spite of politics.

So, now stands the statue of the immortal Altgeld, the Colossus, looking out upon Lake Michigan, with that firm, placid expression upon the face, that the writer so often observed, when he, in his matchless oratory, pleaded a better, juster future for the oppressed. Grouped around his noble form, is a proletarian family, father, mother and child, closely nestling under his outstretched protecting arm.

It is seldom that the artist can catch, as it were, the real character of his subject clearly to enable him to impress it upon lifeless stone and metal, but Borglum, the designer, has shown his rare genius in impressing upon cold impressionless bronze the most noble characteristics of his subject, that of protecting the weak against the aggressions of the strong.

When death laid his cold, icy grasp upon J. P. Altgeld, and declared that time for him should be no more, Altgeld, at that very moment, was pleading the cause of oppressed South Africa from the public platform, in Joliet, Ill. So he fell as the hero falleth-unconquered.

Since Illinois was admitted as a sister state to the states of this union, more than three quarters of a century ago, many of her own sons and other men have been elected to govern her, but only one, so far, has she honored with a monument in the most beautiful park of her largest city. John P. Altgeld, not one of her own sons, nor even a native American, has this distinguishing honor

Why? Because he, disregarding the blandishments of the “mob in purple and fine linen,” regardless of consequences, followed Justice where she led, and she led him to the prison doors of Joliet, where three innocent laboring men were imprisoned. She seized his strong arm, back flew bolts and bars, opened wide the doors, three working men are restored to their families and their friends,-vindicated by their governor! And the five, their co-defendants, who had been murdered five years previously, were also vindicated!

In the years to come, children yet unborn, will make their pilgrimages to Lincoln Park, to pay homage to the Governor, who had the courage to stand up against the howls of the “mob in purple and fine linen.”

LUCY E. PARSONS.

Chicago, Illinois, September 8, 1915.

[Photograph and paragraph break added.]

SOURCESLabor Journal
(Everett, Washington)
-Sept 17, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

The Labor World
(Duluth, Minnesota)
-Sept 11, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

Gov. John P. Altgeld’s pardon of the anarchists
and his masterly review of the Haymarket Riot
Preface by Lucy E. Parsons
Lucy E Parsons, 1915
https://archive.org/…

IMAGES
Monument of John Peter Altgeld
by Gutzon Borglum
pdf! http://www.cpdit01.com/…
Lucy Parsons,
Chicago Hunger Riot Arrest, Jan 1915
http://www.thenation.com/…
John Peter Altgeld
https://archive.org/…
William Jennings Bryan
https://en.wikipedia.org/…
Altgeld Monument, Chicago 1915
https://archive.org/…
Gov Altgeld’s Pardon,
preface by Lucy Parsons, 1915
https://archive.org/…

See also:

Life of Albert R. Parsons,
with brief history of the labor movement in America
-by Lucy E. Parsons
Chicago, 1889
https://archive.org/…

The Chicago martyrs: the famous speeches
of the eight anarchists in Judge Gary’s court,
October 7, 8, 9, 1886;
and Altgeld’s Reasons for pardoning
Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab
Free Society, 1899
https://books.google.com/…

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Annie Laurie – John McDermott
(Sung by Albert Parsons for Lucy Parsons the night before he was executed.)

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Our readers should note that the Tribune uses the word “bandit” despite the fact that no motive was ever proven for the murder of Mr. Morrison. The murderers stormed into the store, shouted, “We’ve got you now,” opened fire with their revolvers and then fled. The store was not robbed.We will also note that Joe Hill was not tried for nor found guilty of the murder of the boy, Arlin Morrison.

There have not been “thousands of threatening letters,” but only a few among the thousands of letters sent to Governor Spry. Some members of the I. W. W. are of the opinion that the threatening letters were written by operatives of various private detective agencies in order to make work for themselves.

As to anyone preventing the State of Utah from executing Fellow Worker Joe Hill: most everyone agrees, that nothing short of a miracle will prevent the legal murder of the rebel songwriter who was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death upon flimsy circumstantial evidence.

By Ernest Riebe:

From the Salt Lake Tribune of September 19, 1915:

HILLSTROM IS DENIED REPRIEVE BY BOARD
—–

Lives of Spry and His Children Threatened in Letters, Which Demand the Immediate Release of Convicted Murderer of Grocer Morrison and Son;
He wants New Trial.
—–
EXECUTION WILL BE ON OCTOBER 1
—–
Friends of Slayer Declare Appeal Will Be Made to Sweden in Order to
Bring About Another Trial or to Secure Man’s Freedom.
—–

The state board of pardons by unanimous vote yesterday denied the petition of Joseph Hillstrom, murderer of J. G. Morrison and Arling Morrison, to have his sentence of death commuted to life imprisonment.

Hillstrom will be shot to death at the state prison in the early morning of October 1. He has twelve days yet to live.

Since the conviction of Hillstrom, and more especially since the supreme court refused to grant him a new trial, Governor Spry, the members of the supreme bench, Attorney General A. R. Barnes and District Attorney E. O. Leatherwood, have received in all thousands of letters making various threats should the man executed. Other letters contained petitions circulated by the members of the I. W. W. Among the letters received by Governor Spry are many which threaten his life, and one which intimates that his children might be harmed should Hillstrom be not freed.

Scarcely anything short of a miracle can now save the murderer’s life. Friends of the condemned man last night declared that this miracle would come in the form of a protest from the Swedish government. Hillstrom is a Swedish subject, and Hillstrom’s friends insist that the government of Sweden will take the position that he did not have a fair trial and will make representations to this effect to the United States government, to the end that Hillstrom will either be freed or will secure another trial.

The action of the state board of pardons was taken yesterday after Hillstrom himself had dramatically declared to the board that he sought no clemency from it.

Insists on New Trial.
———-
Convicted Murderer Refuses to Make Statement for Himself
Except to Insist Upon New Trial.

[Declared the condemned man:]I don’t want a pardon…I don’t want a commutation. I want a new trial and vindication. If you can’t give me a new trial, that’s all there is to it. I don’t want anything else.

In vain did the governor, the attorney general and the members of the supreme court appeal to Hillstrom to give them some reason why he should be pardoned, some reason for his assertion that he was not guilty of the murder for which he is condemned to die.

[Said Hillstrom:]I will guarantee that if you give me a new trial…I will conclusively prove that I am not guilty and that I will send for or five perjurers to the penitentiary, where they belong.

All of the members of the board of pardons and his attorneys informed Hillstrom that the board was powerless to grant him a new trial, but that he was free to make any statement which he cared to before the board or submit any evidence he cared to in support of his plea of innocence.

[Declared Hillstrom:]I’ve said all I care to say…What does my measly life amount to? What do I care if I have to die? I don’t want the humiliation of commutation or pardon. What I want is an acquittal. If you can’t give me a new trial I don’t want anything. I’ve stated my position-that’s all I care to say.

Chief Justice D. N. Straup suggested that the attorneys for Hillstrom ask to give the pardon board a greater amount of information on which they might base their action. The attorneys said they would prefer that the members of the board themselves question the condemned man. Judge Straup then suggested that he would ask the prisoner certain questions, and the prisoner might answer them or not as he saw fit.

Rejects Opportunity.Hillstrom immediately said he had nothing further to say.

“Then I am to understand that you would object to my putting any questions to you?” asked the chief justice.

I have stated my position. That’s all I want to say.

With this statement by Hillstrom the hearing closed. However, Attorney Soren X. Christensen asked the board to take a recess for five minutes while he conferred with his client. Mr. Christensen and Judge O. N. Hilton of Denver then talked to Hillstrom and urged him to consent to answer the questions that the board might ask him or to make some further statement relative to the case. Hillstrom was obdurate and said he didn’t want to say any more.Mr. Christensen then announced to the board that Hillstrom seemed to consider himself a martyr and was resolved to give the board no further information.

Application Is Denied.The board went into executive session for a few moments and then announced that it had voted unanimously to deny the application made in behalf of Hillstrom to commute the sentence to life imprisonment.

All yesterday afternoon the board considered the Hillstrom case. Eloquent pleas in behalf of Hillstrom were made by Judge Hilton and Mr. Christensen. A short statement was made by Joseph Rohan [Ed Rowan] of the Hillstrom defense committee of the Industrial Workers of the World, of which organization Hillstrom had long been an active member. Hillstrom himself spoke only briefly.

District Attorney E. O. Leatherwood, who prosecuted Hillstrom, was present not to advise either for or against commutation.

Before the board were several hundred letters protesting against the execution of Hillstrom and several thousand signatures to petitions of the same character. A number of the letters openly threatened the governor and the board of pardons. Nearly all of them demanded his release or commutation of his sentence. Very many of them contained veiled threats against the governor’s life. One or two openly declared that the governor would be held personally accountable for Hillstrom’s fate and his life was at stake.

Some Vicious Letters.One particularly vicious letter declared that “labor” would demand “double pay in lives and money for the loss of one of labor’s own,” and asked the governor what he would think if as a result of the execution of Joseph Hillstrom, the governor’s son or daughter were taken as a part of the “double pay” that would be demanded by “labor.”

District Attorney Leatherwood told the members of the pardon board that he, too, had received threatening letters of a similar character. These letters, he said, could only have resulted from some gross misinformation respecting the Hillstrom trial that was disseminated throughout the United States and Canada by some Salt Lake person.

Elects to Attend.At the opening of the hearing yesterday Governor Spry, as chairman of the board, declared that the board was agreed that if Hillstrom wished to be present in person at the hearing he would be permitted to say whatever he cared to say to the pardon board.

Mr. Christensen went into the prison and asked Hillstrom if he cared to be present. Hillstrom said that he wished to attend the hearing, and he was brought before the board.

Evidently Hillstrom was expecting the summons. He was freshly shaven, and as immaculate as possible in his prison uniform. Hillstrom was so thin that the skin appeared tightly drawn over the bones of his gaunt frame. Despite his spareness, there was no suggestion of prison pallor in his cheeks. He appeared to be in good health. His brown hair was combed straight back from his high forehead, after the fashion affected by the modish young men.

Defends Eselius.During the progress of the arguments Hillstrom sat in a chair between Attorney Christensen and Warden Arthur Pratt. He looked at the floor the greater part of the time. He traced imaginary patterns on the back of one hand with the fingers of the other, or balanced one foot upon the toe of the other, apparently not more than casually interested in what was being done or said in his behalf.

Once, however, when district Attorney Leatherwood made a suggestion as to the value of the testimony of Robert Eselius, a friend of Hillstrom, Hillstrom interrupted, saying:

Now, Mr. Leatherwood, you can cast all the aspersions you want to on me, but I don’t want you to insinuate anything against Bob Eselius. He is a good boy, of clean habits, and has lived here all his life. He was born and raised in Utah, and there isn’t anything against him.

This article will be continued in tomorrow’s Hellraisers

Joe Hill
-by Gibbs M. Smith
Gibbs Smith Inc, 1984
(copyright 1969)
https://books.google.com/…

Salt Lake Tribune
(Salt Lake City, Utah)
-Sept 19, 1915
http://newspaperarchive.com/…
http://newspaperarchive.com/…

IMAGES
Joe Hill with text,
Salt Lake Tribune, Sept 19, 1915
http://newspaperarchive.com/…
Joe Hill Shall This Take Place
by Ernest Riebe
http://ns210054.ovh.net/…

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Information from Archie Green via Gibbs Smith:

The Industrial Worker of July 1912 reports that the new edition of the I. W. W. songbook (Little Red Songbook) will include “Casey Jones.” That edition of the songbook was published by The Industrial Worker in Spokane Washington. “Casey Jones” appeared on page 1.

Casey Jones by Mark Ross

The Workers on the S. P. line to strike sent out a call;
But Casey Jones, the engineer, he wouldn’t strike at all;
His boiler it was leaking, and its drivers on the bum,
And his engine and its bearings, they were all out of plumb.

Casey Jones kept his junk pile running;
Casey Jones was working double time;
Casey Jones got a wooden medal,
For being good and faithful on the S. P. line.

The workers said to Casey: “Won’t you help us win this strike?”
But Casey said: “Let me alone, you’d better take a hike.”
Then some one put a bunch of railroad ties across the track,
And Casey hit the river bottom with an awful crack.

Casey Jones hit the river bottom;
Casey Jones broke his blessed spine;
Casey Jones was an Angelino,
He took a trip to heaven on the S. P. line.

When Casey Jones got up to heaven, to the Pearly Gate,
He said: “I’m Casey Jones, the guy that pulled the S. P. freight.”
“You’re just the man,” said Peter, “our musicians went on strike;
You can get a job a’scabbing any time you like.”

Casey Jones got up to heaven;
Casey Jones was doing mighty fine;
Casey Jones went scabbing on the angels,
Just like he did to workers of the S. P. line.

They got together, and they said it wasn’t fair,
For Casey Jones to go around a’scabbing everywhere.
The Angels’ Union No. 23, they sure were there,
And they promptly fired Casey down the Golden Stairs.

Casey Jones went to Hell a’flying;
“Casey Jones,” the Devil said, “Oh fine:
Casey Jones, get busy shoveling sulphur;
That’s what you get for scabbing on the S. P. Line.”
-Joe Hill

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From The Salt Lake Tribune of September 19, 1915-Part II

Judge Hilton opened the pleas in behalf of Hillstrom. He began by saying that he was as thoroughly convinced of the innocence of Hillstrom as he was of any person in any case with which he had been connected in his long career as a practitioner. In his plea, Mr. Hilton referred to the action of the governor of Georgia in the Leo Frank case. He said in Utah there was opportunity to do as the governor of Georgia had done.

Cites Frank Case.Here the courts had reviewed the Hillstrom case, said Judge Hilton, just as the courts of Georgia had reviewed the Frank case. The courts of both states had declared the trials legal, he said, yet he believed that had the judges who passed upon the Frank case been the trial jury in the case they would unhesitatingly have found Frank not guilty. Taking this into consideration, he said the governor of Georgia had commuted Frank’s sentence in order that it might be possible, from the negro Connolly’s lips or otherwise, to learn the truth concerning the revolting murder of the factory girl. The action of the mob in lynching Frank, he said, shut off all opportunity to save the life of an innocent man. In Utah, Judge Hilton suggested, the board of pardons are in the same position as was Governor Slaton of Georgia. It could commute the sentence and gain time, he said, for all the facts in the Hillstrom case to become known, so that there would be no chance of a great injustice being done.

Regrets Threatening Letters.Judge Hilton said he understood there had been a great deal of correspondence received by the governor relative to the Hillstrom case, and that much of it was of an extremely villainous character. It was needless to say, he suggested, that neither the defendant nor his counsel was in any way accountable for this correspondence. He said that he deeply regretted that this annoying and intimidating correspondence had been received, but he said he trusted that no member of the pardon board would consider that the interests of Hillstrom were in any way prejudiced by reason of these letters.

Circumstantial evidence in a homicidal case, particularly where the penalty is death, he said, was always most dangerous. In the face of a single fact, the attorney said, the greatest case of circumstantial evidence would crumble like a house of cards. He quoted a number of cases where circumstantial evidence which was almost conclusive had convicted men who were afterwards proved to be absolutely innocent. Among such cases he cited the celebrated Pelican point murder case, in which Hayes was convicted and sentenced to be hanged for the murder of three boys on the shore of Utah lake, and at the eleventh hour positive proof was found that absolutely established the innocence of the condemned man.

Question as to Inferences.Judge Hilton and the members of the supreme court differed as to the inferences which might be drawn from the evidence in the Hillstrom case. He insisted that the supreme court opinion held that inferences of guilt were deducible from the fact that Hillstrom had remained off the stand and had not explained away the circumstances that pointed strangely to him as the Morrison murderer. All three judges of the supreme court, who are also members of the pardon board, hastened to correct the impression under which the attorney was laboring. They declared that their position was that Hillstrom could not avoid the reasonable inferences to be drawn from uncontroverted facts and circumstances as presented by the state, merely by remaining off the stand.

For the prisoner, Attorney Soren X. Christensen was next heard. Mr. Christensen declared that while Hillstrom may have had a lawful trial he did not have a fair trial. He said that the accused was not properly represented by counsel at the trial.

Attorneys Discharged.The defendant, he said, had discharged his attorneys, Scott and McDougall, and the court appointed them as friends of the court and foisted them upon the defendant. Mr. Christensen said he, himself, was called into the case after it was half over, and attorneys appointed by the court declined to give him any information relative to the theory of the case.

“No self-respecting lawyer would ever continue in a case under any circumstances after his client had discharged him,” declared Mr. Christensen.

“No self-respecting lawyer would decline to continue in a case after having been requested to do so by the district court,” returned Justice W. M. McCarty, with equal emphasis.

“Well, that’s where we differ,” said Mr. Christensen.

Mr. Christensen said he was opposed to capital punishment, and particularly was he opposed to capital punishment when the only evidence against a condemned man was circumstances such as those in this case. He asked the board to consider carefully whether it was right to send five murderers out to shoot Hillstrom to death, and if it were right and these men who fired the bullets into the body of the condemned man were to be rated as good citizens, whether or not the members of the board would permit their sons to form the firing squad that would send Hillstrom to eternity.

A Swedish Subject.It was suggested by Mr. Christensen that while the correspondence received might not give the board much information bearing on the case, it would at least serve to show the great interest taken in the matter throughout the country and impress the board with its importance. He called attention to the fact that Hillstrom was a Swedish subject and said that undoubtedly the Swedish government would take an interest in the case before Hillstrom went to the death chair.

Replying to this phase of Mr. Christensen’s argument, Justice McCarty said that the position of the board was that every alien should have exactly the same rights and privileges of American citizen, except of course, those conferred specifically by citizenship, but that every alien as well as every citizen must obey the law or suffer the same consequences for violations of the law as would a citizen. He said that no one could claim any extra rights or privileges by virtue of being an alien.

Leatherwood Speaks.Following Mr. Christensen, Mr Leatherwood spoke only briefly. He said he had received many threatening and intimidating letters from all parts of the United States and from Canada, letters that were based on gross misinformation relative to the facts in the case and the conduct of the trial, furnished unquestionably by someone in Salt Lake who for some motive or other wished to disseminate base and audacious falsehoods.

The letters he had received, Mr. Leatherwood asserted, charged that Hillstrom was charged with murder and convicted merely because he was he member of a powerful industrial organization. He then declared that the only time any suggestion was made that Hillstrom was a member of any such organization or that the prosecution had in any way resulted because of such affiliation, was made in an argument to the jury by Attorney McDougall, of Hillstrom’s counsel, in which McDougall bitterly arraigned the courts of the state and the United States, the district attorney and all officers charged with the duty of enforcing the law.

“Friend of Court.”“That was not Hillstrom’s attorney,” interrupted Mr. Christensen, “that was the friend of the court.”

Judge Frick then said:

“I believe that everyone in the state of Utah knows that every member of this pardon board, would much rather cut off his own right arm than to condemn a man either because he was or because he was not a member of any labor organization.”

The governor then said:

“Now, Mr. Hillstrom, the board would be glad to hear you if you have anything to say with reference to this matter. Understand, you are not required to say anything or to make any statement whatever. We would be pleased to hear you, but it will not count either for or against you if you decide to remain silent.”

Hillstrom Speaks.Hillstrom arose and said:

Gentlemen, I have a little proposition to make to you. If you grant me a new trial I will guarantee to prove absolutely my innocence and to send four or five perjurers to the penitentiary, where they belong.

“But why did you not bring forward this proof at your trial?” asked Governor Spry.

There was so much confusion at the trial and my attorneys didn’t carry on my case properly. I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t think it was necessary to prove my innocence. I though the state would have to prove a man guilty. I always thought a man was presumed to be innocent until he was convicted. Anyway, I never thought I was going to be convicted on such ridiculous evidence. The district attorney furnished the evidence. He asked it all in the questions. All the witnesses did was to say “Yes, sir.” If I have another trial I don’t want Mr. Scott for my attorney.

“You understand, do you not,” asked Chief Justice Straup, “that this body cannot grant you a new trial? It has no power to do so.”

[Said Hillstrom:]You had the power to deny a new trial…why can’t you grant me one now?

“This is not the supreme court,” said Governor Spry. “This is the state pardon board, of which the three supreme court justices are members, but they are sitting not as a supreme court but as members of the pardon board.”

[Said Hillstrom:]Then I have nothing to say..If I can’t have a new trial I don’t want anything.

“I hope you will not persist in that attitude.” said the governor. “I hope you will give us any information that may aid us in this case.””If you can show us any proof or circumstance that proves your innocence,” said Judge McCarty, “we will grant you an immediate and unconditional pardon, and you will walk out of the door a free man.”

I don’t want pardon or commutation; that is humiliating. I want an acquittal by a jury. I want a new trial so that I can show up the things that are going on in Judge Ritchie’s court room. I want the people to know the dirty deal I got in that court.

Asked for Proof.“Now, look here, Hillstrom,” said Attorney General Barnes, “if you want us to believe that there is anything in this case that should not be, if there is any reason on earth why you should not pay the penalty for the crime, this is the time to show it to us. I am deadly in earnest, old man, and I want to do everything on earth to save you if you are innocent. Won’t you think it over and produce any proof you have here before us?”

I have thought it over. I know what I’m doing.

“Wouldn’t a pardon be as good or better than a new trial?” asked Judge McCarty.”An unconditional pardon would be an absolute acquittal,” declared Justice Frick.

I’ve stated my position. I want a new trial.

“Have his attorneys advised him that we have no power to grant him a new trial?” asked Mr. Barnes.”We have,” replied Mr. Christensen.

“Why don’t you get him to present any proof to us of his innocence, if he has it?” inquired the attorney general.

“How can we get him to do so?” asked Judge Hilton. “We have repeatedly tried to have him do so, but he has refused. You may try to get him to do so if you wish.”

Defense Committee.Mr. Rohan [Rowan] said that he, as a member of the Hillstrom defense committee, had conversed with Hillstrom, and he had urged him to drop all legal proceedings in his behalf, that he was ready to die. However, he said, the committee had instructed the attorneys to continue to do everything for the prisoner that could be done.

The governor then asked Rohan if he would not urge Hillstrom to produce before the board any proof of his innocence that he might have. Rohan replied that he would not do so, as he believed Hillstrom was capable of deciding for himself what should be done.

Chief Justice Straup then suggested that Hillstrom’s attorneys ask their client some questions. They replied that they would prefer that the board question him. The chief justice then said to Hillstrom that he proposed to ask him certain questions which he might or might not answer as he chose. Hillstrom, however, reiterated the statement that he did not care to make any further statement.

Asks Conference.Mr. Christensen asked the opportunity of a private conference with Hillstrom for five minutes. Hillstrom then said:

I don’t need to consult with anyone. I am a man. I know my own mind. I know what I want to do and what I am going to do.

However, he did consent to a short conference with his attorneys, which was barren of results. Mr. Christensen returned to the board and reported that he was unable to change Hillstrom’s attitude.”It seems that he wants to be considered a martyr,” said Mr. Christensen.

The board went into executive session for a quarter of an hour, and then reported that every member of the board had voted in favor of denying Hillstrom’s application for a commutation of sentence.

During the session a special delivery letter was received from a Socialist organization in Berkeley, Cal, protesting against the execution of Hillstrom. More than 200 other letters and petitions were received by the governor yesterday urging clemency or demanding a pardon for Hillstrom.

SOURCE

The Salt Lake Tribune
(Salt Lake City, Utah)
-Sept 19, 1915
http://newspaperarchive.com/…
http://newspaperarchive.com/…

IMAGES
Joe Hill about July 1915
Utah state archives/The Salt Lake Tribune
http://local.sltrib.com/…
Orrin N Hilton
http://darrow.law.umn.edu/…

See also:
AP The Big Story
“Utah event honors Joe Hill, hero to many, murderer to others.”
by Brady McCombs, Sept 5, 2015
http://bigstory.ap.org/…

The Salt Lake Tribune
The Legacy of Joe Hill, 2015
http://local.sltrib.com/…

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Information from Archie Green via Gibbs Smith:

The Industrial Worker of July 11, 1912 reports that the new edition of the I. W. W. songbook (Little Red Songbook) will include “Casey Jones.” That edition of the songbook was published by The Industrial Worker in Spokane Washington, and also included “Everybody’s Joining It” on page 33.

Everybody’s Doing It Now, a Irving Berlin song of 1911
-Collins & Harlan

Everybody’s Joining It
by Joe Hill
Tune: Everybody’s Doin’ It Now

Fellow workers, can’t you hear,
There is something in the air.
Everywhere you walk everybody talks
‘Bout the I. W. W.
They have got a way to strike
That the master doesn’t like —
Everybody sticks,
That’s the only trick,
Al are joining now.

CHORUS:
Everybody’s joining it, joining what? Joining it!
Everybody’s joining it, joining what? Joining it!
One Big Union, that’s the workers’ choice,
One Big Union, that’s the only choice,
One Big Union, that’s the only noise,
One Big Union, shout with all your voice;
Make a noise, make a noise, make a noise, boys,
Everybody’s joining it, joining what? Joining it!
Everybody’s joining it, joining what? Joining it!
Joining in this union grand,
Boys and girls in every land;
All the workers hand in hand —
Everybody’s joining it now.

The’ Boss is feeling mighty blue,
He don’t know just what to do.
We have got his goat, got him by the throat,
Soon he’ll work or go starving.
Join I. W. W.
Don’t let bosses trouble you,
Come and join with us —
Everybody does —
You’ve got nothing to lose.

Will the One Big Union Grow?
Mister Bonehead wants to know.
Well! What do you think, of that funny gink,
Asking such foolish questions?
Will it grow? Well! Look a here,
Brand new locals everywhere,
Better take a hunch,
Join the fighting bunch,
Fight for Freedom and Right.

SWEDES AIDING JOS. HILLSTROMSalt Lake City, Utah, Sept. 21.-To save life of Joseph Hillstrom Swedish residents of Salt Lake have invoked the aid of the Swedish vice consul in New York and hope to interest the Swedish minister to the United States. Hillstrom is sentenced to be shot October 1 for the murder of a grocery man. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence.

—–

Hellraisers

has learned that two prominent women of Salt Lake City, Virginia Snow Stephen and Sigrid Bolin, have appealed directly to W. A. F. Ekengren, Swedish Minister to the United States, requesting his aid in the effort to save the life of Joe Hill. Mrs. Stephens was instrumental in bringing attorneys O. N. Hilton and Soren X. Christensen into the case to defend Fellow Worker Joe Hill.Big Bill Haywood, General Secretary-Treasurer of the Industrial Workers of the World, telegraphed Mr. Ekengren on Monday, September 20th:

Joseph Hillstrom a Swedish subject has been sentenced to be shot to death October first at Salt Lake City, Utah. will you request Secretary of State Lansing to delay execution pending investigation.

From The New York Times of September 20, 1915:

The following article is an excellent example of the lies being spread by the kept press concerning our Fellow Worker Joe Hill and those who are fighting to save his life. Following the article, we take on and correct these lies one by one.

THREATEN UTAH OFFICIALS.
—–
Joe Hill’s Partisans Resent Failure
to Pardon I. W. W. Poet.Special to The New York Times.

SALT LAKE, Sept. 19.-Threats, both veiled and open, against the lives of Governor William Spry, the members of his family, and of various state officials have poured into State offices recently, following the propaganda instituted by the Industrial Workers of the World and many Socialists to prevent the execution of Joseph Hillstrom for murder. More than 10,000 of these letters have been received.The number of guards at the State prison have been doubled, and the residences of Governor Spry, members of the Supreme Court, and other State officials are under heavy guard night and day. Private detectives and peace officers in civilian clothes form bodyguards for the Governor and other State officials. As an added precaution Hillstrom is kept in solitary confinement and visiting hours at the prisons have been discontinued.

Yesterday Hillstrom was given a final hearing before the State Board of Pardons, and his application was turned down. He will be shot on Oct. 1. None of the I. W. W. representatives were permitted at the hearing and fourteen guards, armed with rifles, were posted about the building where the hearing was held, Machine guns have been borrowed from the State militia, and operatives are stationed with them at the prison entrance.

—–Joseph Hillstrom, better known as Joe Hill, the Hobo Poet, was convicted of the murder of a grocer on what his friends declare was flimsy circumstantial evidence. Hillstrom explained a wound found on him when he was arrested shortly after the crime by saying he had received it in a quarrel with a prominent Salt Lake woman whose name he would not reveal for fear of compromising her. Hill’s best-known poem effort is “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” which was the marching song of the church-raiding army of the unemployed in New York in the Winter of 1914.

———-

1. While it is true that letters have poured into the Governor’s office and that there may well be more than 10,000 such requests from all around the world, only a small minority of them have been threatening. Many believe that some, if not most, of the threats are being made by private detective agencies in order to make work for themselves. If true, it seems to be working, for, as seen above, private detectives are being hired as body guards for Utah officials.2. Ed Rowan of the Joe Hill Defense Committee was indeed present at the hearing of the Board of Pardons.

3. Joe Hill has never stated that he received his wound in a fight with a prominent Salt Lake woman. He stated that he was shot by a friend over a quarrel about a woman. The woman has never been identified by her prominence (or lack thereof) in Salt Lake City. Perhaps the Times is alluding to Mrs. Stephen who has been active in defense of Joe Hill.

4. Joe Hill did not write “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” Some of Joe Hill’s most popular songs are: “The Preacher and the Slave,” “Casey Jones,” and “Mr. Block.”

The Case of Joe Hill
-by Philip S Foner
International Publishers, 1965
https://books.google.com/…

Joe Hill
-by Gibbs M. Smith
Gibbs M Smith Inc, 1984
(copyright 1969)
https://books.google.com/…

The Ogden Standard
(Ogden City, Utah)
-Sept 21, 1915
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/…

The New York Times
(New York, New York)
-Sept 20, 1915
http://query.nytimes.com/…

IMAGES
Virginia Snow Stephen
http://historytogo.utah.gov/…
Joe Hill, Salt Lake Tribune,
Sept 19, 1915
http://newspaperarchive.com/…
Letter to UT Board of Pardons on behalf of Joe Hill
from UT Rep Lund, Sept 14, 1915
(page 2) http://images.archives.utah.gov/…

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`
First published in the March 6, 1913 edition, Fifth Edition of the
Little Red Songbook, this was song was being sung as Salt Lake
City police attacked an I. W. W. rally in August 1913, about the
time that Joe Hill arrived in that city from San Pedro, California.

Mr Block – Utah Phillips

Mr. Block by Joe Hill
Tune: “It Looks Like A Big Night Tonight”

Please give me your attention, I’ll introduce to you
A man that is a credit to “Our Red White and Blue,”
His head is made of lumber, and solid as a rock;
He is a common worker and his name is Mr. Block.
And Block he thinks he may
Be President some day.

CHORUS:
Oh Mr. Block, you were born by mistake,
You take the cake, you make me ache.
Tie a rock on your block and then jump in the lake,
Kindly do that for Liberty’s sake.

Yes, Mr. Block is lucky; he found a job, by gee!
The sharks got seven dollars, for job and fare and fee.
They shipped him to a desert and dumped him with his truck,
But when he tried to find his job, he sure was out of luck,
He shouted, “That’s too raw,
I’ll fix them with the law.”

Block hiked back to the city, but wasn’t doing well.
He said “I’ll join the union — the great A. F. of L.”
He got a job next morning, got fired in the night,
He said, “I’ll see Sam Gompers and he’ll fix that foreman right.”
Sam Gompers said, “You see,
You’ve got our sympathy.”

Election day he shouted, “A Socialist for Mayor!”
The “comrade” got elected, he happy was for fair,
But after the election he got an awful shock,
A great big socialistic Bull did rap him on the block.
And Comrade Block did sob,
“I helped him to his job.”

The money kings in Cuba blew up the gunboat Maine,
But Block got awful angry and blamed it all on Spain.
He went right in the battle and there he lost his leg.
And now he’s peddling shoestrings and is walking on a peg.
He shouts, “Remember Maine,
Hurrah! To hell with Spain!”

Poor Block he died one evening, I’m very glad to state,
He climbed the golden ladder up to the pearly gate.
He said, “Oh Mister Peter, one word I’d like to tell,
I’d like to meet the Astorbilts and John D Rockefell.”
Old Pete said, “Is that so?
You’ll meet them down below.”

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`Thursday September 23, 1915
Trinidad, Colorado – Rockefeller Arrives to Inspect Properties of C. F. & I. Company

Whether or not Mr. Rockefeller will visit the imprisoned miners remains to be seen.

From Akron, Ohio, Mother Jones advises the young Mr. Rockefeller to hold mass meetings and to listen to the miners without threat of firing or blacklisting. She further states that he should rise above “the level of the high-class burglars and economic leeches which now surround him.”

From the Kansas Lawrence Daily Journal-World of September 20, 1915:

ROCKEFELLER TO COLORADO
—–
John D. Jr., is Inspecting Properties
of Fuel and Iron Co.
—–
Accepted Invitation of “Mother” Jones
to visit Scenes of Strike Troubles
—–

John D Rockefeller Jr shakes hands with Mother Jones, New York Times, Jan 31, 1915

Trinidad, Colo., Sept. 20.-John D. Rockefeller, Jr., arrived here today for an inspection of the properties of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. His party will spend two or three weeks in Colorado.The Colorado visit of Mr. Rockefeller, as active representative of the principal owning interest of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, has been planned since early in the year. It had its inception at the New York hearing before the federal Commission on Industrial Relations.

On January 27 Mr. Rockefeller was a witness before the commission. After leaving the stand the capitalist stopped to speak to “Mother” Jones, Colorado labor enthusiast, and she invited him to visit Colorado “while the ashes of Ludlow are still hot.”

Other labor leaders present at the hearing urged Mr. Rockefeller to visit the scenes of the Colorado coal miners’ strike recently ended.

———-[Photograph added.]

From the Chicago Day Book of September 22, 1915:

“JOHN D., JR., DON’T KNOW HOW TO GO AT IT,”
-MOTHER JONES

John D Rockefeller Jr and Mother Jones, New York Sun, Jan 27, 1915

Akron, O., Sept. 22-Mother Jones today stated that Rockefeller started out wrong to “obtain first-hand information” when he was accompanied on his inspection tours by the officials and managers of his mines.

[Mother Jones said:]He should hold mass meetings if he wishes to accomplish any good at all…Then he should invite the men to speak without fear of losing their jobs and tell of the horrible oppression.

Rockefeller might want better conditions in the mine. But to get them he must rise [above?] the level of the high-class burglars and economic leeches which now surround him.

[Photograph added.]

SOURCES

Lawrence Daily Journal-World
(Lawrence, Kansas)
-Sept 20, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

The Day Book
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Sept 22, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

IMAGES
John D Rockefeller Jr, 1915
http://en.academic.ru/…
John D Rockefeller Jr
shakes hands with Mother Jones,
New York Times, Jan 31, 1915
pdf! http://query.nytimes.com/…
John D Rockefeller Jr and Mother Jones,
NY Sun, Jan 27, 1915
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/…

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`
They’ll Never Keep Us Down – Hazel Dickens

So working people get your help from your own kind
Your welfare on the rich man’s mind

Your welfare on the rich man’s mind
Your welfare on the rich man’s mind
They want the power in their hands
Just to keep out of the worker’s hands
Your welfare on the rich man’s mind
-Hazel Dickens

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`

John D. Rockefeller Said To Be Implicated
—–

Mine Worker Says Oil Magnate Has
Been Mixed Up In Strike.
—–

John R Lawson with Mother Jones
““`

Denver, Sept. 21.-In an address today to the delegates of the convention of the State Federation of Labor, William Diamond, representing President White of the United Mine Workers of America, said evidence against John D. Rockefeller Jr., and against men in the employ of the Rockefeller interests soon would be placed before the attorney general Farrar of Colorado or before the federal department of justice.The alleged evidence, he said, would have to do with occurrences during the recent coal strike and would be placed before the authorities on the arrival of Mr. A. H. Belcher, attorney for the United Mine Workers of America. Mr. Belcher is reported enroute to Denver from West Virginia.

The military court of inquiry, Diamond declared, was correct in the assumption that a mass of evidence had been gathered at the direction of the miners’ union, adding that much of it had been turned over to international officials at Indianapolis. This court, the speaker said, was named by the governor primarily to determine what the miners’ union had learned and the investigation of charges against national guard officers was merely a blind.

In his annual report, President John McLennan, characterized the conviction of John R. Lawson, miners, union leader, recently sentenced to life imprisonment on a charge of murder, growing out of strike disorders as “the most outrageous instance of injustice that the history of labor records.”

—–[Paragraph breaks and photograph added.]

John McLennan, president of the Colorado Federation of Labor as well as president of District 15 of the United Mine Workers, knows full well the heavy hammer of Colorado Justice has practiced against members of the mine workers’ union. He was taken into custody shortly after the Ludlow Massacre while attempting to retrieve the bodies of the dead from the burnt out colony.

From The Pittsburg (Kansas) Daily Headlight of September 22, 1915:

REFUSES TO INVITE JOHN D. TO SPEAK
—–

COLORADO FEDERATION OF LABOR TABLED
A RESOLUTION EXTENDING FLOOR.
—–
Magnate Spent Last Night in “Spare Room” of
Mine Superintendent and Slept in
Borrowed Night Shirt-
Camp Breakfast.
—-

Now We Will Talk by R. K. Chamberlain, from The Masses of March 1915

Denver, Sept. 22.-A resolution extending to John D. Rockefeller, jr., an invitation to address the delegates to the annual convention of the Colorado State Federation of Labor, in session here, was tabled at today’s session when several delegates vigorously protested against the plan.The presentation of the resolution by Frank Spegel of the musician’s union, threw the convention into disorder. “If he comes up here we’ll throw him out of the window,” one delegate shouted.

Rockefeller’s name again figured in the proceedings when Mrs. Lee Campion [Champion], president of the Justice League addressing the convention, announced that a telegram had been sent to the oil magnate by the league, asking him to confer with John R. Lawson in jail at Trinidad, and also to grant an audience to a delegation of members of the league.

Mrs. Champion accompanied Ludlow survivors on Eastern tour after the Massacre.
Left to right: Mrs. Lee Champion, Mrs. Mary Thomas, Mrs. Mary Petrucci, Mrs. Pearl Jolly, Mrs. Lindsey,
Children of Mrs. Thomas: Olga and Rachael

—–Primero, Colo., Sept. 22.-John D. Rockefeller, jr., after breakfasting today in a miners’ boarding house with an assembly of coal diggers resumed his tour of inspection of the properties of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. He first talked with John Pannich and Harry Schoupel, grievance representatives of the miners, and then conferred with Dr. A. S. Gregg, camp physician, regarding sanitary conditions. Later he visited the public school and spoke briefly to the children.

The a party then started for Sopris.

The Rockefeller party of four was distributed last night in miner’s homes that afforded a spare room, Mr. Rockefeller himself being quartered in the home of Joseph Haske, superintendent of Primero mine. The stay here over night was a departure from today’s schedule and a night shirt had to be supplied the visitor.

Refreshed by a long night’s sleep Mr. Rockefeller resumed his inspection. At breakfast he sat with an assembly of coal diggers and attacked a typical mining camp breakfast. It was expected several camps would be visited during the day.

Rockefeller today contributed money with which to build a band stand for the Primero miners’ band which serenaded him last night to his expressed delight. The amount was not disclosed. The band is composed of coal diggers of divers nationalities.

———-[Photographs added.]

SOURCESThe Wichita Daily Eagle
(Wichita, Kansas)
-Sept 22, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

The Pittsburg Daily Headlight
(Pittsburg, Kansas)
-Sept 22, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

IMAGES
John Lawson & Mother Jones,
Wichita Beacon, Kansas, Apr 22, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
John McLennan, prisoner of Maj Hamrock
after Ludlow Massacre
https://archive.org/…
Now We Will Talk by R. K. Chamberlain,
from The Masses of March 1915
http://dlib.nyu.edu/…
Judge Lindsey and Women of Ludlow:
Thomas, Petrucci, Jolly
http://www.loc.gov/…
Ludlow Massacre, Crucified
http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/…

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`
Which Side Are You On – Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman

Across this great old nation
Tell me whatca gonna do
When there’s one law for the rulers
And one law for the ruled?

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`

This result, the denial of Hill’s petition, is only an exemplification of the iniquitous system of having a pardoning board constituted of four members, all but one of whom have already prejudged the case and solemnly announced that the accused was guilty.Judges are only human, after all, and having once made up their minds it is but natural that they should not only be tenacious of their opinions but insistent in their defense of such preconceived judgments. I found them all unusually so except, perhaps, the governor, and I had not spoken five minutes before they were all after me in violent and frequently raucous disputation and dissent. At one time three of them were talking all at once. What else could be expected than they should find against Hillstrom?

…As to the merits of Hillstrom’s contention, I can only say that his complaint has always been earnest and consistent-that he was deprived of an honest and fair trial, and in that contention I most heartily concur.

I say without the slightest hesitation that the trial which resulted in Hillstrom’s conviction was the most unjust, wicked and farcical travesty on justice that has ever occurred in the west.

…I was much impressed by Hillstrom’s attitude and what he said before the board. His language was classic. The board offered to pardon him if he would state all the facts which might be later verified as the truth, but Hillstrom refused because, as he reasoned, a pardon presupposed a crime committed and he was innocent of all crime and so demanded a new trial when his vindication, as he believed, would be sure to come.

[Photograph and paragraph breaks added.]

With the execution date now only five days away, all hope to save the life of the I. W. W. songwriter now seems to rest upon the intervention of  W. A. F. Ekengren, Swedish Minister to the United States. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that two prominent Salt Lake City women, Virginia Snow Stephen and Sigrid Bolin, are in contact with the Swedish Minister and are urging him to take prompt action through appeals to the U. S. Department of State.

From The Salt Lake Tribune of September 23, 1915:

CHANCE SLIGHT FOR A REPRIEVE
FOR HILLSTROM
—–

Nothing Found to Warrant Stay of Execution,
Word Sent by Vice Consul Here.
—–
WOMEN TELEGRAPH SWEDISH MINISTER
—–
Mrs. Virginia Stephen and Miss Sigrid Bolin
Urge Him to Take Prompt Action.
—–

“Nothing has been found to warrant a stay of execution for Hillstrom,” said in part a special dispatch to The Tribune from Bar Harbor, Me., received at an early hour this morning. The statement embodied the conclusion reached in this city yesterday by Oscar W. Carlson, former county commissioner and Swedish vice-consul for Utah and southern Idaho. Mr. Carlson yesterday telegraphed to the Swedish minister to the United States, who is at his summer home in Maine, following a request from that official for an investigation locally.The representative of the Swedish government, said the dispatch, telegraphed to Mr. Carlson as the result of a telegram he had received from Mrs. Virginia Snow Stephen and Miss Sigrid Bolin, both of Salt lake, who sought a reprieve for Hillstrom that an investigation of his trial might be made.

Petition of Women.Mrs. Stephen, when called on the telephone, admitted that she and Miss Bolin had telegraphed to the Swedish minister.

“We asked him to use his efforts with Secretary of State Lansing to secure a reprieve for Hillstrom so that a more extended investigation of the case might be made. Hillstrom is a subject of Sweden.”

Mrs. Stephen will be remembered as the teacher in the art department of the University of Utah, who, while on a trip to the east about a year ago called upon Attorney O. N. Hilton in Denver and enlisted his support in the defense of Hillstrom. Miss Bolin is a sister of the late Professor Jakob Bolin, who was member of the University of Utah faculty. Mrs. Stephen is at present a teacher at the university.

Declines to Talk.Mr. Carlson refused to discuss the telegram which he had sent to his superior officer in the case. He did say, however, that his investigation did not necessarily mean that the minister would take no action.

The telegram received from Bar Harbor read as follows:

His Excellency, W. A. F. Ekengren
Swedish Minister to the United States

The Swedish minister to the United States tonight received a telegram from the representative of that government in Salt Lake. While the exact wording of the telegram, which related to the Joseph Hillstrom case in Utah, could not be learned, it was ascertained from a reliable source that the minister’s informant declared that “nothing has been found to warrant a stay of execution for Hillstrom.”The vice counsel in Utah is said to have made an independent investigation as the result of a request from the minister. He reported that Hillstrom had had a lawful trial and had been given an opportunity by the board of pardons to present reasons why a commutation of sentence should be granted him.

Wire From Minister.The Swedish minister telegraphed to Salt Lake, following the receipt of a telegraphic appeal received by him from Virginia Snow Stephen and Sigrid Bolin, both of Salt Lake. They declared that Hillstrom had not had a fair trial, and that as he is a subject of Sweden a reprieve should be demanded by that government until an investigation could be made.

The desk of John Hardy, the governor’s secretary, was piled high again yesterday with letters on the Hillstrom case. No threats of violence against the governor were contained in them, though some of them were exceedingly bitter in their denunciation of the governor. Others were ridiculous as regarded the amount of misinformation on the Hillstrom case reflected in them.Among the mail was a letter from Theodore Debs, brother of Eugene V. Debs, acknowledging receipt on behalf of Eugene Debs, of a copy of the supreme court decision in the Hillstrom case. In the Appeal to Reason, the official organ of the National Socialist party, the Hillstrom case has been reviewed and a personal request for information on the case was received from Mr. Debs some time ago.

A Mrs. Emily Lewis of Fresno, Cal, in acknowledging receipt of a copy of he decision, sent to her in reply to a petition for Hillstrom’s release, signed by hundreds of Fresno women, declares she had not had time to read the decision, but is convinced, nevertheless, of Hillstorm’s innocence.

Another letter warns the governor that the execution of Hillstrom would be nothing but the murder of a patriot and that his soul, like that of John Brown, will go marching on through the ages.

In another letter Hillstrom is compared to the Christ and the governor to Pilate.

Another letter asks the governor to pay no attention to the thousands of letters written to him, clamoring for Hillstrom’s life.

——

SOURCES

Joe Hill
-by Gibbs M. Smith
Gibbs M Smith Inc, 1984
(copyright 1969)
https://books.google.com/…

The Salt Lake Tribune
(Salt Lake City, Utah)
-Sept 23, 1915
http://newspaperarchive.com/…

IMAGES
Orrin N Hilton
http://darrow.law.umn.edu/…
Virginia Snow Stephen
http://troydwilliams.com/…
His Excellency, W. A. F. Ekengren,
Minister to the United States
http://books.google.com/…

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`
Joe Hill – The Dubliners

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`

The main speaker at the meeting was Frank J. Hayes, Vice-President of the United Mine Workers of America, with whom Lawson served on the strikers’ Policy Committee during the strike. The Mount Carmel Item described the speech by Hayes:

Then Mr. Hayes told how the mine owners imported 700 gun-men to break the strike, of how they started the trouble by shooting into the tent colonies established by the strikers who had been ejected from company houses. He told dramatically of the shooting or murdering of thirty-eight men, women and children, and not one indictment had been brought against the mine owners.Lawson was indicted for the killing of John Nimo, a mine guard, who was shot down in an open battle between miners and mine guards. Lawson was not within several miles of the scene, but he was indicted because he was in charge of the Ludlow tent colony, and they trumped up a charge that he was responsible for all the acts of the colony.

According to the Item, Hayes recited his poem “The Women and Children of Ludlow,” which was written shortly after the Ludlow Massacre and has since been published in various labor journals:

The Women and Children of Ludlow by Frank J. Hayes(John D. Rockefeller, Jr., testifying before the congressional committee, investigating the Colorado strike, when asked if he approved of the use of machine-guns and paid gunmen to break the strike, even though scores of people were murdered, replied:  “My conscience acquits me.”)

Your conscience acquits you-but how make reply
And speak now of justice, with eyes to the sky,
When there in the ashes their torn bodies lie,
The women and children of Ludlow?
How look on their faces, their blood-matted hair,
Their charred, blackened bodies all swollen and bare,
And the babes on their bosoms thy fiends murdered there,
The women and children of Ludlow?Your conscience acquits you-but what of the dead!
O!  what of the murdered-they asked you for bread;
They begged you for freedom and you gave them lead,
The women and children of Ludlow.
They sought but a chance for their husbands and sons,
A future more kindly for their little ones-
Your conscience acquits you-yet slaughtered with guns
The women and children of Ludlow.

Your conscience acquits you-go look where they died;
Go look where they perished, ay, pleaded and cried-
The mothers, the children, the babes crucified.
The women and children of Ludlow.
And then tell the God you profess to adore,
O!  then tell the Master, your hands red with gore,
Your conscience acquits you-though slaughtered the poor,
The women and children of Ludlow.

From the Mount Carmel Item of September 25, 1915

REMARKABLE DEMONSTRATION BY OUR CITIZENS
IN BEHALF OF FORMER TOWNSMAN LAWSON
—–

Mount Carmel, in a great mass meeting held last night, voiced a mighty protest against the mistrial and conviction of former townsman John R. Lawson, now serving life sentence in a Colorado prison for a crime he never committed. It was such a demonstration as the region has never witnessed, joined in not only by mine workers, but by the business and professional men of the town and region, by the clergy, by public officials, and by citizens, men and women and children, of every walk in life. It was a demonstration that when he hears of it, will make glad the heart of our town boy; and it will, we all hope, do much toward influencing the courts and executives of Colorado so that they will grant him a fair and impartial trial and the acquittal that will be sure to follow,Mount Carmel people who knew Lawson when he lived here, who played with him as a boy and who went to school with him, have followed with closest interest every detail of the “legal” crime that railroads him to prison; but it remained for Frank J. Hayes, International Vice President of the United Mine Workers of America, to tell us the real story from the view-point of a personal observer. And when, at the conclusion of his masterly address last night, a resolution was read condemning the trial and asking for another hearing, it was adopted by unanimous vote of the thousands assembled.

News that Mount Carmel citizens proposed to hold a great mass meeting in the interests of John R. Lawson was heralded far and wide, and brought to our town distinguished men from all sections. When Mr. Hayes was told of the movement he at once notified the committee of Mine Workers, headed by William Callagy that he would be glad to come here and tell of his personal knowledge of the case.

The committee worked faithfully, they arranged a most elaborate affair, and the entire demonstration was so pronounced a success that they are today receiving the unstinted praise of everybody.

Officials Arrive.International Vice President Hayes arrived in town from Indianapolis on the 3:15 Pennsylvania train yesterday afternoon, and established head-quarters at the National Hotel. Among the prominent men in the Union who also came to town were the following:

District President James Mathews, of Mahanoy City; District Secretary James McAndrew; District Vice President John Strambo; International Board Member Martin Nash; District Organizer Stany Gogosis; National Organizer Victor Marietta; District Organizer Thomas Davis of Williamstown; National Organizer David Davis; National Organizer Henry Loguski; National Board Member George Litman of New Philadelphia; District Organizer George Henry of Tower City; National Organizer William Callagy of Centralia; National Organizer Michael McGrath of Lost Creek; and District Organizer Albert Ferlani of Mahanoy City.

The ParadeThe parade was well planned, it was an unusually large and imposing pageant, and it moved like clock-work. Promptly at 7:00 o’clock the Sayre colliery whistle sounded the signal and the parade moved, headed by Chief Marshal W. H. Deitrich and aides, William Gable and John Cranage.

After the American Flag came the General Committee, on foot, and the Mount Carmel Band. Then came a string of twenty-six automobiles, carrying the distinguished visitors, speakers, Chief Burgess, Chief of Police, Councilmen, borough officials and leading citizens.

The boys’ Band led the Anthracite Fire Company, followed by the American Hose Company with truck and auto chemical wagon; then the Clover Hose with the new auto truck. Next came the mail carriers of Mount Carmel, riding in an automobile, in uniform.

The Lithuanian Band headed the second division, with Marshal Richard Skelding and aides William Roseman and John Crouch. This division included the various local unions of the United Mine Workers of Mount Carmel and vicinity, Raeder’s Band heading the local contingent.

The Mass Meeting

John R Lawson with Louie Tikas during the strike.

Arriving at Town Park, the speakers were escorted to the platform erected for the occasion. William Calagy, chairman of the meeting, called for order and introduced the Rev. Arthur Willis Spooner, pastor of the First Presbyterian church, where Mr. Lawson attended Sunday School when a town boy. The reverend gentleman delivered a powerful invocation, and in his prayer asked that the day would soon come when employers and employees would make the Golden Rule the rule of life.Mr. Callagy, after thanking the committee, the bands and the people, and all who assisted in the demonstration, introduced Hon. L. S. Walter, who delivered an eloquent address. He declared that it was wonderful that a man 2000 miles away should influence such a gigantic demonstration. He said that there was justice back of this movement, or all these people would not be here. He severely arraigned the Lawson trial, which, if reports be true, was conducted by a judge, a district attorney, a sheriff and a jury all in the paid employ of the corporations.

Judge Walter declared that if Lawson were given a new trial in another and an unprejudiced jurisdiction, he would go from prison a free man, because he is not guilty. He took occasion in his address to pay a high tribute to the Union and especially to the Union organizers, whose hard task entitles them to the thanks of everybody. His remarks were given tremendous applause.

Mr. Hayes Speaks

Frank Hayes, Vice President
of the United Mine Workers of America

Frank J. Hayes, International Vice President of the Union, the man who had charge of the Colorado situation, and colleague of Lawson, was then introduced. Mr. Hayes spoke in clear, ringing voice. His splendid diction and his magnetic personality at once won his hearers, and he held their closest attention.First paying tribute to Lawson as a splendid man, he declared that he came here as the representative of 500,000 organized coal miners to discuss the so-called “Lawson case.” He told how he and Lawson and other leaders went to Colorado in 1913, how they sought a hearing with the mine owners but met with refusal, because the operators had determined to exterminate the Union. Then he told of how the strike was called, and how the men had hoped to conduct it peacefully, as no strike could be won by violence.

Then Mr. Hayes told how the mine owners imported 700 gun-men to break the strike, of how they started the trouble by shooting into the tent colonies established by the strikers who had been ejected from company houses. He told dramatically of the shooting or murdering of thirty-eight men, women and children, and not one indictment had been brought against the mine owners.

Lawson was indicted for the killing of John Nimo, a mine guard, who was shot down in an open battle between miners and mine guards. Lawson was not within several miles of the scene, but he was indicted because he was in charge of the Ludlow tent colony, and they trumped up a charge that he was responsible for all the acts of the colony.

He declared that Las Animas county was owned body and soul by the corporations. In proof he showed that although in the past 23 years over 1000 miners had been accidentally killed, not one resulted in a damage suit in favor of the miners’ families. All the court officials had been in the pay of the corporations. The Sheriff picked the jury. There was no jury box, but he drew a venire of 75 men prejudiced against Lawson, and of these the twelve worst were placed on the trial jury. Then he told of how the jury was coerced to bring in the verdict of guilty.

Mr. Hayes concluded his masterly speech by enumerating the demands of the Colorado miners, all of which were based on Colorado laws that were not being lived up to by the mine owners. He severely arraigned Rockefeller, and recited a poem that he had composed, based on Rockefeller’s expression, “My Conscience acquits me.” He was given thunderous applause.

Judge Watler then read a resolution drafted on behalf of the people of Mount Carmel and all the surrounding towns, representing 70,000 persons, condemning the Lawson verdict, and appealing to the President of the United States and the Governor of Colorado to grant a new trial. It was adopted by unanimous vote of the  great assemblage.

The next speaker was Mrs. Theodore Puitz, of Philadelphia, nee Jean Lawson, a former town girl and sister of John R. Lawson, who in a beautifully worded little speech heartily thanked the people, on behalf of the Lawson family, for their splendid demonstration for the adoption of the resolution. Mrs. Puitz was wildly applauded.

Then followed addresses by several Union officials, who spoke in the various foreign languages, bringing to a close a most remarkable demonstration.

—–[Photographs and paragraph break added.]

SOURCES

Mount Carmel Item
(Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania)
-Sept 25, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…

Machinists’ Monthly Journal, Volume 26
International Association of Machinists, 1914
https://books.google.com/…
Machinists’ Journal of June 1914
https://books.google.com/…
“Women and Children of Ludlow”
by Frank J. Hayes
https://books.google.com/…

IMAGES
1914 Strikers Policy Committee,
United Mine Workers of America
https://archive.org/…
John R Lawson at Ludlow followed by guard,
Wichita Beacon, Apr 26, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
John Lawson with Olive and Fern
from Day Book of April 23, 1915
http://www.newspapers.com/…
John R Lawson with Louie Tikas during the strike.
http://ludlowsymposium.wordpress.com/…
Frank Hayes of the United Mine Workers of America
http://en.wikipedia.org/…_(unionist)

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We’re Coming Colorado-John McCutcheon

We are fighting for our rights, boys,
We are fighting for our homes,
Shouting the battle cry of union;
Men have died to win the struggle;
They’ve died to set us free,
Shouting the battle cry of union.

The Union forever, hurrah boys, hurrah!
Down with the gunthugs, and up with the law;
For we’re coming, Colorado, we’re coming all the way,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Union.
-Frank Hayes

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TRY TO SEE WILSON IN
HILLSTROM CASE
—–

Mrs. Cram and Miss Flynn,
in Quest of Reprieve,
Fail to Reach President.
—–
NOT IN HIS JURISDICTION
—–
Salt Lake Prepares to Suppress
Possible Outbreaks on Day
of Hobo Poet’s Execution

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29.-Mrs. J. Sargeant Cram and Miss Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of New York, an organizer of the Industrial Workers of the World, called at the White House today, in behalf of Joseph Hillstrom, who is sentenced to be executed in Salt Lake on Oct. 1, but were told by Secretary Tumulty that the President had no power in State murder cases.

Tonight Mrs. Cram and Miss Flynn saw Acting Secretary Frank L. Polk of the State Department and asked him to assist them. Mr. Polk promised to forward the representations made by the Swedish Minister to Governor Spry of Utah, who alone stands between Hillstrom and death. Hillstrom is a Swedish subject.

The women said they had become convinced that Hillstrom had not had a fair hearing, and that they were asking for a reprieve in order that he might have another trial. Hillstrom, who is an active member of the I. W. W., was convicted of having killed a grocer in Utah two years ago.

[Photograph added.]

There is little hope left that the Governor of Utah will be persuaded to grant Fellow Worker Joe Hill a reprieve. Preparations are now under way at the Utah State Prison for the Rebel Songwriter to be shot to death tomorrow morning. However, the Minister of Sweden, W. A. F. Ekengren, continues unabated in his efforts to win a reprieve for his countryman, and has emphasized his opinion that Joe Hill did not get a fair trial.

The New York Times
(New York, New York)
-Sept 30, 1915
http://query.nytimes.com/…

Joe Hill
-by Gibbs M. Smith
Gibbs M Smith Inc, 1984
(copyright 1969)
https://books.google.com/…

IMAGE
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
http://dp.la/…

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                                                                                                    Utah State Prison,
Sept. 30, 1915
Sam Murray, 3345 17th St.,
Frisco, Calif.
Friend and Fellow Worker;

Well, Sam, I received your letter, but you shouldn’t feel so sentimental about it. This dying business is not quiet so bad as it is cracked up to be. I have always said “a new trial or die trying,” and I’ll show that I meant it. I was moved to another cell last night and have an armed guard in front of my cell. I was also given a swell feed for the first time in God knows how long, and that is one of the surest signs.     Well, Sam, you and me had a little pleasure at one time that few rebels have had the privilege of having, and I guess I’ve had my share of the fun after all. Now, just forget me, and say good-bye to the bunch.

Yours for the OBU,

Joe Hill.

P. S. Sent a letter to Caroline.

[Photograph added.]

Joe Hill to Oscar W Larson (translated from Swedish):

                                                                                                 Utah State Prison,
Sept. 30 ’15Oscar W. Larson box 148, Sandy Utah
Dear comrade–

I have received your welcome letter. The Swedish Consul has told me that you are much trouble in regard to me but you must not be so. I am sure that you understand my position. I have always said that I shall have a new trial because I know that I have the right to one. What has been said has been said. I have said it to my friends, it has been in the newspapers, and a man must stand by his word. I am right, and, as they say in Old Sweden, “I will not budge an inch. I’d rather burst” even though I burst.     Biography do you say? No! We shall not ruin the fine letter paper in writing such trash–The only time that exists for me is the present. I am a “citizen of the world” and I was born on a planet called the Earth. On which side or edge of this planet I first saw the light means so little that it is not worth talking about. The song and the “Girl” that I like the best of my own is “The Rebel Girl” and the one that comes after that as my favorite is “Old Man Noah.”

I do not have much to say about my own person. I shall only say that I have always tried to do the little that I could to advance Freedom’s Banner a little closer to its goal. I had too one time the great honor of struggling on the battlefield under the Red Flag and I must admit that I am proud of it–I shall now close with an affectionate and comradely greeting to all Swedish revolutionists and Verdantists.

I have been and am
yours for Freedom & Brotherhood

Joe Hill

[Photograph added.]

Joe Hill to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn:

Utah State Prison Sept. 30-15
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn 511 E. 134th St.
New York City NY.
Dear Friend & F.W.Well Gurley I guess I am off for the great unknown to-morrow morning. I have said that I’d have a trial or die trying. They can kill me I know, but they can never make me “eat my own crow.” I consider my self lucky anyway because I have manged to get some of the facts out, but not all of them by any means. Well I had the pleasure to fight under The Red Flag once, any way, so I guess I’ve had my share of the fun. I would like to kiss you Good-bye Gurley, not because you are a girl but because you are the original Rebel girl.

Good Bye. Yours for the O.B.U. Joe Hill

[Photograph added.]

IMAGES
Joe Hill
http://www.freedomarchives.org/…
The Rebel Girl, Joe Hill, Sheet Music
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/…
Joe Hill
http://en.wikipedia.org/…
Joe Hill to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,
Sept 30, 1915
https://www.flickr.com/…

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The Rebel Girl – Cathy Richardson

IMAGE
The Rebel Girl, sheet music:
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/…

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