Hellraisers Journal: “Barbarous Spokane” by Fred W. Heslewood from the International Socialist Review, Part I

Quote Sheep Herder Anderson re Spk FSF, ISR p712, Feb 1910 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday February 1, 1910
Spokane, Washington – Battleground of Great Fight for Free Speech

From the International Socialist Review of February 1910:

Barbarous Spokane
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By Fred W. Heslewood.
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[Part I of II]

OT Mexico, but Spokane—the battleground of the greatest fight for Free Speech, Free Press, and Public Assemblage in America.

Where over four hundred men and women of the ranks of labor, using the weapons of Passive Resistance, are pitted against the law of brutality, tyranny, oppression and greed. Where the ancient methods of torture are being used to subdue the workers, who wish to safeguard the weapons of the dispropertied, disfranchised—yes, disinherited class. Where truth is crushed to earth, and where a lie is a wholesome morsel, and is relished by the arrogant and ignorant who do not want the truth. The truth hurts. It is a two-edged sword. It must be driven to the hilt. The people must be torn from their lethargy and made to realize that the boasted liberties of this country are fast being taken away.

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Yes, with such rapidity that it will not be surprising to many to awake some morning and find no papers but the subsidized press, representing the economic interests of the master class; the workers barred from every street, and every public hall. We will converse in whispers, and meet with a chosen few in some back room or in the cellar, to talk over our miseries, and the glorious days of old when we could go on the public street and expose the robbing methods of the agents of the master class (the employment sharks), tell the workers how they were being daily robbed; tell them also how to organize to overthrow the existing order of things; how labor creates all wealth, and has nothing; and those that do nothing have every thing.

Will such days come in America? They are dream days now in Spokane, and Spokane is in America.

With our paper confiscated by the police, who, when asked, why such action, replied: “Well, we have them and that is answer enough.” With our own hall, where the rent was well paid in advance, closed by the police, and every hall in the city locked against us; our money being no good; with every street where the workers congregate, closed against free speech; with the officers and editors wearing ball and chain; with the capitalist lying press, free to pour out its damnable lies against our members and our organization; to brand the helpless victims of the masters as criminals, vags., hoboes, etc.; where men meet in groups and bitter mumblings can be heard, while the fat, sleek and well fed profit monger revels in his “filchings from labor” on Canon hill, while those who made him rich are lying on the bare floor in a jail, slowly starving; their emaciated bodies which try to rise, after 30 days of torture, and which would soften the heart of a Nero to behold; stripped of everything but their revolutionary ideas (the one thing the masters want to take but have failed); such are conditions in Spokane.

You may say I draw on my imagination; that I exaggerate; that we want sympathy. That such conditions do not exist in Free America. I say in answer that the conditions cannot be exaggerated. The sufferings cannot be told. The human language cannot express it. This periodical would be suppressed for using obscene language if all was told. The truth is hell. There is no need to lie. Newspaper reporters have described conditions among the prisoners as frightful in the extreme.

One young reporter for the Evening Chronicle (the twin sister of the Morning Liar), the Spokesman Review, stated over his own signature, “If men had murdered my own mother, I could not see them tortured as I saw the I. W. W. men tortured in the city jail.” Yet their crime consists of speaking on the street. Some did not speak. Scarcely any got more than “Fellow Workers” out of their mouths. The judge asked one young fellow if he was speaking on the street, and he replied, “No.” The judge then asked him if he intended to speak. He replied, “Yes.” Thirty days and $100. Next”! replied the judge.

One hundred and three got this dose the first day in a court of justice (?) and then the long fight to maintain life on less than two cents’ worth of old, dry bread a day, with no bed, no blankets, alive with vermin (which infests the city jails), with brutal guards, with the steam cells where men stood in their own offal, and were crowded so tight that they could scarcely breath; yet so tight that the strength of several policemen was required to force the great, air-tight door shut against the human mass of thirty-six men. Where in three minutes of this torture, the men were wringing wet with perspiration, and in two hours they began fainting from the excessive heat, and falling on each other; where the pleadings of the men to the police were in vain; from this to ice-cold cells with windows left open.

Would you weaken, Mr. Reader? Would you only say you would renounce the I. W. W. and get free from all this torture? These men did not. Their hatred for capitalism has only increased. If they did not fully realize the power of property rights over human rights, they do so now; but they did know. They were all revolutionists against the system that makes paupers at one end and the “best people,” the millionaires, at the other.

All this suffering and torture for wanting to tell the truth on the public street—to have the same privileges as the Salvation Army. Special laws were enacted for the Salvation Army; special laws for religious organizations, and special ones for the Industrial Workers of the World.

The Salvation Army will never hurt capitalism, therefore they can tell of the love of Jesus to the slave; they can beg money and old clothes for the victims of the masters. They can tell of the downy wings and streets of gold that await those who are contented with suffering on earth. As long as the Salvation Army and the other Bible pounders don’t bother the streets of gold on earth, the boss will never object. Talk about peace on earth, but don’t shut the cruel valve on the four-inch steam pipe that is fast sapping all vitality from the men, until they fall a deadened mass.

The police are being eulogized by the big capitalist dailies, for the very humane way in which they handled the Free Speech prisoners. The Spokesman-Review especially lauds these human beasts, and says great honor is due to them, because not a blow was struck, a window broken, or a man killed. Then the editor of this capitalist spew forgets himself and in his anxiety to give the news, prints the report of Dr. O’Shea, who treated the prisoners. The following clipping is taken from the Spokesman-Review, of January 3rd:

I. W. W. SICK TREATED, 344.
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Dr. John H. O’Shea, Emergency Surgeon, Renders Report.
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The sick report of I. W. W. prisoners who were held in the city jail and attended by Emergency Physician John H. O’Shea has been completed and shows that there were 334 men on the hospital list and that Dr. O’Shea gave 1,600 treatments. None died.

Dr. O’Shea figures that if he had received the customary fee for the treatments and prescriptions he would be drawing a few thousand dollars at least from the I. W. W. The time extended over sixty days and the cases attended to were exclusive of the regular run of accidents and jail cases. As gratitude one of the “workers” sent a postal card a few days ago calling Dr. O’Shea “the horse doctor,” and only a few hours later one called him by telephone to get an affidavit in aiding them in preparing a suit against the city.

The report speaks for itself. Does it show any brutality? Who are these 334 men? What do you suppose the treatments consisted of? Nearly every man had to be sent to this horse doctor, inside of thirty days. What made them sick? The majority were men who never knew a day’s sickness in their lives; great, big, husky men from railroad camps, from tie-cutting camps, and from lumber woods; men who have always had to eat the coarsest food and take the hardest knocks in life. Many men came straight from the logging camps in Montana, Idaho, and Puget Sound. Some of the men from the coast, that the writer is acquainted with, threw down their tools, called for their time, and went to Spokane to fight for Freedom of Speech.

They were skilled men, drawing the highest wages in the camp. They deposited over $1,400 with the union secretaries, before going on the street to speak, leaving instructions to use every cent of it if necessary.

[Emphasis and paragraph breaks added.]