“Yaas,” said the farmer reflectively,
“all the I.W.W. fellers I’ve met
seemed to be pretty decent lads,
but them ‘alleged I.W.W.’s’ must be holy frights.”
-Little Red Songbook, 1919
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday August 11, 1918
Chicago, Illinois – J. A. McDonald on Free Speech and Freedom
Report on the Chicago I. W. W. Trial from Harrison George:
John A. McDonald, editor of the “Industrial Worker,” occupied the chair for some length of time. He told of the origin of his ideas and how his experiences in the southern timber strike had made an I. W. W. of him.
[He said:]
The experience of all thinkers in the past is that free speech is necessary to social change and to maintain freedom.
[Photograph added.]
Trial Notes: Tuesday July 30, 1918:
On the morning of July 30, Chas. Thompson and Corporal Reynolds were recalled by Vanderveer. They told the jury that when leaving the court room the day before they had been arrested and detained by Department of Justice men in the office of Hinton G. Clabaugh. Over Nebeker’s strenuous objection they told of this attempt to intimidate defense witnesses and said that other soldier witnesses might be fearful of coming to testify. It was rumored about the court that Judge Landis had told Nebeker privately that if another soldier witness would be treated that way he would dismiss the case by a directed verdict. Following this, three Finnish witnesses were called in support of Laukki’s story that the registration trouble in Minnesota was a Finnish issue solely.
Fred Jaakkola, also an editor of “Industrialisti,” and a defendant, contradicted a government witness by proving by a church certificate that he was not a “slacker,” having been born in 1885. Nebeker in a nasty-mannered examination of the big, stolid Finn, thought to get an acknowledgement that Finlanders called a “slacker” a martyr or a hero. “Slacker” had been mentioned and Nebeker said, “You know what I mean by a slacker, don’t you?” “Yes,” said Jaakkola. “By the way,” said Nebeker, “what do you Finns call a slacker?’” “We call it ‘Vitkastelija,’” replied Jaakkola, and everybody laughed. And that was all the answer Nebeker got.
Jaakkola had been a miner in Butte and told of Some evasions used by miners to get a job in spite of the blacklist.
VANDERVEER: What trick did the Socialists there in Butte resort to in order to get “rustling cards?”
A. A good many tricks. One fellow there named Pinople, he said when he asked for work he used to be one of the Sullivans.
Q. One of what?
A. One of the Sullivans. He took the rustling card under the name of Sullivan, and go get work from the mine owners.
Q. Who was Sullivan?
A. Well, in Butte there are several hundred Sullivans and the mining officials don’t know who is who.
Q. Any place else they take names?
A. Well, the foreign workers went to the cemetery and looked up the accidents or some way; those names recorded that way. Then we pick up the dead man’s name and we ask for a rustling card under the dead man’s name.
Q. You would get a job on the dead man’s record?
A. Yes.It took John J. Walsh, defendant longshoreman from the Atlantic Coast, to keep the courtroom in an undignified state of continual laughter with his references to “Fellow Worker Nebeker” and other Irish pleasantries. Defense Attorney Otto Christensen examined Walsh.
CHRISTENSEN: Was there anything in your experience with craft organization that led you to believe industrial organization was the better way of coping with the labor situation?
A. Yes, sir. In 1907 in New York harbor 60,000 longshoremen were out on strike. It was nothing new to see union teamsters riding up and down the docks with cargo for scabs to handle, with a big union button in their hats; also, to see union sailors sometimes going so far that they were not satisfied with doing their work on deck, but came on the docks and down into the holds of the ships, doing the work of the longshoremen. The Marine Cooks and Stewards did the same; also, the members of the Firemen, Oilers and Watertenders’ Union.Walsh had worked at Hog Island shipyards in 1917 and told of conditions there.
The job was so rotten no man could stay any length of time. Then you went up to the pay window on Saturday night and you had to throw three aces on two deuces to get your money.
Q. What do you mean by that?
A. You had to go to thirty-eight assistant timekeepers and forty-six assistant superintendents. You see, a fellow, he would have a letter from some Congressman, and they would put him on the job for timekeeper. He couldn’t keep time in a Chinese laundry.
Q. You say you drew only one week’s pay from the I. W. W. during 1917?
A. It was from the Marine Transport Workers’ about April, I believe.
Q. You have not drawn any since?
A. No, sir. I am living under government ownership.
Q. At Philadelphia—do all the munitions and things that are shipped over to Europe, are they handled by dock workers that are I. W. W.?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Were there any accidents at all?
A. No. No accidents to the cargo, but plenty to the longshoremen. It is quite a dangerous job. Of course, that don’t count. Men are cheap.
Q. How many men are working on the docks at Philadelphia?
A. There are about 5,000 members of the I.W.W.
Q. How many of those are I. W. W. that transport munitions and supplies of war over to the other side?
A. Well, there is not a ship on the Atlantic Coast that has not got I. W. W. men in the fireroom or on deck or even in the galley. You will always find a few; sometimes you will find the whole crew I. W. W., it is nothing unusual. One example I will give you, I was on a ship in December, fixed up their I. W. W. cards for them, shook hands with the crew, and the next day I read in the paper that the ship went down.
Q. What ship was that?
A. The steamship Maryland. There were twenty-six members of the I. W. W. on it; they all went down. She was loaded up by I. W. W. longshoremen at Pier No. 16, Philadelphia.
Q. Do you know of any other members that have lost their lives in transporting war materials?
A. Quite a few ships. There was the steamer Healdon, the Antilles, the Joe Nancy. You could get more in detail from the different Secretaries.Following Walsh upon the stand was a young man who stood two crutches beside the witness chair. His name was Harry Golden and the crutches which served in lieu of one missing leg were mute witnesses to the Class War. Here before the eyes of the jury was one of Labor’s wounded soldiers, here was one whose life blood dyed the decks of the steamer Verona at Everett, Washington, on November 5, 1916. He told the story of how it happened in soft-voiced replies to Vanderveer’s questions; how an open meeting had been advertised to take place in Everett that Sunday; how the hundreds on the Verona approached the Everett docks singing and totally unaware of the volley of lead and steel that poured from the rifles of the hidden murderers gathered by the Everett Commercial Club and led by a drunken ruffian who wore the title of Sheriff. Golden had lost his leg that day at the time five more I. W. W. boys lost their lives. The lumber trust shot his leg off; now, his missing leg disqualifies Golden from service in the armed forces of the nation. Golden said that the I. W. W. had been supporting him, paying him $15.00 a week until recently, when he had asked that it be cut to $10 to allow the union that much more to carry it through the crisis of the big trial.
Fred Nelson, defendant, told the history of the Rockford demonstration against the draft. A parade had been organized and started from the Socialist Party hall. Only about fifteen of the one hundred and thirty-eight arrested at Rockford were members of the I. W. W., others were socialists, some were members of the A. F. of L. and many were only members of the Good Templars. Nelson was arrested once before upon this Rockford matter and charged with “conspiracy,” but had later been discharged by Judge Carpenter as there was “no evidence.” Yet here in Chicago he was practically being held again for the same supposed offense. The main fault that Nebeker found with Nelson was that Nelson had tried to save the life of Joe Hill, as was shown by some seized correspondence.
John Somonson, a witness from Rockford, supported Nelson in his assertion that the meeting at Rockford which gave birth to the demonstration was at the Socialist hall and that the I. W. W. had no connection with the meeting or the parade. An I. W. W. had talked at the meeting but had merely used the floor to ask workers to join the union and had then gone away and taken no part in the parade.
[Emphasis added.]
Trial Notes: Wednesday July 31, 1918:
Norval G. Marlatt, defendant, once secretary of the Railroad Workers’ Industrial Union No. 600 during his idle hours, occupied the stand July 30 and continued again on the 31st. Marlatt had been a railroad man all his life, having worked for only three roads during the period of twenty-one years. He was taken to jail last year while working as an engineer, hauling much-needed war supplies. The prosecution could find nothing to attack Marlatt upon except that he actually could not believe in the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. Very often during the trial the prosecutors spoke as though disagreement with the A. F. of L. were treason itself. Vanderveer elicited the further fact that Marlatt did believe in the Declaration of Independence.
Joseph Laukis…took the stand. He had edited the I. W. W. paper published in the Lithuanian language. The paper was published at the General Headquarters. Laukis knew Haywood well and was on friendly terms with him and others, yet neither Haywood nor anyone else had ever asked him to publish articles opposing the war; in fact, he was sure if there was any “conspiracy” he would have known of it; but there wasn’t any.
Benjamin Schraeger, defendant editor of the I. W. W. paper published in the Polish language, took the stand in his own defense. Schraeger, a fine appearing man of 32 years, has an exceptionally good command of languages. He told graphically of the causes that had moved him to volunteer his spare hours to act as editor of an I. W. W. paper. When asked what his motive was, he replied:
The motive was to bring the Polish people to what they should be. I realized the conditions under which Polish immigrants have been living in this country; that they were a detriment to the welfare of my own people and of everyone else, because they were used as a catspaw to lower wages and the standard of life of everyone else. Living conditions in the stockyards here are abominable, absolutely indescribable. I have visited them and I have always been repelled at the sight of the way they lived. In shacks, in rooms only 10 by 14 feet, and they would be living there, families of three and four, and having boarders besides. They would sleep in shifts, because the wages they were getting were never sufficient to pay the board for even a single man. Their morality is away below any human standard.
It was my own experience during the panic of 1907 and 1908, that the first child born to us died only a few weeks after its birth, due to malnutrition of his mother when I was not in a position to earn sufficient to keep her up in proper nutriment. The children of these Polish immigrants have suffered the same fate—death—the first few weeks or months of their lives, all due to slow starvation while still in their mothers’ womb. I have seen the reasons.
The Steel Trust has been sending agents all through the Slavic countries of Europe heralding what wonderful wages workers were receiving in the steel companies here; how independent they got; they were distributing posters showing pictures of beautiful residential streets, with beautiful electric lights, claiming that those were the homes of the workers for the steel companies in Gary. Showing on one side of the street a factory and on the other side of the street a beautiful bank, and a long stream of workers coming out from those factories with bags of money in their hands and going into the bank and depositing it. They have been luring these men to sell their last little bit of property to pay their trip across in steerage, and when they got here have nothing, not enough to get around, and nothing to get back.
George P. Nichols, the employer of Schraeger, told of how Schraeger at the time of his arrest, and since going out on bond furnished by Nichols himself, had been engaged as draughtsman upon railway and other equipment necessary to war work. He said Schraeger was a good workman and friend. This bore out Schraeger’s statement that the individual employer may have personal friendship for the individual employe, “but as a class it is different.” It was brought out that the Polish paper had never mentioned the war; that the prosecution had been able to find nothing that spoke of war or of anything related to war and they had read nothing from the paper to the jury. Yet the paper was published at the Chicago Headquarters and Schraeger was on friendly terms with Haywood and many others that are supposed to have started some kind of a conspiracy to put the “war on the blink.”
John A. McDonald, editor of the “Industrial Worker,” occupied the chair for some length of time. He told of the origin of his ideas and how his experiences in the southern timber strike had made an I. W. W. of him.
[He said:]
The experience of all thinkers in the past is that free speech is necessary to social change and to maintain freedom.
He denied that destruction and sabotage meant the same; only the employers used destruction, and he cited the California shipyard that was burned because it had adopted the “closed shop”; he then called attention to editorials in “The Worker” which he had written to offset the million lies about the I. W. W. “driving spikes in logs,” etc. Such things may kill workers and “the primary object of the I. W. W. is not to kill anyone, even the capitalist, but to help the workers.” A reprinted article from the Des Moines, Iowa, Tribune was read, which illustrated the fact testified to by many witnesses, that an I. W. W. was denied citizenship by many judges, the Des Moines judge being Judge O’Boyle, who said, on May 4, 1916, “No I. W. W. can get citizenship papers in my court.”
To show that others agree with the I. W. W. in its ideas of a social readjustment, McDonald read for two hours from Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom.” The opening paragraphs of the book are here given as read: “There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years ago. We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past. We have changed our economic conditions absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. Old political formulas do not fit present problems; they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age. In most parts of our country, men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as employes—in a higher or lower grade—of great corporations. If the corporation is doing things it ought not to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must obey orders, and you have often times with deep mortification to co-operate in the doing of things which you know are against public interest.”
“There was no tin box,” said McDonald, “in my office for that ‘German People letter’ to be found in,” in contradiction of a government witness.
[Emphasis added.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCES
The I.W.W. Trial
Story of the Greatest Trial in Labor’s History
by one of the Defendants
-by Harrison George
—-with introduction by A. S. Embree.
IWW, Chicago, 1919
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100663067
Page 155: Tues July 30, 1918
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?view=image;size=100;id=umn.31951d01368761a;page=root;seq=157
Page 160: Wed July 31, 1918
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?view=image;size=100;id=umn.31951d01368761a;page=root;seq=162
Note:
First ad I can find for this book:
Butte Daily Bulletin -page 3
-Mar 5, 1919
https://www.newspapers.com/image/176048912/
Little Red Songbook, 15th Edition, 1919
Page 19, quote re “them ‘alleged IWWs'”
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=vTlRAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA19
IMAGE
John A. McDonald, IWW, ISR Jan 1918
https://archive.org/stream/ISR-volume18#page/n171/mode/1up
See also:
For more on history of IWW 1905-1917:
The I. W. W.
A Study of American Syndicalism, Issue 193
-by Frederick Brissenden
Columbia University, 1920
https://books.google.com/books?id=5CRAAAAAYAAJ
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=5CRAAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA1
For story of Harry Golden on the Verona:
The Everett Massacre, by Walker C. Smith.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001106557
-Harry Golden at Tracy Trial begins on bottom of page:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002672635;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=227;num=221
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Preacher and the Slave – Utah Phillips
Lyrics by Joe Hill
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=vTlRAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA20