Don’t worry, Fellow Worker,
all we’re going to need
from now on is guts.
-Frank Little
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Hellraisers Journal, Monday August 12, 1918
Chicago, Illinois – Defendants Honor Frank Little
Report on the Chicago I. W. W. Trial from Harrison George:
Trial Notes: Thursday August 1, 1918
9 A. M. on August 1 every defendant appeared, wearing upon his breast two strips of silk ribbon, red and black, attached to a small button bearing the picture of Frank H. Little, and upon which were inscribed the words, “Remember August 1, 1917.” This anniversal tribute to the memory of our murdered fellow worker aroused no small comment among the deputies and court attaches.
The first witness on that day was C. O. Carlson of Minot, North Dakota, who had hired I. W. W. threshing crews season after season without having anything horrible happen to either himself or the machinery. Charles W. Westphal of Outlook, Montana, who followed him, told much the same story. Westphal farms1,400 acres of land in co-operation with three brothers. When asked how ranchers’ crops would get along without migratory workers, he said, “I don’t know; that’s a question I couldn’t answer.” Westphal said he always hired all the organized men he could get.
“How do you know they are organized in the I. W. W.?” asked [Prosecutor] Porter.
“Because I always demand their red cards,” was the reply.
“Now, you have found that this country has given you an opportunity,” challenged Porter. “You have a ranch, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” replied Westphal, “I have a ranch, but if I was to sell out, I doubt if I’d come out as well as I went in.”
Defense Attorney W. B. Cleary examined the next witness, Fred Brown of Bisbee, Arizona. Brown is a pleasant-mannered young man, 30 years old, according to his statement.
Cleary: Are you an I. W. W.?
A. I am not.
Q. Have you ever been called an I. W. W.?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Do you belong to any union?
A. American Federation of Labor.
Q. Hold any position in the A. F. of L.?
A. I am District Organizer for the Warren District.
Q. Is that where Bisbee is located?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. In Cochise County, Arizona?
A. Yes, Sir.
Q. What craft union do you belong to?
A. Retail Clerks’ Protective Association.
Q. What office do you hold in that union?
A. President.
Q. Had you been active in organizing the clerks in the Warren mining district?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Did the A. F. of L. unions have any district organization?
A. The Warren District Trades Assembly.
Q. And did you hold any official position in that body?
A. Recording Secretary.
Q. So you held three positions in the A. F. of L.?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. How many unions were there in Bisbee, of miners?
A. The Western Federation and the I. W. W.
Q. Did the I. W. W. have any representation on the Warren District Trades Assembly?
A. It did not.
Q. Do you remember whether or not the Warren District Trades Assembly endorsed the strike in the mines?
A. I remember it did.
Q. So that it was not altogether a strike of the I. W. W., but of the Trades Assembly, of the A. F. of L. unions as well, that worked in the mines?
A. That is right.
Q. Did you have anything to do with the calling of that strike?
A. Nothing whatever.
Q. Were you in Bisbee on the 12th of July 1917?
A. I was.
Q. What happened to you?
A. I was deported.
Q. Who deported you?
A. Members of the Loyalty League, composed of business men and mining company officials.
Q. When did you come back?
A. On the 31st day of August.
Q. What happened to you?
A. I was arrested and kept in a little house out of town about ten miles all night.
Q. Did you inform them that you had come back to be examined for the draft?
A. I showed them my call.
Q. Did that save you from arrest?
A. It did not.
Q. What position did you hold in the deportation camp at Columbus, New Mexico?
A. I looked after the mail.
Q. Do you know the number of men who were deported that were I. W. W.?
A. Four hundred and twenty-six.
Q. How many belonged to the A. F. of L. unions?
A. Three hundred and eighty-one.
Q. How many belonged to no unions at all?
A. Three hundred and sixty-one.
Q. Was there a charge filed against you when you returned ?
A. Charged with being a vagrant on or about July 11.
Q. On July 11 what was your occupation, if any?
A. I was business agent for the Carpenters and Painters.
Q. You were on salary from the A. F. Of L.?
A. I was.
Q. Did you know any of the I. W. W. members who had registered under the draft law?
A. At least fifty.
Q. Did you know any of them that came back to Bisbee to be examined under the registration law?
A. I know a few, yes.
Q. And what was done to them?
A. Some of them were kept in jail a few days; some for a few hours, and eventually chased out of town. One man I know of came in there and they kept him five days and then gave him sentence on the county road for ninety days for vagrancy.
Q. Do you recall his name?
A. Peter Kundrak.
Q. Did Peter Kundrak serve his time?
A. He did; he served one day over.
Q. What happened to your case?
A. They kept postponing the trial and then finally dismissed it.Brown told what he knew of the murder of James Brew. Brew had been killed by gunmen who accompanied Deputy Oscar McRae when McRae was killed by Brew while breaking down the door of Brew’s room where he and his wife were sleeping, the intention of the gunmen being to drag Brew from his home for deportation on the 12th of July.
Jack Gillett of Jerome, Arizona, told of the deportation of about seventy men from that town on the 10th of July, 1917, two days before the Bisbee outrage.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
Trial Notes: Friday August 2, 1918
E. J. McCosham, defendant, whose name on the indictment was given as Herbert McCutcheon, said McCutcheon was another fellow and not an alias of his own. McCosham, once an officer of the W. F. of M., is a miner of long experience and a possesor of a technical education. As he sat in the witness chair he reeled off with amazing ease, from memory, a list of facts, figures and statistics in regard to the mining industry, causing even the prosecutors to sit in wide-eyed astonishment at the erudition of this “hobo miner” who spoke with such ease and polish.
Speaking of the production of copper, McCosham, who testified on August 2, said:
Now then, 217½ pounds of copper per man per day, selling at 27½ cents brings in the neighborhood of fifty odd dollars. As by-products in silver and gold, they produced a million two hundred and some odd thousand ounces of silver, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 29,100 ounces of gold. That brought the total value of the product up to $63 per man per day.
Now the cost of production amounted to, per man, per day, in the neighborhood of $14. Deducting the $14 from the $63, you have a net profit of $49 per man per day.
Now, these were the profits they were making, and the men, on the other hand, had been receiving, pre-war, in the neighborhood of $3.50. All the cost of living, clothing and shelter had gone up about 80 or 85 per cent. Naturally, the men wished to receive a wage sufficient to cover the increased cost of living. So they demanded what? Six dollars. Six dollars would not quite cover it, but they would be satisfied. We said here: “These people are making this enormous profit; they are using the war to enrich themselves, and yet they are saying we are anti-patriotic; that they are patriots.” So the men said: “Well, if they wish to buy our labor power, we will sell this labor power on these conditions: Buy this labor power from us if you want to; if you don’t want to, then don’t blame us for closing down the mines. We are not closing them down. You are the fellows who are going to close them up.”
Speaking of company control in Arizona, McCosham said:
They hold complete power practically over life and death. There is no liberty. Liberty does not exist down there. The best proof in the world is that federal officers, men holding office today, are men who have taken part in these deportations. They determined who the officers shall be, federal officers and local officers.
They have the right to go ahead and make 300 or 400 per cent profit; we have not any right to live. We must eat what they tell us to eat; work the hours they tell us to work. The mine owners closed the mines; the men remained on strike. They did not use any violence. But the mine owners immediately got their private army together, their private, paid army. Can you beat that? In a free country, an army of men, remember, owned and controlled by a few individuals, having the right of life and death over other men! And they will shoot when told to do so. Didn’t they shoot? I assure you they did: in the first strike killing one, and wounding two others. No man was arrested for that murder. Was any man arrested in these different camps when men were shot down in cold blood? No! Nobody was arrested, and nobody will ever be arrested. The only weapon the workers have is the industrial weapon; the only thing they can do is simply to strike.
Continuing, McCosham told of how he and other miners were deported from Jerome, Arizona.
On the morning of the 10th of July, Mike Mutich, a man who spent seven years in Folsom penitentiary, approached my bed with two guns and a sap; along-side him two other individuals, in my room, and told me to get up. I was led down to the street. There was an army of some fifty or sixty on either side of the street, and I was marched up to the jail. I remained in jail until the number added reached 135 or 150. We were taken from the jail to the office of the United Verde Copper Company. Some officials of the company, the mayor of the town, picked out a few and we were marched onto this train of stock cars. Under guard of thirty-five or forty individuals armed with Winchesters, we proceeded to the railway junction. At the junction we detrained and waited the coming of the passenger train. When the train arrived we were forced in, and then a guard of twelve to fifteen was put over us. The one in charge of this guard was H. Carlson, who was a Deputy U. S. Marshal, and Robertson, an under-sheriff of Yavapai County. Carlson, apparently, was the one in charge, and Robertson was second in command. We were taken then to Needles, California.
Not allowed to detrain in California by authorities, who forced them back across the Arizona line, the little group of exiles, who were neither fed nor given water for two days while traveling back and forth in the blazing heat of the desert, finally broke up at Kingman, Arizona.
[Roots in Karl Marx]
Charles Rothfisher, defendant editor of the Hungarian I. W. W. paper, together with some supporting witness, gave some important and interesting testimony. Rothfisher had translated many of Marx’ writings into English and used them in the paper and Vanderveer sought to reveal the fact that Marx was persona non grata with Germany’s rulers. Nebeker, of course, objected, and Landis asked of Vanderveer: “Just what is the materiality of Karl Marx’ philosophy?”
“I don’t know,” said Vanderveer. “Your Honor could learn better from counsel. It was he who dragged Karl Marx into the case; it was he who suggested that he was a German; and it was he who called him a cesspool of political and economic thought; and it was he who said we had our roots in Karl Marx; and it was he who has time and again suggested by inuendo that we were borrowing pro-German philosophy from Karl Marx.”
He continued: “Now, this case has involved what the organization, apart from the individual, stands for; and the one way of finding out is to deal directly with the source of its inspiration—Karl Marx. We do not deny that.”
“Well,” spoke the judge, “for whatever it is worth in this case, you may assume as a fact in this case—I am not holding that it is material or that it amounts to anything—that Karl Marx was not acceptable to the ruling, dominating classes in Germany; would not be today, if that satisfies you.”
Vanderveer, turning to the prosecutor, demanded: “Does that satisfy you, Mr. Nebeker?”
With a sick look on his face, which belied his acceptance, Nebeker said, “Entirely so.”
“Then it satisfies me,” said Vanderveer, smiling, as he resumed examination.
At great length Rothfisher told of how the I. W. W. Hungarian paper was the first publication in America to expose the plottings of the Austrian ambassador, Dumba, to incite strikes of Austro-Hungarian workers in war industries in the United States previous to 1917. Rothfisher had been sent out on a lecture tour by the I. W. W. early in the war to oppose the sale of Austrian war bonds and the calling home of Austrian reservists by agents of Ambassador Dumba. Before 1917, Rothfisher had written in the paper, copies of which were introduced, that: “Blame rests upon the German people, too, as well as upon the Junkers, for their slavish minds.” Also: “The common enemy is the militaristic system of Prussia.”
In attacking Ambassador Dumba, Rothfisher had written one article headed: “His Excellency, the Strike Leader.” All this opposition to Austrian plots had led to clashes between those who intrigued with corrupt officialdom at Washington and the Hungarian I. W. W. paper, which was suppressed at the instance of the intriguers. One of these was the notorious William Wurms, and another named Baracs, who, though an Austrian spy agent, was, and is an employee of the United States Department of Justice.
Vanderveer: Did the I. W. W. one time have a controversy with some manufacturer in Toledo, was it, or Cleveland?
A. Yes, he was a man that was several times in Cleveland with the Theodore Koontz factory.
Q. Who was the secretary of this Theodore Koontz?
A. A man named Baracs.
Q. Did he have any connection with this matter (of inciting strikes)?
A. Well, Baracs is secretary of Theodore Koontz, “the father of the American Hungarians,” as the Minister of Interior calls him in Hungary.
Q. So that in this propaganda which you were carrying on and lectures you delivered opposing the return of reservists to Hungary you were opposed by this man?
A. You bet!
Q. What was his connection with the Department of Justice of the United States?
A. As far as I know, he was a secret service man.But for the silence of the kept press upon this testimony of Rothfisher, these men, who play the dual role of Austro-German spy and patriotic American officials of the U. S. Department of Justice, would suffer the expose Rothfisher predicted in 1917 for those who “stand close to the trustees of the Kaiser in the United States and persecute the I. W. W. to make themselves secure.” Rothfisher’s testimony was corroborated by Louis Tarcai and another Hungarian witness.
The next witness, a defendant, William Moran, a big taciturn lumberjack whose sole offense was that he held a job as secretary of branch unions at Spokane, told of his birth in Australia and his life as a worker. Moran exposed the nasty work of Nebeker, who, during the presentation of its side, had read a resolution from the records of a Spokane business meeting which in the record said it was “moved and seconded that we abolish the word ‘Wobblie’ in the United States,” but which Nebeker had twisted into the laughable ambiguity “that we abolish the United States.”
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCE
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 164: Thur Aug 1, 1918
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?view=image;size=100;id=umn.31951d01368761a;page=root;seq=166
Page 168: Fri Aug 2, 1918
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?view=image;size=100;id=umn.31951d01368761a;page=root;seq=170
Note:
First ad I can find for this book:
Butte Daily Bulletin -page 3
-Mar 5, 1919
https://www.newspapers.com/image/176048912/
IMAGE
Remember Frank Little Button, see HG IWW Trial, Aug 1, 1918
Note: sold at auction for $569.25, hope whoever bought it displays with honor for our martyred fellow worker.
https://www.hakes.com/Auction/ItemDetail/82565/MEMORIAL-BUTTON-FROM-1917-FOR-IWW-LEADER-FRANK-LITTLE-LYNCHING-VICTIM
See also:
WE NEVER FORGET Frank Little
Who Gave His Life in Freedom’s Cause at Butte, Montana on August 1, 1917
Tag: Bisbee Deportation of 1917
https://weneverforget.org/tag/bisbee-deportation-of-1917/
Tag: Jerome Deportation of 1917
https://weneverforget.org/tag/jerome-deportation-of-1917/
Tag: Great Northwestern General Lumber Strike of 1917
https://weneverforget.org/tag/great-northwestern-general-lumber-strike-of-1917/
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