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Hellraisers Journal – Monday January 4, 1909
Five Patriots Illegally Imprisoned in American Jails
With a banner headline and a wide column down the center of the front page of this weeks’s Appeal to Reason, Eugene V. Debs calls for the rescue of the Mexican and Russian patriots now held for deportation by American authorities at the behest of foreign tyrants.
From the Appeal to Reason for January 2, 1909:
RESCUE THE REFUGEES
By EUGENE V. DEBS.
When Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian revolutionist, refugee from his native land for attempting to overthrow its government, reached the United States, in 1851, he was received as the “distinguished Hungarian patriot” by President Fillmore, hailed as another Washington by the American congress and welcomed by the American people amidst demonstrations of the wildest enthusiasm. He was a rebel and a revolutionist and before making his escape had been condemned for “treason” and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment “on account of taking a position favorable to six patriots who had been illegally imprisoned.”
Five patriots are now illegally imprisoned, not in Hungary, but in United States; not for committing crimes, but for resisting tyranny in their native lands, as Kossuth had done before them.
Flores Magon, Antonio I. Villarreal and Librado Rivera, Mexican patriots, are in jail in Los Angeles. Jan Pouren and Christian Rudowitz, Russian revolutionists, are in jail in New York and Chicago, respectively.
Magon was the president, Villarreal the secretary and Rivera one of the speakers of the Junta of the Mexican liberal party. All three are educated men and liberty-loving patriots. They opposed the Diaz despotism, which masquerades as a “republic,” were marked for vengeance and fled to the United States. Here they were dogged by detectives, thrown into prison on trumped-up charges and about to be returned to the Mexican government to be shot for treason when the Socialists started the agitation which delayed their extradition. The Mexican authorities are determined that these patriots shall not escape them.
Jan Pouren and Christian Rudowitz participated in the Russian revolution three years ago and were compelled to flee for their lives. They came to the United States, tracked hither by the hounds of the czar, were arrested at the instance of the Russian authorities and now await extradition.
The crime charged against these five men is of purely a political nature and not subject to extradition under the treaties and laws of the United States. They are criminals in precisely the same sense in which Paine, Franklin, Jefferson, Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale were criminals in 1776.
Magon, Villarreal, Rivera, Pouren and Rudowitz are patriots in the loftiest sense, doing, or trying to do, for their respective countries what the men of ’76 did for the American colonies. For this they deserve to be honored as men instead of being jailed as felons.
A few years ago such an outrage would not have been attempted. It ought not to be possible now. It is an insult to every American citizen. Every one of us should blush with shame for it.
Think of these Russian and Mexican assassins being allowed to hunt down their victims in the very heart of this boasted land of freedom, this asylum for the oppressed of all nations!
Think of Uncle Sam as the blood hound and wearing the collar of Diaz of Mexico and Nicholas of Russia! Shades of Sam Adams and Ethan Allen!
Thousands of the bravest and best of this country’s citizens came to these shores as refugees and exiles from European countries and were welcomed as heroes and honored as patriots. Today their children and grandchildren witness with supine indifference the spectacle of other refugees being throttled at our once hospitable doors and thrown into prison as criminals.
It is only within the last few years that such an affront to the most sacred of American traditions would have been tolerated-only since the advent of the American plutocracy and its grip upon Russian bonds and Mexican concessions. This accounts for Root’s obsequious visit to Diaz and Taft’s servile pilgrimage to Nicholas, exhibitions of American degeneracy revolting to the last degree.
What has become of our boasted republic and its treasured memories of the revolution? What of its traditional contempt for tyranny and love of freedom?
The five political prisoners now held by order of the Mexican and Russian despots are modern Kossuths imbued with the spirit of patriotism and fired with the passion for freedom, and in this country, of all others, unless it has taken its place among the despotisms of the earth, they should be received with wide-open arms and the blood-hounds on their track forbidden to cross the border.
Would the Austria-Hungarian government have dared to pursue Kossuth to the United States in 1851 and demand his extradition?
For the very reason that he was a rebel against tyranny and charged with treason by a despot he was officially welcomed by the American government and honored as few men have been by the American people.
Less than sixty years later this same American government arrests and imprisons the Kossuths who flee to its shores for shelter and security and delivers them in cold blood to their tyrant executioners.
Oh, what a change in three score years! When Kossuth came the love of freedom and the bravery to fight for it won for him a hero’s crown and the plaudits of the nation. When Magon and Rudowitz and their compatriots came their love of liberty and patriotism won for them felons’ fetters and today they sit in prison cells in contemplation of the star spangled banner and the land of the free.
The asylum provided by our revolutionary sires has been converted into a prison fortress and patriotism has degenerated into a crime.
Can any self-respecting American citizen look these brave men, these great souls, these confiding refugees in the face, even in fancy, without blushing scarlet with humiliation and shame?
What would James Otis and Patrick Henry say to see these liberty-loving and self-sacrificing spirits in American jails, guarded by Mexican and Russian blood-hounds! Their eyes would again flash fire as they launched the thunderbolts of their wrath upon the despotism of the tyrant and the degeneracy of the people.
But these are the days of Rockefeller, not Jefferson; Morgan, not Paine; Carnegie, not Kosciusko.
The bureaucracy which rules Russia and the plutocracy which rules the United States are the same in spirit and there is no material difference between Nicholas, Diaz and Roosevelt.
That is why Russian and Mexican patriots lie festering in American jails.
So far as the authorities are concerned they are doomed. “Foote” acted for the whole plutocratic body. Back to hell is the verdict. The bloody czar gruffly demands it and Uncle Sam meekly grants it.
A storm of indignation ought to sweep these states and reversed that damnable verdict. It is a crime against patriotism and an insult to American manhood. It outrages decency and spits in the face of self-respect.
Every hour these comrades of ours who sought safety at our doors from the hounds of hell lie in our jails is an eternal disgrace to us all. We can never atone to them nor excuse ourselves to our own consciences.
Let us rise all over this nation and demand the liberation, immediate and unconditional, of these patriotic refugees. Let us at once call mass meetings in every state of the union to resent this flagrant insult and remove this foul blot from the honor of the American people.
Let us resolve that the right of asylum shall be preserved and that refugees from tyranny shall be so welcome here that no foreign blood-hound will dare to track them on American soil.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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SOURCE
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Jan 2, 1909
https://www.newspapers.com/image/67587584/
IMAGE
Villareal, Magon, Rivera, Barbarous MX p273, 3rd ed 1911
https://archive.org/stream/barbarousmexico00turnuoft#page/272/mode/2up
See also:
Tag: Mexican Revolutionaries
https://weneverforget.org/tag/mexican-revolutionaries/
The Rudowitz Extradition Case by Frederick C. Giffin
IL, 1982
http://moses.law.umn.edu/darrow/documents/Rudowitz_Extradition_Case_Journal%20ofthe%20Illinois%20State%20Historical%20Society.pdf
The case of Jan Janoff Pouren, a political refugee from Russia: held over a year in an American prison by demand of the Czar.
NY, 1909
http://lawcollections.library.cornell.edu/trials/catalog/sat:3801_5
Louis Kossuth
https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/austria-and-hungary-history-biographies/louis-kossuth
Russian Revolution 1905
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution
Barbarous Mexico by John Kenneth Turner
Cassell, 1912
https://books.google.com/books?id=gjbZAAAAMAAJ
re Elihu Root
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=gjbZAAAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA271
New York Times of Dec 4, 1907
https://www.nytimes.com/1907/12/04/archives/no-secret-mission-to-czar-says-taft-in-st-petersburg-speech-he.html
NO SECRET MISSION TO CZAR, SAYS TAFT; In St. Petersburg Speech He Denies Rumors That Have Made Europe Anxious. EXPECTS NO EASTERN WAR He is Warmly Welcomed at the Duma and Will Meet the Russian Emperor To-day.
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Corrido a Flores Magón – Nacho Cárdenas