You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Saturday January 6, 1917
From the Mesabi Range, Minnesota, Comes News of Plea Agreement
The International Socialist Review of January 1917:
Victory on the Mesaba Range
By HARRISON GEORGE
We were all ready to go to press when the following telegram came in. We feel sure all REVIEW readers will be interested in the brief sketches that follow:
Virginia, Minn., Dec. 15, 1916.
Tresca, Scarlett, Schmidt, Mrs. Masonovitch, Orlandich, [F]reed, Phil Masonovitch, Nikich, Cernogorovich year sentence each. All cases against Gilday, Greeni, others dismissed. Full statement will follow. Funds needed here meet honor bound obligations. All committees rush balance funds on hand here. All together for freedom Everett and all class war prisoners.
Ettor, Gilday, Flynn.
CARLO TRESCA, who was born in Sulmona, Italy, in 1879. Entering the labor movement at an early age, he became editor of a Socialist paper in his native town when he was only twenty years old. By 1904 he had shown his worth by being many times sent to prison on political charges. In 1903 he was elected secretary of the largest labor organization of Italy, the Syndicate of Firemen and Railroad Engineers. In 1904, however, he was given choice of eighteen months penal servitude or ten years exile for political offenses, and, choosing exile, he landed in America in August, 1904. As organizer and editor he continued his fight for labor, now being editor of an Italian paper in New York, LL’Avenire [L’Avvenire]. Jailed for months on different occasions, he was attacked by an assassin, who is said to have been an emissary of the Italian consul in Pittsburgh and his throat badly slashed. In the last six years Tresca has taken part in all big strikes of the I. W. W., which involved Italian workers. Lawrence, Little Falls and Paterson are only a few of the many strikes where thousands cheered when Tresca stood before them. Now he is on trial for murder. The witness against him has said that when a certain remark was made by another speaker, Tresca smiled and said, “Good, good!” For a smile and one short word, twice uttered, Tresca has been charged with murder!
About Joe Schmidt volumes could be written and yet do but scant justice to his revolutionary career. As a lad of sixteen he became interested in the great scheme of things when he saw a beautiful girl sent to prison in his little native town in Russian Lithuania. In a short time he became active in the secret organizations that challenged the terrible Romanoffs. For seven years he traveled on the dangerous missions necessary among the Polish, Lithuanian, Slav and Tartar people, learning their dialects and spurring them on to self-liberation. He led three victorious strikes in Russia at Vilna, Shawly and Ponewez in 1903 and 1904. His sister aided him in his work and in the spring of 1904 both were arrested with five others—surrounded by soldiers at a secret meeting. Both were sentenced to Siberian exile, and his sister, then a beautiful young girl of seventeen, today remains an exile in the desolate, frozen territory of North Siberia, while her brother faces tyranny, not of the Romanoff’s, but of the czars of American industry.
A valued man to the secret organizations working forbidden wonders under the nose of the Russian police, Schmidt was not allowed to long remain a convict-exile. With money sent “underground” he bribed a guard and one night in November, 1904, after his day’s work in the convict brick-yard, he threw off the bricks piled over him by fellow prisoners and in the winter’s darkness started on a terrible journey for liberty. Altho close to the Bering Straits across which lay Alaska, he feared recapture on the coast and so chose a longer route across the wilds of Asia, over the Ural mountains to Europe. Words—mere words cannot picture the awful hardships of his heroic and lonely break for freedom. He himself says his reason reels when confronted with its memories. Wading waist-deep through arctic snows, walking by night and hiding in the forests and brush to sleep by day, following the line of the Trans-Siberian railroad—not too close—for watching the rails and bridges for three miles on each side were the brutal—man-hunting Cossacks; guided by winds and stars he trudged onward. Exhausted by battling the elements and often without eating for many days, he would almost collapse upon seeing food, near—but often denied to him.
Eating raw fish stolen from native traps, ever alert against recapture at guarded roads and bridges, he pressed on over the snowy passes of the Ural Mountains into European Russia. There were more settlements here and food could be begged at peasant doors, so adopting the part of a sick beggar, he fastened to his back the baskets carried by Russian beggars to collect crusts from house to house. In this guise he went on from village to village, always haunted by the fear of recapture. As he journeyed he heard the news of the 1905 revolution and of Bloody Sunday Massacre in Petrograd in front of the palace of the Tsar. Covered only by rags never removed from his body, the soles of his shoes gone and his frozen, bleeding feet marking his path; hair and beard long and matted, he indeed looked the part he played when, after six months, he arrived at the end of a three-thousand-mile trip in the City of Niznij Nowgorod. Here he was furnished money and after one more adventure in crossing the border, reached Germany.
Coming direct to America Schmidt was welcomed with an ovation by the Philadelphia Socialists and joined the American movement. In 1909 he first came in touch with the Industrial Workers of the World, and recognizing the effectiveness of their program, devoted himself to the industrial field under the banner of the ONE BIG UNION. He has been in many strikes, including Lawrence, and at Lowell where 16,000 strikers won their demand without a single arrest. Now a man of only 34 years, having passed through experiences shaming the writers of fiction with their puny plots and heroes, Joe Schmidt is on trial for murder because he made a speech in free America.
Scarlett—Sam Scarlett, a clean young lad with a pleasant Scotch glint in his eyes, has a record of daring enthusiasm on the athletics field which he transferred to the I. W. W. five years ago. Born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, of famous fighting blood, he came to Canada in 1903. A machinist by trade, he loved the sport of football, captaining the World’s Champion Soccer Team at the St. Louis fair as well as the champion teams of Colorado and Utah. Graduating from craft unionism in the Harriman shopmen strike, he joined the ONE BIG UNION and has since devoted all his old sporting spirit to the struggle of the classes. He too is charged with murder because he made a speech.
Of the Montenegrin strikers, Orlandich, Nickich and Cernogorovich, Masonovich and his wife Malitza, there can only be told the same story of their humble lives of toil. Born in that little nation called “The eagle’s nest of Europe,” where women go to battle with the men against the invading Turk, they were all poor peasant laborers until lured to the industrial hells of Carnegie and Morgan by lying posters put up in old-country towns. Robbed and denied opportunity, they are examples of that great class who do the hardest and most necessary work of the world, who eat the crusts of slaves and go unsung to paupers’ graves. Let us honor these brave, simple people who sprang to the defense of a working-class woman struck down by a Steel Trust gunman.
O. N. Hilton, the “Little Judge,” who never lost a case for the W. F. of M., together with Arthur LeSueur of the Peoples’ College, lead the counsel for the accused. Hilton has taken sides with labor in many a legal battle. He was consulted in the Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone trials, at Lawrence and at Paterson. For five weeks he was in charge of the McNamara cases until supplanted by Darrow; besides these, he successfully defended Steve Adams in Colorado and the 350 defendants at Calumet. He is now disbarred from Utah because he told the supreme court of that state what he thought of its denial to Joe Hillstrom of a fair and impartial trial. Besides LeSueur, Hilton was assisted by Leon Whitsell of California, Victor Power of Hibbing and John Keyes of Duluth.
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From Butte, Mont.-The Workingmen’s Union of Butte, Mont., sends in their check for $60, renewing their standing bundle order for THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW during 1917. The union has subscribed regularly for 100 copies of the REVIEW since 1912. The members appreciate the REVIEW and recognize the necessity of carrying on a militant educational campaign all the time. Comrade George Curry visited our office during the past month.
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Going to Have a Library—The comrades of Local Vineland, New Jersey, are going to begin real educational work by taking advantage of our offer of a thirty-volume library. They will own their library in common. A comrade is building a bookcase. Education is the rock on which we must build, otherwise we will continue to float around up in the air at the mercy of every reform wind that happens to be blowing.
SOURCE & IMAGE
The International Socialist Review, Volume 17
-ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company,
July 1916-June 1917
https://books.google.com/books?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ
ISR January 1917
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA387
“Victory on the Mesaba Range” by Harrison George
MN16 Gunthugs on the Mesabi, ISR Jan 1917
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SVRIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA429
See also:
Most of the IWW Strikes mentioned can be found listed here:
https://iww.org/about/chronology/2
Sadly, the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912 is too often not included in the historical record. More on that struggle, including the role of M. Helen Schloss, the Red Nurse, is covered here by Big Bill Haywood:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=qFNIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA519
Photo of Miss Schloss from cover of January 1913 ISR:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=qFNIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA516-IA3
According to American Labor Who’s Who of 1925, Tresca was editor of L’Avvenire from 1909-1917 when the newspaper was suppressed under the Espionage Act.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012841634;view=2up;seq=242
Prison Camps in Siberia:
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSsiberia.htm
Russian Revolution of 1905 & St. Petersburg Bloody Sunday:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution
I believe “the City of Niznij Nowgorod” is actually Nizhny Novgorod, (more research needed):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nizhny_Novgorod
For more on Harriman Shopmen’s Strike of 1911, search Joe Hill by Gibbs Smith with: harriman:
https://books.google.com/books?id=wFwsHQVuHVUC&dq=harriman+shopmen%27s+strike&source=gbs_navlinks_s
For more on Peoples’ College see Pearson’s Magazine of March 1915 for a long article:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SEklAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA298
An ad for Peoples’ College, with names of those involved, here:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SEklAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA512-IA4
And another ad here:
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=SEklAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA772
North Country Blues – Joan Baez