Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: “The Shame of San Diego” by Hartwell S. Shippey, Part I

Quote EGF, re Spk FSF, ISR p618, Jan 1910 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday May 3, 1912
“The Shame of San Diego” by Hartwell S. Shippey, Part I

From the International Socialist Review of May 1912:

The Shame of San Diego

by HARTWELL S. SHIPPEY

[Part I of II]

SPAT upon, cursed, reviled; the victims of lying calumny and vile vituperation; the recipients of farcical indignities on the part of the legal lackeys of an organized oligarchy; beaten, kicked, clubbed, starved by brass-bound blue-coated Cossacks and vigilantes, the scorned and despised members of the I. W. W. hold San Diego-on-the-bay in their grasp.

Laughing, only passively resistant, singing their songs of solidarity, these homeless, propertyless, countryless “hoboes,” incarcerated in the iron-bound bastiles of smiling San Diego, are clamoring not for physical comforts or luxuries, but for mental food, the works of Marx, Spencer, Renan, Rousseau and Dietzgen.

Even without definite knowledge of the rhythmic tread of the thousands marching to their rescue, these modern Crusaders, buoyed up by their indomitable idealism, secure in the virtue of their cause, have that great faith in the loyalty of their kind to feel, if they cannot know, that theirs will be the victory.

Rivaling the Coeur d’Alene and Colorado, the San Diego fight for free speech and free press will enter the pages of revolutionary history as a stupendous example of red-blooded men heroically enduring every conceivable form of “Man’s [perfect?] self-control in the face of fiendishly inhumanity to man” and preserving brutal persecution.

San Diego may congratulate herself on being the instrument by which two socially valuable bits of education have been given to the world. First the world has come to know the extremes to which an overbearing despotism will go in its efforts to crush labor; and second, it is being demonstrated that, under certain conditions, revolutionary and conservative branches of the labor movement will line up together solidly and unitedly.

For, know ye, the battle is not primarily one fought for a short hundred yards of city street, nor yet for free speech and press alone. It is, at bottom, a struggle on the part of labor for the privilege of organizing and educating its kind to the end that the products of labor shall be rendered unto labor, and that better living conditions for the toilers shall make of this modern miasma of human misery a more fit state for human beings to occupy.

What precipitated this struggle in the non-commercial city nestling on the hills above a beautiful bay with the blue mountains rising in the distance?

California will, barring intervening preventatives, hold two great fairs in 1915, one at San Francisco and one at San Diego. A great amount of labor will be employed in instituting and conducting these fairs. Organized labor, as represented by the A. F. of L., insists on having a voice in determining the rate of wages it will receive and the conditions under which it will work. Organized capital, dominated by the M. and M., declares that IT shall be the sole arbiter in reference to these questions. Organized capital insists that the open shop shall prevail in California; while organized labor realizes that the closed shop is its life-principle. Knowing that it cannot prevail against the unions when there are no idle men to take their places, the M. and M., controlling the press of the country as it does, has systematically published misinformation throughout the country to the effect that jobs are plentiful in California-to the end that jobless men may flood the labor market of the coast and imperil the power of the unions.

The chief function of the Industrial Workers of the World on the coast has been, and is, an education of the unemployed to an understanding of the interests of labor that prevents the out-of-works from acting in the selfish and cowardly role of strike-breaker or scab. The M. and M. recognizes this menace to their plans and strikes at the vitals of this education by an attempted suppression of free speech and press, these forms of freedom being imperative to the educators of the floating population.

Not only as preventers of scabbery is the I. W. W. feared, but as a forerunner of that grim spectre that haunts Europe-revolutionary industrial unionism. An editorial in the San Diego Sun warns the natives that the Syndicalism of France and the industrialism that now holds England in its powerful clutch is rapidly taking form in America.

There are, among the most powerful of the local capitalists, some who state positively that the present rule of the vigilantes is a deliberate and direct result of a meeting of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association held in the U. S. Grant Hotel of this city, presided over by the infamously notorious Harrison Grey Otis. The action taken at this meeting was the beginning of a campaign against labor on the coast and particularly against the I. W. W. as the greatest menace against obtaining a scab-hearted army of unemployed.

That this program is not alone a local affair is proven by the systematic cooperation of the official lackeys of the M. and M. throughout the state. The police of Los Angeles and others points are exerting their power to prevent the marching men from arriving at San Diego. And that it is an attack on ALL forms of labor is evidenced by the arresting, beating and deporting of trades-unionists, Socialists and sympathizers, as well as members of the I. W. W.

The labor movement has good cause to be grateful to the M. and M. and local officialdom. They have accomplished that which the labor movement itself seemed unable to effect-namely a welding together into a solid. working unit, the heretofore widely different factions of labor; and the educating of all isms and philosophies to an understanding that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and that all must unite to fight the common enemy.

Following close upon that memorable conference in the Grant Hotel, the city council, acting upon a petition of eighty five members of the M. and M., and in opposition to a counter-petition of three hundred other citizens and tax-payers, passed an ordinance creating a “restricted district,” and forbidding street speaking therein. The enforcement of this ordinance excluded the street speakers from that part of the city where they could get and hold an audience of workingmen and men out of work.

The evening of February 8, the ordinance went into effect and forty-three members of the I. W. W., Socialists, trades-unionists and sympathizers were pulled from the historic soap-box—the first speaker being a member of the A. F. of L. Two women, Mrs. Laura Emerson, wife of a jeweler and a forceful speaker for the I. W. W.; Miss Juanita McKamey, 18 years of age and a very enthusiastic member of that organization; Kasper Bauer, Wood Hubbard, prominent and red-blooded members of the socialist party; Charles Grant, a veteran of every free speech fight on the coast, and other members of the I. W. W. and Socialist party composed the party which spent this first night in the city bastile. Forty were locked in the “drunk” cell with no blankets to make the concrete floor more comfortable.

For the following few days several men and women were arrested nightly until 216 were free speech prisoners, each demanding separate jury trials. In the last six weeks, three cases have been tried, and two convicted and sentenced to thirty days, over 100 veniremen being examined in each of these cases.

From the first the press, including the Scripps sheet, the Sun, supposedly the “friend” of labor, have printed everything but the truth; and fake dynamite scares were only relieved in their monotony by incitation to violence.

The local jails being crowded to capacity and the official physician fearing an epidemic, seventy prisoners were deported to other county jails, where they are at the present writing.

During this time, ]. Edward Morgan, one of the most powerful speakers in the revolutionary movement, was filling the halls to overflowing and speaking for the free speech league outside the restricted district. The collections on these occasions furnished ample funds to carry on the fight, so a “move on” ordinance was passed, the same serving as an anti-picketing ordinance in Los Angeles and elsewhere. To this ordinance the trades unionists are bitterly opposed, as it will undoubtedly be used against them when on strike.

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[Emphasis added.]