Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday April 6, 1920
Montesano, Washington – John Nicholas Beffel Observes Centralia Trial
From The Liberator of April 1920:
Fear in the Jury Box
[-by John Nicholas Beffel]
Eugene Barnett
A NERVOUS little man is on the witness stand in Montesano. He is James T. McAllister, whose wife owns the Roderick Hotel next door to the raided I. W. W. hall in Centralia. He testifies that one of the defendants, Eugene Barnett, was in the Roderick lobby all during the Armistice Day shooting and not in the Avalon Hotel, as the prosecution asserts.
“But when you were arrested you said there was nobody in the lobby,” says a prosecutor for the lumber trust. “Why did you say that?”
“I wasn’t sworn then,” replies the little man. “I didn’t want to be drawed into no trouble.”
He cowers in his chair, remembering the mob. There was a list of people to be hung that night beside Wesley Everest.
“What’s the matter?” demands Vanderveer, counsel for the defense. “Are you afraid now?”
“N-no.” The little man shakes as with a chill.
Ten men sit facing the judge and jury and gallows. They are accused of killing Warren O. Grimm, service man, in the Armistice Day parade. But it is not a murder trial; it is a trial of organized labor; the lumber interests seek to crush their most dangerous enemy, the uncrushable I. W. W. The main legal issue is whether men still have a right to defend their lives and property against violence. If these ten workers get a fair trial and are judged solely by the evidence, they will without any doubt go free. But will the jury dare to acquit? A verdict of acquittal would mean ruin for the twelve. Each man’s history is known to the lumber trust; it knows how to break men; it has broken men before.
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Grays Harbor County is shadowed by fear. There is an atmosphere of surveillance everywhere; stool-pigeons for the prosecution appear at your right hand and look over your notes; American Legion men introduce themselves to you and display too keen an interest in your welfare; there is a mysterious knock at your hotel room door while you are bathing; you ask who it is and a man says: “I’ll come back later.” He doesn’t come back.
Investigators for the defense are jailed repeatedly without warrant, are held for days and then released. The case was rushed to trial. Judge John N. Wilson himself stated that a fair trial could not be had in Montesano; indicated that he would grant a second change of venue. Five days later he announced that the law will not permit a second transfer.
Attorney George Vanderveer
George F. Vanderveer, attorney for the defense, battles alone against six prosecutors, behind whom the lumber trust’s shadow always looms. He is quick, forceful and fearless-equal to the battle.
“He is a man I’d like to go tiger-hunting with,” an onlooker said to me.
Guns to arm a garrison are exhibited by the state, to build up an atmosphere of violence and blood-thirstiness around the I. W. W.; a regiment of soldiers is marched into town by the governor to add to this atmosphere; intimate testimony about wounds and death is given; but the lumber lawyers battle to keep out evidence about Wesley Everest and the mob which tore and hung him, and about the plan to raid the Wobblies’ hall and run them out of town.
The stuff gets in, however, time after time.
There is not the slightest doubt that these ten defendants shot in self-defense, and that if the jury votes on the weight of evidence it will vote for acquittal. And this even though the judge rules so flagrantly in favor of the prosecution, that Vanderveer was compelled once to threaten to withdraw from the case. The only question in this trial is whether there is one courageous man in the jury. And no one in any other part of the United States can imagine the amount of courage it will take for that man to be honest.
One holiday I went to Centralia, fifty miles from Montesano, through stump-lands. The town is like an open wound. Strangers are watched with menacing eyes; are questioned if they pause. I saw the tragedy scene, and the gray skeleton of the earlier I. W. W. hall; an eye-witness of the torture of Wesley Everest pointed out to me a white-haired citizen who carried a rope in the crowd, a business man who tore strips of flesh from Everest’s face with his finger nails, a youngster who helped hang this ex-service man and boasted of it afterwards.
[The Death of Wesley Everest]
Everest died without a whimper; never pleaded for mercy; did not cry out when bayonets were stuck into him; and he was alive then, standing up in the street near the jail with the mob surging around him. My companion saw that. The man with the bayonetted gun didn’t have room enough, and the crowd had to push back to let him make the thrust. Then Everest’s body was dragged through the streets, covered with mud and blood. On a tree near the bridge where he was hung, which Everest could have seen if alive, is a sign: “Eternity where?” Parties of singing men and women and girls came through the night in automobiles to jeer the half-naked figure, swinging in the glare of automobile searchlights; finally somebody cut the body down; it lay in the river for hours; then was fished out and carried to the jail.
Loren Roberts
That revolting corpse with its foot-long neck was placed where the other Wobblies must see it. Throughout the night members of the mob talked at intervals under Loren Roberts‘s cell window. “We lynched that guy Everest,” they would say. “We’ll get this fellow Roberts next if he doesn’t come clean.”
Courthouse, Montesano. -JOHN NICHOLAS BEFFEL.
[Photographs, emphasis and paragraph break added.]
From New Solidarity of November 25, 1919:
The Lynching of Wesley Everest by Maurice Becker —–
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