Hellraisers Journal – Saturday February 1, 1919
Sacramento, California – I. W. W. Defendants Silent Except for the Coughing
From The Liberator of February 1919:
The Silent Defense in Sacramento
By Jean Sterling
Silent Defenders
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“Do the defendants, not represented by attorneys, wish to interrogate the talesman?”
The court reporter held his pencil suspended. The forty-three defendants faced with mocking eyes and closed lips their jailers, prosecutors and the presiding judge.
“Do they wish to exercise the right of challenge?”
For a tense second the inexorable wheels of justice stopped turning. Some one had thrown a felt slipper in the cogs. The defendants gave the prospective juror not so much as a glance. They had read and yawned and gazed vacantly out of the high windows while the attorneys for the prosecution had been probing the talesman’s soul for any humane or modern ideas on the subject of labor.
Then, after a decorous silence, such as is observed in court procedures and funeral rites, the Judge said quietly, “If, then, there are no objections to the talesman, he may take his seat in the jury box.”
And so the juryman, an ancient rancher, the prophesy of the type to follow, took his seat.
And in this manner did the forty-three defendants, I. W. W.’s, now being tried in Sacramento, California, on charges of conspiracy, under the Espionage Act, open their “silent defense.”
Three of the group have employed lawyers. All three have domestic ties or dependents, which makes this separate action imperative. But the remainder, the forty-three, who are in jail during the trial because of the exorbitant bail which was demanded in each case, will maintain throughout the entire trial a defense of unbroken silence.
“We decided upon the silent defense,” said Mortimer Downing, elected spokesman for the group, “because we despair of justice for the workingmen being achieved through the courts. The Mooney case, the Frank Little incident, the Bisbee cases, the Chicago trials-these have convinced us of the uselessness of legal defense. We are tried in a prejudiced community. Some of our men have been held incommunicado. They have been prevented by United States agents from mailing courteous appeals to the court. Some of them have been confined, untried, for a year, These conditions are intolerable, and this “silence strike” is to preserve the self-respect of ourselves as members of organized labor.”
And so they sit there in the big white court-room, challenging neither talesmen nor evidence nor exhibits nor witnesses. They have grown pallid from their, long sojourn out of the sight of the sun. They are. emaciated. They are unshaven, many of them. Their clothes are ill-fitting and thin. But their eyes smile and are unafraid. There they sit, throughout the long sessions, coughing, coughing, several of them obviously tubercular, their incessant coughing shattering into fragments the well-cemented evidence against them. Upon his bench, the Judge sits with his handkerchief pressed against his nose and mouth, lest the contagion from the defendants spread.
As they cough the prisoners raise their hands to their mouths-the shrivelled hands of old men, of men not old, blue and cold and calloused. These are the hands that have helped to sink the shafts and mine the gold in frozen Alaska, that have cut spruce and pine in the deep wet forests of Washington, packed salmon in Oregon, harvested the crops in the sun-scorched valleys of California. These are the hands that have worked incredible hours in steaming canneries,, in shrieking saw-mills, on fog-swept wharves and down in starless mines.
Unconsciously they offer these hands in evidence of service to their country, these hands with the scars and the wounds of labor upon them. And their bodies, too, they offer, illy- nourished, warped and broken by toil.
True, these defendants belong to an organization which they think will eventually prevent these wounds, these trials. Even their silence does not deny this charge in the indictment. And it may be-I do not know-that some of them as individuals have struck out in retaliation against powerful and unseen forces which sapped their vigor and burned out their youth; that they pitted their own puny force against the overwhelming force of established society.
But, whatever they have done or have not done, they will not speak in their own defense. “It is useless,” they say. “We despair! Look for yourself to the history of our case. Look at the powers arrayed against us!”
The hidden springs of these trials begin far back, even farther back than the spring of 1916, when a coast-wide drive was started against organized labor. In the seasonal trades, which form so large a part of the work of the Pacific Coast, the I. W. W. organization was numerically strong. Among these modern nomads was fast quickening a sense of industrial solidarity. Meanwhile in the cities, particularly in Seattle and San Francisco, the American Federation of Labor unions were politically powerful.
The Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco was said to have collected a fund of a million dollars with which to fight organized workers. Economic battles raged in camps, in fields and factory. Legal battles were fought in Everett, Washington. In San Francisco, the famous Mooney case began, backed by the Chamber of Commerce. America’s entrance into the war did not reconcile the clashing economic interests, except superficially. So that while the I. W. W.’s in Sacramento are being tried on charges growing out of war conditions, we find the same influences lined up, politically and industrially, as lined up before the war.
We find Deputy United States Marshall Mulhall, a special investigator for the Department of Justice in the Sacramento cases, in frequent discussion with Fickert over the methods to pursue and the probable outcome of the two cases. “I am going to link the Mooney case with the Sacramento case,” Fickert tells his assistant. “I’m going to have a meeting with Mulhall tomorrow.” (Dictagraph record.) [*]
Mulhall came, and in the course of their conversation Mulhall told Fickert, “If ever you get in a hole send for me. I can take any of these witnesses and pull the friendly stuff on them and generally get what I go after.” Mulhall discussed the possibility of losing out in the Sacramento cases and also in the Mooney case. Finally he said, “You know that if this thing ever breaks we will go down hill so fast that all hell won’t save us.”
These are the main facts in regard to the Sacramento case: During the course of this interminable Mooney a recall was started against Fickert. On December 17th, 1917, the night before the recall elections, bomb exploded under the back steps of the Governor’s mansion in Sacramento. It did no harm, except to return Fickert to office.
A round-up of all I. W. W.’s followed. Their hall was raided, books, papers, properties were seized. Within ten days forty-eight men were in jail.
Federal investigators appeared in Sacramento; but the trail from the scene of the explosion, instead of inevitably dipping toward the jail, wound in a curiously opposite direction. Don Rathbun, special agent for the Department of Justice, reported that they “found nothing to warrant action.” The Governor’s own detective was unable to connect the men in jail with the explosion…..But the men stayed in jail.
A demand was sent to the Department of Justice in Washington that the men be held. D. W. Marmichael, president of the Chamber of Commerce and head of the Sacramento City Council, together with the editor of “The Sacramento Bee” and Ray Benjamin, Deputy Attorney General, Fickert’s personal friend, the official whitewasher of Oxman whose perjured testimony sent Mooney to jail, demanded that the Federal Government take action.
“The Sacramento Bee” questioned the willingness of the United States Government to act and called upon the “aroused citizens to take the law in their own hands.” It printed a letter from the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce in Tulsa, Oklahoma, recommending that “a coat of tar and feathers be embossed on the prisoners’ backs through the lashing process.”
The following February, after being held in jail for nearly three months on one charge, the charge was dismissed and the men were re-indicted by the Federal Grand Jury. Others were added to the group. Theodora Pollok, the one woman indicted, was included. Theodora Pollok is a woman of gentle breeding and fine culture, who had given of her frail strength in the defense of Ford and Suhr.
Months went by without the defendants being brought to triaL I am told that for sixty days they slept on the cold cement floor, in winter, with only a scant cotton blanket; that when food was brought to them from the outside it was placed before their eyes but out of their reach.
Meantime the daily papers abounded with “outrages” committed by the I. W. W.’s. Candidates for the governor-ship toured California, sowing the seeds of hatred and misunderstanding. “Successful prosecution of the war for democracy” and the “extermination of the I. W. W.’s” were the two great issues common to both sides in the campaign.
In September, eight months after the original arrests, down in Fresno County another round-up of I. W. W.’s took place. Twenty men were jailed on charges of arson. “The fires in the haystacks are due to incendiary bombs,” say the arresting officers. “Due to imperfectly cured hay or the ‘disciplining’ of refractory non-members of the Farmers’ Association,” say the accused men.
In October a final indictment was returned. It consolidates the Sacramento and the Fresno cases, grouping them all under the charge of conspiracy. By this arrangement, men in jail are charged with crimes committed long after their imprisonment. This last indictment dropped a number of the lesser defendants and others took their places, more dangerous to society. Up to this day no one has been apprehended for the explosion at the Governor’s home a year ago.
Finally in December, a year after the original arrests, they are all brought to trial-all but five who have died in jail-brought to trial down in the rich silt valley of the Sacramento, where bitterness has grown rank, where are located the great hop ranches of Ford and Suhr fame, where “The Sacramento Bee” is to be found in every home and on every ranch-the paper that urged lynching as the solution of the labor problem. In the heart of this beautiful valley lies the city of Sacramento, gay in its Christmas greens and red street lights; and in the heart of the city stands the Federal Building, a structure of enduring stone.
Walled in by the high Sierras and the Coast Range is this garden spot. Walled in by collossal prejudices and actual circumstances are the defendants. No utterances of their grievances; of their point of view, reaches the outside world. Their Their publicity committees are arrested. Their offices are raided. Their paraphernalia and plans of defense seized. Their Defense Bulletin is denied the mails. All incoming and outgoing mail is, of course, read by the jailers. All conversations are in the presence of detectives-as with all prisoners. Scareheads in the local papers warn the public of a possible bomb at the trial, and therefore “in the interest of the public,” the spectators’ door is kept locked during the sessions. Visitors are questioned as to their interest, who they are, so that either through fear of inconvenience, no one comes to “listen” to the “silent defense.” The seats for the public remain empty.
“Don’t you see,” they say, “the uselessness of the usual defense?”
And they continue to sit in silence. But their silence is not sullen; neither is it pert. It has back of it a conviction rather than a mood. It is intellectual rather than emotional. It is always challenging, argumentative; piquing the curiosity of judge, of prosecutor and of jury. It is not the silence of death; not of winter, but of early spring.
Silently they sit, awaiting the inevitable sentences, so cool, so unbroken in spirit, proving that man does not live by bread alone; making strangely artificial and pompous the perfunctory decorum of the court.
In spite of the constant coughing a certain pleasantness pervades the court room. The fact that the defendants-the silent group of forty-three men-do not oppose the prosecution, or through lawyers seek to block and outwit the state, makes the prosecutor’s task an easy one. He can be almost himself. And “himself” is a cheery, grandfatherly man from the little town of Ukiah, up north, and he jog-trots along with his load of evidence, as if on a pleasant country road. He is assisted by an amiable young lawyer of the Sunday school type who “helped” in the Chicago convictions.
So far, the prosecution have only read and read and read; hour in, hour out, from “Solidarity” and from the I.W. W. Song Book. Everything they read is intended to show the attitude of the I. W. W.’s toward grave social questions, problems which have not as yet disturbed the sweet- scented serenity of the Sacramento valley; articles which portray the class struggle in the coarse language of the “blanket stiff” as he trudges the “dirty plate route.” In kindly voice, the young prosecutor explains to the jury, as one would to little children, what “sabotage” and “the cat” and “one big union” mean-to him. He shows them pictures of cats and wooden shoes.
By four o’clock the defendants have sunk far down in their seats. Their heads rest on the back of their chairs. The coughing is more and more frequent. The judge presses his handkerchief tightly over his mouth and nose. Can it be that there is danger of infection from these ideas? The deep-set eyes that look out over his mask, seem almost tender in the fast fading light. A judge should have sterner eyes!
The jury-such old, old men! look bored and helpless. What horrible ideas they have just heard! Jesus, “a blanket-stiff!” “Pie in the sky!” Employers called “snakes” and “reptiles,” and the word “prostitute” right out in print. For this is a country jury, good men.
At last five o’clock. The judge instructs the jury to “form no opinions” and they go their separate ways. The judge comes down from his bench. The prisoners are lined up by their jailers to be taken down an elevator, through a tunnel under the Federal Building, back to their jail. The big white room, tomblike in its marble, is full of shadows and unsaid things.
As the elevator with its human freight drops into subterranean regions, a hollow cough echoes up into the vaulted chambers of justice.
For more Fred and Emma Little of Fresno
& the Sacramento IWW Case, see: Frank Little and the IWW:
The Blood That Stained an American Family
-by Jane Little Botkin
University of Oklahoma Press, May 25, 2017
(Chapters 26 & 27, pages 312-338-the role of
Emma Little was esp heroic.) https://books.google.com/books?id=gBskDwAAQBAJ
For more on emphasized names and places,
search this source with same: The IWW
A Study of American Syndicalism
-by Paul Frederick Brissenden, Ph.D.
2nd Edition, NY, 1920 https://books.google.com/books?id=5CRAAAAAYAAJ
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