Hellraisers Journal – Saturday June 7, 1913 New York, New York – John Reed Recalls Time Spent in Passaic County Jail
From The Masses of June 1913:
“Speaking of Anarchy” by Art Young
[Part I of II]
There’s war in Paterson. But it’s a curious kind of war. All the violence is the work of one side—the Mill Owners. Their servants, the Police, club unresisting men and women and ride down law-abiding crowds on horseback. Their paid mercenaries, the armed Detectives, shoot and kill innocent people. Their newspapers, the Paterson Press and the Paterson Call, publish incendiary and crime-inciting appeals to mob-violence against the strike leaders. Their tool, Recorder Carroll, deals out heavy sentences to peaceful pickets that the police-net gathers up. They control absolutely the Police, the Press, the Courts.
Opposing them are about twenty-five thousand striking silk-workers, of whom perhaps ten thousand are active, and their weapon is the picket-line. Let me tell you what I saw in Paterson and then you will say which side of this struggle is “anarchistic” and “contrary to American ideals.”
At six o’clock in the morning a light rain was falling. Slate-grey and cold, the streets of Paterson were deserted. But soon came the Cops-twenty of them—strolling along with their nightsticks under their arms. We went ahead of them toward the mill district. Now we began to see workmen going in the same direction, coat collars turned up, hands in their pockets. We came into a long street, one side of which was lined with silk mills, the other side with the wooden tenement houses. In every doorway, at every window of the houses clustered foreign-faced men and women, laughing and chatting as if after breakfast on a holiday. There seemed no sense of expectancy, no strain or feeling of fear. The sidewalks were almost empty, only over in front of the mills a few couples—there couldn’t have been more than fifty-marched slowly up and down, dripping with the rain. Some were men, with here and there a man and woman together, or two young boys. As the warmer light of full day came the people drifted out of their houses and began to pace back and forth, gathering in little knots on the corners. They were quick with gesticulating hands, and low-voiced conversation. They looked often toward the corners of side streets.
Suddenly appeared a policeman, swinging his club. “Ah-h-h!” said the crowd softly.
Six men had taken shelter from the rain under the canopy of a saloon. “Come on! Get out of that!” yelled the policeman, advancing. The men quietly obeyed. “Get off this street! Go home, now! Don’t be standing here!” They gave way before him in silence, drifting back again when he turned away. Other policemen materialized, hustling, cursing, brutal, ineffectual. No one answered back. Nervous, bleary-eyed, unshaven, these officers were worn out with nine weeks’ incessant strike duty.
On the mill side of the street the picket-line had grown to about four hundred. Several policemen shouldered roughly among them, looking for trouble. A workman appeared, with a tin pail, escorted by two detectives. “Boo! Boo!” shouted a few scattered voices. Two Italian boys leaned against the mill fence and shouted a merry Irish threat, “Scab! Come outa here I knocka you’ head off!” A policeman grabbed the boys roughly by the shoulder. “Get to hell out of here!” he cried, jerking and pushing them violently to the corner, where he kicked them. Not a voice, not a movement from the crowd.
A little further along the street we saw a young woman with an umbrella, who had been picketing, suddenly confronted by a big policeman.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he roared. “God damn you, you go home!” and he jammed his club against her mouth. “I no go home!” she shrilled passionately, with blazing eyes. “You bigga stiff !”
Silently, steadfastly, solidly the picket-line grew. In groups or in couples the strikers patrolled the sidewalk. There was no more laughing. They looked on with eyes full of hate. These were fiery-blooded Italians, and the police were the same brutal thugs that had beaten them and insulted them for nine weeks. I wondered how long they could stand it.
It began to rain heavily. I asked a man’s permission to stand on the porch of his house. There was a policeman standing in front of it. His name, I afterwards discovered, was McCormack. I had to walk around him to mount the steps.
Suddenly he turned round, and shot at the owner: “Do all them fellows live in that house?” The man indicated the three other strikers and himself, and shook his head at me.
“Then you get to hell off of there!” said the cop, pointing his club at me.
“I have the permission of this gentleman to stand here,” I said. “He owns this house.”
“Never mind! Do what I tell you! Come off of there, and come off damn quick!”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”
With that he leaped up the steps, seized my arm, and violently jerked me to the sidewalk. Another cop took my arm and they gave me a shove.
“Now you get to hell off this street!” said Officer McCormack.
“I won’t get off this street or any other street. If I’m breaking any law, you arrest me!”
Officer McCormack, who is doubtless a good, stupid Irishman in time of peace, is almost helpless in a situation that requires thinking. He was dreadfully troubled by my request. He didn’t want to arrest me, and said so with a great deal of profanity.
“I’ve got your number,” said I sweetly. “Now will you tell me your name?”
“Yes,” he bellowed, “an’ I got your number! I’ll arrest you.” He took me by the arm and marched me up the street.
He was sorry he had arrested me. There was no charge he could lodge against me. I hadn’t been doing anything. He felt he must make me say something that could be construed as a violation of the Law. To which end he God damned me harshly, loading me with abuse and obscenity, and threatened me with his night-stick, saying, “You big — — lug, I’d like to beat the hell out of you with this club.”
I returned airy persiflage to his threats.
Other officers came to the rescue, two of them, and supplied fresh epithets. I soon found them repeating themselves, however, and told them so. “I had to come all the way to Paterson to put one over on a cop !” I said. Eureka! They had at last found a crime! When I was arraigned in the Recorder’s Court that remark of mine was the charge against me!
[Singing Day and Night]
Ushered into the patrol-wagon, I was driven with much clanging of gongs along the picket-line. Our passage was greeted with “Boos” and ironical cheers, and enthusiastic waving. At Headquarters I was interrogated and lodged in the lockup. My cell was about four feet wide by seven feet long, at least a foot higher than a standing man’s head, and it contained an iron bunk hung from the sidewall with chains, and an open toilet of disgusting dirtiness in the corner. A crowd of pickets had been jammed into the same lockup only three days before, eight or nine in a cell, and kept there without food or water for twenty-two hours! Among them a young girl of seventeen, who had led a procession right up to the Police Sergeant’s nose and defied him to arrest them. In spite of the horrible discomfort, fatigue and thirst, these prisoners had never let up cheering and singing for a day and a night!
In about an hour the outside door clanged open, and in came about forty pickets in charge of the police, joking and laughing among themselves. They were hustled into the cells, two in each. Then pandemonium broke loose! With one accord the heavy iron beds were lifted and slammed thunderingly against the metal walls. It was like a cannon battery in action.
“Hooray for I. W. W. !” screamed a voice. And unanimously answered all the voices as one, “Hooray !”
“Hooray for Chief Bums!” (Chief of Police Bimson).
“Boo-o-o-o!” roared forty pairs of lungs—a great boom of echoing sound that had more of hate in it than anything I ever heard.
“To hell wit’ Mayor McBride!”
“Boo-o-o-o !” It was an awful voice in that reverberant iron room, full of menace.
“Hooray for Haywood! One bigga da Union! Hooray for da Strike! To hell wit’ da police! Boo-o-o-o! Boo-o-o-o! Hooray! Killa da A. F. of L.! A. F. of Hell, you mean! Boo-o-o-o!”
“Musica! Musica!” cried the Italians, like children. Whereupon one voice went “Plunk-plunk! Plunk-plunk!” like a guitar, and another, a rich tenor, burst into the first verse of the Italian-English song, written and composed by one of the strikers to be sung at the strike meetings. He came to the chorus:
“Do you lika Miss Flynn?” (Chorus) “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!” “Do you lika Carlo Tresca?” (Chorus) “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!” “Do you lika Mayor McBride?” (Chorus) “No! No! No! No!” “Hooray for I. W. W.!” “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!!!”
“Bis! Bis!” shouted everybody, clapping hands, banging the beds up and down. An officer came in and attempted to quell the noise. He was met with “Boos” and jeers. Some one called for water. The policeman filled a tin cup and brought it to the cell door. A hand reached out swiftly and slapped it out of his fingers on the floor. “Scab! Thug!” they yelled. The policeman retreated. The noise continued.
The time approached for the opening of the Recorder’s Court, but word had evidently been brought that there was no more room in the County Jail, for suddenly the police appeared and began to open the cell doors. And so the strikers passed out, cheering wildly. I could hear them outside, marching back to the picket-line with the mob who had waited for them at the jail gates.
And then I was taken before the Court of Recorder Carroll. Mr. Carroll has the intelligent, cruel, merciless face of the ordinary police court magistrate. But he is worse than most police court magistrates. He sentences beggars to six months’ imprisonment in the County Jail without a chance to answer back. He also sends little children there, where they mingle with dope-fiends, and tramps, and men with running sores upon their bodies—to the County Jail, where the air is foul and insufficient to breathe, and the food is full of dead vermin, and grown men become insane.
Mr. Carroll read the charge against me. I was permitted to tell my story. Officer McCormack recited a clever mélange of lies that I am sure he himself could never have concocted. “John Reed,” said the Recorder. “Twenty days.” That was all.
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