Hellraisers Journal: John R. McMahon and Ernest Untermann Report from Boise for Wilshire’s Magazine

There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones

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Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday June 5, 1907
Wilshire’s Magazine Covers the Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone Case

The above photograph is from page 8 of the June edition of Wilshire’s Magazine, which edition devotes much space to coverage of the Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone Case now unfolding in Boise, Idaho. We offer a review of that coverage below.

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Wilshire’s on “The Pinkerton Labor Spy” by Morris Friedman

Pinkertons up Against It

As we go to press this month “The Pinkerton Labor Spy” has gone through an edition of over 30,000, and sales are averaging 1,000 to 1,800 a day. The mere announcement of the book in the May number sold out an edition of 20,000 in two weeks. Never in the history of bookdom has a book gone so rapidly and been circulated so widely by the working class alone. Actually no effort has as yet been made to sell the book through the regular book channels. The working class alone has done the trick. In another page I will print a few of the enthusiastic letters we have received about the book. They are only samples, however, and many equally as good are crowded out for lack of space…

[Photograph of Friedman from elsewhere in this issue.]

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John R. McMahon reports from Boise:

Pen Pictures From Boise

By Our Special Correspondent, John R. McMahon,
Author “Toilers and Idlers”

Boise, Idaho, May 16, 1907.

THE incongruous elements of the historic trial of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone surpass all my expectations. The closer I get to the affair the more unreal and artificial it seems. At moments it is a badly arranged farce enacted by bucolic thespians, and again I sense a tragedy in which eighty million people take more than a spectator’s interest. There is no doubt that the unities have been violated by the inartistic capitalists who are engineering the prosecution. In their rude haste to railroad three men to the gallows, they have not chosen the proper time and place; they manage the drama with exaggerated simplicity and even an affectation of shy awkwardness. You might sit for a week in the court room and hardly realize that the bushy-bearded, complacent farmers and shopkeepers of Idaho there present are but marionettes operated by the cunning of a great capitalist conspiracy, moved by the overt injustice of the President of the United States, the Secretary of War, the Governor of Idaho, and by the secret deviltry of Mine Owners tools, the Pinkerton detectives and Federal spies…

[Photograph added is from elsewhere in this issue.]

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Ernest Untermann reports from Boise:

In the Enemy’s Land

By ERNEST UNTERMANN.

(Member National Executive Committee, Socialist Party.)
(Special Correspondent WILSHIRE’S MAGAZINE.)

Boise, Idaho, May 12th, 1907.

SIX weeks ago a grizzled old farmer stood with me on the railroad platform of a little station in Central Florida. His knotty fists were doubled up, his sharp, eyes full of fire. “We must see them boys through up thar’ in Eyedehoow,” he said fiercely. “We must see ’em through if it takes a Civil War to do it.”

I pointed to a bundle of WILSHIRE’S MAGAZINE, which he held under his arm.

“There is the only ammunition that will do any good now,” I said. “There is the only Civil War that will save those boys and others like them…. ”

[…..]

[Photograph of Untermann is from elsewhere in this issue.]

Untermann goes on to describe the importance of the Socialist Press in its ability to tell the true story of the mine owners’ conspiracy to frame the officials of the Western Federation of Miners, and Roosevelt’s role in that conspiracy. He describes his journey out to Idaho, and gives a description of Boise and her citizens as he found them. This article will be continued next month.

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Immense Protest in New York City:

NEVER in the history of New York City has such an immense and significant demonstration of organized labor been recorded, as that which on the evening of May 4th converged from various points upon the Grand Central Palace on Forty-second street, to publicly emphasize the attitude of organized labor in the now celebrated Moyer-Haywood case. Conservative estimates of the numbers taking part, place it at about fifty thousand, though some enthusiasts evidently, considering this figure too low, have insisted that it was at least seventy or seventy-five thousand. However this may be, it is certain that New York has never before witnessed a labor demonstration of such extraordinary dimensions.

The were forty-two bands in the line of march, and the strains of the “Marseillaise” seemed to resound from every part of the city….