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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday April 30, 1911
Photograph of Comrade Debs at Waco, Texas, on January 29th
From The Coming Nation of April 29, 1911:
From the Appeal to Reason of April 29, 1911:
Another Kidnaping Plot!
———-Heads of Structural Iron Workers Charged with Dynamiting,
Secretly Arrested andRailroaded to Prison
-Repetition of Moyer-Haywood-Pettibone Outrage.
———-
BY EUGENE V. DEBS.
———-By Telegraph to Appeal to Reason.
Terre Haute, Ind., April 23, 1911.-Sound the alarm to the working class. There is to be a repetition of the Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone outrage upon the labor movement. The secret arrest of John [J. J.] McNamara, international secretary of the Bridge ad Structural Iron Workers by a company detective agency has all the earmarks of another conspiracy to fasten the crime of murder upon the labor union officials to discredit and destroy organized labor in the United States.
Five years ago it was the mine owners’ association which concocted the infamous kidnapping conspiracy to destroy the Western Federation of Miners. Today the merchants and manufacturers’ association is making the same attempt to wreck the building trades.
The methods and tactics in both cases are identically the same. The bribal powers of corporate capital knows only how to crush the object of its blind wrath.
It has no sense of justice, respects no law, and has no scruples and in the long run is sure to run amuck and wreck itself.
The method of arrest of McNamara and his two union brothers is a dastardly outrage and a burning disgrace to all who are connected with it. Their constitutional rights as citizens were scandalously violated and they were virtually kidnapped and by armed force torn from their homes and rushed with a mad hast to their impending doom.
This in itself is enough to stamp the proceeding as an unmitigated outrage, which should arouse like the blast of a trumpet the workers from Maine to California, and from Minnesota to Mexico to unite in a thunderous protest against the unspeakable infamy.
———-
McNamara’s kidnapping is a foul and damnable blot upon the state of Indiana. He was given no chance to resist extradition. Governor Marshall, who has alway posed as the friend of labor, honored the requisition in private. The arrest was made in secret and although McNamara pleaded for time to employ legal counsel he was brutally denied and rushed from the state by the corporation hirelings who will get the blood money furnished by monsters who expect to profit by his execution.
Governor Marshall would never have treated a capitalist in that way and the workingmen of Indiana should rise in their righteous indignation and demand his impeachment from the office he has disgraced.
McNamara was entitled to a legal defense but was denied this only because he was a working man.
Let the case of ex-Governor Taylor of Kentucky be recalled and placed in contrast. Taylor was under indictment for murder in Kentucky with a reward of $100,000 upon his head but the governor of Indiana absolutely refused to surrender him to the Kentucky authorities.
McNamara is totally innocent so far as the public knows and yet he is not only surrendered like a dog without an instant’s hesitation, but is denied the legal right to employ counsel to show why he should not be torn from his home and friends and rushed 2,000 miles away to be railroaded to the penitentiary or gallows.
Taylor was a capitalist politician; McNamara is only a labor union official-another demonstration that under the capitalist system the law is for the capitalist class and against the working class.
Within twenty minutes after Gov. Marshall had secretly granted the requisition McNamara had been secretly arrested. The victim, in the charge of four detectives, was hustled into a waiting auto and hurried from the city to a railroad train and rushed beyond the borders of the state before his friends could have the chance to assert his legal rights and fight his extradition.
It is simply monstrous.
There is nothing in the police spy system of czar-cursed Russia to surpass it. No question of innocence or guilt has any place for consideration here.
Here more working men have been kidnapped and rushed across the continent to glut the vengeance of fiends.
As in the cases of Moyer and Haywood the arrests were not made until the courts were closed and lawyers’ offices deserted so as to absolutely prevent legal interference with devilish conspiracy.
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Every workingman in the country must feel the shock of this monstrous outrage and rise in revolt against it. It is nothing less than another kidnapping conspiracy. Arouse, ye workingmen! Ring the alarm bells throughout the nation! To the rescue of your brethren is the crying demand.
Let the millions who toil assert themselves. This infamous conspiracy cannot succeed without the cowardly acquiescence of the working class.
Arouse, ye hosts of labor and swear that this villainous plot shall not be consummated.
Be not deceived by the capitalist papers. Their columns were filled for months with the alleged guilt of Moyer, Haywood, and Pettibone, and so they will be in this case.
Pause to think of the atrocious crime perpetrated upon James [J. B.] McNamara and Ortie McManigal: arresting them in secret in Detroit, spiriting them to Chicago, and there locking them in murderers’ cells and keeping them in secret confinement for ten days without their relatives or friends knowing what had become of them.
If this damnable outrage perpetrated upon workingmen by mercenary detectives in the employ of criminal corporations is tolerated by the working class they are a mass of cringing cowards that deserve the slavery these corporations are forcing upon them.
———-
We are again face to face with a crisis. There is no time to lose. The workers must be stirred and the nation aroused.
This is the APPEAL’S fight and we must go our whole length to see that these three kidnapped workingmen are rescued from the would-be murderers and given a square deal.
The APPEAL Army must get into action in all the states. The organized workers of the Pacific coast must rally their forces in unvanquishable number. The revolutionists and radicals of California must unite as one to face the corporate criminals and fight them to the death upon this issue. This is no time to quibble over minor matters. Let all differences be sunk in the battle cry of the millions of honest workingmen and liberty-loving citizens agains the buccaneering corporations which have stolen the public domain, enslaved, robbed, and insulted the working class, and now attempt for the second time, through a monstrous conspiracy promoted by their official political hirelings and venal detectives who would sell Christ for thirty copper cents, to kidnap and murder workingmen as a means of destroying organized labor and perpetuating their black regime of rapacity and crime.
No one not feebleminded will be deceived by the “plants” of dynamite and explosive appliances which were “discovered” by the sleuths of the corporations. These are necessary accessories in such theatrical settings and are never found wanting.
All that is now lacking is for a Harry Orchard to appear upon the scene and he will doubtless be sprung in due time.
———-
Shocking as this last outrage is, there is nothing surprising about it. It is the logical sequence of the oath taken by the merchants and manufacturers’ association to wipe organized labor from the Pacific coast and I predicted the arrests which have now been made and raise the warning cry against what has just happened at the time the office of the Los Angeles Times was blown up, which I then believed and am now more than ever convinced, was the dastardly crime of the corporation plotters themselves.
Organized labor had everything to lose and the corporation criminals everything to gain by this tragedy.
Let it not be forgotten that when the Times building was blown up the crime was charge up on the typographical union and the frenzied corporationists swore they had the proof to convict the guilty parties and now more than six months later they suddenly discover that it was not the printers’ union, but the structural iron workers’ union that committed the crime.
———-
But enough has been said. There is no necessity for argument here. The outrage has been perpetrated before our eyes. Let us to the rescue.
It is up to us and we must act. Let the voice of protest and indignation rise and swell like angry billows when the storm god sets them in motion.
Let us not squander hundreds of thousands of the hard-earned dollars of wage-slaves, depriving their children of bread, upon an array of high-priced lawyers, but let us appoint a committee of our own to investigate thoroughly—that “we, the people” may know the truth and, having ascertained it, let us demand that justice be done in such thunder tones that no corporation hireling or set of hirelings masquerading in the name of the law will dare to deny it.
—————
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES & IMAGES
The Coming Nation
(Girard, Kansas)
-Apr 29, 1911, page 14
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/coming-nation/110429-comingnation-w033.pdf
https://www.newspapers.com/image/487741002/
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Apr 29, 1911, page 1
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/110429-appealtoreason-w804.pdf
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66983489/
See also:
“Red Tom” Hickey
The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism
-by Peter H. Buckingham
Texas A&M University Press, 2020
https://books.google.com/books?id=OVF_xAEACAAJ
Reddin Andrews
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddin_Andrews
“Another Kidnapping Plot!” by EVD
– from AtR of Apr 29, 1911, page 1
https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1911/110423-debs-anotherkidnappingplot.pdf
“The Haywood-Mayer-Pettibone case – Louis Adamic”
https://libcom.org/history/haywood-mayer-pettibone-case-louis-adamic
Los Angeles Times bombing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Times_bombing
The McNamara Brothers Trial
http://moses.law.umn.edu/darrow/trials.php?tid=2
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Hold the Fort – Monsieur Jack