You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
Sunday July 30, 1916
Hibbing, Minnesota – Joe Ettor Speaks to Striking Miners
From The Duluth News Tribune of July 27, 1916:
STRIKERS AT HIBBING OPEN DOORS TO PUBLIC
—–
Non-Members Hear Speakers- Joseph Ettor,
Long Expected, Arrives on Scene-
Says conditions Are Deplorable.
—–HIBBING, July 26.-With two of their foremost leaders on the scene the I. W. W. here made a change in tactics today when they abandoned their former secretive methods and opened the doors of Workers’ hall to the public to hear speeches on the strike situation as viewed by the strikers. Joseph Ettor, who gained notoriety for his share in various eastern strikers, arrived here this afternoon by automobile from Virginia, joining Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who addressed a meeting here last night.
The meeting this afternoon was opened by Miss Flynn, who declared that the only people who can “break or win this strike are the miners themselves.”
Present at the meeting were Assistant Superintendent W. A. Tappan of the Oliver Iron Mining company, other mining officials and a few business men. Scarcely 200 miners were present.
[Asserted Miss Flynn:]
You need not be afraid that scabs will take your places…If the mining companies could have gotten them they would have been here long ago. The war in Europe cuts off practically all immigration and the harvest fields are calling for every available bit of surplus labor. Why don’t the companies put their paid deputies at work. If they did those fellows would lose some of that big front they have.
Sheriff Meining is in a bad fix. He has 800 deputies that are being paid by the county now, costing $2,000 a day. If he takes them away the operators will cry for protection and if he lets them stay the tax payers will protest against the expense.
Ettor was found just before he addressed the meeting this afternoon at a Finnish boarding house where he was eating what he said was the first meal he had tasted since he left Duluth yesterday.
Although on the range but comparatively few hours he said he had seen enough to satisfy him that “deplorable conditions existed here.”
[He further said:]
The shacks that I have seen to shelter the miners are the worst I ever saw. From the outside it looks all right but when you get a closer view its awful.
There is an army on the range large enough to guard Verdun from the Germans.
Ettor carefully avoided giving information and would reveal nothing of his plans. He said he had not seen Haywood for several weeks refusing to state whence he came, where he was going or how long he intended to stay.
[Photograph added.]
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SOURCE
The Duluth News Tribune
(Duluth, Minnesota)
-July 27, 1916, page 5
http://www.genealogybank.com/
IMAGE
Joe Ettor Speaks in Boston for Joe Hill, Globe, Nov 8, 1915
http://newspaperarchive.com/us/massachusetts/boston/boston-daily-globe/1915/11-08/page-28
Casey Jones the Union Scab – Mark Ross
Lyrics by Joe Hill