Am I to die, starving in the midst of plenty?
Or shall I die fighting?
For my part, a thousand times over,
I’ll die fighting before I’ll die starving.
-J. H. Walsh
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Hellraisers Journal Monday September 21, 1908
Billings, Montana – Mrs. Hazlett Encounters Walsh and His Army
From the Socialist Montana News of September 17, 1908:
On Mrs. Hazlett’s trip to Red Lodge, where the Labor day committee refused to let her speak after having engaged her, she spoke Saturday night at Billings. She had to combat a patent medicine doctor, another street fakir, and J. H. Walsh was there also with his industrial army. This “army” is a curious development of the unemployed protest. It will be remembered that J. H. Walsh was the first editor of the Montana News. He has since been a national organizer for I. W. W., and has been speaking along the coast, and through the western country. He has recently organize this hobo army of twenty, and they are on their way to the convention of the Industrial Workers of the World at Chicago.
They hobo it through the country and camp out. Mrs. Walsh goes through on a Pullman and he takes the baggage. They sing songs of the red flag and revolution, sell literature and take collections. They do not talk for socialism, but only for industrial unionism. Walsh does not believe in political action at all, but only in “direct action.” At the same time he says their propaganda is addressed to the large ranks of the unemployed, floaters, who are disfranchised because of no place to stay. Such work as the “hobo army” does may arouse the spirit of revolt in this class made miserable by society’s injustice, and so teach the only possible remedy for these terrible evils-the ownership by all mankind of the means of life.
———-
[Photograph and paragraph break added.]
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SOURCE
Montana News
“Owned and Published by the
Socialist Party of Montana”
(Helena, Montana)
-Sept 17, 1908
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024811/1908-09-17/ed-1/seq-4/
IMAGE
IWW Membership Card
http://www.iww.org/content/red-card
See also:
Tag: J. H. Walsh
https://weneverforget.org/tag/j-h-walsh/
The I. W. W.
A Study of American Syndicalism
-by Paul Frederick Brissenden
Columbia University, 1920
-pages 221-4, 233
(search: “overalls brigade”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=5CRAAAAAYAAJ
Citizen Hobo:
How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America
-by Todd DePastino
University of Chicago Press, Mar 15, 2010
https://books.google.com/books?id=OsGMuyFE_FQC
An excerpt from Citizen Hobo
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/143783.html
The Politics of Hobohemia
On September 1, 1908, a barnstorming band of nineteen hoboes departed Portland, Oregon, on a 2,500-mile journey across the wageworkers’ frontier. Led by J. H. Walsh…..
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