Don’t Mourn, Organize!
-Joe Hill
Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday December 13, 1916
From the Seattle Union Record: Red Flowers for Martyred Workers
In this week’s edition of the Union Record, Wilbur Maitre Fairbanks offers his view of the funerals held on Saturday, November 18th, for Fellow Workers Felix Baran, Hugo Gerlot and John Looney, who were murdered by Sheriff McRae and his gang of deputized company gunthugs on November 5th, a day which will go down in history as Everett’s Bloody Sunday.
IMPRESSIONS MADE BY FUNERAL
OF MURDERED WORKERS
—–
Over that crowd at Ninth and Union as it formed itself into line of march behind the dead hung Hugo’s “seven jaws of misery-night, solitude, nakedness, weakness, ignorance, hunger and thirst.” The night of despair, the solitude of social contempt, weakness against brutal persecution, ignorance of the reason for today’s despair and of what the abuse and degradation of tomorrow might be, hunger and thirst for just a place on God’s footstool whereon to live, to hope, to labor and to love.
Those men, every one, were of the earth’s disinherited, the down-trodden, reviled and shunned. Sorrow beat the requiem of that death march. A sepulchre and a tomb-one for those yet living, the other for the dead. Yet, tragically portentious as was that spectacle, there were those upon the curb who smiled, jested and even sneered. (Praises, be, these were few in number!)
Noting this, there came to my mind those immortal words of Daniel Defoe in his famous classic “Robinson Crusoe”:
I saw the world around me, one part laboring for bread, and the other part squandering in vile excess or empty pleasures, equally miserable, because the end they proposed still fled from them; for the man of pleasure every day surfeited of his vice, and heaped work for sorrow and repentence; and the man of labor spent his strength in daily struggling for bread to maintain the vital strength he labored with; so living in a daily circulation of sorrow, living but to work, and working but to live, as if daily bread were the only end of a wearisome life, and a wearisome life the only occasion of daily bread.
And I knew that what Defoe saw still held forth today.
But lo! time’s passage blazes new highways that those who travel may follow with more aggressive and assured confidence. As a result, behold, we see a protest, a protest in the forms of those dead men being escorted to their graves by the thousands of sympathizers. I recalled the lines of Hugo:
Oh, my rich gentry, because you cannot eat up everything, because opulence produces indigestion, seeing that your stomachs are no bigger than ours, because it is, after all, better to distribute the remainder than to throw it away, you exalt a morsel flung to the poor into an act of magnificence. Oh, you give us bread, you give us shelter, you give us clothes, you give us employment, and you push audacity, folly, cruelty, stupidity, absurdity to the pitch of believing that we are grateful. The bread is the bread of servitude, the shelter is a footman’s bedroom, the clothes are a livery, the employment is ridiculous, paid for, it is true, but brutalizing.
Oh, you believe in the right to humiliate us with lodging and nourishment, and you imagine that we are your debtors, and you count on our gratitude! Very well, we will eat up your substance, we will devour you alive and gnaw your heartstrings with our teeth!
Time has been steadily teaching this lesson to the world. Today, Saturday, November 19, A. D. 1916, the dead have been carried away by the meek and peaceful men, men who distributed flowers freely among the multitudes that gazed upon the funeral march of those same givers’ slaughtered brothers. And among those who gave flowers many were hungry, most of them ragged, all of them despised and shunned!
Yes, flowers-red flowers, carnations and roses-were that Saturday, November 19, offered. But beware, ye soulless, greedy perpetrators of iniquity and injustice! The handwriting is on the wall. Too long has a patient and submissive people borne the burdens which a haughty, pitiless, relentless iron heel has placed upon them. Beware! Else on Sunday, November, 20, the roses and carnations of Saturday will have turned to the boom of guns, and the mob’s roar!
WILBUR MAITRE FAIRBANKS.
———-[Photographs and paragraph breaks added.]
Note: The funerals of Fellow Workers Baran, Gerlot and Looney where held on Saturday November 18th.
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SOURCE
Seattle Union Record
(Seattle, Washington)
-Dec 9, 1916, page 3 (019)
http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/search/collection/pnwlabor/page/1
IMAGES
Everett Massacre, Funeral Gerlot, Looney, Baran, Nov 18, 1916, WCS
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002672635;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=125;num=119
Everett Massacre, Funeral Felix Baran, Nov 18, 1916, UW
http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/search/collection/pnwlabor/page/2
Everett Massacre, Funeral Baran Gerlot Looney, Nov 18, 1916, UW
http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/search/collection/pnwlabor/page/1
See also:
Seattle Union Record (1900-1928)
-by Natalia Salinas-Aguila
http://depts.washington.edu/labhist/laborpress/Union_Record_1900-1928.htm
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Volumes I & II
-by Daniel Defoe
Cochrane and Pickersgill, 1831
https://books.google.com/books?id=1GR9f7suUgIC
https://books.google.com/books?id=3g8E58hyqpAC
The Defoe quote above: “I saw the world [busy] around me…”
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=3g8E58hyqpAC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA7
The Works of Victor Hugo: The Man Who Laughs, Volume I
-by Victor Hugo
Athenaeum Society, 1888
https://books.google.com/books?id=p-xDAQAAMAAJ
The Hugo quote above: “Oh, my rich gentry…”
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=p-xDAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&source=gbs_atb&pg=GBS.PA339
This appears to be the entire book:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12587
Hellraisers Journal: Funerals Held in Seattle for Young Everett Martyrs; Mourners Sing “The Red Flag”
https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-funerals-held-in-seattle-for-young-everett-martyr-mourners-sing-the-red-flag/
Hellraisers Journal: Seattle Union Record Reports on Funeral for Everett Martyrs and Mass Meeting at Dreamland
https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-seattle-union-record-reports-on-funeral-for-everett-martyrs-and-mass-meeting-at-dreamland/
The Everett Massacre
-by Walker C. Smith.
IWW, 1918
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001106557
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31810/31810-h/31810-h.htm
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