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Hellraisers Journal – Friday March 3, 1911
Fresno, California – The Jail and Eleven of 100 (+) IWWs from Behind the Bars
From The San Francisco Call of March 2, 1911:
HUNDRED IN JAIL AND
MORE SEEK “MARTYRDOM”
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By FRED BECHDOLT(Author of “The Hard Rock Man.” “Stories of Hazardous Callings” and other short stories in the Saturday Evening Post and various magazines.)
(Special Dispatch to The Call)FRESNO, March 1.—Fresno is the center of one of the most remarkable movements in the troubled history of labor. In this place, whose per capita wealth is more than ordinarily large—the center of one of the richest productive areas in all America—more than 100 discontented men are in jail, and to it other hundreds are marching “to fan the flames of discontent.”
That is the way the literature of the industrial workers of the world puts it, “to fan the flames of discontent.”
With that end in view, this order has begun an invasion of the state of California. With that end in view, its members invited arrest and went to jail; and to serve the same purpose, ragged and shivering zealots are even now sleeping behind the piles and riding brakebeams over the continent’s whole width, in the idea of getting behind the same bars which their companions have found.
TRAMP TO GET INTO JAIL
It is one of those strange situations which crop up suddenly and are hard to understand. Some thousands of men, whose business is to work with their hands, tramping and stealing rides, suffering hardship and facing danger— to get into jail. And to get into that one particular jail, in a town of which they had never heard before, in which they have no direct interest.
Naturally the questions come to mind: Who are these men? What is their order? Why does it exist? And why does that order pick out Fresno? To answer all of them briefly, I can risk offense by repeating that catch phrase of the I. W. W.: “To fan the flames of discontent.” It even answers the first.
I want to tell things coherently and in order. But, before beginning at the chronological beginning, I will tell what I have seen in Fresno, and what I have heard. In the first place, the town is prosperous, and the country around it is very rich. Men earn good wages here, and employers often have a hard time to find all the men they want.
In this place the businessmen have, as a rule, made their ways through many hard knocks and against many obstacles, and they are decided individualists, a law abiding and rather sturdy opinioned lot. These businessmen are now deeply stirred up, and it is no exaggeration to say that a large proportion of them are talking earnestly of mob violence, should the two invading bodies of I. W. W. members—who are coming, one from the north and the other from the east—reach this town…..
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Frank Little, Fresno Jails Dungeons, FMR p6, Sept 2, 1910
https://www.newspapers.com/image/606951967/
The San Francisco Call
(San Francisco, California)
-Mar 2, 1911
(-read full article here, and see page 2 for more.)
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1911-03-02/ed-1/seq-1/
See also:
Tag: Fresno Free Speech Fight of 1910-1911
https://weneverforget.org/tag/fresno-free-speech-fight-of-1910-1911/
Fellow Workers and Friends
I.W.W. Free Speech Fights as Told by Participants
-by Philip S Foner
Greenwood Press, Jan 1, 1981
-see Chapter 3, pages 76-123
https://books.google.com/books?id=y4yxAAAAIAAJ
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“I. W. W. SONGS to Fan the Flames of Discontent”
(Joe Hill Memorial Edition, LRSB, 1916)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Songs_of_the_workers_9th_Edition.pdf
Hold the Fort