—————
Hellraisers Journal – Friday October 13, 1922
“The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter, Part I
From The Survey Graphic Number of October 1922:
[Part I of II.]
HE other day I was riding in a street car in New York behind two well dressed men deep in their daily papers. Their comments on some of the dispatches about the railroad strike reminded me more of James Whitcomb Riley’s refrain: “The goblins’ll get yer if yer don’t look out” than anything I had heard for a long time.
“I tell you, those I. W. W. fellows…one of them rumbled.
“It doesn’t say it’s proved yet they were around …” the other suggested timidly.
“Huh! Doesn’t need to!” the first shook his head ominously. “Nowadays a man takes his life in his hand wherever he goes. I believe in giving that kind of vermin a wide berth. I never saw one of them and I never want to!”
The next instant there was some sort of mix-up with a truck on the track and we all got a violent jolt. The speaker, who had risen in his seat to get off at the next corner, became rather badly tangled with some passengers across the aisle. I helped to disentangle them and he was at once all smiles and amiability—“Almost like one of our college football rushes,” he grinned, in the easy fellowship an earlier generation is apt to accord its successors on the same campus.
I should have liked to watch his face when I told him that I am a sincerely convinced, indelible I. W. W.; that I had just been released from Leavenworth prison on expiration of a five-year sentence under the 1918 Chicago indictment; and that I am now working with all the strength and ability I possess in the interest of my fifty-two fellow-workers, fellow-prisoners, still in Leavenworth, some with twenty-year sentences.
But “We’re late for that appointment,” his companion reminded him, and I missed my chance.
He will doubtless go on indefinitely repeating his “bogey-man” stuff about people whom he admits he has never seen and knows nothing of except by hearsay. I wonder how many people who read this have done exactly the same thing? And how long they are going to keep on doing it?
This is why, when I. W. W.’s are on trial, whether in courts or in newspapers, practically “everything goes.” But in all such movements, persecution only serves as propaganda, and weeds out the worthless material—those who “can’t stand the gaff” and go back on their principles—and shows the grain of the men who cannot be bribed or bought, who have the courage to stand by their convictions at whatever the cost.
There are fifty-two such men in Leavenworth today. Over two-thirds of them are American-born. They have been there since 1918, and most of them have ten- or twenty-year sentences. I know these men; and I want everyone else to know them. They are of the stuff that makes history, the sort of stuff that went to the making of our country in the beginning, and that is needed just as much right now, perhaps more, to keep our country true to its big ideals.
I am not going to try to give fifty-two full biographies (though I wish I could, for everyone of them is a story in itself—an almost unbelievable story!) but just a suggestion or a characteristic here and there of a few of the men. They are all very human, the same hopes and desires, the same flesh and blood we are all made of-fathers, husbands, brothers-it means as much to every one of them to stay there in prison year on year under those hideously monotonous, unsanitary, galling conditions, as it would to any of you who read these words. Try for one moment to realize what these things mean. Try honestly. And then try to understand what it means in terms of character for these men to stay there rather than to compromise.
NOT long ago the Rev. Richard W. Hogue, known doubtless to many [Survey] GRAPHIC readers as the international secretary of the Church League for Industrial Democracy, made a visit to Leavenworth, and James P. Thompson was one of the men with whom he talked.
“How can we, how can any decent, self-respecting man,” Thompson said to him, “buy his release at the cost of his manhood, by promising to refrain ever after from expressing his convictions and standing by his principles? It would be degrading and dishonest for us to accept ‘parole’ on the terms on which it has been offered us. We will go out of here as men, when we do go, not as ‘criminals’ purchasing ‘liberty’ with the barter of our convictions and our consciences. When we leave this place it will be with our heads up…”
Thompson has been called the “rough-necked Isaiah of the American proletariat.” Over six feet tall, with clear-cut features, deep-set eyes and level brows, he is not altogether unlike the common conception of ancient prophets, especially when he thunders—”The very people who are abusing the I. W. W. today, would, if they had lived in the days of our forefathers, have been licking the boots of King George. They would have said of the boys fighting barefooted in the snow at Valley Forge, ‘Look at them! They haven’t shoes to their feet, and they are talking about liberty! The people who are knocking the I. W. W. are the same type as those who dragged William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston with a rope round his neck; who killed Lovejoy and threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.” He is fond of quoting Woodrow Wilson’s The New Freedom where it is developed in detail how the industrial interests America control the whole machinery of government; of quoting Supreme Court Justice Brandeis as saying that “America has a hereditary aristocracy of wealth which is foreign to American ideals and menacing the nation as a democracy,” and ex-President Taft: “We must keep law and justice a little closer together in order to justify the law,” and Judge Cullen: “There is danger, real danger, that the people will see with one sweeping glance how we lawyers in the pay of predatory wealth corrupt law at its fountainhead; that the furies may then break loose and all hell will ride on their wings.”
After some three years on the Leavenworth “rock pile,” during which time he studied mechanics in all his spare hours, especially with reference to motors, Thompson now has charge of the prison garage, and also teaches in the prison night school.
PRACTICALLY all these fifty-two men have taken up some definite study or course of reading and are fitting themselves for various kinds of work and social service. They have in a sense, insofar as such a place will permit, dominated their surroundings and made their own world. Several have enrolled in the University of Wisconsin extension courses in electricity, medicine, and so on, many of them teach in the prison school, many are writers-Ralph Chaplin’s poems, for instance, are too well known perhaps to need much comment here.
Then there is Mortimer Downing, nearly sixty years old, a newspaper man, well educated, widely travelled, with friends among people of influence all over the world. Not long ago he was offered a post in the prison printing-plant, a position for which he is eminently well fitted, and one not requiring hard or very monotonous labor. But he refused it and remained as “runner” for the “rock-pile gang” (a tedious post, involving exposure and considerable exertion, the “rock-pile” being the official Gehenna of the prison) because in this way he could keep in closer touch with this group of fifty-two (all I. W. W’s., as he is) and continue to be of service to them individually. A practical example of the fine sense of fellowship and solidarity that characterizes all I. W. W.’s worthy the name.
G. J. Bourg is a construction worker, imperturbable, indomitable. One of his chief distinctions with us is the grit with which he used to keep doggedly on with his organizing-harvest fields, lumber camps, everywhere–no matter how many times he was “beaten up” by “Vigilantes” and “Citizens’ Committees.” He would crawl into camp and stay long enough to get “fit,” and out he would go again. He does not seem to know what fear means. George O’Connell is another construction worker-white haired, slow of speech, gentle-voiced, his infrequent smile is a reward in itself; he is another hard student and has made himself proficient in electricity. And Alexander Cournos, who was assistant “weather man” out in South Dakota-short, slender, keen-eyed, wiry-would rather calculate than eat or sleep.
Sam Scarlett (whose very name conjures visions of the time of Robin Hood) claims he is a “citizen of industry” and has no other nationality.
“Where is your home?” he was asked by the prosecution during the Chicago trial.
“Cook County Jail.”
“Before that?”
“County Jail, Cleveland, Ohio.”
“And before that?”
“City Jail, Akron, Ohio.”
“Are you a citizen?”
“No.”
“That’s enough.”Scarlett was a champion soccer football player for some years and is also a skilled machinist and electrician and one of our best speakers and organizers. Robert Connellan, a man of almost sixty, is a chemist, a graduate of the University of California, and a musician (playing in the prison orchestra). We know him best as never too tired to explain carefully, in detail, no matter how tedious the matter may be. He is one of the famous “Silent Defence” men who survived those awful days in the vile Sacramento jail-an ordeal intended to break their spirit but which instead shattered their health but confirmed them in their principles.
One Saturday afternoon there was a movie show at the penitentiary, and for no reason whatever we I. W. W.’s were singled out (and particularly the long-sentence men, contrary to the custom in all prisons) to shovel coal while the rest went to the show. Of course we refused, and equally of course we were all put in The Hole. We missed the show, but we made a stand against the policy of domineering injustice that officials had inaugurated against us. For the first three years we were in prison, we were kept steadily on the “rock-pile”-a deputy warden, since transferred, told us he had orders “from Washington” “not to give us any easy time” but to “break our spirit,” and he was going to give us “good reason to know that he was running that prison.
[Emphases added.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote BBH IWW w Drops of Blood, BDB Sept 27, 1919
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045085/1919-09-27/ed-1/seq-5/
Hellraisers Journal – Monday September 29, 1919
History of I. W. W. Written with “Drops of Blood” and “Bitter Tears of Anguish”
The Survey, Graphic Number
(New York, New York)
-October 1922, page 29
https://archive.org/details/surveyoctmar1923surv/page/28/mode/2up
(search: wetter other day)
https://books.google.com/books?id=OqQqAAAAMAAJ
See also:
Rebel Voices
An IWW Anthology
-ed by Joyce L. Kornbluh
PM Press, Sep 1, 2011
https://books.google.com/books?id=VbVHEAAAQBAJ
-page 343 (193 of 268)
https://archive.iww.org/PDF/history/library/misc/rebel-voices-2_0.pdf
American Political Prisoners
Prosecutions Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts
-Stephen Martin Kohn
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994
(search: with last names of Class War Prisoners mentioned above)
https://books.google.com/books?id=-_xHbn9dtaAC
Tag: Chicago IWW Class War Prisoners
https://weneverforget.org/tag/chicago-iww-class-war-prisoners/
Tag: Sacramento IWW Class War Prisoners
https://weneverforget.org/tag/sacramento-iww-class-war-prisoners/
Name Index to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary
-Inmate Case Files, 1895-1931
Note:
Chicago Class War Prisoners’ inmate numbers begin: 131
Sacramento Class War Prisoners’ inmate numbers begin: 135
https://www.archives.gov/kansas-city/finding-aids/leavenworth-penitentiary
Pierce Wetter, 13179
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/112062414
James P. Thompson, 13145
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/55282172
Ralph Chaplin, 13104
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6952405
Mortimer Downing, 13566
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117719318
G. J. Bourg, 13118
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117703286
George O’Connell
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117719347
Alexander Cournos, 13123
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117703298
Sam Scarlett, 13114
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117703272
Robert Connellan, 13563
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117719307
IWW Martyrs of the Sacramento County Jail
WE NEVER FORGET: The IWW Martyrs of the Sacramento County Jail
Who Died Awaiting Trial, October-November, 1918
Between October 22nd and November 2nd, 1918, five Fellow Workers, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, died of influenza while awaiting trial on Federal Espionage charges.
FW Ed Burns-died October 22nd
FW James Nolan-died October 28th
FW R. J. Blaine-died October 28th
FW H. C. Evans-died October 31st
FW Frank Travis-died November 2nd
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Mourn Not the Dead” by Ralph Chaplin
Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin
The Commonwealth of Toil – Peter Hicks
Lyrics by Ralph Chaplin