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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday October 14, 1922
“The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter, Part II
From The Survey Graphic Number of October 1922:
[Part II of II.]
wo of our men-Caesar Tabib and Edward Quigley—are suffering from tuberculosis aggravated if not contracted in the Sacramento jail where they spent a year before they were brought to trial. Because of their physical condition, these two men were prevailed on by the rest of us to make application for release, for “clemency,” but their application was coldly refused by the Department of Justice. Apparently they are not yet near enough to death to make it “safe” to release them.
Another of our number, William Weyh, was kept on the “rock-pile” last December until the exposure resulted in severe illness, hemorrhages—twelve in a single day. He was so emaciated as to be scarcely recognizable. It was at this point that a prison official said to him: “I don’t believe you have another ten hours to live if you stay in this place. Drop your I. W. W. affiliations, and you can go out of here as soon as you please.” Weyh’s answer was: “No. I’ll die first.” We had been urging him to make application for release and he at last consented, and the authorities agreed, apparently preferring that he should die outside the walls. He stipulated, however, in writing, that “I have not wavered in my adherence to the I. W. W. and its principles.”
There is not space here to go further down the list of these fifty-two men; they all have the same splendid spirit, the same high courage, the same sense of the crucial human value of solidarity.
AGAIN and again I am asked by those who depend only upon newspapers for their information, why we refuse to ask for “clemency”; and last July, when a petition for general amnesty (that is, for unconditional release for all charged with the same “offence”) signed by some three hundred thousand names from all over the country, was presented to President Harding by a delegation of representative men and women, the President expressed “surprise” about this refusal on our part, and of course at the same time went through with that same ancient formula—”No one advocating the overthrow of the government by violence will be pardoned.” This phrase is continually used by officials, apparently in lieu of any reason they can give for our continued imprisonment.
The truth of the matter is, not one of these fifty-two men was ever even indicted on the preposterous charges brought against them in the press during war-time hysteria, such as the receipt of German gold, and being spies. They are in prison now solely for expression of opinion, and none of those opinions have anything to do with the overthrow of any government in any way—they are merely opinions against war. Note also that these men are confined under the Espionage Act only, though it is now no longer in force. In lieu of any legal reason for their continued incarceration, Attorney General Daugherty even felt obliged to resort to giving out false information in reply to inquiries made on this subject by the Federal Council of Churches (see March 11, 1922 issue Information Service Research Department, Commission on Church and Social Service, F. C. C. C. A., room 604, 105 East 22 Street, New York).
Now, to revert to the President’s “surprise” that we are unwilling to crawl out, I don’t for a moment doubt his genuineness. It is entirely likely that it really is very difficult for him to understand such a thing. Let me quote from the Open Letter since prepared by these fifty-two men and sent a month ago not only to the President, but also to all Cabinet officials, Congressmen, the Governors of the forty-eight states, and to editors and others throughout the country. (I shall be very glad to send a copy to any one who will write me in care of the SURVEY.)
We are not criminals and are not in prison because we committed any crimes or conspired to commit them. From the beginning, justice has been denied us and the truth of our case withheld from the consideration of the public….In the press, the I. W. W. is like the Mexican in the movie show; he is always the villain….We are in prison now solely for exercising our constitutional right of free speech…. If it is a crime to exercise the right for which our fathers laid down their lives, we have no apology to make.
…To make application for pardon would make hypocrites of us all….We refuse to recant, and continue to refuse to beg for a pardon which in common justice should have been accorded to us long ago….We are but a small group, insignificant in the universal scheme of things, but the ideas we are standing for are not insignificant. They are big and vtial and dynamic and concern every man, woman and child in America. It matters little what happens to us, but if the American people lose the right of free speech, the loss to the whole world will be irreparable.…We believed before we were convicted and we believe now that the present economic order is wasteful, planless, chaotic and criminal….We seek to replace it with a well-ordered and scientifically managed system in which machinery will be the only slave... a civilization worthy of the intelligence of humanity….Persecution is not new to us. Some day the truth of the incredible atrocities perpetrated upon our workers in this “Land of the Free” will become known to the world. Our imprisonment is only a single episode in the long history of brutality,…onslaughts of cruelty to be compared only with the burning of witches-exile and torture and deliberate murder have for years been our invariable lot. But ideals cannot be altered by force; human convictions cannot be caged with iron bars; human progress cannot be damned with a prison wall….
Captain Sidney Lanier, of the U. S. Military Intelligence Corps, with the facts of this case weighing heavily on his conscience, made a direct appeal to President Wilson: “I am of the opinion,” he declared, “that these men were convicted contrary to the law and the evidence, solely because they were leaders in an organization against which public sentiment was aroused, and the verdict rendered was in obedience to public hysteria.” His opinion is borne out by the fact that war-profiteers, German agents, and others convicted of direct assistance to Germany during the war have long since been released, and of the 946 convictions under the so-called Espionage Act, (of persons not I. W. W.’s), all but five are now free.
Solidarity-the basic, ineradicable, human faith that an injury to one is an injury to all—is the spirit, the very essence of our organization. Compromise of any sort, for any purpose, is cheap enough; to compromise the principle of solidarity is essentially disloyal not only to the rest of the group, but to the whole vital cause for which we stand. “We were not convicted as individuals, but as a group. We were convicted of a ‘conspiracy’ of which we are all equally innocent or all equally guilty.”
THESE men in prison are bearing the brunt of intolerance and repression bred of the war and of the forces that bred the war. They are standing by their ideals at the cost, literally, of their lives in the full knowledge that for them individually there is everything to lose and nothing to gain, that no advantage can possibly accrue to them personally.
You who read these words: do none of you care whether justice is done? Do none of you care enough to make it your serious, personal concern to get the facts, all the facts, the whole truth, about this matter? And then add your influence to the forces already at work for the release of these men.
[Emphasis added.]
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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:
Hellraisers Journal – Friday October 13, 1922
“The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter, Part I
Sept 2, 1922, New York Times
-52 IWWs Open Letter to Pres Harding, Refuse to Recant Beliefs
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/111439489/sept-2-1922-new-york-times-52-iwws/
“Open letter to President Harding: from 52 members of the I.W.W. in Leavenworth Penitentiary who refuse to apply for individual clemency”
IWW, Chicago, 1922
https://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/openletterpresident.pdf
Truth about IWW Prisoners
ACLU, April 1922
http://cfss.indstate.edu/debspams/a505t7_1922.pdf
Unity, Volumes 89-90
A.C. Clark, 1922
(search: “political prisoners”)
(search: “caesar tabib”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=PlHwCNr3CUQC
“Freedom for political prisoners. Are 110 million
Americans afraid of the ideas of 66 men?”
Joint Amnesty committee, 233 Maryland Bldg., Washington, D. C. [1922].
https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.20803300/?st=text
The Nation, Volume 116
J.H. Richards, 1923
-Feb 14, 1923
(search: “caesar tabib”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=Mr9yjzF7xcMC
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
Caesar Tabib
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117719365
Edward Quigley
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/117719353
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The Commonwealth of Toil – Peter Hicks
Lyrics by Ralph Chaplin