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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday March 3, 1914
Herman Suhr and Richard Ford Convicted of Second Degree Murder
From the International Socialist Review of March 1914:
The Wheatland Boys
HERMAN Suhr and Richard Ford, leaders of the strike on the Durst Hop Ranch at Wheatland, have been convicted of murder in the second degree, in the trial for the murder of District Attorney Edmund Manwell, killed in the raid of the sheriff’s posse on a peacable meeting of men, women and children strikers. William Back and Harry Bagan, who stood trial with them, have been released “on account of insufficient evidence.”
Ford and Suhr are convicted of murder. But they are not convicted of actually having murdered Mr. Maxwell. They are convicted of conspiring to murder, of being accessory before the fact.
The evidence of several eye witnesses proved that the District Attorney was killed by a Porto Rican, who came to the rescue of his fellow strikers. But the Porto Rican was killed himself; Ford and Suhr were not killed. And, as Prosecuting Attorney Carlin says, “The blood of Ed Manwell cries from the ground for their conviction.” The employing class cry for their conviction, Mr. Carlin might have added with less false sentiment and more truth. For these men, Ford and Suhr, were strike leaders, and their strike promised to be successful, had not the sheriff’s posse acted as strikebreakers for the Hop Barons.
These are the reasons for the conviction of Ford and Suhr. The precedent of a conviction of a labor leader for conspiracy to murder, of being accessory before the fact to any violence fomented by the employers in time of industrial trouble, is choked down the throats of the working class in California. And a staggering blow is given of the organization of the migratory workers, in whose vast army they urge toward organization had just begun to take embryonic shape.
Immediately behind the four prisoners during the trial sat Mrs. Suhr and Mrs. Ford, each with her two children. Suhr is desperately broken by the tortures of the Burns detectives, and even wiry, spirited hopeful Ford shows the long imprisonment and the strain. But the men show their ordeal hardly more than their wives.
As they sat before the twelve men who were to decide their fate, it was difficult to imagine a situation where justice would be more bitterly impossible to secure than in this county of Yuba, from which change of venue had been denied the four prisoners. Not a man in the jury who would not consider (however falsely) that his financial interest would be more secure for the conviction of these men. Not a man there who knew them or had ever looked upon their faces before. Not a man there who did not know at least by reputation, the dead man, his widow and orphans. Not a man who had not read the bitter attacks of the local press, condemning these men to the gallows before they were even brought to trial. Not a man who had ever read a word favorable to them (the reading of the pamphlet [“Plotting to Convict the Wheatland Hop Pickers”] sent into Yuba County by this league having been declared by the judge to disqualify a man from jury service). Not a man in the jury, probably, who did not share the prejudice of the man with a home, against the so-called hobo.
Austin Lewis’ plea for the defense was brilliant, profoundly human and convincing. It took the evidence, as given by both sides and utterly demolished the case of the prosecution with the sword of cold reason, slashed the cowardly Stanwood for his persecutions of helpless prisoners, and then flung itself upward in such an appeal to the blood-kindred of all men in aspirations for betterment and freedom, such as the strike on the Durst Ranch, as must have stirred the blood of every listener. But Lewis was a stranger to the jurymen, and their petty life in an agricultural community rendered it impossible for them to judge in a case involving an industrial question.
Prosecuting Attorney Carlin, who followed, had set his stage well. Opposite the jury sat the widow of the dead man with her six children. Intimately, as a man might talk to them leaning over the front fences, Carlin drove his plea home to the jury, every man of whom knew him, and many of whom, it is stated, were under obligations to him. Analysis of the testimony there was none; argument there was none; reason there was none.
A poor, shabby, cowardly speech, vulgar and dull. But it did not have to be very clever. All was well prepared without a clever plea. The judge read to the jury instructions from the law exactly covering a conviction for conspiracy in these cases, and hastily skipped over the instructions which would have freed the men by showing that Ford and Suhr did not aid and abet the Porto Rican who did the shooting.
The crooked, brutal case was about finished. The prophecy of gentlemen intimately associate with the ever clever Burns detectives to the effect that the verdict would be brought in at 1:30 p. m. on January 31, was correct. Society women and social workers who had come up from San Francisco, representatives of the press, investigators from the new Federal Commission on Industrial Relations, townsmen and townswomen crowded the courtroom. And the impious mock dignity of the law went on its wind-inflated way, to free the two men whom it dare not hold and to pronounce guilty the two whose sole crime was that they rose to lead out of the darkness, a helpless crowd of men, women and children, to convict these men who used what talents were theirs to voice the will and aspirations of these people for clean and decent conditions and a wage sufficient to allow them to hold up their heads as men.
Their cases will be appealed, and the storms of protest and wrath will not be downed until they are free.
[Photograph and Emphasis added.]
From the International Socialist Review of January 1914:
The Wheatland Boys
NELS NELSON has “hanged himself” (we quote) in his lonely cell at Marysville Jail-Nels Nelson with one arm shot off by a deputy sheriff on Wheatland’s “Bloody Sunday.” Sixteen-year-old Edward Gleaser has disappeared after being technically released by the prosecution to prevent his uncle from regaining possession of the boy through habeas corpus proceedings. Where is the boy? Are the Burns sleuths hiding him, or, possibly, has he like Nels Nelson passed beyond the cowardly mockeries of Justice as it is administered in Yuba County?
These, the most recent developments in the Wheatland cases, of which the first case comes to trial January 12, are somber as the whole story of the Wheatland trouble. There is but one bright spot in that story-the superb solidarity shown in the strike which preceded the sheriff’s raid, when a motley crowd of Swedes, Mexicans, Japanese, Syrians, Americans and other nationalities, men, women and children, stood as one man for decent human conditions and a living wage. The fear inspired in Ralph Durst by that solidarity was the unacknowledged cause of the sheriff’s raid incorrectly known as the Wheatland riots.
On August 4 of this year the small army of workers on the Durst hop ranch at Wheatland, Yuba County, California, met to protest against their conditions and pay. Two thousand three hundred in number, men, women and children, they had answered the flowery advertisements for hop pickers published by the Durst Brothers. Arrived there, for their accommodation they found six toilets; water lukewarm and polluted by nearness of refuse and garbage and furnished meagerly under a temperature registering daily 110 degrees (one of this thrifty family sold acetic acid lemonade at five cents a glass to the hop pickers in the field). Their pay was disgracefully small, for the Dursts saved the expense of high pole men to pull the vines down, demanded extra clean picking, and exploited the workers further under the infamous bonus system. Most of the strikers’ demands covering the above abuses Ralph Durst parried; he flatly refused the increase in pay. He was given time for further consideration, the strikers awaiting his answer.
But Durst feared their solidarity, so he sent his answer-the sheriff of the county, the district attorney and two automobiles filled with deputies, with guns full loaded and hearts bitter with scorn of the homeless man, the “blanket stiff” and his comrades in toil. Against the law he represented, the sheriff ordered the perfectly peaceful meeting the strikers were holding to disband. Without protest the strikers descended from the platform. Crazed with power, however, someone among the capitalist-owned posse fired his gun-Mr. Durst testified it was Sheriff Voss himself. The sheriff dropped his gun; a Porto Rican striker seized it. In the melee following a young Englishman and the Porto Rican were killed, also two of the attacking party, the district attorney and a deputy sheriff, while a number of others, including the sheriff, were wounded.
Within a twinkling, the craven hearted deputies, ready enough to fire on a defenseless crowd which included women and children, fled to their automobiles, leaving their dead and wounded to the miraculous gentleness of the strikers. This is the story of California’s “Bloody Sunday.
Answering the call of the cowardly and bloodthirsty county authorities, the militia was rushed to Wheatland-authority given by Governor Johnson for calling out the entire state body. Victims of Bloody Sunday’s outrages were arrested. The hop fields were searched minutely for guns; none were found-the “blanket stiff” knows better than to carry them, and women and children do not (as yet) run around even industrial America with revolvers. It remained for the Burns Agency to “find” guns.
It is to the methods of the prosecution in Yuba County, however, and the methods of the Burns Detective Agency, that we would especially call your attention. Then, if the court in Yuba County refuses a change of venue, as the violent talk of the county indicates, you will be able to see what kind of justice these Wheatland victims are likely to receive.
No sooner had the sheriff’s posse made its raid, than the Blood Hunt began on William ]. Burns’ field of dishonor. Dollars blew the bugle; the smell of human blood drew the Burns carrion lovers. Even into other states men were hunted-innocent men, wanted as witnesses only. From one town and jail and hotel to another they were dragged-Suhr, Nelson, the lad Gleaser and others, that the prosecution and its agents might the more safely torture, beat, drive mad and lose them beyond all tracing, to their friends. Everywhere the Burns ruffians had the freedom of the jails, for they are the servants of the Money Lords! No act was too inhuman which might wring from the broken bodies and nerves of men too honorable to be bought, fake confessions against themselves or their fellows.
Again and yet again counsel has been denied the Wheatland victims. They have been kept in jail for as long as sixty days without being taken before a magistrate as the law demands. Suhr, who had been tortured into attempting suicide in Alameda County jail, was prevented by Prosecuting Attorney Stanwood and other so-called officers of the law, from filing complaint against his assailants. Counsel has been repeatedly denied the right to see their own clients, and thus far no notary has been found in Yuba County courageous enough to take the prisoners’ depositions. The shorthand reporter is not allowed to take their statements, and representatives of the press are barred from seeing them.
Such is law and order in Yuba County, in the State of California. We put it to you-Would any jury in Yuba County dare acquit these innocent men?
The defense, working against these well nigh insurmountable obstacles, is in great need of funds-money needed for immediate use. During the trial, the witnesses for the defense, workingmen ill paid and irregularly employed at best, must be housed and fed. The working class cannot subpoena men from its own numbers and leave them to starve.
Funds should be forwarded to the Wheatland Hop Pickers’ Defense Committee, Andy Barber, Secretary, at 1119 Third Street, Sacramento, California.
[Emphasis added.]
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SOURCES
Quote JP Thompson re Wheatland, June 25-26, 1918,
Chicago IWW Trial of H George, p71-2,
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d01368761a&view=1up&seq=75
International Socialist Review
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Mar 1914, p522
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v14n09-mar-1914-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf
-Jan 1914, p442-3
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v14n07-jan-1914-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf
IMAGE
Hop Pickers, Durst Ranch, Wheatland, California, 1913
https://reuther.wayne.edu/node/4068
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 23, 1913
Marysville, California – I.W.W. Hop-Pickers Martyred at Wheatland
Vincent St. John, “The Wheatland Victims:Speech at a Protest Meeting for the Wheatland Hop Pickers: Chicago — Sept. 28,1913”
Solidarity [Cleveland], v. 4, no. 40, whole no. 196 (Oct. 11, 1913), pp. 1, 4.
http://www.marxisthistory.org/history/usa/unions/iww/1913/0928-stjohn-wheatland.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1913/v04n40-w196-oct-11-1913-solidarity.pdf
N.A. Richardson, “The Murderers at Wheatland”, The Western Comrade, vol. 1, no. 9 (Dec. 1913), pp. 296–297.
https://archive.org/details/westerncomrade19np
Tag: Wheatland Hop-Pickers Strike of 1913
https://weneverforget.org/tag/wheatland-hop-pickers-strike-of-1913/
Tag: Richard Blackie Ford
https://weneverforget.org/tag/richard-blackie-ford/
Tag: Herman Suhr
https://weneverforget.org/tag/herman-suhr/
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Overalls and Snuff