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Hellraisers Journal – Saturday March 7, 1914
New York City – Police Attack and Arrest Unemployed Men Seeking Shelter
200 Unemployed Men Held after Arrests
at St. Alphonsus’ Catholic Church
Some 200 unemployed men were arrested during a blizzard on the night of March 4th as they sought shelter at St. Alphonsus’ Catholic Church. Frank Tannenbaum is being held on a felony charge with his bail fixed at $5,000. The others could be bailed out at the cost of $1000 each, were that amount available. The men are being held at four different prison: the Tombs, Jefferson Market, West 57th Street, and West 53rd Street.
At the Jefferson Market prison, the men are being kept in a large pen without cots and with only eight blankets for 50 men. Conditions at West 57th are much the same. At the Tombs and the West 53rd Street prison, the men have been crowded five and six to cell, and are being kept in unsanitary conditions described as vile.
Mary Heaton Vorse explains how the arrests came about:
Frank Tannenbaum, [Frank Strawn] Hamilton and [Charles] Plunkett had asked Father Schneider of St. Alphonsus if they might have shelter in his church. Father Schneider had refused on the ground that the Blessed Sacrament of the Body of our Lord was exposed and it would be sacrilege to allow men to sleep in the church at such a time.
The crowd of unemployed had not understood their instruction to wait outside and had started going inside to sit down in the back seats. A police officer told Tannenbaum to go into the church and bring the men out. Tannenbaum obeyed. The doors were closed and locked on him as soon as he went inside. The arrest followed before he could speak to the men. The papers had been told that the Catholic Church was going to stand for no nonsense and there was a battery of reporters and cameramen ready for the trouble.
It so happens that the newly formed Labor Defense Conference was holding its first meeting at the home of Mary Heaton Vorse and her husband, Joe O’Brien, the same night that the men were arrested. The Conference was organized by Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of World, and has attracted what Vorse calls “a strangely assorted group.” All of them are committed to defending workers, whether currently employed or not.
In the middle of the meeting, Heber Blankenhorn entered the room, and said, “We have your first case for you. Frank Tannenbaum and a crowd of two hundred men have just been arrested down at St. Alphonsus’.”
The Labor Defense Conference launched into action immediately. Justus Sheffield was contacted and will act as the attorney for men.
Note: Newsclip from New York Tribune of March 5, 1914
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Quote Joe Hill, Poor Ragged Tramp, Sing One Song, LRSB 5th ed, 1913
IW p2, Mar 6, 1913
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v4n50-w206-mar-06-1913-IW.pdf
A Footnote to Folly
Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse
NY, 1935, p56-61
https://archive.org/details/footnotetofolly0000mary/page/56/mode/1up?q=%22the+unemployed%22&view=theater
New York Tribune
(New York, New York)
-Mar 5, 1914
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1914-03-05/ed-1/seq-1/
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1914-03-05/ed-1/seq-2/
See also:
Mary Heaton Vorse (1874-1966)
https://spartacus-educational.com/USAvorse.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Heaton_Vorse
Frank Tannenbaum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Tannenbaum
Unemployed New York City workers
holding up 1914 newspaper, “Voice of the People”
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3a34037/
Tag: Mary Heaton Vorse
https://weneverforget.org/tag/mary-heaton-vorse/
Tag: Unemployed Workers
https://weneverforget.org/tag/unemployed-workers/
Excerpts from Chapter IV of Footnote to Folly by Mary Heaton Vorse
-Chapter IV gives us the story of a period of desperation for the unemployed in New York City in early 1914:
After the arrest of the 200 unemployed men at St. Alphonsus’ Church, the ongoing IWW organizing of the unemployed of New York City intensified. Vorse and her husband, Joe O’Brien, were in the thick of the fight as their home became a “movement house.”
That winter the snow never stopped falling.
There was a great deal of unemployment. The bread line, by the Vienna Bakery on Broadway near Grace Church, grew longer nightly. The city was full of shelterless men…..
On March 4th, there was a blizzard. This was the night of the first general meeting of the newly formed Labor Defense Conference, which was held at our house.…..
That meeting was interrupted by news of the arrests of 200 unemployed men at St Alphonsus’ Catholic Church. The defense of these men, then, became the first case of the LDC.
Vorse continues:
These so-called church raids were part of an unemployed movement led by the I.W.W. The shifting mass of unemployed workers was run by a Committee of Ten, the ablest of the group. …They wanted to say to society, “We are skilled workmen thrown out of jobs through no fault of our own. What are you going to do about us?”…..
From March 4th, the little brick house with its prim Victorian furniture was full of unemployed boys. They took over our house and our lives and made us part of their movement…. We always kept a wash boiler of spaghetti on the stove and boiled ham and a roast of beef for sandwiches for anyone who came in…
What went on within both Joe and myself that winter was a sort of welding process. What had begun in Lawrence was here being hammered into shape. The unemployed would never again be a faceless, nameless crowd to us. We had seen it broken down into its component parts of human beings…. Only now there was difference in the intensity of our preoccupation. In Lawrence we had, after all, been only spectators. We had been on the outside. Now suddenly we were on the inside, part of the movement, with responsibility for these men. We would never again be spectators….
[Emphasis added.]
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We Will Sing One Song – Six Feet In the Pine
Lyrics by Joe Hill