Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday May 4, 1920
Ralph Chaplin on the Truth Behind the Centralia Conspiracy
From The One Big Union Monthly of May 1920:
THE BACKGROUND OF CENTRALIA
By RALPH CHAPLIN
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IN ORDER to get the truth of the Centralia conspiracy it is necessary to understand the circumstances leading up to the tragedy on Armistice Day, 1919. There are two distinct viewpoints from which this unfortunate affair may be observed: That of the lumber interests, which is to isolate the incident from its anteceeding circumstances and make it a “plain murder case”; and that of working people of the Northwest generally to consider all the facts in the case in order to find out, not only how the tragedy occurred, but what brought it about as well.
It is well to state here that the lumber interests, with the aid of the trial judge, the prosecuting attorneys and the press, succeeded in keeping from the consideration of the jury, all but the actual happenings on November 11th. The long and unbroken chain of threats, raids, deportations and murders perpetrated against the I. W. W. boys before they made a last stand for their lives in their union hall, was objected to by the lumber trust’s attorneys and ruled out by the lumber trust’s lackey on the judicial bench. In this manner men who were simply defending their lives and property from a mob were shown to be deliberate and wanton assassins, while their tormentors were held up to the world as splendid examples of unquestioned and persecuted patriotism.
The efforts of the defense to prove the existence of a conspiracy on the part of the lumber interests to raid and demolish union halls and to murder their occupants were painstakingly ignored by the press.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday May 3, 1910
New York, New York – Clara Lemlich and Fannie Zinsher, Heroines
From The Progressive Woman of May 1910:
TWO LITTLE HEROINES
From The Survey of January 22, 1910 —–
I have listened to all the speakers and I have no patience for talk. I am one who feels and suffers for the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike.—Clara Lemlich at the famous Cooper Union meeting.
The spontaneous strike of 20,000 shirt waist makers in New York City was the greatest event in the history of woman’s work. The majority of the strikers were mere girls, few of them over twenty years of age. They had no “great” leaders, but among them were individualities strong enough and great enough to hold a place in the history of our country’s industrial development. Two of these were Fannie Zinsher and Clara Lemlich. The following from The Survey [“The Spirit of the Strikers” by Mary Brown Sumner] is a sketch of the lives of these two brave little girls:
I have two pictures of Fanny Zinsher in my mind, one as she came from Russia at fourteen, fleeing from persecution to free America, with round cheeks, smiling, irresponsible lips and clear eyes full of interest and delight in living; the other after five years of American freedom, with sad sweet eyes whose sight was strained by the flashing of the needle and by study late at night, mouth drooping with a weight of sadness and responsibility and an expression of patience and endurance far beyond her twenty years.
She came a little high school girl from Kishineff to San Francisco. She did not know what work for wages was, but she and her brother four years older had to turn to and support a mother and a little brother. Three hundred power-machines in one long room of the garment factory welcomed this little human machine-in-the-making. The roar and flash of the needles terrified her. She tried to work, but her nerves went more and more to pieces, her frightened eyes failed to follow her fingers as they guided her work and the second day she slit a finger open and was laid up for three weeks. When she returned she could adapt herself no better to the nervous strain. At piece work she could earn little over one dollar a week, until a kind forewoman removed her to a smaller room where in time she rose to five dollars.
Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: “Preston and Smith, a Cry from the Depths of Nevada’s Prison”
Quote EVD Movements of Undesirables, AtR p4, Oct 31, 1908
https://www.newspapers.com/image/67587512
The International Socialist Review, Volume 10
(Chicago, Illinois)
-July 1909-June 1910
C. H. Kerr & Company, 1910
https://books.google.com/books?id=MVhIAAAAYAAJ
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009034160
ISR of Apr 1910
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=MVhIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA865
“Preston and Smith, a Cry From the Depths of Nevada’s Prison”
-by Maurice E. Eldridge
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=MVhIAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA894
BNR FWs Preston n Smith Still in Jail, IW p2, Apr 9, 1910
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v2n03-w55-apr-09-1910-IW.pdf
HREE years ago the 10th of March, John Sylva, a restaurant keeper at Goldfield, Nevada, was shot and killed by M. R. Preston, a miner and member of the Western Federation of Miners at that time affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, and on May 9th, just two months later, Preston and Joseph Smith, the latter a cook and member of the I. W. W., were found guilty on an indictment charging them with murder and were sentenced to imprisonment, Preston to twenty-five and Smith to ten years.
A girl employed as waitress in Sylva’s restaurant had left her job and Sylva withheld a part of her wages. The local union of the I. W. W. sent its business agent to demand a settlement and upon being denied, a strike was called and a boycott instituted and the place was picketed, all the proceedings of the union being lawful in the State of Nevada.
Preston and Smith both acted as pickets in front of the restaurant and on several occasions, as appeared in the testimony at the trial, Sylva had displayed a large caliber revolver and threatened to take the life of Preston. On the night of March 10th, Smith had left his post and gone to his home to eat supper with his family. Preston came along and took up the picket duty and after a little while Sylva rushed to the door, gun in hand, and ordered Preston to leave. Preston refused to abandon his post and Sylva raised his gun threateningly at Preston.The latter, having heard of the threats and seeing the gun pointed at his person, had good reason to believe that his life was in danger, and in self-defense drew his own weapon and fired, killing Sylva.
Further on I shall review carefully some of the most important points of the case as they developed at the trial and some of the subsequent developments, but here I wish to state my purpose in presenting the case for your consideration.
Banner carried each week by Industrial Worker —–
Preston and Smith are wage workers. Like Debs, Moyer, Haywood and others, they were organized. They were members of unions that were organized to fight the capitalist exploiters, not to barter with them for the sale of the commodity, labor-power. And they were active members of their union, thus constituting themselves a menace to vested interests, to the right of capital to exploit labor, to the right of the capitalist to defraud and pillage the victims of our social system.
Like Debs, Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, Preston and Smith were drawn into the coils of the capitalist law and order machine and the forfeit of their lives demanded because they had dared to oppose the capitalist monster and to fight in the interest of their class, the class that lives only when it finds work and that finds work only when that work adds to the wealth of other men.
The arrest and conviction of Preston and Smith occurred while the W. F. of M. and all of the other labor organizations of the country were in the throes of the struggle to save the lives of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone. The W. F. of M. and the I. W. W. provided able counsel and some funds for the defense of these two valiant members of our class and a good fight was made for their lives, but it was almost entirely overshadowed by the other fight and as a result the capitalists and their hirelings in Nevada were allowed to send our comrades and fellow-workers to prison.
They have committed no crime but that of class-consciousness.
They have done no wrong but that of defending a helpless girl of their class against the brutal power of capital entrenched.
Their trial was a farce.
Their motion for a new trial was denied, arbitrarily.
Their application for an appeal was denied upon a technicality of language, a word used in the future instead of the present tense.
Through their counsel they have appeared twice before the State Board of Pardons and although the most flagrant violations of even the capitalist rules of legal procedure were shown to have developed at the trial, the Board has persistently, and consistently with the bourgeois idea denied their prayer.
Now, comrades and fellow workingmen and women of America, wherever you happen to be, it is time for us to act.
It is time for us to again submerge our differences of opinion as to the most effective method of political and industrial organization.
It is time for us to re-organize the Moyer, Haywood, Pettibone Protest Conferences into Preston and Smith Protest Conferences.
It is only by arousing and uniting the wage-workers all over the entire country that we shall succeed in swinging open the heavy doors of Nevada’s bastile so that our imprisoned brothers may come forth into light, liberty and life.
Will you join us comrade? brother? fellow-worker?
The following are a few of the most glaring irregularities that developed in the judicial farce which landed Preston and Smith behind the prison bars.
Preston and Smith were charged with having entered into a conspiracy to kill Sylva. To prove the conspiracy charge the State offered three witnesses-Claiborn, Bliss and Davis.
Claiborn was a predatory person infesting the mining camps of the West and at the time of giving his testimony was wanted at his home in Arkansas on a charge of having forged an insurance policy. He disappeared immediately after the trial.
Of Bliss, the leading paper of Goldfield had the following to say: “Member of Butch Cassidy’s gang at Robber’s Roost, Utah, and participated in the robbery of a $7,000 payrole; implicated in the Schurz stage robbery; arrested and brought to Goldfield, jumped bond; in trouble all through Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado and part of Utah; principal witness against Preston nd Smith.”
Jack Davis, the third of this trio of state’s witnesses, had been tried and found guilty of a most brutal and cowardly murder of two sheep men in Idaho. While on the stand he was asked a question regarding the trial and he answered in great braggadocio “Sure—I was convicted of murder in Idaho,” and he often displayed the rope with which he was to have been hanged.
It was not merely the evidence of these desperadoes that convicted Preston and Smith, it was generally understood in the court room that these three would “get” any juror who failed to come through with a verdict of guilty. But notwithstanding the charge of conspiracy and the testimony, the jury failed to bring in a verdict of murder in the first degree as the prosecution demanded and the instructions of the court would have permitted. The jurors knew that Preston and Smith were innocent, that they had violated no law, but they also knew that they had to bring in a verdict of guilty and consequently they found Preston guilty of murder in the second degree and Smith guilty of manslaugther.
I have before me two books of 80 and 75 pages, respectively, published by the Clerk of the Supreme Court of Nevada, and which constitute the briefs submitted by P. M. Bowler and F. J. Hangs, attorneys for plaintiffs in error, and by Judge O. N. Hilton, of Denver, of counsel for plaintiffs. In these two volumes every error and every flagrant violation of law and rule in the trial is taken up and discussed in the minutest detail and the reports of state and federal courts as well as English and Canadian reports have been ransacked for parallel cases that have been decided almost invariably for the defendant. Space will not permit me to go at length into these details, every one of which should be on the end of every working class tongue in America, but these two books should be reprinted in pamphlet form so that every member of the protest conferences might have a copy.
Attorneys for the defendants asked the trial judge to give the following instruction to the jury: “If you believe from the evidence that the deceased, John Sylva, made an attack upon the defendant, M. R. Preston, and that the defendant, M. R. Preston, believed and honestly acted upon the belief that he was in danger of losing his life or receiving great bodily harm, and that in order to protect his life, or to protect himself from great bodily injury it was necessary for him to kill the said John Sylva, then and in that case the killing was justifiable and you must acquit the defendants.” But the court refused to give the instruction saying that it did not state the law correctly. Judge Hilton, in his brief, says: “It conforms to every authority in its requirements and is full, complete and cogent,” and he asks if it would not have been given if the case had been reversed, if Sylva, the business man, had killed Preston, the workingman, and had been put on trial for his life.
That’s the point, fellow workers! It was class justice that was being doled out by the court, capitalist class justice by a capitalist court. Let us demand working class justice, and let us organize the members of our class to voice that demand.
The case of Smith would be a joke if it were not so serious for Smith. He is charged as a principal and accessory to murder, planed, premeditated, and is found guilty of manslaughter. In this case it was impossible to commit the crime of manslaughter for he was not present when the killing occurred, and the statutory requirement is of passion, too great, apparently, to be resisted, and without being premeditated. Smith was at home eating with his family when Sylva was killed and Attorney Bowler well says: “there being no evidence of the presence of Smith at the time and place of killing, there was no middle ground and the jury with equal propriety might have found Smith guilty of sodomy, rape, robbery or any other crime or public offense as to have found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter.”
The jury just simply had to find a verdict of guilty for both Preston and Smith and in their fear and ignorance they decided upon manslaughter as a pretty good thing for Smith.
All the courts and constituted authorities to whom they may appeal have turned them down. Comrades and fellow-workers, these two imprisoned workers now appeal to the members of their class, to the workers of the world. Shall we turn them down?
One more point which developed in that infamous trial and I have finished. An outside attorney was hired by the citizens’ alliance or the mine owners and paid $5,000 for his services as special counsel to assist in the prosecution. At the conclusion of the testimony, in his address to the jury, he uttered substantially the following words which I quote from the brief submitted by the defense to the supreme court: “You must convict the defendants, because such conviction will cause people living outside of Nevada to invest their money in the State and so bring about great prosperity. Convict these men as an example, not because of individual guilt, but sacrifice them, if need be, to secure the general prosperity of Nevada.”
Enough!
Comrades and fellow-workers, our lives and our liberties are to be sacrificed in order that capital may not be timid, that it may be invested in the industries in which we toil our lives away to enrich others.
How long, oh, how long, shall we submit!
Let every Socialist and Labor paper in the land copy this article or get the facts and write their own version of the infamy, and then let us all with one accord urge the workers of America to unite for effective protest against the further imprisonment of these two brothers. Let the protest come from every quarter and let it be so loud that the very doors of the prison will fly open. Until a central organization can be formed communications may be addressed either to John J. Balem or to the undersigned, both members of a committee elected by Branch Oakland, Socialist Party of California, for the purpose of precipitating this action.
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[Inset added from Industrial Worker of April 9, 1910.]
Tag: Preston-Smith Case
https://weneverforget.org/tag/preston-smith-case/
The Pacific Reporter, Volume 95
West Publishing Company, 1908
https://books.google.com/books?id=ETo8AAAAIAAJ
NV Supreme Court – May 25, 1908
-re State v Preston et al
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=ETo8AAAAIAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA918
From Appeal to Reason of Nov 23, 1907:
-“Preston and Smith” by Eugene V. Debs
Miner’s Magazine
-June 3, 1909-Jan 19, 1911
Western Federation of Miners, 1909
(search: “preston and smith”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=hT8tAQAAMAAJ
Search at Chronicling America:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/pages/results/?state=Nevada&date1=1907&date2=1907&proxtext=%22preston+and+smith%22&x=16&y=16&dateFilterType=yearRange&rows=50&searchType=basic&sort=date
Note: Smith was paroled in 1911 and Preston in 1914, see: Rebel Girl by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, page 93
https://libcom.org/files/rebel-girl-autobiography.pdf
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday April 30, 1910
Carson City, Nevada – Fellow Workers Preston and Smith Remain Behind Bars
From the International Socialist Review of April 1910:
HREE years ago the 10th of March, John Sylva, a restaurant keeper at Goldfield, Nevada, was shot and killed by M. R. Preston, a miner and member of the Western Federation of Miners at that time affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, and on May 9th, just two months later, Preston and Joseph Smith, the latter a cook and member of the I. W. W., were found guilty on an indictment charging them with murder and were sentenced to imprisonment, Preston to twenty-five and Smith to ten years. Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From Fellow Workers Morrie Preston and Joseph Smith, “A Cry from the Depths of Nevada’s Prison””→
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday April 29, 1920
Butte, Montana – Fellow Worker Thomas Manning Laid to Rest
From The Butte Daily Bulletin of April 28, 1920:
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FIRST OF VICTIMS OF A. C. M. MURDERERS
TO DIE SHOWN LAST HONOR
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This morning, a week to the day, since Thomas Manning fell on Anaconda road, riddled with bullets fired from guns in the hands of the notorious Roy Alley and his gang of hired murderers of the Anaconda Copper Mining company, the mortal remains of that martyr to the cause of the rights of workingmen were laid at rest in Holy Cross cemetery. And though his mangled body lies beneath six feet of cold earth, the dauntless spirit which impelled Manning, unarmed except with the conviction that he was in the right, to face the hordes of killers on the hill last Wednesday [April 21st], is still with his fellow workers and fellow victims.
In Ireland, an aged father waits in vain for the return of his son from America-reputed land of the free, where justice is supposed to dwell and where the workingman is presumed to have equal rights with the millionaire.
In Ireland, also, a loving wife, who as yet does not know that she is a widow, waits patiently for the letter from her man whom she thinks is working in this land of unexampled wealth to amass the nest-egg on which her husband and herself will be enabled to keep the wolf from the door. And, perhaps, she is awaiting that letter which will tell her that Tom has saved up enough money to bring her to the United States to make anew their home in glorious, free America.
It is also possible that Mrs. Manning, as she hears of the killings and riotings in British-ruled Erin breathes a silent prayer that her loving Tom is in America, where British soldiery with their guns are now unknown, and where, as she mercifully believes, such despicable creatures as armed company gunmen have no existence.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday April 28, 1920
Chehalis, Washington – Mike Sheehan and Elmer Smith Back Behind Bars
From The Butte Daily Bulletin of April 23, 1920:
CHEHALIS JAILOR CHARY ABOUT RECEIVING VISITS
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Correspondent Tells of Conditions in Prison Where
Victims of Centralia Lumber Barons Were Confined
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(By John Nicholas Beffel.)
Centralia, Wash.-It’s difficult to get into the decrepit old jail at Chehalis unless you are a Wobbly. I wanted to get inside, but Sheriff John Berry wouldn’t let me. He was firm about it, and a bit peevish. Sanitary conditions within were a delicate subject, a cause for official sensitiveness.
That jail has an important relation to the Centralia tragedy story. Some of the I. W. W. defendants consented to make statements while confined there. Mrs. Mary McAllister, one of the vital witnesses for the defense, who testified that Eugene Barnett was in the Roderick hotel during the rioting and not in the Avalon hotel, was held in the Chehalis jail twenty days without warrant or charge, and then released.
And now Mike Sheehan and Elmer Smith, acquitted at Montesano, were back at Chehalis, imprisoned in a little cell, suffering for lack of proper ventilation, fighting live rats and enduring the odor of dead ones. Sheehan and Smith had been found innocent of connection with the death of Warren O. Grim, and then were immediately rearrested charged with conspiring to murder Arthur McElfresh, another slain Armistice Day parader.
I asked Sheriff Berry if I could see the interior of the jail.
“Who are you investigatin’ jails for?” he demanded suspiciously.
“For the labor press,” I said.
“It won’t be necessary for you to see the inside of this jail,” he decreed. “It ain’t the kind of place it ought to be, but I can’t help that. I’ve tried to get the county commissioners to fix things, but they won’t loosen up.”
Already I knew that Berry would not permit the prisoners to receive any copies of the Seattle Union Record or any other labor paper.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday April 27, 1920
Butte, Montana – Fellow Worker Thomas Manning Dies
From The Butte Daily Bulletin of April 26, 1920:
—–
M’CARTHY AND SULLIVAN HOVERING ON BORDER
OF DEATH IN LOCAL HOSPITAL
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In the early hours of yesterday morning the spirit of Thomas Manning, first of the victims of the bloodlust of the Anaconda Copper Mining company’s gunmen as evidenced in the massacre of last Wednesday on Anaconda Road, fled to join the spirits of those who at Ludlow, and at other industrial centers of the United States have offered up their lives on the altar of devotion to the cause of the wage slaves.
On a cot in St. James hospital James Sullivan, with his spine shattered by a bullet from one of the company assassins and the lower part of his body paralyzed, lies awaiting the call of the Angel of Death. On another cot in the same institution, John McCarthy, his lungs riddled with shot fired by the murderers of Manning, also awaits the call and is hourly expected to join Manning in the Great Beyond.
Manning joined the ranks of the labor martyrs, sent to their deaths by the greed of the corporate interest who never hesitate to use the riot gun, the machine gun, the rifle and the bayonet to perpetuate the enslavement of the workers, at about 1:30 o’clock yesterday morning. Despite the severity of his wounds and the frequency of internal hemmorhage the merciful administration of opiates by the hospital authorities made his last hours on comparatively painless, although his tortured body tossed and turned in the delirium of approaching death.
The name of Manning, first of the martyrs of Wednesday, the twenty-first, has been emblazoned on the scroll of organized labor in Montana and from reports reaching Butte from the various organizations of workers throughout the state, “Manning!” will be the shibboleth around which the wage slaves will rally to end forever the reigns of the copper, the lumber, the power and the railroad kings in Montana.
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HREE years ago the 10th of March, John Sylva, a restaurant keeper at Goldfield, Nevada, was shot and killed by M. R. Preston, a miner and member of the Western Federation of Miners at that time affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, and on May 9th, just two months later, Preston and Joseph Smith, the latter a cook and member of the I. W. W., were found guilty on an indictment charging them with murder and were sentenced to imprisonment, Preston to twenty-five and Smith to ten years.
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