Hellraisers Journal – Sunday January 9, 1921 New York, New York – Mary Heaton Vorse Reports from Employment Bureau
From the Oklahoma Leader of January 3, 1921: (Note: the leader is a member of Federated Press.)
IN THE EMPLOYMENT BUREAU —–
BY MARY HEATON VORSE
New York Daily News December 15, 1920
In the employment bureau of the Amalgamated [Clothing Workers of America] on East Tenth street, groups of women gather every morning. There are bareheaded women, and smart, well dressed women, who look as if they had just stepped off Fifth avenue. In the same room Sicilian peasants meet and talk with advanced workers of Tuscan descent.
Labor contests are lost and won in such little groups. Put a dozen of them together and you have the temper of the people. It is not what people shout for in big meetings that always counts most, it’s what they say at home or among themselves in slack moments on gray, rainy mornings, waiting in the employment bureau.
Out of the murmur and talk a voice cuts with corroding sharpness: “Children! I haven’t any children! Children break strikes. The worker’s children make it easy for the employers to tramp us. The workers are afraid because they are afraid for the children. Look at our Sicilian women who have a baby every year. How terrible a strike is for them! Babies are scab makers and strikebreakers for a worker! I’ll not have babies to live wretched like me! Let the rich people have the children! Let the employers’ children do the work!“
The revolt in this woman was a hot blue flame. It never went out. It was a spirit like this that had taken the factories in Italy. With that example before her, what a scorn she had for the American workers.
“The people in this country lie down for the bosses to walk on. My husband he’s just come back from Italy. The workers here make me ashamed-when a policeman waves a club at a crowd they run; there it takes fifty guards to capture thirty workers.”
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday December 3, 1910 Chicago, Illinois – Report on Strike of 41,000 Garment Workers, Part II
From the International Socialist Review of December 1910:
[Part II.]
Not satisfied with cutting the rates and wages of the tailors, the firm instituted a system whereby the employes were charged from five to fifteen dollars for the least damage done to a garment. Lost spools, bobbins and other implements were charged up to the workers and taken out of their wages.
During the slack months, the piece workers were forced to report for work. They sat around in the shops, work or no work, earning no money, but stifling in the close, dust laden atmosphere of the fabric smelling shops.
When the pre-season months, those that constitute the busy time in the clothing industry, arrived, things changed as if by magic. Every employe was driven at top speed. Girls who had worked late into the night at home, threading needles or doing other work in order to make more money and sidestep the ten-hour law, came down to work next morning almost ill. None, however, were ever allowed to go home when sick.
Girls who asked permission to go home when sick were given some powders—good for every ailment from an earache to a sick stomach. If these powders failed to cure and the girl fainted, as happened several times each day, a doctor was summoned. But never, under any circumstances, was a girl or boy given permission to go home when sick, at least not until more substantial evidence than a sickly appearance or a mere statement was given.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 20, 1920
-Mother Jones News for May 1920, Part II
Found Described by John D. Barry and Speaking in Streator, Illinois
From The Pacific Commercial Advertiser of May 15, 1920:
AN EVENING WITH MOTHER JONES
BY JOHN D. BARRY
The News “New York’s Picture Newspaper” May 7, 1920
A few months ago I heard someone say: “I wonder where Mother Jones is now. I suppose that, like many an other she has pulled in her horns and gone into retirement.”
I thought of those words as I listened to the old lady in Los Angeles recently, on her way to San Francisco, and heard her declare in that deep, strong voice of hers, the highly developed voice of the practiced orator, that she had passed her ninetieth milestone.
“You’ve got a lot of fight in you yet,” said a man who had himself long been a fighter for good cause.
[Mother Jones announced:]
Whenever there’s a fight for labor, I want to be there. I’m still in the ring.
I wondered if those fights hadn’t been the means of keeping her so well and young. She fulfilled the law emphasized by the psychologists, that life, to be a success, must mean persistent devotion to the ideals of the mind and the spirit. Her ideals had been high. They had exacted hard service. She had lived up to them devotedly.
* * *
She knew that a group of us had come to hear her talk and it was characteristic of her good humor to talk freely for our entertainment and enlightenment. She was evidently a born story teller. She had a dramatic quality that, under different circumstances, might have made her a great actress or a great playwright. Her memory was like a series of brilliant slides. Now she would give us one picture, now another.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 24, 1920
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – Steel Workers Offer Resolution of Heartfelt Thanks
From The Butte Daily Bulletin of March 20, 1920:
STEEL WORKERS THANK CLOTH UNION FOR HELP
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(By the Federated Press.)
New York, March 20.-As a mark of gratitude for the magnificent aid given by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America to the steel workers during the great strike of 1919, they have been sent a handsomely drafted resolution of thanks. The document, which is signed by John Fitzpatrick and William Z. Foster, respectively chairman and secretary-treasurer of the committee for organizing the iron and steel workers, thanks the amalgamated for their gift of $100,000 to the strikers’ defense fund.
The amalgamated’s solidarity with the steel workers has created a sensation all over the world. Their gift is the largest sum ever raised by any organization to aid workers in another industry.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 1, 1919
Lawrence, Massachusetts – Children Return Following Textile Workers’ Victory
Happy News from the Norwich Bulletin of May 26, 1919:
About 30 of the children sent from Lawrence during the textile strike were brought back to their homes today.
From The New York Call of May 21, 1919:
From The New York Call of May 23, 1919:
–The following article by Anthony Capraro covers nearly half of page three of this edition of The Call and documents the harrowing story of the kidnapping and near lynching of Capraro and fellow strike leader, Nathan Kleinman.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday May 22, 1919
Lawrence, Massachusetts – Textile Strikers Stand Firm
From The Liberator of May 1919:
The Lawrence Strike
[by Ruth Pickering]
THE causes of the Lawrence strike are the most elemental in the whole history of the labor movement. It is a struggle simply for a living wage. But the “law and order” fraternity are doing their best to bring on what they so much fear-a revolution. Partly as an excuse for breaking the strike, partly out genuine nervousness, they are attempting to obscure the primary issues in the fog of “Bolshevism.” And the more they advertise the revolution as something which they hate, as something so manifestly dangerous to them, the more do the workers wonder: “If they hate this thing so-whatever it is-it must have something in it for us.” Fear of Bolshevism and memories of 1912 have made the Lawrence citizens and the press applaud all repressive measures. Mounted police have been imported from Lynn, and stray recruits have been added which cost the city 3,000 extra dollars per week to maintain. Their horses are scrawny and rickety and they ride with some difficulty, but what pride they lose in their consciousness of these facts, they take out on the pickets.
Men come in from the picket-line with their heads cut open and blood covering their shirt fronts. That the strikers have a legal right to maintain the picket-line is out of the question. Liberty has come to be a joke. There is no law for the “damned Bolshevik foreigner.” The brave mounted police ride up on the sidewalk cursing and swinging their sticks. The pickets retreat before these onslaughts-but they will never forget.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday May 7, 1919
Lawrence, Massachusetts – The Ordeal of Anthony Capraro and Nathan Kleinman
From the Boston Evening Globe of May 6, 1919:
TWO LAWRENCE STRIKE LEADERS KIDNAPED
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BEATEN BY CROWD, THEY BOTH SAY
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One Found in Andover, the Other in Lowell
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Special Dispatch to the Globe
Brattleboro Daily Reformer May 6, 1919
LAWRENCE, May 6–Anthony Capraro, reputed to be a representative of the New York Call, a Socialist newspaper, who has been here several weeks, reported to day that he and Nathan Kleinman, also of New York, who is an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, endeavoring to organize the Amalgamated Textile Workers as a nucleus, were kidnaped at 1:30 this morning by masked and armed men and terribly beaten.
Kleinman appeared at hotel in Lowell early today. Capraro was found in West Andover early this morning in a badly battered condition, and he was taken to the office of Dr. P. J. Look in Andover and his wounds dressed, and afterward taken to the Andover Police Station, where he now is.
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Alleges Mob Beat them
Capraro told his own story while in the Andover Police Station. He said he and Kleinman were in their rooms at the Needham Hotel in Lawrence this morning at 1:30, when a bell boy named James Silk brought the mob of 20 men to their doors. Capraro declared that the score of men were heavily masked and carried revolvers and blackjacks in their hands. When they got into the rooms of Kleinman and Capraro they began beating both labor leaders, Capraro alleged, and finally hustled them down to the street and put them into an automobile and drove away under the cover of darkness.
Capraro stated that it seemed as if they would never reach their destination, the ride was so long, and all the while they were speeding over the country roads in the automobiles the mob was busy beating Kleinman and Capraro over the heads, faces and bodies with their bludgeons.
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Put Noose About His Neck
Capraro said the mob took him out of his automobile in the woods and fixed a noose about his neck and told him they were going to hang him. All the while some of the members of the mob were beating him. Capraro said he could not see Kleinman while this was going on. The crowd which had Kleinman evidently took him to another spot. Finally they decided not to hang Capraro, he said, and they removed the noose from his neck and choked and beat and kicked him unmercifully. When the crowd tired of beating him, Capraro asserted, he managed to escape and he ran into a field and in the dark eluded his screaming pursuers.
Capraro declared that he finally reached a field, fell exhausted and crawled into the high grass and concealed himself. He lay there suffering untold pain and anguish until dawn. He then managed to crawl to the farmhouse of William I. Livingstone, near the Hackett’s Pond railroad station in West Andover. He aroused the occupants of the farmhouse at 5:30 and told his story.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday May 5, 1919
Butte, Montana – The Bulletin on “Bomb Plot” Frame-Up and May Day “Riots”
The following reports and opinion pieces are from The Butte Daily Bulletin, published May 1st, May 2nd and May 3rd, and covering the dramatic events surrounding May Day 1919.
From The Butte Daily Bulletin of May 1 1919:
BOMBS ARE SENT BY MAIL
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Packages Sent to Several Government Officials
and Citizens Throughout U. S.
Contained Explosives.
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(Special United Press Wire.)
Washington May 1.-What is believed by the officials to be a wide spread attempt on the lives of members of Wilson’s cabinet has just been discovered. Seventeen packages being held in the postoffice at New York were found to contain explosives. it is not known how many have already passed through the mail.
The packages were addressed to officials throughout the United States among whom were; Postmaster-General Burleson, Secretary of Labor Wilson, Attorney-General Palmer, and Commissioner-General Palmer, and Commissioner-General of Immigration Caminetti. There were also packages addressed to John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, New York Commissioner Howe, Mayor Hylan of New York, Governor Sproul of Pennsylvania, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, District Attorney Fickert of California and his assistant, Edward Cunha. The bombs were similar to the ones received by Mayor “Ole” Hanson of Seattle and former Senator Hardwick of Georgia. The packages all bear the label of Gimble Bros., a New York department store, but the officials of the store declare they are imitations.
Fear is expressed that some of the packages may have had sufficient postage to insure their delivery through the mails and may be enroute to their intended victims. It is noted that virtually all the prominent men to whom the packages were addressed are concerned one way or another with the immigration problems. A warning has been issued by the postoffice department to all postoffice inspectors and superintendents in charge of the railway mail service to watch for any bombs that may still be in transit. If has not been ascertained, the officials state, whether any bombs have been sent to the Americans who are attending the peace conference.
Friends of Edward Cunha delivered the package to him at his sick bed, thinking that it was a present for him. The package was only partly opened when their suspicions were aroused and the package was not opened until later. When the contents were disclosed they were found to contain sulphuric acid and explosives similar to that received by Mayor Hanson. Ficket’s package was left unopened.
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