Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: “Blood Shed in San Diego”-The Murder of Fellow Worker Joseph Mikolasek

18th May 202218th May 2022 Janet RayeFree Speech Fights

Quote EGF, re Spk FSF, ISR p618, Jan 1910 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday May 18, 1912
San Diego, California – The Death of Fellow Worker Joseph Mikolasek

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of May 16, 1912:

San Diego, Calif., May 9, 1912-The climax in the free speech fight came Tuesday, May 7. as a result one unarmed worker [Joseph Mikolasek] was murdered by the police, the town was practically under martial law, workers were clubbed on the streets, and over one hundred deported.

Tuesday morning it was reported that 84 members of the Industrial Workers of the World who were coming to participate in the free speech campaign, had arrived in the city on a freight train and were at Old Town, about three miles from the heart of the city. The police excitedly sent out all the reserves and special police men, who held up the train and took from a box car 84 free speech fighters on their way to battle. The men were lined up and herded into an old schoolhouse.

At 2 o’clock it became apparent that the vigilante outrages would be repeated for the business men were hurriedly arming themselves with rifles and shot guns. At 3 o’clock Attorney Moore of the free Speech League applied for a writ requesting the sheriff to take possession of the 84 prisoners. He also presented to the court an affidavit charging that it was the intention of the police to hand the men over to the “Vigilantes.” The writ was refused, the judge stating later in the evening he might grant a writ of habeas corpus. This was done at 8:45 p. m., too late to serve it.

Late that night, under cover of darkness, the police and the Vigilance Committee escorted the 84 Socialists and Industrial Workers out to the county line, and after tying them to trees, horsewhipping them and otherwise brutally treating them, they were told to “March north and keep going.”

Among the men thus deported were several members of the American Federation of Labor and the Socialist party.

At 7 o’clock Tuesday evening the men in town decided to make another attempt to speak on the streets. Accordingly 70 men went to the corner of Fifth and E streets and started to speak. The fifth man had mounted the rostrum when the reserve squad of the police charged the crowd which had gathered, clubbing indiscriminately. One small man named Catallon was knocked down and jumped on by a vigilante. Several citizens were injured and many speakers were arrested.

During the melee on the street some policemen were heard to say that the I. W. W. hall would be raided that night, and word was sent by sympathizers to vacate the hall, which was done, and at 7:30 p. m. when four policemen appeared at the hall it was empty. The policemen came to the doors and without demanding entrance, they poured a volley of shots into the building. They then broke into the hall and finding no one present they approached a group of I. W. W. men standing on the sidewalk around the corner. These men they proceeded to “beat up” but did not arrest them.

They then went back to the hall and saw Joe Mickolasek [Mikolasek] an I. W. W. who had just entered the building. According to Mickolasek’s dying statement the police immediately opened fire on him without any provocation. Mickolasek thereupon picked up an axe and although mortally wounded, attempted to defend himself. He wounded a policeman with the axe. The policeman who was hit with the axe was named Heddon. Thereupon Policeman Stevens opened fire upon Mickolasek. Nine shots took effect in Mickolasek’s body. During the excitement Policeman Stevens was shot in the shoulder it is supposed that this was an accident, but Woodford Hubbard, a socialist organizer, was charged with attempting to murder, although he was not in the crowd at the time of the shooting.

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[Emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: “The Shame of San Diego” by Hartwell S. Shippey, Part I

3rd May 20224th May 2022 Janet RayeFree Speech Fights

Quote EGF, re Spk FSF, ISR p618, Jan 1910 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday May 3, 1912
“The Shame of San Diego” by Hartwell S. Shippey, Part I

From the International Socialist Review of May 1912:

The Shame of San Diego

by HARTWELL S. SHIPPEY

[Part I of II]

SPAT upon, cursed, reviled; the victims of lying calumny and vile vituperation; the recipients of farcical indignities on the part of the legal lackeys of an organized oligarchy; beaten, kicked, clubbed, starved by brass-bound blue-coated Cossacks and vigilantes, the scorned and despised members of the I. W. W. hold San Diego-on-the-bay in their grasp.

Laughing, only passively resistant, singing their songs of solidarity, these homeless, propertyless, countryless “hoboes,” incarcerated in the iron-bound bastiles of smiling San Diego, are clamoring not for physical comforts or luxuries, but for mental food, the works of Marx, Spencer, Renan, Rousseau and Dietzgen.

Even without definite knowledge of the rhythmic tread of the thousands marching to their rescue, these modern Crusaders, buoyed up by their indomitable idealism, secure in the virtue of their cause, have that great faith in the loyalty of their kind to feel, if they cannot know, that theirs will be the victory.

Rivaling the Coeur d’Alene and Colorado, the San Diego fight for free speech and free press will enter the pages of revolutionary history as a stupendous example of red-blooded men heroically enduring every conceivable form of “Man’s [perfect?] self-control in the face of fiendishly inhumanity to man” and preserving brutal persecution.

San Diego may congratulate herself on being the instrument by which two socially valuable bits of education have been given to the world. First the world has come to know the extremes to which an overbearing despotism will go in its efforts to crush labor; and second, it is being demonstrated that, under certain conditions, revolutionary and conservative branches of the labor movement will line up together solidly and unitedly.

For, know ye, the battle is not primarily one fought for a short hundred yards of city street, nor yet for free speech and press alone. It is, at bottom, a struggle on the part of labor for the privilege of organizing and educating its kind to the end that the products of labor shall be rendered unto labor, and that better living conditions for the toilers shall make of this modern miasma of human misery a more fit state for human beings to occupy.

What precipitated this struggle in the non-commercial city nestling on the hills above a beautiful bay with the blue mountains rising in the distance?

California will, barring intervening preventatives, hold two great fairs in 1915, one at San Francisco and one at San Diego. A great amount of labor will be employed in instituting and conducting these fairs. Organized labor, as represented by the A. F. of L., insists on having a voice in determining the rate of wages it will receive and the conditions under which it will work. Organized capital, dominated by the M. and M., declares that IT shall be the sole arbiter in reference to these questions. Organized capital insists that the open shop shall prevail in California; while organized labor realizes that the closed shop is its life-principle. Knowing that it cannot prevail against the unions when there are no idle men to take their places, the M. and M., controlling the press of the country as it does, has systematically published misinformation throughout the country to the effect that jobs are plentiful in California-to the end that jobless men may flood the labor market of the coast and imperil the power of the unions.

The chief function of the Industrial Workers of the World on the coast has been, and is, an education of the unemployed to an understanding of the interests of labor that prevents the out-of-works from acting in the selfish and cowardly role of strike-breaker or scab. The M. and M. recognizes this menace to their plans and strikes at the vitals of this education by an attempted suppression of free speech and press, these forms of freedom being imperative to the educators of the floating population.

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Hellraisers Journal: Joe Hill Speaks on Behalf of California Free Speech League at San Francisco Building Trades Temple

13th April 202213th April 2022 Janet RayeFree Speech Fights

Quote Joe Hill, General Strike, Workers Awaken, LRSB Oct 1919 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday April 13, 1912
San Francisco, California – Joe Hill Speaks on Conditions in San Diego Jail

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of April 11, 1912:

FREE SPEECH DOINGS IN CALIFORNIA

(By Caroline Nelson).

The free speech protest in Building Trades hall Last Sunday [March 31] was a great success; $175 were collected to carry on the fight in San Diego.

Austin Lewis delivered one of his masterly addresses. He showed that street speaking of the I. W. W.’s was an absolute necessity. Without street speaking the migratory worker could not be reached, because he would not go to any hall. Without street speaking there would have been no organization among the lumber workers and section laborers, and therefore no strikes or fights for better conditions. In street speaking pamphlets, circulars and propaganda sheets are given out and find their way to camps where they do their work.

The last speaker was a released speaker from San Diego, Fellow Worker Hill. He explained that he had just come from the hospitality of the M. & M. [Merchants and Manufacturers Association] in San Diego, that owing to that hospitality he was physically unable to make any lengthy speech. He looked as though he had just risen from a sick bed. His face was pale and pinched. Dressed in overalls he bespoke the low standard of living that our modern civilization imposes upon our most intelligent workers; for he spoke more intelligently and eloquently than many a widely heralded upper class jaw smith, who has had nothing to do all his life but to wag his tongue and to look up references. He nailed the widely circulated lie that the upper class have bought out all the workers who have any intelligence, and that every intelligent man can get work.

Fellow Worker told how they practiced sabotage in San Diego in the jail in the form of building battle ships, as they called it, by hammering on the iron doors. The court was located on the second story over the jail and terrible noise made by the hungry prisoners prevented them from holding a session in the upper region. They sent word down to the prisoners to be quiet or they couldn’t hold court. The prisoners’ replied that it was their intention that no court should be held until they were fed.

Hill brought down the house when he proposed that the army of fifty thousand unemployed of San Francisco move on the San Diego, to free the men now in jail there which the M. & M. intend to railroad to the pen. The San Diego jail and bull pen are full now. They are running up the expenses of the tax-payers fearfully and an army of invaders would scare them stiff, and prevent the sending of the ten men now on trial to the penitentiary. But unless something was done quickly these men would be sent over the road; for there is nothing our ruling class doesn’t dare when it comes to strike terror to the hearts of the workers. They violate every law on the statute books, and trample in the dust every human right that is supposed to be sacred. They hold no law sacred except when it protects them in their piracy.

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