Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday April 15, 1913
“Sunday” -Drawing by Maurice Becker, Poem by Louis Untermeyer
-On Sunday September 29, 1912, at Lawrence, Massachusetts, a parade, led by Carlo Tresca, was attacked by police. The I. W. W. marchers were on their way to the cemetery in order to place flowers on the grave of Anna LoPizzo, martyr of the Lawrence Textile Strike. Tresca was seized by police, but freed by his Comrades.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday March 8, 1913 Charleston, West Virginia – Coal Barons Own State Government, Rule Over Miners
From the Chicago DayBook of March 7, 1913:
HER NATURAL DESERTS
Little West Virginia is having big troubles. She deserves most of them.
For years, her politics have been, a cesspool of corruption, her contributions to the U. S. senate, for instance, being silly, caricatures upon the word “statesmen” and their selections being brazen travesties upon the term “self-government.”
The other day, a legislator, a minister, got up in the assembly and announced that his pockets had been stuffed with money to induce him to vote for a certain man for U. S. senator. The arrests of four representatives and one state senator followed. Last Thursday it took an entire police department to put down a riot in the capitol at Charleston. Rotten politics begets rotten conditions, and West Virginia has earned what she has got.
West Virginia has permitted her “coal barons” to treat their workmen like dogs. There has been bloody, warfare in the Holly Grove district. Six companies of militia are there, the third invasion of troops in less than a year. The governor is averaging three proclamations of martial law per week. “Mother Jones,” the well known friend of the miners, an editor and two labor union officials have been jailed as “accessories before the fact” in the death of a man killed in one of the riots. The Ettor case over again, you see.
The military court has 150 cases against strikers to pass upon. And the governor is compelled to borrow the money to promulgate his declarations of martial law. Such are West Virginia’s industrial, or economic troubles. She has earned them by foul liason with the vilest gang of monopolists that ever debased a community and looted her resources.
But maybe there’s hope for even West Virginia. Some of her citizens are being shot or arrested, and some of her editors are going to jail in behalf of the right of free speech, Such things seem to be the beginnings of reforms now-a-days.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday December 28, 1912 New Pamphlets Now Available from I. W. W. Headquarters in Chicago
From the Spokane Industrial Worker of December 26, 1912:
On the Firing Line
Extracts from the Report of the General Executive Board to the Seventh Annual Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World Held in Chicago, Ill., Sept. 17 to 27, 1912 -I. W. W. General Executive Board: Thomas Halcro F. H. Little, Ewald Koettgen, George Speed
Ettor and Giovannitti Before the Jury at Salem, Massachusetts, November 23, 1912
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 27, 1912 Salem, Mass. – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: “It is a foolish court that will try to fool an awakened people.”
From The Tacoma Times of October 26, 1912:
BY H. P. BURTON.
SALEM, Mass., Oct. 26.—There is just one spot of light in the shadowy Salem court house where sit, in their iron-meshed cage, Joseph Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Caruso, on trial for their lives and their cause. It is the grave, pale face of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Madonna of the women who slave.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is only a slip of a girl, 22. But she has been living a life for six years. She has gone from coast to coast, speaking for “the cause,” and suffering abuse, want and imprisonment, that the burden of the beaten-down may be lifted a little.
For a year now, with her baby clinging to her skirts, she has fought capitalism in the woolen trust town of Lawrence, regardless of winter cold or summer heat, picketing, helping, cheering and speaking.
And today she sees what this trial means not only to Ettor, Giovannitti and Caruso, her comrades-in-arms, but, as she thinks, all of us, and indeed to all the world.
As she let her gaze float over Gallows hill, where they hanged the witches, she said:
They will not see, I fear—these cogs in the machine of justice—in just what sort of a way they are. They will not understand that they are not trying our leaders, but they are putting Justice itself on trial.
It is a foolish court that will try to fool an awakened people. It is a foolish court that does not release quickly those wrongly indicted men. For the anger of the American working man is awaken, it cannot be held in leash much longer, even by the strongest, leaders.
I wish I did not have to say it, but I have seen how in the past few weeks we have failed to hold the workers of Massachusetts and New York in check-how they have struck “in demonstration” against our advice and pleading. If we cannot hold these few thousand, how shall we be expected to keep calm a nation of them if they are aroused, as they surely will be if they are not given back their “lost leaders”?
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s pale face was even whiter than when she began speaking. She snatched up the little baby that had sat at her feet as she talked, and pressed him close to her.
[And she said:]
It’s for his sake and the other little ones like him that I hope it will not happen, that they will not make it HAVE to happen—babies are so helpless!
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday June 20, 1912 Riverview Park, Chicago, Illinois – Debs Opens Socialist Party Campaign
[Eugene V. Debs Speaks to Thousands at Grand Picnic
Sunday June 16, 1912 – Full Text of Speech, Part II:]
The national convention of the Socialist Party recently held at Indianapolis was in all respects the greatest gathering of representative socialists ever held in the United States. The delegates there assembled demonstrated their capacity to deal efficiently with all the vital problems which confront the party. The convention was permeated in every fiber with the class-conscious, revolutionary spirit and was thoroughly representative of the working class. Every question that came before that body was considered and disposed of in accordance with the principles and program of the international movement and on the basis of its relation to and effect upon the working class.
The platform adopted by the convention is a clear and cogent enunciation of the party’s principles and a frank and forceful statement of the party’s mission. This platform embodies labor’s indictment of the capitalist system and demands the abolition of that system. It proclaims the identity of interests of all workers and appeals to them in clarion tones to unite for their emancipation.It points out the class struggle and emphasizes the need of the economic and political unity of the workers to wage that struggle to a successful issue. It declares relentless war upon the entire capitalist regime in the name of the rising working class and demands in uncompromising terms the overthrow of wage-slavery and the inauguration of industrial democracy.
In this platform of the Socialist Party the historic development of society is clearly stated and the fact made manifest that the time has come for the workers of the world to shake off their oppressors and exploiters, put an end to their age-long servitude, and make themselves the masters of the world.
To this end the Socialist Party has been organized; to this end it is bending all its energies and taxing all its resources; to this end it makes its appeal to the workers and their sympathizers throughout the nation.
In the name of the workers the Socialist Party condemns the capitalist system. In the name of freedom it condemns wage-slavery. In the name of modern industry it condemns poverty, idleness, and famine. In the name of peace it condemns war. In the name of civilization it condemns the murder of little children. In the name of enlightenment it condemns ignorance and superstition. In the name of the future it arraigns the past at the bar of the present, and in the name of humanity it demands social justice for every man, woman, and child.
The Socialist Party knows neither color, creed, sex, or race. It knows no aliens among the oppressed and downtrodden. It is first and last the party of the workers, regardless of their nationality, proclaiming their interests, voicing their aspirations, and fighting their battles.
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—————The national convention of the Socialist Party recently held at Indianapolis was in all respects the greatest gathering of representative socialists ever held in the United States. The delegates there assembled demonstrated their capacity to deal efficiently with all the vital problems which confront the party. The convention was permeated in every fiber with the class-conscious, revolutionary spirit and was thoroughly representative of the working class. Every question that came before that body was considered and disposed of in accordance with the principles and program of the international movement and on the basis of its relation to and effect upon the working class.
