Don’t Mourn! Organize!
-Joe Hill
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Hellraisers Journal, Monday March 5, 1917
From the Snohomish County Jail – Everett Class-War Prisoners Speak Out
The Industrial Worker of March 3rd offers the story of our I. W. W. Class-War prisoners who have spent the last few months behind the bars of the Snohomish County Jail in Everett, Washington. Despite the harsh conditions, the usual I. W. W. organizational and educational activities continue unabated.
PRISONERS WRITE EVERETT JAIL CONDITIONS AND ACTIVITIES
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Will get Freedom, If There Exists Shadow of Justice in America;
Bring order and Cleanliness Out of Filth and Disorder;
Abused by Drunken Deputies.
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“Everything is fine and dandy on the outside, don’t worry, boys.”
This is the first thing we have heard from visitors ever since we seventy-four have been incarcerated in the Snohomish County Jail at Everett.
While “everything is fine and dandy on the outside” there are no doubt, hundreds who would like to hear how things are on the inside. Let us assure everyone on the outside that “everything is fine and dandy” on the inside. We are not worrying as it is but a short time till the beginning of the trials, the outcome of which we are certain will be one of the greatest victories Labor has ever known, if there exists a shadow of justice in the courts of America.
One hundred days in jail so far-and for nothing! Stop and think what one hundred days in jail means to seventy-four men! It means that in the aggregate the Master Class have deprived us of more than twenty years of liberty. Twenty years! Think of it, and a prospect of twenty more before all are at liberty.
And why?
There can be one reason, one answer: We are spending this time in Jail and will go thru the mockery of trial because the masters of Everett are trying to shield themselves from the atrocious murders of Bloody November Fifth.
After being held in Seattle, convicted without a trial, except such as was given us by the press carrying the advertising of the boss and dependent on him for support, on November 10th forty-one of us were brought to Everett. A few days later thirty more were brought here.
Russianized Jail Conditions.
We found the jail conditions barbarous. There were no mattresses and only one blanket to keep off the chill of a Puget Sound night in the cold, unheated steel cells. There were no towels. We were supplied laundry soap for toilet purposes, when we could get even that. Workers confined in the lower cells were forced to sleep on the floors. There were five of them in each cell and in order to keep any semblance of heat in their bodies they had to sleep all huddled together in all their clothing.
The first few days we were in the jail we spent in cleaning it, as it was reeking with filth and had probably never been cleaned out since it was built. It was alive with vermin. There were armies of bed bugs and body lice. We boiled up everything in the jail and it is safe to say that it is now cleaner than it has ever been before or ever will be after the wobblies are gone.
