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Hellraisers Journal – Friday January 31, 1913
New York, New York – Love Poems Found Dedicated to Tresca by Miss Flynn
From the Spokane Daily Chronicle of January 30, 1913:
Tag: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Hellraisers Journal: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn on Trial of Ettor and Giovannitti at Salem: “They Are Putting Justice Itself on Trial.”
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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!
[Emphasis and paragraph break added.]
Hellraisers Journal: From The Comrade: “Child Labor in Free America” by John Spargo, Illustrated by Ryan Walker
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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday July 3, 1902
“Child Labor in Free America” by John Spargo, Illustrated by Ryan Walker
From The Comrade of July 1902:
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Mocking the stately phrases of the Declaration of Independence and the proud boast enshrined in our national songs, is the terrible reality of child-slavery. From the far South comes a cry from children that know no childhood and upon whose degradation the great edifice of our commercial supremacy is being raised. Not since the early years of the last century when the great and good Robert Owen, Michael Sadler and the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury (then Lord Ashley) gave voice to the terrible condition of the mere babes who languished and toiled in British mills and factories, has such a terrible story of shame been told as that which is told of Alabama, Georgia, and the two Carolinas to-day. Little boys and girls of five, six, seven, and eight years, toiling in factories ten, and even twelve, hours a day, all unconsciously mock our “civilization” and imperil the very life of the nation.
But it is not alone in these States that child labor prevails. From almost every State in the Union the cry of the child toiler for rest, for childhood, for life, is heard. In the North no less than the South; East no less than the West, the same great problem exists-the problem of child labor co-existing side by side with a permanent army of unemployed adults. In the textile mills of the South it is estimated that there are at least 20,000 children at work under fourteen years of age. In Alabama alone there are some twelve hundred children employed, being a proportion of between six and seven per cent of all the operatives. In Georgia the proportion of children under twelve to grown persons employed in the mills is stated to be not less than 14 per cent, and in South Carolina it is at least nine per cent. The ages of these children thus classified as “under twelve” run all the way down to six and even five years!
Let those who prate of our “glorious progress,” and boast of our ascendant commercial power, reflect upon the terrible fact that little children, scarcely more than babies, can be found by the thousand in these southern mills working 12 and 12½ hours every day at the spinning frames for wages that range from ten to twenty cents a day. Here is a terrible account of this child slavery, written by a special correspondent of Cincinnati Post, which should be sufficient of itself to shame the people of this country, and to rouse them to vigorous action. He says:
I secured entrance to the People’s mills of Montgomery, (Alabama) which manufacture sheeting for the China trade. In the spinning room, where most of the children are employed, there were 125 persons of all ages at work. Of that number between 40 and 50 were children less than 12 years old. Those who had ever been in a school house were rare exceptions. In this room I saw boys and girls so small that their efforts to perform their work were absolutely pitiful. In reaching up to join the ends of the broken threads they were obliged to strain and stretch every muscle and sinew of their frail bodies and some were so small that they were compelled to stand on their tiptoes. This was repeated every five minutes or oftener for twelve long hours. I called the foreman’s attention to several little ones who I was sure could not be over six years old and was told “they are not working,” which meant that they were not on the pay-roll, but were helping the parent or older brother or sister, or learning the machines, so as to be able to take their place in that mill.
