Floyd Ramp – WE NEVER FORGET

Quote Frank Little re Guts, Wobbly by RC p208, Chg July 1917

Hellraisers Journal – Thursday January 16, 1919
Leavenworth Penitentiary – Report on Brutal Treatment of Prisoners, Part II

From The New Appeal of January 11, 1919:

[Part 2 of 2.]

Summing up the results of his inquiry, Mr. Moore [Attorney for the Industrial Workers of the World] says:

Extremely fragmentary as is the above, I believe that the following points may be considered as fully established:

1. That negro convicts armed with clubs were used under the direction of Mr. Fletcher [Deputy Warden] to beat up white men. That among those so beaten up were Stratton, Murphy and Floyd Ramp.

2. That many prisoners, whose physical condition was extremely bad, were placed on bread and water diet and deprived of their blankets and compelled to sleep on the cement floor at a time when this would seriously endanger their health.

3. That many prisoners were chained by their wrists to the sides of their cells and so compelled to stand for a period in excess of twenty-four hours.

Visits Husband in Cell.

In an affidavit, of which The New Appeal has been furnished a copy, Mrs. Floyd Ramp, wife of one of the solitary prisoners, states that she was allowed a brief visit with her husband on December 15, having come to Leavenworth in response to a report from friends that her husband had been seriously injured. Mrs. Ramp states that she was not permitted to question her husband regarding his injuries, but that his right eye was badly discolored and he was in an emaciated condition. Owing to the presence of the guard she could elicit no information of what had occurred beyond the most vague and unsatisfactory references. Ramp did say that Stratton was “pretty badly hurt.” Mrs. Ramp states “that Jack Phelan, who was released from the Leavenworth prison on December 18 because declared by the Appellate Court to have been illegally incarcerated on a charge of violating the Espionage Act, told her he had seen Floyd Ramp’s body and that it was a mass of bruises which led him to believe that he had been beaten, kicked and trampled upon.”

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Quote Frank Little re Guts, Wobbly by RC p208, Chg July 1917

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday January 15, 1919
Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kansas – Brutal Treatment of Prisoners Reported

From The New Appeal of January 11, 1919:

[Part 1 of 2.]

In its issue of last week The New Appeal reproduced a report of conscientious objectors at Camp Funston, Kans., detailing the brutal treatment to which they were subjected at the command of certain officers, contrary to the express directions of the war department in Washington. This report was published primarily as a matter of record, the guilty officers having been dismissed from the service and the conditions complained of corrected.

We are now in the way of making a more important exposure-an exposure of brutalities committed upon Socialists, I. W. W.s. and others imprisoned in the Federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., brutalities that we have reason to believe have not been brought to the notice of the higher authorities since the efforts of interested persons to investigate these brutalities have been baffled at every turn by prison officials. Enough evidence has been dragged into the light, however, to make it shamefully plain, to use the words of Mrs. Floyd Ramp, wife of a Socialist prisoner, “that things are occurring in this penitentiary which citizens of a democracy should not knowingly countenance.”

Could Not Question Prisoners.

On December 12, F. H. Moore, a Chicago attorney, went to Leavenworth to discuss certain legal steps with the group of prisoners sentenced under the Chicago indictment of the I. W. W. alleged anti-war agitators. He also desired to make personal inquiry of the treatment the prisoners were receiving, disquieting reports of which had reached him through “underground” channels. In company with Miss Caroline A. Lowe, who assisted in the defense of the prisoners at the trial, Mr. Moore called upon the warden. They were told by the warden that they could talk over legal matters connected with the case, but they were absolutely forbidden to question the prisoners as to conditions in the penitentiary.

Mr. Moore, in a somewhat lengthy communication sent to The New Appeal, repeatedly emphasizes this autocratic censorship of the warden. As they interviewed, separately, each one of twenty-two prisoners held in solitary confinement with unusual punishment, the deputy warden, who was present during the interviews, sternly suppressed every attempt to question the prisoners as to the manner in which they had been handled and as to their physical condition at the time. Nor were Mr. Moore and Miss Lowe, when they met and conferred with the majority of the prisoners in a body permitted to refer to the condition of their fellow prisoners who were “in solitary.”

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