Hellraisers Journal – Monday December 16, 1912 Little Falls, New York – Strikers Seek Protection; Insanity Case Fails Against Nurse
From the Grant County Socialist (Medford, Oklahoma) of December 14, 1912:
STRIKERS APPEAL TO GOV. DIX FOR STATE MILITIA ———- Only Resort Little Falls Workers Can See ———- Bosses Would Establish Case of Insanity to Incarcerate Helen Schloss. ———-
Binghamton Press and Leader (New York) December 5, 1912
Little Falls, N. Y., Dec. 6.-“Send the State militia to Little Falls!” is the appeal to Governor Dix that the striking textile workers of this city sent out today.
This is the only avenue of escape from the inhuman and brutal persecution of the local police and the company’s hired thugs that the strikers think they have left.
The strike is now in its eighth week, and the solidarity of the workers is second only to that demonstrated by the 22,000 textile workers in the historic Lawrence strike. There’s nothing that can break the united spirit of the men and women and children that are fighting for bread except the atrocious activities of the hirelings of the mill owners. It is their high-handed methods in stifling the rebellious spirit of the workers that have driven the strikers to appeal for the state militia.
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How Miss Schloss Was Hounded
Helen Schloss, the city nurse, who, after seeing the condition of the strikers, decided to give up her position in order to be better able to help the strikers, today told the story of how the special police persecuted her in an effort to discourage her activities in the strike.
Not being able to persuade her to withdraw from the strikers’ ranks, they determined to find out some way of getting her out of the way, at least till the strike is over. Without knowing anything Miss Schloss was subjected to an examination of her state of mind by 3 local physicians. For two long hours they questioned her in a manner that would put the much heard of third degree to shame. All this in an effort to establish the fact of her insanity.
Miss Schloss, however, stood the test, and at times it looked as if the doctors who investigated her mental status were not er rational themselves. They finally gave up the job in disgust.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 24, 1912
Jay Smith, Secretary of B. of T. W., Appeals for Funds to Save Fellow Workers
From Pittsburg (Kansas) Labor Herald of August 16, 1912:
Shall Emerson Die?
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[Letter from Jay Smith, B. of T. W. Secretary]
Brother, Comrades, Fellow-workers:
On Sunday evening, July 7, 1912, while the Brotherhood of Timber Workers were holding a mass meeting on the public road at Grabow, La., thugs concealed in the office of the Galloway Lumber Co., fired upon our people with rifles and pump guns loaded with buck-shot. When the firing ceased, three men were found to be killed outright, several mortally and seriously wounded and thirty-odd others injured, the great majority being union men. Immediately following the “riot”, as it was called by the capitalists class, President A. L. Emerson, who was our chief speaker on the occasion, and other members of the Brotherhood, were arrested, denied bail, and placed in the county jail at Lake Charles, La., which prison is totally inadequate to accommodate the number of men now confined there, and is in a deplorably unsanitary condition, besides. Despite the condition of this prison, sick and wounded men are confined there, the authorities giving the excuse that there is no room in the I hospital for them and our boys are still being arrested.
This, so far, is the outcome of the “riot” at Grabow. That our boys were neither looking for nor expecting any such trouble is borne witness to by the fact that many of them had taken along their women and children, and, that none of the last were killed by the Trusts gunmen, is a miracle.
All the news and evidence so far reported shows that our men were not only ambushed, but that the “riot” had been carefully planned by the Lumber Trust, and we have every reason to believe, that hidden in the offices of the Galloway Lumber Co., were gunmen who had been sent over from other places by the Southern Operators’ Association. The “riot” was but the culmination of a long series of outrages against the Brotherhood and all other Union labor, and was staged by the Operators’ Association for the purpose of crushing out the unions in the Southern timber districts and terrorizing its workers back into meek submission into peonage. This has been the boasted purpose of the Operators’ Association: “To crush all union labor out of their mills and camps, drive all Socialist speakers out of their towns, and run things as they damned please.”
For twenty long months we have fought this mighty and merciless combination of capital, this vicious combine of grafters and gunmen, and, because they have not been able to whip us back into their mills and slave pens, they have planned the massacre of Grabow, and, failing there to kill our President Emerson and his bravest associates, they have taken him and them to jail and are preparing to stage another legal murder.
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