The worst thief is he who steals
the playtime of children.
Join the I. W. W. and help put
the thieves to work.
-Big Bill Haywood
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday April 16, 1918
As Chicago Trial Continues, IWW Found Guilty by Kept Press
Today we offer Part One of the following article by Boyden R. Sparkes which appeared as a full-page spread in the April 14th edition of the New York Tribune. We will conclude tomorrow with Part Two.
THE I. W. W.: AN X-RAY PICTURE
Chicago Trial Shows Searing Sparks from the Anvil Where Industrial-Military Power is Being Forged Endanger Progress-
Sabotage, Malcontents’ Principal Weapon,
a Menace to Farm, Factory and Home.THE I. W. W. PRINCIPLES AS SHOWN IN THEIR OWN CARTOONS
By Boyden R. Sparkes
Chicago, April 13, 1918.
OUT in the hill country of Oklahoma last August a group of tenant farmers and oil field workers were just a little too quick on the trigger, and what Federal officials believe was intended to have been a country-wide uprising of American “Bolsheviki” against the draft law was quelled almost before it started.
At the hearing in the Federal court in Enid, Okla., it was developed that forty-eight organizations under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World had planned a nation-wide revolution. The anti-draft rioters in Seminole, Hughes and Pontotoc counties began shooting just a little too soon, and posses of patriotic citizens had put 500 of them under arrest before many persons had been killed.
The men arrested belonged to organizations affiliated with the I. W. W., chief among these being the “Working Class Union.” The government is still trying to find out where the money used to purchase arms for the rioters came from.
It is the opinion of government attorneys that these I. W. W. leaders believed they would receive the support of the American Federation of Labor. Naturally any such hope was doomed to disappointment. But the government is still picking up threads of evidence that strengthen the belief that the American Bolsheviki leaders were prepared and hoping for a reign of terror in America that would have far outdone the Bolsheviki uprising in Russia.
