Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 8, 1913 New York, New York – John Reed Recalls Time Spent in Passaic County Jail, Part II
From The Masses of June 1913:
The Paterson Evening News April 28, 1913
[Part II of II]
And so it was that I went up to the County Jail. In the outer office I was questioned again, searched for concealed weapons, and my money and valuables taken away. Then the great barred door swung open and I went down some steps into a vast room lined with three tiers of cells. About eighty prisoners strolled around, talked, smoked, and ate the food sent in to them by those outside. Of this eighty almost half were strikers. They were in their street clothes, held in prison under $500 bail to await the action of the Grand Jury. Surrounded by a dense crowd of short, dark-faced men, Big Bill Haywood towered in the center of the room. His big hand made simple gestures as he explained something to them. His massive, rugged face, seamed and scarred like a mountain, and as calm, radiated strength. These slight, foreign-faced strikers, one of many desperate little armies in the vanguard of the battle-line of Labor, quickened and strengthened by Bill Haywood’s face and voice, looked up at him lovingly, eloquently. Faces deadened and dulled with grinding routine in the sunless mills glowed with hope and understanding. Faces scarred and bruised from policemen’s clubs grinned eagerly at the thought of going back on the picket-line. And there were other faces, too-lined and sunken with the slow starvation of a nine weeks’ poverty—shadowed with the sight of so much suffering, or the hopeless brutality of the police—and there were those who had seen Modestino Valentine shot to death by a private detective. But not one showed discouragement; not one a sign of faltering or of fear.As one little Italian said to me, with blazing eyes: “We all one bigga da Union. I. W. W.—dat word is pierced de heart of de people!”
“Yes! Yes! Dass righ’! I. W. W.! One bigga da Union”—they murmured with soft, eager voices, crowding around.
[Introduced to Quinlan and Strikers by Big Bill]
I shook hands with Haywood, who introduced me to Pat Quinlan, the thin-faced, fiery Irishman now under indictment for speeches inciting to riot.
“Boys,” said Haywood, indicating me, “this man wants to know things. You tell him everything”—
They crowded around me, shaking my hand, smiling, welcoming me. “Too bad you get in jail,” they said, sympathetically. “We tell you ever’t’ing. You ask. We tell you. Yes. Yes. You good feller.”
And they did. Most of them were still weak and exhausted from their terrible night before in the lockup. Some had been lined up against a wall, as they marched to and fro in front of the mills, and herded to jail on the charge of “unlawful assemblage”! Others had been clubbed into the patrol wagon on the charge of “rioting,” as they stood at the track, on their way home from picketing, waiting for a train to pass! They were being held for the Grand Jury that indicted Haywood and Gurley Flynn. Four of these jurymen were silk manufacturers, another the head of the local Edison compony—which Haywood tried to organize for a strike—and not one a workingman!
“We not take bail,” said another, shaking his head. “We stay here. Fill up de damn jail. Pretty soon no more room. Pretty soon can’t arrest no more picket!”
It was visitors’ day I went to the door to speak with a friend. Outside the reception room was full of women and children, carrying packages, and pasteboard boxes, and pails full of dainties and little comforts lovingly prepared, which meant hungry and ragged wives and babies, so that the men might be comfortable in jail. The place was full of the sound of moaning; tears ran down their work-roughened faces; the children looked up at their fathers’ unshaven faces through the bars and tried to reach them with their hands.
“What nationalities are all the people!” I asked. There were Dutchmen, Italians, Belgians, Jews, Slovaks, Germans, Poles—
“What nationalities stick together on the picket- line?”
A young Jew, pallid and sick-looking from insufficient food, spoke up proudly. “T’ree great nations stick togedder like dis.” He made a fist. “T’ree great nations—Italians, Hebrews an’ Germans”—
“But how about the Americans?”
They all shrugged their shoulders and grinned with humorous scorn. “English peoples not go on picket-line,” said one, softly. “’Mericans no lika fight!” An Italian boy thought my feelings might be hurt, and broke in quickly: “Not all lika dat. Beeg Beell, he ‘Merican. You ‘Merican. Quin’, Miss Flynn, ‘Merican. Good! Good! ‘Merican workman, he lika talk too much.”
This sad fact appears to be true. It was the English-speaking group that held back during the Lawrence strike. It is the English-speaking continent that remains passive at Paterson, while the “wops” the “kikes,” the “hunkies”—the ‘degraded and ignorant races from Southern Europe”—go out and get clubbed on the picket-line and gaily take their medicine in Paterson jail.
But just as they were telling me these things the keeper ordered me to the “convicted room,” where I was pushed into a bath and compelled to put on regulation prison clothes. I shan’t attempt to describe the horrors I saw in that room. Suffice it to say that forty-odd men lounged about a long corridor lined on one side with cells; that the only ventilation and light came from one small skylight up a funnel-shaped airshaft; that one man had syphilitic sores on his legs and was treated by the prison doctor with sugar-pills for “nervousness;” that a seventeen-year-old boy who had never been sentenced had remained in that corridor without ever seeing the sun for over nine months; that a cocaine-fiend was getting his “dope” regularly from the inside, and that the background of this and much more was the monotonous and terrible shouting of a man who had lost his mind in that hell-hole and who walked among us.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday May 4, 1913
Paterson, New Jersey – The Arrest of Bill Haywood and Adolf Lessig
From the International Socialist Review of May 1913:
The Arrest of Haywood and Lessig
By Phillips Russell
DETERMINED that the 25,000 silk strikers of Paterson, N. J., should not listen to William D. Haywood on Sunday, March 30, the guardians of Paterson’s law and order, seized Haywood and Adolph Lessig on their way to Haledon and, in the interests of the mill owners, secured Haywood’s conviction and sentence to six months at hard labor, and Lessig to six months.
No single act or process in the proceeding had the least semblance of legality, and no attempt to make even a show of legality was made. The mill owners are represented on Paterson’s Police Commission by one of themselves.They appointed as Recorder one James F. Carroll, notorious in the city as a bar room politician. They wanted Haywood and Lessig out of the way; they had them seized by their police; they put them behind the prison bars, and intended them to stay there.
A mass meeting had been called for Sunday, March 30, in Lafayette Oval, which had been secured for the purpose by the strikers. On the preceding Saturday Police Chief Bimson issued an order prohibiting the meeting, but partly because of the lateness of the order’s appearance, but more largely because they believed they had the rights of free assemblage and free speech, the strikers ignored the order, and at the appointed hour began to pour in thousands down the roads leading to the meeting place.
In the meantime, a squad of special police detailed for special duty, namely, to prevent the meeting and disperse the crowd, held up Haywood and Lessig a block before they reached the Oval. The police informed Haywood that no meeting would be allowed, and that if he attempted to speak he would be arrested, whereupon the strikers within hearing distance shouted “On to Haledon!”
The cry was taken up by the thousands assembled, Haywood assenting: “All right we’ll go to Haledon,” and he began to walk the two miles beyond which lies the little Socialist municipality, followed by the strikers who had just learned that in Paterson they had no rights.
The crowd was perfectly orderly, although without any formation, but when it had got within half a block of the city’s limits the patrol wagon thundered through the mass of men, women and children to where Haywood and Lessig were walking in front. Motorcycle police had noted the general direction of the crowd and had rushed for the wagon, which was hooted and jeered by the strikers as it dashed directly for Haywood and Lessig.
Police Sergeant Ryan jumped out of the wagon, pointed at Haywood, saying, “You’re under arrest!” and grabbed Lessig, at the same time shouting, “Get Tresca!” Carlo Tresca, however, had dropped behind. As the wagon dashed by on its way to Haywood, some friends seized Tresca and hurried him into the house of a friend from whence he smiled pleasantly at the police who came to seize him.
After Haywood and Lessig were under arrest, the police, in a frantic effort to drive back the crowd, met with one who refused to be hurried. This was Messari, who was arrested and later arraigned on the same charges as the two principal defendants, some of the police conveniently swearing he was with them, as the amended charge required three defendants to make it legal.
“Have you a warrant?” asked Haywood of the policemen who rode with him in the wagon.
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