Tag: Industrial Workers of the World

Hellraisers Journal: “The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter (Formerly Class War Prisoner, Inmate 13179), Part II

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote BBH IWW w Drops of Blood, BDB, Sept 27, 1919—————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday October 14, 1922
“The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter, Part II

From The Survey Graphic Number of October 1922:

IWW Class War Prisoners, Men Left at Leavenworth by Wetter, Survey p29, Oct 1922

[Part II of II.]

IWW Class War Prisoners, Men Left at Leavenworth by Wetter, T, Survey p29, Oct 1922wo of our men-Caesar Tabib and Edward Quigley—are suffering from tuberculosis aggravated if not contracted in the Sacramento jail where they spent a year before they were brought to trial. Because of their physical condition, these two men were prevailed on by the rest of us to make application for release, for “clemency,” but their application was coldly refused by the Department of Justice. Apparently they are not yet near enough to death to make it “safe” to release them.

Another of our number, William Weyh, was kept on the “rock-pile” last December until the exposure resulted in severe illness, hemorrhages—twelve in a single day. He was so emaciated as to be scarcely recognizable. It was at this point that a prison official said to him: “I don’t believe you have another ten hours to live if you stay in this place. Drop your I. W. W. affiliations, and you can go out of here as soon as you please.” Weyh’s answer was: “No. I’ll die first.” We had been urging him to make application for release and he at last consented, and the authorities agreed, apparently preferring that he should die outside the walls. He stipulated, however, in writing, that “I have not wavered in my adherence to the I. W. W. and its principles.”

There is not space here to go further down the list of these fifty-two men; they all have the same splendid spirit, the same high courage, the same sense of the crucial human value of solidarity.

AGAIN and again I am asked by those who depend only upon newspapers for their information, why we refuse to ask for “clemency”; and last July,  when a petition for general amnesty (that is, for unconditional release for all charged with the same “offence”) signed by some three hundred thousand names from all over the country, was presented to President Harding by a delegation of representative men and women, the President expressed “surprise” about this refusal on our part, and of course at the same time went through with that same ancient formula—”No one advocating the overthrow of the government by violence will be pardoned.” This phrase is continually used by officials, apparently in lieu of any reason they can give for our continued imprisonment.

The truth of the matter is, not one of these fifty-two men was ever even indicted on the preposterous charges brought against them in the press during war-time hysteria, such as the receipt of German gold, and being spies. They are in prison now solely for expression of opinion, and none of those opinions have anything to do with the overthrow of any government in any way—they are merely opinions against war. Note also that these men are confined under the Espionage Act only, though it is now no longer in force. In lieu of any legal reason for their continued incarceration, Attorney General Daugherty even felt obliged to resort to giving out false information in reply to inquiries made on this subject by the Federal Council of Churches (see March 11, 1922 issue Information Service Research Department, Commission on Church and Social Service, F. C. C. C. A., room 604, 105 East 22 Street, New York).

Now, to revert to the President’s “surprise” that we are unwilling to crawl out, I don’t for a moment doubt his genuineness. It is entirely likely that it really is very difficult for him to understand such a thing. Let me quote from the Open Letter since prepared by these fifty-two men and sent a month ago not only to the President, but also to all Cabinet officials, Congressmen, the Governors of the forty-eight states, and to editors and others throughout the country. (I shall be very glad to send a copy to any one who will write me in care of the SURVEY.)

We are not criminals and are not in prison because we committed any crimes or conspired to commit them. From the beginning, justice has been denied us and the truth of our case withheld from the consideration of the public….In the press, the I. W. W. is like the Mexican in the movie show; he is always the villain….We are in prison now solely for exercising our constitutional right of free speech…. If it is a crime to exercise the right for which our fathers laid down their lives, we have no apology to make.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter (Formerly Class War Prisoner, Inmate 13179), Part II” →

Hellraisers Journal: “The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter (Formerly Class War Prisoner, Inmate 13179), Part I

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote BBH IWW w Drops of Blood, BDB, Sept 27, 1919—————

Hellraisers Journal – Friday October 13, 1922
“The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter, Part I

From The Survey Graphic Number of October 1922:

IWW Class War Prisoners, Men Left at Leavenworth by Wetter, Survey p29, Oct 1922

[Part I of II.]

IWW Class War Prisoners, Men Left at Leavenworth by Wetter, T, Survey p29, Oct 1922

HE other day I was riding in a street car in New York behind two well dressed men deep in their daily papers. Their comments on some of the dispatches about the railroad strike reminded me more of James Whitcomb Riley’s refrain: “The goblins’ll get yer if yer don’t look out” than anything I had heard for a long time.

“I tell you, those I. W. W. fellows…one of them rumbled.

“It doesn’t say it’s proved yet they were around …” the other suggested timidly.

“Huh! Doesn’t need to!” the first shook his head ominously. “Nowadays a man takes his life in his hand wherever he goes. I believe in giving that kind of vermin a wide berth. I never saw one of them and I never want to!”

The next instant there was some sort of mix-up with a truck on the track and we all got a violent jolt. The speaker, who had risen in his seat to get off at the next corner, became rather badly tangled with some passengers across the aisle. I helped to disentangle them and he was at once all smiles and amiability—“Almost like one of our college football rushes,” he grinned, in the easy fellowship an earlier generation is apt to accord its successors on the same campus.

I should have liked to watch his face when I told him that I am a sincerely convinced, indelible I. W. W.; that I had just been released from Leavenworth prison on expiration of a five-year sentence under the 1918 Chicago indictment; and that I am now working with all the strength and ability I possess in the interest of my fifty-two fellow-workers, fellow-prisoners, still in Leavenworth, some with twenty-year sentences.

But “We’re late for that appointment,” his companion reminded him, and I missed my chance.

He will doubtless go on indefinitely repeating his “bogey-man” stuff about people whom he admits he has never seen and knows nothing of except by hearsay. I wonder how many people who read this have done exactly the same thing? And how long they are going to keep on doing it?

This is why, when I. W. W.’s are on trial, whether in courts or in newspapers, practically “everything goes.” But in all such movements, persecution only serves as propaganda, and weeds out the worthless material—those who “can’t stand the gaff” and go back on their principles—and shows the grain of the men who cannot be bribed or bought, who have the courage to stand by their convictions at whatever the cost.

There are fifty-two such men in Leavenworth today. Over two-thirds of them are American-born. They have been there since 1918, and most of them have ten- or twenty-year sentences. I know these men; and I want everyone else to know them. They are of the stuff that makes history, the sort of stuff that went to the making of our country in the beginning, and that is needed just as much right now, perhaps more, to keep our country true to its big ideals.

I am not going to try to give fifty-two full biographies (though I wish I could, for everyone of them is a story in itself—an almost unbelievable story!) but just a suggestion or a characteristic here and there of a few of the men. They are all very human, the same hopes and desires, the same flesh and blood we are all made of-fathers, husbands, brothers-it means as much to every one of them to stay there in prison year on year under those hideously monotonous, unsanitary, galling conditions, as it would to any of you who read these words. Try for one moment to realize what these things mean. Try honestly. And then try to understand what it means in terms of character for these men to stay there rather than to compromise.

NOT long ago the Rev. Richard W. Hogue, known doubtless to many [Survey] GRAPHIC readers as the international secretary of the Church League for Industrial Democracy, made a visit to Leavenworth, and James P. Thompson was one of the men with whom he talked.

“How can we, how can any decent, self-respecting man,” Thompson said to him, “buy his release at the cost of his manhood, by promising to refrain ever after from expressing his convictions and standing by his principles? It would be degrading and dishonest for us to accept ‘parole’ on the terms on which it has been offered us. We will go out of here as men, when we do go, not as ‘criminals’ purchasing ‘liberty’ with the barter of our convictions and our consciences. When we leave this place it will be with our heads up…”

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter (Formerly Class War Prisoner, Inmate 13179), Part I” →

Hellraisers Journal: Nine of Grabow Defendants, Members of Brotherhood of Timber Workers, Will Be Tried Together

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote BBH re BTW LA White n Black Unity, ISR p106 , Aug 1912

Hellraisers Journal – Monday October 7, 1912
Lake Charles, Louisiana – Nine of Grabow Defendents Will Be Tried Together

From the New Orleans Times-Democrat of October 6, 1912:

SEVERANCE IS GRANTED
———-
Nine of Grabow Defendants
To Be Heard Together.
———-

[…..]

Special to The Times-Democrat.

BTW Prisoners of Grabow Massacre, NO Tx Dem p17, Oct 6, 1912
Group of Fifty-Eight Prisoners Held at Lake Charles in Connection with
the Grabow Riot. The First Trial is Set for Monday.

Lake Charles, La., Oct. 5-After hearing the motion argued for more than an hour this afeternoon, Judge Overton rendered a deciaion granting the motion for severance in the Grabow riot murder cases, asked for by the district attorney. Accordingly the nine men named in the motion will be placed on trial Monday morning [October 7th]…..

The nine men who will be placed on trial Monday are: A. L. Emerson, president of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers; Jack Payne, alias Charles Gibbon, Louis Brown, Ed Lehman, Edgar Holingsworth, John Hilton, Doc Havens, F. E. Ezell and W. A. Chatman.

It is conceded that these are the men against whom the State has the striongest case…..

[Emphais added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: “The New Woman of The Old South” by Covington Hall, Heroic Stand with Brotherhood of Timber Workers

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote C Hall, Women of BTW Grabow, Prg Wmn p6, Oct 1912—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 6, 1912
Lake Charles Jail, Louisiana – Heroic Women Stand by Fighting Lumberjacks

From The Progressive Woman of October 1912:

THE NEW WOMAN of THE OLD SOUTH
By Covington Hall
———-

Grabow, Union Prisoners Lake Charles Jail, Dinner, Prg Wmn p6, Oct 1912
Union Prisoners in Lake Charles Jail, and the Big Dinner Given Them
by the Women of De Ridder, La.

IN the long and bitter struggle of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers against the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association none have suffered more or borne their part in the battle more heroically than the wives, mothers and daughters of the fighting lumberjacks of the south.

In the long and terrible lockout, lasting from July, 1911, to February, 1912, when hundreds of families were reduced to the direst want and misery by the silken savages of the lumber trust in its brutish effort to starve the men out of the union and back into submission, the women, with their babies living on cornbread and molasses, still urged their husbands, fathers and brothers to keep up the battle for “A man’s life for all the workers in the mills and forests,” no matter what the cost, no mater what Kirby, Long and their brother wolves demanded as the price of liberty.

When the blacklist was added to the lockout, when thousands of workers were hounded from state to state, when the only way a man could get a job was to dishonor himself by taking an oath of allegiance to the lumber trust, by swearing obedience and loyalty to his sworn enemies, the women took up that other battle cry of the Union: “Don’t be a peon-be a MAN!” and the desperate fight for justice still went on.

When all law was suspended, when the states of Louisiana and Texas abdicated their authority to the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association and allowed this combine of grafters and gunmen to proclaim martial law throughout the timber belt, when the worst in this scum and slum class came to the surface and the reign of terror that reached its climax in the “riot” at Grabow was inaugurated, when no one’s life or person was safe anywhere in the empire of the lumber trust, the women still urged the men on to battle and in many instances took their places beside them on the “firing line.”

When sixty-five of our best and bravest boys were arrested, thrown into jail and charged with murder on account of the “riot” at Grabow, when men were torn from their sick mothers, wives and children, taken from their homes in the dead of the night by the deputy sheriffs of the Association, still the women did not quail but shrieked defiance at their enemies, still louder rose the cry of the Brotherhood: “ONE BIG UNION, life and freedom for ALL the workers!“

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “The New Woman of The Old South” by Covington Hall, Heroic Stand with Brotherhood of Timber Workers” →

Hellraisers Journal: From The Comrade: “How I Became a Socialist” by Father Thomas Hagerty, Seventh in Series

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Quote EVD, Father Hagerty, SDH p1, Aug 15, 1903—————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday October 4, 1902
“How I Became a Socialist” by Father Thomas Joseph Hagerty

From The Comrade of October 1902:

How I Became a Socialist.

VII. [of Series]

By Rev. T. [J]. HAGERTY.

A CONVICTION grew upon me in my boyhood days-which has broadened and deepened with the out-going years—that human nature is inherently good. In the old Hebraic records, composite of earlier documents which register the world’s notion of creation, I was caught by the reiteration of the idea of the goodness of all things. The after-development of tribe and nation, however, seems to give the lie to this primal verity. Prophets and philosophers in the cuneiform script and Vedic hymn of Egypt and India, singers and sculptors in the psalm and glistening marble of Palestine and Greece, throughout the centuries have sought to keep alive the sense of goodness in the brain of man. Yet all the time murder and rapine, disease and wretchedness flaunted denial in the face of truth. Pariah, slave, and bond-servant groaned in hopeless toil the while Kung-fu-sdu and Gotamma the Buddha proclaimed kindness and justice and David and Homer sang of high emprise.

Father Hagerty, Comrade p6, Oct 1902

Christianity came, with a catholic breadth of goodness, teaching the brotherhood of man, gathering up the treasures of foregoing ages wherewith to enrich the race, and sending messengers of peace through all the turbulent highways in every land. Far-reaching deeds of love marked its growth in palace and hovel: yet the clash of swords and the snarl of the slave-driver’s lash broke in upon its holiness; and, ever and anon, hunger drove some mother to insane slaughter of the anæmic babe at her breast. The rich in high places rose up against a Savonarola and a Sir Thomas More and tried to silence the reproach of their goodness in death:

“And in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.”

Within reach of every banquet’s savor crouched the gaunt figure of Poverty; and the shadows of the Universities swept athwart the bleak paths of Ignorance and intensified the darkness. Gradually, through all the travail of the earth’s growth, came the machine to lift the burden from the straining muscles of men; and its only effect was to change the servitude of the many into an equally galling wage-slavery without surcease of misery and hate and crime. Meanwhile, the inherent goodness of human nature asserted itself in large heroism and patient bravery. Republics were builded out of the strength of the common people; and fine philosophies of liberty were engrossed upon the parchment of history, but humanity failed to reach the heights where gladness holds her breathing-places. The goodness of human nature seemed to be spent in the Sisyphus-like task of rolling some needless burden up the hill of Time and falling ever backward to the bottom in a futile renewal of toil.

As I read the annals of civilization in books and traced their later chapters in field and shop and factory, my early conviction of the inherent goodness of human nature was sharpened by its contrast with the physical evils everywhere so blatant. I saw the tragic waste of life wherewith the commerce of to-day stands crimsoned in the blood of the proletariat. I noticed little children slowly murdering by the loom and sewing-machine. In the disease-sodden tenements of the slums I saw hundreds of men and women dragging out a living death their lives foreshortening by the vilest adulteration of food and drink and by the foul air and reeking bodies of their fellow-men in the low, narrow rooms in which they huddled together. Drunkenness, insanity, and sexual perversions were all too common: nevertheless self-sacrifice, kindness, and wondrous patience were equally in evidence.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Comrade: “How I Became a Socialist” by Father Thomas Hagerty, Seventh in Series” →

Hellraisers Journal: From the Spokane Industrial Worker: B. T. W Prisoners Form Union Local at Lake Charles Jail, Louisiana

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote BBH re BTW LA White n Black Unity, ISR p106 , Aug 1912—————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday September 14, 1912
Lake Charles Jail of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana – B. of T. W. Prisoners Form Union

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of September 12, 1912:

BATTLING B. T. W. FORM JAIL UNION

REBELLIOUS PRISONERS FORM UNION IN JAIL
-BLACK HOLE OF CALCASIEU IS LABOR’S RECRUITING GROUND
-NO COLOR LINE DRAWN IN PRISON-REBELS ARE RISING.

 

BTW Prisoners of Grabow Massacre at Lake Charles Jail, af July 7, 1912
B. of T. W. Prisoners, Lake Charles La.

On August 15th a charter was issued by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers to the following white and colored workers:

White: Pat Perkins, R. W. Perry, John Perry, L. Perry, J. M. Richley, Joe Rogers, J. H. Simpson, W. D. Smith, S. B. Slaydon, W. R. Stacey, Ben Sturgia, C. D. Woodard, Leon Zebeau, Chas. Zebeau, C. E. Jones, John Killen, C. Leblue, B. J. Lee, George M. Lacey, Ed. Lehman, J. W. Moor, W. A. Mathis, Frank McBride, R. Parkham, J. Pennington, Chas. Gibbons, Josh Perkins, Walter Delcour, Williams Davis, Andy Denby, A. L. Emerson, Will Estes, Ed. Eyell, Frank Farr, G. H. Gibson, G. M. Grim, J. H. C. Helton, C. Havens, C. C. Holley, Arthur Hammonds, R. V. Hennigan, W. E. Hollingsworth, H. L. McFillen, A. H. Burge, R. D. Burge, J. H. Baily, A. A. Bondreaux, J. W. Bowers, L. H. Brown, Waldon Cooley, W. A. Chatham, A. R. Cryar, A. F. Creed, Jeff Cooper, B. B. Collier, Tom Cooper, J. W. Callie, J. D. Perkins, Herman Slaydon, Charlie Hampton, O. P. Bell, John Hood.

Colored: Peter Blackman, Elisha Fowler, Jason Clark, Garfield Holcomb, Pink Morris, Silas Anderson, H. Green, Jim Cotton, Robert Chopin, Dennis Myles, Robert Johnson, Milton Mitchel, Robert Milton.

These boys compose the roll of honor making up the membership of Local Union, Jail No. 1, B. of T. W., office address, Parish Prison, Lake Charles, La. They also organized a local of the Socialist Party, Jail No. 1, with 54 members and both locals are still growing. Men are coming into the prison every day and joining, or sending in their applications. This is, indeed, the deathless spirit, the spirit that must and will conquer all before it. Dead, the souls of these boys will do a mightier work for the emancipation of their class than ever yet; imprisoned, yet their voices will be heard and, mingling with the cries of Ettor and Giovannitti, all the workers of the world will be awakened, triumphant the hosts of labor will arise and the social revolution be an accomplished fact. Truly did Edward Bellamy speak  when he said: “No masters class has ever learned anything from the experience of its predecessors and the capitalist class will be no exception to the rule.” Down here in the Land of Dixie the slugging committee of the capitalist class is still busy, just as it was in Lawrence, just as it is in Canada and San Diego,-power(?)-crazed, gold-drunk hyenas trying to slug and shoot back the onward upward march of the human race! Fools who base their system on a thug’s heroism and a detectives’s honor, this is what the capitalist class has already degenerated to, and this is the surest sign of a system’s fall. 

All that is now left for the working class to do to end its age-long misery is to unite and rise in ONE BIG UNION. 

RISE! 

Save Ettor, Giovannitti, Emerson, Lehman, and all the other hero lumberjacks now in the Black Hole of Calcasieu!

RISE!

Clan of Toil, awaken! Rebels of the South, arise! Workers of the World, unite! You have nothing but your chains to lose! You have a World to gain!

RISE!

Organize! Organize!! Organize!!!

COVINGTON HALL.

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: Joe Ettor from Essex County Jail at Lawrence, Massachusetts: Strong, Resolute and “Eager for the Fray”

Janet RayeBread and Roses Strike of 1912
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Quote Joe Ettor, ed, Thank You, IW p1, Aug 29, 1912—————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 31, 1912
Joe Ettor Writes from Essex County Jail at Lawrence, Massachusetts:

From the Spokane Industrial Worker of August 29, 1912:

Letter from Joe Ettor in Jail, IW p1, Aug 29, 1912

[Photograph added.]

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Joe Ettor from Essex County Jail at Lawrence, Massachusetts: Strong, Resolute and “Eager for the Fray”” →

Hellraisers Journal: Shall Emerson Die?-President of Brotherhood of Timber Workers Jailed in Lake Charles, Louisiana

Janet RayeHellraisers Journal
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Quote BBH re BTW LA White n Black Unity, ISR p106 , Aug 1912—————

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?
———-

[Letter from Jay Smith, B. of T. W. Secretary]

A. I. Emerson, Pres BTW, Cmg Ntn p6, Aug 24, 1912

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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Hellraisers Journal: International Socialist Review: “Timber Workers and Timber Wolves” by William D. Haywood, Part II

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Quote BBH re Industrial Freedom BTW LA, ISR p , Aug 1912—————

Hellraisers Journal – Saturday August 3, 1912
Brotherhood of Timber Workers Organizing Campaign in Louisiana

From the International Socialist Review of August 1912:

Timber Workers by BBH, ISR p105, Aug 1912

[Part II of II]

Before the campaign of organization [Brotherhood of Timber Worker] now inaugurated by the Industrial Workers of the World is closed the lumber barons of Dixieland will have learned that it is impossible to fell trees with rifles and saw lumber with six shooters.

It should be mentioned here that of the nine men arrested four are non-union men, two of them, John and Paul Galloway, being owners of the Lumber Company. All are charged with murder. This, perhaps, indicates that the Trust has not entirely corralled the officialdom of Louisiana. It is certain that they are in bad repute with the business element in nearly all of the towns as their commissaries have been the means of controlling nearly the entire earnings of their employees, who are compelled to trade with the companies or lose the only means they have of making a living.

To maintain their absolute control of the camps the lumber companies, with the aid of their thugs, patrolled the towns, in some places inclosures were built around the mills and shacks. Notices were posted warning away union men, peddlers and Socialists.

Only a few days ago, H. G. Creel, one of the Rip-Saw editors on a lecture tour, was roughly handled at Oakdale and DeRidder, La. He was compelled to leave the first-named place, being threatened and intimidated by gun-men.

The small merchant realizes that if the workers are allowed to trade where they choose some of their money would pass over their counters and they know if wages are increased there would be a corresponding increase in their day’s receipts. This will account for the fact that the small business man and farmer have given their sympathy and a measure of support to the growing union of timber workers.

Arthur L. Emerson and Jay Smith, both Southern born, are the men around whom interest centers. They are the men who organized the Brotherhood of Timber Workers. Emerson had made two trips to the West-one to the Lumber District to the Southwest and the other to the Northwest. It was during the time that he worked with the lumber jacks of the Pacific Coast that he learned the need of organization. This thought was especially developed when he came in contact with the Lumber Workers’ Union of St. Regis and other points in the Bitter Root Range of Mountains. Being a practical lumber jack and saw mill hand and mill-wright himself, he saw at once the discrepancy in wages between the Pacific Coast and the Gulf States and upon his return to Dixieland he immediately took up the burden of organizing the workers as the only possible means of bringing up their wages and conditions to the level of the already too-low Western scale.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: International Socialist Review: “Timber Workers and Timber Wolves” by William D. Haywood, Part II” →