Hellraisers Journal – Monday November 9, 1903 Mother Jones Speaks to Miners at Sopris and Starkville, Colorado
From The Rocky Mountain News of November 8, 1903:
[Mother Jones at Sopris and Starkville]
…..The meeting held at Sopris last night [November 6th], where the speaker was Mother Jones, was crowded. To-night she speaks at Starkville. Both these towns are incorporated, and the coal companies do not own the town sites, so no interference with the meeting can be brought about, even if it was the desire of the operators…..
It is stated that all the miners are out at Berwind, and that all at Sopris and Starkville will refuse to go to work Monday. In the two latter towns, Mother Jones has made hurricane appeals to the miners to strike. She is a speaker of the strongest type, and the fact that she is a white haired woman carried weight with her talks, all of which recited the condition in the Eastern fields, and none of which referred to the conditions prevailing in Colorado or how to improve them…..
Hellraisers Journal – Monday September 1, 1913
“Copper Country” of Michigan – Western Federation of Miners Issues Strike Call
From the International Socialist Review of September 1913:
The Copper Miners’ Strike
By Edward J. McGurty
[Part I of II]
THE territory known as the “Copper Country” of Michigan is a peaked peninsula lying to the north of the Upper Peninsula. It is washed on three sides by the waters of Lake Superior, embracing the counties of Keweenaw, Houghton and Ontonagon.
The country is rich in copper and has one of the deepest incline shafts in the world, the Calumet & Hecla No. 7, at Calumet, which goes down about 8,000 feet. The Calumet & Hecla Company, with its subsidiaries, owns and controls practically all the property up here. For the past thirty years there has been no labor trouble here of any consequence. In that time the C. & H. has paid out $125,000,000 in dividends on an original capitalization of $1,200,000. The employes, many of them Cornish miners, have not revolted for years. They have submitted to every injustice and to tremendous exploitation.
For a number of years it was impossible for the Western Federation to make any headway in the Upper Peninsula. Attempts at organization have been met by the sacking and firing of men. Little could be accomplished. Gradually the Federation formed organizations at various points along the range. The Finns were very zealous in keeping activity alive. This last year especial efforts have been made to organize the men of the various nationalities. Those working in the mines are Cornish, Finnish, Croatian, Italian and Austrian. Up to May first, about 7,000 men were taken into the union.
The companies have worked a pseudo-contract system and cheated the men outright. They have paid low wages, many of the men getting as low as a $1.00 a day and some even less. The shifts have been long, running as high as twelve and thirteen hours. Last year the companies installed what is known as a “one-man” drill which is a man-killer.
It was the straw that broke the camel’s back in the copper zone. On the night of July 22, men went from one end of the range to the other, on foot and in rigs rousing the miners and making known the strike order. The next day there were 15,000 mine-workers who had laid down their tools. Smelter-men, surface-men, under-ground-men, all were out and the copper mines were tied up as tight as a drum. Then the men who had not already joined the union began to make their way to the offices and in a few days 90 per cent of the miners were organized.
Directly the men went out the sheriff of Houghton county deputized about 500 men and sent them about to create trouble. They provoked the strikers to the breaking point and there were 500 deputies without stars or guns in a short time. There were also a few of them went to the hospitals.
The papers here, under the control of the companies, have, as usual, lied about the strike, slandered the strikers, burned the “locations” up in their columns; killed law-officers, etc. The second day of the strike the sheriff acting under orders from McNaughton, $85,000-a-year-manager of the Calumet & Hecla, requested troops from Governor Ferris. Without any investigation of the situation Ferris ordered the entire state militia dispatched here. Protest after protest has been made by the people here, because the presence of the troops is for the purpose of creating trouble. But Ferris stalwartly keeps them here.
The commander of the troops is a real, dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He says that the refusal of the union men to work the pumps and keep water from flowing into the mines amounts to the DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY. Even in times of industrial war, the mine-owners are accustomed to meek wage slaves that pump the water out of the mines.
The troops have ridden up the streets of Calumet and Red Jacket at night on horse-back and have ruthlessly clubbed innocent men and women conversing on the side-walks. They knocked down an old man of 70, and threw a baby out of a buggy onto the pavement. They have shot at strikers all over the range when the strikers were doing picket duty.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday July 2, 1913 “The Paterson Strike Pageant” by Phillips Russell, Part II
From the International Socialist Review of July 1913:
[Part II of II]
The New York Press the next day said:
“The Garden has held many shows and many audiences, from Dowie to Taft to Buffalo Bill, but it is doubtful if there ever was such an assemblage either as an audience or as a show as was gathered under the huge rafters last night. In fact, it was a mixed grouping that at times they converged and actor became auditor and auditor turned suddently into actor. When more than 10,000 sang and shouted within, 5,000 outside clamored for admittance and were willing to pay double the prices to get in.”
The New York Evening World said:
“Fifteen thousand specators applauded with shouts and tears the great Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden. The big mill aglow with light in the dark hours of early winter morning, the shrieking whistles, the din of machinery-dying away to give place to the Marseillaise sung by a surging crowd of 1,200 operatives, the fierce battle with the police, the sombre funeral of the victim, the impassioned speech of the agitator, the sending away of the children, the great meeting of desperate hollow-eyed strikers-these scenes unrolled with a poignant realism that no man who saw them will ever forget.”
No spectacle enacted in New York has ever made such an impression. Not the most sanguine member of the committee which made the preparations for the pageant believed that its success would be quite so overwhelming. It is still the talk of New York, most cynical and hardened of cities, and will remain so for many days.
There were times when the committee were assailed with oppressive doubts. When one sat down and thought it over in cold blood, the idea of arranging for and carrying through such a thing in two weeks’ time seemed almost grotesque. Outside of the mechanical difficulties involved, the multitudinous details to be attended to, the advance outlay of money that would be necessary seemed to present an insuperable obstacle. There was the single item of $1,000 to be put down for the rental of one night, the $750 needed for scenery, the huge sum for advertising, all to be provided.
After plunging in with enthusiasm for the first few days, a bad reaction seized the promoters. They called a meeting in which the most gloomy forebodings were indulged in. There were disturbing reports of the small advance sale of tickets and there wereserious proposals to give the whole thing up.
It was the workers themselves who stepped into the breach. Delegates from the New York silk strikers,whose cause has almost been lost sight of in the more spectacular struggle of Paterson, arose indignantly.
“What?” they cried. “Give this thing up after our people have set their hearts upon it? Never! Is it money you need? Leave it to us-we’ll raise that! We are poor. We are on strike. But a lot of us still have a few dollars left in the savings bank that we’ve been putting by through many years. We’ll get it out and lump it together. We will go to our business men and say: ‘Here, we’ve been trading with you a long time. We have helped to make your profits. Now you help us or we won’t trade with you any more.’ Never mind. You leave it to us-we will raise the money.”
And they did. Other generous people, more richly upholstered with ready cash, also came forward with contributions and in four days there was ample money with which to cover all deposits.
And it was found that the result was worth all the toil and trouble involved. The lives of most of us are sordid and grey. So tightly are we tied to the petty round of toil to which our galley-masters bind us, that most of us probably are born, live and die without experiencing one deep-springing, surging, devastating emotion. We are either afraid to feel or we have lost the capacity.
The Paterson pageant will be remembered for the sweeping emotions it shot through the atmosphere if for no other reason. Waves of almost painful emotion swept over that great audience as the summer wind converts a placid field of wheat into billowing waves. It was all real, living, and vital to them. There were veterans of many an industrial battle in that audience, though the cheeks of many still held the pink of youth.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 15, 1913
Ipswich, Massachusetts – Police open fire on picket line, one woman killed.
On Tuesday, June 10th, police here opened fire on the strikers’ picket line at the Ipswich Hosiery Mill killing Nicholetta Paudelopoulou, 27, and wounding seven others. The wounded were taken to a hospital in Salem. Miss Paudelopoulou was taken to a nearby doctors office where she died of a bullet wound to the head.
Fifteen strikers were arrested, including the local leaders of the I.W.W.Nathan Hermann, I.W.W. organizer, Mr. E.L. Pingree, Secretary of the Lowell I.W.W., and Mrs. Pingree have been charged with inciting to riot resulting in murder. Thomas J. Halliday, National Secretary of the textile branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, has arrived to take charge of the strike.
The strike at the Ipswich mill has been on for the past seven weeks. At this time, 500 Italians and 100 Greeks remain on strike. Sadly, most of the 500 English-speaking workers have chosen to cross the picket line.
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 – Saturday June 7, 1913 New York, New York – John Reed Recalls Time Spent in Passaic County Jail
From The Masses of June 1913:
“Speaking of Anarchy” by Art Young
[Part I of II]
There’s war in Paterson. But it’s a curious kind of war. All the violence is the work of one side—the Mill Owners. Their servants, the Police, club unresisting men and women and ride down law-abiding crowds on horseback. Their paid mercenaries, the armed Detectives, shoot and kill innocent people. Their newspapers, the Paterson Press and the Paterson Call, publish incendiary and crime-inciting appeals to mob-violence against the strike leaders. Their tool, Recorder Carroll, deals out heavy sentences to peaceful pickets that the police-net gathers up. They control absolutely the Police, the Press, the Courts.
Opposing them are about twenty-five thousand striking silk-workers, of whom perhaps ten thousand are active, and their weapon is the picket-line. Let me tell you what I saw in Paterson and then you will say which side of this struggle is “anarchistic” and “contrary to American ideals.”
At six o’clock in the morning a light rain was falling. Slate-grey and cold, the streets of Paterson were deserted. But soon came the Cops-twenty of them—strolling along with their nightsticks under their arms. We went ahead of them toward the mill district. Now we began to see workmen going in the same direction, coat collars turned up, hands in their pockets. We came into a long street, one side of which was lined with silk mills, the other side with the wooden tenement houses. In every doorway, at every window of the houses clustered foreign-faced men and women, laughing and chatting as if after breakfast on a holiday. There seemed no sense of expectancy, no strain or feeling of fear. The sidewalks were almost empty, only over in front of the mills a few couples—there couldn’t have been more than fifty-marched slowly up and down, dripping with the rain. Some were men, with here and there a man and woman together, or two young boys. As the warmer light of full day came the people drifted out of their houses and began to pace back and forth, gathering in little knots on the corners. They were quick with gesticulating hands, and low-voiced conversation. They looked often toward the corners of side streets.
Suddenly appeared a policeman, swinging his club. “Ah-h-h!” said the crowd softly.
Six men had taken shelter from the rain under the canopy of a saloon. “Come on! Get out of that!” yelled the policeman, advancing. The men quietly obeyed. “Get off this street! Go home, now! Don’t be standing here!” They gave way before him in silence, drifting back again when he turned away. Other policemen materialized, hustling, cursing, brutal, ineffectual. No one answered back. Nervous, bleary-eyed, unshaven, these officers were worn out with nine weeks’ incessant strike duty.
On the mill side of the street the picket-line had grown to about four hundred. Several policemen shouldered roughly among them, looking for trouble. A workman appeared, with a tin pail, escorted by two detectives. “Boo! Boo!” shouted a few scattered voices. Two Italian boys leaned against the mill fence and shouted a merry Irish threat, “Scab! Come outa here I knocka you’ head off!” A policeman grabbed the boys roughly by the shoulder. “Get to hell out of here!” he cried, jerking and pushing them violently to the corner, where he kicked them. Not a voice, not a movement from the crowd.
A little further along the street we saw a young woman with an umbrella, who had been picketing, suddenly confronted by a big policeman.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he roared. “God damn you, you go home!” and he jammed his club against her mouth. “I no go home!” she shrilled passionately, with blazing eyes. “You bigga stiff !”
Silently, steadfastly, solidly the picket-line grew. In groups or in couples the strikers patrolled the sidewalk. There was no more laughing. They looked on with eyes full of hate. These were fiery-blooded Italians, and the police were the same brutal thugs that had beaten them and insulted them for nine weeks. I wondered how long they could stand it.
It began to rain heavily. I asked a man’s permission to stand on the porch of his house. There was a policeman standing in front of it. His name, I afterwards discovered, was McCormack. I had to walk around him to mount the steps.
Suddenly he turned round, and shot at the owner: “Do all them fellows live in that house?” The man indicated the three other strikers and himself, and shook his head at me.
“Then you get to hell off of there!” said the cop, pointing his club at me.
“I have the permission of this gentleman to stand here,” I said. “He owns this house.”
“Never mind! Do what I tell you! Come off of there, and come off damn quick!”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”
With that he leaped up the steps, seized my arm, and violently jerked me to the sidewalk. Another cop took my arm and they gave me a shove.
“Now you get to hell off this street!” said Officer McCormack.
“I won’t get off this street or any other street. If I’m breaking any law, you arrest me!”
Officer McCormack, who is doubtless a good, stupid Irishman in time of peace, is almost helpless in a situation that requires thinking. He was dreadfully troubled by my request. He didn’t want to arrest me, and said so with a great deal of profanity.
“I’ve got your number,” said I sweetly. “Now will you tell me your name?”
“Yes,” he bellowed, “an’ I got your number! I’ll arrest you.” He took me by the arm and marched me up the street.
He was sorry he had arrested me. There was no charge he could lodge against me. I hadn’t been doing anything. He felt he must make me say something that could be construed as a violation of the Law. To which end he God damned me harshly, loading me with abuse and obscenity, and threatened me with his night-stick, saying, “You big — — lug, I’d like to beat the hell out of you with this club.”
I returned airy persiflage to his threats.
Other officers came to the rescue, two of them, and supplied fresh epithets. I soon found them repeating themselves, however, and told them so. “I had to come all the way to Paterson to put one over on a cop !” I said. Eureka! They had at last found a crime! When I was arraigned in the Recorder’s Court that remark of mine was the charge against me!
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday May 27, 1903 West Virginia Miners Face Gatling Guns, Company Guards & Peonage
From the Duluth LaborWorld of May 23, 1903:
GATLING GUN FOR THE MINERS ———-
RIDDLES GREAT TREES IN FOREST IT IS TRAINED UPON. ———-
WORKMEN HELP PRISONERS ———- Will Resort to More Bloodshed If It Becomes Necessary to Coerce the Miners. ———-
Labor conditions in West Virginia mines are not enviable. Besides reports of Gatling guns mounted on fortifications to command approaches to the mines, comes the further news that the mining camps are surrounded by armed guards ready to shoot down any of the workers who try to reach the outside world. So, between the guns and the guards, the wage workers of one of the naturally rich states of the Union cannot be said to pass very happy lives.
Though so rich in natural resources-for there are coal and iron mines and virgin forests that have never yet been touched-West Virginia is cursed by monopoly. As a result, the wage workers are not free to employ themselves, but must accept the conditions of those who control the source from which all must draw their subsistence-the land.
For no other reason do the inhabitants of that state submit. Those who are enticed into its boundaries under false pretences, as evidenced by the affidavits of the miners published in the organ of the Mine Workers’ Union; have hard work to get away. They are subdued by their poverty and fear of the armed guards.
The necessity for organizing West Virginia is so apparent that it is a wonder the American Federation of Labor does not flood the state with “agitators” for human freedom and human rights. What the wage workers there need is the knowledge that their own efforts to improve their own condition will be supplemented by the good will and financial assistance of organized labor everywhere. It is a hard proposition, to be sure, to go into territory dominated by such powerful social and political interests, but greater tasks have been accomplished, and it only needs the united power of an aroused commonwealth to bring about great and good industrial changes in that section of the country.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday May 3, 1913 Paterson, New Jersey – Bill Haywood on the General Strike of Silk Workers, Part II
From the International Socialist Review of May 1913:
The Rip in the Silk Industry
By William D. Haywood ———-
[Part II of II]
The Red Badge of Toil
In this connection it is worth while to relate an incident-one of the most dramatic of the strike. The Paterson bosses lost no time in injecting the “patriotic” issue after the fashion of Lawrence, Little Falls and Akron. The red flag, they howled, stood for blood, murder and anarchy-the Star Spangled Banner must be upheld, etc., etc. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was on the platform at a big strike meeting one day explaining the significance of the red flag when a striking dyer sprang up from the middle of the audience crying:
“I know ! Here is the red flag!”
And aloft he held his right hand-stained a permanent bloody crimson, gnarled from years of toil, and corroded by the scarlet dye which it was his business to put into the fabrics worn by the dainty lady of the capitalist class as well as by the fawning prostitute.
For an instant there was silence and then the hall was rent by cries from the husky throats as all realized this humble dyer indeed knew the meaning of the red badge of his class.
Ribbon weaving is largely done by men and women. In this department the bosses have developed a speeding up system with reductions in pay, overlooking no opportunity to introduce improved machinery. Thus they increase production, at the same time they lowered the pay, until the workers are now demanding a scale which 19 years ago was imposed upon them! That is, the weavers now ask a wage that prevailed two decades ago.
The significance of this demand makes it plain that in the evolution of industry and the introduction of new machinery the workers have obtained no benefit, while the bosses have reaped ever increasing profits.
Many children are employes in the silk industry, most of them being between the ages of 14 and 16. However there are few violations of the child labor law, not because. the manufacturers care anything about either the law or the children, but because the making of high grade silk requires the careful and efficient work that only adults can give. However the Paterson capitalists have begun to set up plants in the southern states as well as in the mining regions of Pennsylvania, installing there new style looms which can be operated by girls and children.
Meeting For Children
One of the best and most enthusiastic meetings held during the strike was that for the benefit of the children of the mills. They packed Turner Hall and listened eagerly and with appreciation as speakers outlined to them the development in the manufacture of silk from the cocoon to the completed fabric lying on the shelves of the rich department store.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday March 6, 1913 Paterson, New Jersey – Giovannitti Speaks to Silk Strikers at Turn Hall
From the Passaic Daily News of March 5, 1913:
The first move toward a settlement of the silk strike in Paterson came last night, when, at a meeting of delegates from dyers and broad silk weavers, demands were formulated for presentation to manufacturers today. These demands, in brief, are:
Abolition of the four-loom system and and eight-hour day at the same price now paid per week for the dyers…..
Arturo Giovannitti, I. W. W. leader, who was recently tried and acquitted in Lawrence, Mass., on a charge of murder in connection with the strike riots in that city, arrived in Paterson this morning shortly after 11 o’clock. He went at once to Turn Hall where he addressed nearly 5,000 strikers, speaking first in Italian and then repeating his speech in English.
Giovannitti urged the strikers to stand by their action in walking out, saying that they were bound to receive their rights and that their demands would be granted. He was received as a hero of the “cause,” with much applause. He was introduced by Carlo Tresca, the I. W. W. leader who was arrested last week with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Patrick Quinlan. He did not advocate violence.
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