Hellraisers Journal: Eugene V. Debs on Journey with Fred Warren to Leavenworth Prison for Visit with Comrade Araujo

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Quote RF Magon, no AtR in jail, p1, Mar 13, 1909———-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 15, 1909
Eugene Debs and Fred Warren Travel to Leavenworth, Visit Mexican Comrade

From the Appeal to Reason of March 13, 1909:

With Araujo in Prison

BY EUGENE V. DEBS.

Quote Tomas Paine, ed Receive the Fugitive, AtR p1, Mar 13, 1909

Returning from Texas whither he had hastened to ascertain the true facts in the Araujo case, the managing editor of the Appeal, Fred D. Warren, was up in arms, declaring the affair a monstrous injustice and his determination to aid the convicted Mexican by all the means in his power. This determination was made stronger by the connection he discerned between the case and the cases pending in Arizona with which Appeal readers are familiar and by its important bearing upon the whole question of the war in Mexico.

For, be it understood, the war in Mexico has begun. The despotism of assassination has done its worst and at last the people have revolted, for which thank God!

In this Mexican war the working class of the United States is deeply and vitally interested, whether it knows it or not.

In Mexico fourteen million working people are in peon slavery. Their wages, in American money, will not average 25 cents a day.

American capitalists virtually own these millions of slaves and grind out their lives to amass fortunes to squander upon syphilitic parasites. These American capitalists, in collusion with Diaz, the despot, have taken possession of Mexico. Millions upon millions of wealth are in sight. Diaz and his government-government by assassination-keep down the slaves. No labor leaders there. They are shot. Strikers are hanged and agitators waylaid and assassinated.

The Mexican government is the slave herder of the American capitalists. Diaz is the chief herder in the service of Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman and other American plutocrats who own Mexico.

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Hellraisers Journal: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn for Chicago Propaganda League on Working Class Women and Suffrage

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Quote EGF, Pious women, Servant girls, Bff Cr NY p6, Mar 1, 1909———-

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 10, 1909
Chicago, Illinois – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Speaks for Propaganda League

From The Industrial Union Bulletin of February 27, 1909:

PROPAGANDEA LEAGUE LECTURES.

EGF, Socialist Woman Cv, Dec 1908

Sunday evening, February 21, Elizabeth G. Flynn gave a very instructive lecture under the auspices of the Chicago Propaganda League, at 55 North Clark street, on the subject, “Why Women of the Working Class Need Not Be Interested in Woman Suffrage.”

The speaker argued not so much against woman suffrage in itself, as against the emphasis now being placed by Socialists upon a question of secondary importance. She pointed out that woman’s activity in the labor movement promised more fruitful results along the line of building up the economic organization, by which alone conditions in industry could be improved and rendered more nearly equal for both men and women, and the danger of “sex war” averted, which was one of the grave possibilities of the agitation merely for “equal political rights.”

The meeting was well attended, and interest manifest throughout the lecture and the discussion which followed.

Next Sunday, February 28, at the same hour (8 o’clock) and place (55 North Clark street). Theodore Hertz will speak on “Tendencies in the European Trades Unions towards Industrial Unionism.” The change in dates for these two lectures was made on account of the fact that Miss Flynn will speak in Buffalo on the 28th.

———-

[Photograph added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for February 1909, Part II; Found in Chicago and in Denver

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Quote Mother Jones, Great Church upon Bodies of Girls, Dnv Rck Mt Ns p2, Feb 28, 1909———-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 8, 1909
Mother Jones News Round-Up for February 1909, Part II:
-Found in Denver, Colorado; Scheduled to Speak at Protest Meeting

At the end of February, Mother Jones arrived in Denver, Colorado, where she was scheduled to speak at a “Gompers Protest Meeting” on March 1st. According to the Rocky Mountain News of February 28th, Mother made the following statements:

Mother Jones w edit, Dnv Rck Mt Ns p2, Feb 28, 1909

There is an industrial panic in the United States today, and it is not confined to any particular locality. The steel trust is now engaged in stamping out the independent steel concerns, and God have pity on the iron and steel workers when this happens and the rest of the people, too. In Illinois the coal miners are having their trouble, some working only one day a week, and some three days a week. The shoemakers all over the country are struggling against similiar conditions, and everywhere you turn you find this industrial stagnation…..

How can you expect labor to make very much headway with 10,000 judges ruled by the capitalists? Where can they get justice? Where can justice be had with Wall Street dictating the policies of the president, congress and the governors of the states?

Even religion is mixed up in the conditions. I saw in an Eastern city a $2,000,000 church built with the subscriptions of men whose daughters work in factories and stores for $3 and $4 per week. Oh, the farce of it all! Dare you tell me that a girl can work for $3 a week and be respectable? The idea of building a great church upon the sold bodies of girls!…..

I tell you that there is a limit to all things-and the limit will come in the present economic conditions of this country, and people will arise and take the industries into their own hands and right the wrongs that are making of this nation the most grasping in the world today.

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Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for February 1909, Part I; Found Praising the Appeal to Reason

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Quote Mother Jones, Wall Street Knows Fears, AtR p1, Feb 13, 1909———-

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday March 7, 1909
Mother Jones News Round-Up for February 1909, Part I:
-Found Praising the “Appeal to Reason”

From the Appeal to Reason of February 13, 1909:

“WALL STREET KNOWS AND FEARS.”

Mother Jones, Ipls UMWC with Her Boys detail, Ipl Str p7, Jan 29, 1909

The Appeal feels a pardonable pride in the compliment paid to it by that grand old agitator, Mother Jones. She has been with the Appeal from the day of its first issue and she knows its record as few others do. She knows its trials and its struggles, its privations and reverses, it’s mistakes and defeats, and she also knows what its motive and purpose has been through all its career. She knows that while the Appeal, like every other paper, has its shortcomings and has committed its follies its one unflinching purpose has been to serve and strengthen the Socialist movement in the struggle for industrial emancipation.

It is gratifying therefore to have one who so well knows the Appeal and who is so well known for her own spotless integrity and courage to write us that the Appeal

is the one Socialist paper that Wall street knows and fears!

The Appeal values this appreciative expression from Mother Jones sufficiently to move it to exert all its effort to increase the fear of Wall Street and the confidence and good will of all who are helping to overthrow capitalism and usher in the reign of the people.

———-

[Photograph added.]

—————

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Hellraisers Journal: Mrs. Elizabeth Trowbridge Sarabia on the Conviction and Sentencing of Antonio de Pío Araujo

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Quote Mother Jones Save Our Mexican Comrades, AtR p3, Feb 20, 1909 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Friday March 5, 1909
Antonio de Pío Araujo Sentenced to More Than Two Years at Leavenworth

From the Appeal to Reason of February 27, 1909:

LETTER FROM MRS. SARABIA
—–

Antonio de Pío Araujo, Prison 1908
Antonio de Pío Araujo

As we go to press we are in receipt of a letter from Elizabeth Trowbridge Sarabia, wife of Manuel Sarabia, one of the Mexican patriots awaiting trial. The following excerpts will be of interest to our readers:

One of the worst features of these Mexican cases is that so many of them come and go and the public seem to take no interest, regardless of the atrocities committed and of the precedents set to use later against the American workers. One of the worst of all has taken place recently in San Antonio, Tex., where on the 21st of January, a young man named Antonio de P. Araujo, was sentenced to two years and six months in the penitentiary at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., for the awful crime of being an associate editor of a Mexican Liberal paper published in the United States. There certainly is “liberty of the press” in this “free republic!”

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Hellraisers Journal: “Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution” by John Murray, Part III: the Mexican Revolutionaries

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Quote Freedom Ricardo Flores Magon, Speech re Prisoners of Texas, May 31, 1914———-

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 3, 1909
Mexico City -John Murray Meets with Mexican Revolutionaries

John Murray recently returned from Mexico and has written an article about that experience for this month’s edition of the International Socialist Review. Below we offer the conclusion of that article in which Mr. Murray meets with a group of Mexican Revolutionaries.

Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution

BY JOHN MURRAY
[Part IIII]
—–

Mex Rev, Sarabia, R Magon, Rivera, Villarreal, ISR p642, Mar 1919

We turned into the mouth of a narrow street, cobbled from wall to wall. Herbierto knocked at a door. A window swung open above our heads and a voice called out, “Is that the doctor?”

“It is,” answered Senora Moreno. “Is the child still sick?”

“Yes, come in quickly,” replied the watcher, closing the window.

“A sick child?” I questioned, as the door opened and we stumbled through the dark passageway.

“No,” meaningly answered Herbierto. “A sick country, with the revolution as the only medicine.”

And the woman added: “That was the pass word.”

Around an oblong table in the room we entered sat two dozen men, as dissimilar in their appearance as their native land is varied, Mexico is half desert and half tropics and breeds its people small, light-skinned and still-tongued, or swarthy, heavy-boned and voluble, as unlike each other as sand and sage brush are to mountain torrents and black jungle-land.

“A friend from Los Angeles,” explained Herbierto to the group watching me in surprised silence, but as he read my credentials from Magon their faces changed and when the signature was reached, a slim, black-eyed boy warmly grasped my hand, asking the question which seems to echo through Mexico:

“How is Ricardo?”

I gave them greetings from their imprisoned leader. He was their hero, their master-mind, whose years of unflinching struggle against the crushing powers of the Dictator had kept hope in Mexico alive; and in return I heard the news of the revolutionary movement.

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Hellraisers Journal: “Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution” by John Murray, Part II: The Rio Blanco Massacre

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Quote John Murray re Rio Blanco Martyrs, ISR p653, Mar 1909———-

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday March 2, 1909
At Mexico City – John Murray Learns Details of Rio Blanco Massacre

John Murray recently returned from Mexico and has written an article about that experience for this month’s edition of the International Socialist Review. Below we offer part two of that article in which Mr. Murray arrives in Mexico City and hears the story of the Rio Blanco Massacre.

Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution

BY JOHN MURRAY
[Part II]
—–

Mex Rev, Sarabia, R Magon, Rivera, Villarreal, ISR p642, Mar 1919—–

Black clouds gathered against the mountains and as the City of Mexico was reached the deluge broke.

A sandal-footed, brass-tagged “cargador” seized my bags and carried them from the Pullman’s steps to a blue-flagged coach.

I kept my face glued to the carriage window and asked myself this question: “Mexico, Mexico, Mexico is—what?” The answer seemed to rise from the passing throng of bent-backed, human burden bearers, “Mexico is a land of cargadores.”

With leather thongs passed across their foreheads and around their heads, cargadores carrying as much as three hundred pounds, trotted by without a stumble. And in the steps of these men followed the women and children likewise loaded.

In no other country in the world does the human back so stagger under a dead weight as here in Mexico.

Arriving at the hotel in front of the Alameda, I went immediately to my room, locked the door and got out my list of addresses in cipher. It was a wearisome task to figure them out, one by one, but I dared not run the risk of being taken by the police and having them find names of Mexican revolutionists given me by the Junta in Los Angeles—that would mean prison for all. One person in Mexico in particular had been recommended to me by Magon. I would see him first.

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Hellraisers Journal: “Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution” by John Murray, Part I: Train Ride to Mexico City

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Quote R Magon re John Murray, ISR p643, Mar 1909———-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 1, 1909
From Juarez to Mexico City – John Murray Talks with an American Cane-Grower

John Murray recently returned from Mexico and has written an article about that experience for this month’s edition of the International Socialist Review. Below we offer part one of that article in which Mr. Murray travels from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City and speaks with an American cane-grower along the way.

Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution

BY JOHN MURRAY
[Part I]
—–

The third uprising of the Liberal Party failed but another is preparing in Mexico that will not be so easily snuffed out by President Diaz and his “partners,” so asserts the writer of this article, John Murray, who saw Mexico a few months ago in the fever-heat of revolt. With credentials from the revolutionary leaders he traveled from one Liberal Party group to another and was shown by them the underside of Mexico-the Mexico that President Diaz hides from view and guards with guns in hourly fear that it may rise and end his dictatorship.—Editor.

Mex Rev, Sarabia, R Magon, Rivera, Villarreal, ISR p642, Mar 1919

Letter T, ISR p641, Mar 1909HE warm clasp of Tom’s hand tempted me to talk—in a moment, and my loose tongue let slip enough to give hint of my errand to Mexico. Now Tom Hart was the last man that I should have supposed would show the white feather—a bear hunter, mind you, and grizzlies at that.

“Look here, Bud,” he spoke with a down-drop of his eyes that was new to me, “don’t be so foolish as to rub the President’s hair the wrong way. You don’t know Mexico—it’s prison or death down here. You’re fooled if you think for a moment that this is the United States. Why, I have seen a bunch of rurales ride into a village before sun-up, where things were not going to suit the Diaz government, and call out the whole population, line ’em up and shoot down every tenth man. No trials. Nothing. That’s Mexico. And don’t you go for to stand on your dignity as an American citizen, thinking that you’re safer than a native to speak your mind free. I’ve seen Americans—yes, and there’s three of ’em right now in the prison of San Juan de Ulua—who might just as well be Esquimaux for all the protection that their nationality gives ’em. For God’s sake, old man”—Tom’s pleading startled me, for if he were possessed of such a crushing fear of Diaz what chance had I to escape contagion?—”don’t do anything to offend the Mexican government.”

“It’s too late, Tom, I’m into it now—up to my neck. You never held back when we were after the big-footed grizzly that killed our cattle in the pines back of the Loma Pelon ranch. The game I am after now is news—the true story of Mexico’s sandaled-footed burden-bearers and their nearness to revolt.”

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