Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday April 15, 1913
“Sunday” -Drawing by Maurice Becker, Poem by Louis Untermeyer
-On Sunday September 29, 1912, at Lawrence, Massachusetts, a parade, led by Carlo Tresca, was attacked by police. The I. W. W. marchers were on their way to the cemetery in order to place flowers on the grave of Anna LoPizzo, martyr of the Lawrence Textile Strike. Tresca was seized by police, but freed by his Comrades.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday February 13, 1922 West Virginia Miners and Their Families Are Destitute and Suffering
From The New York Times of February 12, 1922:
ASK AID FOR 35,000 STRIKING MINERS. ———- West Virginia Labor Committee Here Seeks Food, Clothes and Medicines for Idle Men. ———-
Thirty-five thousand striking miners and their families are destitute and suffering in West Virginia, according to a statement yesterday by a committee of West Virginia labor officials who came to New York seeking food, clothing and medical aid for the unemployed workers and their dependents.
The committee said it also would appeal to the national Red Cross organization at Washington and to the convention of the United Mine Workers at Indianapolis next Tuesday for emergency help. The committee consisted of William T. Harris, President of the West Virginia State Federation of Labor; Fred Mooney, Secretary-Treasurer, District 17, United Mine Workers, and Frank W. Snyder, editor of The West Virginia Federationist.
The committee said a survey of conditions showed that more than 70,000 West Virginia miners were out of work, many of them since the signing of the armistice.
High wages had nothing to do with the unemployment, the committee said, pointing out that coal was being sold in the unionized Kanawha fields at lower prices than in the non-union Guyan region. Kanawha coal, they said, was selling at $2.15 a ton f. o. b. mines last week, and in Guyan at $2.35.
In the face of the unemployment, the commutes said, the operators were attempting wholesale evictions. Many miners and their families had been forced out of their homes, but these evictions had been checked by the intervention of the Department of Labor at Washington.
“In the mining fields,” said Mr. Mooney, “there are 35,000 destitute families. They are without food and clothing. The bread winners in some of these families have not worked more than three months since the armistice. The families have been living from hand to mouth on charity furnished by their neighbors and friends.”
The committee arranged with the American Civil Liberties Union here to raise a relief fund here in New York.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday October 6, 1921 Art Shields Reports from West Virginia on Battle of Logan County
From The Liberator of October 1921:
The Battle of Logan County By Art Shields ———-
[Part II of II.]
The murder of Hatfield and Chambers in that premeditated fashion on the court house steps was the dramatic event that focused their eyes on the crisis before the whole labor movement of West Virginia. It was now or never for the cleaning up of Mingo County.
Up and down a hundred mountains where men delve deep for coal and even in the black diamond fields of Kentucky and Virginia, men began reaching for their high power rifles for the big hunt again, as in Cabin Creek days. Organization for the purpose was hastily improvised, outside of the United Mine Workers, which did not allow its district machinery to be used, and shortly after the middle of the month thousands of men began to move for the gathering place of Marmet. They came by train or car to this little town and its surrounding fields, there on the border of Boone and Kanawha counties, just sixty-five miles, as the bird flies, or more than a hundred by road, to the Mingo coal fields. The route led straight across the union grounds of Boone County and the thug-ridden lands of Logan.
Thousands of miners, black and white, came at the call: railroad men were there, atoning for the stain cast by the men who were transporting machine guns and thugs into Sheriff Don Chafin’s Logan County lands; building trades men came who knew that the powerful miners’ union held up all organized labor in West Virginia, and machinists and farmers’ boys gathered with the rest. Among the lot were more than two thousand who had taken post graduate lessons in shooting “over there.”
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday October 5, 1921 Art Shields Reports from West Virginia on Battle of Logan County
From The Liberator of October 1921:
The Battle of Logan County By Art Shields ———-
[Part I of II.]
“THESE are our hills and we love ’em.We had to fight for them long ago, against the bears and the panthers and the wolves and the rattlesnakes, and now I reckon Don Chafin’s thugs ain’t a-goin’ to scare us out.“
A sturdy old mountaineer of more than three score and ten voiced these sentiments as we stood together on one of the loftiest peaks of Blair Mountain and filled our eyes with the surrounding magnificence of giant shaded valleys and mighty ridges, tossed in forested glory against the sky. It was a garden of towering wonder that blinded my eyes for the moment to the shallow trench at my feet, where thousands of empty shells were ugly reminders that Don Chafin’s machine gunners and automatic rifle men had been nesting there a few days before.
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday April 6, 1920
Montesano, Washington – John Nicholas Beffel Observes Centralia Trial
From The Liberator of April 1920:
Fear in the Jury Box
[-by John Nicholas Beffel]
Eugene Barnett
A NERVOUS little man is on the witness stand in Montesano. He is James T. McAllister, whose wife owns the Roderick Hotel next door to the raided I. W. W. hall in Centralia. He testifies that one of the defendants, Eugene Barnett, was in the Roderick lobby all during the Armistice Day shooting and not in the Avalon Hotel, as the prosecution asserts.
“But when you were arrested you said there was nobody in the lobby,” says a prosecutor for the lumber trust. “Why did you say that?”
“I wasn’t sworn then,” replies the little man. “I didn’t want to be drawed into no trouble.”
He cowers in his chair, remembering the mob. There was a list of people to be hung that night beside Wesley Everest.
“What’s the matter?” demands Vanderveer, counsel for the defense. “Are you afraid now?”
“N-no.” The little man shakes as with a chill.
Ten men sit facing the judge and jury and gallows. They are accused of killing Warren O. Grimm, service man, in the Armistice Day parade. But it is not a murder trial; it is a trial of organized labor; the lumber interests seek to crush their most dangerous enemy, the uncrushable I. W. W. The main legal issue is whether men still have a right to defend their lives and property against violence. If these ten workers get a fair trial and are judged solely by the evidence, they will without any doubt go free. But will the jury dare to acquit? A verdict of acquittal would mean ruin for the twelve. Each man’s history is known to the lumber trust; it knows how to break men; it has broken men before.
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