Hellraisers Journal: Chicago IWW Trial Testimony: Deportations from Bisbee and Murder of Frank Little at Butte

Share

Don’t worry, Fellow Worker,
all we’re going to need
from now on is guts.
-Frank Little
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hellraisers Journal, Monday July 8, 1918
Chicago, Illinois – Trial of I. W. W. Leaders Continues

Fellow Workers Embree and Rogers for the defense:

Court was adjourned for the Fourth of July, and those defendants still confined in Cook County Jail were kept locked in their cells for that entire sweltering summer day. On the 5th of July, Defendant A. S. Embree resumed the testimony begun July 3rd regarding the Arizona deportations. Harrison George, also one of the defendants, picks up the story:

The law of Arizona was but the plaything of the Copper Trust, he said, in giving a long and explicit account of how he and 1,185 other men were deported from Bisbee by gunmen under direction of Sheriff Harry Wheeler and company officials. Embree was examined by Attorney W. B. Cleary, himself a deportee, and his story of that memorable 12th of July, 1917, when all law was set aside in the interest of industrial autocracy, was backed by many photographs of the deportees and their deporters. On the morning of that day five men with rifles came out of the office of Postmaster Bailey, and more guns came from the Y. M. C. A., Embree stated.

Bisbee Deportation, White Arm Band Gunthug, libcom
—–

Of those deported, 40 percent. were members of the I.W.W., 25 percent. were members of the A. F. of L. and 35 per cent. were unorganized workers or business and professional men. Fred Brown, state organizer of the A. F. of L., was deported. Several grocery men were deported; also the proprietors of two restaurants with all their employees. Registered men, 400 of them, were sent away and forbidden to return, even for draft examination; many holders of Liberty Bonds, one a cash purchaser of $15,000 of these bonds-everyone who would not bow to gunman rule and Copper Trust law-400 married men with families dragged from homes and sent into the desert-

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Chicago IWW Trial Testimony: Deportations from Bisbee and Murder of Frank Little at Butte”