Hellraisers Journal – Saturday October 28, 1922 Mingo County, West Virginia – United Mine Workers Calls Off Strike
From The West Virginian of October 27, 1922:
END OF TWO-YEAR STRIKE IN MINGO STOPS MINE WAR ————— Big Factor in Labor Disturbances in State Passes Out of Existence. ———-
CHARLESTON, W. Va., Oct. 27.-Mingo County, greatest single factor in the labor disturbances of the Southern West Virginia coal fields, was free from the last vestige of its “mine war” today with the announcement made last night that the two year strike there had been abandoned by the United Mine Workers.
The announcement was first made at Williamson by R. B. White International organizer, on receipt of a letter from International President John L. Lewis, and was confirmed at district headquarters here by District Secretary Fred Mooney.The principal visible effect will be abandonment of the tent colonies maintained since the strike began, July 1, 1920, and the possible return to work in the non-union mines of the county of some of the 200 occupants of the colonies and of the strikers, whose numbers are variously estimated by union and operator authorities.
The attempted unionizing of the Mingo County mines was the beginning of a long series of events reaching their high points in the declaration of martial law and the “miner’s march” that was halted after a week’s fighting on the Logan-Boone County border in 1921. Out of evictions of miners’ families before the strike was called grew the famous Matewan street battle, when Baldwin and Felts detectives and inhabitants clashed with a death toll of ten and from that time on a series of disorders, including much shooting across the Tug River, separating West Virginia and Kentucky, caused a number of deaths. Martial law was declared May 19, 1921, and this proclamation was followed by another and the establishment of a military force June 27 of the same year, after the courts had held military occupation was necessary to martial law.
Rumors that union men were being mistreated in Mingo, coupled with the killing at Welch in August, 1921, of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers, chief figures in the Matewan battle, were given by union miners in other fields as the causes of the march late in August on which are based the trials of union officials now being held at Charles Town.
The announcement that the union had abandoned the strike came close on the heels of the repeal on October 17, this year, by Governor Morgan of the martial law proclamations that had been in force for fifteen months.
Union officials have declared that relief work in the tent colonies at one time was costing $25,000 a week and more recently was being conducted at a cost of $11,000 a week. The tent colonies also figured in the suit now pending in federal courts, known as the Borderland case, in which an injunction against the colonies was sought but was denied by the Circuit Court after having been granted in the District Court.
Hellraisers Journal –Friday October 20, 1922 Fellow Workers, Fletcher, Nef and Walsh, Offered Belated Justice
From the Baltimore Sun of October 18, 1922:
BELATED JUSTICE.
Exactly six months ago it was announced by the Department of Justice that the cases of four Philadelphia longshoremen, imprisoned under the Espionage act, were being subjected to individual review.At that time it was admitted by the Administration that evidence was not available to disprove the assertions of many men of reputation, the former United States District Attorney in Philadelphia for one, that their war records were blameless. In particular their work in the responsible duty of loading munitions for overseas was shown to be of the most patriotic character.
On Monday three of these men were offered liberty on condition that “they will be law abiding in the future.” Those three, whose names should be well known to SUN readers, are Walter T. Nef, former secretary-treasurer of the Marine Transport Workers of Philadelphia; John J. Walsh and Benjamin H. Fletcher, members of the same union. All are members of the I. W. W. Three Swedish workmen, likewise said to be members of this organization, were also offered liberty-to be deported.
When we remember the number of political prisoners still in jail we see no reason to congratulate the Government on this belated act of justice.Imprisoned under a Democratic administration and held in jail by its Republican successor, they are free at last-after all of the few bomb-plotters and German spies ever convicted under the Espionage act have been given liberty. Apparently nothing illegal was ever proved against these men. Simply because they were members of the I. W. W. they were held five years in prison. And at the end Mr. Daugherty, over-busy with injunctions, found six months necessary to “review their cases.”
Considering the whole ignoble history of the Espionage act, it is perhaps scarcely surprising that the Department of Justice could not let them go without that final insult about being good in future.
Hellraisers Journal –Thursday October 19, 1922 Six Fellow Workers, Chicago-Group Class-War Prisoners, Offered Liberty
From the Baltimore Sun of October 17 1922:
PRISONERS OFFERED LIBERTY ———- Six Convicted Of Espionage May Go Free If They Accept Condition.
Fellow Worker Ben Fletcher
Washington, Oct. 16.-Six men serving sentences imposed after conviction of the espionage act have been offered conditional executive pardons, the Department of Justice announced today, the condition in the case of three, who are aliens, being deportation, and in the others that “they will be law-abiding in the future.”
The men to whom the offer of clemency has been made are Walter T. Nef, former secretary-treasurer of the Marine Transport Workers [I. W. W.], Philadelphia; John J. Walsh and Benjamin H. Fletcher, members of the same union, and Ragner Johannsen, Siegfried Sternberg [Sigfried Stenberg] and Carl Ahlteen, formerly of Minneapolis, but natives of Sweden. The last three are alleged to have been members of the I. W. W.
No, hint as to whether any or all of the prisoners will accept the conditions has been received by the Government agencies in charge of their cases, it was said tonight. Both Nef and Fletcher made individual applications for pardons, but Walsh was one of 52 prisoners in Leavenworth who refused to sign such petitions.
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:
[Part II of II.]
wo 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.
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:
[Part I of II.]
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…”
Hellraisers Journal – Monday October 9, 1922 Charles Town, West Virginia – Powerful Forces Work to Covict Union Miners
From The Bottle Maker of October 1922:
Charles Town Spirit of Jefferson October 3, 1922
Charlestown, W. Va., Sept. 5.—Industrial feudalism, allied with and enthroned upon a local aristocracy, and exploiting the naivette of guileless farmers and and unsuspecting rural population, is moving mercilessly and relentlessly in the ancient court house of this town to defeat and destroy organized labor in West Virginia, drive labor unions from the borders of the State, and take a new lease upon control and domination of government in West Virginia.
In this undertaking, industrial oppression and vengence is masquerading behind the law and the prosecuting power of the State, utilizing the executive machinery of the State, and subsidizing newspapers and news dispatches, to accomplish the end sought.
Walter Allen, a young official of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, is on trial in Charles Town on a charge of treason against the State. Allen is one of twenty-three officials of this union who were indicted in the coal-tainted courts of Logan county last year on the charge of treason. More than 500 others are indicted on charges of conspiracy or murder. These indictments were found after the union miners of Kanawha, Fayette, and Raleigh counties rebelling against the venal industrial conditions of Logan and Mingo counties, and finding that gunmen of the coal operators prevented peaceful union organization, had attempted to right their wrongs by an invasion of those counties directed against company gunmen.
William Blizzard, president of sub-district No. 2 of this union, was another of the twenty-three. Blizzard was acquitted last May after a trial of five weeks, but no such fortune seems to be in prospect for Allen. Every resource at the command of a great and entrenched industrial feudalism in West Virginia-a feudalism that makes governors, elects legislatures, and controls political parties and newspapers—is being brought to bear to convict Allen and all of his associates, and through their confinement in the State prison, break up the miners’ union, and drive unionism as a whole from the State.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 8, 1922 “The Battle Ground of Coal” by James M. Cain
From The Atlantic Monthly of October 1922:
THE BATTLE GROUND OF COAL
BY JAMES M. CAIN
I
As you leave the Ohio River at Kenova, and wind down the Norfolk and Western Railroad beside the Big Sandy and Tug rivers, you come into a section where there is being fought the bitterest and most unrelenting war in modern industrial history. The country furnishes a suitable setting. Rocky hills, small mountains, rise on each side. They are gashed by ‘creeks’; looking up these, you see that the wild region extends for miles back from the railroad. There is no soft, mellow outline about these hills. They are sharp and jagged; about their tops grows a stunted, scraggly forest. Their color is raw: glaring reds and yellows, hard, waterstreaked grays. Here and there you see the blue-black ribbon of coal.
In this untamed section of West Virginia two tremendous forces have staked out a battle ground. These are the United Mine Workers of America and the most powerful group of nonunion coal-operators in the country. It is a battle to the bitter end; neither side asks quarter, neither side gives it. It is a battle for enormous stakes, on which money is lavished; it is fought through the courts, through the press, with matching of sharp wits to secure public approval. But more than this, it is actually fought with deadly weapons on both sides; many lives have already been lost; many may yet be forfeited.
As the train carries you southeastward, you see some signs of it. You pass many coal mines, and some of these are closed down. At the stations, pairs of men in military uniform scrutinize all who alight. These are the West Virginia State Police; a strong force of them is on duty here, for bloodshed became so frequent that one of these counties, Mingo, was placed under martial law. You pass occasional clusters of tents-squalid, wretched places, where swarms of men, women, and children are quartered. Everywhere you are sensible of an atmosphere of tension, covert alertness, sinister suspicion. It is not by accident that these State policemen appear always in pairs.
If you get off the train at Williamson, county seat of Mingo, you will be at the fighting front. People there will tell you that this struggle has been going on for three years. They will tell you of the bloody day at Matewan, May 1920, when ten men, including the mayor of the town, fell in a pistol battle that lasted less than a minute.They will tell you of guerrilla warfare that went on for months; how Federal troops had to be called in twice. They will tell you of the ‘three days’ battle,’ which resulted, in May, 1921, in the declaration of martial law. Union partisans will tell you of the exercises on May 30 last, when the graves of a score of union fallen were decorated with all the ceremony accorded soldiers who have died for the flag. The operators will tell you of attacks from ambush: how their men have been shot down from behind; how witnesses for trials were mysteriously killed before they could testify. The atrocity list and quantity of propaganda give this war quite an orthodox flavor. It is very hard to sift out the truth.
II
Back in 1898, when the coal industry was quite as unsettled as it is now, the union and the big operators evolved a working plan to stabilize conditions and equalize opportunity. This was the conference in the Central Competitive Field,whereby a wage scale was arrived at for this region, and scales in all other union districts were computed by using this scale as a basis and making allowances for different operating conditions, freight rates, and so forth. This was in order to give all districts an equal chance at the market. Coal is probably the most fluid commodity sold: coal from one section competes with coal from another section remote from the first. It is not analogous to a trade-marked article, for which an arbitrary price can be obtained by advertising campaigns and kindred methods. No amount of advertising can make coal of a given grade from one section outsell the same grade from another section at a higher price. This peculiarity of the coal market was the reason for the basic wage-scale arrangement which gave all districts as nearly equal chances as possible, and precluded the possibility that a miscalculated rate might put whole mining fields out of business altogether.
The plan worked fairly well for a time. Within a few years, however, it was discovered that large new areas of coal lands had been developed, and that most of these were being worked with nonunion labor. They had been left out of the original calculation, largely because the existence of such large virgin fields was not known until after the opening of the present century. Some of them were in Pennsylvania, but most, and by far the largest, were in southern West Virginia. Employing nonunion labor, they worked at a lower wage-scale than the union areas, and had become a formidable factor in the industry, for they were underselling union coal constantly. In the years just preceding the war, their effect on the market-and particularly the greater number of days their labor worked during the year-had become definitely noticeable. During the war, there was demand for everybody’s coal, and there was no pinch then. The pinch came, however, in the year following the peace.
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—————wo 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.
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