Pierce Wetter – WE NEVER FORGET

Quote BBH IWW w Drops of Blood, BDB, Sept 27, 1919 —————

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.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter (Formerly Class War Prisoner, Inmate 13179), Part II” →

Quote BBH IWW w Drops of Blood, BDB, Sept 27, 1919 —————

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…”

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: “The Men I Left at Leavenworth” by Pierce C. Wetter (Formerly Class War Prisoner, Inmate 13179), Part I” →