The bosses ride fine horses
While we walk in the mud,
Their banner is the dollar sign,
Ours is striped with blood.
-Aunt Molly Jackson
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday October 31, 1916
Immigrant or American-Born, Neither Matters When Workers Strike
Today’s Hellraisers presents two stories of striking workers driven from their homes by company gunthugs. The strikers in Utica, New York, are mostly Polish immigrants. In Hardin County, Illinois, there are very few immigrants, most of the strikers are second or third generation Americans. But we find from these two stories that neither the striker of foreign birth nor the native-born striker can expect any mercy from the gunthugs hired by the companies and deputized by the county sheriff.
From the Duluth Labor World of October 28, 1916:
2,700 POLISH TEXTILE STRIKERS DRIVEN
FROM HOMES IN NEW YORK
—–BRUTAL GUARDS ASSAULT WOMEN
TEXTILE WORKERS
—–
By DANTE BARTON.
Member Industrial Relations Committee.
NEW YORK, Oct. 26.-Right in the heart of central New York, prosperous and boasting of its wealth, there is now an example of cruelty, incompetence and lawlessness against striking workers which rivals the things done in Colorado by the Rockefeller interests, or on the Mesaba range or in Pittsburgh, by the Steel trust.
Just outside of Utica, in the little town of New York Mills, 2,700 Polish men and women, industrious and peaceful, are being thrown out of company houses, terrorized and assaulted by armed thugs and guards, their children sickened and in many instances killed by the diseases of exposure; themselves and their families subjected to starvation and sickness.
These things are being perpetrated against them by their employer, the New York Mills corporation, of which A. D. Juilliard, New York city, is the responsible president, because they have struck for a 10 per cent increase of wages that are too low, by any standard, for decent living.
