Hellraisers Journal – Saturday March 25, 1899
New York, New York – Eugene Debs Speaks on Prison Labor
On Tuesday March 21st, Comrade Eugene Debs came before the wealthy members of the Nineteenth Century Club at Delmonico’s to lecture them on the evils of prison labor. The Indianapolis Journal quotes the speech in part; the full speech can viewed below.
From The Indianapolis Journal of March 22, 1899:
DEBS ON PRISON LABOR.
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Terre Haute Agitator Talks to Business,
Professional and Scientific Men.
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San Francisco Call – January 30, 1898
NEW YORK, March 21.-About 230 members of the Nineteenth Century Club gathered at the ballroom of Delmonico’s tonight to listen to an address to the organization by Eugene V. Debs, the labor agitator. There were a number of substantial business, professional and scientific men present. The interest in Mr. Debs’s words was rather out of the ordinary and the speaker was applauded mildly several times during his remarks. Mr. Debs spoke on “Prison Labor, Its Effects on Industry and Trade.” Among other things Mr. Debs said:
Here in this proud city, where wealth has built its monuments, grander and more imposing than any of the seven wonders of the world named in classic lore, if you will excavate for facts you will find the remains, the bones of toilers buried and imbedded in the foundations. They lived, they wrought, they died. In their time they may have laughed and sung and danced to the music of their clanking chains. They married, propagated their species and perpetuated conditions, which, growing steadily worse, are to-day the foulest blots the imagination can conceive upon our much vaunted civilization, and from these conditions there flow a thousand streams of vice and crime which have broadened and deepened until they constitute a perpetual and ever increasing menace to the peace and security of society. Jails, workhouses, reformatories and penitentiaries have been crowded with the victims, and the question how to control these institutions and the unfortunate inmates is challenging the most serious thought of the most advanced nations on the globe.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 8, 1909
Mother Jones News Round-Up for February 1909, Part II:
-Found in Denver, Colorado; Scheduled to Speak at Protest Meeting
At the end of February, Mother Jones arrived in Denver, Colorado, where she was scheduled to speak at a “Gompers Protest Meeting” on March 1st. According to the Rocky Mountain News of February 28th, Mother made the following statements:
There is an industrial panic in the United States today, and it is not confined to any particular locality. The steel trust is now engaged in stamping out the independent steel concerns, and God have pity on the iron and steel workers when this happens and the rest of the people, too. In Illinois the coal miners are having their trouble, some working only one day a week, and some three days a week. The shoemakers all over the country are struggling against similiar conditions, and everywhere you turn you find this industrial stagnation…..
How can you expect labor to make very much headway with 10,000 judges ruled by the capitalists? Where can they get justice? Where can justice be had with Wall Street dictating the policies of the president, congress and the governors of the states?
Even religion is mixed up in the conditions. I saw in an Eastern city a $2,000,000 church built with the subscriptions of men whose daughters work in factories and stores for $3 and $4 per week. Oh, the farce of it all! Dare you tell me that a girl can work for $3 a week and be respectable? The idea of building a great church upon the sold bodies of girls!…..
I tell you that there is a limit to all things-and the limit will come in the present economic conditions of this country, and people will arise and take the industries into their own hands and right the wrongs that are making of this nation the most grasping in the world today.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday November 16, 1908
Theresa Malkiel: “Prostitution is very seldom a voluntary choice…”
From The Socialist Woman of November 1908:
Our Unfortunate Sisters
THERESA MALKIEL
The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
It has been estimated that there are six hundred thousand women in the United States who sell their bodies for a living. I know that many of you will shudder reading of this number of unfortunates and will think of them with hatred and disgust.
But be merciful, women, those sisters of yours are not bond slaves like the prostitutes of ancient times, nor are they aliens like the medieval woman of the street. They are gathered from your very midst, from the girls who have by adverse circumstances been impelled to turn to prostitution as a means of livelihood.
Like ourselves, these unfortunates have been carried under a mother’s heart, like ourselves they have been born and destined for an honest life, but victims of force and fraud, or economic conditions, they soon reached the point where society held out nothing better for them than the life of shame.
Prostitution is very seldom a voluntary choice on the part of the fallen. Girls do not elect to cast themselves away, they are driven to the haunts of vice. A young working girl is an easy mark for a man’s designing. And the designers are not wanting. Their most fruitful recruiting grounds are the stores where girls work long hours for small pay; the homes that have few comforts and no pleasures; the streets where girls are often cast while still unknown to sin, but are in want and without shelter; in places where distress and temptation stand ever present.
You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday November 10, 1908
Chicago, Illinois – 5,000 Children Go to School Hungry
From The Socialist Woman of November 1908:
American School Children Starving
Chicago Tribune of October 5, 1908
When we are talking of the number of men who are tramping the country looking for work—hungry, broken-spirited, abject creatures, who once thought themselves men, as good as any of their kind—let us not forget the women, and the little children of these men.
Last winter in Chicago after the first flurry of the panic, I had occasion to visit a number of the “homes” of those who had been thrown out of work. In every case the men were out, hunting feverishly for the chance to make even a little money by any kind of hard labor. And in every case my heart ached and my soul grew sick when I thought of the future of the women and children of those families.
“It is awful when the children cry for food, and we cant give it to them,” said one woman who had never before known what it was to be down and out. Another mother, about thirty, and strong and handsome, had to sit by and watch her seven-year-old daughter burning with fever, and without the care of a doctor because she had lost her job in a department store, and there was no money even to buy food. She had applied for work at all the large stores again and again. She had tried everywhere—and was told that they might need her during the holidays. But the holidays were weeks away. Already she had moved into a questionable quarter because rent was cheap. And unless that mother got work within two weeks, there was but one resource left her, if she would save herself and her child from death through starvation. And that was the sale of her body.
It was for a charitable institution I was working—and I knew that those institutions were crowded to their utmost with destitute cases.
Such, indeed, was the condition of the poor in Chicago last winter, that the superintendent of compulsory education, W. Lester Bodine, took up the case of hungry school children, followed his investigations for six months, and finally ascertained that there are 5,000 starving children, and 10,000 that are underfed, in the schools of the city.
Not yours the victor’s meed of praise,
When Freedom leads her hosts to war,
For even in these evil days
Her fighters grow from more to more.
-Michael Schwab
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 2, 1898
“From More to More” by Michael Schwab
Whoso stoppeth his ears
at the cry of the poor,
he also shall cry himself,
but shall not be heard.
-Proverbs 21:13
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Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday August 2, 1898
From Commonwealth, Georgia – George Howard Gibson Speaks
From the Appeal to Reason of July 30, 1898:
[Part II of article by George Howard Gibson]
In Italy the bread riots in the last few weeks have been almost general and desperate enough to cast down the throne and government. The uprising in many portions of Italy took the form of looting the homes and business places of the wealthy. A millionaire miller in Minervino named Bantella was killed in a brutal manner after he had offered the mob a fortune for his life. His wife also was reported killed. From his window he scattered a thousand francs among the mob, but they could no longer be placated by charity. They destroyed his warehouses and littered the whole country around with his cornered grain.
They also corner wheat and sugar and oil and coal and lumber and houses and land and everything in America. And the masses here love liberty and their inalienable rights.
Force is no remedy. The torch and bomb may destroy the rich, but they can never emancipate the poor. “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”—the rich and poor together. Christ-love, brotherhood, unselfish voluntary association is the only way of salvation for both rich and poor. This is the word of prophecy, of warning, of entreaty which we send out today to all classes. Be brothers, live in peace, love one another; or be economic enemies and expect increasing selfishness and poverty that shall ultimate in awful war. It must be the feast of love (Rev. 19:7-9); or the feast of vultures (Rev. 19:17-18).
The needy shall not always be forgotten; the expectation of the poor shall not forever perish. -Psalm 9:18 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal, Monday August 1, 1898
From Commonwealth, Georgia – George Howard Gibson Speaks
From the Appeal to Reason of July 30, 1898:
[Part I of article by George Howard Gibson]
“When a man finds himself going down and down, without power to mend things, freezing, hungering and dying by inches, he’s sure to get desperate, In the last week I’ve been an atheist, anarchist and devil. I’ve sat here and cried out that there was no God except for the rich. I’ve said that if I could get down stairs I’d burn and kill. I’ve looked at my wife and children with murder In my heart.”
Those words were spoken to a reporter for the New York World by a sick man, living with his wife and children in a dingy room on the third floor of a miserable tenement house in New York City. There are millions in like circumstances, landless, homeless, destitute—and they are wealth producers. They are workers, but they must beg for a job and pay tribute for each day’s work when men choose to hire them.
When products cannot be sold at a net profit, the workers can get nothing to do and have no income to live on.
Read another item clipped from a New York paper of about the same date:
At a dinner party given in New York the other day to thirty-three persons, the bill was $6,500, or $200 a plate.
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