Hellraisers Journal – Sunday June 8, 1913 New York, New York – John Reed Recalls Time Spent in Passaic County Jail, Part II
From The Masses of June 1913:
The Paterson Evening News April 28, 1913
[Part II of II]
And so it was that I went up to the County Jail. In the outer office I was questioned again, searched for concealed weapons, and my money and valuables taken away. Then the great barred door swung open and I went down some steps into a vast room lined with three tiers of cells. About eighty prisoners strolled around, talked, smoked, and ate the food sent in to them by those outside. Of this eighty almost half were strikers. They were in their street clothes, held in prison under $500 bail to await the action of the Grand Jury. Surrounded by a dense crowd of short, dark-faced men, Big Bill Haywood towered in the center of the room. His big hand made simple gestures as he explained something to them. His massive, rugged face, seamed and scarred like a mountain, and as calm, radiated strength. These slight, foreign-faced strikers, one of many desperate little armies in the vanguard of the battle-line of Labor, quickened and strengthened by Bill Haywood’s face and voice, looked up at him lovingly, eloquently. Faces deadened and dulled with grinding routine in the sunless mills glowed with hope and understanding. Faces scarred and bruised from policemen’s clubs grinned eagerly at the thought of going back on the picket-line. And there were other faces, too-lined and sunken with the slow starvation of a nine weeks’ poverty—shadowed with the sight of so much suffering, or the hopeless brutality of the police—and there were those who had seen Modestino Valentine shot to death by a private detective. But not one showed discouragement; not one a sign of faltering or of fear.As one little Italian said to me, with blazing eyes: “We all one bigga da Union. I. W. W.—dat word is pierced de heart of de people!”
“Yes! Yes! Dass righ’! I. W. W.! One bigga da Union”—they murmured with soft, eager voices, crowding around.
[Introduced to Quinlan and Strikers by Big Bill]
I shook hands with Haywood, who introduced me to Pat Quinlan, the thin-faced, fiery Irishman now under indictment for speeches inciting to riot.
“Boys,” said Haywood, indicating me, “this man wants to know things. You tell him everything”—
They crowded around me, shaking my hand, smiling, welcoming me. “Too bad you get in jail,” they said, sympathetically. “We tell you ever’t’ing. You ask. We tell you. Yes. Yes. You good feller.”
And they did. Most of them were still weak and exhausted from their terrible night before in the lockup. Some had been lined up against a wall, as they marched to and fro in front of the mills, and herded to jail on the charge of “unlawful assemblage”! Others had been clubbed into the patrol wagon on the charge of “rioting,” as they stood at the track, on their way home from picketing, waiting for a train to pass! They were being held for the Grand Jury that indicted Haywood and Gurley Flynn. Four of these jurymen were silk manufacturers, another the head of the local Edison compony—which Haywood tried to organize for a strike—and not one a workingman!
“We not take bail,” said another, shaking his head. “We stay here. Fill up de damn jail. Pretty soon no more room. Pretty soon can’t arrest no more picket!”
It was visitors’ day I went to the door to speak with a friend. Outside the reception room was full of women and children, carrying packages, and pasteboard boxes, and pails full of dainties and little comforts lovingly prepared, which meant hungry and ragged wives and babies, so that the men might be comfortable in jail. The place was full of the sound of moaning; tears ran down their work-roughened faces; the children looked up at their fathers’ unshaven faces through the bars and tried to reach them with their hands.
“What nationalities are all the people!” I asked. There were Dutchmen, Italians, Belgians, Jews, Slovaks, Germans, Poles—
“What nationalities stick together on the picket- line?”
A young Jew, pallid and sick-looking from insufficient food, spoke up proudly. “T’ree great nations stick togedder like dis.” He made a fist. “T’ree great nations—Italians, Hebrews an’ Germans”—
“But how about the Americans?”
They all shrugged their shoulders and grinned with humorous scorn. “English peoples not go on picket-line,” said one, softly. “’Mericans no lika fight!” An Italian boy thought my feelings might be hurt, and broke in quickly: “Not all lika dat. Beeg Beell, he ‘Merican. You ‘Merican. Quin’, Miss Flynn, ‘Merican. Good! Good! ‘Merican workman, he lika talk too much.”
This sad fact appears to be true. It was the English-speaking group that held back during the Lawrence strike. It is the English-speaking continent that remains passive at Paterson, while the “wops” the “kikes,” the “hunkies”—the ‘degraded and ignorant races from Southern Europe”—go out and get clubbed on the picket-line and gaily take their medicine in Paterson jail.
But just as they were telling me these things the keeper ordered me to the “convicted room,” where I was pushed into a bath and compelled to put on regulation prison clothes. I shan’t attempt to describe the horrors I saw in that room. Suffice it to say that forty-odd men lounged about a long corridor lined on one side with cells; that the only ventilation and light came from one small skylight up a funnel-shaped airshaft; that one man had syphilitic sores on his legs and was treated by the prison doctor with sugar-pills for “nervousness;” that a seventeen-year-old boy who had never been sentenced had remained in that corridor without ever seeing the sun for over nine months; that a cocaine-fiend was getting his “dope” regularly from the inside, and that the background of this and much more was the monotonous and terrible shouting of a man who had lost his mind in that hell-hole and who walked among us.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday February 22, 1920
David Karsner, of New York Call, “Paints Debs with Loving Hands” -Part I
From The Butte Daily Bulletin of February 13, 1920:
[Part I of II.]
“Debs, His Authorized Life and Letters,” has just gone into its second edition, (Boni and Liveright, New York). Written for socialists, by a socialist, it might well be termed a book for Americans, since socialism is the great issue of the present day. “Debs” is propagandist. And as such it should be a handbook of ready reference for those who agree with its doctrines, and for those whore aim it is to refute those doctrines. But the book primarily presents the emotional color of Debs’ socialism.
David Karsner, the author, paints Debs with loving hands. He is an ardent disciple. He depicts a man who is not a fiery leader, but rather one who is filled with good-will and a desire for peace on earth. Debs was not born a socialist. He was pushed, says the author by the logic of facts as he saw them, into the opinions that have finally caused his incarceration in prison. According to Karsner, his magnetism does not issue from flame, for he is not a “Red.” He is, says Karsner, a mild and greatly loved leader. He is said to have no desire for honors. Yet he was four times a candidate for the presidency of the United States.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday July 24, 1899
Tribute to Robert G. Ingersoll by Eugene V. Debs
From the Terre Haute Gazette of July 22, 1899:
Deb’s Tribute to Ingersoll
Numberless tributes will be paid to Robert G. Ingersoll. Not one of them all, however great the love that may inspire it, will be as tender and touching, as beautiful and poetic, as his own enchanting words in the presence of death. His tribute over the remains of his brother, Ebon C., in Washington [D. C.] in 1879, moved by its exquisite tenderness the whole country to tears. Almost every line of it has become classic. What a pity that there is not one, with tongue inspired, to speak such noble words above his pulseless clay. How truly these words, spoken of his brother, apply to himself:
The record of a generous life runs like a vine around the memory of our dead, and every sweet, unselfish act is now a perfumed flower. * * * There was, there is, no gentler, stronger, manlier man.
In the same oration he said:
He who sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of death for the return of health, whispered with his last breath, “I am better now.” Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas, of fears and tears, that these dear words are true of all the countless dead.
What a strange and beautiful coincidence that his own latest words were the same as those of his brother! Asked by his devoted wife how he felt, he answered with a smile, “Oh, better!” and in the same second his great soul winged its way to the farther shore. He died as he wished to die, and again his own words must be quoted:
When the duties of life have all been nobly done; when the sun touches the horizon; when the purple twilight falls upon the past, the present, and the future—then, surrounded by kindred and by friends, death comes like a strain of music. The day has been long, the road weary, and the traveler gladly stops at the welcome inn
Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday June 11, 1918
Fort Wayne, Indiana – Claude G. Bowers Describes Debs on Speaker’s Platform
Following a speech given May 20th by Eugene Debs at Moose Hall in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Claude G. Bowers devoted space in his column, “Kabbages and Kings,” to give a moving description of Debs as he appeared on the speaker’s platform:
Last week a tall, lean, long-legged man with a lean, thin, sharp face and piercing eyes, stood on the platform at the Moose hall in this city and talked for more than an hour on “Socialism and Democracy.” It was evident that the greater part of the audience was in sympathy with his ideas and more than ordinarily in love with the man. He was a socialist,-perhaps the most famous America has produced….
There was no bitterness against men. Very little mere bitterness against principles and systems. The most biting things were the flash of wit and humor. These cut like a knife but the audience laughed. The speaker was Eugene V. Debs. As an orator he is among the finest….
[Note: the entire column can be found below.]
[Inset is from The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette of May 19th.]
The barter and sale that goes on to-day
in the name of love
is highly obnoxious to me.
-Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, age 15
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Hellraisers Journal, Thursday January 3, 1907
From the New York Sun: Interview with Miss Elizabeth Flynn
From The Sun of April 8, 1906:
A GIRL STIRS UP SOCIALISTS.
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COMRADE ELIZABETH FLYNN
A LEADER AT 15.
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“The Daughter of the Reds.” They Call Her, and Maybe They’ll Elect Her President Yet-Not Yet Out of School, She Captures Meetings With Her Oratory Has Radical Theories and Doesn’t Care for Love, Clothes or Matinees.
Within the last few weeks there has appeared at various social reform meetings a young girl-she is said to be only 15-with the high, broad forehead and the dream filled, far gazing eyes of the idealist; a skin of almost infantile pinkness and whiteness and a mass of flyaway black hair, tied loosely in schoolgirl fashion at the back of her neck who has electrified the audiences by joining in the debate with a certainty of manner, an eloquence of expression and a lucidity of thought that have surprised experienced speakers and even professional radicals.
Her speeches have been the more impressive because she is good to look upon. Added to the charm of her youth and her unusual gifts in line and color harmonies her face is bright and expressive. Her deep blue eyes are of unusual size and purity of color. The delicate, sensitive mouth has a queer little quivering twist of the upper lip. The nostrils of the clear cut, high bridged nose are thin and vibrant. The chin is small, pointed, delicately modelled.
She has always been simply dressed in the regulation schoolgirl shirtwaist and short skirt. Her attire shows a certain inattention to details that betrays a lack of interest in the whole subject of clothes. She is the average height of girls of 15, slender and girlishly immature.
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