Remember, this is the only
American working-class movement which sings.
Tremble then at the I. W. W.,
for a singing movement is not to be beaten.
-Jack Reed
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday September 5, 1918
Chicago, Illinois – “Take care, most arrogant master-class…”
From The Liberator of September 1918:
Part IV of John Reed’s coverage of Chicago I. W. W. trial with drawings by Art Young-
The Social Revolution In Court
By Art Young And John Reed—–
—–Day after day, all summer, witness after witness from the firing-line of the Class Struggle has taken the stand, and helped to shape the great labor epic; strike-leaders, gunmen, rank and file workers, agitators, deputies, police, stool-pigeons, Secret Service operatives.
I heard Frank Rogers, a youth grown black and bitter, with eyes full of vengeance, tell briefly and drily of the Speculator mine fire, and how hundreds of men burned to death because the company would not put doors in the bulk-heads. He spoke of the assassination of Frank Little, who was hung by “vigilantes” in Montana, and how the miners of Butte swore to remember…. (In the General Headquarters of the I. W. W. there is a death mask of Frank Little, blind, disdainful, set in a savage sneer.)
Oklahoma, the tar-and-feathering of the workers at Tulsa; Everett, and the five graves of Sheriff McRae’s victims on the hill behind Seattle… all this has come out, day by day, shocking story on story. I sat for the better part of two days listening to A. S. Embree telling over again the astounding narrative of the Arizona deportations; and as I listened, looked at photographs of the miners being marched across the arid country, between rows of men who carried rifles in the hollow of their arms, and wore white handkerchiefs about their wrists.
The half-starved men and women on the bread lines are the rulers of Russia. The crowd is the government. The faction of which Kerensky was the head, once looked upon by the world as radical, became, comparatively, as conservative as Taft in his second campaign. This faction did not represent the crowd, so it fell, leaving Kerensky with about as much influence in Russia as one William Jennings Bryan has here. If Kerensky should return to Russia he would be killed. If he and his supporters and remained in power two months longer every city in Russia would have been under German control. Korniloff planned the fall of Riga to frighten the Russian people into action, and admitted it publicly. The Kerensky government, when the people threatened to take its power from it, practiced sabotage on the food supplies of the people, fomented strikes in the manufacturing plants, and closed down factories.