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.
When things are rearranged so that
I can help my fellow man best by helping myself,
…then, I shall love him more than ever.
-Eugene Victor Debs
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Hellraisers Journal – Monday October 5, 1908
Milwaukee, July: Eugene Debs Interviewed by Lincoln Steffens
From Everybody’s Magazine of October 1908:
Part II:
—–
[Debs on the Evils of Capitalism]
[Said Debs, without waiting for questions:]
To begin with, we Socialists know what the matter is: it’s Capitalism; and we know what the cure is: it’s Socialism.
“Words,” I muttered.
[Said he, drawing near and reaching out his hands:]
No. Capitalism is a thing, a system; it’s the organization of society under which we all live. And it’s wrong, fundamentally wrong. It is a system of competition for wealth, for the necessities of human life, and, a survival of the old struggle of the jungle, it forces the individual to be selfish, and rewards him for beating and abusing his fellow man. Profit is made the aim of all human effort, not use, not service. The competitive system sets man against man, class against class; it puts a premium upon hate; and love—the love of a man for his neighbor—is abnormal and all but impossible. The system crucifies the prophets and servants of mankind. It pays greed the most, honors highest the ruthless, and advances swiftest the unscrupulous. These are the fit to survive.
Debs seized my arm.
It’s wrong, isn’t it? It’s inherently unjust, inhuman, unintelligent, and—it cannot last. The particular evils you write about, graft and corruption, and the others about which I speak, the poverty, crime, and cruelty, they are evidences of its weakness and failure; the signs that it is breaking down.
Hellraisers Journal, Thursday March 5, 1908
Josephine Conger-Kaneko on Crime of Child Labor in America
From The Socialist Woman of March 1908:
THE HORRIBLE CRIME OF CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA.
—–
Josephine Conger-Kaneko.
“How long,” they say, “how long, Oh, cruel nation
Will you stand, to move the world on a child’s heart;
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?”
A little over one hundred years ago the first act was passed by the British Parliament to abate the evils of child labor.
The workhouses of London at that time were crowded with pauper children to the extent that their managers were paying a premium to the manufacturers to take them off their hands. These puny, half-starved children whom nobody owned, orphans, deserted infants, who had become a burden on the tax payers, were sent by the hundreds and thousands to supply the demand for cheap labor which was springing up in factories on every hand. They were housed in barracks, were driven long hours at hand tasks by their overseers, were fed the coarsest of food, and died by scores from disease—bone rot, curvature of the spine, consumption, and other infections produced by their manner of living.
It was this state of things that brought about the first law regulating in any way the labor of the child. This law was passed in 1802. And it was but the merest beginning. The evils of child labor were so many, so varied and so persistent, that to this day there is no adequate child labor law in the whole world. In 1833 it was estimated that in England there were 56,000 children between nine and thirteen in factories. many of whom worked sixteen hours a day. The English Woman’s Journal of 1859 gives the following account of pauper children in London:
I studied carefully the New York East Side,
the slums, the dives, and the sweatshops
and the terrible conditions of the people there
drove me into socialism.
-Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
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Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday September 18, 1907
Chicago, Illinois – Girl Socialist Is I. W. W. Delegate
Miss Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, age 17, of New York City, is a delegate to the Convention of Industrial Workers of the World which opened its first session on Monday morning, September 16th.
From The Chicago Daily Tribune of September 17, 1907:
…Industrial Workers of the World Open Annual Convention…..
With a gavel valued at $100 in the chairman’s hands, the annual convention of the Industrial Workers of the World opened in the morning at Brand’s hall. The gavel was presented by the unions of Alaska. It is made of walrus tusks. It is expected a tangle over the credentials will be straightened out today, and the unionists will take up business matters…
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[Photograph added.]
Miss Flynn, “Platform Wonder”
MISS GLYNN IN SOAPBOX TALKS.
—–
“Platform Wonder” Tells Her Hearers
the General Strike Is to Be the
Watchword of Future.
—–
Standing on a soapbox at Halsted and O’Brien streets last night, Miss Elizabeth Gurley Glynn [Flynn], the 17 year old union “platform wonder,” addressed a crowd of 200 workingmen and exhorted them to prepare for the “general strike” in Chicago in the near future. Other unions “revival” meetings were held at Clark and Erie streets and elsewhere about the city. The soapbox campaign will be conducted while the convention of the Industrial Workers of the World is in session this week at Brand’s hall.
[Declared Miss Flynn:]
Not until every workingman quits his labor and refuses to go back until he is given a fair share of the profits will the labor question be settled. The general strike is the watchword of the future. It is certain to come soon.
Meetings will be held tonight in the Milwaukee avenue district and at several places on the west side.
It’s great to fight for Freedom
with a Rebel Girl.
-Joe Hill
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Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday September 10, 1907
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – Miss Flynn Lectures on Socialism
From the Chicago Inter Ocean of September 9, 1907:
GIRL IN HIGH SCHOOL SOCIALIST LECTURER
—–
Miss Elizabeth Flynn Mounts Dry Goods Box
on Philadelphia’s Corners to Expound the
Doctrines of Her Political Beliefs.
—–
STRICKEN BY POVERTY, SHE AIMS BLOW AT CAPITALISTS
—–
Handles Rockefeller, Roosevelt, and Other Leaders
Without Gloves in Addresses to Masses
-Says Crisis Will Bring Change.
—–
Special Dispatch to The Inter Ocean.
PHILADELPHIA. PA., Sept. 8.-Philadelphia is being treated to a series of lectures on socialism, delivered by a girl of 17 years. She is miss Elizabeth Flynn of New York, still in high school, and every night she expounds the doctrine of ther political faith from the top of a dry goods box at a busy corner.
Two weeks ago Miss Flynn passed her seventeenth birthday, celebrating this important occasion by delivering two powerful addresses on socialism, brimful of tart remarks about Mr. Rockefeller’s fine and about the insincerity of Mr. Roosevelt and any other politician of the capitalistic class.
Draws Picture of Capitalist.
Here are some hammer blows from her speeches:
On the one hand is the working class, on the other hand the things they need, and between the two the capitalist dragging down the working man and pushing up the price of materials he must have.
Are we going to sit around and starve ourselves waiting for the capitalist to get out of his market glue?
Mark me!The downfall of capitalism will come in some great crisis.
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