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Hellraisers Journal – Friday June 23, 1911
Poems of James Kelly Cole, Martyr of Spokane Free Speech Fight
From the Spokane Industrial Worker of June 15, 1911:
THE LIFE WORK OF KELLY COLE
—————By Frank Bohn.
James Kelly Cole was killed in a railway accident at Tomah, Wisconsin, November 17th, 1909. He was on his way to take part in the Spokane free speech fight and was riding free.
At that time I wrote a short letter in the [New York Socialist] Call, drawing attention to the self-forgetfulness which led to the untimely death of this young comrade. To me he was simply one of many who were then fighting for freedom of speech in Spokane and elsewhere. I had not even learned his name. It is therefore a peculiar pleasure to discover that, dying in the cause, he left us something very much worth while. A little book of poems entitled “Revolutionary Writings” suggest to us the deep loss suffered by the movement when he went to his death.
His picture as well as his poems makes one regret not to have known him personally. He was a representative of a type-the type of idealistic young Americans of both sexes who are now thronging into the Socialist movement. He was fortunate in having had educational advantages. He had been a student at one of the Chicago High schools and abundant leisure during his youth afforded him opportunity for wide reading on a variety of subjects.
The most significant feature about his personality and his work was the revolutionary spirit. His intense hatred for misrule coupled with his desire for emancipation from wage slavery once led him into a tactical error. He was forced to spend more than a year in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas.
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