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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday November 5, 1913
Paterson, New Jersey – Young Weaver Tells of Conditions in Silk Mill
From The Masses of November 1913:
Tag: Tuberculosis
Hellraisers Journal: “The Sweating System” by Mary L. Geffs, Investigator, Bureau of Labor Statistics of Ohio, 1893
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday November 6, 1910
Ohio Labor Investigation – Report on Sweatshops from 1893
From The Progressive Woman of November 1910:
THE SWEATING SYSTEM
MARY L. GEFFS
Special Investigator for the Bureau of Labor Statistics of Ohio, 1893Origin of Title.
It is not definitely known what gave the system its title, but it is safe to hazard a guess that it was the sheer aptness of the word ”sweating” to describe the condition. For many of the shops and tenements where the work is carried on are veritable bake ovens. They are often found in attic rooms where the summer sun beats down unmercifully upon the roof but a few feet above the toilers’ head, where the heat of charcoal stoves and the steam and heat of irons needed in pressing, together with a total lack of proper ventilation render anything less than sweating impossible. It may, therefore, be to the over-doing of the command said to have been given to the First Pair, “in the sweat of they face shalt thou eat bread,” that this title is due, but it might with equal fitness express the orthodox idea of the abode of the lost, for, in all the range of woman employing industries, not only are there few so hot, but fewer still so hard, so unremunerative, so slavish, nor whose baneful effects are so wide-spread and far-reaching as that known by the title of “The Sweating System.”
What it is and How It Operates.
This system is that by which garments are cut in the big factories and given out to be made in the shops or homes of the workers. The work is paid for by the piece or by weekly wages based on the piece, and prices are reckoned according to the iron law of wages. That is, as near as possible to the life limit; the lowest point at which the workers can live and continue to produce. They are so low that long hours must be put in every day in order that the workers may eke out a bare existence.
Hellraisers Journal: From the Appeal to Reason: “Girl Slaves of Milwaukee Breweries” by Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday April 14, 1910
Milwaukee, Wisconsin – Mother Jones on Girl Slaves of Brewery Plutocrats
From the Appeal to Reason of April 9, 1910:
It is the same old story, as pitiful as old, as true as pitiful.
When the whistle blows in the morning, it calls the girl slaves of the bottle washing department of the breweries, to don their wet shoes and rags, and hustle to the bastile to serve out their sentences.
It is indeed true, they are sentenced to hard, brutal labor, labor that gives no cheer, brings no recompense. Condemned for life to drudge daily in the wash-room with wet shoes and wet clothes, surrounded with foul mouthed, brutal foremen, whose orders and language would not look well in print, and would surely shock over-sensitive ears, or delicate nerves!
And their crime? Involuntary poverty. It is hereditary. They are no more to blame for it than a horse is, for having the glanders. It is the accident of birth. This accident that throws so many girl workers into the urging, seething mass, known as the working class, is what forces them out of the cradle into servitude-to be willing (?)slaves of the mill, factory, department store, hell or bottling shop in Milwaukee’s colossal breweries.
Here they create wealth for the brewery barons, that they may own palaces, theaters, automobiles, blooded stock, farms, banks and heaven knows what all, while the poor girls slave on, all day, in the vile smell of sour beer, lifting cases of empty and full bottles, weighing from 100 to 150 pounds, while wearing wet shoes and rags; for God knows they can not buy clothes on the miserable pittance doled out to them by their soulless master class.
Hellraisers Journal: Class War Prisoner, Patrick Quinlan, Exposes Horrors of New Jersey’s Modern-Day Bastile
There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Wednesday December 27, 1916
From the Appeal to Reason: Newly Released, Quinlan Describes Prison Life
Unspeakable Horrors of New Jersey’s
Bastile Exposed by Quinlan
—–“Political Prisoner”, Recently Liberated After Serving Unjust Sentence, Tells Appeal Readers of Atrocities Practiced on Helpless Victims of Social System-Quinlan’s Remarkable Training as Labor Agitator Combined With His Terrible Experience in Penitentiary Brings Forth This Unprecedented Story of “Crimes Against Criminals.”
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BY PATRICK L. QUINLAN
My experience in New Jersey’s penitentiary compels me to say that I am not prepared to accept in full the statement so often made that our public institutions reflect the spirit, the mind of the people. If it were entirely true that institutions were the mirror of a people, then the state of New Jersey and its two and a half million inhabitants would occupy the largest place in Dante’s Inferno of lost souls. One would be compelled to conclude that the people of New Jersey were fiendish in their cruelty, diabolical in their oppression, medieval in their conception of their duties toward the inmates of their state prison, located within the shadow of their capitol at Trenton. But they are not, I am sure, more cruel, not more oppressive, nor more medieval than the people of other states; they are, only, perhaps, more indifferent and, I hope they will pardon me, more ignorant. Their social soul, their public conscience, is not formed to harmonize with the spirit of the times, nor is it developed to work sympathetically with its progressive sister states.
If New Jersey’s penitentiary reflected the people of the state, then we would be prepared to disagree with Edmund Burke’s famous dictum that one cannot indict a whole people, and proceed to charge the two and a half million people of the state of New Jersey with murder, robbery and graft.
Pictures the Bastile.
With this brief apology for the citizens of New Jersey, I will, in the following lines, give the readers of this paper an unexaggerated picture of New Jersey’s bastile, with the hope that the same good results will be accomplished for its unfortunate inmates as were done for the victims of Fort Leavenworth federal prison.
Men who had been in every big prison in the United States told me in language that was emphatic as well as picturesque, that Trenton’s “Big House” was the worst prison in the country, and the study of prison reports and the literature of penology convince me that the convicts told the truth. Personally, I cannot imagine anything worse except the contract prison camps of the south and the Siberian dungeons, where the victims of the Russian autocracy are buried alive.
