Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Duluth, Minnesota 1908 4- ir + £ jL 5K«a p&ftt'Ss ILL sw*UH»

In the Spring of 1914 we organized an IWW. Unemployed Union of New York (membership free) with a headquarters and reading room at 64 East 4th Street. A committee of ten was placed in charge. It published a program:

1. 
   Organization of the Unemployed. (In Union there is Strength.)
   
2. 
   A Rent Strike. (No wages, no rent.)
   
3. 
   A Workers’ Moratorium. (Don’t pay your debts till the jobs come around.)
   
4. 
   Refusal to Work at Scab Wages. (Don’t let the boss use your misery to pull down the workers’ standard of life.)
   
5. 
   A Demand for Work or Bread. (If the bosses won’t let you earn a decent livelihood then they must foot the bill for your keep.) The workers make the wealth of the world. It’s up to us to get our share!
   

The police were viciously brutal to the unemployed whenever a street meeting was held or groups of them gathered anywhere. At every opportunity the so-called Bomb Squad, led by Lieutenant Gegen with officers Brown and Gildea, would club, kick and punch arrested men into insensibility. Two who suffered horrible beatings were Joe O’Carroll and Arthur Caron after an attempt to hold a meeting in Union Square while the Central Labor Council was holding one there. The anarchists, led by Berkman, were attempting to take over the leadership of the unemployed movement and in this case unfortunately gave the police a convenient pretext to interfere. A grim tragic end came to Caron later that summer.

After the Paterson strike I had a long siege with chronic bronchitis, which I could not shake off. That Spring, Carlo and I were invited to spend a week or ten days at Tampa, Florida, and to speak there at May Day celebrations. We went by boat most of the way. It was a restful and lovely trip. When we arrived it was as hot as midsummer in New York City. Tampa and its environs, especially Ybor City, were cigar-making centers. Men and women—Cuban, Italian, Mexican, Spanish—worked in factories. They were highly skilled workers who made the finest and most expensive cigars by hand. In the evening they sat on their porches smoking. The women smoked small cigars, especially made for them in these factories.

We spoke on the public square of Tampa at noon of May Day and in the afternoon at a picnic of cigar workers. It was crowded and gay —with food, drink and music of the many nationalities present. The accents were odd, foreign such as we had heard in the North, but softened and blurred by the Southern accent acquired from the natives. I remember one young boy asking me about snow, which he had never seen, and he asked could I send him some the next winter. Carlo and I spoke with local people in the afternoon on the dance platform. Suddenly I realized there were no Negroes in the audience but outside the high wire fences I saw dark faces, lit with interest and eagerness to hear “the IWW from the North.” I felt ashamed to see them excluded on May Day.

Carlo and I went over the fence after we finished and talked to them. They clustered around tightly to hear our words. We told them of the hundreds of Negro longshoremen who belonged to the IWW in Philadelphia and of the militant Negro dye workers we knew in the Paterson strike. But while we talked we saw the foreign-born committee was nervous and fearful lest the picnic be broken up by the police, as they had threatened to do. It was my first experience with the horrible Jim Crow system of the South and marred the pleasure I had in the trip. The warm climate helped my throat a great deal and I was ready for work again when I returned.

Jim Larkin Comes to the United States

One day in the Spring of 1914 a knock came on our door at 511 East 134th Street in the Bronx. We lived up three flights of stairs and the bell was usually out of order. There stood a gaunt man, with a rough-hewn face and a shock of graying hair, who spoke with an Irish accent. He asked for Mrs. Flynn. When my mother went to the door,

He was very poor and while in New York he lived in one room in a small alley in Greenwich Village, called Milligan Place. It ran diagonally from Sixth Avenue through to 11th Street and faced the old Jefferson Market Court. He had a small open fireplace and a tea kettle was ever simmering on the hearth. The tea was so strong that it tasted like medicine to us. His way of life was frugal and austere. He was bitterly opposed to drink and denounced it as a curse of the Irish. Once he was with a group of us at John’s Restaurant on East 12th Street, which we frequented from 1913 on. He asked for tea. They had none, but out of respect for him they sent out for tea and a teapot, and he taught them how to make it.

He was a magnificent orator and an agitator without equal. He spoke at anti-war meetings, where he thundered against British imperialism’s attempts to drag us into war. My mother gave him the green banner of the Irish Socialist Federation and he spoke under it innumerable times, especially on the New York waterfront. It finally was lost somewhere on the West Side by an old Irish cobbler who used to take care of it in his shop—but visited taverns en route. When Connolly and his comrades were shot down in the 1916 uprising, Larkin aroused a tremendous wrath of protest here, especially when he roared against the professional Irish, mostly politicians, who tried to explain away an actual armed uprising of the Irish people. He went to Paterson with us after we won our free speech fight, and spoke to a large gathering of silk workers who contributed a pathetic collection of pennies, nickels and dimes to help the Irish, in response to Jim’s appeal “for bread and guns.” Many an Irish cop turned the other way and pretended not to hear when Jim made this appeal. He joined the American Socialist Party’s Left-wing movement after his arrival here and was a delegate to a founding convention of the Communist Party five years later in Chicago, in 1919.

Larkin’s record as a fighting labor leader in Ireland was well known

James Larkin was the nephew of one of the Manchester martyrs, hanged by the British government in 1867. He boasted of his family tree, amid cheers of approval from Irish audiences, that “a man was hung in every one of four generations, as a rebel.” Connolly and Larkin represented a remarkably effective combination in the struggle for Irish freedom, the building of an Irish labor movement and the establishment of a socialist movement. They complemented each other and were loved and respected in Ireland—and respected each other. I am proud I had the opportunity to count both of these truly great sons of Erin as my comrades and friends.

When Spring came in 1913 the army of the unemployed melted with the snows. By the next winter, World War I had been declared and war-order jobs were on the increase. Our 1914 Eastern unemployed agitation was due to sink away into insignificance beside the bitter struggles of the copper miners in Michigan arid the coal miners in Colorado. The right to organize into the Western Federation of Miners and the United Mine Workers of America, was at stake in these two areas. And as usual, employer-supplied brutality was rampant. Twice within a few months, miners’ children were struck down by death. Cold-blooded murder was the verdict of the entire country, swept by new waves of horror and indignation.

The first tragedy occurred in Calumet, Michigan, on Christmas


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THE IWW, 1912-1914

Day, 1913. The women’s auxiliary had arranged a party for the strikers’ children, who were thrown into a wild panic by a fake cry of “Fire!” They rushed down the narrow stairs and 73 were smothered to death in the entryway when the door jammed shut. Charles H. Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners was beaten and deported out of the district when he refused $1,500 as “blood money,” collected by the anti-labor Citizens’ Alliance “to help the children.”

Colorado was a scene of intense labor struggle since the turn of the century. A unique episode of force and violence occurred in the Cripple Creek area during the strike in 1893-1894. The governor, David Waite, was a Populist. He sent the militia to guard the miners and restore order against the company gunmen. A group of vigilantes, organized by the mine owners, took T. J. Tamey, adjutant-general of the militia, from the Antler Hotel at Colorado Springs, and tarred and feathered him.

The next big strike was in 1914, and extended into 1915, culminating in the Ludlow Massacre. The striking miners had been evicted from their homes by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a Rockefeller subsidiary. They were living in a tent colony, surrounded by the militia. The women were fearful of the militia and had dug a deep cave under one tent where they put the children to sleep. On April 29, 1914, the militia set fire to the tent colony with kerosene. Two women, one pregnant, and 13 children were smothered to death in the cave. Two of the tent colonies, Forbes and Ludlow, were destroyed. The pretext for the massacre was that “a fugitive from arrest” was there. One woman, Mrs. Petrucci, lost three children, but no one was ever arrested for their murder. Louis Tikas, a Greek union organizer, was shot in the back trying to rescue a child. Over 30 miners were killed in the battle that ensued. Demonstrations of protest and sympathy started all over the country, particularly directed against the Standard Oil Company.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had testified before the House Mines Committee on April 6 (New York World, April 7, 1914) that the strike had become a fight for “the principles of freedom of labor” and that he and his associates “would rather that the present violence continue and that they all lose all of their millions invested in the coal fields than that American working men should be deprived of the right under the Constitution to work for whom they please.” He expressed his confidence in the competent men he had placed in authority over

That year, 1914, was indeed a barbarous and bloody year in the class struggle in America. It ushered in the holocaust of World War I, in which millions laid down their lives.