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

I had never met Joe Hill before I went to see him in jail. He was tall, slender, very blond, with deep blue eyes. He was 31 years old— “the age when Jesus was crucified,” he said to me. We sat in the sheriff’s office, looking out the open barred door at the wide expanse of a beautiful lawn. It was spring in the garden city of Salt Lake, encircled by great mountains, crowned with eternal snows. In springtime its green shimmer, high altitude, and clear pure air were like wine. But the familiar fetid jail odor assailed the nostrils, the clang of the keys, the surly permission to enter, the damp air loaded with the sickening smell of disinfectants, all marked the prison abode. It was the first time Joe had been allowed to receive a visitor in the office and to shake hands with a visitor. The head jailer was one of the detectives who made up the case and they hoped that Joe would “talk.” He was expected to prove himself innocent.

He had little to say to me about his case. I knew his appeal—taken over at the eleventh hour by Judge O. N. Hilton, long the chief counsel of the Western Federation of Miners—was pending. The case was a legal mess because his first lawyer, a local Socialist, was timid and inept and had made no real defense, had registered no proper objections and exceptions to “protest the record,” as the lawyers put it. Joe finally stood up in court and fired him, telling the judge he did not need two prosecutors. The judge reappointed the same lawyer forthwith and Joe refused to participate further in the case. Joe had questioned at one time the advisability of an appeal because of the expense involved but we had persuaded him otherwise. In spite of all the legal


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difficulties, we were optimistic as to the outcome, with the victories of Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, and Ettor and Giovannitti behind us.

Joe Hill did not share our optimism but he did not oppose our efforts. He said to me: “I am not afraid of death, but I’d like to be in the fight a little longer.” He saw I was downcast as I left. A feeling of foreboding clutched my heart as I said good-bye to him. He joked about a bearded old man mowing the lawn outside. “He’s lucky, Gurley. He’s a Mormon and he’s had two wives and I haven’t even had one yet!” I can see him standing behind the barred door, “smiling with his eyes” as the modern song describes. Many young people of today may think Joe Hill is a mythical figure, like Paul Bunyan. They know him only through the song with its haunting refrain, “I never died, said he.” The real story of this martyred troubador of the IWW is a tragic chapter of the infamous frame-up system against workers.

Judge Hilton came East and laid all the information before the Swedish Minister, W.A.F. Ekengren, who had heard from Sweden of tremendous protests there. He interceded with President Wilson, who had no power in a state case. However, he sent a request to Governor Spry of Utah, and the execution which was set for October 1 was postponed to allow the Swedish Minister to present his views to the governor. While Judge Hilton was in New York City, I introduced him to Mr. and Mrs. J. Sargent Cram. Mrs. Cram was a liberal, an avowed pacifist. Prior to World War I she rented stores in various parts of the city for neighborhood exhibitions of Robert Minor’s magnificent antiwar cartoons. She made all her appointments at the swanky Colony Club in New York and occasionally took me to her summer home in Old Westbury, Long Island. She introduced me to Judge Lovett, president of the Union Pacific Railroad, who lived in a palatial home nearby and who was “amazed” that I thought he had “influence” with the governor of Utah. She also introduced me to one of the Guggenheims, owners of the mines in Utah. For me it was like talking to creatures from another planet!

Judge Hilton and I went to Long Island to see Mr. Cram. He was a portly, bald-headed, shrewd Democratic politician who thought we were all slightly goofy. But he was impressed with Judge Hilton’s presentation of the case and he liked me as “a sensible woman,” particularly because I enjoyed the rare wines from his cellar. So he agreed to arrange an interview with President Woodrow Wilson for Mrs. Cram and me. We had gone once before on September 28, 1915, to try to

We went down on November 11, 1915. We had breakfast with Gifford Pinchot, Mrs. Cram’s Republican brother-in-law, who escorted us to the White House. Mr. Tumulty, the President’s Secretary, was friendly. He knew of me from the Paterson strike of 1913. When the President came in he greeted us cordially, in fact he held Mrs. Cram’s hand. He listened attentively while we presented our appeal. He said he had once intervened at the request of the Swedish Minister. He wondered if further insistence might do more harm than good. Not knowing the etiquette of talking to the President, I interrupted: “But he’s sentenced to death. You can’t make it worse, Mr. President.’’ He smiled and said: “Well, that’s true!” and promised to consider the matter.

As the days passed we felt that our mission had failed. But fortunately the American Federation of Labor, meeting in San Francisco, Wired a plea on November 17 to the President, signed by Samuel Gompers. President Wilson, under pressure, sent a second message to Governor Spry as follows: “With unaffected hesitation but with a very earnest consideration of the importance of the case, I again venture to urge upon Your Excellency the justice and advisability of a thorough reconsideration Of the case of Joseph Hillstrom.” Governor Spry curtly rejected this message from the President of the United States as “unwarranted interference.”

In Utah a condemned man had the right to choice—to be hanged or to be shot by a firing squad. It was a remnant of the old West. Joe chose to be shot. On November 19, 1915, five masked men, one with a blank in his gun, were brought to the prison in a carriage with all the curtains drawn so the identities of those who fired the fatal shots would be unknown. Joe’s last words were: “Don’t mourn, organize.” His Wish “not to be found dead in the state of Utah,” was respected and the IWW took his body to Chicago for cremation. I was unable to attend because of my pending trial in Paterson. Judge Hilton was the principal speaker at the services in Ashland Auditorium and because of his speech he was disbarred in the state of Utah from further practice there. This is the first labor case I know of where a lawyer was penalized for defending his client. It was a forerunner of such a

On this trip I spoke on the Joe Hill case in Salt Lake City at a large mass meeting of over 400, and then went on to California. My first stop was Los Angeles, where I stayed at the home of our IWW chief counsel, my old friend, Fred Moore.

My outstanding experience in Los Angeles, which he arranged, was a visit to Dave Caplan and Matt Schmidt, lodged in the Los Angeles jail high up over a court building. They had been arrested in 1914 in the aftermath of the famous McNamara case of 1911, a further proof that Lincoln Steffens’ “Golden Rule” contract with the prosecution had miscarried. A secret reward of $25,000 had not been canceled. A young man in the employ of the Bums detective agency, son of an anarchist woman from Howe Colony, near Tacoma, Washington, had wormed his way into a party at Emma Goldman’s house, and there had met Schmidt and reported it to the police. Caplan got 15 years and Schmidt a life sentence. I did not know either of these men but considered it my duty to visit all the class war prisoners, as we then called them. Labor felt highly indignant that they should be arrested after the agreement which Steffens had so widely publicized, and meetings were held for their defense. I spoke at several such meetings on this trip.

In May 1915 I saw for the first time the American city which I love the best,, that white city seated by the blue sea,, which I felt then—and ever after—to be the most beautiful in our country, San Francisco. The IWW had a large hall at 3345 17th Street. I spoke there and at Carpenters Hall on Valencia Street alternately for about a week on the Joe Hill case, the Caplan-Schmidt case, on “Violence and the Labor Movement” and on “The Role of Women in Strikes.” I also spoke in Oakland, where “Red” Doran was chairman. Many odd and amusing things happened in the IWW. At this meeting the double doors of the hall, at the end of a wide aisle, opened suddenly and a well-dressed young man entered with an enormous bouquet of flowers in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. “Greetings and welcome to California, Gurley!” he sang out. He stopped the meeting till I accepted both.

In San Francisco drinking coffee after the first meeting, I again met Tom Mooney and was introduced to his wife Rena, who taught music to children. They were not members of the IWW, but came to hear me speak. Tom was the same as when I had met him in Idaho— dark-haired, rosy-cheeked and jolly. He recalled that he had met me first at an IWW meeting in Chicago, when he bought a pamphlet from me he could not afford but was ashamed to say “No.” In 1915 Tom was a member of the Molders Union, AFL, but was busy trying to organize the streetcar workers of San Francisco.

At the same time, I first met a “native daughter” of California, a slender beautiful woman in her forties, soft-spoken but firm and courageous in her ideas, Anita Whitney. As president of the College Equal Suffrage League, she had led her forces to victory in 1911, when California became the sixth state in the union to grant women suffrage. She was second vice-president of the American Equal Suffrage Association, of which Dr. Anna Shaw was president and Jane Addams first vice-president. She was a member of the executive committee ‘of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1914 Anita Whitney had joined the Socialist Party. After graduating from Wellesley College in the 1890s, she had spent three months in a New York College Settlement on Rivington St. The sights and smells of the squalid slums, the sweat shops, child labor, the crowded living quarters of the poor with rats and roaches, the prostitution, crime and terrible fires were appalling revelations. Such mockery of the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness haunted her on her return to her pleasant California home.

She was a charity worker in Alameda County, California for 15 years. She fought for juvenile courts and became the first probation officer. She worked as a relief worker in the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. She finally resigned from her profession because she felt a fundamental change of a political character was necessary to affect poverty. If “Miss Whitney of California,” as she was known at suffrage conventions, had not been a Socialist she could have been

While I was in San Francisco, an Exposition was in progress, of a very colorful and interesting character. I went there with George Speed, who was even then a veteran of the labor movement. He was bom near where we lived in the South Bronx and apprenticed in his youth to make high silk hats. Later, he had become a sailor and was one of the pioneers in organizing this group of exploited workers.

I visited San Quentin Prison for the first time during this stay in San Francisco. Fremont Older, the editor of a San Francisco paper, gave me a note of introduction to the warden. It is a few miles out from the city on the mainland, a forbidding, dreary place, like all prisons. I went to see Albert Ryan, a member of the Western Federation of Miners and an old friend of St. John. He was in prison for life for shooting a deputy sheriff. The Saint had asked me to see him. I also saw J. B. McNamara, secretary of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union, who was serving a 15-year sentence. His hair was white, yet he was a comparatively young man. The other brother, J. J. McNamara, would not see any visitors at that time. J. B. expressed his gratitude that a stranger, a member of the IWW with which he had had no contact while on the outside, took the trouble to come to see him, while Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL, was in San Francisco at that very time and made no effort to come over to the prison. He dropped his gray prison cap on the floor as he rose to leave and I picked it up for him. He smiled and his deep blue eyes filled with tears. “That’s the first thing a woman has done for me in four years,” he said.

From San Francisco I went to Portland, Oregon, another beautiful city of hills, with the Willamette and wide , Columbia Rivers, fir trees and roses, with resplendent Mount Hood on the eastern horizon. Here I met a stormy petrel of the Northwest, Dr. Marie D. Equi, a successful woman doctor, who put me up at the swanky Hotel Multnomah. She entertained all the women speakers who passed through the City of Roses—Anita Whitney and Sara Bard Field, suffrage workers, Hanna Skeffington and Katherine O’Brennan, Irish nationalists, Margaret Sanger and myself. We all appreciated the unusual comfort.

Dr. Marie D. Equi, then in her forties of Italian and Irish parentage, was a fiery personality. She was born in New Bedford, Massa


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THE IWW, 1912-1914

chusetts. but had been sent out to eastern Oregon as a young girl to live with an older New Bedford woman who was a school teacher at The Dalles. She suffered from a tubercular condition, which the sun and mild dry air of that area helped to heal. She attended medical school in California and graduated in Oregon. During the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco she organized a trainload of doctors, nurses and supplies to go from Oregon and so distinguished herself during the catastrophe that she was honored with a military rank by the U.S. Army. No consideration was given to this service, however, when she later became a political prisoner because of her opposition to World War I.

She early identified herself with the IWW in the Northwest. Her father has been a stonemason and a member of the Knights of Labor. During her girlhood in Massachusetts she had aided in the fight for an eight-hour day. In the West she carried on campaigns against the horrible, unsanitary conditions in the lumber camps and, although not a member of the IWW, gave them medical attention, spoke for them and defended them. During a cannery strike in 1913, involving women and girls, she was arrested and so badly abused physically in the Portland County jail, that she had to go East for medical examination and treatment. She helped to secure a law in Oregon limiting the hours of women and child workers, and to place Oregon in the ranks of the first states that granted women suffrage. She was among the most feared and hated women in the Northwest because of her outspoken criticisms of politicians, industrialists, so-called civic leaders and all who oppressed the poor. She was loved and cherished by masses of plain people.

At the time that war was declared in Europe in 1914 there was a strong anti-war feeling in this country which grew during the next three years. A sense of complete isolation from Europe and the quarrels of its various dynasties prevailed. There was criticism of the German Socialists who had capitulated to their country’s war program. Anti-British feeling reached a high point after the Easter Week uprising and the executions in Ireland in 1916. Many peace organizations came into existence such as the Emergency Peace Federation in 1914, and the National Women’s Peace Party in 1915, in both of which Jane Addams of Chicago was a leading spirit. A large group of American

One of the strangest demonstrations for peace at that time was the Ford Peace Party which chartered a ship, the Oscar II, known as the Peace Ship. It sailed on December 4, 1915 and its slogan was: “Get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas.” Henry Ford paid all the expenses of the trip, it was rumored. The pilgrims for peace numbered about 30 determined souls, including Miss Addams, Miss Balch, Miss Beckenridge of Chicago and—amazingly enough—William C. Bullit of Philadelphia. The roster of prominent, honest Americans who stood squarely for peace and for keeping us out of war was impressive, including statesmen, ministers, professors, labor leaders, women leaders, writers, editors and even capitalists. However, we of the IWW took no part in any of these pacifist activities. To us it was a grim joke to see an anti-union exploiter like Ford a participant in a peace movement. We were suspicious of non-working-class elements of all sorts and held ourselves aloof from them. Yet, it was the IWW that bore the full impact of wartime prosecution as soon as war was declared.

While war raged abroad and President Wilson campaigned in 1916 on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of War,” we in the IWW doggedly stuck to our knitting. Our self-appointed task was to organize the unorganized workers and lead them in struggles for better wages, shorter hours and decent working conditions. Our concentration was bound to be in basic industries, where the war profits were soaring. It was not long before we were accused of being pro-German because the material produced in these industries was for war purposes.

The IWW was opposed to militarism and war. We were internationalists in our outlook. It was not accidental, though it may have appeared presumptuous, that we were called Industrial Workers of the World. There were actually IWW groups in England, South Africa and Australia, probably a result of our reputation and our visiting seamen. Haywood wrote at one time to Frank Little, who was pressing for an out-and-out stand' against conscription: “Many of the members feel as you do, but regard the present war between the capitalist nations as of small importance when compared to the great class war in which we are engaged.” As a matter of fact, outside of a resolution passed in the 1914 and 1916 conventions against war in general, the IWW never did officially take a stand before or after April 1917

Of course, there was enough happening on the class struggle front right here in our own country to keep us busy during the years 1915 and 1916. It all unavoidably dovetailed with the anti-war struggle. Foremost was the Mooney case.

In July 1916 the open-shop forces of San Francisco staged a “Preparedness Day” parade. The entire labor movement of the city had gone on record against their membership participating in any way in this affair because of its anti-labor character and because they were against beating the drums for war. A bomb was thrown at the marchers, it was charged, that killed a number of people. There has always been a doubt as to whether it was a bomb or whether dynamite in a suitcase exploded. Tom Mooney and his wife Rena, Warren K. Billings, Ed Nolen and Israel Weinberg were arrested. One of the most infamous frame-ups in the history of the American labor movement began to unfold. The labor movement finally recognized the whole business as a frame-up and rallied to the defense of those accused. The theory of the defense, in which I believe there was validity, was that German agents, later convicted of blowing up bridges in Canada, were responsible for the explosion.

I was personally not in a position to become active immediately in the Mooney case because I was involved in the strike in the Mesabi Range in Minnesota. Carlo Tresca had been on a speaking tour as far as California in the late Spring of 1916 and at the request of Haywood, who was now general secretary of the IWW, had gone to the Mesabi Range in Minnesota to speak. He was arrested there in July with a group of speakers, organizers and strikers, who were loaded on a special train at Virginia and taken to Duluth County Jail. At this time the IWW also had considerable activity among the anthracite coal miners and a strike was on in Old Forge, Pennsylvania. I went there to speak at a picnic arranged by Joe Ettor, who was in charge in that area. We received a wire from Haywood to proceed at once to Chicago, prepared to go to the Mesabi Range to take charge of the strike and the defense of those in prison. Joe and I were off for Minnesota the next day.