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

On this trip, in the local IWW hall at Des Moines, Iowa, Kate Richards O’Hare was also speaking for the Socialist Party and we not only visited each other but she came to speak with me at one of my meetings and I reciprocated at one of hers. She was a tall, slender woman, not yet 40, who was born in Kansas, had been a school teacher and social worker, and was at this time associated with her husband in the editorship of a Socialist paper, The Ripsaw, of St. Louis, Missouri. Kate had been the American Party’s secretary to the Socialist International. She was an active Socialist for 17 years and had the reputation of having covered more territory and delivered more socialist lectures than any other person in the country. She had four children, whose pictures covered her bureau top in the hotel room.

Kate told me of her experiences in Socialist “Chautauquas” in Oklahoma and Arkansas, where the farmers came from miles around, camped out for three or four days, and listened to a continuous round of speeches and entertainment provided under a big tent by the local Socialist Party. Kate was their star attraction, sometimes speaking three and four times a day. She spoke with such fervor that she would be wringing wet with perspiration at the end of each performance. She loved to dress in white and her laundry bills caused the committee to remark she should buy stock in a laundry. So she started to wash and iron all her garments herself. This was before the days of nylon, and women wore a lot more clothes—petticoats, corset covers, etc. She had a clothesline up in her room and an ironingboard which fitted into her suitcase, and she worked at her chores as she talked to me. She was a splendid orator and a militant Socialist. She made a big hit with the IWW men in my audience. They sang for her all the Joe Hill songs that had any reference to women, like: “One little girl, fair as a pearl, Worked everyday in a laundry.”

A Solomon’s Decision

Finally, fall was upon us, with a knife-like chill in the air that forewarned of the regular sub-zero winter soon to grip that area. Its tena

In late December 1916 the lawyers called us to Duluth for a conference. They arranged it in a large room in the courthouse, with all the defendants present. We knew they had been holding pre-trial conferences with the state’s attorney but their proposal was a complete surprise to all of us. It was that three of the four Montenegrin defendants should plead guilty to manslaughter and serve one to three years; the woman and one of the workers were to be dismissed unconditionally and the three organizers were to be set free without trial. “You mean my wife will not go to prison?” Phillip Masonovich asked incredulously and with great joy. He shook hands with Tresca and patted him on the back, saying: “Carlo, you go out and do more good work.” Each of the four insisted another go out and he remain. It was left to them to decide who was to be freed. It was not strange that they so readily greeted the idea with satisfaction since they had resigned themselves to the fate of life imprisonment for all concerned.

The organizers demanded further explanation from the lawyers, who said the state was willing to agree to this in view of the fact that the strike was over and they did not want to enter into a series of long and expensive trials. But since two men had been actually killed in the fracas, and it was agreed by all witnesses that the woman and one man were inside the house and could not have been involved in the actual shooting, this was the best they could propose. If the proposal was rejected they would proceed to try the Montenegrin workers first and felt sure they could get a verdict of guilty from a handpicked, English


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THE IWW, 1912-1914

speaking, middle-class jury in that area. We had no illusions on this score. We knew they could. Mr. Keyes felt confident he could secure their release by the Parole Board at the end of one year. The defendants discussed it alone and decided to accept. All present concurred. It was a Solomon’s decision. We all believed we were doing the very best for all concerned. Then everything started to happen.

The next day in court the judge sentenced the three workers to five to twenty years for manslaughter. The organizers protested: “This was not the agreement.” We were stunned. The lawyers insisted: “It’s all right; it was agreed; they will get out before the three years are up.” Mr. Keyes, who was the one we most depended upon to see us through, died of pneumonia within a few weeks. The prosecutor went to France in World War I and his successor denied any knowledge of the agreement. Haywood blasted us publicly without even waiting for our explanations, which complicated the problem. We put some money in a local relief fund for Mrs. Masonovich and her family for one year and $2,000 in a trust fund to carry on further legal efforts for their release, and for further relief to the family if necessary. We sent a lawyer before the parole board twice.

Considering that it was wartime, with ferocious attacks then being made on the IWW, plus our later arrests and other obstacles (which even involved the bank holding up the funds temporarily because they were “IWW”), it was a great relief to all of us concerned when these heroic workers were finally freed, just a little over three years after their imprisonment. The whole episode terminated the official relations of Ettor and Tresca with the IWW. I stuck for a while longer, determined to prove to my fellow-workers that my loyalty and devotion could not be shaken by my relations with Haywood. But it wasn’t easy, and became increasingly difficult in the next few years after 1916.


SIX

World War I and its Aftermath

The Mooney Frame-Up

Developments on the labor front in other parts of the country had weighed heavily with all of the IWW organizers involved in accepting the settlement of the case on the Mesabi Range. Foremost was the Mooney-Billings case, as it came to be known later—a notorious frame-up exceeding anything that the employers had attempted since 1886. When we came to our decision in Minnesota, four men and a woman were in jail in San Francisco charged with murder. This grew out of the anti-labor, open-shop “Preparedness Parade” on July 22, 1916, when an explosion caused the death of ten people and injured many others. The ones arrested were my friend, Tom Mooney and his wife Rena; Warren Billings, who had been president of a Shoe Workers Union and active in various strikes; Edward D. Nolan of the International Association of Machinists; and Israel Weinberg, a member of the executive board of the Jitney Operators Union. (“Jitneys,” a nickname for nickels, were automobiles carrying passengers along regular routes for a five-cent fare. They were forerunners of buses and popular competitors to the streetcar system, which finally succeeded in outlawing them.)

At the time of which I write, December 1916, one prisoner, Warren K. Billings, had already been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in Folsom Penitentiary on one indictment. Others were held over him. Tom Mooney was facing trial in January 1917, under indictment for eight murder charges. That was the number of victims who had died up to the date of the Grand Jury hearing. A spirit of mob hysteria had been created in the area by the prosecution. But a bold, fearless

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WORLD WAR I AND ITS AFTERMATH

and able defender appeared for Tom Mooney and the others—Robert Minor, a great artist and valiant fighter for human rights.

At this time, Minor, who was then 32 years old, was well known as a cartoonist and political writer. Bom in Texas in 1884, he had worked as a painter, carpenter and railroad worker before he became one of the most famed and talented cartoonists in America, employed on the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the New York World. He was fired for making cover designs for Emma Goldman’s monthly, Mother Earth. He was a member of the central committee of the Socialist Party in St. Louis in 1910 and a member of the Press Writers Union. When Mooney and his co-workers were arrested Minor plunged fearlessly into their defense. He aided in the organization of the International Workers Defense League of San Francisco in 1916, and became its publicity director. He wrote the first two pamphlets on this case and worked tirelessly to bring their cause before the American labor movement.

He was finally able, with the assistance of a young New Jersey Lawyer, Leon Josephson, to persuade John McDonald, a star witness, to confess his perjury and his dealings with the prosecution. But this was later, in the 1920s. At the period of which I write, Bob Minor was engaged in organizing protest meetings, speaking to labor unions and labor conventions, exposing the frame-up, piece by piece, as new revelations of perjury came to light. He was. a tower of strength in saving the lives of Mooney and his comrades. Out of this experience, Minor became one of the most skillful strategists and one of the most able organizers of labor defense cases.

His pamphlet revealed the first bold outlines of the frame-up—the attempts by detective Martin Swanson, employed by the United States Railways, to bribe both Billings and Weinberg to testify against Mooney; and the fact, provable by the famous accidental photograph of a street clock, that Tom and Rena Mooney were watching the parade a mile and a quarter away from the scene of the crime at the precise moment he was supposed to be at the scene with the bomb. It exposed the professional jury system under which Billings had been convicted in September 1916 by 12 old men, hangers-on around fftteom, some of whom had sat on juries for nine years at $2 per day. Afterwards they said they had sent the young man to prison for life on the chance that he might “help find the guilty parties.” Eight of the 12 had no other occupation than serving on juries. The Billings case, however, ended this shocking system.