Hellraisers Journal: Mrs. Hamlin Blames Private Police for Violence in Mesabi Range Strike

As for the women on the picket lines,
they are not playing “the baby act.”
They’re good soldiers.
They’re thoroughly “game,” those women and
we should be immensely proud of them.
-Lenora Austin Hamlin

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Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday September 26, 1916
Mesabi Iron Range, Minnesota – Mrs. Hamlin Describes Conditions

From the Duluth Labor World of September 23, 1916:

BLAMES PRIVATE POLICE FOR VIOLENCE
IN MINERS’ STRIKE
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Lenora Austin Hamlin Gives First Pen Picture of
Actual Conditions on Mesaba Range From
Disinterested Standpoint—Makes Telling
Report to Woman’s Welfare League
of St. Paul.
—–

Lenora Austin Hamlin of St. Paul was sent by the Woman’s Welfare league to get first hand information about the treatment accorded to men and women during the miners’ strike on the Mesaba range, following a speech made before the league by Mary Heaton Vorse and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

The St. Paul women wanted a colorless story of actual conditions. Mrs. Hamlin, well trained for this sort of investigations, was requested to do the work. She visited all the important points in the strike zone, and her story confirms the claims made during the strike by the miners.

Minnesota is closely following in the footsteps of Colorado and West Virginia, as is shown by the report. It reads in full as follows:

Members of the Woman’s Welfare league will recall that on Tuesday, Aug. 15, we were addressed by Mary Heaton Vorse and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn on the subject of strike conditions on the range and that great interest was aroused by their descriptions of the part women were taking in the strike and the hardships they were enduring in consequence.

Following the meeting an informal request was made by officers and members of the league that an investigation of strike conditions as they affect women and children be made by the State Labor department with special reference to the case of Mrs. Masonovich held, with her baby, without bail, in the St. Louis County jail. This
request was endorsed by other women’s organizations and later a committee of three members of the League, of which I was one, was appointed to follow up the inquiry.

In response to our request an investigation was made by the Labor Department into the Masonovich case, and into certain charges of child labor at the mines, and a report filed with the governor.

My visit to the Range was of course quite unofficial, but as I enjoyed rather exceptional opportunities of meeting and talking with the strikers and their families, a brief summary of my impressions and conclusions may,perhaps, be of interest

From the Keewatin picnic on Sunday, when several hundred men and women walked a distance of fourteen miles or more to protest in a half dozen different languages against the refusal by the sheriff of Itasca county of the right of free assemblage in that county, to my visit to Carlo Tresca and Mrs. Masonovich in the Duluth jail, the week was a continuous motion picture performance of the most novel and vital sort.

Reel after reel unrolled of the “heart throb” stories of a simple foreign people; of tragedy suddenly injected into a homely domestic scene; of heart-breaking struggle of the workers against wealth and power and hunger and stupid, sometimes brutal officialdom; of defiance and the swift, sure descent of the law; of slow imprisonment and the marshaling of the legal forces for the final battle—all against a background of bare, riven, red earth and beautiful, swept and garnished cities. Verily a cross section of American life.

There was a wild ride through the rain followed by a careful, painstaking examination of the house near Biwabik in which the shooting of Deputy Myron occurred, a tragedy as stupid, as unnecessary as could well be imagined. Four armed deputies enter a home and demand the immediate surrender of a than who happens to be asleep at the time in an adjoining room—on the charge of “unlawful assemblage.” The people in the house are immigrants from the South of Europe, speaking little or no English. “Wait till O’Hara come” says the woman. O’Hara is the Biwabik police officer whom all the foreign people of the district respect and obey.

But no, these newly,created officers of the law clothed in a little brief authority, will not wait They pull their guns and begin to shoot. The woman struggles with one of the deputies and tries to take his gun from him. The husband and the four boarders and the woman struggle with the deputies and beat them off. A deputy is shot dead. A man delivering a case of pop at the gate is shot dead. Two presumably useful lives are snuffed “out, two women made widows, and their children’ fatherless, and all because they wouldn’t “wait till O’Hara come.”

Now a slender, dark eyed Montenegrin woman with a pale-faced baby at her breast waits in a close, sunless, inside jail room, along with a dozen “drunk and disorderly” women of the streets, charged with murder because she joined in defending her home and her family against an attack of armed and apparently lawless men. The pity of it, and the shame of it—in America.

There was a, visit to two women in a Duluth hospital, one a young Finnish woman whose back had been severely injured by being dragged over railroad ties and then tumbled into a ditch while on picket duty. The other, an Austrian woman, was arrested in her kitchen, also on a, charge of picketing. She denied the charge and resisted arrest and lost her unborn baby as a result of the encounter. She was very ill, indeed, when I saw her. Afterward I met and talked with the Sheriff of Crow Wing County, where both affairs occurred. He admitted thai there hand been unnecessary display of force on the part of his fifty men when first put on duty, but said he had to get them together as soon as he he could and told them to “cut it out.” He said he never carried a gun himself, that the people of his county respected him and he didn’t need a gun. I think he spoke the truth.

My feeling is that most of this “guntoting” on the part of officers of the law is a totally unnecessary piece of business; that it provokes violence instead of abating it and that it brutalizes the men who carry the guns.

As for the women on the picket lines, they are not playing “the baby act.” They’re good soldiers. They picket because they are likely to be less roughly handled than the men, because they can’t be blacklisted and because they want to help their men. They’re thoroughly “game,” those women and we should be immensely proud of them.

Then there is Alice Arcola, who bit the patrolman, and is out on bail. She was picketing and a big policeman grabbed her and left the black and blue mark of his five fingers on her breast. Alice bent her head and bit his hand and he let go. What woman wouldn’t? Mrs. Vorse told us that story you remember and said she saw the marks. I met plump, sparkling Alice Arcola in her home one night and she confirmed the story. She said she was going on the picket line the next morning at five.

The Finnish co-operative movement is one of the surprises of the Range. In most of the towns there is a Finnish hall owned co-operatively, and in many of them a Finnish co-operative store. The halls have been open to the strikers for their meetings, free of charge, and except for them it would have been exceedingly difficult for the strikers to find a place in which to meet.

These Finnish people on the Range are a remarkably interesting racial group which will richly repay study and further acquaintance. For one thing they stand for equality between men and women. They bring that idea with them from Finland where men and women enjoy equal political rights. They are all equal suffragists.

The mine operators may break this strike, they probably will, but they might as well make up their minds that organization is coming. Capital is organized and labor must organize in self-protection, and the public will support labor in its efforts to organize. No amount of welfare work or philanthropy will take the place of self-respecting, self-directing organization of the workers by themselves for themselves.

As to housing conditions on the Range, they could be improved no doubt, but there are much worse housing conditions in St. Paul and Minneapolis than any I saw on the Range. There should be a state housing code with officers to enforce suitable housing regulations in both city and county districts.

Life in the mining “locations” could be made much less colorless and lonely-if the school buildings in the “locations” were opened for Social Center purposes at night. People who work hard need recreation near their homes, and the public school is the only building in the “location” large enough for recreation purposes. Besides it belongs to the people and they have a right to use it.

A Social settlement on the Range directed by trained and social minded men and women might do much to bring the people of all classes together and help them to understand each other. The point of view of the rich is often more limited and provincial than that of the poor.

But one thing above all we must stand for shoulder to shoulder over all this great country of ours and that is the right of free assemblage and free speech. We must strike swift and hard at every attempt to deprive us of that fundamental democratic privilege without which free institutions cannot endure. In defense of the right of free assemblage and free speech we must be prepared to take cracked heads and bloody noses, if necessary, women as well as men, for without it we are a nation of slaves.

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[Photograph added.]