Hellraisers Journal: Art Shields Reports: “Amazon Army” on the March Against Scabs in the Mines of Southeastern Kansas

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Quote Mother Jones Raising Hell, NYT p1, Oct 6, 1916—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday December 18, 1921
Southeastern Kansas – Art Shields Reports on the Miner’s “Amazon Army”

From the Oklahoma Leader of December 13, 1921:

Ok Ldr, p1, Dec 13, 1921

OK Ldr p1, Dec 13, 1921

PITTSBURG, Kan., Dec 13- There is joy and laughter in the coal fields of Kansas for the strikebreakers are on the run before the militant ladles of that Sunflower state.

The fun begun before daylight when the 120 men who have helped themselves to the vacant jobs in the big Jackson-Walker mine No. 17 near South Franklin began to get off the two interurban cars and to get into hot water all at once.

They say there used to be some excitement in the old Amazon days, but it was nothing to the action out there on the Kansas prairie. Seven hundred and fifty lively ladies gave the travelers the liveliest reception they had ever experienced. Young women, old women, blondes, brunettes and every kind began swarming into those wishers for unhallowed work and began ruffing their feelings.

Deputies Looked On.

In the midst of the charming host were the forces of the law, Sheriff Gould and his deputies, to see that nothing happened that ought not to happen, and all they could do was to look on while the cause of the trouble was all removed by the visitors rushing pell mell back into the cars and begging the motormen to drive on.

What could the sheriff do against such a crowd of lovely femininity, all in their best bibs and tuckers, flying the stars and strips from a dozen poles and laughing and singing? One stalwart woman wrapped her country’s banner around the sheriff and gave him three cheers, and they all joined in and gave him three cheers, and gave the inter-urban cars a salvo of hurrahs as they went on with the men who tried to break the strike for the release of Howat and Dorchy.

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Hellraisers Journal: From The Liberator: “The Battle of Logan County”-Art Shields Reports from West Virginia, Part II

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Quote EVD Wlg WV Oct 24, Wlg Dly Int p2, Oct 25, 1900—————

Hellraisers Journal – Thursday October 6, 1921
Art Shields Reports from West Virginia on Battle of Logan County

From The Liberator of October 1921:

The Battle of Logan County
By Art Shields
———-

[Part II of II.]

WV Battle by Shields, Same Old Line Up by B Robinson, Lbtr p19, Oct 1921

The murder of Hatfield and Chambers in that premeditated fashion on the court house steps was the dramatic event that focused their eyes on the crisis before the whole labor movement of West Virginia. It was now or never for the cleaning up of Mingo County.

Up and down a hundred mountains where men delve deep for coal and even in the black diamond fields of Kentucky and Virginia, men began reaching for their high power rifles for the big hunt again, as in Cabin Creek days. Organization for the purpose was hastily improvised, outside of the United Mine Workers, which did not allow its district machinery to be used, and shortly after the middle of the month thousands of men began to move for the gathering place of Marmet. They came by train or car to this little town and its surrounding fields, there on the border of Boone and Kanawha counties, just sixty-five miles, as the bird flies, or more than a hundred by road, to the Mingo coal fields. The route led straight across the union grounds of Boone County and the thug-ridden lands of Logan.

Thousands of miners, black and white, came at the call: railroad men were there, atoning for the stain cast by the men who were transporting machine guns and thugs into Sheriff Don Chafin’s Logan County lands; building trades men came who knew that the powerful miners’ union held up all organized labor in West Virginia, and machinists and farmers’ boys gathered with the rest. Among the lot were more than two thousand who had taken post graduate lessons in shooting “over there.”

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Liberator: “The Battle of Logan County”-Art Shields Reports from West Virginia, Part II”

Hellraisers Journal: From The Liberator: “The Battle of Logan County”-Art Shields Reports from West Virginia, Part I

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Quote EVD Wlg WV Oct 24, Wlg Dly Int p2, Oct 25, 1900—————

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday October 5, 1921
Art Shields Reports from West Virginia on Battle of Logan County

From The Liberator of October 1921:

The Battle of Logan County
By Art Shields
———-

[Part I of II.]

WV Battle by Shields, Same Old Line Up by B Robinson, Lbtr p19, Oct 1921

THESE are our hills and we love ’em. We had to fight for them long ago, against the bears and the panthers and the wolves and the rattlesnakes, and now I reckon Don Chafin’s thugs ain’t a-goin’ to scare us out.

A sturdy old mountaineer of more than three score and ten voiced these sentiments as we stood together on one of the loftiest peaks of Blair Mountain and filled our eyes with the surrounding magnificence of giant shaded valleys and mighty ridges, tossed in forested glory against the sky. It was a garden of towering wonder that blinded my eyes for the moment to the shallow trench at my feet, where thousands of empty shells were ugly reminders that Don Chafin’s machine gunners and automatic rifle men had been nesting there a few days before.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From The Liberator: “The Battle of Logan County”-Art Shields Reports from West Virginia, Part I”

Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Pioneer: Art Shields on Conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti by Capitalist Court

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Quote EGF, re Sacco at Dedham Jail, Oct 1920, Rebel Girl p304—————

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 23, 1921
Dedham, Massachusetts – July 14th, Sacco and Vanzetti Convicted of Murder

From the Industrial Pioneer of August 1921:

Sacco-Vanzetti: Victims

By Art Shields

Vanzetti Sacco Rosina, Bst Eve Glb p1, May 31, 1921
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Nicola Sacco, Rosina Sacco

AMERICAN workers are getting hardened to the prostitution of capitalist courts,—so the conviction of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the court house at Dedham, Mass. [on July 14, 1921], does not bring the shock that such action would have brought ten years ago, but none the less the case is the most glaring perversion of that abstraction known as “justice” that has been seen in years.

The multitude of evidence proving the innocence of these two working men of the charge of killing a paymaster and a shoe company guard at South Braintree, Mass., in May, 1920 has been put before working class readers time and again, so there is no need to go over it here. Nor is it necessary to recount again the methods which the Department of Justice and the labor-hating state police of Massachusetts used, to put over their nefarious act. It has been told before in this case and others, the putting of stoolpigeons into adjacent cells with stories of their I. W. W. connections and their desire for dynamite to blow up the prison, for the purpose of entrapping the defendant into conversation in order to pervert his remarks later. The use of witnesses, who were far away from the scene, the burglarizing of defense offices; these and a dozen other dirty finkstunts are nothing new to any intelligent worker.

The point is that these workingmen, whose crime was their advocacy of economic direct action in the shoe and cordage mills of New England, and their determined resistance to the murder tactics of the secret police in the case of their fellow worker, Andrea Salsedo, who pitched to his death from the fourteenth story window of the Department of Justice in New York, the point is that these men have lost a legal battle with the owners of the law.

The lives of Sacco and Vanzetti will not be saved without direct action. This does not mean to state that further legal efforts will not also be necessary. But what is meant it that the added power, the kind of power that obtained the release of Ettor, Giovannitti and Caruso from the death cage at Salem, after the Lawrence strike of nine years ago, comes from the force of organized labor in motion.

———-

[Photograph and emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: Bogalusa Mobbers of Southern Lumber Company Must Finally Answer in Court for Murder of Union Men

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Quote Messenger p2 editorial, Bogalusa Massacre, Feb 1920—————

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday May 8, 1921
Bogalusa, Louisiana – Widows of Murdered Union Men Seek Measure of Justice

From the Duluth Labor World of May 7, 1921:

COURT FINALLY TELLS MOBBERS
TO FACE TRIAL
———-
Southern Lumber Company and Its Agents
Must Answer for Murder of Union Men.
———-

Bogalusa Massacre, NYT p1, Nov 23, 1919
The New York Times
November 23, 1919

NEW ORLEANS. May 5.—After resorting to technicalities for 18 months Federal Judge Foster has ordered the city of Bogalusa, the Great Southern Lumber company and other persons sued for damages as the result of killings at Bogalusa, in No­vember [22nd], 1919, to stop fighting for delay and get ready for trial. It will probably be another year before the mobbers will be placed on the witness stand and forced to tell of their connection with the murder of several trade unionists and the attempted lynching of Sol Dacus, influential negro in Bogalusa, who urged fellow negro workers to stand with the white workers in the mill strike of that year.

The suits were started by the widows of the mudered unionists. In the case of George Williams the charge is made that he was beaten nearly to death because he refused to quit his business of draying and return work in the mill.

The widows charge that their husbands were killed for the “sole purpose of destroying organized labor” in Bogalusa, and that the company sounded the mill’s siren whistle to assemble the mob.

The mob first went to the home of Dacus, but the negro hid in the swamp, and with the aid of white workers made his way to New Orleans and later to Gulfport, Miss. When the mob failed to find Dacus his home was demolished, his fam­ily terrified and $1,300 worth of war savings stamps stolen.

—————

[Newsclip and emphasis added.]

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Hellraisers Journal: From the New York Liberator: Salsedo Dead-Sacco and Vanzetti in Danger -by Robert Minor

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Quote EGF, re Sacco at Dedham Jail, Oct 1920, Rebel Girl p304———-

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 2, 1921
Salsedo Dead in New York City; Sacco and Vanzetti in Danger in Massachusetts

From the New York Liberator of March 1921:

One Dead-Two in Danger

By Robert Minor

Cover by Robert Minor, Are They Doomed by Art Shields, Ad Lbtr Mar 1921
-by Art Shields
-cover design by Robert Minor

OUT of a window high in an office building in Park Row, a man’s body took the long drop to the street below. Early morning newspaper distributors and a policeman smoothed back the black hair on the head that rolled loosely. There were the fine forehead of olive skin, the black eyes and aquiline nose of an Italian.

The body had fallen from a window that gaped open in the half-dark of dawn, fourteen stories above. Investigation of the fourteenth floor showed that this was a window of a secret prison kept by the agents of the United States Department of Justice.

Do you remember “Palmer’s Revolution?” It was dated for May 1st, 1920. The Italian workman’s plunge to death on May 3rd from Palmer’s secret prison was its only casualty.

The secret jail, hidden away in an office building in the heart of the business district, was the headquarters for “Palmer’s Revolution.” In that resort, away from the restraints of regular prisons, Palmer’s agents handled “reds.” Andrea Salsedo was one of the working men that was being handled there. There was another man in the prison, Roberto Elia, a friend of the dead man. Elia had seen that Salsedo’s head and face were a mass of bruises. Salsedo had been taken out each day three times, he said, to be questioned and to be beaten so as to make him give the answers that were wanted. Elia said that he heard Salsedo’s screams while he was being tortured, and saw the agents examine Salsedo’s eyes and finger nails to learn whether the beating was going so far as to endanger life. When Elia went to sleep at night, the agents pointed to the open window, saying: “Don’t forget this is the fourteenth floor.”

In the morning Elia was told that Salsedo had “jumped out of the window.” The newspaper men and city policemen and strangers came, asking questions. The pile of shapeless flesh in the pool of blood below the window of the secret prison was embarrassing to Palmer and to Flynn of the Secret Service. Even the capitalist press stirred a little with the tang of the mystery. Did the man jump and kill himself, or was he thrown from the window? Was he thrown out alive? Or was a dead body dropped from the window to conceal the manner in which death had taken place?

The newspapers were shut off at last. The body was quickly buried without any coroner’s inquest. Roberto Elia was the only one who knew anything-except Palmer’s men. He was quickly deported to Italy, where he disappeared from sight. Then the Italian population of various American industrial districts began to make trouble. Agitators began to make protest meetings.

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Hellraisers Journal: With Band Playing “The Marseillaise,” Bolsheviki Steamer Shilka Leaves Seattle, Sets Sail for Russia

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I have no country to fight for
My country is the earth
And I am a citizen of the world.
-Eugene Victor Debs

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hellraisers Journal: Thursday January 10, 1918
Seattle, Washington – The Shilka Sets Sail to Cheers of Supporters

From The Tacoma Times of January 9, 1918:

Rss Rev, Shilka lvs Stt, Tacoma Tx p5, Jan 9, 1918

—–

(Special to the times.)

SEATTLE, Jan. 9.-Serenaded by a volunteer brass band playing “The Marseillaise” and “The Star Spangled Banner,” cheered by more than a hundred admirers and friends, the Russian steamship Shilka, which had return from Tacoma on Monday morning with her bunkers full of coal, bade farewell to Seattle at Pier 5 at 2 o’clock Tuesday afternoon when she sailed for Kobe via Yokohama.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: With Band Playing “The Marseillaise,” Bolsheviki Steamer Shilka Leaves Seattle, Sets Sail for Russia”