Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday March 3, 1914 Herman Suhr and Richard Ford Convicted of Second Degree Murder
From the International Socialist Review of March 1914:
The Wheatland Boys
HERMAN Suhr and Richard Ford, leaders of the strike on the Durst Hop Ranch at Wheatland, have been convicted of murder in the second degree, in the trial for the murder of District Attorney Edmund Manwell, killed in the raid of the sheriff’s posse on a peacable meeting of men, women and children strikers. William Back and Harry Bagan, who stood trial with them, have been released “on account of insufficient evidence.”
Ford and Suhr are convicted of murder. But they are not convicted of actually having murdered Mr. Maxwell. They are convicted of conspiring to murder, of being accessory before the fact.
The evidence of several eye witnesses proved that the District Attorney was killed by a Porto Rican, who came to the rescue of his fellow strikers. But the Porto Rican was killed himself; Ford and Suhr were not killed. And, as Prosecuting Attorney Carlin says, “The blood of Ed Manwell cries from the ground for their conviction.” The employing class cry for their conviction, Mr. Carlin might have added with less false sentiment and more truth. For these men, Ford and Suhr, were strike leaders, and their strike promised to be successful, had not the sheriff’s posse acted as strikebreakers for the Hop Barons.
These are the reasons for the conviction of Ford and Suhr. The precedent of a conviction of a labor leader for conspiracy to murder, of being accessory before the fact to any violence fomented by the employers in time of industrial trouble, is choked down the throats of the working class in California. And a staggering blow is given of the organization of the migratory workers, in whose vast army they urge toward organization had just begun to take embryonic shape.
Immediately behind the four prisoners during the trial sat Mrs. Suhr and Mrs. Ford, each with her two children. Suhr is desperately broken by the tortures of the Burns detectives, and even wiry, spirited hopeful Ford shows the long imprisonment and the strain. But the men show their ordeal hardly more than their wives.
As they sat before the twelve men who were to decide their fate, it was difficult to imagine a situation where justice would be more bitterly impossible to secure than in this county of Yuba, from which change of venue had been denied the four prisoners. Not a man in the jury who would not consider (however falsely) that his financial interest would be more secure for the conviction of these men. Not a man there who knew them or had ever looked upon their faces before. Not a man there who did not know at least by reputation, the dead man, his widow and orphans. Not a man who had not read the bitter attacks of the local press, condemning these men to the gallows before they were even brought to trial. Not a man who had ever read a word favorable to them (the reading of the pamphlet [“Plotting to Convict the Wheatland Hop Pickers”] sent into Yuba County by this league having been declared by the judge to disqualify a man from jury service). Not a man in the jury, probably, who did not share the prejudice of the man with a home, against the so-called hobo.
Austin Lewis’ plea for the defense was brilliant, profoundly human and convincing. It took the evidence, as given by both sides and utterly demolished the case of the prosecution with the sword of cold reason, slashed the cowardly Stanwood for his persecutions of helpless prisoners, and then flung itself upward in such an appeal to the blood-kindred of all men in aspirations for betterment and freedom, such as the strike on the Durst Ranch, as must have stirred the blood of every listener. But Lewis was a stranger to the jurymen, and their petty life in an agricultural community rendered it impossible for them to judge in a case involving an industrial question.
Prosecuting Attorney Carlin, who followed, had set his stage well. Opposite the jury sat the widow of the dead man with her six children. Intimately, as a man might talk to them leaning over the front fences, Carlin drove his plea home to the jury, every man of whom knew him, and many of whom, it is stated, were under obligations to him. Analysis of the testimony there was none; argument there was none; reason there was none.
A poor, shabby, cowardly speech, vulgar and dull. But it did not have to be very clever. All was well prepared without a clever plea. The judge read to the jury instructions from the law exactly covering a conviction for conspiracy in these cases, and hastily skipped over the instructions which would have freed the men by showing that Ford and Suhr did not aid and abet the Porto Rican who did the shooting.
The crooked, brutal case was about finished. The prophecy of gentlemen intimately associate with the ever clever Burns detectives to the effect that the verdict would be brought in at 1:30 p. m. on January 31, was correct. Society women and social workers who had come up from San Francisco, representatives of the press, investigators from the new Federal Commission on Industrial Relations, townsmen and townswomen crowded the courtroom. And the impious mock dignity of the law went on its wind-inflated way, to free the two men whom it dare not hold and to pronounce guilty the two whose sole crime was that they rose to lead out of the darkness, a helpless crowd of men, women and children, to convict these men who used what talents were theirs to voice the will and aspirations of these people for clean and decent conditions and a wage sufficient to allow them to hold up their heads as men.
Their cases will be appealed, and the storms of protest and wrath will not be downed until they are free.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday August 25, 1913
Cleve Woodrum, Martyred Union Miner by Cabin Creek Striker
From the Shawnee County Socialist of August 23, 1913:
CLEVE WOODRUM AN HUMBLE MARTYR
TO THE CAUSE OF LABOR.
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The Washington Herald July 26, 1913
There are some who would wish us to believe that the West Virginia outrages have ceased since the Senate Committee and the Socialist Party Committee have made their report, but they still go on.
Cleve Woodrum was picking berries for his sick wife, but had with him his rifle, when two hired murderers of the mine owners attacked him. Woodrum killed both of them, and was himself wounded.The other hired assassins, finding the two did not return from their murder, hunted and found one of the guards mortally wounded and the other dead.The wounded guard, Don Slater, they sent to the Hospital where he died, but, [finding] Woodrum, these [gunthugs] tortured the wounded man and then mutilated his body and left it in the bush where it was afterward found by his friends.
This was a cowardly assassination and then a brutal savagery of which only [gunthugs] are capable, and yet no paper but a few labor papers will mention it.
Read this letter from a Cabin Creek striker and remember that the mine owners, whose money hires these [gunthugs] are mostly pious church members, and they pay some of this blood money to the preachers to preach as they the mine owners demand.
This may be Christianity, but it has nothing to do with the gentle and loving Jesus.
Our Comrade, Cleve Woodrum. Eskdale, West Virginia.
Cleve Woodrum, the martyr to the cause of human liberty, born October 12, 1884, killed July 24, 1913, entered the coal mines at the early age of 11, denied an education by the same class that hired the gunman to kill him. The departed comrade leaves a father, mother and eight brothers and sisters, an invalid wife with six little children, the eldest being eight years old and Mrs. Woodrum soon to become a mother. Cleve met his death while just out of hearing from home and was picking berries for his sick wife who had just returned from the hospital after undergoing surgical treatment. A plot between the coal operators and the military thugs to put Slater out of the way as Slater knew too much about the dirty work, murders and sluggings the coal operators had ordered and which had been carried out to the letter and the operators taking the advantage of the jealousy existing between the old line of Baldwins and the military Baldwins and Slater was ambushed by his own crowd.
Comrade Woodrum immortalized this great fight for the cause of justice and the freedom of his class from wage slavery, as much so as the John Brown martyrdom immortalized the scaffold for his opposition to chattel slavery.
I knew the deceased when he was a little trapper boy in the mines years ago. Standing in water cold as ice up to his knees while the young bones were trying to develop and powder smoke so thick you could hardly see. Long weary hours of toil, and food that was kept in a dinner pail closed in tight for several hours which was not nutritious or fit to eat. Even at that Cleve was manly, honest, upright, square, hard working man.
He had been in the Socialist movement about two years when he saw the light, his honest heart just responded to the working class’s philosophy of reason that the worker should receive the full product of his labor just like the rose to a spring shower.
This was his creed, this was his religion. He professed the religion of humanity, the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man and to attain that end he had the highest of motives first taught by a union carpenter and Social Revolutionist by the name of Jesus, put to death by the ruling class for his radical teachings and would not recant one iota.
The union miners of this field should place suitable shaft over his tomb and ae well provide for his widow and little helpless children. Why not? The capitalist class pension their uniformed hired murderers for shooting down their own class and calling them heroes. So it is to the Socialist and union miners to provide for these widows and keep the grave green of working class heroes, as the coal barons forgot Slater as soon as the last breath went out.
A CABIN CREEK STRIKER.
This is the class war. Comrade Woodrum’s tortured and mutilated body is the dumb witness to the class war, and should rouse us slaves to class consciousness.
We should resolve over the mutilated body of this humble and faithful comrade to unite, organize and resolve that this class war shall end in the coming Co-Operative Commonwealth.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday August 3, 1903 “Child slavery’s awful curse eats at the vitals of the nation.”
From The Comrade of August 1903:
Child Slaves of Philadelphia
By J. Spargo
CHILD slavery’s awful curse eats at the vitals of the nation. But nowhere to a more alarming extent than in the City of Philadelphia. The great textile industries rest upon the enslavement of children and women. Not even in the South are conditions worse than here. At present the majority of the mills are idle owing to a strike for shorter hours of labor, and the children, or those of them who have not been cowed into submission, being on strike they are free to enjoy the fresh air. But when the mills are working the boys and girls are caged up for sixty hours a week in the unhealthy atmosphere common to these industrial hells.
The present strike in an effort on the part of the textile workers to obtain a reduction of the working hours to fifty- five per week. Although wages are miserably low they are willing to forfeit five hours’ pay if only they can obtain the desired reduction of hours.
In 1892, the year of the great panic, wages in the textile industry fell enormously.The Dingley Tariff of 1894 was to restore wages and improve conditions all round. So the workers voted for “Protection.” They continue to vote for “Protection” despite the fact that wages are still lower than in 1892, and that women and children-especially children-are employed in ever increasing numbers.
The law fixes the minimum age at which children may be employed in factories at thirteen years.The cold, calculating brutality of men deliberately passing a law permitting boys and girls of thirteen to be employed sixty hours a week is even more disgraceful than neglect of the question altogether would be. It is certain, however, that the law has very little effect so far as maintaining even the minimum is concerned.
There are said to be sixteen thousand children at work in the textile industries of Philadelphia,and it is certain that thousands of these are below the legal age. Factory inspection is of the most perfunctory kind: false certificates are not difficult to obtain, and it is easy to use certificates of older children to cover any “suspects.” Moreover, the parents themselves are, in too many cases, ignorant enough-or poor enough-to swear falsely as to the ages of their children. In thousands of cases this is exactly what happens. No one who knows anything whatever about the subject doubts that there are thousands of children between the ages of ten and twelve employed in the textile industries of this city in normal times.
On the morning before “Mother” Jones started to march to New York with her little “army of crusaders” from the Kensington Labor Lyceum, early in July, I saw a number of such children of both sexes. Whenever “Mother” or myself asked one of them his or her age we got the stereotyped reply “Thirteen!” But even if one could believe they spoke the truth, the fact remains that not a few of them had been employed for periods ranging from a few months to two years or even more. One little fellow told me how, in the factory where he worked, when the inspector came round, the smallest of them were either hidden or sent out to play. In not a few cases the “inspection” of the factory all takes place in the employer’s office as every intelligent mill worker knows.
One of the effects of child labor, the illiteracy of adults, I have observed here and in the surrounding towns and villages to a much greater extent than anywhere else in this country. It is by no means an uncommon thing to meet native born Americans of twenty-five years of age, or over, unable to read or write even their own names! What a terrible price to pay for the folly and crime of child labor!
Of course, the first break in the ranks of the strikers took place among the children. Poor children! they entered upon the strike with light hearts. To them it meant a chance to rest; to straighten their little backs. But they were in most cases easily browbeaten by the brutal bosses or their agents. I heard of several cases where mothers took their children-literally dragged them-to the mill gates and forced them inside to “scab.”One little fellow I heard of was dragged and beaten by his mother right up to the mill door when he was roughly pulled inside by a bully of a foreman who hurled a volley of curses at the cowering child.And the burden of the little fellow’s cry was “Don’t make me scab! I’ll die first! Don’t make me scab!”
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday August 2, 1903 New York, New York – Mother Jones Holds Street Meeting, Pens Letter to President
From the Brooklyn Standard Union of July 31, 1903:
From the Philadelphia North American of July 31, 1903 -letter from Mother Jones to President Theodore Roosevelt:
New York, July 30.
The Hon. Theodore Roosevelt President of the United States Oyster Bay, Long Island
Your Excellency-
Twice before have I written to you requesting an audience, that I might lay my mission before you and have your advice in a matter which bears upon the welfare of the whole nation.
I speak of the emancipation from the mills and factories of the hundreds of thousands of young children who are yielding up their lives for the commercial supremacy of the nation.
Failing to receive a reply to either of the letters, I went yesterday to Oyster Bay, taking with me three of these children that they might plead to you personally. Secretary Barnes informed us that before we might hope for an interview with you we must first lay the whole matter before you in a letter. He assured me of its delivery to you personally, and also that it would receive your attention.
I have espoused the cause of the laboring class in general, and of suffering childhood in particular. It was for them that our march of principle was begun. We sought to draw the attention of the public to these little ones, so that sentiment would be aroused and ultimately the children freed from the workshop and sent to schools. I know of no question of to-day that demands from those who have at heart the perpetuity of this republic more attention.
The child of to-day is the man or woman of to-morrow, the one the citizen and the other the mother of still future citizens. I ask, Mr. President, what kind of citizen will be the child who toils twelve hours a day in an unsanitary atmosphere, stunted mentally and physically, and surrounded with often immoral influences. Denied education, he cannot assume the duties of true citizenship, and enfeebled physically he falls a ready victim to the perverting influences which our present economic conditions have created.
I grant you, Mr. President, that there are State laws which should regulate these matters, but results have proved that they are inadequate. In my little band are three boys, the eldest 11 years of age, who have worked in the mills a year or more, without interference from the authorities. All efforts to bring about reform have failed.
I have been moved to this, Mr. President, because of actual experience in the mills. I have seen little children without the first rudiments of education and no prospect of acquiring any. I have seen little children with hands, fingers and other parts of their bodies mutilated because of their childish ignorance of machinery.
I feel that no nation can be truly great while such conditions exist without attempted remedy.
It is to be hoped that our crusade on behalf of enslaved childhood will stir up a general sentiment and secure the enforcement of the present laws.
But that is not sufficient as this is not alone a question of separate States, but of the whole nation. We come to you as the chief representative of that nation. I believe Federal laws should be passed and enforced governing this evil and including a penalty for violation.
If this is practicable, and I believe you will agree that it is, surely you can advise me of the necessary steps to pursue.
I have with me three children who have walked one hundred miles, serving as living proof of the truth of what I say.
If you decide to see these children, I will bring them before you at any time you may set.
Secretary Barnes has assured me on an early reply, and this should be sent care of the Ashland House, New York City.
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday July 30, 1903
Mother Jones Speaks on Child Labor While Lions Roar at Bostock’s on Coney Island
From The New York Times of July 27, 1903:
MOTHER JONES SPEAKS TO
CONEY ISLAND CROWD
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Delivers Address in a Menagerie
and Lions Interrupt.
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Anti-Child Labor Crusader Rebukes Young Man in the
Audience Who Smiled-On to Oyster Bay This Week.
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“Mother” Jones and her army were the central attraction yesterday afternoon [Sunday July 26th] at Bostock’s trained animal show at Coney Island. Mme. Morelli and her cage full of snarling leopards, reluctantly obeying her at the persuasion of a horse whip skillfully wielded by scarred arms, did not excite half the interest there was in “Mother” Jones and her army. Even the baby elephant that wanders about in the crowd at the entrance of the animal show excited little interest, to the intense mortification of the massive infant. The monkey tribe huddled dejectedly in the corners of their cages, and the animals indulged in long siestas with their backs turned to those who had come to admire them. They went through their performances in the steel-barred stage sullenly, with occasional exhibitions of savagery, at the idea that they were eclipsed by “Mother” Jones and her army.
The “barker” who raps a cane on his elevated desk to attract attention to the wonders of the show early in the afternoon grew hoarse in his announcements that “Mother” Jones would deliver an address at 4:30 o’clock. The building was well filled some time before the scheduled address of “Mother” Jones.
At the conclusion of the performance of the animals the stage scenery was shifted so that it was meant to represent the Colosseum, the populace high above all danger of the animals, and an Emperor on either side, with forearms extended and thumbs pointing downward, the two Emperors within easy striking distance of any beast, not suffering with rheumatism, which might prefer royal to other meat.
“Mother” Jones offered no objection to the stage setting; on the contrary, she expressed her approval. They were typical of aristocracy and her crusade is aimed against what she designates as “the aristocracy of employers.”
The official announcer heralded the coming of “Mother” Jones and her army, and they appeared in the Colosseum surrounded by bars. The idea of being caged was disagreeable to the speaker, and she positively refused to talk from “behind the bars.” A platform was therefore arranged for her outside of the cage, she standing on a board resting on two chairs. She had scarcely begun to talk when the largest lion, known as “the King of the Beasts,” set up a horrible roar, the others joining in his protest against attacks on aristocracy, even if it was of the human kind. During her remarks “Mother” Jones was constantly interrupted by the discourteous beasts. In the course of her address she said in part:
After a long and weary march, with more miles to travel, we are on our way to see President Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. We will ask him to recommend the passage of a bill by Congress to protect children against the greed of the manufacturer. We want him to hear the wail of the children, who never have a chance to go to school, but work from ten to eleven hours a day in the textile mills of Philadelphia, weaving the carpets that he and you walk on, and the curtains and clothes of the people.
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