Hellraisers Journal – Thursday August 14, 1913
Pat Quinlan Released from New Jersey State Penitentiary but Soon Rearrested
From the Appeal to Reason of August 2, 1913:
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From the Appeal to Reason of August 9, 1913:
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Hellraisers Journal – Sunday December 1, 1912
Terre Haute, Indiana – Debs Responds to Indictment by Federal Grand Jury
From the Richmond Evening Item (Indiana) of November 26, 1912:
DEBS DECLARES WORLD WOULD
STAND AGHAST
———-IF WHOLE TRUTH WERE DISCLOSED ABOUT
CONDITIONS AT LEAVENWORTH PRISON.
———-(By the Associated Press.)
Terre Haute, Ind., Nov. 26.-Eugene V. Debs, indicted by the federal grand jury at Girard, Kas., Saturday, appeared at his home Monday, refuting the report that he had started for Ft. Scott, Kas., on hearing of the indictment. In speaking of the case, Debs said:
These indictments are based on an infamous lie. There was never any attempt on the part of the officers of The Appeal to Reason to induce any witness to leave anywhere. I have recently been the candidate of the working classes for the presidency. I suppose I can now be the candidate of the capitalistic class, for the penitentiary. Were the whole truth told about conditions in the Ft. Leavenworth prison, the world would stand agast.
[Emphasis added.]
From The Coming Nation of November 30, 1912:
AN INCREDIBLE STORY
By A. M. Simons
THAT within two weeks after receiving the votes of almost a million citizens for the office of president of the United States, Eugene V. Debs should be indicted by federal grand jury for obstructing the orderly process of the court by alleged tampering with a witness is almost incredible…..
When the Appeal turned the light on Leavenworth penitentiary it pulled a bone away from a pack of hungry office-holding curs who sprang in hydrophobic rage upon the persons who had disturbed their foul feast. When to this was added the exposure of the corruption of the federal courts of the nation and especially of the southwest, another allied pack was started into full cry for vengeance. It was easy for these to get the backing of the great powers of capitalism, and all the branches of class government…..
In their blind baffled rage the conspirators played their last card. A servile grand jury indicted Eugene V. Debs, Fred D. Warren and J. I. Sheppard for attempted tampering with a witness in the case based upon the Leavenworth exposure…..
The object of this assault is to cripple the publications against which it is directed. Throughout this fight the Appeal has helped to carry the COMING NATION. In this desperate crisis no extra weight can be carried. Yet if the news goes out that the first effect of the assault was to compel the abandonment of the COMING NATION that will have all the effect of a victory for the enemy. They will have restricted and choked the voice of revolt by just that much. They will have strangled in youth what promises to be a powerful champion when full grown…..
[Emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday November 26, 1912
Girard, Kansas – Wayland’s Last Paragraph, “…no unkind words…”
From the Appeal to Reason of November 23, 1912:
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———-
To a Good Soldier
[-by Kate Richards O’Hare]
We shed no tears of grief; grief is for the naked lives of those who have made the world no better.
We have no idle, vain, regrets; for who are we to judge, or say that he has shirked his task or left some work undone? No eyes can count the seed that he has sown, the thoughts that he has planted in a million souls now covered deep beneath the mold of ignorance which will not spring into life until the snows have heaped upon his gave and the sun of springtime comes to reawaken the sleeping world.
Sleep on our comrade; rest your weary mind and soul; sleep sweet and deep, and if in other realms the boon is granted that we may again take up our work, you will be with us and give us of your strength, your patience and your loyalty to your fellow men. We bring no ostentatious tributes of our love; we spend not gold for flowers for your tomb, but with hearts that rejoice at your deliverance offer a comrade’s tribute to lie above your breast-the red flag of human brotherhood.
KATE RICHARD O’HARE.
St Louis. Mo.[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday November 20, 1912
Girard, Kansas – Comrade J. A. Wayland Has Died; His Memory Will Live On
From the Appeal to Reason of November 16, 1912:
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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday November 5, 1912
Miss Helen Keller States She Would Love to Carry the Red Flag Past The Times
From The New York Call of November 3, 1912:
How I Became a Socialist
-by Helen Keller
———-
For several months my name and socialism have appeared often together in the newspapers. A friend tells me that I have shared the front pages with baseball, Mr. Roosevelt and the New York police scandal. The association does not make me altogether happy but, on the whole, I am glad that many people are interested in me and in the educational achievements of my teacher, Mrs. Macy (Anne Sullivan). Even notoriety may be turned to beneficent uses, and I rejoice if the disposition of the newspapers to record my activities results in bringing more often into their columns the word Socialism. In the future I hope to write about socialism, and to justify in some measure the great amount of publicity which has been accorded to me and my opinions. So far I have written little and said little about the subject. I have written a few letters, notably one to Comrade Fred Warren which was printed in the Appeal to Reason. I have talked to some reporters, one of whom, Mr. Ireland of the New York World, made a very flattering report and gave fully and fairly what I said. I have never been in Schenectady. I have never met Mayor Lunn. I have never had a letter from him, but he has sent kind messages to me through Mr. Macy. Owing to Mrs. Macy’s illness, whatever plans I had to join the workers in Schenectady have been abandoned.
On such negative and relatively insignificant matters have been written many editorials in the capitalist press and in the Socialist press. The clippings fill a drawer. I have not read a quarter of them, and I doubt if I shall ever read them all. If on such a small quantity of fact so much comment has followed, what will the newspapers do if I ever set to work in earnest to write and talk in behalf of socialism? For the present I should like to make a statement of my position and correct some false reports and answer some criticisms which seem to me unjust.
First — How did I become a Socialist? By reading. The first book I read was Wells’ New World for Old. I read it on Mrs. Macy’s recommendation. She was attracted by its imaginative quality, and hoped that its electric style might stimulate and interest me. When she gave me the book, she was not a Socialist and she is not a Socialist now. Perhaps she will be one before Mr. Macy and I are done arguing with her.
My reading has been limited and slow. I take German bimonthly Socialist periodicals printed in braille for the blind. (Our German comrades are ahead of us in many respects.) I have also in German braille Kautsky’s discussion of the Erfurt Program. The other socialist literature that I have read has been spelled into my hand by a friend who comes three times a week to read to me whatever I choose to have read. The periodical which I have most often requested her lively fingers to communicate to my eager ones is the National Socialist. She gives the titles of the articles and I tell her when to read on and when to omit. I have also had her read to me from the International Socialist Review articles the titles of which sounded promising. Manual spelling takes time. It is no easy and rapid thing to absorb through one’s fingers a book of 50,000 words on economics. But it is a pleasure, and one which I shall enjoy repeatedly until I have made myself acquainted with all the classic socialist authors.
In the light of the foregoing I wish to comment on a piece about me which was printed in the Common Cause and reprinted in the Live Issue, two anti-socialist publications. Here is a quotation from that piece:
“For twenty-five years Miss Keller’s teacher and constant companion has been Mrs. John Macy, formerly of Wrentham, Mass. Both Mr. and Mrs. Macy are enthusiastic Marxist propagandists, and it is scarcely surprising that Miss Keller, depending upon this lifelong friend for her most intimate knowledge of life, should have imbibed such opinions.”
Mr. Macy may be an enthusiastic Marxist propagandist, though I am sorry to say he has not shown much enthusiasm in propagating his Marxism through my fingers. Mrs. Macy is not a Marxist, nor a socialist. Therefore what the Common Cause says about her is not true. The editor must have invented that, made it out of whole cloth, and if that is the way his mind works, it is no wonder that he is opposed to socialism. He has not sufficient sense of fact to be a socialist or anything else intellectually worthwhile.
Consider another quotation from the same article.
The headline reads: “SCHENECTADY REDS ARE ADVERTISING; USING HELEN KELLER, THE BLIND GIRL, TO RECEIVE PUBLICITY.”
Then the article begins:
“It would be difficult to imagine anything more pathetic than the present exploitation of poor Helen Keller by the Socialists of Schenectady. For weeks the party’s press agencies have heralded the fact that she is a Socialist, and is about to become a member of Schenectady’s new Board of Public Welfare.”
There’s a chance for satirical comment on the phrase, “the exploitation of poor Helen Keller.” But I will refrain, simply saying that I do not like the hypocritical sympathy of such a paper as the Common Cause, but I am glad if it knows what the word “exploitation” means.
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Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday May 15, 1912
Girard, Kansas – Eugene Debs on Shipping Special Edition of the Appeal
From The Coming Nation of May 11, 1912
-April 22nd, Shipping the Special Judiciary Edition of April 27th:
A view of part of the great record-breaking edition of the Appeal to Reason, at the railroad station, Girard, Kansas
The photographer’s lens was not wide enough to catch all of the piles of the special Judiciary Edition of the Appeal to Reason which were delivered to one single train. The total edition was over 3,000,000.
From the Appeal to Reason of May 4, 1912:
April 22, 1912, at Girard
BY EUGENE V. DEBS.
SITTING at my desk at the APPEAL office, I hear the whirl and roar of the mammoth press. The Judicial Edition is racing through it-20,000 copies an hour. “Old Chap,” the veteran pressman, is pitted against his own record.
At the rate of a quarter of a million a day it will take twelve days to turn out this marvelous edition the greatest ever issued by any paper, in any nation, since the printing art was born.
“Old Chap” and the boys are standing by the racing, roaring old leviathan to win the wager that “she will not make it” and she does not miss a throb of her swift-beating heart in all the twenty-four hours of the day and night.
All about the APPEAL today the boys and girls are tense with trial-“drinking in the breath of their own swiftness”-making the record that is to stand against the world.
There is no night in Girard this week-there is but one long day-the day of Wayland, Warren and Phifer’s defiance to Pollock, Hook and Bone-the day of the APPEAL triumphant over the criminal courts of capitalist America.
* * *
IT is now ten-thirty in the morning. I am near the depot platform and I gaze upon a mountain raised by human hands and human hearts and human brains-in sweet and sympathetic social alliance-the like of which the eyes of man never saw before.
Piled high enough to hide the depot and extending far enough to tower like a range of mountain peaks, the APPEAL,-a thousand pouches and a million copies-is awaiting transportation. And this is but the first installment of the fabulous edition.
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Hellraisers Journal – Friday October 27, 1911
Mother Jones News Round-Up for August 1911, Part II
Mother Jones Accompanies Samuel Gompers on Visit to Jailed Miners
On Sunday, August 20th, Mother Jones accompanied Gompers on his visit to the miners jailed by Injunction Judge Whitford, which visit was described in the August 29th edition of The Joliet News (Illinois):
President Gompers [while in Denver] en route to the Pacific coast expressed a desire to visit the coal miners who have been made the victims of the abuse of the injunction writ in the strike in the northern coal fields of the state. The committee in charge made suitable arrangements and a trip was made to the quarters of the miners in the jail, where Mother Jones, on behalf of Mr. Gompers, presented the prisoners with a large bouquet of flowers. An informal and impromptu meeting was held and a few remarks made by Mr. Gompers. The prisoner have been accorded the privileges of the court yard and following the meeting inside the jail all retired to the court yard where, with the grated windows of county jail serving as a background, a group picture was taken, President Gompers and Mother Jones being the central figures.
[Photograph added.]
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From The Denver Post of August 21, 1911:
GOMPERS VISITS MINERS IN JAIL
———-“Distortions of law” and “byplays of justice” were terms applied to the injunctions issued by District Judge Greeley W. Whitford in the miners’ trouble of northern Colorado by Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, in a speech at Eagles’ hall in the Club building at 2 o’clock Sunday afternoon [August 20th].
Later in the day he visited the miners in jail and told them they were martyrs to labor’s cause and deserved to be ranked with Lincoln and Jefferson in their devotion to the people. He told the men thy suffered no moral stigma and the good their imprisonment is doing for labor could not be measured in words…..
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Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 29, 1911
Chicago, Illinois – Barnes Resigns as National Secretary of Socialist Party
From the Appeal to Reason of August 26, 1911:
RESIGNATION OF BARNES.
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J. Mahlon Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist party [Socialist Party of America], has resigned. The resignation was accepted by the national executive committee and John M. Work, who has been head clerk in the national office was made national secretary until an election can be held.
This a consummation of a hard and bitter fight that has been waged against Barnes. There was no charge against his official acts, but only relative to his private life. Twice the national executive committee investigated the charges, and in both case found that while there were many charges, there was no definite proof of his guilt. So soon, however, as an affidavit was presented showing that in day s past Barnes had been guilty of immorality, being charged with paternity of a seven-year-old girl, the action indicated above was taken. Barnes denies guilt, but admits it was best for the party that he retire.
This much must be said of the case, that the Socialist have handled the matter as no other party would dare do. With democrats and republicans it has been assumed that the private life of the individual has absolutely nothing to do with the fitness for public office. The notorious Tom Taggard, who was proven guilty of running numerous house of ill-fame and who was accused in the Ella Gingles case, was chairman of the democratic national central committee, and nothing was said about it. So soon, however, as it was charged that the private life of a Socialist official was not all it might be there was agitation, that amounted to a clamor, for his removal, and when the first affidavit, which made definite and positive charges, was brought to light, resignation was offered and accepted.
Nothing could more clearly show the attitude of the Socialist Party on questions of personal purity and nothing could demonstrate more clearly that the Socialist party is capable of managing its own affairs and having its will executed.
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[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Monday January 23, 1911
Columbus, Ohio – Mother Jones Speaks at Miners’ Convention
From the Washington Sunday Star of January 22, 1911:
LIE IS PASSED FREELY AT MINERS’ CONVENTION
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“Mother Jones” Makes Address Calling
Supreme Court Judges Real Anarchists.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio, January 21.-Control of the United Mine Workers’ convention came to a severe test in the contest for the seating of delegates from nine locals of district No. 2 of central Pennsylvania. Charges of falsehoods were made freely by each side and the convention finally adjourned to continue the fight Monday.
Expected contests over the seating of President Francis Feehan of the Pittsburg district did not materialize and he was seated without final objection.
“Mother” Jones spoke before the convention. She classes members of the United States Supreme Court and Gov. Harmon of Ohio among “the real anarchists of the country.”
[…..]
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
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Hellraisers Journal – Monday January 16, 1911
Girard, Kansas – Fred Warren, Editor of Appeal Reason, Must Go to Jail
From the International Socialist Review of January 1911:
EDITORIAL
Fred Warren Goes to Jail.
On December 30, 1905, Frank Steunenberg was killed by the explosion of a dynamite bomb at Caldwell, Idaho. Several weeks later Charles H. Moyer, President of the Western Federation of Miners; William D. Haywood, Secretary, and George E. Pettibone, an honorary member of the organization, were kidnapped from their home in Colorado and secretly carried off to Idaho on a special train to be tried for the murder of Steunenberg. Requisition papers were issued by the Governor of Colorado on an affidavit signed by the County Attorney in Idaho, setting forth that the men were present in Idaho when the crime was committed and had fled from the state, although every one concerned knew perfectly well that they had not been in Idaho for months. The Western Federation of Miners was at that time engaged in a death struggle with the mine owners, and it is a fair inference that this kidnapping was a preconceived plan to discredit and crush this organization.
The capitalist press of the whole country united to fasten the charge of conspiracy to commit murder upon these men, while the Socialist press, with scarcely an exception, defended them. They were held for nearly a year and a half without trial, while strenuous efforts were made by both accusers and defendants to arouse public opinion on one side or the other. In this situation Fred D. Warren, editor of the Appeal to Reason at Girard, Kans., conceived the idea of giving the American people a striking object lesson. With this in view, he had postal cards printed offering a reward for the kidnapping of ex-Governor Taylor of Kentucky, who was at that time under indictment for murder in his own state and was safe in Indiana, because the Republican governor of that state refused to sign extradition papers.
This object lesson was an important factor in arousing public sentiment for the imprisoned miners, and when Haywood was finally put on trial he was acquitted; the other men were finally discharged. But the government officials and their capitalist masters did not forget the part Fred Warren played in their defeat, and an indictment was brought against him for having “sent scurrilous, defamatory and threatening matter through the mails.” After long delay he was tried and convicted by a packed jury, every member of which was a Republican. From this decision he appealed. Again long delays, and finally, after election is over, the Appellate Court has sustained the decision of the District Court, and Fred Warren must go to jail for six months. On the 21st of January, he is to begin serving his sentence.
