Hellraisers Journal – Friday July 18, 1919
Mother Jones News for June 1919
-Found Speaking at Memorial for Coal Miners of Herrin, Illinois
From Springfield [Massachusetts] Republican of June 1, 1919:
Mother Jones has participated in many a successful strike. During the war she is reported to have said to miners: “Let us lick the kaiser first, then we can lick the operators.”
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday July 17, 1919
Chicago, Illinois – Arrested for Speech Critical of Government
-Dissident to be “turned over to the government.”
From The Chicago Sunday Tribune of July 13, 1919:
Find Red Flag Poem on
Peace Treaty Assailer
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Frank Michalucine, of 14 West Superior street, was arrested in a poolroom at North Clark and West Huron streets yesterday after he is said to have made derogatory remarks about the government and the treaty which is now before congress for ratification.
When searched at the detective bureau a copy of a poem called “The Red Flag” and said to have been written by Ralph Chaplin an inmate of the Leavenworth penitentiary, was found in his pocket.
Michalucine was arrested some time ago by federal agents on the same charge but was released. He will be turned over to the government tomorrow.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday May 23, 1919
W. E. B. Du Bois on “Returning Soldiers”
From The Crisis of May 1919:
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RETURNING SOLDIERS
We are returning from war! THE CRISIS and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle. For bleeding France and what she means and has meant and will mean to us and humanity and against the threat of German race arrogance, we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood; for America and her highest ideals, we fought in far-off hope; for the dominant southern oligarchy entrenched in Washington, we fought in bitter resignation. For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality and devilish insult—for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also.
But today we return! We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday April 30, 1919
From Appeal Book Department: “The Unbroken Tradition” by Nora Connolly
In the April 26th edition of the Appeal to Reason, we find Miss Nora Connolly’s book, “The Irish Rebellion of 1916 or The Unbroken Tradition,” on sale for $1.25 (see below). In the April 12th edition of the Appeal we find a review of Miss Connolly’s book along with a short history of the Easter Uprising of 1916.
From the Appeal to Reason of April 12, 1919:
Daughter of Rebel Leader Tells Story of Irish Revolt
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Thus goes one of the fighting songs of the Irish patriots who rose in armes against British authority in Ireland, the week of Easter, 1916. The physical failure of the brief, spirited upflare of independence is now a part of Ireland’s tragic history; yet today no one who sees clearly can doubt that the cause of a free Ireland is stronger than ever.
Nora Connolly-a young girl possessed of the fortitude and vision that is the unending marvel of character displayed by all true revolutionists-was an intimate participant in the rebellion of 1916. Her father, James Connolly, was the leader of the rebel forces and was executed for his “treason” to what most Irishmen have always regarded as an alien and hostile government. Nora Connolly escaped after the rebellion and made her way, through caution and subterfuge, to America. Here she set down the story of this ill-fated uprising with a direct candid simplicity that reveals events in their bold, epic outlines. This story, whose unaffected realism is so intense that the reader vividly visualizes and emotionally seems to move in the very midst of the scenes described is called “The Unbroken Tradition,” because, says Nora Connolly:
In Ireland we have the unbroken tradition of struggle for our freedom. Every generation has seen blood spilt, and sacrifice cheerfully made that the tradition might live. Our songs call us to battle or mourn the lost struggle; our stories are of glorious victory and glorious defeat. And it is through them the tradition has been handed down till an Irish man or woman has no greater dream of gory than of dying “A soldier’s death so Ireland’s free.”
Hellraisers Journal – Monday January 27, 1919
Leavenworth Penitentiary – Fellow Workers Arrive from Sacramento
From The Leavenworth Times of January 26, 1919:
MORE I. W. W. PRISONERS HERE
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Special Car Load of Them Brought in
From California Yesterday
-Names and Sentences.
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Silent Defenders
Another big batch of I. W. W. prisoners was landed in the Federal penitentiary yesterday. They were brought in from California in a special car in charge of six deputy United States marshals. They got into the prison at 3:30 in the afternoon.
These were all white men and they were a tough looking bunch. There were sharp and well dressed looking prisoners in the ninety-one that were brought over from Chicago with Haywood last fall, but the California gang seems to be run down hobos.
They will be dressed in Monday and put to work Tuesday. Like the other I. W. W. prisoners they will be divided up among the working gangs of the penitentiary.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday January 20, 1919
Mother Jones News for December 1918, Part I
-Mother Found Speaking before Illinois Federation of Labor Convention
On Wednesday December 4, 1918, Mother Jones was introduced at the Convention by John H. Walker, President of the Illinois State Federation of Labor. She stood before the delegates gathered together in Bloomington for the 36th Annual Convention of the Illinois F. of L. and gave a long and spirited address in which she said, in part:
Your President is not a member of the high class burglars’ association—he wouldn’t welcome me here if he was.
Mr. Chairman and Fellow Workers, we are passing through the greatest change the world’s history has ever undertaken to bring man through. The world is making over, it is making into a new world, and it is up to the workers to say how that world will be shaped for the future destiny of the race. If we are indifferent to the change that is coming the future generations will pay the penalty.
I want to make a statement to you. I don’t live in your club rooms, I don’t belong to your parasitical type of woman, I am not a Sunday School teacher, I don’t work for Jesus—He don’t need me. I want to open the eyes of the workers…..
You and your organizations are up against a stone wall, and the most insidious machine that was ever organized in the human history is organized to break you. Are you going to let them do it? Or will you rise like men and tell them you are at the threshold of a new civilization, the map of the world is changing and you are going to change, too? You went abroad and cleaned up the kaiser, now let us clean up the kaisers at home!….
You know what the women did in New York. I went there to talk to the women. The women came to hear me. The commissioner of police sent a woman there who did not belong to my class. I spotted her immediately. She was one of Mrs. Belmont’s little lapdogs and when I began to talk she said I must be careful. She said she was the president of a number of organizations. One of them was a school decorating organization. I got the women worked up anyhow and they went out and cleaned up the scabs. The cops ran and the women with babies in their arms took the clubs and beat the cops. They were not Sunday School women, they were fighters. If the men had the fight in them those women had we would have won the battle in New York…..
Tom Mooney has been sentenced by order of the capitalists, the chamber of crooks, of California, to life imprisonment. I know Mooney, I know his wife, I know his mother. He has been a good fighter. He may have made a great noise at times, just as I have, but I know he had no more hand in the crime he is charged with, nor did any other working man, than I had, and I was a thousand miles away from San Francisco at that time. I am going to tour the nation and arouse the people to the injustice of that trial…..
Hellraisers Journal – Friday December 27, 1918 New York, New York – Jack Reed & Art Young on Second Masses Trial
From The Liberator of December 1918:
-Defense Attorney Seymour Stedman by Art Young
SEYMOUR STEDMAN, attorney for the defense, in his eloquent summing up, referred as follows to the fact that the Masses editors asked an injunction compelling the Post Office to mail the very magazine for publishing which they were later indicted:
Do men who are committing a crime go into a Federal Court and face a District Attorney and ask the privilege of continuing it? A strange set of burglars! A strange set of footpads! A strange set o smugglers! A strange set of criminals! I ask Mr. Barnes to tell you when before in his experience, men in the City of New York came in and filed an appeal, opening all their proof and all their evidence and all their testimony and said, “if the Court please, we insist on the right to continue this deep, dark, infamous conspiracy, and have it sanctified by an advocate of the United States Court.” History finds no parallel that I know of in any criminal procedure which has ever taken place.
-John Reed on Second Masses Trial
About the Second Masses Trial
by John Reed
IN the United States political offenses are dealt with more harshly than anywhere else in the world. In the amendment to the Espionage Act [the Sedition Act] it is made a crime equivalent to manslaughter to “criticize the form of government.” The sentences in Espionage cases run anywhere from ten to twenty years at hard labor, with fines of thousands of dollars.
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