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| Dan Clore... |
 Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 3:48 am |
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/nov/01/a-fight-for-free-speech/
November 1, 2009
A fight for free speech
One hundred years ago, workers and activists protested a new city law
limiting labor agitation, sparking the nation’s first significant free
speech battle
By Jim Kershner
The Spokesman-Review
jimk at (no spam) spokesman.com, (509) 459-5493
One of the most dramatic periods in Spokane’s history – the Free Speech
Fight of 1909 – began 100 years ago Monday on a downtown street corner.
It would take an entire book to do justice to this wild period of
Spokane’s history. Yet we can sum it up a few sentences:
• The Spokane City Council enacted a law in early 1909 banning speeches
on downtown streets, as a way to limit labor agitation.
• The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – nicknamed the “Wobblies” –
issued a call for hundreds of workers and activists to converge on
Spokane to “fill the jails” in a mass civil protest.
• Beginning on Nov. 2, 1909, activists took turns standing on soapboxes
and getting arrested as soon as they opened their mouths.
• Within weeks, 500 people had been arrested, including the 19-year-old
socialist firebrand Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
• The city was forced to house the prisoners at an abandoned school and
at the barracks at Fort George Wright. The costs for the city – and the
bad publicity – began to add up.
• In March 1910, the fight ended with both sides declaring victory. The
city repealed the law and the Wobblies moved on to similar fights in
other cities.
It was the “first significant free speech fight in the country,” said
Dale Raugust, a Spokane historian who has written about the event. It
was also one of the first examples of mass, nonviolent civil disobedience.
It all began with boiling resentment over what the Wobblies called
Spokane’s employment “sharks.”
Dozens of employment agencies in downtown Spokane were charging loggers
and miners $1 for a job and then splitting the fee with employers who
would fire the worker after only a day or two. Then the worker would
have to go back to the agency and pay another dollar for a job.
One logging company hired 3,000 men one winter in order to maintain a
crew of 50, according to author Robert Tyler in “Rebels In the Woods:
The IWW in the Pacific Northwest.”
The IWW already had a reputation as one of the most radical – and
effective – unions in the country and was particularly strong in
Spokane. It began holding mass public demonstrations on the streets near
the agencies.
Alarmed, the Spokane City Council passed an ordinance effective Jan. 1,
1909, banning public speeches on the streets within the “fire limits” –
the area burned in the Great Fire of 1889, i.e., most of downtown.
The Wobblies were outraged at what they saw as abridgement of their
constitutional rights. So they declared Nov. 2, 1909, to be Free Speech
Day and issued a nationwide call for people to come “and fill the jails
of Spokane.” The idea was to protest the law by violating it en masse
and straining the city’s resources.
Spokane authorities responded with bravado. Police Chief John T.
Sullivan claimed he had jail accommodations for 500 and prepared a
special “rockpile” at Monroe and Broadway for his new inmates.
When Nov. 2 arrived, both sides played their roles. Dozens of men and
women stepped up to soapboxes at Stevens Street and Front Avenue (now
Spokane Falls Boulevard) and were immediately arrested.
One city detective saw a man about to get up on a soapbox and said,
“Come this way, please.”
“I’m an American citizen and I want my rights,” replied the man.
“That’s what they all say,” said the detective, who proceeded to smash
the box so “that it might not serve for any more unkempt Ciceros,”
according to The Spokesman-Review.
Police also raided the IWW hall and arrested the editor of the IWW’s
West Coast weekly newspaper, which was published in Spokane, and several
“girl agitators.” Suffragettes and the city’s “club women” had
enthusiastically joined the cause.
The day’s batch numbered about 103 people, all of whom spent the night
in the city’s jail. Already word was leaking out of overcrowding and
rough conditions.
“If people insist on crowding the jail, then they can’t complain because
the jail is crowded,” said the unsympathetic police chief.
The Wobblies defiantly announced that the Free Speech Fight was just
getting started. By the next day, the arrest total reached 150. On Nov.
4, the city’s fire hoses were turned loose on an orator at Front and
Stevens.
“His words, ‘Feller workers,’ were cut short with a cold, blinding
stream of water,” reported The Spokesman-Review. “… The crowd scattered
in every direction.”
Spokane was making national news. The reaction of local citizens can be
gauged in part by the editorials in the local newspapers. The city’s two
dominant newspapers, The Spokesman-Review and the Chronicle, were
uniformly unsympathetic toward the Wobblies and their cause.
The Chronicle editor called them “professional tramps and hoboes.” The
Spokesman-Review editor called them “anarchists,” “chronic agitators,”
“loafers” and “shiftless, irresponsible, indolent men.”
As for free speech, they found no merit in the Wobblies’ cause.
The Spokesman-Review called the anti-street-speaking ordinance
“reasonable and necessary.” It said that the Wobblies could hold all of
the meetings they want outside the “fire limits” or on vacant lots or in
halls, but they did not have the right to “obstruct business streets and
sidewalks” and “force their doctrines” upon the unwilling ears of the
citizens of Spokane.
The Spokane Press, which called itself the “people’s paper,” had a
different perspective. It advocated immediately modifying the
street-speaking law to allow citizens to “go ahead and spiel.”
“Citizens of Spokane, the members of the IWW are American citizens,”
wrote the editor of the Press. “Remember that. Free speech is an
inherent right.”
But the city’s establishment was in no mood to compromise. The papers
got plenty of mileage out of the fact that 40 percent of those arrested
were not American citizens – many were German, Swedish, Italian and Irish.
As arrests mounted into the hundreds, conditions in jail emerged as the
most incendiary issue. The Spokane Press ran a headline screaming,
“Human Bedlam in the City Bastille.”
The abandoned Franklin School was pressed into service to house hundreds
of inmates. When the school grew too crowded, the federal government
allowed the city to move hundreds of prisoners into barracks at Fort
George Wright. About 500 people were incarcerated.
Many Wobbly rank-and-file inmates refused to do hard labor on the police
chief’s rock pile, so they were put on a bread-and-water diet. Their
leaders, who were better fed, resolved to go on a hunger strike in sympathy.
“It took a lot of will power, but when they brought our food, we threw
it out through the bars on the floor of the hallway,” wrote Wobbly
organizer John Panzner in a memoir. “There were steaks, potatoes, bread,
coffee and tin plates and cups all over the floor.”
“The petty acts of the men in jail, such as throwing their food upon the
floor, breaking the dishes, screaming out silly songs and pouring
torrents of abuse upon the law and police department, are what sane and
orderly minds look for from incorrigible children and men in insane
asylums,” said The Spokesman-Review.
The hunger strike was called off after about eight days, after
generating plenty of publicity.
And those “silly songs”? They were selections from an IWW songbook
printed in Spokane, which would become legendary in the annals of folk
music as the “Little Red Songbook.”
By Nov. 12, one of the stars of the Wobbly movement – the young activist
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – had arrived in Spokane.
She took over as editor of the Wobbly paper, and did not pull any
punches. She called one of Spokane’s judges a “lackey of the parasites”
and referred to Spokane police as “hired thugs,” “Cossacks,” “fat-jowled
Hibernians” and “hired clubbers.”
Flynn was arrested for conspiracy at the end of November, along with
four other “ringleaders,” and spent a night in jail. She was released on
bond and immediately wrote a sensational article accusing the jailers of
using the women’s prison as a kind of municipal brothel.
City authorities retaliated by raiding the Wobbly paper and confiscating
7,000 copies of the December issue. At a trial a few days later, Flynn
was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to three months in prison, but
was promptly acquitted on appeal.
The tone of the fight was getting nastier. At Thanksgiving, the press
reported that the Franklin School inmates would be given a holiday meal
of “bread and water, with a dessert of fresh air.”
Wobblies instigated several lawsuits against the city over their
treatment in prison. A number of people got sick in jail, and at least
three died shortly after their release, said Raugust.
As December dragged on, the city was beginning to get nervous about this
unpleasant national publicity. The Spokesman-Review and Chronicle
indignantly refuted various “Eastern” newspaper stories accusing the
city of depriving citizens of their constitutional rights.
[That would be "rebuted", not "refuted". These words don't mean the same
thing.--DC]
Also, the bills were beginning to add up. The prisoners were costing
taxpayers at least $1,000 a week, according to one report.
“The trouble has been somewhat expensive to the taxpayers, but the money
has been spent in a good cause,” said the Chronicle. “The men who have
come here to bully the city ... have been taught a lesson they will not
soon forget.”
After 1910 arrived, both sides were ready to settle. City and IWW
officials held a conference in March in which they agreed to end the
fight. The prisoners in jail would be released and the IWW hall and
newspaper would be maintained.
The IWW agreed to drop its lawsuits. The street-speaking ordinance,
however, was left intact.
This was touted in the newspapers as a victory for the city.
“The police conceded nothing, but got everything,” said the Press.
However, within a week the city council passed a new ordinance which
allowed public street-speaking with only a few restrictions.
“I think it was a victory for the IWW, because, basically, they got what
they wanted, the right to speak on the street,” said Raugust.
The Wobblies certainly touted it as an unqualified victory. And the
problem that started it all – the corruption among the employment agency
“sharks” – was resolved as well. The city council revoked the licenses
of 19 of the 31 employment agencies.
Finally, a pair of postscripts:
• Flynn went on to become national chairperson of the Communist Party of
the United States. When she died in 1964, 25,000 people attended her
funeral in Moscow’s Red Square.
• Police Chief Sullivan was assassinated in 1911 while sitting near a
window at his home. The crime was never solved.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW):
http://www.iww.org/
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_ |
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