The Web

CHAPTER X
THE GREAT I. W. W. TRIAL

The greatest trial with which the American Protective League was identified was the genuine cause celébrè known all over the world as the I. W. W. trial. It began in the Federal Court for Chicago, presided over by Judge Kenesaw M. Landis (the same of fame in the Standard Oil case), on April 1, 1918, and ended with ninety-seven convictions and sentences in one lot. The case was concluded at two in the afternoon of August 30, 1918.

The trial lasted for five months. The preparation for it covered two years or more. The record is said to be the most elaborate and complete ever prepared in any case at law. The case was by no means a Chicago or Illinois case, but was a national and indeed an international one. The documentary and other evidence preserved in the rooms of the Bureau of Investigation in Chicago is so voluminous as to pass belief, and it includes more proof of the depravity of the human mind than any like assemblage of written and printed material known to man. It is the record of the attempted ruin of this republic.

With this great case, the American Protective League had been connected practically all the time from the date of its own inception. It had men shadowing the suspects, men intercepting their mail, men ingratiating themselves into their good graces, men watching all their comings and goings, men transcribing and indexing the reports, men looking into the law in all its phases as bearing on these cases. No one knows how many A. P. L. operatives, in all the states from Michigan westward, worked on this case for months before an arrest was made. There were fifteen lawyers, all of them members of the League, not one of whom got a cent of pay, who worked for a full year helping the Bureau of Investigation to brief the evidence. There you see the A. P. L. in action.

For months and years before the arrests, the Industrial Workers of the World, as they call themselves, had been notorious for their anarchy and violence. Countless acts of ruthlessness had marked their career; millions and perhaps billions in property had been destroyed by them; their leader had been tried for the murder of a governor of a Western state, though acquitted. Nothing lacked in their record of lawlessness and terror, and they were inspired by a Hun-like frightfulness as well as a Hun-like cunning which for a time both excited and baffled the agents of the law in a dozen Western States.

The I. W. W. as an organization began, according to their Secretary and Treasurer, W. H. Haywood, in 1904, in an amalgamation agreed to by officers of the Western Federation of Miners and the American Labor Union. The theory of the band, reduced to its least common denominator, was that of striking terror by secret acts of violence. Their ethics were precisely those of the barnburner, who works in the dark. What was their reason for their acts? None. They all had had their fair chance in America—more than a fair chance. But, because some men had wealth, they thought they also should have, and if it was not offered them free, then they would show their resentment by destroying wealth and injuring those who had it. Their plea was the wish to “aid the laboring man.” God save the mark! They did more to hurt the cause of labor than could have been done in any other way in the world. They stained the name of this republic so black that the most rabid labor unions in Europe protested and disowned them. And they got their reward for that; or at least some of them have, and more will have before the tale is told.

Sabotage and strikes were the common methods of the I. W. W. organization, which at the time of the trial numbered over 100,000 members, mostly scattered in the West in many trades. They managed strikes in widely scattered parts of the Union, and as they grew bolder, they planned in war times a general strike of all branches of labor, all over the United States. They first began work among the lumber-jacks, then among the miners. They meant to include all harvest hands in harvest time, all agricultural labor, indeed, labor of every sort. It was the plan to demand a six hour day and $6.00 a day, even for all farm labor; which, as all Americans now carrying the war prices of living can see, would inevitably have raised the price of food unspeakably had it succeeded. When opposed, they wrecked and burned and ruined, maimed, murdered.

“Big Bill” Haywood, the I. W. W. leader, execrated “military preparedness.” He called sabotage—that is to say, secret industrial wrecking—the “weapon of the disinterested.” Perhaps in peace times our fatuousness as a people would have caused us to pay small attention even to the series of I. W. W. outrages. We would have absorbed the discomforts and the crimes in our old careless, cowardly way. But now we were at war. We were making ships and airplanes, cannon and small arms and munitions and clothing and equipment. We needed the labor of every loyal man as much as we needed money and soldiers. And it was about this time that Frank H. Little (an I. W. W. leader who was lynched in Butte, Montana, soon after) wrote a letter to the general board of the I. W. W., demanding that the board should take action against the draft law requiring service in the Army.

This, coupled with the evidence of strikes, and the prospect of paralysis in many essential government activities, was going too far. It was known that the I. W. W. intended to get at the marine workers, then all allied industries. That would have meant the end of the war, or of our activity in the war.

Now, therefore, these arrogant and lawless men, never else than malcontents, became traitors. In order to work out to the quotient of ruin these vague theories about the “rights of man,” they cast aside what shred of patriotism they ever may have had to cover their nakedness of manhood, and declared themselves ready to cripple and leave helpless before her merciless foe this republic of America, whose whole theory from the foundation has been that of the rights of man, who fought in all her wars for the rights of man and has asked only in this peace the recognition of the rights of man. Ah, they were so wise, these ruffians!

But now they ran against our espionage law and its new teeth. Secretly watched for months by the many agents of the Government and its auxiliaries, the I. W. W. was at last found with sufficient goods on it to warrant the movement of the law’s forces. The charges were made that I. W. W. members had violated the espionage act; that they had fostered strikes to delay the output in war munitions; that they had spoiled industrial material; that they had been guilty of acts of violence against men not of their views; that they had violated the postal laws; that they had violated the statutes against conspiracy. The indictments were framed on those general lines, and the long arm of Uncle Sam, not that of any state or county or city, reached out for the accused.

By this time the agitations of the I. W. W. had covered Montana, Arizona and Colorado, were reaching into Utah and Nevada, and had Minnesota and Michigan next on the list. But pari passu with the I. W. W. activities had gone on those of certain other alphabetical organizations, to wit, D. J. and A. P. L.

Mr. Clabaugh, the storm center of the Chicago Bureau of Investigation, worked long months with the Government attorneys. Mr. Frank Nebeker, the trial lawyer, was an assistant U. S. Attorney General of Salt Lake City, and he was on this case for over a year. It was he who directed the raids. He was assisted by Mr. Claude Porter, of Des Moines, Iowa, U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa—now Assistant to the U. S. Attorney General in Washington. Mr. Porter came on as Special Assistant in place of Mr. Frank C. Dailey of Indianapolis, who had resigned. These men and their aids brought together, as has been said, the most elaborate legal records ever known. That they had the evidence is proved by the results of the trial—ninety-seven convictions out of the ninety-nine accused and tried. The A. P. L. got the evidence.

These men and Mr. Clabaugh were all in conference with U. S. Attorneys all over the country from Detroit west, and in conference with the governors of many states as well. Everything was kept secret. Then, one day, a wire flashed across the country which set the law afoot. At the same moment, two o’clock, Central time, on the afternoon of September 5, 1917, one hundred I. W. W. offices were raided. The Web had done its work! One hundred and sixty-five frightened insects struggled where but now a like number of arrogant and boastful traitors had strutted free. At one time Mr. Clabaugh took down to the Department of Justice in Washington a large trunk full of papers—incriminating documents once property of the I. W. W. It would take such reading of these unspeakable documents by all the American public as these officers of the law gave them, before America ever could know what foul sort of traitors she has been welcoming here at her own table.

Some of these arrested suspects were bailed out, others held in prison. Of the total arrested, ninety-nine were brought to trial. The case began before that staunch fighting man, Judge Landis—who had a son in the U. S. aviation corps himself—on Monday, April 1, 1918, and a month was spent in selecting a jury. In all this work, the A. P. L. was active, and more than once its men choked off alleged illegal enterprises—for the defendants were desperate now. The opening statement was made by Mr. Nebeker on May 2, and examination of witnesses followed for six weeks, when the Government rested till Wednesday, June 19. Mr. George Vandever, for the defense, made the opening statement on Monday, June 24. Judge Landis charged the jury Saturday, August 17. The jury brought in its verdict in fifty-five minutes and on one ballot. The statements of the prisoners were taken on Thursday, August 29, and sentence was passed by Judge Landis at 2:00 P. M., August 30, 1918.

The jury had needed but little time for deliberation. The judge in reading his instructions, dismissed the fifth count of the indictment, charging a conspiracy to violate the postal laws of the United States. After telling the jury that it had exclusive domain over the determination of the facts of the case, while it must take the law from the Court, Judge Landis said it was within the province of the court to give his opinion regarding the evidence.

“But in this case I shall not do so,” said the court. “I shall submit it to you free from expression of my own judgment. Your decision shall be the last and only one on the question of fact.”

He then explained the law of conspiracy at considerable length, after presenting a brief digest of the substance of the indictment. He announced that it was unnecessary to prove explicit agreement to enter a conspiracy against the defendants if there was circumstantial evidence that such a conspiracy existed, judged by the facts and the actions of the defendants.

“Mere passive knowledge of the criminal activities of other persons is not sufficient to establish a conspiracy,” he instructed. “Some participation, coöperation, must be shown to establish the connection of any defendant, and by evidence of fact and circumstances independent of the declarations of other people,—that is, by evidence of the defendants’ own acts. Until such evidence is introduced, the defendants are not bound by the declaration or statements of others. But after it is shown he is a member of the conspiracy, he is so bound, providing the acts are in furtherance of the common purpose.”

The court also instructed that if any defendants entered the conspiracy after it started, knowing its purpose, they were equally guilty as if they had been of those who originally conspired, but he tempered this by suggesting that they might all have been guilty of minor conspiracies in different places, and he stated that if these were not related to a common purpose, they were not guilty under the indictment. He also announced that they might all be guilty of the acts of violence set forth in the indictment, and yet, if these were not related to a common conspiracy, they were not guilty in the charge in the case.

Both sides professed satisfaction with the instructions. The sentences of the Court sent Haywood and fourteen others, his principal aids, to the penitentiary for twenty years. Thirty-three men got ten years, the same number got five years; twelve men got a year and a day, two men got off with two days in jail, and two had their cases continued. There was well nigh a train load of them that started for Leavenworth federal penitentiary the next day. The Department of Justice could not find handcuffs enough in the city of Chicago to accommodate all the prisoners on that train!

The total time covered by these I. W. W. sentences amounts to eight hundred and seven years and twenty days. The world is deprived of that much-too-independent work in a time when the world needs honest labor. Haywood’s boast that there are 100,000 uncaught and unrepentant I. W. W.’s in the United States alone is all the proof needed of the nature of the men thus put away.

These men, like most under-cover criminals, were cowards. Haywood’s face went white when he heard sentence passed on him. The prisoners, but lately sneering and arrogant, now sat overwhelmed. Their friends and adherents also were stunned. The court room was filled with armed U. S. Marshals and A. P. L. men, all unknown and all ready for trouble. There was no trouble. Dead silence was in the room. All bail was cancelled, of course, and the march to jail began.

What did the Government prove against the I. W. W.’s? That they had been guilty of almost everything a depraved mind could invent in the way of crime. The public is already conversant with the argot of the band. The “sab cat,” or worker of sabotage—secret destruction of property—was a title of pride among them. “Wobblies,” “high jacks,” “scissor-bills,” “bundle-stiffs”—all were part of the personnel put in evidence. A “clock” was divulged to mean a phosphorus bomb, intended to be fired by the sun and set a wheat stack ablaze.

These men spiked a great many spruce trees so that mill saws were ruined on the logs. They killed vineyards in California, and claimed to have burned $2,000,000 worth of wheat in that state alone. They not only burned wheat in the stack, but sowed spikes to damage reapers. They dropped matches and bits of metal in threshing machines. They put emery in delicate machine bearings. In canning factories they mixed the labels, so that grades were vitiated for the vegetables sent out. They polluted or poisoned canned goods with dead rats and the like in factories where they worked. No doubt also they set forest fires, and beyond doubt caused explosions that destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars in property. They did this to terrorize their own country in its day of peril. They were not worth the name of men. You can not make citizens out of such creatures. Fear is all they understand.

Their literature was a continuous blasphemy. Cursing the name of the Savior was nothing to their writers. They put lime in men’s shoes and burned their feet to the bone. They had a special sort of club they used in attacking “scabs.” It had short, sharp nails driven along it, painted the color of the club so they could not easily be seen. The victim would catch at the club to wrest it from his assailant. It was then jerked through his hands, often tearing out the sinews, always scarring and often maiming him forever. Always they were cowards. To injure and not destroy was part of their religion. “Strike while you work” meant to disable a machine for a while and so to stop work for the crew or for the whole plant. “Feed the kitty more cream” meant to use more emery on bearings, to do more dirt in factories, to wreck and mar and mutilate more cunningly and covertly—and to escape by feigning the innocent laboring man. If they were not all Huns, they had the foul Hun imagination, and also the methods of the Hun.

By December of 1918, the trial of a half hundred more alleged I. W. W. men was progressing at Sacramento, California. The attempt of the prosecution there was to show a nation-wide plot against the Government of the United States. And again, A. P. L. had the evidence ready, ticketed and tabulated, for A. P. L. covers all of the United States and not merely one part. On January 16, 1919, forty-six of the defendants were convicted.

If we have 100,000 I. W. W. members such as these yet among us, and internment camps full of Germans and pro-Germans, would there not seem need for a house cleaning? It is time now for a new American point of view. We are not going to allow America to be used as it has been by these men. Fear at least they shall understand.