The North Coast times-eagle., August 01, 1994, Page 13, Image 13

PAGE 13
THE SWEAT & BLOOD OF
LABOR
DRAWING BY ROBERT MINOR
• <»»,i
r
BY JULIA RUUTTILA
The preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World constitution declares
that labor and management have nothing in common. The history of labor in the
Pacific Northwest is as torturous as its geography. Much of it is buried in forgot-
m dostow to *. ufaG 3rave$ or in the Çackstacks of used bookstores and libraries. Julia Ruuttila
KlZ\\j o ar. A
«
o f th&thistory for more than 60 years, since she was a child passing out
HWV leaflets. She was a small, quietly spoken woman who served on countless
picketlines and in as many defense committees for jailed union men and women.
She was often arrested and the victim of labor violence. She wrote for the union
press for more than half a century.
-MPMC
It has become popular for universities and historical
societies to collect labor documents, even to squabble over who
gets what. Invariably, the sought after records reflect events
long past, no longer controversial or likely to endanger the
economic establishment's net take, coined now as always from
the sweat and blood of labor.
Several years ago an acquisitions struggle took place
over the "Free Ray Becker" files. These documents concerned a
post-Worid War 1 labor frame and efforts of the Woodworkers
Union to get the last of the Centralia defendants out of prison1
As the sole surviving member of the "Free Ray Becker" commit­
tee, 1 was surprised to learn that the Universities of Oregon and
Washington and the Oregon Historical Society had come to
value America's "other history.”
1 assumed that the Centralia case (which in its ramifi­
cations, tragedy and horror outranks the Mooney case, the
Sacco and Vanzetti case, and even some of those described in
C. Osborne Ward's, The American Lowly) would soon be written
up in student dissertations and papers. Yet in the 10 years the
Ray Becker files and part of the old Centralia Defense Commit­
tee files were either on loan deposit wth the University of Wash­
ington or (as they now are) in the permanent archives of the
Oregon Historical Society, not one history professor mentioned
them in class nor did any academic figure2 delve into that dark
story of frameup, torture, official coverup, intimidation of jurors
and wholesale subornation of perjury.
It has been 75 years* since a Lewis County lumber
tycoon met wth American Legion brass and Chamber of
Commerce types to plan a raid on a workers' hall in Centralia. It
has been 75 years since the last contingent in an Armistice Day
parade, armed with ropes, clubs and guns, broke ranks to smash
in the hall door, killing a member of their own raiding party by
mistake in the excitement. And it has been 75 years since the
bullet-ridden body of Wesley Everest dangled from the Chehalis
•River Bridge, and since the coroner of Lewis County cut off his
balls as a souvenir of the lynch party in which he and others
(their names are in the files) participated on November 11,
1919. .
Almost 75 years have elapsed since the lawyer vtfio was
to act as special prosecutor at the trial of Everest's jailed
companions killed one of them under third degree interrogation,
and since the body was incinerated in the sawdust burner at
Hubbard's Mill.
It is 74 years since troopers were encamped on the
courthouse lawn in Montesano, and since a bailiff took word into
the jury of wdat would happen to them if they returned any
verdict other than guilty.
,
The Centralia case still seems to be a hot potato.
Is this because the frameup and its official coverup
I reached so deeply into the political and economic structure of
the Sawdust Belt?
Papers were presented at a labor history conference I
»attended some years ago on "Black Miners & the Knights of
Labor in the Washington Coal Fields", "The 1934 Portland Long­
shore Strike", "Father Edwin O'Hara & the Origins of Minimum
Wage Legislation in Oregon", "Harry Wicks & William Dunn: The
Boy Bolsheviks", "Lumber Technology & Violence in the West
Coast Forests", and "Immigrant Workers & Community Power in
Astoria, Oregon, Circa 1880-1900"
Most of the papers reflected careful research and
sincere interest in working class history. But there was no paper
on the Centralia case.
During more than 60 years in the labor movement I
have never ceased to marvel over why it takes friends and
colleagues of frameup victims so long to grasp what is going on,
to figure out who is doing the "conspiring", and who is respon­
sible for the violence mentioned so glibly in the indictments.
Frameup has been used since ancient times to keep
political dissenters and advocates of peace and bread for the
masses in their place.
When I was a child, Flora Freeman, a teacher in
Tillamook, was sent to federal prison for telling her students that
World War 1 was not a war for democracy. The munitions
makers who coined millions from that war were not jailed. Nor
was General Douglas MacArthur, who sent helmeted soldiers
and horse troops to lob teargas into the pitiful packing box
community of World War 1 veterans, the "Bonus Army" at
Anacosta Flats in Washington, D C.
One of the Anacosta victims was an infant of 11 weeks.
Flora Freeman contracted tuberculosis in her damp
prison cell.
COLUMBIA RIVER
MARITIME MUSEUM
VISIT THE MUSEUM SHOP
IN ASTORIA, OREGON
Doctor Marie Equi, a remarkable woman wdose life
spanned many of the heroic events in the untold story of
Northwest labor was sent to San Quentin for agitating against
the same war. A celebrated physician whose agile brain had no
difficulty grasping the implications of history on the hoof, Equi
used her medical skill to help the victims of the Everett
Massacre3. She adopted the orphaned daughter of Wesley
Everest, impaled a policeman with a hatpin on a cannery
workers' picketline when these women were about to be charged
by horsecops, and sent money to the families gunned down by
policemen at Pier Park in San Francisco during the 1934
Maritime Strike.**
She also shinnied up a telephone pole on 4th Avenue in
the Portland Free Speech Fight after friends of the Wobblies
(IWW) had been yanked off the soapbox and flung into the
paddy wagon. She scaled the pole with the aid of spurs
borrowed from a telephone company lineman, one of her many
admirers in the working class. It took city fire department smoke-
eaters so long to get her down (they too admired her) that she
alone of the free speech activists was able to finish her remarks
One of the labor leaders who worked to get Equi out of
San Quentin was Otto Hartwg, a member of the Painters' Union,
who met her w4ien he was doing some redecorating in the
medical building where she had offices
Hearing a commotion on the floor above, Hartwig
dashed up the stairs to find Equi telling off a colleague w4io had
refused to make a housecall on a desperately ill child of a poor
family in St. John.
Although he ranks as a conservative in the labor move­
ment, Hartwig, who later became secretary of the State Feder­
ation of Labor, not only had considerable understanding of
labor's immediate needs4, but a perceptive sense of history on
the hoof.
When a former Portlander, Louise Bryant, wife of John
Reed, also from Portland and author of Ten Days That Shook
The World, had returned from Russia to plead for noninterven­
tion in the workers' and peasants' revolution, it was Hartwig who
presided over the meeting. It was held in the Portland Civic
Auditorium and jammed to the rafters with people eager to hear
what Bryant had to say
Workers in both Oregon and Washington seemed to
have been fired by the winds of change sweeping off the
Russian steppes. Perhaps because so many of them had come
to this country to escape famine and pestilence in the cities of
Europe and from enforced service in the armies of the Czar.
In Seattle, longshoremen refused to load arms for the
White General Kolchak. This happened in September 1918,
wrfien the Soviets were fighting against foreign intervention on
17 fronts. The dockers became suspicious when a mysterious
shipment arrived by rail -- 50 boxcars wth crates marked
"sewing machines" consigned to Vladivostok A longshoreman
opened one of the crates: it was filled with rifles.
United States interference in the efforts of the have-nots
in other lands to throw off their chains was going on then just as
it was to go on later in Vietnam and Cambodia, and - in a
subtler form - against the Popular Unity Government in Chile in
1973 and against the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador
Major General Smedley Butler, former Commandant of the U S
Marine Corps and one of only two men to win the Congressional
Medal of Honor twice, said of his 30 years with the USMC: "I
spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big
Business."
There were many Russians and Finns in Oregon in the
early 1900s. Finland at that time was a grand duchy of the Czar.
When the cry of "Bread, Peace, Land" rang over the Black Sea
and the Volga Basin, the eyes of Finnish and Russian families
turned with tears of joy toward their homelands There is proof of
this in the old cemeteries where these people are buried. In an
old graveyard in north Portland, bounded by the freeway and a
packing plant, wrfiere the grass is cut only for Decoration Day
and wld rabbits bound among the stones, is the grave of John
Zeide, a worker w4io died during the 1919 flu epidemic. On his
monument are these words: From the vast world above my
grave / 1 hear the tread of marching men, / The patient armies of
the Soviet Other such graves may be found in Greenwood
Cemetery in Astoria, and some of these graves, including that of
Maria Raunio, who fled to this country to escape being sent to
Siberia following the general strike in Finland in 1905, have
hammers and sickles engraved on their headstones. Maria, a
textile worker from Tampara, head of a transport during the
strike, was a member of the Finnish Diet at a time when women
in Oregon could not even vote
The foreign bom workers were active in the struggles to
improve conditions on the waterfront, in the fishing industry
vhere they at first worked as boatpullers and net menders, in the
mining and logging camps, shingle mills and textile mills of the
Northwest. They "packed the rigging" in the harvest fields and
on the ships, and later helped organize the Congress of Indus­
trial Organizations (CIO). They were also the backbone of
resistance to World War 1.
The U S. Immigration Service mounted a vast drive to
deport these workers.
In the days wrfien the street signs in Astoria reportedly
were printed in both Finnish and English, the entire staff of a
Finnish language daily newspaper was deported. The Javerts of
the Immigration Service had not then devised, as they did later,
the gimmick of canceling citizenship, so they were unable to
‘ Dates in this article have been updated Armistice Day
1994 is the 75th anniversary of the "Centralia Massacre
“ See Bloody Thursday and The Streamlined Strike
NCTE, July 1994
***The reporter was Julia Ruuttila.
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