PAGE 6
THE SWEAT
& BLOOD
OF LABOR
BY JULIA RUUTTILA
The preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World constitution
declares that labor and management have nothing common. The history
of labor in the Pacific Northwest is as torturous as its geography. Much
of it is buried in forgotten graves or in the backstacks of used bookstores
and libraries. Julia Ruuttila was part of that history for more than 60 years,
since she was a child passing out IWW leaflets. She was a small, quietly
spoken woman who served on countless picketlines and in an as many
defense committees forjailed union men and women. She was arrested
often and the victim of labor violence. She wrote for the union press
for more than half a century.
- michael M c C usker
INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD
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, I was surprised to learn that the Universities of Oregon and
Washington and the Oregon Historical Society had come to
value America's "other history."
I 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 with 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 84 years
*
since a Lewis County lumber
tycoon met with American Legion brass and Chamber of
Commerce types to plan a raid on a workers' hall in Centralia. It
has been 84 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 84 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 84 years have elapsed since the lawyer who 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 83 years since troopers were encamped on the
courthouse lawn in Montesano, and since a bailiff took word into
the jury of what 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
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 responsible 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.
Doctor Marie Equi, a remarkable woman whose 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 famous 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 Hartwig, a member of the Painters' Union,
who met her when 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 who 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
movement, Hartwig, who later became secretary of the State
Federation 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
1
COLUMBIA RIVER
MARITIME MUSEUM
VISIT THE MUSEUM SHOP
IH ASTORIA, OREGOH
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 amis for the
White General Kolchak. This happened in September 1918,
when the Soviets were fighting against foreign intervention on
17 fronts. The dockers became suspicious when a mysterious
shipment arrived by rail — 50 boxcars with 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, where the grass is cut only for Decoration Day
and wild rabbits bound among the stones, is the grave of John
Zeide, a worker who died during the 1919 flu epidemic. On his
monument are these words: From the vast world above my
grave / / 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 born workers were active in the struggles
to improve conditions on the waterfront, in the fishing industry
where 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 Industrial
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 when 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
exile one of the most articulate members of the Finnish com
munity, Sulu Syvanen. A gifted linguist, he had managed to get
his papers. One of the Toveri editors, Sanetri Nuorteva, had
gone to Canada on a speaking tour and was deported from that
country. He was at the bedside of John Reed when he died of
typhus in Moscow.
‘Dates in this article have been updated. Armistice Day
2003 is the 84th anniversary of the "Centralia Massacre".
**See Bloody Thursday and The Streamlined Strike,
NCTE, July 1994.
***The reporter was Julia Ruuttila.