The San Francisco Bomb Case

What Can a Poor Executioner Do Against a Man Who Is Willing to Die?[1]

ROBERT MINOR

I am glad that it’s Ed Nolan, Tom Mooney, Rena Mooney, Warren Billings, and Israel Weinberg who are in jail at San Francisco, awaiting death—or friends. Not that I want such men and women to meet death, but I wish the friends to be able to come to the rescue, knowing that they are worthy of the best effort that rebel ever put forth for an individual. We are so tired of the revolter who whines when his turn comes to pay. So we can almost laugh with an almost glee in the thought that we shall not be cheated this time; these rebels do not whine.

This is not a McNamara case. The prisoners are not going to “confess.” Even if they wanted to, they’d have to get the prosecutor to write their confession for them, for they did not cause the Preparedness Parade explosion. I know they didn’t, as you would know it had you read the transcript of the testimony on which the Grand Jury indicted them, or if you could observe their open efforts to provide every possible light on their actions.

Dirty Hearst tried to lynch them. So did all the rest. All the rats from the cellar of life—Pastors of the Lord, Broadminded Editors, Illustrious Exceptions, etc., turned tail and ran—or helped in the near-lynching. All except one Catholic priest!

They all thought it was 1886, that “the anarchists were to be hanged”—and one doesn’t believe in that kind of thing, you know, and can’t sacrifice one’s great opportunity to good in general—and every skunk would stink alike, so all would be well.

But this is not 1886, and there have been some to come forward, and the men and woman are going to be saved. With all Prominent Persons in their holes, a few unimportant workingmen, between announcements of their own hangings to come, have stirred up some of the labor unions to an extent that you would never believe possible, to do the unheard-of thing to be loyal to their fellow members.

The International Workers’ Defense League, thoroughly discredited, as the papers announce, by having defended every labor rebel of recent American history, is taking contributions to the enormously expensive work. Simply to gather evidence and enlighten the few thousand who are not afraid, and to pay a high-priced lawyer to array the evidence—that is what we want your money for. Send it to the International Workers’ Defense League, Robert Minor, Treasurer, Room 210 Russ Building, San Francisco.

And know that if we lose this fight it will be because a horde of “business men” have been judge, jury, and prosecutor against their five rebel enemies. It will not be because our men have flinched. When Ed Nolan says “the fear of death is the beginning of slavery,” he speaks the spirit of the five. We shall not be ashamed of these.

The Labor Farce

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

I really must say what I think about this ridiculous bomb business.

You will find the facts of the case, about the five innocent people who were indicted and why the Chamber of Commerce wanted them indicted, on page twenty-nine. But what happened after the indictment is more interesting and more horrible to me.

The five victims were put into jail. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and a few other anarchists began a fight for them,—raising money for lawyers, etc. The labor unions began to raise money. After about three weeks of argument and hesitation and won’t-it-be-better-to-go-a-little-slow and is-it-advisable-to-distribute-pamphlets, etc., etc., no lawyer had been engaged and none of the “workers” could agree about what “stand” to take: would it be better to express sympathy openly with the anarchists—(none of the five has ever claimed to be an anarchist, I believe)—or would it be wiser to try to prove they were not anarchists, or would it be safer to get a small lawyer who costs little and is worth nothing or a big one who costs too much and might do something, or would it be more expedient to keep out of it altogether, etc., etc., etc.,—or shall we just do the best we can even if it isn’t much? Do you think there was a single worker with the incredible inspiration to “do the most we can and make sure that it is very much”? I saw Emma Goldman and Berkman brooding over this strange and awful spectacle like two prophets whose souls are slowly petrifying under the antics of their disciples.

Just here some one told me a story. Once upon a time Björnstjerne Björnson, up in Norway, heard of a little French seamstress who was accused of murder in Paris. She was poor and quite unbefriended and there was practically no chance of her receiving justice. Björnson hurried to Paris, took her case, and won it in the French courts, in French, for the simple joy of doing something he believed in.

Can you imagine that happening in America? There isn’t a single labor lawyer in the country who ever does it. If there are any who are willing they are not able; if they are able they are not allowed. C. E. S. Wood tried to do it for Caplan and Schmidt, but the workers themselves prevented him from taking the case. They kept him trotting between Portland and Los Angeles while they decided that it would be fatal to have him come straight out with the fact that it was a labor fight. Sometimes I imagine a young god springing up in labor ranks strong enough to rush in and fight the courts for his people, young enough to devote his life to it, naive enough to do it for an idea rather than for a fee, and ironic enough to do it whether his people want it or not.

But to continue about the bomb. Finally a prominent lawyer was found—one whose name carried enough weight to impress even the important and ignorant San Francisco citizens who were howling about “anarchists.” But the fee he charged before even touching the case was so large that Emma Goldman and the unions could raise only half of it, and the rest was supplied by the daughter of a man whom the workers would call a capitalist and whose money they would repudiate as having been drained from the blood of their class. She not only supplied the money; she said she would stand behind the victims if it took the last cent she had—not merely because they were innocent; and the only thing she asked was that the money should be used in a direct and active way and not for the pretending and denying and covering up that characterize all labor fights in this country. Well, I wouldn’t get half so disgusted with labor if it would ever acknowledge that vision is not necessarily a matter of class. It is almost terrifying to watch a labor propagandist think. If he is talking about Henry Ford, for instance, he will sketch the picture of a man who has created a $5 a day minimum wage only by such speeding-up of labor that labor is too nerve-racked to benefit by it; so that Ford becomes a clever rascal who makes labor rich only to make himself richer. Of course Ford is an idealist of appalling and marvelous simplicity, in quite the same position that an anarchist would be whose scheme had begun to work, and no more to blame for the spots in which it didn’t work.

The propagandist can’t think. But for that matter only one kind of mind really does think, and that is the artist kind. I mean this: only the artist mind sees that this is the way things happen in the world and refuses to sentimentalize over it or to do nothing about it. Here are five labor people misunderstood by “society,” unchampioned by “labor,” and rescued by the bloody capitalist who has neither the limitations with which labor endows capital nor the limitations with which capital endows labor. What fun! And some of the propagandists will feel like “Major Barbara” about accepting that money. Only the artist mind knows that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from: money is money, and it is made of slavery whether it comes from a financier or a coal-digger. Only the artist mind....

Of course the point of the whole business is this: the labor farce isn’t confined to labor: it is merely the farce in which all people contentedly luxuriate. It is a matter of rebellions that never become real.

There is the sixteen-year-old girl living in the midst of a typical American family. Now, no one can live long in such a place without losing his mind—unless he has none to lose. But let the girl try to get out of that hideous hell and the family detectives can have her back in a minute and arrest any one who tried to help her as an abductor.

Such a thing happened the other day in Chicago. It happens every few minutes all over the earth. The only way to get out of such a mess is to get out of it—detectives, jails, families and friends to boot. Follow through! Make it real! Your friends can’t afford to be very real: one of them probably has a family to support and the others probably couldn’t stand the horror of being in the papers! But a girl or a boy can stand up to anything. If they can’t their old age will find them among the rest of the botched and the weak.

Ed Nolan says that the fear of death is the beginning of slavery. I think it may be that the fear of life is the very beginning.