Part One: The IWW and the Hobos Who Saved Free Speech

Margaret talks with Robert Evans about the Spokane Free Speech Fight and the itinerant workers who invented new forms of civil disobedience.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, and welcome to C p W D c S.
The show that's easier to say the full name of
than the acronym floor or for the penance in the
audience the initialism because an acronism, which is the most
annoying thing of the world. I guess I'm de penitive
the audience. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week

(00:21):
I tell you about some cool people who did cool stuff.
This week we've got a returning guest, Robert Evans. Robert Evans,
who are you? That's a great question, Margaret, who is
any of us? Are any of us really here? Or
we just reflections on a cave wall being looked at
by Greeks in a story I half remember because I

(00:42):
don't I don't. Yes, Margaret, I'm the host of a
podcast behind the Bastards. There we go, Margaret, I have
a question for you. Okay, show you've got butterflies on
your face? Is that a reference to a character in
a movie that we watched last night. We're gonna We're
gonna get to that. We're gonna get to that. X it. Okay.

(01:02):
So we also have our producer, Sophie Lichtman on the call, Sophie,
who are you? Who am I? Or how am I? Currently?
I'm somebody who feels like I'm that that like person
who has the devil and the Angel on each shoulder. Um,
and um, you're the angel and Robert is you know,

(01:24):
the devil, and um, that's who I am? Is? Just
you know, I'm here, okay, okay, And that tracks because
both Robert and I are still wearing the renfair garb.
But that we got yesterday my sword. Oh my god, Robert,
that's beautiful and then immediately handed it to a seven

(01:47):
year old in the parking lot. That sounds like Robert.
If I learned one thing from the movie we watched
last night, it's that the greatest act of any hero,
you have a child a sword. Yes, exactly, well one
of the two great acts, ideally while dripping with the
blood of a police officer in in an elementary school.

(02:08):
So also, Ian does our audio editing, and on woman
wrote our theme song. And and this week we're going
all the way back to the year Yea released the
best movie of the twentieth century, Night Riders. It's fucking
incredible movie. I had never seen this. The last night

(02:30):
I did not realize what a goddamned treasure this film was.
That's amazing. Yeah, it's actually talking about night Writers today
because it is to talk I kind of wish, um
we can we can interject here and there and compare
the events that we're going to talk about to the
events of night Rider. But night Riders. Sorry that we

(02:50):
are not talking about the night Writers show with the
talking car. This is much cooler. But I tried to
take the butterflies off my face and it took me
too long, and so now and I got distracted. Okay,
So this week, though, Robert, how do you feel about
free speech? Is a nice, loaded, easy, easy question. The

(03:12):
actual thing, which is people being able to speak and
express their thoughts and feelings free of government censorship, is
great free speech. The buzzword is a real problem. I
I agree on both counts, and that's why I'm excited
to tell you that the largest and fiercest fight over

(03:32):
free speech in US history, which I never learned anything
about in school, was not anything like the buzzword version
of it today. Instead, that's great came from the left,
and in order to tell you about free speech and
the fights for free speech that happened across the West,
and about nineteen nine and nineteen sixteen, I get to

(03:53):
tell you about basically the coolest union the US has
ever produced, the Industrial Workers of the World, the i
w W, the Wobblies, and I want to do one
day the Wobblies will. I mean, you could really just
do an entire podcast it just talks about the Wobblies.
They did so much. But the really brief introduction to

(04:13):
the i w W five a whole bunch of socialists
and anarchists and other trade unionists. They got together and
they were like, you know what, the U S should
have a cooler union than the ones we have, which
are not cool enough. So they were like, what would
make a union cooler. Some of the founders include alumni
of the podcast, like the Irish Goths, socialist Mother Jones,

(04:34):
and the formerly enslaved black anarchist Lucy Parsons, who is
on the very first episode of this show. They also
had future friend of the pod, James Connolly, who popped
over from Yeah, Yeah, he's He's not even American or
even an immigrant. He's a you know, Irish nationalist, Irish
as hell. He's the person I most wish had Twitter

(04:56):
for the queen's death, we would have gotten some great
James absolutely and and so he popped over to the
US for a while to help, you know, he paused
fomenting rebellion in Ireland to come talk about syndicalism and
ship and help the US get cool, which I didn't
know about until more recently that James Connolly numbers. Yeah.

(05:20):
And they came up with some answers about how to
make a cooler union than the unions that are around.
And they're good answers. Anyone out there who's like, how
do you make a union cool? I think that these
are some good answers that at least applied in five
and may or may not apply now, while some of
them absolutely do apply now. One of them. The kind
of the founding idea was no more splitting up the
workers by trade everyone into one big union. Um the

(05:43):
motto is an injury to one is an injury to all.
And of course to fight against the fact that they're
now centralizing everything, they're like one big union. It's all decentralized.
So you can only have one big union in an
ethical way if there's no so were on at the top, right,
and the most important thing that they did in contrast
to the rest of the US, not the rest of

(06:03):
the U. S. Labor movement, but the like large federated
parts of the labor movement at the time. I ww
weren't a bunch of fucking racists. That's always the bummer
when you talk about the coolest A lot of the
coolest parts of American labor history, like Blair Mountain, where
it's like, got their fucking red bandanas, they're shooting at
the National Guard, they're going to Oregon and they don't

(06:24):
like letting black people. Well that's not true. And with
Blair Mountain, one of the names that they had on
their lips as they went into battle, I don't remember
his name right now, but I mean, I'm certain that
there were races. It was it was it was a
it was a fight with organizing Blair Mountain to like yeah, yeah, yeah,
totally yeah. And you also get these like this difference

(06:46):
in both directions between the rank and file and the
organizers and all that stuff. But but yeah, and so
the i w W. One of their founding principles is
let's not be racists. Will take white people, black people,
Irish people, whatever. They also unified the anarchist and the
socialists and the Marxist which is the thing that seems
impossible in the modern context. It sure does to be

(07:06):
fair this and the Bolsheviks hadn't started killing all their
political opponents, like the socialists and the anarchists. Yeah, there's
a little bit less bad blood. Yeah, and the other
Marxists anyway, um, as I as I present some of
my bad blood about all of this. Uh. And the
way they unified the left was that they did it
in a way they by minimizing hierarchy as much as

(07:26):
possible if you have all of these different types of
people coming together. The main way that you can do
that in an ethical way is that everyone is equals
um and so different ideas and so basically prevent power
grabs by distributing power every wobbly as a leader, every
wobbly as an organizer. They also just the checklist of
how to be a cool union. They organized the unemployed,

(07:49):
They organized women as well as men. They were really
forthright that their goal was the destruction of the wage system,
and that any reforms that they came across were just
to step along the way towards the end of capitalism.
They had this whole big fight where some of them
wanted to take the union more reformist and more more
politically focused and less direct action focused, and that faction

(08:09):
lost because you don't join the Wobblies because you don't
want to do direct action. Um. And they scared the
ever loving hell out of the elite basically when they
were founded. But we're going to talk about free speech
in a moment, But first, I know what you're wondering, Robert.
Are you wondering where they're called the fucking Wobblies? Isn't

(08:32):
it just because there's I w W and it's kind
of like wobbly. I don't know. I assumed it had
something to do with all the dubs. It does possibly
if you ask the actual like the Okay, the answer
is no, one knows. Someone might know. This another situation
where're gonna tell me there's a cool fucking name and
there's nobody who can tell us why this is a trend?

(08:56):
This is this is this is this is like tuberculosis
pops up every episode. Yeah, and you know what, that's
fucking cool and I'm okay with it. Yeah. And there's
there's a couple of bests is called tuberculosis, so no
one knows what I thought. It was named after Johnny Tuberculosis.
He was the Johnny after seate of tuberculosis traveled around
North America giving everyone tb oh. Okay, okay, well that

(09:21):
makes the heroes. And also the Wobblies were founded by
John Wobbly. Yeah yeah, I thought I thought he went
by Johnny Wobbly John Bulls, they called him when he
got drunk. If someone knows why the Wobblies are called
the Wobblies, they're not telling. And since we're talking about

(09:41):
hundred fifteen years ago, if they're still alive and they
know they're either dead or a vampire, like like the
Queen of England who was also in a dead or
a vampire. It was a vampire. That makes sense. I've
I've outlined a book around this, well, actually was about
the person who threw the bomb at Haymarket still and
around hundred fifty years later as a vampire. But anyway,

(10:03):
the main theories as to why they're called Wobblies is
that it was being used against them as an epithet
and it has to do with racism, and it has
to do with racism around the fact that the IWW
had a ton of Chinese members at a time, where
like that is one of the main categories of people
that were being excluded from the working class on the
West coast right or being excluded from labor unions, and

(10:25):
so it was probably someone like a boss making fun
of the Chinese immigrant ac accent as they tried to
pronounce IWW. Oh but the but then the Wobblies were like, yeah, fuck,
you will take that, you know, because they were also that,
you know, the Chinese Wobblies were also the wobblies, and

(10:46):
so everyone's like, yeah, no, like a whole fucking thing
is an injury to one is an injury at all.
So they probably they called themselves wobblies. That is the
most likely story. Um. And also, if you had a
union card and good standing, there are a bunch of
Chinese food restaurants you could walk into and show your
Union card and get free food, which also rules yeah. Um.
The other theory, which actually has less evidence about it,

(11:07):
is that lumberjacks would make their sls wobble in order
to slow down production when they were in a labor dispute. Okay, yeah,
but we're not but we are going to talk about lumberjacks.
All right, let's do it. Okay, I'm time about Spokane, Washington.
We're gonna start with a quote from eight from a
radical unionists from the i w W named James walsh Am.

(11:29):
I to die starving in the midst of plenty, or
shall I die fighting for my part? A thousand times over?
I'll die fighting before I die starving, because it was
a really shitty time to be a worker in the US,
and now I'm trying to think of a time it
wasn't really shitty to be a working class anyway. In

(11:49):
early Spokane, Washington, which is in eastern Washington, is this boomtown.
There's this whole like inland empire that is basically where
all of the like lumber stuff is coming from. They
found the most beautiful forests the world has ever produced
and turned turned it into a an industry into Yeah,
it was good stuff. Which is why I always had

(12:09):
very complicated feelings about this particular story, because it's heroes
are the people who got down to old growth forests,
are the people who destroyed for like a dollar a
day because they didn't want to starve to death. Yeah,
they're not the people who capitalized. Yeah, I don't blame
them specifically, it is it is sad, yeah. Yeah. And

(12:31):
so Spoken is a boomtown and has legalized gambling in
sex work, and it's like the kind of place that
workers show up in between jobs to blow all their
money and look for other jobs. And one of the
anecdotes that you get is that we have a lot
of the Wobbles Road a lot. And so you hear
about Spokane at the time, and basically they were like,
if you flash too much money, you'll get the knockout
Special from the bartender, where the bartender just gives you

(12:53):
a drink with a bunch of fucking drugs and it
knocks you unconscious so they can all rob you. Oh well,
so that kind want to start a bar now, that's
actually a pretty pretty good money making idea. Yeah. And
also it kind of sounds like the kind of town
that would be fun to hang out in. Yeah it does. Yeah,
it sounds like it would have some strong deadwood vibes.
Stevens Street and Spoken was covered in employment agencies, which

(13:16):
got called sharks and leeches, and they would basically sell
you a job. You'd walk into an employment agency give
him a dollar and they'd sell you a job, and
at least half the time it was a lie. They
were like, oh, yeah, it's a job. And then you
get to the work site and they give you a
job for a day and then they send you home
like you've literally just made back your dollar, so you

(13:38):
have enough money to come spend and spend another dollar
on another job. And among the people who did this
sort of work, the employment agency work is second time
villains of the pod No, mostly now known for their gyms,
the y m c a AH, as well as several
other Christian organizations that like would set up and pross

(14:00):
ties but then just be like and give us a
dollar and we'll give you a job. Just kidding. I
read one take one person say that like literally one
out of fifty people got the job that they paid for. Um,
so you'd be like, oh, I'm gonna go be a
lumber not bad, and they send you a job like
doing something completely unrelated. If you got a job at all,

(14:20):
and the people behind all these grips were fucking millionaires,
is another job that would work really well for you.
And yeah, I mean, honestly, Sophie, what if we tried
to do this with podcasts. People pay us and then
we give them a podcast. But not really wait that's
what you did with me though, well but not not
with you, Margaret, of course. Not no, no, not at all. Okay.

(14:46):
By the way, that that that check of yours still
hasn't cleared. I'm sure it's corporate's fault. Don't worry, don't worry,
I trust you. So anyway, the Cool Zone him an
agency of Spokene, Washington. They're fucking millionaires, and they're millionaires
in nineteen o nine money, which is still millionaires and

(15:07):
modern money, but it's like thirty five millionaires, more millions.
And they're driving around in fancy cars or in nineteen
nine terms, a car at all. And to lay the scene,
I'm gonna quote from a memoir written by a participant
who later spent five years in prison for his organizing
like I think in the twenties, named John pans Pan Pansner,
not not Tank, not John Tanka not not. That's a shame,

(15:31):
So John Tank said, before telling you the story of
the spoken free Speech fight, I must say a few
words about the situation in the West at the time.
West of the Mississippi River, there were about two million
migratory workers, sometimes called hoboes. They harvested the wheat, corn,
hay and picked the fruit and even planted most of
the crops. They built the railroads, damn powerhouses, They did
the logging in the woods, and I I think people

(15:56):
don't necessarily recognize like how much the hobo is how
the infrastructure of the US was built. Yeah, and they
weren't treated really kindly. Uh, you'll be shocked to know
once they did get jobs. Yeah, go ahead, that that
was my what my grandpa did. You know, his family
wasn't able to feed him, so he like walked across

(16:17):
two states with cornbread in his pocket to like get
a job building national parks and stuff. Like. We never
talked about him as having been a hobo, but that's
essentially what was going on, right Like he was he
was living on the street, uh, working you know in jobs,
building up what is still the infrastructure of the country
because we've never actually invested more money and it's which

(16:40):
is why it's all going to ship right now. Yeah,
that's that's actually what my granddad did too. He wrote
around trains in the Great Depression and did like agricultural work. Um,
and I only found out because once again, the family
didn't like talk about that, Whereas I think that's the
coolest thing my grandfather did that I'm aware of, you know,
like well, if foughtom World War two, but you know,

(17:02):
like well, and when I started riding freight trains, that's
when my family told me that my grandfather also wrote
freight trains, which I have not successfully. My goal is
to get my father on a freight train, just to
sort of complete though the ark. But so once you
get a job, I didn't. I didn't ride freight trains
to work. To be real, I actually wrote freight trains
more like the Wobblies that we're going to talk about

(17:23):
today road freight trains. But that's foreshadowing. That's what I'm
gonna call spoilers from now on, foreshadowing. So once you
get a job, it's fucking awful. You have to bring
your own blankets. You sleep in tents and cabins. There's
licensed bed bugs everywhere, as cockroaches in the kitchens. There's
no mattresses. You're sleeping on straw. At one power line
building camp, the workers had to walk three to four

(17:45):
miles to work from their camp then work twelve hours,
then walk three to four miles back home. It's some
like real uphill both ways. Ship they get two dollars
a day. They then have to pay almost half of
that five fifty a week for room and word. Basically
they make about thirty five dollars a day in today's
terms for walk working twelve hour shifts with like two

(18:07):
hours a walk in each direction. The Hobos mostly had
no families, they had no church. They functionally couldn't vote
since they weren't residents anywhere long enough to register to vote,
and they only had each other. And so you have
this whole fucking massive dispossessed people. And the big mainstream
union at the time, the a f L, the American
Federation of Labor, they don't even try to organize the Hobos,

(18:32):
the wobblies, they were mostly Hobos themselves, and they called
the a f L the Aristocrats of Labor, which I
have a feeling like when you're riding arown freight trains
and sleeping on straw, everyone who, like I don't know,
has a house is an aristocrat. Yeah, but I mean certainly, yeah,
if you're if you're if you're riding the rails. Anybody

(18:52):
who's got a roof is an aristocrat. Yeah, And the
a f L they saw the masses of the unemployed
as a pole. I'm not a solution because huge groups
of unemployed people make it harder to unionize in the
traditional ways that they were used to. Well. Yeah, because
it's also it is a vulnerability if you're like organized labor,
because they get brought in as strike breakers and stuff
a lot totally, which is the same as the racism

(19:14):
of the a f L. A f L s notoriously
racist at this time. It's the same, Yeah, like constantly different. Um,
you know, presidents and ship would just be like, oh
well go send you know, Italian people or black people
or whatever to go break up a strike, um and
use race and ethnic tensions against it all. And you
can just do the same when you have two million

(19:35):
unemployed people wandering around. Yeah, it is because like the
obvious solution is if you help those people out so
that they're like inclined to act in solidarity with you
rather than just see you as another group of people
fucking with them, then the bosses have nobody to pull
for when they're trying to replace you. Yeah, And it

(19:55):
it works when people remember to do that, you know. Yeah,
I mean we could say the same thing about like
the international situation regarding labor right now. But yeah, well absolutely,
and I mean and a lot of that ties into
you know, Okay, so like the a f L. Uh,
you know, their racism was based in nationalism. It was
based in like the word I forget for old timey,

(20:19):
I hate immigrants. It's a different word than now, I
don't remember. And they they met and the a f
L meets in in April to specifically condemn the invasion
of the US by the Japanese, not the country, but
you know, workers and talked openly about the eradication of
brown men from industrial competition. So this is the Yeah,

(20:41):
this is the level of like when I'm saying a
FL sucked back then, That's where I'm at. But what's
interesting to me is all of the things that don't suck. Robert.
We are show sponsored entirely actually apparently responsored by me
paying for this show to exist. But beyond beyond the Margaret,
it will work out for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah totally.

(21:03):
And actually, listeners, if you pay me, you can have
a podcast on cool Zone Media. It's this new multi
tiered system. Yeah. Now, so here's here's the way it works, folks.
You get contracted two make a podcast, and you give
money to Margaret, Margaret gives the money to me. Then

(21:24):
you find two new podcasters underneath you who give you
money to podcast, which you give to Margaret, which Margaret
gives to me, and we eventually have a fully sustainable
business operation. Yeah. Yeah, um and where it's yeah called
a tapered rectangle scheme. Yeah. Yeah, a three sided as

(21:46):
the strongest shape. Actually, yeah, a three sided rectangle that
is the strongest shape of nature. Yeah, so we're supported
by you. And also these ads, wow, Margaret, those products.
Boy doesn't just want to make you run out and

(22:07):
join the police. Yes, I have become a Washington State
Highway Patrol officer, and I also am using better Help
online therapy. Alright, so the IWW. So one of the

(22:28):
things that I I noticed is whenever we talk, especially historically,
when we talk about like, oh, well there's the radicals
and then there's the mainstream union, and you imagine the
mainstream union maybe maybe you do, maybe you already figure
this out. You imagine the mainstream union as the bigger union, right,
you imagine like the IWW is like the scrappy tiny union. Yeah,
not so at least in the Inland Empire. The IWW

(22:51):
like vastly outnumbers the a f L. And yeah, and
especially in Spokane. And I mean it makes sense because
the a f L just like won't touch any of
ship um and they don't really have much to offer
to a hobo. But the Wobblies will take everyone employed
or not of any race. And they write extensively about

(23:12):
how racism is a divide and conquered game to control
the working class in a way that actually feels very modern.
If you read i WW tracks for fun um, which
you can, you you should. You should become someone who
only talks about history instead of things that happen in
the modern world. There's um, you'll never alienate anyone, You'll
have lots of friends. So Wobbly James Walsh, he shows

(23:37):
up and spoken and a he's a bro cobo and
he's the guy we opened with a quote from about
how he'd rather fight die fighting than die starving. And
the first thing he does, at least he claims, the
first thing he does is that there's thousands of angry
workers who are in the edge of a riot and
they want to go smash up these employment centers, and
he's like, no, no, no, join the wobblies. We will

(23:59):
organize a thing instead of just rioting. When she goes
against my instinct in which we should both organize and riot.
But the i w W had had different ideas and
kind of knew more than I do about how to organize, so,
you know whatever, They set up a union hall. They
get thousands of members of the it's skyrockets the IWW

(24:19):
as soon as they get there. There are three year
old union and they're suddenly skyrocketing, and they set up
a union hall. It has a library and a reading
room with a no talking allowed policy, so you can
go in and quietly read. There's a a cigar and
a newspaper stand. There's a a fucking movie feeder that's
so old timey that they refer to it as having
a fine new Edison moving picture machine available to them.

(24:44):
Oh yeah, that's that good old time stuff. And they
write in it and they're like, at the moment, we
show mainstream movies, but once we successfully have a socialist revolution,
will show socialist movies. Just the one upside of us
not having had a socialist revolution. Let's we don't have
to watch too many socialist movies. Yeah, yeah, not a
lot of Battleship Timpkins showings. Back to Bay. They also

(25:10):
have a meeting hall. They have four to five lectures
a week. You know, when I think about what kind
of movie I would want my ideal post revolutionary state,
it's more or less Night Writers. Yes, that's true. George
Romero film about people who fight as nights on motorcycles,
starring Ed Harris. Yeah, this is absolutely about motorcycle joustin

(25:31):
if you've made it essentially a beautiful anti capitalist religion. Yeah,
it's a pretty good movie. I think the Wobblies would
have liked it. I think so too. And after they
finished shrieking at the concept of motorcycles existing, Oh no,
now I don't know what motorcycle iron horse. Yeah, they're

(25:53):
gonna put all Bessie out of a job. Now, they're
probably we can rob a lot of banks at that,
but not as the Wobblies. That's one of the things
I love. I love reading historical subtext where it's like
and then a bunch of stuff happened, but that wasn't us. Um,
IWW's masters of that. So so they're having lectures and
meetings at their at their hall. They hire the paid

(26:15):
staff of the hall includes a librarian, a piano player,
and a singer. So you could just go hang out
and there's someone playing piano and singing and and one
of the things I realized is another thing that comes
up all the time in this show when I'm talking
about these different cultures that have cropped up, is that
the most interesting ones are ones that kind of allow

(26:37):
people without access to money to have access to culture.
And they basically, like you know, like the plays and
ship that people are putting on, the songs that they're singing.
The Wobblies were all about their fucking songs. Um. It's
like a really big part of what makes them interesting.
They also hire a law firm on retainer for compensation

(26:58):
for injured workers. They offer health insurance. It's not mandatory.
If you join the union, you don't have to pay
for it, but if you put in some money you
can get like health insurance. And you know, when a
tree falls on you where you're cutting down a force
I wish you had left alone, Um, you can get
take care of a hospital. Wasn't a lot of it,
like burial benefits to just like because everyone was dying

(27:18):
all the time and that was a real problem for people.
I think. So I didn't read anything specifically about that
and what they were doing here, but that is like
a whole thing that, like insurance in general, including life insurance,
was basically these like you joined these social organizations I camera,
like fraternal organizations and things um and so I assume
the loobblies were doing that. They they also maintain job listenings,

(27:43):
so you no longer needed to go to a job shark.
You could go to the hall and find work, and
as long as you remember in good standing, you could
get a job, which, to be clear, does involve a
monetary transaction. It costs fifty cents to join the i
w W at the time, which is half the price
of a job, and get to a whole lot of
other stuff. I feel like I'm advertising let everyone go

(28:04):
and join the i w W in nineteen or nine. Spoken.
If you are listening and you're in nineteen and nine, spoken,
head on down to the Union Hall. There's four different
locals to choose from. I don't even know why they
had four different branches, but they did and join up.
It's fifty cents our newspapers. I'm now I'm actually not
a meer Wobbly. The Wobbly still exist and I'm not

(28:24):
actually a member, but uh, pretending like I'm a nineteen
o nine wobbly. Our newspapers only thirty three cents. Well
in today money, it's a penny in old timing money.
And they set up a newspaper called The Industrial Worker,
which is not a very clever name, um, but it
was full of comics. Well that's cool and ads. This

(28:46):
is where I was gonna do an ad transition, but
it's it's the wrong time. So they did sell ads
to work clothes in local coffee shops. Capitalism on your
mind at all times, Margaret. Uh, there's a whole large
thing where people require the routine, um, let's say, importation

(29:07):
of food into their bodies that make them think about
where that money comes from. Also, I'm just really trying
to you know, I really want my podcast to do well.
So if I raise more money for you all, um,
then my podcast will do better. That's what you told me, right,
and then we that's right, yes, yes, that that that
that's how it will eventually work. Um. But you just
you really need to get another like six people under

(29:28):
you to start. But that's called your upline, Margaret um,
and that's really gonna increase your profits in what is
totally a legitimate business. Cool like cool zone. Okay, So thanks,
I make the jokes for Sophie. Um. So the wobbly

(29:50):
is in addition to having all this stuff at the
union hall, the main thing that they're doing is they
go right up to the employment agencies where all the
like workers are gathered around up front waiting to buy jobs.
And they're like, hey, I got an idea. What if
you don't buy a job. What if what if you
shouldn't have to pay to work? Imagine that? And and
they're like, if you want work, go to the union hall.
Give us fifty cents. It's actually not a grift, okay,

(30:13):
but they're like, you know, go join the union, we'll
get you jobs, will take care of you. And they
would also any time they heard about someone were robbing
the workers of their wages more directly, they would to
quote from an anonymous article and the industrial worker, it
is generally enough to send a few men from the
union hall to reason with the employment shark in the

(30:35):
case where he has robbed a victim, the employment shark
pays back the amount stolen. He has had a change
of heart. So their labor thugs, which also rules, Yeah,
I'm fine with that. Everybody needs thugs. And this was
essentially the first social power within Spokane, Washington, like a power,
you know, existing among the people, rather than the sort

(30:56):
of existing city infrastructure, even more importantly, the capital list infrastructure.
And they have thousands of members really fucking quick, and
every member's leader, and this scared the ship out of everyone.
Well not them, they liked it, but the employment agencies
they're like, yeah, all right, we have to stop free speech.

(31:18):
If we want to keep up our grift, we have
to stop people standing in front of our stores saying
it's a grift. So they band together they form the
Associated Agencies of Spokane. Oh so they've unionized too. That
it is cool that that is every like big union
fight story has the moment where like all of the

(31:38):
factory owners of the corporations or whatnot basically make a
union for themselves to fight back. Yep. And this is
why it's so embarrassing that isn't the a f l C.
I oh, that the cops are a union? Cop union
is part of I can't remember. I'll stop my head. Um, yeah,
I think so if a f l C. I, oh,
it's not you. I'm sorry I've slandered you in this
particular way. But yeah, no, yeah, exactly. The employers union

(32:03):
and the cop union are not fucking unions in the
same way that a workers union as a union. So
the associated agencies of a Spokane they just when you
read the like quick descriptions of this thing, they're like
they pressured city council to pass a law, and then
you read the actual articles from the time and it's
like bribed. They went up and said, here's a ton

(32:25):
of money past the following law. I mean, that is
literally how it works now. Like in the Portland is
dominated by a Portland Business Association. Most cities have a
business association that runs at least junk of the city.
In these what are called economic opportunity zones or whatever.
There's a couple of different names for them. They start
under the Reagan administration, but they're like areas where organizations

(32:46):
of small businesses basically get to decide how law enforcement
is employed sometimes hire their own cops in a few
cases hiring their own fucking d a's, and like, yeah,
as as a result, wind up in exercise saying like
massive influence over the entire way the city works. Like
it's all still this, right, It's still people with like

(33:07):
small and medium sized business is basically bribing city and
town council leaders and whatnot to institute laws and do
stuff like crackdown on the homeless in in Uh. Yeah,
it's it's cool. It's cool that that's that's always been
the same. Um, I'm sure, yeah, it's I guess the

(33:28):
big difference is that now there's no opposition to those groups,
like that's the default. You just kind of have to
pick your group of corporate interests in your town that
want the least shitty things for your town. Um. But
but yeah, there's no no countervailing force at all. Yeah,
which is I mean, you know, it's like it's why
I do this podcast and why I talk about history

(33:50):
is like I think history is neat kind of for
its own sake, because it's just like grand narrative that's
even more intricate than like Lord of the Rings. But
more than that, it's like you look at this and
you're like, oh, nothing fucking changes, you know, or things change.
We have motorcycles now. We do have motorcycles now, and
we can joust upon them with Edward Harris exactly, Um,
which I think is the solution to most of these problems.

(34:12):
And UM, I'm actually surprised the i w W did
as well as they did without Edward Harris. But they yeah,
I mean, you know, it's like, that's like, why to
talk about these sorts of things from my point of view,
So we can see these patterns and then we can
see them in our own lives and we can look
at ship that people did that didn't didn't work. Um.
Business improvement districts, by the way, that's what they're okay, okay,

(34:35):
I got the term bids, sorry, bids bids bids. Yes,
So they bribe city council and they're like, let's have
an ordinance against street meetings and they're like, well, wait,
what about religious organizations And they're like no, no, no no, no,
they can do it. And they're like, well what about
these other things? No, no, no, they can do it.
Do you just mean the i w W. And they're like, yeah, yeah,

(34:57):
we just mean panning, the i w W from from
organized and the i w W from letting people know
there's a scam in town. Yeah, exactly, And so the
ordinance passes. It passed in probably January first, nineteen o nine.
There's like different stories that claim exact dates that are different,
but my money's on January first, nineteen o nine. And
the mayor, of course of the town was a neutral

(35:20):
party because he owned boy. He as a wholesale timber
guy whose entire fortune was entirely based on the exploitation
of these workers. So he was yeah, yeah, that that
that that sounds unbiased. That's a guy who couldn't possibly
have an angle. Yeah, no, totally. I mean you know,
maybe someone even worse ran against him, who knows. Yeah,
but one guy was like, what if we just literally

(35:41):
put all the workers into this hole and set the
hole on fire. Yeah he was, he was. He was
in the ground beef industry, just trying to sell the
meat of the from the bones of the labor class exactly.
And so they're like, man, Pratt, he's our guy. He
just wants he doesn't think we should be eating. Yeah,
I like the cut of this man's job. And so okay,

(36:02):
at first, the i w W when this ordinance passes,
they're like, all right, we'll do our talking in the
meeting home. Um, and a lot of transient workers take
off for harvest season, and they they're challenging in court
is the first thing they do, and they actually do
succeed at getting the courts to say, okay, you can't
ban only the iww from meeting in public, and so
it bans other groups, including most notably the Salvation Army,

(36:23):
who are religious organization who are still a problem today,
UM speaking of griffs. And they and they actually successfully
challenge it in the Court's like okay, you're right. And
instead of the court being like you're right, everyone should
have free speech, the judges like, you're right, no one
should have free speech, and they banned the Salvation Army

(36:44):
to except no one enforces it against the Salvation Army. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean that that's you have a conversation about some
concerns I have with gun control. But yeah, that's that.
That is often the way this kind of ship works. Yeah. Yeah,
So the summer comes and goes, and you know, basically
it's all being fought in court, and it's not going
incredibly well. And in fall, the itinerant workers come back

(37:08):
to town. They're mostly coming back to town from basically
working summer jobs, and they kind of are like a
lot of workers come back into town and they're like,
all right, I'm gonna take it easy for the winter
as best as they can. And so now their numbers
are bolstered, and they're like, all right, fuck it, it's on.
And there's four different IWW locals in town. Again, I've
literally no idea why. I guess just decentralization consus. Yeah,

(37:31):
that just that that seems consistent with what you say
saying yeah, And so they come to consensus and they're like,
all right, we're gonna call for a free speech fight.
And this isn't the first of these free speech fights.
They just want a really similar battle on a smaller
scale in Missoula, Montana. Missoula, Montana had outlawed streets speaking,
and hundreds of wobblies had poured into town on box

(37:52):
cars and they set up speaking all over the city.
They clogged the local jails, and they forced the city
to drop the ordinance. And they're like, all right, that's
how we fucking get it done. We're going to do
a replicable tactic. Yeah. Yeah, and so the first person
to get arrested on this new law, I thank again.
Different things claim different things. The wobbling named Jim Thompson.
He was dragged off to jail in October. Soap Boxing

(38:15):
and the Industrial Worker their their newspaper puts out a
call and basically they're like, hey, are you hoboes or
they also use the words bindle stiffs and timber beasts.
I didn't know timber beasts. We ought to use timber
beasts more often. I agree that. I mean, honestly, that
just sounds cool when you're like someone new comes to
town and you're trying to stop them from moving there,
and you can be like, well, there's a lot of

(38:37):
timber beasts in the woods. Yeah. Then maybe they think
that you're talking about wolves, and so they they go
back home to Iowa. Yes, and then you can sell
them a a coyote pelt as if it's a wolf
a timber beast pelt. This is a thing that happened
to Margaret and I at at a Renaissance fair. We
didn't actually buy it, no, no, no, no, no. It

(38:59):
was immediate the obvious that it was a coyote belt. Yeah,
good on them, m um. Okay. So they're like, hey,
come to you know, hey, all you hobos come get arrested,
or to use their oh you timber beasts? Oh sorry,
are you timber beasts? Come and get arrested. And their
actual quote is the headline of their newspaper that they like,
the broadside they sent out across the country is wanted

(39:22):
men to fill the jails of Spokane. That's great. I
did see there was stuff like that at Standing Rock.
There was discussion like that at Standing Rock, which was, yeah,
it's an interesting tactic. I've like, I've done it on
a smaller scale, like for like a day where you know,
we expect a thousand people to get arrested, so we
all refuse to give our names when we get arrested,

(39:43):
and they like clogs up the jails and they're like,
funk this, get out of here, you know, um, which
is why I have been arrested twice and I've never
given my name. Um. I'm very proud of that. I
hope it stays though, and where would Okay? So uh,
and they send out this across the US, and I
think Canada and they say, show up for November two,

(40:05):
be prepared to be orderly. We're not going to riot,
but we're going to fucking get this ship then, and
the hope it is just pour in there's they're crammed
fifty to seventy people in a box car. Um and
that the uniform they're wearing, because nothing never changes their uniform.
These like anarchists and socialist hobos is black overalls and

(40:26):
or jumpers with black shirts, and they wear red ties,
and they have like they look like kind of like
working nerds, you know, because they're like they have like
um and they have like they have red ties, and
they have the Red Songbook in their pocket like other
i WWW books which are all like red covers and
ship they have IWW pins on their coat. Total fucking nerds.

(40:51):
And the train lines are mostly unionized, so all of
the union train operators, not all of them, A lot
of them turn a blind eye to the wobblies and
help them get where they're going, put them on the
right cars. Some of them wrap them out. Even some
of the unionized workers are like, I know how to
get a book? I can you know? I saw these
people out or whatever to deal with that yeah, and
they camp and make coffee, and the hobo jungles around

(41:14):
the train yards, which is where people like sleep in
camp before they get on freight trains. And sometimes they
head into whatever town they're on that whatever town they're
stopped in, and just like walk in and force and
start giving speeches to the workers and like selling wobbly merch.
It's just basically a tour um. They like make their
coffee money by selling the Little Red Songbook full of
all their songs, basically their mixed CD. And thousands of

(41:38):
them do this and they're off to spoken. This is
the tradition in which I wrote freight Trains. I wrote
freight Trains to go around and get arrested trying to
protest things. And it was formally launched on November two.
One by one, wobblies mounted and overturned crate their soapbox
and they would start talking and then get arrested. Um.
Usually once they got arrested, they were forced to run

(42:00):
the gauntlet between two lines of cops who beat them
with batons. They would plead guilty and then they would
get sentenced to thirty days of hard labor breaking rocks
for the crime of disorderly conduct. Anyone who has picked
out as a leader was given six months for conspiracy.
Some of them were facing five years in prison. Even
their attorneys kept getting arrested. That sounds above board, Yeah, totally. Yeah.

(42:24):
It was like they would get arrested for delivering letters
to their clients. You know, Um, but you know who
else would smuggle things into jail for you, Robert oh Well,
Ed Harris. Um. I I suspect that if I needed it,
Ed Harris would have my back. Um. And and we, Margaret,
do you know who Ed Harris is? I do, because

(42:46):
I watched this movie last night, this excellent movie. Margaret
showed it to us favorite movies of all time. If
you don't recognize Ed Harris, he's the guy in the
movie The Rock who lays the military commander who takes
over Alcatraz, And in the beginning of the movie you
see him at the grave site of his wife and

(43:06):
the only thing written on his wife's gravestone is just
his wife, not a name. It's awesome, Michael Bay No
one makes movies like that. Ridiculous. But if you want
to see him as an anti capitalist, basically a narco monarchist,
go go watch Night Riders because this show is brought

(43:27):
to you by George Romero. Smash it, Night Riders, Night Writers.
It didn't make any money, and neither do we. Here's
the ads. Okay, we are back, and we are talking
about people standing up on soapboxes to get arrested for

(43:50):
speaking their mind. And not all of them were orators,
because you know, their job was to get arrested, not
actually give speeches. And and then guess a lot of
a lot of mixed quality in the speech is going
out at these events. Oh yeah, also a lot of
variable levels of ability to communicate in English. Um, you

(44:11):
know about half of the people who get arrested are immigrants,
and some of them apparently go up and say fellow
workers or even like mine workers, you know, like because
they're trying to shock Yeah, and then my German accent,
but I've been informed it's offensive okay, um okay, And
and they'd be like, okay, ship, where are the cops

(44:32):
because that's all they knew how to say in English?
Maybe right, was my fellow workers? And you know, and
if the cop wasn't around to arrest them, um, they
were they were in trouble because they did not give talks.
Some of them actually were really good orators, and they
would bring out ringers. It was all very well orchestrated.
It wasn't when I first heard this story, I sort
of imagined them all like dutifully lining up and the

(44:53):
cops are waiting, and like they'd stand up and they're
basically just talking to the cops and just getting sent
off one by one. Now, this whole thing is like
almost like free speech riot. They're like they run around
kind of undercover, and then they whenever they see a
group of workers, they like pop up on a soapbox
and start giving speeches. The crowd fights off the cops
for like ten minutes. Sometimes when the cops finally break through,

(45:16):
the people run into the crowd and get the funk
away so that they can keep doing it. Okay okay yea,
And they know they're going to get arrested eventually, but
they're gonna make it easy for the police. Do as
many speeches, draw as much money out for them. Yeah,
it's good strategy, good texts, and so they would and
so like sometimes the crowd would give them signals like hey,

(45:36):
the cops are coming, um and yeah, all very well
planned and when they thought they had a chance of
actually a longer talk, they would send their better orators,
or when they needed to draw a crowd, they'd send
the people with like the booming voices that would bring
people from all over. Um, it's very hard to imagine
this in modern context to me, Like, I just struggle
to imagine me standing on a corner full of people

(45:57):
and talking and having anyone do anything besides me throw
a coin at me, Margaret. People didn't have phones or
TVs back then, So I feel like a big missing
piece in all these stories is there was not much
going on. Like when we talk about why don't we
do this cool ship today, it's, well, there are video games,
like people do have like have activities. Back then, it

(46:17):
was like, well, we have like an hour and a
half before we die of cholera, and there's there's nothing
to watch or listen to and we can't read. So
I guess we'll go fight for civil rights. Yeah, totally, totally. Um, sorry,
that's not fair, but but but but but like, yeah,
people are way more engaged with whatever it is that

(46:39):
they're immediately doing when they're on the street. Right now.
The thing that's serious about this is. I don't think
it's not a factor that there was a lot less
of of things that you could fill your time with
back then. Yeah, totally. At least one person was arrested
for speaking through a window to people outside the building.
They were allowed to be in the building, but they

(46:59):
just like saying hey, fellow workers out the window. The
cops like break in and arrest them. Um. Other wobblies
start getting arrested just walking down the street if they're
recognized as wobblies, and they're like held for days while
the cops sit around try and figure out what charges
they can throw at them. Eight kids get arrested, Eight
wobbly kids aged eight to sixteen who were like newsboys
who would sell the newspapers. Yeah. Um, they get arrested

(47:22):
and thrown in jail for a night and they're given
rough interrogations in quotes at all hours. Um. One of
the kids, his wobbly parents almost lost custody of him
for being socialists. Uh. The judge was like, the union
hall isn't I'm not quoting, but I'm pretending like I'm quoting.
The union hall is not a place where any reputable
woman would hang out. But this piste off everyone in town,

(47:45):
and so everyone in town shows up the next day
at court and it's like flooded with women who are like,
fuck you, I want to go to the Union home now.
You can't fucking tell me at a parent my fucking kids. Yeah,
And and that kind of vibe is what really gets
every and through this, and the juvenile cases are dropped
after all the women in town just show up and
are like, fuck off, you can't fucking take people's kids

(48:07):
away for you know, being wobblies. One man, he decides
to troll, so he gets up on soapbox and he
reads the Declaration of Independence. Oh, you don't want to
be doing that. He gets thirty days at the rock pile. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean a good third of our founding fathers would

(48:27):
have been happy with that. Yes, that is true. And
and what's interesting is because all of this is framed
and a lot of their you know, public facing stuff,
they're like, we are here fighting for free speech. That
was very explicit, and they're like, the right of free
speech is guaranteed by the Constitution, and that was like
part of their demands. But they were fighting for free
speech because free speech is their weapon. Against capitalism, not

(48:50):
just as this abstract love for the U. S. Constitution. Uh.
In a l edition of The Industrial Worker, one Wobbli
puts it like this, The fights for free speech conducted
by the I w W throughout the American continent have
a greater meaning than appears upon the surface. They signify
a distrust of legal methods for obtaining redress for the
wrongs inflicted upon a slave class. In these fights, the

(49:12):
workers do not stand upon their quote constitutional rights, for
they are aware of the fact that they have no
rights save those which they're organized power and forces. True,
they may use phrases during the progress of the battles,
but merely as a means of showing the rest of
the workers the folly of relying upon phrases written upon
musty pieces of parchment by slaveholding labor skinners of the past.

(49:35):
The principal point in all these fights is seen when
the settlement takes place. For then it is that the
master class, with all their powers, forced to deal with
the workers not as individuals, not as part of capitalist society,
but as a new power. And I just like that,
because it's like it's They're like, no, we are a
a power and we are going to take power and

(49:55):
exercise power, you know. And and the tool that they're
using for that is free speech. So that's why they're
fighting for free speech. Yeah, I mean this is this again.
It's kind of everything is so fucking fragmented now I
think we can thank technology for But like, there used
to be this attitude among the left that like workers
were a power the same way or should be a

(50:18):
power like that was the goal to make the power
of the ways in the same way as any nation
state was Like that was that was the I think
a lot of it died with World War One because
there was this expectation among a lot of socialists that like,
such a thing couldn't happen because the workers wouldn't let
themselves be turned against each other in that way. But yeah,
and that ties into the Wobblies a lot, because one

(50:38):
they're called the Industrial Workers of the World even though
their US Union um, because they fucking believe in internationalism,
and because World War One recks their ship. Yeah, it
turns out. Look, I'm normally in favor of shooting archdukes.
Don't get me wrong, Like I don't I don't have
any hatred for shoot the archduke. But it doesn't always

(51:02):
work out shooting the archduke, you know, now, shoot carefully.
I think that one of the main lessons of history
is random bombs and random violence. Alright, fucking crap. Shoot, yeah,
and probably a worse than like overall, worse than good. Um,
if they're not especially if they're not tied. Well, I

(51:23):
don't know, Margaret, you know, let's let's get a secondary opinion.
I've invited on the show roughly half of the young
men in Western Europe in nineteen fourteen. Oh no, no,
oh yeah, I don't hear anybody. It looks like they
may have missed the email. Probably got tuberculos. I don't
think that's what happened. The only way that I think

(51:45):
I didn't more people die of disease in World War
One than bullets. I can't remember. Well, it was about equal,
I think during the war, and then after the war
like that many people again died or something like that.
I'm not because there was like Spanish COVID, the influential, yeah, COVID,
the influential influence the epidemic. But I mean, as a
general rule, up until like sixty years ago, you were

(52:05):
like at least as many dead from various diseases. Yeah,
but the influenzer's yeah on Instagram. Okay, wow, wow, so
they I think we have to cancel Margaret for that one. Nope, wow,
you can't. You can't cancel Margaret Killjoy. It's just like

(52:26):
Twitter can uncancellable. Oh no, this is not a fight
I want to bring upon myself. The only fight we
have against social media right now is Mark Zuckerberg just
suspending me on Instagram for this is I feel like
he almost might be a bastard. Yeah, this is the pause.

(52:49):
We're going to get the workers of the world back
together and getting Sophie Backer. I just want to be
able to post pictures of puppies, podcasts and plants puppies
on internet. It yeah, Zuck, I feel okay. Well, I
actually it's probably not the right time for burning the
Reichstag jokes. So after two days, after two days of this,

(53:13):
a hundred fifty Wobblies are in jail, and after a month,
six of them are in jail. About half of them
are immigrants, half of them are US born, and the
courts are full every single day with labor cases, um
and the they closed the courts, so a lot of
them anyway, so people can't come in. One local man
who wasn't even a wobbly he tried to get into

(53:34):
the courtroom. He didn't realize I think he I think
it's maybe comprehension of English wasn't good, or something happened.
He tried to walk in, and he was beaten so badly.
His screams echoed throughout the halls of justice as he
tried to enter. Okay, I mean that does sound pretty bad.
But that guy was probably no angel. Yeah, that's right.

(53:55):
We don't We don't know anything about him. He could
have he probably started World War One, yeah, or worse,
he might have been Irish or Italian, yeah, or from
one of the Swabian countries. Yeah. Yeah, Okay. One of
the heartbreaking things about all of this is that I think,
like a really good chunk of the wobblies are Irish,

(54:16):
and a really good junk of the cops are throwing
him in jail or Irish, yeah, which is what the
Irish diaspora is never quite really reckoned with. Yeah. There's
actually some good speeches on that from Irish rebels who
like did stuff like go to the United States to
support the black panthers, and we're like, I don't know
what the funk happened to everybody who moved over to

(54:36):
your goddamn country. But there are a lot less base
than they ought to be um. So when they get sentenced,
they all get thirty days in jail, except the ones
who get six months or five years or whatever. And
they get sentenced to break rocks. But the wobblies did
not want to break rocks. Actually, they said, we're happy
to break rocks. We demand union wages for our rock
breaking duties. And they were like, okay, fine, no breaking rocks. Instead,

(54:59):
you are nished with rations of bread and water and
no time out of yourselves. But it put the Chain
Gang of Spokane out of commission while they were there,
because basically, the cops in that town had just been
kind of whenever they needed unpaid labor. There's must be
some other word for it, but we'll just use unpaid
labor to come up with another word for unpaid labor
that's still written into our constitution. They would just arrest

(55:21):
drunks and get free labor for construction out of these
drunks by putting them on the chain gang. But all
of the random arrestees were basically set free because the
jail is full of wobblis and so no more chain
gang in town. The leaders and a lot of the
other people, they go on hunger strike. And this is
a new political tactic. It's the first time it's used

(55:43):
in the US as far as I can tell. The
idea of just refusing food while you're in jail. Um.
And they were tortured in jail. All jail is torture.
Jail is full of horrors right now. But several of
them died during their thirty days stay Jesus. They were
they were given only bread and water. The bread was
thrown onto the floor for them that each got half

(56:05):
a loaf of bread per day. A lot of them
got scurvy and like lost heath um whenever the wild.
You have to assume their their nutrition levels weren't ideal beforehand.
To there's this, there's this part. It didn't make into
the script, but like someone smuggles in an onion and
cuts it into sixty three separate pieces, so that everyone
gets an equal share of the one onion that they've

(56:27):
like risk their fucking life to smuggle in and whenever
the wildlies make a fuss, the cops closed the windows
and turn on the steam heat and just like cook
them and then drop them into the immediate cold. It's
very cold and spoken in the winter. And this is
what kills them, right, A lot of them dry die
of pneumonia. And this is, by the way, a tactic

(56:49):
that is used prominently, has been used up into through
the nineties, and I think even later than that, in
the early two thousand's, police in large junks of Canada
would do this indigenous people, not just you know, people
who are like protesting. Yeah, protesting makes it okay, but
just like random like is a random act of murder. Essentially,
you can move about like midnight rides. I think they

(57:10):
were called um and during the two fourteen risings in
Ukraine against the want to be dictator Yunakovich, his riot
police the beer kut one of the things they would
do when they would get people that kind of isolated
sections of the line or protest camps or people driving
in supplies as they would take them, strip them naked
and throw them in snow drifts like it's a it's

(57:31):
a yeah, a great, great tactic. I'm yeah, good stuff. Yeah,
I've I've been at demonstration where some of the people
who arrested they singled out black arrestees, put them in
dog cages and sprayed them naked with freezing water. Um
and Jesus yeah um. Miami the ft A protests in

(57:53):
two thou three prisoners were treated real fucking bad um
and anyway, sorry um okay. So they got packed ten
to twelve people into cells designed for four people, and
so they couldn't sit or lie down. Right, You're stuck

(58:13):
for like months standing up in a fucking cell. Uh.
But while they were in jail, they would like have
their wobbly business meetings because they're all leaders and they're
all in jail together, so what the funk else are
you gonna do? They like plan things out, They have
prayer meetings. Uh, they give lectures, they sing revolutionary songs
the whole time. They work really hard to keep all

(58:34):
their spirits up. Did the jail fills up quick? And
soon they're they're the extra arrestees are taken to this. Basically,
there's an abandoned schoolhouse in town that once the hey,
let's fill the jails started happening, the city is like okay,
and they prepare this unheeded, fucking abandoned schoolhouse to be
with no bathing facilities, to be the new jail. And

(58:57):
so they get thrown into empty classrooms with threadbare blankets
and only newspaper to sleep on. Most of them were lumberjacks,
and so most of them had warm clothes that they
were arrested in, and those without warm clothes this is
really sweet. Uh, they would sleep in the middle so
that everyone else would keep them warm. And then when
that got full up, because you know, the whole plan

(59:19):
was we're going to fill out the jail, so they
kept to have to find new jails, right, and so
then they start putting them into a military site called
Fort Right, and Fort Right was was had a black garrison,
and the wobblies who were stationed that were treated way
the funk better than the wobblies who were in the
jail and the schoolhouse. And it actually wasn't a federal
decision to turn the federal fort into a fucking prison

(59:43):
for like state offenses or city offenses. And the local
commander had completely ignored the chain of command in order
to do this because he hated these fucking hoboes, and
so he actually got dismissed from his post because he
wasn't supposed to turn his fucking command into a jail
mhm um. Eventually, the prisoners in the schoolhouse they get

(01:00:04):
marched and masked the jailhouse to bathe. I think it's
after like almost a fucking month, and and they've been
completely cut off from communications from the outside world besides
like a conservative newspaper that they get shown every now
and then, literally because it says like the Wobblies have lost,
We're winning, even though it's like exactly not what's happening.
And so they've been stuck together in this tiny schoolhouse

(01:00:25):
and they're like, what the fund is gonna happen? They're
gonna they basically are like, we're gonna like death march
you a mile to the jail and then hose you off. Um.
And they're like, what the fund is gonna happen when
we go outside? And they go outside and they're immediately
greeted not with an angry mob, but a fucking like
like people like lined up to cheer them on. All
of the towns people come out, they throw them tobacco,

(01:00:47):
fruit cake wrapped up sandwiches. They throw all the ship
into the crowd of them, and so they start gathering
up all this stuff and they're they're they're eating it,
and the cops are like, oh, no, you don't. They
start confiscating all the ship, and the crowd is, oh, yes,
they fucking do, and the cops are like, oh, we're
severely outnumbered. I guess these people can eat their food,

(01:01:09):
because if we don't let them, we'll probably not have
any prisoners anymore and we might be dead. It's amazing
how that works. Yeah, yeah, I mean jail support baby.
One of the I mean up to the up to
the present moment the uprisings in one of the most
important pieces of activism anyone did in any of the
cities that had serious BLM activity in twenty was was

(01:01:31):
jail support. Was going out to find the people who
were who had gotten arrested and like greet them when
they leave, make sure they have the things they need,
they have transport. People often get released basically naked without
their phones and ship like. Um. This is still a
big deal to this day, although usually it doesn't get
to be as cool as this because the cops have

(01:01:53):
gotten smarter than just walking everybody out in the middle
of the city. Yeah, the cops actually get smarter than
that after this and they start driving back and forth
after that. Um. But but yeah, no, totally, like, um,
you know, and even if you don't smoke and you
hate people hate smokers, like bring cigarettes, right yeah, Like, um,
when you're waiting outside for people to get out of jail,

(01:02:14):
bring whatever stuff they might want, not what you want
them to want. That that's one of those that's good
advice because it's kind of other people. But like, as
a general rule, anytime I'm going into any sort of
situation that's like violence or there's just been violence, or
it's it's a dicey place, I'm always going to bring
a pack of cigarettes because, among other things, like a

(01:02:36):
hell of a lot of time you can calm people
down who are agitated with like do you want a cigarette?
Do you smoke? Like something like that. It works, It
works an awful lot of the time. Um. It's people
sometimes just need to take a minute, which is why
cigarettes are so popular all over the world. Totally. Yeah,

(01:02:56):
we yeah, the Elk Fork John Brown gun Club people
were just talking about, like, yeah, of the things we
do that, like the City Outreach doesn't do is that
along with food and help with people moving their stuff,
Like we'll bring them smokes because like it's it helps
calm people down. There's a lot of like folks who
use it to sort of self medicate for one thing
or another. And if they're living on the street, they
don't have a whole lot of other options. So yeah, like,

(01:03:18):
no charity is gonna want to bring them cigarettes, but
it is what people fucking want, and yeah, it's yeah, anyway, whatever,
this is enough of it. No, I don't actually smoke.
I just see the utility of cigarettes sometimes. Yeah. Same,
It's like I kind of want all my friends to
quit smoking. But I'm also like, yeah, whatever, like you
do you when it comes to this kind of ship,
you know? Yeah, okay. So and as they're as they're

(01:03:41):
marching off to jail, one woman starts singing a wobbly
song from a porch of a privately owned house that
she has permission to be at. It might even be
her house, I'm not sure. And she gets arrested for
singing a wobbly song on her own porch and gets
thirty days in jail for disorderly conduct. When they get
to the jail. The bathing is that they're hosed down

(01:04:02):
with scalding water and then freezing water in rapids secession. Um.
At one point whether in jail, the Salvation Army shows
up and tries to proselytize to the jailed Wobblies, and
then they just get booed and jeered at until they
leave because and they're not even anti religious as far
as I can tell, I think overall the Wobblies tend
to skew a little bit towards atheism. But I was
reading about them having prayer meetings in the fucking jail.

(01:04:25):
And then one woman who um went to jail I
think ten times during this fight was a woman named
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and she's nineteen at the time. She's
a young, fiery socialist Wobbly organizer, and she wants to
give a speech right but she doesn't want to get
hauled off to jail right away, so she chains herself
to a post so that she can give She gets

(01:04:47):
a good ten minutes in before they managed to like
unchain her, cut the chains or something drag her off
to jail. She ends up going up on conspiracy charges
as one of the one of the organizers and basically
just gives the investig it's lip instead of answering. They're like,
did you say the following things? And she's like, I
say a lot of things. A lot of women were
arrested as well as men, because the IWW actually bothered

(01:05:09):
to organize women, and therefore they organized was organized also
by women. A lot of the women who were arrested,
they were arrested directly at the i w W hall.
I think fewer of them were the speakers as far
as I can tell, and more of them were like
organizers back at the hall, and the hall just kept
getting rated. It got rated so much that eventually the
cops just stationed four cops inside the hall to like

(01:05:33):
keep track of what everyone said, because apparently free speech
also doesn't apply in the hall. Yeah, it kind of
doesn't sound like they haven't, and so they wind up
evicted from their hall that they're up on the rent.
But basically the cops were like, yeah, we're gonna beat
the ship out of you, landlords if you don't evict
these people. And they go through place after place and

(01:05:55):
people are is like, no, I can't rent to you.
The cops are threatening me too hard. Until the German
immigrant Association called the Turners, which was basically a gymnastic
association for German immigrants. They're like, we're not afraid of
the cops, and they rent to the Wobblies. The women's
cells are less crowded, but they saw something even worse

(01:06:16):
than what the men were facing. Most of the wobblies
in jail were sex workers. Um. And soon Elizabeth Flynn
realized that the sheriff had turned it into it gets
called a brothel. Whatever you do, yep, it is not
sex work if it is not a job, if it's cosy, yeah, so,

(01:06:38):
and the cops were going around and soliciting customers and
keeping all of the money. Um. And and then there's
some graphic accounts that I won't read of attempted rape
by the interrogators against the arrested wobbly women as well.
And so this actually ends up being a lynch pin
in the fight, even though this hadn't really happened to
the wobblies as much. The wobbly see this happening. Elizabeth

(01:07:01):
Flynn in particular sees this happen, and so immediately she
gets out and she tells the world was happening right
through the industrial worker, and the newspaper had been publishing
the whole time, even though every single time they put
out an issue, the editor would get arrested. Um. But
since every Wobble as a leader, every Wobble is a
potential editor, they went through eight editors, are eight different issues,

(01:07:25):
and and how over how eight issues? Yeah, yess monthly? Um,
and as he or actually I think it's more than monthly.
Might actually be weekly, I think because by December, Elizabeth
Flynn lays out her charges against the police that they
are doing this horrendous thing. Um, and the cops immediately

(01:07:47):
confiscate all the papers and like burn them and impound everything.
And they're like, go fucking wild on it, And so
they move the newspaper to Seattle so that they can
keep publishing. Because this is the like, this is the
step too far, This is the like yeah, oh fuck
you know, um, because she's telling the world about this,
Any human who has told the story, I would hope

(01:08:10):
would react very negatively. Now, Margaret, it does sound like
a reoccurring theme here, is that the right to free
speech exists only in so far as you have control
of the people whose job it is to hurt people
in your society, whether either you fight them or you
pay their salaries. But one way or the other, free
speech doesn't exist otherwise for other groups. Yep, that's cool.

(01:08:35):
And also free speech it exists in as much as
we own the means by which to produce and distribute speech. No, no, no,
but that's not right, because we have free speech here
in the United States. And I'm pretty sure that I
have never seen police officers slam a kid's head into
the concrete for holding a sign. Yeah, yeah, no, I
mean that would be yeah wild, that would be that
would be that would be really that would be really
fucked up. Actually, if that had happened anyway, And we

(01:08:58):
don't have to pay for podcasts, we just choose to.
Uh it's you pay to have your podcast produced by
cool Zone Media by going through me. Um, then I
get to pay, I get I get to play Robert
who gets to pay Sophie and folks, if you really
want to learn the secrets podcasting could have made us
all you knew it, you We're we're We're doing a

(01:09:22):
convention at the Marriott at the Airport Marriott in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
So just come on down. It is three days of
workshops and motivational speeches. It is steal dollars. That's all
dollars per person, plus sixteen fifty for meals lunches and
breakfasts and dinners not included. Um. And of course you

(01:09:43):
know you're eight hundred and fifty dollar per night room fee. Uh.
And yeah, you'll you'll guaranteed guaranteed path to riches in
the podcasting visits. Just just hop on over barely sixty
dollars if you buy the Ultra Express tickets which come
with a coffee mug. Hit We're for me. And I
wasn't paid to say this, that's right. She'd have to

(01:10:04):
tell you if she was. Yeah, that's the being a cop. Hm. Anyway,
Elizabeth Flynn girle Is Girley Flynn is a very interesting
person of her own right. She goes on to do
a lot of stuff that I have not yet fully
wrapped my head around how I feel about her, because
she got kicked out of the Wobblies for kind of
leading to some people to bumplead deal. But then she

(01:10:26):
founded the a c l U, and then she joined
the Communist Party, and then She got kicked out of
the a c l U when the when Soviet Russia
became allies with Germany at THEE when they signed a
non aggression pact with Germany, and the a c l
U was like, we don't trust people who are siding
with the Nazi, so you're all kicked out. I don't
know how I feel about any of the ship. I
just read about her. She's very interesting as Honestly, I

(01:10:48):
don't entirely know how I feel about the A c
l U today because they also have kind of a
mixed bag of a history. But so she's she's a
she's a complicated figure, but is uncomplicated that she solve
this ship and told the world about it at great
personal risk, and I believe went out and got arrested

(01:11:09):
again after seeing that ship. So based and that's where
we're going to leave it for today. The Wobblies are
in jail. They're fighting hard as funk for the right
to organize, the right to free speech, because that's what
the right to free speeches is, the right to organize. Um, yeah, yeah,
So you know, I don't think too much about the

(01:11:32):
fact that free speech only exists in so far as
you're able to stop people with weapons from ceasing stopping
you from exercising free speech. Don't think about the fact
that that's the only way in which people get to
actually guarantee they're able to speak their minds. Think instead
about our upcoming convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin three days for

(01:11:55):
First through the five called the Secret of Free Speech
and Moral Enlightenment. Yeah. But actually both of you have
books from a k Press. Is that is that correct?
Like non sarcastic books, but actual books, non sarcastic books. Yes,
we do, Margaret, and I did co author the book

(01:12:17):
The Secret to Regaining Your Freedom of Speech, which is
just pictures of a Molotov cocktail. They're very nice. It's
a it's a it's very well photographed. It's a coffee
table book. It's a coffee table book. But but but actually,
you can get Robert's book after the Revolution wherever you
buy books, right, Robert, That is something that I've been told. Yes,

(01:12:40):
you can get it if you google a k Press
after the Revolution, or find any website that sells you
books and type in the title and and your book
is officially available for pre order right now, right Margaret, Yes,
unless Oh, yes, you have one day left of preorder.
If you want a little piece of art that I
think is really by the same cover artists. Who's who

(01:13:01):
did the cover of my book, Cassandra John's And if
you want that, you have one day to pre order.
We won't be here tomorrow from a K Press or
other participating bookstores which are mostly like collectively owned or
really cool Boxcar Books, Red Emmas and Um, Firestorm Books
and calf Coffee. Actually there's no coffee a Firestorm Books
and Coffee anymore, so I think it's just Firestorm Books,

(01:13:23):
cool bring around coffee and uh, you know you can't
follow me on Instagram unless Suckerberg has given it back
and hopefully he's been canceled for her many crimes. It's
buck soccerbo Um. But we'll be back on Wednesday. We're
with you car too good. I hope they win. I

(01:13:47):
think they will. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
a production of cool Zone Media, but more podcasts and
cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the preadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. M HM