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Women and Kids Form a “Living Petition” for Free Speech

September 22, 2015 By Pam

1917 poster depicting Ralph Chaplin behind bars

1917 poster of Ralph Chaplin behind bars

After Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act in June 1917, it became illegal for U.S. citizens to express “disloyalty” when the nation was at war.

WITCH-HUNT FOR WAR RESISTERS

In its vagueness and ambiguity, this Act became a tool used to imprison anyone who spoke or wrote against the war, especially labor leaders and socialists, who opposed the war as “capitalist folly.” They argued that workers were sent to the slaughter while the ruling class, bragging of “patriotism,”  grew rich from war profits.

In September 1917, government agents raided union meeting halls, seizing literature and arresting union leaders for antiwar conspiracy. Over 100 union leaders were found guilty of disloyalty and jailed, some with sentences of up to twenty years, including luminaries such as union leader Eugene V. Debs and Ralph Chaplin, author of the workers’ anthem “Solidarity Forever.”

O’HARE’S PLEAS FOR PEACE & FREE SPEECH

Kate Richards O’Hare spoke for workers’ rights, peace, suffrage, free speech

Kate Richards O’Hare drew crowds, advocating for workers’ rights, peace, suffrage, and free speech

Kate Richards O’Hare (1876-1948), a socialist, advocate for working women, and mother of four, was arrested for giving an antiwar speech in North Dakota. It was the same speech she had delivered in at least 70 other towns and cities. She was sentenced to five years and sent to prison.

In prison, O’Hare wrote two books and befriended fellow inmate Emma Goldman. Because her imprisonment stirred nationwide outrage, she won an early release from Woodrow Wilson.

As soon as “Red Kate” was freed, she set out on a “Welcome Home” tour, agitating for amnesty for the other political prisoners.

By the spring of 1922, Warren G. Harding was president. O’Hare decided it was time to send him a “living petition.”

CRUSADE OF STORYTELLING WOMEN

Sheet music for the hit tune of the antiwar movement

Sheet music for the hit tune of the antiwar movement

Thirty-five women and their children began a truth-speaking tour. It was a journey of storytellers, poor and working-class, from midwestern cornfields and New England factories.

On their way to the White House, the Living Petition stopped in towns and cities to educate anyone who’d listen about the 113 men imprisoned for the crime of political dissent in the “land of the free.”

Media-conscious organizers called it the “Children’s Crusade for Amnesty,” hoping that the mention of children would catch the headlines they needed and the sympathy, too.

Their stories were about workers — tenant farmers, factory workers, lumberjacks, miners — union men, most of them “Wobblies,” the nickname given members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

It took courage to defend the right to express antiwar sentiments during a time of patriotic fervor, but speak they did, in city after city.

A “GRIEF PARADE”

1919 article about O’Hare, pictured with her children, imprisoned at the MissourI State Penitentiary, with an inset of the warden

1919 article about O’Hare, pictured with her children, imprisoned at the Missouri State Penitentiary, with an inset of the warden

One woman, known only as Mrs Hicks, was frail and sickly. She held a toddler named after the famous deaf-blind socialist, Helen Keller. She had a story to tell: In 1912, her husband, a pacifist and socialist, had written a letter to a friend in England about the possibility of war and the effect it might have on working people. Though it had been written before passage of the Espionage Act, he was sent to prison because of that letter.

With her husband in prison and seven little children to feed, Mrs. Hicks appealed to a county judge, pleading for help. Instead, the judge removed one of her children and threatened to take the others.

The storytelling women experienced a range of responses to their Crusade. In Indianapolis, the American Legion opposed their visit. City officials refused to let them march, speak, or distribute leaflets. In Cleveland, on the other hand, 2,000 turned out to greet the women and their weary children, and joined in calling for the release of all political prisoners.

In New York City, the women paraded from Grand Central Station up Madison Avenue with banners: “IS THE CONSTITUTION DEAD?” and “A HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN MEN JAILED FOR THEIR OPINIONS!” When she saw the procession, Mary Heaton Vorse, the great labor journalist and feminist, called it a “grief parade.”

That evening, the women told their stories at a mass meeting in Webster Hall. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the fiery labor organizer known as “the rebel girl,” was there that night. In her autobiography she wrote:

I remember most vividly Kate O’Hare, tall, gaunt, standing there speaking while she held Helen Keller Hicks asleep in her arms. There were no loudspeakers then, but Kate’s powerful ringing voice filled every part of the hall. “This,” she said of the sleeping child, “is a petition they cannot throw away!”

FROM “LIVING PETITION” TO PICKET LINE

From “living petition” to picket line

Seeing kids on the picket line eventually touched Harding’s heart.

The crusaders reached Washington, D.C. on April 29, exhausted but determined to meet with President Harding. He, however, chose to meet with Lord and Lady Astor that day instead.

When the president was still busy the next day and the next, the women and their children formed a picket line in front of the White House. They had come too far and been through too much to turn back now.

The women, with children in tow, picketed the White House through weeks of an uncommonly hot Washington summer. At night, they bedded down in a house that had been rented for them.

On July 19, President Harding reportedly groaned, “I can’t stand seeing those kids out there any longer!”

When a delegation was finally allowed to meet with the president, they handed him a petition with a million signatures. Harding expressed his sympathy for the prisoners and their families. Although he refused to grant a general amnesty, he agreed that each case should be reviewed.

The women and their children returned home with honor, carrying bundles of gifts from well-wishers.

TO GO DEEPER

“Kansas: Remembering ‘Red Kate’” by P. S. Ruckman, Jr. on Pardon Power (blog)

50-book-coverBOOKS

Kate Richards O’Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches, edited by Philip S. Foner and Sally M. Miller, Louisiana State University Press, 1982

From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O’Hare by Sally M. Miller, University of Missouri, 1993

The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life 1906-26 by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, International Publishers, 1973

VIDEO CLIPS


“Women in the IWW” (1.25 mins.)


“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” The First Anti-War Hit Record (3 mins)

 

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: Children’s Crusade for Amnesty, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Espionage Act, Eugene V. Debs, Helen Keller, I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier, Kate Richards O’Hare, Mary Heaton Vorse, Ralph Chaplin, Wobblies

International Women’s Day — Born in the U.S.A.

March 6, 2015 By Pam

34-PosterAccording to one legend, International Women’s Day commemorates a March 8 demonstration in 1857, when women garment workers on New York City’s Lower East Side took to the streets to protest their deplorable working conditions. Problem is, there is no record of such a protest on that date.

Legends aside, the official holiday had modest beginnings in 1908 when the Socialist Party of America appointed a Women’s National Committee to Campaign for the Suffrage. This committee recommended that a day be set aside every year to work for women’s right to vote.

“CURSED WITH THE REIGN OF GOLD LONG ENOUGH”

34-Helen-KellerSocialists in the U.S. were not as rare in the early 1900s as they are today. Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party, received 900,000 votes when he ran for president in 1912. “I am for Socialism because I am for humanity,” he said. “We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough.”

By 1914, Oklahoma (!!) had elected six socialists to the state legislature. In Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, there were 55 weekly socialist newspapers.

Helen Keller, Jack London, and other famous people were not afraid to be identified as socialists.

“HOME SHOULD MEAN THE WHOLE COUNTRY”

Bust of Clara Zetkin in a Dresden park.

Bust of Clara Zetkin in a Dresden park.

In 1909, American socialists agreed to designate the last Sunday in February as “National Woman’s Day.” Women throughout the U.S. held mass meetings and listened to union organizers and others call for equal rights for women. In one address, writer/ lecturer Charlotte Perkins Gilman said, “It is true that a woman’s duty is centered in her home…” but she clarified, “home should mean the whole country and not be confined to three or four rooms or a city or a state.”

In 1910, in Copenhagen, at the Second International Conference of Women, Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin, the German women’s rights leader, proposed internationalizing the American Woman’s Day. It passed unanimously among the women, as it did a few days later at the general International Socialist Congress.

FEBRUARY OR MARCH?

The first celebration of International Woman’s Day was in 1911. There were rallies worldwide. According to an account by Russian delegate Alexandra Kollontai, the slogan of the new celebration was, “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism.”

34-suffrageThe day was named, the slogan chosen, but a date was never specified. Consequently, from 1911 to 1918, International Woman’s Day was celebrated on different days throughout the world.

In the U.S., it continued to be celebrated in February; in other countries, March. Whatever the date, it became a day for women’s celebrations, demonstrations for women’s liberation and workers’ rights, speeches, and, increasingly, a day for peace activism. It was widely held that women would use the ballot to end war.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1915, Clara Zetkin called on socialist women from neutral as well as warring nations to use the day to protest the war. Two years later, in Italy, women protested food shortages and posted this notice:

Hasn’t there been enough torment from this war? Now the food necessary for our children has begun to disappear. It is time for us to act in the name of suffering humanity. Our cry is “Down with arms!” We are part of the same family. We want peace. We must show that women can protect those who depend on them.”

THE WOMEN’S STRIKE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

34-Russia-strikeThe International Woman’s Day protest that changed the world occurred that year in Russia. Women had planned a day of speech-making and leafletting (March 8 by Western reckoning on the Gregorian calendar, February 23 on the Julian calendar used in Russia at the time). The spirit of the day carried them beyond these simple plans.

Coming on the rise of long struggle and many strikes, thousands of women left their homes and factories to protest food shortages in Russia, high prices, war, and the suffering they had so bitterly endured.

That day, the women went on strike. Trotsky wrote in The History of the Russian Revolution:

A mass of women, not all of them workers, flocked to the municipal duma demanding bread. It was like demanding milk from a he-goat. Red banners appeared in different parts of the city, and inscriptions of them showed that the workers wanted bread, but neither autocracy nor war. Thus, the fact is, that the February revolution was begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organizations, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the proletariat, the women textile workers, among them no doubt many soldiers’ wives. 

Russian women inadvertently inspired the last push of a revolution. A general strike spread through Petrograd, and, within a week, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.

FROM WOMAN TO WOMEN TO EXTRAORDINARY

After 1917, in honor of women’s role in the Russian Revolution, International Woman’s Day secured its place on March 8. The day became official in 1921, and the name changed to plural (Women’s) after 1945.

George W. Bush signs the Women’s History Month proclamation, March 10, 2008.

George W. Bush signs the Women’s History Month proclamation, March 10, 2008.

Today, IWD is celebrated around the world, from Afghanistan to Zambia. In the U.S., a consistent effort has been made to downplay its labor roots.

Here, International Women’s Day morphed into Women’s History Week and finally Women’s History Month — a time set aside to celebrate noteworthy women who have made extraordinary contribution’s to history and, um, not so much women garment workers. Sigh.

 

TO GO DEEPER

“International Women’s Day History” The University of Chicago summary

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: Alexandra Kollontai, Clara Zetkin, Helen Keller, International Women’s Day, Luise Zietz, March 8, National Woman’s Day, Socialist Party of America, Women’s History Month, Women’s History Week

Pam McAllister

In 1982, I edited the anthology Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence and then wrote two books about women’s use of resistance and action: You Can't Kill the Spirit and This River of Courage.

I've spent a lifetime compiling stories of courageous, creative actions, categorizing them (a la Gene Sharp), writing books and articles, speaking at university forums, church retreats, feminist conferences. I’ve also joined in the action -- antiwar protests in the '70s, Take Back the Night marches in the '80s, prison reform rallies in the '90s, and Occupy Wall Street actions in recent years.

I am currently researching more examples of nonviolent action for peace and justice around the world for two new books -- one for/about children and another about women (whose actions are still so often left out or overlooked).

Here I am with Barbara Deming, my mentor and friend, in Sugarloaf Key in the early ‘80s. The photo has faded, but the memories and love have not.

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