“But in this case I shall not do so,” said the court. “I shall submit it to you free from expression of my own judgment. Your decision shall be the last and only one on the question of fact.”
He then explained the law of conspiracy at considerable length, after presenting a brief digest of the substance of the indictment. He announced that it was unnecessary to prove explicit agreement to enter a conspiracy against the defendants if there was circumstantial evidence that such a conspiracy existed, judged by the facts and the actions of the defendants.
“Mere passive knowledge of the criminal activities of other persons is not sufficient to establish a conspiracy,” he instructed. “Some participation, coöperation, must be shown to establish the connection of any defendant, and by evidence of fact and circumstances independent of the declarations of other people,—that is, by evidence of the defendants’ own acts. Until such evidence is introduced, the defendants are not bound by the declaration or statements of others. But after it is shown he is a member of the conspiracy, he is so bound, providing the acts are in furtherance of the common purpose.”
The court also instructed that if any defendants entered the conspiracy after it started, knowing its purpose, they were equally guilty as if they had been of those who originally conspired, but he tempered this by suggesting that they might all have been guilty of minor conspiracies in different places, and he stated that if these were not related to a common purpose, they were not guilty under the indictment. He also announced that they might all be guilty of the acts of violence set forth in the indictment, and yet, if these were not related to a common conspiracy, they were not guilty in the charge in the case.
Both sides professed satisfaction with the instructions. The sentences of the Court sent Haywood and fourteen others, his principal aids, to the penitentiary for twenty years. Thirty-three men got ten years, the same number got five years; twelve men got a year and a day, two men got off with two days in jail, and two had their cases continued. There was well nigh a train load of them that started for Leavenworth federal penitentiary the next day. The Department of Justice could not find handcuffs enough in the city of Chicago to accommodate all the prisoners on that train!
The total time covered by these I. W. W. sentences amounts to eight hundred and seven years and twenty days. The world is deprived of that much-too-independent work in a time when the world needs honest labor. Haywood’s boast that there are 100,000 uncaught and unrepentant I. W. W.’s in the United States alone is all the proof needed of the nature of the men thus put away.
These men, like most under-cover criminals, were cowards. Haywood’s face went white when he heard sentence passed on him. The prisoners, but lately sneering and arrogant, now sat overwhelmed. Their friends and adherents also were stunned. The court room was filled with armed U. S. Marshals and A. P. L. men, all unknown and all ready for trouble. There was no trouble. Dead silence was in the room. All bail was cancelled, of course, and the march to jail began.
What did the Government prove against the I. W. W.’s? That they had been guilty of almost everything a depraved mind could invent in the way of crime. The public is already conversant with the argot of the band. The “sab cat,” or worker of sabotage—secret destruction of property—was a title of pride among them. “Wobblies,” “high jacks,” “scissor-bills,” “bundle-stiffs”—all were part of the personnel put in evidence. A “clock” was divulged to mean a phosphorus bomb, intended to be fired by the sun and set a wheat stack ablaze.
These men spiked a great many spruce trees so that mill saws were ruined on the logs. They killed vineyards in California, and claimed to have burned $2,000,000 worth of wheat in that state alone. They not only burned wheat in the stack, but sowed spikes to damage reapers. They dropped matches and bits of metal in threshing machines. They put emery in delicate machine bearings. In canning factories they mixed the labels, so that grades were vitiated for the vegetables sent out. They polluted or poisoned canned goods with dead rats and the like in factories where they worked. No doubt also they set forest fires, and beyond doubt caused explosions that destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars in property. They did this to terrorize their own country in its day of peril. They were not worth the name of men. You can not make citizens out of such creatures. Fear is all they understand.
Their literature was a continuous blasphemy. Cursing the name of the Savior was nothing to their writers. They put lime in men’s shoes and burned their feet to the bone. They had a special sort of club they used in attacking “scabs.” It had short, sharp nails driven along it, painted the color of the club so they could not easily be seen. The victim would catch at the club to wrest it from his assailant. It was then jerked through his hands, often tearing out the sinews, always scarring and often maiming him forever. Always they were cowards. To injure and not destroy was part of their religion. “Strike while you work” meant to disable a machine for a while and so to stop work for the crew or for the whole plant. “Feed the kitty more cream” meant to use more emery on bearings, to do more dirt in factories, to wreck and mar and mutilate more cunningly and covertly—and to escape by feigning the innocent laboring man. If they were not all Huns, they had the foul Hun imagination, and also the methods of the Hun.