The reader will remember the vivid picture of the contemplated rebellion in the mind of the "Wobbly" who wrote in "The Rebel Worker," April 15, 1919:
"The United States is in the grip of a bloody revolution! Thousands of workers are slaughtered by machine guns in New York City! Washington is on fire! Industry is at a standstill and thousands of workers are starving! The government is using the most brutal and repressive measures to put down the revolution! Disorganization, crime, chaos, rape, murder and arson are the order of the day--the inevitable results of social revolution!"
The I. W. W.'s are certainly conspirators, and seek the overthrow of our Government by industrial violence, and we were told by "The Evolution of Industrial Democracy," page 40, that "Government, as now understood, will disappear--there being no servile class to be held in subjection--but in its place will be an administration of affairs."
The spirit of armed rebellion against our Government was foremost in the minds of the Left Wing members of the Socialist Party who afterwards formed the Communist and the Communist Labor Parties. We shall recall some of the words of Louis C. Fraina during the great struggle between the Rights and Lefts:
"All propaganda, all electoral and parliamentary activity are insufficient for the overthrow of Capitalism, impotent when the ultimate test of the class struggle turns into a test of power. The power for the social revolution issues out of the actual struggles of the proletariat, out of its strikes, its industrial unions and mass action."--"The Revolutionary Age," July 12, 1919.
"Socialism will come not through the peaceful, democratic parliamentary conquest of the state, but through the determined and revolutionary mass action of a proletarian minority."--"The Revolutionary Age," July 12, 1919.
"Revolutionary Socialists hold, with the founders of Scientific Socialism, that there are two dominant classes in society--the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; that between these two classes a struggle must go on until the working class, through the seizure of the instruments of production and distribution, the abolition of the capitalist state, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, creates a Socialistic system. Revolutionary Socialists do not believe that they can be voted into power. They struggle for the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat."--"The Revolutionary Age," March 22, 1919.
"The Communist," of Chicago, April 1, 1919, it will be remembered, in speaking of November 7, 1919, the day on which the armistice was signed, said:
"On that day the seething proletariat ruled Chicago by sheer force of numbers. One thing alone was needed to give this mass expression identity with the proletarian uprisings in Europe--one thing, the revolutionary idea."
After the formation of the Communist and Communist Labor parties, in September, 1919, both made great progress in winning recruits to the cause of armed rebellion. On January 2, 1920, government agents all over the country suddenly descended upon the conspirators and took thousands of them prisoners. Bombs, rifles and other weapons were captured by the department agents. In Newark 25 rifles and a large number of bombs were taken, many tons of violent literature were seized and innumerable quotations from it appeared in the daily press, showing beyond the shadow of a doubt the evil intentions of these "Reds" against the land that we love.
The Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party have the same purposes and aims as the Communist Party of Russia. They are joined with the latter in advocating and supporting the manifesto of the Third International, which openly urges an armed revolution to bring about the overthrow of the Government of the United States.
Both parties have conducted effective propaganda work through newspapers, books, pamphlets and other means. The Communist Party alone had twenty-five newspapers printed in several languages, actively supporting its cause. This number was being increased weekly, papers which were formerly Socialist Party organs going over to its support. The alien editors of most of these papers were taken by the Department of Justice agents in the raids.