In the three days that followed, the police arrested a total of six hundred men; they arrested hundreds for attempting to speak on Liberty Hill; they arrested hundreds for singing and cheering on the street. Any slightest sign of sympathy with the strike or with other arrested men was enough to cause a man to be tapped on the shoulder by the police and told to report at the police station. Crowds of men were surrounded on the street, loaded into trucks, carted off to the police station, and packed away in cells. George Chalmers Richmond, Episcopal clergyman from Philadelphia, was arrested when walking along the street, having in mind the criminal intention of addressing the strikers when he reached the place of meeting. A restaurant proprietor was dragged out from behind his counter and thrown into jail, upon the charge of helping to prolong the strike—that is, he had fed the strikers and their children. In describing these incidents, the Los Angeles “Times” stated that the police announced their intention “to arrest all idle men at the harbor.”
The city of Los Angeles boasts of being the fastest growing city in the world, but its jails have not grown at all in the last thirty years. To describe them as death-traps would not be using reckless language, but merely quoting from reports of one public body after another which has investigated and denounced them. The jails were already crowded; and here were six hundred more men suddenly thrust into them! Some of the “tanks,” built to hold twenty or thirty men, were required to hold a hundred, and it was literally impossible for all the men to sit down at once. All the jails were swarming with vermin, there was no bedding obtainable, and the food was atrocious. These things not being enough, wanton cruelty and torture was added. In one of the “tanks,” because the men persisted in singing, the jailers sealed up all the ventilation and turned on the steam heat for two hours. Ninety-five men were in this hole, and many of them swooned. Other men were chained up by the thighs, so that they could not quite sit down. We have the affidavits of several men to the fact that Chief of Police Oaks personally reviled the prisoners, calling them liars and degenerates; and when one of the men spoke up and said this was not true, Oaks called him out from the “tank,” and in the presence of many witnesses struck him in the face and knocked him down again and again, pounding him until the chief was exhausted.
Such was the situation on May 15th. The “Times” for that morning announced that the city council had appropriated money to build a stockade, in which to hold the strike prisoners, and all the remaining strikers at the harbor were to be thrown into this pen. I was about to begin the writing of this book, but I found it impossible to keep my peace of mind in a “bull-pen” civilization, and decided to do what I could to remind the authorities of Southern California that there is still supposed to be a Constitution in this country.
With seven friends I went to interview the mayor that afternoon. The interview lasted an hour, and developed curious notions upon the part of the chief executive of a large city concerning the meaning of civil rights. According to Mayor Cryer, all the arrests which had been made night after night on Liberty Hill, and the complete abrogation of the rights of freedom of speech and of assemblage, were justified by the fact that somebody unknown had violated the unconstitutional ordinance of the city of Los Angeles against the displaying of a red flag. The wholesale arrests of hundreds of men upon the street day after day were justified by the fact that on one occasion some rowdy unknown had shouted: “Here comes Captain Plummer, that fat prostitute.” I said: “Mr. Mayor, according to your way of reasoning, if some one were to upset a peanut stand on Broadway and steal the peanuts, you would feel justified in arresting everybody in sight and closing the thoroughfare to traffic for a month.”
Our mayor is a politician, and cautious. He would not say that it was the duty of the police to smash the harbor strike, neither would he say that a group of American citizens had the right to proceed to Liberty Hill and there read the Constitution of their country and explain to all who might care to hear them the meaning of the Bill of Rights. His proposition was that we should go to the harbor and ask permission of Captain Plummer, and if Plummer refused, the mayor would “review” his decision. To this we answered that the essence of the situation was time; the strikers were being robbed of their rights every hour, and civil liberties were not subject to review by either a police captain or a mayor. The upshot of the hour’s argument was that Mayor Cryer made the specific promise that he would telephone to Captain Plummer and instruct him that we were to be “protected in our constitutional rights, and not molested so long as we did not incite to violence.” Let it be added that at his next interview the mayor denied that he had made this promise.
Now, I shall not take up space in detailing what happened to our little group. Suffice it to say, we repaired to the harbor, a dozen ladies and gentlemen, with two lawyers; and in an interview with Chief of Police Oaks we were informed that if we attempted to read the Constitution of the United States on Liberty Hill we would be arrested and jailed without bail. Four of us, Prince Hopkins, Hugh Hardyman, Hunter Kimbrough, and the writer, did attempt to read the Constitution. I personally read Article One of the first amendment, and was then placed under arrest. Kimbrough started to read the Declaration of Independence. Hopkins remarked, “We have not come here to incite to violence.” Hardyman remarked, “This is a most delightful climate.” For these words they were arrested—all four of us for “suspicion of criminal syndicalism.”[[A]] We were held “incommunicado” for eighteen hours, and an effort was then made to rush us into court a few minutes before closing time, and have us committed and spirited away again, so that we could be given the “third degree”; but this plot was balked, owing to the fact that a confidant of Chief Oaks betrayed it to my wife, and our lawyers got to the court and demanded and obtained bail. A week later we went again to the harbor and held our mass meeting, and said to ten or fifteen thousand people everything that we had to say. Next day the police turned loose all but twenty-eight of the six hundred men they had arrested; and some three weeks later a police judge threw out the case against us four. So ended our little adventure in “criminal syndicalism.”
[A]. Extract from a letter written by a student of Washington University, St. Louis, now visiting in Santa Monica, California: “The St. Louis papers had only short accounts, which said that Upton Sinclair and several other I. W. W. had been arrested on a charge of Syndicalism. And my friends out here tell me that a raid was made when Upton Sinclair, after having submitted a most innocuous abstract of his speech to the authorities, exhorted a strikers’ meeting to break loose, smash all windows in sight, and dump the street-cars off the tracks. He also attacked the integrity and honor of the chief of police.”