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DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS AND VOICING THE DEMANDS OF THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT

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WASHINGTON, D. C., December 9, 1911.

In the recent past, the good name and high ideals of our great labor movement, its men, and the cause of humanity it and they represent, have been attacked as never before. Every enemy, every "interest," arrayed against the organized workers has howled like dervishes. They hope to bring our tried, trusted, and faithful men into disrepute, to destroy your confidence in their integrity and thereby weaken, and finally crush, the organizations of labor.

Every union member deplores violence and crime, whether committed by an ordinary outlaw, by a corporation director or agent, or by a so-called union man. Labor resents the insinuation that because one or two union members became criminally fanatical or fanatically criminal, that the rank and file, and the officers of the labor movement, are responsible either legally or morally.

Labor in its history has met, resisted, and overcome the bitter hostility of its foes. Labor, standing for the great cause of justice and humanity, will again.

Men and women of Labor: Stand firm, be true to yourselves and to each other. Let the spirit of fraternity, justice, freedom, and solidarity imbue your every thought, word, and action. Stand by your union. Organize the yet unorganized workers, and labor will triumph.

The following statement of the McNamara Ways and Means Committee is commended to the thoughtful consideration of you and all interested. Please read it at your meeting and insert it in your minutes for future. information and reference. Grit your teeth and organize!

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A Statement.

To the American Public on the McNamara Case:

The McNamaras stand before the world self-convicted of great crimes. They have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment J. B. during his natural life, J. J. for fifteen years. The position of labor in connection with the effort made to afford these men an opportunity for adequate defense before the courts has been attacked and misrepresented to such a degree as to require a clear statement at the hands of the undersigned, who are in the best position to make an authoritative statement at this time—a statement that will be strengthened by some review of the principal points of the case.

Was there an explosion of gas in the Los Angeles Times building when it was destroyed? Immediately after the disaster, the press reports stated that men who had been at work in the building spoke of an odor of gas for some time previous to the explosion. Gas leakage in the building, it came out later, had been known to others. Many conservative trade union officials, newspaper writers and publicists, on making an investigation in Los Angeles, soon after, were positive in assuring the public that they believed gas had destroyed the building. Among the mine workers, not one man, so far as information has reached us, has believed the destructive explosive was dynamite. Prominent officials of the United Mine Workers, cautious, honorable men, whose word is taken as truth by all who know them, who are familiar with mining explosives, declared that the effect of the explosion was not that which follows a discharge of dynamite. Were all these men speaking from blind partisanship or from honest conviction? Were they utterly mistaken? The answer has now been supplied by the prosecution. While the "gas theory" was being hooted at by enemies of the unions, while even so late as last Friday night an editor of the New York Times was inditing a contemptuous slur at John Mitchell for supposing "that proof would be adduced to show that an explosion of gas destroyed the Los Angeles Times building," the prosecution knew that gas was an agency in the explosion and a great factor in the destruction which ensued. W. J. Burns, in a press interview Saturday last said: "Why, McManigal told us in his first confession that McNamara turned open the stopcocks of the gas mains of the building when he set the bomb. We knew all the time that a part of the explosion was due to gas." Now, the possible terrific force of a gas explosion, even in the open air, was shown in the wreckage caused by the accident at the Grand Central Station, New York, December 19, 1910, while the Los Angeles disaster was being discussed throughout the country.

The fact of a gas explosion led all others in importance in the minds of the organized workers. Nearly all of them were convinced that it was an established fact. The most cautious reasoners among them regarded the possibilities of the fact sufficient to hold to belief in it until proof to the contrary could be produced. They were willing to suspend conclusive judgment while awaiting evidence.

The public also wanted such facts regarding the circumstances of the explosion as could be accepted as evidence of the way it came about. What was given the public, first and foremost? On the instant, at the hearing of the explosion, H. G. Otis broke into a savage denunciation of trade unionists, accusing them of having caused the disaster, and he has ever since declared it was the result of dynamite. By this course, he diverted the case from one in which citizens in common should have proceeded, through legal methods alone, to search for the truth. He threw the unions on their defense, outraged them, insulted their officials, raised animosities that could have been avoided. He was at once backed up by the small circle of bitter enemies of trades unionism, whose fulminations were largely made up of transparent falsehoods leveled at trade unions in general and at the leaders of trade unions.

Despite all clamor it must be remembered that, with few exceptions, the international trade unions, more than 120 in number, are and have usually been in normal business relations with the employers of their members. Many of them have for years arranged their differences and their working conditions with employers through trade agreements or other methods resulting in a minimum loss through suspension of work. Violence in cases of dispute are not common to them. Trade unionists have been made aware, by experience, that stories of disorder by unionists during strikes or lockouts have been systematically exaggerated.

Therefore, aware of the necessity of trade union organization of the incalculable amount of good in various forms done by and through their unions every year, of the long and bitter campaign carried on by Otis, Kirby, Post and others, to destroy trade unionism, and perceiving the intention of these plotters and their detectives to ignore the apparent, and, to their minds, proven cause of the Times disaster, and to turn that terrible event solely to account as a means of discrediting trade unionism, the unions energetically stated their side of the case to the American public as they saw it at that time.

When, after six months, the McNamaras were arrested, it was in Russian style, not American. Holding the members of the Executive Board of the Structural Iron Workers in confinement without warrant, hurrying J. J. McNamara away from Indianapolis in an automobile and by circuitous routes taken to California-what were these but features of high-handed irregularity, and tyrannical lawlessness, known in arrests in Russia that precede transportation of prosecuted citizens to Siberia? And, when Detective Burns has throughout been doubted by so great a part of the American public, it has been largely the fault of his proceedings at this point, and of his own defouling the reputation of his craft, for has he not said: "Private detectives, as a class, are the worst lot of blackmailing scoundrels that live outside of prisons." (See page 357, McClure's Magazine, August, 1911.)

J. J. McNamara had not been of sufficient prominence among labor men to be the subject of discussion as a leading figure, but what was generally known of him was to his credit. He was seen at conventions as a

man of pleasing appearance and of mild manner. He was spoken of as self-educated and a faithful secretary of his organization. His speech and his writings for his magazine were reputed to be conservative. When placed under arrest, and throughout his imprisonment, his bearing was undemonstrative. His letters to officials of the American Federation of Labor and telegram to the Atlanta Convention were concise and without suspicious characteristics. In nowise, to common observation, had he shown abnormal

traits.

Did organized labor properly express its condemnation of violence on hearing of the Los Angeles disaster? It did by interviews, addresses, and publications. The hundreds of union labor papers, in their issues succeeding the event, contained what, taken together, would make volumes, declarative of the sentiments of their editors and of the rank and file of union membership on the subject. All recognized the case as one of mystery, the feeling shown being that of horror at the possibility of any union man being implicated in it. Unions framed resolutions in meetings, declaring that trade unionism was not to be advanced by murderous acts. Union labor officials, and many others, were quoted to similar effect. The President of the American Federation of Labor, the day after the disaster occurred, as published by the St. Louis Star, said:

"Labor does not stand for such outrages, nor comtemplate such crime. I can not believe that a union man has done it, and I deeply hope no one who was connected with the labor movement will be found to have done it. It is inconceivable that a union man should have done this thing. And yet, if it is found that a union man has done it, unionism can not be blamed by fair-mined men for the deed of a man devoid of any human feeling, as the perpetrator of this horrible catastrophe must have been. It was the act of a madman. No one with an ounce of sympathy in his makeup could do aught but contemplate such a crime with the deepest abhorrence."

These facts were further fully presented in the June, 1911, issue of the AMERICAN FEDERATIONIST, in a seventeen-page article entitled the "McNamara Case," in which the leading facts up to that time were reviewed. Speaking before the St. Louis Central Labor Union on Sunday, October 2, 1910, the day after the disaster, President Gompers asserted he would "immediately turn the dynamiters over to the proper authorities if he could lay hands on them." The Globe-Democrat also quoted him as saying: "I only wish I knew the actual perpetrators, and if I did, take my word for it, I would turn them over to justice." The universal condemnation of a murderous deed in labor circles, ought to be a fact so far beyond question, so easily ascertainable from accessible records, that no man with any regard for his reputation for veracity could deny it. Yet, the New York Times, in an editorial last Saturday, printed this sentence: "From the day when James B. McNamara's bomb blew his twenty-one victims into eternity, down to the present time, no authoritative voice in the ranks of labor has been raised to express the hope that the murderers would be brought to justice, even should they prove to be union men."

Relative to other phases of the McNamara case, the article in the June AMERICAN FEDERATIONIST contains these passages:

"It may be said that from that time (the kidnapping) to the present, Detective Burns, Attorney Drew, Editor Otis, C. W. Post, and the active agents of the extremists in the Manufacturers' Association in general have all played to perfection the hysterical characters to which we are accustomed in the pages of cheap fiction and on the boards of the Bowery class of theaters."

"Nothing more surprised us in the series of audacious acts committed by Detective Burns than his saying to a reporter of the World, May 7, 1911:

"Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, knows by this time that there was no frame-up and that the arrests of the McNamaras and McManigal were not the result of a plant. Why? Because Gompers has been conducting an investigation of his own at Indianapolis that has convinced him that there was no frame-up and no plants.'

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"These assertions of Burns were entirely without foundation. Nothing was brought to our knowledge in Indianapolis or elsewhere that could be used as evidence against the prisoners or to show that the Structural Iron Workers' Union has been conducting a dynamite campaign against the Erectors' Association."

Since the McNamaras' confession Burns has been reiterating this charge. The only "investigation" in which President Gompers participated in Indianapolis was the meeting of the prominent trade unionists held last. May, 10-12, called by officials of the eight international unions which have their headquarters in that city, and the meeting of the officials of a large number of trade unions called by authority of the Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor, and held at Indianapolis, June 29, 1911. What President Gompers learned there was precisely what every one attending the conference learned, and that was nothing that helped to solve the mystery of the Los Angeles disaster or of criminality of any kind.

Indeed, the unlawful and un-American kidnapping of McNamara formed one of the chief factors of fixing in the minds of the working people of our country that he was innocent. They reasoned, as they had a right to reason, that if there existed evidence of McNamara's guilt of the crime charged, every protection would and should have been accorded him to demonstrate. before the courts of Indiana that he was innocent of the crime with which he was charged. His protestations of innocence, his demands to be represented by counsel, were all ruthlessly ignored.

Violence, brutality, destruction of life or property, are foreign to the aims and methods of organized labor of America, and no interest is more severely injured by the employment of such methods than that of the workers organized in the labor movement. Therefore, quite apart from the spirit of humanitarianism and justice which prompts the activities of the organized labor movement, policy and hopes for success, forbid the resort

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