Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to C p W D c S.
Speaker 1: The show that's easier to say the full name of
Speaker 1: than the acronym floor or for the penance in the
Speaker 1: audience the initialism because an acronism, which is the most
Speaker 1: annoying thing of the world. I guess I'm de penitive
Speaker 1: the audience. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week
Speaker 1: I tell you about some cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 1: This week we've got a returning guest, Robert Evans. Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: who are you? That's a great question, Margaret, who is
Speaker 1: any of us? Are any of us really here? Or
Speaker 1: we just reflections on a cave wall being looked at
Speaker 1: by Greeks in a story I half remember because I
Speaker 1: don't I don't. Yes, Margaret, I'm the host of a
Speaker 1: podcast behind the Bastards. There we go, Margaret, I have
Speaker 1: a question for you. Okay, show you've got butterflies on
Speaker 1: your face? Is that a reference to a character in
Speaker 1: a movie that we watched last night. We're gonna We're
Speaker 1: gonna get to that. We're gonna get to that. X it. Okay.
Speaker 1: So we also have our producer, Sophie Lichtman on the call, Sophie,
Speaker 1: who are you? Who am I? Or how am I? Currently?
Speaker 1: I'm somebody who feels like I'm that that like person
Speaker 1: who has the devil and the Angel on each shoulder. Um,
Speaker 1: and um, you're the angel and Robert is you know,
Speaker 1: the devil, and um, that's who I am? Is? Just
Speaker 1: you know, I'm here, okay, okay, And that tracks because
Speaker 1: both Robert and I are still wearing the renfair garb.
Speaker 1: But that we got yesterday my sword. Oh my god, Robert,
Speaker 1: that's beautiful and then immediately handed it to a seven
Speaker 1: year old in the parking lot. That sounds like Robert.
Speaker 1: If I learned one thing from the movie we watched
Speaker 1: last night, it's that the greatest act of any hero,
Speaker 1: you have a child a sword. Yes, exactly, well one
Speaker 1: of the two great acts, ideally while dripping with the
Speaker 1: blood of a police officer in in an elementary school.
Speaker 1: So also, Ian does our audio editing, and on woman
Speaker 1: wrote our theme song. And and this week we're going
Speaker 1: all the way back to the year Yea released the
Speaker 1: best movie of the twentieth century, Night Riders. It's fucking
Speaker 1: incredible movie. I had never seen this. The last night
Speaker 1: I did not realize what a goddamned treasure this film was.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. Yeah, it's actually talking about night Writers today
Speaker 1: because it is to talk I kind of wish, um
Speaker 1: we can we can interject here and there and compare
Speaker 1: the events that we're going to talk about to the
Speaker 1: events of night Rider. But night Riders. Sorry that we
Speaker 1: are not talking about the night Writers show with the
Speaker 1: talking car. This is much cooler. But I tried to
Speaker 1: take the butterflies off my face and it took me
Speaker 1: too long, and so now and I got distracted. Okay,
Speaker 1: So this week, though, Robert, how do you feel about
Speaker 1: free speech? Is a nice, loaded, easy, easy question. The
Speaker 1: actual thing, which is people being able to speak and
Speaker 1: express their thoughts and feelings free of government censorship, is
Speaker 1: great free speech. The buzzword is a real problem. I
Speaker 1: I agree on both counts, and that's why I'm excited
Speaker 1: to tell you that the largest and fiercest fight over
Speaker 1: free speech in US history, which I never learned anything
Speaker 1: about in school, was not anything like the buzzword version
Speaker 1: of it today. Instead, that's great came from the left,
Speaker 1: and in order to tell you about free speech and
Speaker 1: the fights for free speech that happened across the West,
Speaker 1: and about nineteen nine and nineteen sixteen, I get to
Speaker 1: tell you about basically the coolest union the US has
Speaker 1: ever produced, the Industrial Workers of the World, the i
Speaker 1: w W, the Wobblies, and I want to do one
Speaker 1: day the Wobblies will. I mean, you could really just
Speaker 1: do an entire podcast it just talks about the Wobblies.
Speaker 1: They did so much. But the really brief introduction to
Speaker 1: the i w W five a whole bunch of socialists
Speaker 1: and anarchists and other trade unionists. They got together and
Speaker 1: they were like, you know what, the U S should
Speaker 1: have a cooler union than the ones we have, which
Speaker 1: are not cool enough. So they were like, what would
Speaker 1: make a union cooler. Some of the founders include alumni
Speaker 1: of the podcast, like the Irish Goths, socialist Mother Jones,
Speaker 1: and the formerly enslaved black anarchist Lucy Parsons, who is
Speaker 1: on the very first episode of this show. They also
Speaker 1: had future friend of the pod, James Connolly, who popped
Speaker 1: over from Yeah, Yeah, he's He's not even American or
Speaker 1: even an immigrant. He's a you know, Irish nationalist, Irish
Speaker 1: as hell. He's the person I most wish had Twitter
Speaker 1: for the queen's death, we would have gotten some great
Speaker 1: James absolutely and and so he popped over to the
Speaker 1: US for a while to help, you know, he paused
Speaker 1: fomenting rebellion in Ireland to come talk about syndicalism and
Speaker 1: ship and help the US get cool, which I didn't
Speaker 1: know about until more recently that James Connolly numbers. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they came up with some answers about how to
Speaker 1: make a cooler union than the unions that are around.
Speaker 1: And they're good answers. Anyone out there who's like, how
Speaker 1: do you make a union cool? I think that these
Speaker 1: are some good answers that at least applied in five
Speaker 1: and may or may not apply now, while some of
Speaker 1: them absolutely do apply now. One of them. The kind
Speaker 1: of the founding idea was no more splitting up the
Speaker 1: workers by trade everyone into one big union. Um the
Speaker 1: motto is an injury to one is an injury to all.
Speaker 1: And of course to fight against the fact that they're
Speaker 1: now centralizing everything, they're like one big union. It's all decentralized.
Speaker 1: So you can only have one big union in an
Speaker 1: ethical way if there's no so were on at the top, right,
Speaker 1: and the most important thing that they did in contrast
Speaker 1: to the rest of the US, not the rest of
Speaker 1: the U. S. Labor movement, but the like large federated
Speaker 1: parts of the labor movement at the time. I ww
Speaker 1: weren't a bunch of fucking racists. That's always the bummer
Speaker 1: when you talk about the coolest A lot of the
Speaker 1: coolest parts of American labor history, like Blair Mountain, where
Speaker 1: it's like, got their fucking red bandanas, they're shooting at
Speaker 1: the National Guard, they're going to Oregon and they don't
Speaker 1: like letting black people. Well that's not true. And with
Speaker 1: Blair Mountain, one of the names that they had on
Speaker 1: their lips as they went into battle, I don't remember
Speaker 1: his name right now, but I mean, I'm certain that
Speaker 1: there were races. It was it was it was a
Speaker 1: it was a fight with organizing Blair Mountain to like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: totally yeah. And you also get these like this difference
Speaker 1: in both directions between the rank and file and the
Speaker 1: organizers and all that stuff. But but yeah, and so
Speaker 1: the i w W. One of their founding principles is
Speaker 1: let's not be racists. Will take white people, black people,
Speaker 1: Irish people, whatever. They also unified the anarchist and the
Speaker 1: socialists and the Marxist which is the thing that seems
Speaker 1: impossible in the modern context. It sure does to be
Speaker 1: fair this and the Bolsheviks hadn't started killing all their
Speaker 1: political opponents, like the socialists and the anarchists. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a little bit less bad blood. Yeah, and the other
Speaker 1: Marxists anyway, um, as I as I present some of
Speaker 1: my bad blood about all of this. Uh. And the
Speaker 1: way they unified the left was that they did it
Speaker 1: in a way they by minimizing hierarchy as much as
Speaker 1: possible if you have all of these different types of
Speaker 1: people coming together. The main way that you can do
Speaker 1: that in an ethical way is that everyone is equals
Speaker 1: um and so different ideas and so basically prevent power
Speaker 1: grabs by distributing power every wobbly as a leader, every
Speaker 1: wobbly as an organizer. They also just the checklist of
Speaker 1: how to be a cool union. They organized the unemployed,
Speaker 1: They organized women as well as men. They were really
Speaker 1: forthright that their goal was the destruction of the wage system,
Speaker 1: and that any reforms that they came across were just
Speaker 1: to step along the way towards the end of capitalism.
Speaker 1: They had this whole big fight where some of them
Speaker 1: wanted to take the union more reformist and more more
Speaker 1: politically focused and less direct action focused, and that faction
Speaker 1: lost because you don't join the Wobblies because you don't
Speaker 1: want to do direct action. Um. And they scared the
Speaker 1: ever loving hell out of the elite basically when they
Speaker 1: were founded. But we're going to talk about free speech
Speaker 1: in a moment, But first, I know what you're wondering, Robert.
Speaker 1: Are you wondering where they're called the fucking Wobblies? Isn't
Speaker 1: it just because there's I w W and it's kind
Speaker 1: of like wobbly. I don't know. I assumed it had
Speaker 1: something to do with all the dubs. It does possibly
Speaker 1: if you ask the actual like the Okay, the answer
Speaker 1: is no, one knows. Someone might know. This another situation
Speaker 1: where're gonna tell me there's a cool fucking name and
Speaker 1: there's nobody who can tell us why this is a trend?
Speaker 1: This is this is this is this is like tuberculosis
Speaker 1: pops up every episode. Yeah, and you know what, that's
Speaker 1: fucking cool and I'm okay with it. Yeah. And there's
Speaker 1: there's a couple of bests is called tuberculosis, so no
Speaker 1: one knows what I thought. It was named after Johnny Tuberculosis.
Speaker 1: He was the Johnny after seate of tuberculosis traveled around
Speaker 1: North America giving everyone tb oh. Okay, okay, well that
Speaker 1: makes the heroes. And also the Wobblies were founded by
Speaker 1: John Wobbly. Yeah yeah, I thought I thought he went
Speaker 1: by Johnny Wobbly John Bulls, they called him when he
Speaker 1: got drunk. If someone knows why the Wobblies are called
Speaker 1: the Wobblies, they're not telling. And since we're talking about
Speaker 1: hundred fifteen years ago, if they're still alive and they
Speaker 1: know they're either dead or a vampire, like like the
Speaker 1: Queen of England who was also in a dead or
Speaker 1: a vampire. It was a vampire. That makes sense. I've
Speaker 1: I've outlined a book around this, well, actually was about
Speaker 1: the person who threw the bomb at Haymarket still and
Speaker 1: around hundred fifty years later as a vampire. But anyway,
Speaker 1: the main theories as to why they're called Wobblies is
Speaker 1: that it was being used against them as an epithet
Speaker 1: and it has to do with racism, and it has
Speaker 1: to do with racism around the fact that the IWW
Speaker 1: had a ton of Chinese members at a time, where
Speaker 1: like that is one of the main categories of people
Speaker 1: that were being excluded from the working class on the
Speaker 1: West coast right or being excluded from labor unions, and
Speaker 1: so it was probably someone like a boss making fun
Speaker 1: of the Chinese immigrant ac accent as they tried to
Speaker 1: pronounce IWW. Oh but the but then the Wobblies were like, yeah, fuck,
Speaker 1: you will take that, you know, because they were also that,
Speaker 1: you know, the Chinese Wobblies were also the wobblies, and
Speaker 1: so everyone's like, yeah, no, like a whole fucking thing
Speaker 1: is an injury to one is an injury at all.
Speaker 1: So they probably they called themselves wobblies. That is the
Speaker 1: most likely story. Um. And also, if you had a
Speaker 1: union card and good standing, there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: Chinese food restaurants you could walk into and show your
Speaker 1: Union card and get free food, which also rules yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: The other theory, which actually has less evidence about it,
Speaker 1: is that lumberjacks would make their sls wobble in order
Speaker 1: to slow down production when they were in a labor dispute. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: but we're not but we are going to talk about lumberjacks.
Speaker 1: All right, let's do it. Okay, I'm time about Spokane, Washington.
Speaker 1: We're gonna start with a quote from eight from a
Speaker 1: radical unionists from the i w W named James walsh Am.
Speaker 1: I to die starving in the midst of plenty, or
Speaker 1: shall I die fighting for my part? A thousand times over?
Speaker 1: I'll die fighting before I die starving, because it was
Speaker 1: a really shitty time to be a worker in the US,
Speaker 1: and now I'm trying to think of a time it
Speaker 1: wasn't really shitty to be a working class anyway. In
Speaker 1: early Spokane, Washington, which is in eastern Washington, is this boomtown.
Speaker 1: There's this whole like inland empire that is basically where
Speaker 1: all of the like lumber stuff is coming from. They
Speaker 1: found the most beautiful forests the world has ever produced
Speaker 1: and turned turned it into a an industry into Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was good stuff. Which is why I always had
Speaker 1: very complicated feelings about this particular story, because it's heroes
Speaker 1: are the people who got down to old growth forests,
Speaker 1: are the people who destroyed for like a dollar a
Speaker 1: day because they didn't want to starve to death. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not the people who capitalized. Yeah, I don't blame
Speaker 1: them specifically, it is it is sad, yeah. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: so Spoken is a boomtown and has legalized gambling in
Speaker 1: sex work, and it's like the kind of place that
Speaker 1: workers show up in between jobs to blow all their
Speaker 1: money and look for other jobs. And one of the
Speaker 1: anecdotes that you get is that we have a lot
Speaker 1: of the Wobbles Road a lot. And so you hear
Speaker 1: about Spokane at the time, and basically they were like,
Speaker 1: if you flash too much money, you'll get the knockout
Speaker 1: Special from the bartender, where the bartender just gives you
Speaker 1: a drink with a bunch of fucking drugs and it
Speaker 1: knocks you unconscious so they can all rob you. Oh well,
Speaker 1: so that kind want to start a bar now, that's
Speaker 1: actually a pretty pretty good money making idea. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: also it kind of sounds like the kind of town
Speaker 1: that would be fun to hang out in. Yeah it does. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds like it would have some strong deadwood vibes.
Speaker 1: Stevens Street and Spoken was covered in employment agencies, which
Speaker 1: got called sharks and leeches, and they would basically sell
Speaker 1: you a job. You'd walk into an employment agency give
Speaker 1: him a dollar and they'd sell you a job, and
Speaker 1: at least half the time it was a lie. They
Speaker 1: were like, oh, yeah, it's a job. And then you
Speaker 1: get to the work site and they give you a
Speaker 1: job for a day and then they send you home
Speaker 1: like you've literally just made back your dollar, so you
Speaker 1: have enough money to come spend and spend another dollar
Speaker 1: on another job. And among the people who did this
Speaker 1: sort of work, the employment agency work is second time
Speaker 1: villains of the pod No, mostly now known for their gyms,
Speaker 1: the y m c a AH, as well as several
Speaker 1: other Christian organizations that like would set up and pross
Speaker 1: ties but then just be like and give us a
Speaker 1: dollar and we'll give you a job. Just kidding. I
Speaker 1: read one take one person say that like literally one
Speaker 1: out of fifty people got the job that they paid for. Um,
Speaker 1: so you'd be like, oh, I'm gonna go be a
Speaker 1: lumber not bad, and they send you a job like
Speaker 1: doing something completely unrelated. If you got a job at all,
Speaker 1: and the people behind all these grips were fucking millionaires,
Speaker 1: is another job that would work really well for you.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean, honestly, Sophie, what if we tried
Speaker 1: to do this with podcasts. People pay us and then
Speaker 1: we give them a podcast. But not really wait that's
Speaker 1: what you did with me though, well but not not
Speaker 1: with you, Margaret, of course. Not no, no, not at all. Okay.
Speaker 1: By the way, that that that check of yours still
Speaker 1: hasn't cleared. I'm sure it's corporate's fault. Don't worry, don't worry,
Speaker 1: I trust you. So anyway, the Cool Zone him an
Speaker 1: agency of Spokene, Washington. They're fucking millionaires, and they're millionaires
Speaker 1: in nineteen o nine money, which is still millionaires and
Speaker 1: modern money, but it's like thirty five millionaires, more millions.
Speaker 1: And they're driving around in fancy cars or in nineteen
Speaker 1: nine terms, a car at all. And to lay the scene,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from a memoir written by a participant
Speaker 1: who later spent five years in prison for his organizing
Speaker 1: like I think in the twenties, named John pans Pan Pansner,
Speaker 1: not not Tank, not John Tanka not not. That's a shame,
Speaker 1: So John Tank said, before telling you the story of
Speaker 1: the spoken free Speech fight, I must say a few
Speaker 1: words about the situation in the West at the time.
Speaker 1: West of the Mississippi River, there were about two million
Speaker 1: migratory workers, sometimes called hoboes. They harvested the wheat, corn,
Speaker 1: hay and picked the fruit and even planted most of
Speaker 1: the crops. They built the railroads, damn powerhouses, They did
Speaker 1: the logging in the woods, and I I think people
Speaker 1: don't necessarily recognize like how much the hobo is how
Speaker 1: the infrastructure of the US was built. Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: weren't treated really kindly. Uh, you'll be shocked to know
Speaker 1: once they did get jobs. Yeah, go ahead, that that
Speaker 1: was my what my grandpa did. You know, his family
Speaker 1: wasn't able to feed him, so he like walked across
Speaker 1: two states with cornbread in his pocket to like get
Speaker 1: a job building national parks and stuff. Like. We never
Speaker 1: talked about him as having been a hobo, but that's
Speaker 1: essentially what was going on, right Like he was he
Speaker 1: was living on the street, uh, working you know in jobs,
Speaker 1: building up what is still the infrastructure of the country
Speaker 1: because we've never actually invested more money and it's which
Speaker 1: is why it's all going to ship right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's actually what my granddad did too. He wrote
Speaker 1: around trains in the Great Depression and did like agricultural work. Um,
Speaker 1: and I only found out because once again, the family
Speaker 1: didn't like talk about that, Whereas I think that's the
Speaker 1: coolest thing my grandfather did that I'm aware of, you know,
Speaker 1: like well, if foughtom World War two, but you know,
Speaker 1: like well, and when I started riding freight trains, that's
Speaker 1: when my family told me that my grandfather also wrote
Speaker 1: freight trains, which I have not successfully. My goal is
Speaker 1: to get my father on a freight train, just to
Speaker 1: sort of complete though the ark. But so once you
Speaker 1: get a job, I didn't. I didn't ride freight trains
Speaker 1: to work. To be real, I actually wrote freight trains
Speaker 1: more like the Wobblies that we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: today road freight trains. But that's foreshadowing. That's what I'm
Speaker 1: gonna call spoilers from now on, foreshadowing. So once you
Speaker 1: get a job, it's fucking awful. You have to bring
Speaker 1: your own blankets. You sleep in tents and cabins. There's
Speaker 1: licensed bed bugs everywhere, as cockroaches in the kitchens. There's
Speaker 1: no mattresses. You're sleeping on straw. At one power line
Speaker 1: building camp, the workers had to walk three to four
Speaker 1: miles to work from their camp then work twelve hours,
Speaker 1: then walk three to four miles back home. It's some
Speaker 1: like real uphill both ways. Ship they get two dollars
Speaker 1: a day. They then have to pay almost half of
Speaker 1: that five fifty a week for room and word. Basically
Speaker 1: they make about thirty five dollars a day in today's
Speaker 1: terms for walk working twelve hour shifts with like two
Speaker 1: hours a walk in each direction. The Hobos mostly had
Speaker 1: no families, they had no church. They functionally couldn't vote
Speaker 1: since they weren't residents anywhere long enough to register to vote,
Speaker 1: and they only had each other. And so you have
Speaker 1: this whole fucking massive dispossessed people. And the big mainstream
Speaker 1: union at the time, the a f L, the American
Speaker 1: Federation of Labor, they don't even try to organize the Hobos,
Speaker 1: the wobblies, they were mostly Hobos themselves, and they called
Speaker 1: the a f L the Aristocrats of Labor, which I
Speaker 1: have a feeling like when you're riding arown freight trains
Speaker 1: and sleeping on straw, everyone who, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: has a house is an aristocrat. Yeah, but I mean certainly, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're if you're riding the rails. Anybody
Speaker 1: who's got a roof is an aristocrat. Yeah, And the
Speaker 1: a f L they saw the masses of the unemployed
Speaker 1: as a pole. I'm not a solution because huge groups
Speaker 1: of unemployed people make it harder to unionize in the
Speaker 1: traditional ways that they were used to. Well. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it's also it is a vulnerability if you're like organized labor,
Speaker 1: because they get brought in as strike breakers and stuff
Speaker 1: a lot totally, which is the same as the racism
Speaker 1: of the a f L. A f L s notoriously
Speaker 1: racist at this time. It's the same, Yeah, like constantly different. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, presidents and ship would just be like, oh
Speaker 1: well go send you know, Italian people or black people
Speaker 1: or whatever to go break up a strike, um and
Speaker 1: use race and ethnic tensions against it all. And you
Speaker 1: can just do the same when you have two million
Speaker 1: unemployed people wandering around. Yeah, it is because like the
Speaker 1: obvious solution is if you help those people out so
Speaker 1: that they're like inclined to act in solidarity with you
Speaker 1: rather than just see you as another group of people
Speaker 1: fucking with them, then the bosses have nobody to pull
Speaker 1: for when they're trying to replace you. Yeah, And it
Speaker 1: it works when people remember to do that, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we could say the same thing about like
Speaker 1: the international situation regarding labor right now. But yeah, well absolutely,
Speaker 1: and I mean and a lot of that ties into
Speaker 1: you know, Okay, so like the a f L. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, their racism was based in nationalism. It was
Speaker 1: based in like the word I forget for old timey,
Speaker 1: I hate immigrants. It's a different word than now, I
Speaker 1: don't remember. And they they met and the a f
Speaker 1: L meets in in April to specifically condemn the invasion
Speaker 1: of the US by the Japanese, not the country, but
Speaker 1: you know, workers and talked openly about the eradication of
Speaker 1: brown men from industrial competition. So this is the Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the level of like when I'm saying a
Speaker 1: FL sucked back then, That's where I'm at. But what's
Speaker 1: interesting to me is all of the things that don't suck. Robert.
Speaker 1: We are show sponsored entirely actually apparently responsored by me
Speaker 1: paying for this show to exist. But beyond beyond the Margaret,
Speaker 1: it will work out for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah totally.
Speaker 1: And actually, listeners, if you pay me, you can have
Speaker 1: a podcast on cool Zone Media. It's this new multi
Speaker 1: tiered system. Yeah. Now, so here's here's the way it works, folks.
Speaker 1: You get contracted two make a podcast, and you give
Speaker 1: money to Margaret, Margaret gives the money to me. Then
Speaker 1: you find two new podcasters underneath you who give you
Speaker 1: money to podcast, which you give to Margaret, which Margaret
Speaker 1: gives to me, and we eventually have a fully sustainable
Speaker 1: business operation. Yeah. Yeah, um and where it's yeah called
Speaker 1: a tapered rectangle scheme. Yeah. Yeah, a three sided as
Speaker 1: the strongest shape. Actually, yeah, a three sided rectangle that
Speaker 1: is the strongest shape of nature. Yeah, so we're supported
Speaker 1: by you. And also these ads, wow, Margaret, those products.
Speaker 1: Boy doesn't just want to make you run out and
Speaker 1: join the police. Yes, I have become a Washington State
Speaker 1: Highway Patrol officer, and I also am using better Help
Speaker 1: online therapy. Alright, so the IWW. So one of the
Speaker 1: things that I I noticed is whenever we talk, especially historically,
Speaker 1: when we talk about like, oh, well there's the radicals
Speaker 1: and then there's the mainstream union, and you imagine the
Speaker 1: mainstream union maybe maybe you do, maybe you already figure
Speaker 1: this out. You imagine the mainstream union as the bigger union, right,
Speaker 1: you imagine like the IWW is like the scrappy tiny union. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not so at least in the Inland Empire. The IWW
Speaker 1: like vastly outnumbers the a f L. And yeah, and
Speaker 1: especially in Spokane. And I mean it makes sense because
Speaker 1: the a f L just like won't touch any of
Speaker 1: ship um and they don't really have much to offer
Speaker 1: to a hobo. But the Wobblies will take everyone employed
Speaker 1: or not of any race. And they write extensively about
Speaker 1: how racism is a divide and conquered game to control
Speaker 1: the working class in a way that actually feels very modern.
Speaker 1: If you read i WW tracks for fun um, which
Speaker 1: you can, you you should. You should become someone who
Speaker 1: only talks about history instead of things that happen in
Speaker 1: the modern world. There's um, you'll never alienate anyone, You'll
Speaker 1: have lots of friends. So Wobbly James Walsh, he shows
Speaker 1: up and spoken and a he's a bro cobo and
Speaker 1: he's the guy we opened with a quote from about
Speaker 1: how he'd rather fight die fighting than die starving. And
Speaker 1: the first thing he does, at least he claims, the
Speaker 1: first thing he does is that there's thousands of angry
Speaker 1: workers who are in the edge of a riot and
Speaker 1: they want to go smash up these employment centers, and
Speaker 1: he's like, no, no, no, join the wobblies. We will
Speaker 1: organize a thing instead of just rioting. When she goes
Speaker 1: against my instinct in which we should both organize and riot.
Speaker 1: But the i w W had had different ideas and
Speaker 1: kind of knew more than I do about how to organize, so,
Speaker 1: you know whatever, They set up a union hall. They
Speaker 1: get thousands of members of the it's skyrockets the IWW
Speaker 1: as soon as they get there. There are three year
Speaker 1: old union and they're suddenly skyrocketing, and they set up
Speaker 1: a union hall. It has a library and a reading
Speaker 1: room with a no talking allowed policy, so you can
Speaker 1: go in and quietly read. There's a a cigar and
Speaker 1: a newspaper stand. There's a a fucking movie feeder that's
Speaker 1: so old timey that they refer to it as having
Speaker 1: a fine new Edison moving picture machine available to them.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's that good old time stuff. And they
Speaker 1: write in it and they're like, at the moment, we
Speaker 1: show mainstream movies, but once we successfully have a socialist revolution,
Speaker 1: will show socialist movies. Just the one upside of us
Speaker 1: not having had a socialist revolution. Let's we don't have
Speaker 1: to watch too many socialist movies. Yeah, yeah, not a
Speaker 1: lot of Battleship Timpkins showings. Back to Bay. They also
Speaker 1: have a meeting hall. They have four to five lectures
Speaker 1: a week. You know, when I think about what kind
Speaker 1: of movie I would want my ideal post revolutionary state,
Speaker 1: it's more or less Night Writers. Yes, that's true. George
Speaker 1: Romero film about people who fight as nights on motorcycles,
Speaker 1: starring Ed Harris. Yeah, this is absolutely about motorcycle joustin
Speaker 1: if you've made it essentially a beautiful anti capitalist religion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a pretty good movie. I think the Wobblies would
Speaker 1: have liked it. I think so too. And after they
Speaker 1: finished shrieking at the concept of motorcycles existing, Oh no,
Speaker 1: now I don't know what motorcycle iron horse. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: gonna put all Bessie out of a job. Now, they're
Speaker 1: probably we can rob a lot of banks at that,
Speaker 1: but not as the Wobblies. That's one of the things
Speaker 1: I love. I love reading historical subtext where it's like
Speaker 1: and then a bunch of stuff happened, but that wasn't us. Um,
Speaker 1: IWW's masters of that. So so they're having lectures and
Speaker 1: meetings at their at their hall. They hire the paid
Speaker 1: staff of the hall includes a librarian, a piano player,
Speaker 1: and a singer. So you could just go hang out
Speaker 1: and there's someone playing piano and singing and and one
Speaker 1: of the things I realized is another thing that comes
Speaker 1: up all the time in this show when I'm talking
Speaker 1: about these different cultures that have cropped up, is that
Speaker 1: the most interesting ones are ones that kind of allow
Speaker 1: people without access to money to have access to culture.
Speaker 1: And they basically, like you know, like the plays and
Speaker 1: ship that people are putting on, the songs that they're singing.
Speaker 1: The Wobblies were all about their fucking songs. Um. It's
Speaker 1: like a really big part of what makes them interesting.
Speaker 1: They also hire a law firm on retainer for compensation
Speaker 1: for injured workers. They offer health insurance. It's not mandatory.
Speaker 1: If you join the union, you don't have to pay
Speaker 1: for it, but if you put in some money you
Speaker 1: can get like health insurance. And you know, when a
Speaker 1: tree falls on you where you're cutting down a force
Speaker 1: I wish you had left alone, Um, you can get
Speaker 1: take care of a hospital. Wasn't a lot of it,
Speaker 1: like burial benefits to just like because everyone was dying
Speaker 1: all the time and that was a real problem for people.
Speaker 1: I think. So I didn't read anything specifically about that
Speaker 1: and what they were doing here, but that is like
Speaker 1: a whole thing that, like insurance in general, including life insurance,
Speaker 1: was basically these like you joined these social organizations I camera,
Speaker 1: like fraternal organizations and things um and so I assume
Speaker 1: the loobblies were doing that. They they also maintain job listenings,
Speaker 1: so you no longer needed to go to a job shark.
Speaker 1: You could go to the hall and find work, and
Speaker 1: as long as you remember in good standing, you could
Speaker 1: get a job, which, to be clear, does involve a
Speaker 1: monetary transaction. It costs fifty cents to join the i
Speaker 1: w W at the time, which is half the price
Speaker 1: of a job, and get to a whole lot of
Speaker 1: other stuff. I feel like I'm advertising let everyone go
Speaker 1: and join the i w W in nineteen or nine. Spoken.
Speaker 1: If you are listening and you're in nineteen and nine, spoken,
Speaker 1: head on down to the Union Hall. There's four different
Speaker 1: locals to choose from. I don't even know why they
Speaker 1: had four different branches, but they did and join up.
Speaker 1: It's fifty cents our newspapers. I'm now I'm actually not
Speaker 1: a meer Wobbly. The Wobbly still exist and I'm not
Speaker 1: actually a member, but uh, pretending like I'm a nineteen
Speaker 1: o nine wobbly. Our newspapers only thirty three cents. Well
Speaker 1: in today money, it's a penny in old timing money.
Speaker 1: And they set up a newspaper called The Industrial Worker,
Speaker 1: which is not a very clever name, um, but it
Speaker 1: was full of comics. Well that's cool and ads. This
Speaker 1: is where I was gonna do an ad transition, but
Speaker 1: it's it's the wrong time. So they did sell ads
Speaker 1: to work clothes in local coffee shops. Capitalism on your
Speaker 1: mind at all times, Margaret. Uh, there's a whole large
Speaker 1: thing where people require the routine, um, let's say, importation
Speaker 1: of food into their bodies that make them think about
Speaker 1: where that money comes from. Also, I'm just really trying
Speaker 1: to you know, I really want my podcast to do well.
Speaker 1: So if I raise more money for you all, um,
Speaker 1: then my podcast will do better. That's what you told me, right,
Speaker 1: and then we that's right, yes, yes, that that that
Speaker 1: that's how it will eventually work. Um. But you just
Speaker 1: you really need to get another like six people under
Speaker 1: you to start. But that's called your upline, Margaret um,
Speaker 1: and that's really gonna increase your profits in what is
Speaker 1: totally a legitimate business. Cool like cool zone. Okay, So thanks,
Speaker 1: I make the jokes for Sophie. Um. So the wobbly
Speaker 1: is in addition to having all this stuff at the
Speaker 1: union hall, the main thing that they're doing is they
Speaker 1: go right up to the employment agencies where all the
Speaker 1: like workers are gathered around up front waiting to buy jobs.
Speaker 1: And they're like, hey, I got an idea. What if
Speaker 1: you don't buy a job. What if what if you
Speaker 1: shouldn't have to pay to work? Imagine that? And and
Speaker 1: they're like, if you want work, go to the union hall.
Speaker 1: Give us fifty cents. It's actually not a grift, okay,
Speaker 1: but they're like, you know, go join the union, we'll
Speaker 1: get you jobs, will take care of you. And they
Speaker 1: would also any time they heard about someone were robbing
Speaker 1: the workers of their wages more directly, they would to
Speaker 1: quote from an anonymous article and the industrial worker, it
Speaker 1: is generally enough to send a few men from the
Speaker 1: union hall to reason with the employment shark in the
Speaker 1: case where he has robbed a victim, the employment shark
Speaker 1: pays back the amount stolen. He has had a change
Speaker 1: of heart. So their labor thugs, which also rules, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm fine with that. Everybody needs thugs. And this was
Speaker 1: essentially the first social power within Spokane, Washington, like a power,
Speaker 1: you know, existing among the people, rather than the sort
Speaker 1: of existing city infrastructure, even more importantly, the capital list infrastructure.
Speaker 1: And they have thousands of members really fucking quick, and
Speaker 1: every member's leader, and this scared the ship out of everyone.
Speaker 1: Well not them, they liked it, but the employment agencies
Speaker 1: they're like, yeah, all right, we have to stop free speech.
Speaker 1: If we want to keep up our grift, we have
Speaker 1: to stop people standing in front of our stores saying
Speaker 1: it's a grift. So they band together they form the
Speaker 1: Associated Agencies of Spokane. Oh so they've unionized too. That
Speaker 1: it is cool that that is every like big union
Speaker 1: fight story has the moment where like all of the
Speaker 1: factory owners of the corporations or whatnot basically make a
Speaker 1: union for themselves to fight back. Yep. And this is
Speaker 1: why it's so embarrassing that isn't the a f l C.
Speaker 1: I oh, that the cops are a union? Cop union
Speaker 1: is part of I can't remember. I'll stop my head. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so if a f l C. I, oh,
Speaker 1: it's not you. I'm sorry I've slandered you in this
Speaker 1: particular way. But yeah, no, yeah, exactly. The employers union
Speaker 1: and the cop union are not fucking unions in the
Speaker 1: same way that a workers union as a union. So
Speaker 1: the associated agencies of a Spokane they just when you
Speaker 1: read the like quick descriptions of this thing, they're like
Speaker 1: they pressured city council to pass a law, and then
Speaker 1: you read the actual articles from the time and it's
Speaker 1: like bribed. They went up and said, here's a ton
Speaker 1: of money past the following law. I mean, that is
Speaker 1: literally how it works now. Like in the Portland is
Speaker 1: dominated by a Portland Business Association. Most cities have a
Speaker 1: business association that runs at least junk of the city.
Speaker 1: In these what are called economic opportunity zones or whatever.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of different names for them. They start
Speaker 1: under the Reagan administration, but they're like areas where organizations
Speaker 1: of small businesses basically get to decide how law enforcement
Speaker 1: is employed sometimes hire their own cops in a few
Speaker 1: cases hiring their own fucking d a's, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: as as a result, wind up in exercise saying like
Speaker 1: massive influence over the entire way the city works. Like
Speaker 1: it's all still this, right, It's still people with like
Speaker 1: small and medium sized business is basically bribing city and
Speaker 1: town council leaders and whatnot to institute laws and do
Speaker 1: stuff like crackdown on the homeless in in Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's cool. It's cool that that's that's always been
Speaker 1: the same. Um, I'm sure, yeah, it's I guess the
Speaker 1: big difference is that now there's no opposition to those groups,
Speaker 1: like that's the default. You just kind of have to
Speaker 1: pick your group of corporate interests in your town that
Speaker 1: want the least shitty things for your town. Um. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, there's no no countervailing force at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is I mean, you know, it's like it's why
Speaker 1: I do this podcast and why I talk about history
Speaker 1: is like I think history is neat kind of for
Speaker 1: its own sake, because it's just like grand narrative that's
Speaker 1: even more intricate than like Lord of the Rings. But
Speaker 1: more than that, it's like you look at this and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, nothing fucking changes, you know, or things change.
Speaker 1: We have motorcycles now. We do have motorcycles now, and
Speaker 1: we can joust upon them with Edward Harris exactly, Um,
Speaker 1: which I think is the solution to most of these problems.
Speaker 1: And UM, I'm actually surprised the i w W did
Speaker 1: as well as they did without Edward Harris. But they yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's like, that's like, why to
Speaker 1: talk about these sorts of things from my point of view,
Speaker 1: So we can see these patterns and then we can
Speaker 1: see them in our own lives and we can look
Speaker 1: at ship that people did that didn't didn't work. Um.
Speaker 1: Business improvement districts, by the way, that's what they're okay, okay,
Speaker 1: I got the term bids, sorry, bids bids bids. Yes,
Speaker 1: So they bribe city council and they're like, let's have
Speaker 1: an ordinance against street meetings and they're like, well, wait,
Speaker 1: what about religious organizations And they're like no, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: they can do it. And they're like, well what about
Speaker 1: these other things? No, no, no, they can do it.
Speaker 1: Do you just mean the i w W. And they're like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we just mean panning, the i w W from from
Speaker 1: organized and the i w W from letting people know
Speaker 1: there's a scam in town. Yeah, exactly, And so the
Speaker 1: ordinance passes. It passed in probably January first, nineteen o nine.
Speaker 1: There's like different stories that claim exact dates that are different,
Speaker 1: but my money's on January first, nineteen o nine. And
Speaker 1: the mayor, of course of the town was a neutral
Speaker 1: party because he owned boy. He as a wholesale timber
Speaker 1: guy whose entire fortune was entirely based on the exploitation
Speaker 1: of these workers. So he was yeah, yeah, that that
Speaker 1: that that sounds unbiased. That's a guy who couldn't possibly
Speaker 1: have an angle. Yeah, no, totally. I mean you know,
Speaker 1: maybe someone even worse ran against him, who knows. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but one guy was like, what if we just literally
Speaker 1: put all the workers into this hole and set the
Speaker 1: hole on fire. Yeah he was, he was. He was
Speaker 1: in the ground beef industry, just trying to sell the
Speaker 1: meat of the from the bones of the labor class exactly.
Speaker 1: And so they're like, man, Pratt, he's our guy. He
Speaker 1: just wants he doesn't think we should be eating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like the cut of this man's job. And so okay,
Speaker 1: at first, the i w W when this ordinance passes,
Speaker 1: they're like, all right, we'll do our talking in the
Speaker 1: meeting home. Um, and a lot of transient workers take
Speaker 1: off for harvest season, and they they're challenging in court
Speaker 1: is the first thing they do, and they actually do
Speaker 1: succeed at getting the courts to say, okay, you can't
Speaker 1: ban only the iww from meeting in public, and so
Speaker 1: it bans other groups, including most notably the Salvation Army,
Speaker 1: who are religious organization who are still a problem today,
Speaker 1: UM speaking of griffs. And they and they actually successfully
Speaker 1: challenge it in the Court's like okay, you're right. And
Speaker 1: instead of the court being like you're right, everyone should
Speaker 1: have free speech, the judges like, you're right, no one
Speaker 1: should have free speech, and they banned the Salvation Army
Speaker 1: to except no one enforces it against the Salvation Army. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that's you have a conversation about some
Speaker 1: concerns I have with gun control. But yeah, that's that.
Speaker 1: That is often the way this kind of ship works. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the summer comes and goes, and you know, basically
Speaker 1: it's all being fought in court, and it's not going
Speaker 1: incredibly well. And in fall, the itinerant workers come back
Speaker 1: to town. They're mostly coming back to town from basically
Speaker 1: working summer jobs, and they kind of are like a
Speaker 1: lot of workers come back into town and they're like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm gonna take it easy for the winter
Speaker 1: as best as they can. And so now their numbers
Speaker 1: are bolstered, and they're like, all right, fuck it, it's on.
Speaker 1: And there's four different IWW locals in town. Again, I've
Speaker 1: literally no idea why. I guess just decentralization consus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that just that that seems consistent with what you say
Speaker 1: saying yeah, And so they come to consensus and they're like,
Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna call for a free speech fight.
Speaker 1: And this isn't the first of these free speech fights.
Speaker 1: They just want a really similar battle on a smaller
Speaker 1: scale in Missoula, Montana. Missoula, Montana had outlawed streets speaking,
Speaker 1: and hundreds of wobblies had poured into town on box
Speaker 1: cars and they set up speaking all over the city.
Speaker 1: They clogged the local jails, and they forced the city
Speaker 1: to drop the ordinance. And they're like, all right, that's
Speaker 1: how we fucking get it done. We're going to do
Speaker 1: a replicable tactic. Yeah. Yeah, and so the first person
Speaker 1: to get arrested on this new law, I thank again.
Speaker 1: Different things claim different things. The wobbling named Jim Thompson.
Speaker 1: He was dragged off to jail in October. Soap Boxing
Speaker 1: and the Industrial Worker their their newspaper puts out a
Speaker 1: call and basically they're like, hey, are you hoboes or
Speaker 1: they also use the words bindle stiffs and timber beasts.
Speaker 1: I didn't know timber beasts. We ought to use timber
Speaker 1: beasts more often. I agree that. I mean, honestly, that
Speaker 1: just sounds cool when you're like someone new comes to
Speaker 1: town and you're trying to stop them from moving there,
Speaker 1: and you can be like, well, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: timber beasts in the woods. Yeah. Then maybe they think
Speaker 1: that you're talking about wolves, and so they they go
Speaker 1: back home to Iowa. Yes, and then you can sell
Speaker 1: them a a coyote pelt as if it's a wolf
Speaker 1: a timber beast pelt. This is a thing that happened
Speaker 1: to Margaret and I at at a Renaissance fair. We
Speaker 1: didn't actually buy it, no, no, no, no, no. It
Speaker 1: was immediate the obvious that it was a coyote belt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: good on them, m um. Okay. So they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: come to you know, hey, all you hobos come get arrested,
Speaker 1: or to use their oh you timber beasts? Oh sorry,
Speaker 1: are you timber beasts? Come and get arrested. And their
Speaker 1: actual quote is the headline of their newspaper that they like,
Speaker 1: the broadside they sent out across the country is wanted
Speaker 1: men to fill the jails of Spokane. That's great. I
Speaker 1: did see there was stuff like that at Standing Rock.
Speaker 1: There was discussion like that at Standing Rock, which was, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting tactic. I've like, I've done it on
Speaker 1: a smaller scale, like for like a day where you know,
Speaker 1: we expect a thousand people to get arrested, so we
Speaker 1: all refuse to give our names when we get arrested,
Speaker 1: and they like clogs up the jails and they're like,
Speaker 1: funk this, get out of here, you know, um, which
Speaker 1: is why I have been arrested twice and I've never
Speaker 1: given my name. Um. I'm very proud of that. I
Speaker 1: hope it stays though, and where would Okay? So uh,
Speaker 1: and they send out this across the US, and I
Speaker 1: think Canada and they say, show up for November two,
Speaker 1: be prepared to be orderly. We're not going to riot,
Speaker 1: but we're going to fucking get this ship then, and
Speaker 1: the hope it is just pour in there's they're crammed
Speaker 1: fifty to seventy people in a box car. Um and
Speaker 1: that the uniform they're wearing, because nothing never changes their uniform.
Speaker 1: These like anarchists and socialist hobos is black overalls and
Speaker 1: or jumpers with black shirts, and they wear red ties,
Speaker 1: and they have like they look like kind of like
Speaker 1: working nerds, you know, because they're like they have like
Speaker 1: um and they have like they have red ties, and
Speaker 1: they have the Red Songbook in their pocket like other
Speaker 1: i WWW books which are all like red covers and
Speaker 1: ship they have IWW pins on their coat. Total fucking nerds.
Speaker 1: And the train lines are mostly unionized, so all of
Speaker 1: the union train operators, not all of them, A lot
Speaker 1: of them turn a blind eye to the wobblies and
Speaker 1: help them get where they're going, put them on the
Speaker 1: right cars. Some of them wrap them out. Even some
Speaker 1: of the unionized workers are like, I know how to
Speaker 1: get a book? I can you know? I saw these
Speaker 1: people out or whatever to deal with that yeah, and
Speaker 1: they camp and make coffee, and the hobo jungles around
Speaker 1: the train yards, which is where people like sleep in
Speaker 1: camp before they get on freight trains. And sometimes they
Speaker 1: head into whatever town they're on that whatever town they're
Speaker 1: stopped in, and just like walk in and force and
Speaker 1: start giving speeches to the workers and like selling wobbly merch.
Speaker 1: It's just basically a tour um. They like make their
Speaker 1: coffee money by selling the Little Red Songbook full of
Speaker 1: all their songs, basically their mixed CD. And thousands of
Speaker 1: them do this and they're off to spoken. This is
Speaker 1: the tradition in which I wrote freight Trains. I wrote
Speaker 1: freight Trains to go around and get arrested trying to
Speaker 1: protest things. And it was formally launched on November two.
Speaker 1: One by one, wobblies mounted and overturned crate their soapbox
Speaker 1: and they would start talking and then get arrested. Um.
Speaker 1: Usually once they got arrested, they were forced to run
Speaker 1: the gauntlet between two lines of cops who beat them
Speaker 1: with batons. They would plead guilty and then they would
Speaker 1: get sentenced to thirty days of hard labor breaking rocks
Speaker 1: for the crime of disorderly conduct. Anyone who has picked
Speaker 1: out as a leader was given six months for conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Some of them were facing five years in prison. Even
Speaker 1: their attorneys kept getting arrested. That sounds above board, Yeah, totally. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was like they would get arrested for delivering letters
Speaker 1: to their clients. You know, Um, but you know who
Speaker 1: else would smuggle things into jail for you, Robert oh Well,
Speaker 1: Ed Harris. Um. I I suspect that if I needed it,
Speaker 1: Ed Harris would have my back. Um. And and we, Margaret,
Speaker 1: do you know who Ed Harris is? I do, because
Speaker 1: I watched this movie last night, this excellent movie. Margaret
Speaker 1: showed it to us favorite movies of all time. If
Speaker 1: you don't recognize Ed Harris, he's the guy in the
Speaker 1: movie The Rock who lays the military commander who takes
Speaker 1: over Alcatraz, And in the beginning of the movie you
Speaker 1: see him at the grave site of his wife and
Speaker 1: the only thing written on his wife's gravestone is just
Speaker 1: his wife, not a name. It's awesome, Michael Bay No
Speaker 1: one makes movies like that. Ridiculous. But if you want
Speaker 1: to see him as an anti capitalist, basically a narco monarchist,
Speaker 1: go go watch Night Riders because this show is brought
Speaker 1: to you by George Romero. Smash it, Night Riders, Night Writers.
Speaker 1: It didn't make any money, and neither do we. Here's
Speaker 1: the ads. Okay, we are back, and we are talking
Speaker 1: about people standing up on soapboxes to get arrested for
Speaker 1: speaking their mind. And not all of them were orators,
Speaker 1: because you know, their job was to get arrested, not
Speaker 1: actually give speeches. And and then guess a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of mixed quality in the speech is going
Speaker 1: out at these events. Oh yeah, also a lot of
Speaker 1: variable levels of ability to communicate in English. Um, you
Speaker 1: know about half of the people who get arrested are immigrants,
Speaker 1: and some of them apparently go up and say fellow
Speaker 1: workers or even like mine workers, you know, like because
Speaker 1: they're trying to shock Yeah, and then my German accent,
Speaker 1: but I've been informed it's offensive okay, um okay, And
Speaker 1: and they'd be like, okay, ship, where are the cops
Speaker 1: because that's all they knew how to say in English?
Speaker 1: Maybe right, was my fellow workers? And you know, and
Speaker 1: if the cop wasn't around to arrest them, um, they
Speaker 1: were they were in trouble because they did not give talks.
Speaker 1: Some of them actually were really good orators, and they
Speaker 1: would bring out ringers. It was all very well orchestrated.
Speaker 1: It wasn't when I first heard this story, I sort
Speaker 1: of imagined them all like dutifully lining up and the
Speaker 1: cops are waiting, and like they'd stand up and they're
Speaker 1: basically just talking to the cops and just getting sent
Speaker 1: off one by one. Now, this whole thing is like
Speaker 1: almost like free speech riot. They're like they run around
Speaker 1: kind of undercover, and then they whenever they see a
Speaker 1: group of workers, they like pop up on a soapbox
Speaker 1: and start giving speeches. The crowd fights off the cops
Speaker 1: for like ten minutes. Sometimes when the cops finally break through,
Speaker 1: the people run into the crowd and get the funk
Speaker 1: away so that they can keep doing it. Okay okay yea,
Speaker 1: And they know they're going to get arrested eventually, but
Speaker 1: they're gonna make it easy for the police. Do as
Speaker 1: many speeches, draw as much money out for them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good strategy, good texts, and so they would and
Speaker 1: so like sometimes the crowd would give them signals like hey,
Speaker 1: the cops are coming, um and yeah, all very well
Speaker 1: planned and when they thought they had a chance of
Speaker 1: actually a longer talk, they would send their better orators,
Speaker 1: or when they needed to draw a crowd, they'd send
Speaker 1: the people with like the booming voices that would bring
Speaker 1: people from all over. Um, it's very hard to imagine
Speaker 1: this in modern context to me, Like, I just struggle
Speaker 1: to imagine me standing on a corner full of people
Speaker 1: and talking and having anyone do anything besides me throw
Speaker 1: a coin at me, Margaret. People didn't have phones or
Speaker 1: TVs back then, So I feel like a big missing
Speaker 1: piece in all these stories is there was not much
Speaker 1: going on. Like when we talk about why don't we
Speaker 1: do this cool ship today, it's, well, there are video games,
Speaker 1: like people do have like have activities. Back then, it
Speaker 1: was like, well, we have like an hour and a
Speaker 1: half before we die of cholera, and there's there's nothing
Speaker 1: to watch or listen to and we can't read. So
Speaker 1: I guess we'll go fight for civil rights. Yeah, totally, totally. Um, sorry,
Speaker 1: that's not fair, but but but but but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: people are way more engaged with whatever it is that
Speaker 1: they're immediately doing when they're on the street. Right now.
Speaker 1: The thing that's serious about this is. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's not a factor that there was a lot less
Speaker 1: of of things that you could fill your time with
Speaker 1: back then. Yeah, totally. At least one person was arrested
Speaker 1: for speaking through a window to people outside the building.
Speaker 1: They were allowed to be in the building, but they
Speaker 1: just like saying hey, fellow workers out the window. The
Speaker 1: cops like break in and arrest them. Um. Other wobblies
Speaker 1: start getting arrested just walking down the street if they're
Speaker 1: recognized as wobblies, and they're like held for days while
Speaker 1: the cops sit around try and figure out what charges
Speaker 1: they can throw at them. Eight kids get arrested, Eight
Speaker 1: wobbly kids aged eight to sixteen who were like newsboys
Speaker 1: who would sell the newspapers. Yeah. Um, they get arrested
Speaker 1: and thrown in jail for a night and they're given
Speaker 1: rough interrogations in quotes at all hours. Um. One of
Speaker 1: the kids, his wobbly parents almost lost custody of him
Speaker 1: for being socialists. Uh. The judge was like, the union
Speaker 1: hall isn't I'm not quoting, but I'm pretending like I'm quoting.
Speaker 1: The union hall is not a place where any reputable
Speaker 1: woman would hang out. But this piste off everyone in town,
Speaker 1: and so everyone in town shows up the next day
Speaker 1: at court and it's like flooded with women who are like,
Speaker 1: fuck you, I want to go to the Union home now.
Speaker 1: You can't fucking tell me at a parent my fucking kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and that kind of vibe is what really gets
Speaker 1: every and through this, and the juvenile cases are dropped
Speaker 1: after all the women in town just show up and
Speaker 1: are like, fuck off, you can't fucking take people's kids
Speaker 1: away for you know, being wobblies. One man, he decides
Speaker 1: to troll, so he gets up on soapbox and he
Speaker 1: reads the Declaration of Independence. Oh, you don't want to
Speaker 1: be doing that. He gets thirty days at the rock pile. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean a good third of our founding fathers would
Speaker 1: have been happy with that. Yes, that is true. And
Speaker 1: and what's interesting is because all of this is framed
Speaker 1: and a lot of their you know, public facing stuff,
Speaker 1: they're like, we are here fighting for free speech. That
Speaker 1: was very explicit, and they're like, the right of free
Speaker 1: speech is guaranteed by the Constitution, and that was like
Speaker 1: part of their demands. But they were fighting for free
Speaker 1: speech because free speech is their weapon. Against capitalism, not
Speaker 1: just as this abstract love for the U. S. Constitution. Uh.
Speaker 1: In a l edition of The Industrial Worker, one Wobbli
Speaker 1: puts it like this, The fights for free speech conducted
Speaker 1: by the I w W throughout the American continent have
Speaker 1: a greater meaning than appears upon the surface. They signify
Speaker 1: a distrust of legal methods for obtaining redress for the
Speaker 1: wrongs inflicted upon a slave class. In these fights, the
Speaker 1: workers do not stand upon their quote constitutional rights, for
Speaker 1: they are aware of the fact that they have no
Speaker 1: rights save those which they're organized power and forces. True,
Speaker 1: they may use phrases during the progress of the battles,
Speaker 1: but merely as a means of showing the rest of
Speaker 1: the workers the folly of relying upon phrases written upon
Speaker 1: musty pieces of parchment by slaveholding labor skinners of the past.
Speaker 1: The principal point in all these fights is seen when
Speaker 1: the settlement takes place. For then it is that the
Speaker 1: master class, with all their powers, forced to deal with
Speaker 1: the workers not as individuals, not as part of capitalist society,
Speaker 1: but as a new power. And I just like that,
Speaker 1: because it's like it's They're like, no, we are a
Speaker 1: a power and we are going to take power and
Speaker 1: exercise power, you know. And and the tool that they're
Speaker 1: using for that is free speech. So that's why they're
Speaker 1: fighting for free speech. Yeah, I mean this is this again.
Speaker 1: It's kind of everything is so fucking fragmented now I
Speaker 1: think we can thank technology for But like, there used
Speaker 1: to be this attitude among the left that like workers
Speaker 1: were a power the same way or should be a
Speaker 1: power like that was the goal to make the power
Speaker 1: of the ways in the same way as any nation
Speaker 1: state was Like that was that was the I think
Speaker 1: a lot of it died with World War One because
Speaker 1: there was this expectation among a lot of socialists that like,
Speaker 1: such a thing couldn't happen because the workers wouldn't let
Speaker 1: themselves be turned against each other in that way. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and that ties into the Wobblies a lot, because one
Speaker 1: they're called the Industrial Workers of the World even though
Speaker 1: their US Union um, because they fucking believe in internationalism,
Speaker 1: and because World War One recks their ship. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: turns out. Look, I'm normally in favor of shooting archdukes.
Speaker 1: Don't get me wrong, Like I don't I don't have
Speaker 1: any hatred for shoot the archduke. But it doesn't always
Speaker 1: work out shooting the archduke, you know, now, shoot carefully.
Speaker 1: I think that one of the main lessons of history
Speaker 1: is random bombs and random violence. Alright, fucking crap. Shoot, yeah,
Speaker 1: and probably a worse than like overall, worse than good. Um,
Speaker 1: if they're not especially if they're not tied. Well, I
Speaker 1: don't know, Margaret, you know, let's let's get a secondary opinion.
Speaker 1: I've invited on the show roughly half of the young
Speaker 1: men in Western Europe in nineteen fourteen. Oh no, no,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, I don't hear anybody. It looks like they
Speaker 1: may have missed the email. Probably got tuberculos. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's what happened. The only way that I think
Speaker 1: I didn't more people die of disease in World War
Speaker 1: One than bullets. I can't remember. Well, it was about equal,
Speaker 1: I think during the war, and then after the war
Speaker 1: like that many people again died or something like that.
Speaker 1: I'm not because there was like Spanish COVID, the influential, yeah, COVID,
Speaker 1: the influential influence the epidemic. But I mean, as a
Speaker 1: general rule, up until like sixty years ago, you were
Speaker 1: like at least as many dead from various diseases. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the influenzer's yeah on Instagram. Okay, wow, wow, so
Speaker 1: they I think we have to cancel Margaret for that one. Nope, wow,
Speaker 1: you can't. You can't cancel Margaret Killjoy. It's just like
Speaker 1: Twitter can uncancellable. Oh no, this is not a fight
Speaker 1: I want to bring upon myself. The only fight we
Speaker 1: have against social media right now is Mark Zuckerberg just
Speaker 1: suspending me on Instagram for this is I feel like
Speaker 1: he almost might be a bastard. Yeah, this is the pause.
Speaker 1: We're going to get the workers of the world back
Speaker 1: together and getting Sophie Backer. I just want to be
Speaker 1: able to post pictures of puppies, podcasts and plants puppies
Speaker 1: on internet. It yeah, Zuck, I feel okay. Well, I
Speaker 1: actually it's probably not the right time for burning the
Speaker 1: Reichstag jokes. So after two days, after two days of this,
Speaker 1: a hundred fifty Wobblies are in jail, and after a month,
Speaker 1: six of them are in jail. About half of them
Speaker 1: are immigrants, half of them are US born, and the
Speaker 1: courts are full every single day with labor cases, um
Speaker 1: and the they closed the courts, so a lot of
Speaker 1: them anyway, so people can't come in. One local man
Speaker 1: who wasn't even a wobbly he tried to get into
Speaker 1: the courtroom. He didn't realize I think he I think
Speaker 1: it's maybe comprehension of English wasn't good, or something happened.
Speaker 1: He tried to walk in, and he was beaten so badly.
Speaker 1: His screams echoed throughout the halls of justice as he
Speaker 1: tried to enter. Okay, I mean that does sound pretty bad.
Speaker 1: But that guy was probably no angel. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: We don't We don't know anything about him. He could
Speaker 1: have he probably started World War One, yeah, or worse,
Speaker 1: he might have been Irish or Italian, yeah, or from
Speaker 1: one of the Swabian countries. Yeah. Yeah, Okay. One of
Speaker 1: the heartbreaking things about all of this is that I think,
Speaker 1: like a really good chunk of the wobblies are Irish,
Speaker 1: and a really good junk of the cops are throwing
Speaker 1: him in jail or Irish, yeah, which is what the
Speaker 1: Irish diaspora is never quite really reckoned with. Yeah. There's
Speaker 1: actually some good speeches on that from Irish rebels who
Speaker 1: like did stuff like go to the United States to
Speaker 1: support the black panthers, and we're like, I don't know
Speaker 1: what the funk happened to everybody who moved over to
Speaker 1: your goddamn country. But there are a lot less base
Speaker 1: than they ought to be um. So when they get sentenced,
Speaker 1: they all get thirty days in jail, except the ones
Speaker 1: who get six months or five years or whatever. And
Speaker 1: they get sentenced to break rocks. But the wobblies did
Speaker 1: not want to break rocks. Actually, they said, we're happy
Speaker 1: to break rocks. We demand union wages for our rock
Speaker 1: breaking duties. And they were like, okay, fine, no breaking rocks. Instead,
Speaker 1: you are nished with rations of bread and water and
Speaker 1: no time out of yourselves. But it put the Chain
Speaker 1: Gang of Spokane out of commission while they were there,
Speaker 1: because basically, the cops in that town had just been
Speaker 1: kind of whenever they needed unpaid labor. There's must be
Speaker 1: some other word for it, but we'll just use unpaid
Speaker 1: labor to come up with another word for unpaid labor
Speaker 1: that's still written into our constitution. They would just arrest
Speaker 1: drunks and get free labor for construction out of these
Speaker 1: drunks by putting them on the chain gang. But all
Speaker 1: of the random arrestees were basically set free because the
Speaker 1: jail is full of wobblis and so no more chain
Speaker 1: gang in town. The leaders and a lot of the
Speaker 1: other people, they go on hunger strike. And this is
Speaker 1: a new political tactic. It's the first time it's used
Speaker 1: in the US as far as I can tell. The
Speaker 1: idea of just refusing food while you're in jail. Um.
Speaker 1: And they were tortured in jail. All jail is torture.
Speaker 1: Jail is full of horrors right now. But several of
Speaker 1: them died during their thirty days stay Jesus. They were
Speaker 1: they were given only bread and water. The bread was
Speaker 1: thrown onto the floor for them that each got half
Speaker 1: a loaf of bread per day. A lot of them
Speaker 1: got scurvy and like lost heath um whenever the wild.
Speaker 1: You have to assume their their nutrition levels weren't ideal beforehand.
Speaker 1: To there's this, there's this part. It didn't make into
Speaker 1: the script, but like someone smuggles in an onion and
Speaker 1: cuts it into sixty three separate pieces, so that everyone
Speaker 1: gets an equal share of the one onion that they've
Speaker 1: like risk their fucking life to smuggle in and whenever
Speaker 1: the wildlies make a fuss, the cops closed the windows
Speaker 1: and turn on the steam heat and just like cook
Speaker 1: them and then drop them into the immediate cold. It's
Speaker 1: very cold and spoken in the winter. And this is
Speaker 1: what kills them, right, A lot of them dry die
Speaker 1: of pneumonia. And this is, by the way, a tactic
Speaker 1: that is used prominently, has been used up into through
Speaker 1: the nineties, and I think even later than that, in
Speaker 1: the early two thousand's, police in large junks of Canada
Speaker 1: would do this indigenous people, not just you know, people
Speaker 1: who are like protesting. Yeah, protesting makes it okay, but
Speaker 1: just like random like is a random act of murder. Essentially,
Speaker 1: you can move about like midnight rides. I think they
Speaker 1: were called um and during the two fourteen risings in
Speaker 1: Ukraine against the want to be dictator Yunakovich, his riot
Speaker 1: police the beer kut one of the things they would
Speaker 1: do when they would get people that kind of isolated
Speaker 1: sections of the line or protest camps or people driving
Speaker 1: in supplies as they would take them, strip them naked
Speaker 1: and throw them in snow drifts like it's a it's
Speaker 1: a yeah, a great, great tactic. I'm yeah, good stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've I've been at demonstration where some of the people
Speaker 1: who arrested they singled out black arrestees, put them in
Speaker 1: dog cages and sprayed them naked with freezing water. Um
Speaker 1: and Jesus yeah um. Miami the ft A protests in
Speaker 1: two thou three prisoners were treated real fucking bad um
Speaker 1: and anyway, sorry um okay. So they got packed ten
Speaker 1: to twelve people into cells designed for four people, and
Speaker 1: so they couldn't sit or lie down. Right, You're stuck
Speaker 1: for like months standing up in a fucking cell. Uh.
Speaker 1: But while they were in jail, they would like have
Speaker 1: their wobbly business meetings because they're all leaders and they're
Speaker 1: all in jail together, so what the funk else are
Speaker 1: you gonna do? They like plan things out, They have
Speaker 1: prayer meetings. Uh, they give lectures, they sing revolutionary songs
Speaker 1: the whole time. They work really hard to keep all
Speaker 1: their spirits up. Did the jail fills up quick? And
Speaker 1: soon they're they're the extra arrestees are taken to this. Basically,
Speaker 1: there's an abandoned schoolhouse in town that once the hey,
Speaker 1: let's fill the jails started happening, the city is like okay,
Speaker 1: and they prepare this unheeded, fucking abandoned schoolhouse to be
Speaker 1: with no bathing facilities, to be the new jail. And
Speaker 1: so they get thrown into empty classrooms with threadbare blankets
Speaker 1: and only newspaper to sleep on. Most of them were lumberjacks,
Speaker 1: and so most of them had warm clothes that they
Speaker 1: were arrested in, and those without warm clothes this is
Speaker 1: really sweet. Uh, they would sleep in the middle so
Speaker 1: that everyone else would keep them warm. And then when
Speaker 1: that got full up, because you know, the whole plan
Speaker 1: was we're going to fill out the jail, so they
Speaker 1: kept to have to find new jails, right, and so
Speaker 1: then they start putting them into a military site called
Speaker 1: Fort Right, and Fort Right was was had a black garrison,
Speaker 1: and the wobblies who were stationed that were treated way
Speaker 1: the funk better than the wobblies who were in the
Speaker 1: jail and the schoolhouse. And it actually wasn't a federal
Speaker 1: decision to turn the federal fort into a fucking prison
Speaker 1: for like state offenses or city offenses. And the local
Speaker 1: commander had completely ignored the chain of command in order
Speaker 1: to do this because he hated these fucking hoboes, and
Speaker 1: so he actually got dismissed from his post because he
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to turn his fucking command into a jail
Speaker 1: mhm um. Eventually, the prisoners in the schoolhouse they get
Speaker 1: marched and masked the jailhouse to bathe. I think it's
Speaker 1: after like almost a fucking month, and and they've been
Speaker 1: completely cut off from communications from the outside world besides
Speaker 1: like a conservative newspaper that they get shown every now
Speaker 1: and then, literally because it says like the Wobblies have lost,
Speaker 1: We're winning, even though it's like exactly not what's happening.
Speaker 1: And so they've been stuck together in this tiny schoolhouse
Speaker 1: and they're like, what the fund is gonna happen? They're
Speaker 1: gonna they basically are like, we're gonna like death march
Speaker 1: you a mile to the jail and then hose you off. Um.
Speaker 1: And they're like, what the fund is gonna happen when
Speaker 1: we go outside? And they go outside and they're immediately
Speaker 1: greeted not with an angry mob, but a fucking like
Speaker 1: like people like lined up to cheer them on. All
Speaker 1: of the towns people come out, they throw them tobacco,
Speaker 1: fruit cake wrapped up sandwiches. They throw all the ship
Speaker 1: into the crowd of them, and so they start gathering
Speaker 1: up all this stuff and they're they're they're eating it,
Speaker 1: and the cops are like, oh, no, you don't. They
Speaker 1: start confiscating all the ship, and the crowd is, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: they fucking do, and the cops are like, oh, we're
Speaker 1: severely outnumbered. I guess these people can eat their food,
Speaker 1: because if we don't let them, we'll probably not have
Speaker 1: any prisoners anymore and we might be dead. It's amazing
Speaker 1: how that works. Yeah, yeah, I mean jail support baby.
Speaker 1: One of the I mean up to the up to
Speaker 1: the present moment the uprisings in one of the most
Speaker 1: important pieces of activism anyone did in any of the
Speaker 1: cities that had serious BLM activity in twenty was was
Speaker 1: jail support. Was going out to find the people who
Speaker 1: were who had gotten arrested and like greet them when
Speaker 1: they leave, make sure they have the things they need,
Speaker 1: they have transport. People often get released basically naked without
Speaker 1: their phones and ship like. Um. This is still a
Speaker 1: big deal to this day, although usually it doesn't get
Speaker 1: to be as cool as this because the cops have
Speaker 1: gotten smarter than just walking everybody out in the middle
Speaker 1: of the city. Yeah, the cops actually get smarter than
Speaker 1: that after this and they start driving back and forth
Speaker 1: after that. Um. But but yeah, no, totally, like, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and even if you don't smoke and you
Speaker 1: hate people hate smokers, like bring cigarettes, right yeah, Like, um,
Speaker 1: when you're waiting outside for people to get out of jail,
Speaker 1: bring whatever stuff they might want, not what you want
Speaker 1: them to want. That that's one of those that's good
Speaker 1: advice because it's kind of other people. But like, as
Speaker 1: a general rule, anytime I'm going into any sort of
Speaker 1: situation that's like violence or there's just been violence, or
Speaker 1: it's it's a dicey place, I'm always going to bring
Speaker 1: a pack of cigarettes because, among other things, like a
Speaker 1: hell of a lot of time you can calm people
Speaker 1: down who are agitated with like do you want a cigarette?
Speaker 1: Do you smoke? Like something like that. It works, It
Speaker 1: works an awful lot of the time. Um. It's people
Speaker 1: sometimes just need to take a minute, which is why
Speaker 1: cigarettes are so popular all over the world. Totally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we yeah, the Elk Fork John Brown gun Club people
Speaker 1: were just talking about, like, yeah, of the things we
Speaker 1: do that, like the City Outreach doesn't do is that
Speaker 1: along with food and help with people moving their stuff,
Speaker 1: Like we'll bring them smokes because like it's it helps
Speaker 1: calm people down. There's a lot of like folks who
Speaker 1: use it to sort of self medicate for one thing
Speaker 1: or another. And if they're living on the street, they
Speaker 1: don't have a whole lot of other options. So yeah, like,
Speaker 1: no charity is gonna want to bring them cigarettes, but
Speaker 1: it is what people fucking want, and yeah, it's yeah, anyway, whatever,
Speaker 1: this is enough of it. No, I don't actually smoke.
Speaker 1: I just see the utility of cigarettes sometimes. Yeah. Same,
Speaker 1: It's like I kind of want all my friends to
Speaker 1: quit smoking. But I'm also like, yeah, whatever, like you
Speaker 1: do you when it comes to this kind of ship,
Speaker 1: you know? Yeah, okay. So and as they're as they're
Speaker 1: marching off to jail, one woman starts singing a wobbly
Speaker 1: song from a porch of a privately owned house that
Speaker 1: she has permission to be at. It might even be
Speaker 1: her house, I'm not sure. And she gets arrested for
Speaker 1: singing a wobbly song on her own porch and gets
Speaker 1: thirty days in jail for disorderly conduct. When they get
Speaker 1: to the jail. The bathing is that they're hosed down
Speaker 1: with scalding water and then freezing water in rapids secession. Um.
Speaker 1: At one point whether in jail, the Salvation Army shows
Speaker 1: up and tries to proselytize to the jailed Wobblies, and
Speaker 1: then they just get booed and jeered at until they
Speaker 1: leave because and they're not even anti religious as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, I think overall the Wobblies tend
Speaker 1: to skew a little bit towards atheism. But I was
Speaker 1: reading about them having prayer meetings in the fucking jail.
Speaker 1: And then one woman who um went to jail I
Speaker 1: think ten times during this fight was a woman named
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and she's nineteen at the time. She's
Speaker 1: a young, fiery socialist Wobbly organizer, and she wants to
Speaker 1: give a speech right but she doesn't want to get
Speaker 1: hauled off to jail right away, so she chains herself
Speaker 1: to a post so that she can give She gets
Speaker 1: a good ten minutes in before they managed to like
Speaker 1: unchain her, cut the chains or something drag her off
Speaker 1: to jail. She ends up going up on conspiracy charges
Speaker 1: as one of the one of the organizers and basically
Speaker 1: just gives the investig it's lip instead of answering. They're like,
Speaker 1: did you say the following things? And she's like, I
Speaker 1: say a lot of things. A lot of women were
Speaker 1: arrested as well as men, because the IWW actually bothered
Speaker 1: to organize women, and therefore they organized was organized also
Speaker 1: by women. A lot of the women who were arrested,
Speaker 1: they were arrested directly at the i w W hall.
Speaker 1: I think fewer of them were the speakers as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, and more of them were like
Speaker 1: organizers back at the hall, and the hall just kept
Speaker 1: getting rated. It got rated so much that eventually the
Speaker 1: cops just stationed four cops inside the hall to like
Speaker 1: keep track of what everyone said, because apparently free speech
Speaker 1: also doesn't apply in the hall. Yeah, it kind of
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like they haven't, and so they wind up
Speaker 1: evicted from their hall that they're up on the rent.
Speaker 1: But basically the cops were like, yeah, we're gonna beat
Speaker 1: the ship out of you, landlords if you don't evict
Speaker 1: these people. And they go through place after place and
Speaker 1: people are is like, no, I can't rent to you.
Speaker 1: The cops are threatening me too hard. Until the German
Speaker 1: immigrant Association called the Turners, which was basically a gymnastic
Speaker 1: association for German immigrants. They're like, we're not afraid of
Speaker 1: the cops, and they rent to the Wobblies. The women's
Speaker 1: cells are less crowded, but they saw something even worse
Speaker 1: than what the men were facing. Most of the wobblies
Speaker 1: in jail were sex workers. Um. And soon Elizabeth Flynn
Speaker 1: realized that the sheriff had turned it into it gets
Speaker 1: called a brothel. Whatever you do, yep, it is not
Speaker 1: sex work if it is not a job, if it's cosy, yeah, so,
Speaker 1: and the cops were going around and soliciting customers and
Speaker 1: keeping all of the money. Um. And and then there's
Speaker 1: some graphic accounts that I won't read of attempted rape
Speaker 1: by the interrogators against the arrested wobbly women as well.
Speaker 1: And so this actually ends up being a lynch pin
Speaker 1: in the fight, even though this hadn't really happened to
Speaker 1: the wobblies as much. The wobbly see this happening. Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Flynn in particular sees this happen, and so immediately she
Speaker 1: gets out and she tells the world was happening right
Speaker 1: through the industrial worker, and the newspaper had been publishing
Speaker 1: the whole time, even though every single time they put
Speaker 1: out an issue, the editor would get arrested. Um. But
Speaker 1: since every Wobble as a leader, every Wobble is a
Speaker 1: potential editor, they went through eight editors, are eight different issues,
Speaker 1: and and how over how eight issues? Yeah, yess monthly? Um,
Speaker 1: and as he or actually I think it's more than monthly.
Speaker 1: Might actually be weekly, I think because by December, Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Flynn lays out her charges against the police that they
Speaker 1: are doing this horrendous thing. Um, and the cops immediately
Speaker 1: confiscate all the papers and like burn them and impound everything.
Speaker 1: And they're like, go fucking wild on it, And so
Speaker 1: they move the newspaper to Seattle so that they can
Speaker 1: keep publishing. Because this is the like, this is the
Speaker 1: step too far, This is the like yeah, oh fuck
Speaker 1: you know, um, because she's telling the world about this,
Speaker 1: Any human who has told the story, I would hope
Speaker 1: would react very negatively. Now, Margaret, it does sound like
Speaker 1: a reoccurring theme here, is that the right to free
Speaker 1: speech exists only in so far as you have control
Speaker 1: of the people whose job it is to hurt people
Speaker 1: in your society, whether either you fight them or you
Speaker 1: pay their salaries. But one way or the other, free
Speaker 1: speech doesn't exist otherwise for other groups. Yep, that's cool.
Speaker 1: And also free speech it exists in as much as
Speaker 1: we own the means by which to produce and distribute speech. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: but that's not right, because we have free speech here
Speaker 1: in the United States. And I'm pretty sure that I
Speaker 1: have never seen police officers slam a kid's head into
Speaker 1: the concrete for holding a sign. Yeah, yeah, no, I
Speaker 1: mean that would be yeah wild, that would be that
Speaker 1: would be that would be really that would be really
Speaker 1: fucked up. Actually, if that had happened anyway, And we
Speaker 1: don't have to pay for podcasts, we just choose to.
Speaker 1: Uh it's you pay to have your podcast produced by
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media by going through me. Um, then I
Speaker 1: get to pay, I get I get to play Robert
Speaker 1: who gets to pay Sophie and folks, if you really
Speaker 1: want to learn the secrets podcasting could have made us
Speaker 1: all you knew it, you We're we're We're doing a
Speaker 1: convention at the Marriott at the Airport Marriott in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: So just come on down. It is three days of
Speaker 1: workshops and motivational speeches. It is steal dollars. That's all
Speaker 1: dollars per person, plus sixteen fifty for meals lunches and
Speaker 1: breakfasts and dinners not included. Um. And of course you
Speaker 1: know you're eight hundred and fifty dollar per night room fee. Uh.
Speaker 1: And yeah, you'll you'll guaranteed guaranteed path to riches in
Speaker 1: the podcasting visits. Just just hop on over barely sixty
Speaker 1: dollars if you buy the Ultra Express tickets which come
Speaker 1: with a coffee mug. Hit We're for me. And I
Speaker 1: wasn't paid to say this, that's right. She'd have to
Speaker 1: tell you if she was. Yeah, that's the being a cop. Hm. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Flynn girle Is Girley Flynn is a very interesting
Speaker 1: person of her own right. She goes on to do
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff that I have not yet fully
Speaker 1: wrapped my head around how I feel about her, because
Speaker 1: she got kicked out of the Wobblies for kind of
Speaker 1: leading to some people to bumplead deal. But then she
Speaker 1: founded the a c l U, and then she joined
Speaker 1: the Communist Party, and then She got kicked out of
Speaker 1: the a c l U when the when Soviet Russia
Speaker 1: became allies with Germany at THEE when they signed a
Speaker 1: non aggression pact with Germany, and the a c l
Speaker 1: U was like, we don't trust people who are siding
Speaker 1: with the Nazi, so you're all kicked out. I don't
Speaker 1: know how I feel about any of the ship. I
Speaker 1: just read about her. She's very interesting as Honestly, I
Speaker 1: don't entirely know how I feel about the A c
Speaker 1: l U today because they also have kind of a
Speaker 1: mixed bag of a history. But so she's she's a
Speaker 1: she's a complicated figure, but is uncomplicated that she solve
Speaker 1: this ship and told the world about it at great
Speaker 1: personal risk, and I believe went out and got arrested
Speaker 1: again after seeing that ship. So based and that's where
Speaker 1: we're going to leave it for today. The Wobblies are
Speaker 1: in jail. They're fighting hard as funk for the right
Speaker 1: to organize, the right to free speech, because that's what
Speaker 1: the right to free speeches is, the right to organize. Um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, I don't think too much about the
Speaker 1: fact that free speech only exists in so far as
Speaker 1: you're able to stop people with weapons from ceasing stopping
Speaker 1: you from exercising free speech. Don't think about the fact
Speaker 1: that that's the only way in which people get to
Speaker 1: actually guarantee they're able to speak their minds. Think instead
Speaker 1: about our upcoming convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin three days for
Speaker 1: First through the five called the Secret of Free Speech
Speaker 1: and Moral Enlightenment. Yeah. But actually both of you have
Speaker 1: books from a k Press. Is that is that correct?
Speaker 1: Like non sarcastic books, but actual books, non sarcastic books. Yes,
Speaker 1: we do, Margaret, and I did co author the book
Speaker 1: The Secret to Regaining Your Freedom of Speech, which is
Speaker 1: just pictures of a Molotov cocktail. They're very nice. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a it's very well photographed. It's a coffee
Speaker 1: table book. It's a coffee table book. But but but actually,
Speaker 1: you can get Robert's book after the Revolution wherever you
Speaker 1: buy books, right, Robert, That is something that I've been told. Yes,
Speaker 1: you can get it if you google a k Press
Speaker 1: after the Revolution, or find any website that sells you
Speaker 1: books and type in the title and and your book
Speaker 1: is officially available for pre order right now, right Margaret, Yes,
Speaker 1: unless Oh, yes, you have one day left of preorder.
Speaker 1: If you want a little piece of art that I
Speaker 1: think is really by the same cover artists. Who's who
Speaker 1: did the cover of my book, Cassandra John's And if
Speaker 1: you want that, you have one day to pre order.
Speaker 1: We won't be here tomorrow from a K Press or
Speaker 1: other participating bookstores which are mostly like collectively owned or
Speaker 1: really cool Boxcar Books, Red Emmas and Um, Firestorm Books
Speaker 1: and calf Coffee. Actually there's no coffee a Firestorm Books
Speaker 1: and Coffee anymore, so I think it's just Firestorm Books,
Speaker 1: cool bring around coffee and uh, you know you can't
Speaker 1: follow me on Instagram unless Suckerberg has given it back
Speaker 1: and hopefully he's been canceled for her many crimes. It's
Speaker 1: buck soccerbo Um. But we'll be back on Wednesday. We're
Speaker 1: with you car too good. I hope they win. I
Speaker 1: think they will. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media, but more podcasts and
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone media dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the preadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. M HM