The Everett Massacre: A history of the class struggle in the lumber industrySmith, Walker C.
History
The Everett Massacre: A history of the class struggle in the lumber industry
Smith, Walker C.
Industrial Workers of the World; Lumbering -- Washington (State); Lumbermen -- Washington (State)
"The meals! Did we say 'meals?' A thousand pardons! Next time we meet a
meal we will apologize to it. Up to the time we asserted our displeasure
at the stinking, indigestible messes thrown up to us by a drunken brute
who could not qualify as head waiter in a 'nickel plate' restaurant, we
had garbage, pure and simple. Think of it! Mush, bread and coffee at
7:30 a. m., and not another bite until 4 p. m. Then they handed us a
mess which some of us called 'slumgullion,' composed of diseased beef.
Is it any wonder that four of the boys were taken to the hospital? But
we will not dwell on the grub. Suffice it to say we were all more or
less sick from the junk dished out to us. We were all hungry from
November 10th until January 22nd. One day in November we had beans.
Little did we surmise the pains, the agony contained in that dish of
innocent looking nutriment, beans. At two in the morning every man in
the jail was taken violently ill. We aroused the guards and they sent
for a doctor. He came about eight hours later and looked disappointed
upon learning that we were not dead. This doctor always had the same
remedy in all cases. His prescription was, 'Stop smoking and you will be
all right.' This is the same quack who helped beat up the forty-one
members of the I. W. W. at Beverly Park on October 30th, 1916. His nerve
must have failed him or his pills would have finished what his
pickhandle had started.
"During the entire time of our confinement under McRae, drunken deputies
came into the jail and did everything in their power to make conditions
as miserable as possible for us. McRae was usually the leader in
villification of the I. W. W.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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