The city of Los Angeles boasts of being the fastest growing city in the world, but its jails have not grown at all in the last thirty years. To describe them as death-traps would not be using reckless language, but merely quoting from reports of one public body after another which has investigated and denounced them. The jails were already crowded; and here were six hundred more men suddenly thrust into them! Some of the “tanks,” built to hold twenty or thirty men, were required to hold a hundred, and it was literally impossible for all the men to sit down at once. All the jails were swarming with vermin, there was no bedding obtainable, and the food was atrocious. These things not being enough, wanton cruelty and torture was added. In one of the “tanks,” because the men persisted in singing, the jailers sealed up all the ventilation and turned on the steam heat for two hours. Ninety-five men were in this hole, and many of them swooned. Other men were chained up by the thighs, so that they could not quite sit down. We have the affidavits of several men to the fact that Chief of Police Oaks personally reviled the prisoners, calling them liars and degenerates; and when one of the men spoke up and said this was not true, Oaks called him out from the “tank,” and in the presence of many witnesses struck him in the face and knocked him down again and again, pounding him until the chief was exhausted. Such was the situation on May 15th. The “Times” for that morning announced that the city council had appropriated money to build a stockade, in which to hold the strike prisoners, and all the remaining strikers at the harbor were to be thrown into this pen. I was about to begin the writing of this book, but I found it impossible to keep my peace of mind in a “bull-pen” civilization, and decided to do what I could to remind the authorities of Southern California that there is still supposed to be a Constitution in this country. With seven friends I went to interview the mayor that afternoon. The interview lasted an hour, and developed curious notions upon the part of the chief executive of a large city concerning the meaning of civil rights. According to Mayor Cryer, all the arrests which had been made night after night on Liberty Hill, and the complete abrogation of the rights of freedom of speech and of assemblage, were justified by the fact that somebody unknown had violated the unconstitutional ordinance of the city of Los Angeles against the displaying of a red flag. The wholesale arrests of hundreds of men upon the street day after day were justified by the fact that on one occasion some rowdy unknown had shouted: “Here comes Captain Plummer, that fat prostitute.” I said: “Mr. Mayor, according to your way of reasoning, if some one were to upset a peanut stand on Broadway and steal the peanuts, you would feel justified in arresting everybody in sight and closing the thoroughfare to traffic for a month.”