me when I waved to him on the way out.
Back at the archives, I asked the librarian, the same pudgy guy, for a file on the free-speech fight and he brought it over to me glumly. Mostly, it was a fairly haphazard selection of newspaper clippings from 1911 and 1912. I read a pair of dueling rants: The Union editorialized in favor of the vigilante attacks on the Wobblies and their supporters, while The San Diego Sun attacked the owner and editor of the Union, John D. Spreckels. One of the attacks was entitled, “Put This in Your Pipe and Smoke it Mr. Anti-Labor Man.” In it, the writer decried the way Spreckels sought to run San Diego like General Otis of the LA Times had run Los Angeles—as a petty dictator. More to the point, The Sun argued, it was clear that Spreckels was most upset about being taxed for “occupying the streets with his railways.” I took a few notes and remembered having read that one of the key things that preceded the free speech fight was the effort of the tiny San Diego I.W.W. Local 13, which had only fifty members, to organize the Mexican workers on Spreckels’ street car lines.
Unlike the local AFL unions who wouldn’t even try to organize Mexicans, blacks, or Chinese workers, the Wobblies welcomed everyone—even unskilled migrant workers. The Wobblies were the only American union to oppose exclusion laws and organize Asians and other workers like the Jews, Catholics, and recent immigrants frequently ignored by the American Federation of Labor. The Industrial Workers of the World was born out of the fires of Colorado mining wars, and the Wobblies thought of themselves as revolutionaries. They rejected contracts, believed in direct action, were suspicious of political organizations, and mixed anarchism, syndicalism, Marxism, and an inverted form of Social Darwinism freely as their rough and ready membership thought of theoretical distinctions as useless nitpicking. (Having covered my share of endless leftist political gatherings, a hostility to useless nitpicking was a sentiment I could get behind.) Believing in “One Big Union of All the Workers,” they thought that their form of organizing would eventually lead to a huge general strike in which the workers would take control of the means of production and end the rule of the bosses. They were forming the structure of a new society in the shell of the old. Unrealistic, as it turned out, but a good thought. In San Diego, by hitting Spreckels’s streetcar franchise they went straight after the interests of the richest man in town and scared the shit out of the powers that be. I liked that.
For the Wobblies, the whole street-speaking thing was more about organizing than it was about some abstract idea of the Bill of Rights. By standing on a soapbox in the middle of the street they could reach out to the floating unemployed population, disgruntled workers, and others receptive to their message, and educate them about the interests of all workers or agitate them to join a given fight. The goal was to turn those on the outskirts of society away from shame and defeat, and toward anger. They wanted to turn “bums into men.” I looked at a picture of a scruffy crowd listening to a soapboxer at 5th and E, and smiled as I imagined the present day parade of bistros, wine-bars, and trendy meat markets. When I had first visited San Diego back in the eighties, downtown had still been a sailor town of dive bars, strip joints, porno shops, greasy spoons, flop houses, and mom and pop shops. Back at the turn of the century, the Gaslamp was called the Stingeree and 5th and E was Heller’s Corner. The Stingeree was where most of the working-class whites, white-ethnic immigrants, Chinese, and Mexicans lived. It was full of shops, saloons, cheap hotels, gambling houses, opium dens, and prostitutes. Middle- and upper-class ladies used to complain about having to pass by the soapboxers and the grimy throng of workingmen and other ill-clad, shabby-looking characters. All in all, it sounded a lot more fun back in the day than it is now—unless you’re looking for a bad cover band or an overpriced cheese plate.
What kicked off the events that led to the free speech fight was an incident on January 6th, 1912 in which an off-duty cop and real estate man tried to drive his car straight through a street meeting. The crowd rocked his car and slashed his tires even though the Wobbly speaker warned them that this would just give the police an excuse to break up the meeting, which they did. I have to say that after being almost hit by a car, it might be tough for me to show restraint too. I’ve been known to flip off a heedless driver or two in my day, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, after that, Spreckels and his crew saw their opening and pushed San Diego city authorities to pass an ordinance banning street speaking in basically the entire Stingeree District in February 1912. Of course the ban irritated not only the I.W.W. but also a whole range of other folks including the AFL, Socialists, religious leaders and civil libertarians who formed the California Free Speech League to challenge the ban. The I.W.W.’s response was to flood San Diego with thousands of protesters, and when the first waves of the Wobbly army hit town, city authorities passed a “move-on ordinance” that gave police wide powers to break up street meetings and harass “vagrants.”
The Wobblies were pretty disciplined and did everything they could to avoid violence because they knew the cops generally welcomed an excuse to bust heads. San Diego police, however, emboldened by the new laws and egged on by the city’s bosses, didn’t hold back. They waded into crowds with batons flying and beat prisoners all the way to jail. They used fire hoses to knock protesters off their feet, and filled the jails with Wobblies. In jail, the brutality continued with the murder of sixty-five-year-old Michael Hoey, who was savagely beaten by three cops, kicked in the groin multiple times, and left to die on the cement floor of an overcrowded, rat-infested cell. Outside the pen, they shot another Wobbly named Joseph Mikolasek in front of the I.W.W. headquarters. Still, a tough bunch, the Wobblies didn’t get scared off. They kept flooding into town, packing the jails, and singing until it drove the police crazy. In one article I found a quote where a cop whined, “These people do not belong to any country, no flag, no laws, no Supreme Being. I do not know what to do. I cannot punish them. Listen to them singing all the time, yelling and hollering, and telling the jailors to quit work and join the union. They are worse than animals.” Great stuff, I thought.
When police brutality didn’t work, the city fathers ended up resorting to vigilante terror. Working at the behest of the elite, most of the vigilantes were scared middle-class merchants, aspiring real estate men, clerks, off-duty cops, and otherwise-respectable thugs who were just looking for blood sport. This reminded me of the stuff that happened with the cops around the time of the LA riots. Some of the elites such as George Marston and The Sun’s owner, Scripps, didn’t support the I.W.W. but did support the idea of free speech. Most, though, were in line with the reign of terror. As the Union editorial put it, “Hanging is none too good for them and they would be much better dead; for they are absolutely useless in the human economy; they are waste material of creation and should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion there to rot in cold obstruction like any other excrement.” I think it’s safe to say they weren’t fucking around. So a vigilante army of about 400 men was formed. They met a trainload of incoming Wobblies and beat and tortured 140 men, making them run the gauntlet before sending them bleeding on their walk back to Los Angeles.
I looked over several reports of Emma Goldman’s visit to San Diego. Most people who’ve ever heard of the free-speech fight also know the story of how Goldman, the famous anarchist, was driven out of San Diego by quite a welcoming committee. Met at the Santa Fe depot by a snarling mob of “ladies” screaming for her blood, Goldman was ushered to the US Grant Hotel where the mayor denied her the opportunity to speak to an angry mob in the park across the street below. While this negotiation was taking place, a crew of thugs kidnapped her lover, Ben Reitman, and drove him out to near the Peñasquitos Ranch to meet a pack of vigilantes who proceeded to make him kiss the flag and sing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Think of that the next time you’re at a ballgame and I bet you won’t sing. They stripped Reitman, viciously beat him, jammed a cane up his bunghole, nearly twisted his balls off, and branded I.W.W. in his ass with a lit cigar. He was then tarred and feathered and sent north on foot. What interested me, however, was not the story of these legendary anarchists, but the unknown stories of those who were lost to history.
I kept skimming through the articles, some of which I’d seen quoted in books, until I came upon a longer piece in The Sun about the vigilante attacks on free-speech fighters. It gave the basic details but also featured
