my interest:
They took us from the cattle pen in groups of five. I remember looking up at the back of the fellow in front of me. It was covered in manure as they had made us lie in a pile of cattle dung while we waited for our turns. The first of the thugs I caught sight of had on a constable’s badge and a white handkerchief tied around his left arm. All of them, it turned out had white handkerchiefs on their arms. Most of our captors had a gun or a rifle in one hand and a club or other such weapon in the other. That is unless they had a bottle of whiskey. This gang of fine men of property and law had all got their courage up by getting good and drunk. All the better to be in high spirits while you’re beating unarmed men, I suppose. Well, they pushed, kicked and prodded us along to a spot where they had us each pay our respects to the flag. The kid in front of me, about 17 years old, got smacked in the head with a wagon spoke and he fell to his knees. Kiss it, you F** Son of a B**, Kiss the G** damn flag, they yelled at him. I could see the blood pouring down his face from a head wound. They had no mercy with him, despite his youth. After he performed their profane ritual, he ran the gauntlet of over a hundred men, each one taking a swing with a club, a bat, or some other weapon. By the end of the line, the kid was crawling through the dirt, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
Next they made Giovanni, “the priest” we used to call him on account of his preaching all the time about non-violence, kiss the flag and sing “The Star Spangled Banner.” Get it right you Dago Son of a B***, one of the bigger thugs yelled before kicking the back of his legs to bring him to his knees. For Giovanni, the worst was not the spit on his face after his song was complete, but the first horrible blow he took from a wagon spoke with a big spike driven through the end. Giovanni had failed to get his arms up in time and it pegged him straight in the forehead. He went down with a thud and didn’t move. He was kicked and poked with more than a few bats and clubs until one of the sharper wits in the pack of wolves got the idea to drag him away and dump his limp body off to the side. I never heard word of Giovanni after that. Lots of fellas went down that way, with no one to remember ’em.
After Giovanni got dragged away, they took big Jacob, or “the Kike” as they called him. They seemed to take a special liking to beating the Jews, Catholics, and Mexicans in our unfortunate little parade. For Jacob, one of the off-duty men of the law selected a hose filled with gravel and tacks. I heard him scream after the first swing and then I was struck from behind by the butt of a pistol and my knees were taken out by a couple swings of a bat. I guess I was a bit too much of a mess for Old Glory ’cause they quickly pushed me past the flag into the gauntlet with no need of a kiss or a song. Just lucky I guess. I couldn’t see well through the blood dripping into my eyes but I stayed low and kept my head covered with my arms as I limped through the gauntlet. There was a whole lot of cursing blending together and stupid yelling about anarchy and godlessness and the lesson I was getting from those pious gentlemen with such brave souls. I remember staggering out the back end of the line and being told that if I ever came back, they’d find a nice spot to bury me on some of their pretty real estate. If I learned a lesson there, though, it was that I was through with non-violence. Poor Giovanni’s corpse was a sterner teacher than his pretty words.
As told by I.W.W. agitator, Buckshot Jack
I stopped dead and reread the name, flipped back through the file to the mugshot with the same name. When I asked the librarian who had made the correction and changed the name to Bobby Flash on the back of the picture, he didn’t know. He walked back to check with the main archivist. No luck. The file was put together years ago by a librarian who had passed away. I read the rest of the article that included another account of the gauntlet, but no more on Bobby Flash or his partner, Gus Blanco. Still, this was an interesting piece in the puzzle. I thought for a whimsical moment about my mysterious great grandfather and let myself ponder the possibility that this could be him. No way, I thought, pulling myself back to the task, it was far too interesting a story for my sad family.
I had the librarian copy The Sun article and looked through the rest of the file. No more leads. When the librarian came back to take the file, he recommended I try the Historical Society in Balboa Park. I thanked him and went down to the stacks to find a book on the Magónista revolt of 1911 that I’d been meaning to read. I grabbed it, checked it out, and left the building.
Outside the library it was a beautiful January day, but I hardly noticed that as I walked toward the trolley to meet Ricardo Flores in Tijuana. I was still stuck in my head, thinking about Bobby Flash. Had he been one of the group of Wobblies who were forced to walk back along the railroad tracks toward Los Angeles? Had he been so badly injured that he been taken to a local hospital? There had been nothing in the article beyond the account of the gauntlet. I was still ruminating when I got to the transit center. I absent-mindedly picked up a copy of the LA Times at a news rack and had to run to hop on the trolley to San Ysidro. I found an empty pair of seats by the window and put my satchel with the library book and my notes in it on the seat next to me. I glanced across the aisle at a Mexican woman sitting with her two little boys. They had bags full of souvenirs from the San Diego Zoo.
I looked out the window at a utility box that still had a fading Obama “Hope” poster plastered on it. During the campaign, I had been skeptical about the vagueness of Obama’s messianic appeal, just as I had been brought to tears when he spoke on more than one occasion. It was a battle between my middle-aged pessimism and some deep need for, well, hope. I think more than a few people felt that way. The front page of the Times had a story about things going badly in Afghanistan, one about more lay-offs, another about the latest California budget debacle, and an in-depth piece on rising global instability due to the economic crisis. I couldn’t help but think of the parallels between the beginning of the last century and this one: the economic and political polarization, the anger at “the bosses” as the Wobblies would say. Now though, people weren’t in the streets, at least not yet. People didn’t know who to shoot.
I looked up at a bunch of teenage kids jumping on board in National City. What kind of future would these kids have? It was hard to say. There were dark clouds on the horizon, but sometimes it was times like these that made people stand up. At the next stop, a pair of soldiers got on board in their white uniforms complete with hats. They were talking loudly about sex with prostitutes. I picked up the book on the Magónista revolt and flipped to the middle to look at a black-and-white photo of Ricardo Flores Magón and his brother, Enrique. Both men had thick curly hair and identical handlebar mustaches. Ricardo’s serious expression and little round glasses gave him the aura of a philosopher.
The desert revolution was an international affair, inspired by the Magón brothers who ran the insurgency from their exile in General Otis’s Los Angeles, just after the LA Times building was bombed by a pair of angry AFL labor activists, the McNamera brothers. That bombing led to a wave of anti-labor hysteria in Southern California, thus making the Magónista’s assault on the sparsely populated border region improbable. The fact that both Otis and Spreckels had extensive land, water, and railroad holdings also assured that the odds were against them. Nonetheless, in January 1911 at the I.W.W. headquarters in Holtville, California, a group of mostly Mexican rebels loyal to Magón planned an attack on Mexicali. Soon afterwards, the rebel band captured Mexicali in a predawn raid, killing only the town jailor. Poor sap. The initial success of the raid led to a wave of support from famous voices on the left like Jack London and Emma Goldman, who spoke in San Diego to help rally workers to the cause. The rebels’ biggest backers in the US were the Wobblies and Italian anarchists, both of whose philosophies were in line with Magón’s mix of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Marx’s. Simply put, Magón called upon the workers to “take immediate possession of the land, the machinery, the means of transportation and the buildings, without waiting for any law to decree it.” Brutally treated by the Diaz dictatorship, and deeply committed to a utopian vision of communal society, Magón’s idealism made him both admirable and seemingly unable to reconcile his dream with political reality. This last malady was something I had a soft spot for. Go figure.
Soon after the success at Mexicali, the rebels took Tecate, where
