Labor activists

"¡Sí se puede!"

"You are here to discuss a matter which is of extreme importance to yourselves, your families and your community, so let's get to the subject at hand. A hundred and fifty-five years ago, in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico, a padre proclaimed the struggle for liberty. He was killed, but ten years later Mexico won its independence. We Mexicans here in the United States, as well as all other farm workers, are engaged in another struggle for the freedom and dignity which poverty denies us. But it must not be a violent struggle, even if violence is used against us. Violence can only hurt us and our cause. The law is for us as well as the ranchers. The strike was begun by the Filipinos, but it is not exclusively for them. Tonight we must decide if we are to join our fellow workers."

"I became a vegetarian after realizing that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy like we (humans) do."

"We don't know how God chooses martyrs. We do know that they give us the most precious gift they possess — their very lives."

"We need, in a special way, to work twice as hard to make all people understand that animals are fellow creatures, that we must protect them and love them as we love ourselves... The basis for peace is respecting all creatures... That's the basis, the beginning for peace. ...We know we cannot defend or be kind to animals until we stop exploiting them - exploiting them in the name of science, exploiting animals in the name of sport, exploiting animals in the name of fashion, and yes, exploiting animals in the name of food."

"History will judge societies and governments — and their institutions — not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless."

"We can't be free ourselves if we can't free our women."

"We, the undersigned, gathered in Pilgrimage to the capital of the State in Sacramento in penance for all the failings of Farm Workers as free and sovereign men, do solemnly declare before the civilized world which judges our actions, and before the nation to which we belong, the propositions we have formulated to end the injustice that oppresses us."

"Our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich. The pilgrimage is a witness to the suffering we have seen for generations."

"This is the beginning of a social movement in fact and not in pronouncements. We seek our basic, God-given rights as human beings. Because we have suffered — and are not afraid to suffer — in order to survive, we are ready to give up everything, even our lives, in our fight for social justice. We shall do it without violence because that is our destiny. To the ranchers, and to all those who opposes, we say, in the words of Benito Juárez: "El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz." [Respect for another's right is the meaning of peace.]"

"We seek the support of all political groups and protection of the government, which is also our government, in our struggle. For too many years we have been treated like the lowest of the low. Our wages and working conditions have been determined from above, because irresponsible legislators who could have helped us, have supported the rancher's argument that the plight of the Farm Worker was a "special case." They saw the obvious effects of an unjust system, starvation wages, contractors, day hauls, forced migration, sickness, illiteracy, camps and sub-human living conditions, and acted as if they were irremediable causes. The farm worker has been abandoned to his own fate — without representation, without power — subject to mercy and caprice of the rancher. We are tired of words, of betrayals, of indifference. To the politicians we say that the years are gone when the farm worker said nothing and did nothing to help himself. From this movement shall spring leaders who shall understand us, lead us, be faithful to us, and we shall elect them to represent us. We shall be heard."

"We seek, and have, the support of the Church in what we do. At the head of the pilgrimage we carry La virgen de la Guadalupe because she is ours, all ours, Patroness of the Mexican people. We also carry the Sacred Cross and the Star of David because we are not sectarians, and because we ask the help and prayers of all religions."

"We are suffering. We have suffered, and we are not afraid to suffer in order to win our cause. We have suffered unnumbered ills and crimes in the name of the Law of the Land. Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that the system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, and the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hunger on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure."

"We shall unite. We have learned the meaning of Unity."

"The ranchers want to keep us divided in order to keep us weak. Many of us have signed individual "work contracts" with the ranchers or contractors, contracts in which they had all power. These contracts were farces, one more cynical joke at our impotence. That is why we must get together and bargain collectively. We must use the only strength that we have, the force of our numbers. The ranchers are few; we are many. United we shall stand."

"We shall Strike. We shall pursue the revolution we have proposed. We are sons of the Mexican Revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking, bread and justice. Our revolution will not be armed, but we want the existing social order to dissolve, we want a new social order. We are poor, we are humble, and our only choices is to Strike in those ranchers where we are not treated with the respect we deserve as working men, where our rights as free and sovereign men are not recognized. We do not want the paternalism of the rancher; we do not want the contractor; we do not want charity at the price of our dignity. We want to be equal with all the working men in the nation; we want just wage, better working conditions, a decent future for our children. To those who oppose us, be they ranchers, police, politicians, or speculators, we say that we are going to continue fighting until we die, or we win. We shall overcome."

"Across the San Joaquin Valley, across California, across the entire Southwest of the United States, wherever there are Mexican people, wherever there are farm workers, our movement is spreading like flames across ad dry plain. Our pilgrimage is the match that will light our cause for all farm workers to see what is happening here, so that they may do as we have done. The time has come for the liberation of the poor farm worker. History is on our side. May the strike go on! Viva la causa!"

"When we refer to the Church we should define the word a little. We mean the whole Church, the Church as an ecumenical body spread around the world, and not just its particular form in a parish in a local community. The Church we are talking about is a tremendously powerful institution in our society, and in the world. That Church is one form of the Presence of God on Earth, and so naturally it is powerful. It is powerful by definition. It is a powerful moral and spiritual force which cannot be ignored by any movement."

"When the strike started in 1965, most of our friends forsook us for a while. They ran — or were just too busy to help. But the California Migrant Ministry held a meeting with its staff and decided that the strike was a matter of life or death for farm workers everywhere, and that even if it meant the end of the Migrant Ministry they would turn over their resources to the strikers. The political pressure on the Protestant Churches was tremendous and the Migrant Ministry lost a lot of money. But they stuck it out, and they began to point the way to the rest of the Church. In fact, when 30 of the strikers were arrested for shouting Huelga [Strike], 11 ministers went to jail with them."

"The growers in Delano have their spiritual problems... we do not deny that. They have every right to have priests and ministers who serve their needs. But we have different needs, and so we needed a friendly spiritual guide. And this is true in every community in this state where the poor face tremendous problems. But the opposition raises a tremendous howl about this. They don't want us to have our spiritual advisors, friendly to our needs. Why is this? Why indeed except that there is tremendous spiritual and economic power in the church. The rich know it, and for that reason they choose to keep it from the people."

"We should be prepared to come to the defense of that priest, rabbi, minister, or layman of the Church, who out of commitment to truth and justice gets into a tight place with his pastor or bishop. It behooves us to stand with that man and help him see his trial through. It is our duty to see to it that his rights of conscience are respected and that no bishop, pastor or other higher body takes that God-given, human right away."

"What do we want the Church to do? We don't ask for more cathedrals. We don't ask for bigger churches of fine gifts. We ask for its presence with us, beside us, as Christ among us. We ask the Church to sacrifice with the people for social change, for justice, and for love of brother. We don't ask for words. We ask for deeds. We don't ask for paternalism. We ask for servanthood."

"Today, thousands of farm workers live under savage conditions — beneath trees and amid garbage and human excrement — near tomato fields in San Diego County, tomato fields which use the most modern farm technology. Vicious rats gnaw on them as they sleep. They walk miles to buy food at inflated prices. And they carry in water from irrigation pumps."

"All my life, I have been driven by one dream, one goal, one vision: to overthrow a farm labor system in this nation that treats farm workers as if they were not important human beings. Farm workers are not agricultural implements; they are not beasts of burden to be used and discarded. That dream was born in my youth, it was nurtured in my early days of organizing. It has flourished. It has been attacked."

"I'm not very different from anyone else who has ever tried to accomplish something with his life. My motivation comes from my personal life, from watching what my mother and father went through when I was growing up, from what we experienced as migrant workers in California. That dream, that vision grew from my own experience with racism, with hope, with a desire to be treated fairly, and to see my people treated as human beings and not as chattel. It grew from anger and rage, emotions I felt 40 years ago when people of my color were denied the right to see a movie or eat at a restaurant in many parts of California. It grew from the frustration and humiliation I felt as a boy who couldn't understand how the growers could abuse and exploit farm workers when there were so many of us and so few of them."

"I've traveled through every part of this nation. I have met and spoken with thousands of Hispanics from every walk of life, from every social and economic class. And one thing I hear most often from Hispanics, regardless of age or position, and from many non-Hispanics as well, is that the farm workers gave them the hope that they could succeed and the inspiration to work for change."

"From time to time, you will hear our opponents declare that the union is weak, that the union has no support, that the union has not grown fast enough. Our obituary has been written many times. How ironic it is that the same forces that argue so passionately that the union is not influential are the same forces that continue to fight us so hard."

"Today, the growers are like a punch-drunk old boxer who doesn't know he's past his prime. The times are changing. The political and social environment has changed. The chickens are coming home to roost — and the time to account for past sins is approaching."

"These trends are part of the forces of history that cannot be stopped. No person and no organization can resist them for very long. They are inevitable. Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. Our opponents must understand that it's not just a union we have built. Unions, like other institutions, can come and go. But we're more than an institution. For nearly 20 years, our union has been on the cutting edge of a people's cause — and you cannot do away with an entire people; you cannot stamp out a people's cause."

"Like the other immigrant groups, the day will come when we win the economic and political rewards which are in keeping with our numbers in society. The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism. That day may not come this year. That day may not come during this decade. But it will come, someday! And when that day comes, we shall see the fulfillment of that passage from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament, "That the last shall be first and the first shall be last." And on that day, our nation shall fulfill its creed — and that fulfillment shall enrich us all."

"Dr. King was a powerful figure of destiny, of courage, of sacrifice, and of vision. Few people in the long history of this nation can rival his accomplishment, his reason, or his selfless dedication to the cause of peace and social justice. Today we honor a wise teacher, an inspiring leader, and a true visionary, but to truly honor Dr. King we must do more than say words of praise. We must learn his lessons and put his views into practice, so that we may truly be free at last."

"Many people will tell you of his wonderful qualities and his many accomplishments, but what makes him special to me, the truth many people don't want you to remember, is that Dr. king was a great activist, fighting for radical social change with radical methods. While other people talked about change, Dr. King used direct action to challenge the system. He welcomed it, and used it wisely."

"Dr. King was also radical in his beliefs about violence. He learned how to successfully fight hatred and violence with the unstoppable power of nonviolence. He once stopped an armed mob, saying: "We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we live by. We must meet hate with love.""

"My friends, as we enter a new decade, it should be clear to all of us that there is an unfinished agenda, that we have miles to go before we reach the promised land. The men who rule this country today never learned the lessons of Dr. King, they never learned that non-violence is the only way to peace and justice. Our nation continues to wage war upon its neighbors, and upon itself."

"My friends, the time for action is upon us. The enemies of justice wants you to think of Dr. King as only a civil rights leader, but he had a much broader agenda. He was a tireless crusader for the rights of the poor, for an end to the war in Vietnam long before it was popular to take that stand, and for the rights of workers everywhere. Many people find it convenient to forget that Martin was murdered while supporting a desperate strike on that tragic day in Memphis, Tennessee. He died while fighting for the rights of sanitation workers. Dr. King's dedication to the rights of the workers who are so often exploited by the forces of greed has profoundly touched my life and guided my struggle."

"Just as Dr. King was a disciple of Gandhi and Christ, we must now be Dr. King's disciples. Dr. King challenged us to work for a greater humanity. I only hope that we are worthy of his challenge."

"In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups."

"(How has the city changed over the decades?) In the 70's we were so engaged - that's a hard one for me, to try not to discount the losses, to see what is hopeful. I feel a lot of times that we've lost leadership. There's no Cesar Chavez or Robert Kennedy. We've lost the great inspiring role models that gave us ideas about a bigger self. We started to value the celebrity, the person who got his."

"The farm-worker movement of the 1960s, led by Cesar Chavez, was perhaps the first nationally known effort by people of color to address an environmental issue."

"From the beginning in 1962, Chávez, like Galarza before him, lobbied for strict control of the US-México border, arguing that a mass of noncitizen and politically powerless workers would make it difficult to recruit US citizens to the union. They also viewed undocumented Mexican workers as strikebreakers. The UFW maintained that stance in its early years, even reporting undocumented workers to the immigration service. But by 1974, important Chicano support organizations were openly criticizing the stance, making newspaper headlines. It came to a crisis when Attorney General William B. Saxbe announced that the Justice Department would deport a million "illegal aliens" and claimed to have the full support of the UFW. The UFW backed off the stance, and Chávez wrote a letter, published in the San Francisco Examiner, denying Saxbe's claim, writing that "illegal aliens are doubly exploited, first because they are farm workers, and second because they are powerless to defend their own interests. . . . If there were no illegals being used to break our strikes, we could win those strikes overnight and then be in a position to improve the living and working conditions of all farm workers." But he promised that the United Farm Workers would support legalization for the undocumented, "our brothers and sisters." By the late 1970s, Chávez's views had changed, and he was advocating the legalization of undocumented immigrants and encouraged their inclusion in the union movement."

"racial and ethnic minorities were being environmentally-and economically-exploited in ways that didn't involve incinerators or dumps. Between 1965 and 1971, for example, under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, Mexican farmworkers in California launched a historic resistance movement to organize a union not only in the interest of raising wages and improving working conditions but also to combat pesticide abuse, which was notorious for making workers sick."

"I was very impressed with Cesar Chavez's grasp of organizing strategy. He started organizing around small fruit to start with, where there was a semipermanent work force. That gave the union continuity. These workers didn't move around to follow the different crops. You didn't start fresh every time there was a strike."

"Cesar, a priest, a minister, and nine farmworkers were arrested for going into a camp in Borrego Springs, just to get the workers’ clothes after the workers were fired for union activity. They were arrested, stripped naked, and chained by the officers."

"There have been incidents of violence against the union, many of them, and it has taken all that Cesar can do and the rest of the people can do to keep workers nonviolent."

"The people in the union have to take a tremendous amount of harassment, such as the materials of State Senator Hugh Burns’ Committee on Un-American Activities in California. The man who made up that committee report was sitting in his home in Three Rivers. He never once went to Delano. Yet, he wrote a report which has been used all over the country in which he tried to redbait the members of the union. Among other mistruths, he says 3 years of Cesar Chavez’ life are missing, and suggests he was getting some kind of subversive training. Those are the 3 years he spent in the U.S. Navy. That should be put in the record."

"Now when we first tried to get this plan passed, many of the growers were very upset about it. They said you have to go through an insurance company. We are very lucky that César Chávez is a grammar-school dropout and he hasn't been educated to think that insurance is a way of life. He said he wasn't going to give any of his money to an insurance company, any of the workers' money."

"Within the next year they are spending millions of dollars to destroy the United Farm Workers. They are spending millions of dollars to tell what a bad administrator César Chávez is. Have you seen these articles in the New York Times and Time magazine? They say César Chávez is a bad administrator. What they really mean is he is the wrong color. And if he were a good administrator.... Can you imagine five clinics, a medical plan, a credit union, a retirement center for farm workers, fantastic increases in wages, the removal of the labor contract system-all of this César did in a few short years. What would he do if he was a good administrator?"

"Chavez fought illegal immigration tenaciously. In 1969, he marched to the Mexican border to protest farmers' use of illegal aliens as strikebreakers. He was joined by Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Senator Walter Mondale. In the mid 1970s, he conducted the “Illegals Campaign” to identify and report illegal workers, “an effort he deemed second in importance only to the boycott” (of produce from non-unionized farms), according to Pawel. She quotes a memo from Chavez that said, “If we can get the illegals out of California, we will win the strike overnight.” The Illegals Campaign didn't just report illegals to the (unresponsive) federal authorities. Cesar sent his cousin, ex-con Manuel Chavez, down to the border to set up a “wet line” (as in “wetbacks”) to do the job the Border Patrol wasn't being allowed to do. Unlike the Minutemen of a few years ago, who arrived at the border with no more than lawn chairs and binoculars, the United Farm Workers patrols were willing to use direct methods when persuasion failed. Housed in a series of tents along the Arizona border, the crews in the wet line sometimes beat up illegals, the “cesarchavistas” employing violence even more widely on the Mexican side of the border to prevent crossings."

"One of the heroic figures of our time."

"[L]ate one night in 1962, there was a knock at the door and there were three men. One of them was Cesar Chavez. And the next thing I knew, they were sitting around our table talking about a union...Cesar said, "The women have to be involved. They're the ones working out in the fields with their husbands. If you can take the women out to the fields, you can certainly take them to meetings." So I sat up straight and said to myself, "That's what I want!""

"Our separate struggles are really one. A struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity. ... You and your valiant fellow workers have demonstrated your commitment to righting grievous wrongs forced upon exploited people. We are together with you in spirit and determination that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized."

"Forty years ago, here in the United States, there were true activist visionaries and mass movements to enact those visions...There was a César Chávez and a viable farm workers' movement, propped up by the agit-prop of a teatro para un movimiento campesino."

"Many years ago, when I was merely a vegetarian, I met the great Cesar Chavez, and he said to me: "If you are interested in preventing animal suffering, the first thing you should give up is eggs and milk, because the animals who produce those foods lead the most unhappy lives. You would do better to eat meat and stop eating eggs and dairy products." I was shocked, since I had no intention of eating meat but had never thought of giving up eggs or dairy products. But when I looked into it I realized he was right, and now, years later, after I have studied the matter up close, I know for certain that he was completely correct about the cruel treatment of the animals raised for such products. The advantages of a vegan diet are enormous for our health, for the environment, for the animals themselves."

"The reality is that many businesses, large and small, have long used undocumented workers to pad their bottom lines. Just consider the agricultural workforce. In California alone-where the $45 billion-a-year agricultural sector supplies more than half the produce consumed in the United States-between 40 and 50 percent of the workforce is made up of undocumented workers. No wonder California has been the site of some of the most important immigrant labor struggles, brought to the consciousness of many Americans in the 1960s and 1970s by the great United Farm Workers leader, Cesar Chavez. That struggle continues today."

"Whether one views the Chicano Student Movement as a political quest or as a nationalist struggle, one cannot subsume its identity under the rubric of "Me, too." Although there were a few connections to African-American civil rights groups, with SNCC veterans Betita Martínez and María Varela bringing their organizing skills and experiences to the Southwest, the Chicano Movement was very much its own entity with its own genesis. However, in U.S. history textbooks, Mexicans are typically relegated to the end of the book and pictured as either followers of Cesar Chávez or student activists emulating African Americans. It was not that they wanted a piece of the "American pie," they wanted the freedom to bake their own pan dulce."

"Activists like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were also fighting in the 1960s and '70s for Latinx families to have safer environments. Their activism shouldn't have been considered separate from the Earth Day movement, but it was. Not only did their work contribute to the overall movement, but their efforts helped lead to the ban on the use of harmful pesticides that impacted farmworker safety and increased awareness of environmental justice within the Latinx community. However, because of racism, xenophobia (fear of immigrants), and classism, these activists were excluded."

"And what about César Chávez in California? What's the history of the campesino and what is he fighting for? These are our people too. And in Texas our brothers and sisters have a struggle. Just what is this all about? What is happening to our people? We feel what is happening, let's learn about it and let's start speaking up. Let's talk to each other and let's not be afraid to be heard."

"Abnormal rates of cancer for farmworkers in California aroused the Chicano community. Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers fasted for thirty-five days in 1988 to call attention to these conditions."

"The name of Cesar Chavez is an important name in the history of American social movements. He was one of the leaders of a new movement among Latino farmworkers in the West-a particularly charismatic and effective leader."

"It is true that nationwide Black protest really did overshadow Latino protest in the 1960s, so that giving less attention to the latter is appropriate. But the absence of information about protest by other peoples of color is too extreme to be explained away on this basis...A more helpful explanation related to the media-might be that no leaders with the vast, multifaceted, international stature of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X emerged among Latinos (or Asians and Indians). César Chávez came closest."

"When César died in his sleep at the age of 66 on April 22, 1993, most people in the United States were unaware that his life had set an unsurpassed example of persistent struggle for human rights, day after day, week after week, year after year. Most people would not understand, for example, why César Chávez was compared to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. by more than one speaker at the April 29 funeral, including Rep. Ron Dellums, who said: "César stands with the giants of this planet as an advocate of nonviolence as a way to challenge the powerful." Most people shamefully underestimated a heroic figure in the twentieth-century struggle for social justice, and an extraordinary labor leader."

"As we marched on April 29 through flat, dusty farmland and past almond orchards, we were walking with Chávez' strengths. We walked with someone who fought for 40 years to gain labor rights and human rights for the most disenfranchised and impoverished workers in the United States. Under his leadership, they ceased to be faceless immigrants whom the dominant society dismissed as subhuman, disposable. Never again would the public be so unaware of farmworker poverty and exploitation."

"César Chávez (pronounced "CHA-vez") died long after the height of the farmworker cause, like the entire Chicano movement, had been forced to spend much energy defending its small gains of the 1960s."

"You can’t change the facts with your lies, allegations and counterfeits"

"Freedom must be gained step by step, slowly. Freedom is a food which must be carefully administered when people are too hungry for it."

"Na zmęczeniu, goryczy, uczuciu bezsilności nie można budować."

"Aresztowano mnie wiele razy. Za pierwszym razem, w grudniu 1970 roku, podpisałem 3 albo 4 dokumenty. Podpisałbym prawdopodobnie wtedy wszystko, oprócz zgody na zdradę Boga i Ojczyzny, by wyjść i móc walczyć. Nigdy mnie nie złamano i nigdy nie zdradziłem ideałów ani kolegów."

"Można powiedzieć, że byłem gdzieś niezręczny, może nawet kogoś wsypałem, ale nie to, że byłem agentem. Nie to, że chciałem kogoś zdradzić (...) Przysięgam i niech mnie szlag trafi, jeśli kłamię."

"I am convinced that Germany has drawn conclusions [from World War II] and Europe has drawn conclusions as well. And I can say an unpopular thing. If once again Germany should risk destabilizing Europe, then there would be no division of Germany — it would simply be blown off the map of Europe. With the kind of technology that exists, with the kind of experiences we have had, there can be no other way — and the Germans know it."

"If once again Germany destabilizes Europe, then Germany will be not be divided again, but wiped off the map. East and West have the necessary technology in order to enforce this verdict. If Germany begins again, there is no other solution."

"Dobrze się stało, że źle się stało."

"Dodatnie i ujemne plusy."

"Dokonałem zwrotu o 360 stopni."

"I am for, and even against."

"(About the defeat of communism) Interviewer: Can it be said that the Pope brought the forces of the free world together?"

"The weakness of the Eastern European regimes was demonstrated anew in Poland, both by the activities of underground Solidarity and by the serious strikes that began in April 1988. The government had grudgingly sought to widen its support by negotiating with other elements, but it wished to exclude Solidarity. The Catholic Church, however, refused to create a co-operative Christian labour movement as the government wanted, preferring to leave the more intransigent Solidarity as the key body for negotiations. The Communists were opposed to trade union pluralism, but, as a sign of movement on the government’s part, the amnesty of 1986 had freed political prisoners. The 1988 strikes discouraged the Party leadership and demonstrated its failure to find a solution to Poland’s problems. Combined with Gorbachev’s renunciation of intervention on behalf of Communism, this failure encouraged the leadership to move toward yielding its monopoly of power. On 30 November 1988, there was a televised debate between Lech Walesa and Alfred Miodowicz, the head of the official trade union federation and a member of the Politburo. This was a highly significant step as the television served as a means of controlling the dissemination of opinion. On 6 February 1989, Round Table talks between government and the technically illegal opposition began, with the Church, an institution of great prestige in Poland, playing an important mediatory role. Under an agreement, signed on 5 April 1989, reached against a background of widespread strikes, elections were held in Poland on 4 June. Only 35 per cent of the seats in the lower house, the Sejm, were awarded on the basis of the free vote, the remainder going to the Communists and their allies, but all of these seats were won by Solidarity. This expression of the public will was a dramatic blow to the old order. Communist cohesion collapsed, not least with the Communist Party being abandoned by its hitherto pliant allies. Strikes and other protests meanwhile continued. The new government was headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a member of Solidarity and a Catholic intellectual. He became the first non-Communist Prime Minister behind the Iron Curtain. There was, however, to be a major division between those who endorsed the ‘Round Table’ political settlement of 1989 as a way to avoid bloodshed, and those who criticised it as, allegedly, a compromise providing subsequent cover for ex-Communists to pillage the state."

"Moreover, Catholicism was the driving force behind the new Polish independent trade union, baptized Solidarity, which began to function in the Gdansk shipyard in June 1980, achieved reluctant legal recognition from the regime two months later, and, under its fervent Catholic leader, Lech Walesa, gradually undermined the regime during the decade. A further eight-year legal ban, imposed in 1981, was finally ended in April 1989, when Communist authority began to collapse. Four months later, on 24 August, Poland became the first country in the Soviet bloc to appoint a non-Communist government, with Walesa’s colleague, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of a Catholic newspaper, as Prime Minister. The destruction of Communism was completed in 1990–91, when Walesa himself became President, and all remaining religious restraints were removed. This largely peaceful change of regime showed how powerful the alliance between the human longing for personal freedom and the force of religious belief could be."

"Never mind what others may say, or think, or do. Stand erect in the majesty of your own manhood. Listen for just once to the throbbing of your own heart, and you will hear that it is beating quickstep marches to Camp Freedom. Stand erect! Lift your bowed form from the earth! The dust has long enough borne the impress of your knees. Stand up and see how long a shadow you cast in the sunlight! Hold up your head and avow your convictions, and then accept, as becomes a man, the consequences of your acts!"

"Go out into the field and bring in the rest of the workers, that they may be fully equipped for their great mission. We will wrest what we can, step by step, from the capitalists, but with out eye fixed upon the goal; we will press forward, keeping step together with the inspiring music of the new emancipation; and when we have enough of this kind of organization, as Brother DeLeon said so happily the other day, when we are lined up in battle array and the capitalists try to lock us out, we will turn the tables on the gentlemen and lock them out. We can run the mills without them but they cannot run them without us."

"The workers are the saviors of society; the redeemers of the race; and when they have fulfilled their great historic mission, men and women can walk the highlands and enjoy the vision of a land without masters and without slaves, a land regenerated and resplendent in the triumph of freedom and civilization."

"The class which has the power to rob upon a large scale has also the power to control the government and legalize their robbery."

"The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society — we are on the eve of universal change."

"I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands."

"Wherever capitalism appears, in pursuit of its mission of exploitation, there will Socialism, fertilized by misery, watered by tears, and vitalized by agitation be also found, unfurling its class-struggle banner and proclaiming its mission of emancipation."

"Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun."

"The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION."

"A score of pages of the most graphic writing could not be so effective. This is the cartoon at the high tide of inspiration. It is one of the most subtle of educational forces. Its evolution has been slow under capitalism, but is being rapidly accelerated with the growth of Socialism. The true art of the untrammelled cartoonist is now being developed and he will be one of the most inspiring factors in the propaganda of the revolution. No more is the cartoonist compelled to prostitute his genius and traffic in his art. The prizes of capitalism no longer tempt him; its chains of dependence no longer hold him captive. The social revolution fires his blood and he eagerly seizes its opportunities to develop his art and ennoble himself in the service of humanity...[the social cartoonist] is the social conscience, the social sense of duty, the social love and the social inspiration, and his the thrillingly joyous and self-imposed task to redeem the art of pictorial appeal from gross and sordid commercialism and consecrate it to the cause of freedom and the service of humanity."

"There is no moral idealism in the cornering of the market and the pursuit of private profit. Great, masterful cartoonists must starve under sordid capitalism-or perforce prostitute their genius, as so many have done, to the base and vulgar ends of the masters of the bread."

"I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; I am a citizen of the world."

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."

"From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it."

"As we have said, the bankers are for bullets—for the fool patriots that enlist at paupers' wages to stop the bullets, while the bankers clip coupons, boost food prices, increase dividends, and pile up millions and billions for themselves. Say, Mr. Workingman, suppose you have sense enough to be as patriotic as the banker, but not a bit more so. When you see the bankers on the firing line with guns in their hands ready to stop bullets as well as start them, then it is time enough for you to be seized with the patriotic itch and have yourself shot into a crazy-quilt for their profit and glory. Don't you take a fit and rush to the front until you see them there. They own the country and if they don't set the example of fighting for it, why should you?"

"Moyer and Haywood are our comrades, staunch and true, and if we do not stand by them to the shedding of the last drop of blood in our veins, we are disgraced forever and deserve the fate of cringing cowards. We are not responsible for the issue. It is not of our seeking. It has been forced upon us; and for the very reason that we deprecate violence and abhor bloodshed we cannot desert our comrades and allow them to be put to death. If they can be murdered without cause so can we, and so will we be dealt with at the pleasure of these tyrants. They have driven us to the wall and now let us rally our forces and face them and fight. If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least will meet them with guns. They have done their best and their worst to crush and enslave us. Their politicians have betrayed us, their courts have thrown us into jail without trial and their soldiers have shot our comrades dead in their tracks. The worm turns at last, and so does the worker."

"It is utterly unsocialistic, reactionary and in truth outrageous, and I hope you will oppose with all your power. The plea that certain races are to be excluded because of tactical expediency would be entirely consistent in a bourgeois convention of self-seekers, but should have no place in a proletarian gathering under the auspices of an international movement that is calling on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to unite for their emancipation."

"Lenin and Trotsky were the men of the hour and under their fearless, incorruptible and uncompromising leadership the Russian proletariat has held the fort against the combined assaults of all ruling class powers of earth. It is a magnificent spectacle . It stirs the blood and warms the heart of every revolutionist, and it challenges the admiration of all the world."

"Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most — that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least."

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."

"Solidarity is not a matter of sentiment but a fact, cold and impassive as the granite foundations of a skyscraper. If the basic elements, identity of interest, clarity of vision, honesty of intent, and oneness of purpose, or any of these is lacking, all sentimental pleas for solidarity, and all other efforts to achieve it will be barren of results."

"Of course, Socialism is violently denounced by the capitalist press and by all the brood of subsidized contributors to magazine literature, but this only confirms the view that the advance of Socialism is very properly recognized by the capitalist class as the one cloud upon the horizon which portends an end to the system in which they have waxed fat, insolent and despotic through the exploitation of their countless ."

"What the workingmen of the country are profoundly interested in is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution, the enslaving and degrading wage-system in which they toil for a pittance at the pleasure of their masters and are bludgeoned, jailed or shot when they protest — this is the central, controlling, vital issue of the hour, and neither of the old party platforms has a word or even a hint about it. As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class."

"I would address a few words to those who are in sympathy with the Social Democratic Party, but who hesitate to vote for it for fear they may lose their votes. Let me say to you: It is infinitely better to vote for freedom and fail than to vote for slavery and succeed."

"Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like all other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation. The Illinois Central Railroad Company selected the site upon which the city is built and this consisted of a vast miasmatic swamp far better suited to mosquito culture than for human beings. From the day the site was chosen by (and of course in the interest of all) said railway company, everything that entered into the building of the town and the development of the city was determined purely from profit considerations and without the remotest concern for the health and comfort of the human beings who were to live there, especially those who had to do all the labor and produce all the wealth. As a rule hogs are only raised where they have good health and grow fat. Any old place will do to raise human beings."

"I do not oppose the insane asylum—but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community."

"The Elgin writer says that we shall "jeopardize the best interests of the Socialist Party" if we insist upon the political equality of the Negro. I say that the Socialist Party would be false to its historic mission, violate the fundamental principles of Socialism, deny its philosophy and repudiate its own teachings if, on account of race considerations, it sought to exclude any human being from political equality and economic freedom. Then, indeed, would it not only "jeopardize" its best interests, but forfeit its very life, for it would soon be scorned and deserted as a thing unclean, leaving but a stench in the nostrils of honest men."

"Foolish and vain indeed is the workingman who makes the color of his skin the stepping-stone to his imaginary superiority. The trouble is with his head, and if he can get that right he will find that what ails him is not superiority but inferiority, and that he, as well as the Negro he despises, is the victim of wage-slavery, which robs him of what he produces and keeps both him and the Negro tied down to the dead level of ignorance and degradation."

"The man who seeks to arouse prejudice among workingmen is not their friend. He who advises the white wage-worker to look down upon the black wage-worker is the enemy of both."

"The African is here and to stay. How came he to our shores? Ask your grandfathers, Mr. Anonymous, and if they will tell the truth you will or should blush for the crimes."

"For myself, I want no advantage over my fellow man, and if he is weaker than I, all the more is it my duty to help him."

"There has never been a free people, a civilized nation, a real republic on this earth. Human society has always consisted of masters and slaves, and the slaves have always been and are today, the foundation stones of the social fabric. Wage-labor is but a name; wage-slavery is the fact."

"The most barbarous fact in all christendom is the labor market. The mere term sufficiently expresses the animalism of commercial civilization. They who buy and they who sell in the labor market are alike dehumanized by the inhuman traffic in the brains and blood and bones of human beings."

"The very moment a workingman begins to do his own thinking he understands the paramount issue, parts company with the capitalist politician and falls in line with his own class on the political battlefield."

"The political solidarity of the working class means the death of despotism, the birth of freedom, the sunrise of civilization."

"The capitalist class is represented by the Republican, Democratic, Populist and Prohibition parties, all of which stand for private ownership of the means of production, and the triumph of any one of which will mean continued wage-slavery to the working class."

"The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles."

"Deny it as may the cunning capitalists who are clear-sighted enough to perceive it, or ignore it as may the torpid workers who are too blind and unthinking to see it, the struggle in which we are engaged today is a class struggle, and as the toiling millions come to see and understand it and rally to the political standard of their class, they will drive all capitalist parties of whatever name into the same party, and the class struggle will then be so clearly revealed that the hosts of labor will find their true place in the conflict and strike the united and decisive blow that will destroy slavery and achieve their full and final emancipation."

"Ignorance alone stands in the way of socialist success. The capitalist parties understand this and use their resources to prevent the workers from seeing the light. Intellectual darkness is essential to industrial slavery."

"Death to Wage Slavery!"

"The united vote of those who toil and have not will vanquish those who have and toil not, and solve forever the problems of democracy."

"Civilization has done little for labor except to modify the forms of its exploitation."

"The Republican and Democratic parties are alike capitalist parties — differing only in being committed to different sets of capitalist interests — they have the same principles under varying colors, are equally corrupt and are one in their subservience to capital and their hostility to labor."

"First of all, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles W. Fairbanks, candidates for President and Vice-President, respectively, deny the class struggle and this almost infallibly fixes their status as friends of capital and enemies of labor. They insist that they can serve both; but the fact is obvious that only one can be served and that one at the expense of the other. Mr. Roosevelt’s whole political career proves it."

"The people are as capable of achieving their industrial freedom as they were to secure their political liberty, and both are necessary to a free nation."

"The hand tools of early times are used no more. Mammoth machines have taken their place. A few thousand capitalists own them and many millions of workingmen use them."

"Capitalism is dying and its extremities are already decomposing. The blotches upon the surface show that the blood no longer circulates. The time is near when the cadaver will have to be removed and the atmosphere purified."

"The working class must be emancipated by the working class. Woman must be given her true place in society by the working class. Child labor must be abolished by the working class. Society must be reconstructed by the working class. The working class must be employed by the working class. The fruits of labor must be enjoyed by the working class. War, bloody war, must be ended by the working class."

"With faith and hope and courage we hold our heads erect and with dauntless spirit marshal the working class for the march from Capitalism to Socialism, from Slavery to Freedom, from Barbarism to Civilization."

"Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself, but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society. Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe to myself. What would you think of me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death?"

"People are never quite so strange to each other as when they are forced into artificial, crowded and stifled relationship. I would rather be friendless out on the American desert than to be friendless in New York or Chicago."

"The rights of one are as sacred as the rights of a million."

"If it had not been for the discontent of a few fellows who had not been satisfied with their conditions, you would still be living in caves. Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation."

"Competition was natural enough at one time, but do you think you are competing today? Many of you think you are. Against whom? Against Rockefeller? About as I would if I had a wheelbarrow and competed with the Santa Fe from here to Kansas City."

"When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other's throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. We will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known."

"We live in the capitalist system, so-called because its dominated by the capitalist class. In this system the capitalists are the rulers and the workers the subjects. The capitalists are in a decided minority and yet they rule because of the ignorance of the working class."

"The economic unity of the workers must first be effected before there can be any progress towards emancipation. The interests of the millions of wage workers are identical, regardless of nationality, creed, or sex, and if they will only open their eyes to this simple, self-evident fact, the greatest obstacle will have been overcome and the day of victory draw near."

"Robert G. Ingersoll and Wendell Phillips were the two greatest orators of their time, and probably of all time. Their power sprang from their passion for freedom, for truth, for justice, for a world filled with light and with happy human beings. But for this divine passion neither would have scaled the sublime heights of immortal achievement. The sacred fire burned within them and when they were aroused it flashed from their eyes and rolled from their inspired lips in torrents of eloquence."

"Had Ingersoll and Phillips devoted their lives to the practice of law for pay the divine fire within them would have burned to ashes and they would have died in mediocrity."

"Denial of one's better self seals the lips or pollutes them. Fidelity to conviction opens them and truth blossoms in eloquence."

"There is no inspiration in evil and no power except for its own destruction."

"He who aspires to master the art of expression must first of all consecrate himself completely to some great cause."

"Revolutionary tactics must harmonize with revolutionary principles. We could better hope to succeed with reactionary principles and revolutionary tactics than with revolutionary principles and reactionary tactics."

"As a revolutionist I can have no respect for capitalist property laws, nor the least scruple about violating them. I hold all such laws to have been enacted through chicanry, fraud and corruption, with the sole end in view of dispossessing, robbing and enslaving the working class."

"If I had the force to overthrow these despotic laws I would use it without an instant's hesitation or delay, but I haven't got it, and so I am law-abiding under protest - not from scruple - and bide my time."

"I have not a bit of use for the "propaganda of the deed." These are the tactics of anarchist individualists and not of socialist collectivists. They were developed by and belong exclusively to our anarchist friends and accord perfectly with their philosophy. These and similar measures are reactionary, not revolutionary, and they invariably have a demoralizaing effect upon the following of those who practice them. If I believed in the doctrine of violence and destruction as part policy; if I regarded the class struggle as guerilla warfare, I would join the anarchists and practice as well as preach such tactics."

"There have been times in the past, and there are countries today where the frenzied deed of a glorious fanatic like old John Brown seems to have been inspired by Jehovah himself, but I am now dealing with the twentieth century and with the United States."

"But my chief objection to all these measures is that they do violence to the class psychology of the worker and cannot be successfully inculcated as mass doctrine. The very nature of these tactics adapts them to guerilla warfare, to the bomb planter, the midnight assassin; and such warfare. in this country, at least plays directly into the hands of the enemy."

"The sound education of the workers and their thorough organization, both economic and political, on the bassis of the class struggle, must precede their emancipation. Without such education and organization they can mke no substantial progress, and they will be robbed of the fruits of any temporary victory they may achieve, as they have been through all the centuries of the past."

"An organization of intellectuals would not be officered and represented by wages earners; neither should an organization of wage earners be officered by intellectuals."

"Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an intellectual, moral and spiritual human being."

"Jesus ... has been disfigured and distorted by cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their blind bigotry and savage superstition ... He has persisted in spite of two thousand years of theological emasculation to destroy his revolutionary personality, and is today the greatest moral force in the world."

"The vain attempt persisted in through twenty centuries of ruling class interpolation, interpretation and falsification to make Jesus appear the divinely commissioned conservator of the peace and soother of the oppressed, instead of the master proletarian revolutionist and sower of the social whirlwind—the vain attempt to prostitute the name and teachings and example of the martyred Christ to the power of Mammon, the very power which had murdered him in cold blood, vindicates his transcendent genius and proclaims the immortality of his work."

"To speak for labor; to plead the cause of the men and women and children who toil; to serve the working class, has always been to me a high privilege; a duty of love."

"I may not be able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets."

"This assemblage is exceedingly good to look upon. I wish it were possible for me to give you what you are giving me this afternoon. What I say here amounts to but little; what I see here is exceedingly important. You workers in Ohio, enlisted in the greatest cause ever organized in the interest of your class, are making history today in the face of threatening opposition of all kinds—history that is going to be read with profound interest by coming generations."

"There is but one thing you have to be concerned about, and that is that you keep foursquare with the principles of the international Socialist movement. It is only when you begin to compromise that trouble begins. So far as I am concerned, it does not matter what others may say, or think, or do, as long as I am sure that I am right with myself and the cause. There are so many who seek refuge in the popular side of a great question. As a Socialist, I have long since learned how to stand alone."

"I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and misrepresentatives of the masses — you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks."

"They who have been reading the capitalist newspapers realize what a capacity they have for lying. We have been reading them lately. They know all about the Socialist Party—the Socialist movement, except what is true. Only the other day they took an article that I had written—and most of you have read it—most of you members of the party, at least—and they made it appear that I had undergone a marvelous transformation. I had suddenly become changed—had in fact come to my senses; I had ceased to be a wicked Socialist, and had become a respectable Socialist, a patriotic Socialist—as if I had ever been anything else. What was the purpose of this deliberate misrepresentation? It is so self-evident that it suggests itself. The purpose was to sow the seeds of dissension in our ranks; to have it appear that we were divided among ourselves; that we were pitted against each other, to our mutual undoing. But Socialists were not born yesterday. They know how to read capitalist newspapers; and to believe exactly the opposite of what they read. Why should a Socialist be discouraged on the eve of the greatest triumph in all the history of the Socialist movement? It is true that these are anxious, trying days for us all — testing days for the women and men who are upholding the banner of labor in the struggle of the working class of all the world against the exploiters of all the world; a time in which the weak and cowardly will falter and fail and desert. They lack the fiber to endure the revolutionary test; they fall away; they disappear as if they had never been. On the other hand, they who are animated by the unconquerable spirit of the social revolution; they who have the moral courage to stand erect and assert their convictions; stand by them; fight for them; go to jail or to hell for them, if need be — they are writing their names, in this crucial hour — they are writing their names in faceless letters in the history of mankind."

"There is nothing that helps the Socialist Party so much as receiving an occasional deathblow. The oftener it is killed the more active, the more energetic, the more powerful it becomes."

"Those boys over yonder—those comrades of ours—and how I love them! Aye, they are my younger brothers; their very names throb in my heart, thrill in my veins, and surge in my soul. I am proud of them; they are there for us; and we are here for them. Their lips, though temporarily mute, are more eloquent than ever before; and their voice, though silent, is heard around the world."

"Are we opposed to Prussian militarism? ... We have been fighting it since the day the Socialist movement was born; and we are going to continue to fight it, day and night, until it is wiped from the face of the earth. Between us there is no truce—no compromise."

"You remember that, at the close of Theodore Roosevelt’s second term as President, he went over to Africa to make war on some of his ancestors. You remember that, at the close of his expedition, he visited the capitals of Europe; and that he was wined and dined, dignified and glorified by all the Kaisers and Czars and Emperors of the Old World. He visited Potsdam while the Kaiser was there; and, according to the accounts published in the American newspapers, he and the Kaiser were soon on the most familiar terms. They were hilariously intimate with each other, and slapped each other on the back. After Roosevelt had reviewed the Kaiser’s troops, according to the same accounts, he became enthusiastic over the Kaiser’s legions and said: “If I had that kind of an army, I could conquer the world.” He knew the Kaiser then just as well as he knows him now. He knew that he was the Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. And yet, he permitted himself to be entertained by that Beast of Berlin; had his feet under the mahogany of the Beast of Berlin; was cheek by jowl with the Beast of Berlin. And, while Roosevelt was being entertained royally by the German Kaiser, that same Kaiser was putting the leaders of the Socialist Party in jail for fighting the Kaiser and the Junkers of Germany. Roosevelt was the guest of honor in the white house of the Kaiser, while the Socialists were in the jails of the Kaiser for fighting the Kaiser. Who then was fighting for democracy? Roosevelt? Roosevelt, who was honored by the Kaiser, or the Socialists who were in jail by order of the Kaiser? “Birds of a feather flock together.”"

"In 1869 that grand old warrior of the social revolution, the elder Liebknecht, was arrested and sentenced to prison for three months, because of his war, as a Socialist, on the Kaiser and on the Junkers that rule Germany. In the meantime the Franco-Prussian war broke out. Liebknecht and Bebel were the Socialist members in the Reichstag. They were the only two who had the courage to protest against taking Alsace-Lorraine from France and annexing it to Germany. And for this they were sentenced two years to a prison fortress charged with high treason; because, even in that early day, almost fifty years ago, these leaders, these forerunners of the international Socialist movement were fighting the Kaiser and fighting the Junkers of Germany. They have continued to fight them from that day to this. Multiplied thousands of Socialists have languished in the jails of Germany because of their heroic warfare upon the despotic ruling class of that country."

"If Theodore Roosevelt is the great champion of democracy —the arch foe of autocracy , what business had he as the guest of honor of the Prussian Kaiser? And when he met the Kaiser, and did honor to the Kaiser, under the terms imputed to him, wasn’t it pretty strong proof that he himself was a Kaiser at heart? Now, after being the guest of Emperor Wilhelm, the Beast of Berlin, he comes back to this country, and wants you to send ten million men over there to kill the Kaiser; to murder his former friend and pal. Rather queer, isn’t it? And yet, he is the patriot, and we are the traitors. I challenge you to find a Socialist anywhere on the face of the earth who was ever the guest of the Beast of Berlin, except as an inmate of his prison—the elder Liebknecht and the younger Liebknecht, the heroic son of his immortal sire."

"I hate, I loathe, I despise Junkers and junkerdom. I have no earthly use for the Junkers of Germany, and not one particle more use for the Junkers in the United States."

"They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. This is too much, even for a joke. But it is not a subject for levity; it is an exceedingly serious matter."

"These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United States. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people."

"The Man of Galilee, the Carpenter, the workingman who became the revolutionary agitator of his day soon found himself to be an undesirable citizen in the eyes of the ruling knaves and they had him crucified."

"How stupid and shortsighted the ruling class really is! Cupidity is stone blind. It has no vision. The greedy, profit-seeking exploiter cannot see beyond the end of his nose. He can see a chance for an "opening"; he is cunning enough to know what graft is and where it is, and how it can be secured, but vision he has none — not the slightest. He knows nothing of the great throbbing world that spreads out in all directions. He has no capacity for literature; no appreciation of art; no soul for beauty. That is the penalty the parasites pay for the violation of the laws of life."

"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war. The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives. They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasize the fact — and it cannot be repeated too often — that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why; Yours but to do and die. That is their motto and we object on the part of the awakening workers of this nation. If war is right let it be declared by the people. You who have your lives to lose, you certainly above all others have the right to decide the momentous issue of war or peace."

"If ever I become entirely respectable I shall be quite sure that I have outlived myself."

"You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. You need to know that you were not created to work and produce and impoverish yourself to enrich an idle exploiter. You need to know that you have a mind to improve, a soul to develop, and a manhood to sustain."

"They are continually talking about your patriotic duty. It is not their but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches. And now among other things they are urging you to "cultivate" war gardens, while at the same time a government war report just issued shows that practically 52 percent of the arable, tillable soil is held out of use by the landlords, speculators and profiteers. They themselves do not cultivate the soil. Nor do they allow others to cultivate it. They keep it idle to enrich themselves, to pocket the millions of dollars of unearned increment."

"And now for all of us to do our duty! The clarion call is ringing in our ears and we cannot falter without being convicted of treason to ourselves and to our great cause. Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters, but be concerned about the treason that involves yourselves. Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth. Yes, in good time we are going to sweep into power in this nation and throughout the world. We are going to destroy all enslaving and degrading capitalist institutions and re-create them as free and humanizing institutions. The world is daily changing before our eyes. The sun of capitalism is setting; the sun of socialism is rising. It is our duty to build the new nation and the free republic."

"In due time the hour will strike and this great cause triumphant — the greatest in history — will proclaim the emancipation of the working class and the brotherhood of all mankind."

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on Earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

"In this country — the most favored beneath the bending skies — we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child — and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…"

"When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning."

"Something was in Debs, seemingly, that did not come out unless you saw him. I'm told that even those speeches of his which seem to any reader indifferent stuff, took on vitality from his presence. A hard-bitten socialist told me once, "Gene Debs is the only one who can get away with the sentimental flummery that's been tied onto Socialism in this country. Pretty nearly always it gives me a swift pain to go around to meetings and have people call me 'comrade.' That's a lot of bunk. But the funny part of it is that when Debs says 'comrade' it is all right. He means it. That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as he's around I believe it myself.""

"Eugene V. Debs left to the workers’ movement a life record of unceasing struggle on the side of the oppressed, of dauntless spirit and careless disregard for personal rewards or hazards. It is a priceless heritage. That heritage belongs to the revolutionary workers. Let them claim it for their own."

"Of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, we can only say this frankly: if it lay in our power to make him President of the United States we would do so, for of the four men mentioned he alone, by word and deed, stands squarely on a platform of human rights regardless of race or class."

"He was lost and forgotten, even by the Chair, in the glowing demonstration of intelligent class-consciousness which claimed Debs, the indicted Socialist, and rejected the emissaries of a great capitalist government, however disguised."

"Why is the thought of Debs in jail so heart-breaking? It isn't because he is sixty years old. It is because he has the heart of a child, warm, trusting, merry heart, and who can think of a shut-in child without crying?"

"Eugene Debs is a good American citizen as well as a good Socialist, and a man beloved by all who know him. To punish such a social servant for standing by his principles is a historic mistake — the world has made many such."

"During my stay in Chicago I attended a Labour convention in session in the city...The most striking figure at the convention was Eugene V. Debs. Very tall and lean, he stood out above his comrades in more than a physical sense…Whatever the politicians in his party might be doing, I was sure that he was decent and high-minded. His belief in the people was very genuine, and his vision of socialism quite unlike the State machine pictured in Marx's communist manifesto. Hearing his views, I could not help exclaiming: "Why, Mr. Debs, you're an anarchist!" "Not Mister, but Comrade," he corrected me; "won't you call me that?" Clasping my hand warmly, he assured me that he felt very close to the anarchists, that anarchism was the goal to strive for, and that all socialists should also be anarchists. Socialism to him was only a stepping-stone to the ultimate ideal, which was anarchism. "I know and love Kropotkin and his work," he said; "I admire him and I revere our murdered comrades who lie in Waldheim, as I do also all the other splendid fighters in your movement. You see, then, I am your comrade. I am with you in your struggle." I pointed out that we could not hope to achieve freedom by increasing the power of the State, which the socialists were aiming at. I stressed the fact that political action is the death-knell of the economic struggle. Debs did not dispute me, agreeing that the revolutionary spirit must be kept alive notwithstanding any political objects, but he thought the latter a necessary and practical means of reaching the masses. We parted good friends. Debs was so genial and charming as a human being that one did not mind the lack of political clarity which made him reach out at one and the same time for opposite poles."

"When the news of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 burst upon the world, American workers learned for the first time of a man named Vladimir Lenin-through this great event in human history, the beginning of socialism. We also learned some new words, which became part of the language in no time, "Bolshevik" and "Soviet," among them. Even those of us who were left-Socialists and IWWs knew practically nothing of the Russian Socialist movement, except that we had great sympathy with its long, agonizing struggle to overthrow the tsar's cruel and bloody regime. Overnight, "Bolshevik" became a household word, even to those who did not know it merely meant "majority," and referred to a political division in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. "I am a Bolshevik from the crown of my head to the tip of my toes!" said Debs. "Damned Bolsheviks!" employers shouted at militant workers and union organizers. All strikers were "Bolsheviks," of course."

"(The IWW} was not only the inheritor of many of the traditions of the 1880's but personalities who were identified with the 1880's were present at the early conventions of the IWW. The names may not be known to you unless you are students of labor history but included were such figures as Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon and Mrs. Lucy Parsons."

"Eugene Victor Debs, whose home is an infrequently visited museum on the campus of Indiana State University, was arguably the most important political figure of the 20th century. He built the socialist movement in America and was eventually crucified by the capitalist class when he and hundreds of thousands of followers became a potent political threat."

"They heard the stirring voice of Eugene Debs, that most compassionate of American voices since Lincoln, and they knew it rang with truth."

"You dear comrade! I have long loved you because you are an apostle of brotherhood and freedom. For years I have thought of you as a dauntless explorer going towards the dawn; and, like a humble adventurer, I have followed in the trail of your footsteps. From time to time the greetings that have come back to me from you have made me very happy; and now I reach out my hand and clasp yours through prison bars."

"The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 acted as a catalyst for the protracted workers' rights struggles and widespread sociopolitical change that would define much of the twentieth century. Transformative figures like anarchist organizers Emma Goldman and Lucy Parsons, socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs, Knights of Labor head Terence V. Powderly, and AFL founder Samuel Gompers were all inspired by the massive forty-five-day railroad strike that cost hundreds of millions in damage, resulted in one hundred casualties, and saw a thousand people imprisoned."

"In U.S. historiography, as in American popular culture, historians have tended to over-emphasize the role of the individual in history. Great men are identified as founders and leaders; they become the virtual representatives of the movement: William Lloyd Garrison for abolition, Eugene Debs for the socialist movement, Martin Luther King Jr. for the civil rights movement. In fact, no mass movement of any significance is carried forward by and dependent upon one leader, or one symbol. There are always leaders of subgroups, of local and regional organizations, competing leaders representing differing viewpoints, and, of course, the ground troops of anonymous activists. And, as can be shown in each of the above cases, emphasis on the "great man" omits women, minorities, many of the actual agents of social change. In so doing it gives a partial, an erroneous picture of how social change was actually achieved in the past and thereby fosters apathy and confusion about how social change can be made in the present."

"At the People's College in Fort Scott, Kansas, my mother met Arthur Le Sueur, who with Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, and Charles Steinmetz had founded the greatest workers' school in the country. Thousands of farmers and hillbilly men, miners, and other workers took correspondence courses in workers' law and workers' English and workers' history."

"Eugene Debs was a man the likes of which I had never seen before or since. He was a man who expressed love boldly. He loved and kissed the people. Kissing was not common on the puritan prairies, but he kissed comrades and children and women. He couldn't have been made anywhere else but in the Midwest. He knew poetry and the IWW preamble and all the people's expressions. It seemed to me theat his growth actually came from the people, his growth forced upon him by their needs, and he returned to them the image. He was fed, matured, and consumed by the struggles of his time. He loved the American earth and its people. He would sit in our kitchen and recite the death speech of John Brown (abolitionist). He believed in oratory and poetry and love. He was a lanky, tall man, who moved, like so many farm boys, as if the shy body receded backward, hung on the bones; his delicate face and bald head and his whole being were full of a kind of tenderness. He also liked to drink in a bar with the workers and recite poetry, orations, and stories and to listen to theirs. He was a marvelous speaker. In the time of no amplifiers his delicate message rang like a bell, as if his whole being became a resonance. He walked back and forth lifting his long arms and spoke like a lover and a teacher. Arthur had traveled with him on the "Red Special" in the 1908 presidential election. They spoke every hour from the train platform; the farmers stood in the fields to listen, and the workers came down to hear him at the station...I heard Debs tell with wonder how he confronted Jim Hill at the foot of Fourth Street in St. Paul, after he had held up Hill's trains in the Pullman strike of 1896 and how the big cyclops had said that not a man would go out on strike, that he knew every man who worked on his railroad (and he probably did). But they followed Debs and they won the strike, and Debs told how when the train pulled out of the St. Paul station, thousands of railroad workers stood silent and bare-headed beside the track. The greatest tribute ever paid him he said, was when they stood with their shovels and with happiness radiating from their faces, yet with tears in their eyes, their tribute more precious than all the bouquets in the world. These prairie agrarian prophets, these sagas of the people, still rise in the nitrogen of the roots, still live in the protein."

"In both political and legal ways he played a significant part in reducing intolerance of dissent in this country, and bringing to life the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech."

"The words of the great American socialist, Debs, comes to my mind: “THE COURT OF FINAL RESORT IS THE PEOPLE, AND THAT COURT WILL BE HEARD FROM IN DUE TIME . . .”"

"Debs knew what war does to societies. The very avoidable "Great War" broke the momentum of our nation's rising progressive reform movement, ushered in the era of red-baiting, and directly set the stage for World War II. Most crucially, the aggressive expansion of the American Empire and military state distracted and lowered the expectation levels for American democracy and civic society. Debs knew full well how power structures thwarted the general population's expectations for the good life and paved the way for entrenched austerity and misery, despite a growing gross domestic product."

"I also had luck because I was proud of my class--because of growing up with Socialist parents and having sat on Eugene V. Debs's lap and given him red roses. And hearing him. I remember how he said passionately, "You are not heads to them, brains that can think. You are not hearts to them, that can feel. You are hands." And he held up his hands. And he started, you know: "Cowhands, farmhands. . . ." I was impressed again by the power of language."

"Grand Old Rebel! I am writing you these few lines to express my admiration and appreciation of the grand stand that you have taken, regarding your restoration to citizenship. Why should you ask for that which you, in justice and fairness, have never forfeited? It is [thanks] to such characters as you that reaction is halted and this stupid old world moves on a little, until the time for change is reached...Hoping that your useful life may be spared for many years, I am"

"Ah Debs, Debs, Debs, you are out-weighed, out-priced, These are the days of Caesar, not of Christ — And yet — suppose — when all was done and said, There were a Resurrection from the Dead!"

"In the Socialist Party I met Debs again. At that time the face of the party was truly turned towards the labor movement and from the first both Debs and I found our place mainly among the workers. We were always associated in the left wing of the party and both of us struggled constantly against the opportunistic, petty-bourgeois tendencies in the right wing of the party, led by the old-guard lawyer, Morris Hillquit."

"In 1979, with changing technology, I wrote and produced a video on the life and times of Eugene Victor Debs that was sold to colleges around the country. Debs was a great American who played an enormously important role in our history, but he was unknown to most people. He was one of the leading trade union leaders of the late nineteenth century, the founder of the American Socialist Party, and a six-time candidate for president of the United States. In 1920, he received nearly 1 million votes for president while he was in jail for his opposition to World War I. Many of the ideas that Debs campaigned on were later adopted by FDR and incorporated into the New Deal. Today, I have a plaque of Debs on a wall in my Senate office."

"Clearly the White House is the only safe place for an honest man like Debs."

"While the history of Debs is the history of the Socialist Party in its activities and enthusiasm, it seems in the retrospect a somewhat extraordinary fact that a man who had been so active in building labour organization for more than twenty years was not, in the Socialist Party, primarily an organizer any more than he was a theoretician. He was instead the voice, sometimes the pen, always the soul and conscience of the Party."

"While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines sniping, attacking, and denouncing them… This man was a traitor to his country and he will never be pardoned during my administration."

"He helped found both the American Railway Union and the Industrial Workers of the World, and was jailed in 1919 for his opposition to World War I. While in prison he ran for president, and received nearly 1,000,000 votes."

"It must have been about this time that I first heard Debs speak. He was facing an audience which packed the Academy of Music. On that same stage Henry Ward Beecher had stood and upheld the cause of the Democratic party in a tense campaign. I had been greatly interested in seeing Debs, for I had read and been told much about him-of his fearless leadership in the railroad strike of 1894, his term in jail as a consequence, and his fighting spirit. But I was disappointed that night-not by what he said, but by his manner. I thought him too much like a school-boy elocutionist. In after years, however, I attended several mass-meetings at which Debs was the main speaker, and he who had once been amateurish had become a real tribune of the people and a master of chastisement of the profit pharisees. No question about it an inspiring man because he was himself inspired. He was emotional, and used the logic of understanding born of long experience with workers. When one heard him voice a natural sympathy for the enslaved, one felt that here was a champion who would go to the stake rather than sacrifice his own beliefs."

""Chattel slavery has disappeared," Eugene Debs said. "But we are not yet free. We are engaged in another mighty agitation today. It is as wide as the world. It is the rise of the toiling and producing masses, who are gradually becoming conscious of their interest, their powers, as a class, who are organizing industrially and economically, who are slowly but surely developing the economic and political power that is to set them free. They are still in the minority, but they have learned how to wait and to bide their time. It is because I happen to be in this minority that I stand in your presence today, charged with crime." Not one word of his speech in Canton did he take back or try to soften. Instead he re-asserted the right of any minority, or any individual, to speak out against war or any other act of a nation which that minority or individual believed wrong. The indictment charged Debs with utterances calculated to incite mutiny in the army, stirring up disloyalty to the government, obstructing the enlistment of soldiers, encouraging resistance to the United States of America, and promoting the cause of the enemy. Then sixty-three years old, Debs was found guilty and sent to Atlanta penitentiary to serve ten years."

"I regret exceedingly that though I am constantly coming upon references to the martyrdom of Eugene V. Debs, I do not know what particular act of righteousness has landed him in gaol. But from the admiration which he has excited in the breasts of many Americans whom I admire, I have an uneasy suspicion that he ought to change places with his judges."

"It was the Depression of 1893 that propelled Eugene Debs into a lifetime of action for unionism and socialism."

"There were Negroes in the Socialist party, but the Socialist party did not go much out of its way to act on the race question. As Ray Ginger writes of Debs: "When race prejudice was thrust at Debs, he always publicly repudiated it. He always insisted on absolute equality. But he failed to accept the view that special measures were sometimes needed to achieve this equality.""

"when he read Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, it deeply affected him."

"When Susan B. Anthony, at eighty, went to hear Eugene Debs speak (twenty-five years before, he had gone to hear her speak, and they had not met since then), they clasped hands warmly, then had a brief exchange. She said, laughing: "Give us suffrage, and we'll give you socialism." Debs replied: "Give us socialism and we'll give you suffrage.""

"The writer Heywood Broun once quoted a fellow Socialist speaking of Debs: “That old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as he's around I believe it myself.""

"As the Socialists became more successful at the polls (Debs got 900,000 votes in 1912, double what he had in 1908), and more concerned with increasing that appeal, they became more critical of IWW tactics of "sabotage" and "violence," and in 1913 removed Bill Haywood from the Socialist Party Executive Committee, claiming he advocated violence (although some of Debs's writings were far more inflammatory)."

"Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right; But when asked how 'bout something to eat They will answer with voices so sweet:You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die."

"Workingmen of all countries, unite, Side by side we for freedom will fight: When the world and its wealth we have gained To the grafters we'll sing this refrain: You will eat, bye and bye, When you've learned how to cook and to fry Chop some wood, 'twill do you good, And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye."

"There is pow'r, there is pow'r In a band of workingmen. When they stand hand in hand, That's a pow'r, that's a pow'r That must rule in every land — One Industrial Union Grand."

"A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read."

"I'll take the shooting. I'm used to that. I've been shot a few times in the past, and I guess I can stand it, again."

"My will is easy to decide, For there is nothing to divide. My kin don't need to fuss and moan — "Moss does not cling to a rolling stone." My body? — Oh! — If I could choose, I would to ashes it reduce, And let the merry breezes blow My dust to where some flowers grow. Perhaps some fading flower then Would come to life and bloom again. This is my last and final will. Good luck to all of you. [Joe Hill]"

"Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize."

"I die with a clear conscience, I die fighting, not like a coward."

"Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave? Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?"

"The planet, Earth."

"If there is really one thing that I am proud of in my long labor history, it is that while he was in prison, before he was executed, Joe Hill wrote a song for me dedicated to me, that was called, the "Rebel Girl" and that song, I hope you will do it here some time, it may not be the best of words or the best of music, but it came from the heart and it was certainly so treasured."

"I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night Alive as you or me Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead," "I never died," says he."

"During his short life, he penned some of the Wobblies' most beloved labor songs, including labor movement mainstays like "There Is Power in a Union" and "Rebel Girl," which he dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and his last words to Big Bill Haywood have since been taken up as a rallying cry-"Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize!""

"It was characteristic of IWW meetings that after the last speech had ended and the applause had died down, the audience would break up into circles, to continue discussing the subject, and later each circle would sing its favorite song. Gradually the circles would merge, and finally each man present, his arms over another's shoulders, would join in Joe Hill's best-known ballad, The Preacher and the Slave."

"The American Dream is not about gadgets. It’s not about the size of our gross national product. It’s not about the level of technological sophistication. The American Dream is about man. It’s about broadening the opportunities and facilitating the growth of every human being, so that each person can reach out and achieve a sense of purpose and fulfillment."

"Labor is not fighting for a larger slice of the national pie. Labor is fighting for a larger pie."

"We have a saying in the union: "If a fellow looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, the possibility is that he is a duck." That is the way with a Communist. If the guy does everything that the party does, the prospects are very good that he is a party member or fellow traveler."

"There's a direct relationship between the ballot box and the bread box, and what the union fights for and wins at the bargaining table can be taken away in the legislative halls."

"American labor had better roll up its sleeves, it had better get the stiffest broom and brush it can find, and the strongest soap and disinfectant, and it had better take on the job of cleaning its own house from top to bottom and drive out every crook and gangster and racketeer we find. Because if we don't clean our own house, then the reactionaries will clean it for us. But they won't use a broom, they'll use an axe, and they'll try to destroy the labor movement in the process."

"We live in a world in which the common denominator that binds the human family together has been reduced to its simplest fundamental term—human survival."

"We are going to keep preaching the gospel that freedom and democracy in peace are indivisible values in the world and that no one can have them unless they are universal and all people may share them."

"The trouble is that industry operates on the basis of these double economic and moral standards. They say to the worker when he is too old to work and too young to die, 'You cannot have security in your old age, that is reserved to only the blue bloods, only the ones who were smart enough to pick the right grandfather before they were born. They can have security, but if you live on the wrong side of the railroad tracks you are not entitled to it.'"

"We say to American industry, if you can afford to pay pension plans to people who don't need them, then by the eternal gods you are going to have to pay them to people who do need them."

"We have to reassert the sovereignty of people above profits in America."

"You cannot make peace and freedom secure in the world as long as hundreds of millions of people are denied the necessities of life, so long as millions and millions of people are committed to belong to the have-not nations, and they and their children are denied the right to achieve economic and social justice."

"Free management must realize that in a free society there is no substitute for the voluntary discharge of social responsibility."

"All the learned men with all their wisdom, with all of the legal niceties they can put together on the finest of parchment, cannot produce one ton of steel."

"Let us never forget that he who would serve God must prove that he is worthy by serving man."

"There is no greater calling than to serve your brother. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well."

"In the struggle for the hearts and minds of millions of yet uncommitted people in the economically underdeveloped portions of the world, the more young Americans we send to help as technical missionaries—with slide rule, with textbook, and with medical kit—to work in the pursuit of peace, the fewer we might need to send with guns and flame-throwers to resist Communist aggression on the battlefields."

"The great challenge before us is to find a way to use the bright promise of science and technology in a massive retaliation against poverty, hunger, and social injustice in the world."

"Free labor understands and acts in the knowledge the the struggle for peace and the struggle for human freedom are inseparably tied together with the struggle for social justice."

"We believe that it is not enough to fight against the things that we oppose—we must fight with equal courage and equal dedication for the things that we believe in."

"Democratic nations must seek and find unity in diversity, while Communists achieve unity through conformity."

"Only in an atmosphere of freedom can the creative genius of the human spirit find full expression."

"I have been saying for a long time that I believe the more young Americans who are trained to join with other young people in the world to be sent abroad with slide rule, textbook, and medical kit to help people help themselves with the tools of peace, the fewer young people will need to be sent with guns and weapons of war."

"The struggle against racial intolerance and racial discrimination and bigotry must be waged everywhere in the world wherever such immoral and ugly practices exist."

"We must learn to judge people, not by their color or race or creed, but rather by their worth as human beings."

"Just as the moral and spiritual power of Gandhi won in Indian, so American Negroes shall win in America, and they shall take their place as free and equal citizens in the family of American democracy."

"The great challenge before us is to find a way to get people and nations working together in the positive and rewarding task of peace as they have repeatedly joined together in the senseless and destructive waging of war."

"If the peoples of great nations can work, sacrifice, fight, and die together because they share common fears and common hatreds in war, why can we not find a way to tap the great spiritual reservoir that lies deep within each of us and get people and nations working, sacrificing, and building together in peacetime because they share common hopes and common aspirations."

"You cannot save democracy in a vacuum of idealism. You have got to be motivated by idealism, but you have got to also be fighting the hard problem of practical politics."

"The crisis in the world is not economic, military, or political; essentially, it is a moral crisis. It is a reflection of man's growing inhumanity to man, which finds its most horrible expression in the total destruction now made possible by the H-bomb. I believe our problem is a reflection of the fact that there is a growing and most serious moral and cultural gap between the progress we have made as a people in the physical sciences, and our lack of progress in the human and social sciences. We know much better how to work with the machines than we know how to live with people."

"Why do we have these machines? Is economic effort an end, or is it a means to an end? Obviously it must be a means to an end. And the end must be the enrichment of human life, and the expansion of frontiers for human growth, not for just the few, but for the many."

"I ask this simple question. I ask it of you and I ask it of my fellow Americans everywhere. Why is it that we have the courage to mobilize the power of America to meet the challenge of war, but we fail to have the same courage to mobilize America to meet the challenge of peace?"

"I'm proud of the role the American labor movement has played historically in fighting to make education possible for everyone's child. We share the belief that every child is made in the image of God and that every child ought to have the right to an educational opportunity that will enable that child to grow intellectually and spiritually and culturally—not limited by antiquated classrooms, overcrowded classes, or underpaid teachers—but limited only by the capacity which God gave that child to grow."

"I've read in the papers, as you do, about juvenile delinquency. I've always had a feeling that the problem in America is not juvenile delinquency, but adult delinquency. Our children are not failing us—it is we who are failing our children."

"These are the sober facts. This is where we are. We stand there in that delicate, precarious balance on the rim of hell, and on the other side is this brave new world that lies ready to be realized. This is one of the great tragedies of the world—and you history teachers perhaps know it better than I—that we find chapter after chapter of the history books filled with the stories of man's inhumanity to man and of the great wars. In those great wars of the world's history, many nations achieved their highest expression of collective action—they worked, they marched, they sacrificed, and they died because they were driven forward by the negative motivations of war and because of their common fears and common hatreds. I believe that the great challenge of the leadership of the world is to find a way to tap the great spiritual reservoir, the great spiritual power that lies deep within the human breast, and find a way to get people working, marching, building, and sacrificing because of positive peacetime motivations and because they have common hopes, common aspirations, and common faith."

"I'm proud to belong to the NAACP, because it is made up of people who are dedicated in a great crusade to make America true to itself. This is what this is about. Make America live up to its highest hopes and aspirations and translate those hopes and aspirations into practical, tangible reality in the lives of all people, whether they are white or black, whether they live in the North or the South. I say that each of us is blessed that we can be engaged in this crusade, in this struggle for justice, for human dignity, in this struggle to wipe out in every phase of our national life every ugly immoral kind of discrimination."

"When the employer can divide you and pit white against black, American-born against foreign-born, he can divide and rule and exploit everyone."

"I've often thought: Why is it that you can get a great nation like America marching, fighting, sacrificing, and dying in the struggle to destroy the master race theory in Berlin, and people haven't got an ounce of courage to fight against the master race theory in America? We need the same sense of dedication, the same courage, and the same determination to fight the immorality of segregation and racial bigotry in America as we did in the battlefields against Hitlersim."

"I have been saying for a long time that the crisis in the world is not economic or political or military. Essentially, the crisis in the world is a moral crisis. It's a reflection of man's growing immorality to himself, of man's growing inhumanity to man. The H-bomb is the highest and most terrible destructive expression of that growing inhumanity. And in a sense our crisis in America—the crisis in education, the crisis in civil rights—is not political, it is moral. But we haven't demonstrated the moral courage to step up to solving these problems, and this is our basic problem. America is in crisis, not because it lacks the economic resources, not because it lacks the political know-how, not because we don't know how to do the job of squaring democracy's practices with its noble promises. We just haven't demonstrated the moral courage. And until we do, we will not meet this basic crisis in civil rights and in education."

"Just sit down on a doorstep with a peasant in a village of Northern India and take on the task of trying to explain to him why America, conceived in freedom and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that can split the atom, that can make a pursuit ship go three times as fast as sound and yet, in this twentieth century, we can't live together in brotherhood and we continue to discriminate against Negroes. It will tax your ingenuity, and you will give them no answers. You can only give them excuses. And excuses are not good enough, if we are going to win the struggle of freedom in the world."

"But in truth, America is the last, best hope of freedom. If we can't make freedom and democracy work in America, then it can't be made to work any place in the world."

"The Supreme Court is living in the twentieth century and the Congress is still somewhere back in the dark nineteenth century. It's about time they catch up."

"Well, I want to say to these people in Congress that they have been on the longest sit-down strike in the history of America—eight long years. And we think it's about time that they terminate that sit-down strike on civil rights and begin to turn out some legislation."

"Well, there are some mighty fine people in America who tell you, "yes," they are against discrimination in every phase. They are opposed to it in terms of job opportunities. They are opposed to it in terms of education. They are opposed to it in terms of transportation. But, they say, "legislation is not the way to do it; you've got to get hatred out of men's hearts." Well, we agree. Education is important. But you can't educate this problem out of existence by education alone. You've got to work both on the educational front and the legislative front. And you've got to parallel those two activities right down the line."

"We want an America in which every child has educational opportunity, an America in which every citizen has equal job opportunity, equal rights to the use of all public facilities, the right to live in a decent neighborhood, in a decent home."

"The task is difficult. The struggle will be hard, but let us always remember that human progress has never been served to mankind on a silver platter. The history of the world shows chapter after chapter that men of faith and courage have had to fight to bring to fulfillment their dreams and their hopes and their aspirations. What we need to do is keep the faith. Keep the faith in ourselves. And when the going is rough, as it will be, let us remember the the test of one's convictions is not how did you behave, how did you stand up, when it was convenient and comfortable. The test of one's convictions is: Do you stand up for the things you believe when it takes courage? Do you stand up in the face of adversity, in the face of great controversy? This is the kind of fight we are engaged in. That's why when the going is rough, always remember that there are millions of us, and that together we can move mountains, and that together we can solve this problem and make America in the image of what it really stands for. So I say to you, we pledge our hands and our hearts, we pledge our all to you in this struggle, because we believe that this is the most important struggle that America must win, if it is going to be true to itself and provide leadership to the free world. And if we mobilize our multitudes, if we mobilize all the people of good will and good faith in America, I say that we can do the job, and together we can build that brave new tomorrow that we dream about and fashion it in the image of peace, freedom and justice, and human brotherhood."

"Freedom is an indivisible value and when the freedom of one is threatened the freedom of all is in jeopardy."

"No man and no people live as an island unto themselves."

"The real test of friendship and solidarity is not where one stands when the weather is fair and the sun is shining but rather where one stands at a time of storm and stress."

"Freedom, like peace, can be made secure only as it is made universal."

"We must negotiate from unity and strength and stay firm on matters of principle and flexible on matters of procedure."

"For centuries man has struggled to divide up economic scarcity. There was too little food for the hungry, too little clothing for the naked. Now for the first time in the history of mankind, we have within our grasp the economic tools of unprecedented abundance which can end man's ageless struggle against want and misery. The same scientific and technical know-how which brought forth the H-bomb and guided missiles gives to the world automation and the tools of economic abundance. Will mankind have the vision and common sense to use the new tools of abundance to usher in an era of human progress and human fulfillment?"

"This is our goal—a world of peace, freedom, and social justice for all people everywhere."

"Together we shall build a world of peace, freedom, security, social justice, and brotherhood."

"One thing we must do, most of all, in the future, is to harness the atom for peace and get all of the miners out of the earth."

"The only war America wants to fight is war against poverty, hunger, ignorance, and disease. It's the only war mankind can win."

"Therefore, as we see it, the cold war is not an attempt to change each other's systems of government, but to influence those that are uncommitted."

"Wall Street says I am an agent of Moscow, and Moscow says I am an agent of Wall Street."

"I think one of the things we need to do is to avoid the tragic waste of human potential."

"I happen to believe that this is the crux of where we're going in terms of the future of the American economy. I think that the basic problem is to find a way to work out the competing equities among the three groups—the worker, the stockholder, and the consumer—so that we share the abundance in a way that would create the dynamics of growth and expansion."

"We will not meet the problems of tomorrow by talking about yesterday's concepts."

"The problems of tomorrow require whole new concepts of how a free economy can work. As the tools of production become more productive, it means that we've got to find the markets by which people can absorb this greater productivity. Unless the fruits of technology are shared among workers and stockholders and consumers more equitably, the economy gets in trouble because you develop a lag between the ability to create wealth on the one hand, and the inability of people to consume the wealth that we know how to create."

"When we get to the place in the development of our society where the tools of abundance can take care of the material needs of the outer man with less and less human effort, the real emphasis then has to be shifted to enabling the inner man to grow."

"I am for the state only doing what people are unable to do in the absence of government action."

"If we don't plan for the constructive and creative use of the growing measure of human leisure that we're going to have based upon our technological progress, we can wind up as a well-fed nation of morons."

"You've got to judge the worth of the government not by what it does to help the few who have too much to get more, but what governments does to help the many to get enough."

"Now this essentially is the difference between the Republican party and the Democratic party. Philosophically, the Republican party believes that if you help big business to earn higher profit, they will then invest more money in plants. That will create more job opportunities. That will create full employment. They've got this trickle-down theory that you can build prosperity from the top down. The Democrats basically believe that you've got to build prosperity from the bottom up by expanding purchasing power, by doing the things that will make it possible for all the American people to participate in prosperity."

"Now I share the basic philosophy of Abraham Lincoln when he said that the purpose of government is to enable the people to do together through the instruments of government what they are unable to do without the aid of government."

"I only want the government to do the things that you can't do without the government."

"I'm grateful for the contribution [private enterprise] made, but even in the early days of capitalism the government helped a great deal. The railroads got tremendous land grants, the steamship companies got subsidies—they still get subsidies–the airlines got subsidies; none of these great industries developed without some assistance from the government. The whole question here, Mike, the whole question is not are you opposed or are you in favor of government intervention into certain areas of our free society. The question is: Whenever people are either unable or unwilling to do what must be done to maintain the health and advance the well-being of the whole society, then government is the only instrument that the whole people have to look to to do that job. Now, I'm for limiting that; I'm for encouraging voluntary nongovernmental approaches. This is why I try to do everything I can at the collective bargaining table; this is why we fought on the Social Security front, on the pension front. But when you've got a problem like education or medical care for the aged that you can't solve on a nongovernmental basis, then the government must do the job."

"Well, you see, I have nothing against Goldwater. I think he has the finest eighteenth century mind in the U.S. Senate."

"I think Jimmy Hoffa is bad for the American labor movement because I believe that he is surrounded by forces who are interested in a fast buck, and I think that anybody in the leadership of the American labor movement has got to be dedicated to the advancement of the well-being of the rank-and-file and their families, and whenever they're interested in a fast buck, they ought to be on the other side of the table."

"Americans of all religious faiths, of all political persuasions, and from every section of our Nation are deeply shocked and outraged at the tragic events in Selma Ala., and they look to the Federal Government as the only possible source to protect and guarantee the exercise of constitutional rights, which is being denied and destroyed by the Dallas County law enforcement agents and the Alabama State troops under the direction of Governor George Wallace. Under these circumstances, Mr President, I join in urging you to take immediate and appropriate steps including the use of Federal marshals and troops if necessary, so that the full exercise of constitutional rights including free assembly and free speech be fully protected. Sunday's spectacle of tear gas and night sticks whips and electric cattle prods used against defenseless citizens demonstrating to secure their constitutional right to register and vote as American citizens was an outrage against all decency. This shameful brutality by law enforcing agents makes a mockery of Americans’ concepts of justice and provides effective ammunition to Communist propaganda and our enemies around the world who would weaken and destroy us. Mr President, your prompt and decisive leadership in this crisis is imperative in demonstrating Americans’ fundamental allegiance to the constitutional rights of all citizens. Prompt and decisive action on your part will moreover discourage the apostles of hatred, bigotry, and violence, who would divide America. It will give great encouragement and added strength to the many Americans in the South who, like you and the vast majority of Americans, believe that every citizen has a moral and constitutional right to register and vote. I am confident that in this crisis, Mr President, you will act with the same conviction, courage, and compassion which has characterized your leadership and other periods of challenge."

"Walter Reuther was an American visionary so far ahead of his times that although he died a quarter of a century ago, our Nation has yet to catch up to his dreams."

"Every worker today stands on the shoulders of giants, people like Lucy Parsons, Cesar Chavez, Bayard Rustin, Eugene V. Debs, and Walter Reuther."

"The psychological basis for the use of nonviolent methods is the simple rule that like produces like, kindness provokes kindness, as surely as injustice produces resentment and evil. It is sometimes forgotten by those whose pacifism is a spurious, namby-pamby thing that if one Biblical statement of this rule is "Do good to them that hate you" (an exhortation presumably intended for the capitalist as well as for the laborer), another statement of the same rule is, "They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind." You get from the universe what you give, with interest! What if men build a system on violence and injustice, on not doing good to those who hate them nor even to those who meekly obey and toil for them? And persist in this course through centuries of Christian history? And if, then, the oppressed raise the chant:"

"Educational enterprises do not for any length of time remain immune from the struggle of interests for power which is the dominant feature of social life under a class system."

"We belong to the Society of Friends, a community of love, a family of persons. In so far as we are not just another “denomination,” we know also that the salvation of our age is in our keeping; that is, that it lies in the divine-human society which is "rooted and grounded in love." This is the unity which alone can make one world out of "one world", and not one nightmare, one hell, one burned-out cinder. We know also and in a way we respond to the fact that we have a mission, we are "called to be saints"."

"It is said that if the United States were to stop shooting and withdraw its troops from Vietnam, the Viet Cong would then stage a great purge of the people who we have been seeking to protect — have pledged to protect. First of all, so far they have been getting precious little protection from us. The Vietnamese people as human individuals have been shot at by the French, by us, by Communists, by guerrillas for years. Maybe, if only somebody would stop shooting at them that would be something to the good."

"There is no way to peace; peace is the way."

"There is a certain indolence in us, a wish not to be disturbed, which tempts us to think that when things are quiet, all is well. Subconsciously, we tend to give the preference to 'social peace,' though it be only apparent, because our lives and possessions seem then secure. Actually, human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom. There is nothing noble about acquiescence in a cramped life or mere submission to superior force."

"We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life. Disarmament cannot be achieved nor can the problem of war be resolved without being accompanied by profound changes in the economic order and the structure of society."

"[Their foremost task] … is to denounce the violence on which the present system is based, and all the evil — material and spiritual — this entails for the masses of men throughout the world.... So long as we are not dealing honestly and adequately with this ninety percent of our problem, there is something ludicrous, and perhaps hypocritical, about our concern over the ten percent of violence employed by the rebels against oppression."

"Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure — more, doubtless, by life than by words — to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved."

"In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist."

"[He made] remarkable effort to show that pacifism was by no means passivism and that there could be such a thing as a non-violent social revolution."

"There are two themes that ran through A.J. Muste's life so clearly and marked his own actions so decisively, that the conflict between them became a dialectic, never resolved. One theme was peace, nonviolence, profound reverence for life. The other theme was social justice. To respect life meant to struggle to achieve social justice, yet the struggle for social justice invariably disturbed the peace and risked the nonviolence so central to A.J. The life-destroying institutions of injustice which A.J. saw around him were intolerable--yet violent social change was also intolerable. It was this "dialectic" which led him into the Marxist-Leninist movement and then back into the religious pacifist movement. Those who worked most closely with him are convinced that he was never fully able to leave behind his Christian mysticism when he was a Marxist-Leninist, and that on his return to the Church he brought with him much of his Marxism. No authentic honor can be done to the memory of the man and his life if we select one theme and ignore the other. Few people have been so deeply committed at the same time both to peace and to social justice, so fully aware of the difficulty of reconciling these two demands, and so intent on making that effort."

"I've never read Marx's Capital, but I've got the marks of capital all over my body."

"If one man has a dollar he didn't work for, some other man worked for a dollar he didn't get."

"The bandage will remain on the eyes of Justice as long as the Capitalist has the cut, shuffle, and deal."

"Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep - eight hours a day! (From the Haymarket era eight-hour campaign)"

"The mine owners "did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!""

"The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood."

"Tonight I am going to speak on the class struggle and I am going to make it so plain that even a lawyer can understand it."

"Sabotage means to push back, pull out or break off the fangs of Capitalism."

"Moyer and Haywood are our comrades, staunch and true, and if we do not stand by them to the shedding of the last drop of blood in our veins, we are disgraced forever and deserve the fate of cringing cowards. We are not responsible for the issue. It is not of our seeking. It has been forced upon us; and for the very reason that we deprecate violence and abhor bloodshed we cannot desert our comrades and allow them to be put to death. If they can be murdered without cause so can we, and so will we be dealt with at the pleasure of these tyrants. They have driven us to the wall and now let us rally our forces and face them and fight. If they attempt to murder Moyer, Haywood and their brothers, a million revolutionists, at least will meet them with guns. They have done their best and their worst to crush and enslave us. Their politicians have betrayed us, their courts have thrown us into jail without trial and their soldiers have shot our comrades dead in their tracks. The worm turns at last, and so does the worker."

"This is the agitator's work, this continual activity. And we lay awake many nights trying to think of something more we could give them to do. I remember one night in Lawrence none of us slept. The strike spirit was in danger of waning for lack of action. And I remember Bill Haywood said finally, "Let's get a picket line out in Essex street. Get every striker to put a little red ribbon on and walk up and down and show that the strike is not broken." A few days later the suggestion was carried out, and when they got out of their homes and saw this great body that they were, they had renewed strength and renewed energy which carried them along for many weeks more in the strike."

""Big" Bill Haywood came out of jail a hero-a fitting symbol of the solidarity of labor. He was described by one reporter as, "big in body, in brain, and in courage." He made a triumphal tour of the United States and Canada, under the auspices of the Socialist Party and the labor organizations which had defended him. He was an intensely down-to-earth dramatic speaker. I remember hearing him say: "I'm a two-gun man from the West, you know," and while the audience waited breathlessly, he pulled his union card from one pocket and his Socialist card from the other."

"Bill Haywood decided that we had to speak English so these people could understand it. And I will never forget the lesson he gave to us. I was very young at that time, I was 22, and he said, now listen here, you speak to these workers, these miners in the same kind of English that their children who are in the primary school would speak to them and they would understand that. Well, that's not easy -- to speak to them in primary school English. Well, we learned how to do it. The only trouble is with me it kind of stuck and when I go to speak to a college audience I feel at a little bit of a disadvantage because I don't know all the big words. The small words, the short words, were the ones I was drilled in by William Haywood."

"At the same time that this Lawrence strike was going on, there was a great strike of timber workers in Louisiana, also under the auspices of the IWW, and I single that out, although we had strikes all over the place, we were just hopping all over from one place to another, because there for the first time the discrimination, the segregation rules were-broken down. William D. Haywood went down there to speak and he said every striker sits wherever he wants to sit. Segregation in this hall of the IWW and the Negro and white workers, I think for the first time in American labor history, broke that taboo and met together."

"William "Big Bill" Haywood, the WFM's secretary-treasurer, began working in an Idaho silver mine at the age of nine; as an adult, he was one of the most fearsome and effective union organizers in America, a strapping frontier socialist with a missing eye and a booming, powerful voice that carried throughout the nation's union halls and picket lines. He went on to help cofound the IWW, lead influential strikes in the Northeast (including the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike), fight for the eight-hour workday, and later flee the country for Russia after decades of state persecution, but his time with the WFM is what first honed his radical sensibilities and his fervent belief in industrial unionism, the necessity of organizing the entire working class into "One Big Union.""

"Bill Haywood, the one-eyed giant of the miners, hid out there. He talked to us and paced back and forth in the little wooden rooms. He was out on bail and he told us how you had to fight your weakness to be a fighter for the working class. He said he liked to drink and sometimes went on a spree, lurching in and out of saloons, brawling, taking on enemies, and reciting poetry. And then he would hole up and discipline himself for the working class, his class, and study Darwin and Morgan and London and Marx. Above all, he loved Shakespeare and would recite whole scenes. Sometimes, he said, he strengthened himself by fasts. Haywood said his first school was with the miners. Each one would have a book and they would pass them around, and there was always a student, a scholar, among them who went around teaching. From such a scholar he first heard the slogan "an injury to one is a injury to all." He told how he had first been impressed by the Haymarket martyrs. He felt that a great light shone from them. He seemed to me to have grown out of the mines and the gloom and terror like some giant plant, fed by the lives of the miners. He would tell about their maiming toil and about the color of the lead miners, a deathly ashen gray, for they were dying of lead poisoning. He mourned them all and fought for them all. I had never before seen a man like that."

"In the brief span of its life, the IWW produced men who became internationally known and whose names were torches of inspiration in many lands. Most of them paid a high price for their fame, some with their lives...Bill Haywood, out of prison on bail while his war-time conviction was being appealed, was persuaded by New York Communists that world revolution was just around the corner and that he was needed in it. He skipped bail and fled to Russia, only to be relegated to the sidelines, and to die there a broken man."

"Bill Haywood, head of the I.W.W., was on the witness stand four days; and no juror ever dozed in that time; for always the story he told, in answer to questions by Vanderveer, was moving and vital. Through those questions Big Bill, with his large one-eyed head, bulky body, and small hands which seldom gestured, sat there and traced his own life struggle-as a boy in the mines, as an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners in territory where that meant risking death from gun-men's bullets, as a defendant in the famous trial in Boise, when he was one of three accused of conspiracy to kill, and of killing, ex-Governor Steunenberg of Idaho with dynamite; of his helping to organize the Socialist Party, and later the Industrial Workers of the World; and of his part in many of the I.W.W. strikes andfree speech conflicts across the land."

"A suffragette once asked Bill Haywood, who leaned toward the anarcho-syndicalist faith, if he thought women should have the vote, and Bill said: "Sure, and besides, they can have mine." Such was the indifference to political action held by many who could see no hope in the ballot, nor in the whole set-up of parliaments, but put their full faith in the organization of labor."

"As the Socialists became more successful at the polls (Debs got 900,000 votes in 1912, double what he had in 1908), and more concerned with increasing that appeal, they became more critical of IWW tactics of "sabotage" and "violence," and in 1913 removed Bill Haywood from the Socialist Party Executive Committee, claiming he advocated violence (although some of Debs's writings were far more inflammatory)."

"The gap left by the arrest of Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti was immediately filled by Bill Haywood' and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Haywood's years of experience in the labour struggle, his determination and tact, made him a distinctive power in the Lawrence situation. On the other hand, Elizabeth's youth, charm, and eloquence easily won everybody's heart. The names of the two and their reputation gained for the strike country-wide publicity and support...Bill Haywood had but recently come to live in New York. We had met almost immediately and became very friendly. Bill also was not an anarchist, but, like Elizabeth, he was free from narrow sectarianism. He frankly admitted that he felt much more at home with the anarchists, and especially with the Mother Earth group, than with the zealots in his own ranks. The most notable characteristic of Bill was his extraordinary sensitiveness. This giant, outwardly so hard, would wince at a coarse word and tremble at the sight of pain. On one occasion, when he addressed our eleventh-of-November commemoration, he related to me the effect the crime of 1887 had had on him. He was but a youngster at the time, already working in the mines. "Since then," he told me, "our Chicago martyrs have been my greatest inspiration, their courage my guiding star." The apartment at 210 East Thirteenth Street became Bill's retreat. Frequently he spent his free evenings at our place. There he could read and rest to his heart's content, or drink coffee "black as the night, strong as the revolutionary ideal, sweet as love.""

"Sasha was inclined to believe it; he had lost faith in Bill since 1914, when the latter had shown himself weak-kneed during the free-speech fights that Sasha had conducted in New York. I defended Bill hotly, pointing out that our actions are not always to be judged so easily."

"Bill Haywood had often been under our roof, by day and by night, always our welcome guest, our comrade in many battles, though not sharing the same ideas."

"He had jumped his bail, he said suddenly; he had run away. Not because of the twenty years of prison that faced him, though that was no small matter at his age. "Ridiculous, Bill," I interrupted; "you would never have to serve the whole sentence. Gene Debs was pardoned and Kate Richard O'Hare also." "Listen first," he interrupted; "the prison was not the deciding factor. It was Russia, Russia, which fulfilled what we had dreamed about and propagated all our lives, I as well as you. Russia, the home of the liberated proletariat, was calling me." He had also been urged by Moscow to come, he added. He was told he was needed in Russia. From here he would be able to revolutionize the American masses and to prepare them for the dictatorship of the proletariat. It had not been easy to decide to leave his comrades to face their long terms in prison alone. But the Revolution was more important and its ends justified all means."

"Bill had always stood for a strong State and centralization. What was his One Big Union but a dictatorship?"

"Men trade unionists are accused of sex privilege and prejudice … A belief in the divine right of every man to his job is not peculiar to kings and capitalists, and men in organised trades are not disposed to share these advantages with a host of women competitors."

"I'm here to change the world, and if I am not, I am probably wasting my time."

"No root, no fruit."

"As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America….""

"We, the American People, are enormously wealthy. You know that? Who owns all of those trees in the national forests? (This is not a rhetorical question.) We do! Who owns all of that off-shore oil you read about in the newspaper, huh? We do! Who owns all of those minerals under the federal lands? We do! It’s public property, you know. But we elect people to go to Washington—who are those assholes?—what have we gotten ourselves into now?—they go to Washington, they lease off what we own, public property, to private companies to sell us back our own stuff for the sake of a greasy buck. That’s dumb."

"You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!"

"But they lived those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful, than the best damn history book I ever read."

"I coulda got mad. But then I had to stop and think, well, what did he get in school? What did he get in his work experience? What did he get even from his own union, that gave him some tools to understand what he was seeing on that television?"

"Talking to a conservative is like talking to your refrigerator... You know, the light goes on, the light goes off; it's not going to do anything that isn't built into it... And I'm not going to talk to a conservative anymore than I talk to my damn refrigerator."

"I coulda got mad. But then I had to stop and think, well, what did he get in school? What did he get in his work experience? What did he get even from his own union, that gave him some tools to understand what he was seeing?"

"The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses."

"Get it straight, I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser."

"I don't care about political parties. I went down to the Greenback parties, to the Populist party, in fact I went through them all. I found some of the parties most powerful weapons, but money interest prostitutes them all. Nowhere have you elected a man in this last election that represents your interests. I do not care what political party you put in power because we are of the economical power. We have the power to do and we will do it! They are not going to fool us there. It was not the political party that gained the eight hour day for the railroad man."

"Look at this watch of mine. Two hands there, nice looking, but let me take the hands out and it will be no good. It would be useless to, and your two hands are like unto the hands of the watch. You are the tool that move the nation. The Salvation Army, the Y.M.C.A. we build their institutions, pay for them, feed the people and everything. We are going to change that. The page is turned. The world is a moving magnet; a new civilization is coming; the pendulum is swimming as it has never swung before. It behooves to do our duty."

"The old condition is passing away. The new dawn of another civilized nation is breaking into the lives of the human race."

"If you ever saw a policeman with a club in his hand, I want to ask you, did you ever see that policeman club a millionaire? But it is "Get out of here, damn you, go on to jail, damn you," if it is a working man."

"No matter what your fight, don't be ladylike! God almighty made women and the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies."

"If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I would shout, 'Freedom for the working class!'"

"Your organization is not a praying institution. It's a fighting institution. It's an educational institution along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!"

"And why were these things done? Because a group of men had demanded an eight hour day, a check weighman and the abolition of the scrip system that kept them in serfdom to the mighty coal barons. That was all. Just that miners had refused to labor under these conditions. Just because miners wanted a better chance for their children, more of the sunlight, more freedom. And for this they suffered one whole year and for this they died."

"When I get to the otherside, I shall tell God Almighty about West Virginia!"

"I could have settled it in twenty-four hours… I would make the operators listen to the grievances of their workers. I would take the $650,000 spent for the militia during this strike and spend it on schools and playgrounds and libraries that West Virginia might have a more highly developed citizenry, physically and intellectually. You would then have fewer little children in the mines and factories; fewer later in jails and penitentiaries; fewer men and women submitting to conditions that are brutalizing and un-American."

"I refer to the United States, the union of all the states. I ask then, if in union there is strength for our nation, would there not be for labor! What one state could not get alone, what one miner against a powerful corporation could not achieve, can be achieved by the union. What is a good enough principle for an American citizen ought to be good enough for the working man to follow."

"The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win."

"Organized labor should organize its women along industrial lines. Politics is only the servant of industry. The plutocrats have organized their women. They keep them busy with suffrage and prohibition and charity."

"I knew it was useless to tell the governor about conditions as I found them. I knew he would be neither interested nor would he care. It wasn’t election time."

"I do not believe that iron bars and brutal treatment have ever been cures for crime. And certainly I feel that in our great enlightened country, there is no reason for going back to middle ages and their form of torture for the criminal."

"Human flesh, warm and soft and capable of being wounded, went naked up against steel; steel that is cold as old stars, and harder than death and incapable of pain. Bayonets and guns and steel rails and battleships, bombs and bullets are made of steel. And only babies are made of flesh. More babies grow up and work in steel, to hurl themselves against the bayonets, to know the tempered resistance of steel."

"Christ himself would agitate against them. He would agitate against the plutocrats and hypocrites who tell workers to go down on their knees and get right with God. Christ, the carpenter’s son, would tell them to stand up on their feet and fight for righteousness and justice on earth."

"In spite of oppressors, in spite of false leaders, in spite of labor’s own lack of understanding of its needs, the cause of the worker continues onward. Slowly his hours are shortened, giving him leisure to read and to think. Slowly, his standard of living rises to include some of the good and beautiful things of the world. Slowly the cause of his children becomes the cause of all. His boy is taken from the breaker, his girl from the mill. Slowly those who create wealth of the world are permitted to share it. The future is in labor’s strong, rough hands."

"The Greatest woman agitator of our time was Mother Jones. Arrested, deported, held in custody by the militia, hunted and threatened by police and gunmen-she carried on fearlessly for 60 years. I first saw her in the summer of 1908, speaking at a Bronx open-air meeting. She was giving the "city folks" hell. Why weren't we helping the miners of the West? Why weren't we backing up the Mexican people against Diaz? We were "white-livered rabbits who never put our feet on Mother Earth," she said. Her description of the bullpen, where the miners were herded by federal troops during a Western miners' strike, and of the bloodshed and suffering was so vivid that, being slightly dizzy from standing so long, I fainted. She stopped in the middle of a fiery appeal. "Get the poor child some water!" she said, and went on with her speech. I was terribly embarrassed."

"The next winter I saw Mother Jones again in Chicago at a meeting in Hull House of the Rudewitz Committee, to which I was a delegate from Local 85, IWW. I heard her hot angry defiant words against the deportation of a young Jewish worker on the vile pretext of "ritual murder." (Jane Addams and others saved him from certain death by their spirited defense). Mother Jones was dressed in an old-fashioned black silk basque, with lace around her neck, a long full skirt and a little bonnet, trimmed with flowers. She never changed her style of dress throughout her lifetime. She may sound like Whistler's Mother but this old lady was neither calm nor still, breathing fearless agitation wherever she went... She was put out of hotels. Families who housed her in company towns were dispossessed. She spoke in open fields when halls were closed. She waded through Kelly Creek, West Virginia, to organize miners on the other side. Tried for violating an injunction, she called the judge a "scab" and proved it to him. She organized "women's armies" to chase scabs-with mops, brooms and dishpans. "God! It's the old mother with her wild women!" the bosses would groan. In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, when a group of women pickets with babies were arrested and sentenced to 30 days, she advised them: "Sing to the babies all night long!" The women sang their way out of jail in a few days to the relief of the sleepless town. She was asked at Congressional hearing: "Where is your home?" and she answered: "Sometimes I'm in Washington, then in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota. My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong. In 1903 she led a group of child workers from the textile mills in the Kensington district of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to confront President Theodore Roosevelt with proof of child labor. In Colorado, after the Ludlow massacre in 1914, she led a protest parade up to the governor's office. In West Virginia, time after time, she led delegations to see various governors and "gave them hell," as she said...When she was a very old lady, she warned the rank and file against leaders who put their own interests ahead of labor. Until her death she stoutly affirmed her one great faith: "The future is in labor's strong, rough hands!"... She inspired me a great deal when I first heard her in New York and Chicago in those early days, though I confess I was afraid of her sharp tongue. But when I reminded her of the meeting in the Bronx and told her I had lost my baby, she was very sympathetic and kind. Her harshness was for bosses, scabs and crooked labor leaders."

"The UMWA had a number of big personalities and tough-talking bruisers at its disposal, but one of its most effective agitators was an old Irish woman in a black dress who prowled the picket lines and struck fear into the hearts of the corporate elite. This "John Brown (abolitionist) in petticoats" was a militant socialist who breathed class war like a dragon and doted on her members as if they were her own children. The woman who would become Mother Jones lived an entire life's worth of pain, struggle, and tragedy before she found her calling: organizing the working class, lifting up the unheard, and unseating those who would gladly earn their money by grinding the poor's bones to dust. A dressmaker by trade, left widowed with four deceased children in the 1871 yellow fever epidemic, Jones reinvented herself as a labor organizer and self-proclaimed hell-raiser...She grew famous for her signature billowing black dress, replete with lace collar, a severe white bun, and a pair of tiny eyeglasses perched on her fierce countenance. A century before Johnny Cash donned his all-black getup to symbolize his allegiance with the poor and downtrodden, Jones reached for widow's weeds to illustrate her status as the grandmother of a movement. She cultivated a matriarchal, sometimes impish image, fondly referring to grizzled miners and favored politicians alike as "my boys" and crusading against child labor. Only some of that came naturally; the rest was a theatrical flourish, cooked up to emphasize Harris's age and gravitas and add to her stature as the one and only Mother Jones, the bane of the coal bosses and a fighter to the core...Unlike many labor figures of her day, Jones did not discriminate against women or Black workers (though her single-minded focus on building working-class power at all costs left some of her views shortsighted at best, in particular her silence as the American labor movement went on the offensive against Chinese immigrant workers). During labor clashes, her greatest weapon was the womenfolk. She was known for actively encouraging women and families to get involved in strikes and organizing wives into "mop and bucket" battalions to fight alongside their husbands on the picket lines and hold down the home front."

"At the time [1903], 18 percent of American workers were under the age of sixteen, and as Jones herself once said, "The American people were born in strikes, and now in the closing days of the nineteenth century, even the children must strike for justice.""

"hailed in labor circles as "the miner's angel""

"I do not love you the way I love Mother Jones"

"In these tours of the Ohio minefields I often met Mother Jones. Our paths had crossed many times before, especially in the early 1900's in the Pennsylvania mining fields, and we were good friends. Mother Jones became interested in the labor movement after the death of her husband, who had been a soldier in the Civil War. She herself was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1830. She was an instinctive fighter against the capitalist class and spent her time organizing the miners into the U.M.W.A...In later years Mother Jones came under the wrong influences, and was sometimes made use of to play a reactionary role. She always retained great prestige among the miners, who would do almost anything she asked. I can remember time after time when a caucus in the A. F. of L. prepared to make a demonstration of strength against Gompers, she would come in at the last moment and say, "Stick to your old Sammy, boys, stick to your old Sammy!" and they would vote for him again. But just the same Mother Jones was an historical figure, a fine woman and a fine courageous fighter. I met this remarkable woman many more times, since a great deal of my work in the Socialist Party was spent among the miners, and we often held meetings together. Mother Jones died in December, 1930, at the age of 100. The last major strike in which she participated was the great steel strike of 1919, but she was in touch with things and spoke at meetings until 1923, when she was in her nineties. After that she went to stay with a Socialist family who took care of her until the end."

"Mother Jones came to Washington and told a Congressional committee about the terror in the West Virginia coal regions. I pictured her, and wrote that it was not easy to portray that "benign and yet so belligerent" face. When she was held captive by the West Virginia authorities she said to them: "You can stand me up against that wall and riddle me with bullets, but you can't make me surrender.""

"Mother Jones had a delightfully extensive profane vocabulary and did not hesitate to use it in conversation...Whenever Mother Jones came to New York she would let me know. She was moving toward the century mark, but she still had fire in her eye. For hours at a time I would talk with her in her room in the old Union Square Hotel. With a pail of beer on the table, she liked to tell me all about "my boys" (the miners), her experiences in jails, and what happened during strikes."

"In her seventies (and I guess this was one of the reasons she was called Mother, because she was old enough to be the mother of almost everybody who was working), she was organizing miners in West Virginia, and then Colorado. She was so colorful and so dramatic, and she looked like a schoolteacher, wearing her bonnet over her white hair. She was a fiery speaker. She did very dramatic things, like bringing the children of striking miners in Pennsylvania on a march to New York, to Theodore Roosevelt's house, to demand an end to child labor. They were carrying signs saying WE WANT TIME TO PLAY…She was jailed many times. Nothing daunted her. She was brought into courts and she would defy the judge. She inspired miners and other workers all over the country."

"Grouping and mutuality of countries and peoples in the Balkans is the only road that leads to economic, national and political liberation."

"Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans."

"We have carried out the attempted premeditated murder of an entire nation. We were caught in that criminal act and have been obstructed. Now we have to suffer the punishment.... In the Balkan Wars, Serbia not only doubled its territory, but also its external enemies."

"It is now necessary to face the truth and to acknowledge against all prejudices that the struggle that the Albanian tribe is leading today is a natural and unavoidable historic struggle for a different political life than that experienced under Turkish rule – different also from that which its neighbours Serbia, Greece and Montenegro would like to force upon the Albanians."

"Many women who would be shocked at the very thought of killing their children after birth, deliberately destroy them previously. If there is any difference in the actual crime, we should be glad to have those who practice the latter, point it out. The truth of the matter is that it is just as much a murder to destroy life in its embryotic condition, as it is to destroy it after the fully developed form is attained, for it is the self-same life that is taken... Can anyone suggest a better than to so situate woman, that she may never be obligated to conceive a life she does not desire shall be continuous?"

"If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women.... Under such glaring inconsistencies, such unwarrantable tyranny, such unscrupulous despotism, what is there left [for] women to do but to become the mothers of the future government? There is one alternative left, and we have resolved on that. This convention is for the purpose of this declaration. As surely as one year passes from this day, and this right is not fully, frankly and unequivocally considered, we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government, complete in all its parts and to take measures to maintain it as effectually as men do theirs. We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the south. We are plotting revolution; we will overslough this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead, which shall not only profess to derive its power from consent of the governed but shall do so in reality."

"The rights of children, then, as individuals, begin while yet they are in fetal life. Children do not come into existence by any will or consent of their own."

"Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere."

"Of all the horrid brutalities of our age, I know of none so horrid as those that are sanctioned and defended by marriage. Night after night, there are thousands of rapes committed, under cover of this accursed license; and millions— yes, I say it boldly, knowing whereof I speak— millions of poor, heartbroken, suffering wives are compelled to minister to the lechery of insatiable husbands, when every instinct of body and sentiment of soul revolts in loathing and disgust... The world has got to be startled from this pretense into realizing that there is nothing else now existing among pretendedly enlightened nations, except marriage, that invests men with the right to debauch women, sexually, against their wills, yet marriage is held to be synonymous with morality! I say, eternal damnation, sink such morality!"

"Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth."

"Promiscuity in sexuality is simply the anarchical stage of development wherein the passions rule supreme. When spirituality comes in and rescues the real man and woman from the domain of the purely material, promiscuity is simply impossible. As promiscuity is the analogue to anarchy, so is spirituality to scientific selection and adjustment. I am fully persuaded that the very highest unions are those that are monogamic, and that these are perfect in proportion as they are lasting. Sexual freedom means the abolition of prostitution, both in and out of marriage; means the emancipation of woman and her coming into ownership and control of her body; means the end of her pecuniary dependence upon man, so that she may never, even seemingly, have to procure whatever she may desire or need by sexual favor; means the abrogation of forced pregnancy, of ante-natal murder of undesired children, endowed by every inherited virtue that the highest exaltation can confer at conception, by every influence for good to be obtained during gestation, and by the wisest guidance and instruction on to manhood industrially and intellectually."

"They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform... The world moves."

"She vowed that if God gave her the strength she would resume her political campaign to overthrow the government, which was full of men not fit to be picked up out of the gutter."

"Her remedy for crime and her method of abolishing it may be comprehended in the word 'Stirpiculture,' the improvement of the human race by the application of the 'doctrine of natural selection' to the human family. She repudiated the notion that free-love, as she advocated it, meant promiscuity, and maintained that the inevitable result would be to prevent promiscuity, which was the curse of society now."

"While Woodhull's earlier radicalism had stemmed from the Christian socialism of the 1850s, for most of her life, she was involved in Spiritualism and did not use religious language in her public speeches. However, in 1875, Woodhull began publicly espousing Christianity and changed her political stances. She exposed Spiritualist frauds in her periodical, alienating her Spiritualist followers. She wrote articles against promiscuity, calling it a "curse of society". Woodhull repudiated her earlier views on free love, and began idealizing purity, motherhood, marriage, and the Bible in her writings. She even claimed that some works had been written in her name without her consent. Historians doubt Woodhull's claim in this matter."

"Worn out by harassment, suffering from anemia, constantly in need of money, Woodhull, to the dismay of her radical admirers, now retreated into biblical symbolism and rhapsodies on purity, motherhood, and the sanctity of marriage."

"Can any one feel any respect for a government that accords rights only to the privileged classes, and none to the workers?"

"Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism, or Socialism, means the re-organization of society upon scientific principles and the abolition of causes which produce vice and crime."

"We did not want bloodshed, for we are not bandits. We would not be socialists, if we were bandits. /.../ When the preacher of the truth meets the death penalty, well - proud and defiant, I will pay the price."

"The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."

"I say, if death is the penalty for proclaiming truth, then I will proudly and defiantly pay the costly price! Truth crucified in Socrates, in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, Galileo still lives -- they and others whose number is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow!"

"I believe leaders of the business community, with few exceptions, have chosen to wage a one-sided class war today in our country—a war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society."

"I would rather sit with the rural poor, the desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose goal is profit and whose hearts are cold."

"My father ... rarely smiled. Then I did not know why, but now I do know that it was overwork, under-nourishment and the burdens of daily living which had made a broken man out of him, although still so young in years. His eyes were perpetually inflamed by the coal dust which also gnawed away at his lungs and made him spit out black sputum."

"My father worked from ten to fourteen hours a day and sometimes during the night, for which he never received any extra pay. Every year that passed only increased the wretchedness of his condition and our way of living. Work as hard as he would, there seemed to be no way out for us."

"My father was miserably treated by the mining company, but he had imbibed the false humility and meekness that the oppressors of his race and class had hypocritically taught him. He sought consolation from his torment in a touching devotion to his church, distracting himself from the sordid realities of his life and that of his family with dreams of the Reward Hereafter."

"Of what was Herndon "guilty"? He had led a demonstration of unemployed Negro and white workers to City Hall, had been found with a couple of Communist pamphlets in his possession, and possessed a firm and inspiringly defiant advocacy of the freedom of Negroes and of the liberation of the white masses from exploitation. The "dangerous" policy he then espoused as a Communist, was the unity of the Negroes in the South with the impoverished white workers and poor farmers."

"Those who ruled in high places, and had the making of the laws in their hands, were chiefly rich landowners and successful traders, and instead of trying to raise the people, create a higher standard of comfort and well-being, and better their general condition, they did their best or worst to keep them in a state of poverty and serfdom, of dependence and wretchedness."

"Those who owned and held the land believed, and acted up to their belief as far as they were able, that the land belonged to the rich man only, that the poor man had no part nor lot in it, and had no sort of claim on society."

"When a labourer could no longer work, he had lost the right to live. Work was all they [the landowners] wanted from him; he was to work and hold his tongue, year in and year out, early and late, and if he could not work, why, what was the use of him? It was what he was made for, to labour and toil for his betters, without complaint, on a starvation wage. When no more work could be squeezed out of him, he was no better than a cumberer of other folk's ground, and the proper place for such as he was the churchyard, where he would be sure to lie quiet under a few feet of earth, and want neither food nor wages any more."

"With bowed head and bended knee the poor learned to receive from the rich what was only their due, had they but known it. Years of poverty had ground the spirit of independence right out of them; these wives and mothers were tamed by poverty, they were cowed by it, as their parents had been before them in many cases, and the spirit of servitude was bred in their very bones. And the worst of it was the mischief did not stop at the women—it never does. They set an example of spiritless submission, which their children were only too inclined to follow. Follow it too many of them did, and they and their children are reaping the consequences and paying the price of it today."

""Much knowledge of the right sort is a dangerous thing for the poor," might have been the motto put up over the door of the village school in my day. The less book-learning the labourer's lad got stuffed into him, the better for him and the safer for those above him, was what those in authority believed and acted up to. I daresay they made themselves think somehow or other—perhaps by not thinking—that they were doing their duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them, when they tried to numb his brain, as a preliminary to stunting his body later on, as stunt it they did, by forcing him to work like a beast of burden for a pittance."

"These gentry did not want him [the labourer's lad] to know; they did not want him to think; they only wanted him to work. To toil with the hand was what he was born into the world for, and they took precious good care to see that he did it from his youth upwards."

"The labourer's lad ... might learn his catechism; that, and things similar to it, was the right, proper, and suitable knowledge for such as he; he would be the more likely to stay contentedly in his place to the end of his working days."

"I had been journeying to and fro on the face of a fine broad bit of English earth, seeking what wages I could earn, what work I could get, and what facts I could devour. I found, I got, I devoured, every morsel which came in my way. I read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, as the prayer book says somewhere, all I could lay my hands or ears or eyes on. At the same time I was taking in a supply of facts which would not be digested—tough facts about the land and the labourer, that accumulated and lay within my mind, heavy as a lump of lead, and hard as a stone. No matter what I did, whether I was working with my hands or my head, that mass of indigestible facts was always in the background, worrying and bothering me. I got no peace; it worried and bothered me more and more as each year went by."

"I flung Churchgoing over early in life, from religious conviction. I did not believe in Church doctrine, as preached by the parson. I did not believe either in ordering myself "lowly and reverently to all my betters," because they were never able to tell me who my betters were. Those they called my betters I did not think my betters in any respect."

"Yes, my religious views are strong ones; but I don't want to talk much about them, for I hold that a man's religion should be more in his life than on his lips."

"This great squire—he was a very rich, influential man—sent for me to go down to his house when my work was over, in order to canvass me. I went down, and after some talk he said to me, "Do your Liberals find you employment?" "What has that to do with my vote?" I said. "I sell you my labour, but not my conscience ; that's not for sale.""

"The trodden worms, which had so long writhed under the iron heel of the oppressor, were turning at last. The smouldering fire of discontent was shooting out tongues of flame here and there. The sore stricken, who had brooded in sullen anger over their wrongs, were rising to strike in their turn."

"Some of the wars America fought were "simply for profit" and the sanctions it has imposed on certain countries have been as destructive as wars... The American people have virtually no say over when we go to war. These decisions are made in back rooms somewhere...The American people continue to be lied to about why we go to war, because again, one of the big reasons is simply for profit, and that's always been true to some extent, but now it is in a very naked way."

"[On the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan] From a strategic point of view, it has to be seen as a complete failure, and yet it went on for 20 years, why did it go on for 20 years? Because the defense industry companies that make the bombs, that make the planes, that make the vehicles, and also the private military contractors that now are fighting the wars in lieu of public military personnel, they made trillions of dollars as long as the war continued. So they didn't care if the war was ever won, the goal was for the war to simply continue forever... the point is not to win the war, but to make sure it never ends because you're going to keep making profits. The U.S. is not advancing human rights through its military interventions. It's not advancing humanitarianism. In fact, it's undermining it in a huge way."

"..in terms of the damage, sanctions and wars do deliver similar results... They do deliver death. They do deliver destruction of infrastructure, in the same way, that bombs and bullets do...If we can't just overthrow you, we will destroy you, and that's what the U.S. has done time and again. The sanctions... have also prevented Venezuela, which has the world's largest proven oil reserve, from maintaining its oil industry and maintaining its power grids... Sanction is war by another means...You're just denying the people the economic benefits of their industries, and also, again, you're denying them electricity, other infrastructure, again in much the same way that you could or would through actual military means...However, most Americans don't see sanctions as war and they don't know the consequences so they tolerate it more and think the sanctions are somehow a legitimate form of coercion...When you look at the results, they're the same or similar to actual military warfare..."

"Instead of taking responsibility for its own failings, the US government, and its compliant media, have taken to trying to scapegoat others... Russia is taking measures to confront the pandemic which the US has failed to do, particularly in the epicentre of the pandemic, Moscow... far exceeds the efforts of the US which has yet to announce plans for mass testing of individuals for the virus... The US has always prided itself at being number one in the world, and it continues to be number one in many categories – for example, the number of prisoners held in jails, the most mass shootings, and the most costly and ineffective healthcare system in the industrialised world. And now, the US has the dubious distinction of being number one in terms of the number of COVID-19 cases and the number of people killed by COVID-19"

"The US appears to be intentionally spreading chaos throughout strategic portions of the world, leaving virtually no independent state standing to protect their resources, especially oil, from Western exploitation. And, this goal is being achieved with resounding success, while also achieving the subsidiary goal of enriching the behemoth military-industrial complex."

"Former president Jimmy Carter recently made a profound and damning statement — the United States is the “most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Carter contrasted the United States with China, saying that China is building high-speed trains for its people while the United States is putting all of its resources into mass destruction. Where are high-speed trains in the United States, Carter appropriately wondered."

"As if to prove Carter’s assertion, Vice President Mike Pence told the most recent graduating class at West Point that it “is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life... You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.” Clearly referring to Venezuela, Pence continued, “Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.” In other words, Pence declared, war is inevitable, a certainty for this country."

"Nearly every day, we are bombarded with “news” about problems in Venezuela. And certainly, there are problems, such as food and medicine shortages and skyrocketing inflation. But there is something that is downplayed. What the press downplays, if it mentions it at all, is the very real and significant ways that US sanctions have contributed to these problems facing Venezuela and how these sanctions are making it nearly impossible for Venezuela to solve these problems. What the press also fails to mention is the even greater humanitarian issues confronting Venezuela’s next-door neighbor, Colombia – the US’ number one ally in the region and, quite bizarrely, the newest “global partner” of NATO from Latin America. And, the US is very much responsible for these issues as well, but in quite different ways. The fact is that, by a number of measures, Colombia has one of the worst human rights situations on earth, but you would never know this from watching the nightly news."

"I just returned from observing my fourth election in Venezuela in less than a year. Jimmy Carter has called Venezuela’s electoral system “the best in the world,” and what I witnessed was an inspiring process that guarantees one person, one vote, and includes multiple auditing procedures to ensure a free and fair election. I then came home to the United States to see the inevitable “news” coverage referring to Venezuela as a “dictatorship” and as a country in need of saving. This coverage not only ignores the reality of Venezuela, it ignores the fact that the U.S. is the greatest impediment to democracy in Venezuela, just as the U.S. has been an impediment to democracy throughout Latin America since the end of the 19th century. ...most of Venezuela’s poor are better off now than they were before the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro ... Before Chavez, the sprawling poor barrios which ring the cities were literally not on any government maps, and they had no utilities and no election centers. After Chavez...they were provided with utilities, health service, election stations and, most important, dignity. Chavez even started a world-class music program which has now provided 1 million underprivileged children with music education."

"Grateful for a government on their side and flouting U.S. extortion, the poor came out to vote in large numbers for Mr. Maduro.... These are the same poor, by the way, who came down from the mountains in 2002 to demand the return of Hugo Chavez to power after he was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup and kidnapped. But you never hear the voices of these poor people in the U.S. press. You never hear their side of the story, how they have benefitted from the Bolivarian Revolution and how desperately they do not want to go back to how things were before. While they have been given a voice in Venezuela, it remains muzzled in this country, and by a press which passes off pro-intervention and pro-war propaganda as journalism. It is no wonder the United States continues to careen into one disastrous military adventure after another."

"...I am simply baffled by what appears to be the prevailing view in this country... that Russia is somehow a threat to the United States....While I certainly understand it is in the interest of the military-industrial complex... to continue to vilify Russia in order to justify our already-bloated military spending... Russia was our ally in WWII in defeating the Nazis. And, contrary to what most Americans are taught, it was Russia that truly won that war in Europe, having lost over 20 million people to the war... 80 percent of the... Nazi['s] kills... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties USA lost ~400,000... certainly since 1960 and up to the present time, the U.S. has been much more brutal and blood-thirsty than Russia. It is not even a close call..."

"It is these U.S. wars, along with the U.S.’s over 800 military bases in more than 70 countries (Russia has bases in only one country (Syria) outside the former Soviet Union) which has led to the U.S. rightly being viewed in a poll of people in 65 countries as by far the greatest threat to world peace... President Trump’s expressed desire to stop antagonizing Russia and to work with it... should be welcomed as eminently reasonable and indeed necessary to avoid a possible nuclear confrontation. This should also be welcome by an American public whose resources have been drained by the greatest military-spending spree by far on the planet....Certainly, liberals, who at least once stood for peace and for greater social spending, should be in the lead in cheering such overtures instead of drumming up anti-Russian hatred which can only lead to more war and more impoverishment of our society."

"I certainly consume NPR news more than any other mainstream source, usually listening to it at least twice daily, though I abhor its coverage of international events. For these reasons, and with the reader’s forbearance, I have chosen to single NPR out to look at how we in the U.S. are collectively misled into ignoring or accepting our own government’s atrocities."

"This week, NPR has had some significant segments on the world’s refugee crisis, the worst since World War II. While Syria is always mentioned in these segments and gets much mention on NPR in general, there is barely a mention of the refugee crisis emanating from Yemen."

"And, this is a big omission, for as the International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has recently reported, Yemen had more people displaced last year due to conflict than any other country on earth. Thus, 2.2 million people were displaced by the armed conflict in Yemen in 2015, a figure which accounts for over 25% of the 8.6 million people displaced around the globe due to conflict last year. In addition to Yemen’s refugee crisis, the IDMC also notes that over 14 million Yemenis are on the verge of starvation as a result of the current conflict."

"...The only discussion I have found that NPR gave to Yemen in the context of the world refugee crisis was one, solitary piece back on May 11, and that piece was very telling in what it refused to say about the causes for Yemen’s mass displacement problem... The result of this disproportionate news coverage is that the listener could very well miss out entirely on any discussion of such issues as U.S.-backed crimes in Yemen. And, even if one does hear a segment or two on this matter, this issue will be easily forgotten and certainly not taken as seriously or treated as urgently as the misdeeds of the U.S.’s ostensible enemies, such as Syria’s Assad government, to which NPR gives nearly obsessive attention."

"In this way, we in the U.S., who may otherwise be moved to care about the fate of millions in Yemen whose lives are being upended with our own government’s complicity, are lulled into complacency, with our comfortable feeling about our nation’s inherent goodness fully intact. The result is that those in power in our ostensibly democratic government are given a free hand to aid and abet such atrocities as the near-total destruction of Yemen without the fear of any reprisal or approbation."

"If it weren’t bad enough that the U.S. has imposed an illegal embargo against Cuba for over 50 years, it has also tried to prevent those interested in learning about this embargo (more accurately termed a blockade because the U.S. aggressively enforces it against third countries to stop them from trading with the island) from reading Salim Lamrani’s new book, The Economic War Against Cuba.... author Salim Lamrani... explains that the U.S. war against post-revolutionary Cuba began on March 17, 1960 – one month before Cuba established relations with Moscow. Lamrani relates that this war, declared by President Eisenhower, was “built on several pillars: the cancellation of the Cuban sugar quota, an end to the deliveries of energy resources such as oil, the continuation of the arms embargo imposed in March 1958, the establishment of a campaign of terrorism and sabotage, and the organization of a paramilitary force designed to invade the island overthrow Fidel Castro.” This war would then be expanded by President Kennedy in 1962 to include the unprecedented economic blockade against Cuba – a blockade which continues to this day... it demonstrates what Noam Chomsky has argued numerous times before: that during the Cold War the U.S. intentionally pushed Third World countries guilty of declaring their independence from U.S. hegemony towards the Soviet Union so as to manufacture a convenient pretext for U.S. belligerence.... Indeed, the stated purpose of the blockade all along has been to inflict suffering on the Cuban people to achieve the U.S.’s political objective of regime – the sine a qua non of terrorism."

"Why does the U.S. government not lift the blockade against Cuba? I will answer: because it is afraid. It fears our example. It knows that if the blockade were lifted, Cuba’s economic and social development would be dizzying. It knows that we would demonstrate even more so than now, the possibilities of Cuban socialism, all the potential not yet fully deployed of a country without discrimination of any kind, with social justice and human rights for all citizens, and not just for the few. It is the government of a great and powerful empire, but it fears the example of this small insurgent island."

"We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur. And then we had violence by the Teamsters union with the goons that they hired at that time — and by the way, I have to say that the Teamsters union are OK today...They came at us with two by fours. We had a lot of violence, definitely. And then I was beaten up by the police San Francisco [in 1988], which also is shown in the film."

"We were in Arizona. We were organizing people in the community to come to support us. They had passed a law in Arizona that if you said, "boycott," you could go to prison for six months. And if you said "strike," you could go to prison. So we were trying to organize against that law. And I was speaking to a group of professionals in Arizona, to see if they could support us. And they said, "Oh, here in Arizona you can't do any of that. In Arizona no se puede — no you can't." And I said, "No, in Arizona sí se puede!" And when I went back to our meeting that we had every night there ... I gave that report to everybody and when I said, "Sí se puede," everybody started shouting, "Sí se puede! Sí se puede!" And so that became the slogan of our campaign in Arizona and now is the slogan for the immigrant rights movement, you know, on posters. We can do it. I can do it. Sí se puede."

"When I went to Mexico, they always talked about gays. These were people that had to be protected, not abused. And in the early farm worker movement we had a young group of gay men who worked in the packing shed. They were really, really strong activists. So growing up it never occurred to me that you should discriminate against people who are gay and lesbian. I personally always felt that any kind of discrimination is wrong. I've always supported gay rights and went to all the gay rights marches that they had."

"I never felt overlooked because I didn’t expect any kind of recognition. I think that’s very typical of women. I had been acculturated to be supportive, to be accommodating, to support men in the work they do. We never think of getting credit or recognition or even taking the power. We didn’t think it those terms. Of course I think that’s changing now and there’s a surge of women who are not only running for office, but getting elected. That could make an incredible amount of difference in our world. We will never have peace in the world until feminists take power."

"La Cucaracha speaks for the disenfranchised with humor and a cutting voice"

"The complete lack of protection and vulnerability of farm workers should not be minimized"

"The CSO nationally has taken the position of being against the further importation of labor from other countries."

"The question arises, do those governors who wish to be part of a Government subsidized program have a right to expect imported labor when they do not recruit and actually discourage local workers either by extremely low wages and adverse working conditions?"

"Would our govt by any stretch of the imagination furnish imported labor to any other occupation if the working conditions were anywhere near the condition of farm workers?"

"The present economic state of a large amount of our population is a disgrace to the American standard of living and our ideals. If we openly detest oppression as a nation, let us not condone it for just one group — the agricultural workers"

"Certainly, some responsibility should be placed back on the growers. It’s not fair that they should declare a labor shortage when they make it impossible for people to continue working for them."

"We have met with the governor and his secretaries before in a closed-door session. We are n o longer interested in listening to the excuses the governor has to give in defense of the growers, to his apologies for them not paying us decent wages or why the growers can not dignify the workers as individuals with the right to place the price on their own labor through collective bargaining. The governor maintains that the growers are in a competitive situation. Well, the farm workers are also. We must also compete with the standard of living to give our families their daily bread."

"The difference between 1959 and 1966 is highlighted by the peregrination, it is revolution-the farm workers have been organized."

"To the governor and the legislature of California we say: You cannot close your eyes and ears to our needs any longer, you cannot pretend that we do not exist, you cannot plead ignorance to our problem because we are here and we embody our needs for you. And we are not alone. We are accompanied by many friends. The religious leaders of the state, spearheaded by the California Migrant Ministry, the student groups and civil rights groups that make up the movement that has been successful in securing civil rights for Negroes in this country, right-thinking citizens, and our staunchest ally, organized labor, are all in the revolution of farm labor."

"The workers are on the rise. There will be strikes all over the state and throughout the country because Delano has shown what can be done, and the workers know now they are no longer alone."

"The social and economic revolution of the farm workers is well under way and will not be stopped until they receive equality."

"We are conscious today of the significance of our present quest. If this road we chart leads to the rights and reforms we demand, if it leads to just wages, humane working conditions, protection from the misuse of pesticides, and to the fundamental right of collective bargaining, if it changes the social order that relegates us to the bottom reaches of society, then in our wake will follow thousands of American farm workers. Our example will make them free. But if our road does not bring us to victory and social change, it will not be because our direction is mistaken or our resolve too weak, but only because our bodies are mortal and our journey hard. For we are in the midst of a great social movement, and we will not stop struggling 'til we die, or win!"

"We mean to have our peace, and to win it without violence, for it is violence we would overcome - the subtle spiritual and mental violence of oppression, the violence subhuman toil does to the human body."

"Grapes must remain an unenjoyed luxury for all as long as the barest human needs and basic human rights are still luxuries for farm workers. The grapes grow sweet and heavy on the vines, but they will have to wait while we reach out first for our freedom. The time is ripe for our liberation."

"We have had tremendous difficulties in trying to organize farmworkers. I don’t think, first of all, that we have to belabor the reason why farmworkers need a union. The horrible state in which farmworkers find themselves, faced with such extreme poverty and discrimination, has taught us that the only way we can change our situation is by organization of a union. I don’t believe that it can be done any other way. Certainly, we can’t depend on Government to do it, nor can we expect them to take the responsibility."

"UFWOC has undertaken an international boycott of all California-Arizona table grapes in order to gain union recognition for striking farmworkers. We did not take up the burden of the boycott willingly. It is expensive. It is a hardship on the farmworkers’ families who have left the small valley towns to travel across the country to boycott grapes. But, because of the table grapes growers’ refusal to bargain with their workers, the boycott is our major weapon and I might say a nonviolent weapon, and our last line of defense against the growers who use foreign labor to break our strikes. It is only through the pressure of the boycott that UFWOC has won contracts with major California wine grape growers."

"In spite of this type of antiunion activity, our boycott of California-Arizona table grapes has been successful. It is being successful for the simple reason that millions of Americans are supporting the grape workers strike by not buying table grapes."

"the U.S. Department of Defense table grape purchases have been very detrimental to our effort."

"the grapes of wrath are being converted into the grapes of war by the world’s richest government in order to stop farmworkers from waging a successful boycott and organizing campaign against grape growers."

"DOD table grape purchases are a national outrage. The history of our struggle against agribusiness is punctuated by the continued violations of health and safety codes by growers, including many table grape growers."

"If the Federal Government and the DOD is not concerned about the welfare of farmworkers, they must be concerned with protecting our servicemen from contamination and disease carried by grapes picked in fields without toilets or washstands."

"Focusing on other forms of crime in the fields, we would finally ask if the DOD buys table grapes from the numerous growers who daily violate State and Federal minimum wage and child labor laws, who employ illegal foreign labor, and who do not deduct social security payments from farmworkers’ wages?"

"The health care of farmworkers is almost nonexistent, and the rate of tuberculosis is 200 percent above the national average."

"The Department of Defense increasing purchases of table grapes is nothing short of a national outrage. It is an outrage to the millions of American taxpayers who are supporting the farmworkers’ struggle for justice by boycotting table grapes. How can any American believe that the U.S. Government is sincere in its efforts to eradicate poverty when the military uses its immense purchasing power to subvert the farmworkers’ nonviolent struggle for a decent, living wage and a better future?"

"Many farmworkers are members of minority groups. They are Filipino and Mexican and black Americans. These same minority people are on the frontlines of battle in Vietnam. It is a cruel and ironic slap in the face to these men who have left the fields to fulfill their military obligation to find increasing amounts of boycotted grapes in their mess kits."

"how can the Department of Defense explain or justify the intervention into the grape boycott, while we are supposedly fighting for freedom in Vietnam, and yet we are trying to destroy the farmworkers’ struggle for economic freedom m our own country."

"Our only weapon is the boycott. Just when our boycott is successful the U.S. military doubles its purchases of table grapes, creating a major obstacle to farmworker organizing and union recognition. The Department of Defense is obviously acting as a buyer of last resort for scab grapes and is, in effect, providing another form of Federal subsidy for antiunion growers who would destroy the efforts of the poor to build a union."

"the reason why we have to use the boycott is that our other weapons have been rendered ineffective."

"The police harassment against the strikers is unbelievable. We have to say that the police departments and sheriffs departments are in most cases direct agents of the employers."

"Cesar, a priest, a minister, and nine farmworkers were arrested for going into a camp in Borrego Springs, just to get the workers’ clothes after the workers were fired for union activity. They were arrested, stripped naked, and chained by the officers."

"We had this picket line; across the street from our picket line was a counterpicket line, which was being conducted by the reactionary groups in Delano. They were shouting things like “Go home, Spic,” and saying a lot of four-letter words to the women on the picket line. In fact, the officers went over and shook hands with them, and were conversing with them. The counterpickets opened up a tank of ammonia, and the strikers were getting gagged from ammonia."

"The police really work against the strikers. When a melon truck came to the picket line, the driver said that he didn’t want to go through the picket line, and the police ordered him through the picket line anyway. This is a common practice with the police."

"we go to the courts, and we try to get some relief from the courts, but there, again, we find that we have none. The courts, on the other hand, issue injunctions against the strikers."

"When we try to go to the Government for any kind of help, even for the enforcement of the sanitation laws. the Government turns its head."

"The growers are willing to spend tremendous amounts of money to try to represent the fact that farmworkers don’t want a union, by hiring people like Jose Mendoza, who took a picture with Senator Dirksen to try to prove that the farmworkers don’t want a union. They could very easily have paid the workers decent wages with the money they are spending. They have hired public relations firms to try to prove that we are a violent union, which I think everyone knows we are not."

"Mr. Allen Grant, one of Reagan’s top men in agriculture in California, is talking about violence. They are trying to create a climate of fear and violence...We think that this is a deliberate effort to bring violence into the farm labor scene which we know has not been there."

"There have been incidents of violence against the union, many of them, and it has taken all that Cesar can do and the rest of the people can do to keep workers nonviolent."

"the growers don’t have any heart at all. They have all the economic power, the power in hiring and firing. There have been entire crews of workers fired because one person in the crew said something favorable about the union. There are entire crews of workers who were fired because they had Kennedy stickers on the bumpers of their cars."

"The people in the union have to take a tremendous amount of harassment, such as the materials of State Senator Hugh Burns’ Committee on Un-American Activities in California. The man who made up that committee report was sitting in his home in Three Rivers. He never once went to Delano. Yet, he wrote a report which has been used all over the country in which he tried to redbait the members of the union. Among other mistruths, he says 3 years of Cesar Chavez’ life are missing, and suggests he was getting some kind of subversive training. Those are the 3 years he spent in the U.S. Navy. That should be put in the record."

"It is no accident that farm workers have an average life span of forty-nine years of age."

"Now when we first tried to get this plan passed, many of the growers were very upset about it. They said you have to go through an insurance company. We are very lucky that César Chávez is a grammar-school dropout and he hasn't been educated to think that insurance is a way of life. He said he wasn't going to give any of his money to an insurance company, any of the workers' money."

"once we got the medical plan, we found that that really didn't stop the abuses, because the doctors were still not giving the workers good health care. So the next step was then to build a clinic. So the workers started to build their clinics."

"I think our clinics are unique in that we call them people's clinics. The people built them, we raised the money for them. There is no government money at all in our clinics. And the kind of work that the clinic does is primarily, first of all, educational. And we don't have Mickey-Mouse clinics. Our clinics are really beautiful. I mean there is good medicine in our clinics. The workers are taught about nutrition, to combat diabetes, which is very common among farm workers. They are given prenatal instruction to have healthier babies and healthier mothers. They are taught about inoculations. You know, it's really a funny experience to go into the waiting room of our clinic, and you will see a group of farm workers sitting around talking. And one worker will say to the other one, "Well, I came in to get a shot." And the other worker will say, "Why, you shouldn't get a shot if you just have a cold, because you know you can build up an immunity to penicillin." And these are farm workers teaching each other about health."

"Now, some of you might wonder how come I have ten children, right? One of the main reasons is because I want to have my own picket line."

"Now another great thing about our clinics is that we train farm workers as lab assistants, lab technicians, nurse's aides, we train farm workers to do the administration of the clinic."

"what we're doing is we're not only just giving good health care-fantastic health care-but we are training our own people to be able to do the health work and to administer the program."

"you can't help poor people and be comfortable. You know, the two things are just not compatible. If you want to really give good health care to poor people you've got to be prepared to be a little uncomfortable and to put a little bit of sacrifice behind it"

"I'm going to talk a little bit about the pesticides, because... we raised the issue many years ago and a lot of people have been concerned about [it], but it was sort of a no-no. Nobody could talk about it openly."

"Do you know that we were amazed to find out you can get all kinds of information about what's harmful to a pet, but you can't get any information about what's harmful to a farm worker?"

"when we were negotiating contracts-I was in charge of the contract negotiations for the union-we called up a friend of ours who worked with the Los Angeles County Health (Department), and he gave us some information on one of the organic phosphates that we wanted to know. Well, one of the growers who was in on the negotiations tried to get him fired for giving us that information. And this man worked for the Los Angeles County Health Department. But this shows you and I'm going to talk about that a little bit more about the kind of repression that I know a lot of you are faced [with] when you do try to make real changes or when you try to get into those controversial areas where you have conflicts of power."

"In our contracts, we banned DDT, Aldrin, Endrin, 2,4-D, 2,4-T, Tep and many of the other-Monitor 4-many of these other pesticides. We banned these pesticides in our contracts starting from 1970. It is interesting that just recently, the government has come out against Aldrin and Endrin. And the Farm Workers Union banned these pesticides many years ago. We find that the only way that you can be sure that the so-called laws are administered, that the so-called laws are carried out, is when you have somebody right there on the ranch, a steward, a ranch committee, somebody that can't get fired from the job, somebody that has the protection of a union contract to make sure that these things are carried out."

"It is sad for us to report this, but the clock has been turned back and California agriculture, with the exception of a handful of contracts that we still hold, we now have the labor contractor, the crew leader system back again, we now have child labor back again."

"We now have a return to pesticides-forty thousand acres of lettuce were poisoned with Monitor 4. This lettuce was shipped to the market. In California, it was sold as shredded lettuce in Safeway stores. That's nice to have Monitor 4 with your shredded salad, huh? And we have a return back to the archaic system that we had, [a] primitive system that existed before and still exists, where we don't have United Farm Workers contracts. People working out there in those fields without a toilet, people working out there in those fields without any hand-washing facilities, without any cold drinking water, without any kind of first-aid or safety precautions. All of this has come back again."

"The California Rural Legal Assistance just did a spot survey of about twenty ranches in the Salinas and the Delano area just a couple of months ago. And [in] every single instance they found either no toilet or a dirty toilet, and you can imagine. And this is something consumers don't understand that that lettuce, those grapes are being picked right there in that field. If there's a dirty toilet, it's right next to the produce, and that produce is picked and packed in that field and shipped directly to your store."

"The Teamsters have brought back illegal aliens. And now when I say this, I want to tell what's happening to these people. Today, President Ford is meeting with Echeverría in Mexico. And they're going to talk about a bracero program, which is a slave program for workers, for Mexican workers."

"They want to bring in one million Mexicans from Mexico. We've already got close to a million people here illegally. And how are they being treated? They are paying three hundred dollars each to come over the border. They are being put in housing where you have thirty or forty people in a room without any kind of a sanitary facility."

"I think that the one thing that we've learned in our union is that you don't wait. You just get out and you start doing things."

"We don't have to talk about a charitable outlook. You know, people come in with a lot of money and they give people charity. We've got to talk about ways to make people self-sufficient in terms of their medical health. Because when they go in there with charity and then they pull out, then they leave the people worse off than they ever were before. We've got to use government money to help people. And I don't think that this is so radical. Lord knows that the growers are getting billions of dollars not to grow cotton, all kinds of supports and subsidies. Well, if any money is given for medical health, it should stay in that community."

"We've got to take the side of the people that are being oppressed. And if we can't do that, then we're not doing our job, because the people in that minority community or in that community are not going to have any faith in the medical program that is in there if you can't take their side."

"Health, like food, has got to be to cure people, to make people well. It can't be for profit. Food should be sacred to feed people, not for profit. Health has got to be a right for every person and not a privilege. You would be sad to know that many farm workers-before we had our clinics-had never been to a doctor."

"Within the next year they are spending millions of dollars to destroy the United Farm Workers. They are spending millions of dollars to tell what a bad administrator César Chávez is. Have you seen these articles in the New York Times and Time magazine? They say César Chávez is a bad administrator. What they really mean is he is the wrong color. And if he were a good administrator.... Can you imagine five clinics, a medical plan, a credit union, a retirement center for farm workers, fantastic increases in wages, the removal of the labor contract system-all of this César did in a few short years. What would he do if he was a good administrator?"

"And you will really see-when we talk about the principle of nonviolence, you will see it in action. Because you will see farm workers getting beaten and killed, and you will see that the farm workers do not fight back with violence. We are using a nonviolent action of the boycott, so we really need your help in that."

"We're going to say first "Viva la Causa," which is the cause of labor, peace, and health, "Viva la justicia," which is justice, and then we will say "Viva Chávez," for César, may God give him long life. And then we'll say "down with fear," abajo, and "down with let-tuce and grapes," abajo, and "down with Gallo wine." Because Gallo is on the boycott too"

"We did that at the impeachment rally in Washington, D.C., and we said, "Down with Nixon! Abajo!" and it worked."

"Can we live in a world of brotherhood and peace without disease and fear and oppression? Si se puede"

"Who is a revolutionary woman? A revolutionary woman wants change, not mere cosmetic change but change to the status quo, and she is willing to sacrifice to make this happen. We have some extraordinary examples: Sojourner Truth, Las Adelitas, Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dorothy Day, Malala Yousafzai, Coretta Scott King, and others."

"Historically, stories of revolutionary women have been minimized or even left untold."

"I drew strength from Rebecca Flores, who led farmworkers in organizing for better pay and working conditions in Texas in the 1960s. Women like Rebecca are rocks. She and others were so strong, and willing to go to jail, and take their children with them to the picket line-and still do everything that was expected of them at home. They are all remarkable women."

"Organizing is about trying to get people to lose their fear so they know that they have power, and letting them know they don't have to go it alone-they can form a group and then a movement. And then they can bring about change. When I speak to young women I try to remind them that we will never have peace in the world until women take power."

"Women have to become strong internally and psychologically; learning how to organize is like exercising. If your muscles get sore, you are exercising and getting stronger. If you feel butterflies in your stomach, those feelings shouldn't tell you to stop, because it's okay to be nervous. You keep on going, because the more we engage, the more we can offer and the stronger we become."

"Once you get involved with helping others, you start to work on issues that are larger than you are. All of your personal issues diminish because you don't have the time or energy to focus on them, and many of those personal problems will solve themselves. When you are working with others on conflicts that are bigger than you, you can see that you, along with other people, do have the power to make changes. When you are part of the change, you open yourself to a whole different world. Women don't always want to take credit for the work they do because they don't want to seem conceited. I tell young women, "Channel your inner Oprah Winfrey." I tell them to stand up and say, "This was my idea, my project, my creation." And be proud of it."

"When I was a child in New Mexico, people were still talking about the revolution. And it had an influence on me because I learned that poor people could change the government. Coretta Scott King said that women have to get involved, take power, and create peace in the world. But it may not happen all at once. Remember the song lyrics, "No hay que llegar primero, pero hay que saber llegar." Be a revolutionary woman-you don't have to get there first, just get there."

"Some of the women who led the movement in its early days were Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, Alicia Escalante with the Welfare Rights Organization, and Gracia Molina de Pick and Anna Nieto-Gómez with feminist activities. Women politicians like Virginia Muzquiz of Crystal City, Texas, Mariana Hernández, and Grace Davies put Chicanas in the political forum. Like these women, there have been hundreds of others who, in the late 1960s and 1970s, have proved that Chicanas have come of age politically in this country."

""The social and economic revolution of the farmworkers is well underway and it will not be stopped until we receive equality," key NFWA organizer Dolores Huerta told a crowd in 1966. "The farmworkers are moving. Nothing is going to stop them!" She was right. The Delano strike ended in 1970 with significant wins for the farmworkers: a substantial pay increase, higher safety standards, and union rights. It also ushered in a new era of farm-worker organizing when the AWOC merged with the National Farm Workers Association to create a new organization, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC), which would ultimately become today's United Farm Workers."

"Our demands were met, but it was hard bargaining. At one point, one of the Christian Brothers' lawyers said, "Well, sister, it sounds to me like you're asking for the moon for these people." Dolores Huerta came back, "Brother, I'm not asking for the moon for the farmworkers. All we want is just a little ray of sunshine for them!" Oh, that sounded beautiful!"

"The life of Dolores Huerta reveals a woman who is not only a fearless and committed organizer for farmworker rights but also takes a stand for justice wherever needed."

"I have yet to encounter any formal acknowledgment from the Obama campaign that Dolores Huerta first conceived the phrase in Spanish as a rallying cry for the United Farm Workers."

"A legendary activist, Dolores Huerta has a long history of fighting for social change, workers' rights, and civil justice. Unlike many other awardees, she was rightfully awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, among many other recognitions."

"Dolores Huerta is a fearless fighter for social justice. In 1962, she taught school in Stockton, California while being a political activist with the CSO and a mother of six with a seventh on the way. "When I left my teaching job to go start organizing farm workers, a lot of people thought I had just gone completely bananas"...A tough, savvy negotiator, Huerta skillfully manipulated her positionality as a mother at the bargaining table."

"Activists like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were also fighting in the 1960s and '70s for Latinx families to have safer environments. Their activism shouldn't have been considered separate from the Earth Day movement, but it was. Not only did their work contribute to the overall movement, but their efforts helped lead to the ban on the use of harmful pesticides that impacted farmworker safety and increased awareness of environmental justice within the Latinx community. However, because of racism, xenophobia (fear of immigrants), and classism, these activists were excluded."

"One of the most prevalent ideological mantras of Western capitalism is that the market should rule. But as the latest health and economic crises demonstrate, capitalists soon forget their worship of the market when times get tough. They scream for government money, and plenty of it. It turns out that “the market” is fine when it comes to whipping workers to accept lower wages, but when it comes to lower profits, the market can go hang."

"Every student with the misfortune to have studied economics at school or university will know that “the market” is the god before which we must all kneel. Markets bring s and producers together to ensure an equilibrium of , the textbooks tell us. We may all be individuals each pursuing our own private interests, but this selfish endeavour miraculously results in an optimum outcome for all. You don’t even have to step inside a classroom to have received this lesson. It’s rammed home in normal times in every newspaper, in every news bulletin on the TV, in every politician’s speech. Just listen to them. Governments can’t expand spending on Newstart because “the markets” won’t allow it. Governments shouldn’t ramp up public housing because that will throw property markets into a spin. Competition should be opened between universities because a market in education will sift out the bad providers from the good. The champions of the market, if challenged to explain how it is that markets consistently result in supplies of goods lurching from shortages to gluts, point to the economic dysfunction of the old Soviet Union as proof that if “planning” replaces the market, a much bigger disaster ensues. It doesn’t take an Einstein to see what rubbish this is. The last thing any capitalist wants is “free competition”, because that might squeeze their profits. Just look at how the supermarkets have destroyed small shops or how any new industry that emerges is soon dominated by three or four companies globally."

"is urging the federal government to provide wage subsidies to workers, equivalent in value to Newstart to all businesses experiencing a sharp downturn. It is also asking the government to provide concessional loans of up to half a million dollars, with 80 percent of the debt guaranteed by government, as well as wage subsidies to cover sick leave entitlements. Nothing but corporate welfare of a kind that they have long decried when applied to workers themselves. In the short term, working class households will get some benefits from this cash splash. In Australia welfare beneficiaries will be getting $750 in their bank accounts. in In the United States it is likely that Americans will receiving close to $1,000. But this is just short term relief to get the economy moving. The long term benefits will go to the capitalist class in the form of and other financial concessions. The current crisis demonstrates not only that all the ideological nonsense about the virtues of the free market is quickly thrown overboard when capitalist interests are threatened, but also that the idea that governments are essentially powerless in the face of the markets is rubbish. Governments are not helpless victims who cannot do anything in the face of “economic reality”. In the normal course of events, when we demand things like better welfare, health care or education, governments tell us that it isn’t possible."

"Most of the time we’re told that “the economy” can’t afford a decent for workers – higher minimum wages, liveable Newstart allowances, a massively expanded program to get people out of the private rental market, free university education. Budgets have to balance. Businesses have to be competitive. Taxes have to be kept low. And now, all of a sudden, we’re finding that the economy can, apparently, afford things that we have long demanded. Governments around the world are now laying out money on things that just weeks ago they would have attacked as unaffordable."

"It’s not that governments have suddenly discovered a big pot of gold in the basement of the . They say that they are taking these measures to both protect and to save the economy. But it’s obvious which takes priority. The new measures constitute the largest bailout bonanza in world history, carried out through state-administered transfers of public wealth and current and future debt to billionaires and big business: socialisation of losses, privatisation of profits. The outcome will be to further transfer, consolidate and concentrate wealth, just as has occurred since the GFC. While there is discussion about small handouts, nothing serious is being proposed to halt the mass layoffs now gathering steam."

"In pretty much every spending package, subsidies to business, government loans and tax concessions account for two-thirds or more of the funds outlaid. Things that directly benefit workers – the big majority of the population – account for only one-third of the money."

"It turns out that these things, too, can be done. So, in an economic emergency, few of the usual rules apply. Governments can marshal the resources and can threaten the narrow interests of private businesses. Hardcore libertarians despise these measures as rampant socialism. From their perspective, they’re right: the very existence of such programs is condemnation of the free market capitalist model that they promote. But they are best seen only as another approach to the management of the capitalist economy. The fact that governments across the are now prepared to spend trillions of dollar to save the from collapse only confirms that the world economy cannot be left safely in the hands of “the market”. And, the situation clearly confirms that when the capitalist class and governments deem it necessary to save their system, lots of measures they once denounced as “unaffordable”, not permitted by the condition of “the economy”, are actually affordable and permitted. Governments can act when required. The ideological justifications of yesterday are revealed as threadbare. But nor are government interventions of this nature geared towards the interests of the working class, only the interests of the bosses."

"Education is considered the peculiar business of women; perhaps for that very reason it is one of the worst-paid business in the world; the salaries of men who engage in it are double those of women, who do better work and more of it."

"The Industrial Workers of the World is a new form of labor organization, one that stands for the industrial working class and that class alone."

"The working class of this country look out upon a situation where there are natural resources present to supply the entire world with plenty; they look out upon an industrial situation which has invented machinery capable of getting these natural resources with but little labor expenditure into finished commodities of necessities or luxuries. Yet in spite of that and in spite of the productiveness made possible by men who labor and the natural abundance of the earth itself, in spite of that, we have people starving in this country and five million idle; over a million child laborers in the United States; seventy thousand children in New York City and fifty thousand in Chicago that go to school without a breakfast in the morning. We have a conditionin which the majority of the people are a propertyless class, are a class that own no land, that control none of that productive machinery, that control absolutely nothing in this land of the free and home of the brave but their own labor power; their own abilities to work."

"Today the working class have only conditions that they themselves are in a position to remedy, they have only false conditions, not nature’s making, but man’s making, that they themselves can overthrow"

"All we have is our ability to labor and the capitalist class have not that one commodity; they have the factories, they have the land, they have the railroad but they have not the labor power, the power of wealth producing."

"Gompers, the Bosses’ Friend."

"We have only our organization, fellow workers; they have capital; they have the power of the government, the slugging community of the capitalist class; they have the power of the state; they have the power of international capital — and we have but our power of organization."

"I feel that many of our critics are people who stayed at home in bed while we were doing the hard work of the strike."

"What is a labor victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society is to have achieved a temporary gain and not a lasting victory. For workers to go back with a class-conscious spirit, with an organized and a determined attitude toward society means that even if they have made no economic gain they the possibility of gaining in the future. In other words, a labor victory must be economic must be revolutionizing. Otherwise it is not complete."

"a labor victory must be twofold, but if it can only be one it is better to gain in spirit than to gain economic advantage."

"Our work was to educate and stimulate. Education is not a conversion, it is a process. One speech to a body of workers does not overcome their prejudices of a lifetime. We had prejudices on the national issues, prejudices between crafts, prejudices between competing men and women, all these to overcome."

"Stimulation, in a strike, means to make that strike and through it the class struggle their religion; to make them forget all about the fact that it's for a few cents or a few hours, but to make them feel it is a "religious duty" for them to win that strike. Those two things constituted our work, to create in them a feeling of solidarity and a feeling of class-consciousness"

"I don't say that violence should not be used, but where there is no call for it, there is no reason why we should resort to it."

"Physical violence is dramatic. It's especially dramatic when you talk about it and don't resort to it. But actual violence is an old-fashioned method of conducting a strike. And mass action, paralyzing all industry, is a new-fashioned and a much more feared method of conducting a strike. That does not mean that violence shouldn't be used in self-defense. Everybody believes in violence for self-defense. Strikers don't need to be told that. But the actual fact is that in spite of our theory that the way to win a strike is to put your hands in your pocket and refuse to work..."

"If on Sunday, however, you let those people stay at home, sit around the stove without any fire in it, sit down at the table where there isn't very much food, see the feet of the children with shoes getting thin, and the bodies of the children where the clothes are getting ragged, they begin to think in terms of "myself" and lose that spirit of the mass and the realization that all are suffering as they are suffering. You have got to keep them busy every day in the week, and particularly on Sunday, in order to keep that spirit from going down to zero. I believe that's one reason why ministers have sermons on Sunday, so that people don't get a chance to think how bad their conditions are the rest of the week. Anyhow, it's a very necessary thing in a strike."

"In fact that is a necessary process in every strike, to keep the people busy all the time, to keep them active, working, fighting soldiers in the ranks. And this is the agitator's work,-to plan and suggest activity, diverse, but concentrated on the strike. That's the reason why the I.W.W. has these great mass meetings, women's meetings, children's meetings; why we have mass picketing and mass funerals. And out of all this continuous mass activity we are able to create that feeling on the part of the workers, "One for all and all for one." We are able to make them realize that an injury to one is an injury to all, we are able to bring them to the point where they will have relief and not strike benefits, to the point where they will go to jail and refuse fines, and go hundreds of them together."

"This is the agitator's work, this continual activity. And we lay awake many nights trying to think of something more we could give them to do. I remember one night in Lawrence none of us slept. The strike spirit was in danger of waning for lack of action. And I remember Bill Haywood said finally, "Let's get a picket line out in Essex street. Get every striker to put a little red ribbon on and walk up and down and show that the strike is not broken." A few days later the suggestion was carried out, and when they got out of their homes and saw this great body that they were, they had renewed strength and renewed energy which carried them along for many weeks more in the strike."

"People learn to do by doing. We haven't a military body in a strike, a body to which you can say "Do this" and "Do that" and "Do the other thing" and they obey unfailingly. Democracy means mistakes, lots of them, mistake after mistake. But it also means experience and that there will be no repetition of those mistakes."

"The employers have a full view of your army. You have no view of their army and can only guess at their condition."

"Shall it be 'America First' or 'Workers of the World, Unite!'""

"Let those who own the country, who are howling for and profiting by preparedness, fight to defend their property."

"I despise the rule of Rockefeller and Morgan as much as that of King or Kaiser, and am as outraged by Ludlow and Calumet as by Belgium."

"The majority of our workers are foreigners, one or two generations removed, and with their European home-ties and American environment, internationalism becomes the logical patriotism of a heterogeneous population."

"The train on which I write rushes by factories where murder instruments are made for gold."

"It obliterates all differences of race, creed, color, and nationality. It celebrates the brotherhood of all workers everywhere. It crosses all national boundaries, it transcends all language barriers, it ignores all religious differences. It makes sharp and clear, around the world, the impassable chasm between all workers and all exploiters. It is the day when the class struggle in its most militant significance is reaffirmed by every conscious worker."

"This day is to the enlightened worker an augury of a new world, a classless world, a peaceful world, a world without poverty or misery. It is the glowing promise of socialism, the real brotherhood of mankind. On this day in 1941 the wise words of Lenin; “Life will assert itself. The Communists must know that the future at any rate is theirs,” will light up the lonely jail cells of Browder and Thaelman and countless others. Lowhummed snatches of revolutionary song will be heard in concentration camps. On the sea, in military barracks, in the forced labor of factory or mill, the hearts of the driven workers will beat to unison with those far away who parade joyously behind gleaming red banners, to stirring music on Moscow’s Red Square. “Do your damnedest to us!” they mutter between clenched teeth, the conscripts in European trenches, the prisoners in Franco’s dungeons, in Hitler’s hell holes, in Mussolini’s prisons; “Your days are numbered. You can’t stop the final victory of the people!""

"May Day was baptized in the blood of American workers."

""Let the voice of the people be heard!" cried Parsons, as the noose tightened around his neck. It has been, it ever Will be on May Day, brave martyred hero of yesterday! This year the newly organized, victorious strikers of the International Harvester Works in Chicago will hallow your names on May first."

"Rosa Luxemburg, brave woman Socialist of Germany, who was later brutally murdered by the militarists, sounded the alarm against a World War in 1913. She called upon the workers to make May Day a mighty demonstration for peace and socialism. “Workers of the world, Unite!” became the insistent cry on May Day. Every vital issue was pressed, more and more militant slogans raised in each country and internationally."

"Only workers are forbidden to be internationalists. It’s perfectly proper for J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford; for the bankers, the munitions trusts, the chemical companies. It’s proper for scientists, stamp collectors, athletic associations, musicians, spiritualists, people who raise bees, to be internationalist – but not workers. Only the clasped hands of the workers across the boundaries are struck down in every country. It will pass for all anthropologist to say in abstruse language, “There is but one race – the human race!” But let a worker say, “Brother, fellow worker, comrade” – and there’s hell to pay. He should be sent back from where he came from! He should be deprived of his citizenship; he should lose his job; he should be jailed! If a Christ-like voice should challenge them: “But what about loving thy neighbor as thyself?” the wild man from Texas would roar: “Who said that? He’s a Red, subversive, a trouble maker!” Let us not be dismayed in the slightest by all this frenzy. Let us remember the cool words of Lenin: "Acting thus the bourgeoisie acts as did all classes condemned to death by history." Every beautiful May Day of solidarity, triumph, and hope is another reminder to us to take “the long view” – the Bolshevik view of passing events. The road ahead may be rougher but it is shorter than the road behind."

"On May Day we salute the Soviet Union – land of socialism – land of peace and plenty, the great ideal of labor since time immemorial, the cooperative commonwealth of all who toil."

"Let the war mongers shout; let the profit-mad rave. “We shall not be moved!” retort these millions of American workers on May Day. There is nothing to be despondent about; nothing to be weary about – not so long as we are organizing and fighting. Not so long as we are holding what we have won in an iron grip; are moving forward, getting more. Not so long as there is unswerving resistance to the Roosevelt-Willkie war party among eighty-six percent of the American people. Organize. Fight. Press Forward – that’s the spirit of America’s May Day in 1941."

"Organize and fight, to stay out of war! Against all imperialism and fascism, including American!"

"peace and socialism is in the hearts, in the minds, on the lips of millions around the world May First, 1941. The “sun of tomorrow” shines upon us. The future is ours."

"I and none of my comrades are guilty of any conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the United States government by force and violence. Silence might be construed as defeatism when the truth is that I am so serene in our consciousness of innocence of any crimes, that I can be imprisoned but I cannot be corrected, reformed or changed. My body can be incarcerated but my thoughts will remain free and unaffected. All human history has demonstrated that ideas, thoughts, cannot be put in prison. They can only be met in the forum of public discussion."

"The political, industrial and social conditions under capitalism which created our ideas remain. They will produce similar ideas in the minds of countless others and further strengthen them in ours. Never did prison affect resolute people who live and work and die if necessary by their ideas. We Communists are such people. I have faith in the ultimate justice of the American people once the fog of lies, hysteria, prejudice and, worst of all, fear is swept away. It is a terrible thing to see one's country in the grip of fear-needless, stupid, foolish fear; fear of imaginary enemies, fear of our allies and friends; fear of the accusing fingers of stool pigeons, fear of losing one's job or one's citizenship or one's place in a community. The whole governmental bureaucracy, wasting billions of dollars, boasting, bragging, bullying, is whistling in the dark of fear, trying to make the whole world afraid of us."

"It is from a small handful of frightened rich that this contagion has spread the men of the trusts, who never loved their country more than their stocks and bonds, whose patriotism is always on a percentage basis, who would rule and exploit and use violence against not only their fellow countrymen but the human race. They would plunge the world into a sea of blood by atomic warfare in order to maintain their own mean and mercenary rule, their way of life, and foist it upon other people who want none of it. Great as the danger looms, I have faith that fascism will never come to pass in our country. I am proud of the role that our Party has played in signalizing that danger since 1935."

"Somewhere and soon the Smith Act will go into the discard as did the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1800, the Fugitive Slave Laws of the sixties, the Criminal Syndicalist Laws of the 1920s."

"The fog engulfing courtrooms, middle class juries and the press will lift among the masses of plain people, the ones who never get on federal juries because their appearance and manner doesn't satisfy a hard-boiled political appointee who splits his infinitives, doubles his negatives and toadies to the prosperous."

"A people's movement is arising in our country like a strong, fresh prairie wind against repressive legislation, loyalty oaths, congressional investigations, witch-hunts, political trials and the like."

"I asked you a question on Friday, Your Honor, which I now repeat: If the Communist Party is not illegal, its membership and officership is not illegal, if advocating socialism is not illegal, if advocating a day-to-day program of "good deeds," as the government cynically calls it, is not illegal, what in all conscience is illegal here? Of what are we guilty?"

"In all my long life. ... I never expected that I would go to jail for books, and not even whole books but scraps and pieces, and if I return to my normal life of the last forty-seven years, of working and speaking on unionism, democratic rights, the rights of the Negro people and of women, on peace and against fascism and war, and on socialism, what happens then, Your Honor?"

"Your Honor, all the material property I possess, as far as a fine is concerned, are books accumulated since I first bought a paper-covered copy of Tom Paine's Common Sense at the age of sixteen. They are good books-poetry, drama, history, political economy, fiction, philosophy, art, music, travel, literature. Marx and Engels are there beside Shakespeare, Shaw, Emerson, Hegel, Mark Twain; Lenin and Stalin are there beside Thoreau, Jefferson, the Beards, the Webbs, Hugo, Hardy and many others...There is force and violence on those shelves but not where the government looked for it. It is in Irish history-Connelly, O'Casey and others telling of the long and bloody struggle against British rule. It is in American labor history, in Colorado, West Virginia, Homestead, South Chicago and on the Embarcadero of San Francisco. It is in American history-the Revolution, the wars against the American Indians, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War. It is in the struggles of the Negro people. It is in the Bible, too-which is on my shelf, Your Honor-violence against the Jewish Tribes, and the old prophets, against Jesus and his Disciples, and the early Christian martyrs."

"Force and violence come from the ruling class and not from the people."

"An unforgettable tragedy of our childhood was the burning of the excursion boat, the General Slocum, in 1904."

"The book (Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy) first popularized the idea of socialism in this country. It was a biting criticism of capitalism, which hit home to many Americans and with which they agreed in the days of rising monopolies."

"His (Peter Kropotkin's) appeal to the youth of the poor struck home to me personally, as if he were speaking to us there in our shabby poverty-stricken Bronx flat: "Must you drag on the same weary existence as your father and mother for thirty or forty years? Must you toil your life long to procure for others all the pleasures of well-being, of knowledge, of art, and keep for yourself only the eternal anxiety as to whether you can get a bit of bread?""

"Another book I recall, which caused an immediate change in my life, was The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. After reading it I forthwith became a vegetarian!"

"During that period (around 1906) I had studied two more books, which helped to catapult me into socialist activities. One was the Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft; the other was Women and Socialism by August Bebel."

"The unionization of women, even in occupations like the needle trades where they predominated, had scarcely yet begun. Equal opportunities, equal pay, and the right to be organized, were the crying needs of women wage-earners then and unfortunately these demands remain with us today. Many union leaders, like Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, did not consider women workers organizable or dependable. "They only work for pin mon-ey was the usual complaint. An outside job was considered by the woman worker herself as a temporary necessary evil-a stop-gap between her father's home and her husband's home. Fathers and husbands collected women's wages, sometimes right at the company office. Women did not have a legal right to their own earnings. There was no consideration for the special needs and problems of working mothers, though they were numerous and pressing. Even the clothes of women hampered them-the long skirts that touched the ground, the big unwieldy sleeves, the enormous hats. You were still "a girl" if your skirt was above your shoe tops."

"The struggle for the right of women to vote was nationwide and growing. It had started with the first Equal Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was addressed by Frederick Douglass, the great Negro leader. The suffragists had been ridiculed, assaulted by mobs, refused halls, arrested for attempting to vote, disowned by their families. By 1904, groups of working women, especially Socialist women, were banding together to join in the demand for the vote. Two years later, International Women's Day was born on the East Side of New York, at the initiative of these women demonstrating for suffrage. It spread around the world and is universally celebrated today, while here it is deprecated as "a foreign holiday.""

"The suffrage movement was growing more militant and figures like Maude Malone appeared. She organized the Harlem Equal Rights League in 1905. She interrupted Theodore Roosevelt at a meeting of 3,000 people to demand where he stood on woman suffrage. She walked up and down Broadway, at the same time we were holding our street meetings there, with signs front and back, like a sandwich man, demanding "Votes for Women," and lost her post as a librarian in consequence."

"Suffragist speakers on streetcorners were invariably told: "Go home and wash your dishes," or, regardless of their age: "Who's taking care of your children?" Others said: "Imagine a pregnant woman running for office," or "How could women serve on juries and be locked up with men jurors?""

"There was a prevalent concept that "woman's work" was confined to the domestic scene. "Woman's place is in the home," was the cry. Women were constantly accused of taking "men's jobs.""

"I said then and am still convinced that the full opportunity for women to become free and equal citizens with access to all spheres of human endeavor cannot come under capitalism, although many demands have been won by organized struggle."

""Big" Bill Haywood came out of jail a hero-a fitting symbol of the solidarity of labor. He was described by one reporter as, "big in body, in brain, and in courage." He made a triumphal tour of the United States and Canada, under the auspices of the Socialist Party and the labor organizations which had defended him. He was an intensely down-to-earth dramatic speaker. I remember hearing him say: "I'm a two-gun man from the West, you know," and while the audience waited breathlessly, he pulled his union card from one pocket and his Socialist card from the other."

"In 1907, During the campaign to free Moyer, Haywood and Pettibone, I was invited to speak at a meeting, in Newark, New Jersey, arranged by the Socialist Labor Party...This meeting is an unforgettable event in my life because it was here I first met James Connolly, the Irish Socialist speaker, writer and labor organizer who gave his life for Irish freedom nine years later in the Easter Week Uprising of 1916 in Dublin...He was short, rather stout, a plain-looking man with a large black moustache, a very high forehead and dark sad eyes, a man who rarely smiled. A scholar and an excellent writer, his speech was marred for American audiences by his thick, North of Ireland accent, with a Scotch burr from his long residence in Glasgow...Connolly worked for the IWW and had an office at Cooper Square. He was a splendid organizer, as his later work for the Irish Transport Workers, with James Larkin, demonstrated...He felt keenly that not enough understanding and sympathy was shown by American Socialists for the cause of Ireland's national liberation, that the Irish workers here were too readily abandoned by the Socialists as "reactionaries" and that there was not sufficient effort made to bring the message of socialism to the Irish-American workers...He published a monthly magazine, The Harp. Many poems from his own pen appeared. It was a pathetic sight to see him standing, poorly clad, at the door of Cooper Union or some other East Side hall, selling his little paper. None of the prosperous professional Irish, who shouted their admiration for him after his death, lent him a helping hand at that time. Jim Connolly was anathema to them because he was a "So'-cialist." He had no false pride and encouraged others to do these Jimmy Higgins tasks by setting an example. At the street meetings he persuaded those who had no experience in speaking to "chair the meeting" as a method of training them. Connolly had a rare skill, born of vast knowledge, in approaching the Irish workers. He spoke the truth sharply and forcefully when necessary"

"Its (the IWW's) advent was an important event and it blazed a trail, like a great comet across the American labor scene, from 1905 to the early 1920s. It made labor history, and left an indelible impress on the labor movement. The IWW was a militant, fighting, working class union. The employing class soon recognized this and gave battle from its birth. The Iww identified itself with all the pressing immediate needs of the poorest, the most exploited, the most oppressed workers. It "fanned the flames" of their discontent. It led them in heroic struggles, some of which it organized. Others jumped in to give leadership after the strike had started. The memorable accusation against Jesus, "He stirreth up the people!" fitted the IWW. It set out to organize the unorganized, unskilled foreign-born workers in the mass production industries of the East and the unorganized migratory workers of the West, who were largely American born and employed in maritime, lumber, agriculture, mining and construction work. In the East and South, it reached workers in textile, rubber, coal maritime and lumber and in a variety of smaller industries. In New York City, for instance, there were IWW locals in clothing, textile, shoe, cigar, rattan, piano, brass and hotels. In the West there was a Cowboys' and Broncho Busters' local of the IWW. The entire working class of the fabulous town of Goldfield, Nevada, was organized in 1906 by Vincent St. John into the IWW. The Italian laborers at the U.S. Army's West Point were once organized in the IWW. I recall speaking to them there, about 1911. I joined in 1906…"

"At this (IWW) convention I was thrilled to meet Mrs. Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, who had been executed 20 years before in the yard of the Cook County Jail in the heart of Chicago. While he was hanged she was held a prisoner in the Clark Street Station House, not far from where we were then meeting... I remember Mrs. Parsons speaking warmly to the young people, warning us of the seriousness of the struggles ahead that could lead to jail and death before victory was won. For years she traveled from city to city, knocking on the doors of local unions and telling the story of the Chicago trial. Her husband had said: "Clear our names!" and she made this her lifelong mission."

"I never met a man I admired more than Vincent St. John...He was damned as a dynamiter, a gunman, a dangerous agitator; he entered camps with a price on his head, used his mother's name-Magee-and organized hundreds of men, often single-handed. He was one of the greatest labor organizers this country ever produced...He was short and slight in build, though broad-shouldered, quick and graceful in his movements, quiet, self-contained, modest, but his keenness of mind and wit outmatched any opponent...In a real fight, Saint's mild blue eyes became steely and cold. He fought only on principle and then as mercilessly as the enemies of the workers did. His loyalty to the working class was boundless. For eight years, from 1907 to 1915, he struggled with lack of funds and the uneven development of the IWW, whose strength he never exaggerated."

"The Greatest woman agitator of our time was Mother Jones. Arrested, deported, held in custody by the militia, hunted and threatened by police and gunmen-she carried on fearlessly for 60 years. I first saw her in the summer of 1908, speaking at a Bronx open-air meeting. She was giving the "city folks" hell. Why weren't we helping the miners of the West? Why weren't we backing up the Mexican people against Diaz? We were "white-livered rabbits who never put our feet on Mother Earth," she said. Her description of the bullpen, where the miners were herded by federal troops during a Western miners' strike, and of the bloodshed and suffering was so vivid that, being slightly dizzy from standing so long, I fainted. She stopped in the middle of a fiery appeal. "Get the poor child some water!" she said, and went on with her speech. I was terribly embarrassed."

"The next winter I saw Mother Jones again in Chicago at a meeting in Hull House of the Rudewitz Committee, to which I was a delegate from Local 85, IWW. I heard her hot angry defiant words against the deportation of a young Jewish worker on the vile pretext of "ritual murder." (Jane Addams and others saved him from certain death by their spirited defense). Mother Jones was dressed in an old-fashioned black silk basque, with lace around her neck, a long full skirt and a little bonnet, trimmed with flowers. She never changed her style of dress throughout her lifetime. She may sound like Whistler's Mother but this old lady was neither calm nor still, breathing fearless agitation wherever she went... She was put out of hotels. Families who housed her in company towns were dispossessed. She spoke in open fields when halls were closed. She waded through Kelly Creek, West Virginia, to organize miners on the other side. Tried for violating an injunction, she called the judge a "scab" and proved it to him. She organized "women's armies" to chase scabs-with mops, brooms and dishpans. "God! It's the old mother with her wild women!" the bosses would groan. In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, when a group of women pickets with babies were arrested and sentenced to 30 days, she advised them: "Sing to the babies all night long!" The women sang their way out of jail in a few days to the relief of the sleepless town. She was asked at Congressional hearing: "Where is your home?" and she answered: "Sometimes I'm in Washington, then in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Colorado, Minnesota. My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong. In 1903 she led a group of child workers from the textile mills in the Kensington district of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to confront President Theodore Roosevelt with proof of child labor. In Colorado, after the Ludlow massacre in 1914, she led a protest parade up to the governor's office. In West Virginia, time after time, she led delegations to see various governors and "gave them hell," as she said...When she was a very old lady, she warned the rank and file against leaders who put their own interests ahead of labor. Until her death she stoutly affirmed her one great faith: "The future is in labor's strong, rough hands!"... She inspired me a great deal when I first heard her in New York and Chicago in those early days, though I confess I was afraid of her sharp tongue. But when I reminded her of the meeting in the Bronx and told her I had lost my baby, she was very sympathetic and kind. Her harshness was for bosses, scabs and crooked labor leaders."

"After war was declared a mounting wave of hysteria and mob violence swept the country. It was not shared by the vast majority of American people who became increasingly intimidated. Printed signs were tacked up in public places: "Obey the law and keep your mouth shut!" signed by Attorney General Gregory. The victims of mob violence were varied-Christian ministers, Negro and white, advocates of peace on religious, moral or political grounds; Socialists, IWWS, members of the Non-Partisan League, which was strong among farmers in the Middle West; friends of Irish freedom, and others. Some individuals, both men and women, who made chance remarks on war, conscription or the sale of bonds were tarred and feathered, beaten sometimes to insensibility, forced to kiss the flag, driven out of town, forced to buy bonds, threatened with lynching."

"This spirit of mob violence was one of the most dangerous and shameful manifestations in our country, all in the name of making the world "Safe for Democracy.""

"Kate Richards O'Hare, as I have described, was a prominent and extremely effective Socialist speaker."

"Whatever her subsequent political shortcomings may have been, progressive women were very proud of her at that time."

"I had been a devoted IWW, but my activities in the Workers Defense Union also brought me into contact with Socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, Communists, suffragists, pacifists, liberals, Indians, Irish nationalists and official representatives of both the Soviet and Irish Republics."

"There were practically no women in the Italian movement-anarchist or socialist. Whatever homes I went into with Carlo the women were always in the background, cooking in the kitchen, and seldom even sitting down to eat with the men."

"Woodrow Wilson spoke fluently and freely on all subjects as a "liberal," but his sorry deeds belied his words. "Self-determination" and "make the world safe for democracy" were the most vulnerable. Demonstrations and delegations of advocates of peace, "Hands off Russia," freedom for Ireland, amnesty for political prisoners and last, but not least, "Votes for Women," confronted him at every turn. His administration was faced with the great steel strike of 1919-20. His plans to join the League of Nations were defeated by the Senate. Members of his administration resigned in protest over various issues-a secretary of state over war, a collector of the New York port over suffrage, the issue that perhaps plagued him most."

"World War I made many radical changes in the lives of American women. It brought to an end the "lady" type. The labor shortage was great, the need of trained workers acute. At the end of 1918, nearly three million women were employed in food, textile and war industries. Occupations hitherto regarded as "men's work" were open to woman. They worked as conductors on street cars. For the first time they were trained as radio operators. Women volunteered for the motor corps in the army and wore uniforms for the first time. "Farmerettes," wearing bloomers, went from the cities to farms. Women did relief work, sold war bonds, organized canteens for the armed forces, joined nursing units. Thousands emerged from their homes into public life. Many remained in industry, either from necessity or choice, when the war ended."

"Brave women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been the early pioneers, facing abuse and ridicule, violence and even arrests for attempting to vote. Later, women like Dr. Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt headed the National American Women's Suffrage Association, which struggled against "the lethargy of women and the opposition of men." But by 1916 a younger, bolder and more militant group emerged, which was dissatisfied with the slower process of winning suffrage, state by state, and fought for a constitutional amendment. They organized the Women's Party in 1916, which planned to mobilize the women's vote in all suffrage states only for parties and candidates who would support national suffrage. That year a group of wealthy suffragists financed and toured in a Suffrage Special. They did not campaign directly for the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, but their slogan was anti-Wilson: "Vote against Wilson! He Kept Us Out of Suffrage!" Many voted for Eugene V. Debs, then in prison."

"The Women's Party picketed almost continuously from January 1917 until March 19, 1919. They picketed the White House and Capitol, held military parades, return receptions for Wilson after his trips to Europe and receptions when he departed. They picketed him in Washington, Boston and New York. Only the Irish had attempted such tactics. Later, a Children's Crusade for Amnesty picketed President Harding. Suffrage banners were addressed to foreign visitors and President Wilson's speeches on "freedom" and "democracy" at home and abroad were burned by the suffragists in a "watch-fire of freedom" urn."

"Once the right to vote was achieved, women did not remain united as women, but divided into the existing political parties and other organizations as their views and interests dictated. The one common denominator of peace could, I believe, unite women once again, with a few exceptions."

"I have no recollection of the term "united front" in the 1920s. It came into use considerably later. But the extent to which the radical and progressive movements operated then on such a principle is very apparent. Men and women who spoke out for suffrage would also sign appeals for financial aid to the IWW and appear on Irish and amnesty delegations and were in the peace movement. There were no hard and fast lines drawn between one good freedom cause and another and no such fears of reprisal as there are today. People were not afraid they would hurt one cause by identifying themselves with another. I marvel today at how wide and diffuse were my contacts and friendships in those days."

"I was still an IWW in my convictions and hesitated to join a political party, although the Russian Revolution and association with the suffragists and the Communists were modifying my views considera-bly"

"When the news of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 burst upon the world, American workers learned for the first time of a man named Vladimir Lenin-through this great event in human history, the beginning of socialism. We also learned some new words, which became part of the language in no time, "Bolshevik" and "Soviet," among them. Even those of us who were left-Socialists and IWWs knew practically nothing of the Russian Socialist movement, except that we had great sympathy with its long, agonizing struggle to overthrow the tsar's cruel and bloody regime. Overnight, "Bolshevik" became a household word, even to those who did not know it merely meant "majority," and referred to a political division in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. "I am a Bolshevik from the crown of my head to the tip of my toes!" said Debs. "Damned Bolsheviks!" employers shouted at militant workers and union organizers. All strikers were "Bolsheviks," of course."

"the IWW...those are the initials for the Industrial Workers of the World which used to be called the "I Won't Work" which was extremely incongruous because actually the people who belonged to the organization were in the basic, most difficult hard-working industries of our country. To call it the workers of the World was rather an ambitious name as actually it never did go beyond the confines of the United States and it grew out of the desire of American workers to continue the traditions and the form of organization of the old Knights of Labor."

"(The IWW} was not only the inheritor of many of the traditions of the 1880's but personalities who were identified with the 1880's were present at the early conventions of the IWW. The names may not be known to you unless you are students of labor history but included were such figures as Eugene Debs, Daniel DeLeon and Mrs. Lucy Parsons"

"There were many free speech fights...their techniques were something like the Freedom Riders of today. They would send out telegrams, and; I am explaining, you understand, I am not agitating, they would send out telegrams something like this, and say: "Foot Loose Wobblies, come at once, defend the Bill of Rights", and they would come on top of the trains and beneath the train, and on the sides, in the box cars and every way that you-didn't have to pay fare, and by the hundreds literally they would land in these communities, to the horror and consternation of the authorities and they would stand up on platforms or soap box and they would read part of the Constitution of the United States or the Bill of Rights...those were the free-speech fights that are very well known and very characteristic of the IWW in the western part of the country."

"The AFL was the skilled workers' organization and its form and methods and principles were not the same as the IWW. The IWW believed in the class struggle. They didn't believe in the brotherhood of capital and labour and they believed that these unorganized foreign-born mass production workers should be organized in an industrial union - all together in one union and not split up into a dozen or more organizations."

"what precipitated the big strike in 1912, [which was known as the Bread & Roses Strike] which is one of the great historical struggles in our country, was a political act on the-part of the State."

"Bill Haywood decided that we had to speak English so these people could understand it. And I will never forget the lesson he gave to us. I was very young at that time, I was 22, and he said, now listen here, you speak to these workers, these miners in the same kind of English that their children who are in the primary school would speak to them and they would understand that. Well, that's not easy -- to speak to them in primary school English. Well, we learned how to do it. The only trouble is with me it kind of stuck and when I go to speak to a college audience I feel at a little bit of a disadvantage because I don't know all the big words. The small words, the short words, were the ones I was drilled in by William Haywood."

"I will give you an example of how he used to speak. We had to explain to them why we wanted them to be in the IWW, one big union and not in the AFL. Well, he would say, [showing his hand fingers spread] the American Federation of Labor, the AFL is like that, each one separated, but the IWW is like that, [he would make a fist] and they would all say, three cheers for the IWW and he had made his point."

"At the same time that this Lawrence strike was going on, there was a great strike of timber workers in Louisiana, also under the auspices of the IWW, and I single that out, although we had strikes all over the place, we were just hopping all over from one place to another, because there for the first time the discrimination, the segregation rules were-broken down. William D. Haywood went down there to speak and he said every striker sits wherever he wants to sit. Segregation in this hall of the IWW and the Negro and white workers, I think for the first time in American labor history, broke that taboo and met together."

"if there is really one thing that I am proud of in my long labor history, it is that while he was in prison, before he was executed, Joe Hill wrote a song for me dedicated to me, that was called, the "Rebel Girl" and that song, I hope you will do it here some time, it may not be the best of words or the best of music, but it came from the heart and it was certainly so treasured."

"in the period of World War I a tremendous onslaught was made against the IWW, the Socialists, all Progressives in our country. There was a very strong peace movement at that time. It was not like World War II, which was an anti-Fascist war."

"I really should tell you something about where the IWW stood in relation to other organizations because the picture probably is not yet too clear. Well, it was not a craft union; it was an industrial union and it was opposed to the AFL, bitterly so. It did not stand for any of the things that the AFL stood for, a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, a brotherhood of capital and labor, none of those things. It was strong for fighting the boss every time we got a chance and so some of the things sound very strange, but it was the truth. They did not believe in making any contracts. They believed that as long as you were organized, you could hold the office to what it said it was going to do. But a contract, a piece of paper held you and so they didn't make any contracts. How, their attitudes towards what we call the white collar workers was not good. Not good at all, because they just considered that they didn't belong to the working class. You had to wear overalls, be muscular, you had to work. If you were a pen pusher, you were not a worker, according to the IWW. Now, this also applied to students. In other words, what they would call today a very sectarian organization. But to some extent the students of that day were responsible because the students had no sympathy with the labor movement. In fact, when there were strikes it was always possible, as I saw down in a hotel, at a strike in New York City, it was always possible to get students to go in and take the place of the workers. Well, times have changed, I am very glad to say."

"the IWW also differed from the AFL in that it stood for Socialism. Although it differed from the Socialist Party in that it rejected political parties and political action, and this might have been a reflection of is composition...they had this very peculiar attitude that the real struggle was in the industries, in the shops, what they call at the point of production."

"it almost seems to me that we lived in a kind of wilderness when I tell you what didn't exist. There were no radios, no TV, no movies, very little of advertising as we know it today, there were no plastics, no artificial fabrics, no airplanes."

"I am talking about 1919, 1920, that Mr. J. Edgar Hoover first put in his appearance. He was put in charge of these raids and all reports of all over the country were to be made to him, and they were called "G" men. The FBI came into existence a little later - in 1924. So he has had this kingdom for 38 years now, regardless of administrations and it is not actually under Civil Service or under the control of the Department of Justice."

"the hatred against the IWW was so great -that editorials in papers would say, "They should be arrested at dawn and shot before breakfast, without a trial.""

"today the methods to have political auxiliaries to unions is a much better and a much more effective thing. But we tried to put everything in one pot and it simply didn't work. We were unable, and we were pretty arrogant. We were young and had the right answer to everything. We didn't want to work with the AFL, we didn't want to work with the Socialist Party, we didn't want to work with anybody else. And naturally, when the Communist Party came along, they considered that a real party because here was a much more revolutionary organization than the old Socialist Party, and they didn't agree either with the concept of the Russian Revolution although they were glad that it was a revolution that overthrew the Czar and they didn't stand with Kerensky but there was certain, you might almost call it, primitive concepts of a revolution. To the IWW a revolution meant that you take over the factories, and the shops and the mills, and the mines and the fields and you chase the bosses out, just chase them out, and that was the end of it. That was the revolution."

"the IWW's positive side, certainly it was militant, it was courageous, that it fitted the period, that it belonged to the pioneer days and that it fought for the interests of the poorest, the most lonely, the most despised, those that the AFL couldn't organize, the foreign born, the women, and as the Negroes began coming into industry, the Negroes."

"we certainly never heard of such a thing and we never thought it would be possible, that there would be social security or unemployment insurance. Those were the results of the 30's. The great struggle hat came out after the decline of the IWW. Also, we never heard of vacations with pay. We never heard of vacations, let alone vacations with pay. We never heard of seniority as it is understood today. There were no pensions for retirement of workers. There were no welfare funds of unions. There were no health centers of unions, and there were no trade union schools such as there are today. All of these things have come with the unions that have come into existence since the period of the IWW."

"There is less violence against labor today, but there are more legal restrictions. There are more attempts to invade the rights of labor by repressive legislation and by all kinds of restrictions."

"have we made progress? Oh, we certainly have, we certainly have, in spite of all the difficulties, in spite of all the problems, the labor movement has made tremendous progress. There is a new role and a new outlook for youth today. One of the pamphlets that I read years ago, I don't know if any of you have ever heard of it, is Peter Kropotkin's Appeal to the Young and it was a beautiful appeal to the young to carry forward their responsibility to make this world a better world to live in. Now, I feel in our way we did our best but the time comes when you know, they say old age isn't a disease but I say it is. The time comes when you have to slow down and lay off and give the benefit of your experience to a younger generation, if they want it."

"Club member Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, famed organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, and later a leading member of the U.S. Communist party referred to her membership in Heterodoxy as "an experience of unbroken delight!" She added, "It has been a glimpse of the women of the future, big spirited, intellectually alert, devoid of the old 'femininity' which has been replaced by a wonderful freemasonry of women.""

"During my days of solitary confinement, after Margaret had persuaded the warden that I should have access to reading material, I spent a few sessions alone in the library. Within a short time I had combed the entire place, turning up only a few books that held the slightest interest: A book on the Chinese Revolution by Edgar Snow, the autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, and a book on communism written by an astonishingly objective little-known author. After my discovery of these books, my thoughts kept wandering back to their enigmatic presence. And suddenly it hit me: they had probably been read by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Claudia Jones, or one of the other Communist leaders who had been persecuted under the Smith Act during the McCarthy era. I myself had been told that if I received any books during my time there, I would have to donate them to the library-which was a pleasure, considering the state of that so-called place of learning. As I turned the pages of those books, I felt honored to be following in the tradition of some of this country's most outstanding heroines: Communist women leaders, especially the Black Communist Claudia Jones."

"The gap left by the arrest of Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti was immediately filled by Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Haywood's years of experience in the labour struggle, his determination and tact, made him a distinctive power in the Lawrence situation. On the other hand, Elizabeth's youth, charm, and eloquence easily won everybody's heart. The names of the two and their reputation gained for the strike country-wide publicity and support. I had known and admired Elizabeth since I had first heard her, years before, at an open-air gathering. She could not have been more than fourteen years of age at the time, with a beautiful face and figure and a voice vibrant with earnestness. She made a strong impression on me. Later I used to see her in the company of her father at my lectures. She was a fascinating picture with her black hair, large blue eyes, and lovely complexion...The splendid free-speech fight she had made in Spokane with other members of the I.W.W., and the persecution she had endured, brought Elizabeth Gurley Flynn very near to me. And when I heard she was ill, after the birth of her child, I felt great sympathy for this young rebel, one of the first American women revolutionists of proletarian background. My interest in her had served to increase my efforts in raising funds, not only for the Spokane fight, but for Elizabeth's own use during her first months of young motherhood. Since she had returned to New York we were often thrown together, in meetings and in more intimate ways. Elizabeth was not an anarchist, but neither was she fanatical or antagonistic, as were some of her comrades who had emerged from the Socialist Labor Party. She was accepted in our circles as one of our own, and I loved her as a friend."

"Flynn succeeded Gene as Party chairman. She was the first woman to be elected to that post. She had been a compromise candidate; Ben Davis was also campaigning for it and many people in the Party, including a good section of the Black leadership, were terrified by that prospect. Liz seemed the best alternative. Elizabeth enjoyed a very positive reputation in the Party. When she rejoined in the 1930s (she had been a member briefly and secretly in the 1920s), she moved directly into the top leadership. She didn't need to adopt that fierce demeanor that was required of other women who were battling their way up in the hierarchy. She was genuinely concerned about people in a way that most Party leaders were not. Whenever I went to New York I would try to visit her down in the Chelsea Hotel, where she lived. She was worth listening to for her political views and because she had very acute opinions of her coworkers in the national office and wasn't afraid to express them. She adored Gene Dennis but was always very critical of Foster. Evidently the antagonism went back many, many years. She wasn't taken in by all the glamour of his heroic past as a union organizer. After all, she had her own credentials which were at least as impressive as his. She was very effective in the role of a public face for the Party, as well as a link with the historic past of the Wobblies, the "Bread and Roses" strike in Lawrence, and the free speech fight in Spokane. She had a remarkable ability to speak in plain language before a large audience and establish immediate rapport. That was something that the old-time agitators in the Party had, people like Flynn and Foster, and Clarence Hathaway, much more than my own generation. But over time I developed very mixed feelings about Liz. In Party meetings she was always very careful not to say anything unacceptable to Gus or to the Soviet Union. She was worried about me and the bad end to which my politics would lead me."

"I share the faith of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Pettis Perry and all my co–defendants that America’s working people, Negro and white, will surely rise, not like sheep, but with vigilance towards their liberty, to assure that peace will win and that the decadent Smith Act, which contravenes the Bill of Rights, will be swept from the scene of history."

"I'll see you in young shooting sprouts/That sneer at weeds - age-gnarled in doubt/Of users who defile in epithet,/A life well-lived in service, built from strife...I'll think of you forever/And how your spirit rings/Because your faith leaps as a flame/Sweet nurture to all things"

"Dorothy Day regarded Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, for instance, who had joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1937, as "my sister in the deep sense of the word." Flynn, Day wrote, "always did what the laity is nowadays urged to do. She felt a responsibility to do all in her power in defense of the poor, to protect them gainst injustice and destitution" (Long Loneliness, 145-146)."

"One of my favorite historical labor figures, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the famed rebel girl whom Joe Hill sang about and a formidable union organizer in her own right, hit the nail on the head way back in the nineteenth century while discussing the need to keep political and social justice demands on the same level as so-called bread-and-butter economic issues. In her words: "What is a labour victory? I maintain that it is a twofold thing. Workers must gain economic advantage, but they must also gain revolutionary spirit, in order to achieve a complete victory. For workers to gain a few cents more a day, a few minutes less a day, and go back to work with the same psychology, the same attitude toward society, is to achieve a temporary gain and not a lasting victory.""

"In Flynn's words, it was "a day without parallel in American labor history... a reign of terror prevailed in Lawrence which literally shook America.""

"According to traditional Marxist theory housewives were problematical as to their class consciousness; they often were unreliable allies of radical men. They were usually grouped with peasants and intellectuals as a potentially conservative drag line on the forward march of proletarian men. Women's equality was a stated goal of all Marxist movements, but the way women's issues were treated, one got the clear message that what women did was marginal to the struggle, unless they excelled at doing it the way men did. The great and celebrated heroines-La Pasionaria, Mother Bloor, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Clara Lemlich did not organize housewives; they organized female factory workers, women's auxiliaries or men."

"During my tours for the war prisoners I went back to New York periodically to report to the organization and consult with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and others in this work. So began my long years of association with that fighting daughter of a long line of fighting Irish ancestors. At sixteen she was already active in the I.W.W., and Joe Hill put her in a Wobbly song, "The Rebel Girl." While she did not join with us in the early days of the Communist Party, she worked with us closely. Finally, after an interlude of ten years of illness in Portland, Oregon, she came back to New York and joined the Party, and is today one of our finest speakers, and one of the most honored and beloved members of our National Executive Committee. The story of Elizabeth's life is interwoven with many of the great labor struggles of this country. Workers everywhere know her lovely ringing voice and glowing spirit and great fighting heart. Calumet-Pas-saic-Paterson-Lawrence-all these places knew her on the picket line and the platform. Today, bearing a heavy burden of sorrow from the sudden death of her only son, Fred, she fights on for a world in which mothers will not have to lose their sons needlessly in battles for their masters."

"The woman for whom I had the greatest admiration was, of course, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn."

"She began this amazing record by getting arrested on a street corner when she was fifteen. Her father was arrested with her. He never has been arrested since. It was only the beginning for her. The judge inquired, "Do you expect to convert people to socialism by talking on Broadway?" She looked up at him and replied gravely, "Indeed I do." The judge sighed deeply in pity. "Dismissed," he said."

"she joined the I.W.W., which was then in its golden age. Full of idealism, it swept the Northwest. They had free-speech fights everywhere. The authorities arrested them and more came. They crammed the jails to bursting. "In one town," said Elizabeth, "there were so many in jail that they let them out during the day. We outside had to feed them. Every night they went back to jail. At last the wobblies decided that when the jail opened they would not come out. People came from far and near to see the wobblies who wouldn't leave jail." This part of her life, organizing and fighting the fights of the migratory workers of the West, is the part of her life that she likes most."

"Defense work was no new thing to her, and from 1918 until recently her major activities have been getting political prisoners out of jail. And since 1921 she has concentrated on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. There has been constant work, there have been arrests, there has been her preoccupation with comrades in jail for their opinions. She comes out of her first twenty years in the labor movement undimmed and undiscouraged."

"If I had no other pleasant memories to recall than those of the beautiful women I have met who were active in progressive or radical affairs, life would still be worth while. I fell in love with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn when as a young girl she aroused uncounted thousands with her clear, ringing voice to the cause of social revolt."

"One gets a sense of the energy and fire of some of those turn-of-the-century radicals by looking at the police record of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn"

"We felt like that instead of those nationals sending in white organizers that would go to 256, we wanted them to go where the white workers were."

"They can say anything they want to about it, but we carried it out democratically. Ain't going to say we didn't make mistakes. Hell, I made mistakes, you have, and they did. But some of the mistakes they made, we talked about them."

"They knew I'm going to fight you for...what I feel like is for the workers."

"Having a union made a lot of difference."

"The women were the backbone of that union."

"They were afraid of black people. They just couldn't stand to see, their nerves would not allow them to meet with ten black people without an attorney, whole lots of us."

"We'd go to singing and he'd say, "Velma, how can you sing? They're working the hell out of you." And I said, "I'm singing the hell out of you."...it made you forget how hard you were being worked and the treatment you were going through. Singing is something that is good for the soul, and we used to do lots of it. We had to."

"When we once got the union, I think people began to realize, I've got a crutch, and they began to tell some things. See, some things would happen to people that maybe they were afraid. Self-preservation, I've got to work. I'm head of a household. I'm feeding children. Even though you ain't making but $9.35. That $9.35 meant survival. And once we got the union, they felt like, well, I've got some protection. I've got somebody that really cares. They didn't feel like it was a little group here and there. It was 10,000 on check-off, and 10,000 members makes you feel good, you know. You're surrounded. And the grievances became more."

"My training, I guess, came from coming from a mother and working in the church and in the school. I'd always participated in PTAs, and we had organizations. And I was head of an organization in the church. I got lots of my training from my pastor too."

"Shiloh was the only church that we could go into."

"In the beginning of the union we set up, because we had poor people, they didn't have enough. And you couldn't go to the welfare or nothing if you were black. If you were black and had a clean house, you went to the welfare, you didn't get nothing. They'd tell you if you had a little old raggedy radio set, sell the radio and use that money. So we had clothes banks and things, and churches would contribute to that."

"I surround myself with people. I know my limitations. And I'll surround myself with people that I can designate to be sure it's carried out...And if you can't do that, you're not an organizer."

"We had one voting place in Winston-Salem, Forsyth County, for blacks, Fairview School. And when we started our drive to get people to register, actually pulled it to its height, it was at that school. That's where the policeman came out there, in gear, to arrest everyone of us."

"They called us niggers, communists, everything in the book."

"And when we went down there, they told us, "You niggers can register but you're not going to have a nigger. We're not ready for a nigger to be elected officer." They didn't say Negroes, a nigger. And we sat there and looked at them."

"Paul Robeson, they came and told us he had been to Russia and what communism was."

"They went on the air and labeled the union top and all the union leadership as communist that night at midnight (before an election)."

"Many in the audience were tired of resolutions being passed but never acted upon."

"What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist the right to life as a rich woman has it, the right to life, and the sun, and music, and art....The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too."

"I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today: the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the fire-proof structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 143 of us are burned to death. We have tried you, citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers and daughters and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us. Public officials have only words of warning to us-warning that we must be intensely orderly and must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back when we rise into the conditions that make life bearable. I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement."

"When I was about five years of age my parents brought me to this country and we settled in New York. So my earliest recollections are of living in a crowded street among the East Side Jews, for we also are Jews."

"I was doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines-150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their machines. It was not so bad for me, as I had only paid a little of what I owed. The bosses got $500,000 insurance, so I heard, but they never gave the girls a cent to help them bear their losses. I think they might have given them $10, anyway."

"After I had been working as a cap maker for three years it began to dawn on me that we girls needed an organization. The men had organized already, and had gained some advantages, but the bosses had lost nothing, as they took it out on us."

"Then came a big strike. . . . About 100 girls went out. The result was a victory, which netted us-I mean the girls-$2 increase in our wages on the average. All the time our union was progressing very nicely. There were lectures to make us understand what trades unionism is and our real position in the labor movement. I read upon the subject and grew more and more interested, and after a time I became a member of the National Board, and had duties and responsibilities that kept me busy after my day's work was done. But all was not lovely by any means. . . . Soon notices... were hung in the various shops: “After the 26th of December, 1904, this shop will be run on the open shop system, the bosses having the right to engage and discharge employees as they see fit, whether the latter are union or nonunion.” Of course, we knew that this meant an attack on the union. The bosses intended gradually to get rid of us, employing in our place child labor and raw immigrant girls who would work for next to nothing."

"Women have proved in the late strike that they can be faithful to an organization and to each other. The men give us the credit of winning the strike. . ."

"The girls and women by their meetings and discussions come to understand and sympathize with each other, and more and more easily they act together.."

"we must stand together to resist, for we will get what we can take-just that and no more."

"There are many factories and trades where women stand all day where there are even no chairs, though those are called for by the law. There are many kinds of work at which girls could sit instead of stand if the pressure of work were not so intense, if they were not speeded up to the highest point of endurance."

"what an absurd law, to require employees to testify against their employer before action can be taken."

"When you go to a factory as I have done, and see young girls in the first flush of womanhood bending their backs to the machine, or sitting crouched upon a chair putting stitches into men's hats; or standing with the stench of dead beasts in their nostrils in packing houses, putting sausages into sausage skins, standing on slime-soaked floors with wet feet; or when you see them in the laundries in steam filled rooms because there is no adequate hood over the machine, you marvel at the courage, or buoyancy of youth. And then when you see middle aged women with their drawn faces, still at the same kind of work they were doing as young girls, with evidently the life, buoyancy and hope crushed out; or when you see the old, old women who should be tenderly treated because of their age, we marvel at the tragedy of life which held such promise and gave so little fulfillment."

"But today there is no hope for any woman who is forced to labor to have any respite even in her remotest old age. It is said, of course, that her children should take care of her; but what of the woman who does not marry, or who, having married, has lost her children and husband? Or of the old mother who is too proud to be a burden upon her young son who himself is supporting his family with difficulty?"

"There are thousands of girls and men working in the textile mills of this state under conditions which are almost a guarantee for tuberculosis"

"No amount of money is saved to break strikes and every possible means are used to continue to pay young women such wages upon which it is almost impossible for them to live."

"The great menace to society from home work is not so much a danger of transmitting disease, although this is constant, as it is the menace which results from exploited childhood and womanhood. It is impossible to guard children from being exploited in their homes."

"we could report one story after another showing how the children are forced to work. Of course the moment an opportunity offers for them to enter the factory they do it, their vitality and vigor already sapped. Is this an intelligent way we have of dealing with the citizens of our Republic?"

"We think we have a wonderful law in New York limiting the hours to eight, but I would like to ask you if it is common sense for democracy to allow its children to wrap caramels at $3.50 a week instead of training and educating them in industrial schools so that when they are mature they may be intelligent citizens, and when they are married become intelligent mothers."

"We have in recent years experienced a tremendous awakening who have risen up and struck against conditions."

"Bread and butter, shelter and clothes and adequate food are absolutely necessary to people, and more than that we need time for other things, of the spirit and mind-and, what is more, we need money for it, and when they talk of minimum wages and say that a girl can live on six or eight dollars a week they take nothing into account except bare necessities; and when they say that eight or nine hours a day is reasonable they take nothing into account except work, and they do not for one moment consider the needs of the mind and spirit and the right of every individual to have leisure for the development of the higher qualities of man."

"I want to say to you suffragists, especially to some of you who are saying that the working women are not taking part in this great suffrage movement, and that they are not coming to the fore as they should, how can they? Working nine, ten hours a day and then on their return home attending to their home duties, where is the time for them to take active part in even a suffrage movement? Many times they have to stay in the factory and work through the evening, they cannot make engagements without the reservation that they can break them if work calls. And when these women join their union, attend their meetings and pay their dues they are doing more for social betterment than any other group that we know of. They are getting their suffrage training."

"Woman suffrage will only accomplish the results we expect of it and hope of it if women develop into an intelligent electorate, and I would like to impress upon you the need of becoming familiar with industrial conditions so that when we get the power we can change them; and it seems to me that it is up to the women of leisure who are working in some way in the suffrage movement not to cry out or protest against the working woman's indifference to suffrage but to recognize her distinct contribution as an organized worker and to be ready to stand by her in her heavily handicapped struggle to better her conditions. Some of the leaders of the New York State have done this magnificently, but there are thousands who have not and who stand aloof and indifferent to the great struggle."

"the suffragists have a great opportunity to lay before a group of over worked women the power of their vote; in this way an intelligent electorate would be developed who knows before it has it, what it can do with the vote, and who will use it effectively. It is as we suffragists make ourselves intelligent upon the problems which we will have to solve that the vote will be of any use to us or to the community or nation."

"If the women of leisure and opportunity would do as that young and extraordinary woman Carala Voerishoffer did we would more quickly get results."

"Political democracy will not do us much good unless we have industrial democracy; and industrial democracy can only come through intelligent workers participating in the business of which they are a part, and working out the best methods for all."

"As activists and rebels, Jewish women like Emma Goldman, Maud Nathan, Rose Schneiderman, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan influenced many of the key social movements of their eras suffrage, trade unionism, international peace, and the contemporary women's rights movement."

"In the first two decades of the 20th century, the suffrage movement was infused with immigrant working-class women, in which Jewish women were very prominent. Their numbers–pouring into parades and suffrage organizations–were in the tens of thousands. The two most prominent Jewish immigrant suffrage leaders were Rose Schneiderman and Clara Lemlich. Both were heroines of the Triangle Shirt Waist strike [Uprising of the 20,000] and fire. Lemlich became a communist, Schneiderman a Roosevelt Democrat. They both linked suffrage to the legislative and economic concerns of wage-earning women."

"Those who call resistance to assimilation a luxury might do well to think about calling "sexual preference" a luxury, or reproductive rights, or access to education or creative expression. None of these is bread, but "Bread and Roses" was a demand voiced by Rose Schneiderman, a union organizer and a Jew. What are the roses? As Jews we need our peoplehood, our culture, history, languages, music, calendar, tradition, literature... We need these things because they are beautiful and ours, and because the point of struggle is not bare survival but lives full of possibility. But Rose Schneiderman's metaphor flounders. Our culture is not a rose, it is our backbone."

"Some young women found a focus for their lives in union work. Few became as totally immersed as Rose Schneiderman, who never married and discovered, when she became active in the union, "All of a sudden, I was not lonely any more.""

"On 11 January 1912, the Lawrence strike, also known as the Bread and Roses strike, broke out. Polish women working in cotton mills in New England noticed their pay had been reduced and stopped their looms, leaving the mill shouting "short pay!". Other workers, mostly women and girls, also walked out and within a week 20,000 were out. Despite savage repression they held out until mid-March and won all of their demands, which were also mirrored by other employers who wanted to avoid similar strikes. The popular name for the strike came from a line from a speech by socialist Rose Schneiderman: "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too", a demand which young girls inscribed on their banners in Lawrence."

"History knows her best for a 1912 speech in which she proclaimed, "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too," but that enduring turn of phrase only scratches the surface of Schneiderman's lifelong contributions to the cause of workers' rights. Another speech she gave in 1911, as the ashes of the Triangle smoldered behind her, laid bare her mission as an organizer. "Too much blood has been spilled," she said then. "I know from experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. And the only way is through a strong working-class movement.""

"Schneiderman had long pushed for cross-racial engagement in the laundry sector, recognizing the power in numbers and the symbolic advantage of a fully integrated labor effort."

"The once radical Rose Schneiderman herself had become an established mover and shaker in the country's labor leadership. Appointments to New York's Minimum Wage Advisory Board and FDR's National Recovery Act (NRA) Labor Advisory Board were evidence of her mellowing politics, and Schneiderman also drew criticism from the long-running Communist paper the Daily Worker for being an "ally" of "the A. F. of L. machine." Schneiderman's close relationship with the Roosevelts and discomfort with the emerging radical movements that would define the 1930s political landscape were another factor. The ideological gap between different eras of the WTUL would lead to its eventual dissolution in 1949."

"more Chicanas are fighting for their do not care who does not like it. Women must learn to say what they think and feel, and free to state it without apologizing or prefacing every statement to reassure that they are not competing with them."

"Abortion is a fact of life. Long before more moderate laws were introduced, women were engaged in aborting pregnancies, many times endangering their health. Some in desperation going to quick abortion mills or to unscrupulous medical men bent on making a fast buck. Abortion, in our opinion, is a personal decision. The women must be allowed to make it without legal restrictions."

"Some of the workshops held on Saturday were so large that only the most vocal and most aggressive could be heard discussing issues that interest women but which are shaking the men who feel threatened by women in action, women in leadership roles, women who are literally out of reach of the masculine dictum. The three workshops which received the greatest and the hottest discussion were: Sex and the Chicana-Noun and Verb; Marriage: Chicana Style; and the Feminist Movement: Do We Have a Place in It?"

"If the promulgators of the "Chicana's role is in the home having large families" also projects concern with the health problems of abnormal or self-induced abortions and still born births, we might accept their contentions as a basis for discussion. As it stands, however, we have to conclude that their belief on the role of the Mexican women is based on erroneous cultural and historical understanding of what is meant by "our cultural heritage," as it relates to the family."

"those who promote backward and reactionary theories cannot cleanse themselves by engaging in diversionary tactics... blaming all who do not agree with them-as being women's lib! The tactics of reaction used to be red-baiting... now we have women-baiting. Women's lib, indeed!"

"The effort and work of Chicana/Mexican women in the Chicano movement is generally obscured because women are not accepted as community leaders either by the Chicano movement or by the Anglo establishment."

"The women will have a lot to say from now on. Not only on those questions which affect them personally, such as abortions, the pill, sex information, child care, well being of the family, relationship to other women's organizations, education, equality, etc., but also issues of interest to the whole group, such as peace, prison reform, law enforcement. And this includes the welfare of the men."

"Women, like any minority, have personal problems which many do not feel can be, or will be, discussed in general meetings of men. Women must have an avenue open to them, to deal with these issues so that they can project them for support of the whole movement of la causa."

"we insist that "our cultural heritage" implies that the woman must be placed on a pedestal, without examining the reason for this attitude, it's inevitable consequences and it's effect on the youth. We must bring this issue out into the open ... discuss it and its psychological implications upon our community. Only in this way will it be possible to lift the burden it is placing on our women."

"long-time labor activist Francisca Flores and Ramona Morin of the women's auxiliary of GI Forum founded La Carta Editorial in the mid-1960s to serve as a community-based publication that would report on political activities. Flores went on to found Regeneración in 1970 and made vital contributions through her magazine's singularly forthright analysis regarding women's issues. Besides two Chicana special issues published in 1971 and 1973, Regeneración was known for its news stories that reported on women's organizing, op-ed pieces that critiqued sexist practices in the Chicano movement, artwork featuring local Chicana artists, and articles analyzing political issues and legislation affecting the lives of Chicanas."

"Francisca Flores had fabulous organizing energy despite a long struggle with tuberculosis that left her with only one lung...She was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and once said "we must march with him""

"Articles from Chicana print media and the development and publication of oral histories played a vital role in the development of the Chicana studies curriculum. The Chicana press included Francisca Flores's Regeneración, a magazine published in Los Angeles; Chicana newspapers such as Hijas de Cuauhtémoc and Pepita Martinez's El Grito del Norte from New Mexico; and journals such as Encuentro Femenil, a Chicana feminist journal from Long Beach, and San Francisco's Dorinda Moreno's La Mestiza. In addition, there were special edition community newspapers from all parts of the nation."

"In the words of Francisca Flores, "Women must learn to say what they think and feel, and free to state it without apologizing or prefacing every statement to reassure men that they are not competing with them.""

"picking up the pen for Chicanas became a "political act." ...Women also founded and edited newspapers-El Grito (Betita Martinez); Encuentro Feminil (Adelaida del Castillo and Anna Nieto-Gómez); Regeneracion (Francisca Flores); and El Chicano (Gloria Macias Harrison). Through their writings, Chicanas problematized and challenged prescribed gender roles at home (familial oligarchy); at school (the home economics track); and at meetings (the clean-up committee),"

"Many of these farmworkers...lived along with all farmworkers at labor camps and when growers were asked to raise the wages of farmworkers to 75 cents an hour, they said they could not afford the camps anymore, so they tore them down after we asked them to please repair them so ewe could live as human beings, one of these growers bring Mr. Russell Giffen, the other being Mr. Anderson Crayton, and all of the big growers around in Fresno County."

"When we asked for land, they tell us, why? Why should farmworkers want land? They are not farmers. But the true farmer is the one that works the land, and this is the farmworker, if it was not for the farmworker, there would not be any vegetables of fruits or anything on your table without the farmworkers."

"when the canals were built out there, we were looking at it as a future for the farmworkers to form our family farms, but the big growers would look at the water and instead of seeing people and family farms, they were looking at dollar signs."

"Many of the farmworking families are living in the most miserable places available for human beings. It is not fit for human beings. They live out in the slums in crowded houses, a small house for too large families. They sleep on the floor. During the day they are forced outdoors because there is no room in those houses, so they are left free to roam the streets. So, where does the crime come from if not young adults out in the streets until about the middle of the night because they cannot come home because it is to crowded, and it is too noisy."

"what some agencies are doing, they are hiring people to investigate crime while they should be using this money to put there families to work where they can support their families"

"The people that are rich, that have the money, get more money without doing anything. They do not work at all."

"we need a change. We need a change for social justice"

"when I got to thinking about how I was forced to live, it is a sad thing, but now I am working for a brighter future for my children and myself."

"Out in the fields there were never any restrooms. We had to go eight or ten hours without relief. If there wasn't brush or a little ditch, we were forced to wait until we got home!"

"These big growers have a lot of money because we earned all that money for them. Because of our sweat and our labor that we put on the land."

"[L]ate one night in 1962, there was a knock at the door and there were three men. One of them was Cesar Chavez. And the next thing I knew, they were sitting around our table talking about a union...Cesar said, "The women have to be involved. They're the ones working out in the fields with their husbands. If you can take the women out to the fields, you can certainly take them to meetings." So I sat up straight and said to myself, "That's what I want!""

"When I became involved with the union, I felt I had to get other women involved. Women have been behind men all the time, always. Just waiting to see what the men decide to do, and tell us what to do. In my sister-in-law and brother-in-law's families, the women do a lot of shouting and cussing and they get slapped around. But that's not standing up for what you believe in. It's just trying to boss and not knowing how. I'd hear them scolding their kids and fighting their husbands and I'd say, "Gosh! Why don't you go after the people that have you living like this? Why don't you go after the growers that have you tired from working out in the fields at low wages and keep us poor all the time? Let's go after them! They're the cause of our misery!" Then I would say we had to take part in the things going on around us. "Women can no longer be taken for granted-that we're just going to stay home and do the cooking and cleaning. It's way past the time when our husbands could say, 'You stay home! You have to take care of the children! You have to do as I say!"" Then some women I spoke to started attending the union meetings, and later they were out on the picket lines."

"I said, "Well! Do you think we should be putting up with this in this modern age? You know, we're not back in the twenties. We can stand up! We can talk back! It's not like when I was a little kid and my grandmother used to say, 'You have to especially respect the Anglos,' 'Yessir,' 'Yes, Ma'am!' That's over. This country is very rich, and we want a share of the money these growers make of our sweat and our work by exploiting us and our children!""

"It was very hard being a woman organizer. Many of our people my age and older were raised with the old customs in Mexico: where the husband rules, he is king of his house. The wife obeys, and the children, too. So when we first started it was very, very hard. Men gave us the most trouble-neighbors there in Parlier! They were for the union but they were not taking orders from women, they said."

"At another place, in Kern County, we were sprayed with pesticides. They would come out there with their sprayers and spray us on the picket lines."

"Our demands were met, but it was hard bargaining. At one point, one of the Christian Brothers' lawyers said, "Well, sister, it sounds to me like you're asking for the moon for these people." Dolores Huerta came back, "Brother, I'm not asking for the moon for the farmworkers. All we want is just a little ray of sunshine for them!" Oh, that sounded beautiful!"

"I became involved in many of the activities in the community-school board meetings, city council meetings, everything that I could get into. For example, I began fighting for bilingual education in Parlier, went to a lot of meetings about it and spoke about it."

"Being a migrant worker I changed schools about every three to four weeks. As soon as one crop was picked, we went on to the next one. I'd go to school for about a week or two, then I was transferred. Every time we transferred I had a pain in my stomach, I was shaking, scared to go to school. This is why I began fighting for bilingual education. I didn't want what happened to me to happen to the little children in Parlier whose parents couldn't speak English."

"Parlier is over eighty-five percent Chicano, yet during that time there were no Chicanos on the school board, on the police force, nowhere. Now it's changed; we fought to get a Chicano mayor and officials."

"We had Senate hearings at the Convention Center in Fresno. There were hundreds of people listening. A man I know comes to me and says, "Jessie, you're next." He'd been going to speak, but he said we wanted me to speak in his place. I started in Spanish, and the senators were looking at each other, you know, saying, "What's going on?" So then I said, "Now, for the benefit of those who can't speak Spanish, I'll translate. They tell us there's no money for food stamps for poor people. But if there is enough to fight a war in Vietnam, and if there is money enough for Governor Reagan's wife to buy a three-thousand-dollar dress for the Inauguration Ball, there should be money enough to feed these people. The nutrition experts say surplus food is full of vitamins. I've taken a look at that food, this cornmeal, and I've seen them come up and down. But you know, we don't call them vitamins, we call them weevils!" Everybody began laughing and whistling and shouting. In the end, we finally got food stamps for the people in Fresno County."

"Sometimes I'd just stop to think: what if our parents had done what we were doing now? My grandparents were poor. They were humble. They never learned to speak English. They felt God meant them to be poor. It was against their religion to fight. I remember there was a huge policeman named Marcos, when I was a child, who used to go around on a horse. My grandmother would say, "Here comes Marcos," and we just grew up thinking, "He's law and order." But during the strikes I stood up to them. They'd come up to arrest me and I'd say, "O.K., here I come if you want. Arrest me!""

"Every worker deserves to have protections on the job and it is the goal of the labor movement to ensure that happens."

"The ability to speak up for each other on the job and at the ballot box is a crucial component in determining the rights and enacting the policies that affect the lives of millions of women and their families."

"We need to join together and speak out for good wages, great benefits, fair scheduling and equal pay for equal work"

"As many women in our movement do – we find ourselves outside the spotlight, doing the hard work behind the scenes, focusing on making big plans come together to benefit the whole"

"It’s not enough to protect what we have, we’re not just going to recover what we have lost. This is about taking risks to define the future…on our terms."

"Employers have the ability to voluntarily recognize them off the spot, but that doesn't always happen as we know. And then there's a contract negotiation process that goes on"

"People are tired of toxic environments. They're tired of being treated poorly and not having a say in how their workplace is being shaped or changed."

"I have toiled from morn to night, from week to week, from year to year, without any bright memories of the past or dreams for the future. Like you, I have lived to work. Every day brought forth the same dull program; the only variation being the time when work was slack, and then the fear of the morrow made matters still worse. We girls of the same workroom often rebelled against our nerve and body tearing tasks, often wishes for a glimpse of the clear sky and the bright sunshine, the green fields and shady woods, which very few of us ever got a chance to enjoy. But what was the use of complaining? We saw no remedy for it, and what was more, didn’t care to look for one."

"It is true there was the possibility of marriage, but how many of us look for the married life as a relief from hard burdens, as easier living. What with the housework and small babies, that come soon enough, a few boarders or some homework, or the job of a janitress, there is little time for recreation, or thought for better things."

"Toilers live the life of animals — that is work, and sleep, with short intervals for food. Now let us put our heads together and see if this is right; if things out to, and will, go on forever in this way."

"We are too tired to think, or read what others have brought out for us; when bones ache and the head reels, the bed, even if it is a hard one, is more inviting that then most attractive lecture room."

"Just as the philosopher or scientist must once in a while occupy himself with manual labor, so it is necessary for working girls to have some brain work to relieve their physical fatigue. If we come home with no other thought but the grind that awaits us again tomorrow, the best thing for us to do is to find forgetfulness in sleep."

"It is entirely different however, if you become absorbed in something which turns your mind into a different channel of thought, which makes you blood run faster in your veins, and makes life worth living. Try it, girls. I am talking from experience."

"Some day we will work to live; there is a beautiful world ahead of us, a world with plenty for all. It is in your, in mine, in everybody’s power to bring it about, but we must all utilize our power, we must all put our shoulders to the wheel."

"There are millions of men and women who give up what is best in them for that very purpose. Girls, why not join hands with them? Every atom of their breath is devoted to the cause of the working class. They, too, work for a living and are tired when night comes; but within them burns a holy fire which gives them the strength and energy to go forth and proclaim the message of truth, to sound the trumpet announcing the coming of freedom, and, take it from me, sister workers, it is glorious to be one of them. The daily grind becomes only an incident in your life, there opens a far broader field to absorb your entire being; with millions of comrades, ready to welcome you in any part of the world you cannot help feeling that you are higher than the mere tool, or band that you are supposed to be, from the boss’s point of view; instead of looking up to him, and often forgiving him his liberties with you, you learn to look down at him, and pity him for his ignorance and shortsightedness."

"Again and again we will hear a despondent voice exclaiming: “What is the use? Life is too dull and empty; it is hardly worth living.” And yet there is so much to live for, there is so much to be accomplished in this wide, wide world, and neither father, brother, husband or sweetheart can do our art for us. She who wants to be free must herself strike the blow; and strike we will, my sisters. Not with swords and hatchets, as man was wont to do, but through our intelligence and energy, through our efforts to rise above the spirit of greed and exploitation."

"Come, my sisters, let us shake off our fetters; let us rise and assert our rights. It is time! The bugle call sounds louder and louder; my toiling sisters of the world, arise!"

"Following the general deduction that the majority of children go to work because of the immediate need of bread, we must give them their daily bread if they are to live."

"We, the Socialists, claim that since child labor is a blot upon our civilization and since the children are sent to work because they must have bread and clothing immediately the State should assume the responsibility of supplying them with food and clothing, as it supplies them with books and instructors at present. We go a step further and say that since the children of today are the men and women of tomorrow it is in the interest of society at large to give each new born child an equality of opportunity, whereby it would be enabled to receive bodily care and a thorough education in order to fit it to take its place on the battlefield of life."

"The aim of Socialism is to place the adult worker in the possession of the necessary tools of production, so that he would not be compelled to part with the lion’s share of t his wage for the mere privilege of their use. Socialism proposes to offer each adult worker a certainty of livelihood and thus enable him to take care of his own."

"Your forefathers achieved independence by fighting with muskets, but you live in an age when the guns are in the possession of your opponents. You don’t need guns, for you can accomplish more than your forefathers did, by the use of your ballots."

"If we continue to let children go to their deaths and thousands of women to their degradation, a clash is bound to come sooner or later. Why not avert it with your ballots?"

"Hundreds of thousands, nay millions of American children, are sacrificed yearly on its altar."

"There were a number of outstanding Jewish women among American socialists, chief among them Theresa Malkiel, who began her career as a union organiser in the 1890s, and Rose Pastor Stokes, who later became a leading figure in the Communist Party, but their involvement in union affairs was less important than their role as propagandists."

"In Malkiel's (fictitious) Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, a work of propaganda, she puts into the mouth of her narrator, an American 'Mary', admiration for the Jewish girls who seemed to have in"

"Their blood, 'like Jesus Christ the spirit of sacrifice'. In real life, such admiration was often tempered by prejudice and hostility."

"Malkiel wrote of women as victims of 'the breeding beast', took a Jewish fellow socialist to task for praising women as 'instinctual, intuitive creatures' and looked forward to a socialist society in which 'women would cease to be idle candidates for marriage, children no longer a burden, and women would return to a primeval freedom'."

"In these times of ours, when all classes in society, from the Bowery Socialists to the highest professors of science, seem to vie with one another in demanding State interference, State protection, and State regulation, when the ideal State to the workingman is that proposed by the authoritarian Marx, or the scarcely less authoritarian George, and the ideal State to the scientist is the Germany of today, where the scientists are under the government’s special protection, it would seem idle to hope that the voices of those who prize liberty above an things, who would fain call attention to the false direction in which it is desired to make the world move, should be other than “voices crying in the wilderness.” But, nevertheless, it is not by accident that we who hold the ideas that what is necessary to progress is not the increase, but the decrease, of governmental interference have come to be possessed of these ideas. We, too, are “heirs of all the ages,” and it is our duty to that society of which we form a part to give our reasons for the “faith that is in us.”"

"It is always important that the position of devil’s advocate should be well filled."

"Responsibility is the parent of morality"

"As Leslie Stephen has demonstrated, to suppress one truth is to suppress all truth, for truth is a coherent whole."

"Do you think that a country, one of whose most distinguished professors, Virchow, is afraid of giving voice to the doctrine of evolution, because he sees that it inevitably leads to Socialism (and Socialism the government has decided is wrong, and must be crushed out), is in the way of long maintaining its supremacy as a scientific light, when the question which its scientific men are called upon to decide is not what is true, but what the government will allow to be said?"

"It is our duty to truth to cultivate the spirit which questions all things"

"We still have no evidence on record to prove that great men are endowed with more than the ordinary share of common sense, which is so necessary in conducting the ordinary affairs of life. Indeed, if the gossip of history is to be in any way trusted, great men have usually obtained less than the ordinary share of this commodity. Frederick the Great is reported to have said that, if he wished to ruin one of his provinces, he would hand its government over to the philosophers. Is it into the hands of a Bacon, who had no more sense than to expose himself (for the sake of a little experiment which could have been made just as well without the exposure), a Newton who ordered the grate to be removed when the fire became too hot for him, a Clifford, who worked himself to death, that the direction of the affairs of a people is to be given, with the assurance that they will be carried on better than now?"

"Will advance by having no opinion protected from discussion and agitation, by having the greatest possible freedom of thought, of speech, and of the press."

"Dr. Gertrude Kelly, a surgeon of great skill and a supporter of the Irish Republic."

"In basing their demands on a claim of justice-women are human beings; therefore they ought to possess all the rights and privileges of human beings-the anarchist-feminists refused to make any extravagant claims for social and political benefits that would flow from equality. But they thereby lost an opportunity to appeal to men on the grounds most likely to gain their attention, those of self-interest. The early feminists had faced the same problem and their arguments also had failed to win masculine support. As a result, the suffragists at the end of the century often felt it necessary to exploit their womanhood in an attempt to render feminism more palatable to men. Such tactics were unacceptable to the anarchist-feminists, but a few of them did try to persuade their male comrades that women's equality was essential to a radical platform. Gertrude B. Kelly, for example, argued that a successful revolution would depend on a commitment to feminism, contending that unless radical men began to take steps to end the oppression of women, their attempts to remake the world would end in failure. She agreed with her male comrades who said that there was "properly speaking no woman question as apart from the question of human right and human liberty." But men often used such statements to try to persuade women to mute their demands for sexual equality until after the liberation of the "people" had been accomplished, implying that while the concerns of male revolutionaries were by their very nature universal, those of women were at best parochial. Kelly, on the other hand, insisted that without sexual equality no liberation could take place. Men hurt themselves as well as women by their refusal to recognize this: "No wrong can be done to any class in society without part at least of the evil reverting to the wrong-doers."...Gertrude Kelly's earnest attempt to enlist male support through appeals to self-interest was unusual. The anarchist-feminists recognized for the most part that women must seek their own emancipation. They placed (accurately as it turned out) little faith in the enlightenment of radical men. The significance of their approach may be seen most clearly by an examination of the anarchist-feminists proposals for the reorganization of society based on the premise of economic and psychological independence from men."

"Anarchist-feminists found it difficult to persuade their male corevolutionaries to take the Woman Question seriously...Gertrude Kelly berated them because she believed that by ignoring the demands of women radical men were actually retarding the revolution"

"The enthusiasms of the social feminists for example temperance, protective legislation for women and children workers, and social purity usually drew a negative response from the anarchist-feminists, both communists and Individualists. Although like the more conventional feminists they abhorred prostitution, anarchists believed it to be a predictable result of both capitalism and societal repression of sexuality that could only be removed by the overthrow of both. The Individualist Gertrude Kelly argued in 1885 that social purity advocates possessed the evidence to show "that destitution is the chief cause of prostitution" but that they refused to follow the logic of their findings. "When we come to examine the remedies proposed, we find not a word on the subject of... making their wages equal to those of a man for the same work.""

"Voltairine de Cleyre possessed one of the best minds among the American anarchists, and her essays, particularly in the early twentieth century, were sophisticated and subtle. On the other hand, the other anarchist-feminists who attempted to explain anarchist ideas tended to approach every problem as a separate issue without reconciling, or in some cases even noticing, disharmonies and contradictions. They espoused feminism and the standard anarchist remedies for social ills without troubling to look for connections. It almost seems as if they deliberately avoided those questions that would force them to confront anarchist ideology as a whole. Gertrude B. Kelly, for example, concentrated on questions of finance when she was not writing about women. She was enthusiastic about the innovation of checking accounts, which she viewed as the harbinger of the Mutual Bank, an institution that, for Individualists, was at the heart of anarchist economics. Yet she not only found it unnecessary to explain the effect of new bank practices on the overall power structure, but she also failed to connect monetary issues with questions about the redistribution of wealth or the economic role of women.'..Where Gertrude B. Kelly had confined herself to specific details of anarchist thought without attempting an inclusive analysis, Florence Finch Kelly offered sweeping generalities without touching on their application."

"Women more than men can strip war of its glamour and its out-of-date heroisms and patriotisms, and see it as a demon of destruction and hideous wrong — murder devastating home and happiness. Women are here to reaffirm their protest against war, to restate their unalterable faith in the righteousness of Peace, the practicality of mediation — a protest against the outrage upon the moral convictions of long developed social sentiments, and to offer their profound sympathy and compassion for the victims of the European war."

"The movement for public playgrounds is now well known. They have been valiantly fought for and their need wonderfully told by Mr. Jacob A. Riis, that best friend of, and most lovable fighter for, the children of the poor."

"Musicales, private theatricals, and the varied undertakings that bring gayety and zest into the social life are successful with us. We are fond of saying that next to nursing typhoid fever we love to give a ball!"

"It is good from this point of view that the patient should know the home of the nurse, and that the nurse should be intelligent about the housing conditions, the educational provisions, and the social life of the neighborhood in which she works and lives."

"During the two decades of the existence of the Settlement there has been a significant awakening on matters of social concern, particularly those affecting the protection of children throughout society in general; and a new sense of responsibility has been aroused among men and women, but perhaps more distinctively among women, since the period coincides with their freer admission to public and professional life. The Settlement is in itself an expression of this sense of responsibility, and under its roof many divergent groups have come together to discuss measures "for the many, mindless mass that most needs helping," and often to assert by deed their faith in democracy. Some have found in the Settlement an opportunity for self-realization that in the more fixed and older institutions has not seemed possible. (preface)"

"In discussions throughout the country of the problems of immigration it is significant that few, if any, of the men and women who have had extended opportunity for social contact with the foreigner favor a further restriction of immigration. (chapter 16 p290)"

"The planting of roots in the new soil can best be accomplished through an intercourse with the immigrant in which the dignity of the individual and of the family is recognized. Heroic measures may be necessary to establish a satisfactory system of distribution, and these measures must be based on a philosophic understanding of democracy. (p292)"

"The state, as employer, alone determines the terms upon which its new canal shall be built. It defines in great detail its standard of materials and workmanship, but takes no thought for the workmen who must operate in great transient groups. It does not leave to chance the realization of its material standard, but sends inspectors to make tests and provides a staff of engineers. It does leave to chance (in the ignorance and cupidity of padroni) the quality and price of foods and care of the men. It takes great care to prevent the freezing of cement, but permits any kind of houses to be used for its laborers. (p296)"

"The immigrant brings in a steady stream of new life and new blood to the nation. (p306)"

"The final abolition of war and the establishment of permanent peace must depend upon the convictions of men and women, who are equally responsible as they must be in the final analysis for all measures affecting Society. But never before, during the time of any great conflict, have women been so organized or so self-conscious as now, and it is fitting that the world should ring with their outcry against this blasphemy upon all the things that they hold most sacred."

"Suddenly, without the consent of the people involved, all the structures of civilization, so painstakingly built upon, are swept away, and hatred, destruction and contempt for human life take their place. Multitudes of men and women and children in the countries at war are helpless victims, and their judgments concerning wars, and this war, can not be known, at least not until they are recorded in history. We, the fortunate dwellers upon a neutral land, are, through sympathy and actual suffering, involved in their tragedy. Those who suffer call across the waters, and their cry is heard — the cries of little children and those yet unborn."

"Men who love their homes and their children are roused to war fervor “to protect their homes’ ‑but to destroy other homes; “to wave their wives and children” – by starving and impoverishing other women and children."

"The horrors of war that stir the thinking world have been least noticed by the historians. The violation of women, and even children, is hardly included in the term “atrocity.” Yet so abhorrent are these things that the brutality of war passeth understanding, and men and women must so dedicate themselves to tis cause that it can never come into the world again."

"Though the hatred and the enmity that have been stirred up are not real, the suffering and the desolation and the outrages that have come to men and to the women and the children are real. These pitiless sacrifices must stop."

"When war and human sacrifice of the many have been banished, as that of the individual has been, eyes will be opened and ears unstopped, and men and women will understand all the wrongs of Society, and work together, nations with nations."

"The conception of religion has extended from the individual to society; a true religion fills the need of both. Economics and government and a rational view of religion are based on human needs; and fundamental human needs underlie the so-called labor and women’s movements."

"At a stage in history when women were first organizable they came together to protest against war and to offer reasonable substitutes for settling international disagreements."

"Florence Nightingale lifted the vague, casual, though kindly and devoted, feeling of women into organized, efficient and invaluable service; she enlarged the nurse’s vision to sympathy for great groups outside her family or particular tribe."

"The task of organizing human happiness needs the active cooperation of man and woman: it cannot be relegated to one half of the world. And active cooperation for such noble ends cannot be secured unless men and women really work together. The women have been experiencing the growth of a new consciousness, an integral element in the evolution of self government, and as a result many women believe that they can best represent the human interests in government, at least that they can best represent themselves in those measures that immediately concern them and for which tradition and experience have fitted them."

"Militaristic propaganda cloaked under the reasonable name of “preparedness.”"

"It seemed to us the sinister reversion to the war system would be at the cost of democracy."

"The small group that directed this committee, and the enormous number of men and women who have affiliated themselves in one way or another with its propaganda, consider themselves true patriots of America, — patriotism that is borne of the passionate love for the best that is in America, not for rich America nor for successful America, but for the America of democracy, of ideals, and the America that stand for the things essential to a world of love and law and order."

"We intend to continue our own peculiar methods, peculiar they are said to be for “pacifist.” I am told that we are violating the popular conception of this group, and one newspaper which strongly disapproved of our aggressiveness against preparedness hysteria, said that, judging from our belligerency, we were the ones who “put the fist in pacifist.”"

"At the base our plan for getting the people of the two countries into instant actual contact with an understanding of each other would always prevent this."

"Militarism is an evil growth which threatens our industrial democracy, our political institutions, our educational ideals and our international relationships. If the good things for which this country stands are to go on, clarion voices must ring out against movements that would destroy those precious possessions. The spirit of militarism has invaded us. It threatens the great constructive up-building, life-saving social work. To stamp it out, to recover the ground we have lost, to build upon them, — that is the task confronting all those who have the true interests of democracy at hear. We believe that militarism is opposed to democracy and that great numbers of citizens everywhere fear not so much an invading army but this other danger so close upon us — militarism. Good and true citizens of the great American Republic are united in this."

"As I look back, it seems to me that our efforts toward peace, even in the midst of war, bulk large in the story I have set myself to tell; they show, that a small group having profound and selfless interest in the going world is not useless, and its position and its influence may without embarrassing publicity contribute to the clarification of problems of the day. (chapter XII p285)"

"Internationally the outlook is more disturbing. Despite the united front against war among the plain people of the earth, as expressed through conferences not only of pacifists, but of college faculty and students, of labor bodies, of women's associations, of radical and temperate organizations, the cloud of war darkens the horizon and the German influence cannot be ignored. Many people regard the Chancellor as insane or neurotic, perhaps in part because through all his denunciations and illogical conclusions he has shown no gleam of humor; nevertheless his leadership seems for the moment to sway the German nation. (p323)"

"As a worker in the factories for years and as an organizer of working women for five or six years, as one who has come in contact with the working women in the factories during strikes, in organizations and out of organizations, I favor a minimum wage for working women and minors."

"As to the necessity of a minimum wage there is no longer any doubt in the minds of intelligent people be they socialists, social workers or merely fair minded people."

"A working woman is a human being, with a heart, with desires, with aspirations, with ideas and ideals, and when we think of food and shelter we merely think of the actual necessities to cover her body and to feed her. But what about the other things? Have we thought of providing her with books, with money for amusements, and when I speak of amusements I do not speak of the five cent picture shows, I speak of amusements that a girl should go to — a good drama or refined vaudeville — few think about that. Have you thought about a girl providing herself with a good room that had plenty of air, proper ventilation, in a somewhat decent neighborhood. Do you think of all these things when we speak of a minimum wage? Do you want a girl to have a nice comfortable room?"

"When we discuss the lives of girls let us be a little more liberal; let us not think of a piece of bread; let us not think of a sandwich... let us think of the working woman as a human being who has her desires to which she is entitled"

"Should we not consider a yearly minimum wage on the average?"

"The trouble has been that society has neglected its members."

"We know it takes years and years to drill into a girl the absolute necessity for organization, the value of organization, and I am not pessimistic. I know that working girls are awakening to the necessity for organization, but how about those trades where no attempt has as yet been made to organize them? In the meantime the girls are absolutely starved."

"The things we liked most of course were the things that more or less selected or symbolized our own feelings of conditions and life in general. For example, I recall that we liked Thomas Hood's "The Sound of the ship" Now, nothing could come closer to the way we felt than that particular poem. We also read and managed an interest in that other one, "The Bridge of Sighs" also by Thomas Hood. Later, we found "The Masque of Anarchy" by Shelley, and of course in addition to that there were the Jewish poets, like Rosenfeld and Edelshtat. They were magnificent in their writing, in their poetry depicting the life of the people in the shop. There was one writer who I got to know later very well, who wrote a thing just called "Sketches," of conditions and of people in the different shops and naturally in the needle industry in New York. He was magnificent, and we loved everything he wrote. For that, we found time. Now, whether all of us found time, I don't know, but I do know that quite a number of us tried to find an interest outside the job."

"I also recall that on Sunday morning when we didn't have to go to the shop, we went to lectures. A man called Hugh Pentacost lectured at a place on Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, named Merit Hall. It's no longer there. We would come at eleven o'clock, and Mr. Pentacost would lecture on current events. He was an excellent speaker. He was, as I remember, a philosophical anarchist, and we really didn't discuss his philosophy at all. We would take up current events. We were very much interested in that, and we would go there just as religious people would go to synagogue. We would go there every Sunday except on Sundays that we had to work in the shops."

"Some of us got to know about the Socialist Literary Society on the East Side of New York, East Broadway. It was chiefly a young men's club, but some of the young ladies wanted to join...I remember the hot debates that went on at the Socialist Literary Society whether to admit women, and finally the women won out. They voted to admit women, so...We joined the Socialist Literary Society, and there, really, we obtained what we could in the way of education, especially with English literature. The club was very fortunate in obtaining the services of Dr. Henry Newman, no relation of mine, but who was a professor of literature at City College of New York. I think he still is with the Brooklyn Ethical Cultural Society. He was a magnificent teacher. I don't think there are many who can surpass his interest in the students and in the people who came to his classes. And I, personally, shall never forget his kindness and attention. I remember he was teaching us English literature, giving us an idea of what George Eliot and Thackeray and Dickens were about. And he would ask questions to find out whether we really got his point... He was terribly interested in my reading, and I still remember his kindness and attention, because he was a great help to me. Lord knows what I might have read if it weren't for him."

"It is so obvious that to treat people equally is the right thing to do."

"I wondered why people made speeches in favor of something so obviously right,...Women breathed the same air, got the same education; it was ridiculous, spending so much energy and elocution on something rightfully theirs."

"Social welfare—that's the chief interest I have ever had. People are wrong in thinking that the best incentive is competition. Competition is good, but only as the instrument for the common good."

"every...act should be an expression of the God, or goodness, in us."

"men should look into their own lives, see their many doings, their sins (if you will), repent of them, [and] lead bettter lives than [in] their past."

"Being finite ourselves, we human beings cannot know God directly, but only through the phenomena, or manifestations of God in our universe. These manifestations range from the distant world of the milky way to the tiniest blade of grass, from the vast oceans to the dew drop, from the grandest mountain to the soft skin of a baby's cheek; they include every act of kindness and generosity and sacrificial devotion of a human being to another human being, the love of a man for his wife, the love of a mother for her child. They include our very search for God—They include all the beauty and the glory and the mystery of the universe around us and within us. The more we grow in wisdom and in the understanding of these things, the more nearly we can approach to a knowledge of God."

"Twenty-four years of noble struggle against so many morbid germs that would annihilate the collective effort, that terribly and vilely devote themselves to devouring mutualism"

"twenty-four years of joining souls through the principle of humanity, through the sentiment of innate altruism in the heart, and altruism that permits us to fulfill our obligation to our beloved comrade"

"That is mutualism, a noble mission of truth, sublime and holy mission mission of charity that nations ignore or have forgotten; nations, whose workers are dispersed, segregated, strangers to each other, and . . . how many times, sad to say, more than strangers, subject to ruinous enmities, that workers’ element divides instead of seeking [union], becomes offended instead of giving aid and, no, rejects with hatred its own [members] , rather than embracing [all workers] with love; [workers] reject each other without seeing that their blood and their anguish kneaded together become the bitter bread that they devour together; without seeing that their arms are what sustain the industry of nations, their richness and their greatness."

"Mutualism needs the vigor of struggle and the firmness of conviction to advance in its unionizing effort; it needs to shake away the apathy of the masses, and enchain with links of abnegation the passions that rip apart its innermost being; it needs hearts that say: I am for you, as I want you to be for me; mutualism has need of us workers, the humble, the small gladiators of the idea, it needs for us to salvage from our egotisms something immense, something divine, that can make us a society ,that can make us nobly human. And the worker should not think of his humbleness, nr of his insignificance, he should not reason that he is unimportant and so remove himself discouraged from the social concert. What does it matter that he is but an atom, what does it matter? The atoms invisible for their smallness are the only elements of the universe."

"The worker is the arm, the heart of the world."

"it is to him, untiring and tenacious struggler, that the future of humanity belongs. May you, beloved workers, integral part of human progress, yet celebrate, uncounted anniversaries, and with your example may you show societies how to love each other so that they may be mutualists and to unite so that they may be strong."

"At the turn of the century, Sara Estela Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita Idar and the staff members of La Voz de la Mujer and Pluma Roja were organic intellectuals of their times who revealed different discursive positionings of women within their societies, positionings informed by the master narratives of nationalism, religion and anarchism. Until now these women's work as publishers and their written contributions have remained virtually unrecognized. Either because of political affiliations or gender discrimination, their work has not been recognized in Mexico. In the United States, these factors, as well as linguistic biases, have relegated their work to oblivion. These women's stories and their publishing efforts, nonetheless, capture the realities of a people, the significance of whose daily existence transcends the limitations imposed by political and national borders."

"The U.S. -Mexico borderland saw mexicanas fighting for the revolution, often with the PLM, and also to win justice for tejanos. They included Sara Estela Ramírez, who lived in Laredo and became known to thousands of tejanos as a labor organizer, human rights activist and poet. She launched a revolutionary feminist newspaper, Aurora, in 1904. She died in 1910 at the age of 29 but her unique, visionary poetry rings true today."

"Tejana socialist labor leader and political activist Sara Estela Ramirez would not live to participate in El Primer Congreso Mexicanista held the following year. Ramirez's ideas, however, would resonate in the words of her compañeras. Composed of South Texas residents, this Congreso was the first civil rights assembly among Spanish-speaking people in the United States. With delegates representing community organizations and interests from both sides of the border, its platform addressed discrimination, land loss, and lynching. Women delegates, such as Jovita Idar, Soldedad Peña, and Hortensia Moncaya, spoke to the concerns of Tejanos and Mexicanos."

"Established order, being an instituted fixity, excludes reform, and whoever advocates change by that very act becomes an enemy to it."

"The wisest government is that which but responds readiest to the demand to which its own establishment had given birth, and for this reason will yield only as forced by fear to give something rather than risk losing all."

"Is not the whole long career of the proletariat but the “Martyrdom of Man” strewn with whitened bones, cemented with scalding tears welling up from broken hearts, and stained with the bleeding feet of countless millions?"

"Events are the true schoolmasters, and smarting under the White terror which yearly sacrifices its millions the Social Revolutionist does not hesitate to invoke the Red terror, knowing that here the words apply that “he who loseth his life shall save it.” But how? By words of rodomontade? By inviting others to do by simply preaching the gospel of discontent? No; but by deeds. The Social Revolutionist is not moved by revenge nor by mere impulse. When Alexander II was killed, when Cavendish and Burke were sent to judgment, when John Brown shot men he had never before met, the world understood the full significance of each act."

"To my mind, the very assumption of “natural rights” is at war with evolution."

"Social intercourse has slowly evolved the Ideal that peace, happiness and security are best attained by equal freedom to each and all; consequently, I can lay no claim in equity to a privilege, for that which all alike may enjoy ceases to be privileged. The important deduction from social evolution is that as militancy has weakened and industrialism widened its boundaries, liberty has ever tended toward such equalization, Privilege finds sanction in equity as right, because it violates the ideal of social progress — equality of opportunities."

"Precisely as water flows to a level when obstructions are removed, just so will social relations flow to equitable conditions when restrictions are swept away. And precisely also as liberty comes in does the assertion of “rights” go out."

"Until my imprisonment I had believed that except for Albert Parsons, Dyer D. Lum, Voltairine de Cleyre, and a few others America was barren of idealists. Her men and women cared only for material acquisitions, I had thought. John Swinton's account of the liberty-loving people who had been and still were in every struggle against oppression changed my superficial judgment."

"Dyer D. Lum proposed the creation of "co-operative homes," and Voltairine de Cleyre later elaborated the idea: "I would destroy the individual 'home' with its waste of forces and have instead magnificent palaces, spacious grounds. . swimming rooms, bathrooms, everything on a large scale," yet with private rooms for every individual whenever he or she desired to be alone."

"We're shaping software and the software is shaping us. It's a circle."

"Soften; Lighten; Quiet; Shrink. Conceal the bridge; Your ancestors built— A lady’s nose (like her mind) Must be petite. Blonde the mane, Straighten the curls— Her hair’s much too loud And fills space not for girls. Alter the foundation, Uproot olive for blush— Make light of those shadows, A woman’s face speaks none. Soften; Whiten; Quiet; Shrink."

"The time was the era shortly after the First World War when waves of post-war immigration carried to the new world like rotting bilge water all the bitter hatreds, prejudices and venoms of Tsarist Russia and Poland."

"Hatred springs from uncertainty and fear."

"Woe to our memory if it can be said by unhappy future generations that we defeated Hitler and Mussolini, only to lay down arms to the Hoovers, the Vandenbergs, the Wheelers, Hearsts, Knutsons, and McCormicks of America. If we allow Germany to be built up again as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, if we permit American cooperation to be transformed into American imperialism-woe to our memory if we allow the seeds of a third world war to be planted under our victorious feet!"

"The ones we love are like lighted candles in our being. When one goes out, it leaves a part of us in darkness. I have a duty to perform, grappling with the darkness where once you used to be-a duty to you and to all youth like you born into a world of poverty and depression and war, a world which seems to have no present and no future. I have a monument to build to your memory...a better society where youth can blossom to its rich fulfillment. Goodbye, little sister! Thousands of crushed and broken youth lie like you in their needless graves, youth who had no present, and saw no future. But millions of us have set our teeth against the wind. The working class is moving toward a happier world where its beloved children will not be gnarled and twisted and broken, but will grow straight as the young trees straining towards the sun. ("She who Died Without Living")"

"History itself is the only arbiter of "dangerous thoughts" and to whom they are dangerous. For the world does move. Men's thoughts change as the times change. You can no more freeze the thoughts of mankind than you can stop the earth from moving on its axis, than you can freeze a lovely face into eternal youth. To try to do this is not only to make a mockery of democracy, it is to stop the movement of progress and to whip up a fierce tide of reaction. Who should have the right to determine that another man's thoughts are "dangerous"? ("Jailed for her Thoughts")"

"Uneasy is the head that wears a crown. ("Justice in Connor's Kingdom")"

"Greed and hypocrisy are indeed inseparable companions. ("To a Young Girl Graduate")"

"From the labor movement of the 1930s to the the civil rights, peace, and women's movements of the 1950s through the 1970s, Irene Paull conveys the richness of ethnic, working-class and oppositional cultures within the fortress of America. Her voice rings as true as it did sixty years ago."

"Irene Paull worked against injustice all her life, and part of that work was her exquisite writing"

"Irene Paull was an intensely feminine, brilliantly intelligent and morally passionate woman. The privilege of publishing her stories in Jewish Currents, and the luxury of the friendship I enjoyed with her (mostly through her remarkable letters), have been among the ornaments of my personal and professional life."

"Irene Paull was a great person, as these selections of her writings make clear. She had no pretensions and great honesty with herself and others. If the world is still here in a hundred years, it will be because of people like her."

"Irene Paull is a voice of our time, of all the struggles, of the wars and depressions. Early she protested the violent, oppressed life of the Duluth harbor and the timber industry, the anti-Semitism, the exploitation of the immigrants in labor. She became a voice of the people, collecting the poems of lumberjacks."

"The independent strong woman was a bad woman, even in the radical press. Irene and I had a vision of the free new woman growing in her own pattern-a new crop, new protein, new communication, new connections, new conceptions-birthing out of terrible hunger and anger."

"1959 was declared Anti-Pass Year by the ANC in honour of the women because we fought so bravely against the passes"

"I don't know what you mean by "tired". I can't give up because the spirit is still there. I can't help it, even if I wanted to give up. Although I can't do everything physically, the spirit still wants what I have always wanted."

"A pass is this little book you must get when you are 16, and it says where you can work, and where you can be, and if you have got work. You can't get a job without this book. And you can only get a job where they stamp your pass to say 'Johannesburg' or 'Pretoria' and so on. You must carry it with you all the time because the police can ask you, 'Where is your pass?' any time, and then you must show them. If you haven't got your pass, they put you in jail for some days or else you must pay some money to get out."

"My spirit is not banned — I still say I want freedom in my lifetime."

"Being in a mixed science school is the ultimate test of your survival."

"When my first results came, Eighty per cent of the girls had between A and B-. Soon the girls were writing to tell me that though they admired my work, they felt I was destined for bigger things."