‘Drumright, Oklahoma’ by A.W. Rockwell from The Voice of the People. Vol. 3 No. 26. June 30, 1914.

Where everybody is money-mad and where life is sacrificed on the altar of greed, where law, order and deceney is set at naught, everything that goes to make a hellhole and to deprive a slave of reason, is here. Surface toilets, poor water, alleys one mass of decaying garbage and filth from the overcrowded restaurants, no sanitary arrangements whatever, fully one-third of the people sick with intestinal troubles, fourteen little babies died in one week, bootleggers plying their trade openly, cocaine peddlers and fiends on every corner, the town full of human vultures known as pimps, lewd women by the hundreds, drunken men by the score, wages low, work the hardest, each slave or crew thriving on their reputation of being able to lay more pipe or drive more rivets than any man or crew in the field. Restaurants have raised their price to 35 cents a meal.

It is awful to sit back and ponder upon such a scene and wonder what it is all about. Men, calling themselves human, working hard under almost unbearable conditions, becoming completely covered with oil and forced off the job in a few days through physical exhaustion and without even buying themselves a clean shirt, hunting up a bootlegger or going to the drug store after “Mule,” then to the jungles where they sleep off a beastly drunk. In all my travels I have never found a place that needs awakening like this place. Local 586 has bought a tent for summer quarters and has leased a lot. We are now waiting the coming of an organizer who is capable of arousing the downcast, slumbering spark of manhood ere it becomes totally extinct in the slave’s breast. Come on, all you footloose, fighting Rebels and help us put Drumright on the I.W.W. map. Here is a big job and one that we can make a success.

A. W. Rockwell, Secretary I.W.W. Local 586.

The Voice of the People continued The Lumberjack. The Lumberjack began in January 1913 as the weekly voice of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers strike in Merryville, Louisiana. Published by the Southern District of the National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers, affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, the weekly paper was edited by Covington Hall of the Socialist Party in New Orleans. In July, 1913 the name was changed to Voice of the People and the printing home briefly moved to Portland, Oregon. It ran until late 1914.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/lumberjack/140630-voiceofthepeople-v3n26w077.pdf