In this amazing historic document Dublin-born socialist editor T.A. Hickey writes from Hallettsville, Texas of the execution of friend James Connolly, whom he met in the U.S.

The Rebel (Hallettsville, Texas). No. 251. May 20, 1916.

The Rebel was begun by Edward Otto Meitzen and Dublin-born Thomas Hickey in 1911 as the voice to the Texas Socialist Party. The paper’s dangerous attitude towards labor organizing, land redistribution, the Mexican Revolution and tenant farmers les to several assaults on the paper’s offices, including the shooting and wounding of Meitzen by a local sheriff. Edited in Hallettsville, Texas with “The Great Appear Great To Us Only Because We Are On Our Knees-Let Us Arise” as its masthead, the paper soon reached circulation of over 20,000 leading Hickey, a popular speaker, to run for Lieutenant Governor. The SP of Texas in the early 1910s was a formidable force, becoming the second largest party in the state, though it declined as the decade, and the War wore on. Opposed to US entry into World War One, like many papers of the time, The Rebel was closed in 1917 under the Espionage Act.

Access to full paper: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth394584/m1/1/