Frank Miller, Rhode Island mill worker and member of the I.W.W. General Executive Board, is sent to Leavenworth on a ten-year sentence for Criminal Syndicalism.

‘Another Victim for Leavenworth’ by John Nicholas Beffel from Truth (Duluth). Vol. 4 No. 20. May 20, 1921.

Providence, R.I. Whatever the Appeals Court may have said about Francis Miller, who was tried and sentenced with the Industrial Workers of the World at Chicago, the people of Providence have a great affection for him, within and without labor circles. When he left the other day to serve the remainder of his 10-year sentence at Leavenworth, his fellow-workers at the big Riverside textile mill took up a collection to pay his fare to Kansas. And his foreman, Captain John Kelly a Spanish war Veteran, shook hands with Miller heartily, and said: “Hurry back, Frank; your job will be waiting for you when you come.”

A quiet gray-haired spectacled man of 40 is Miller; I spent some hours with him just before he went away. We talked about the trial days in Chicago, the crude methods of the prosecution, and the vile Cook County jail in which he was held. If he had been tried separately from the others, as was his legal right, he might never have gone to prison. His one offense was that he was a member of the I.W.W. general executive board. Business correspondence with William D. Haywood was used as evidence against him.

Miller’s wife is a fine motherly woman. She has gone to work In the mills so that the household may he kept together, and that she may send occasional gifts to the man behind the gray walls. There are two Miller boys, Harold 20, who has turned to mechanics, and Erl, 11, who goes to school.

Truth emerged from the The Duluth Labor Leader, a weekly English language publication of the Scandinavian local of the Socialist Party in Duluth, Minnesota and began on May Day, 1917 as a Left Wing alternative to the Duluth Labor World. The paper was aligned to both the SP and the I.W.W. leading to the paper being closed down in the first big anti-I.W.W. raids in September, 1917. The paper was reborn as Truth, with the Duluth Scandinavian Socialists joining the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. Shortly after the editor, Jack Carney, was arrested and convicted of espionage in 1920. Truth continued to publish with a new editor J.O. Bentall until 1923 as an unofficial paper of the C.P.

PDF of full issue: https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/lccn/sn89081142/1921-05-20/ed-1/seq-1