What jail in rural Louisiana was like for incarcerated members of the integrated Brotherhood of Timber Workers, affiliated with the I.W.W., during their 1912 strike against the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association.

“Black Hole of Calcasieu” from Solidarity. Vol. 3 No. 33. August 10, 1912.

Barbarous Louisiana Prisons where Lumber Trust is Trying to Break Spirit of Timber Workers   

Alexandria, La, August 3. Frenchmen shudder still at the mere mention of the word “Bastille;” the Mexican people still sicken when “Belem’s” awful name is spoken; the bull pens of Idaho and Colorado long since have become synonyms for cruelty and injustice; the whole human world has come to regard these horrible prisons as expressing the sum total of “man’s inhumanity to man.” But down here, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, there are two little prisons belonging to the parish of Calcasieu that will go down in history side by side with Belem and the Bastille. One of these little dens is called the “New Prison” and is not yet finished. On its lower floor, in a steel cage, dark and damp, yesterday there were incarcerated 16 members of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers and its allies, and the deputies were still out man bunting.

In the other jail, which is a wing of the old jail, which has been condemned as a plague spot by the state board of health, and which is about 36 by 40 feet in dimensions, there were confined 107 men and women–39 members of the Brotherhood and 88 other prisoners. On the second floor of this chamber of horrors, in a room about 36 by 40 feet, 51 men and boys were confined, one of the boys being insane; 28 of these were negroes and 23 whites, the great majority of the whites being union men.

A rope had been stretched across this room to divide the whites from the blacks; on the white side was a single water pipe and faucet, with a single bathtub, and in this tub the white men washed themselves and their clothes and utensils; on the single toilet stool all of them answered the call of nature, and it was seldom out of use. The colored men came to this one faucet to fill a big tub in which they bathed, washed their clothes and all other effects, and to the single toilet stool they came to empty great buckets in which they had been forced to deposit their sewage. To this room was brought at 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. the men’s food; and in this indescribable place the men ate the two meals a day, consisting of half of a small loaf of bread and a plate of bull meat, that are so generously furnished its prisoners by the “imperial parish of Calcasieu.”

In this upper room A.L. Emerson, president of the Brotherhood, and 15 or 20 of his associates were confined, he and several others half sick and two or three of them wounded, one badly; on the lower floor in a dirty, damp, filthy room were Ed. Lehman, secretary of the DeRidder District Council, B.T.W., and eight other union men, one of them wounded, and several other prisoners.

Although the great majority of union men could have escaped long before their arrest, had they wished, they are all kept as closely confined as though they were already condemned criminals of the most desperate character. They, men of open air, are never taken out and allowed to exercise; to escape for one moment the putrid air of this cesspool. During these torrid, sultry summer days the prisons become stifling hot, till the men seem as though in a sweat-box and literally gasp for breath. Added to this, their friends and families have to crawl on their knees to get to speak a word to them; the organizers of the Brotherhood who are on the ground are barred from the jail, though private detectives are not and are allowed to grill whom they will, especially those sick, wounded or suspected of being weak.

All this is done, it is said, because the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association wishes to break and break forever the spirit of all those it cannot hang or send to the penitentiary; and the conditions of these horrible prisons and the treatment of the unionists, many of whom are, like John Hilton, nothing more nor less than political prisoners, seem to bear witness that this is the intention of the association.

Words have failed me, I know, in my attempt to picture the conditions existing in these horrible prisons, but that is the fault of the language and not mine. If you, however, think what is here set down is too horrible to believe, I invite you to go to Lake Charles and see for yourself its chamber of horrors. You will see all I have here set down of inhumanity and more, and, thank God, you will see the Brotherhood still defying the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association; still believing that the Union of the Forest and Lumber Workers is destined to be one of the greatest labor organizations on earth; still calling to you who are yet on the outside of the “black hole of Calcasieu” to close up your ranks and press on to victory; still crying, “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing but your chains to lose! You have a world to gain!”

What is your answer? Will you allow them to be sent to death or to penal servitude without a struggle–they, the true and brave; they, who are in this chamber of horrors only because they fought for labor and YOU?

Protest!

Deluge the governor of Louisiana and the president of the United States with letters and telegrams denouncing these iniquitous prisons, ye men and women of labor, ye lovers of freedom and justice everywhere!

Notice!

Send all contributions to defense fund to JAY SMITH, General Secretary, Box 78, Alexandria, LA

EMERSON DEFENSE COMMITTEE,

Brotherhood of Timber Workers.

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1912/v03n33-w137-aug-10-1912-Solidarity.pdf