A look at the repression faced by the interracial Brotherhood of Timber Workers culminating in the ‘Grabow Riot’ where gun thugs attacked striking marchers on July 7, 1912 near Grabow, Louisiana. The workers defended themselves, setting the stage for imprisonment and trial for many B.T.W. members. Three fellow workers Asbury Decatur (“Kate”) Hall, J. Tooley, and Ed Brown were killed, as was a gun thug. Fifty were wounded and dozens arrested. A major event in the southern class war of the times, the Brotherhood were not stopped, and continued their dogged struggle in the harshest of conditions, achieving modest successes over the following years.

‘Iron Heel on Dixie’ from Solidarity. Vol. 3 No. 34. August 17, 1912.

Some of the Methods of Brutal Repression Employed by Lumber Kings Against Fighting Timber Workers.

THE LUMBER KING

A snarling, slinking, silk-clad human fiend:
A harpy never yet from hell-thought weaned;
Steeped to the inmost soul in murder’s art
A cur incarnate and a wolf at heart.
A vampire brooding o’er the virgin soil
And drinking to the dregs the blood of Toil!

–Covington Hall.

Alexandria, La, August 10. Throughout western Louisiana and eastern Texas the Forest and Lumber Workers are in open rebellion against the lumber trust. The Brotherhood of Timber Workers and the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association are in a death struggle, the outcome of which will be a Unionized and uplifted or a peonized and degraded South, depending on whether the tollers or the spoilers win the battle, whether the red flag of brotherhood or the black flag of the plunderbund floats triumphant at the conflict’s close, and the red flag of brotherhood has never yet gone down.

For twenty months now the Union and the Association have fought each other, but back of this stretch years on years of robbery and persecution of the workers by the Southern oligarchy, which is today composed of a lot of Northern “carpet baggers” and Southern “scalawags” who have grown rich by despoiling the South, and of which the “gentlemen” who call themselves the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association, are leading and shining lights.

The massacre of the workers at Grabow, La., on Sunday, the 7th of July, 1912, is not the only “riot” the lumber kings of the South have planned and staged, nor was their attempted assassination of Creel in any way outside their regular order of doing business, for their hands, or rather the bands of their gunmen, are dripping red with the blood of working men–the hands of their gunmen, for Mr. R.A. Long is too gentle a christian and John H. Kirby too desirable a citizen to do murder other than by proxy.

Veritably Dixie has been and still is under the Iron Heel, and especially is this statement true of the timber belt. There, for wages as low as $1.25 a day, men are forced to labor 10 to 12 hours a day; FORCED to pay fees to support doctors in whose selection they have no voice; forced to pay premiums for alleged accident insurance; forced to pay fees to maintain hospitals and then have to take up a collection among themselves and send to a public hospital anyone who falls too ill to be kept in camp; forced, by a monthly or longer pay day, to trade in the company stores, or “rob-alls,” as the workers call them, or to suffer a discount of from 10 to 25 per cent on their time checks; forced to pay exorbitant rent for the shacks they live in, and then be told by a gunman who shall and shall not visit them; forced, under threat to discharge and the blacklist, to swear love, loyalty and obedience to the lumber trust and then forced to take the most infamous anti-union oath ever conceived in the soulless brain of a corporation lawyer; forced to suffer eternal espionage and forced to stand for any and every graft the managers, superintendents, foremen and gunmen take a notion to put over; forced to listen to talks by managers and gunmen assuring them that they had “nothing to complain of and then forced to stay in their quarters” when the speakers of the Brotherhood came around; forced to live under insanitary conditions in. houses a lumber king would not house his hogs in and then he told they had “nothing to complain of,” forced to work overtime without pay and to submit to dishonest scaling of logs; forced, by direct exploitation and by graft piled on top of graft, to give back to the companies every dollar of their pay, and then come cut in debt to the “rob-alls;” forced, in the midst of boundless wealth and unending labor, to see themselves, their wives and children underfed, ill-clothed, half sick, and then be told their misery was due to the hookworm which bad been sent by God to punish them for their “improvidence;” forced to toil from the cradle to the grave for nothing but a commissary living, a peon’s wage, and then be denied even the right of PETITIONING their lords and masters for a redress of their grievances. THIS is what the Southern forest and lumber workers have revolted against. It was either rise and make a fight for liberty or stay under the iron heel of peonage forever. This is what caused the birth of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, the first local union of which was organized at Carson, La., on December 3, 1910, by A.L Emerson and Jay Smith. So rapid was the growth of the organization that the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association, in a desperate attempt to crush it out, ordered the closing down of over 40 mills in Louisiana and Texas, the lockout becoming effective in July, 1911, and lasting until January and February, 1912, during which time thousands of workers were reduced to, extreme misery, their only meal consisting of corn bread and molasses.

But this lockout failed of its purpose and the Association, with the reopening of the mills, began a campaign of terror that has seldom if ever been equaled even in the history of the capitalist class. Thousands of workers were blacklisted and bounded from place to place, the whole timber belt was filled with an army of detectives and gunmen of the worst and lowest type. The state governments, all “democratic” and “anti-trust,” and the railroad corporations acted in concert with the Association. Hardly a day passed but President Emerson received letters and messages threatening his life and the lives of all other officers and organizers of the union. Whole towns were fenced in, even the United States post offices, men were beaten, robbed and outraged in every conceivable manner; in no Association town was any man’s life or person safe.

The lumber trust practically declared martial law throughout the timber belt and attempted to enforce it with its army of “deputized” thugs and gunmen. All civil rights, all pretense at legal procedure, all laws, even those the most elemental and respected even by savages, were thrown to the winds; all constitutional guarantees became a joke and man-hunting for the lumber trust the chief function of the Democratic officials.

But still the cry of the workers for justice would not down, and still the union grew and, then astonished at the strength of the rebellion and maddened by the resistance of its hitherto submissive peons, the lumber trust, in one last desperate effort to make its terror terrorize, planned and carried through the massacre of Grabow.

As a result of this “riot,” a packed grand jury has indicted President Emerson and 64 other members of the Brotherhood and its allies, each being charged with murder on three counts, two of the counts charging that they killed their own brothers, with one count against each for shooting at with intent to kill, and they are now in the parish prison at Lake Charles, La., held in close confinement, fed on food that would sicken a buzzard, amid surroundings so revolting and so vile that they are beyond the power of words to describe.

The same grand jury-grand juries in Louisiana are always made up of our best citizens,” never of useful workers– released all the mill owners and their gunmen, though John Galloway, one of the owners of the Galloway Lumber Co., at whose town the “riot” occurred, was the only man charged with murder by the coroner’s jury, three witnesses testifying that be bad shot and killed Decatur Hall, unionist, as Hall was running away from the scene of battle.

At first the Association crowd boasted of the valorous deeds of their gunmen in this “riot,” but now, they are moving heaven and earth to make it appear a fight between union and non-union labor, this though they and everyone else know that every scab employed in the plant ran when the first shot was fired, which came from the office of the Galloway Lumber Co. and was undoubtedly intended for President Emerson, as the first man to fall was standing at his side in the wagon from which he was speaking.

When the “riot” was over it was found three men had been killed outright, two unionists and one gunman, and about 40 wounded, several desperately, and that many of the unionists had been shot with soft-nosed, copper cased bullets-bullets that not only shatter bones, but poison the wound they make as well, and which the laws of nations prohibit being used even against savages.

In the union gathering were many women and children, and that none of these were killed is a miracle, for the gathering was fired upon from several points by at least 15 to 20 gunmen with pump guns loaded with buckshot and rifles loaded with soft-nosed copper cased bullets. One woman, however, bolding her six months’ old baby in her lap, got a rifle ball through her hair, which shows it was not the fault of the Association’s gunmen that the women and children escaped with their lives. Also, the presence of their women and children proves that the unionists went to Grabow to start a “riot,” as is charged by the Association.

At first the venomous capitalist press, being the only source of information, public sentiment was all against the workers, but as the facts regarding the “riot” and its causes began to come out public feeling changed rapidly, men who had never before taken sides openly denounced the Association and its methods; the workingmen and working farmers, regardless of union and party affiliations, took up the cause of the Brotherhood and its imprisoned members. New applications began to pour in on Secretary Smith, and the massacre of Grabow, far from shattering the Brotherhood, as the Association hoped, has but produced a greater solidarity of Labor.

But let no one think from this that the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association will pause in its insane effort to bang or send to a felon’s life the 65 men now in prison. From inside information we know that it intends to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hang at least four men-President Emerson, Secretary Lebman of the De Ridder district council, Organizer Burge of the Brotherhood and Secretary John Hilton of Local De Ridder, Socialist Party, to send as many of the others as it can to the penitentiary for long terms, and, in any event, to keep them all in close confinement under brutal treatment in that heinous prison at Lake Charles until their health is ruined, so that if they escape conviction they will go out into the world broken in body and spirit, forever unable to make another fight in the cause of human liberty.

Brothers: Comrades! Fellow workers! Will you let the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association accomplish its infamous and inhuman purpose?

Fighting against the Southern oligarchy and the millions of the lumber trust for the lives and freedom of our fellow workers, we appeal to our brothers and comrades everywhere to come to our aid, to help us gather the funds necessary to defend our boys and care for their helpless families. Only a UNITED WORKING CLASS can save them; can make the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association loosen its vampire hold upon these men whose only crime is that they sought to organize and uplift the workers of the South.

Rebels of the South, arise! “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain!”

EMERSON DEFENSE COMMITTEE, BROTHERHOOD OF TIMBER WORKERS, Box 78, Alexandria, La.

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/v03n34-w138-aug-17-1912-Solidarity-damaged-pg-SD.pdf