News from the seat of the hard-fought Little Falls textile strike of 1912.

‘Americans Scab on Foreigners at Little Falls’ from Buffalo Socialist. Vol. 1 No. 22. November 2, 1912.

Polish, Italian and Slav Workers Cry Shame at Americans for Taking Sides with Bosses–District Attorney and Church Help Bosses in Their Attempt to Crush Workers at Little Falls.

The latest developments at Little Falls show that the foreign workers who are on strike against the mill owners intend to stick until they win. The I.W.W. have taken charge, and they are parading past the mills with banners, asking the American girls not to help the bosses starve the foreigners into submission. One of the banners reads: “More bread for the workers, less booze for the bosses.”

The native born workers broke through the line of marchers at the mill gates and returned to the mills.

LUNN’S INSOLENT FOE

The enginery of the criminal law has since time immemorial been used to entrench the exploiters and crush the exploited. The face of the average district attorney in a very short time assumes the expression of a hyena. And he becomes as remorseless. He is always on the crouch to jump into the limelight as a courageous warrior and protector of the stolen wealth of the wealthy. He is the incarnation of the arrogance of the predatory class. The bully never lets slip an opportunity to browbeat the man safely handcuffed. He is big with courage when amply protected by the law. Then he delights in outdoing any coward in heaping insult. He is always ready to take the vilest kind of advantage of his position as a lawyer and public prosecutor, for, when he thinks his own fortune and standing will be advanced with the robbers of mankind. Insult is his stock in trade. The prisoner must endorse it in silence. The ordinary prisoner is so oppressed by fear as to his own future that he does endure, and suffers in silence.

But the viper filling the office of prosecutor of Herkimer County found something different when he let loose his scurrilous tongue in the farcical prosecution instituted against Comrade George R. Lunn. He found a man who would not sit idly by and weakly allow even a district attorney to vomit forth uncalled-for vituperation. The prisoner had the audacity to stand upon his feet and hurl the hireling’s imprecations back into his teeth. This was something new and strange. Other persecuting reptilians will smile cynically, as they have a way of doing, at the occurrence at Little Falls, but they might better take heed and warning.

THE CLERGY OF LITTLE FALLS.

News reports from Little Falls tell us that the clergymen of that city have taken a decided stand against organization of a branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. These clergymen are true to the history of the clergy. Always truckling to the predatory possessors of wealth, always solicitous that their own intestines be well stuffed they know by instinct that thrift always follows a decided stand against anything that stands for the interest of the workingman. They hypocritically advise the workingman to turn his peepers up. They are safe in pretending to love the carpenter from Nazareth, for scripture tells them they are safe. The Nazarene was done to death long ago. If that selfsame Carpenter should, however, turn up in Little Falls, these selfsame ministers would have Him sent to jail.

THE ASSININITY OF GOV. DIX.

Dix, the Governor, woke up at last; and what a pitiful waking up it was. On Friday, the modern wonder, after sleeping long and soundly on the situation at Little Falls, took up Mayor Lunn’s protest against the malicious prosecution of Socialists at Little Falls for exercising their right of free speech, and ventured a reply. Listen to the oracle. The Governor says: “It is true that the constitution of our state grants the right of free speech. It includes no right whatever that one shall speak in any particular place.”

There we have the usual sham argument of capitalism in defense of brutality.

Free speech means, freedom to say what one pleases when one pleases and where one pleases, so long as no right of another is invaded. The hirelings of the Little Falls mill owners lacked the courage to state the real reason for the arrest of Mayor Lunn and his associates.

That reason was that they were spreading the light of Socialism. So pretended reasons were resorted to. Dix indulges in the same falsehoods, and advances flubdub for argument.

To say to one “you can say what you please, but we shall say where you shall not say it,” is a denial of free speech. The assumption of the power to say that one shall not say his say in presence of a thousand men who want to hear him, is no different from forbidding him to say it to one willing listener. To say that a man shall not exercise his right of free speech before willing auditors in a public park is no different from saying that he shall not exercise that right conversing with a friend, whilst walking along a public street, or in his own home.

Under the Dixonian democracy, run in, the interest of the exploiters, the government, working its power to forbid the exercise of this precious right of free speech at the times and places distasteful to the exploiters, would accord to every Socialist the full protection of the law in the exercise of his right of free speech in the presence of himself at the bottom of a well with the cover clamped on.

The Buffalo Socialist was a weekly published in Buffalo New York by the Buffalo Socialist Publishing Company from 1911-1915 and aligned with the Socialist Party of America. Edited by Max Sherover, the company also produced a weekly women’s newspaper, New Age, from 1915.

For PDF of issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/buffalo-socialist/v1n22-nov-02-1912-Buf-Soc.pdf