Irish-born wobbly James McInerney dies in Walla Walla prison from meningitis on August 13, 1930. A participant in the Centralia fight which saw I.W.W. members defend their hall against American Legion thugs in a 1919 Armistice Day attack, resulting in the deaths of five reactionaries and the lynching of I.W.W. activist Wesley Everest, as well as long jail terms for heroic comrades like McInerney.

‘James McInerney’ from The Militant. Vol. 3 No. 29. September 1, 1930.

The news of the death in Walla Walla, Wash. penitentiary of James McInerney has come as a shock to every class conscious worker in the country. McInerney was one of the famous Centralia I.W.W. defendants sentenced by a bosses’ court to from 20 years to life imprisonment for having de- fended their hall and lives, weapons in hand, against a mob of uniformed American Legion gunmen who raided it on Armistice day, 1919, with murder in their eyes. Wesley Everest, one of the I.W.W. members, was lynched by the mob after having been unspeakably tortured and finally castrated by the masked cowards.

McInerney, one of the finest types of revolutionary workers in the country, was himself tortured bestially. With the bullet wound received in the famous Verona battle, the tortures in Centralia, and the destructive regime in prison the last ten years, even his usually robust health was undermined. He died of tuberculosis and spinal meningitis–his blood on the hands and head of the lumber barons, their Legionaries and their corrupted courts.

Upon receipt of the tragic news, the I.W.W. throughout the country organized memorial demonstrations. In New York over a thousand workers gathered on two days notice at 14th Street and University. Speakers representing the Lovestone group, the Lore organization, the Socialist party, the Proletarian party, the anarchists, spoke from the platform. Max Shachtman spoke for the Communist League (Opposition) and Herbert Mahler, the chairman, and W.I. Fisher spoke for the I.W.W. The leaders of the Communist Party and the “non- partisan” I.L.D. refused to participate or send a speaker on the grounds that they would not occupy the same platform “with Trotskyists and Lovestoneites”! This act of spiteful and criminal sabotage did not raise the prestige of the Party among the sympathetic workers; it was only greeted with bitter indignation.

In the meantime the balance of the Centralia men are still imprisoned, all of them under the threat of McInerney’s martyr death. They are among the men that have created one of the sturdiest traditions of the American labor and revolutionary movement. Their continued imprisonment remains a rebuke to the workers–particularly the militants among them. The untimely death of McInerney is a startling reminder of the obligations the working class, for whom these fighters worked so loyally, has toward them.

Are our prisoners to die in their cells, like trapped rats? Shall the hand of death alone release them from imprisonment, or shall it be the linked arms of labor battering down the steel and stone that holds them?

The Militant was a weekly newspaper begun by supporters of the International Left Opposition recently expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 and published in New York City. Led by James P Cannon, Max Schacthman, Martin Abern, and others, the new organization called itself the Communist League of America (Opposition) and saw itself as an outside faction of both the Communist Party and the Comintern. After 1933, the group dropped ‘Opposition’ and advocated a new party and International. When the CLA fused with AJ Muste’s American Workers Party in late 1934, the paper became the New Militant as the organ of the newly formed Workers Party of the United States.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1930/01sep1930.pdf