Wobbly, anti-war political prisoner, inmate no. 13564, Roy P. Connor could not be broken. Connor was born poor in Kennesaw, Georgia around 1892. Leaving home, tramping and looking for work across the country, he joined the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union Local 400 in 1916, becoming an I.W.W. organizer and convention delegate. Picked up in the Palmer Raids, comrade Connor was a defendant in Sacramento’s ‘silent witness’ trial and would first go to Leavenworth in 1917. Released and arrested again in 1918, he was sentenced to ten years for violating the Espionage Act. Entering Leavenworth on January 25, 1919, comrade Connor immediately refused to break rock. Nearly four of those years were spent in isolation or segregation leading in 1922 to a series of hunger strikes against the prison regime. In 1923 comrade Connor was placed in the ‘psychopathic ward,’ a straight-jacket, force-fed, and subjected to torture. And still, he would not stop resisting. His parents, who had lost touch with him since he left home, contacted him and began to campaign for his release. Along with many other prisoners, Roy Connor was released by the December 13, 1923 Presidential Amnesty Order.

‘Will the President Let Roy Connor Die?’ from Truth (Duluth). Vol. 5 No. 42. October 20, 1922.

(Defense News Service.) Leavenworth, Kan. Roy Connor, one of the I.W.W. war-opinion prisoners, broken in health from three years of solitary confinement, has begun his fourth hunger strike. Either he will obtain his liberty through the amnesty which has been denied the politicals by President Harding, or he will die in the federal penitentiary here, according to prisoners just released.

And if Connor dies in his desperate efforts to win his right to freedom all of the 69 other I.W.W. prisoners here will abandon their various jobs, and will henceforth refuse to work.

“Connor is in bad shape,” declares a man who has just completed a non-political sentence, “and unless relief comes to him soon, the federal government will have a dead political prisoner on its conscience.”

When the war broke out, Connor was employed in the hop-fields of Yuba county, California. He was arrested and jailed because he was a member of the I.W.W., and was among the 53 men who were held for 64 days and nights in a single) cell 21 by 21 feet in the malodorous and disease-breeding jail at Sacramento. Five of those men died in that jail, from influenza and tuberculosis.

After Connor was convicted for not believing in the war, he came to Leavenworth carrying a great voltage of resentment against the indignities heaped upon him and the others at Sacramento. Never for an instant did his hatred for the system which had put him into prison relax.

Leavenworth officials say that Connor is not a good prisoner. That is true. He has never adjusted himself to the regulation life in the penitentiary. He has no respect for the authority which has dominated the last five years of his life. His lack of respect caused him to be put into solitary confinement three years ago.

Last spring Connor began his first hunger strike. For 27 days he refused food. Seven days later he struck again, and fasted 25 days. Then a five-day interval, followed by a third hunger strike lasting 21 days. Another interval, and now a fourth fast.

Connor’s physical strength is waning. He is doing this thing on sheer nerve. There is no color in his cheeks, according to word from inside; he has the appearance of death. This man is no more than 30 years old, it is said, but looks 50. He was a telegrapher in earlier years, but found the work too confining, and went into the open for his health–at a time when he valued health.

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 IWW leading to the paper being closed down in the first big anti-IWW 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 JO Bentall until 1923 as an unofficial paper of the CP.

PDF of full issue: https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/lccn/sn89081142/1922-10-20/ed-1/seq-1