Telegrams and statements from Frank’s sisters, Bill Haywood, Justus Ebert, Adolph Germer, Charles Lambert, Victor Berger, and many more respond to the murder of Frank Little by agents of capital in Butte, Montana on August 1, 1917.

‘Comments on the Lynching of Fellow Worker Little’ from Solidarity. Vol. 8 No. 396. August 11, 1917.

FRANK LITTLE HAS NOT DIED IN VAIN

August 1st, 1917.

The dastardly murder of Frank H. Little, member of the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World, by hired gunmen of the Amalgamated and Anaconda Copper Companies at Butte, Montana, which took place at three o’clock this morning, shows that the Industrial Kings of this country are not above taking human life.

They broke into the door of Frank’s room and dragged him out, without his clothes or crutches. It should be known to the public that Little was a cripple, suffering from a broken leg, which occurred in an accident that had taken place in Arizona a short time before.

It was not because of anything that he had said about the soldiers that he was killed. He was murdered because of the part he was taking in the strike at Butte, Montana.

He had left Chicago not more than two weeks ago and his presence in Butte was to help by counsel and advice the miners in their battle against the Copper Trust.

They have silenced the lips of Frank Little, but the message of industrial unionism that he conveyed to them, their demands for shorter hours and better pay, will be carried into effect.

The tragic, brutal death of Frank Little will unite the working forces of this country against the masters of bread. He has not died in vain, and with his blood will be written the abolition of the wage system. This was the cause to which he had dedicated his life.

WM. D. HAYWOOD, Secretary-Treasurer Industrial Workers of the World.

ITALIANS MOURN FRANK LITTLE

Send Wire to Butte–“Il Proletario” Stopped by Authorities.

Boston, Mass., August 4, 1917. The news of the lynching of Frank Little has been like a thunderbolt from a clear sky to us, From now on the workers will be convinced that the law is nothing but a piece of rubber that the capitalists can stretch at their convenience.

Upon learning of the sad news we sent the following telegram to Butte, Mont.:

Il Proletario and the Italian Propaganda League of the I.W.W. painfully impressed by the brutal crime committed by capitalism against our Fellow Worker, Frank Little, and raging with indignation, send you the hearty expression of our deep emotions and the assurance of our solidarity in this great struggle against the assassins of modern civilization. Let the memory of our sacrificed martyr be avenged by our great victory,

A. RENZI, A. FAGGI

Six gunmen with masks on their faces broke into Frank Little’s room this morning at three o’clock. They took him away and hung him under trestle of the C.M. & St. P, railroad track. Every striker has sworn to stick together now until our demands are granted. Victory is sure now.

PETER PETAJA, Butte, Mont.

Frank Little murdered this morning by gunmen. Strikers standing firmer than ever.

GROVER H. PERRY, Salt Lake City, Utah.

The news of the cowardly murder of Frank Little by Butte gunmen was received by members here with feelings of fierce anger and deeper grief.

PHIN EASTMAN, Augusta, Kans.

Stigmatizing the barbarous act so accomplished by the Copper Trust in Butte as a crime, the Union of Farrell wishes to give assurance that it will work as never before to advance the cause of the Industrial Workers of the World. Fellow Worker Little was one of the most valorous, one of the most human and one of the most militant of the fighters for Industrial freedom. Human justice has been outraged, but his foul murder not go unavenged.

MATTINO, Farrell, Pa.

On verification of the death of Frank Little the following resolution was passed: Be it resolved that we, Metal Mine Workers’ Industrial Union No. 800 of this district, demand that a general strike be called. This resolution was passed at a mass meeting of copper miners, thirty-five hundred workers attending.

W.H. LEWIS, Miami, Arizona.

If the reports of Little’s murder are true, then I not only mourn the passing of a brave true-hearted fighter for the workers, but stand ready to go to Butte at short notice and help bring the real murderers to the justice they have outraged too long. Our members have been too patient. We must act.

PRASHNER, Scranton, Pa.

Have just read in the papers about the lynching of Fellow Worker Frank Little. Some brave stunt on their part to murder a cripple,

E.S. ROSE, Milwaukee, Wis.

Telegraph Frank’s funeral arrangements. Save few of Joe Hill’s ashes for me.

EMMA B. LITTLE (Sister of Frank), Fresno, Cal.

Bury Frank Little where the Organization thinks best.

BESSIE COURTWRIGHT (Sister of Frank.)

Will bury Little Sunday evening. All Butte miners to turn out. be the largest funeral ever seen in Butte, Mont.

PETER PETAJA, Butte.

Please purchase floral wreath or design for Little’s funeral inserted “from Bisbee’s deported miners.” The Arizona strike situation is very encouraging. Miners indignant at the Butte crime.

KIMBALL Columbus, N.M.

Fellow Worker Frank Little lynched last night at 3 a.m. They broke his room door and took him without his clothes or crutches.

JOE KENNEDY, Butte, Mont.

Do you need me in Butte? Would be glad to go. Answer quick.

SAM SCARLETT, Pittsburgh, Pa.

The boys here send their deepest heartfelt sympathy in our bereavement at the loss of our martyred fellow worker, Frank Little.

I.W.W. PICKETS Per Frank Dewey. Elma, Wash.

Frank Little murdered but not dead. His silence does much to awaken class consciousness. May his life be the last as the price of Industrial Democracy.

ST. LOUIS, RECRUITING UNION. BEN MEYERSON, Sec’s.

The following motion was adopted the County Committee of Local Allegheny Co. at a meeting this afternoon:

We extend to the Industrial Work- es of the World our sympathy on the death of Frank Little, and we protest against this outrageous murder.

LOCAL ALLEGHENY CO. SOCIALIST PARTY. Per CHAS. W. SELLEMANN, ETHEL B. TAIT.

The following statements were se cured by M.C. Walsh, a special writer for the Chicago “Examiner,” and were censured by the “law.” None of them have been published. A further conspiracy of silence was also shown on the preceding days when the newspapers of the United States, with the exceptions of the Butte and Chicago newspapers, did not print the news of the cowardly murder of Frank Little:

The mine owners of the country, and especially Montana and Arizona, are breaking all laws in their efforts to keep the workers from earning decent wages to keep body and altogether. They, the mine owners, and their paid agents are resorting to lawlessness and deportation in Arizona and their mining centers in order to keep the miners from trying to cope with the high cost of living by using their rights under the constitution by organizing and striking for more wages. This sort of high handed lawlessness is not going to get the approval of the American public. They are not going to stand such anarchist tactics much longer and the mine owners of Wall street will in all probability reap the harvest that will surely come if the same continues. The dastardly hanging of Little places the responsibility on Wall street in their fiendish attempts to crush Organized Labor.

ED. NOCKELS, Secretary Chicago Federation of Labor. JOHN FITZPATRICK, President Chicago Federation of Labor.

While I have nothing in common with the methods of the I.W.W., yet the hanging of Frank Little by a band of masked cowards in Butte, Montana, is a contemptible act beyond description. Frank Little and the workers of the I.W.W.s are as much entitled to their opinion as any Democrat, Republican or Sam Gomperite. The existence of the I.W.W. is not without cause. Were it not for the brutal capitalist anarchists there would be no occasion for the I.W.W. Whatever lawlessness the I.W.W. has resorted to, if any, has been the counteraction to the lawlessness of organized and greedy capitalism. And the copper thieves and timber thieves think they can suppress an opposing idea by deporting or hanging people. It is convincing evidence that they are stupendously ignorant of social forces.

The execution of a person is by no means an execution of the idea. Quite to the contrary; to resort to mob lawlessness, as has been done against the I.W.W., in many cases, only creates sympathy for them and adds to their strength. If a continuation of the Butte and Arizona outrages should bring on violent disorders, the people, of the United States should fix the responsibility therefor upon the organized and lawless capitalist class.

ADOLPH GERMER, National Secretary American Socialist Party.

The reported lynching of Frank Little by a masked mob in Butte, Mont., is another ominous symptom of what seems to be brewing in the Far West. President Wilson censured the mob, which deported the striking I.W.W. miners from Bisbee, Arizona, but did nothing to punish them. He censured the copper, coal and steel barons for attempting to extort profits out of the blood of the soldiers, but did nothing to prevent further extortions. There is but one way to end outrages such as this Butte, such as those in Bisbee, and such as that the coal operators of Illinois are now trying to perpetrate upon the state. It is the taking over by the government of all the Mineral wealth of the country-coal, copper, iron, lead and zinc mines; of all the necessary means of transportation and communication–railroads, telegraph and telephone lines; and the operation by the government of these utilities for public service and not for private profit. That will end outrage and extortion. Unless this step is taken, and taken soon, the threats of a violent explosion, amounting to a revolution which have been heard in the halls of Congress with increasing frequency of late weeks, will come true. This country sits on the edge of a volcano, but nothing seems to be able to convince the Atlantic Seaboard where financial rulership and political rulership are alike concentrated, of that fact.

IRWIN ST. JOHN TUCKER, Chairman of People’s Council, Chicago.

The hanging of Frank H. Little in Butte, Mont., is plain murder, and cowardly murder at that. The murderers plainly acknowledged this by masking their faces. I am surely not an I.W.W. In fact I am responsible for the change in the constitution of the Socialist party which prohibited sabotage and the violence clause which was introduced in the 1912 convention. But I understand that the I.W.W. is here because the American Federation of Labor has failed in its duty to the working class of America. The I.W.W. is practically the same thing as the Trades Unions of France and our Allies, which is syndicalist in its principles, and the I.W.W. borrowed their theories and tactics. I can not see what is laudable in France should be a crime in America. The cowardly murder of Frank Little, who was a cripple at that, will bring to the I.W.W. a good many converts. For his is the blood of the martyr that is the seed of the faith in a labor union as well as a church.

VICTOR BERGER, Editor of the Milwaukee Leader, Former Congressman and Executive Member of the Socialist Party.

It is almost inconceivable that such a crime could take place in the United States in the year 1917. This seems to be an echo of the lawless deportations in Arizona that called forth the censure of President Wilson. It is to be hoped that the government of the United States will be reestablished at the earliest possible moment in the copper empires of the West. Frank Little will be looked upon as a martyr in the cause of hundreds of thousands exploited wage slaves seeking to better the Ping conditions in the metal mines of this nation. No less a body of men than the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, appointed by President Wilson, has declared these conditions to be intolerable. This is a struggle between Industrial democracy and autocracy and it cannot be settled by hanging men struggling to uphold the rights of the great masses of the toilers.

J. LENGDAHL, Editor “American Socialist.”

MOURN NOT, REJOICE, REJOICE!

Let us not mourn, let us not mourn!

He’s gone, he’s gone!! Foully done to death; murdered in a great cause!!!

But see, look, look!! His dying makes men serious; they question society that must murder in order to survive!!

Look, look!! Men stir, they know not why! This brutality but deepens a great unrest and gives prophecy of a great storm coming that shall uproot the tree that bears such fruit.

Look, look! Men spring up to fill the gap his death has caused. And where he was one before he has become hundreds, nay tens of hundreds, now!

Look, look!! They did him to death. But it was themselves they killed. They have given him immortality and themselves the doom of the damned!

Mourn not, mourn not. Rejoice. rejoice, that such men can be of us! Rejoice that not with us was lined the coward crew, but the noble martyr of labor, whose going means our coming, and whose death means our life.

Sing no song of sorrow. No paean of grief shall be ours. A battle song we will sing! Death to capitalism, death to capitalism, death to capitalism, shall be its one refrain! And we shall sing It now in a chorus made stronger by the martyrdom of one of us. In it shall be his untiring devotion to ideals. His unceasing efforts for freedom even in pain. His love of class that was but his hatred of oppression, and his zeal for the emancipation of all! We sing, we sing the victory that his murder makes plain is coming and is ours to achieve!

Death to capitalism, death to capitalism, death to capitalism!!!

TO FOLLOW MOURN NOT WRITE HIS NAME BIG!

Henceforth let us write his name no longer LITTLE

Henceforth let us write his name BIG.

BIG in the martyrdom that measures men and movements as fit for success.

BIG in the idealism that gives to a mangled physique a powerful personality.

BIG in the death few men desire and that all would fain emulate. BIG in the inspiration that makes of cowards men and fools sages, BIG in the portents of disaster to the social forms that, in killing him, but hastened their own annihilation. BIG in the promise that from his grave will come victory and from his dangling corpse aroused manhood hastening on with renewed determination to peace and progress.

BIG in the love we give to him who died that we might live, and who, in his dying, has become reincarnated in the lives of the proletarian myriads who feel in his death the urge towards the new time coming when men and women shall both be free and the end shall have come to all tyranny.

JUSTUS EBERT.

Frank Little—Rebel

The murder of Frank Little at Butte, Montana, by copper company stool pigeons, aided and abetted by the Chambers of Commerce throughout the country and the prostituted hirelings of the capitalist press, show clearly what desperate measures are being resorted to by the oligarchs of wealth to prevent the working class in general, and the miners in particular, from obtaining a larger measure of the products of their toll.

Frank Little was probably the best known member of the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World, having been a member of the Board since 1911. He had the entire confidence of every member of the organization, and was as cordially hated by the capitalist class, first, for his indomitable courage, second, for his integrity. He could not be bought by them or swayed by honeyed words to break faith with his fellow workers. He was active in free speech fights in the West, Middle West and East; in fact, he was always on the firing line battling the emissaries of the master class for the right of free speech, to organize and to bring about a better state of society.

Whenever a strike was on and a call for help sounded Frank was always ready and willing to go, regardless of personal interest or danger, and threw himself into the fight with all his energy.

At the time he went to Butte he was on crutches, having lately met with an accident while attending to organization business in Arizona. He was called to Chicago to attend. a meeting of the Executive Board and was anxious to return to Arizona, but an urgent call came from Butte, and though not in any fit condition to travel he responded and went to his death.

His cowardly murder, which was perpetrated for the purpose of striking terror into the hearts of the miners and force them to return to their previous condition of slavery, will fall of its purpose. It will cause every red-blooded worker to rally to the support of the miners, showing clearly to the copper barons of the West the keen appreciation by the workers of the class struggle, and the thorough abhorrence of the dastardly act.

The road to industrial freedom is strewn with the bones of martyrs, and we shall march on undismayed until victory lights on our banner. For On OUR CAUSE must go, Amidst joy, or weal, or woe, Til we’ve made the “ONE BIG UNION,” Great and Grand.

C. L LAMBERT, Member Executive Board, I.W.W.

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