An inter-racial union movement of some of the most exploited workers in Texas and Louisiana was sure to bring down murder on the heads of those who advocated it. Here, a howl against oppression from the Deep South. Also, we need to bring back the word ‘Plunderbund.’

‘Man-Hunting Lumber Lords’ from Industrial Worker. Vol. 4 No. 24. September 5, 1912.

LUMBER TRUST OUTRAGES STILL CONTINUE-0SAVAGERY REIGNS SUPREME–NO LIBERTY LEFT IN LOUISIANA.

Man-hunting has ever been the one true sport of Kings. There has never been an aristocracy, a plutocracy or an oligarchy of any kind that did not maintain an army of bloodhounds, both four and two-footed, for this purpose. The King, whether crowned or uncrowned, has ever been the incarnation of brute force, the ermined and sceptered representative of savagery, the leader of the Plunderbund. Witness Rome under the Caesars, France under the Napoleons, Germany under the Bismarks, Mexico under the Diazs, and the South under the Lumber Kings. Each one long reign of terror, each one long man-hunt, each sowing broadcast the seed of its own destruction, and each learning nothing from its predecessor, falling at last in the corruption and the ruin it had wrought. As it was with the Caesars, the Napoleons, the Bismarks, the Diazs, so shall it be with the reign of the Lumber Kings, for no system that so flagrantly violates all the fundamental rights, liberties and ethics of the race can endure; it is doomed to destruction, “peaceably if it will, forcibly if it must,” but doomed it is, and by its own deeds. Avails it nothing for such a system to raise the cry of “anarchy,” “atheism” and “treason” against its opponents, for its deeds drown out its words and shock humanity into revolution. This the Brotherhood of Timber Workers knows; this the Lumber Kings who call themselves the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association do not know, else they would hasten to clear themselves of the crimes that are being committed throughout the Southern timber belts in their names today.

Let the world judge between the Brotherhood and the Association:

We were forced to work long hours, 10 to 12 a day, at the hardest kind of labor, for wages as low as $1.25 per day; forced, we from whose labor comes all the lumber on the earth, to pay high rents for the shacks we lived in, and then be charged for light and water; forced to pay fees to support doctors in whose selection we had no voice; forced, by a monthly or longer pay-day, to trade at the Company stores, or suffer a discount of from ten to twenty-five per cent on our time checks, and this discount we often suffered rather than pay the extortionate prices demanded at the commissaries; forced to pay premiums for alleged accident insurance and never be allowed to see a policy; forced to pay fees to maintain hospitals, located no one knows where, and then be compelled to take up a collection and send to a public hospital anyone too ill to remain in camp; forced to see all that came to us from the company’s right hand taken back with its left, and more; forced to suffer eternal espionage and insult from an army of gunmen of the worst and lowest type and have, besides, the galling knowledge that these thugs had been commissioned as deputy sheriffs by the states of Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi, so that in resisting them we resisted the authority of the states that exist only by the labor of our hands and brains. Under these conditions, all our petitions both to our masters and the state for a redress of our grievances being ignored, life became unbearable and, in 1910, we revolted against this system of legalized peonage and began the organization of an Industrial Union of Timber and Lumber Workers. From the beginning our every demand, no matter how courteously worded, was met by the Association mills with insulting answers and threats of violence. We were charged with intending to commit every crime in the calendar, but, again, let the world Judge between the Brotherhood and the Association. The Association’s first act of war against us was the closing down of over 40 mills in the Texas-Louisiana timber belt, with the open and declared purpose of “starving” us “into submission.” This lockout lasted from July, 1911, to January and February, 1912, and thousands of workers were reduced to direst want and misery. It failed of its purpose, the destruction of the Union, and, with the re-opening of the mills, the Association augmented its army of gunmen, blacklisted over 1,000 men, forced all workers applying for employment to take one of the most infamous anti-union oaths ever written and to sign an application blank that not only degraded our manhood but relieved every one, except ourselves, of legal liability for everything. This also failing, the Association then began a campaign of terror that has been seldom equaled and never surpassed. President Emerson was assaulted in Lake Charles, La., by the General Manager of the Industrial Lumber Co., his life has been threatened dozens of times, and be has been arrested now six times on trumped-up charges; Organizer Wiggins was only saved from being lynched at Zwolle, La, by the quick arrival on the scene of union men and sympathizers; one of our other organizers was taken near Mansfield, beaten, stripped naked and driven off down the railroad track; at Bonami John McWilliams was given the water-cure because he was suspected of being a union sympathizer; at Elizabeth a poor devil was terribly beaten for the same reason; at Oakdale the assassination of Creel was attempted because he had published the secret correspondence of the Association in the “National Rip-Saw”; then, at Grabow, came the massacre of our people and the wholesale arrest and incarceration of our members, all the mill owners and their gunmen being released by the grand jury, It refusing to give any weight to our testimony, as though we were still living in the days when a “noble’s” word was worth that of twelve “common men”; since then Organizer Humble has been terribly beaten and then robbed at Strong, Arkansas, Fellow Worker Carl Cunningham frightfully whipped and Comrade Wm. M. Wier tried by a company drum-head court martial and run out of Bogalusa, and Organizer Ezra Moss assaulted at Lake Charles, La. Who will be the next to suffer we do not know, for the State has practically refused us all protection, has abdicated its authority to the Association, allowed it to proclaim martial law, to abrogate all constitutional guarantees and to violate every principle upon which the safety of society depends. Yet with all this, with the capitalist press blazoning us to the world an criminals of the blackest dye, we who have never been guilty of a single outrage of the kind above set forth, in whose towns even the lives and persons of Association gunmen and detectives are respected, we are told to be “law-abiding”–law-abiding when no one can know what is the law, all laws changing with the changing whim of mill-owners and mill managers–law-abiding under a government of the people by a private detective agency for the Lumber Trust–law-abiding! gods, what a travesty on justice, what a mockery of reason–law-abiding in the midst of lawlessness! Law abiding! This to us who alone have respected the laws of humanity!

Keep on, my masters, keep on, keep on, keep on!

But hear you this and heed it: The National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers will be here when the last tree is cut from Southern soil and not a single one of the martyred sixty-five shall die or go to the penitentiary for a single day.

Lie as you will to cut off our defense funds, to lull to sleep our fellow workers so that you may rush their brothers to the gallows or to penal servitude, yet the truth will out and the truth shall make them free. The Truth! The Truth! The thing you fear above all else, the immortal thing you have had the folly to order your gunmen to beat, to shoot and strangle into silence, the all-conquering truth! The Truth shall set them free and send your peon system crashing down the slopes of oblivion into the Junkpile of the savage past, where it belongs. The Truth, the thing you fear above all else, that you can neither chain nor kill, the ever-free, immortal, all-conquering Truth!

To the Rescue!

Clan of Toil, awaken! Rebels of the South, arise! Workers of the World, unite! You have nothing but your chains to lose!

You have a world to gain!

Committee of Defense, BROTHERHOOD OF TIMBER WORKERS, Box 78, Alexandria, La.

The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1907 until 1913. First printed in Joliet, Illinois, IUB incorporated The Voice of Labor, the newspaper of the American Labor Union which had joined the IWW, and another IWW affiliate, International Metal Worker.The Trautmann-DeLeon faction issued its weekly from March 1907. Soon after, De Leon would be expelled and Trautmann would continue IUB until March 1909. It was edited by A. S. Edwards. 1909, production moved to Spokane, Washington and became The Industrial Worker, “the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism.”

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v4n24-w180-sep-05-1912-IW.pdf