Art Shields reviews Chaplin’s classic account of 1919’s Centralia Massacre and the lynching of Wesley Everest. Agreeing with Shields that this is a fantastic book, one of the best in its genre, there is a link below to an online copy.

‘Ralph Chaplin’s Book of Heroes’ by Art Shields from The Daily Worker. Vol. 2 No. 55. May 21, 1924.

Ralph Chaplin, whose battle songs of the West Virginia miners furnished inspiration to the readers of the old International Socialist Review ten years ago, deals with another dramatic story of the class war in the Centralia Conspiracy, just reissued in greatly amplified form by the Defense Committee.

The armed defense of the loggers’ union hall against the Lumber Trust’s white guard is a theme that Chaplin does justice to as probably no one else could. The author was one of the first investigators on the scene after the battle and by revolutionary temperament and artistic insight he was qualified to tell the story with color and power.

There is a magnificent militancy running through the 144 pages of Chaplin’s book, without any straining after effect. The story tells itself. It would have been easy for another writer, seeking to avoid the sickly apologetics of liberalism, to have veered over into a penny-dreadful style. Not so with Chaplin. The battle of Centralia and the class war background behind it had been stamped into his heart and mind in the weeks that he spent going over the ground, while the White Terror was still rampant.

Chaplin is a poet and artist but he is also one of the boys. In fact he is first of all one of the boys. And he tells the story of the Centralia fellow workers in this book just as though he were talking to an audience of lumber workers–which in fact he is doing, for the book will have its largest sale in the logging camps of the northwest.

***

Wesley Everest’s Last Stand.

We hear the wobblies discussing the coming raid.

“I hope to Jesus nothing happens,” said the secretary.

“Wesley Everest laid down his few unsold papers, rolled a brown paper cigarette and smiled enigmatically over the empty seats in the general direction of the new One Big Union label on the front window. His closest friends say he was never afraid of anything in his life.”

***

“Torn and defiant as a wind lashed reed,
“Wounded, he faced you as he stood at bay,”

begins Chaplin’s great sonnet to Wesley Everest.

It was a hero’s death that is described in the prose narrative–Everett’s last stand on the banks of the Chelalis River. The hall had been raided. Three Legionaires bit the dust. The mass of invaders broke through bent on lynching the union men inside. Everest who ran outside, drew the fire on himself and saved the lives of his comrades.

***

“Having kept off his pursuers thus far the boy started boldly for the comparative security of the opposite shore, splashing the water violently as he waded out into the stream. Suddenly Everest seemed to change his mind and began to retrace his steps to the shore. Here he stood dripping wet in the tangled grasses to await the arrival of the mob bent on his destruction. Everest had lost his hat and his wet hair stuck to his forehead. His ammunition was nearly gone. Eye witnesses declare his face still wore a quizzical half-bantering smile when the mob overtook him. With his pistol held loosely in his rough hand Everest stood at bay, ready to make a last stand for his life.”

Dale Hubbard, nephew of the lumber king who organized the mob, falls dead. Bullets gone, Everest battles with fists. The mob’s fury vents itself on him. A gun barrel knocks his teeth out. A rope is thrown over him.

“You fellows haven’t got guts enough to lynch a man in the daytime,” ejaculates Everest “torn and defiant.”

The night of torture and terror in the jail; the emasculation and lynching from Chehalis Bridge is told as only a strong man, wrung with the outrage of it, could tell it. This is the chapter of the Centralia story that must be told and retold, lest we forget.

A White Guard Leader.

“Tell the boys I died for my class,’ were Everest’s last words as he was dragged out to mutilation and death.

Likewise the four white guard leaders who were shot down in the raid against the workers’ hall died for their class–the employing class. This was recognized last summer by the late President Harding in one of his last official acts when he laid a wreath on the memorial to the four slain Legionaires, near Centralia.

Chaplin’s picture of the commander of the Centralia post of the Legion, for whose death Wesley Everest’s comrades were convicted, would fit many a young White Guard leader:

“Warren O. Grimm came from a good family and was a small town aristocrat. Grimm was a lawyer, a college athlete and social lion. He had been with the American forces in Siberia and his chief bid for distinction was a noisy dislike for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic of Russia, and the I.W.W. which he termed the “American Bolsheviki.” During the 1918 raid on the Centralia hall Grimm is said to have been dancing around “like a whirling dervish” and waving the American flag while the work of destruction was going on. Afterwards he became prominent in the American Legion and was the chief cat’s paw for the lumber interests who were capitalizing the uniform to gain their own unholy ends. Personally he was a clean-cut modern young man.”

***

Chaplin sketches the social background to Armistice Day, 1919, in clear cut strokes: The millions of fir and cedar trees “straight and majestic, with green and foam flecked streams purling here and there at their feet;” the lumber monopoly that stole this magnificent domain from the people; the lumberjacks who toiled 10 and 12 hours daily until their rebellious unionism won them some few of the good things of life and the hatred of their masters, with its culmination at Centralia.

“The lumberjack,” says Chaplin, “…is the perfect proletarian type–possessionless, homeless, rebellious…But as wage earners go, he is not the common but the uncommon type both as regards physical strength and cleanliness and mental alertness. He is generous to a fault and has all the qualities Lincoln and Whitman loved in men.”

A Rebel Portrait Gallery.

So Ralph Chaplin says in the opening pages but he is too accurate an artist to see the individual I.W.W. loggers with whom this Centralia drama deals as “types.” Each is reflected in his individual contour and light and shade. There is old Mike Sheehan, 64 at the. time of the raid, born in Ireland and a stoker in the navy during the Spanish-American war who became a woodsman only in his latter years; Eugene Barnett and his sweetheart wife, who had gone into the timber game just to get some money to prove up his Idaho claim; Ray Becker, educated for the ministry; having “the zeal of a prophet and the courage of a lion;” O.C. “Commodore” Iland, the father of seven children and John Lamb, the father of five; James McInerny, whose neck was stretched all night by a rope while the inquisitors tried to make him turn stool pigeon; Britt Smith, hall secretary, 20 years a logger, who slept in the hall and watched it night and day; Bert Bland, one of the men who was posted on Seminary Hill during the fight; Loren Roberts, the unfortunate youth whose mind flew away during the night of torture and Bert Faulkner who was involved in the affair by accident; Tom Morgan, moral weakling who succumbed to the terror and turned stool pigeon as Rad Ike Brewer, one of the defenders of Matewan with Sid Hatfield.

Elmer Smith.

Elmer Smith stands in a still more individual light. Not that he is not heart and soul for their cause now as he was when he visited their hall and gave them the legal advise that they had a constitutional right to defend themselves. But because Elmer Smith is a revolutionist without the wage slave background. He is a lawyer–still a member of the Washington bar in spite of the conspiracy by lumber interests to disbar him–but so genuine a comrade of the boys in jumpers that not one of them would think of calling him anything but “Elmer.” And physically he is a powerful giant who could give almost any lumberjack a tussle though he insists he would not like to go up against tough old Mike Sheehan.

The legal analysis of the case is explained with more convincing detail than it has been explained before but this side of the case is of more importance to the outsider than it is to the rebel who is for the Centralia boys because they had the guts to fight back against the employers’ gangsters and to inflict such a signal lesson that such raiding has ceased in the northwest.

After all, as Walt Whitman says: “How futile are all arguments before a defiant deed!”

The Centralia Conspiracy, published by the General Defense Committee, 1001 W. Madison street, Chicago, Ill. Price, 50 cents.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v02a-n055-may-21-1924-DW-LOC.pdf

Chaplin’s book online: https://archive.lib.msu.edu/AFS/dmc/radicalism/public/all/centraliaconspiracy/AEO.html