A leading wobbly swept up in the 1917 raids and doing time in Leavenworth writes to the founding convention of the Communist Labor Party from prison to announce his fidelity to the new party. Not all of the many I.W.W. militants who adhered to the Communists at that time joined the C.L.P., but most did. George would be one of the last released, not being freed until 1923.

‘To the Communist Labor Party Convention’ by Harrison George from Truth (Duluth). Vol. 3 No. 37. September, 19, 1919.

Dear Comrades: To all of you I send greetings from this Siberia of the western world: and from this prison camp I urge you all to remember the great word “solidarity”. Not that that word or any other phrase, however so pleasing counts for aught. But with solidarity accomplished, all is accomplished.

I and those who are here imprisoned with me, shall judge you by the direction of your efforts and their results from this viewpoint. You may be assured that speaking for myself I shall not hesitate to join and work for the organization which best represents the ideas of the Manifesto of 1848 and the program of the Third International, when again I am a man instead of a number.

To many of us here, and in particular to myself, the expulsion of the bulk of the membership by Berger, Germer and Co. has meant simply that, as a last desperate bargain, they are selling the virtue of the party to keep their freedom—to avoid Leavenworth. To any one with a shred of revolutionary honor, such appearance of compromise for personal ends can but be despicable. Not that we want them here; no, for this place is only for the worthy and those who laugh rather than weep at prison sentences. We wish for no Scheidermann and Noske in “our jail” or in “our country”.

I would say more, a good deal more, but space and place forbid, and I think ji u all know your duty anyhow without any Instructions from this jail bird. Yet your duty is great, for the honor of founding the Communist Labor Party is great, yet the duty of carrying it to success is tremendous, and the responsibility is incalculable. May your capabilities and your responsibility to the proletariat keep you to the high mark that your own name sets for you. And may no clash of factions, or individuals over questionable issues mar the march of the “iron battalions” toward emancipations.

Let us all have done with compromise with liberalism, with reformism and with capitalism–as I’ve said elsewhere, any fool of a workman at all worth “saving” knows already that he is exploited, that he Is a wage slave. The main duty and effort is to show him that freedom is possible, that it is within his reach. He will take it fast enough once he is shown it can be taken and held.

There has been nothing of news or of information in this letter aside from the fact of ray adhesion to your cause as I see it. What ever that is worth you are at liberty to use as you see fit. That said, I remain

Yours for Industrial Freedom,

HARRISON GEORGE,

Convict No. 13158, Leavenworth, Kas.

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 I.W.W. leading to the paper being closed down in the first big anti-I.W.W. 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 J.O. Bentall until 1923 as an unofficial paper of the C.P.

Access to full paper: https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/lccn/sn89081142/1919-09-19/ed-1/seq-1