The system's hand

Front matter

The syslem s M,nid, i nil III 111 II

I|| II nil 1 II ii;i

II II ! II II '1

Preface

"The System's Hand" is a story pure and simple, but a story founded on facts. No attempt is made to mold public opinion. Conditions are revealed as tbey existed and as they still exist.

If I have told too much and laid bare truths that have thus far been carefully concealed and the reader is horrified, I am sorry, but I would warn him that in this book we are just starting out on a journey and in the volumes following there are many miles yet to go. I trust that he will courageously go with me to the end.

The Author,

This book is written by Mary Tupper Jones in collaboration with Stephen A. Doyle. Fiction is used to present facts in an entertaining form.

It is endorsed by John Fitzpatrick, President of the Chicago Federation of Labor, and by Duncan McDonald, President of the Illinois State Federation of Laibor. It will be endorsed by all honest employers of labor.

Many other endorsements and the support and superviBion of well known labor men are a criterion that the purpose of this book is absolutely honest, and that it is produced as an educational effort

By MARY TUPPER JONES

Chapter I

"There are two things of which I am certain," wrote Kant, the philosopher, "the starry heavens and the moral law."

Looking back over a life so filled with tragedy as to make of me an old man before my time, I seem to focus on a certain autumn morning in the year 1878, when I, the boy, Stephen Angus Doyle, just turned nine, and whose head had always been up in the clouds, came to a sudden and full realization of the difference between right and wrong.

Driving the cows to and from pasture, I had wondered at the mystery of the pale grey dawn, and the marvel of the sunset glow. The faint tinkle of a cow-bell to this day brings back to my mental vision great stretches of timothy land with the moon shining on it, and a wistful-eyed boy leaning against a bam door, dreaming.

On this particular autumn morning, my Scotch mother turned to my Scotch-Irish father and showed him some scraps of paper in her hand, and they spoke to each other in Gallic, while all the time I wept unrestrainedly.

"Why are you crying, son?" asked my father.

"Don't put them in jail," was all that I could stammer.

Then my stem yet kindly father smiled his slow, sweet smile and said.

"Suppose you quiet yourself and tell us aU about it, Stephen."

I made an effort and began.

"You know father how you thought sailors had robbed Graham's store. WeU, I know it was some of our own town bovs, for I found all these fresh tobacco tags and candy wrappers, now in mother's hand, by the creek, when I took the cows to water, and sailors would never be crossing there. It was — " but tears again choked me.

Father nodded — ^he knew of whom I was speaking, and then I weakly added, "Don't arrest them, please."

This was the beginning of my life's work.

I became one of the most noted detectives in America, but the heart of that little child crying out in his Nova Scotia home grew also, and the soul, reaching out beyond the old harbor-town, refused to be crushed when it later found itself confronted with the horrors of "The System's Hand."

And today, when I see young people flung into juvenile prisons, or so-eaUed reform schools, thus started on the downward path, I recall how my father, who was the constable of the county, sought these two youthful robbers, orphans both of them, and on mischief bent, and how he talked to them, and made them repair the damage done, and how they grew up into useful citizens, and I realize how hiunan-nature is the one thing that has not changed with all the years. The children of the late seventies up there in the Canadian country are the same boys and girls we see now, crowded almost to suffocation, on Chicago's great West Side, playing and fighting in a dozen different tongues, edging their way into picture-shows, pushing into grimy little candy-shops and often sore put to it to find an extra penny.

Poor little things. The odds are all against them. In most cases their mothers had to stand in some shop or factory up till the very moment of their birth. They have scarcely ever known what it is to have a square meal, or enough clothes on when the snow comes drifting down; but the great fact remains that they are here. They have been buffeted about by meddlesome charity officials, hustled through a few grades of politically controlled public schools, where they received a lot of mis-information and all the diseases known to childhood, and finally dumped back into the reservoir of America's melting-pot, — ^the street. Yet, looking into their old-world eyes, you catch something of the vision that has sustained the foreign people down through all the ages — the endurance that has out-lasted pain, the hope that no poverty has ever crushed.

My fourteenth year found me in the lumber mills of Minnesota, at the head of Knife Falls on the St. Louis river. I had always been ambitious to make my own way in the world, and was the first of a large family of boys to leave home- My work in the mills consisted of trimming lumber. At this dangerous occupation I stood for twelve hours at a time, catching the timber with my hands as it came towards me on the endless chains, and at the same time stepping quickly on the saw with my feet.

The bad water which we had to drink brought on typhoid fever, and while slowly convalescing from this illness, I had time to overhear much of the talk of older employees. Many things that to them were inexplicable, were, to me, owing to my early environment, at least partially clear. It was at this period that I got my first insight iato the place a detective holds in a big corporation.

As a child I had often heard my father speak of Scotland Yard, and I imbibed the idea that to be a detective meant something very fine. It appealed to me as a life of service, that was the way the people regarded the caUiag in the colonies and in England, but fate took me to the United States to work out my destiny, and the day came when I turned with such loathing from the work that I had chosen that it was as if I had crawled out of a nest of writhing serpents.

At the Richmond Lumber Company where I was employed, two men, by the names of Clark and Wallace, were sent out by the firm in the capacity of walking bosses. This meant that they were to go about the woods and locate valuable timber lands. The government had barred the monopoly of such land by individual corporations and they set about to overcome this obstacle. This was accomplished by inducing aliens, mostly from Canada, to pre-empt one hundred and sixty acres each. The firm's representatives knew, of course, that it was not possible for any but full-fledged American citizens to take up these homesteads, but the aliens didn't know the law upon the subject. On a certain day they found themselves, in a darkened room, compelled to sign papers which they could not see to read. At the expiration of a few months, so-called secret service men, saying they were representing the government, were introduced into the scene, and I think the first thing I realized about a detective was that he must be a pretty good actor. These fellows, playing the part, told the hard-working mill-hands that they were not legally entitled to the land, that they had committed perjury in taking it up, and that their documents were worthless. Here the men sought Wallace, who had gotten them to sign the papers, and told him the situation. Wallace *s reply was, * ' The secret-service men are right. You had better strike for the tall timber at once." He then conveyed to them the impression that he was going to do them a favor by letting them have the pay due them, without the usual twenty-five per cent discount, which was customary, when an employee was forced to draw his earnings before the logging season terminated.

"What of our land?" cried the men.

Wallace laughed. "Why, you have no land, and what's more, you stand in danger of prosecution."

What was left for the men, frightened and discouraged, but to strike indeed for the tall timber.

On a dreary day, in early winter, I saw about a hundred and fifty of my fellowwori^men, fine, up-standing lads, who had thought they were laying the foundations of little homes, turn from their work and sadly disappear into the woods. I have seen many instances, in the years that followed, of masses of human-beings, driven like dumb cattle, but nothing ever touched me more deeply than the sight of these young exploited mill-hands, a haunted look in their eyes, going slowly into the heart of the forest. They were branded by their associates, who were entirely ignorant of the state of affairs, as fugitives from justice, when, as a matter of fact, the signatures that they trustingly put to those papers, in that darkened room, were not affixed to final proofs and to pre-emption papers alone, but to deeds and mortgages conveying the land to the Richmond Lumber Company.

It was shortly after this that the boy Earl came into my life. Such a little rough-neck as he was. When I see him today, leading thousands of men and women by the very force of his indomitable personality and making history in the New National Labor Party. I remember the first time I ever saw him. He was Ijdng in a ditch where he had fallen from the top of a freight car, when trying to beat his way to the coast. ' ' Going West," he muttered, as I bent over him and felt for broken bones. He must have been about twelve at this time, but he had already felt the pressure of the iron heel on his neck, and was struggling to get out from under. Literally a child of the people he had known the sufferings of the oppressed. Often he used to tell me of the days when he and his little brothers and sisters begged in vain for a crust of bread, and how his mother would bow her head in her apron and sob bitterly because she had nothing to give her starving brood.

Somehow or other, I got the cut and bruised boy to my mill boarding house, which was a structure of rough boards. The small portion which I called my room contained a narrow cot, bench and board shelf. For several days Earl was delirious and during that time I heard many strange phrases concerning "grease-monkeys" and * ' screw-boys. ' ' In the period that followed, when he was able to sit up and talk rationally, I got my first glimpse of that great body of Labor which is organized, and I began to sense something of the psychology of the strike.

"We pulled one," Earl said to me once. "That was when I was only ten, too."

With that flame in his voice and eyes that one always notes in the born orator, he curled up on the blankets and began:

* ' Steve, what show has a guy got in one of them hellholes in the big steel-mills of the East, if he and the rest of the fellows don't stick together? Us boys was a- working twelve-hour shifts, that's one for the day and one for the night, and gee, but it's hard keeping awake and working at night. Girls have to do it too. Some of them are so little that they have to stand on boxes to be tall enough to brand tin plates. But there was about sixty of us boys getting five cents an hour for greasing the necks on the cold roUs, and them straw-bosses never intending to pay us a cent more, but we seen how the skilled workers, over in the hot-mills department, by joining together, and having committees to represent them, got big money, compared to the rest of us poor guys, so I up and told the feUows, when the boss wasn't around, and when he was, we talked in hoglatin, that we must get together somehow and ask the superintendent for a raise.

** After talking things over, they chOse me and Kelly Ryan and Bill Louis to go and hand our little line of dope to the main gink. We marched right up to the of&ce. Kelly was kinda skeered, and Bill was a^shaking, though he laughed sort of careless, but me? I was having the time of my life. I knew all we needed was a little spunk, and we'd land the raise. Frightening the wits out of you is the way them bosses figure they can keep a guy what's working for them, always down and out. When we got to the door of the office I cut out knocking and walks right in. Gee, you should a seen that gink's mug when he seen us kids all covered with^ease, just a-dropping it on his nice thick carpet. I give him a chance to speak first, but he couldn't, so I starts right in.

" *Mr. Laird,' says I, 'we come in to get a raise in wages.'

"He smiled then, and says, 'Well, boys — ' but he didn't finish up with 'have a seat,' so I just naturally took one on the edge of his desk.

"He smiled again, polite as you please, and got out a big box of black cigars. We didn't refuse 'em, we understood we was being treated Uke a regular comnoittee.

" 'And now,' says he, 'what is the nature of your grievance?'

"I answered, 'we are now getting sixty cents a day for twelve hours' work, and we think we are entitled to seventy. If we don't get it, we have voted to strike tomorrow evening at quitting time.'

"Mr. Laird looked kinda funny then, and says he, /Boys, I don't think you are treating me quite fair. I have to take this matter up with the National ofi&ce, and it would be impossible to receive a reply under a week.'

" 'I've told you,' says I, 'What is laid down by the bunch, and that's all I've got to say.'

*'We bid him good-day and walked out. Just as we was going down the steps, leading from the office. Laird called me back and taking me aside, says, 'You are spokesman for all these boys, and we are going to hold you responsible to keep them working until Saturday night, when I may be able to get word from the National office.' Then he patted me on the shoulder and says, 'Don't forget I'm going to buy you a nice new suit of clothes Saturday night.'

"I just looked him all over, and I says, says I, 'Mr. Laird, you pay us boys seventy cents a day, and we wUl buy our awa. clothes,' and with that I turned and walked away."

"Did you get it — did you get the raise?" I interrupted.

"Did we?" answered Earl, "Well, you can just bet your life we did. The next evening we kept our word and pulled the strike. We was only out two hours, when the boss come around and offered us the ten cents raise." Earl laughed at this point. "You see he didn't have to send to the National office after all," said he.

My Kttle room was very lonely after Earl left. He had filled it so with life and laughter, even when wearing the grotesque bandages I had managed to wrap around his arms and legs. I begged him to stay there with me in the timber-land, but he had only shaken his head and replied:

' ' No, Stevy, I gotta see the world. You 're different. You like books, and you always seem to be studying something, but it's too quiet here for me. I wanta go down to the cities where there's lots of folks."

"I'm going to the city too, some day. Earl, and maybe we'll meet again," said I.

But several years passed before our paths again crossed, and then in a manner no man could have foreseen.

Chapter II

"I want you to help me at the polls today." It was Fred Hollis speaking, and I looked up from my book and nodded. "All right, old boy, I'm with you,"

As we left Police Headquarters, and strolled down the streets of Duluth, "Handsome Hollis," as he was called, explained to me some of the details of my first assignment as special officer.

I had now been in the employ of the city about a week, during which time I had received training as a detective, and I looked forward with much eagerness to my initial job.

"All you have to do is keep the peace and be observant," said he.

"That sounds easy," I replied, and took up my station at the booth which was in a store on the corner of Seventh and Superior streets.

I soon became impressed with the silence of the men who came streaming up the streets. They might have been the inmates of a deaf and dumb asylum, stopping on their way to work to east their ballot for their president, for it was the presidential election of the year 1888.

As the day wore on, and I passed in and out of the voting place, I became curious about the endless nimaber of blue and red, especially red, tickets that were handed to the clerks. The former read "I want to vote the straight Democratic Ticket," and the latter, "I want to vote the straight Republican Ticket." I asked a man, who was collecting the bits of pasteboard, and taking down the men's names, ''What on earth is aU this for?"

He gave me a pitying glance, but appeared too busy to furnish any further information. Being in the habit of finding out things for myself, and sensing that there was something crooked, I engaged a fairly inteUigent-looking laboring man in conversation.

"Pal," said I, "This is a big industrial center. Lots of hard-working men, aren't there f

"Over two thousand will vote at this poll," he answered.

"Queer way you have of doing it here in Duluth," I remarked.

The man looked at me a moment, as if hesitating, then said, "A poor man is never given a chance to cast his ballot as he wants — ^he has to cast it like he is told."

"Who dares to tell you how to vote?" I questioned.

"Who?" he echoed, with that dumb look of suffering on his face that we have grown accustomed to seeing on the faces of the toilers the world over. The men who fell the forests and till the soil and build the cities, but who can not vote as they see fit. "Why, the bosses, of course," he added.

"Pal," said I, "Tell me all about it. I don't even know your name, so no harm shall come to you, but I'm new here, and I like to understand things." The man shifted his lunch-pail from one hand to the other, glanced over at the heavy line of smoke which marked the factory district, and began.

"For weeks now the 'ward heelers' have been going around to all the shops, mills and elevators, and talking with the foremen, and the foremen have done their talking to us workers, and we were told which ticket to vote. The Republican machine is in power here, so most of the men were given orders by them. I guess they'll elect a Republican president all right. That's the way I voted, though I belong to the Democratic Party. StUl they're just about the same, when you <3ome down to it, — ^neither one cares what becomes of the laboring man and the laboring man has no party."

The man's voice trailed ofE as if he were utterly spiritless. I watched him a little while in silence. He was above the average; he had education of a kind, and he had evidently once had his ideals, yet he let himself be driven like an animal.

"Did you have to do as they bid you?" I asked, with a touch of scorn in my voice.

"I have a wife and five children to support," he answered quietly, "and there'll be a sixth child soon. When the foremen quit giving out the voting orders, they always say for the benefit of any new men who may be present, 'remember, you open your mouths, or let the voting clerks know that you can speak English, or hand in any ticket but the one we give you, and you'll be thrown on the street, your jobs taken from you, and your names placed on the 'blacklist,' which means we couldn't get another job anywhere in this community."

A whistle blew, the man started, and moved hurriedly down the street. I was looking after him when Hollis came up and slapped me on the back.

"Wake up, old chap," said he. "Are you overcome with the number of full-fledged American citizens we have here in Duluth?"

"There does seem to be a good many," I answered absently, my mind on the man who had sacrificed his one chance of having a voice in the government of his country, that his babies might have food.

Hollis laughed heartily. "Why, Steve, don't you know that more than half of these fellows who have voted are aliens? Everybody has to hand in a ticket here. I guess the reds have won all right. The Democrat is like the fellow who fell out of the balloon — ^he isn't in it."

This was in the days before the present Australian ballot system was introduced, compelling those entitled to a vote to register.

But politics have not improved as the years have gone by. They are, if anything, more corrupt. The crudity of the miU-hand, pretending ignorance of the English language by handing in a colored card at the poU, is done away with, but in its place we find the people of the country, who are supposed to be the very government itself, dully, despairingly casting their ballot for municipal, county, state, or National nominees, as the "boss" has ordered them to do, and big business is in absolute control of the situation.

As late as 1916, in some of the states of the Mid-west, I observed illustrations of the truth of this statement in several small towns through which I happened to be passing. In one there is a great foundry company, which owns practically all the carmanufacturing plants in the United States, and whose stockholders have held diplomatic positions in European countries. They so control the votes of the citizens of this community that only those who belong to the company "gang" are allowed to cast a ballot at all. If a man on the outside should vote, his vote is not counted. Prom the prosecuting attorney down to the sheriff, all needed protection is given to the corporation.

In another place, where most of the voters are struggling to make ends meet, and failing, by putting in long hours of service for a great boot and shoe manufacturing concern, they are ruled politically and industrially by one man who, in addition to holding the office of mayor of the town, is paymaster of the company, and the attorney for the same.

In one good-sized town an enormous enameling company, whose excess profits during the first year of the world war were something over eight million dollars, informed their foremen, who are in charge of large crews of workmen, that they must pass slips of paper among the men on which they should indicate their political preference, and that unless it was the Republican Party, the plant would shut down for a long time and there would be no work. The middle-man who conveys instructions from employer to employee is generally hired from a private detective agency, and is put into the plant in the capacity of foreman, or understrapper, and is a double paid individual, receiving the usual salary from the company, and a wage from the agency to which he belongs.

Not until the close of the year 1918 did I find any solution of the problem which had pained and perplexed the mill-hand on that far away morning in Duluth, when he had said, "and the laboring man has no party."

In December of that year, close around Christmas time, was bom the hope, politically speaking, of the people of America.

After passing through numberless harrowing experiences, including the unearthing of the murder of a child, the exposing of the abduction of the girl Leta Dobey, who had mysteriously disappeared, and who was found brutally murdered, I found myself rapidly acquiring the rudiments of my chosen calling. I had now progressed from municipal emplojonent to the position of operative for a vast corporation. This was the Interstate Traction Company of Duluth. As a detective for the city I had had to swallow many things distasteful, but at least I had felt that I was helping to bring about a safer and saner state of affairs, when I became a member of a private agency^ the

iron veritably entered into my soul. * « » *

Soon after I went to work for this Traction Company, I saw that they were much concerned over rumors of a coming strike. The employees were all underpaid and overworked, and repeated efforts on their part to get a slight raise in wages, a little shortening of the hours, and better working conditions, by sending representatives of their union to meet with the officials of the company, had availed them nothing, therefore the men were driven to that last resort — ^the strike. When the company realized this, they did what big business has done and is doing the world over today — they precipitated the strike. While the workers were still going quietly about their duty, hoping against hope, that the employers would show a spark of humanity and grant their requests, the heads of the Traction Trust sent for the famous, or more properly the infamous, bimch of strike breakers known as the Himcky-Dunk gang. They were in the charge of a man named Henry Delden of the Hart Detective Agency, with headquarters in St. Louis. J was detailed, assisted by another operative named Wilton, to find suitable housing for these men. Duluth was so well organized by this time that it would have been impossible to get a bed or meal for them at any hotel or boarding-house. So we prepared the upper story of the street-car bams at 28th Avenue West, and filled it up with cots. There were about a hundred and sixty men in all, the lowest type of manhood it has ever been my misfortune to meet. They began fighting among themselves and robbing each other that very first night.

With every thing against them, the employees were still sticking it out when the company deliberately discharged three men who had been in their service for fifteen years. They had committed no offense and their standing was very high. They were efficient and trusted employees, so that this sudden discrimination, on the part of the employers, incensed the rest of the workers to such an extent that they all walked out and the strike was on. It was just what the company desired. The private detectives and the gang of strike breakers now began operations. I witnessed them placing dynamite on the tracks and blowing up the cars. Delden seemed disappointed that no lives were lost.

"Why, I've become so expert doing this kind of thing," said he, "that I bet I could blow the top of your ha;t off without moving a hair of your head."

The trust press was given the news that the union men were causing the explosions, and following instructions from the Traction corporation, and as usual giving no heed to the plea of the working-man that he be given a square deal in the paper, the headlines were all about how dangerous the striker was becoming.

The next move was to frame the organization. And here comes iu one of the most insidious methods employed by Capital to defeat Labor and which caUs for the complete co-operation of the "system's hand."

A man by the name of LeMoyne, at least that was the name he went by in Duluth, had long since been planted in the very heart of the union itself. Corporations, telling the private detective agencies, with whom they are in constant communion, to go the limit to keep them informed as to the movements of the workers, are given much perverted information by the agency, who in turn has gotten a lot of twisted tales from the agents who are sent into every town and hamlet to worm their way into organized labor.

These Judas Iscariots are told to spend money lavishly, there is plenty more where the first came from (the toilers are producing it right along) and to pose as being greatly interested in the cause of the laboring man. They are told to follow some craft long enough to be admitted into a union, and then urged to strive after some office in the organization. In such a capacity a private detective can readily tell when the workers are at the breaking point of endurance, and when the actual pangs of hunger can no longer be endured. But this is not the way their reports read — ^they are concocted so as to convey to the corporation the news that the organized men are in a wild state of revolt against aU law and order and that the very lives of the employers themselves are in danger, but that they, the agency men, may be able to defend them from the hand of the assassins. This puts the middle-men, the private detectives, in such complete control of the industrial situation that they have even gotten to the point where they can command armies.