"As fast as they can pinch us, we can always get some more" - San Diego's 1912 Free Speech Movement

[struggle4progress]

The I.W.W. Free Speech Movement: San Diego, 1912
By Rosalie Shanks
The Journal of San Diego History
Winter 1973, Volume 19, Number 1

... There were fifteen free speech fights of considerable importance in the United States between 1911-1913, but dwarfing them all was the San Diego episode ... The City Council on January 8, 1912, passed an ordinance that prohibited all public speeches in a six block square area ... Some 175 people had been jailed by February 21; more arrests came every day. The Free Speech League, at this point, proposed to glut the jails and then to demand individual jury trials which would clog the courts and bring the legal machinery to a standstill. This idea appealed to the IWW which sent out word via their newspapers to come to San Diego ...

http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/73winter/speech.htm

[pnorman]

1. great find!

K & R!

[pacalo]

2. Good strategy: no bail, clog the jails, then demand individual jury trials.

Interesting find!

[liberal N proud]

3. That should serve as encouragement for the OWS groups.

Solidarity through history!

[struggle4progress]

4. Wobblie Joe Hill "wasn't a front-line organizer, although he did get severely beaten and permanently

scarred during a free speech campaign in San Diego in 1912"
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/joe-hill

That year, he apparently wrote "Overalls and Snuff"
... We have got to stick together, boys, and fight with all our might.
It's a case of no surrender: we have got to win this fight ...
http://www.folkarchive.de/nomore.html

The song was modified for the Wobblies' Wheatland hop pickers' strike in 1913:

... They have sentenced Ford and Suhr, and they've got them in the pen.
If they catch a wobbly in their burg, they vag him there and then.
There is one thing I can tell you, and it makes the bosses sore:
as fast as they can pinch us, we can always get some more ...
Now we've got to stick together, boys, and strive with all our might.
We must free Ford and Suhr, boys. We've got to win this fight.
From these scissor bill hop barons, we are taking no more bluff.
We'll pick no more damned hops for them for overalls and snuff ...
http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/usa/overalls.htm