San Diego and Its Trouble
By Editor
We stated some time ago, in noting news from that troubled city, that we would wait for the report of the governor’s commissioner, Mr. Harris Weinstock. Mr. Weinstock has reported. The report is a voluminous document, and we can only briefly summarize. He tells us that the I. W. W. (Industrial Workers of the World) constitute a lawless class growing out of European conditions and imported from Europe; but the vigilantes of San Diego who punished the Industrial Workers were guilty of greater wrongs than they. Mr. Weinstock sums up the doctrines of the I. W. W. as follows:— 1. That workmen are to use any and all tactics that will give the results sought with the least possible expenditure of time and energy. 2. The question of right or wrong is not to be considered. 3. The avenging sword is to be unsheathed, with all hearts resolved on victory or death. 4. The workman is to help himself when the proper time comes. 5. No agreement with an employer of labor is to be considered by the worker as sacred or inviolable. 6. The worker is to produce inferior goods, and kill time in various ways. 7. The worker is to look forward to the day when he will confiscate the factories and drive out the owners. 8. The worker is to get ready to cause national industrial paralysis, with the view of confiscating all industries, and taking forcible possession of all things he may need. 9. Strikers are to disobey and treat with contempt all judicial injunctions. Certainly such teachings as these are seditious, and really call, it would seem, as Mr. Weinstock says, for remedial legislation, State and national. He also declares that excessive brutality was used against these Industrial Workers of the World, and that the representative citizen who has committed these lawless acts against the law and the Constitution, has “in the eyes of the law made himself a criminal—a far greater criminal than those whom he brands as anarchists, revolutionists, and the scum of the earth.” He also declares that unless the Industrial Workers of the World are checked by wise legislation, they may grow into a serious menace to the Pacific Coast. He brands their literature as incendiary, and says that the methods pursued by them are strongly condemned by the great body of wage-earners affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, and by the thoughtful and law-abiding Socialistic bodies of the country. On the other hand, District Attorney H. S. Utley, of San Diego, declares that Mr. Weinstock’s statements are libelous. But since Mr. Weinstock’s investigation, the vigilantes of San Diego have taken, without charge or warrant, Dr. Ben Reitman, the manager of Emma Goldman, the anarchist lecturer, from the U. S. Grant hotel in San Diego, to a distance of about nine miles from the city, where he was tarred and feathered, or tarred and rubbished. “I. W. W.” was branded on his back by either fire or a heated wire, and he was warned not to return. We learn this from the Los Angeles Tribune, and have seen no denial of the report. Messrs. Fred H. Moore and Marcus W. Robbins, who are attorneys for the I. W. W. prisoners, have received notice to leave the city, but they say that they propose to stay. In the name of law and order, the vigilantes have inaugurated a reign of terror. These conditions against all law and justice are a sign of the lawlessness of the times, foretold in Scripture. See 2 Tim. 3:1-5. Revolution is impending in the Old World and the New. Everything points in that way. But the real question arises, after all, Are we helping to stay the storm by illegal methods? Sometimes in the punishment of criminals, where men take the law in their own hands, they induce sympathy on the part of thousands, and increase that which they attempt to prevent. Now, above all other times, “be sober.”