Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane
Fighting for Free Speech with the Hobo Agitators of the Industrial Workers of the World
edited by John Duda
Publication date: August 2009
Paperback: $15
Purchase from AK Press
Mass civil disobedience, train-hopping militants, insurrectionist poets, radical marching bands, and a victory for a precarious proletariat—in 1909! Published to coincide with the 100th Anniversary of the Spokane Free Speech Fight, which began in November of 1909, Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane! tells the story of one of the first of the Industrial Workers of the World's famous "free speech fights." Through newspaper articles, dispatches from the scene of the fight, and personal recollections, the voices of the men (and women!) who filled the prisons of Spokane, Washington in the name of free speech and the One Big Union are brought back into print. A hundred years later, the courage and creativity of these Wobbly free-speech fighters, laughing in the face of law and order to defy an unjust system and even less fair working conditions, could not be more relevant.
Includes articles, letters, updates, and essays by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Agnes Thecla Fair, Richard Brazier, J. H. Walsh, and other Wobbly free speech activists, direct from the pages of The Industrial Worker, The International Socialist Review, The Workingman's Paper, and more!
About the editor: John Duda is a founding member of Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse, a Baltimore worker's collective affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, and an activist-scholar of social movements and self-organization.