Free Speech Canto LV by Michael Ceraolo
Free Speech Canto LV
Bisbee, Arizona
June 26, 1917
About 3,000 miners go out on strike
against Phelps-Dodge mining company
The authorities will suppress such speech,
but how?
It took a little over two weeks
for that question to be answered
Near dawn on July 12, 1917,
having shut down the telegraph
and silenced all outgoing phone calls
in order to keep their doings secret
for as long as possible,
2,200 deputies
"having no authority whatever in law"
rounded up some 2,000 men
in a manner "wholly illegal"
Several hundred of those rounded up
renounced the strike at gunpoint,
but many more maintained solidarity
And so
either 1,186,
or 1,286,
or
some other number of those
were crammed into 23 rail cars
and deported from Bisbee
to a desert camp 200 miles away
It was just dumb luc
that none of the deportees died,
though
one man, striker James Brew,
did meet the ultimate suppression,
being killed by a gang of deputies
breaking into his house to take him off;
he did manage to get one of them
in the struggle
Word of course eventually did get out,
and
the Feds indicted Sheriff Harry Wheeler
and a number of others
for violating the constitutional rights
of the strikers
The lower court threw out the case
The Feds appealed to the Supreme Court
Of the nine Supremes, eight,
including some allegedly great,
ignored the Fourteenth Amendment
(the alleged great had not yet made
the long-overdue decision that the Bill of Rights
was 'incorporated' into the Fourteenth Amendment),
and
said it was solely the state's responsibility
to police itself even when it was the one
committing the violation of the law
And so,
back in the safety of state court,
the miscreants acquitted themselves
of all criminal charges,
and only paid
a negligible amount in civil damages
to a few of those damaged by their actions
Most of those harmed never returned
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