“CITIZENS OF INDUSTRY”: THE CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS OF THE IWW
“The IWW was an idea born in jail. It emerged from the labor struggles in the western United States, where labor unions like the Western Federation of Miners emerged to counter the power of the Mine Owners’ Association and the Pinkerton Detective Agency in bringing a violent end to labor strikes. Big Bill Haywood once noted in a United Mine Workers Convention speech that the Western Federation of Miners was “not ashamed at having been born in jail, because many great things . . . have emanated from prison cells.” After clashes between 1892 and 1899, Bill Haywood and others drew on the knowledge of labor struggles in the Western Federation of Miners to develop the idea of “One Big Union.” It was a coming together of unskilled labor and the unemployed that resulted in new ideas about freedom, work, and citizenship. Rather than identify as citizens of states that routinely used violence against starving workers, IWW workers described themselves as “citizens of industry.” Formally established in Chicago in 1905, the IWW articulated their work in the language of democracy—the founding convention was opened as the “continental congress of the working class.”
When ninety-four members of the IWW arrived at Leavenworth in September of 1918, the prison’s newspaper reported that the “eyes of the nation were focused on this prison.” They were charged with ten thousand crimes in four mass trials in Chicago, Sacramento, Omaha, and Wichita. Each trial employed a different prosecutorial strategy. In Wichita, Kansas, the prosecution set out to prove only that the defendants were members of the IWW, while in Sacramento a silent defense in protest of the deaths of two Wobblies in the Sacramento County Jail resulted in harsh sentences.
In fifty-five minutes, the Chicago trial sentenced the paid employees of the union to 878 years in prison and focused on the IWW as an antiwar organization aligned ideologically with the German Kaiser. The event was accompanied by a military band and was billed as the “trial of the century.” The movie theater across the street featured The Red Viper and The Menace of the IWW. When the court began handing down ten- and twenty-year sentences, Benjamin Fletcher, the only Black prisoner among the Wobblies, announced to the courtroom that “Judge Landis is using poor English today. His sentences are too long.” By the time the IWW reached Leavenworth, five of its members had already died in the local jails.
Once at Leavenworth, the ninety-four members of the IWW began organizing for their release, but they were limited by prison rules in their communication with the outside world. Although the IWW were allowed to publish “News and Views from the Labor World” in the prison’s newspaper, Leavenworth New Era, they were prohibited from publishing any writing in the outside press. E. F. Doree noted in a letter that
the matter of our freedom is out of our hands. We are not permitted to write for publications. We cannot conduct meetings. We are limited in the number of letters we may write. Our mail is subject to censoring. What we may do is not much.
Some Wobblies were able to smuggle their writings out—James Rowan, for example, published an article in the Nation while imprisoned at Leavenworth. The insularity of the prison was also an opportunity to read and to think about strategies and principles. Earl Browder, who would later become the leader of the Communist Party, recalled in his memoirs that
in Leavenworth our university courses began. We began an intensive education. We had plenty of time on our hands.
Their efforts to organize a legal defense campaign were complicated by the new organizational leadership that emerged in their absence. The imprisoned IWW believed that those who had replaced them in the IWW offices preferred seeking status as Communist Party politicians to taking on the burden of anti-prison activism. Doree noted that he had read nearly every issue of Industrial Worker and that “to read it you would not know we were here at all.” Feeling a sense of erasure, Ralph Chaplin drew and distributed one of his most famous drawings—an image of himself behind bars pointing out at the free world: “Remember! WE ARE IN HERE FOR YOU, YOU ARE OUT THERE FOR US.”
While Chaplin’s circular motivated outside groups to mobilize in defense of the IWW—the Children’s Crusade for Amnesty, for example, brought twenty-five children of imprisoned Wobblies to the White House—organizing efforts were complicated when the IWW was accused of starting a fire at Leavenworth. The warden told the local newspapers that “an IWW spirit” had purposefully targeted the only wooden structure in the whole prison.
Within the context of their further criminalization as prison arsonists, the Wobblies at Leavenworth splintered—some believed that individualized applications for clemency could lead to their release, while others believed that an appeal for clemency was an admission of guilt and that the IWW should remain, as a matter of principle, in prison. “An Open Letter to President Harding From Members of the IWW in Leavenworth Penitentiary Who Refuse to Apply for Individual Clemency” argued that while “there is not one of us who will not bear the scars of the prison until he dies,” they had arrived at Leavenworth on a group conviction for conspiracy that could be remedied only by mass release. The document noted that three prisoners had applied for clemency at the insistence of the fifty-two signers because they were dying of tuberculosis or going insane. Their applications were denied.
One successful application resulted in the temporary release of the IWW for twenty-two months but ended with their return to Leavenworth on the grounds that the government had not yet issued a formal declaration of peace. In the context of a wartime economy of crime and sedition, Bill Haywood escaped to Russia, while the editors of IWW newspapers published in immigrant languages, A Bermunkas, Darbunenku Balsas, Il Proletario, Rabochy, El Rebelde, A Luz, Allarm, and Solidarnose, were deported from the United States after their release from Leavenworth.
When the Wobblies met Ricardo Flores Magón and Librado Rivera at Leavenworth, they formed a discussion group in the prison’s yard called the Campus. This collective space of learning emerged because Ralph Chaplin and other members of the IWW considered the Flores Magón brothers their “personal heroes” before their arrival at Leavenworth. The publication of John Kenneth Turner’s work Barbarous Mexico (1910), which chronicled the PLM’s work to link indigenous and workers’ rights to the construction of the US-Mexico border, made the IWW into regular readers of the PLM’s paper, Regeneración.
The paper, often credited with beginning the Mexican Revolution, was published from St. Louis and then Los Angeles because the PLM had been exiled from Mexico after they hung a large banner from the newspaper offices of El Hijo del Ahuizote, which read “LA CONSTITUTION HA MUERTO.” As a result, they were thrown into Mexico’s Belén Prison and were then prohibited under threat of further punishment from ever publishing any statements in the Mexican press. Once exiled in the United States, the PLM survived police brutality in Los Angeles, confinement in the St. Louis and Los Angeles jails, and prison sentences at Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona and McNeil Island in Washington before arriving at Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1918.
Although Ricardo Flores Magón and Librado Rivera refused to admit guilt or ask the state for mercy, any application for clemency or pardon would have been denied. Department of Justice memos reveal that although the men had committed no violence they were considered “IWW’s of the most violent character.” Prison authorities also condemned them as “anarchist types,” even though members of the PLM understood anarchism through an indigenous framework of self-determination represented by the slogan “Land and Liberty!” The mathematician Librado Rivera is described in prison records as a “Mexican who is said to have made trouble in his own country and he works with the I.W.W. and other destructive groups in the United States.”
In reflecting on the twenty-year sentence handed down by the courts, the Department of Justice noted that while “the sentence is a long one . . . nothing else will deter a criminal of this kind,” since “Punishment for short terms in the penitentiary has absolutely no effect upon them.” US Attorney Alfred Bettman admitted in internal documents that espionage law was not “designed to reach pamphleteering of this kind” but recommended that “any consideration of commutation” be “postponed until after they have served a considerable term.”
Although the PLM prisoners chose not to generate a legal defense in order to reject the very terms of US law and their own punishability, they continued to publish, through their lawyers, updates on the failing health of Ricardo Flores Magón. They resisted the insularity of civil death by writing letters and poetry even when their writing privileges were revoked. His lawyer published Ricardo’s own description of his failing health in the New Republic:
Once when I was young, I was kept for several weeks in a dark dungeon, so dark that I could not see my own hands. It was in the City of Mexico during that harrowing period in which Diaz swayed with a bloody hand. . . . But I could suffer all that excepting the absence of light. I need light. I need light. I need light, and I want to be free to cure my eyes. . . . I can still see the color of a flower. I can still see a sunbeam and can still glory in the sight of a smile. If I could only step into life again before it be too late.
Having resisted civil death and the force of US law, Ricardo Flores Magón died at Leavenworth on November 21, 1922. Pressure from outside organizations had resulted in Ricardo’s examination by prison doctors in October of 1922, when he was declared only “slightly pale from indoor confinement.” State documents offer conflicting accounts of his death, which is listed on the Record of Death and Internment as the result of angina pectoris (a strangling feeling in the chest caused by blocked arteries). In a telegram sent by prison officials to Magón’s lawyer, his time of death is recorded as 5:00 in the morning, while an internal report from the prison physician to the warden puts his death at 4:15 in the morning:
The night attendant at the hospital was called by guard Lewis in Cell House B about 4:15 o’clock this morning. The attendant went over promptly and found Magón suffering with distress and pain about the heart, he examined him and returned to the hospital for medicine. While the attendant was returning to the hospital the guard called again and stated that Magón was dead.
Both Librado Rivera and Ralph Chaplin maintain that Flores Magón was moved to a different cell where they could not see him in the days before his death. Librado Rivera was called to see the body and swore until his own death in 1932 that Magón’s body bore the marks of strangulation. As a result, Rivera’s mail privileges were “suspended indefinitely”—he wrote three undelivered letters detained in his prison file that described Leavenworth as a “regime of terror” and insisted that the prison physician consistently misrepresented Magón’s declining health. When Magón’s body was transported to Los Angeles and then to Mexico, thousands gathered along the train’s route to honor his dreams of freedom.
What Ricardo Flores Magón left behind was a critique of the prison as a form of mass incarceration. In reflecting on the state pedagogy of punishment, he asked
What is the object aimed at by means of these banishments, and incarcerations, and even lynchings of those who cherish an ideal different to that sustained by those in power? And after thinking and thinking until my head aches I can find but one answer: to kill the ideal!
Flores Magón was already analyzing the racialization of US prisons in some of his earliest political speeches. “The Intervention and the Prisoners of Texas,” delivered on May 31, 1914, implored his audience to take up arms to “claim our brothers who are prisoners in Texas from the hands of bourgeois justice” and to recognize moreover that “the prisons in the United States are full of Mexicans.” In a 1911 speech, he referred to the “shameful rule called Law” and to the words of Praxedis G. Guerrero, “the first Mexican libertarian,” who often said, “To be alive is to be a prisoner.” He offered a cross-border analysis of “the world” as a prison
a much larger one than those with which we’re familiar, but a prison nonetheless. The prison guards are the police and soldiers; the wardens are the presidents, kings, and emperors; the watchdogs are the legislators; and in this sense we can exactly equate the armies of prison functionaries and their acts with the armies of government functionaries and their acts. The downtrodden, the plebeians, the disinherited masses are the prisoners, obliged to work to support the army functionaries and the lazy, thieving rich.
When Rivera was finally released in 1923, he would not “obey the laws of the United States if released unless they agree with his conscience” and was deported to Mexico, where he was imprisoned again for his radical journalism. The dreams of the PLM remain central to theories of prison abolition that take seriously the relationship between walls and borders and the potential for solidarity between the working classes of Mexico and the United States.
The IWW and the PLM were joined by the members of the Black Twenty-Fourth Infantry, who were also considered guilty at the level of the group and who built a successful movement for mass release. The Black Twenty-Fourth Infantry was created in the aftermath of the Civil War in 1868 as part of the Reconstruction troops, along with the Twenty-Fifth Infantry and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries. Because of their relationship to the western United States (they were, unlike white troops, rarely rotated out of duty in the frontier states), they came to be known as the Buffalo Soldiers. When Black soldiers claimed the rights of citizenship through military service, conflicts between Black troops and local police were common.
The Twenty-Fifth Infantry stationed at Brownsville, for example, were falsely accused of shooting and killing a white person and were dishonorably discharged as a group by Teddy Roosevelt for their “conspiracy of silence.” Like the soldiers at Brownsville, the Twenty-Fourth Infantry had encountered extreme racial violence—at Salt Lake they endured the taunts of the Mormons, in Tampa, Florida, they witnessed the use of a two-year-old boy for target practice, and in Waco, Texas they experienced harassment by the police and fought back. When they were transferred to Houston to guard a military camp under construction on the outskirts of the city, Houston’s white residents posted circulars warning Houston to “remember Brownsville” and refuse the service of alcohol to Black soldiers. The resistance quickly gave way to tolerance on the part of white merchants who profited from their residence. On the night of the “Houston Riot,” they were to be honored at an event at Emancipation Park.
In the months before the arrival of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, police violence in Houston and lynching in Texas had reached unprecedented levels. The racism of Houston’s citizens was backed by a police force known for its frequent practice of shooting at the ground to invoke terror in Black citizens. The Twenty-Fourth Infantry, as readers of the Crisis, encouraged Houston’s Black citizens to stand up for themselves and began tearing down the “whites only” signs and the segregation screens from the public street cars and throwing them out the windows.Three days before the Houston Riot, a white man stabbed Sam Blair, a Black camp employee, for cutting into the payment line; one day before the Houston Riot, the soldiers had asked to be transferred out of Houston on the grounds that they were “treated like dogs here.”
The next morning, the newspapers described a military attack on the city of Houston by enraged soldiers marching in formation. Houston saw sixteen white bodies and four Black bodies. It could not see its own history of racial violence. Amid calls for revenge and the restoration of white supremacy in the city, W. E.B. Du Bois, as editor of the Crisis, sent Martha Gruening, a white reporter from New York, to investigate. Her report, published in the November 1917 edition of the Crisis, revealed that the Twenty-Fourth Infantry had been disarmed after two of its members—Baltimore and Edwards—were beaten and shot by two police officers who had earned reputations for “negro baiting.” The soldiers were beaten after intervening in the arrest of Sara Travers, a Black woman whose home had been invaded by police looking for “crap shooters” while she ironed in her underwear. As Travers was arrested for hostility toward police, Edwards approached the police officers but was beaten and arrested, and when Baltimore confronted the police officers that assaulted Edwards he was shot and wounded.
It was the inaccurate news that Colonel Baltimore had been shot to death that brought the Twenty-Fourth Infantry to the edge of law, and it was the subsequent expression of outrage that brought the US Army to disarm the Twenty-Fourth Infantry, leaving them entirely unprotected against police violence. For these reasons, “They faced and faced fearlessly the vision of a shameful death.” As they walked toward Houston, one thousand white citizens gathered at the police station and were provided with police weapons.
The following morning, every member of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry was arrested and sent to Camp Furlong near the US-Mexico border, where they were imprisoned with one thousand members of the IWW before their removal to Fort Bliss. As they left Houston by train, the soldiers dropped signs of their discontent scrawled on paper: “remember august 23, 1917” and “take tex and go to hell.” The remaining members of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry were sent south to dig ditches in Georgia and were permanently disarmed; the unit was eventually dissolved altogether. Black Houston was also disarmed—police searched houses and confiscated guns. Two weeks after the uprising, Officer Sparks shot two more Black men in the city of Houston.
While the “Houston Riot” was depoliticized almost immediately in political memory (a riot is an unthinking and apolitical act of chaos, not rebellion), the Twenty-Fourth Infantry used the trial as another stage for the condemnation of American justice. The structure of the military courts-martial, governed by a panel of judges and a judge-advocate who was both the trial organizer and prosecutor, limited any available defense to the casting of doubt on the identities of the participants. This was the same legal strategy used in the federal prosecution of the IWW.
Having already established their collective guilt, the military judges were ruling simply on the question of whether these men as a mass constituted “Houston Rioters.” Coming before the law as a group, the Twenty-Fourth Infantry refused to legitimize the law by participating in its proceedings. In a photo published by Du Bois in the Crisis, the prisoners at trial are dressed in army uniforms but surrounded by armed guards and seated behind a rope that divides them from the room, a diamond-shaped chapel at Fort Sam Houston. The photograph, taken from one point in the diamond, focuses on the rows of soldiers who sit in protest of the legal ritual—the entire front row distances themselves from the work of law with crossed legs and crossed arms. Only the seven soldiers who confessed and implicated others in exchange for lesser sentences were allowed to speak during the proceedings.
In the aftermath of the largest courts-martial in US history, a trial that was not about establishing guilt, the US Army sentenced thirteen members of the Black Twenty-Fourth Infantry to death on December 11, 1917. They were hanged within a few hours of the trial despite their request that they be shot like soldiers. Buried without the customary right to appeal and in graves marked only by numbers 1 through 13, the soldiers Baltimore, Nesbit, Brown, Wheatley, Moore, McWhorter, Davis, Divins, Breckenridge, Hawkins, Snodgrass, Johnson, and Young were confined to coffins, each with a soda bottle containing a slip of paper with the soldier’s name, rank, and date of death. This was a combination of the burial of a soldier and an enemy—they remained anonymous to the world above ground but retained the identity of the soldier inside the coffin. Two subsequent mass trials resulted in two more mass executions, while sixty-two men were given life sentences at Leavenworth Penitentiary.
When the soldiers-turned-prisoners arrived at Leavenworth, they built a mass movement that resisted the insularity of the prison house door in order to reframe their collective identity from the Houston Rioters to the Houston Martyrs. After their initial work began, outside organizers were focused on the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, and Congress entertained the idea of paying restitution to the white people of Houston for the events of “Black mutiny.”
The Houston Martyrs began a letter-writing campaign to the NAACP. Nearly every letter acknowledged the failure of the anti-lynching bill but suggested that their cause would draw attention to the injustice of their own mass incarceration. They argued that only a mass movement could end a structure of punishment that was defined by blanket charges that applied to the group and by individualized remedies for mass injustice:
Now the [War] Department, upon being urged to consider our cases, says that only individual consideration can . . . be given to each man.
Their mass sentence was recalibrated, on the basis of individual behavior, from life to twenty- and thirty-year terms. When an unsigned letter reached Du Bois in November of 1920, he wrote to James Weldon Johnson that he was writing an editorial for the December issue of the Crisis, adding, “I think we ought to start something.”
Although the Houston Martyrs convinced the NAACP and the National Equal Rights League to organize a mass movement around their case, they had to proceed as individuals making applications for clemency. To build support for executive action, James Weldon Johnson hand-delivered two petitions to two US presidents—one with fifty thousand signatures to Harding in 1921 and one with one hundred thousand signatures to Cleveland in 1923, when he brought a delegation of black churches, the black press, and black women’s organizations to the White House.
Eventually, he orchestrated the unprecedented strategy of bringing 558 members of the NAACP to Leavenworth Penitentiary. In September of 1923, the NAACP held its annual meeting in nearby Kansas City so that delegates could visit the Houston Martyrs. Johnson’s speech at the prison reiterated the organization’s commitment to their cause and noted that even Warden Biddle believed they were “neither criminals nor murderers.” The Crisis referred to the Leavenworth visit as that “now famous pilgrimage” to Leavenworth by 558 delegates (“stirring addresses made”) and reported to readers that the Houston Martyrs were “clean-cut specimens of manhood, their head unbowed by six years of prison.”
Although the Martyrs had the support of the warden, they were recalled by military authorities in January of 1925 and transferred to the neighboring Fort Leavenworth prison. This had the political effect of keeping them incommunicado—they could not write to outside groups, including the NAACP, but smuggled messages on toilet paper. This retaliatory action on the part of the military returned to them their status as soldiers. Once stripped of that status and housed as civilians, they were now returned to military custody in order to be hidden away from the outside world. In 1927, according to a letter written by Leroy Pinkett, the National Equal Rights League convinced authorities to reduce the prison sentences by eighteen months, which made the remaining men eligible for parole. After a twelve-year campaign initiated and sustained by the men themselves, the last of the Houston Martyrs, Stewart Phillips, left Leavenworth in 1936.
The movement generated new ways of working across the walls, but it was enmeshed in Leavenworth’s racial architecture, which pitted prisoners against each other to undermine a sense of collective power. Some prisoners resisted that framework. Ben Fletcher of the IWW smuggled information to NAACP officials about the mistreatment of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry. He and other Wobblies committed themselves, even after they were released, to securing the freedom of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry. Two members of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry accepted roles in the labor of prison discipline, which meant that they served as “isolation orderlies” in Building 63. In an “Open Letter” published by the IWW in 1922, the authors described an “atavistic” Black prisoner who “beat our boys into insensibility in the prison dungeon with a club” and then was “given his liberty.”
Roy Connor, an IWW placed in isolation for three years for refusing to break rock, wrote in a letter to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that was smuggled out of the prison that the permanent isolation cells were “ruled by two Negro Rioters.” One of these men remains unnamed, but the other was likely Roy Tyler, who Warden Biddle wrote deserved clemency because he was “on duty for a long time as [an] orderly in the isolation department . . . and . . . rendered valuable services in protecting officers when attempts were made to assault them by vicious characters.” Biddle reported to federal authorities that Tyler “always lines up with the side of good order and shows a commendable disposition to back the prison officials. On November 14, 1923, when Joe Martinez, a Mexican murderer killed Captain Andrew Leonard and wounded six guards by stabbing them, Tyler voluntarily entered the underground coal bunker and took a dagger from Martinez.”
There is also a remote possibility that one of the men was Jack Johnson. Jack Johnson had a complicated presence in the racial regime of Leavenworth, sometimes representing a figure of Black freedom and sometimes becoming part of the prison’s logic. When Johnson arrived at Leavenworth as a fugitive world champion, he drove himself to the prison’s gates greeted by cheering crowds. As the famous world champion, Johnson had traveled the world to avoid prison time on Mann Act charges (which meant transporting a woman across state lines for lewd or immoral purposes, or, in Johnson’s case, having consensual interstate sex with white women).
Because of his fame, Johnson dined with the warden in his home, wore starched jackets instead of prison grays and blues, and kept a supply of liquor, cigars, and fancy foods in his possession. His relationship with the prison administration and his confidence made him the target of outraged guards who wrote him up for using the staff restroom. He was allowed and encouraged to return to the ring inside Leavenworth, and in 1920 the entire prison and many of the city’s local elite gathered ringside to watch him box. But there was a period of three months when Johnson was borrowed from his regular job in the prison’s baseball park as a sweeper and umpire and was used as an isolation orderly.
Johnson wrote his own account of his time in Leavenworth, but the 135-page manuscript written on a combination of prison stationery and blank New Era paper remained in federal custody until the 1990s because the warden refused to release it. It reveals little about the institution’s racial architecture, but Johnson’s place within the labor of prison discipline illustrates how the art of division is part of the prison’s project.
Although the labor of prison discipline was a mechanism for dividing prisoners, the vast majority of the IWW and the Twenty-Fourth Infantry saw the connections between their struggles and refused the logic of the prison as a racial architecture. After his release, the Wobbly H. F. Kane wrote a letter to the NAACP noting that
much has been made by some who call themselves radicals, of the fact that in Leavenworth penitentiary several of the imprisoned 24th Infantrymen have been used by prison officials to beat members of the I.W.W. who had been accused of revolting against the inhuman prison system. . . . Prison officials, as do the employing class, try to pit white and black workers against each other whenever it is possible.
Kane insisted that these men were “forced to maltreat men of my organization” and that the incorporation of prisoners into the violence of the institution does not erase the legacy of the Houston Martyrs:
The grave cannot give up the dead. . . . But the fifty-four victims still living can be released from their prison cells.
This analysis of the connections between mass incarceration and the targeting of political prisoners against war, racism, and imperialism was generated in discussion groups in Leavenworth’s yard, where Librado Rivera and the Flores Magóns taught and learned as teachers and students.
Out of this period came a critique not just of individualizing struggle but of the whole idea of what it meant to build a prison like Leavenworth. In the disciplinary mechanisms of Leavenworth’s internal arrangements, prisoners imagined new ways of relating across difference in spite of the prison’s lessons in segregation. As a staged racial encounter, Leavenworth worked to contain political possibilities and to discipline political movements that disbelieved in its power. In a cartoon image published to draw attention to the mass incarceration of the Houston Martyrs, thirteen ghosts stand with a banner that spells out that ongoing struggle, but they are pointing at Leavenworth. With arms outstretched and fingers extended, they are pointing to the prison as an antidemocratic idea about democracy.
The prison in that image was by that time a powerhouse in a carceral state that targeted citizens for political crimes. The federal prison population had exploded in the early part of the twentieth century, when Leavenworth held as many as four thousand prisoners. Much of this overcrowding resulted from the creation of new federal crimes in 1910, 1914, and 1920 that regulated interstate sexual relations, drug taxes, and automobile thefts. These new prisoners joined Native people convicted of “major crimes” and a whole generation of political prisoners who were imprisoned as a mass in the years between the world wars. There were more than one hundred Mennonite conscientious objectors imprisoned at Leavenworth in 1917, and when they protested the shaving of their beards they were sent as a mass to the isolation cells. At Leavenworth and the other federal prisons, socialist, communists, and anarchists wrote letters and memoirs describing the terms of mass incarceration. Eugene Debs was sent to Atlanta, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was sent to a newly built federal prison for women at Alderson in West Virginia, and Earl Browder was sent to Leavenworth.”
- Sara M. Benson, The Prison of Democracy: Race, Leavenworth, and the Culture of Law. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. pp. 103-113.
Picture: Moving image of prisoners running the Leavenworth printing press, circa 1918
