for disorderly conduct and some were sentenced to jail for thirty days. If one of them said “Fellow-Worker” on the street, he was liable to a fine of $100.00 and costs. Frank Little was declared to have been given thirty days for reading the Declaration of Independence. There were over 100 arrests the first day. Calls for volunteers were answered by 40 from Portland and many from elsewhere. The I. W. W. headquarters was raided. They replied that their plan was to make this as expensive as possible to the tax-payers of Spokane. The prisoners were locked up in school buildings and subjected to unsanitary conditions with rough treatment by the police until 344 sick men were reported as treated. The struggle ended without any clean cut victory either way though the I. W. W. secured the right to talk unmolested.²²

Other free speech fights were conducted in 1909 at Missoula, Mont., and Newcastle, Pa…. By 1913 some twenty had been made, lasting from a few days to more than six months. They occurred at Wenatchee and Walla-Walla, Wash.; Fresno, Calif.; Denver, Colo.; Portland, Ore.; San Diego, Calif.; and Lawrence, Mass.

THE SAN DIEGO FREE SPEECH FIGHT

The most celebrated of these conflicts was in 1912, at San Diego, Calif. The causes were general labor troubles and antagonism to the I. W. W. It opened with a petition from eighty-five citizens, mostly business men asking the Council to prohibit street-speaking in certain congested districts. The results were reported to the Governor by a special investigator, Harris Weinstock, a business man of San Francisco. He says:

Public meetings are not permitted in any part of the city unless a permit is granted by the Chief of Police, despite the fact that there is no law requiring a permit. The I. W. W. charge that in recent weeks they have not been permitted to conduct street-meetings, the police justifying their refusal, under the existing circumstances, and by an alleged use of slanderous and abusive language by I. W. W. speakers…. No body of men should be deprived of their constitutional right of free speech beyond

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