opaganda meeting every
Saturday night. These propaganda meetings were given over to a discussion
of these industrial problems and beliefs. From that district there were
dispatched into nearby lumber camps and wherever there were working people
to whom to carry this message--there were dispatched organizers who went
out, made the talks in the camps briefly and sought to organize them into
this union, at least to teach them the philosophy of this labor movement.

Because that propaganda is fatal to those who live by other people's work,
who live by the profits they wring from labor, it excited intense
opposition on the part of employers and business people of Centralia and
about the time this hall was opened we will show you that people from
Seattle, where they maintain their headquarters for these labor fights,
came into Centralia and held meetings. I don't know what they call this
new thing they were seeking to organize--it is in fact a branch of the
Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association of the United States, a national
organization whose sole purpose is to fight and crush and beat labor. It
was in no sense a local movement because it started in Seattle and it was
organized by people from Seattle, and the purpose was to organize in
Centralia an organization of business men to combat this new labor
philosophy. Whether in the mouths of the I.W.W., or Nonpartisan League, or
the Socialists, it did not make any difference; to brand anybody as a
traitor, un-American, who sought to tell the truth about our industrial
conditions.

The Two Raids

In the fall of 1918, the I.W.W. had a hall two blocks and a half from this
hall, at the corner of First and B streets. There was a Red Cross parade,
and that hall was wrecked, just as was this hall. These profiteering
gentlemen never overlook an opportunity to capitalize on a patriotic
event, and so they capitalized the Red Cross parade that day just as they
capitalized the Armistice Day parade on November 11, and in exactly the
same way as on November 11.

And that day, when the tail-end of the parade of the Red Cross passed the
main avenue, it broke off and went a block out of its way and attacked the
I.W.W. hall, a good two-story building. And they broke it into splinters.
The furniture, records, the literature that belongs to these boys,
everything was taken out into the street and burned.

[Illustration: O. C. Bland

Logger. American. Resident of Centralia for a