International Working Women’s Day Originated in the US

Was what International Women's Day was originally called. It originated, as did May Day, in the United States. It was a union and socialist holiday recognizing women workers rights to organize unions, a struggle that still is with us today as the battle in Wisconsin shows.

American Socialists organised a mass meeting on the suffrage in New York on Sunday 8 March 1908. The first National Woman’s Day (woman’s in the singular) was held on 23 Feb 1909 in the USA, and American women kept the custom of gathering on the last Sunday of February. Sundays were preferred so that people would not miss a day of work.

Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of history at New York's Barnard College, says the holiday was created as the country's workers, including large numbers of women, were losing patience with poor labor conditions.

Early American women's activist Rose Schneiderman speaks at a union rally around 1910.

"I would date it back to 1908 and the strike of some 15,000 women in the garment industry on the Lower East Side who were suffering low pay and terrible working conditions, and who walked off the job and protested," Rosenberg says.

Among their complaints was the fact that employers refused to recognize workers' unions.

"Unionization is such an enormous issue in the United States today," Rosenberg says. "It's poignant to think about this 100th anniversary in that context."

It was the International proletariat organizations in Europe that responded to the call from workers organizations in the United States to celebrate both events.
And both are based on tragedy, May Day the Haymarket Massacre and IWD the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Indeed the struggle of women workers in America would continue with the great Patterson Mill Strike of 1913.

And while American workers, both women and men, have made great leaps forward as has American Capitalism, class war has been declared once again on workers rights to organize.

The International Ladies' Garment Workers Union organized workers in the women's clothing trade. Many of the garment workers before 1911 were unorganized, partly because they were young immigrant women intimidated by the alien surroundings. Others were more daring, though. All were ripe for action against the poor working conditions. In 1909, an incident at the Triangle Factory sparked a spontaneous walkout of its 400 employees. The Women's Trade Union League, a progressive association of middle class white women, helped the young women workers picket and fence off thugs and police provocation. At a historic meeting at Cooper Union, thousands of garment workers from all over the city followed young Clara Lemlich's call for a general strike.

Women's labour unrest continued in the U.S. through 1909, with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union staging a short-lived strike in September in New York City. On Nov. 22, a general strike was called, dubbed the Uprising of the Twenty Thousand, which lasted 13 weeks and eventually led to a fairer contract for 15,000 labourers.

In Europe, women's issues were also top of mind. In 1907, the first meeting of Finnish parliament included 19 women. In 1910, an International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen, featuring representation from 17 countries, including union leaders and the Finnish parliamentarians.

Clara Zetkin, the founder of International Women's Day, is seen at left with friend Rosa Luxemburg. Zetkin came up with the idea during a womens' labour conference in 1910. WikiMedia Commons

Clara Zetkin, head of the women's office for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, first raised the idea of an annual women's day when women all over the world would be able to air their grievances about labour conditions, suffrage and the need for women in parliament.

The first International Women's Day was held on March 19, 1911, (moved to March 8 in 1913), with rallies in Germany, Denmark, Austria and Switzerland. More than one million women and men attended.

One week later, a devastating fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City drew further attention to the horrible working conditions female workers, mostly immigrants, were forced to endure.

275 girls started to collect their belongings as they were leaving work at 4:45 PM on Saturday. Within twenty minutes some of girls' charred bodies were lined up along the East Side of Greene Street. Those girls who flung themselves from the ninth floor were merely covered with tarpaulins where they hit the concrete. The Bellevue morgue was overrun with bodies and a makeshift morgue was set up on the adjoining pier on the East River. Hundred's of parents and family members came to identify their lost loved ones. 146 employees of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were dead the night of March 25, 1911. The horror of their deaths led to numerous changes in occupational safety standards that currently ensure the safety of workers today.

To an entire generation of urban reformers, activist clergy, progressives,
feminists, and trade-unionists, the Triangle fire instantly became an emotion charged
symbol, a kind of menetekel, representing all the evils that they had
combated for so long; it became the impetus of a moral crusade to prevent things
like this from ever happening again. Many of the people who made modern America
2
- political leaders like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Smith, Fiorello
Laguardia, and Robert Wagner; social activists like Frances Perkins; and tradeunionists
like Rose Schneiderman and Dave Dubinsky, were all directly or indirectly
inspired by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. A direct genealogical line can be drawn
from the fire, to a host of New York City and New York State progressive reforms,
to the New Deal of the 1930s. No wonder that almost every American history
textbook lists the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire as one of the key events of
Progressive era America. “In the end,” write Ric Burns and James Sanders, in their
history of New York City, “the carnage of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire would
prove to have been one of the most transforming events in American political
history.”2 It seems obvious that the Triangle Fire would assume the meaning that it
did. And yet, when one interrogates the obvious, one encounters the problematic.
“This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in this city,” trade
unionist Rose Schneiderman bitterly remarked to mourners just after the fire,3 and
in fact this was not the worst fire in New York City history, nor was it the only
industrial accident of this kind. Why then did the Triangle Fire become such an
incandescent icon for so many?


Striking laborers rallied against unfair labor practices with two of the most publicized strikes occuring in 1910: The garment workers in New York City and the strike that took place at the Los Angeles Times. However, one labor union strike would significantly define the labor movement: the Patterson Strike of 1913. To understand the pros and cons of striking unions, it's necessary to recall that few federal or state laws had been enacted at that time to protect workers from unsafe working conditions or from exploitation through which laborers earned unimaginably low wages while working fourteen or fifteen hours a day.

When IWW organizers began to arrive at textile mills to proclaim the doctrine of industrial democracy, a substantial number of workers were interested. By 1908, after leading a number of minor strikes, the IWW could claim 5,000 members for its National Industrial Union of Textile Workers headed by James P, Thompson. The biggest textile challenge came four years later when pay cuts led to a groundswell of strike sentiment in Lawrence, Massachusetts. IWW Local 20 had been on the scene for more than four years, and its members had an excellent grasp of the conditions of the 60,000 Lawrence residents dependent on the mills for their livelihood. Prompted by local IWWs, the strikers sent for seasoned organizer Joe Ettor, an IWW orator who had already been in Lawrence, and Arturo Giovannitti, Secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation and editor of its organ, Il Proletario.

Faced with having to organize workers from twenty-four major national groups speaking twenty-two different languages, the Lawrence leadership devised an organizational structure that became the standard IWW mode of operation. Each language group was given representatives on the strike committee, which numbered from 250 to 300 members. All decisions regarding tactics and settlements were democratically voted on by the committee, with the IWW organizers acting strictly as advisors.

The Lawrence strikers realized that their battle went beyond wages and work conditions to address the question of the quality and purpose of life. Female strikers expressed their needs in an unforgettable phrase when they appeared on the picket line with a homemade placard declaring, "We Want Bread and Roses Too," a demand which became a fixture in the labor and ferninist movements. But neither roses nor bread were possible without the most militant kind of strike and innovative worker tactics. Women would show the way on both scores. More female pickets than males were to be arrested for intimidating strikebreakers, and rank and file women provided decisive leadership at key moments in the strike.

Prohibited from massing before individual mills by law, the male and female strikers formed a moving picket line around the entire mill district! This human chain involving thousands of spirited workers moved twenty-four hours a day for the entire duration of the ten-week strike. Augmenting the awesome picket lines were frequent parades through town of from 3,000 to 6,000 strikers marching to militant labor songs. When a city ordinance was passed forbidding parades and mass meetings, the strikers improvised sidewalk parades in which twenty to fifty individuals locked arms and swept through the streets. They passed through department stores disrupting normal business and otherwise succeeded in bringing commerce to a halt. At night strikers serenaded the homes of scabs trying to get a good night's sleep, and in some cases the names of scabs were sent back to their native lands to shame their entire clan.

When striker Annie Lo Pezzo was killed during one of the demonstrations, Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested on murder charges; they were said to have provoked workers to illegal acts which in turn resulted in the death. Their places were promptly taken by Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Trautman, and Carlo Resca. Haywood's arrival in Lawrence was tumultuous. Fifteen thousand strikers greeted him at the railroad station and 25,000 listened to him speak on the Lawrence Commons. During the course of the strike, there were dynamite schemes by employers, a proclamation of martial law, the death of a Syrian teenage boy from a militiaman's bayonet, and repeated physical confrontations between strikers and law enforcement groups. Women again played a critical role when it was decided to have the children of the strikers cared for by sympathizers in other cities. After some groups of children had left Lawrence, the army resolved to block further removals. In the ensuing physical confrontation, many women were beaten and two pregnant women miscarried, The brutal incident led to the national publicity and governmental hearings that resulted in victory for the strikers.

In the wake of the Lawrence triumph came strikes in other textile centers under IWW leadership and a successful campaign to free Ettor and Giovannitti. Prominent women such as socialist humanitarian Helen Keller, birth control activist Margaret Sanger and AFL organizer Mary Kenney O'Sullivan enthusiastically supported various IWW initiatives. Textile owners not yet faced with strikes began to grant wage increases unilaterally in hopes of averting unionization. The Detroit News estimated that 438,000 textile workers received nearly fifteen million dollars in raises as an indirect consequence of the Lawrence strike, with the biggest gains scored by the 275,000 workers in New England.

In 1913, John Reed (later famous for his firsthand account of the Russian Revolution) met Bill Haywood, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). Reed ventured to Paterson, New Jersey, to learn about the Wobbly-led silk workers’ strike then in progress and decided to mount a massive public pageant to publicize the strike and raise money for the strikers. He won financial backing from art patron Mabel Dodge and enlisted artists such as John Sloan, who painted a ninety-foot backdrop depicting the Paterson silk mills. The pageant opened on June 7 in Madison Square Garden and ended with the workers and the audience triumphantly singing the “Internationale,” the anthem of international socialism. Unfortunately, neither the pageant nor the strike ended on a triumphant note. The pageant lost money while the strike ended in defeat after five months. Nonetheless, the pageant represented an important moment in the alliance between modern art and labor radicalism.

New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant

Martin Burgess Green Scribner Book Company $0 (325p) ISBN 978-0-684-18993-2

The celebrated New York Armory Show in early 1913 introduced Picasso, Matisse, Cubism and Dada to the American scene. Three months later, 1,200 striking textile workers from Paterson, N.J. staged a pageant in Madison Square Garden to dramatize their demands. Green, who is fond of cultural juxtapositions ( Children of the Sun, etc.), links these two events with the lame argument that modern art and revolutionary politics share a spiritual, transcendental goal. He takes us inside the salon of Mabel Dodge, the wealthy art patron and labor pageant organizer, who was ensconced in respectability yet actively subverted it. He also takes us into the Wobblies' union halls where people of any race or nationality were welcome and workers' poems were composed on the spot. The pageant saw hostilities flare up between leaders Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; Green believes the event marked the beginning of the International Workers of the World's slow decline. His atmospheric study limns a brief moment when art and politics came together. Photos. (Nov.)

Also See:

Lucy Parsons Redux

Black Herstory Month: Lucy Parsons

IWD: Raya Dunayevskaya

Whose Family Values?
Women and the Social Reproduction of Capitalism
"proletarii, propertyless citizens whose service to the State was to raise children (proles).”
Classical Antiquity; Rome, Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Verso Press 1974

Don't Mourn Organize

The Greatest Wobbly folk singer and hobo since Joe Hill has taken the last train out of the station.

Bruce 'U' Utah Phillips has passed away late Friday night. We mourn his passing, a great Wobbly who kept wobbly culture alive through many a dark night when the organization was a mere memory of its past glory. By keeping our wobbly culture of song, and activism alive the spirit of the organization continued on inspiring a whole new generation of activists to become wobs.

As Joe Hill admonished his comrades on his passing; Don't Mourn boys, organize, the same holds true for our fallen comrade and wobbly hobo; Utah Phillips.

The IWW is strong and growing in no small part thanks to the dedication and perseverance of Utah.

U. Utah Phillips

U. Utah Phillips has passed away in his sleep at 11:30PM PDT on May 23, 2008.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.

Phillips' other survivors include another son and a daughter, several stepchildren, brothers and sisters and a grandchild. The family requests memorial donations go to Hospitality House, a homeless shelter founded by Phillips in Grass Valley, Calif. Additional information is available at www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org.

SEE:


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Alberta Reds

And it ain't just our necks. Take that conservative revisionists, you know who you are. Southern Alberta was the origin of union organizing in Alberta and Western Canada at the beginning of last century laying the foundation for Western Canadian Industrial Unionism.

Alberta Labour History Institute Visits Southern Alberta Foundation of the Union Movement in Western Canada

Edmonton: A provincial labour history group, the Alberta Labour History Institute (ALHI) will be in Medicine Hat for three days this week to promote labour history as key aspect of the industrial development of the Medicine Hat area.

ALHI will be in the Medicine Hat area from Wednesday to Friday, October 10-12 to conduct Oral History interviews with labour leaders and community activists. In addition, they will participate in activities organized by the Medicine Hat Clay Industries Historical Society, including a noon luncheon for former clay industry employees at the Museum on Thursday, and a presentation to students at the Eagle Butte School in Dunmore on Friday.

The visit to South-Eastern Alberta is the first stage in a series of community visits across the province as part of a five-year project leading up to the centennial of the Alberta Federation of Labour in 2012.

Entitled ‘Project 2012’, the mission will gather stories about work and working people to ensure that labour and its long history in each area of the Province is preserved for students, academic researchers, historians and others. Videotaped interviews will be conducted with local workers, and pictures, materials, and other artifacts will be collected to add to the story.

This material will be posted on the ALHI website at www.labourhistory.ca which was constructed two years ago as part of Alberta’s Centenary. An education project with Aspen Foundation is being developed for integration into the Alberta Social Studies curriculum for Grades 1 to 12.

ALHI President Dave Werlin says these trips are dedicated to highlighting the profile of workers and their organizations throughout Alberta.

“This is why this volunteer labour history institute was started about 10 years ago by trade unionists, community activists, librarians, archivists and historians,” said Werlin, “We realized that someone had to take the initiative to preserve and publicize the story of Alberta’s working people, otherwise it would be lost forever - a critical but untold part of Alberta’s history.”

“People in Alberta may remember some of the strikes that took place in the Medicine Hat area years ago. What many don’t know, however, is that 100 years ago, this whole area was the hotbed of union organization in Western Canada. Really, this is where it all started.”

“Medicine Hat must be of particular interest to anyone engaged in labour history because it was one of the first fully industrialized centres in this Province. Manufacturers and government policy makers seized upon the natural resources and other advantages this area had to offer for industrial development, and it was no surprise that workers’ organizations quickly followed.”

It was in Lethbridge, another Southern Alberta city, that the Alberta Federation of Labour was formed, when about 25 railway workers, meatpackers, construction tradesmen, public workers, coal miners and farmers met in 1912 to form an organization through which they could work for political and social reform. This is why ALHI decided to start its community visits in this part of the province.

-30-

SEE:

Alberta Labour History Institute Web Launch

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labour, Edmonton, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, labour-history, history, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, IWW, OBU, labourweb

Farmer John Exploits Mexican Workers

Back in the early days of the IWW, Wobblies organized farm workers, since many workers in Canada and the U.S. found interim work on the farm before finding work in mills, mines, in lumber and on the railroads. Their term for a farmer who exploited farm workers was Farmer John.

Farmers in the West in Canada and the U.S. relied upon itinerant workers, hobos, to bring in the grain. Paying them 'bum' wages, treating them like slaves, charging them for room and board, led to the I.W.W. to organize farmworkers on a large scale industrial basis.

Today Farmer John relies upon temporary workers from Mexico and in Alberta, over a century later nothing has changed. Farm workers brought in from Mexico and the Caribbean to work for Farmer John in Alberta remain indentured servants, slaves by any other name.

Farm workers cannot bargain collectively in Ontario and Alberta and there is no independent voice for the workers in the program. In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that farmworkers enjoy the same rights as other workers to associate without intimidation, coercion or discrimination by their employers.

And for that reason Farmworkers need a union.

***

A Mexican farm worker who had a bad experience working on a farm near Provost has gone back home.

Armando Garcia flew back to his wife and two children Wednesday after parishioners at the Catholic Church in Provost raised money for his plane ticket.

His friend in Edmonton, Miguel Herrero, said he's appalled Alberta's labour code provides no protection for farm workers. He's trying to raise additional money for Garcia to help him get back on his feet after his bad experience in Canada.

Alberta Employment is investigating claims that the temporary foreign worker didn't get the medical coverage he was promised, wasn't paid extra for overtime and had so many deductions from his paycheque that he was getting paid less than $1 an hour.

***

Harvest War Song

(Tune: "Tipperary")

We are coming home, John Farmer, we are coming back
to stay.
For nigh on fifty years or more, we've gathered up your
hay.
We have slept out in your hayfields, we have heard your
morning shout;
We've heard you wondering where in hell's them pesky
go-abouts?
CHORUS
It's a long way, now understand me; it's a long way to
town;
It's a long way across the prairie, and to hell with Farmer
John.
Up goes machine or wages, and the hours must come
down;
For we're out for a winter's stake this summer, and we
want no scabs around.
You've paid the going wages, that's what kept us on the
bum,
You say you've done your duty, you chin-whiskered son
of a gun.
We have sent your kids to college, but still you must rave
and shout,
And call us tramps and hoboes, and pesky go-abouts.

But now the wintry breezes are a-shaking our poor frames,
And the long drawn days of hunger try to drive us boes
insane.
It is driving us to action--we are organized today;
Us pesky tramps and hoboes are coming back to stay.

IWW Little Red Song Book

The early Wobblies were above all famous for their Westerners: the part-Indians and the Yankees, sons and daughters of pony express drivers and gold prospectors whose families had kept going west but never escaped poverty. But even in these early years, many of the militants were fresh from Europe or the children of immigrants, radicalized on the other side of the ocean or in their first years of American life. They remained in the IWW when native-born “Americans” mostly came and left, published magazines and newspapers that lasted decades, and kept the Wobbly spirit alive for later generations.

The Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO) planted itself in the work-life culture of the mostly white, male, mobile harvest workers of the plains states. Like the Wobs in the mines and sawmills, they epitomized the Western (and “American”) spirit of the organization. Notoriously rebellious and restless, their effective control of box car-riding (“show your red card”) was legendary. The capability of Wobbly organizers to create miniature egalitarian communities among the transient workers testified to their adeptness but also their belief in the lowest ranks of workers.

The larger AWO could also grow strong in the face of repression, peaking in 1918, for a seemingly unlikely reason. The First World War created a labor shortage: it was easier to quit or get fired and move on, because more jobs were available everywhere. Not that AWO organizing drives necessarily succeeded. The racial diversity of many California farms was difficult to overcome (although they tried). The repression of labor during wartime meant suppression of Wob newspapers, arrests of organizers, and threats of vigilante violence. In the longer run, the mechanization of farming would dramatically reduce the numbers of agricultural workers and their bargaining power.

Wobblies also learned that organizing in fields was more complicated than in factories. They could not rely on family or ethnic ties, and so had to rely on sudden job actions, slowdowns, and similar tactics to attract and hold members. Thus in April 1915, Frank Little called a conference to organize casual workers (hoboes), creating a job delegate system within the IWW, with Wobs setting wage and hour demands before the harvest, selecting an individual or committee to negotiate with a farmer, and then having all the Wobs ratify the agreement. This way, the AWO built quickly and successfully. Dues were a two dollar initiation, then fifty cents per month. By 1915, many had won immediate Wob goals: the ten hour day, three dollar minimum, overtime, good board, clean beds; all realizable because war raised the price of wheat.

Thus, Wobs would arrive outside town, establish a “jungle” near a stream, then call a meeting and elect committees to keep the camp clean. A “spud and gump brigade” foraged or begged for food and did the cooking, while some got jobs in town to build up a common fund. This was the IWW world in miniature, a workers’ society run by itself—although organizing it and keeping it going sometimes distracted from actual organizing in the fields.

IWW strike leadership would naturally be blamed for causing deaths and injuries handed out by police and private thugs. Huge defense fights exposed terrible conditions while leaders were handed long sentences. Yet, the IWW’s reputation spread most amazingly. Japanese and Chinese workers had their own labor organizations that worked with the IWW, although not usually affiliating directly. The Fresno branch chartered the Japanese Labor League in 1908 with a thousand members. Mexicans formed their own Wobbly locals (especially in San Diego and Los Angeles) and published Wobbly pamphlets, leaflets, and papers in Spanish. All this activity was unknown and indeed unwanted by the mainstream AFL.

» Zane Grey » The Desert of Wheat

Hard? It sure is hard. But it'll be the makin' of a great country. It'll weed out the riffraff.... See here, Kurt, I'm goin' to give you a hunch. Have you had any dealin's with the I.W.W.?"

"Yes, last harvest we had trouble, but nothing serious. When I was in Spokane last month I heard a good deal. Strangers have approached us here, too--mostly aliens. I have no use for them, but they always get father's ear. And now!... To tell the truth, I'm worried."

"Boy, you need to be," replied Anderson, earnestly. "We're all worried. I'm goin' to let you read over the laws of that I.W.W. organization. You're to keep mum now, mind you. I belong to the Chamber of Commerce in Spokane. Somebody got hold of these by-laws of this so-called labor union. We've had copies made, an' every honest farmer in the Northwest is goin' to read them. But carryin' one around is dangerous, I reckon, these days. Here."

Anderson hesitated a moment, peered cautiously around, and then, slipping folded sheets of paper from his inside coat pocket, he evidently made ready to hand them to Kurt.

"Lenore, where's the driver?" he asked.

"He's under the car," replied the girl

Kurt thrilled at the soft sound of her voice. It was something to have been haunted by a girl's face for a year and then suddenly hear her voice.

"He's new to me--that driver--an' I ain't trustin' any new men these days," went on Anderson. "Here now, Dorn. Read that. An' if you don't get red-headed--"

Without finishing his last muttered remark, he opened the sheets of manuscript and spread them out to the young man.

Curiously, and with a little rush of excitement, Kurt began to read. The very first rule of the I.W.W. aimed to abolish capital. Kurt read on with slowly growing amaze, consternation, and anger. When he had finished, his look, without speech, was a question Anderson hastened to answer.

"It's straight goods," he declared. "Them's the sure-enough rules of that gang. We made certain before we acted. Now how do they strike you?"

"Why, that's no labor union!" replied Kurt, hotly. "They're outlaws, thieves, blackmailers, pirates. I--I don't know what!"

"Dorn, we're up against a bad outfit an' the Northwest will see hell this summer. There's trouble in Montana and Idaho. Strangers are driftin' into Washington from all over. We must organize to meet them--to prevent them gettin' a hold out here. It's a labor union, mostly aliens, with dishonest an' unscrupulous leaders, some of them Americans. They aim to take advantage of the war situation. In the newspapers they rave about shorter hours, more pay, acknowledgment of the union. But any fool would see, if he read them laws I showed you, that this I.W.W. is not straight."

"Mr. Anderson, what steps have you taken down in your country?" queried Kurt.

"So far all I've done was to hire my hands for a year, give them high wages, an' caution them when strangers come round to feed them an' be civil an' send them on."

"But we can't do that up here in the Bend," said Dorn, seriously. "We need, say, a hundred thousand men in harvest-time, and not ten thousand all the rest of the year."

"Sure you can't. But you'll have to organize somethin'. Up here in this desert you could have a heap of trouble if that outfit got here strong enough. You'd better tell every farmer you can trust about this I.W.W."

"I've only one American neighbor, and he lives six miles from here," replied Dorn. "Olsen over there is a Swede, and not a naturalized citizen, but I believe he's for the U.S. And there's--"

"Dad," interrupted the girl, "I believe our driver is listening to your very uninteresting conversation."

She spoke demurely, with laughter in her low voice. It made Dorn dare to look at her, and he met a blue blaze that was instantly averted.

Anderson growled, evidently some very hard names, under his breath; his look just then was full of characteristic Western spirit. Then he got up.

See:

Slavery in Canada

Monte Solberg

temporary workers


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