100 years ago in Spokane: Wobblies threaten protest if IWW members convicted for wearing badges

The Wobblies threatened to “fill Spokane’s jails” if 13 of their brethren in the Industrial Workers of the World were convicted of felonies for the crime of wearing Wobbly badges, the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported.

About 1,400 Wobblies were preparing to show up at the courthouse wearing badges in defiance of the law.

Meanwhile, a Wobbly speaker at Turner Hall said that workers should model their revolution after the radicals of Britain instead of Russia’s Bolshevists.

He said they could win their revolution with “as little loss of life and destruction of property as possible.”

In the trial, the Wobblies’ attorney argued that the Wobblies did not advocate overthrow of the U.S. government, but control of the economic institutions of the country.

From the murder beat: The “net of evidence” was tightening around the four McDonald siblings.

Extradition proceedings were being prepared in Los Angeles, where three of the four McDonalds were being held on charges of being complicit in the murder of W.H. McNutt of Spokane. The fourth sibling, Will McDonald, was still at large.

Also on this day

(From the Associated Press)

1809: Just more than three years after the famous Lewis and Clark expedition ended, Meriwether Lewis was found dead in a Tennessee inn, an apparent suicide; he was 35.