THE CASE OF MACQUEEN.

Evening Star, Issue 12989, 7 December 1906, Page 6

THE CASE OF MACQUEEN.

A STUDY-IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY.

[Bt H. Q. Wklls.]

Mac Queen is one of those young men England is now making by the thousand in her elementary schools, a man of that active, intelligent, mentally hungry, self-edur eating sort that is giving us our elementary teachers, our Labor mere hers, able journalists, authors. Civil servants, and some of tl» most public-spirited and efficient of our municipal administrators. He is the sort of man an Englishman grows prouder cf as he sees America and something of her politicians and Labor leaders. After his board school days Mac Queen went to work as a painter and grainer, and gave his spare energy to self-education. He mastered German, and read widely and freely. He corresponded with William Morris, devoured Tolstoi and Bernard Shaw, followed the ‘ Clarion ’ week by week, discussed social questions, wrote to the newspapers, debated, made speeches. The English reader will begin to recognise the type. Gaol had worn him when I saw him. but I should think ho was always phyacally delicate. He wears spectacles, he warms emotionally as he talks. And he decided, after much excogitation, that the ideal State is one of so tine a quality of moral training that people will not need coercion and repressive laws. He colls himself an Anarchist, of the early Christian, Tolstoiaa, nonresisting school. Such an Anarchist was Emerson, among other dead Americans whose names are better treasured than their thoughts. That sort of Anarchist has as much connection with embittered bombthrowers and assassins as Miss Florence Nightingale has with the woman Hartmann, who put on a nurse’s uniform to pofaon and rob.

Well, Mac Queen led an active life in England, married, made a decent living, and took an honorable part in the local affairs of Leeds until he was twenty-six. Then he conceived a desire for wider opportunity than England offers men of his class. In January, 1902, ho crossed the Atlantic, and, no doubt, ho came very much aglow with the American idea. He felt that ho was exchanging a decadent country of dwarfing social and political conditions for a land of limitless outlook. He became a proof-reader in New Ycrk, and began to seek around him for opportunities of speaking and forwarding social progress. He tried to float, a newspaper. The New York labor unions found him a useful speaker, and, among others, the German silk workers of New York became aware of him. In June they asked him to go to Paterson to speak in German to the weavers in that place. To my mind, Paterson isn't so much a town as a festering industrial sore. No country could possibly be proud of Paterson. Beside it Preston is well governed and well educated, and West Ham a focus of light. New Jersey, in its company law, its education, its industrial legislation, is half a century behind England or New York State, and Paterson is one of the predestined receptacles for those imported Italian children about whom I have already written; it is a place which receives and uses up immigrants. It is a place of ugliness, and weariness, and injustice, of vice and retaliatory violence, more slovenly than any European town west of Russia, and as hopeless. The workers sooth in polyglot discontent, and they even sustain a wretched little paper in Italian, called ‘ La Questionc Sociale,’ whose dominant note is anger, which constantly advocates violence. I mrst confess I don’t blame it or them. H I was caught in the Paterson mill I should certainly want to kill somebody. Well, the silk-dyers were on strike in Paterson, but the weavers

were weaving “ stab suk," dyed by dyers elsewhere, and it was believed that the dyers’ strike would fail unless they Struck aJao. They had to be called out. They were chiefly Italians, some Hungarians. It was felt by the Kew York German silk workers that perhaps MacQueen’s German learnt in England might meet the linguistic difficulties of the case.

Ho went. I hope ho will forgive me if I ear that bis was an extremely futile expedition. I think it wan an altogether honorable thing for him to have gone; but, as a matter of fact, the salvation of Patereon is to be achieved, if it ever is achieved, at Washington, at Harvard, and through a long conflict of years. Industrial sores are not cared by local irritation. However, that was not his idea, and he went to Paterson. Ho did very little. He wrote an entirely harmless article or so in English for ' La Question© Sodale,’ and he declined, with horror and publicity, to appear upon the same platform with a mischievous and violent lady Anarchist called Emma Goldman, On June 17, 1902, he went to Paterson again, and spoke to lus own undoing. There is no evidence that be ‘ad'f anything illegal or inflammatory ; there is clear evidence that he bored his audience. They shouted him down, and called for a prominent local speaker named Qaliano. Mac Queen subsided into the background, and Galiano spoke for an hour in Italian. He aroused great enthuniaam, and the proceedings terminated with a destructive riot. Eight witnesses testify to ineffectual efforts on the part of Mac Queen to combat the violence in progress. That finishes the story of ilacQucem’s activities in America, for which he is now in durance at Trenton. He, in common with a large crowd, and in common, too, with nearly all the witnesses against him, did commit one offence against the law—he did not go home when destruction began. Ho was arrested next day. From that tm» forth hia fate was out of his hands, and in the control of a number of people who' wanted “ to make an example ” of the Paterson strikers. The Press took up Mac Queen. They began to clothe the bare bones of this aim pie little history I have told in fluent, unmitigated lying. They blackened him. one might think, out of sheer artistic pleosaire in the operation. They called this rather nervous, educated, nobly-meaning, if ill-advised young man, a “notorious Anarchist,” his headline title became “ Anarchist Mac Queen,” they wrote Ids “ story ” in a vem of imaginative fervor, they invented “an unsavory police record” for hia in England, and enlarged upon the marvellous secret organisation for crime of which he was representative and leader. In a little while Mac Queen had ceased to be a credible human, being; he might have been invented by Mr William La Queux. He was arrested' —Galiano went scot free—and released on bail. It was discovered that hie pleasant, docent Yorkshire wife and three children were coming out to America to him, and she became “Ore woman Nellie Barton”—her maiden name, and “ a Socialist of the Emma Goldman stripe.” This, one gathers, is the most horrible stripe known to American journalism. Had there been a worse one, Mn Mac Queen would have been that ex-officio. And now here is an extraordinarv thing—public officials began to join in the process. This is what perplexes mo most in this affair. Assistant-Secretary of the Treasury, H. A. Taylor, withont a fact to go upon, subscribed to the “unsavory record ” legend ; Assistant-Secretary C. H- Keep fell in with it. Yon know, with every desire to be polite to these gentlemen, they must have seen what it was they were endorsing. In a letter from Mr Keep to the Rev. A. W. Wishart, of Trenton (who throughout has fought most gallantly for justice in tihs case), I find Mr Keep distinguishes himself by the artistic device of putting “William MacQueen’a" name in inverted commas. So, very debcutely be conveys oat of the void the m--6innation that the name is an alias- Meanwhile the Commissioner of Immigration prepared to take a band in the game of break-ing-up Mac Queen; he stopped Mrs MacQncen at the threshold of liberty, imprisoned her in Ellis Island, and sent her back.to Europe. Mac Queen, still on bail, was not informed of this action, and waited on the pier for some hours before ho understood. His wife had come second class to America, but she was returned first class, and the steamship company seized her goods for the return fare. That was more than Mac Queen ooold stand- He had been tried, convicted, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, and he was now out on bail pending an appeal. Anxiety about his wife and children was to much for him. He slipped off to England after them (“ Escape of the Anarchist MacQuecn”b mad? jriprtJJroyißjon and arrange-

meets be coaid for them' and retatMi it time to save his bondsman’s money (“ Capture of the Escaped Anarchist Mac Queen ’)- Several members of the Leeds City Council (“Criminal Associates in Europe'’) saw him off. That was in 1903. His appeal had been refused on a technical point- He went into Trenton gaol, and there he is to this day. There I saw him. Trenton gaol did not impress me as an agreeable place. The building is fairly old, and there is no nonsense about the food. The cells hold, some of them, four criminals, some of them two. but latterly MacQnecn has bad spells in the infirmary, and has managed to get a cell to hansel f. Many of the criminals ale negroes and half-breeds, imprisoned for unspeakable offences. In the exercising yard Mac Queen likes to keep apart. “When I first came I used to get into a corner,” he said. . . -

Now, this case of Mac Queen has exercised my mind enormously. It was painful to go out of the grey gaol again after I bad talked to him—of fihaw and Morris, of the Fabian Society, and the British Labor members—into sunlight and freedom; _and ever and again as I went about New York having the best of times among the most agreeable people, the figure of him would come back to me quite vividly, in his grey dress, sitting on the edge of an unaccustomed chair, hands on his knees, speaking a little nervously and jerkily, and very glad indeed to see me. He is younger than myself, but much my sort of man, and we talked of books and education and his case like brothers. There can be no doubt to any sensible person who will look into the story of his conviction, who will even go and see him, that there has been a serious miscarriage of justice. There has been a serious miscarriage of justice, such as (unhappily) might happen in any country. That is nothing distinctive of America. But what does impress me as remarkable and perplexing is the immense difficulty—the perhaps unsurmountable difficulty—of getting this man released. The Governor of the State of New Jerrev knows ho is innocent, the Judges of the Court of Pardons know he is innocent. Three of them I was able to buttonhole at Trenton and hear their point of view. Two were of the minority and for release; one was doubtful in attitude hut hostile in cprntThey hold, he thinks, the man on the score of public policy. They put it that Paterson is a “ hot-bed ” of crime and violence, that once Mac Queen is released cvery Anarchist in the country will be emboldened to crime, and so on and so on- I admit Paterson festers, but if we are to punish anybody instead of reforming the system, it’s the masters who ought to bo in gaol for that. “ What will the property-owners in Paterson sav to.ns if this man is released!" one of the* Judges admitted frankly.

“ But he hadn’t anything to do with the violence,” I said, and argued the case over again—quite missing the point of that objection. Whenever I had a chance in New York, in Boston, in Washington, oven amidst the conversation of a Washington dinner table, I dragged up the case of Mac Queen. Nobody seemed indignant. One lady admitted the sentence was heavy. “He mighthavo been given six months to cool off,” she said. I protested he ought not to have been given a day. “ Why did ho go there?” said a Supreme Court Judge in Washington, a lawyer in New Tork, and several other people. “Wasn’t he making trouble?” f was asked. At last that reached my sluggish intelligence.

Yet I still hesitate to accept the new in. terpretatkms. Galia.no, who preached blind violence and made the riot, got off sootfree; ilacQneen, who wanted a legitimate strike on British lines, went to gaol. So long as the social injustice, the sweated disorder of Paterson’s industrialism, rente its cries in Italian in ‘La Qnestiono Socialc,' eo long as it remains an inaudible misery so far as tie great pnWic is concerned, making vehement yet impotent appeals to mere force, and so losing its last chances of popular sympathy, American property, 1 gather, is content-. The masters and the immigrants can deal with one another on those lines. But to have outsiders coming

There is an active Press campaignagainot the release of “the Anarchist Mac Queen,” and I do not believe that Mr Wishart will succeed in, bis endeavors. I think MaeQuecn will serve out hia five years. The plain truth is that no one pretends be is in gaol on his merits; he is in gaol as an example and lesson to anyone who proposes to come between master and immigrant worker in Paterson. He lias attacked the systemTho people who profit by the system, the people who think things are “ all right at thev are,” have hit back in the most effectual way they can, according to their lights. That. 1 think, accounts for the sustained quality of the lying in this case, and, indeed, for the whole situation. He is in gaol on principle, and without personal animus, just as they used to tar and feather tbo stray abolitionist on principle in Carolina. The policy of stringent discouragement is a reasonable one—scoundrelly, no doubt, but understandable. And I think I can pat myself sufficiently into the place of the Paterson masters, of the Trenton Judges, of those journalists, of those subordinate officials at Washington even, to understand their motives and inducements. I indulge in no self-righteous pride. Sanply I thank hca-ven 1 have not bad their peculiar temptations. But my riddle lies in the attitude of the public —of the American nation, which hasn't, it seems, a spark of moral indignation for this sort of thing, which, indeed, joins in quite cheerfully against the victim. It is ill-served by its Press, no doubt, but surely it undeisiand,;. —London ‘Tribune.’