It was freezing in that wagon, and through the frosted back window, I could see them leading newsboys away while cops battered the last of our doors and chairs. A small cop with a red beard climbed in and sat next to me. A moment later, Chief Sullivan stuck his head in and smiled.
“Well, look at this,” Sullivan said to the other police officer. “We’ve managed to do the impossible: We’ve shut up Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.”
The bearded patrolman laughed. I’ve always been surprised at how it stings, the laughter of small men. The smaller the man, the more the laughter hurts, as if saying, I may be nothing, but you are less.
The wagon rumbled over streetcar tracks, and they took me to the women’s jail, where I was unloaded and booked on a charge of “conspiracy to incite men to violate the law.” I asked to see my lawyer, but the clerk stared as if I’d asked for a cannon. “You’ll see him tomorrow,” he said, “when you’re arraigned.”
A pigeon-toed jailer led me down a long, dark hallway. He turned once and looked me up and down, as if considering a purchase, and I felt a wave of disgust. Unlike most cities, Spokane did not employ a jail matron, Chief Sullivan saying jail was no place for a decent woman to work. This sloth led me to a heavy iron door, a single electric bulb illuminating it. “Back up!” he called through the door. Then he keyed it open. A few socialist ladies had spent the night in the women’s cell in Spokane for our cause, and I’d heard them describe it as a cold, dark dungeon, filled with prostitutes arrested on late-night raids for not having the twenty-five-dollar fine ready.
True to form, two tavern girls were lying on cots when I came in. One of the women was facing the wall, skirts bunched, her back to me. The other was younger and sat up when I came in. “You’re that Elizabeth Gurley,” she said with a heavy Austro-Hungarian accent. “No, I seen you speak one day.”
I had been in jail cells before, but this one made New York’s holding pen seem like the Waldorf Astoria. Heavy rock walls and an iron door—a freezing draft and a faint light through two barred windows, a stone floor beneath us, and on my cot, a single blanket, thin and scratchy as old leaves, and a pillow that was little more than rice in a sock.
“Here, you take mine,” said the woman with the accent. And she held out her blanket to me.
“I couldn’t,” I said, “thank you.”
She raised her skirts and showed me what looked like men’s pants beneath them. “My barman give me these before the police come yesterday.”
“He knew the police were coming?”
She whispered: “My barman is behind to pay the police—” She shrugged. “He get the money, buy us back tomorrow, hope tomorrow—”
The other one rolled half over to shush her. “Katya, shut up. You’ll get us in more trouble.” She shot me a look.
A few minutes later, Pigeon-Toed was back and the heavy door opened. “Elizabeth Jones,” he said. He led me out, back down the dark hall, to a room with no windows.
The prosecutor Pugh was sitting at a table, Sullivan against the wall. They sat me at the table across from Pugh. The needling prosecutor read from a thick notepad as he slowly questioned me for the next hour. Who was funding our chapter? Who sent me? Would I confess to conspiring to violate the anti-speaking law, to inciting violence, to causing a riot, to disturbing the peace? Did I know that I faced two years in prison? How many more men were coming to protest? How many had I rallied in Seattle? In Wallace? In Taft? Was it true that Vincent Saint John was planning to come to Spokane? And what about the murderer Big Bill Haywood? Was my husband, Jack, bringing mining toughs from Montana? Who was leading this conspiracy?
My face heated up as he spoke, anger blessedly replacing my fear. “I am conspiring to exercise my right to speak freely, if that’s what you mean.” I began interrupting his questions. “Bill Haywood was framed by Pinkertons and acquitted of murder. You should read the newspapers, they are quite informative.” I laughed as he pressed me: which men were coming, which men were leading the fight, which men were pulling my strings. Even the sentence he threatened me with, two years in jail, was for conspiring to incite men to violate the law.
“And what if I promise to incite only women?” I said.
Mr. Pugh was unamused. “You do not seem to appreciate the severity of this situation, Mrs. Jones.”
“Nor you, Mr. Pugh.”
Sullivan came off the wall. “See—now this manner of yours is what I don’t understand, sister. The shrillness. Disrespect. It doesn’t have to be this way. You could be ladylike. You’re not bad-looking, not one of those dried-up milk cows like Emma Goldman or Mother Jones.”
“They are champions of—”
He acted as if I hadn’t spoken. “I don’t see why you’d throw your life off like this. Do you want to have your husband’s baby in jail? Raise it among fallen women when, with a little cooperation, Mr. Pugh might be convinced to contact your husband and have him come get you? Forget this whole mess?”
“My husband is proud that I am fighting for—”
“No, no, no. Don’t start with me. I’m not talking about that.” He bent so that he was at eye level. “I don’t see your husband as a man at all, Mrs. Jones. I don’t approve of your rabble-rousing, and I would forbid my wife from making a whore’s spectacle of herself—but if she
