Defense Attorney George Vanderveer hurried across the continent from
Chicago to take up the legal battle for the eleven men who had been
arrested and charged with the murder of Warren O. Grimm. The lumber
interests had already selected six of their most trustworthy tools as
prosecutors. It is not the purpose of the present writer to give a
detailed story of this "trial"--possibly one of the greatest travesties on
justice ever staged. This incident was a very important part of the
Centralia conspiracy but a hasty sketch, such as might be portrayed in
these pages, would be an inadequate presentation at best. It might be
well, therefore, to permit Mr. Vanderveer to tell of the case as he told
it to the jury in his opening and closing arguments. Details of the trial
itself can be found in other booklets by more capable authors.
Vanderveer's opening address appears in part below:
May it please the court and gentlemen of the jury:--As you have already
sensed from our examination of you and from a question which I propounded
to counsel at the close of his statement yesterday, the big question in
this case is, who was the aggressor, who started the battle? Was it on the
one side a deliberately planned murderous attack upon innocent marchers,
or was it on the other side a deliberately planned wicked attack upon the
I.W.W., which they merely resisted? That, I say, is the issue. I asked
counsel what his position would be in order that you might know it, and
that he said was his position, that he would stand and fall and be judged
by it, and I say to you now that is our position, and we will stand or
fall and be judged by that issue.
In order that you may properly understand this situation, and the things
that led up to it, the motives underlying it, the manner in which it was
planned and executed, I want to go just a little way back of the
occurrence on November 11th, and state to you in rough outline the
situation that existed in Centralia, the objects that were involved in
this case, the things each are trying to accomplish and the way each went
about it. There has been some effort on the part of the state to make it
appear it is not an I.W.W. trial. I felt throughout that the I.W.W. issue
must come into this case, and now that they have made their opening
statement, I say unreservedly it is here in this case, not because we want
to drag it in here, but because it can't be left out. To conceal from you
gentlemen that it is an I.W.W. issue would be merely to conceal the truth
from you and we, on our part, don't want to do that now or at any time
hereafter.
The I.W.W. is at the bottom of this. Not as an aggressor, however. It is a
labor organization, organized in Chicago in 1905, and it is because of the
philosophy for which it stands and because of certain tactics which it
evolves that this thing arose.
[Illustration: James McInerney
Logger. Born in County Claire, Ireland. Joined the Industrial Workers of
the World in 1916. Was wounded on the steamer "Verona" when the lumber
trust tried to exterminate the union lumberworkers with bullets at
Everett, Washington. McInerney was one of those trapped in the hall. He
surrendered to officers of the law. While in the city jail his neck was
worn raw with a hangman's rope in an effort to make him "confess" that the
loggers and not the mob had started the trouble. McInerney told them to
"go to hell." He is Irish and an I.W.W. and proud of being both.]