"Big" Bill Haywood came out of jail a hero-a fitting symbol of the solidarity of labor. He was described by one reporter as, "big in body, in brain, … - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Your Honor, all the material property I possess, as far as a fine is concerned, are books accumulated since I first bought a paper-covered copy of Tom Paine's Common Sense at the age of sixteen. They are good books-poetry, drama, history, political economy, fiction, philosophy, art, music, travel, literature. Marx and Engels are there beside Shakespeare, Shaw, Emerson, Hegel, Mark Twain; Lenin and Stalin are there beside Thoreau, Jefferson, the Beards, the Webbs, Hugo, Hardy and many others...There is force and violence on those shelves but not where the government looked for it. It is in Irish history-Connelly, O'Casey and others telling of the long and bloody struggle against British rule. It is in American labor history, in Colorado, West Virginia, Homestead, South Chicago and on the Embarcadero of San Francisco. It is in American history-the Revolution, the wars against the American Indians, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War. It is in the struggles of the Negro people. It is in the Bible, too-which is on my shelf, Your Honor-violence against the Jewish Tribes, and the old prophets, against Jesus and his Disciples, and the early Christian martyrs.

The political, industrial and social conditions under capitalism which created our ideas remain. They will produce similar ideas in the minds of countless others and further strengthen them in ours. Never did prison affect resolute people who live and work and die if necessary by their ideas. We Communists are such people. I have faith in the ultimate justice of the American people once the fog of lies, hysteria, prejudice and, worst of all, fear is swept away. It is a terrible thing to see one's country in the grip of fear-needless, stupid, foolish fear; fear of imaginary enemies, fear of our allies and friends; fear of the accusing fingers of stool pigeons, fear of losing one's job or one's citizenship or one's place in a community. The whole governmental bureaucracy, wasting billions of dollars, boasting, bragging, bullying, is whistling in the dark of fear, trying to make the whole world afraid of us.

The struggle for the right of women to vote was nationwide and growing. It had started with the first Equal Rights Convention, at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was addressed by Frederick Douglass, the great Negro leader. The suffragists had been ridiculed, assaulted by mobs, refused halls, arrested for attempting to vote, disowned by their families. By 1904, groups of working women, especially Socialist women, were banding together to join in the demand for the vote. Two years later, International Women's Day was born on the East Side of New York, at the initiative of these women demonstrating for suffrage. It spread around the world and is universally celebrated today, while here it is deprecated as "a foreign holiday."