[A four-page pamphlet, printed in purple ink on the mimeograph of the I.W.W. local. Rough paper. Cover: a simple black border around the title in Stefan's hand.]

ONE YEAR SINCE THE GATES AT BLACKWELL

By a worker of the Ward

On the eighteenth of July, 1922, three men were killed at the gates of the Blackwell Iron Works. The newspapers of this city, with one exception, told the public that those men were killed by their own comrades in the picket line. That is a lie. It is a paid lie. It is a lie that a Company bought and a Press sold.

My father was one of those men. I was standing ten feet from him when he fell. I saw the direction from which the bullets came. The bullets came from the doorway of the Cadenza & Sons warehouse across the street. They were fired by a man we have since learned was called Prendergast, who was paid by someone at Blackwell Iron Works to do what he did. He was paid through an account at Cadenza & Sons, to which the word "consulting" was attached, and which Mr. Otto Brecht, chief engineer, authorized. He was paid on the fifth of July nine hundred dollars, and on the twenty-eighth of July, when his work was completed, another six hundred. He took the streetcar out of Port Hume within two days of our fathers' burial and has since, we are told, been seen in Pittsburgh in the employ of similar interests.

The man Prendergast did not act on his own. He was hired. He was hired by a decision that was made in a room, and the room was in a private club, and the men in the room included Mr. Julian Cornelius Thorpe, president of Blackwell Iron Works. I do not have the names of every man in that room. I do not have the minutes of the decision. I have only what my father taught me, which is that such decisions are not made by one man but are permitted by many.

I name Mr. Thorpe because he is the one whose signature is on the public defense of the lie. I name Mr. Brecht because his name is on the voucher. I name the man Prendergast because he pulled the trigger. I do not yet name the others. I will name them when I have their names.

I also name Chief Donal Keane of the Harbor Police and Chief Marcus Royland of the City Police, who between them have ensured that the case is closed, that the carbon of Patrolman Reilly's first report was "misplaced," that the Cadenza voucher has been "revised" in the pay-book, and that the witness Mr. Herrick the night-watchman has been dismissed for the "neglect of duty" of which his own employer Mr. Cadenza states he was not in fact negligent.

I do not ask any of the men I name for their reply. Their reply is in the newspapers they buy and the offices they hold.

I ask the working men and working women of Port Hume a different question. I ask: what will you do the next time there is a strike, and the Company comes again to Pittsburgh for another Prendergast, and the newspapers again write that the picket killed itself? What will you do when it is your father? Your husband? Your son?

I am nineteen years old. I have three weeks of union organizing to my name. I have, instead, the name my father gave me and the education my parents paid for with their hands. I will not be silent about my father's death. If I am silent I have buried him. He does not stay buried in me.

S. Vasko, a worker of the Ward July 18, 1923.

Published by the Little Warsaw-Ward Workingmen's Council. Additional copies available for the ask at Café Solange and the Ward Street Settlement House. Not sold. Not licensed. Not apologized for.