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Today in Labor History December 31, 1918: U.S. courts found Marie Equi guilty of sedition for speaking out against World War One. Marie Equi was born to working-class immigrant parents in New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a young woman, she went to work in a textile mill. Her first documented experience as an activist came in 1893, when she horse-whipped Reverend Orson D. Taylor, a land developer and superintendent of the Wasco Independent Academy, after he reneged on paying her lover, Bessie Holcomb, her salary for teaching at the institution. Many local people considered Taylor as a crook and applauded her attack. In 1897, she moved to San Francisco to study medicine. She practiced medicine in Portland, Oregon, where she cared primarily for working-class and poor patients. However, she came back to San Francisco to volunteer during the 1906 earthquake.
In 1913, she went to support a strike by women cannery workers at Oregon Packing Company over low wages. When the IWW and socialists joined the strike, the demands broadened to include equal rights for women and the right to free speech. During that strike, police clubbed her as she protested their brutality toward a pregnant woman. The experience radicalized her and drew her into the anarchist and the radical labor movements. She became a leader in Portland’s unemployment crisis of 1913-14, supported the IWW’s free speech fights, and the labor battles of the region’s timber workers. Throughout her career as a doctor, she provided information on birth control and abortions despite both being illegal at the time, providing discounts to lower income women. She was imprisoned in 1916 for providing abortion literature.
As nationalism and jingoism increased during the years leading up to U.S. involvement in World War One, there were massive Preparedness Parades held throughout the country. Equi believed the war was about profits for capitalists at the expense of working-class people. During one Preparedness Parade in downtown Portland, she unfurled a banner that reading: Prepare to die, workingmen, JP Morgan & Co. want preparedness for profit. She was arrested at this protest, and again in 1918. They sentenced her to three years at San Quintin, which President Wilson commuted to one. After her release, she returned to Portland and invited IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to come live with her.
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