Industrial Army Members Sentenced for Train Trespassing
Three men were sentenced to 40 days in the King County jail for boarding a freight train near the Stampede Tunnel, marking the latest legal maneuver in the suppression of the Industrial Army.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The latest of the case of the Industrial Army was disposed of by Judge Hanford in the United States court yesterday afternoon, not counting the men who are lying wounded in the hospitals of this city and North Yakima. The regular troops will return to their barracks at Vancouver tomorrow and the special deputies are being discharged. The trial yesterday was those of Paul Conings, Joseph Croazia and William Flanagan, who were accused of breaking the seals on a freight car to cross the Stampede tunnel, and of John Nelson, who had been included in the last batch but was granted a new hearing due to deafness. The defendants were among twenty-nine Industrials who were put off the cars upon their arrival at Stampede from Puyallup. Judge Hanford ruled that even though there was doubt regarding the seal-breaking, their presence on the train as trespassers was established. He sentenced the three men to forty days in the King County jail, while Nelson was discharged due to a lack of clear evidence.
“He stole a ride, but thought he had as much right in the cars as any other man.”
The 'Industrial Army' was a contingent of Coxey’s Army, a massive protest movement of unemployed men marching on Washington D.C. during the 1894 economic depression. Today, Seattle's relationship with protest and the criminalization of unhoused or migrant populations in public spaces remains a central, often contentious, debate.
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