ers, as a witness for the prosecution in order to create
distrust and suspicion among the prisoners.

About this time the efforts of Detective McLaren and his associates were
successful in "influencing" one of the prisoners, and Charles Auspos,
alias Charles Austin, agreed to become a state's witness. Contrary to
the expectation of the prosecution, the announcement of this
"confession" created no sensation and was not taken seriously on the
outside, while the prisoners, knowing there was nothing to confess, were
concerned only in the fact that there had been a break in their
solidarity. "We wanted to come out of this case one hundred per cent
clean," was the sorrowful way in which they took the news.

Auspos had joined the I. W. W. in Rugby, North Dakota, on August 10th,
1916, and whether he was at that time an agent for the employers is not
known, but it is evident that he was not sufficiently interested in
industrial unionism to study its rudimentary principles. It may be that
the previous record of Auspos had given an opportunity for McLaren to
work upon that weak character, for Auspos started his boyhood life in
Hudson, Wisconsin, with a term in the reformatory, and his checkered
career included two years in a military guard house for carrying
side-arms and fighting in a gambling den, a dishonorable discharge from
the United States Army, under the assumed name of Ed. Gibson, and
various arrests up until he joined the I. W. W.

This Auspos was about 33 years of age, five foot eleven inches tall,
weight about 175 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, medium complexion but
face inclined to be reddish, slight scar on side of face, and was a
teamster and general laborer by occupation, his parents living in Elk
River, Minn.

And while Auspos had by his actions descended to the lowest depths of
shame, there were those among the prisoners who had scaled the heights
of self-sacrifice. There were some few among them whose record would
look none too well in the light of day, but the spirit of class
solidarity within them led them to say, "Do with me as you will, I shall
never betray the working class." James Whiteford, arrested under the
name of James Kelly, deserves the highest praise that can be given for
he was taken back to Pennsylvania, which state he had left in violation
of a parole; to serve out a long penitentiary sentence which he could
have avoided by a few easily told lies implicating his fellow workers in
a conspira