In Chicago's darkened dungeons
For the O.B.U.
Remember you're outside for us
While we're in here for you.
We make a pledge—no tyrant might
Can make us bend a knee,
Come on you workers, organize
and fight for Liberty.[129]
Upton Sinclair, astonished by his arrest for attempting to read the United States Constitution while standing on private property with the permission of the owner during the IWW's Marine Transport Workers' strike at San Pedro in 1923, wrote a four-act play called Singing Jailbirds. In it he portrayed prisoners and their friends singing, among other songs, "Remember," adapting it to their own locale by substituting "California" for "Chicago." In a postcript Sinclair described his own arrest and contributed some historical notes on conditions in the country's jails and prisons. He also quoted a San Pedro police captain who, after the Wobblies were freed, was reported to have complained that "somebody has been making holy asses of us policemen."[130]
While in Leavenworth Penitentiary, Chaplin wrote "All Hell Can't Stop Us!" but it was not published among his prison poems. This song also was to the tune of "Hold the Fort," and it appeared in the 1919 edition of "The Little Red Song Book," or, as the cover title has it, with typical Wobbly humor, I.W.W. Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.[131] The first verse and the chorus of "All Hell Can't Stop Us" indicate its no-nonsense character:
Now the final battle rages;
Tyrants quake with fear.
Rulers of the New Dark Ages
Know THEIR end is near.
Scorn to take the crumbs they drop us;
All is ours by right!
Onward, men! All Hell can't stop us!
Crush the Parasite![132]
A Sunday afternoon program arranged by the IWW "class war prisoners" in the Cook County jail in December 1917 opened with the IWW chorus singing a version of "Hold the Fort" and ended with it singing "The Red Flag." Doubtless, the version of "Hold the Fort" sung then was that of the British Transport Workers. As the "English Trans-
