Biography
Ed Burns was the assistant to W. E. Spear, the Seattle district secretary-treasurer of an IWW industrial union organization. On April 22, 1920, Seattle's police Red Squad raided the organization's office in the Globe Building, seized records said to include a directory of roughly twelve thousand members, and arrested Burns together with Spear and the office stenographer Alicia Rosenbaum. Contemporary reports said the prisoners were held incommunicado for investigation on open charges, and the defendants were brought toward trial in June 1920 under Washington's criminal-syndicalism and criminal-anarchy repression. Spear's case was dismissed on January 24, 1921 on the prosecution's motion; no verdict or dismissal notice specifically naming Burns has been located, so his disposition is unresolved.
He is not the Ed Burns of the Sacramento IWW case, who died in the Sacramento County Jail in November 1918 — seventeen months before the Globe Building raid — and who has his own record in this database.
