Biography
John Alex MacDonald, editor of the Industrial Worker, received a ten-year sentence, of which he served over five years in Leavenworth Penitentiary. In prison he became a schoolteacher, but lost that position and was sent into isolation for "becoming sarcastic and ridiculing the laws and system of Government of the United States." He described his prison experience in harsh language: Depicted by a Milton or a Dante, Hell had its flashes of sulphur, its massive pictures of damnation; here also is damnation, but it is a damnation sordid, soiled, small, unpicturesque and mouldy as a decaying corpse.
From Kenyon Zimmer's Red Scare Deportees index (kenyonzimmer.com, compiled from INS deportation case files): Served nine years in the US Army at Vancouver, Washington, before discharge due to tuberculosis contracted during service. He joined the IWW around 1913 in Kansas City and became editor of The Industrial Worker in Seattle in May 1916, actively defending members prosecuted after the Everett Massacre. A defendant in the federal IWW trial (1917–1918), he was sentenced to ten years. His wife Kate (Katherine Beidel), whom he married in 1918, edited the paper during the trial until July 1918. His sentence was commuted in 1923, and he was deported to Canada August 5, 1923.
In Canada he continued organizing for the IWW and writing for its US publications through at least 1926, including organizing agricultural workers alongside fellow deportee Sam Scarlett.
MacDonald was diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis, but the government refused to grant clemency because he had published the poem “A Patriot” in the Industrial Worker: “I love my country, yes, I do, / I love my Uncle Sam, / I also love my steak and eggs, / I guess I won’t enlist. / I love my flag, I do, I do, / Which floats upon the breeze, / I also love my arms, and legs, / I guess I won’t enlist. / I love my country, yes, I do, / I hope her folks do well; / Without our arms and legs and things / I think we’d look like Hell. / Yet men with faces half shot off / Are unfit to be seen; / I’ve read in books it spoils their looks, / I guess I won’t enlist.”
