Biography
M. C. Sullivan was a traveling delegate of the Oil Workers Industrial Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, arrested on a vagrancy charge while organizing in the Utah Copper Company district at Bingham Canyon, Utah. The Industrial Worker reported that the city authorities tried several times to dispose of the case and that the town's mayor insisted it go forward. He was found guilty by a jury of four, and by April 19, 1924 had appealed to the district court at Salt Lake City. The union's answer to the charge was that he was employed as a union delegate and had money on him, and so was not a vagrant under any ordinary meaning of the word.
Vagrancy law was the standard instrument for clearing organizers out of company towns: it required no proof of any act, only a judgement about the person. Whether Sullivan served any jail time, and how the appeal ended, are both unresolved. This record therefore carries no custody dates and publishes no time-served figure, and his arrest is placed no more precisely than late 1923 or early 1924.
