“READ YOU MUTT!” the Life and Times of Tom Burns, the Most Arrested Man in Portland

OHS digital no. bb OHS digital no. OREGON VOICES 007 “READ YOU MUTT!” 24 The Life and Times of Tom Burns, the Most Arrested Man in Portland by Peter Sleeth TOM BURNS BURST onto the Port- of Liverpool to his death in Southeast land scene in 10, out of curiosity, Portland, Burns lived a life devoted and stayed, he said, for the weather.1 A to improving the lives of the working loner and iconoclast, Burns found his class. way into virtually every major orga- Historians frequently mention nized social movement in his time. Burns’s involvement in Portland’s In his eighty-one years, from England labor movement, but his life has never to Oregon, Burns lived the life of a been explored in detail. From his free-wheeling radical, a colorful street- friendships with lawyer and author corner exhorter whose concern for the C.E.S. Wood to his alliance with femi- working stiff animated his life. His nist and anarchist Dr. Marie Equi, his story is full of contradictions. Burns name runs through the currents of noted having been a friend to famous the city’s labor history. Newspapers communist John Reed prior to the of the day — as well as Burns himself Russian Revolution, but he despised — called him The Most Arrested Man the Communist Party.2 Although in Portland, the Mayor of Burnside, he described himself as a Socialist, and Burns of Burnside. His watch and was what we could call a secular shop on the 200 block of W. Burnside Reporter Fred Lockley dropped by Tom Burns’s book shop on a winter’s night in humanist today, Burns was also briefly was a focal point for radical meetings 1914: “The air was blue with tobacco smoke and vibrant with the earnest voices of involved in a publishing venture with that included luminaries of Portland’s several men discussing the conspiracies of capital” (Oregon Journal, February 22, the former Grand Dragon of the literary, political, and labor landscape. 1914). His storefront at SW Fourth and Ankeny illustrated Burns’s twin desires to Oregon Ku Klux Klan. Burns con- I first heard of Burns at the din- repair both watches and the world. The diminutive Burns stands to the left. sidered himself a man with a simple, ner table, growing up in Multnomah lifelong mission: “My whole idea is County, east of the city. He had been that everybody should have enough a friend to my grandfather and my befriended Dana Sleeth, a Progressive manhood included many nights before anybody has too much.”3 From father, and in my family, he was leg- Era journalist, and then my father amidst the intellectual anarchy of his birth in the Dickensian tenements end: A liberal and watchmaker who Marshall Sleeth, whose journey to Burns’s basement hideout beneath OHQ vol. 112, no. 1 © 2011 Oregon Historical Society Sleeth, Life and Times of Tom Burns 2 invective that could shock and dismay working men and women. He believed 007 even his friends: Local Communists the only way to escape wage slavery were “penus-pulling political was through education. His compact polecats,” for example, and Christian shop was a warren stuffed with clocks, preachers were “peddling Jesus junk watch-making tools, and propaganda. OHS digital no. bb OHS digital no. and Bible bunk.” Even Portland itself Yet it was his cellar, more than 2,000 was not safe from his pen’s vitriol. In square feet of basement, that held the a 113 screed — an attempt to sup- shop’s treasure. There, hobos, radicals, port my grandfather, who was in the and preachers packed in shoulder-to- midst of an editorial crusade and legal shoulder to argue, talk, and hide in a battle — Burns wrote that his adopted safe house for the mad, the brilliant, city “is among the Rottenest of the and the inflamed. Rotten of American cities. Where, houses of Prostitution, (in Violation BURNS’S JOURNEY as a Portland of all Law,) run wide open, night and radical and never-give-an-inch ora- day, that’s Portland; Ladd and Tilton tor started nearly ,000 miles east of town.” He continued on in the five- the city, in England. After Nathaniel page, sometimes-rhyming document Hawthorne became U.S. Consul in to insult everyone by name from local Liverpool, England, in 1853, he found business leaders to the governor before himself in the slums of the otherwise declaring that state legislators “are prosperous port: Tom Burns supported his family with his Portland watch repair business until his Saloon Bum Lickspittles and Big Mitt death at age eighty-one, although his social activism almost always took precedence Almost every day, I take walks about Liv- artists, [who] are Raping the Treasury over his time pieces. Burns was part of what historian Robert Johnston called “The erpool; preferring the darker and dingier Radical Middle Class” that helped shape Portland’s vibrant political life. His role as of the State for their Boss, the Southern streets, inhabited by the poorer classes. The scenes there are very picturesque in their a business owner may have made his politics more tolerable to Portland’s elites. Pacific [Railroad].” “Read, You Mutt!” was the only way; at every two or three steps, a gin-shop; also . [fil]thy in clothes and person, ragged, permanent saying affixed to his watch- pale, often afflicted with humors; women, shop window, where on any given day, nursing their babies at dirty bosoms; men his now largely forgotten watch shop. a police target. His crusades — and Portlanders could learn of his most haggard, drunken, care-worn, hopeless, but By the 10s, my father had become a there were hundreds — ranged from recent crusades in an ever-changing with a kind of patience, as if all this were the conservative Richard Nixon Republi- aiding striking workers to advocat- mix of articles, self-drawn cartoons, rule of their life. I never walk through can, yet he still beamed with admira- ing for public control of utilities.4 He and political flyers. He aimed a second these streets without feeling as if I should catch some disease.7 tion whenever he heard the name Tom became a small-business owner with admonition at the men who filled the Burns. his watch shop as well as a family man, bars and brothels surrounding his By the time Thomas Joseph Burns Here is what the record tells us of forcefully weaving himself into the time shop on Portland’s skid road — was born to an Irish father and Welsh the man. fabric of the city. By the end of his life, “Empty Your Pocketbook into Your mother in those very slums on July When Burns arrived in Portland he was a Portland institution, having Brain” — and Burns backed up the 2, 17, things had hardly improved. at age twenty-eight, he was a watch- dished out his earnest, if sometimes encouragement to read with a lend- Immigrants had poured into the city maker by trade and a Socialist by call- peculiar, form of arguments in hun- ing library of more than ,000 books, throughout the nineteenth century, ing. His fiery rhetoric and aggressive dreds of street speeches, pamphlets, certainly one of the largest personal seeking the dock jobs and factory work street speaking quickly transformed and newspapers he self-published, book collections in the city at the created by the Industrial Revolution. him from an unknown newcomer to with an acidic, sometimes crude, time. All were available for free to They lived in squalid conditions. The 0 OHQ vol. 112, no. 1 Sleeth, Life and Times of Tom Burns 1 11 British census shows Thomas and Tom Burns was fourteen years old and Mountains rising quickly to the west. Mississippi River. The Easterners alone Ellen Burns living with four children, listed as an “assistant,” or apprentice, “Traffic was congested and noisy,’’ nearly matched the city’s 14,200 full- including their four-year-old son most likely with Russell & Co. Ltd., a wrote Laurence Pratt, in his memoir, time residents.1 The exhibition was a Thomas. The father listed himself as large watch-making firm in the city. “I Remember Portland, 1–11”: wonder, built on the extensive wetlands employed at the “Alkali Works,” or He had wanted to become a school of Guilds Lake, surrounded by lush Iron-shod horses clattered along at a good chemical plants, as did all of his neigh- teacher, but his father had differ- speed with light wagons and buggies. forests, bordered by the Willamette bors. The plants were poisonous, ent ideas. He was one of now seven Two, four, or six Percheron horses, big as River and Portland, a place rich in choking places, filled with employees children in his Irish Catholic family, elephants, clanged eight to twenty-four symbols of the promise of a city in the who had little voice in the conditions his father listing himself as a “general ringing shoes on the cobblestones, aided and wilds. The affair put Portland in the abetted by the clash of iron- or steel-rimmed at work or home. “We lived in the laborer.”13 national spotlight, and most agreed it wheels. Along Third and Fifth Avenues, tenement district,” Burns would later In May 13, at age seventeen, Burns up Washington and Morrison Streets almost was a wonderful success. Burns refused tell a newspaper reporter. “I saw plenty stowed away on the ship Luconia and bumper to bumper the [street] cars ran with to even take a peek. The organizers had of misery and vice as a boy.

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