Biography
John Merrick was an active union shoe worker in Haverhill, Massachusetts. John Merrick was framed up in January 1923 on a charge of placing a bomb in front of a shoe factory — a classic case, as the International Labor Defense reported it, of a militant unionist targeted with a manufactured charge. Tried and convicted, he was out on bail while the case was appealed; the ILD supported the defense ("The Haverhill Frame-Up," Labor Defender, January 1926). A letter from his wife Martha, printed in October1926, subsequently placed him in Charleston prison; the precise admission, disposition and release remain unverified.
In a letter printed in the October 1926 Labor Defender, Martha Merrick states that she visited her husband John E. Merrick in Charleston prison. This supplies a later observation of actual imprisonment in addition to the earlier appeal-bail account. It does not establish an admission day, a final appeal disposition or a release date. The paper's account of a Haverhill frame-up remains an attributed defense characterization.
James P. Cannon's September 1926 Labor Defender article reports that John Merrick had begun serving the sentence imposed in connection with a Massachusetts shoe workers' strike. This establishes actual sentence service after the earlier account that described him on bail pending appeal. The article does not give the individual admission day, length served, institution or discharge date, and none is supplied from the issue month or its relative chronology.
The preliminary hearing dismissed the charge of planting dynamite near a Haverhill factory but held John E. Merrick for the grand jury on manufacturing an infernal machine. His original $40,000 bond was not reduced and he was remanded to jail. The paper attributes the prosecution to an attack on militant shoe unionists; this preliminary ruling was not an acquittal on every count or the later trial conviction.
