Biography
Stephen Shuren was arrested in Kansas and scheduled to be tried in the mass IWW trial in Wichita. While awaiting trial Shuren attempted suicide at the Shawnee County Jail in Kansas. The attempted suicide occurred after Shuren had spent approximately a year in jail. After having been forced to share a cell with a seriously syphilitic inmate, Shuren "snapped, " using his shaving razor "to cut a deep wound in his neck from ear to ear, and fell to the floor." Nearly dead he was rushed to the hospital. Wliile recuperating he wrote: "Life has denied me everything. WHiiat have I to live for? W^hy should I live?" Within two weeks of the attempt, he was transferred back to the Shawnee County Jail. His fellow IWW inmates watched over Shuren continuously after his return. A reporter commissioned by the National Civil Liberties Union and Survey magazine visited Shuren and wrote that "the expression in his eyes was not normal and he looked at me from his clouded face. The men said that little of his mind seemed to remain." Shuren was transferred to the state insane asylum at Osawattomie. Soon thereafter the government dropped its indictment of these Wichita IWW defendants.
The March 1920 One Big Union Monthly prisoner roster provides a contemporaneous procedural account. The roster lists a Wichita federal conspiracy indictment dated September 24, 1918, $10,000 bail, and release pending trial on December 1, 1919. These source-reported procedural dates do not independently establish final asylum discharge or a complete custody total. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/one-big-union-monthly/v02n03-mar-1920_One%20Big%20Union.pdf#page=19
Individually dated arrest in the contemporary Kansas account
The June 27, 1919 newspaper individually names Stephen Shurin, the spelling used in this source, as an oil-field worker arrested on the job near Augusta, Kansas, in November 1917. His Philadelphia family, IWW/oil-workers connection, survived self-harm episode and later Osawatomie transfer bridge the spelling to the existing Stephen Shuren record. The arrest is recorded only at month precision: November 1 is a storage placeholder, not a documented arrest day. The separate November 20 roundup statement concerns a group and is not assigned as his individual day. The account does not separately date his initial physical admission, final release or asylum exit, so none is inferred from that arrest month. Its hospital stay, return to jail and later institutional transfer are not new independently quantified episodes. Existing duration fields are preserved, not re-certified as a measured lifetime total.
The Workers’ World, Kansas City, volume 1 number 13, June 27, 1919, original printed page 2. All four original newspaper pages, including continuations and surrounding material, were reviewed. Political, medical and mistreatment claims remain attributed to the paper.
