by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Fred Thompson
Chicago,
January 1987
“Dust” Wall in (One Big Union Monthly, May 1920)
Preface to the First Edition
“We have been naught, we shall be all,” sang the delegates to the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago in 1905. The socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, and revolutionaries who met to lay the groundwork for One Big Union formed one of the first social movements in this country to develop an extensive literature and lore all its own. The Wobblies sang their songs of savage mockery and sardonic humor. They laughed grimly at the evils of the world. They used their songs, poems, stories, anecdotes, skits, language, and visual symbolism to transmit their own values within the structure of a society they wished to change.
Combining elements of Marxian and Darwinian thought, the I.W.W. ideology envisaged a utopian society consisting of one big industrial union which would abolish capitalism and the wage system and create a social order in which all good things of life would be meted out to workers with complete justice. “The I.W.W. was a fighting faith,” wrote Wallace Stegner in the preface to his novel The Preacher and the Slave (Boston, 1950). “Its members were the shock troops of labor…. It existed for the prime purpose of making the first breaches in the resistance of entrenched industry so that later organizations could widen and deepen them.”
Yet, as Stegner also pointed out, “no thoroughly adequate history of the I.W.W. exists. The standard histories are factual and doctrinal summaries, valuable for the record of the I.W.W.’s organization and activities … but lacking in the kind of poetic understanding which should invest any history of a militant church.”
This anthology is an attempt to bring together the history of the I.W.W. as told by the Wobblies themselves. It is a story of their strikes, free-speech fights, trials, and riots, of militancy and martyrdom, of sacrifices and suppression, of epic struggles for a One Big Union and a Cooperative Commonwealth which would be free of class and nationality distinctions.
The I.W.W. message was spread through tracts and pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines, and thousands of copies of the “little red songbook”—started by the Wobblies about 1909. In 1920 historian Paul F. Brissenden listed close to sixty official and semiofficial I.W.W. periodicals which had been published by that date. Many of them were in foreign languages—Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Flemish, Yiddish, Italian, and Spanish—published in American cities to meet the needs of the ethnic groups whose members carried Wobbly red membership cards. One of the newspapers was published in London, another in Australia, another in South Africa—countries where I.W.W. branches had been started by sailors and marine transport workers who spread the O.B.U. message to other lands.
Through the dedicated efforts of Jo Labadie and Miss Agnes Inglis, many of the I.W.W. newspapers, pamphlets, and songbooks have been collected in the Labadie Collection of Labor Materials in the University of Michigan Library. In 1911 Charles Joseph Antoine Labadie, of French and American-Indian descent, gave the University of Michigan a remarkable accumulation of pamphlets, periodicals, leaflets, and other material dealing chiefly with anarchism but including information on labor unions and various economic and political reform movements. Labadie, whose great great grandfather was a Potawatomie chief and whose father for many years served as interpreter for the Jesuits among the Indian tribes of Michigan and Indiana, was then sixty-one. He had been a printer, editor, and publisher, an early organizer for the Knights of Labor, and Greenback-Labor Party candidate for mayor of Detroit. He was one of the original founders of the Detroit Council of Trades, helped to form the Michigan Federation of Labor, and served two terms as its president. Drawn to anarchism in the 1880’s, he became known throughout Michigan as “the gentle anarchist,” about whom R. C. Stewart, a University of Michigan librarian, wrote: “He was first and foremost a good neighbor, a humanitarian, who despised man’s cruelty to man and fought it with such moral and intellectual resources as he had in his keeping” (Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, May 10, 1947).
In 1917 Miss Agnes Inglis, who was born in Detroit in 1870 of wealthy and socially prominent parents, learned that the Labadie Collection was lying in boxes in the University of Michigan Library. Although she was not a trained librarian, Miss Inglis, who had worked at Chicago’s Hull House and Detroit’s Franklin Settlement, volunteered to put the collection in order. Over the years Miss Inglis added to the scope and value of the collection, acquiring many rare historic items through her extensive correspondence with individuals and institutions around the world.
The material for this anthology was taken from over twenty I.W.W. and socialist periodicals in the Labadie Collection, as well as from the files of clippings, scrapbooks, songbooks, and boxes of pamphlet materials. Although the I.W.W. organized among many trades in the United States and abroad, the material in this book focuses on four groups of I.W.W. members: textile, agriculture, lumber, and mining workers who were active in different geographic areas of this country. All of the items are by I.W.W. members or by writers whose work was published in the I.W.W. press.
Finding biographical material about the writers has been an extremely difficult task, and many of them remain unknown except for the names with which they signed their songs, poems, stories, and articles. For most Wobblies, the Movement was more important than the record of the lives of individual members. Also, as Nels Anderson pointed out in The Hobo (Chicago, 1923), most migratory workers made a point of not inquiring into the background and past life of a new acquaintance or associate. This cult of anonymity extended to the manner in which many Wobblies signed their contributions to the I.W.W. press: “J.H.B., The Rambler,” “Card No. 34528,” “Denver Dan,” “Red,” or simply, “A Wob.” When I asked Ben Williams, the first editor of the I.W.W. newspaper Solidarity about I.W.W.-poet August Wahlquist, whom he had met several times, Williams could describe Wahlquist only as “a big Swede” who frequently dropped into the I.W.W. editorial office in Cleveland about 1913, helped address and mail out copies of Solidarity during his visits, and rolled out his bedding at night in the small back room.
It is hoped that this collection will be a starting point for additional research into the literature and lore of the I.W.W. that will explore its impact on American society. In addition, I hope that it may serve as a long overdue tribute to Jo Labadie and Agnes Inglis, as well as attract additional materials of interest and importance to labor history archives that have been started at several universities in different areas of the country.
I owe a debt of gratitude to many persons in many cities who have helped with this anthology. My thanks go also to the many librarians who helped at various stages of research: Edward Weber and Miss Marjorie Putnam in the Labadie Collection, Mrs. Louise Heinze at the Tamiment Institute Library in New York City, Mrs. Hazel Mills of the Washington State Library, Miss Margaret Brickett of the U. S. Department of Labor Library in Washington, D.C., and Dr. Philip Mason, Dr. Stanley Solvick, and Mrs. Roberta Mc-Bride at the Labor Archives at Wayne State University in Detroit.
I owe a great debt of appreciation to several persons who read the manuscript and made knowledgeable and insightful suggestions: Dr. Sidney Fine of the University of Michigan, my Washington friends Henry Fleisher and Henry Zon, Carl Keller, the present editor of the I.W.W. Industrial Worker, and Fred Thompson, author of The I.W.W.: Its First Fifty Years (Chicago, 1955).
My debt to folklorist Archie Green cannot be measured. Professor Green generously shared with me many items from his own collection, suggested material that I might otherwise have overlooked, put me in contact with many persons who were of help in providing information, patiently read the manuscript, and made many valuable suggestions. His work with me has made a major contribution to this book. My thanks go also to Page Stegner, who permitted me to quote from his unpublished manuscript, “Protest Songs of the Butte Mines,” to Peter Stone, Richard Brazier, Ben and Rose Williams, Ca
rlos Cortez, Chuck Doehrer, Ted Frazier, John Forbes, Aino Thompson, Herb Edwards, Phyllis Collier, and Olga Winstead Peters, who provided additional help and information about persons and events.
My appreciation is also due the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, the University of Michigan-Wayne State University, which offered me office space during the writing phase of this book, and to Mrs. Esther Van Duzen who competently and cheerfully typed most of the manuscript. My profound thanks go also to the Rabino-witz Foundation whose financial help at a critical time enabled this work to be completed.
I am especially grateful to School Arts magazine for permission to reprint “Modern Hieroglyphics,” to Mr. Alex Hillman for permission to reprint the section from Fred Beal’s A Proletarians Journey (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1937), to E. Cle-mente Publishers for permission to reprint the poems by Arturo Giovannitti from The Collected Poems of Arturo Giovannitti (Chicago: E. Cle-mente, 1962), and to the editors of Western Folklore for permission to reprint the version of “Fifty Thousand Lumberjacks” which appeared in California Folklore Quarterly, I (1942).
A very special debt of gratitude goes to my husband, Hy Kornbluh, and our own two rebels, Peter and Jane, whose intense interest, encouragement, and enthusiasm made this book very much a part of our family life during the past two years.
William Henkelman (Industrial Worker, 1940s)
Chapter 1
One Big Union:
The Philosophy of Industrial Unionism
The Industrial Workers is organized not to conciliate but to fight the capitalist class…. The capitalists own the tools they do not use, and the workers use the tools they do not own.
EUGENE V. DEBS
Grand Central Palace, New York
December 10, 1905, in
E. V. Debs, Industrial Unionism
(New York: New York Labor
News Co., n.d.), pp. 4–5.
At 10 A.M. on June 27, 1905, William D. Haywood, then secretary of the Western Federation of Miners, walked to the front of Brand’s Hall in Chicago, picked up a piece of loose board and hammered on the table to silence the whispers in the crowded room.
“Fellow Workers,” he said to the delegates and spectators in the room, “This is the Continental Congress of the Working Class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement in possession of the economic powers, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution without regard to capitalist masters.”1
In the audience were nearly 200 delegates from thirty-four state, district, and national organizations—socialists, anarchists, radical miners, and revolutionary industrial unionists. They were united in opposition to what they called “the American Separation of Labor’s” craft unionism, conservative leadership, and nonclass-conscious policies, and by their desire to establish an industrial labor organization that would ultimately overthrow the capitalist system and create a “cooperative commonwealth” of workers.
On the speakers’ platform were Eugene Debs, leader of the American Socialist Party, Haywood, and Mother Mary Jones, a little lady of seventy-five with curly white hair and gray eyes, who had been a labor agitator for almost half a century. Other well-known delegates were Daniel De Leon, the sharp-tongued, erudite leader of the Socialist Labor Party; A. M. Simons, editor of the International Socialist Review; Charles O. Sherman, general secretary of the United Metal Workers; William E. Trautmann, editor of the United Brewery Workers’ German-language newspaper; Father Thomas J. Hagerty, a tall, black-bearded Catholic priest who edited the American Labor Union’s Voice of Labor; and Lucy Parsons, widow of one of the anarchists condemned to death following the 1886 Chicago Haymarket riot.
Rapidly expanding machine technology, the growth of large-scale corporate enterprise, and the class-war character of many industrial struggles west of the Mississippi had led to several previous attempts to organize workers into industrial unions and to oppose the conservative orientation of the American Federation of Labor. Shaken by crushing strikes in Colorado and Idaho, leaders of the Western Federation of Miners which broke from the A.F.L. in 1897, formed first the Western Labor Union, then the American Labor Union to strengthen their organization and broaden their base of support.
Late in 1904, W.F.M. leaders initiated a meeting in Chicago of six radical spokesmen to consider plans for a new national revolutionary union. They invited thirty prominent socialists and labor radicals to meet for a secret conference in the same city on January 2, 1905. The invitation expressed hope that the working classes if correctly organized on both political and industrial lines were capable of successfully operating the country’s industries.2
The January Conference, as it came to be known, was held for three days in a hall on Lake Street often used by the Chicago anarchists. Most of those invited were present. They drafted a manifesto, an analysis of industrial and social relations from the revolutionary viewpoint, which spelled out labor’s grievances, criticized existing craft unions for creating a skilled aristocracy, and suggested “one big industrial union” embracing all industries” and “founded on the class struggle.”3
Printed in great quantities, the Industrial Union Manifesto was sent around the country. All workers who agreed with the document’s principles were invited to attend a convention in Chicago’s Brand’s Hall on June 27, 1905, to found a new, revolutionary working-class organization.
The Western Federation of Miners was the most important organization represented in this founding convention. Others were the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance; the American Metal Workers Industrial Union; and a few former A.F.L. locals. Individuals came from the Socialist Labor Party and Socialist Party.
“Big Bill” Haywood, chairing the sessions, a massive, stoop-shouldered man, had been a cowboy, homesteader, and miner. Blinded in one eye in a mine accident, Big Bill left the Silver City, Utah, mines at the turn of the century to become an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners and the Socialist Party. He was, as historian Foster Rhea Dulles has phrased it, “a powerful and aggressive embodiment of the frontier spirit.” From the start of the convention Haywood expressed his interest in organizing the forgotten unskilled workers, those without votes and without unions.
“I do not care a snap of my fingers whether or not the skilled workers join the industrial movement at this time,” Haywood shouted at the meeting. “We are going down into the gutter to get at the mass of workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living.”4
Speaker after speaker rose to elaborate the theme that since machinery was rapidly eliminating the craftsman’s skill, it was necessary to organize workers made unskilled by advancing technology into integrated industrial unions paralleling the integrated structure of modern industry. This was vital to wage effective war on the great combinations of capital. To the philosophy of industrial unionism, an essentially American contribution to labor theory and practice, the I.W.W. added a new concept: that industrial unions would become the basis for a new social order.
For ten days the delegates debated issues and voted on resolutions and a constitution. Although they were united in opposition to capitalism and craft unionism, they were divided as to the tactics of bringing about an end to capitalism and the wage system.
Secretary to the constitution committee was Father Thomas J. Hagerty, a Catholic priest from New Mexico who had been converted to Marxism even before his ordination in 1892. Suspended by his archbishop for urging Telluride miners to revolt during his tour of Colorado mining camps in 1903, his formal association with the church ended at this time, although he insisted that he was still a priest in good standing. Hagerty, who helped frame the Industrial Union Manifesto and composed the chart of industrial organization (“Father Hagerty’s Wheel”), is also credited with authoring the famous Preamble to the I.W.W. constitution with its provocative opening sentence, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”5
For much of the convention, de
bate focused on the political clause of the Preamble whose second paragraph, as presented by the constitution committee, read: “Between these two classes [capital and labor] a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political as well as the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class without affiliation with any political party.”
For the most part, the western delegates were against “political action at the capitalist ballot box”; as itinerant workers, many had never voted in a public election. In addition to their antagonism to all types of politicians, they feared that the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Party would dominate the new organization and ultimately use the I.W.W. as a political adjunct.
Daniel De Leon, making the longest speech in favor of the political clause, argued that political action was “a civilized means of seeking progress.” He emphasized the Marxist position that “every class struggle is a political struggle.” It was necessary, however, he stated, “to gather behind that ballot, behind that united political movement, the Might which alone is able, when necessary, ‘to take hold.‘ ”6
When the political clause came to a vote, it was sustained by a sizeable majority, yet the controversy over direct vs. political action led to major cleavages in the I.W.W. which came to a head three years later at the 1908 convention.
Solidarity, November 5, 1910.
The constitution and resolutions passed during the first convention attempted to link the immediate struggles of workers with a class-conscious, revolutionary aim. Any wage earner could be a member of the new organization regardless of occupation, race, creed, or sex. To the I.W.W. it “did not make a bit of difference if he is a Negro or a white man … an American or a foreigner.”7 An immigrant with a paid-up union card in his own country was eligible for immediate membership. Initiation fees and dues were set very low.