by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Labor-management contracts were viewed as an interference with labor’s only weapon—the strike. Contracts were also rejected because they hampered workers from declaring strikes at the most critical times for employers. The “social general strike” was recommended as the most effective weapon to overthrow the capitalist system, and May 1 adopted as the Labor Day of the new organization. Militarism was condemned, and membership could be denied anyone who joined the state militia or police.
The constitution provided that the structure of the I.W.W. would prepare for the eventual establishment of the trade-union state. Thirteen centrally administered industrial departments composed of unions of closely related industries were proposed. In this way, when the “one big strike” was called, and won, the I.W.W. would have control of each of the major industries of the country. Socialism would be established through action by workers at the point of production, and thus, “the army of production [would] be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with capitalists, but to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown.”8
An I.W.W. poet was to make this philosophy enduring with his famous stanza from the labor hymn, “Solidarity Forever”:
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,
For the Union makes us strong.9
Less than six months after the first I.W.W. convention Frank Steunenberg, the anti-union, ex-governor of Idaho, was killed by a bomb as he opened the gate to his house during the Christmas holidays. Within a few days after Steunenberg’s murder, police arrested a man who called himself Harry Orchard (born Albert E. Horsley) and turned him over to James McParland, head of the Denver Pinkerton Agency and a “consultant” to the Colorado Mine Owners’ Association. Orchard confessed to the murder, as well as twenty-six other crimes which he claimed had been plotted by a radical “inner circle” of the Western Federation of Miners. Several weeks later, Idaho officials without warrants, seized Charles Moyer, W.F.M. president; Bill Haywood, W.F.M. secretary; and George Pettibone, a blacklisted miner turned small businessman. The men, arrested individually at night, were taken by a special railroad car to Boise, Idaho, charged with the murder of Steunenberg, and put in the death cells of the federal penitentiary.
The Haywood-Moyer-Pettibone case outraged the I.W.W., other labor organizations, and the labor and radical press. Frantic activity focused on raising thousands of dollars to defend the prisoners. Rallies in large cities netted enough money to engage Clarence Darrow and other prominent attorneys. Agitation in labor and radical newspapers resulted in improved treatment for the prisoners, including their transfer to cells in the county jail.
Fifteen months after his arrest, the trial of Haywood began in Boise on May 9, 1907. Defense lawyer Darrow was matched against prosecuting attorney William Borah, the Idaho attorney who was later to become a powerful senator from that state. In a brilliant courtroom performance, Darrow exposed Harry Orchard as a perjurer, produced witnesses to contradict his statements, and charged that McParland of the Pinkerton Agency had deliberately “fixed” Orchard’s confession to throw blame for the murder on the W.F.M. The jury found Haywood, the first to be tried, not guilty. Moyer and Pettibone were later acquitted and released. Orchard was sentenced to be hanged, with a recommendation for clemency.
Haywood left Idaho a popular hero. Turning down lucrative offers from theater managers to lecture about his prison experiences, he toured the large cities, preaching the gospel of industrial unionism to hundreds of thousands of workers.
However, despite the emergence of Haywood as a national labor figure, the Idaho trial was a paralyzing blow to the newly organized I.W.W., which had invested tremendous funds and energy in contributing to the defense. Ideological factionalism and personality disputes split the new organization in the tense first years of its existence. Dissension developed almost immediately between the members who favored the tactics of direct economic action and those who advocated political action. Describing his views, direct-actionist Vincent St. John wrote:
The first year was one of internal struggle for control by these different elements. The two camps of socialist politicians looked upon the I.W.W. only as a battleground on which to settle their respective merits and demerits. The labor fakirs strove to fasten themselves upon the organization that they might continue to exist if the new union was a success.10
Quarrels erupted in a chaotic 1906 convention held while Haywood and Moyer were in prison. The “wage slave delegates” led by Daniel De Leon, William Trautmann, and Vincent St. John opposed the “conservative” faction, which included I.W.W. president Charles Sherman and most of the delegates from the Western Federation of Miners. In the process Sherman was charged with misdirected use of funds, removed from office, and the office of president was abolished. W.F.M. delegates bolted the convention and control of the organization remained with the “revolutionists.”11
Masthead of Solidarity—letters are formed from tools.
At their 1907 convention, the Western Federation of Miners voted overwhelmingly to withdraw from the I.W.W., whose revolutionary views had tinged the national newspaper publicity of the Idaho trials. Growing increasingly more conservative, the miners’ federation was to rejoin the A.F.L. four years later. Meanwhile, it fired Bill Haywood who had been going around the country agitating for class solidarity, militant direct action, and a new social order. Vincent St. John, a W.F.M. executive board member, stayed with the I.W.W. in spite of the withdrawal of the miners’ federation. The stage was set for the final clash between the direct and political actionists.
Industrial Worker, March 27, 1913.
Despite organizational schisms, across the country from Tacoma, Washington, to Skowhegan, Maine, the message of “One Big Union” stimulated strikes among loggers, miners, smeltermen, window washers, paper makers, silk workers, and streetcar men. Wobblies staged the first sitdown strike in America at the Schenectady, New York, plant of the General Electric Company in December 1906. In the frontier town of Goldfield, Nevada, where Vincent St. John had been a zealous organizer, an I.W.W. strike won a minimum of $4.50 a day for most of the cooks, waiters, and bartenders. In Portland, Oregon, the I.W.W. helped win a nine-hour day and a wage increase for sawmill workers and dramatized itself as a new force on the industrial scene of the Pacific Northwest.
Led by Jack Walsh, a former Socialist Party soapboxer, some twenty of these vigorous Westerners—loggers, sawmill workers, and seasonal harvest hands—beat their way across country to Chicago, to attend the 1908 I.W.W. convention. Traveling in freight cars, and camping in hobo jungles, these men, who were dressed in denim overalls, black shirts, and red bandanna neckerchiefs, held I.W.W. propaganda meetings along the way, selling I.W.W. pamphlets and song cards to finance their expenses.
In Chicago members of the “Overalls Brigade” numbered about twenty of the twenty-six delegates in a convention whose delegate strength was reduced because of membership splits and the 1907 financial depression. De Leon was offended by their lack of sophistication and little knowledge of socialist theory. He dubbed them the “rabble” and the “bummery” because of their singing of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” at convention sessions and accused them of trying to make the I.W.W. a “purely physical force body.” “Most of them,” he noted soon after the convention, “slept on the benches on the Lake Front and received from Walsh a daily stipend of 30 cents. This element lined the walls of the convention.”12
In turn, the Westerners joined Trautmann and St. John in ousting De Leon from the convention on the parliamentary technicality that he was a delegate to the convention from a union other than his own. De Leon and his followers withdrew to set up a rival I.W.W. with headquarters in Detroit, which became a propaganda arm of the Socialist Labor Party. In 1915 it changed its name to the Workers International Industrial Union and was fina
lly dissolved in 1925. As editor of the S.L.P. newspaper, The Weekly People, De Leon continued until his death in 1914 to attack the anarcho-syndicalists, “labor-fakirs,” craft unionism, and Samuel Gompers.
One of the first actions of the 1908 convention delegates after De Leon’s ouster struck out all reference to political activity from the Preamble. Detached from both the Socialist Party and Socialist Labor Party influence, the pragmatic Westerners helped in the next few years to shape the fundamental long-range policies of the I.W.W. The goal was industrial democracy in a worker-controlled, cooperative commonwealth. The basic tactic to achieve it would be the weakening of the capitalist system through “action at the point of production” which would form “the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”13 The vehicle would be the One Big Union which, when strong enough, would carry through a general strike of all workers in industry to abolish the wage system, take over the means of production, and establish the new social order.
“We have been naught, we shall be all,” sang the delegates to the 1905 founding convention.14 Inspired by the social idealism of the Manifesto and Preamble and the militant spirit of the Western rank-and-filers, the radical documents, slogans, songs, and poems by Wobblies in the years to come reflected the antiauthoritarian, anarchistic thrust set in that epochal 1908 convention.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel could turn;
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn—
That the Union makes us strong.15
A NOTE ON SOURCE CITATION
The source cited in the note to each selection is the earliest date I have found the item in print in an I.W.W. publication. Many of the items were frequently reprinted in the I.W.W. press and a large number of the songs have been included in other editions of the I.W.W. songbook after their first appearance. The latest edition of the I.W.W. songbook is the twenty-ninth. It was issued in 1956 in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the organization. I have marked with an asterisk those songs and poems which were selected for inclusion in the twenty-ninth edition. The addition and deletion of various songs and poems from the songbooks over the years would make an interesting, and valuable folklore study.
1
In January 1905 about thirty prominent socialists and labor radicals met in Chicago to lay the groundwork for a new industrial union. They included Eugene Debs, A. M. Simons, and Ernest Untermann from the Socialist Party; Charles Moyer, Bill Haywood, and John O’Neil from the Western Federation of Miners; Clarence Smith and Daniel McDonald from the American Labor Union; and Frank Bohn representing the Socialist Labor Party and Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. The meeting drafted a Manifesto, spelling out labor’s grievances and calling for an organization that would help overthrow the capitalist system. Father Thomas Hagerty, a Catholic priest who shortly before the Manifesto conference had become the editor of the Voice of Labor, the publication of the American Labor Union, is credited with taking a leading role in writing the Manifesto. The Manifesto was signed by those present at the January meeting and sent to all unions in the United States and to the industrial unions in Europe. A discussion of the “Origin of the Manifesto” was printed in the Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (New York, 1905).
MANIFESTO
Social relations and groupings only reflect mechanical and industrial conditions. The great facts of present industry are the displacement of human skill by machines and the increase of capitalist power through concentration in the possession of the tools with which wealth is produced and distributed.
Because of these facts trade divisions among laborers and competition among capitalists are alike disappearing. Class divisions grow ever more fixed and class antagonisms more sharp. Trade lines have been swallowed up in a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend. New machines, ever replacing less productive ones, wipe out whole trades and plunge new bodies of workers into the ever-growing army of tradeless, hopeless unemployed. As human beings and human skill are displaced by mechanical progress, the capitalists need use the workers only during that brief period when muscles and nerves respond most intensely. The moment the laborer no longer yields the maximum of profits, he is thrown upon the scrap pile, to starve alongside the discarded machine. A dead line has been drawn, and an age-limit established, to cross which, in this world of monopolized opportunities, means condemnation to industrial death.
The worker, wholly separated from the land and the tools, with his skill of craftsmenship rendered useless, is sunk in the uniform mass of wage slaves. He sees his power of resistance broken by craft divisions, perpetuated from outgrown industrial stages. His wages constantly grow less as his hours grow longer and monopolized prices grow higher. Shifted hither and thither by the demands of profit-takers the laborer’s home no longer exists. In this helpless condition he is forced to accept whatever humiliating conditions his master may impose. He is submitted to a physical and intellectual examination more searching than was the chattel slave when sold from the auction block. Laborers are no longer classified by differences in trade skill, but the employer assigns them according to the machines to which they are attached. These divisions, far from representing differences in skill or interests among the laborers, are imposed by the employers that workers may be pitted against one another and spurred to greater exertion in the shop, and that all resistance to capitalist tyranny may be weakened by artificial distinctions.
While encouraging these outgrown divisions among the workers the capitalists carefully adjust themselves to the new conditions. They wipe out all differences among themselves and present a united front in their war upon labor. Through employers’ associations, they seek to crush, with brutal force, by the injunctions of the judiciary, and the use of military power, all efforts at resistance. Or when the other policy seems more profitable, they conceal their daggers beneath the Civic Federation and hoodwink and betray those whom they would rule and exploit. Both methods depend for success upon the blindness and internal dissensions of the working class. The employers’ line of battle and methods of warfare correspond to the solidarity of the mechanical and industrial concentration, while laborers still form their fighting organizations on lines of long-gone trade divisions. The battles of the past emphasize this lesson. The textile workers of Lowell, Philadelphia and Fall River; the butchers of Chicago, weakened by the disintegrating effects of trade divisions; the machinists on the Santa Fe, unsupported by their fellow-workers subject to the same masters; the long-struggling miners of Colorado, hampered by lack of unity and solidarity upon the industrial battle-field, all bear witness to the helplessness and impotency of labor as at present organized.
Solidarity, April 28, 1917.
This worn-out and corrupt system offers no promise of improvement and adaptation. There is no silver lining to the clouds of darkness and despair settling down upon the world of labor.
This system offers only a perpetual struggle for slight relief within wage slavery. It is blind to the possibility of establishing an industrial democracy, wherein there shall be no wage slavery, but where the workers will own the tools which they operate, and the product of which they alone will enjoy.
It shatters the ranks of the workers into fragments, rendering them helpless and impotent on the industrial battle-field.
Separation of craft from craft renders industrial and financial solidarity impossible.
Union men scab upon union men; hatred of worker for worker is engendered, and the workers are delivered helpless and disintegrated into the hands of the capitalists.
Craft jealousy leads to the attempt to create trade monopolies.
Prohibitive initiation fees are established that force men to become scabs against their will. Men whom manliness or circumstances have driven from one trade are thereby fined when they seek to transfer membership to the union of
a new craft.
Craft divisions foster political ignorance among the workers, thus dividing their class at the ballot box, as well as in the shop, mine and factory.
Craft unions may be and have been used to assist employers in the establishment of monopolies and the raising of prices. One set of workers are thus used to make harder the conditions of life of another body of laborers.
Craft divisions hinder the growth of class consciousness of the workers, foster the idea of harmony of interests between employing exploiter and employed slave. They permit the association of the misleaders of the workers with the capitalists in the Civic Federations, where plans are made for the perpetuation of capitalism, and the permanent enslavement of the workers through the wage system.
Previous efforts for the betterment of the working class have proven abortive because limited in scope and disconnected in action.
Universal economic evils afflicting the working class can be eradicated only by a universal working class movement. Such a movement of the working class is impossible while separate craft and wage agreements are made favoring the employer against other crafts in the same industry, and while energies are wasted in fruitless jurisdiction struggles which serve only to further the personal aggrandizement of union officials.
A movement to fulfill these conditions must consist of one great industrial union embracing all industries,—providing for craft autonomy locally, industrial autonomy internationally, and working class unity generally.
It must be founded on the class struggle, and its general administration must be conducted in harmony with the recognition of the irrepressible conflict between the capitalist class and the working class.