Rebel Voices
Page 10
The word “sabotage” was first used officially by French labor organizations in 1897, when anarchist Emile Pouget reported to the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) about the earlier Scottish practice called “ca’canny,” meaning to “go slow” or “soldiering.” The etymology of the word has been summarized by Waldo Browne in What’s What in the Labor Movement (1921):
Derived from the French word sabot, meaning a wooden shoe, this term is often supposed to have originally denoted the idea of stalling machinery by throwing a wooden clog into it. Probably its more direct derivation is from the French verb saboter, meaning to bungle or to botch; while some find its origin in the French expression, “Travailler a coups de sabots,” meaning to work as one wearing wooden shoes, often applied to lazy or slow-moving persons.12
I.W.W. historian Fred Thompson relates that in France, long after the industrial workers had started wearing leather shoes, the peasants, who were frequently used as strikebreakers, still used wooden sabots. The peasants were called “saboteurs” in much the same way as the word “hayseed” is used in this country. When the defeated strikers returned to work, they expressed their discontent by bungling their work in the same manner as the inexperienced, clumsy strikebreakers. Their efforts were called “sabotage.”13
Whatever its origin, sabotage in I.W.W. terms aimed, as pamphleteer Walker C. Smith wrote, “to hit the employer in his vital spot, his heart and soul, or in other words his pocketbook.”14 It included actions which would disable machinery, slacken production, spoil the product, or reduce company profits by telling the truth about a product. In her pamphlet Sabotage (1915), Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an I.W.W. organizer from 1906 to 1917, much later a leader of the Communist Party, wrote:
Sabotage means either to slacken up and interfere with the quantity, or to botch in your skill and interfere with the quality of capitalist production so as to give poor service. It is something that is fought out within the walls of the shop. Sabotage is not physical violence; sabotage is an internal industrial process. It is simply another form of coercion.15
The word sabotage appeared in the I.W.W. press for the first time in Solidarity (June 4, 1910) in a report of a strike of 600 Chicago clothing workers who had walked out of Lamm and Company when one of their coworkers was dismissed. The article stated that when scabs were brought into the clothing factory, “workers in other firms where the material for the strike-bound firm was made, ‘sabotaged’ their work to such perfection” that the company yielded to almost all the strikers’ demands.16 Organizer Trautmann advised the strikers to go back to work and use “passive resistance” methods of getting the discharged worker rehired.17
The controversy over the term sabotage was dramatized in the 1912 convention of the Socialist Party when a resolution was passed aimed at disqualifying for Socialist Party membership anyone who “opposes political action or advocates crime, sabotage, or other means of violence as a weapon of the working-class to aid in its emancipation.”18 The resolution was an outgrowth of the schism between the right and left wing over politics vs direct action, a rift which had been growing since soon after the Party’s organization early in the century. It hit at Bill Haywood who, as a Socialist Party executive board member, had been a delegate to the 1910 congress of the Second International in Europe and had come home to America to lecture on the need for “socialism with its working clothes on,”19 militant direct action, and the general strike. In February 1913 Haywood was recalled from his post as executive board member and expelled from Socialist Party membership. He continued to be one of the best-known and most popular Wobbly leaders.
According to Haywood, literature dealing with sabotage was circulated in the I.W.W. from about 1913 to 1917, although translations of radical European articles had appeared in the I.W.W. press since 1910. Some of the pamphlets sold by soapboxers or distributed at meetings were written by I.W.W. members, privately printed, and did not represent the official views of the organization.20 The growing argument over the relation of sabotage to violence led the 1913 I.W.W. convention to adopt a resolution which stated in part: “The program of the I.W.W. offers the only possible solution of the wage question whereby violence can be avoided, or at the very worst, reduced to a minimum.”21 The following year, the I.W.W. convention resolved that its speakers recommend to all workers the curtailing of production “by slowing down and sabotage.”22
However, bold rhetoric continued to dramatize industrial evils, and the wooden shoe symbol for sabotage appeared widely in Wobbly song, prose, and illustration between 1913 and 1918. Some editions of the Wobblies’ little red songbook carried the verse:
If Freedom’s road seems rough and hard,
And strewn with rocks and thorns
Then put your wooden shoes on, pard,
And you won’t hurt your corns.23
Sabotage symbols of a wooden shoe and a black cat appeared constantly in Wobbly illustrations and cartoons. Stickers and circulars showed a hunched black cat showing its claws. The words “sab cat,” “kitten,” “fix the job,” were used to suggest or threaten striking on the job, sabotage, and direct action.24
Whether or not I.W.W. members practiced lawlessness and violence would be difficult to determine at this time, but many investigators conclude that such reports were exaggerated. After spending several months in the West studying the I.W.W. for a series of articles which appeared in the New York Evening Post in February and March 1918, writer Robert Bruere found no evidence that the men in the lumber camps were guilty of sabotage as had been charged.
“Won’t we be taking [the lumber camps] over one of these days, and what sense would there be in a destroying what is going to belong to us?” one Wobbly lumberjack asked him.25
Bruere reported on February 16, 1918, that western lumber owners admitted to the President’s Mediation Commission in Seattle that “the peculiar reputation for violence and lawlessness which has been fixed upon the I.W.W. was largely the work of their own ingenious publicity agents.”26 The report of the President’s Mediation Commission in 1917 declared that for many Wobblies, I.W.W. membership represented a “bond of groping fellowship” and the unrest in the lumber camps was “at bottom … the assertion of human dignity.”27
In a 1919 memorandum regarding persecution of the radical labor movement in the United States the National Civil Liberties Bureau stated:
The common charge of violence to achieve the organization’s purpose has not been proved in a single trial. Not a single fact has been proved against the organization which could not have been proved with equal force against any aggressive A.F.L. union—with the single exception of the publication of radical literature expressing revolutionary ideas of the struggle of labor.28
An extensive 1300-page study of criminal syndicalism laws by E. F. Dowell at Johns Hopkins University in 1939 concluded:
The evidence made available in the course of this study leads to the conclusion that from 1912, or earlier, until 1918, the I.W.W. undoubtedly advocated in its publications sabotage in the sense of disabling or injury of property to reduce the employers’ profits or production, and then ceased this advocacy in 1918. Although there are contradictory opinions as to whether the I.W.W. practiced sabotage or not, it is interesting to note that no case of an I.W.W. saboteur caught practicing sabotage or convicted of its practice is available.29
Bold free speech fights which brought the impact of the organization to the doorstep of many communities across the country, militant strikes, revolutionary theories, and inflammatory propaganda resulted in legal and illegal attempts to suppress the organization. Its success in organizing rebellions of immigrant factory workers, the expansion of its membership in the mines, lumber forests, and midwestern harvest fields led to a savage opposition in the press which made no attempt to separate rhetoric from reality and frequently exaggerated the “Wobbly menace” to create a dramatic news story and an eye-catching headline. Although the I.W.W. proved far less extreme in its actions than
in its words and conducted strikes notably lacking in violence, the members were individually persecuted by federal and state governments, and the organization was violently condemned.
Industrial Worker, March 23, 1911.
In the attack on all radicalism in the second and third decade of the twentieth century, the Wobblies were characterized first, as wild, bomb-throwing industrial terrorists, then as German saboteurs financed by the kaiser’s gold, and, finally, as fanatic Bolsheviks plotting to sovietize the United States.
Communities across the country took literally the title and words to a vigorous Wobbly song, “Paint ‘Er Red,” offered by the prosecution in many courtroom trials as evidence of “revolutionary intent”:
We hate their rotten system more than any mortals do,
Our aim is not to patch it up, but build it all anew,
And what we’ll have for government, when finally we’re through,
Is One Big Industrial Union.30
1
James H. Walsh, who wrote this account of the trip of twenty Westerners to the 1908 I.W.W. convention in Chicago, was a Socialist Party member who had worked in Alaska before becoming an I.W.W. soapboxer and organizer in the Portland area. The men whom he led to Chicago were dubbed “the Bummery” by Daniel De Leon from their singing of the ribald verses of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.” Walsh was a leader in the I.W.W. campaign against employment “sharks,” which led to the Spokane free speech fight in 1909. This article appeared in the Industrial Union Bulletin (September 19, 1908).
I.W.W. “RED SPECIAL” OVERALL BRIGADE
On Its Way Through the Continent—Along the Campfires.—Great Success in Propaganda.—Thousands Listen to the Speakers—The “Special” Leaving a Red Streak Behind It.—Contributions Liberal.—Gompers and His Satellites Furious with Rage!
Well, we’re in the yards, gathered together at the water tank. In order to know if all are present, we have numbered ourselves. The numbers run from one to nineteen, Mrs. Walsh making twenty. A switchman is seen and he informs us where our “Special car” will be found. The train is late however, and we are delayed a few hours. “Fly Cops” are pretty busy in the yards. They are watching their master’s property that some hobo may not break a sacred seal and pile into a car where valuable merchandise is stored.
Two blasts of the locomotive whistle are heard and the train is starting on its journey, and simultaneously nineteen men, all dressed in black overalls and jumpers, black shirts and red ties, with an I.W.W. book in his pocket and an I.W.W. button on his coat, are in a “cattle car” and on our way.
In a short time a glim (lantern) appears and the brakeman jumps into the car. His unionism is skin-deep. He belongs to the B. of R. T., but never heard of the class struggle. He is unsuccessful, however, in the collecting of fares, and we continue our journey.
Our first stop, where we expect to hold a meeting is Centralia, and when about half way there, “our car” is set out. There is only one now left in the train to ride on. It is an oil car, so nineteen men will be found “riding” on that car as soon as the train starts. Being delayed for a few hours again, while the train is being transferred across the ferry, we are hovered around the first camp-fire toward the wee sma’ hours of morning. At last two short blasts of the whistle are heard, and all are aboard. It is only a short distance to our destination and the train is whirling along at passenger speed. The morning is turning cold and spitting a little rain, but all are determined to stick to the car, when again, appears the brakeman and tells us we cannot ride since daylight has come, but he is informed that we must get to Centralia. He insists we’ll get off at the next stop, but we fail to get off, and in a few minutes we arrive at our first stop.
It is early Sunday morning, and we are off to get a cup of coffee, after which we will congregate around the camp fire in the “jungles.” The morning is bright and all are sleeping on the jungle grass, with our arms for pillows, and coats for covers.
About noon we are all up and wending our way toward the depot; here we meet Mrs. Walsh and the whole “bunch” congregates. The rubber-necks of the little country city are all stretched on us. Later in the day the “To Night Bells” are distributed and at 8 P.M., we find a good crowd at the park to listen. They all like the songs and close attention is given to the lecture. The literature sales are fair, the collection fair and the songs sell like hot cakes.
We have finished our first propaganda meeting, and taking all in all, it is a grand success. Now, for the next date which is Tacoma. The train committee has ascertained that “our special car” will not leave until 2 A.M., so off to the camp fire again. The time has arrived for departure and we are again on our way. Another brakeman appears and after a conference he decides to let us ride. A few minutes later he appears again with two large watermelons. We are in an empty coal car, but the train is making passenger time. A long blast of the whistle tells us that we are near Tacoma. Now for a few blocks’ walk and we are at the I.W.W. hall. The bills are being distributed and a big meeting is expected. The street is packed and a great meeting is the result. The sale of literature is good, the collection is fair, and again the songs sell like hot cakes. Four new members are secured for the Tacoma local.
Having finished our work here, we are ready for a start toward Seattle. On arrival in the yards, we find a “train ready.” We are off, but on arrival at Meaker Junction, we find a walk in store for us of eight miles, in order to catch a train that will land us in Seattle in time for a propaganda meeting. The eight miles is undergoing repair work, and the Italians are on strike, so you can imagine what a beautiful roadbed we have to “hike” over in the night.
Industrial Worker, February 13, 1913.
The trip has been made and luckily we strike another train ready to land us in Seattle. We find “our special car,” and several hobos are in it. They are telling of the bad “shack” (brakeman) on the train who packs a big gun and makes the “boes” get. The shack arrives with a big gun. He is a small man, but says in a gruff voice: “Get out of here! Every G----- d----- one of you,” and the strangers in the car all pile out. Three of our bunch step up to him to tell him that we are all union men, and desire to get to Seattle. He is not a union man and again gives the command that we must get off. At this juncture the whole bunch is awakened and told that we must get off and that the shack has a gun. The command is given, “call the roll!” The roll is called, and as they sound their numbers from one to nineteen the brake-man turns white and meekly says: “I did not know this.” He piles out and we are on our way. In Seattle we held several good meetings and then departed for the east. We met a very nice train crew apparently, out of Seattle. They claimed to all be union men, but they proved to be cheap dogs of the railroad. Fearing such a large bunch, they telegraphed ahead to Auburn Junction for a force to take us off. When we arrived at the junction we were surrounded by a band of railroad officials—the papers stated there were 25—when we were covered by guns and told to unload. We were marched to jail and held over night. In the morning the writer was separated from the bunch, but finally we were all turned loose. Being separated, we did not learn until evening where each and all were. However, all except the writer had gotten back to Seattle, and secured the services of Attorney Brown, to take up the case, should it become necessary. It was not necessary. The boys held a street meeting in Seattle, and part started from there for Spokane, over one road, and the rest over another road.
We continued our work of propaganda without missing a single date, and all re-united at Spokane, where we held several good meetings. Leaving Spokane, we took in Sandpoint, Idaho, and then rambled into Missoula, Montana, where we had some of the best meetings of all the places along the route.
We put the “Starvation Army” on the bum, and packed the streets from one side to the other. The literature sales were good, the collections good, and the red cards containing the songs sold like hot cakes.
At Missoula, Mont., we have completed two full weeks’ wo
rk on the road. We left Portland with 20 members. We lost 4 of them, but we picked up one at Seattle, and two at Spokane, so our industrial band is practically the same as when we started.
There are “Mulligan Bunches” all along the road. We had scarcely gotten out of the city limits of Portland, when we saw the camp fires of the “boes” along the road, and we have never, as yet, been out of sight of those camp fires. In fact, the further east we get, the more numerous appear to be the “boes.” On investigation, we find that the “Mulligan Bunch” is not composed of pick and shovel artists alone, but that all kinds of tradesmen can be found among them.
There is still three weeks between us and the Fourth Annual Convention, and we expect to be in Chicago by that time. So far we have made every place on schedule time, and we hope to keep up the record.
The receipts from the sale of literature and collections for the first week, were $39.02, and the second week was $53.66, a total of $92.68. Of course, do not imagine that this is all profit, for it’s necessary to buy a passenger ticket for the wife of the writer, and as we are carrying 160 pounds of excess baggage—literature—these receipts are eaten into at a lively rate.
This may not be a “Red Special,” but it is leaving a red streak behind it. All fellow workers can get a meal at our special car—the jungles—free of charge. Many a poor, hungry devil has been fed by the boys around the camp fires.
In the above money of literature and collections, the song sales are not counted. The boys in the bunch have that money to themselves. It runs from two or three dollars to eleven dollars per night.
It is time for another street meeting, and so I must close to join the revolutionary forces on the street, who are now congregating, after a big feed in the jungles.
Yours for the I. W. W.,
J. H. WALSH,
National Organizer.