Rebel Voices
Page 15
Q.—Did you ever advocate driving spikes into logs?
A.—No, sir.
Q.—Cutting logs short?
A.—No, sir, although—
Q.—Is that sabotage?
A.—That mere fact of cutting a log short would not be destruction of property. Cutting the log short now, that is an idea that prevails, yet it is not true—
Mr. Nebeker: This is not responsive, if the Court please. The witness should not be permitted to make an argument on every question asked. I object to it.
Mr. Christensen: Q.—Why isn’t cutting logs short, sabotage?
A.—Because the only thing they succeed in doing by cutting logs short is in disorganizing the orders that the companies have. They do not waste any material which is just like the hog. All of the log is used. It is simply, if they have orders for certain sized material, it may tend to disorganize their order system; that is all, but there is no loss, no unusual loss attendant.
Q.—Did you ever say anything on the subject of fouling a gear or a line?
A.—No. You mean—well, I heard this witness here say something about fouling a line.
Q.—Well, did you ever—
A.—Say anything like that?
Q.—Make any comment about a line?
A.—Absolutely nothing of that kind.
Q.—Is that sabotage?
A.—Certainly not.
Q.—What is it?
A.—That is murder.
14
The following note (about 1920) by Miss Agnes Inglis (1870–1952) was included in her “Sabotage” folder in the I.W.W. files in the Labadie Collection. The daughter of a wealthy Michigan family, Miss Inglis for many years devoted her time to the Labadie Collection of Labor and Radical Materials donated to the University of Michigan Library in 1911 by an anarchist printer, Joseph Labadie. On Miss Inglis’ death in 1952, her long-time friend, the writer John Nicholas Beffel, wrote in the Industrial Worker (April 25, 1952): “Her connection with the library was rather informal but effective. She kept her own hours, worked quietly, intensively…. She accepted no wages … always, she lived simply and economically. Her one stipulation, which was readily granted, was that she be allowed enough money to acquire occasional new acquisitions for the Labadie Collection, and to cover express charges on gifts, and that she have ample use of the University Library’s facilities for binding newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets and any necessary rebinding of books…. Long before Joe Labadie died in 1933, he had the satisfaction of knowing that a tireless friend was carrying on where he had left off and that the scope and value of his gift to posterity was widening and growing because of her ceaseless effort…. She managed to acquire a great many rare and valuable historical items without purchase, getting them as gifts through diplomatically worded letters to individuals and institutions throughout the United States and abroad.’
A personal friend of many radicals throughout the country, Miss Inglis kept close touch with social movements in the Detroit-Ann Arbor area. Her correspondence and notebooks in the Labadie Collection are filled with accounts of meetings she attended, social causes to which she contributed, and friendships she made through her contacts with radical organizations.
NOTE ON SABOTAGE:
THE CASE OF JOHN MAHONEY
By AGNES INGLIS
It was at the time they were “ruthlessly wrecking the 14 stories of the luxurious Hotel Pontchartrain’’ that I met one of I.W.W. boys on the street. His name was John Mahoney. As I met him his face impressed me. He looked very thoughtful and sad. He said to me “What do you think I am working at now?” I said I didn’t know. He said “I’m working at a job wrecking the Hotel Pontchartrain. Just think of it! Here the workers build that beautiful building and they haven’t even homes to live in themselves. And now they are being told to pull it down in order to build a big bank-building. It’s a beautiful building. I call that “Sabotage!” says John Mahoney….
I never forgot John Mahoney. He was an I.W.W. The Board of Commerce men would have said, “The awful I.W.W.! They believe in sabotage.” But here was an I.W.W. He was a nice thoughtful, earnest man and an ardent I.W.W. He dreamed of a world in which workers had homes fit to live in! But workers do not have homes fit to live in. They build such things as the Hotel Pontchartrain and then are told to tear it down and then they build the First National Bank on the same spot of ground. And workers dream of a new society and are accused of practicing “sabotage.”
Sabotage…. I never hear the word without thinking of John Mahoney. I’ve never thought of that word since without his tired and sad face flashing before me as he said “I call that ‘sabotage!’”—And back of him I see the workers’ homes….
Chapter 3
Riding the Rails: I.W. W. Itinerants
He built the road, With others of his class he built the road. Now o’er it, many a weary mile, he packs his load, Chasing a job, spurred on by hunger’s goad. He walks and walks and walks and walks, And wonders why in Hell he built the road.
The Industrial Worker (April 23, 1910).
Songs to fan the flames of discontent were sung by Wobblies on picket lines, in free speech demonstrations, in I.W.W. halls, around hobo jungle fires—wherever Wobbly rebels gathered to agitate for a new world built “from the ashes of the old.”
Early in 1914 when Carleton Parker, a University of California sociologist who pioneered in psychological studies of casual labor, reported on the acute conditions under which California migrants lived, he wrote that about half of the 800 men whom he interviewed “knew in a rough way the—for them curiously attractive—philosophy of the I.W.W. and could also sing some of its songs.”1
“Where a group of hoboes sit around a fire under a railroad bridge, many of them can sing I.W.W. songs without the book.”2
“The book” that Parker referred to was the little red songbook started by the Spokane branch of the I.W.W. about 1909. It contained the provocative subtitle, “Songs of the Workers, On the Road, In the Jungles, and In the Shops—Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.” Twenty-nine known editions from 1909 to 1956 have included more than 175 songs.3
Folklorist John Greenway has called the little red songbook, “the first great collection of labor songs ever assembled for utilitarian purposes…. Historically, it is of first importance as a record of a conscious effort to carry economic and social discontent to the singing stage…. In the field of folksong scholarship, the I.W.W. songbook is significant for its preservation of original compositions which potentially are folk material.”4
The Spokane local of the I.W.W. was situated at the crossroads of the Northwest. Its members included lumberjacks, construction workers, harvesters, ice cutters, and railroad section hands-seasonal workers who circulated the message of One Big Union.
J. H. Walsh, a Socialist Party member who had been active in Alaska, was one of the spark plugs of the local. Described as a “go-getting type, full of pep and energy and ideas,”5 he led the “Overalls Brigade” from Portland to the 1908 Chicago convention. Walsh introduced the idea of recruiting members by preaching revolutionary industrial unionism from a soapbox. To rival Salvation Army bands in attracting crowds for Wobbly street-corner meetings, he organized a red-uniformed I.W.W. band which for a short time traveled through the Northwest. Parodying Salvation Army gospel hymns and popular songs, the band developed its own repertoire of Wobbly verses sung to well-known gospel and popular melodies. Several of these were printed on pocket-sized colored cards which were sold to the crowd for a nickel a piece. Four of the songs, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” “Where the Silvery Colorado Wends Its Way,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” and “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” were printed in a ten-cent leaflet.
Authorship of the popular “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” was claimed by a Spokane local member, Harry (“Haywire Mac”) McClintock, a former tramp entertainer, who said he composed it to the tune of a gospel hymn he sang as a boy soprano in his church choir in Knoxvill
e, Tennessee.6 At least one of the other three songs in the leaflet was written by English-born Richard Brazier, a prolific parodist, who had drifted down to Spokane from a construction job in British Columbia. Brazier submitted twenty other songs to a local union song committee set up by Walsh, who decided that there was enough talent among the membership to expand the song leaflets into a Wobbly songbook.7
The first edition, published about 1909, contained twenty-five songs including “The Marseillaise,” “The Red Flag,” the Bum song, sixteen parodies by Brazier, and several others. Two of the songs, “Workingmen Unite” and “The Banner of Labor,” had been sung, and perhaps’ composed, by members of the Industrial Union Band as the “Overalls Brigade” called itself, on the way to the 1908 convention in Chicago.8 The contents of the little red book dramatized the ideas of the Preamble, which was printed in each copy, and reflected the spirit, humor, and experiences of the Western migrants. In general, the songs vindicated the hobo status of the segment of industrial life that Haywood called “labor at the bottom,” the floating fraternity of seasonal workers.
In 1908 the nation had come through a financial panic; unemployment in all trades was close to 36 percent.9 Low wages and periodic unemployment forced millions to drift from one industrial center to another looking for work.
Moving across country, the itinerant workers harvested crops, sawed trees, cut ice, built roads, laid railroad ties. In the Midwest, they followed the ripening crops from Kansas to the Dakotas. On the West Coast, they gathered the fruit, hops, and grain, canned the fruit and vegetables of California, Washington, and Oregon, and found whatever out-of-season employment possible. Most of them “beat their way” by freight car from one place to another, and railroad companies estimated that there were half a million hoboes riding the rails, walking the tracks, or waiting at railroad junctions to catch onto a train, at any one time. Carleton Parker noted, “This group might be called a fraction of the migratory millions actually in transit.”10
Riding the “rattlers” (freight cars) was dangerous.11 From 1901 to 1905, almost 24,000 trespassers were killed on the railroads and over 25,000 were injured.12 Railroad police, whose job it was to keep hoboes off the trains, frequently pursued, beat, and terrorized the trespassers and the “shacks” (brakemen) threw them off trains. The migrant was often arrested as a ‘Vag” (vagrant) and given the brutal third degree or “sixty days” in the county jail. Sometimes the town police, or “clowns” as the migrants called them, ordered the vagrants to “leave town by the next train,” rather than clutter up the county jails at the taxpayers’ expense. Caught between the town “clowns” and the railroad “bulls,” the migrant had little respect for law and the administration of justice. These experiences, as Nels Anderson wrote, “sometimes put fear into his heart but do not reform him.”13
Although the I.W.W. was as active in other parts of the country as it was in the West, the image of the “typical” Wobbly became that of a migratory or seasonal worker without close family ties. In Carleton Parker’s 1914 study of California migrants, close to 80 percent were under age forty, and 55 percent had left school before age fifteen. Nearly 70 percent gave their occupation as “floating laborers” and 37 percent expressed radical views on politics.14
Parker concluded that the I.W.W. can be profitably viewed only as a psychological byproduct of the neglected childhood of industrial America.15 He characterized the American I.W.W. as “a lonely hobo worker, usually malnourished and in need of medical care [who was] as far from a scheming syndicalist, after the French model, as the imagination could conceive.”16 His mind was “stamped by the lowest, most miserable labor conditions and outlook which American industrialism produces.”17
Rexford Tugwell in his article, “Casual of the Woods,” also pictured the migrant as “a rather pathetic figure … wracked with strange diseases and tortured by unrealized dreams that haunt his soul.”18
Yet I.W.W. publicity made the distinction that although the migrant’s situation was degrading, he himself was not degraded. An article in Solidarity, November 21, 1914, stated:
The nomadic worker of the West embodies the very spirit of the I.W.W. His cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of bourgeois society, including the more stringent conventions which masquerade under the name of morality, make him an admirable examplar of the iconoclastic doctrine of revolutionary unionism…. His anomalous position, half industrial slave, half vagabond adventurer, leaves him infinitely less servile than his fellow worker in the East. Unlike the factory slave of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Central States, he is most emphatically not “afraid of his job.”
His mobility is amazing. Buoyantly confident of his ability to “get by” somehow, he promptly shakes the dust of a locality from his feet whenever the board is bad, or the boss is too exacting, or the work unduly tiresome, departing for the next job even if it be 500 miles away. Cost of transportation does not daunt him. “Freight trains run every day” and his ingenuity is a match for the vigilance of trainmen and special police. No wife or family encumber him…. Nowhere else can a section of the working class be found so admirably fitted to serve as the scouts and advance guards of the labor army. Rather they may become the guerillas of the revolution—the francs-tireurs of the class struggle.19
The I.W.W. migrant was called a hobo, as distinguished from a tramp or a bum. As Dr. Ben Reitman explained it, “The hobo works and wanders, the tramp dreams and wanders, and the bum drinks and wanders.”20 The word hobo may have originated from the term “hoe boy,” a seasonal farm worker. It was just one of the colorful words developed by the migrants to describe the members of the different seasonal occupations. “Snipes” and “jerries” laid railroad sections; “splinter bellies” did rough carpentry work; “pearl-divers” washed dishes; “sewer hogs” dug ditches; “skinners” drove mules; “muckers” shoveled dirt, rock, and gravel from mines or excavations; “timber wolves” or “timber beasts” felled trees; “gandy dancers” tamped ties on the railroads and frequently worked with “banjos” (short-handled shovels), “muck sticks” (long-handled shovels), or “anchors” (tamping picks).21
But probably the I.W.W. migrant was most frequently called a “bindle stiff” or “bundle stiff” who was said to be “packing his balloon,” that is, carrying his blanket in a roll. In I.W.W. and hobo speech, the words “stiff” and “working stiff” were commonly applied to all casual or migratory workers, and especially to I.W.W. members.
Between jobs, “bindle stiffs” congregated in hobo “jungles” (hobo camps) or on the “main stem,” or “skid row” of a town or city. A hobo jungle was usually near a railroad junction point, close enough to a town for those hoboes who needed to “bum lumps” (ask for handouts), yet far enough away from the attention of town police. A good place for a jungle included shade trees, room to stretch a number of blanket rolls on the ground, water for cooking, and wood to keep the fire going.
The jungle was a social institution with its own rules, regulations, mores, and division of labor. It was a catalyst of hobo culture and traditions. Harry Kemp, the hobo poet, wrote about such a camp in 1911:
It is often a marvel of cooperation. Discarded tin cans and battered boilers are made over into cooking utensils and dishes. Each member contributes to the common larder what he has begged for the day. There is usually in camp someone whose occupational vocation is that of cook, and who takes upon himself, as his share of the work, the cooking of meals. Stews are in great favor in trampdom and especially do they like strong, scalding coffee. Usually the procuring of food in such a camp is reduced to a system such as would interest economists and sociologists. One tramp goes to the butcher shop for meat, one goes to the bakers for bread, and so forth. And when one gang breaks up, its members are always very careful to leave everything in good order for the next comers. They will even leave the coffee grounds in the pot for the next fellow so that he can make “seconds” if he needs to. These things are p
art of tramp etiquet, as is also the obligation each new arrival is under to bring, as he comes, some wood for the fire.22