by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
And they have no more use for the state. To them the statue of liberty is personified by the policeman and his club.
Chapter 8
Organizing the Harvest Stiffs
“Yaas,” said the farmer reflectively, “all the I.W.W. fellers I’ve met seemed to be pretty decent lads, but them ‘alleged I.W.W.’s’ must be holy frights.”
I.W.W. Songbook, fifteenth edition (1919), p. 19.
In early August 1913, some 2800 men, women and children were camped on an unshaded hill near Marysville, California, on the hop ranch of E. B. Durst, the largest single employer of migratory labor in the state. They came in answer to Durst’s newspaper advertisements for 2700 hop pickers. Many walked from nearby towns and cities. They arrived to find that Durst had deliberately advertised for twice as many pickers as he needed and that living conditions were totally inadequate even for half their number. Some of the people slept on piles of straw rented from Durst at seventy-five cents a week. Others slept in the fields. Nine outdoor toilets provided the only sanitary facilities for the entire group. Irrigation ditches became garbage disposals and the stench in the camps was nauseating. Dysentery spread.
The resulting episode, known as the Wheatland Hop Riot, has been called, “one of the most significant incidents in the long history of labor troubles in California.”1 It was the first such outburst of migratory farm labor in this century which resulted in national publicity. It affected the future of the I.W.W. in California profoundly and aroused some interest in the living and working conditions of agricultural workers in that state.
In addition to the intolerable living conditions, Durst offered ninety cents a hundred weight to the crowd of unskilled laborers he had attracted to the ranch. The going rate that season was $1.00. He held back a ten-cent “bonus” to be paid if the worker stayed through the harvest. He also required “extra clean” picking which further reduced the workers’ earnings.
The men, women, and children started work at four A.M. and often picked crops in 105 degree heat during the day. They went without drinking water since no water was brought into the fields. Durst’s cousin sold lunch wagon lemonade, which could be bought for five cents a glass. Because the stores in surrounding towns were forbidden to send delivery trucks into the camp, the hop pickers were forced to buy their food and supplies at a concession store on the ranch.
Only about one hundred of the workers had at any time been I.W.W. members. About thirty of them immediately formed an I.W.W. local on the ranch to protest the living and working conditions. “It is suggestive,” the official investigation report later stated, “that these thirty men through a spasmodic action, and with the aid of deplorable camp conditions, dominated a heterogeneous mass of 2,800 unskilled laborers in three days.”2
A mass meeting of the workers held three days after their arrival at the ranch, chose a committee to demand drinking water in the fields twice a day, separate toilets for men and women, better sanitary conditions, and an increase in piece-rate wages. Two of the committee, Blackie Ford and Herman Suhr, had been in the I.W.W. free speech campaigns in Fresno and San Diego. Ranch-owner Durst argued with the committee members and slapped Ford across the face with his gloves.
The following day, August 3, the Wobblies called a mass meeting on a public spot they had rented for the occasion. Blackie Ford took a sick baby from its mother’s arms, and holding it before the crowd of some 2000 workers, he said, “It’s for the kids that we are doing this.”3 The meeting ended with the singing of Joe Hill’s parody, “Mr. Block.” While the singing was going on, two carloads of deputy sheriffs drove up with the district attorney from Marysville to arrest Ford. One of the deputies fired a shot over the heads of the crowd to “sober the mob.”4 As he fired, fighting broke out. The district attorney, a deputy sheriff, and two workers were killed. Many were injured, and, as the deputies left, another posse of armed citizens hurried to the ranch.
In the following panic and hysteria, the roads around the ranch were jammed with fleeing workers. Governor Hiram Johnson dispatched five companies of the National Guard to Wheatland “to overawe any labor demonstration and protect private property.”5 Burns detectives rounded up hundreds of suspected I.W.W. members throughout California and neighboring states. Some of them were severely beaten and tortured and kept incommunicado for weeks. One I.W.W. prisoner committed suicide in prison and another went insane from police brutality. A Burns detective was later convicted of assault on an I.W.W. prisoner, fined $1000, and jailed for a year.
At a trial beginning eight months later, Ford and Suhr were charged with leading the strike which led to the shooting and convicted of second-degree murder. They were sentenced to life imprisonment and jailed for over ten years.
In his testimony before the Industrial Relations Commission in San Francisco in 1914, Austin Lewis, the Socialist lawyer who defended Ford and Suhr at the Marysville trial, drew the parallel between conditions in agriculture and those in factory work. He called the Wheatland Riot “a purely spontaneous uprising … a psychological protest against factory conditions of hop picking … and the emotional result of the nervous impact of exceedingly irritating and intolerable conditions under which those people worked at the time.”6 I.W.W. agitation about the Wheatland episode led to an investigation by the newly created Commission on Immigration and Housing in California which made subsequent annual reports on the living and working conditions of migrants. Professor Carleton H. Parker was appointed to make a report on the hop riot and investigate abuses in labor camps.
After Wheatland, the California press denounced both the I.W.W. and the exploiters of farm labor. The conservative Sacramento Bee on February 9, 1914, editorialized:
The I.W.W. must be suppressed. It is a criminal organization, dedicated to riot, to sabotage, to destruction of property, and to hell in general. But it will not be suppressed until first are throttled those conditions on which it feeds. Great employers like Durst who shriek the loudest against the I.W.W. are the very ones whose absolute disregard of the rights of others, and whose oppressions and inhumanities are more potent crusaders to swell the ranks of the I.W.W. than its most violent propagandists.7
In the year following Wheatland, forty new I.W.W. locals started in California. Five national organizers and over one hundred volunteer soapboxers agitated throughout the state. The I.W.W. blanketed California with stickers and circulars urging a boycott of the hop fields until Ford and Suhr were released, and living and working conditions improved. Members were urged to organize on the job and slow down if their demands were not met. Employers charged that the I.W.W. members burned haystacks, drove copper spikes into fruit trees, and practiced other acts of malicious sabotage during this campaign. Although much of the I.W.W. propaganda included a hunched black cat showing its claws, an emblem of sabotage, the stickers condemned such practices. I.W.W. opponents claimed that the propaganda ironically advocated the very acts advised against.
“It is no use appealing to the master’s sense of justice for he has not got any, the only thing left is action on the pocketbook …”8 read an I.W.W. statement of this time. By the end of 1914, the I.W.W. Hop Pickers’ Defense Committee claimed that action on the pocketbook had left the hop crop 24,000 bales short. Three years later, the I.W.W. estimated that their boycott of the hop fields had cost California farmers $10,000,000 a year, while the farmers themselves charged that their total losses were between $15-20,000,000 since 1914.9
Ranch owners like Durst financed their own private police force of gunmen and detectives to eliminate the I.W.W. It cost them an estimated average of $10,000 each a year.10 In addition, a Farmers’ Protective League, organized to see that strikes and riots would never threaten the harvesting of a ripened crop, turned its attention to lobbying with the federal government for federal prosecution of the I.W.W.
I.W.W. Songbook, Third Edition.
In October 1915, the governors of California, Oregon, Washington, and Utah urged President Wilson to investigate th
e I.W.W. immediately. They stated:
California, Oregon, Washington, and Utah are experiencing abnormal disorder and incendiarism. These experiences are coincident with threats made by I.W.W. leaders in their talks and publications, and are in harmony with doctrines preached in their publications. Local or state apprehension of ring leaders is impracticable, as their field of activity is interstate…. Through federal machinery covering the whole territory involved, the national government might get at the bottom of this movement…. Exigencies of the situation demand absolute secrecy.11
A Department of Justice agent was sent from Washington to look into these charges, but found that the I.W.W. numbered some four thousand members in California and Washington, and that it was composed “chiefly of panhandlers, without homes, mostly foreigners, the discontented and unemployed, who are not anxious to work.”12 The Farmers Protective League found this a disappointing report.
I.W.W. activity was moving out of the cities onto the farms. Hundreds of thousands of industrial workers left jobless by the 1914 financial depression hopped freights in hope of finding work in the harvest fields. Professor Paul S. Taylor described the situation this way:
In the second decade of the twentieth century, American radicalism in the form of the I.W.W. spread rapidly among these men. It became unsafe to ride the freights unless one carried a “red card.” Farmers learned the meaning of strikes for better wages and working conditions, and responded with vigilante mobs, driving agitators and workers from towns at points of guns. Class warfare broke out in the most “American” sections of rural America.13
Based on over a decade of experience, there developed within the I.W.W. a growing demand to build an organization with a more permanent membership. More than 300,000 Wobbly membership cards had been issued since 1905—but workers often passed through the I.W.W. and did not stay. Usually, I.W.W. branches were “mixed locals” of members from many industries which at times were dominated by the transient workers and at times by the homeguards, the more permanently employed.
In September 1914 the national I.W.W. convention passed a resolution endorsing a conference of representatives from I.W.W. agricultural workers’ locals. This meeting, held in Kansas City in April 1915, organized the Agricultural Workers’ Organization, with headquarters in Kansas City. The A.W.O. was called No. 400 in reference to Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, to indicate that, “the new union was being formed by the elite of the working class.”14
The A.W.O. was set up initially to improve working conditions in the 1915 harvest season. But it proved so effective that it continued as a branch of the I.W.W. for several years. It was the first union to organize and negotiate successfully higher wage scales for harvest workers. It was one of the most dramatic union efforts ever to appear on the American scene.
Practical policies met the problems of organizing the wheat industry, in which thousands of farmers over a vast region hired seasonal workers. The most novel innovation was that of the “job delegate system,” a mobile set of organizers who worked on the jobs, starting at the Mexican border in the early spring and winding up in the late fall in the Canadian provinces. Each local could nominate job delegates who reported regularly to the A.W.O. general secretary. It was the job delegate system of volunteer organizers who “carried the entire office in their hip pocket”—application cards, dues books, stamps, and Wobbly literature—that enabled the organization to spread so rapidly in the wheat fields. One of the job delegates described the opening drive for A.W.O. members in 1915:
With pockets lined with supplies and literature we left Kansas City on every available freight train, some going into the fruit belts of Missouri and Arkansas, while others spread themselves over the states of Kansas and Oklahoma, and everywhere they went, with every slave they met on the job, in the jungles, or on freight trains, they talked I.W.W., distributed their literature, and pointed out the advantage of being organized into a real labor union. Day in and day out the topic of conversation was the I.W.W. and the new Agricultural Union No. 400…. Small town marshals became a little more respectful in their bearing toward any group who carried the little red card, and the bullying and bo-ditching shack had a wonderful change of heart after coming in contact with No. 400 boys once or twice. As for the hijacks and the bootleggers, one or two examples of “direct action” from an organized bunch of harvest workers served to show them that the good old days, at least for them, were now over, and that there was a vast difference between a helpless and unorganized harvest stiff and an organized harvest worker. But best of all, the farmer, after one or two salutary examples of solidarity, invariably gave in to the modest request of the organized workers, with the result that the wages were raised, grub was improved, and hours shortened.15
The Kansas City Conference decided to abandon street agitation and soapboxing in harvest towns in favor of conserving energy for on-the-job organizing. An agriculture workers’ handbook stated this new policy:
Waiting in town or in the “jungles” while holding out for higher wages is a poor policy. This tends to help the organized men “on the ‘bum’” while the unorganized do nothing to improve conditions. The place to take action is on the job and it is the only way to get results. Other tactics that are harmful are soapboxing by ignorant or inexperienced members … and throwing unorganized workers off freight trains…. We are out for 100 percent organization, but we must keep the issues of the big struggle constantly in mind and use judgment and foresight. Tactics that have proved successful are: take out organizers’ credentials … line up as many of the crew as possible and then make demands if conditions are not what they should be. The slowing-down process will be found of great help where employers are obstinate.16
“Get on the Job!” and “Never Mind the Empty Street-corners: The Means of Life Are Not Made There!” became the new slogans of the campaign.
Industrial Worker, August 21, 1913.
The A.W.O. pressed for a uniform wage increase of fifty cents to raise wages to a daily rate of $3.50 in the 1915 wheat harvest. In many areas it was successful. It won its demands through sporadic strikes on the job which became a characteristic form of I.W.W. direct action. Members were instructed to bring other Wobbly crews onto the struck job to strike again if necessary, or effect a slow-down until their wage demands were granted.
Membership expanded to a peak of 70,000 in 1917 as A.W.O. organizers followed the harvest crews into lumber and mining areas to sign up off-season workers. Wherever harvest stiffs met in the Midwest, they sang Wobbly songs. Whenever farm workers had a grievance, the A.W.O. job delegates would be their spokesmen. In some areas cooperative train crews honored the little red membership card as a train ticket and allowed I.W.W. members to move freely from one harvest town to another. The Wobbly card often protected its holder from hijackers and hold-up men who were afraid of molesting an I.W.W. member for fear of incurring the wrath of the organization. Thus the A.W.O. became entrenched in the wheat fields and was regarded as the I.W.W. in the Midwest.
Using the A.W.O. as a model, the 1916 I.W.W. convention set up other industrial branches which absorbed some of the nonagricultural members of the A.W.O. In March 1917, No. 400 was rechartered as Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union No. 110, and restricted solely to organizing agricultural workers. Its members became known as the “one-ten cats.” Despite its depleted membership, the A.W.O. remained the financial backbone of the I.W.W. until about 1925.
From the start of the A.W.O., I.W.W. attempts to recruit farm labor met with organized hostility in some rural communities. Vigilante committees, known as “pick-handle brigades,” sprang up to take care of the “Wobbly menace.” In one small community in South Dakota, for example, the newspaper advised “every member of the vigilante committee over twenty-one to supply himself with a reliable firearm and have it where he can secure it at a moment’s notice.”17 As the nation entered the war, newspaper stories fanned the hysteria of local village and farm groups by repeated exposes of “I.W.
W. plots” of widespread sabotage and destruction of property.
In March 1918, Thorstein Veblen drafted a memorandum to the U.S. Food Administration based on an investigation he had made of the availability of farm-labor to harvest wartime crops. He wrote:
These members of the I.W.W., together with many of the workmen who are not formally identified with that organization, set up the following schedule of terms on which they will do full work through the coming harvest season: (a) freedom from illegal restraint; (b) proper board and lodgings; (c) a ten-hour day; (d) a standard wage of $4.00 for the harvest season; and (e) tentatively, free transportation in answering any call from a considerable distance.
These are the terms insisted on as a standard requirement; and if these terms are met, the men propose a readiness to give the best work of which they are capable, without reservation. On the other hand, if these terms are not met in any essential particular, these men will not refuse to work, but quite unmistakably, they are resolved in that case to fall short of full and efficient work by at least as much as they fall short of getting these terms on which they have agreed among themselves as good and sufficient. It should be added that there is no proposed intention among these men to resort to violence of any kind in case these standard requirements are not complied with. Here, as elsewhere, the proposed and officially sanctioned tactics of the I.W.W. are exclusively the tactics of nonresistance, which does not prevent occasional or sporadic recourse to violence by members of the I.W.W. although the policy of nonresistance appears, on the whole, to be lived up to with a fair degree of consistency. The tactics habitually in use are what may be called a nonresistant sabotage, or in their own phrasing, “deliberate withdrawal of efficiency,” in other words, slacking and malingering….