by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
The Negroes were invited into the convention sessions which voted three to one to affiliate with the I.W.W. National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers. Negro as well as white delegates were elected to attend the 1912 I.W.W. convention.
The Brotherhood had a short, tragic existence. Company lockouts were intensified following the official I.W.W. affiliation, as lumber companies decided to “fight the question to a finish.”4
At Grabow, Louisiana, a company town which was enclosed like a stockade behind a high wooden fence, company guards shot and killed three strikers who were taking part in a union meeting on a public road near the town. The coroner’s jury charged officers of the company with murder, but the grand jury indicted fifty-eight union men and no company officials. The union members were lodged for three months in the prison known as the “Black Hole of Calcasieu” in Lake Charles, Louisiana, before the start of a dramatic four weeks’ trial. The jury took only one hour to acquit the I.W.W. members after state’s witnesses testified that company officers had distributed guns to the guards and encouraged them to get drunk before the union meeting. The testimony also revealed that the councils of the Brotherhood were honeycombed with company detectives, including one who had stolen the union’s records and membership lists.
Following the Lake Charles trial, a prolonged strike at Merryville, Louisiana, protested company blacklisting of the trial’s defense witnesses. A campaign of terrorism from a vigilante brigade, known as the Good Citizens’ League, coupled with continuing discrimination against union members, wrecked the union, and by 1913 its blacklisted leaders and active members moved west to agitate for industrial unionism in the oil fields of Oklahoma.
In the Northwest, living conditions in lumber camps were notoriously bad and constituted a major grievance for lumberjacks. Going from job to job, the men were forced to carry rolled up blankets on their backs, since the companies provided no bedding. As late as September 1917, an article in the New Republic described typical housing for lumberjacks this way:
Forty loggers occupied a bunk house that should not have accommodated more than a dozen—the men sleeping two in a bunk with two more in a bunk on top; a stove at either end, sending the steam rising from lines of clothes strung the length of the room; beds made in many cases by dumping hay into a wooden bunk; food that was unsavory; the crudest kind of provisions for cleanliness and sanitation.5
A month after it was organized in February 1912, the I.W.W. Forest and Lumber Workers’ Industrial Union struck all the sawmills of Aberdeen, Hoquiam, and Raymond, Washington, against the ten-hour day and low wages. Several thousand loggers in western Washington walked out in sympathy. Many strikers were jailed on trumped up charges; others were dragged from their beds at night, marched into the swamps, and beaten. At Hoquiam, a vigilante committee loaded 150 strikers into boxcars for deportation, but the railroad workers refused to move them. In nearby Raymond, 100 Greek and Finnish workers were shipped out of town. The strike lasted five weeks and was partly successful. A citizens’ committee recommended a slight increase in wages, exclusion of I.W.W. members, and a preference for American-born workers. Membership in the I.W.W. lumber locals dropped off; only a few scattered branches remained, and the National Union of Forest and Lumber Workers fell apart.
Spurred by success in the drive to organize harvest workers, the I.W.W. made plans in 1917 to renew efforts in the lumber camps. Lumber Workers’ Industrial Union No. 500 was formed at the I.W.W. 1917 convention, and a strike was planned for the Spokane short-log region.
The demands of the I.W.W. lumberjacks in 1917 indicate major grievances. They called for an eight-hour day, no Sunday or holiday work, higher wages, satisfactory food served in porcelain dishes with no overcrowding at the dinner tables, and sanitary kitchens.
Industrial Worker, October 27, 1909.
They also pressed for sleeping quarters with a maximum of twelve people in each bunkhouse, single spring beds and shower baths, adequate lighting in the bunkhouses, free hospital service, and semimonthly pay by bank check. They called for the end of child labor in the sawmills and of discrimination against I.W.W. members in the camps.
The I.W.W. lumber strike of 1917 was the most spectacular controversy that had taken place in the industry up to that time. In many areas, close to 90 percent of the men became I.W.W. members. By August 1917, the strike which started on July 1, had paralyzed more than 80 percent of the lumber industry in western Washington, threatening the manufacture of airplanes for the war and the supply of lumber for cantonments and for crating shipments.
Newspaper articles in the Northwest charged that the I.W.W. lumber strike was financed with German gold and organized by the Wobblies to oppose the war effort. The governor of Washington proposed a state-wide vigilante committee; police frisked men on streets and on trains for red cards or other signs of I.W.W. membership. I.W.W. members were detained in stockades built in many communities in northern Washington, and I.W.W. halls were raided and wrecked throughout the Northwest. Local lawyers refused to defend Wobblies who were imprisoned, and, in Congress, some of the senators from Utah, Montana, and Washington urged the use of military force to drive the Wobblies out of the lumber camps.
As the strike progressed, Secretary of War Baker asked lumber employers to concede an eight-hour day. An editorial in the American Lumberman answered this appeal. It said:
It is really pitiable to see the government … truckling to a lot of treasonable, anarchistic agitators … playing into the hands of our enemy and doing tremendously more harm to our allied cause than the German army is doing…. With a little firmness … this situation could be relieved.6
Employers refused mediation by federal or state officials and linked their stand to the national defense efforts. Members of the Lumberman’s Protective Association raised a half million dollar “fighting fund” to break the strike. Any member who gave into demands for the eight-hour day would be fined $500.
Wobblies met the challenge. Alarmed at dwindling strike funds, arrests of strike leaders, and use of scab crews in the camps, Wobblies went back to work in the forests. But, instead of doing a full day’s work, they would “hoosier up,” that is, act like “greenhorns” who had never seen the woods before. A lumberjack described the tactics this way:
We went out together and we came back together, that’s what the lumber bosses couldn’t fight. And then, of course, we learned some new tricks about striking. Ever hear of the “intermittent strike”? Well, we tried that. Our funds were-getting low, so we decided to strike on the job. A bunch of us would go back to work. The bosses were glad to see us—thought we’d given up. And then—well, the rules and regulations aren’t usually observed very well when you’re at work. We observed ’em. It certainly did slow things up! Everything went wrong. And then, to finish, somebody would institute the eight-hour day by pulling the whistle two hours before quitting time. Naturally, everybody stopped work. The bosses had a fit and fired us. So we moved on to the next camp, and wired headquarters to send another bunch to the last place. It certainly worked. I never saw a more peaceful strike in my life than that one, and I’ve seen some strikes.7
Industrial Worker, December 26, 1912.
There was also evidence that some members, acting as individuals, drove spikes into logs to break saws, wasted materials through planned carelessness, and engaged in other acts of “conscientious withdrawal of efficiency.” But attempts to prove acts of criminal sabotage on the part of the I.W.W. proved fruitless.
The Northwest lumber industry panicked at the disorganization and confusion. As Senator Borah remarked:
… you cannot destroy the organization…. It is something you cannot get at. You cannot reach it. You do not know where it is. It is not in writing. It is not in anything else. It is a simple understanding between men, and they act upon it without any evidence of existence whatever.8
President Wilson sent a Mediation Commission to investigate and, if possible, settle the crisis. The c
ommission reported that the lumber operators took advantage of the wartime hysteria to fight not only the I.W.W. but all unions. It said:
The I.W.W. is filling a vacuum created by the operators…. The hold of the I.W.W. is riveted instead of weakened by unimaginative opposition on the part of the employers to the correction of real grievances…. The greatest difficulty in the industry is the tenacity of old habits of individualism.9
The commission condemned the opposition of the lumber owners to the eight-hour day, since lumber was the only major industry on the West coast in which it did not prevail.
As the unmet need for lumber for the war effort continued, the War Department detailed Colonel Brice P. Disque of the U. S. Army Signal Corps to organize a “Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen” to establish harmony between employers and employees. The “4 L’s” became known as Colonel Disque’s “weapon to bomb pro-Hunism out of the Northwest Woods.”10 The I.W.W. claimed that the 4 L’s was a company union which included employers, and charged that “the police, the press, and cleverly manipulated mob violence all were used as a club to enforce membership.”11 Colonel Disque advised unionists to suspend union activities and organizing until the end of the war.
In March 1918 Colonel Disque took matters in hand and announced that from then on the lumber industry in the Northwest would go on an eight-hour day. The I.W.W. lumberjacks took credit for this victory. They celebrated May Day 1918 by burning their old bedding rolls so that the companies were forced to provide bedding or have no workers.
One lumberjack said after the 1917 strike:
Now the lumberjack is a man. He has burned his lousy blankets and made the company furnish him a decent place to sleep. Why in some camps, the men even have sheets to their beds as if they were regular human beings! And when he goes to town he puts on ordinary human clothes and leaves his corks behind. And he feels like a man, for he has time after an eight-hour day to do some thinking.12
After the Armistice was signed the 4 L’s lost its government support, although the West Coast Lumbermen’s Association urged that it continue. Colonel Disque was elected president of the 4 L’s and promised again to stamp out anarchy and sabotage. Although the organization existed until the 1930’s, membership dropped off as both the A.F.L. and I.W.W. recruited lumber workers after the war, and the organization proved ineffective against company-wide wage cuts during the next decade.
The antiradical hysteria which had gathered momentum in the Northwest during the war was climaxed in the lumber town of Centralia, Washington, in November 1919. Centralia had a history of anti-Wobbly activity. The I.W.W. hall had been wrecked during a Red Cross parade on Memorial Day, 1918, its American flag torn from the wall, the victrola auctioned in the street, and the desk confiscated by a Centralia banker. The newsstand of a blind Wobbly sympathizer, Tom Lassiter, was demolished in June 1919 because Lassiter sold the I.W.W. Industrial Worker. Lassiter was kidnapped, driven out of town, dumped into a ditch, and told never to come back at the risk of his life.
When the I.W.W. opened a new hall in Centralia, the Centralia Protective Association, a local businessmen’s group, issued regular bulletins warning of the I.W.W. menace. A secret committee was appointed to work out details of driving the I.W.W. from the town. Word leaked out that there was a conspiracy to raid the I.W.W. headquarters during an Armistice Day parade in November. Elmer Smith, the I.W.W. lawyer in Centralia, went to see the governor to try to get protection for the organization. The owner of the building which the I.W.W. rented appealed to the police for help. Centralia Wobblies circulated a leaflet door to door asking townspeople for aid in meeting threats against them.
On November 11 Centralians jammed the streets to celebrate Armistice Day and watch a parade of returned veterans. The postmaster and former mayor carried coils of rope. When the marching legionnaires reached the I.W.W. hall, they were halted by the commanding officer. There were conflicting statements as to what happened. Dr. Frank Bickford, a Centralia merchant who had been in the parade, testified that someone suggested a raid on the hall. He said:
I spoke up and said I would lead if enough would follow but before I could take the lead there were many ahead of me. Someone next to me put his foot against the door and forced it open, after which a shower of bullets poured through the opening about us.13
Dr. Herbert Bell, also a marcher, testified that he heard a shout from the ranks ahead while the marchers were standing in front of the hall. He saw the ranks in front of him break and move toward the building.
It seemed to me that it was at the same time that I heard shots. The shooting and movement of men were as nearly simultaneous as any human acts could be.14
The legionnaires rushed to the hall. Shots were fired from the hall, from a hotel room across the street, and from a nearby hillside where several I.W.W. members were stationed. Three legionnaires were killed, including the Legion commander who was at the head of the invaders.
As the paraders broke into the hall, five I.W.W. members hid themselves in an unused icebox in a back room where they stayed until they were arrested. Wesley Everest, a war veteran I.W.W. member, ran out of the back door chased by the legionnaires. Surrounded by a mob on the banks of the Skookumchuck River, he offered to give himself up to any police official in the crowd. As the men rushed to get him, he shot and killed one of the legionnaires.
Everest was knocked unconscious and dragged back to the jail by a strap around his neck. That night the town lights were turned off while a crowd entered the jail, seized Everest, and drove him to the outskirts of town where he was castrated, according to Ralph Chaplin who investigated the tragedy, and lynched. His body was hung to a railroad trestle above the Chehalis River, and as word spread through the town, automobile parties drove out during the night to see the hanging corpse by automobile lights. His body was taken to the jailhouse the following day where it was laid in the corridor to be viewed by the eleven other I.W.W. prisoners. Four of the Wobblies, under guard, were forced to bury it in an unknown grave in a potter’s field so that no pictures would be taken of the body.
Centralia was in a state of hysteria and panic. The American Legion controlled the town, organized armed posses to hunt for Wobblies, and threatened to remove the chief of police for not showing more interest in jailing the Wobblies they rounded up. Arrests of suspected I.W.W. members numbered over 1000. “The city commissioners were deprived of their police power,” wrote a University of Washington professor who had come to investigate the case. “This power has been assumed by the American Legion.”15
The Lewis County Bar Association warned its members that they would be disbarred for defending an I.W.W. member. “Even to sympathize with the perpetrators of the tragedy is proof evident that the sympathizer is a traitor to his country,” the Centralia Chronicle editorialized.16 In nearby Elma, the newspaper declared: “Hanging is none too good for them.”17 The Montesano Vidette called I.W.W. members “copperheads and reptiles” and reported that a movement had been started to make punishment for I.W.W. membership life imprisonment or death.18 Washington’s governor authorized the suppression of all seditious literature and wrote to police chiefs and sheriffs encouraging them to arrest all radicals in their towns. Local officers of the Department of Justice closed down the newspaper offices of the A.F.L. Seattle Union Record and arrested its editorial board for having called on its readers to hear both sides of the story before judging the case.
Seven of the I.W.W. prisoners were declared guilty of second-degree murder in the trial which took place in Montesano, Washington. Two of the prisoners, including the I.W.W. lawyer Smith, were acquitted, and a third was declared insane. Ignoring the jury’s recommendation of leniency for the defendants, the judge sentenced them to maximum jail terms of twenty-five to forty years in Walla Walla Penitentiary. Several years after the trial, six of the jury members gave affidavits to lawyer Elmer Smith, who worked on the case until his death in the early logo’s. They stated that they would have voted to acquit a
ll the defendants if they had known the full story of the legionnaires’ raid on the I.W.W. hall. One juror wrote:
I cannot get it out of my mind these many years; maybe I go back to Sweden … no one will say “there goes Pete Johnson; he helped send innocent men to prison.”19
One of the I.W.W. prisoners died in Walla Walla of tuberculosis. Following the work of amnesty and church groups, five of the prisoners were paroled in 1933. One who insisted on a full pardon rather than a parole, was finally released in 1940 when the court commuted his sentence to the eighteen years which he had served. The Centralia American Legion built a monument to the Legion captain, Walter Grimms, killed in front of the I.W.W. hall on Armistice Day, and the story of ex-soldier Wesley Everest has been preserved in prose and poetry by Wobbly writers and sympathizers.
The Centralia tragedy climaxed the career of the I.W.W. lumberworkers’ organization in the Northwest. Wobbly lumberjacks threw their efforts into fighting the “gyppo,” or piecework, system, which employers initiated after the 1917 strike, and kept up their agitation to secure employer-provided bedding in camps where bindle stiffs were still forced to carry their own blanket rolls. Numerically, however, the union never recovered from the postwar, antiradical campaign.
I.W.W. efforts in the lumber industry were marked by tough campaigning and tragic climaxes against employers determined to destroy union efforts in lumber camps and sawmills. The tactics developed by the Wobblies to meet the rigors of the industry, their reaction to the patriotic appeals used against them, the victory of the 1917 strike, and the tragedies of Grabow and Centralia created a rich Wobbly literature flavored with humor and pathos.
1
This unsigned article, an early account of living and working conditions in lumber camps, appeared in the Industrial Worker (July 2, 1910).