Rebel Voices
Page 63
Amongst the members of the local there was seven for the motion and eight against. Ninety-five not votin’. Motion lost and meetin’ adjourned.
Now my idea is that most mines is just like this one. Just as most loggin’ camps and crews is a lot alike. If the minority has the pep and guts to put things across on the boss by gettin’ their fellow workers to act then the conditions is liable to improve and the boss is liable to receive a set back in his pocketbook. But if not—not.
I found by lookin’ round that here was enough plugs with real workin’ class ideas on hand to swing the union meetings any way they wanted to providin’ they was organized to do it. That is where you run into pitch. They wasn’t organized.
They never laid plans on how to get the real stuff across in meetings. The militant workers went up to buck the fine machine of the officials with no system at all. It was like a Siwash tryin’ to compete with an express train. There wasn’t a chance.
Now I ain’t no steady miner because I like the looks of the tall timber best but what I seen of this camp showed me that the only way to clean out the bunch of parasites that is betrayin’ the miners’ cause, is to build up a nifty little workers’ machine in eyery local.
A little honest study over the best ways and means to get action in the coal camps will show this to be a fact. We got to organize the thinking workers that are already there into small groups that hold special meetings. We got to line up the boys that understand. These special meetings on the side should work out plans for action. They can easy enough spread literature to the rest of the miners and arrange for educational meetings.
These here miners got the stuff in ’em. We need to use the same tactics that the officials are usin’, and learn that the only way to compete with a smooth runnin’ machine is to use a better one.
With every wobbly member that is workin’ in the coal mines organized into a job committee bent on developin’ the miners’ union into a real fightin’ force instead of Johnny Lewis’ plaything there would soon be a fighting spirit among the miners that would make the world sit up and take notice. The wobs could do it too along with the other boys that savvy if they would just form their own little group and tell the reactionaries to slide down some other cellar door.
Maybe this sounds like a lot of free advice. Maybe at this minute I—Tightline Johnson—ought to be jugglin’ the black diamonds myself and formin’ one of these little committees. Maybe so, maybe so but the reasons that I ain’t is another story, as a feller’s wife generally calls his excuses.
Chapter 11
Behind Bars: War and Prison
… if every person who represented law and order and the nation beat you up, railroaded you to jail, and the good Christian people cheered and told them to go to it, how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic? This war is a businessman’s war and we don’t see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs which we now enjoy.
An I.W.W. member to Carleton H. Parker,
The Casual Laborer and Other Essays
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), p. 102.
“We will resent with all the power at our command,” the members of the I.W.W. General Ex-excutive Board stated in 1916, “any attempt to compel us—the disinherited—to participate in a war that can only bring in its wake death and untold misery, privation, and suffering to millions of workers, and only serve to further rivet the chains of slavery on our necks, and render still more secure the power of the few to control the destinies of the many.”1
As early as 1914, the I.W.W. had declared itself officially opposed to World War I in a resolution which read: “We as members of the industrial army will refuse to fight for any purpose except the realization of industrial freedom.”2 Wobbly soapboxers lambasted the European conflict as an object lesson in capitalist folly in which workers were being sent into senseless slaughter to help line the pockets of the owners of industry.
“Don’t Be a Soldier. Be a Man,” read an I.W.W. stickerette issued about 1916. “Join the I.W.W. and fight on the job for yourself and your class.”
Since the founding of the I.W.W. in 1905, Wobblies had opposed war not only on the basis of anticapitalism, but on the grounds of antinationalism and antimilitarism as well. “In the broad sense,” said Wobbly soapboxer J. P. Thompson, “there is no such thing as a foreigner. We are all native-born members of this planet and for members of it to be divided into groups or units and taught that each nation is better than others leads to clashes and world war. We ought to have in the place of national patriotism, the idea that one people is better than another, a broader concept—that of international solidarity.”3
Instead of “yelping at the boss,” Wobblies took the position in the pre-World War I period that the only cure for militarism was industrial anti-capitalism and that they must organize industrially before they had the power to stop war. I.W.W. strikes continued. The organization’s leaders maintained that these were not attempts to sabotage the war effort but efforts to improve conditions for the workers in industries such as lumber, agriculture, and mining. A President’s Mediation Commission, investigating the strikes in Arizona, supported this view. In 1917 Arizona mine owners reported an increase of more than $23,000,000 over the output value of the preceding year, and, although the Wobbly-led strikes were denounced by many companies as pro-German and seditious, the commission reported that they “appeared to be nothing more than the normal results of the increased cost of living, the speeding up processes to which the mine management had been tempted by the abnormally high market price of copper.”4
Although there were hundreds of A.F.L.-led strikes during this period, the I.W.W. strikes were outside the realm of mediation since the organization refused to recognize contracts. Frightened at the prospects of labor shortages at a time when there was a heightened demand for their products, employers vented their fury against the dissenters who, they claimed, were threatening both national security and the capitalist system.
Commenting on the 1917 lumber strike, the Chicago Tribune declared: “This outrageous outburst in the West is … nothing less than rebellion.”5 The Cleveland News editorialized: “While this country is at war, the only room it can afford I.W.W.’s is behind the walls of penitentiaries.”6 Newspaper columns carried stories of I.W.W. plots of destruction and sabotage which were never proved in court. News stories accused Wobblies of planning to arm themselves and take possession of industries, poisoning the nations supply of beef, and plotting to burn crops and cities. The Fargo, North Dakota, Forum declared: “Its members live by the stiletto, firebrand, and bomb.”7 The New York Tribune suggested that I.W.W. and German agents could account for a series of mysterious fires and explosions in munitions factories around the country.8 A Cleveland paper declared that “German influences are behind the labor troubles at Butte,”9 and Theodore Roosevelt addressed a Saratoga, New York, audience in July 1918 on the “frank homicidal march of the I.W.W.”10 In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Daily World ran an editorial headed, “Get Out the Hemp,” which said, in part:
A knowledge of how to tie a knot that will stick might come in handy in a few days…. The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the I.W.W.’s. Kill them, just as you would kill any other kind of a snake. Don’t scotch ’em; kill ’em dead. It is no time to waste money on trials and continuances and things like that. All that is necessary is the evidence and a firing squad.11
The charges that I.W.W. members were German agents and that their strikes were supported by German gold were never verified by the slightest evidence. The source of some of these stories became apparent when Robert Breure, a New York writer, interviewed lumber operators in Washington on a trip he took with the President’s Mediation Commission which was investigating wartime strikes.
The lumber operators admitted that their public relations men manipulated public opinion about the Wobblies. A lumber company owner told Breure:
… in war—and a strike is wa
r—anything is fair. We have fought the I.W.W. as we would have fought any attempt of the A.F.L. to control the workers in our camps. And of course, we have taken advantage of the general prejudice against them as an unpatriotic organization to beat their strike.12
In the middle of 1917 Bill Haywood publicly declared that German money had nothing whatever to do with the strikes of the Wobblies:
It’s true that we think there is only one fight in the world, and that is between capital and labor. It’s true that we are not interested in nationalities. We will fight for German workers or French workers or Norwegian workers just as hard as we will fight for American workers. But do you think we want to see the Prussian military system prevail? How would we stand to gain anything from that?13
Although the I.W.W. remained openly anti-military, it never officially opposed the draft after America entered the war. In July 1917 I.W.W. General Executive Board members, usually scattered throughout the country, met for an emergency meeting at Chicago headquarters. At the national office letters had been received daily from I.W.W. members anxious to know the organization’s policy about conscription. The Wobbly leaders knew they would be damned by their members if they recommended registering for the draft and damned by the public if they officially opposed the draft. The sessions were deadlocked for three days. Ralph Chaplin, the editor of Solidarity, was called into the meeting. In his autobiography, Wobbly, he reported the following exchange:
“If we oppose the draft, they’ll run us out of business,” Richard Brazier had said.
“They’ll run us out of business anyway,” insisted Frank Little. “Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to give in. Either we’re for this capitalist slaughterfest or we’re against it. I’m ready to face a firing squad rather than compromise.”14
But compromise the Executive Board did. Chaplin was instructed to write a signed editorial for Solidarity which advised I.W.W. members to register for the draft as “I.W.W. opposed to war.” The morning after the meeting broke up, Frank Little came up to Chaplin’s office on his way to Butte, Montana, where he was to be killed a few months later. “You’re wrong about registering for the draft,” he told Chaplin, “It would be better to go down slugging.”15
Many I.W.W. members served in the war or worked in war-related jobs. On the other hand, some members agitated against the draft, refused to register, or left the country for Mexico. But only in two areas was there any significant antiwar demonstration. In Rockford, Illinois, about 100 Wobblies, Socialists, and pacifists protested in front of the city hall. On the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota a large number of Finnish miners who shared their native country’s traditional fear of America’s ally Russia, refused to be conscripted. As an organization, however, the I.W.W. staged no antiwar strikes and threw its efforts into leading on-the-job activities.
In the spring of 1917, responding to pressures from bankers, businessmen, mineowners, lumber operators, and farmers, the War Department authorized local army officers to “sternly repress acts committed with seditious intent.”16 Army officers were permitted to arrest Wobblies who committed violence “or similar acts … in pursuance of prearranged plans contemplating violence.”17 Army officers were available to help county sheriffs and district attorneys round up any industrial nonconformists in order to protect communities from the alleged threats of Wobbly violence.
Little effort, however, went into protecting Wobblies from community hysteria. Throughout the summer of 1917, army troops raided I.W.W. halls, disrupted meetings, dispersed outdoor gatherings, jailed Wobblies, guarded industrial property, and patrolled “troublesome sections” of various towns and cities.
On September 5, 1917, numerous federal investigation agents simultaneously raided Wobbly headquarters, halls, and members’ homes around the country, collecting tons of membership records, books, Wobbly literature, official and personal correspondence, minutes of meetings, buttons, badges, stickers and membership cards. Richard Brazier calls this haul, “The Big Pinch.”18 The federal government had enough exhibits to bring the Wobblies to court on the charges that the I.W.W. was “a vicious, treasonable, and criminal conspiracy which opposed by force the execution of the laws of the United States and obstructed the prosecution of the war.”19
Around the country 184 members of the organization were arrested by federal agents and charged with interfering with the war effort, encouraging resistance to the Selective Service Act, conspiring to cause insubordination and disloyalty in the armed forces, and injuring citizens selling munitions to the government. The prisoners were tried in three separate groups in Chicago, Sacramento, and Wichita, Kansas.
In Chicago the trial of about 100 Wobblies opened on April 1, 1918, in the courtroom of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The men had spent seven months in Chicago’s Cook County Jail waiting trial.
Landis, a frail, aged man, wore a business suit instead of conventional judicial robes. He permitted the defendants to take off their coats in the hot courtroom, move around, read newspapers, and doze on the hard benches during the long hours of testimony.
Landis often left the judge’s bench to come down and sit on the steps of the jury box. He asked people not to rise as he entered or left the courtroom. John Reed, who was covering the trial, wrote: “It takes some human understanding for a Judge to fly in the face of judicial ritual as much as that.”20 Less flatteringly, Reed wrote of Landis:
Small on the huge bench sits a wasted man with untidy white hair, an emaciated face in which two burning eyes are set like jewels, parchment skin split by a crack for a mouth; the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead.21
The government based its case on I.W.W. theories about capitalism, internationalism, militarism, the class struggle, direct action, and conscription. Some of the exhibits used to support its case dated back to the founding of the I.W.W. in 1905. Statements made in pamphlets, letters, songs, stories, and poems were used by federal prosecutors to prove the conspiratorial nature of the organization. In turn, I.W.W. members were guilty of the charges against them because they had joined an unlawful confederacy.
Sixty-one defendants testified during the five-month trial which lasted throughout the summer months of 1918. James P. Thompson led off as the first witness, soapboxing to the audience in the courtroom about I.W.W. principles. “Red” Doran lectured for five hours on political economy and used a blackboard to illustrate the points of his testimony. When he finished, he smiled at the jury members and said: “It is customary for I.W.W. speakers to take up a collection, but under these circumstances, I think we will dispense with it.”22 The audience in the courtroom, Judge Landis, and the jury members roared with laughter.
Solidarity, June 16, 1917.
I.W.W. attorney George Vanderveer tried to base his defense on the right of labor to strike during wartime and attempted to submit sworn statements on working conditions in the sweatshops of the Chicago Loop within eyeshot of the courtroom. Landis ruled him out of order stating that the I.W.W., not American industry, was on trial.
To testify in behalf of the I.W.W. defendants, Vanderveer introduced forest rangers who said Wobblies had helped them fight forest fires, farmers who praised the reliability of their Wobbly workers, public officials from several cities who spoke of the peaceful nature of I.W.W. activities in their areas, and Philadelphia longshoremen who reported that Wobblies had handled war supplies for the Army quartermaster general. Of the 100 Chicago defendants, only one had refused to register for the draft.
The defense completed its case during the last week in August. The prosecution gave its closing arguments, and Judge Landis instructed the jury. A little more than an hour later, the jury returned to the courtroom. The members had reached a verdict of “guilty” as charged by the indictment. In the lobby of the courthouse, a band started playing “Hail Columbia,” and waiting crowds outside the building cheered.
On August 30 the sentences were pronounced. Fifteen Wobblies received 20 years, 35 ten years, 33 five years, and 12 one
year and a day. Those that were left got nominal sentences. In addition, the defendants were fined a total of $2,300,000.
In the courtroom, I.W.W. General Executive Board member Ben Fletcher, the only Negro defendant, remarked to Bill Haywood: “The Judge has been using very ungrammatical language. His sentences are much too long.”23
While police held back jeering crowds, the hand-cuffed prisoners were marched down Austin Avenue to the LaSalle Street Depot, where a special train waited to take them to Leavenworth Penitentiary.
In California, arrests of Wobblies by federal agents netted fifty-three prisoners who were thrown into a common prison cell, twenty-one feet square, in Sacramento. One cotton blanket was given to each prisoner. Since there was not room for all to lie down to sleep at night, the Wobblies took turns sleeping and sharing blankets. When Fred Esmond, a leader of the I.W.W. defense efforts in California, notified the attorney general of the deplorable prison conditions, he was arrested and held incommunicado for eight months.
Mail for the Wobbly prisoners was censored. The I.W.W. defense office in San Francisco was raided seven times in six months and all the files and records were confiscated.
The Sacramento trial started in December 1918. Five of the prisoners had died in jail while awaiting trial. The defendants, who had suffered mentally and physically during their agonizing months in prison, were convinced that they would not get a fair trial. Forty-three of them decided on a policy of “no defense” as a protest against their treatment.