Rebel Voices
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Vera Mollers poem “Our Defense” and the song “We Made Good Wobs Out There” were frequently reprinted in the I.W.W. press. “Our Defense” was printed in the Industrial Worker (August 1923); “We Made Good Wobs Out There” was included in the twenty-third edition of the I.W.W. songbook.
E. S. Rose, an I.W.W. leader in Detroit, included a newspaper clipping of “Our Defense” in a scrapbook of Wobbly songs and poems which he presented to the Labadie Collection. Unfortunately, he did not cite the sources for the items he selected. On the clipping of the poem “Our Defense” in the E. S. Rose scrapbook is the following anecdote which is printed after the verses:
I.W.W. headquarters in New York City after raid on November 15, 1919.
Labadie Collection photo files.
”Ex. from the Chicago trial. ‘Well, they grabbed us. And the deputy says, ‘Are you a member of the I.W.W.? I says, ‘Yes,’ so he asked me for my card, and I gave it to him, and he tore it up. He tore up the other cards that the fellow members along with me had. So this fellow member says, ‘There is no use tearing that card up. We can get duplicates’ ‘Well,’ the deputy says, ‘We can tear the duplicates too.’ And this fellow worker says, he says, ‘Yes, but you can’t tear it out of my heart.’”
OUR DEFENSE
By VERA MOLLER
In the end the loss or triumph of the case shall not be hung,
On the golden ease and smoothness of a hired lawyer’s tongue
Nor ably or how bungling every man shall plead his cause,
It’s something beyond the courtroom that makes judge and jury pause.
For they sense the mighty forces in the mutterings of unrest
And the songs of hope and freedom rising in the Workers’ breast
And wherever men are willing for their beliefs to do and dare,
There’s a cause that stands behind them and they feel its power there.
Over treachery and cunning, thru all darkness and suspense,
‘Tis the cause itself shall triumph and in that is our defense.
23
WE MADE GOOD WOBS OUT THERE
By VERA MOLLER
(Tune: “Auld Lang Syne”)
Though we be shut out from the world,
Here worn and battle scarred,
Our names shall live where men walk free
On many a small red card.
So let us take fresh hope my friend,
We cannot feel despair,
Whate’er may be our lot in here,
We made good Wobs out there.
When we were out we did our bit
To hasten Freedom’s dawn,
They can’t take back the seed we spread,
The truths we passed along.
‘Tis joy to know we struck a blow
To break the master’s sway,
And those we lined up take the work
And carry on today.
Though we be shut out from the world
And days are long and hard,
They can’t erase the names we wrote
In many a small red card.
So let us take fresh hope my friend
Above our prison fare,
Whate’er may be our lot in here,
We made good Wobs out there.
Chapter 12
An I.W.W. Miscellany: 1924–1964
We are emerging from a period in which the American worker has been peculiarly unresponsive to proposed radical changes. We think we are through that period. The development of the machine, automation, is rapidly changing the workers’ way of life. It will change their thinking, too. The up-to-the-minute I.W.W. is here waiting for them. We doubt if any person out shopping for a good labor organization to pin up with has ever turned down the I.W.W. because he really believed it to be out of date. Some have thought it too far advanced to be practical in the present day. Many have been afraid to join because “it’s too radical.” But out-of-date? It doesn’t sound possible.
CARL KELLER
Industrial Worker, August 14, 1963.
The ordeal of the antiradical campaigns of the war and postwar years culminated in a serious schism in the I.W.W. organization in 1924. Tensions had arisen over the issue of individual amnesty for political prisoners, the rivalry between the strong lumber workers Industrial Union No. 120 and the agricultural workers Industrial Union No. 110, and the attempt of the Communist Party to infiltrate the I.W.W.
From Leavenworth Penitentiary, James Rowan, a popular leader of the lumberjacks, organized a rump faction known as the E.P.’s from its writing of an “Emergency Program” which attacked the centralized program at I.W.W. Chicago headquarters and advocated a loose federation of highly autonomous I.W.W. locals. With his large following, Rowan had been nicknamed the “Jesus of Nazareth of the Lumberjacks of the Northwest.” When he got a court injunction to restrain I.W.W. headquarters’ officials, primarily two A.W.O. leaders Doyle and Fisher, from continuing to hold the property and funds of the I.W.W., John Mac-Rae, a Wobbly prisoner at San Quentin, penned the following irreverent lines:
TO FAN THE FLAMES OF COURT RESPECT
James Rowan Forever
I must save the proletariat from the tactics of the stools,
The officials, Doyle and Fisher, they have broken all the rules,
And the forty-thousand wobblies are a bunch of ----- ----- fools,
But the Injunction makes us strong.
Chorus
Second Jesus Jimmy Rowan
Second Jesus Jimmy Rowan
Second Jesus Jimmy Rowan
And Injunctions make him strong.
It will cost them all the money; but I do not care for that,
I would rather pay a lawyer than to go and buy a gat,
And I must protect one-twenty from the bunch of
one-ten cats; So Injunctions make me strong.
To me the whole of labor ought to burn a special joss;
But for me this wobbly union would have been a total loss;
And I’m pretty sure His Honor will appoint me as their boss;
While Injunctions make me strong.1
Rowan organized his followers into what labor historian Robert L. Tyler called “something resembling a Puritan reform sect,” and on his release from prison started issuing a newspaper, The Industrial Unionist, which lasted about a year. The Emergency Program faction, which now considered itself the “real I.W.W.,” held its own sixteenth convention in Utah in 1925 and rewrote the constitution to provide complete autonomy for I.W.W. local industrial unions and an end to the per capita tax to national I.W.W. headquarters. It also passed a resolution against owning any property. Membership in the E.P. faction, never very high, dwindled until the group died out in the early 1930’s. The Chicago I.W.W. continued as the spokesman for the Midwestern and Eastern locals, numerically depleted in membership strength.
Rivalry with the American Communist Party, organized in 1919, also resulted in a membership decline as the gulf between the I.W.W. and the CP. widened in the 1920’s. In 1920 Moscow wooed the Wobblies to join the Communist International, praising the “long and heroic service of the I.W.W. in the class war.” Writing for the Comintern, Gregory Zinoviev urged the I.W.W. not to wait until the “new society is built within the shell of the old.” The new society, he wrote, must overthrow the existing state and, in turn, organize a dictatorship of the proletariat.2
The Russian Bolshevik coup attracted some I.W.W. leaders and activists such as Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Harrison George, George Hardy, and Charles Ashleigh. The majority of Wobblies, however, rejected the proposal to affiliate with the Comintern and became increasingly critical of the Soviet system. The distinction between the I.W.W. and the Soviet Union’s philosophies of communism was pointed out by historian Paul F. Brissenden who wrote: “On the whole, the I.W.W.’s have been Bolshevik and anti-syndicalist in their concepts of industrial unionism and the structure of a new society, and syndicalist and anti-Bolshevik in
their rejection of political action…. The I.W.W. believes in the gradual acquisition of control of industry by economic action on the job’ and has no clear idea of how the final overthrow of capitalism is to be accomplished; the communists accept industrial unionism but insist that it is necessary to overthrow the capitalist state and organize a dictatorship of the proletariat in order to build up the new society.”3 In the struggle for the leadership of the American left wing, the I.W.W., according to Brissenden, “rapidly lost ground to the communists,” who attempted to assume leadership of some of the more militant strikes and campaigns.4
In many respects the I.W.W. became a victim of changing American industrial technology following World War I, changes which it had intellectually anticipated and against which it continued to rebel. In the Pacific Northwest the automobile brought the logging camp closer to civilization. Migrations of Southerners to the area, and a general influx of population from other parts of the country reduced the need for single, transient lumber workers as more and more “homeguards” were hired by the logging industry.
In agriculture the expanding use of farm machinery also cut down the use of transient migrant laborers. The “auto tramp” replaced the “bindle stiff,” as whole families traveled by jalopy from one harvest to another. Thus, in addition to the losses suffered from ruthless employer suppression and doctrinaire organizational factionalism, the I.W.W. was confronted with fundamental changes in the work force, which contained fewer and fewer of the kinds of workers who had responded to its past appeals. Despite these problems, however, the I.W.W. carried on its organizing activities for the next several decades, losing ground in the 1930’s to the expanding industrial unions of the C.I.O.
The most important I.W.W.-led strike after 1917 took place in the Colorado coal fields, where for four months in 1927 and 1928 10,000 miners battled against conditions imposed by the company union, the Rockefeller Industrial Representation Plan, installed in the mines and mills of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company following the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado in 1914. When the I.W.W. called a two-day protest strike in the summer of 1927 against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists sentenced to death for a Massachusetts hold-up murder, half of Colorado’s 12,000 miners stopped work. Their protest led to a strike which started on October 18, 1927, against company domination and lack of outlet for miners’ grievances. On the first day of the strike, I.W.W. leader Paul Seidler, in charge of strike publicity, instructed strikers:
You are not to abuse anyone. You are not to strike anyone. Tell them they are hurting themselves as well as the rest of us. There will be no rough stuff on the job. The sheriff’s orders to his men are they must not shoot or abuse anyone. If anyone is going to be killed, let it be one of our men first.5
Despite Seidler’s nonviolent policy statements, opposition to the I. W. W.-led strike spread throughout Colorado. Military law superseded civil law in areas which the authorities declared were in a state of insurrection and riot. At Walsenburg the towns mayor led a band of citizens in demolishing the I.W.W. hall. At the Columbine Mine of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, state police and mine guards fired on an unarmed picket line, killing six workers and wounding twenty-three others. National Guard infantrymen and cavalry troops kidnapped and beat strike leaders, suspended union meetings, raided strikers’ homes and headquarters without warrants. Two more strikers and a sixteen-year old bystander were killed as strikers paraded to a hearing of the Industrial Commission in Walsenburg. The coroners jury pronounced the shooting unprovoked and condemned state police for showing “total disregard for human life,” but the policemen who fired the shots could not be found.6
The Colorado coal strike introduced innovations in strike technique. Striking miners used car caravans to carry their message to other communities to persuade workers to come off their jobs. I.W.W. organizer E. S. Embree and Milka Sablich, known as “flaming Milka, the rebel girl,” toured the United States on a fund-raising campaign. The Junior Wobblies was started by the children of strikers. Its goal was “to form educational classes to prepare the members to take their places in the ranks of organized labor and to arrange recreational programs.”7 Initiation fees were ten cents, and dues, five cents a month.
At the end of four months, the Colorado miners won an increase of a dollar a day, checkweighmen on the tipples, union pit committees in the mines, and enforcement of all state mining laws. “For the first time in the history of the Colorado coal fields,” wrote Donald J. McClurg in a recent study of the Colorado strike, “a general strike of miners had succeeded … (strike leadership of the I.W.W.) way in all ways exceptional.”8
During the depression years the I.W.W. joined with various organizations of unemployed workers that sprang up across the nation and set up its own Unemployed Unions which provided housing and food for jobless Wobblies while they carried on I.W.W. agitation. A handbill of the organization suggested, in part:
The jobless have to get together, somehow, and make so much noise in the world as to attract attention. Only by making a public scandal in every city and town will you break the silence of the press and receive notice. Only the fear of a general social conflagration will make the employers of labor, private or governmental, get together and devise ways and means. As long as you are contented to rot to death in silence, you will be allowed to do so…. But then, when you do get a job, then is your chance to take steps that it shall not happen again. Organize industrially in such great numbers that you are able, with your organized might, to cut down the workday to the required number of hours to provide employment for the jobless. This will possibly tide us over until we are able to take complete control and put an end to unemployment forever.9
The I.W.W. never recovered from the 1924 split in the organization. It lost its printing press and its building which it had bought in 1925 with the aid of money from the Garland Fund. When a new I.W.W. general secretary took office in 1932, he found only $29.00 cash with which to run the activities of the organization.
A large amount of money had been expended in the preceding two years in aiding the defense of miners charged with murder in the bloody and bitter Harlan, Kentucky, coal mining strike. In May 1930, 18,000 mountaineer miners in Harlan and Bell counties quit work to protest wage cuts and widespread layoffs. “We starve while we work; we might as well strike while we starve,” miners stated in a struggle widely publicized by left-wing organizations and the national press.10 For two years Harlan County remained in a virtual stage of siege—”a concentration camp which outsiders entered at the peril of their lives.”11 A gun battle between miners and mine guards at Evarts, Kentucky, left three mine guards and a miner dead, and forty-four miners indicted for murder. “What’s the use of going to law?” a Kentucky miner asked New York Times writer Louis Stark, “ain’t no justice for us in Harlan courts.”12
The I.W.W., which had been called into the Harlan strike when some of the Kentucky miners petitioned for a charter, undertook to help defend the miners indicted for the Evarts shooting. Zealous defense efforts saved all of the prisoners from the death penalty, and the last prisoner was released from jail in 1941. Despite this victory, the Harlan strike was lost, and “bloody Harlan” earned its reputation for being “the toughest place in the country to unionize.”13
Industrial Pioneer, June 1925.
Throughout 1932 and 1933, I.W.W. agitation and organization in Detroit added impetus to the growing unrest of automobile workers suffering from layoffs, wage cuts, and the tensions of speedup in the auto plants. Soapboxing, leafleting, a daily radio program, and weekend socials at the I.W.W. hall on Woodward Avenue provided the growth of a skeleton I.W.W. organization in some of the large auto plants, which helped spur quickie strikes against wage cuts in the Briggs, Hudson Body, and Murray Body plants. Metal finishers at the Hudson Body plant passed out I.W.W. leaflets which read, “Sit down and watch your pay go up.” The sit-ins resulted in five successive wage boosts in that department.
Inspired b
y this victory, the I.W.W. helped organize a strike at the Murray Body plant in December 1932. The failure of this strike, which came on the eve of wholesale layoffs due to a change in body design, was a blow to the I.W.W. organizers. Fred Thompson, an organizer in that campaign, wrote:
The loss of the Murray strike was the loss of the I.W.W. campaign in Detroit. Early in it, the big hall and the radio program were dropped…. Through the strike, but on a reduced scale, organizing efforts continued at other plants; and after it, house to house visiting centered on the Murray recruits; yet all but a few of the newly won members dropped out and new recruits became rare. The I.W.W. in Detroit was left with most of its members the unswerving Finns and Hungarians who had constituted its backbone in 1930.14
Some of the I.W.W. organizers moved on to Cleveland where, during the next few years, they leafleted, organized, and soapboxed, gave impetus to a strike of charwomen, whose picket lines stretched several blocks around the office buildings which they cleaned at night, and gained membership in several foundries and metal shops.
The I.W.W. achieved a longer record of collective bargaining in these Cleveland shops than anywhere else in its history. Shops organized in 1934, such as American Stove Company, were still in the I.W.W. in 1950, when the Cleveland local left the organization over the issue of signing Taft-Hartley affidavits.
Elsewhere in the early 1930’s I.W.W. construction workers struck at Nevada’s Hoover Dam, Cle Elum Dam in Washington, the Mississippi Bridge near New Orleans, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and the New York water tunnel. A branch of the I.W.W. Marine Transport Workers Union was started in Stettin, Germany, in 1929 and during the early 1930’s helped get supplies to the anti-Hitler underground. Likewise, the M.T.W. kept up protest for the four-watch system and the restoration of the old Shipping Board manning and wage scale. A harvest drive through the wheat belt met with vicious opposition in several of the grain-growing states, where authorities and farmers raided the workers’ camps, beat I.W.W. members, deported many, and jailed hundreds. In the Yakima Valley in Washington, a strike of I.W.W. “fruit glommers” against wages of seventy-five cents for a ten-hour day led to the jailing of hundreds in specially built stockades.