by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
During World War II, I.W.W. activity, carried on in Western mining camps and along the waterfront, led Business Week to comment on January 6, 1945: “The I.W.W. shows signs of life. In the metal shops of Cleveland, the vanadium mines of California, the copper diggings of Butte, on the waterfront of San Diego, New Orleans, and New York, the dead past is stirring and men are carrying red cards.”15 A year after the war, the New York Times reported that I.W.W. membership numbered 20,000. Time magazine reported on the 1946 I.W.W. convention with its characteristic flippancy: “Thirty-nine men and a grandmotherly looking woman met in an office building on the northside of Chicago to pass resolutions denouncing Capitalism, Fascism, Nazism, the C.I.O., the A.F.L., and war…. With that off their chests, the Industrial Workers of the World went home.”16
The wartime revival of the organization was not long lasting. Although at its 1946 convention, the I.W.W. had reaffirmed its opposition to the Communist Party in a resolution which read, in part, “we look upon the Communist Party and its fledglings as a major menace to the working class … the interests of world peace can best be served by labor movements that clearly represent the interests of labor and not the interests of any political state,” the I.W.W. was placed on Attorney-General Tom Clark’s list of subversive organizations. Soon after, the Treasury Department ruled that the I.W.W. was subject to paying a corporate income tax, and the final blow came when I.W.W. leaders refused, on principle, to sign the non-communist affidavit required by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and, in the process, lost the Cleveland members.
The I.W.W. picketing which probably attracted the most attention in recent years was held at the New Republic magazine in April 1948. When an article by Wallace Stegner in the January 6 issue suggested that Joe Hill might have been guilty, the Friends of Joe Hill Committee formed and asked that corrective information be published in the magazine. The Committee engaged in extensive research and submitted a study of the Joe Hill case to the magazine. The New Republic ran a synopsis of the study; the whole document was printed in the Industrial Worker on November 13, 1948; the picketing was covered by the New Yorker and the New York Times and the editor of the Nation wryly commented:
We found the Stegner piece interesting, but we doubt whether the legendary figure of Joe Hill can or even should be discredited by the disclosure of the failings of a mere man, Joe Hillstrom, who happened to be turned to legendary use. Such figures are not disposed of so easily. We are not surprised that Wobblies, who are legendary themselves, have appeared before the New Republics door. We shan’t be surprised, either, to hear that Joe Hill is among them.17
The Taft-Hartley Act, the subversive list, and the cold-war period took its toll of I.W.W. membership, and the I.W.W. celebrated its fiftieth anniversary unable to engage in collective bargaining anywhere. Historian Robert L. Tyler described a recent visit to the I.W.W. hall in Seattle, once a busy center for Wobbly activity and membership:
Inside the hall near the door stand two battered roll top desks stacked high with piles of papers and newspapers. A naked light bulb hangs from the ceiling over the desks. In the rear of the hall, several elderly men in work clothes play cribbage at a heavy round table. Against the wall near the door stands a book case, the library of the Seattle I.W.W. branches. A few titles are readily discernible, Marx’s Capital, the Bureau of Corporations’ investigations and report of the lumber industry published in 1913 and 1914, Gustavus Myer’s History of the Great American Fortunes, Darwin’s Origin of Species and, oddly enough, T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems. Above the book case, the Wobblies have hung three ancient photographs, portraits of the three principal Wobbly “martyrs,” Joe Hill, Frank Little, and Wesley Everest. Underneath the picture of Everest someone had hand-printed his last words, spoken as the lynchers dragged him from the Centralia jail, “Tell the boys I died for my class.” These three pictures give a curious ikonlike impression.18
Industrial Pioneer, August 1926.
Yet the I.W.W. persists to the present day; its biweekly newspaper issued from the Chicago headquarters is as lively and provocative as former I.W.W. publications. Its tiny group of members remains zealous, idealistic, and strongly class conscious, convinced that the working class needs the type of organization it has been striving these sixty years to build.
Feared yesterday, almost forgotten today, the Wobblies nevertheless left an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American society. Fighting capitalism and Soviet communism, embracing direct action and democracy, the Wobblies awakened the idealism and stirred the imaginations of millions of workers. Although the I.W.W. never numbered more than 100,000 at the peak of its membership, its doctrine of One Big Union found a response from all types of workers that was to help motivate later and more successful unions.
More than any other early American labor movement, the I.W.W. laid the groundwork for the mass organization of the unskilled and foreign born in the C.I.O. and many A.F.L. unions of the 1930’s and ‘40’s. Many of its members, trained in free speech fights and militant strikes, steeled by trials and frame-ups, helped form the industrial unions of the 1930’s and provided local leadership for the strikes of that decade.
I.W.W. strike techniques—the sit-downs in Schenectady and Detroit, the chain-picketing in Lawrence, the car-caravans in Colorado—once considered revolutionary, became the practices of later A.F.L. and C.I.O. unions. Defiant and flamboyant in their speeches, the Wobblies were damned, as Haywood once said, for preaching what less radical unions practiced.
They left their mark in the civil liberties field when Wobbly free speech fights, trials, and persecutions by vigilante groups aroused liberals across the country to the need for defense organizations to protect the rights of social dissidents. Wobbly fights for better conditions in the bunk-houses and farms focused attention on the problems of migratory agricultural labor which instigated official investigations and some attempts at reform. Their agitation in jails against notorious prison abuses and use of prison contract labor led to public awareness which eventually brought about more humane prison conditions.
The legend and influence of the I.W.W. endures along with its contribution to our literature, language, and folklore. As historian Robert L. Tyler has written about the I.W.W.: “It is a story of the spurned and downtrodden who fought to win respect and dignity as something due their power, who knew that respect and dignity were not a gift but a payment demanded by strength. Though perhaps not true to all details of the record, it is this legend that survives, and makes even contemporary conservatives a little sentimental about the Wobblies, and that has enriched the tradition of the labor movement.”19
Sentimental legend, perhaps. But the Wobblies earned a prominent place in the history of American social protest movements and left all workers a genuine heritage expressed in the concept of their 1905 Manifesto, and made meaningful by their sacrifices and battles—industrial democracy.
1
Millions of words have been written about the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, a shoemaker and a fishpeddler convicted in Massachusetts of a 1920 hold-up murder and sentenced to an. execution which took place in 1927. The case has inspired editorials, novels, plays, speeches, pamphlets, articles, and poems as well as lengthy legal analyses. Convicted during the height of this country’s fear of foreign-born radicals, to many Americans the men symbolized a threat to the American way of life and American religious, patriotic, and property values.
But, as Professor Robert Weeks writes in his book, Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti (New York, 1958): “To millions, Sacco and Vanzetti, irrespective of their being anarchists, draft dodgers, and convicted murderers, were saintly, dignified men—martyrs to social prejudice. Vanzetti in particular became a hero to a whole generation of liberal intellectuals, who memorized phrases from his unidiomatic but powerful speeches and letters.”
The following three tributes to Sacco and Vanzetti were printed in the I.W.W. press. The first, “Sacco and Vanzetti” by the popular poet Jim Seymour
, was printed in the Industrial Pioneer (December 1921). The second, “A Jest” by an unknown writer who signed herself “Lisa,” was printed in the Industrial Pioneer (July 1924). The third, also from the Industrial Pioneer (July 1924), is an article by Matilda Robbins (Rabinowitz), who was active in the I.W.W. Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee.
SACCO AND VANZETTI
By JIM SEYMOUR
What’s all this fuss they’re makin’ about them guys?
Darned if some people ain’t kickin’ because they got
What was comin’ to ’em;
Sayin’, be Jesus,
It’s ‘cause they’re reds.
That’s bad enough,
But that ain’t all—
Not by a damn sight.
Why, man alive,
They’re only a couple o’ God damn dagoes!
I don’t see how anybody can expect white people
To do anything for the likes o’ them.
What are they good for anyway?
What’s their whole damn tribe good for?
There don’t any of ’em know anything
Till they get over here.
When they get over here they hear some good music—
Band pieces an’ grand op’ra an’ jazz.
Why, they can put a nickel in the piano
An’ hear the very latest!
An’ as fer arky—arky—
Fine building—
Why, you’d think they never even looked
At our office buildings.
An’ how about that statue of McKinley in the park!
Solid cast iron, be Jesus!
An’ books—oh, boy!
Didn’t they ever hear about Elinor Glyn?
Or Diamond Dick?
Or Marie Corelli? …
Or the free poet-ry?
Why the hell don’t they read
An’ learn something?
Then maybe they’d ketch up with the people
Tha’t got wireless telegraphs.
But the hell of it is, they ain’t got no—
Wotta ya call it?—
Oh yes, no historic past.
If they ever get one o’ them they’ll be all right.
Then they can talk about 1776
Instead of yellin’ their fool heads off
About Garrybaldeye an’ Spartycuss.
But they’re no thin’ but God damn dagoes.
Now me: I’m an American, I am.
We’re the real people, we are.
We ain’t dagoes—not on yer tintype.
We got railroads, ‘n’ telephones ‘n’—
Automobiles ‘n’—
Office buildings ‘n’—
Them places where ya look at the stars.
An we got some of the biggest deserts in the world.
An’ we keep ’em unirrigated in spite o’ hell V high water.
There ain’t nobody gointa make our land so dang cheap
That ev’rbody can own a piece of it
An’ put the price o’ truck
Down t’ nothin’ …
Not us.
We ain’t dagoes.
No s’r, I ain’t sheddin’ no tears
Over them two guys.
It serves ’em right.
It ain’t so much because they’re reds—
That’s bad enough, God knows,
But bein’ a damn ignorant foreigner is the limit.
They not only don’t know nothin’ about books ‘n’ music,
‘N’ inventin’ ‘n’ science,
‘N’ makin’ purty pictures ‘n’ such things,
But they don’t even know howta talk
The American language right.
Send ’em up, say I,
Show ’em that our courts is American.
We don’t get our law from Italy.
We don’t care whether they done it or not.
To hell with ’em!
They’re dagoes.
Industrial Solidarity, March 24, 1931.
2
A JEST
By LISA
Old Lady Life has strange gifts
In her rag-bag carry all.
You can hear her cackle indecently as she hands them around.
There is an Italian man—
His name is Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
He has a round face, and genial drooping mustache,
But his eyes are gaunt with love
For that Old Harridan.
Mostly he is sober, but when he smiles
A thousand sunbeams dance a jig around him.
He is a man who hates all moneyed things.
Joy comes to him through velvet, starless nights and yellow days;
Through those, his masters first, and now his friends,
He served in solitude—
Karl Marx, and young Rousseau,
And Tolstoy, Dante, and Garibaldi
And many hundred others.
Joy comes to him through teaching brother-love
And freedom to those slaves,
Whose slavery tears his heart.
He has no hate for little things
Like men and gods—
But most, most bitterly he hates
That ceaseless, grinding mill
That some call capital and others greed—
That grinding, grinding, grinding, night and day
Crushes those men he loves to nameless dust.
His life was crowded out of time for love
Of women.
But children used to crawl upon his back
To tweak his hair, and like a bear
He’d growl and shake them off
And they would scream with laughter and climb back.
Sometimes he was a laborer, a cook,
A dish wiper behind a dirty bench.
He fished, he was a porter, kept a store,
And times he roamed about from place to place
Just living.
A dish of ravioli and a not too good cigar
Made Plato all the sweeter
To Vanzetti.
Wouldn’t you think that shameless Old Spinster
Would be generous to a man like that?
She cackled indecently and pawed through her rag-bag carry-all
Then she handed out a conviction of
Murder in the First Degree
For a particularly bloody business.
The Old Lady has a wry sense of humor.
3
ONE OF OURS
By MATILDA ROBBINS
We waited. The high-ceilinged room with iron bars for walls through which could be seen the stone stairs leading to tiers of cells, was the prison reception hall. It was June outside, but here the stone floor and the cold, stale air coming up thru the grated walls chilled. Keys clanked. Doors opened and shut. Huge doors that were portions of the walls. They were opened by a guard whose sole duty seemed to be the opening and shutting of these doors. Opening and shutting of doors. He clanked his keys. They were the only living thing about him. He moved like an automaton opening and shutting doors. His face was expressionless. The guard at the table in the center of the dim, gray hall looked neither to the left nor right of him. He sat rigid, looking straight ahead of him. Into the depths he seemed to look through the grated wall.
Doors opened and shut. Keys clanked. Chilren came to see their fathers. Mothers their sons. Wives their husbands. A young prisoner was smiling up at his sweetheart. Looking up into her eyes ingratiatingly. His own eyes were feverish. There were deep marks around them of sleepless nights and torment.
The west wing door opened and shut. The guard shook his keys and stepped aside. Vanzetti! He came toward us with a quick, springy step, his figure taut, his wonderful smile falling upon us like a pale ray of sunlight. He shook hands with us. “I am so pleased to see you, comrades!” How soft and vibrant his voice! How his sensitive mouth quivered under his drooping mustache.
I had not seen him in three years.
Not since that scorching day in July, 1921, when I saw him and his fellow victim, Sacco, in the steel cage in a Massachusetts’ courtroom. He leaned intently forward, his soft gray eyes full of questioning and of sorrow, while about him was being cast a net of lies upon which the Commonwealth built up its case and found him and Sacco guilty of murder. There was a light in those gray eyes then that could not be extinguished. Four years of the dim cell in the west wing have failed to extinguish it.
We talked. It was hard for me to bring the words up out of my throat. They got mixed up with the tears welling up in it and hurt with their throbbing. Vanzetti has a soft, melodious voice, but charged with the passionate appeal of the dreamer and the social rebel. Except for his comment that his ill-ventilated cell hurts his lungs and that he cannot see the sky from the prison workshop where he makes automobile plates, he did not refer to himself again. But he repeated twice that he could not see the sky. He wanted so to see the blue sky!
How eager he was for news of the proletarian movement! How those soft eyes would light up with hope of labor’s triumph; how sadden at labor’s defeats!
Vanzetti has learned English during his four years of prison. He speaks it with the precision of a foreigner acquiring a new tongue. But he invests it with a charm of liquid inflection with which his own Italian tongue is so exquisitely beautiful. When he spoke to his two Italian friends who were with us, it was like music that rose up and vibrated through the prison catacomb. His smile was like a benediction. His eloquent hands play upon the hearts.
“You have many friends everywhere,” I said to him, “friends who love you and will continue to work for your liberation.”
I shall always remember the wonderful light of gratitude that came into his eyes as he said, “Ah, I know, I know, I feel. That is why I am still living.”
Still living! This noble soul, this generous heart, this dreamer of human brotherhood and beauty still living under the shadow of the electric chair! There was the night when 20,000 volts of lightning snuffed out the life of one man! What a night of horror! He lies awake thinking of the men killed and the men that kill. Passionate apostle of freedom and of service to mankind; rebel against a world where men maim their fellow men in the name of law; where justice is in the hands of men who cannot hear, who cannot see, who cannot understand the spirit of Vanzetti.