by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
The jailor brought a little piece of yellow paper and slipped it into Vanzettfs hand. He clutched it. Under his mustache he bit his lips. The prison clock struck four. The visit was at an end. I held his hand for a moment and quickly turned away. Doors were opening and shutting. Keys clanked. I looked back. With head high and quick step Vanzetti was walking through the grated wall of the west wing.
4
The I.W.W. Marine Transport Workers Union, started in 1913, reached its peak of influence about 1923. It had members on waterfronts and among seamen, engine crews, and stewards on boats sailing from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1919 the M.T.W. established a Latin American branch with headquarters in Buenos Aires. During the 1920’s members of the union struck jointly with members of the International Longshoremen’s Association in Portland and helped tie up the ports of San Pedro, Aberdeen, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Mobile, and Galveston during the 1923 I.W.W. protest strike against the continued imprisonment of “class war prisoners.” Conflicts with other dock-workers’ and seamen’s unions contributed to losses in M.T.W. membership and by the mid 1930’s the union had lost its effectiveness.
“The I.W.W. on a Full-Rigged Ship” by Harry Clayton was printed in the Industrial Pioneer (September 1926). It is one of the few stories about the influence of I.W.W. unionism on a sailors life.
Industrial Worker, July 26, 1932.
THE I.W.W. ON A FULL-RIGGED SHIP
By HARRY CLAYTON
A considerable amount of trade is still conducted in sailing vessels. These old relics of a bygone industrial era are, like other backwaters of capitalism, an opportunity for exploitation of labor to make up for technical inferiority. The fact that they can be still kept running shows that the power of exploitation is something marvelous. As I am now a slave on a “windjammer” and have not seen this particular part of the capitalist system recently exposed to the shame it deserves, I will take this opportunity to spread a little information about it, not new perhaps to the marine workers, but probably interesting to those who have never “gone to sea.”
We signed on “The Star of Russia” in Tacoma, June 1st of this year and are now out at sea thirty days. During that time we have seen but one steamer, the “President Wilson,” and have sighted no land except some island of the “Union Group”—these a long distance away over the waters of the South Pacific. How long the voyage will take depends entirely on the winds. A direct course to our final destination would be something like 6,000 miles, but we are apt to cover 10,000 or more because of weather conditions over which we have no control.
A Venerable Old Hulk
The “Star of Russia” is a full-rigged sailing vessel, formerly owned by the Alaska Parkers’ Association. It has been sold by them to a French company in New Caledonia, a French possession, 700 miles off the north coast of Australia, where the French capitalist government maintains a penal and exile colony, and inflicts like blessings of civilization upon the native population. The French company expects to strip down our ship and use it as a barge in Noumia, New Caledonia.
Talk as you like about the famous old shell games, three card monte games, and other million to one chances to lose money which the gambling fraternity has invented, but those propositions were highly moral and fair compared with the deals handed to the workers in these days. Our case, that of the “Star of Russia,” is one in point. The Alaska Parkers, a Guggenheim outfit, finds it convenient to dispose of this relic of the past, so they sell it to the Frenchmen for many times its original cost. But they are not satisfied with this, they must make still more profits and take out ol the workers’ hides the cost of delivering the obsolete old hulk. So workers in Tacoma load her with timber to be delivered and sold at ports on the way for a handsome profit, and this much more than pays the few dollars the crew get for delivering the ship itself to the buyer in Noumia. They put on 1,500,000 feet of lumber in Tacoma; 250,-000 feet will be discharged at Appia, Samoa, our first stop, and the rest at Noumia.
A Senator Speaks of Ships
And what do we get out of it? If you believe some people, we ought to pay for the privilege of living such a happy life. Senator Free, of California, in speaking officially on maritime affairs, said in substance that all that is required of those who man the ships of every sea is a strong back and a weak mind, and intimated that of course that is all they should be paid for. He was speaking in opposition to a raise in wages for American seamen. He arrived at this conclusion after making a few trips as a first class passenger on a steamboat.
This wordy congressman from the worthy state of California now knows full well that any lubber, himself included, can box the compass, keep the ship on its course in very troubled water, pull the braces, square and brace the yards, “jump up aloft” (sometimes 200 feet or more) and make fast the sails, launch the lifeboats without mishap to life or limb, splice wire and rope, set up standard rigging, stand by the fore boiling when the top sail is hauled in tacking ship, go up the old wooden gallen yard and put on a head earing without using the bull wunger. The good congressman is quite sure that any lubber, himself included, will know the difference between a bunt line and a gant line, and will realize when it is necessary to rig down a royal yard. Should the elements tear the sails to shreds, the expert Congressman Free will tell you that no skill or intelligence is necessary to distinguish between the roping of a sail and the flat seam in order to use a palm and needle; most any “hairy ape” will know how to put in a reef cringle when it is torn away; the seaman with nothing but muscle headgear to recommend him will keep cool and collected in times of trying emergencies when the lives of all on board depend on his executing complicated and technical orders with precision and exactness. Nothing need be said of the courage (perhaps the congressman doesn’t know what it means) needed to face snowstorms and climb aloft to make fast sails while terrific gales are raging and when cold blasts have covered the rigging with ice.
Well, Congressman Free was discussing the wages of sailors. He probably knows, but how many of the workers on land realize, how little a seaman has to look forward to when he reaches his voyage’s end? Ordinary seamen receive $47.50 on Shipping Board Vessels, and “A. B.’s” get $62.50. Crews on other ships (they are in a majority) rate less wages—even as little as $20 a month on the Panamanian Line. One cannot be particular as to what flag he sails under, as economic necessity knows no national boundaries. At the highest rates a seaman can earn $750 for a 365-day year, which means that he would have to have a steady berth, a thing that almost never happens; there is a long time of waiting between trips that must be spent “on the beach” in unre-munerative idleness.
But wages are not after all our major interest, or should not be. One of the most deplorable features of the whole system is the fact that the workers in all industries measure their welfare almost exclusively in dollars, in the amount of wages paid them, neglecting conditions, and especially living standards. The workers as a whole do not yet realize that since they produce all the wealth that there is, they are entitled to the very best and finest there is in life. One who makes this assertion will still meet with ridicule from workers themselves. They think it a huge joke when anybody seriously affirms that workers should ride in Pullman cars instead of box cars and in first class cabins instead of stuffy, foul-smelling fo’c’sles, or if one says that workers should have choice cuts of meat instead of hamburger steak—and in general should scorn the scraps and crumbs of the social product and demand and take the best.
On ship board they may not even get enough scraps. On this particular ship we know what actual hunger is. As I write it is just past midnight. Those on the “graveyard watch” (12 to 4 A.M.) are on duty. The night is cold, the kind of a night when men would relish a warm cup of coffee, but we are not allowed even that. The table is bare with the exception of some dry bread. We would like to have that congressman here!
When we are fed it is nothing wonderful. There was a time, when I enjoye
d the hospitality of the State of Sovereign Moronity, California, that I looked upon beans as a hateful abomination. But now pork has usurped the place of beans in my hierarchy of dislikes.
Our cook hasn’t washed himself since the three wise men went to visit the savior; the crew has him marked for frying if we should ever be wrecked and cast adrift on some foodless island, for he is already larded. But our cook, God rasp his greasy hide, is a genius of a sort. He can think of more ways to cook pork than the bible has contradictions. We get pork plain, parboiled, souped, fried, made into cakes, as wet hash and as dry hash, and as a spread for bread. Salt, fat pork it is, without a streak of lean, for breakfast, dinner and supper, all these many days. It’s ancient, too; I’m inclined to think that we are just now eating, on this voyage, the male of that famous pair of swine that was saved from the wrath of God at the time of the flood.
We begin to think kindly of cannibalism. It is said that these South Sea Islanders had only one domestic animal, the pig. What wonder that they went to any extreme to secure a change of diet? And these supposedly ignorant savages of New Caledonia and such places live on the most aristocratic meat in the world, man meat, while we poor sailors get the flesh of that mud wallowing, filth devouring, slime hound, the hog—and eat it right to the bristly snout! It’s not fair.
Of course, there is other food served to us. There is salt canned horse. Poor old Dobbin! After long years of arduous service, his well hardened muscles to be ungratefully stewed and dished out to us, his fellow slaves! This “hoss” we are eating now, I am persuaded, is the same identical one made famous so many years ago in song and story by Oliver Wendell Holmes—the “hoss” that pulled the One Hoss Shay.
Then, salt cod! Salt cod laid to rest in a hogshead when the art of salting was first invented, along about the time they built the Great Chinese Wall!
Looking forward to meal time is about as joyful as the last days of a condemned man.
On this sort of diet we are supposed to work twelve hours a day in fair weather and any number of hours in bad weather, to be called from our bunks in the wee hours of the morning to help tack ship, or to climb aloft in the dangerous, shrieking dark. It is far-fetched imagination that can find any pleasurable romance in this. Poets sing the beauty of the stars, but men who work watches of four hours on and four off find themselves too fagged to enjoy anything but the tired doze of a beast. Even the impressiveness of the mighty Pacific Ocean palls on one when we see nothing but its vast expanse of water, day after day.
This sort of life is bad for men, and surely nobody has to be convinced of it. But it was not until the I.W.W. came aboard this ship that anything was done to help much. On the last trip the whole crew was unorganized. There was a mixture of nationalities, and two men were part colored. The second mate, who is a born sucker, took every mean advantage of them and roundly abused them, calling the two mixed bloods, “Niggers,” and “Black Bastards,” flourishing a gun while he did all this.
Seven of that crew are still with us, but you can bet your sweet life that none of them are abused in the manner described, by mate, second mate, or skipper. As a matter of fact, the second mate now gives “orders” in a tone of apology. We made him realize right from the start that we were sticking together against those “aft” and that we would consider an injury to one an injury to all, resenting it with direct action.
This condition was brought about by the fact that soon after we came aboard, we lined up the seven old members of the crew, making it 100 per cent organized, I.W.W. We found that the old-timers on board had been working for less than the Shipping Board wage. We held a meeting, formulated demands for a uniform scale but didn’t present them until the skipper came to give orders to “cast off lines.” How could the master win and how could we lose with this kind of direct action tactics? He couldn’t do anything else but give in. He has to submit or stand to lose many times the sum involved in the raise in wages.
It didn’t take a ton of beef to convince the new members of the I.W.W. on this ship that the I.W.W. form of organization can deliver the goods. They may not all stay with the union, but the majority of them will, and they will be real social rebels. It is rebels we need.
The skipper may try some tricks on us at the end of the voyage, but we look to our solidarity to frustrate him. As I was writing the above he had the messboy in his cabin to feel him out about the crew. He asked the messboy, “Are you a W? You better keep away from them, Young Man, it’s a good thing to keep clear of those W’s.”
But his whole crew are “W’s” now.
5
Following his release from an Idaho prison where he had been sentenced under the state’s criminal syndicalism law, I.W.W. organizer E. S. Embree settled in Colorado to build the skeleton of a coal miner’s union in that area. Progress was slow until August 1927, when half of Colorado’s 12,000 miners responded to the I.W.W. call for a protest strike against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. After that successful two-day demonstration, organization of the miners proceeded rapidly, and on October 18, 1927, under I.W.W. leadership, the miners started a walk-out which lasted until February of the following year. The unsigned poem “Hold Fast: the Cry of the Striking Miners” was printed in Industrial Solidarity (January 17, 1927)-
HOLD FAST: THE CRY OF THE STRIKING MINERS
They buried us for eighteen hours in their slimy burrows,
They killed us by the thousands beneath their rotten tops,
They blew us skyward from the muzzles of the gassy shafts.
They paid our sweat and blood and broken bones
With wormy beans and rancid fat.
They made us live in shacks unfit for swine and dogs.
They forced us to go begging crusts of bread
From brothers poor as we, displaying stumps and
Blinded eyes as our right to beg.
They kept us in their stinking camps behind barbed wire
And stockades like prisoners of war, like convicts
Doing time.
And scarcely had the last clod hit our coffin when they drove
Our loved ones from their company shacks—
To scrub, and wash, to beg or steal,
Or starve or rot.
And then we met in the dark of night, in culverts, caves,
And deserted shafts to find a way from woe and want,
From slavery and misery.
Thus the Union was born.
How we struggled, how we fought and bled
For that puny Union babe. Oh, the tears we wept
And the blood we spilled and the lives we paid
To raise that precious child!
At Braidwood, Ludlow, Panther Creek, at Mingo, Latimer and Virden,
Mute tombs still speak of the price we paid
For our Union.
We, too, had our Valley Forge, where we slept on frozen ground
We, too, left the tracks of bleeding feet in the snow Of many a camp.
We, too, had our Fredericksburg and our Appomattox
In the war to preserve the Union.
We, too, had our Mons and Argonne fighting for democracy.
Now, you ask us to desert our Union—the Union that made us free.
You ask, and the hell we will.
Ask a starving mother to swap her child for a pot of beans.
Industrial Worker, June 6, 1936.
“Why, you dear fellow—I suppose you’re writing a poem about Mother Nature?”
“Nuts, lady, I’m just figuring out when I’ll be dead from starvation.”
With shivering limbs and empty guts.
6
“Education” by Clifford B. Ellis is taken from the I.W.W. pamphlet Twenty-Five Years of Industrial Unionism (Chicago, 1930). Ellis, who later became one of the editors of the Industrial Worker, was also author of an important I.W.W. pamphlet, Unemployment and the Machine (Chicago, 1934).
An accountant by trade, Ellis taught for a while at the Work Peoples’ College.
He was a well-known labor orator, especially in the Portland, Oregon, area.
EDUCATION
By CLIFFORD B. ELLIS
Editor of The Industrial Worker
THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATION
Education, in a practical and applied sense, may be defined as that training which enables one to understand and adapt one’s self to material reality. When we say “material” we remove the question beyond the field of metaphysical philosophy. The primary concern of the average human is to make a living—to survive—and that is a purely material problem. It deals only with the material factors of health, education and access to the material means of life unrestricted by man-made laws and inhibitions. If all men and women had an equal opportunity to make a living, education might be reduced to a simple and uniform course of instruction; but where equal access to the means of life is denied, the uniformity of school and college courses leading to uniform “degrees” makes the usual education no education at all. Most of our education today is mere mental gymnastics. It is designed not to fit one to make a living, but adapt one to the social order and teach respect for the class division of society into masters and wage slaves.
If education is to prepare one to perform the duties of life, as Webster says, it is apparent that it should be specialized to suit the needs of the individual. It is assumed by our educators that all members of society have certain duties in common, such as duties to the State, a common moral code and the amenities of social intercourse. If all the members of society were of approximately equal economic condition, the assumption might be accepted as a practical working proposition; but in a society divided by class lines, it is an absurdity. The most important material fact of modern social organization is completely and deliberately ignored in education; namely, that society is divided into two fairly well-defined classes consisting of those who work for wages and those who exploit the wage workers for profit and live by a species of gambling in the wealth produced by the other class.