Whichever the case, Wobblies they were almost from the start. Throughout its short tempestuous career (the IWW still exists but now as a ghostly abstraction) it was the outdoor wandering worker who personified it, romantically and realistically. The hobo, as we have seen, had already existed for several decades as a man conscious of his own identity, and he had grown a cortex of pride and obstreperousness as self-defence against the insecurity of his alienated life.
The IWW acted for these men and was made up of these men It produced a sense of brotherhood of the dispossessed, the knowledge of solidarity against the almost invariably cheating and unscrupulous boss, a front against the antagonism of the majority toward the solo stranger, and the thrill of a possible new dawn for all those at large in the twilight regions of American life. So the IWW became a transient train-riding union and its propaganda of allegiance grew out of hobo camp fire songs and slang; and in turn the IWW completed the draughtsmanship of the hobo and convinced him that, down in the gutter or the ditch or the mine, he had not only muscles other men didn’t have but also a certain berry of life. The IWW gave hundreds of thousands of ‘wage slaves and shovel stiffs’ a face and a mental direction.
Periodically the IWW spat out the urban progressives - the long-hairs and ‘spittoon philosophers’ - who attached themselves, From the beginning there were members who objected sniffily to those who gave the IWW its blood-and-thunder reputation - the Overall Brigade, despised as ‘the bummery’ and ‘the rabble’. Intellectual moderates such as Daniel DeLeon deplored these Westerners’ ignorance of political science and attacked them for turning the IWW into a ‘purely physical force body’.
Rudolph Katz primly described the Overall Brigade as consisting of ‘that element that travelled on freight trains from one Western town to another, holding street meetings that were opened with the song Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, and closing with passing the hat in regular Salvation Army fashion’.
DeLeon and Katz were positively right. From the time of the founding convention in Chicago when delegates sang ‘We have been naught, we shall be all’, the potency of the IWW was in that lucent faith - smash through to workers’ rule - and not in the textual arguments of office committees about negotiation and gradualism. Not only were the rank-and-file stiffs the ‘dispossessed and downtrodden’, they were also voteless non-citizens with no residence more permanent than a boxcar or a bunkhouse, and no property bulkier than their bedroll.
They saw no point whatsoever in parliamentary legislation and reform. They wanted industrial action - ‘lots of it, and right away’ - for they believed they were the vanguard of the revolution. The core of the IWW was ‘a fighting faith’.
The men who turned up at the first meeting in stagged overalls, black thousand-miler shirts, flannel blouses and red sweat rags around their throats, and who propped up their caulked boots on their blanket packs as they listened to the speeches - ‘a tough-looking lot’, one observer reported with nervous distaste - had beat their way there on freights. Smeltermen and timberbeasts and reapers and hard-rock blasters, they had come great distances to consolidate for action, not to listen to a tutorial on civil government from men whom they must have seen in the way a seventeenth-century critic saw Hobbes - none ‘had ever had a finger in the mortar’.
They were bitter, bellicose men, whose experience battling to survive amid an environment of giant indifference, had left them contemptuous of niceties of strategy. They wanted very direct, concrete things. They wanted their One Big Union. They wanted class war to establish a Cooperative Commonwealth, purged of class and racial distinctions, which would own and control the machinery of production and distribution. They wanted simply the overthrow of the capitalist system which sucked their blood and whose every ounce they hated.
So the Overall Brigade were solid in their loathing of the cautious, boss-conciliatory leadership of the conservative American Federation of Labor, or, as they preferred it, the American Separation of Labor.
DeLeon and his faction did not last long, and it is difficult to see how they could have, for after the 1908 convention DeLeon expressed his view of the hobo element in The Weekly People, fingers apparently tweezering nostrils as he wrote: ‘ … to the tune “I’m a bum, I’m a bum,” very much like the tune of “God wills it. God wills it!” with which Cuckoo Peter led the first mob of Crusaders against the Turks, Walsh1 brought this “Brigade” to the convention … Most of them, I am credibly informed, slept on the benches on the Lake Front and received from Walsh a daily stipend of thirty cents.’
The first bifurcated phase of the IWW ended in 1915 when the DeLeonites changed their name to the Workers’ International Industrial Union, because, reported Fellow Worker Crawford in the Industrial Union News, that October the ‘bummery’ had disgraced the letters IWW, and he continued: ‘The name IWW has come to be associated with petty larceny and other slum tactics. It is up to us to choose a new name so as to escape the odium …’ In the same publication the general secretary-treasurer denounced ‘the lunatics on the rampage’.
Divorce took place, but despite the IWWs move left dissension festered on below the surface like a grumbling appendix until in 1924 the lumberjack faction seceded from the main organization. A lofty contempt was still felt for the ‘red-blooded stiffs’ by the town-based ‘thinkers’. A 1924 pamphlet by James Rowan, one of the headquarters group, described the rogue administration as ‘The Grand Goblins … the hi-jack communist machine,’ and continued: ‘The hobo is the migratory worker: the homeguard is the non-migratory worker. The former is footloose, homeless, uncouth; the latter may have a home and family, and is perhaps not so much accustomed to hardship and rude living. In the IWW the hobo and the homeguard psychology never fused.’
He quoted from a General Office Bulletin complaining that the Wobs are ‘the industrial workers of the woods, and not of the world. That is, the migratory psychology dominates, to the disorganization of the IWW itself. Let’s make this plain. In an Ohio city an IWW Headquarters is wrecked and organization almost entirely destroyed. Why? Because the migratory element emphatically insisted on making a “flop house” of club rooms to which the homeguards wished to bring their families.
‘Again, in New York City, a meeting is addressed by a migratory worker. He shouts, “To hell with your jobs! To hell with Defence! Be independent of your jobs; throw it up and go to jail, as I do!” The result is the driving away of married home-guards, with wives and children, who cannot afford such sacrifices.’
When the pro-political ‘yellow’ doctrinaires gathered up their skirts and departed, it seemed that at last confusion had terminated an unsatisfactory situation in which two national labour organizations of incompatible aims and tactics had operated under the same title.
Left with the name, which increasingly shrilled like a burglar alarm in the ears of solid citizen America, was the Overall Brigade. The direct-action ‘bummery’ or ‘red’ Wobs had in any case already imposed their ferocious fundamentalist attitudes on the movement. In 1912, during a San Diego free-speech fight - the planned invasion of an industrial trouble spot to test out soapbox advocacy of strikes and militancy, which ended in pitched fights with police and mass imprisonment - the local Tribune put in print the way most residents spoke of these men who were agitators as well as tramps.
‘Hanging is none too good for them; they would be much better dead, for they are absolutely useless in the human economy; they are the waste material of creation and should be drained off into the sewer of oblivion there to rot … like any other excrement.’
It should be remembered that the ‘excrement’ had been holding public political meetings, as they were entitled to do under the Constitution.
The indigenous nature of the IWW born from the insemination of peculiar American conditions by distant European revolutionary theories, became dominant: it was the party of floaters, the fraternity of hobo brothers who chalked up slogans and greetings on division point water tanks, held delegate meetings in
jungles, and could count on the companionship of another red card carrier on a branch freight in the Montana mountains or in a wheat field camp in Minnesota.
This spirit had been there from the beginning, uncompromisingly, in the figure of Big Bill Haywood, one-time cowboy, miner and homesteader, blinded in one eye in a Utah mine accident, who had left Silver City to take over as organizer for the Western Federation of Miners and the Socialist Party, and who created his reputation by tramping straight through the line of militia bayonets to speak from Denver’s court house steps during the Coeur d’Alene strike of 1,200 miners, when nine were indicted for murder.
At the first convention it was Haywood - ‘a powerful and aggressive embodiment of the frontier spirit’ - who, rejecting the AF of L’s craft unionism for creating ‘scabbery and snobbery’, and setting apart the skilled from the unskilled as the ‘aristocracy of labour’, declared: ‘We are going down in the gutter to get the mass of the workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living … the skilled worker today is exploiting the labourer beneath him, the unskilled man, just as much as the capitalist is.’
The IWW’s violence and ruthlessness were tempered to match the violence and ruthlessness used against the industrial labourer. It means little to refer broadly to clashes between work force and management. Some examples are necessary to give the taste of the lawlessness and cruelty which flared through industrial disputes in America until very recent times, a quality of hatred and fury not evaporated yet.
One of the first and bloodiest of the IWW organized strikes was at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, in July 1909, two months of bitter upheaval which set the pace of IWW militancy for the rest of its active life. Eight thousand employees of the Pressed Steel Car Company downed tools for better conditions, and the Company’s instant and predictable reaction was to call in the ‘cossacks’, the Pennsylvania State Constabulary, whose record was for hitting straight out into the middle of labour disturbances.
On 12 August a steel worker named Harvath was killed, ‘in cold blood’, by the cossacks. The strikers’ reply was an eye-for-an-eye ultimatum which gave McKees Rocks its niche in labour rolls. The police commander was informed that the life of a cos-sack would be taken in retaliation for every steel worker killed. A week later a party of steel men was attacked and a policeman was shot dead in the fray. More steel workers came gunning their way in and five guards were shot down. The battle spread. More strikers and guards fell dead and wounded before the company troops fled for cover, leaving the strikers the field and the offer of settlement around the conference table.
In June 1917 fire exploded in the Butte Speculator Mine and 200 miners clawed at the concrete bulkheads for the steel manholes which had been skimped by the company in disregard of safety regulations. There was a volitional strike and Frank Little, an IWW organizer - although already on crutches, a leg in plaster from an earlier labour brawl when he had committed the seditious act of reading the Declaration of Independence in public - arrived in Butte to take over. He made a speech that evening in the ball park. Afterward six masked armed men entered his room in the Finn Hotel and beat him up. He was dragged at the end of a rope behind a Cadillac to the Milwaukee Railroad trestle. Both kneecaps were smashed. He was found next morning, half naked, hanged on the rope from the bridge. No attempt was made to find the murderers, but next morning the town was flooded with private mine guards and State militiamen to ensure that law and order prevailed.
Atrocities of a slightly milder sort were commonplace wherever the solid citizens were determined to protect decency and American freedom: roughly translated, the employer’s freedom to dictate the terms he chose. In 1917 in Arizona armed guards of the United Verde Copper Company rounded up seventy IWW strikers, herded them on cattle cars and dumped them on the far side of the California line, where they were driven back by a sheriff’s posse and back again in exhausted shuttlecock.
At Bisbee vigilantes made a night raid on the homes of striking miners, held 1,162 in the ball park all night, next morning put them at rifle point on cattle cars, threw them off in the desert without food or water, and kept them out of town until the strike was broken.
At Tulsa an armed mob broke up a union meeting, rushed away the leaders in cars, roped them to trees and flogged them with blacksnake whips, afterward pouring hot tar on the lacerations and bursting pillows over them. In the Wheatland hop fields city officials rolled up in cars with sawed-off shotguns and broke up the strike meeting by killing four. Another four - lumberjacks this time - were killed at Shreveport, Louisiana, in a ‘daylight massacre’ by timber company mercenaries, and fifty-eight strikers were jailed while other men and their families were blacklisted out of the region. In the San Diego free-speech fight Ben Reitman was stripped and his buttocks branded with the letters IWW. In Centralia, Wesley Everest, logger unionist, was beaten by a mob, castrated and hanged from a trestle of the Chehalis River bridge.
27 Don’t waste time in mourning. Organize!
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Joe Hill: The Preacher and the Slave
Of course all this brutality was not a spontaneous sport. As always, in the entire turbulent, gory history of American labour relations, such acts spouted from deeper springs: the disrespect for law in the Westering outlook, the habit of settling personal or community conflicts arbitrarily, the conditions of pioneer anarchy in which toughness ran the show. Generally employers were in a stronger position than the reckless but feckless drifters who had neither a powerful wish nor the opportunity to form permanent local bonds. And finally there was the faith in rugged individualism which was as aggressively acted out by the labourer as by the boss.
So the IWW produced a unique breed of migrant agitator, a brave utopianist who tried to put his romantic pedantry into action and invariably suffered - and quite often died - for it. One who did die, although many still believe that his execution was a frame-up, was the man who pre-eminently made the IWW a ‘singing organization’, an immigrant Swede who took the name Joe Hill when he arrived in America in 1902 at the age of twenty.
Then he was as anonymous as a seed in the wind, among the millions transplanting themselves from the old world. Thirteen years later when he died before a firing squad in Utah State Penitentiary, he was an international hero of the left, a labour martyr whose legend has lasted.
He received the death sentence for allegedly killing a Salt Lake City grocer in a hold-up in January 1914. Hill denied it to the end, but he refused to testify, to give information about his movements on that night - or explain how he got his bullet wound, which the prosecution maintained resulted from the exchange of shots in the shop.
His appeal was turned down. More than 10,000 letters and telegrams arrived protesting against the decision and demonstrations were staged all round the world; the Swedish ambassador interceded and President Wilson obtained a two-week stay. But Utah executed him.
In one of his last letters Hill wrote: ‘… there had to be a “goat”. And the undersigned, being as they thought, a friendless tramp, a Swede, and worst of all, an IWW, had no right to live anyway … I have lived like an artist and I shall die like an artist.’ His farewell note to Haywood ran: ‘Goodbye, Bill. I die like a true rebel,’ and ended with the phrase which was adrenalin for the IWW’s bloodstream: ‘Don’t waste any time in mourning, Organize!’
On the afternoon before the shooting party Hill wrote out his Last Will for a newspaper reporter:
My will is easy to decide
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan -
‘Moss does not cling to rolling stone.’
My body? Ah, if I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
This was done. After his cremation pinches of his ashes were sealed in envelopes and sent to iww members in every s
tate in the Union, and throughout the world and they were emptied into the wind, so Joe Hill went away much as he had arrived in America.
He left behind his songs. Casey Jones - The Union Scab had been printed on cards and sold for strike relief in every West Coast City. More and more of his lyrics went into the ‘Little Red Song Book’, the IWW’s Songs of the Workers, which had on its cover the unequivocal declaration of intent: ‘To Fan the Flames of Discontent’.
Hill invented Mr Block, the character who stupidly placed his faith in Sam Gompers and the AF of L, and he invented Scissor Bill, the bum too lazy and bemused by capitalist propaganda to join a union. The thousands of strikers in the Wheatland riot in 1913 were singing Mr Block, and Scissor Bill - sung to the tune of Steamboat Bill - instantly entered political vernacular and folk lore as a booby figure.
Joe Hill’s most famous song was The Preacher and the Slave, set to the tune of Sweet Bye and Bye and better known by its recurrent line Pie in the Sky :
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Hard Travellin Page 31