There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Frances Perkins and the New York Factory Commission’s George Price, along with Pauline Goldmark of the Consumers League, also returned to the issues that had been at the heart of Lochner. That 1905 Supreme Court decision had rejected the idea that New York State could police sanitation and other conditions in bakeries, but Price and Goldmark shrewdly transferred the focus from the workers to the consumer, uncovering compelling evidence that urban bakeries, frequently located in basements, were horribly unclean and so foul as to be infested with bugs and vermin. One could only imagine the condition of the bread and other baked goods produced in such environs. The public reacted with strong concern to this type of exposé, much as it had to Upton Sinclair’s eye-opening critique of the meat business a few years earlier. So did the business sector, which argued that any new restrictions in the name of bakery sanitation would raise the price of bread, thus destroying the profit margins of small businesses. Still, the FIC won legislation that set minimum standards for the health, safety, and cleanliness of baking facilities, including provisions for washup sinks, clean bathrooms, and safe drinking water. Later the FIC turned to issues of child labor, the minimum wage, and work performed in the home.

  Perkins once observed that the New Deal originated with the victims of the fire at Triangle Shirtwaist. There’s no doubt the tragedy was a source of lasting feeling, an emotional touchstone for the labor movement and liberals generally. The memory of the disaster—a city’s utter helplessness as teenage working girls fell from the sky to their deaths—would haunt a generation of activists and politicians; many, including Perkins and Robert Wagner, were destined to join fellow New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt in devising the century’s greatest agenda of worker reforms.104

  CHAPTER SIX

  WE SHALL BE ALL

  IT WAS LABOR STRUGGLE THAT HELPED KILL off the fable of the Old West. As bloody conflict in Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene in 1892 and the uprising of armies of unemployed in 1894 had demonstrated, western workers, despite the region’s storied reputation as a place of limitless possibility, where a person might rise on his or her own ability, shared fully the desperation of industrial labor in the cities of the East. Pacific Northwest lumberjacks, harvest migrants in California, Rocky Mountain coal and hard-rock miners, all struggled no less, and almost always in greater isolation, than their toiling brethren in the mills and factories of New England or New York. On June 27, 1905, the two factions—eastern and western labor, 186 delegates representing thirty-four labor unions—came together in the middle of the country in the hope of unifying their cause; in a multiday meeting at a Chicago union hall they founded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

  “Big” Bill Haywood, a legendary miner, saloon-brawler, and Western Federation of Miners (WFM) organizer out of Denver, termed the gathering “the Continental Congress of the Working Class,” and surely an observer seeking to confirm the diversity of America’s laboring men and women could have summoned no more convincing a scene. Roughhewn types in kerchiefs and cowboy boots from the rambunctious WFM mingled with bookish eastern Socialists and radicals; Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party greeted Mother Jones; Haywood introduced himself to tiny Lucy Parsons, the widow of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons and now a Chicago labor activist in her own right. Daniel DeLeon, head of the Socialist Labor Party, was in attendance, as were Vincent St. John, a much-admired WFM leader of Colorado miners known as “The Saint,” and the Southwest’s fighting labor priest, Father Thomas J. Hagerty.

  The group made an emotional pilgrimage to the Haymarket martyrs’ memorial in Waldheim Cemetery, before returning to the hall to begin work. The goal the participants had set for themselves was nothing less than the reimagining of the American labor movement, offsetting the power of ever-bigger corporations with “One Big Union” that would unite the concentrated yet vulnerable workers in eastern industries with the dockworkers, fruit pickers, miners, and “timber-beasts” of the West. Unlike the AFL, which was a federation of trade unions, or the ARU, which had been an industrial union of rail trades, the IWW was to be a syndicate representing all trades and industries; it would be open to skilled and unskilled workers regardless of race, gender, or nationality; the unemployed would also be welcomed. The movement would wear proudly its class consciousness. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” declared the preamble to the IWW’s constitution. “There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life.”1

  The IWW’s embrace of unskilled workers offered a sharp departure from the policy of the AFL, a group the founders of the IWW did not hesitate to rebuke. “The American Separation of Labor,” they called it, a “coffin society” obsessed with illness and death benefits rather than real change for workers. The AFL, Debs joked, sought “to chloroform the working class while the capitalist class goes through its pockets.”2 Haywood, who had once watched Sam Gompers in action at a WFM conclave, thought it “amusing to see the big broad-shouldered men of the West taking the measure of this undersized individual that called itself the leader of labor.”3

  The AFL didn’t hesitate to return fire. Gompers dismissed the IWW’s Chicago gathering in the pages of the American Federationist as simply the latest futile effort by radical Socialists to “divert, pervert, and disrupt” the American labor movement.4 “The mountain labored and brought forth a mouse,” Gompers quipped of the IWW’s emergence, “and a very silly little mouse at that.”5

  The IWW’s gadfly delight in tweaking the labor establishment would match its taste for heated rhetoric as it vowed a class struggle that would dramatically transform American society. “I despise the law and I am not a law-abiding citizen,” Haywood warned. “We are the Revolution!”6 The organization’s eventual membership, never more than sixty thousand, was slight compared to the AFL’s 3 million, but because the Wobblies, as the group became known, favored high-profile, at times theatrical methods, it quickly came to enjoy an outsize reputation. “There was something about the Wobs that made stars sparkle and beam,” member Len De Caux recalled, “that raised one’s eyes to the heavens.”7 (The precise origin of the term “Wobblies” is uncertain, although it was likely inspired by the two Ws in the group’s name and possibly denoted the IWW’s freewheeling style of labor advocacy, which, especially to outsiders, could appear erratic.)

  While the IWW was convincing in its stated aim to disturb and unsettle the complacent, it was less precise about what the “cooperative commonwealth” or “industrial commonwealth” it spoke of achieving would actually be like, other than to propose that a syndicate of industrial unions would provide a superior organizing basis for society. This would not be attained by “dropping pieces of paper into a hole in a box,”8 as the IWW held no faith in the electoral process, nor was the group drawn to notions of industrial democracy or the conference system. Power would be won by “a series of strikes, leading to a general strike which would force the capitalists to capitulate,” explains historian Patrick Renshaw. The IWW would be “the embryo of the new society” as well as “the revolutionary instrument for achieving it,”9 an idea captured in the IWW’s version of “The Internationale”:

  Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

  Arise, ye wretched of the earth!

  For justice thunders condemnation.

  A better world’s in birth.

  No more tradition’s chains shall bind us;

  Arise, ye slaves! No more in thrall!

  The earth shall stand on new foundations;

  We have been naught—We shall be All!

  ’Tis the final conflict!

  Let each stand in his place.

  The Industrial Union.

  Shall be the Human Race.10

  “You never heard anybody sing the way those guys sang,” author James Jones said of the IWW. “Nobody sings like that unless it’s for religion.” Nor was it possible to entirely dismiss the visions
of cataclysmic social change that occupied them, for an actual workers’ revolution was at that moment occurring in Europe. The founding of the IWW took place only six months after Bloody Sunday—January 22, 1905—when a peaceful march to petition Tsar Nicholas II for national representation had ended in bloodshed as soldiers opened fire on the protestors outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, killing and wounding hundreds. Infuriated Russian workers staged a national general strike, and sailors mutinied aboard the battleship Potemkin, among other disruptions. In an attempt to restore calm, Tsar Nicholas was forced to relinquish some of his authority to an elected parliament and establish civil rights and other reforms. The IWW looked to the possibility that, in America, too, sweeping change might be inspired by the chaos that could ensue through the withholding of labor. Indeed, many of the western veterans of the WFM could identify wholly with the Russian people who had thrown off tsarist rule; they believed that in recent labor fights in the West they had glimpsed the face of capitalism in its most ruthless guise, and that it was as oppressive and inhumane as any Old World regime.

  Some crises in American labor history were particularly formative—Haymarket, Pullman, Homestead. In the West a seminal event had been the harsh defeat handed striking miners in Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene region in 1892. A Mine Owners Protective Association (MOA) had cut wages and increased hours, and when the Coeur d’Alene Miners Union struck, several mines reopened using scab labor. A Pinkerton agent, Charles A. Siringo, who called himself “the Cowboy Detective,” had, under the name C. Leon Allison, obtained work at the Gem mine and infiltrated the miners’ union so convincingly he was made its recording secretary. He fed the MOA the kind of sensational intelligence it most wished to hear—that there were anarchists in the union and a plan to destroy the Gem’s company store.

  In early July news came of the battle waged by the workers at Homestead against the Pinkerton barges; at the same time, internal union information mysteriously turned up in the owners’ newspaper, the Coeur d’Alene Barbarian, leading to the exposure of Siringo as a Pinkerton spy. The revelation that they’d been duped by one of the breed of villains who had caused the horrors at Homestead infuriated the miners, and their rage was compounded when he managed to escape by hiding under the floor of a boardinghouse. On July 11 the enraged union men attacked the Frisco mine, set off dynamite charges, and took sixty mine guards prisoner; they then turned on the Gem and Bunker Hill mines, “arresting” 130 scabs and forcing them to board a train leaving the state. In response, Governor Norman B. Willey, who had declined earlier MOA appeals for troops, declared martial law and sent to Coeur d’Alene both the state National Guard and federal soldiers obtained by order of President Benjamin Harrison. Willey’s attorney general, in his telegram to Washington about the need for U.S. troops, explained that “the mob must be crushed by overwhelming force” and sought “Gatling guns and small howitzers,” for “the woods may have to be shelled.”

  With so massive a military show of force, the mines were soon reclaimed by their owners and scabs allowed back to work under the troops’ protection. In vicious reprisals carried out under the martial law decree, whole villages of strikers were rounded up, along with lawyers, bar owners, shopkeepers, even judges—anyone believed to have sympathized with the miners’ union. Six hundred were incarcerated in wooden stockades known as “bull pens,” lumber stockades with no sanitary facilities, where many spent the rest of the summer in squalid conditions and on a meager diet of inferior rations. Several men were driven to commit suicide. Although the union was ultimately vindicated in a series of court rulings, organized labor was basically decimated for good in the Coeur d’Alene, a formal ban put in place on worker organizing at area mines.

  This setback, and the brutal treatment the miners had received in the bull pens, gave rise to the founding of the WFM in 1893. Like Eugene Debs’s ARU, the WFM was an industrial union, open to all mine and smelter workers skilled and unskilled. It made provision for the use of full-time organizers to bolster membership and to reach out to miners in even far-flung locales, factors that contributed to the federation’s rapid growth. It fought its first hard battle at Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1894, in a strike in which the MOA tried to overwhelm the newborn WFM with thirteen hundred armed deputies; fortunately for the miners the populist governor, David Hanson Waite, took the unusual step of calling in the militia to roust the deputies from their entrenched positions. In 1896 Ed Boyce, a survivor of the Coeur d’Alene bull pens, took over the federation’s leadership, overseeing growth to two hundred locals, making the WFM not only the West’s most potent union but America’s largest industrial union. The WFM briefly affiliated with the AFL, but departed by 1898 when it became apparent that the larger organization was not going to provide financial assistance.11

  A more recent example of employer-government overkill in the West had come in renewed violence at Cripple Creek in 1903–1904, when a WFM strike against copper mine owners erupted into a violent turf struggle between miners and scabs. On June 6, 1904, as a train arrived in the local depot to pick up replacement workers, a bomb exploded, killing fourteen scabs and injuring dozens more. Governor James H. Peabody blamed the explosion on the WFM and used the incident as an excuse to declare martial law. The miners professed innocence, accusing the authorities or their spies of having set off the bomb. The militia nonetheless descended on Cripple Creek to arrest large numbers of WFM men as vagrants, while a local vigilante group shut down the local WFM union hall and sacked several cooperative stores the WFM had helped create; at one point the militia leader, General Sherman Bell, arrested the entire staff of a newspaper. The vigilantes then joined with the militia to force the arrested miners out of Colorado.

  Confronted by such overwhelming odds in a semifeudal place where corporations controlled state government, the WFM never had the luxury of developing an interest in industrial peace, as had the United Mine Workers under John Mitchell in 1902. The western miners had come to have little faith in the state or the vote, and had been essentially denied the ordinary “niceties” of labor advocacy, whether it went by the name industrial democracy, mediation, or collective bargaining. The answer for such bitter veterans was the action-oriented IWW, which took from the WFM not only its all-embracing membership policy but also its insurrectionary spirit.

  “Tell the people who sent you here that I have a brace of Colts and can hit a dime at twenty paces,” Father Hagerty had once told a group of harassing railroad enforcers in Arizona.12 The men and women who departed the historic 1905 Chicago founding of the IWW became fond of quoting Hagerty’s quaint warning, for they were determined to emulate his kind of bravado in their own words and deeds.

  ON JANUARY 1, 1906, a stranger who had been living in a downtown hotel in Caldwell, Idaho, under the pretense of being a sheep buyer, was taken into police custody and accused of murdering the state’s former governor, Frank Steunenberg. The governor had been mortally wounded on a wintry evening a few days earlier when a bomb rigged to the gate of his home exploded. To interrogate the arrested man, who gave his name as Harry Orchard, authorities called in James McParland, the Pinkerton agent who had gone undercover to expose the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in the 1870s, and who now ran the agency’s Denver office. (He had, in the years since his well-known exploits in coal country, added a D to his surname.) Subjected to three days of interrogation by the Pinkerton, Orchard confessed to the assassination, explaining that he had been angry with Steunenberg for having interfered with his effort to secure the fractional ownership of a mine. But Orchard, who was acquainted with the Denver officials of the Western Federation of Miners, had much more to say. At McParland’s urging he went on to name a cadre of WFM leaders—including Big Bill Haywood—as having conspired with him in the plot to kill Steunenberg.

  The slain governor, a former union printer, had enjoyed a decent record on labor relations until 1899, when he had asked President McKinley for federal troops to help restore order in a local strik
e dispute. Idahoans might have forgiven Steunenberg for the soldiers’ presence, but Washington had dispatched an African American regiment, whose duty consisted in part of guarding arrested miners, who were white. The spectacle of black soldiers “lording it over” white prisoners inflamed local sensibilities, and the governor was held responsible for facilitating such an outrage. But while Steunenberg’s gaffe might have irritated some western labor elements, there was no evidence beyond Orchard’s allegations that the WFM had anything to do with his assassination.13 Yet, in a nighttime extradition of dubious legality, Big Bill Haywood, along with WFM president Charles Moyer and George Pettibone, a former miner and businessman who worked for the union, were seized by authorities in Denver (Haywood, according to legend, was surprised at a brothel), hustled aboard a train, and carried across the state line to Boise to face murder charges. The young IWW had thrived in the six months since its founding, establishing no fewer than 384 locals across the country; however, the arrest of its principal organizer in an assassination conspiracy could hardly bode well for the organization’s future.

  To his admirers, Big Bill seemed to have stepped from the pages of a western dime novel. He was born in Salt Lake City in 1869, the same year the driving of the Golden Spike outside the nearby town of Promontory linked America’s railroads. His father, a former Pony Express rider, died when Bill was three, and his mother, who had come west in an ox-drawn wagon, remarried and relocated the family to Ophir, a rough-and-tumble Utah mining camp. At age seven the boy permanently blinded himself in one eye while carving a slingshot (the adult Haywood always turned in profile before photographers so as to hide the deformity); two years later he left school and went to work in an Ophir silver mine. He married young, homesteaded, but was made to forfeit his land when the government reclaimed it to create an Indian reservation. This sent Haywood back to the mines, where, in 1893, he joined the WFM. A year later he fell in with one of the “industrials” of Coxey’s Army, although his contingent did not make it east of the Mississippi. A person of keen native sensitivity, he had been deeply troubled by the Haymarket affair, especially the executions of November 1887, and a decade later he watched, inspired, as Eugene Debs’s “big union” of the nation’s rail workers brought the country to a halt in the Pullman Strike—at least until the courts and troops intervened. As head of his WFM local and a member of the organization’s national executive board, Haywood journeyed throughout the western mine regions, conducting union meetings, stealthily evading militia and vigilantes, and going armed to secret midnight conclaves of miners too frightened to greet a WFM organizer by daylight. At the same time he honed his political thought as editor of the federation’s journal.14