There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  Never a shouting type of agitator, Haywood nonetheless made a convincing impression on the soapbox, especially before an audience of immigrant workers, using his compelling physical presence and a knack for well-chosen words. “Surrounded by a dense crowd of short, dark-faced men, [he] towered in the center of the room,” the author John Reed wrote. “His big hand made simple gestures as he explained something to them. His massive, rugged face, seamed and scarred like a mountain, and as calm, radiated strength.”15 To show a crowd of non-English speakers the difference between the AFL and the IWW, Haywood would spread his fingers as wide as he could. “The AFL organizes like this,” he would say; then drawing his huge hand into a powerful-looking fist held above his head he would exclaim: “The IWW organizes like this!”16 Big Bill Haywood “believes in men,” wrote Outlook magazine in vouching for his enigmatic appeal, “not as you and I believe in them, but fervently, uncompromisingly, with an obstinate faith in the universal goodwill and constancy of the workers worthy of a great religious leader. That is what makes him supremely dangerous.”17

  Arriving in Chicago for the founding meeting of the IWW in June 1905, Haywood was already something of a movement legend. He had lived rough in the bracing air of the West, had his land stolen, and used his fists when circumstances demanded; there was a rumor he had once hurled an adversary through a plate glass window. Haywood knew the effect this reputation had on suit-and-tie Progressives, and hardly minded if people thought him ragged around the edges. In an age smitten by President Teddy Roosevelt’s celebrated ruggedness and love of the West, “Big” Bill, the one-eyed miner and actual western brawler, seemed more the genuine article than the occupant of the White House.

  By the time the Steunenberg trial began in May 1907, Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone had been held behind bars for a year, while their fate attracted almost daily commentary from the nation’s press. “The Molly Maguires of the West,” the “radical” trio was termed by one conservative sheet, and even Roosevelt weighed in, denouncing them as “undesirable citizens,” an insult to which Haywood publicly objected, insisting he and the others were innocent until proven guilty and that the president of the United States, of all people, should know as much.18 When Roosevelt refused to apologize and instead heaped more insults on the defendants and, for good measure, upon Eugene Debs, it was the hero of Pullman who took umbrage, accusing the president of showing “the cruel malevolence of a barbarian” and privately scorning the “Rough Rider” as “a cowboy in imitation.” IWW supporters donned I AM AN UNDESIRABLE CITIZEN buttons mocking Roosevelt’s remarks, while sympathizers across the country decried the case as political persecution and raised a quarter of a million dollars for the defense, which was to be led by Clarence Darrow.19 But despite the rallying of support and a widespread faith in their innocence, the stakes for the defendants could not have been greater: if convicted, they would face execution as surely as had the real Molly Maguires and the martyrs of Haymarket.

  The first trial was to be that of Haywood, the others to follow. In court, Darrow argued that Harry Orchard had killed Steunenberg as a personal vendetta. He conceded that Haywood had telegraphed WFM lawyers out of concern for Orchard’s arrest immediately after the murder, but insisted McParland had worked up Orchard’s confession and testimony to incriminate Haywood and the others.20 Thus the case soon came to hinge on Orchard’s credibility, which faded fast as he made a number of dubious claims—that he had blown up mills in the Coeur d’Alene, owned part of several mines, and had burned a cheese factory to the ground—all of which, under scrutiny, appeared to be tall tales. Darrow labeled him “the most monumental liar that ever existed.”21 Even his identity was successfully challenged, as it appeared his real name was Albert E. Horsley and that he had also used the alias Thomas Hogan. After Orchard’s lengthy but unconvincing testimony, the prosecution seemed itself to lose faith in its star witness, and, borrowing a page from Haymarket, lapsed into the strategy of reading from left-wing labor papers (including twenty-year-old issues of the Alarm) in an attempt to soil the defendants’ characters with the repeated recitation of terms like “anarchist,” “bomb,” and “revolution.”22

  “I don’t claim that this man is an angel,” Darrow said of Haywood in the defense’s summation:

  The Western Federation of Miners could not afford to put an angel at their head. Do you want to hire an angel to fight the Mine Owners Association and the Pinkerton detectives and the power of great wealth? Oh, no, gentlemen, you’d better get a first-class fighting man who has physical courage, who has mental courage, who has strong devotion, who loves the poor, who loves the weak, who hates inequity and hates it more when it is with the powerful and the great.23

  Darrow assured the jury:

  Don’t be so blind in your madness as to believe that if you make three fresh, new graves you will kill the labor movement of the world … a million men will take up the banner of labor at the open grave where Haywood lays it down, and in spite of prisons or scaffolds or fire, in spite of prosecution by jury, these men of willing hands will carry it on to victory in the end.24

  Haywood was acquitted, as was Pettibone; charges against Moyer were dropped, while Orchard alone took the rap for Steunenberg’s killing and drew a life sentence. The image of the IWW as a dangerous radical group was, however, now more or less fixed in the public consciousness.

  The year of incarceration, the threat of the gallows, then the trial’s daily nip and tuck, had been an ordeal, but Big Bill came out of the Steunenberg case a famous man, the brash westerner who put working people’s rights above all and who’d now added beating a murder conviction to his résumé. Emma Goldman found the adulation he inspired among “well-educated literary writers” amusing, noting, “They follow Haywood much as a bunch of giggling girls go wild over the physical prowess of a quarterback.”25 (Although his fans supported his innocence, many seemed to cherish the idea that somehow Haywood actually had killed Steunenberg.) Turning aside lucrative offers to take to the vaudeville stage for fear “my prestige would be lessened every day,” he nonetheless toured widely, giving speeches, playing up his reputation as a “roughneck,” and cementing his role as the nation’s leading Wobbly.26 In Chicago, Milwaukee, and elsewhere he drew rallies only Eugene Debs could rival—twenty thousand, thirty-five thousand loyal listeners quieting to a churchlike hush to hear Big Bill’s words.

  Despite Haywood’s celebrity, the alliance of disparate forces that had convened at Chicago in 1905 to create the IWW did not long adhere. The WFM fell away, much as Haywood himself broke with many old western friends. Debs would play very little part in the IWW, focusing his energies instead on his own Socialist Party, which was hardly idle in the Wobbly era. After abandoning the idea of founding a utopian “socialist territory” in the western United States, the party embarked on an ambitious crusade—sending speakers across the land, running candidates for state and local offices, and reaching immigrant readers through a range of publications such as the Jewish Daily Forward and the Appeal to Reason.27 Daniel DeLeon had also departed the IWW, intent on nurturing his Socialist Labor Party.

  New members, however, continued to flood into the IWW, and its organizing efforts, characterized by the skillful harnessing of the unified power of immigrant workers, the use of strike reinforcements, and innovative mass actions such as the sit-down strike, scored several key victories. In its negotiations with employers the IWW eschewed the AFL policy of agreeing to no-strike pacts; the Wobblies protected the strike threat, which they saw as a valuable tool in boosting employee morale and keeping management honest.28 The IWW sit-down strike in December 1906 at a General Electric plant in Schenectady was probably the first in the country’s history, while that same year a Wobbly contingent in Portland, Oregon, won a nine-hour day and a wage hike for sawmill employees. In 1907 the IWW realized an impressive $4.50 minimum daily wage for all trades at Goldfield, Nevada, and summer 1909 found the Wobblies assisting eight thousand steelworkers at McKees Rocks, Pen
nsylvania, in a bloody eleven-week war against the Pressed Steel Car Company, state police, and professional strikebreakers, which eventually succeeded in winning employer concessions.

  WHAT THE PRESSED STEEL CAR COMPANY and other firms found unsettling in these early IWW struggles was the group’s ability to reconfigure the dynamics that usually governed labor-capital confrontation; the Wobblies, instead of becoming worn down and losing focus as a labor fight was protracted, only seemed to gather strength. The organization’s national leadership didn’t simply monitor the progress of localized strikes, it championed and publicized specific conflicts until they became national campaigns, drawing IWW members from afar to aid a troubled strike—marching, protesting, submitting to arrest. To a dedicated Wob, his IWW dues card good for free passage on almost any moving freight manned by sympathetic trainmen, a labor fight anywhere—on the Minnesota Iron Range or in a California picking field—was the front line. In the dozen years between its founding and America’s entry into the First World War, the IWW would display similar grit and adaptability in a number of turf battles in western farm and mining towns, campaigns that began as efforts to expose corrupt labor agents or win improved conditions for workers, but rapidly morphed into hard-fought challenges to restrictions on free speech. The very presence of labor radicals in these communities was often sufficient to spark determined resistance, and not entirely without design, the conflicts proved excellent rallying and recruiting opportunities for the Wobblies.

  In Missoula, Montana, in fall 1909 the IWW discovered that predatory employment agencies regularly conned itinerant workers by setting them up with jobs, then arranging with foremen to fire the workers as soon as they earned the fee they owed the agency, thus creating job openings so the deception could be repeated on other unsuspecting workers. Wobblies who spoke out in public against these so-called labor “sharks” were arrested. Missoula authorities, however, were caught off guard by the arrival of one of the IWW’s star soapboxers, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a teenage prodigy from New York City. Slim, attractive, with sparkling blue eyes and red hair (she was known as “the Red Flame” for both her politics and Irish good looks), Flynn took to the streets of Missoula to rally the depleted Wobbly ranks. With others she devised a strategy to break the town—filling the jails with Wobblies who broke the law by making speeches in public, thus draining the municipality’s coffers and overwhelming its administrative resources. As Flynn later recalled, most of the men were more fearful of having to get up and make a speech than they were of being put behind bars, and some had to be prodded to the podium.

  The plan was effective. The town fathers were forced to convert the local firehouse into a jail in order to house and feed the growing number of people in custody, and, as envisioned, the community quickly tired of the bother and expense. Missoula agreed to abandon the prosecutions and release the prisoners, saying the Wobblies could make all the radical speeches they cared to give. Some of the released men had the audacity to return to the lockups at night seeking a meal and a place to sleep after a day of organizing; at one point they pounded on the doors to be let in. It was said ranchers from the surrounding area came on buckboards and mules to witness the spectacle of men who wanted to get into jail.29

  If it was possible to be born a Wobbly, no one personified that ideal more than young Elizabeth Flynn. Reared in an Irish American Socialist family “with its own hagiography, its own radical saints, its own fairy tales of the Haymarket martyrs and the Molly Maguires,”30 she had “lived” the last hours of Spies and Parsons, memorized the words of Debs, and knew the haunting tale of the condemned Molly Maguire whose handprint, decades after his execution, remained visible on the death-house wall. She devoured Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle as well as the words of Marx and Engels. Once, at a Mother Jones rally, she became so swept up in Jones’s passionate account of labor injustice that she keeled over in a dead faint. (“Get the poor child some water!” barked Jones.)31 Soon, with her parents’ approval, she began giving curbside orations of her own.

  At sixteen she was arrested along with her father for lecturing and displaying a red flag in Times Square. The arrest and its resulting publicity—“Mere Child Talks Bitterly of Life”—were more thrill than embarrassment to the girl, and she elected to leave high school to devote her time fully to the cause. Vivid in a simple black skirt, white shirtwaist, and red tie, perched above a crowd on Broadway, she was a phenomenon, preaching the imminent downfall of capitalism. “We gesticulated, we paced the platform, we appealed to the emotions,” she later said. “We provoked arguments and questions. We spoke loudly, passionately, swiftly.”32

  In Broadway Magazine the author Theodore Dreiser dubbed her “An East Side Joan of Arc,” a youngster “as sweet a sixteen as ever bloomed, with a sensitive, flower-like face,” but who, “mentally … is one of the most remarkable girls that the city has ever seen.”33 Theatrical producer David Belasco was also smitten, proposing to star her in a “labor play.” Flynn spurned the offer. “I don’t want to be an actress. I want to speak my own words and not say over and over again what somebody else has written. I’m in the labor movement and I speak my own piece.” An amused Belasco reflected, “She’s the only girl I’ve ever met who did not want to be an actress.”34

  An early convert to the IWW, Flynn was excited to meet some of the very movement personalities she had long admired—Lucy Parsons and Oscar Neebe of Haymarket fame; Emma Goldman (“a … rather stout woman, with mild blue eyes … wearing a funny little flat hat and a flower cocked on one side of it”); as well as Alexander Berkman and the Czech revolutionist Hippolyte Havel, who flirted so shamelessly with her over dinner at Luchow’s that Berkman had to kick his colleague under the table.35 A precocious and attractive young woman with the ability to draw crowds (not to mention the press), she was an automatic reproach to critics who would dismiss the Wobblies as bums or anarchists. Known in the IWW ranks as “Gurley,” she was accorded near-reverential treatment, it being understood by even the roughest male “Wob” or western “timber-beast” that she be respected and that her personal reputation remain unassailable.

  A larger version of the Missoula campaign Flynn had helped resolve played out soon after in Spokane, Washington, where employers’ agents routinely hired lumberjacks and produce pickers and dispatched men across the Idaho border to the silver and copper concerns in the Coeur d’Alenes. When the local IWW attacked rigged employment agencies in March 1909 the city council immediately banned the group’s speakers.

  The Wobblies were strong in Spokane, with about fifteen hundred local members, but summer was not a good time for labor organizing in the region because migratory workers tended to be on the move. The union decided to heed the ban and resume the campaign in the fall. Mass arrests began near the end of October, cops infamously pulling one Wobbly off the speakers’ platform as he read the Declaration of Independence. Within days almost four hundred Wobblies were jailed, and on November 3 police stormed the local IWW hall, indicting the union organizers they captured for “criminal conspiracy.” The Wobblies tried all the methods that had driven the jailers mad in Missoula—singing, banging in unison on the bars of their cells, demanding food—but the Spokane authorities responded with only greater brutality, cramming the prisoners into tighter cells or casting them into unheated rooms without beds or blankets. Many were forced to seek medical treatment during their four months of captivity.

  Flynn arrived in spring 1910, determined to break the town the same way she’d humbled Missoula. She was nineteen years old and pregnant. Jailed almost immediately for violating the speech ban, she demonstrated a flair for creative activism by informing the press that female inmates in the city lockup were being forced into prostitution by their jailers. This scandalous allegation, made by an expectant young mother who was herself incarcerated, chastened the city and, at least momentarily, made the IWW appear morally superior. When Flynn came to trial the jury balked at the very notion of convicting her, its foreman ass
uring the district attorney, “If you think this jury, or any jury, is goin’ to send that pretty Irish girl to jail merely for bein’ bighearted and idealistic, to mix with all those whores and crooks down at the pen, you’ve got another guess comin’.”36 Worn down by the expense of arresting, trying, and jailing Wobblies, its spirit drained by the Flynn fiasco, Spokane finally struck a deal with the IWW. The union hall could be reopened, free speech would be allowed, and the employment sharks would be regulated, authorities acting at once to shutter some of the more flagrant operations—an undeniable Wobbly victory.37