There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  In New York, meanwhile, students from the Socialist Rand School decided to use one of the tactics from the “Revolt of the Unemployed,” and crashed the services at Rockefeller’s church, Calvary Baptist on West Fifty-seventh Street. Rockefeller and his family were not in the congregation that day, but a young man named Charles Morrison confronted the pastor, the Reverend Cornelius Woelfkin, to demand to know if “as a preacher and of the word of God, do you think that Jesus would uphold John D. Rockefeller in his attitude toward the Colorado strikers?” Morrison asked the question four times without receiving a response from the clergyman, who turned and walked away as Morrison was escorted forcibly from the building. The Reverend Woelfkin shared with a reporter his belief that “it is only these people who have no responsibility who go about making trouble. If these people had some responsibility we would hear very little from them.”159

  Rockefeller, it appeared, had slipped out of Manhattan to his country estate at Tarrytown. The protestors followed, and in the quaint little Hudson River community just north of New York City they contended for the right to make speeches denouncing the coal baron in the village square. Rockefeller himself was said to be confined indoors, having caught cold playing golf in the rain. Upton Sinclair arrived, demanding that local officials allow a public meeting where the Colorado situation could be discussed, but a permit for such a gathering was refused. On May 30 a dozen protestors returned to Tarrytown and, not bothering to seek official approval, initiated a series of speeches in the square. They were arrested, charged with blocking traffic, disorderly conduct, and endangering the public health. The next day Alexander Berkman led another group from the city to make speeches in Tarrytown, and all were likewise taken into custody. That very night twenty more speakers arrived and were promptly detained; many complained of rude treatment by the village police, whose ranks had been augmented by detectives from Rockefeller’s private security forces and members of a local patriots’ group.160

  Nursing his cold, looking out from the broad windows of his estate, Rockefeller surely recognized that the situation was untenable. The Colorado fiasco—or “Rockefeller’s War,” as some insisted on calling it—was having a dreadful impact on his and his family’s reputation, as well as their personal safety. Congress’s inquiry into the situation had concluded that Rockefeller had been negligent and arrogant about the management of labor relations for refusing to meet with the miners and rejecting outside proposals of mediation. “The statement that a man or company of men who put their money in a business have a right to operate it as they see fit, without regard to the public interest, belongs to days long since passed away,” the congressional report asserted. “Every individual who invests his capital … is entitled to the protection of the law … but he owes something to society.”161

  Rockefeller, to his credit, was by now questioning his long-standing faith in the guidance of the western managers of the CFI, and to doubt their consistent claims that all the violence during the strike had been caused by the miners. His reaction was twofold; he hired Canadian industrial reformer Mackenzie King, who had been that country’s deputy minister of labor, to head up a fact-finding inquiry into the Colorado situation, and also launched a public relations effort to counter the negative publicity he was receiving. In one inadvertently revealing action, the Rockefeller forces formally announced that CFI was now prepared to concede certain improvements to the Colorado miners, only to learn that many of these “privileges” were already the law in Colorado, that they had long been stifled by the company, and that their denial had been among the strikers’ major grievances. Ivy L. Lee, a former spokesman for the Pennsylvania Railroad whom Rockefeller hired as a publicist, began editing weekly reports from the Colorado coal operators and publishing them as Facts Concerning the Struggle in Colorado for Industrial Freedom. Lee’s tracts praised the militia, rehashed unflattering rumors about Mother Jones, noted how many miners had remained loyal to the operators, and editorialized against the “bloodthirsty agitators” who had fomented all the trouble in the first place. So extensive were Lee’s distortions that the radical press dubbed him “Poison Ivy.”

  Rockefeller had better luck satisfying his critics when, after the strike was formally terminated by the UMW in December 1914, he fired the CFI managerial personnel he now suspected of having fed him inaccurate and biased information about the strike, and personally visited the Colorado coal region. There he mingled with miners and their families, descended into the mines, inspected living quarters and schools, gave impromptu talks, and vowed to henceforth give his workers’ needs a greater share of his attention. According to reports Rockefeller’s personal charm and diplomacy did have a favorable impact on those he met, suggesting that all along it was his style of “absentee capitalism” that was part of the problem. With the assistance of King, he drew up a Colorado Industrial Plan, also known as “The Rockefeller Plan,” that aimed to correct many of the underlying issues of feudalistic paternalism that had brought on the dif-faculties of 1913–1914, although one aspect, a company union, which Sam Gompers dismissed as “a pseudo union,” failed predictably to impress labor and government observers.162

  However much Rockefeller wished to deter outsiders from linking the Ludlow disaster to his personal or family life, his Tarrytown abode was thrust back into the news on July 4, when a bomb believed to be meant for the mansion detonated prematurely at an anarchist bomb factory in New York City. All three men killed in the explosion at an East Side tenement—Arthur Caron, Charles Berg, and Carl Hanson—were anarchists who had been involved in the free speech effort at Tarrytown. “So great was the force of the explosion,” it was reported, “that articles of furniture were blown hundreds of feet into the air, some of the wreckage landing on the tops of houses more than a block away.”163

  Alexander Berkman was greatly moved by the incident. Like him, Caron, Berg, and Hanson had embarked on a noble attentat to exact revenge upon a living monster of greed and capital, and, like him, had been unable to realize their objective. Under the circumstances Berkman could do little but transfer his concern over Ludlow and his grief to the pages of Mother Earth, where he produced an issue largely dedicated to the Colorado troubles; it reprinted several speeches from a well-attended Union Square memorial gathering that had been held for the bomb factory victims, where a consoling banner near the speakers’ stand had proclaimed, THOSE WHO DIE FOR A CAUSE NEVER DIE—THEIR SPIRIT WALKS ABROAD.164

  IF THERE EVER WAS A MAN remembered for having lived and died for a cause, it was the Wobbly songwriter who went by the name Joe Hill, perhaps the most beloved and celebrated labor movement martyr of all. The final chapter of his life—his 1914 murder trial and the worldwide crusade to stay his execution—took place during the intense phase of the American labor struggle that coincided with Lawrence, Paterson, Ludlow, and the coming of the First World War. Hill’s story is thus something of a coda to the early romantic phase of the IWW, which may explain why his martyrdom has long been embraced as among the purest and most meaningful.

  A merchant marine and itinerant laborer who came to the United States from Sweden in 1901, Hill (whose original name was Joel Häggland) was a self-taught writer and musician who scribbled his impressions of the country’s labor struggle as he traveled the West in the first decade of the century. He worked in a rope factory, shoveled coal, and served as a common seaman. In 1910 he joined the IWW, participated in the Fresno and San Diego free speech campaigns, at least once apparently getting knocked around by cops and vigilantes, and spent thirty days in jail in San Pedro, California, on a “vagrancy” charge after serving on a dockworkers’ strike committee. He became a prolific writer of labor songs such as “Workers of the World, Awaken,” “There Is Power in a Union,” “Union Maid,” and “The Preacher and the Slave,” by taking well-known tunes and setting new words to them, the idea being that immigrant workers would be more likely to sing along if the tune was familiar. Hill’s songs were printed frequently in IWW publicati
ons, bringing him a degree of renown, his words always emphasizing the tremendous confidence that buoyed the labor struggle. “If the workers took a notion, they could stop all speeding trains,” Hill sang, “every ship upon the ocean, they can tie with mighty chains.”165 “There Is Power in a Union,” one of Hill’s best-remembered efforts, was set to a church hymn and admonished workers:

  There is pow’r, there is pow’r

  In a band of workingmen.

  When they stand, hand in hand.

  That’s a pow’r, that’s a pow’r

  That must rule in every land—

  One Industrial Union Grand.

  For “Workers of the World Awaken,” he provided both original words and music:

  Workers of the world, awaken!

  Break your chains, demand your rights.

  All the wealth you make is taken

  By exploiting parasites.

  Shall you kneel in deep submission

  From your cradles to your graves?

  Is the height of your ambition

  To be good and willing slaves?166

  Joe Hill might have remained one of many respected “hobo folk composers” attached to the IWW, such as Ralph Chaplin and Richard Brazier, had not his life been altered fatefully on January 10, 1914, in Salt Lake City. A butcher named John G. Morrison, a former policeman, and his seventeen-year-old son, Arling, were shot dead in what at first appeared to be a botched robbery. The sole witness was another son, Merlin, thirteen, who claimed the killers had shouted at his father, “We’ve got you now!”—suggesting the shooting was an act of retribution by criminals against Morrison; no money or goods were taken in the crime, nor was a murder weapon found. Arling, however, had managed to return fire, hitting one of the holdup men before he himself was mortally wounded. Later that night Joe Hill went to a hospital seeking treatment for a gunshot wound. He told police he had been shot in a quarrel over a woman whose name, as a matter of honor, he would not reveal, and proceeded to make his situation more precarious by initially refusing legal counsel.

  Given the paucity of evidence, he might under ordinary circumstances have gone free. There was no discernible motive to be ascribed to Hill and the prosecution was technically unable to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But the atmosphere surrounding the trial was biased against an itinerant workman who belonged to the IWW in a case in which a former lawman and his son had been slaughtered. The legal burden wrongly shifted to whether Hill could prove his innocence, which in court he appeared unable or unwilling to do. He did, however, protest in a letter to the Salt Lake City Telegram:

  I never killed Morrison and do not know a thing about it. He was, as the records plainly show, killed by some enemy for the sake of revenge, and I have not been in this city long enough to make an enemy. Shortly before my arrest I came down from Park City, where I was working in the mines. Owing to the prominence of Mr. Morrison, 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.167

  Although Hill was pilloried at trial for being a Wobbly, he tried to keep the IWW out of the case, insisting the accusation against him did not involve the organization; he even attempted (unsuccessfully) to dissuade the IWW from raising funds or depleting its treasury in his behalf. Once he was convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad, his plight came to wider attention, prompting a crusade for clemency or a pardon. Letters and petitions flooded into the office of Utah governor William Spry, with influential people including Samuel Gompers and the Swedish ambassador to the United States asking that Hill’s case be given further review. Hill himself wrote an article for Appeal to Reason professing his innocence168; however, he remained mute about the details of the alleged crime, even when given a last chance to reveal the truth before a specially convened Board of Pardons. He explained to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with whom he corresponded throughout the ordeal:

  I have no desire to be one of them what-ye-call-em martyrs. On the square I’ll tell you that all this notoriety stuff is making me dizzy in the head and I am afraid I’m getting more glory than I really am entitled to. I put in most of the later years among the wharf rats on the Pacific coast and I am not there with the limelight stuff at all.169

  As the date of his execution neared, Flynn appealed directly to President Wilson, who, at the additional urging of the AFL, telegraphed to Governor Spry requesting another look at Hill’s case and a stay of the death sentence. Wilson in fact attempted twice to convince Spry to halt the execution. But time had run out, and Joe Hill went before a firing squad on November 19, 1915. In one of his last letters he told Big Bill Haywood, “Good-bye, Bill. I will die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize!” His only request was that his body be removed from the state of Utah before it was cremated. Hill’s final words—“Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize!”—became a popular IWW slogan, one frequently invoked by Wobblies headed for incarceration.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DYNAMITE

  THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE IWW BELIEVED that wars were waged for the benefit of monarchies, dying nations, and captains of industry, and turned workers against one another. The real struggle, in their view, remained the one they and millions of other “brothers and sisters of toil” fought every day—the war between labor and capital. Thus, when war overcame Europe in 1914, the Wobblies rejected talk of American involvement, Big Bill Haywood reminding members, “It is better to be a traitor to your country, than a traitor to your class.”1 Addressing a workers’ rally from the stage of Carnegie Hall, he threatened to lead a general strike if the United States allowed itself to be lured into the conflict.2

  When America did enter the war in April 1917, however, nine out of ten draft-eligible Wobblies registered with the Selective Service, and most of those called to arms reported for duty, more or less on par with members of the AFL, which had remained loyal to the government’s foreign policy. Given the great popular support for the war, Big Bill also found it wise to adjust his position, cautioning IWW locals against voicing strident opposition rhetoric, as it would only draw government scrutiny. His change of tone came too late, however; the IWW had already made too many noisy objections, and the nation had embraced the war so fully as to make even a hint of skepticism repugnant. The paranoia that was the by-product of this jingoistic ardor fell hard on the Wobblies, as it did on anyone perceived to be a radical, draft resister, or naysayer.

  The irony was that since 1912 or so, with its efforts in Lawrence and Paterson, the IWW had behaved more as a traditional labor union than a movement of revolutionary change. Even its free speech campaigns of earlier years could be perceived as expressions of faith in the Bill of Rights. But it was unable to shed its reputation for promoting class upheaval, and after the Bolsheviks in Russia, whom the Wobblies supported, ousted the moderate government of Alexander Kerensky in October 1917 and brokered a treaty with the Germans (Brest-Litovsk), the IWW was accused of being in cahoots with the enemy and tarred by the fierce anti-German sentiment sweeping the United States. In towns big and small, German-sounding surnames and place-names were changed, sauerkraut became “Liberty Cabbage,” and anyone persisting in their German ways or “other-ness” was deemed alien or suspect. Victor Reuther, an official of the United Auto Workers, recalled that during a patriotic parade through his hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia, “one of the oldest music houses in town threw all of its recordings of German classics and German folk songs out into the street as the crowd marched by.”3 In this atmosphere, radical labor organizations sympathetic to revolutionary ideas from Europe, such as the IWW, had little chance. “May God have mercy on them,” pronounced U.S. attorney general Thomas W. Gregory, “for they need expect none from an outraged people or an avenging government.”4 West Coast labor activists Tom Mooney and Warren Billings were made an early example, convicted and given substantial prison time for allegedly planting a deadly terrorist bom
b that exploded at a Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco in July 1916.

  Of course, once the United States was in the war, domestic labor union activity appeared in a new context, as the country looked to workers and industry to maintain high production levels of copper, coal, steel, and other essentials. Laboring men in these key industries took seriously the government and military’s needs, but saw the situation also as an opportunity to attain deserved improvements in pay and work conditions; unfortunately, when such demands originated with groups like the IWW they readily became conflated with radicalism or were criticized as unpatriotic. American troops had barely reached Europe when one such altercation broke out in Jerome, Arizona, in early summer 1917. The IWW, which was assisting copper miners who had struck for improved pay and conditions, was confronted by the Jerome Loyalty League, an enforcer organization backed by mine owners and local men of commerce; the league’s armed members stood ready to punish anyone who impeded mine production or harassed replacement workers. On July 10, these vigilantes, braced with guns and pick handles, seized the IWW strike leaders and drove them from the town. When the IWW cabled Washington to complain of so blatant a violation, the Justice Department replied by offering to prosecute the Wobblies.