There is Power in a Union

by Philip Dray

  When Vanderveer’s tactics proved fruitless, he warned Landis that bringing such a spurious case against the IWW would agitate working people everywhere and cause even greater industrial strife. The government shrugged off the attorney’s caution; it had already moved to limit the IWW’s ability to retaliate by raiding the group’s Chicago office a second time and making additional arrests, thereby disrupting efforts to raise a defense fund. At the same time, Congress was considering several bills in spring 1918 that would declare the IWW an illegal organization. While none were passed, the surrounding headlines did little to improve the Wobblies’ already teetering public image.

  By any rational measure the prosecution’s case was weak, blaming the alleged Wobbly “conspiracy” on the “seditious and disloyal character and teachings of the organization.” To such a broad insinuation the defense’s most effective reply was the plainspoken testimony of individual Wobblies, one of whom inquired:

  If you were a bum without a blanket, if you had left your wife and kids when you went West for a job and never located them since; if your job never kept you long enough in one place to vote; if you slept in a lousy bunkhouse and ate rotten food; if every person who represented law and order beat you up … how in hell do you expect a man to be patriotic?

  One allegation the IWW found harder to disown was that of industrial sabotage, as the organization had at times encouraged it. A term of Belgian origin, sabotage referred to the act of working with deliberate slowness, as in the manner of a peasant who wore the clunky wooden shoes known as sabots, or, in some definitions, of placing said footwear into the gears of a machine. Flynn had once published a booklet in praise of the practice, and the IWW had used a related symbol—the “Sab-Cat”—as part of an organizational logo since 1910.25 However, the offenses ticked off in court—Wobblies were alleged to have placed objects in gearboxes, driven copper nails into fruit trees, destroyed threshing machines, and even to have shoved a company horse down a well—seemed purely anecdotal, and were unsupported by any credible proof.26

  The prosecution fell back on reading to the court, and trying to shock the jury, with incriminating statements of radical philosophy culled from confiscated IWW publications and correspondence.27 This was the reprise of Haymarket that had been expected (no source of comfort to the defendants, given that affair’s tragic outcome). In an effort at exoneration the defense turned to published material of its own choosing, including a recent report from the president’s Commission on Industrial Relations, which concluded that American workers by and large had made great sacrifices for their country during the war, and that of more than five hundred strikes called after the U.S. entry into the conflict in 1917, only three had involved the IWW. Vanderveer pivoted on the commission findings to insist that the IWW sought merely to better the nation’s social equity, not to interfere with or threaten the government. Judge Landis, however, ruled off-limits the commission material, as well as other data the defense wished to introduce that detailed the challenging conditions American workers faced. Some of this information did get into the record through the testimony of various Wobblies, although the prosecution retaliated by reminding the jury that as much as those testifying looked like ordinary workingmen, they were in fact dangerous radicals.

  Haywood declared under oath, however, that “the aim and purpose of the [IWW] literature … was to disseminate the idea of industrial unionism, not to destroy but to build, to construct.” As to whether the IWW sought to impede the nation’s war effort, he stated:

  I am very much opposed to war, and would have the war stopped today if it were in my power to do it. I believe that there are other methods by which human beings should settle any existing difficulty. It is not only the murdering of the men, it is the suffering of the wives and children. And it is what this war means to society after this war is over…. Nothing to follow but war cripples, war widows, war orphans, war stories, war pictures and war everything…. I hope … that every man that is imbued with the spirit of war will fight long enough to drive the spirit of hate and war out of his breast … that this may be the last war that the world will ever know.28

  Vanderveer inquired of Haywood about the charge of conspiracy. “We are conspiring,” Big Bill affirmed.

  We are conspiring to prevent the making of profits on labor power in any industry. We are conspiring against the dividend makers. We are conspiring against rent and interest. We want to establish a new society, where people can live without profit, without dividends, without rent and without interest if it is possible; and it is possible, if people will live normally, live like human beings should live. I would say that if that is a conspiracy, we are conspiring.29

  After four months of testimony and the examination of hundreds of exhibits and forty thousand pages of IWW records, the jury required only a single hour’s deliberation to bring in a verdict of guilty. On August 31, 1918, Judge Landis sentenced thirty-five of the men to five years in prison, thirty-three men to ten years, and fifteen men, including Haywood, to a term of twenty years. Benjamin Fletcher of Philadelphia, the only black Wobbly among the defendants, quipped as he was taken away, “Judge Landis is using poor English today. His sentences are too long.”30

  It had been obvious all along that the trial of the IWW was not truly about espionage or sabotage or any of the fantastical allegations heard in Landis’s courtroom; the aim was to cripple a union whose style was aggressive, its members militant, its philosophy so revolutionary it could only be alien, and which, in its inclusion of men, women, blacks, whites, skilled, and unskilled, stood as a rebuke not only to the nation but to the rest of the labor movement. Another cause of the discomfort the IWW provoked was that, despite its Bolshevik sympathies and the twisted allegation of its traitorous collaboration with Germany, it was, in reality, too American. Certainly it had its Tresca and Giovannitti, who could be dismissed as alien political romantics, or the easily red-tainted George Andreytchine or Vladimir Lossief; but it was Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Flynn, Vincent St. John, and Frank Little who were the more unnerving for their clearly native provenance, a quality shared by a majority of those convicted in Judge Landis’s court, men named Glen Roberts, Fred Nelson, George Hardy, “Third-Rail Red” Doran, Charles McWhirt, “Tex” Fraser, Clyde Huff, Archie Sinclair, and so on.

  Due to the chill atmosphere of wartime domestic repression in which the trial had been held, and disdain within the general labor movement for the Wobblies, nary a rallying cry emerged from the rest of U.S. labor and the left, as it had for Ettor and Giovannitti, the McNamara brothers or Joe Hill. The government’s conduct at trial, Landis’s rulings, the sweeping verdicts and sentences—none elicited much comment from the usual bastions of support. As Dubofsky suggests, Americans had been bothered by the drumhead deportations at Bisbee and the mob murder of Frank Little, but it may have appeared less prudent to object openly to what appeared the normal functioning of due process, in this instance the legal persecution of the IWW.31

  THE ARMISTICE OF NOVEMBER 1918 brought relief and happiness as well as signs of irrevocable change. In Europe governments had fallen; others were under siege from forces within. Communist insurrections had occurred in Hungary and Bavaria, civil violence was rife in Germany; Italian workers occupied their factories, and England’s emerging Labour Party vowed to reform the British economy along socialistic lines. Most disturbing to Western observers, the Bolsheviks remained in control in Russia. In America the mood of intolerance lingered, particularly the hatred of Germans and the fear of Bolshevism,32 while isolationism was stimulated by the war’s devastation and the continuing upheaval in Europe. The big foreign policy idea of the day, the League of Nations, a part of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war and which President Wilson had helped negotiate in Paris, received an ambivalent public reception and was viewed skeptically by Congress. “The American people, who but a few years before had so enthusiastically embraced the reform spirit of Progressivism and then had projected themselves with g
reat zeal into the lofty idealism of the war, were weary of any further experimentation either domestically or internationally,” notes historian Robert K. Murray. “They were far less concerned with making the world safe for democracy than with making America safe for themselves.”33

  President Wilson, showing signs of exhaustion, and in defiance of his doctor’s advice, embarked on a cross-country speaking tour in early September 1919 in an attempt to resuscitate domestic support for the League of Nations by speaking directly to the American people. At Pueblo, Colorado, he suffered a nervous breakdown and on October 2 a paralytic stroke; the tour canceled, he was immediately brought home to Washington, where he would spend the remaining seventeen months of his presidency a semi-invalid. The next month Congress formally rejected U.S. membership in the league. Wilson was awarded the 1920 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

  “Every reform we have won will be lost if we go into this war,” the president had told Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels in 1917. “The people we have unhorsed will inevitably come into control of the country for we shall be dependent upon the steel, ore and financial magnates. They will run the nation.”34 Wilson’s caution was borne out by subsequent events. Just as the war had transformed the president, the laws, and the country, so had it affected industry. On the defensive for many years from forces of reform, industry had attained a position of dominance with the production mandates of the American entry into Europe. It had responded loyally and it had done well, and by 1919 was ready to flex its new confidence and strength.

  Labor also strove to realign itself as the peacetime economy slowed production and caused layoffs. In March 1919 there were 175 major strikes; in April, 248; in June, 303; in July, 360; in August, 373. A great number involved unemployed war veterans—a development troubling in numerous ways. There was a sense that men who had sacrificed for their country should have jobs. In their absence African Americans had stepped into the industrial workforce as never before, and the intensified racial component in job competition had sparked deadly riots in East St. Louis in 1917 and Chicago in 1919, among other places. Finally, there was a factor many Americans would have been loath to openly admit—an anxiety about the returning soldiers, who, scarred by their experiences in a horrific war and hungry for work, might act out in bold, desperate ways, falling in with radicals or even fomenting domestic revolution.35 For all these reasons, and often with the help of excitable public officials and a sensationalist press, strikes in the war’s immediate aftermath appeared to a nation on edge unduly portentous; one in particular, the 1919 general strike in the city of Seattle, assumed the scale of a mass uprising.

  The strike crisis began in late 1918 in Seattle’s government-run shipyards, where shipbuilders’ unions organized as the Metal Trades Council sought improved wages for unskilled workers. Supervisors tried to break the unions’ solidarity by offering higher pay for skilled laborers only, but the cause remained intact. Seattle’s mayor, Ole Hanson, was determined to resist labor’s demands. A successful real estate speculator who, legend had it, had come west as a young man from his native Minnesota in a wagon, Hanson had barnstormed the state of Washington in 1914 as the Progressive candidate for the U.S. Senate, visiting every town and speaking to audiences from the front seat of an open car; he had initially held pacifistic views about the United States getting into the war, but once American troops sailed for Europe he became a super-patriot. He was known to leave his desk at city hall some afternoons to drop by the shipyards, volunteering to labor beside the ironworkers as a show of support for the war effort.

  Seattle was at war’s end a vibrant union town, with active AFL and IWW locals as well as longshoremen and shipbuilders’ unions; even though employment had been ample in the government-run shipyards during the war, many unionists had become politicized over the use of the port as an embarkation point for war matériel to anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia, who were being assisted by eighty-five hundred U.S. troops. Pamphlets about the revolution in Russia had circulated in the seafront city, encouraging “workers’ power” and discussing the inevitability that trade unions would someday take over industry. The left-leaning Central Labor Council hosted meetings at which speakers recently returned from Moscow described the Revolution’s success; a local crowd had in December 1917 welcomed the Shilka, the first Soviet vessel to reach Seattle; and local longshoremen several times refused to load vessels carrying munitions to support the anti-Bolshevik fighters.

  These disputed munitions were the cause of street violence on January 12, 1919, when police attacked a downtown rally protesting the shipments, clubbing participants and making numerous arrests. So angry were workers at this mistreatment that they gathered a few days later, on January 16, only to once again be set upon by police. With labor issues now merged fully with resentment of official heavy-handedness, on January 21 as many as thirty-five thousand skilled and unskilled shipyard workers walked off the docks. The local Labor Council immediately offered to conduct a general strike to aid the action, with the AFL and IWW locals signing onto the idea. Although newspapers cried alarm over labor’s capitulation to Bolshevism, on February 6 an estimated sixty thousand Seattle laborers representing 110 of the city’s 130 labor unions halted work, closing a wide array of businesses and services. The city shut down so completely, it was said, even the elevators stopped running.

  The general strike was not a familiar labor tactic in America; it had surfaced fleetingly in St. Louis in 1877 and again in New Orleans in 1892. Such disciplined actions were always viewed as alien, carrying a whiff of European-style revolution, and in the politically charged atmosphere of Seattle in 1919 it raised a palpable fear of Bolshevik influence, even anxiety that actual Bolsheviks had insinuated themselves into the town’s working masses.36 Joe Tumulty, an adviser to President Wilson, termed what was occurring in Seattle “the first appearance of the Soviet in this country.”37 But if revolution had come to Seattle it had a willing nemesis in Mayor Hanson. “His ability to guess what the other fellow is going to do amounts to genius,” noted one admiring contemporary, “and methods do not disturb him greatly. His rule of fighting is to hit his opponent with everything except perhaps the water bucket.”38 He personally led the arrival of federal troops into the city, riding in a large sedan emblazoned with an American flag. To augment the nearly one thousand soldiers from nearby Fort Lewis, who were reported to have brought with them “a machine gun company and 200 hand grenades,” Hanson swore in more than two thousand special deputies, including students from the University of Washington. “Any man who attempts to take over control of municipal government functions here will be shot on sight,” Hanson warned.39 Selected “radical” offices in the city were raided, leading to the arrests of thirty-nine Wobblies, who were denounced as “ringleaders of anarchy.”40

  Local laborites sometimes joked that Hanson suffered from a case of “the Wobbly Horrors,” the exaggerated perception that the IWW represented evil incarnate, but the Wobblies had no choice but to take Mayor Hanson’s harassment seriously, even as privately they derided him as a “crazy clown.”41 In spring 1918 an IWW stenographer named Louise Olivereau was jailed under the Espionage Act for sending letters urging young men to rethink compliance with the draft, while two AFL leaders, Hulet Wells and Sam Sadler, were also arrested, charged with publishing an antidraft pamphlet. Wells and Sadler had a nightmarish time in prison, Wells at one point being trussed up and suspended by his hands. Anger over the arrest of Olivereau and the abuse of Wells and Sadler spilled over into large protest meetings and street rallies, a surge broad enough to unite even the usually disparate IWW and AFL.

  Although in principle a group like the IWW, dedicated to the downfall of capitalism, and the more conservative AFL had little in common, the Lawrence strike as well as the IWW’s work with the Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union on the Philadelphia waterfront had showed the Wobblies capable of organizing around such ordinary union aims as wage increases, overtime pay, and employer
recognition of workers’ committees. As for the moderate AFL, its locals were capable at times of sharp-elbowed militancy. Clearly the willingness to stop work extended through the leadership and rank and file of these two union causes,42 and the Seattle AFL, having bettered its members’ affairs in the war-production buildup, had a great deal to fight for in resisting assaults on any local labor entity, including the Wobblies.

  As revolutions went, the Seattle general strike proved relatively tame. The participants did not attempt to confiscate any private property, nor did they try to seize the reins of city government; they made no effort to commandeer military installations, nor were they themselves armed or organized into fighting units. In addition, a strike committee was designated to ensure that basic municipal services such as trash collection and the provision of milk and coal were maintained. The strike committee approached the city with an offer to call off the general strike if the mayor’s aides would press the shipping authorities to accept the demands of the Metal Trades Council, but the city replied that nothing would be discussed until the dockworkers reported to their jobs. These mitigating details, however, were ignored in the flurry of articles and editorials that applauded Hanson’s flag-waving and his vow to crush the strike, and that cheered his rejection of the “Bolshevik experiment” on American soil.