Flash

by Jim Miller

  Later on in the organization, that same split between the bindlestiffs and city folks (although it was more sloppy than that really) came up again when the communists won over in Russia. Lots of the Wobs who were sympathetic to the revolution in Russia thought that we were too undisciplined. They thought we needed a tighter organization. So they moved toward the CP, while a lot of the old Wobs bucked up against the hard CP line. The CP types didn’t always have the best sense of humor and lots of Wobs didn’t trust a man who couldn’t laugh at himself. That and they didn’t like the idea of anybody telling them what to do, even other radicals. We were an untamed bunch, we were. I came to side with the anarchists who didn’t trust the CP in the end. What did Emma Goldman say, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”? Something like that. Well, despite all these kinds of arguments, we mostly got along. When it came to a struggle, theory didn’t matter that much. It was simply “which side are you on,” and we would die for each other. I know it sounds farfetched, but it was true.

  I remember getting hooked up with a great organizer, Gus Blanco, out in Holtville. I had been working as a dishwasher out there and Gus called a meeting and let us know that there was a revolution in the works in Mexico. So Gus and I were part of that. We were in the first raid that took Mexicali, and we were in both battles of Tijuana. It was a hell of a time down there too. For a while, I really believed we had something started. The red flag was flying over the center of Tijuana and we had folks flooding into town to see the Wobbly army.

  I stopped here and went through my folder and reread the interview I’d found about the Magónista revolt. The account in the manuscript matched the other interview closely, nearly word for word in places. I was on to something it seemed. I kept skimming through this portion until I found a new wrinkle:We lost some fine comrades down there, but I had a good time too. There was a fellow named Dynamite Dan who managed to sneak off with a couple good bottles of tequila before Pryce could bust ’em all up. Well, Dan and I holed up and had a drink in this little shack, and while we were there, I caught sight of a beautiful girl hanging some laundry. I couldn’t get her out of my head, and the next day I came around to see if she was there and we wound up going for a walk. It turned out she was in sympathy with the revolution and we did the best job we could of talking between English and Spanish. At the end of the day, we became lovers, and I think I would have married her if we hadn’t been run out of town after the second battle. Later, I heard from some of the boys who’d been back down there that she’d given birth to a child that was half gringo. Was it my child? I never found out.

  Here the narrative stopped. It was missing a few pages too. Damn it, I thought, what a piece to leave hanging. The next page picked up after a heading, “Soapboxing Days”:

  The first time I got up on a soapbox, I would have just as soon have run a gauntlet. My stomach was tied in knots and I could hear some fellows laughing at the pained expression that must have been on my face. But then some jackass yelled, “Get that bum off the box” and I got mad. That was all it took, “Yeah, bums, that’s what they call us,” I started in. “You can smell ’em before you see ’em is what they say. They say the fine ladies should be protected against seeing shabby fellas like us.” Well, somebody said, “You tell ’em brother” and that was all I needed. I got going about the bosses eatin’ good while we were starving and all that stuff. As I said, it was the belly philosophy that really hit people.

  When a good street meeting really got going it was like a carnival. Other folks would speak too, the Salvation Army and the like, but nobody could match us Wobs on the soapbox. We used to make fun of the preachers and some of them would get so worked up they’d stomp off and call a cop. Sometimes we’d go back and forth with socialists about voting versus the general strike too. But the thing that really stood out was ordinary folks getting a chance to speak their minds. We were mostly interested in organizing, but I can see now how important we were in the struggle for freedom for ordinary folks. We forced America’s hand. You say you have free speech, we’ll give it to you. They didn’t like it of course. We scared the hell out of the bosses and they got dangerous when they were scared. They killed men to shut them up. Think about that, killing a man to stop him from speaking. What kind of freedom is that?

  I seen the worst of it in San Diego where I got to run the gauntlet, and I seen the worst of it again in Minot, North Dakota where the vigilantes came after us again. It was a bloody business, those fights. My buddy Blanco got murdered up in Everett in 1916. Never had a chance against them vigilantes up there.

  I stopped and checked the date against my notes. Blanco had wondered aloud about Flash’s fate in his narrative about the San Diego fight, but it turns out that it was Gus, not Bobby who failed to escape the vigilantes’ wrath. He’d survived the Denver fight, but not the struggle to speak in Everett. I looked over at Pete who was still lost in his mystery even after his jazz CD had stopped. The next section of the manuscript was called, “In the Pen.” I read on:During the free speech fights it was our strategy to fill the jails. The cops would pull in a dozen of us and we’d send a hundred more. At first it drove the police to their wits’ end. In San Diego we had so many folks in the jails they couldn’t take any more. That’s what led them to up the ante and resort to vigilante justice in my opinion. They just couldn’t tame us in jail. I remember hearing a story at one of the hobo colleges once about how when Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit Henry David Thoreau, who was in jail for not paying his taxes to protest the Mexican war, he asked him, “What are you doing in there?” And Henry’s response was, “What are you doing out there?” Well, that was our attitude. If there was a struggle involving fellow Wobs it was a badge of honor to go to jail.

  We’d start giving ’em hell right from the start. They’d ask for our name and we’d say “Joe Hill” or something like that and they’d get riled up and then we’d give them some other made-up name. They’d ask for our family and we’d say, “none.” They’d ask for our best friend and we’d say “Big Bill Haywood” or something like that. When they got to asking for our home address, we’d always say it was the jail we were in at the time or say “a side car” or just give ’em the last place we’d been.

  When there was a bunch of us in there, we’d run our affairs and make our decisions by a committee system and we’d come up with ways to frustrate the jailors. We’d have a hunger strike to try to get better food than the dry bread or pig intestines they’d toss in the pen. If they was beating us badly, we’d raise hell until they couldn’t take it any more. In San Diego and Fresno and Denver and all over the place, the jailors hated the singing. We’d go into “Solidarity” or “Hold the Fort” or “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” or some other song and keep it going for hours so they could hardly think straight. In lots of places, they’d send in the Bible thumpers to save our souls on Sunday and they’d start singing to us and we’d steal the tunes but change the words so the songs made sense. There weren’t hardly any religious Wobs that I ever knew. We all saw it for the scam it was, just another way to keep the working man down. Down and obedient. But they sure didn’t like being made fun of, I’ll tell you that. It was real trying on their Christian charity.

  It was a joke to send in the preachers when they were treating us like animals. We’d get the “steam cleaning” in some of the jails, which meant getting blasted off with hot water. Other jails, they used cold water. We never had enough bunks either, so most of us would sleep on the floor on a dirty blanket or sometimes nothing at all on cold steel. In San Diego, the conditions got so bad at one point that they had to release a whole load of Wobs to avoid an epidemic after a Wob came down with small pox I think it was. If they were being real cruel, then we’d build a battleship. That was when all the boys in a cell would join arms and jump together. If there were enough of us in the pen, the battleship would shake the jail to the foundations. If we were upstairs, it would put the fear into them that the floor wa
s gonna collapse. It was a hell of a way to get their attention, that’s for sure.

  I don’t mean to suggest that it was just a big party in there though. Despite the solidarity of the boys, some of the men would get discouraged from being kicked around so much and lots of fellows got real sick. After a long jail stay, sometimes it’d take a good while to get your health back. You had to heal your wounds and eat proper for a few weeks after the horrible garbage they threw us in the pen. I lost some teeth from my jail time and got a few aches that have never gone away. That was the price you paid, though, it was the price you paid for standing up like a man. It was be a slave or fight, and we chose to fight.

  There were a few more pages missing and what looked to be some notes by the editor about following up with more questions. “Which jails during which struggles?” read one note. “Ask about Fresno” read another. The next typed entry was “Hobo Colleges and Communes”:One thing you don’t hear much about anymore was the fact that there was a Hobo College or a Colony or Commune of some type in or on the outskirts of almost every city. They weren’t all run by Wobblies, but Wobs were there. They were run by sympathetic folks, “fellow travelers” the communists used to call them later, I think. Sometimes it would just be a red boarding house that everybody coming off the road would stay in once they found out about them. Then there were bars and coffee houses too that everyone knew to go to when you were looking for like-minded folks. The most famous hobo college was Ben Reitman’s in Chicago. I saw Emma Goldman speak there and she was terrific. Very passionate, but not too practical. Still I loved to sit and listen to folks talk about politics or literature or just about anything else you could think of to talk about. I stopped at a colony set up by Wobs and Socialists in the hills in Arkansas where they had a real school. I saw a debate about voting versus direct action at a red hall in New Orleans.

  There was a camp by the tracks in Seattle run by a bunch of folks who believed in Free Love. They were anarchists, I believe. The idea was that nobody owned anybody and that women would only be free and equal when marriage was ended. This seemed like an invitation to an orgy to some of the boys as there just weren’t a whole lot of women on the rails in those days, but they were pretty quickly taught the error of their ways by some of the women. To be in with that crowd, any woman had to be high spirited and tough. And there were a good number of them. I have to say that on the road, sometimes the only women you’d have contact with were prostitutes. I knew a good number of gals who made their living that way in the camps. It was a hard life though and many came to bad ends. It seemed to me that it was the most degraded aspect of capitalism that love was for sale. Still is, even in the way folks marry into money and such. That’s just a respectable form of prostitution if you ask me, but that’s another story.

  Some of my favorite lectures in the Hobo Colleges were on Walt Whitman. I heard this one fellow give a talk about what Whitman’s view of the world was—what it could be like after a revolution, when folks could live their lives fully, like human beings and not as slaves to a clock. He spoke a lot too about the way Whitman saw the human body as holy, and sex as holy, and nature as holy, and how every man had the answer to life’s puzzle in themselves. I wasn’t ever religious in anyway, but perhaps if I was, Whitman’s idea of what’s holy lined up well with what matters most to me.

  So there were a lot of talks on things like that. Folks would talk about Oscar Wilde, Karl Marx, Edward Bellamy. And it’s funny that a lot of men that looked all scruffy, and that respectable folks would shy away from, would be sitting in these Hobo Colleges hungry for ideas. That’s the thing, folks still talk about workers like a bunch of dumb stiffs, but a lot of the boys, even with no formal education to speak of, had more to them than people think. There were some real smart folks that could have been lawyers or professors or something like that if they hadn’t been born into the working class. So they put all their energy into the One Big Union. It was our university, our church, our philosophy of life.

  Maybe the best experience I had with schools was at the Llano Colony. Llano del Rio Colony they called it, down in the desert by Los Angeles. It was there I met Miss Molly O’Conner who was a schoolteacher, socialist, and believer in Free Love. I fell in love with her during my first stay at the Llano Colony when I went to a lecture she gave on Melville’s story, “The Paradise of the Bachelors and the Tartarus of the Maids.” She talked about how Melville saw the plight of the worker in the machine age early on and how he showed the women workers as those sacrificed for the luxuries of the rich. Well I was taken with her bright green eyes and her keen intelligence and high spirit. She liked me too and we became lovers, but when I told her that I’d like to leave the road for good and marry her, she told me that she had no interest in marriage. Well, that was it, so I left and heard later that she had had my son. I went back and gave it another try but the answer was still no. She was a strange one, proud and stubborn, that Molly. It was not accepted to be a single mother in those days, not that it is now, but it was worse then. But she believed that marriage would take away her independence. “I belong to no man,” she told me kindly.

  So my son, Herman, grew up there and, later, in Louisiana where Llano moved. I would send him letters and get some back when he was growing up. Later they ended up back in Los Angeles and I got to visit him once or twice when he was a boy. A real great kid, he was. He left home real young too and got married to a fine girl. Unfortunately, he joined the army during the early days of World War II to go and fight the Nazis. He left his wife at home pregnant with my grandson, little Joey. So sad to think he never set eyes on his own son. That will set with me to my grave, I’ll tell you.

  I stopped dead, “Joey?” Now the mere coincidence of “Jack Wilson” just got a whole lot stranger. Joe was my father’s name and what little I knew of my family history, one thing had always been etched in my memory—my dad never knew his dad who had “died in the war.” I sat there for a moment shocked at the possibility that I really had stumbled onto my great grandfather. No, I thought, it couldn’t be true. What are the odds? I read on with a stunned fascination.Never got to see much of my grandson as my son’s wife remarried quickly to another soldier boy who wasn’t particularly interested in his stepson having a grandpa. I did write him a letter now and then and I got a few back with some pictures. It can be a lonely life rambling around like I have. But I don’t regret much, what else could I have done? In fact, I’m proud I’ve lived to old age as a rebel, not somebody’s yes man. And I’m proud my son died fighting Fascism. Maybe the revolution will come for the grandkid [laughs]. I can only hope.

  Anti-War Speaking and Repression

  After the free speech fights, the First World War came, and unlike the Second World War against Fascism, this was a war where the worker did not have a real stake in the fight. We were pawns in their game. Not all the Wobs were quick on the antiwar issue, but most were, I think. Well, I did some antiwar soapboxing in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1917 and there were plenty of workers who were responsive to not getting their brains blown up in a fight between bosses. I always believed that there wouldn’t be no war at all if it wasn’t for the competition for resources that capitalism creates. Really, nations and nationalism is all a bunch of made up stuff. It’s the same with races. We’re all just humans and the divisions between us have all been created to serve the interests of those at the top who benefit from a divided working class. There is that famous line about one of the robber barons telling his fellow parasites that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. Well that’s how I saw it. Other than the war to defeat Fascism, I can’t think of a war that’s done any good—even World War II was used by the rich to make plenty of profit on arms and materials to fight the war. And what happened after WWII? They invented the Cold War to keep the machine rolling on. They’ve always got to have an enemy to distract folks with. Otherwise, we might point the guns the wrong way, as the old Pete Seeger song says—at them.


  Well, back during the Great War, the bosses used the whole war hysteria very effectively to crush the I.W.W. All of a sudden we weren’t against the bosses we were against “Americanism,” whatever the hell that was or is. Hell, they got folks so riled up they had to rename the frankfurter “the hot dog” so folks didn’t have to feel like they was supporting the Kaiser when they ate a sausage. It was ridiculous as hell but it worked. They passed the anti-syndicalism laws that pretty much made it illegal to be a Wobbly. So if you had the little red card, you were an outlaw. Within the I.W.W. there was a big debate between the folks like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn who wanted the Wobs to evade arrest and fight the charges and the folks like Big Bill Haywood who wanted to fill the jails. “We’re in here for you; you are out there for us” was the slogan. Those in the Haywood camp felt that there would be a big wave of working class support for the prisoners, but it never did happen that way. When Haywood left the country that caused a lot of bitterness amongst the Wobs, who felt betrayed. I have to admit, I was with the Flynn crowd. After some of the treatment I saw myself during the free speech fights, I just couldn’t see the point in handing myself over to rot in jail. It ruined a lot of people, those long sentences. And the organization was never quite as strong after that.