From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  The SP organized a large network of locals and two national youth groups, the Young People’s Socialist League for workers and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society for students. Starting in 1910, foreign-language associations—Italian, Finnish, German, Polish, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and others—joined the Party as autonomous federations. By 1912, the SP published over 300 periodicals in many different languages.

  Party members agreed on the electoral path to socialism but not much else, and SP headquarters in Chicago did not try to impose consistency. Urban members usually favored public ownership of land, while rural members generally thought land should belong to those who farmed it. Opinion on race and gender ranged from egalitarianism to outright bigotry. Austrian-born Victor Berger headed a strong socialist movement in Milwaukee, which elected him to six terms in Congress. He believed in white supremacy, reluctantly supported votes for women, and looked down on “new immigrants.” New Yorker Morris Hillquit, another SP leader, was a new immigrant himself—a Latvian Jew who worked in garment shops and helped organize the United Hebrew Trades before he became a lawyer and socialist theorist. Kate Richards O’Hare edited the monthly National Rip-Saw for 150,000 rural readers and drew crowds at “tent meetings” where farm families camped for days of talks and entertainment. She advocated birth control and women suffrage, and accepted racial segregation. Another popular Party orator was George Washington Woodbey, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; he supported women’s rights, called for unity among poor people of all races, and strongly opposed Asian exclusion. In Oklahoma, only whites could join the Renters Union of tenant farmers led by Socialist J. Tad Cumbie. In southern Texas, Party organizers such as Antonio Valdez and J.A. Hernández built interracial agrarian unions.

  By 1910, the Party had more than 3,000 locals. As of 1912, more than 2,000 Socialists held public office, and Eugene Debs won 6 percent of the vote in that year’s presidential election. In 1914, Russian-born labor lawyer Meyer London became the Party’s second U.S. Congressman, elected from New York City’s Lower East Side.

  The SP rejected “dual unionism”—the formation of radical unions to rival those of the AFL. Instead, the Party “bored from within” the Federation, where Socialists promoted industrial unionism, organizing the unorganized, and political action in alliance with the SP. Socialists were active in building industrial unions. In the winter of 1909–10, SP members like Lithuanian-born Pauline Newman played a central role in New York City’s “Rising of the 20,000,” a strike by women shirtwaist makers that won union recognition for the Ladies’ Garment Workers. Party influence also extended to craft unions; Socialists led insurgencies that ousted conservative leaders from office in the Hatters, the Sheet Metal Workers, and the Carpenters. In 1912, Socialist Max Hayes of the Typographical Union challenged Samuel Gompers for the AFL presidency and got close to a third of the vote.

  The Party had a strong rural following among miners, railroad workers, and farmers, both tenants and small landowners. By 1910, the SP’s largest state organization was in Oklahoma, and it was well established in Kansas, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Arkansas, and Texas. Socialist-led farmers’ unions mobilized against landlords and bankers. In 1915, the North Dakota SP joined with dissident Democrats and Republicans to create the Non-Partisan League, which called for public ownership of banks and grain elevators and elected dozens of local and state officials.

  SP speakers and publications identified socialism with American history and values, echoing Debs’s declaration that the Party embodied “the idea of liberty and self-government, in which the nation was born.” Employers’ associations and business-minded civic groups replied with a barrage of literature that depicted socialism as an alien doctrine. AFL leaders loudly agreed.

  Aside from this powerful opposition, the SP’s mainstream strategy was itself problematic. Surveying the Party’s work in the AFL, labor radical Joseph Ettor concluded, “We tried, but the more we fooled with the beast the more it captured us.” To serve the rank and file, or simply to remain in power, Socialist labor officials placed their unions’ immediate interests above Party ideals. For example, William H. Johnston, elected president of the Machinists in 1911, endorsed industrial unionism at AFL conventions but did not promote it in his own union, where he thought it would “cause unlimited trouble.” Socialist efforts to “bore from within” the political system carried similar liabilities. The Party stressed immediate reforms, defined as way stations to a socialist future; but this program lost its radical edge when antisocialist Progressives embraced many of the same reforms the SP championed.

  The electoral focus could also distance the Party from potential supporters. In 1910 the Oklahoma SP campaigned to block a state constitutional amendment designed to disfranchise most black voters, then pandered to race prejudice among white voters by running the segregationist J. Tad Cumbie for governor. This alienated black political clubs that had earlier vowed support for “our Socialistic brethren.” Two years later—disfranchisement now in place—Socialists added a strong civil rights plank to their election platform and hired a black organizer (W. T. Lane of Kansas) to recruit African Americans. But electoral campaigns were no longer a viable means to mobilize black communities. The recruitment drive made headway only in coal towns, where Socialist activity centered in the United Mine Workers.

  When Socialists confronted popular protest beyond the boundaries of unionism and electoral politics, they generally tried to redirect it. In February 1917, thousands of immigrant housewives in New York City took action against soaring food prices with a consumer boycott, neighborhood demonstrations, and mass marches on both City Hall and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (where the governor was rumored to be staying). Amidst the turmoil, the SP organized the Mothers’ Anti-High Price League to lobby public officials. In their work with the League, Socialists repeatedly suggested that the boycotters would do better to support unions’ efforts to raise wages and the Party’s campaign for women suffrage. SP strategists seldom recognized that working people could “vote” with collective action as well as ballots and “unionize” in communities as well as workplaces.

  In contrast, the Industrial Workers of the World (often called Wobblies) thought the labor movement’s future lay with the masses denied the vote and excluded from the AFL. At the initiative of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM)—an independent union of metal miners—some 200 labor radicals convened in Chicago in June 1905. WFM Secretary William (“Big Bill”) Haywood welcomed them to “the Continental Congress of the Working Class.” Among the dignitaries on the platform were Socialists Eugene Debs and Mother Jones, anarchist Lucy Parsons (widow of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons), and the Catholic “labor priest” Father Thomas Hagerty. The convention adopted a constitution that began, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” and the IWW was born.

  Its founders disagreed on political action. Some promoted electoral work. Others advocated syndicalism—taking “direct action” on the job to build industrial unions until they were strong enough to launch a general strike and take over business and government. As Joseph Ettor put it, “the workers of the world . . . have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop.” Syndicalists prevailed at the IWW’s 1908 convention, the others fell away, and Wobblies went forth to organize militant industrial unions under the auspices of the “One Big Union,” the IWW.

  Best known for strike agitation and free speech campaigns, the IWW also staged lectures and debates and distributed pamphlets and periodicals in more than a dozen languages. Its Little Red Songbook included songs like “Solidarity Forever,” written by the Wobbly newspaper editor Ralph Chaplin and today the anthem of American labor. IWW graphics, often contributed by avant-garde artists, still make powerful appeals for labor unity and revolution.

  Wobbly agitators were dedicated, bold, and imaginative. Big Bill Haywood had organized miners for twenty years, always packing a gun. “Rebel Girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who
mounted her first soapbox at age sixteen, traveled coast to coast as an IWW speaker. Black longshoreman Ben Fletcher organized across the South and led Philadelphia’s Local 8 of the IWW Marine Transport Workers; his trademark slogan was “All for one and one for all.” Joe Hill came from Sweden in 1902, tramped from job to job, joined the IWW around 1910, and wrote subversive lyrics to popular tunes. Half-Cherokee Frank Little called himself the reddest Wobbly and the IWW’s only true American.

  Wobblies scrupulously practiced solidarity: “If you are a wage worker, you are welcome . . . the IWW is not a white man’s union, not a black man’s union, not a red man’s union, but a workingman’s union.” They accepted unorthodox behavior; Marie Equi, an Oregon physician who became active with the IWW during a strike by immigrant women cannery workers, wore men’s clothing and lived openly as a lesbian. IWW solidarity also crossed national borders. When Mexican activists invaded Baja California in 1911 to fight the Diaz dictatorship, a hundred Anglo Wobblies joined them.

  The IWW gained national notice for its role in a 1909 strike at a U.S. Steel subsidiary in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. When the company cut pay, Slavic steelworkers went on strike and called in the Wobblies. Strikers and their wives battled with state police for forty-five days; thirteen people were killed. After the Railroad Trainmen, an independent union, refused to transport scabs, the company caved in. The IWW’s reputation grew with the 1912 “Bread and Roses Strike” in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In January, 25,000 workers—immigrants from a dozen ethnic groups—walked out of the city’s textile mills to protest wage cuts. While the AFL textile union tried to quash the strike, the IWW organized “moving pickets” to foil injunctions and sent trainloads of strikers’ children to safe haven in New York and other cities. After two months, the strikers won.

  Militant solidarity was not always enough, however. In Merryville, Louisiana, during the winter of 1912–13, the IWW’s Brotherhood of Timber Workers struck the Santa Fe Railroad’s American Lumber Company, which had fired union members for testifying in defense of workers charged with murdering a company guard. Local farmers supplied the strikers with food. African Americans, Italians, and Mexicans hired as scabs joined the strike instead. In May, posses of lawmen and company guards attacked the town, ransacking homes, beating and arresting strikers, and killing a black organizer. The Brotherhood was destroyed.

  Local governments smashed other Wobbly efforts. A 1913 strike by 17,000 rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, lasted a month. Police clubbed and arrested pickets, deputized vigilantes, broke up meetings, and ran Wobblies out of town. That same year the IWW supported 25,000 workers striking the silk mills in Paterson, New Jersey. Police arrested almost 3,000 pickets and killed two; the strike collapsed after seven months.

  The IWW challenged local governments in more than twenty campaigns to claim free speech and assembly under the First Amendment. In 1909, when Missoula, Montana, tried to silence Wobblies with an ordinance against public speaking, the IWW called members and sympathizers into town and flooded the jail with free speechers. In Spokane, Washington, police detained more than 600 Wobbly speakers in November 1909. Several died from torture in the “sweatbox,” where guards tossed prisoners back and forth between sweltering and freezing rooms.

  Wobblies won many free-speech fights, but they remained prime targets for repression. In 1914, Salt Lake City police arrested Joe Hill for murder. The prosecution presented no motive, eyewitness, or connection between Hill and the victim but still got a conviction. Shortly before his execution, Hill wired Haywood, “Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize.” The IWW scattered his ashes in every state except Utah; in Oregon, Dr. Equi performed the honors.

  By 1915, the IWW had issued 300,000 cards, but it had only about 15,000 members. Wobbly locals were highly unstable. Strikes brought in masses of recruits, but most dropped out after they went back to work. The locals—composed of workers from various industries and shops—were ill equipped to deal with day-to-day conflicts on the job. After the strike defeats in Akron and Paterson, Wobblies set out to build sturdier unions.

  The strategy came from the IWW’s agricultural locals, which merged to form the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO) in 1915 and adopted the “job delegate” system. Organizers in fixed locations directed hundreds of roving delegates, who settled job disputes while recruiting new members and collecting dues. With this system the AWO organized migrant wheat harvesters from Oklahoma into Canada, then branched out to other farm workers and lumberjacks, and grew to 70,000 members by 1917. Their dues funded AWO-style organizing drives among iron and copper miners west of the Mississippi, along with seamen and dockworkers in Atlantic, Gulf, and Great Lakes ports.

  Repression continued. In 1916, police and company thugs savagely attacked striking IWW iron miners in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, and sheriff’s deputies shot up a boatload of Wobblies at the town dock in Everett, Washington, killing six and wounding twenty-seven. But by 1918, the IWW had at least 100,000 dues-paying members.

  At their peaks, the IWW and Socialist Party combined were less than a tenth the size of the AFL, but Samuel Gompers and his lieutenants obsessively maneuvered to counter Socialist influence and thwart Wobbly organizing. The American Federationist repeatedly printed attacks on the SP and IWW, most penned by Gompers himself. In 1912, he charged that Socialists were not genuine trade unionists but “fanatical . . . unscrupulous . . . vote-hunters.” After the Paterson strike, he declared the IWW “destructive in theory and practice.” Socialists and Wobblies responded in kind. The SP called the AFL’s executives “capitalistic misleaders.” For the IWW, the AFL was a nest of “union scabs.” Meanwhile, the SP fought the IWW. In 1912, Victor Berger and Morris Hillquit got the Party’s constitution amended to require the expulsion of members who opposed electoral activity or advocated illegal or violent methods of class struggle. A partywide referendum ousted Haywood from the SP’s national executive committee in 1913, and tens of thousands followed him out of the Party.

  By 1917, on the other hand, prospects looked bright for syndicalists, political socialists, and AFL conservatives alike. The IWW was growing as never before;the SP was rebuilding through its foreign language federations; AFL headquarters was celebrating Woodrow Wilson’s second inauguration. But international developments had already started to shift the ground beneath their feet.

  THE GREAT WAR

  By mid-August 1914, the great powers of Europe, along with their clients and colonies in the Balkans, Middle East, and Africa, had divided into two camps and gone to war. Four years later, the “Great War” between the Allies and the Central Powers had claimed 10 million lives in battle. Another 20 million had died of war-related starvation or disease.

  The United States declared neutrality at first, but there was considerable sympathy with the Allies—Britain, France, and Russia. Financiers like J. P. Morgan helped to fund their side of the war with close to $3 billion in loans and bond purchases. Businessmen joined politicians like Theodore Roosevelt in the “Preparedness Movement” that pressed for military intervention in support of the Allies. The American Defense Society and other patriotic associations held rallies for intervention and sponsored summer camps where young men could receive military training. Newspapers carried stories of war atrocities by the Central Powers—Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Still, many Americans opposed the calls for intervention. German Americans often sympathized with the Central Powers; most Irish Americans condemned any alliance with Britain; Russian Jews were against aid to the czar. Pacifists organized anti-intervention groups like the American Union Against Militarism and the Women’s Peace Party. Much of the AFL came out against intervention too. In May 1915, eight national unions headquartered in Indianapolis jointly condemned U.S. entry into the war. Their combined membership totaled about 900,000—almost half of the AFL’s rank and file. In June, the Chicago-based Labor’s Peace Council organized a national labor coalition to demand strict neutrality, government ownersh
ip of munitions companies, and a ban on arms sales to the combatant nations. The many Preparedness parades that took place during the spring and summer of 1916 met fairly widespread opposition from local unions and labor councils.

  Employers and authorities alike took note. Strikes by munitions workers were blamed on German agents. Several leaders of Labor’s Peace Council were indicted for conspiring with a German officer to instigate strikes. When two of the defendants were convicted, the Council fell apart. Police arrested AFL radicals Tom Mooney and Warren Billings for a bombing that killed ten people at San Francisco’s Preparedness parade on July 22, 1916. Despite photographic evidence of Mooney’s alibi, both men were convicted; they remained in prison until 1939.

  By 1917, Samuel Gompers supported intervention in the war. After President Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany in February 1917, Gompers organized a summit meeting of labor officials. Invitees included members of the AFL Executive Council, national officers of seventy-nine AFL unions, and leaders of the five independent railroad brotherhoods. Gompers had left out the unions most staunchly opposed to intervention—independents like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and AFL affiliates like the Ladies’ Garment Workers, the United Mine Workers, and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (formerly the Western Federation of Miners). At the summit, held on March 12 in Washington, D.C., he set forth a resolution that declared, “Should our country be drawn into the maelstrom of the European conflict, we offer our services.” Ruling revisions out of order and denying union leaders’ requests to consult with members, he demanded and got unanimous approval for the resolution.

  Just weeks later, on April 6, Congress declared war on Germany. The U.S. Army quickly expanded from 200,000 to over 4 million, including nearly 3 million draftees. More than 2 million troops went to Europe, where close to 49,000 were killed in action and another 63,000 died of disease.