TOWARDS A WORKING-CLASS CULTURE
The IWW's counterculture far transcended the issues of electoral politics, capitalist property morality, sabotage, and direct action, and encountered problems far more serious than its controversies with the rival Socialist parties. Indeed, the IWW's revolutionary counterculture confronted mainstream American culture at virtually every point. It redefined the very basis of working-class self-identity, their sources of dignity, meaning, and self-respect. In constructing its counterculture, the IWW challenged deeply-engrained American attitudes towards race, gender, patriotism, and religion. The IWW, to a far greater degree than the Socialist party (and even more the AFL) attacked artificial divisions that undercut class consciousness and vitiated effective working-class action. The Socialist party appealed for votes primarily to white, male, American citizens, whose source of community derived from racial, gendered, and national identities more than from class affiliation. The SP therefore downplayed radical attacks on these prefabricated sources of traditional identities. The IWW, however, propounded a new working-class culture based on conscious class struggle, and offered workers a new community based exclusively on their class affiliation, to the virtual exclusion of inherited, traditional forms of personal identity. Non-class sources of personal identity were not only irrelevant to the IWW, but actively obstructed its mission.
While the IWW's philosophical attack on racism, patriarchy, patriotism, and religion employed many arguments current on the left, it focused on their effects in dividing the working class and undermining its struggle against capitalism. The IWW's innovative method was directly tied to its innovations in philosophy. The IWW undermined white supremacy, male dominance, American patriotism, and religious beliefs not only through argument but through a practical demonstration of their perniciousness and falsity. IWW agitators, publicists, and philosophers believed that the working class would transcend prejudice, superstition, and false pride not when logically convinced of their absurdity (IWW writers had scant confidence in the intellectual and moral abilities of most workers), but through a concrete demonstration that the IWW, by uniting all workers regardless of race, gender, nationality, and religion, "delivered the goods." The IWW would recruit all workers, of whatever origin and belief, into One Big Union, and inculcate IWW philosophy by showing that solidarity raised wages, reduced hours, and improved working conditions. Once workers saw such practical demonstration of their power at the point of production, IWW theorists believed, they would perceive that their concerted action, rather than God, Country, skin color, or sex, gave them the blessings of life. Workers would see their essential oneness and their implacable and inevitable conflict with their oppressors.
The IWW, like Max Eastman and Emma Goldman, contended with working-class cultural conservatism. Workers often found solace and pride in their racial, sexual, national, and religious identities rather than in their class position. Yet such cultural conservatism was not a natural or immutable aspect of working-class consciousness; rather, it was assiduously cultivated by ruthless and unremitting ruling-class terrorism and violence, and by capitalist control of the productive process. The capitalists controlled governments at the local, state, and federal levels; they also owned the press, the pulpit, and popular culture. They used these forces to orchestrate a campaign of intimidation, violence, and murder against the IWW throughout the nation. Capitalist terrorism, economic coercion, and cultural hegemony prevented the IWW from achieving lasting success at the point of production, the essential requisite for the IWW's cultural programme. These same mechanisms of control also channelled working-class resentment into the safer channels of racist and national hatreds and gender condescencion.
Towards a Raceless Society
The IWW vociferously repudiated mainstream American norms, including those of the AFL and the SP, in the area of race. The IWW's counterculture included blacks, Mexicans,[i] Asians, and whites, and immigrants and natives, on terms of perfect equality. As Big Bill Haywood told blacks, the IWW "is the only labor union that has never in theory or practice, since its inception twelve years ago, barred the workers of any race or nation from membership.... The IWW is not a white man's union, not a black man's union, not a red or yellow man's union, but A WORKING MAN'S UNION. ALL OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ONE BIG UNION."[ii] From the very beginning the IWW's constitution and practice banned discrimination upon the basis of race. The IWW press skewered the AFL for excluding blacks, thereby creating scabs and helping the capitalists divide the working class. The IWW also criticized the SP's segregated locals in the South; adherence to capitalist legality and the quest for votes fostered SP segregation where integrated unions were illegal and blacks were disfranchised.
IWW industrialism, however, was incompatible with segregation. When Haywood spoke at the convention of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1912, he asked why there were no blacks present; told that Louisiana law mandated separate meetings, Haywood said
You work in the same mills together. Sometimes a black man and a white man chop down the same tree together. You are meeting in convention to discuss the conditions under which you labor. This can't be done intelligently by passing resolutions here and then sending then out to another room for the black man to act upon. Why not be sensible about this and call the Negroes into this convention? If it is against the law, this is one time when the law should be broken.[iii]
Covington Hall, a prominent white Southern Wobbly, agreed. "Let the Negroes come together with us, and if any arrests are made, all of us will go to jail, white and colored together." The white BTW members accepted this suggestion and affiliated with the IWW. When the IWW organized integrated longshoremen's unions in cities such as Philadelphia and New Orleans, blacks and whites alternated in leadership positions.[iv]
The IWW stressed that the capitalists fostered racism to divide the working class. Workers of the South, the BTW said, enjoy "the supremacy of misery and the equality of rags." The capitalists know that "we can never raise our standard of living or better our conditions so long as they can keep us split, whether on race, craft, religious, or national lines, and they have tried and are trying all of these methods of division in addition to their campaign of terror." The IWW attributed "child slavery" and other horrors of the South to the white racism inculcated by the capitalists. When a Mr. Parker, the owner of a textile mill, attacked the IWW as "preaching equality of race," the IWW replied that Mr. Parker would employ blacks and even offer them specially high wages if necessary to break the strike of white workers. Capitalists regard the white worker as superior only "if he shows that he can produce more wealth for the boss, than his colored brother can.... 'White supremacy' means only the supremacy of Mr. Parker and other capitalists over all workers of both colors." After the failure of the Patterson strike, the IWW recognized that southern racism had national implications; "we can't make very much progress in the Northeast until we get the south."[v]
While the IWW published material specifically addressed to blacks, as it did for other groups, it addressed the same arguments for the IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism to blacks as it did to whites. In his pamphlet, "To Colored Working Men and Women," Haywood reiterated the frequent IWW claim that workers of both races were worse off as wage slaves than as chattels; when the masters owned their workers, they cared for them as they would any other property. But, assuming the persona of a black worker, Haywood claimed that "the white wage worker is little, if any, better off. He is a slave the same as we are and, like us, he is regarded by the boss only as a means of making profits.... The employing class seeks to engender race hatred and division by poisoning the minds of both whites and blacks."[vi]
The IWW, like the SP, stressed class to the exclusion of race, and offered no special program for blacks. The IWW's class-only stance, however, was liberating in a way the SP's was not. Blacks did have special needs in the policial arena--disfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, and lynching were problems the political process could address. When the SP downplayed the distinctive experience of blacks and ignored AFL racism, it distorted reality and collaborated in white racism. The IWW, however, created its own institutions and culture and constructed a new society within the shell of the old. The IWW kept dues low and, castigating the AFL's practice of closing the books to new members, guaranteed the right of free transfer from one union to another. When jobs were scarce, it demanded the reduction of working hours so that every worker would have a job. The IWW focused on the poorest paid, least skilled workers, and increased their pay relative to that of more privileged workers. At Lawrence, the IWW secured a 25% increase in the wages of the poorest paid workers, five times that gained by the most skilled. The IWW also called for the collective ownership of the land, a program that would help blacks more than any other group.
The IWW would not reform the capitalist and racist American society, but replace it with a totally new set of institutions and new forms of cultural self-identity. Blacks could join the IWW, vote, and hold office on terms of perfect equality with whites; as the IWW considered itself the nucleus of the new society, such equality was all that blacks required. The IWW's version of industrial unionism made any special compensation of blacks for past injuries superfluous. When industrial unions owned and managed the industries, every worker would have a good job, characterized by high pay, ample leisure, and democratic participation and control at the workplace. This, plus the mingling of workers on the job in the industries they jointly owned, would eliminate the economic and social bases of racism and segregation. The unskilled majority would outvote the skilled minority, eliminate unfair wage and status differentials, shorten hours for everyone, and equalize access to the skilled jobs. The outcome would probably not have been equality of pay for all workers, but higher pay or shorter hours for drudge work that offered no intrinsic satisfactions. Such jobs would be accorded more dignity even as the workers reduced or eliminated them by reorganizing production.[vii] Inherited advantages of race, skill, wealth, and access to apprenticeship programs would have no existence in such a society. The IWW's programme offered far more to blacks than the most ambitious affirmative action programs of recent decades; by re-creating society from scratch, the IWW could deliver the genuine freedom and equality that capitalist race-based reforms cannot.
Race-based affirmative action programs such as those enacted in recent decades were not only inconceivable in the heydey of the IWW. They also assume the continued existence of a stratified, exploitative society where most workers are locked out of good jobs. Affirmative action guarantees blacks preferential access to desirable jobs as compensation for past and present discrimination. It loses all meaning in a society where every worker has a job, every job is characterized by high pay, decent working conditions, and democratic control by the workers, and where allocation of jobs is determined from the bottom up, by the workers themselves, under a system where any worker can automatically join the union of his or her choice. Capitalist affirmative action, even at its best, achieves cosmetic changes in the distribution of decent jobs, while leaving the structure unchanged and relegating most blacks (and huge numbers of other workers) to poorly paid, insecure jobs, or no job at all. Capitalist race-based programs have exacerbated white racism and resentment, especially among the white males whose wages have been steadily plummeting for almost thirty years, even as the condition of a majority of blacks also steadily worsens. Programs fully appropriate for a class society based upon the slow torture of those at the bottom are manifestly inappropriate for a classless society such as the IWW envisioned--a society that would approximate equality of condition rather than granting an illusory equality of opportunity.
The IWW's vision of a classless and raceless society was, therefore, far more radical than any race-based reform program. Yet the IWW, despite its official class-only ideology, did acknowledge the distinctive experiences and disabilities of blacks. For example, it repeatedly condemned lynchings, which, Solidarity said, "correspond to pogroms in Russia.... The idea is that as long as Mr. Block [a Wobbly term for conservative workers] thinks he can better his conditions by bucking the colored slave instead of the boss, the real culprit will go unpunished." Lynching, another Wobbly averred, was "a war of extermination directed against the more rebellious negroes" who "are demanding more of their product." Yet IWW writers only confronted such distinctive experiences reluctantly. Haywood epitomized a common IWW ambiguity when he said that blacks in the north suffered from "the hardest work and poorest pay," only to immediately add that "the white wage worker is little, if any, better off." Another writer repeated the common IWW claim that "environment is omnipotent" and that workers of all races and nationalities will respond identically to the same treatment-- thus denying the long-term relevance of inherited cultural patterns. Then, responding to northern white fears that recently-arrived blacks would remain content with the lower standard of living prevalent in the South, he asserted that the colored man "is well known to like a good life. After he has been up north for a certain period he shows this racial trait in his dress, food, and in all his ways. This kind of worker is the right material for the revolutionary movement.... It is only by wanting more and more that the capitalist system will be overthrown."[viii]
As blacks moved north during World War I, the IWW reminded whites that blacks were discriminated against in housing, public facilities, voting rights, and employment. IWW agitators, worried that this influx would exacerbate the racism of northern white workers, reminded their white members of the special circumstances that would make black workers difficult to organize. The new arrivals were but recently removed from slavery; they were of southern rural background and new to industry. Until they found their bearings, wage rates in the north would initially seem high to them. Blacks were justifiably suspicious of unions because of AFL policies. "Instead of extending the helping hand, [AFL members], in their stupidity, fanaticism, prejudice and loyalty to their property-protecting unions, turned [the blacks] down flat and even joined in the fanatic mob or race rioters in the persecution of these southern workers." The IWW blamed the AFL and the capitalists, rather than the blacks, when black workers scabbed. When capitalists imported black strikebreakers into Illinois in 1917, Solidarity, seeking to avert a pogrom such as that at East St. Louis, reminded its readers that "colored men come here to work and not to scab on anyone.... THEY WERE TOLD THAT THERE WAS NO STRIKE OR LABOR TROUBLE OF ANY KIND" or they never would have come. The blacks were ruthlessly exploited and, if they attempted to quit, intimidated. "Colored workers have as much to gain by organizing as white workers. Many of them are eager to line up. Why not make the attempt before blaming them for things the bosses are really guilty of?" Solidarity proudly publicized the statement of Mary White Ovington, an SP member and founder of the NAACP, that the IWW was the only organization besides the NAACP that cared about blacks.[ix]
The IWW also confronted virulent anti-Asian racism in the West. Asians were persecuted much like blacks in the deep south; they were ravaged by white violence and periodically expelled from entire communities. The United States banned further immigration of Chinese and Japanese, and denied citizenship to those already present; California forbade Japanese owernship of land. The AFL and many Socialists supported these laws, claiming that Asians worked for lower wages, scabbed on white workers, and in general lowered the standard of living of the (white) working class. The IWW disagreed. Solidarity asserted "that wage slavery produces the same state of mind in the working classes of all countries; that under the same shop and life conditions, the Chinaman will act in the same manner and with the same methods as the American and European wage slaves do. He will hate and fight his economic master." The Industrial Worker claimed that "All workers can be organized, regardless of race or color, as soon as their minds are cleared of the patriotic notion that there is any reason for being born of a certain shade of skin or in an arbitrarily fenced off portion of the earth.... There are but two nations: the robbers and the robbed." On another occasion it proclaimed that the IWW "accepts the Japanese to membership on exactly the same terms as other workers. They know that we accept them, not as Japanese, but as members of our own nation--the working class."[x]
Despite their assertion that all workers responded identically to industrial capitalism, the IWW did sometimes make distinctions between races. The Industrial Worker praised the Japanese as "intelligent and class conscious in a high degree.... The personal cleanliness of the Japanese workers is one of the highest and surest marks of their inborn intelligence and their natural refinement of disposition." The difference between the bunkhouses of white and Japanese workers "can easily be detected a half a mile off, especially if the wind is in the right direction. Comparisons are offensive, and we are not praising the Japanese to flatter them," but merely countering "the lies told about them by the common enemy of all working people--the employing class." The Industrial Worker ridiculed white migrant workers who "eat rotten food, and sleep in their masters' straw stacks" and yet fulminate against their fellow workers from Japan. "Yes, indeed, it would be beneath his unwashed and vermin-covered dignity to associate with a 'Jap.'" IWW writers deemed Japanese workers more class conscious than most whites, and extolled their ingenuity in extracting everything they could from the capitalists. When the AFL Porters Union proposed to "eradicate the brown men from industrial competition," the Industrial Worker dryly commented that the porters would not "exterminate the Japanese by murder outright, but would be more humane (?) by letting the Japanese starve to death--providing the Japanese could be so far educated into the AF of L principles as to be willing tamely to starve to death.... If the porters' union were but half as class-conscious as the average Japanese worker, there would be better wages and better conditions for the porter than the wretched ones they now are forced to submit to."[xi] The Wobbly press publicized instances where Asian workers successfully struck for higher wages than their more timid white co-workers.
The IWW reminded its members that the working class lacked the power to exclude Asians or anyone else from the United States. The Industrial Worker asserted that "the employers constitute the government, and immigration will continue as long as it is in the interests of the employing class." Because immigrants were more militant than native-born whites, and only slowly assimilated AFL craft-scabbing principles, some capitalists opposed immigration. Others, especially in the West, feared the class consciousness of the Japanese workers and their tough competition when they became businessmen. Still others hoped that anti-Japanese fervor would translate into a war against Japan for the sake of capitalist markets and empire.[xii]
The IWW had practical arguments against the exclusion of Asian workers. J.H. Walsh, Western organizer for the IWW and leader of the famed "Overalls Brigade" to the 1908 Convention, reiterated a common Wobbly theme in his contention that "capitalism is international and recognizes no boundary lines or race distinctions. The capitalist has only one thing in view--profits." He does not allow patriotism or racism to impede his pursuit of profit, but buys labor as cheaply as he can in the world market and builds factories wherever they are profitable. If the United States prohibited Asians from immigrating here, American capitalists would build--were even now building--factories in China and Japan. Asian workers "are found creating wealth just across the pond, and this wealth created is in competition in the world market." The IWW must organize on the same international scale as the capitalists, and enlist the workers of the entire world in one big union. Walsh concluded that "there is only one correct and scientific position to be taken on this question." The Industrial Worker similarly said that "No capitalist has any patriotism." If they cannot exploit immigrants in the United States, they will "erect factories in other countries to exploit the workers there.... Anti-immigration is a foolish attempt to benefit the workers here at the expense of the balance of the working class."[xiii]
IWW writers frequently asserted that "race prejudice does not extend to the employing class," who merely used it for their own ends. The Industrial Worker observed that the President of the United States would eat with the leaders of China or Japan at a formal banquet, but "is [the worker] not insulted if asked to eat with his Japanese brother, who is almost always cleaner and healthier than the American?" Time and again, IWW publications asserted that the capitalists violated their every professed belief in the superiority of the white race, (or the delicacy and domesticity of women), in their hiring practices; similarly, the capitalists belied their supposed patriotism by building factories overseas. "Gold, at least, knows no flag." The IWW exaggerated the rationality and racelessness of the capitalists, who are, after all, cultural beings. Yet it correctly asserted that many capitalists consciously bolstered their position, and profits, with racist and patriotic appeals. The Wobblies were accurate in their assertion that "the class struggle is world-wide.... Organization of the workers must be on a line with organization of the employers, in order that the workers may win the world for themselves alone."[xiv] IWW analysis and predictions have an eerie, contemporary sound in an age when the internationalization of capital and runaway shops are wrecking havoc on the working class in the United States and throughout the world.
Members of the IWW did not consider the United States their own country. The United States, Wobblies asserted, belonged to their mortal enemies, the capitalists. When a prominent AFL leader used the expression "our mills and factories" to refer to industries located in the United States, the IWW press sarcastically replied that "the IWW is fighting and organizing to take and hold the mills and factories, but it's no use! They are 'ours' already!" The problems of workers anywhere in the world are "of equal importance and concern with those of this part of the employers' world." In the same vein Covington Hall acidly remarked that "If foreigners are men without homes in the land where they happen to be, there is no land on earth today where the workers are not foreigners."[xv]
The IWW's racial egalitarianism contravened widespread white working-class attitudes. IWW writers castigated poor and working-class whites, an important part of the IWW's natural constituency, for their racist attitudes. A writer in Solidarity complained that "the hatred of the negro is found to be the strongest in the 'poor white'--the poor, submissive slave who is willing to admit the 'superiority' of any soft-handed pasasite who possesses more wordly goods than he does." Justus Ebert, a prominent IWW organizer and writer, exclaimed: "It beats the Dutch to hear workingmen who haven't a cent in their pockets discuss banking and currency laws, or listen to their anti-immigrant twaddle when they ought to get off the continent for the Indian's sake, according to their own logic. Just now, a lot of them, who haven't the price of a burial plot, and most likely will be laid away for their final rest in potter's field, are wagging their jaws in favor of California's anti-Japanese land laws." The IWW castigated the racism and anti-immigrant stance of the skilled, mostly white, native-born craft workers of the AFL; but Solidarity noted that immigrants who successfully fought their way into the craft elite "in many cases have outdone the natives" in racism and patriotism.[xvi]
The IWW practiced the inter-racialism it preached. It transcended ethnic and racial divisions to an extent unparalleled in American society at the time, and seldom equalled since. The IWW united whites and blacks in the north and the deep south, and organized nationalities divided by ancient hatreds into fighting unions. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn remembered that the IWW "spoke to nationalities who had been traditionally enemies for centuries in hostile European countries, like Greeks and Turks and Armenians, yet they marched arm-in-arm on the picket line."[xvii] During its famous strikes at Lawrence, Patterson, the Mesabi Range, and elsewhere, the IWW forged unified strikes out of as many as twenty-five different nationalities. It recruited speakers in many languages, ensured diverse ethnic representation on strike committees, and utilized ethnic communities, solidarities, and institutions in strike activities such as soup kitchens and other forms of strike relief. White, native-born workers created the most difficulties; many of these, affiliated with the AFL, refused to strike with their less skilled co-workers, abandoned strikes at the least sign of trouble, or, if unemployed, rushed to scab on strikers. The AFL often actively recruited scabs to break IWW strikes. Other holdouts were poor, unorganized whites whose lack of solidarity stemmed from patriotic and racist conceit. Native-born white males proved the most difficult recruits to the IWW's new working-class culture.
In evaluating the effects of such racism on the success of the IWW, we must remember that the IWW's task differed from that of publicists such as Emma Goldman and Max Eastman, who changed individuals by rational argument. The IWW intended not to win a philosophical disputation, but to create functioning institutions which would embody its ideal. As John Walsh said, the worker "afraid of falling in 'social caste' is generally pretty quick to see the light of identity of interest when his job is at stake." Solidarity averred that "the working class is not a unit on any great proposition; formulas will not make it a unit; only organization that enables the workers to get an ever firmer control of industry will do the trick. All else is subordinate." Another IWW writer belittled the propaganda of words only and asserted that "the strike itself is the best educator" and "the best propaganda.... We attract more attention, arouse a greater interest in industrial unionism, open the eyes of more wage workers and give them more to hope for during a strike with the capitalist class than at any other time." Solidarity averred that news of labor victories, rather than abstract theorizing, "is the most effective means of reaching workers not yet imbued with our philosophy."[xviii]
Despite the IWW's justified complaints, white racism was not a main cause of their defeat in strikes. Rather, capitalist terrorism and control of the productive process prevented the IWW from "building the new society within the shell of the old." Capitalists fired and blacklisted union organizers; they and the governments they controlled (at the local, state, and national levels) routinely clubbed, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered participants in IWW strikes. Law-enforcement authorities often gunned down a striker and imprisoned the strike leaders for murder. The press often incited vigilantee violence against Wobblies, as against southern blacks. The IWW could not show that inter-racial cooperation brought results. The blacklist, the yellow-dog contract, and assiduous terrorism and violence ensured that workers concerned about their lives and jobs avoided the IWW's inter-racial solidarity.
For example, the whites and blacks of the BTW fought together until a capitalist and governmental reign of terror destroyed their union. As Phillip Foner says, "Everywhere in the South the union met the same experience: mob violence, attacks by gunmen, arrests and deportation of union members" followed by blacklisting. White workers experienced the treatment usually meted out to blacks, while the blacks, vulnerable under ordinary circumstances, suffered even more than the usual abuse.[xix] Such terrorism was neither unusual nor confined to the South. The result was that workers lacked the example of a successful, functioning, inter-racial union. John Walsh's worker worried about his job would "see the light" and avoid the IWW.
The black and white longshoremen also remained united until the general proscription of the Wobblies during World War I. The migrant farm laborers of the West, a group conventionally considered unorganizable because of the temporary and transient nature of their work, are another case in point. The Agricultural Workers Organization united whites, Japanese, and blacks when World War I created a labor shortage; this demonstrates that previous economic conditions (an endemic surplus of workers) and not any imagined qualities of the migrants themselves had impeded organization. The AWO achieved spectacular success until massive federal violence destroyed it during World War I. The IWW won similar successes in the lumber and mining industries of the West during World War I, only to suffer destruction at the hands of government and vigilantee terrorism.
Even when the IWW won a strike, the results were often short-lived. After the IWW united twenty-five nationalities and won the Lawrence strike in 1912, overcoming the usual corporate and government violence, the capitalists gradually and quietly fired union activists, advertised widely for more workers than they required, and shifted production to lower-wage areas, thus generating widespread unemployment and desperation. The IWW local at Lawrence virtually disintegrated. The IWW suffered its catastrophic defeat at Patterson in 1913, which virtually ended its career in the East, because of the usual massive repression and because corporations shifted production to mills in Pennsylvania, which the IWW could not organize.[xx] Racism and ethnic prejudice, however real and endemic, do not explain the IWW's defeat; rather, the destruction of the IWW (and of other attempts at inter-racial cooperation, such as the Populists in the 1890's and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in the 1930's) partly explains the persistence of such racial animosities. The IWW failed not so much because of working-class cultural conservatism, much less its own alleged ideological or organizational shortcomings, but because argument is no match for rifles and bayonets.
The same ruling groups that crushed militant working-class resistance also fostered racist and ethnic hatreds. Class organization evoked violent suppression, but racist pogroms won official sanction or acquiescence. The press caricatured and slandered blacks, Asians, and recent immigrants much as it did Wobblies, and inculcated a sense of racial and patriotic pride in native-born white workers. Segregation, disfanchisement, and public festivals of ritual dismemberment and murder in the South officially stigmatized blacks as an inferior and dangerous race. President Woodrow Wilson, in his own historical writings, his hearty endorsement of the racist film Birth of a Nation, and his segregation of the federal civil service, placed the imprimateur of the national government on racist ideology. Elite whites in the universities trumpheted the supposed "scientific basis" for the inferiority of blacks, Eastern Europeans, and women.[xxi]
The capitalists also reinforced racism by their hiring policies. Many companies segregated their workforce by ethnic group, reserving specific jobs for particular jobs, often upon the basis of some supposed "racial trait" of that group. Intended to divide the workers and make communication between them difficult, this policy actually facilitated united resistance during World War I, so the corporations jumbled the various nationalities together in a renewed effort to foster division and a jealous competition beween groups. Most corporations in the north excluded blacks entirely, or relegated them to the hardest, dirtiest, and worst-paying jobs; in this fashion they instilled a sense of superiority in the white workers, gave the whites an economic incentive for racism, and created a reservoir of excluded workers they could import during strikes (thereby further inflaming racial animosity). The textile mills of the South excluded blacks, which similarly gave whites an economic dividend from racism. Native-born whites, and older immigrants, similarly benefitted by policies which relegated blacks and newer immigratants to the lowest jobs; institutionalized racism afforded limited social mobility to a significant portion of the American white workforce, especially inter-generationally. Collective action encountered violent repression, making individual effort seem more likely to improve a worker's personal circumstances. The owners of industry frequently and overtly appealed to racial sentiment, telling their white and native-born workers that association with the "lower races" was degrading and offering them the bonds of racial fellowship. All this illustrates the cardinal rule: the capitalists can arrange and rearrange production so as to divide the working class and diffuse class militancy. The capitalists decide who occupies what slot in a hierarchy of jobs gradated according to pay, status, and skill; they thus encourage both racism and individual striving for success.
Workers also discovered that the authorities tolerated racial, ethnic, and religious organizations much more than class agencies, a circumstance that also channeled working-class activity away from workplace organization into transclass ethnic or racial affinities. Although capitalist ownership of industry greatly undermined ethnic cultures and institutions--witness Henry Ford's summary dismissal hundreds of Orthodox Christians for observing their Christmas in 1913,[xxii] or the attenuation of the veselija (the Lithuanian wedding celebration) depicted by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle--the capitalists and the various levels of government seldom directed massive violence and repression against such institutions. However obnoxious, condescending, and objectionable repressive "Americanization" programs and other pressures to conform, racial and ethnic forms of identity were accorded relative autonomy. Indeed, the partial segregation of ethnic groups in the workplace and the community, and the treatment of such groups as a unit by the press and political machines, reinforced this socially-recognized form of identity at the expense of a consciousness of the proscribed, officially non-existent class forms.
Racial and ethnic groups were not fixed, eternal, or natural, but often reinforced or created by experience in the United States as well as the old country. Italians, for example, forged their national identities as Italians mainly in the United States. When they arrived here, they identified themselves upon the basis of local or regional affiliations; they became conscious of themselves as Italians when they were treated as Italians. Light, ineffectual repression notoriously reinforces the behavior, traits, and cultural identities it seeks to eradicate. Nativism and Americanization programs were just repressive enough to reinforce ethnic loyalties and generate pride and resistance to complete assimilation. They also encouraged striving immigrants to jettison parts of their old-country heritage and fit into the American mold; the mainstream, patriotic form of cultural revolution paid more dividends in the here-and-now than the IWW's more radical restructuring of personality. Ethnic identities are fully compatible with class consciousness on one level, and sometimes generative of industrial militancy--the IWW effectively utilized it in its major strikes. Yet ultimately such forms of identity weaken class consciousness by emphasizing transclass solidarities (the racial, national, or ethnic community) and intra-class enmities. With the capitalists firmly in control of state and industry, ethnic and racial bonds more often undermined than reinforced united class action. A social structure maintained by actual and threatened violence encouraged workers to identify themselves both as individuals pursuing social mobility and as members of racial and ethnic groups--but rarely as workers. The entire state and industrial apparatus thwarted such class identification.
The racism prevalent in the white working class was not, therefore, an essential, unchanging, trans-historical trait; it was constructed as race was constructed and in tandem with it. Racism, like other instruments of mass murder, torture, and degradation, is not "a machine that goes of itself"; it requires assiduous maintenance and encouragement. White, native workers vented their frustrations on blacks and immigrants because the entire social structure encouraged this, even while preventing effective working-class action against the real sources of their miseries. The IWW could not overcome the weight of government, press, and corporation by mere preaching; only a practical demonstration that workers could unite and better their conditions would prove convincing and create examples that other workers could emulate. But the IWW's attempts to create such institutions encountered terrorism and violence very similar to that which created and maintained racism in the first place.
The IWW's Vision of a Genderless World
The IWW's version of feminism resembled its position on racial egalitarianism. The IWW crafted a radical philosophy that demanded absolute equality for women and denied the existence of any essential differences between the sexes. Nevertheless, despite their materialistic, economic, and class-based theories, IWW writers did acknowledge the distinct experiences and requirements of women.
In an era when almost everyone, including most suffragists and many feminists, proclaimed the fundamental difference of the sexes, the IWW asserted their essential sameness. "Given the same class interests and economic environment," a typical Solidarity article claimed, "woman acts no differently than man." Charles Ashleigh, an important IWW writer, averred that "the woman wage-worker is not concerned in a sex war; she is concerned in a CLASS war.... On the industrial field, the woman worker has the same power as the man," that of withdrawing her labor power. "When she learns to do this unitedly, not as a woman, but as a wage-worker," she and her male co-workers will "bring the master class to its knees." The IWW, Ashleigh noted, recruits both sexes, as well as all races, as members of an exploited class who fight "side by side in perfect equality." Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most prominent female leader, agreed. The IWW "makes no special appeal to women as such. To us society moves in grooves of class, not sex.... Whatever superficial semblance of sex hatred appears" stems, like racism, from "the struggle for the pay envelope." Flynn specifically compared women to Japanese immigrants who entered the American job market later than white men, and therefore competed with them by working for less money. She also reminded both sexes that women are not free from masculine domination "while mercilessly exploited by an employer."[xxiii]
The IWW therefore organized women in the same manner, and for the same purposes, as men. Justus Ebert told his readers that the capitalists were pushing women into more and more formerly male occupations; the IWW must organize these women and, whenever possible, give them "equal opportunities, duties, and privileges, even to the holding of executive office." Aside from explicitly feminist organizations composed almost exclusively of women, no American organization adhered to such an ideal. Forrest Edwards, an IWW organizer and writer, repeated the IWW's contention that "inside the workshop there is no sex. Women are not considered as women by the boss--just so many slaves. There is no use getting sentimental over the fact that the bosses 'demand their pound of flesh' from women and children. They make the same demand of men.... Men and women must forget their sex when they enter industry. They must organize on the basis of the job. The IWW offers them such a program. It offers them the only such program."[xxiv] The Socialist party, which was concerned about women's issues, had a limited vision of women's freedom that stressed suffrage. Many members, including its generally radical standard-bearer Eugene Debs, adhered to Victorian notions about women's nature and place, and argued for a male "family wage" that would support a traditional housewife in the home.
The IWW believed that revolutionary industrial unionism, rather than the vote or an explicitly gender-based feminist agenda, would genuinely liberate women. "Economic equality precedes any other kind," a writer in Solidarity asserted; "and as long as woman can be made the prey of the employing class, in the shop, her possession of the 'vote' will not in the least free her from bondage." Women pickets and strikers "do more to gain respect and 'recognition' for their sex, than all the suffrage lectures in the country put together." Although some Wobblies praised the spirit and radical tactics of the suffragists, they predicted that the vote would do no more for proletarian woman than men; it would, in fact, tighten her chains by giving her the illusion (shared by men) that the government could help her. Flynn doubted that women would win the vote unless the capitalists sought "to exploit their conservatism and use it against the overwhelming forces of radicalism." Women would vote as men because of their economic dependence on men.[xxv]
The IWW stressed that the capitalists treated women as just another source of cheap, expendable labor; they made no distinctions between the sexes, except that they exploited women more ferociously. The IWW press ran numerous stories detailing the starvation wages, long hours, abominable and unsafe conditions, and sexual harassment inflicted on female workers. Flynn, describing miscarriages, stillborn babies, and a shockingly high infant mortality rate in working-class districts, averred that "the heaviest burden is on the tired frame of the woman." Justus Ebert reiterated a common theme when he said that the capitalists "have no regard for any ideals of womanhood.... They are in business to make all the dividends possible, no matter how much womanhood, or any standard of decency or living, may suffer." Large capitalists may feel that employment of women is morally wrong, "but they will not be deterred from raking in profits, despite such beliefs and feelings." Flynn proclaimed that "the IWW is at war with the ruthless invasion of family life by capitalism"--a statement that many conservative, patriarchal Socialists could endorse as implicitly condemning the presence of women in the workforce. Flynn, however, pointed out that women had done productive labor in the home throughout most of the human history and had recently followed their work as it left the home and became commercialized. Following Engles and Bebel, she believed that the male-dominated family, in which the women was detached from meaningful productive labor, was a recent innovation. She praised its contemporary breakdown as potentially liberating for women, and asserted that women were in the job market permanently. She criticized not women workers but "the unnatural and shameful condition" of men unemployed while children toiled, and vowed that the IWW would organize industry so "that all adults, men and women, may work and receive in return sufficiency to make child labor a relic of barbarism." Flynn thought that childcare would remain the main interest of most women, but insisted that "the free choice of work is the IWW ideal--which does not mean to put women forcibly back in the home, but certainly does mean to end capitalism's forcibly taking her out of the home." Flynn heartily approved of women working outside the home, feeling that, even under capitalism, such paid work broadened her horizons and made her more socially conscious and independent. Although Flynn asserted the equality of women and men, she did not believe that mothers of very young children should have to work outside the home.[xxvi]
The IWW, therefore, denied that women had any common interests opposed to or different from those of men, and it opposed cross-class alliances of women. Charles Ashleigh, stating a common position, claimed that the agitation for suffrage and increased employment opportunities stemmed from the intellectual proletariat, a section of the new middle class. He advised working women to eschew enlistment in crusades, such as suffrage, which would entangle them in alliances with their class enemies for the purposes of those enemies. Ashleigh agreed that middle-class women might gain somewhat by access to the "legislative committee of the master class," but said that proletarian women would not. They are robbed at the point of production, not at the ballot box; they are "the victims of industrial exploitation, not suffrage inequality."[xxvii]
The IWW castigated the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) on the grounds that it organized women separately from men, instead of uniting everyone within a specific industry; this divided the working class and fostered the idea that women wage-earners were competitors, rather than allies, of men. The IWW also savaged the WTUL as a refuge for the idle rich seeking escape from ennui. One Edith Thorpe Adams claimed that WTUL labor activism was "a hobby, a fad, a sport with most of these ladies," who want gratitude for their charity and yet fear genuine class organization of working women with working. This would "take away the means by which these ladies are enabled to live in extravagant luxuries and comfort." WTUL ladies reminded Adams of Mrs. Potter Palmer of the National Civic Federation, who invited labor leaders and industrialists to a banquet and hired private detectives to make sure that labor leaders of their wives did not "swipe some of the silverware or other precious articles in her palatial residence." The WTUL was closely affiliated with the AFL, which Adams castigated as a capitalist tool that facilitated "the exploitation of the major portion of the working class by the minor." The WTUL did ignore most IWW strikes. Flynn, who had far more contacts with privileged women than most IWW members, nevertheless agreed that "the sisterhood of women, like the brotherhood of man, is a hollow sham to labor" and denied that "the queen of the parlor" could ally with "the maid in the kitchen" without diluting working-class revolutionary fervor. Cross-class alliances of women, she felt, were neither possible nor desirable.[xxviii]
The salvation of women, Flynn asserted lay ultimately in revolution, and immediately in unionism. "Nothing short of a social revolution" could liberate women. "I am impatient for it, I realize the beauty of our hopes, the truth of its effectiveness, the inevitability of its realization, but I want to see that hope find a point of contact with the daily lives of the working women, and I believe it can be through the union movement." Unions "can have an immediate, constructive value, and an objective educational value." Properly conducted strikes produce "a revolutionary consciousness through the very struggle with the employers." A class union of all the workers, including women, "inspires the workers through its unity of practical every day needs with the ultimate revolutionary ideal of emancipation. Through it we are able to live our ideals, to carry our revolutionary principles into the shops, everyday of the year; not to the ballot box one day alone."[xxix]
The IWW believed that women needed the IWW; it also acknowledged that the IWW needed women. Solidarity, addressing members skeptical of the need for its special women's issue, said that "women are an increasingly industrial factor, necessary to the industrial organization and working class success. The IWW must interest women if it is to succeed in the realization of its ideals."[xxx] Towards this end, and in recognition of the extremely low pay of most women, IWW dues were lower for women then for men.
The IWW recognized that the capitalist organization of production presented women wage-earners as a threat to men. The capitalists replaced high-skilled and well-paid male workers with machinery and abysmally-paid, unskilled female labor whenever they could. This threatened the jobs and incomes of men and generated male hostility, even as it brutally exploited women. With fewer men earning the "family wage" that could support a wife and children, men postponed or avoided marriage, thus necessitating further female entry into the paid labor market. Capitalists justified the starvation pay of women on the grounds that they had husbands to support them, and then claimed that the men did not need a living wage because other family members worked.[xxxi] To resist this trend, the AFL discouraged the employment of female workers and favored special protective legislation that made women uncompetitive with men. The IWW, however, organized women on terms of equality with men.
Although IWW theory denied any essential difference between male and female workers, some Wobblies did acknowledge the distinctive needs and experiences of women. Flynn, citing IWW literature directed towards specific occupations and language groups, wanted "a special appeal based upon [women's] peculiar mental attitudes and adapted to their environment and the problems it creates." Flynn acknowledged that working women were particularly difficult to organize because most of them were only temporarily in the labor market and hoped for quick escape through marriage. Marriage, however, only presented the class struggle in a different form to proletarian women, who "invariably marry workers."[xxxii] AFL behavior also gave unionism a bad name among women, as among blacks. Finally, working women were burdened with housework and childcare, which greatly limited their participation in union affairs.
IWW writers deplored the extremely low wages paid women and demonstrated that many women, far from having husbands to support them, themselves supported sick or disabled husbands, children, elderly parents, and other family members. The IWW attacked the murderous schedules, incompatible with motherhood, imposed upon women, and stressed that wage work imposed special hardships upon pregnant women and new mothers. The IWW documented widespread sexual harassment of women who suffered abuse and forced sex to gain or keep jobs for themselves or their husbands. A local Catholic priest in McKees Rocks complained, before an IWW strike improved conditions, that
Men are persecuted, robbed, and slaughtered, and their wives are abused in a manner worse than death--all to obtain or retain positions that barely keep starvation from the door. It is a pit of infamy where men are driven lower than the degradation of slaves and compelled to sacrifice their wives and daughters to villainous foremen and little bosses to be allowed to work. It is a disgrace to a civilized country. A man is given less consideration than a dog, and dead bodies are simply kicked aside while the men are literally driven to their death.[xxxiii]
The IWW also harshly criticized AFL indifference and hostility to female workers. Flynn thought that the IWW could address women's concerns by promising a more wholesome family life, based on higher wages for the male breadwinner; the abolition of child labor and of compulsory work for mothers with young children; and legal birth control. Echoing other Wobbly writers, she claimed that the IWW would virtually end prostitution by drying up the demand from young men who cannot afford to marry and the supply of "young women submerged in dirt, squalor, and deprivation until their moral fibre disintegrates."[xxxiv]
The IWW organized not only women workers, but the wives, daughters, and sisters of male workers. Sticklers for theory wondered whether housewives were, technically considered, part of the working class. But one Sophie Vasilo wrote the Industrial Union Bulletin that the housewife "is a social producer. In order to sustain herself, she has to sell her labor power, either in the factory, directly to the capitalist, or at home, indirectly, by serving the wage slave, her husband, thus keeping him in working condition through cooking, washing, and general housekeeping.... And as an industrial factor in society, I believe the wage slave's wife has got a right to belong to a mixed local." The editor agreed that housewives could belong to mixed locals--the propaganda adjuncts composed of workers from various industries before the IWW had recruited enough workers to form industrial unions--but admitted that "no provision is made for such a person when the mixed local ends its activities and the members take their place in industrial unions." No one, apparently, suggested that housewives join the industrial unions of their husbands, composed exclusively of workers in a given industry. But years later Flynn agreed that one of the benefits of the newly-formed Propaganda Leagues was that they gave sympathetic women who were not themselves wage workers an organizational forum from which to reach housewives.[xxxv]
Most Wobbly organizers and writers, whatever the intricacies of theory, regarded all members of a worker's family as members of the working class, and made strenuous efforts to mobilize them during strikes. Solidarity said that "the workers must make their wives and families parts of their movement, by some device or other. Then we'll truly have a working CLASS movement and the broader outlook needed."[xxxvi] But when Wobblies attempted to mobilize housewives, they encountered difficulties based upon the different sensibilities and experiences of such non-workers.
Married women (whether working outside the home or not) were discouraged from extensively participating in union activities by housework, childcare, and social prohibitions. Most Wobbly commentators, male and female, acknowledged that most women were less socially conscious than men, less interested in public affairs, and oblivious to the importance of unions. The IWW blamed men for not talking to their wives and also the stultifying atmosphere and primitive, isolating labor of the home. Activists urged both men and women to change--men to take their wives into their confidence and talk to them about union affairs, and women to overcome their timidity and lack of confidence. They also called upon the IWW to appeal to women with special literature.[xxxvii]
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn described the psychological barriers to female organization. Flynn admitted that many male criticisms of female selfishness, emotionalism, ignorance, and frivolity were justified (although also applicable to many men) because women's personalities had been warped by the denial of social rights and education. Giving a woman a man's chance in contemporary society was insufficient because "a man's chance is not enviable under the present order," and because "ideas do not change automatically with environment, and many hold-over ones, a century behind, aggravate and humiliate self-respecting women. With the past dominating in education, we find girls and boys equipped differently for wage-earning." Men know that they have "a life sentence" to wage slavery; furthermore, "combat and struggle are considered essentially manly endeavors.... Miseducation further teaches girls to be lady-like, a condition of inane and inert placidity." Girls are trained to servility and passivity, boys to independence and activity. Women sometimes seem frivolous and overly concerned with fashions and dances because their sex appeal has traditionally been their only meal-ticket. "Their right to life depended on their sex attraction and the hideous inroads on the moral integrity of women produced by economic dependence are deep and subtle. Loveless marriages, household drudgery, acceptance of loathsome familiarities, [and] unwelcome child-bearing... have marred the mind, body, and spirit of women." If women are competitive rather than solidaric, this is because they are only temporarily in the job market, and the "co-operative spirit engendered in the factory is usually neutralized by the struggle for husbands (livings) outside.... The mental horizon of the average housekeeper is exceedingly limited, because of the primitive form of labor in the household."[xxxviii]
Flynn complained that because the AFL barred housewives from participation in strikes, "the men had the joy of the fight, the women not even an intelligent explanation of it." During strikes, they were left alone at home with their children, subject to the blandisements of the capitalists and priests; they saw their children going hungry, but did not understand why. "If she stays home, ignorant of the causes of the strike, with her children tugging at her skirts, and newspapers and gossips giving her a wrong idea of what it's all about, she beats the strike. The IWW has had women right in the front line of pickets wherever we have had a strike. For this we have been accused to hiding behind women's skirts. The truth is the women push themselves to the front ahead of the men on the picket line when they once get interested." In a similar vein, she claimed that "the IWW has been accused of putting women in the front. The truth is, the IWW does not keep them in the back, and they go to the front." Flynn averred that "woman's influence is one of the strongest in the world.... it must be made an educated influence and used to help on the battle that is for her and hers, if she had but realized it."[xxxix]
The IWW actively mobilized housewives as well as working women during strikes; they picketed, gave speeches, and organized soup-kitchens and other relief work. Flynn testified that this required that the IWW overcome deeply-ingrained attitudes. "The old-world attitude of man as 'lord and master' was strong.... There was considerable male opposition to women going to meetings and marching on the picket line. We resolutely set out to combat these notions." The results were gratifying; women proved tenacious and courageous fighters, who scapped with scabs and police and chose jail over bail. Big Bill Haywood said that "one woman is worth ten men--I never knew it to fail." A capitalist paper marvelled that the IWW taught strikers "some of the fundamental principles of democracy. That is, they are taught to manage their own affairs and in their meetings, they make motions and argue their line of action with much more understanding than was the way at first." The strikers referred to were new immigrants and women, "both of which groups are traditionally viewed as incapable of organizing their own affairs." IWW organizers sponsored strike meetings for women only, and found that attendance quickly soared. Haywood encouraged many hitherto timid women to become strong strike leaders.[xl]
When they considered the plight of the housewife, IWW writers confronted the realities of patriarchy and male oppression, formally denied by their class-only analysis. Charles Ashleigh, in the very same essay in which he denied the existence of "sex war," called the housewife "the slave of a slave," exploited in the home by her husband for the ultimate benefit of his capitalist employer. "She fails to see that, but for her, the husband would have to pay somebody else in the restaurant or boarding house for the cooking and other household work; as he would also have to pay the prostitute for sexual satisfaction." At the very time Flynn was propounding her class-only ideology, she complained of the double duty which husbands exacted from their wives. "While the father smokes his pipe and takes his ease mother has the innumerable household tasks still to do." Elsewhere Flynn modified her class-only thesis, stating that "in the final analysis, women's sufferings and inequalities, at least in the working class which is our only concern, are the results of either wage slavery directly or personal dependence on a wage worker.... Multitudes of wives and mothers are virtually sex-slaves through their direct and debasing dependence upon individual men for their existence, and motherhood is all too often unwelcome and enforced." Flynn painted a bleak picture of the housewife's servile, isolated, degrading and unappreciated work, and, as mentioned above, condemned the soul-numbing horrors of enforced economic dependence. She was confident that although "the exact details of the readjustment of human relations after an economic revolution cannot be mapped out.... economic independence without wage slavery will restore women's ancient place in the councils of the people."[xli]
This seeming departure from Marxian economic determinism was, in fact, based upon the same kind of analysis. The whole IWW philosophy was based upon the assertion that economic freedom and independence underlie every other good. Flynn's feminist analysis applied the IWW's economic, class analysis to the patriarchal household. Flynn proclaimed that
Woman stands in much the same relation of man, as man does to his employer. He runs the industrial system and in return gets a bare living for himself and his family; she runs his home and in return gets her bare living. She is in a proletarian-like position, he in a bourgeois-like position, and [she] must submit to man's government in all its extremes, as the proletarian must submit to bourgeois government to the last limit.... The only sex problem I know of is how are women to control themselves, how to be free, so that love alone shall be the commandment to act, and I can see but one way thru controlling tehir one problem of how to live, be fed and clothed--their own economic lives.... Sexual enslavement then follows economic enslavement, and is but a gentle way of saving prostitution, whether it be for one night or one whole life.... Since economic dependence is the cause of social and sexual enslavement, then economic independence means a free woman socially and sexually, a woman who thinks as she pleases, does as she pleases, speaks as she pleases, and belongs to herself alone.[xlii]
Flynn, borrowing from Engels, Bebel, and especially Charlotte Perkins Gilman, condemned a system that kept a woman "digging the best part of her life in a dirty kitchen; separated from the life current of the civilization, its politics, its culture, its interests," and advocated "the organizing and centralizing of household work" so that women would be freed for renumerative, rewarding work outside the home.[xliii]
The Industrial Worker, published by and for the overwhelmingly male and single members of the IWW in the West, also demanded women's independence from men as well as from capitalists. It criticized religion as "one of the chief influences used to keep the female sex in submission" and said that the suffragists show that women "long for independence and liberty. The more intelligent and pure the woman, the more her mind revolts from the thought of marriage as an economic necessity--a means of getting a supporter, a living.... Marriage for money and social position alone, is legalized prostitution." Because "a thousand rules, laws, and customs" impeded women from competing on a basis of equality with men, "the woman is forced to depend, more or less, on the support of the man who has her at an advantage in the struggle for bread.... Only economic freedom will elevate women.... Not until the mothers of the race are economically independent of the fathers, can there be general equality and mutual respect in the relations of the sexes.... The independence of women from trying to rely on the bread-getting powers of men, may be the cause of fewer marriages of convenience, but the marriages of mutual love and respect will starve the divorce lawyers and the courts." The Industrial Worker reminded its readers that the IWW required no initiation fee for women, and only half the dues that it charged men, but that "every woman member has an equal vote and voice" in the IWW, "the only organization which stands for true freedom for women."[xliv]
The IWW did, however, depart from its class-only analysis in its fervent advocacy of legalized birth control. Conservatives had long accused socialists and feminists of plotting the destruction of the home and family, so by the twentieth century many members of those movements had retreated from their earlier advocacy of sexual radicalism. The IWW, however, fervently backed Margaret Sanger's campaign for legalized contraception, and secretly printed and distributed 100,000 copies of her proscribed pamphlet Family Limitation when she fled into temporary exile. Sanger adapted IWW rhetoric and direct action techniques to her campaign for birth control, including its willingness to publicly break the law, court arrest, and use the courts as a forum for spreading ideas. Sanger proclaimed that "the working class can use direct action by refusing to supply the market with children to be exploited, by refusing to populate the earth with slaves." Her establishment of birth control clinics appropriated the IWW's strategy of living the revolution by building functioning counter-cultural institutions even if they evoked police repression. The IWW, generally hostile to anarchism, also publicized Emma Goldman's lectures on birth control. It advocated birth control as a means of undermining, rather than reinforcing, traditional class and gender hierarchies. It favored contraception as a woman's right and a class weapon, not as a professional monopoly, charitable service, or coerced eugenic instrument as later proponents did. Because the constituency, rhetoric, organizational base, and understanding of a reform largely determine its social meaning--as does the economic system in which it occurs--the destruction of the IWW and other radical organizations vastly redirected the course of the birth control movement.[xlv]
The IWW's version of birth control, as popularized by Sanger, Goldman, and Flynn, was a staunchly feminist and revolutionary reading. Flynn lectured to IWW locals on birth control, touting it "not as a solution of the class war, but as a valuable contribution to that end." Workers should "cease hampering themselves in strikes and class battles with a large number of helpless, hungry children." She averred that "the large family system rivets the chains of slavery upon labor more securely. It crushes the parents, starves the children and provides cheap fodder for machines and cannons." Flynn cited the "infant mortality, abortions, early deaths of mothers, [and] child workers" endemic in textile towns as an argument for birth control. Solidarity claimed that "small families mean a decreasing labor supply with increased labor demand and wages. It is large families that mean cheap living, because they mean cheap wages."[xlvi]
These arguments, although clothed in the rhetoric of class, contravened key elements of the IWW's philosophy. The IWW insisted that the capitalists would always create a reserve army of the unemployed to crush strikes and lower wages; there would always be more workers than jobs, regardless of how few children the workers had. Many Wobblies believed in the "iron law of wages," whereby the capitalists would never, for any length of time, pay more than a subsistence wage. Wobblies opposed to emphasis on birth control pointed out that if workers had smaller families, they would need less to survive, and wage rates would correspondingly decline. Wobblies also recognized that American capitalists had a virtually unlimited source of cheap labor in immigrants from abroad, and could exploit the workers in other countries directly by investing overseas. This implied that for birth control to raise wages by lowering the supply of workers, it would have to be practiced world-wide. When not discussing birth control, IWW writers often insisted that workers with families fought the class war most ferociously exactly because they were tied down and forced to fight for higher wages. They could not easily quit or accept low pay. This argument was usually employed in denigration of the fighting qualities of bachelor hoboes of the West, but one Wobbly pointed out that at Lawrence, "the workers who were oppressed the most fought the hardest and stood the brunt of battle--the women, encumbered with babies and husbands."[xlvii] Finally, Wobbly proponents of birth control ignored the fact that large families consume more than small ones, thus requiring greater production and more workers. If small families would decrease the supply of workers, they would also decrease the need for workers.
The IWW press, however, was almost uniformly hostile to arguments belittling birth control. When Wobblies argued on Marxian grounds that capitalism, not large families, caused poverty, they were told "that is true; but it is also true that large families help to accentuate both the exploitation and the poverty." Arguments against birth control appeared in the IWW press only in the course of being rebutted. This indicates that the IWW, whatever its professions, did concern itself with women as women, and not only as workers and the wives of workers. Big Bill Haywood, one of the IWW's most prominent and beloved leaders, strongly advocated birth control and greatly encouraged Margaret Sanger's early efforts. When Carlo Tresca, dilating on the increased leisure and enjoyment the IWW would win for its members, jokingly referred to "more babies," Haywood corrected him. "No, Carlo, we believe in birth control--a few babies, well cared for."[xlviii]
IWW writers also favored sexual liberation for women on the grounds that women should control their own bodies and enjoy a healthful sex life, rather than facing a Hobson's choice of celibacy or ownership by a man. Flynn, by far the IWW's most prominent and celebrated woman, herself embodied the new woman: she left her first husband when he insisted that she settle down and raise a family, freely consorted (while still formally married) with Calro Tresca, and retained her identity and career as an agitator even while loving that strong-willed and famous man. Later, when a member of the more culturally conservative Communist party, she said, somewhat apologetically, "this was according to our code at that time--not to remain with someone you did not love, but to honestly and openly avow a real attachment."[xlix] Ben Williams, the editor of Solidarity, in replying to a woman who complained about the deleterious effects of sexual freedom on women in the revolutionary movement, summed up the IWW's belief in the primacy of economics, the necessity of direct action towards building the new society in the interstices of the old, and the need for a revolution in every aspect of life.
The ethical code of the future society will not spring full-blown with the advent of that society. On the contrary we find its roots immediately in the general movement of today whose goal is economic freedom. And just as there are political and industrial martyrs to the cause of the new society, so there have been, are, and doubtless will be, sex martyrs to the cause of the new morality whose full fruition can only result from the economic freedom of women.[l]
Williams averred that a George Elliot, in challenging the antiquated divorce law of England, may suffer intensely, but "still her conduct may have effect toward changing that law. Hazardous as the 'new moral code' may be, that will not prevent individual women from attempting its practice" in increasing numbers as economic freedom approaches. Although Williams believed a more liberated sexuality "an inevitable part of the general movement towards emancipation," he agreed that male revolutionists should not butt in "with their advice on this question. It seems to us a problem for the woman to decide for herself."
Williams was not the only advocate of a new sexual morality. One Fred Tiffany complained that "the form of marriage in our present society is based on the sacred rights of property.... It cares nothing about whether the man and wife are happy together or not," as long as the rights of inheritance are safeguarded.[li] Another writer called a woman "the bird born and reared in a cage" and said that civilization
imposes all sorts of restraints upon a normal, healthy sexual life for women. Having deprived her of the right to the disposal of her body, except under bond usually of the most exacting character, it has put a premium upon all the possible misery, shame, disease, crime and other evils that flow from "clandestine relationships" between the sexes.... The hideousness of "civilization" thus stands naked before every intelligent observer. Instead of intelligence and a dissemination of sound knowledge on matters of sex; instead of trying to beget a healthy, normal attitude towards sex relationships; it would retain all the hideous nightmare conceived of ignorance and perversion that has made life miserable for male and female alike since the dawn of civilized life. Contrast that picture with the ideal of a free society, wherein woman shall be the economic and social equal of man; free to direct her own sex life, aided from childhood by a thorough knowledge of sex functions.[lii]
Solidarity also reprinted a letter of Mr. Sanger deploring the invasions of privacy of Anthony Comstock and his spies and Sanger's accompanying comment (made before the full horrors of World War I were apparent) that "whatever this war may cost in suffering and death, it will be small compared to that which Comstockery has imposed upon the world."[liii]
The IWW's ideal of a genderless class culture confronted male and capitalist control of the state apparatus, industrial machinery, and press. Patriarchy was not merely a cultural artifact, but a political and economic reality inculcated and enforced by armed violence.
Women were, to an extent even greater than blacks, a legal and political category as well as a cultural one. The nearly absolute control of the workplace which the state granted the corporations allowed the capitalists to segregate women into the worst jobs, pay them less than men, and displace skilled men with women and machinery. The capitalists used their political and economic power to make women a threat to male wages and status, therefore dividing the working class against itself and vitiating any possible working-class culture based on class alone. The state encouraged the organization of capitalists into huge corporations, while forcefully discouraging the organization of workers, including women, who were beaten and jailed during strikes with the same ferocity meted out to men. The Supreme Court, in allowing special protective legislation for women that it nullified when applied to men, gave official imprimatur to the cultural notion of women as a weaker and inferior sex, unable to provide for themselves. During the IWW's effective existence, women were excluded from the voting booth and jury box in most states--a disability that did not much concern the IWW, but which did further officially stamp them as different and inferior, whatever the ideologists of female virtue might claim.
The law bestowed vast powers on the male "head of the household." A husband had a legal right to the obedience of his wife, a right that included sexual access. Any married man, no matter how degraded at work, was master of his own private domain, much as the poorest white could find artificial dignity and superiority in his color. Poor women were denied access to contraceptive information and devices by the armed violence of the state. Combined with the legal power of a husband over his wife's body, this made many poor women into virtual "breeding machines," who endured one pregnancy and birth after another. This weakened or destroyed the health of many women, and rendered them even more dependent on a male breadwinner for sustenance. A husband had a legal right to rape his wife, and to "discipline" her with violence; and a wife's economic dependence on her husband encouraged acquiescence in a level of domestic brutality that exceeded even that allowed by law.[liv]
This combination of legally-enforced starvation wages, legal subjection in the household, and lack of birth control virtually forced most women (except those from privileged backgrounds with exceptional educations) into legal subordination to a man. Girls and boys were socialized to their respective roles from an early age. Flynn, hearing a boy ridicule his sister, saw in the girl's acquiescence "the germ of a pitiable inability to think and act alone, characteristic of so many women. In the arrogance of the male child was the beginning of a dominance that culminates in the drunken miner, who beats his wife and vents the cowardly spleen he dare not show the boss!"[lv] In such behavior of boys and girls, not consciously related to the imperatives of capitalism, patriarchy seems indeed "a machine that runs of itself," conditioned in human nature itself. Like racism and capitalism, however, it is legally structured into the fabric of life and therefore into consciousness, and assiduously if often unconsciously enforced by armed violence and the threat of violence. If the IWW had difficulty persuading its male (and female) members that women are by nature the equals of men, and not different in their essential nature, it was only partly because such a belief would undermine male self-regard and deprive women of their own accustomed role and identity. Such a belief also seemed to contradict the reality of everyday experience.
The IWW's campaign for gender equality, unlike its racial egalitarianism, encountered opposition in its own ranks. IWW discussions of "the woman question" often rebut arguments of revolutionists, Marxists, and rank-and-file members that belittle women and oppose agitation for birth control. Flynn, despite her denial of conflict between the sexes, complained about the backwardness of male IWW members.[lvi] And it is probable that, had the United States government not destroyed the IWW's records and files in 1923, more evidence of such tension would exist. Jane Street, head of the IWW's Denver Housemaid's Union, privately complained that members of Denver's mixed local gave her more trouble than all her other opponents--rich ladies, the employment agencies, and the YWCA--combined. "They have cut us off from donations from outside locals, slandered this local and myself from one end of the country to another, tried to disrupt us from within by going among the girls and stirring up trouble, they gave our club house a bad name because they were not permitted to come out there, and finally they have assaulted me bodily and torn up our charter." Street complained that "this opposition has spread... to all domestic workers' locals," condemned the "men who forget their IWW principles in their opposition to us," but retained faith that "the great principles and ideals that we stand for can completely overshadow the frailties of human nature."[lvii]
This extraordinary letter--which survived only because it was seized by the U.S. government before it reached its destination--is all the more remarkable because no suggestion of this acrimony made it into the IWW press. Both Solidarity and the Industrial Worker carried glowing accounts of the Denver Housemaid's union and appeals for support, some written by Jane Street herself. Ironically, the only inkling of anything unusual was a strange note in Solidarity by the press committee of the Denver mixed local, entitled "Rebel Girl Defenders," complaining that an article in Solidarity had not given credit to four men who had protected the housemaids. One of the four was the man whom Jane Street singled out as the worse offender, who had "worked with maniacal fervor" to drive her out of the IWW.[lviii]
The IWW men opposed Street's separate hall for housemaids, and her policy of excluding men from that hall. Street did not fear unwanted sexual advances by the men as much as she feared that the housemaids--isolated for the vast majority of the week in their employer's household, and usually allowed only one-half a day off per week--would welcome male attention, and forget the purposes of their union. The housemaids, Street said, were not rebels but conventional workers "having all the earmarks of slavery and the prejudices of bourgeois philosophy. Sex can come rushing into your office like a great hurricane and blow all the papers of industrial unionism out the windows."[lix]
Male Wobblies in the West were as starved for sexual attention as the housemaids were, and for similar reasons. Lacking all the desiderata of a potential husband--a steady job, high or even dependable income, fixed residence, social prestige--Western Wobblies had difficulty finding intimacy, or sexual outlet aside from prostitutes. Joe Hill complained that in the West the IWW "created a kind of one-legged, freakish animal of a union, and our dances and blowouts are kind of stale and unnatural on account of being too much of a 'buck' affair; they are too lacking the life and inspiration which the women alone can produce." Frank Dawson, even while extolling the migrant agitators as the mighty precursors of the new society, lamented that "no wifely smile greets their nightly homecoming, no children bless their eyes and rifle their pockets for candy. Like the Nazarene they are homeless." For these reasons, male Wobblies would find an IWW local composed exclusively of women an inviting social center, and feel aggrieved that they were excluded from its meetings and its hall.[lx]
The Denver local that evoked Street's ire was a Mixed Local, the same one that Sophie Vasilo complained about in 1908. A mixed local was a miscellaneous assortment of individuals from different industries who lacked sufficient numbers in any single industry to form a proper industrial union that could function on the job. Intended as temporary recruiting stations for workers who would soon join functioning industrial unions, the mixed locals became a thorn in the side of the IWW, known as a magnet for undisciplined "freaks" who alienated workers by doctrinal hairsplitting, spectacular publicity stunts, and interminable wrangling over points of doctrine. They were, by structure and composition, incapable of organizing on the job, the primary purpose of IWW locals. For all these reasons, the IWW decreed their abolition in ----.[lxi] Despite the convention's resolution, mixed locals refused to disband. Members of Denver's mixed local, therefore, may have been jealous when women organized themselves into an effective, fighting union, without male help, while the men had achieved nothing. Under such circumstances, some men may have wanted to fulfill the tradtional male role of protector of women, as well as finding opportunities to socialize with women.
The IWW encountered other problems in building its genderless counterculture. Although the IWW recruited and developed many able women leaders during strikes and free speech fights, it had almost no women among the national leadership. Flynn was the only woman among the 168 national leaders indicted in the massive Chicago IWW roundup of 1917. (Ben Fletcher, who had organized Southern lumbermen and Philadelphia longshoremen, was the sole black.) Maltilda Robbins, the only other female organizer, had resigned in 1916. Working-class women usually lacked confidence and skills in leadership, parliamentary procedure, and public speaking. Although the IWW overcame these obstacles at the local level, and found many women who could picket, give speeches, and endure beatings and jail with the best of men, few women could endure the danger, isolation, separation from families, and travel (often hobo-style) of national or regional IWW organizers. Flynn herself came from an extraordinary family which not only socialized and educated her far differently from most girls, but also raised her son so that she could live the life of an itinerant agitator. Despite her own resilience and independence, she found that IWW men often offered her unwanted protection. IWW men prided themselves on their chivalry and respect for women--attitudes certainly not lacking in condescension--and boasted that Flynn was as safe among an assemblage of rough-hewed Wobblies "as if she was in God's pocket." The Industrial Worker once claimed that "true respect for women is mostly confined to the working class.... it is the working men who are chivalrous and the loafers [capitalists] who are curs." Joe Hill's famous song, "The Rebel Girl," dedicated to Flynn, proclaimed that "the only and Thoroughbred Lady is the Rebel Girl."[lxii]
Nevertheless, any woman traveling alone risked humiliation and abuse from non-Wobblies; and capitalist thugs brutalized women with the same nonchalence as they clubbed men. Female organizers confronted a less obvious liability. Male organizers could always return to their old trade if, for whatever reason, they stopped working for the IWW. Women, however, became less marketable at their traditional occupation, that of wife, as they aged, and, if they were working-class, could probably not make a living at women's paid work. Any substantial time spent as an IWW organizer would cut her off from alternative sources of income if she proved unwilling or unable to continue with paid IWW work. As Flynn said, "marriage was their career, and to be an old maid was a lifelong disgrace."[lxiii] And if she was married, the burdens only increased; she simply could not travel unless someone else raised her children. The husband simply could not raise the children, even apart from cultural norms and expectations; the IWW did not pay organizers enough to raise an entire family.
The lack of women among the IWW's national leadership was not, therefore, the IWW's fault. The IWW could not overthrow patriarchy, any more than capitalism, by a mere effort of the will.
Despite these problems, there is no evidence that sexual animosities and jealousies seriously impeded IWW organization. The IWW, braving AFL and capitalist taunts, mobilized women in local unions and strikes, and made them an effective force for working-class solidarity. Even Jane Street's union prospered despite local male hostility until the federal government's wartime and post-war reign of terror virtually destroyed the IWW. The IWW furthered women's equality less than it hoped for the same reason that it could not overcome American racism: its local unions, the countercultural institutions that embodied the new life and demonstrated its benefits, were destroyed by ruling-class terrorism, locally and piecemeal from 1905 to 1916, nationally and wholesale thereafter. Lacking actually existing exemplars of the IWW's philosophy, the working class, of both sexes, socialized to patriarchy, took whatever consolation it could in its inherited, gender-based sources of dignity and identity. Odon Por, in a statement that explains much of history--and is as applicable to blacks and women as to workers--recognized that "what the organized working class thinks, what it wills, is of supreme importance, but what it wills depends on its consciousness of power. And this realization comes as a direct result of its collective activity." The desires of a subjugated group, in other words, depend on its ability to imagine viable alternatives to the status quo, which in turns depends on its power and ability to translate its desires into reality. Many insurgent groups grow more radical with success, as the inadequacy of their initial remedies becomes apparent and their power to affect change becomes manifest. As Solidarity said, the IWW recognizes "a class struggle as bitter as death.... The master class must be overthrown. And this cannot be done by honied words, by appeals to sentiment, by the force of logic or by gentle methods, but [only] on the stern battlefield of industrial war," fought where workers are robbed, at the point of production. Repression which destroyed the IWW unions, the nucleus of the new economy, vitiated the entire revolutionary counterculture, not only in what it could achieve but in what it could hope, imagine, and want. As Meredith Tax has said of working-class women, "when their class went down to defeat, they were the most submerged, for their struggle for equality within the working class was dependent on the success of the class struggle as a whole." The IWW intended to revolutionize all of life, not just the economy; its economic organizations and insurgencies provided the basis for a wide-ranging reconstruction of society. When these were crushed, the other aspects of its revolution necessarily faltered.[lxiv]
Nevertheless, the IWW was one of the most strident feminist organizations of its time, fighting more tenaciously for women's equality than any other working-class or male-dominated organization of its era. Its cultivation of female leadership during strikes, often over male opposition, must have affected the most intimate aspects of the lives of its members. Women who gave speeches, picketed, organized striker relief, and went to jail were unlikely to return unchanged to their old domestic roles once the strike was over.
The IWW's position on gender equality, as on race, was revolutionary. The IWW correctly perceived that the first need of most Progressive Era (and subsequent) women was higher wages and democratic control at the workplace, for themselves and then men in their lives. Only this could afford them economic independence from men (both capitalists and husbands); only this could free them to choose a life of work, motherhood, or a combination of the two. The IWW was also correct that the vote had merely symbolic significance. Suffrage gained almost nothing of importance for women until fifty years had passed and another feminist movement, much more radical than that of the Progressive Era, took to the streets as well as the ballot box and demanded change in boardrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms as well as in the legal structure. Meanwhile, in the thirties, white, middle-class female reformers, of the precise sort ridiculed and loathed by the IWW, constructed a state-managed welfare system for women that degraded, stigmatized, and impoverished the very people it purportedly helped.[lxv] The IWW properly recognized that for women and men to seize the entire product of their labor, and manage the industries for their own benefit, would give women the dignity, self-respect, and leisure, and equality that no state-run welfare bureaucracy or capitalist philanthrophy could offer them.
The reform of marriage, a radical feminist demand that IWW publicists occasionally applauded, has achieved less than its proponents hoped because women are still denied economic freedom and equality. The outlawing of marital rape and spouse abuse, certainly a worthwhile achievement, is vitiated in practice if the wife has no alternative to the rule of her husband. In the IWW's heyday, a battered wife would often petition the court for the early release of her imprisoned husband because she could not live without his wages.[lxvi] Similarly, a woman's best guarantee of equality in the kitchen and bedroom is her ability to make an ample, dignified, and independent living. This enables her to negotiate seemingly "private" aspects of life, such as housework, childcare, and sex, from a position of strength. As to political office, the IWW already offered women full equality in the only place where the IWW felt it mattered, in the industrial unions, embodiments of the new society.
The IWW never succumbed to the illusion that fundamental cultural change could occur independently of economic change. It wrestled with the conundrum that the workers must change their culture if they are to fundamentally improve their condition; but if economics largely produces culture, how could cultural change precede economic transformation? This seemingly abstract, chicken-and-egg question was intensely practical, not vapidly theoretical. The IWW's solution was for simultaneous economic and cultural change within its revolutionary industrial unions, the embryo of the new society. As with racial equality, the success of the IWW's feminist program depended on its overall success in permanently organizing workers of both sexes; obstacles to that success undermined women's equality even within the IWW. Without success in their struggles with mainstream society, the IWW could not overcome the structural and cultural barrier's to women's equality even within their own organization. No mere act of the will could elevate women; no manifestos, programmes, or ideologies could do so; only practical victories on the industrial field would help. The IWW found to its sorrow that "nothing succeeds like success."
The IWW's "equity" feminism based on women's common humanity is a better and safer argument for female equality than any variety of "difference feminism." In a patriarchal society, any differences ascribed to women will be pejoratively interpreted and undermine their position, even if the rhetoric is one of female superiority. In the Progressive Era many men as well as women argued that women were naturally purer, more religious, more moral than men; such arguments were used to exclude, as well as to include, women from the "vulgar" spheres of business and politics. "Difference feminism" was at best a two-edged sword, which had the additional disadvantage of dividing the working class, which employers, the legal system, and Congress already did. It reinforced the precise kind of invidious distinctions that the IWW carefully avoided. The IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism, had it been successful, would have offered women far more benefits than the most ambitious gender-based reforms capitalism can offer. Even the enormous upheavals and reforms of the 1960's and 1970's have not won women even the debased equality of wage-slavery with men, as is evidenced by the huge chasm in wages between the sexes, the feminization of poverty, and the ever-increasing numbers of women and children living on the street and scavenging for garbage.
There is an irony in the historiography of American radicalism of the Progressive Era. Many historians have falsely accused Max Eastman and his Masses crowd of ignoring the economic basis of oppression and of seeking frivilous, dilettante, single-issue reforms meant to enhance their own personal lives. Feminist historians, however, have criticized the IWW as excessively Marxist, economistic, and fixated on class, of ignoring the realities of gender oppression and patriarchy, and of offering no distinct programme for women. This is as misguided as the common critique of Max Eastman. Eastman is commonly accused of lacking a unified, totalistic view of the world which reduces every evil to one fundamental cause; the IWW is accused of propounding such a monotone, simplistic view. As we have seen, there is no necessary virtue in a simmplistic, unitary view of history and society. But the critique of the IWW is relevant only to reformers of the present system, or even to revolutionaries who want to capture existing institutions and transform them. The IWW, however, built its own countercultural institutions outside of existing society, and propounded its own values, and structured women's full equality into the very center of those institutions and values. The IWW did recognize women's position as the worst exploited at the workplace and (by their husbands and indirectly by the capitalists) in the home. It had a solid programme for addressing these multiple exploitations. Margaret Sanger and Antoinette Konikov, who lambasted the SP for its eternal waiting, its deferral of all real change into the indefinite future after the revolution, could make so such complaint against the IWW. The IWW had experience in breaking the law, taking risks, and forging countercultural values and institutions, and it placed this experience at the service of the entire working class.
The IWW's philosophy of gender was, after all, relatively simple: workers should identity themselves exclusively upon the basis of class, tossing all other forms of identity into the "ashcan of history." This alone could win a world in which the workers would have the leisure, education, and democratic control over the bases of life, necessary to become authentic, autonomous individuals for whom all collective identities, including that of class, would become obsolete. It is a lesson that the workers of the world, and especially in the United States, have yet to learn.
The IWW on Patriotism and Religion
In its war against traditional working-class cultures, the IWW necessarily confronted patriotism, and, to a lesser extent, religion. While most IWW writers condemned love of country and religious faith, many doubted whether the IWW should emphasize such issues. Attacks on patriotism and religion, unlike those on racism and sexism, were sometimes regarded as distractions from the class struggle that needlessly alienated potential recruits.
The IWW opposed patriotism because it divides the working class against itself while fostering an illusory community between workers and capitalists of the same nation. The Industrial Worker savagely attacked patriotic workers and asserted that "there are only two nations in the world--a nation of workers, and a nation of blood-suckers. The bloodsuckers have established imaginary lines in order to more easily bamboozle the workers." French radical Gustave Herve, in a speech reprinted in the Industrial Union Bulletin, said that "Patriotism is the collaboration of classes; Socialism... is the class struggle. Patriotism is the linking together of two classes" and "their blood communion on the field of battle; Socialism is the universal proletariat." The editor of another Herve speech, published in pamphlet form by the IWW, said that national pride divided the working class not only internationally but also within the United States. American patriotism, he said, is shallow jingoism "combined with race and nationality prejudices born of proximity rather than distance. The 'foreign enemy' is not beyond our borders, but in our midst." The Industrial Worker complained that national pride helped the capitalists, who encouraged different ethnic groups to outproduce each other and work harder, thereby proving their national superiority. Solidarity stated the IWW's position that "ALL WORKERS ON THE SOIL OF THE UNITED STATES ARE AMERICANS regardless of their birthplaces, and must unite as a CLASS against the only foreigners--that is, the labor skinners.... The newly arrived immigrant worker has a vote and voice in the IWW union, on equal terms with a native or old-time member."[lxvii]
Wobbly writers also attacked militarism, closely linked to patriotism, and condemned modern wars as imperialistic. Walker C. Smith, editor of the Industrial Worker, said that "all wars have an economic basis and heretofore, without a single exception, have been waged in the interests of the master class." In the leaflet "War and the Workers," widely distributed by the IWW, Smith complained that the workers who fight capitalism's wars are treated as mere cannon fodder, fed inferior food, subjected to brutal discipline, and killed and maimed in the service of their masters; after the war, they are uncermemoniously discarded. As victory and conquest do not raise pay, improve working conditions, or shorten hours, Smith advised workers: "LET THOSE WHO OWN THE COUNTRY DO THE FIGHTING."[lxviii] Other Wobblies charged that the armed forces recruited placed recruiting stations in the poorest neighborhoods, hoping that starvation would generate recruits.
The IWW recognized that service in the armed forces inculcated blind obedience and turned a person into a mindless, emotionless murder machine, who would kill not only "foreign" workers but American strikers on command. Wobbly writers often treated patriotism and "flag worship" as irredemiably appropriated by the master class. Solidarity pointed out that strikers who carry the flag find it no protection against violence from their "patriotic masters" and asked "what consolation can an empty stomach find in a piece of red, white and blue cloth that always heads processions of armed murdererers of the working class?" July 4th celebrations, it said on another occasion, enable the capitalists "to keep our eyes riveting on the past while they rob and enslave us in the present. To celebrate such a day is to celebrate one's own slavery." The Industrial Worker, observing that a mining company spent $1000 for flags, bunting, and fireworks for an Independence Day celebration even as workers died from unsafe mines, commented that "Patriotism is death.... It is cheaper to spend a thousand dollars for glags and fireworks once a year than to safeguard the mines and pay decent wages." Walker Smith, referring to the concentration camps in which strikers were interred during a Colorado strike, proclaimed that "a flag that floated over the bull pen in Cripple Creek cannot float for me." The Wobblies frequently asserted that all capitalist governments were equally violent and exploitative, and that the workers had no country except their class. Solidarity claimed that workers experienced "the spirit of American institutions" in the form of "the club, gun, jail, court and blacklist." Months after the U.S. had entered World War I, and compulsory patriotism was the order of the day, Solidarity complained that "America has a world-wide reputation as being a huge slave-pen."[lxix]
The IWW, however, clearly differentiated its position from that of bourgeois pacifists, and opposed only capitalist imperialism, not revolutionary insurrection. "Their patriotism is given to their own nation alone--the workers of the world," Smith averred. "They advocate open rebellion to all capitalist war and choose treason to the capitalist government rather than treason to their class." Haywood similarly felt that "it is better to be a traitor to your country than to your class." These statements were made in times of peace, but in 1914, when President Wilson contemplated war with Mexico, Haywood proposed a general strike, saying that "all that the workers would have to do is to fold their arms and there will be no war." Solidarity, fearing that American plutocrats would crush the Mexican revolution, warned that American workers who participated in this enterprise only forged their own chains more securely. It said that Mexican and American workers should fight together against their common oppressor and that "we shall not only refuse to fight for our masters, but we shall fight against them, with a general strike, in case they declare war upon Mexico." The IWW backed these words with deeds, and supported the Mexican revolutionaries with funds, ammunition, and weapons. Some Wobblies crossed the border and fought besides insurgent Mexicans.[lxx]
Other IWW writers, however, doubted whether anti-patriotic agitation was useful. Thinkers disagreed over whether the workers must reject patriotism before they could unite as a class, or whether class unions would precede and encourage liberation from patriotic and religious superstitions. Herve said that patriotic workers "will be incapable of acquiring the instruments of labor, production, and exchange, which form the real fatherland for you workers." Vincent St. John similarly recognized the irreconciable hostility between class consciousness and patriotism, but reversed cause and effect when he claimed that "the antagonisms between races and nations can only be abolished when the idea of class solidarity has been accepted by the workers."[lxxi]
The Industrial Worker asserted that flags are merely symbols, and that symbols could not affect the outcome of the class war. If all red flags and American flags were destroyed, it would make no difference to the outcome. "Destroy every red flag in the universe and conditions will produce the discontent symbolized in its folds. Destroy every national emblem and the patriotism of profit will still curse the land." The IWW could print 50,000 leaflets for the cost of one red silk flag. Revolutionaries should fight for realities, not symbols; "it is to be hoped that none are so foolish as to risk anything in defense of a piece of cloth, no matter what its color." In a similar vein, J.S. Biscay, a contributor to Solidarity, complained that revolutionaries wasted too much effort attacking patriotic and religious symbols. He argued that if the IWW appropriated traditional cultural forms, such as the American flag, the workers could use these symbols against their masters. "Take away their emblems from them and what will they flaunt? The enemy could not then draw on the superstitious herd to fight the radicals." Biscay was confident that "if we manage to get a religious worker interested in the movement, without beginning to make war on his pet fetish, he soon begins to educate himself in the movement" and would soon discard his superstititions. But if the IWW confronts him with anti-patriotic and anti-religious ideas "without giving him the same opportunity we had in educating ourselves, we only frighten him away" and reinforce his threatened ideas. "If we make him think at all, he will only think how horrible we are and [we] may never understand why." A major article in Solidarity likewise criticized speakers who attack religion, raise other issues extraneous to industrial unionism, and attack their audiences as "slaves" or "scissorbills," thus embittering and misinforming potential recruits. "Speakers who do not know really what the IWW aims at, should be made to find out or get off the box.... Let us learn to throw all the light we can on the wonderful subject of industrial unionism, but waste no more time of non-essentials." In late 1915, Solidarity asserted that "flexibility regarding propositions upon which a common ground of agreement has not been reached is absolutely necessary" to the IWW. Members may go to church, the voting booth, the saloon, or even to war, and must agree only on industrial unionism. Revolutionary industrial unionism would abolish all of these evils in time.[lxxii]
The IWW often acted on such advice. IWW strikers, especially in the East, hopefully marched with U.S. flags, partly as a defense against police clubs and militia bayonets, and partly as an assertion by the largely immigrant workers that they too belonged in the United States and contributed to American society. This tactic seldom worked; at Lawrence, the militia refused to salute the flags carried by strikers, and authorities in most places brutalized and murdered IWW strikers with impunity. But IWW activists were only too aware that the employers capitalized on any lack of patriotism among the Wobblies. During the Patterson strike the capitalists, responding to an anti-flag speech, designated March 19 as "flag day" and proclaimed that "we live under the flag; we fight for the flag; and we will work under the flag." IWW strikers attached miniature flags to their coats and responded "we wove the flag; we dyed the flag; we live under the flag; but we won't scab under the flag!" Some IWW writers used traditional notions to their advantage by asserting (usually when condemning vigilante and state terrorism against workers) that the United States had once been a free country with ample opportunity for the common man, and that the closing of the frontier and the growth of monopoly capitalism constituted a revolution from above that undermined traditional American liberties. Commenting on the Everett massacre of at least five Wobblies, and the subsequent trial of seventy-four Wobblies for these murders, a writer in Solidarity said that "the stars and stripes, like many other things that were born in the struggle for freedom, have been usurped by the ruling class and are being used today as a symbol of oppression."[lxxiii]
Religion was another volatile, potentially divisive issue. The Industrial Worker, written by and for western migrant workers who were often bitterly anti-religious, sometimes attacked religion as deluding workers with promises of "pie in the sky," preaching submission, and validating the deaths of workers in mines and factories as the will of God. Organization, not prayers, would secure workers the good things of life. Yet even the Industrial Worker carefully asserted that "we are not a religious organization, as so neither are we an anti-religious body. We do not quarrel with any man's religious convictions--we have our hands fully trying to make a living in this world." On another occasion it reminded its readers that the IWW had Christians, Moslems, and Confucians as members, "but the position of the IWW is not affected by the religious ideas of any of its members.... We confine ourselves to dethroning the kings of industry--the king of heaven is able to fight for himself." If a person earned heaven by worthy deeds on this earth, then "the IWW is the organization to join to get your hand in for the hereafter.... The preachers can fight out the fine points. The trouble with the church" is not its doctrines but that "it sides with the bosses, and fights the workers.... The IWW is the religion of food, healthy bodies, clean houses, and pure women; of decent enjoyment and care-free affection.... The IWW is the bread-and-butter union of the working people. Questions of religion, of race, or color, of nationality are so many firebrands sown among the workers to keep them from fighting the bosses and seeing where their true bread-and-butter interest lies."[lxxiv]
The IWW devoted no leaflets or pamphlets to attacking religion, as it did to debunking patriotism, and Solidarity, the national organ addressed primarily to the more settled workers in the East, usually disparged religion only in passing, while attacking patriotism, craft unionism, racism, and other divisive prejudices. Discussing the Lawrence strike, Flynn outlined IWW policy. The IWW did not attack the strikers' religious ideas "but we said boldly that priests and ministers should stick to their religion and not interfere in a workers' struggle for better conditions, unless the wanted to help.... The majority of workers were Catholic. We had pursued a correct labor policy during the strike of confining our remarks to answering Father Reilly and others only on strike issues. We did not discuss religion and warned all speakers, regardless of their personal views, not to offend the religious feelings of the people." If the strikers won, the IWW argued, they could contribute more to their churches. After the successful conclusion of the strike, anarchists carrying a banner inscribed "No God! No Master!" created headaches for the IWW, as the mill owners cloaked themselves in the mantle of religion. Flynn preferred that the IWW discredit the state and religious officials in the eyes of the strikers in a more subtle way, by allowing them to speak at meetings and reveal themselves in action. "You know, you may put a thing on a banner and it makes no impression at all, but you let a minister show himself up, let all the ministers show themselves against the workers, and that makes more impression than all the 'No God, No Master' banners from Maine to California. That is the difference between education and sensationalism." Years later, she said that "that banner was worth a million dollars to be employers," and may have been the work of a provocateur.[lxxv]
The IWW sometimes went further than religious neutrality and depicted "fellow worker Jesus," as a communist agitator and hobo who stole corn when he needed food, and whose teachings were later appropriated and distorted by the ruling class. Flynn mentions the Christmas decorations at the IWW hall in Tacoma, Washington, which featured the sayings of Jesus about the common people; ministers "came to criticize but were impressed with the simplicity and sincerety of the tribute."[lxxvi]
Many IWW writers focused on organization at the point of production as the raison d'etre of the IWW, and asserted that other problems would resolve themselves after the destruction of capitalism. Such writers opposed beliefs and prejudices such as racism, sexism, and nativism that actively obstructed working-class organization, but willingly downplayed IWW theories about other issues. In late 1915, Solidarity editorialized that experience proved
that to single out any one of the props of capitalism for attack, will only lead to disaster for the attackers.... "Anti-militarist," "anti-religious," "anti-political," and so forth, suggests a negative attitude only--[but] the IWW attitude is positive, in its most promising aspect. We are not merely against capitalism, we are FOR a new society that must logically be put in the place of capitalism.... The economic instinct--the urge for "food, clothing and shelter"--is at the bottom of all other instincts.... Our only hope, then, lies in the development of class consciousness and class organization on the basis of the economic instinct, among the workers. As this organization and consciousness develop, the relation of the economic instinct, to military, religious, political, and other instincts, will be more clearly perceived, as well as their adaptation to the interests of the capitalist class. Capitalism, as well as its props, will tumble into the ditch.[lxxvii]
Four months later, Solidarity reiterated and elaborated upon this stance. "We cannot see how military, religious, or political institutions will cease before capitalism ceases to exist. We are not certain that any or all of them will end even then. But we do know that there is one possible way only of ending them--along with capitalism. That is through industrial organization, as proposed by the IWW.... The great war has shown how overpowering is the organization of the ruling class to control and direct the affairs of the rest of the people. Industrial control is of course the crux of the whole process.... The working class is not a unit on any great proposition; formulas will not make it a unit; only organization that enables the workers to get an ever firmer control of industry, will do the trick."[lxxviii]
The IWW, therefore, both out of a principled emphasis on industrial organization, and a pragmatic adjustment to the sensibilities of many workers, downplayed its strident opposition to patriotism, religion, and ethnic consciousness during strikes, at times even using them as instruments of class solidarity. "Education is not a conversion, it is a process," Flynn said in describing the Patterson strike. "One speech to a body of workers does not overcome their prejudices of a lifetime. We had prejudices on the national issues, prejudices between crafts, prejudices between competing men and women,--all of these to overcome. We had the influence of the minister on the one side, and the respect that they had for government on the other side.... People are not material, you can't lay them down on the table and cut them according to a pattern. You may have the best principles, but you can't always fit the people to the best principles."[lxxix]
Despite Flynn's eloquent pessimism, there is scant evidence that issues of patriotism or religion figured greatly in IWW defeats. Religious authorities joined schoolteachers, the press, and government officials in denouncing the IWW, and all this vituperation undoubtedly had effect. But even in South Carolina, the miserable "stronghold of Americanism" and of an intense religiosity, the IWW made converts until it was suppressed by violence. Before then, illiteracy and a hopeless passivity, "the nakedness of poverty and absence of intellectual development," proved a greater obstacle to the IWW than either religion or patriotism. Deadened by poverty and discouraged by the defeat of past insurgencies, and lacking any examples of successful collective organization, the South Carolina mill workers were initially passive. But soon they flocked to hear IWW speakers, despite capitalist denunciations of their "un-Americanism." The IWW organizer specifically mentioned "The Preacher and the Slave" and "Stung Right," songs ridiculing religion and patriotism, as popular among the workers.[lxxx]
Flynn, arguing for greater IWW control over strikes and strikers, lashed out at anti-patriotic and anti-religious slogans that, in her estimation, alienated many workers. But Dubofsky and Golin have demonstrated that the disintegration of the IWW in Lawrence after its victory there, and its defeat at Patterson, were unrelated to issues of culture. Capitalist control of industrial and state apparatus, not the attitudes of the workers, decisively shaped events. Workers demonstrated ample ability to reject the advice of their religious leaders when such advice conflicted with the necessities of survival, and successfully resisted use of the flag for the purposes of class oppression. To the extent that religious, patriotic, and ethnic attitudes did affect workers, this perhaps stemmed from the workers' relative freedom to forge identities based on such non-class solidarities. IWW therorists may have underestimated the tenacity of religion and patriotism, and too sanguinely predicted their demise once capitalism was overthrown, but there is no way to know this for certain. We do know, however, that religion and patriotism, like other cultural forms, mean many different things to different communities at different historical moments, and that they take these divergent meanings largely from the social matrix in which they are embeded. They constituted an obstacle to the IWW only because they were constructed within the framework of a murderous and exploitative capitalism, which used them for its own purposes. The entire social system encouraged workers to seek solace and identify in mythic communities rather than in self-created lives and personalities based upon the democratic control of industry and meaningful, participatory citizenship. Had the IWW won the battle at the point of production, workers could more easily have redefined both religion and patriotism, as they did during IWW strikes, or jettisoned them altogether.
The IWW and the New Proletariat
The IWW recruited members of its revolutionary counterculture primarily among the unskilled workers, both the relatively sedentary "machine proletariat" of the East and the Western migratory workers. As Haywood said, "the common laborer at the meanest work is entitled to the same standard of life as the most skilled artisan. The chief work of the IWW is to organize the unskilled and the unorganized. It is upon this great mass of humanity that life depends. The skilled worker is comparatively a small faction" and will have to join the IWW once the unskilled mass are organized.[lxxxi]
The unskilled were not only the most numerous; they were also the worst abused and exploited. "The master cannot but regard him as a mongrel, and treat him with indifference or contempt" Solidarity asserted. "He is an alien dog who must hunt his own bone and kennel. He is not to be fed and kept warm before the household fire or sent to the dog kennel when he gets sick.... It is in this attitude of the master that we find hope" because it generates rebellion in the slaves. Gustave Herve similarly warned proletarians that when they "pass from one land to another" they "will everywhere be so much cattle for laboring purposes, have no other value than a piece of merchandise...."[lxxxii]
Yet the IWW claimed that this despised and degraded class, neglected and abused even by the trade unions, represented the future, and epitomized the condition towards which all workers and many non-workers were tending. The relentless development of machinery, with its concomitant deskilling and subdivision of tasks insured that the unskilled would inherit the earth. As Flynn said, "a skilled worker is a fellow waiting for some machine to run him off his job." This was part of what Haywood meant when he said, "the revolution is already occurring around us," and the workers must become conscious of this.[lxxxiii] IWW writers asserted that, just as the capitalists supplanted the feudal nobility, and large caps were now destroying small ones, so proletarians were overtaking craft workers in numbers, social significance, economic power.
Austin Lewis and Abner Woodruff, in major pamphlets which the IWW reprinted for many years, asserted that craft workers, while members of the working class, were not proletarians. Regarding their skill as a species of property, they upheld bourgeois property morality and law. Seeking improvement within the system, they were petty bourgeois in outlook. They protected themselves not only against capitalists but also against the unskilled by limited apprenticeships, high dues and initiations, and other limits on membership; they even devastated others who possessed their own skill by closing the membership books of their unions and locking fellow craftsmen out. Yet craftsmen, like the petty bourgeoisie, were doomed. As Woodruff said, "any economic system built upon the RIGHTS OF PROPERTY is a confiscatory system, and little property disappears before big property. The property of the craftsman--his skill--tends to evaporate." IWW writers recognized that the huge, modern corporations were restructuring work and oblitterating the skilled crafts, and using their enormous economic power to crush craft unions. Vincent St. John only echoed the certainties of most Wobblies when he said that "the future belongs to the IWW. The day of the skilled worker has passed. Machine production has made the unskilled worker the main factor in industry." Yet the skilled workers organized in the AFL, filled with craft, race, patriotic, and gender pride, "have become allies of the employers to keep in subjection the vast majority of the workers."[lxxxiv]
The unskilled majority, IWW writers asserted, are essential to the operation of industry and the very existence of society. As Lewis said, they "form the definite and indispensable substratum of every industry." The side that wins their loyalty during a strike will win because they can operate the industries, especially in conjunction with scab union craftsmen, who, in obedience to their sacred contracts, remain on the job and even do the work of striking craftsmen. When the unskilled strike, however, the skilled craftsmen cannot do their work, and must walk out whether or not they want to. Lewis concluded that "everything then combines to place the unskilled laborer in the strategic position in the labor struggle. He becomes the one vital factor without which no victory in the fight between the laborer and the capitalist can be won. He who has the unskilled laborer has the victory." The unskilled mass, if organized, "can dislocate an industry whevever it chooses to do so. It can practically dictate the terms on which the so-called skilled trades must operate.... When the unskilled laborer enters the fight he drags the rest of the crafts after him." Once they realize their power, they can conquer industry and society; they already do the work. The IWW, Walker Smith said in another IWW pamphlet, "holds that the only power of the master class lies in the ignorance of the workers as to their economic might." The workers can paralyze industry by withdrawing their labor power or "apply it so that the machine does not function properly."[lxxxv]
The unskilled workers, the IWW felt, were the deracinated proletarians predicted by Marx, and were naturally revolutionary. Having no property, even in their skill, they rejected property morality. Solidarity epitiomized the proletarian's natural attitude: property is "the means of our subjugation, the whip in the hands of our masters, the cause of our misery and degradation." The unskilled worker, Lewis claimed, was "a permanently outlawed class" which came into contact with society only as represented by the policeman who beat and degraded him. "He has no part or lot in the existing social system." The police "inflict every indignity upon him and render his necessary migration through the land as difficult and as dangerous as possible." No municipal socialism, labor legislation, or ameliorative reform could help him. Woodruff said that "his whole attitude is one of opposition--opposition to the property of the master class--an attitude utterly subversive of all modern ethics, morals, religions, and laws, an utterly Revolutionary attitude." The proletariat is "an alien class in modern society, [which] finds itself unable to function agreeably, even tolerably, in conjunction with any other class. Its whole attitude is one of fundamental antagonism." All that the IWW must do, in this view, is expound and popularize the proletarian's natural philosophy and make them realize their strength. In the words of Lewis, "the unskilled laborer knows without any telling that he is exploited at the point of production.... He matches his no-property against all the property of the dominant class, his no-law against the law of the industrial and commercial masters, his ability to starve against all the resources of civilization." Haywood admonished the workers, "remember you hold the power in the shop even if the employer does hold the title.... We can lock the capitalists out and continue to run the machinery."[lxxxvi]
Proletarians, the IWW asserted, have no pride in their output, and indeed have no discernible product they can call their own. They have no pride in their skill or in anything connected to their work. "During the hours of their labor," Woodruff stated, "they are no longer thinking men, but mere automatons, performing their functions mechanically and completely dominated by the will of another." Solidarity averred that "their work consists of some monotonous task, such as feeding raw material into a machine, and consciously or unconsciously they are rebels against the existing order. These workers see no chance for promotion from the ranks. They realize that their wages have no relation to the quality or quantity of the product of their toil. They have, in fact, no product, but simply perform their mechanical part in the vast process of manufacturing commodities for the market." Walker Smith repudiated the traditional craftsman ethic and all cant about the nobility of labor. "Such labor as [the IWW's] members do under capitalism," he said, "is performed unwillingly and they refuse to take pride in their work until such time as they are laboring on their own behalf." Starr Bountar, in an article entitled "I Won't Work" (a defiant reply to capitalist editors who claimed that this was the real meaning of IWW) proclaimed that "a day spent in your workshops and factories is a day wasted. It is only the hour of rebellion that counts, it is only the moments spent in undermining by intelligence and education you citadel of oppression, that makes life worth living." Although the proletarian lacked security of employment of any dignity, his work was, Woodruff said, nevertheless "the only place where he appreciably functions in the scheme of modern life."[lxxxvii]
The proletarians were also suitable revolutionary material because they labored under conditions of "scientific team work" and viewed production as a social, not individual, process. They were free from the craft, racial, patriotic, and gender prejudices appropriate to skilled craftsmen. As Woodruff said, "the free and close association of all the workers [and] their discussion and co-operation for mutual economic and social purposes tend to break down the ancient craft, national, and race antagonisms." This was natural, not a forced, process, that occurred on the job and in the factories. Solidarity said that the proletariat, although recruited out of every nationality, race, and sex, was nevertheless a unit. Despite their diverse origins, "they have one long experience in common--they have been and are slaves of the machines. That enables them to understand one another. Through that experience, on the anvil of attempted social repression, they are being welded into industrial solidarity--the unassailable unity of the working class." On another occasion it heralded the machine proletariat, which "stands alone in the world like a lion, and defies all the law and conventions" of the capitalists and "fights in terms of class."[lxxxviii]
Even more important, the IWW regarded the proletariat as, unlike craftsmen, congruent with mechanization and the organization of modern industry. They welcomed the machine as producing more wealth for themselves, once they have seized it, while the reactionary craftsman regarded machinery as undercutting his property in his skill. The craftsman fights a losing battle against modern machinery and also against the centralized, trustified, and international corporation whose efficiency and economic power dooms him. The IWW, on the contrary, welcomed these developments as massing and solidifying the new working class, expanding output, and divorcing ownership from the control and operation of industry, all of which facilitated the coming revolution.
By making proletarians the basis of organization, the IWW felt that it must only realize the inherent tendencies in modern social and industrial organization and bring existing fact into the consciousness of the rising proletariat. IWW writers looked to the machine proletariat rather than the declining craft worker or the declassed petty bourgeois because, as Lewis said, "there is no revolutionary effectiveness in a beaten class." Woodruff said that "like the bird in the egg, the physical portion of the Industrial Democracy already exists within the framework of modern society.... The quickening of this mass into life is the next step. An awakened Social Conscience, a realization of power, and a desire for true economic freedom must bring about the great change." Joseph Ettor called the new machine proletariat "the modern Sileni," an unprepossessing group which is nonetheless destinied to inherit the world. "It is just these workers whom Industrial evolution has cast on the shores of society in order to work out its redemption.... The capitalists know that they have to contend, not with an enervated, corrupt, pauperized class, but a virile class" born of modern industrial tendencies, and structured into the warp and woof of modern society, indispensable and mighty. Lewis averred that the unskilled worker, used to periodic unemployment, living on a pittance, and moving in search of a job, could survive a strike or series of short strikes much better than the skilled craftsman with a mortgage binding him to his locale. The proletarian, Lewis said, pits "his ability to starve against all the resources of civilization."[lxxxix]
In addition to recruiting the machine proletariat of the East, the IWW also targeted workers in the basic, extractive industries of the West. Farm laborers migrated in pursuit of the harvest, carried all of their possessions on their backs, and lodged in bunkhouses or barns, or simply slept under the stars. Loggers worked at a seasonal industry, usually at a succession of isolated camps, while miners sometimes worked for only part of the year and often lived far from permanent towns. Many of these workers, especially the "harvest stiffs" and loggers, were highly transient, young, single men who "rode the rails" in search of work and had no permanent job or occupation. Many lived at times in "jungles," or hobo camps near the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Western towns, and often begged ("threw their feet") or stole when work was unavailable. Some Wobblies saw them as the very epitome of the new proletariat, and hence a natural constituency of the IWW, while others lamented their excessive individualism.
The Industrial Union Bulletin rhapsodized that the hoboes, "strong limbed, resolute, self-reliant--many of them the finest specimens of American manhood--constitute the leaven of the revolutionary labor movement in the West," whose absence in comparable numbers in the East accounted for the greater conservatism of that region. "With his perception quickened by travel and varied experience," the migrant spreads the gospel of revolutionary unionism everywhere he goes. "Leaving his job whenever conditions do not suit him," he raises "the spirit of revolt" among those who stay behind. In the fall, when the harvest is complete, the hoboes congregate in Western towns, "where they spend much of their leisure in public libraries and show up in large numbers at Socialist and IWW meetings." They buy revolutionary literature which they read and broadcast far and wide on their travels.[xc]
Walker Smith, editor of the Industrial Worker, agreed. The western hoboes were recruited from the "more rebellious of the unmarried men" of the East who travelled west looking for opportunity, or in the aftermath of a long and bitter strike. They were "the real proletarians," lacking property, roots, and conventional attitudes. "The one, last tie that binds other workers to society is lacking; there are no family ties.... Yet among these men are found men with intellect, even college bred and powerful speakers are not rare.... This is the class that the masters fear.... It is to this class, turned down by the AF of L, that the IWW must turn for material to organize." In another article, the Industrial Worker said that "for his labor the blanket stiff receives a miserable wage from his bosses, blows from the police, curses from the middle class, and sneers from the aristocracy of labor. And yet his every action influences all of society and when he tries to shake off his chains all society trembles with the upheaval."[xci]
Forrest Edwards, head of the IWW's union of migrant agricultural workers, extolled their independence and fighting spirit. The migrant, Edwards said, must grow strong or perish. He is too independent for a sedentary job in a permanent location, and "will never again enter the industries as a permanent occupation, except in rare cases. The rules in industry are too strict for him." On the road, the hobo jettisons the entire bourgeois moral code. "He has more time to think. He is more radical than the industrial slave. He is more independent. He has no one depending on him for bread. No property interests or instincts. No home. He is despised and hated.... The IWW offers him a measure of protection impossible in any other organization."[xcii]
Frank Dawson, writing in Solidarity, extolled "the quick moving fellow workers who will jump across the continent to reach the centers of revolution.... Like the Nazarene, they are homeless" and "despised and rejected of men." They are thrown into fetid jails. "Yes, they are bums, tramps, and hoboes. But they carry the most significant doctrine of revolt in the land.... They may be seedy. But their very seediness is the surest sign of a serious social canker." Dawson compared the IWW's hobo agitators to the Cromwells and Luthers of history; Star Bounter likened them to Hebrew prophets, early Christians, the student tramps of the Middle Ages who inspired the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the precursor of the French Revolution, the "tramp-peddlar, pack on shoulder, who sowed the seeds of revolt and insubordination."[xciii]
Bountar's paean to the rootless, wandering agitators evoked a reply from Ben Williams. Bountar, Williams complained, romanticized the individualistic "free footed rebel" who embodies merely the "spirit of revolt" and distrusts organizations and institutions as throttling that spirit. Williams insisted that "the revolt must be ORGANIZED, and take concrete form cell by cell, tissue by tissue, in the framework of a new society" even if that "spoils the poetry of the labor movement." Williams surmised that "the pioneer pathfinders may have to give way to non-fighting conservators and builders," and argued that they should do so willingly when the time arrives.[xciv]
Over a year later, another writer in Solidarity, replying to a similar paean to the restless, wandering rebel, likewise stressed the necessity of discipline, solidarity, and organization. The IWW could not succeed with members who were "half industrial slave, half vagabond adventurer." The spirit of the IWW "is embodied in those whose slavery is complete," those who have families to defend. The man who quits a job when conditions are bad is no hero. "The final argument of a scissorbill [a conservative worker] is that he can quit a disagreeable job.... The privilege of quitting is what keeps the scissorbill from organizing. He will chase the rainbow of a good job.... The ones who stay and agitate on the job and try to organize are the ones who may become the guerillas of the revolution" and the sharpshooters of the class struggle.[xcv]
This same author condemned the philosophy of simplifying wants and working little, and branded its adherents as little better than the phrasemongering middle class radicals. The IWW press occasionally printed jovial and insouciant articles from members who refused to work. The Industrial Worker treated its readers to the musings of a wanderer who was surprised that the propertied remained in California's sweltering Imperial Valley during the summer, while "the knights of the road can go where the oranges grow the sweetest and the breezes blow the coolest; when they get tired of resting under the orange trees and eating the luscious fruit, they can go to the ocean and find some sandy secluded spot on the seashore, and undress and let the cool waves of the peaceful Pacific lave their sturdy bodies." Meanwhile the propertied swelter, "keeping the shade trees growing so that there will be shade for the hoboes next winter.... Several of these tramps have told me personally that as long as the moneyed men and ranchers were heroic and ambitious enough to stay here in the summer, they would always show that they appreciated such heroism by coming here to spend their winters."[xcvi] In a similar vein, the Industrial Worker printed without comment "A Tramp's View of Work," written by a member who had probably read Thoreau and who definitely rejected the entire emerging consumer culture:
I live and enjoy myself--by not working. You live and enjoy yourself by working--so you must admit that it is simply a matter of opinion.... But I do maintain that the work a man does should bear some relation to his wants.... My own wants are few.... I have no desire to increase my wants.... Why, then, if you please, should I be forced to work at a job I do not like, simply for the purpose of providing myself with something I do not want?.... I am looking for the irreducible minimum of artificial desire, and am willing to work to satisfy that minimum. I raise no objections if other people are foolish enough to work themselves to death in order to live, though I reserve the right to sneer.[xcvii]
Such sentiments evoked the ire of "Sin Bad," an IWW writer upset that "a doctrine common among quitters is that the less you work the less you are exploited. In order to be exploited less they adopt a standard of living that keeps them in the collar the shortest part of the time. The application of their doctrine keeps the Western Wobbly poorly dressed, poorly fed and poorly sheltered." The author complained that "this element is going to beat the bosses by starving and depriving themselves of the necessities of life." Such workers lack the vitality and motive to fight the boss, and often disrupt IWW locals with hair-splitting doctrinal disputes. "The propaganda of action is what counts," not mere talk. We cannot rely on "hot air and enthusiasm to build the IWW."[xcviii]
Charles Ashleigh agreed with both the extollers and the critics of the Western rebel. The hobo, he said, is "a worker who moves about because he works in seasonable industries. Just that and nothing more," neither a bum and degenerate nor "a species of wandering superman." He lacked ties to organized society, rejected religion and conventional life and morality, and loathed the law. "On the other hand, it has been rather hard to get the floater to accept the idea of job action and agitation. The stationary worker sees no method of escaping rotten conditions except by bettering them. The floater too often tries to avoid them by quitting the job. Especially on the Pacific coast have the more individual romatic and venturesome features of the working class rebellion attracted the workers. Much too little stress has been laid on organization," and the hallmark of a rebel is too often a defiant attitude rather than effective action through the IWW.[xcix]
Edwards differentiated between three types of hoboes, which he defined as "a migratory person." The tramp was an individualist who worked as little as possible, depended on his wits for a living, and wanted to raise a stake for a start in some small business. The crook, of which there were many varieties "is a real menace to the workers" and "a bar to successful organization." The migratory worker "is the only one who can function on the job" and is the only one interested in improving conditions. Justus Ebert defended the migratory worker as necessary to the very existence of the United States and avereed that he is so mistreated that "it is no wonder that he often prefers idleness to work. And with unemployment often his lot it is not wonder that he steals to defend himself." He sometimes becomes unemployable due to "loss of contact with employment" because he cannot find work. "Without property and few ties and with the instinct of rebellion, he is the best material to bring about a fundamental social change. Born of revolutionary changes in production, he is the advance guard in the revolution to change the ownership and control of production.... His fight against degradation is a guarantee of the part he is bound to play in social transformation."[c]
The ultimate word was probably that of a 1912 Industrial Worker editorial on "The Blanket Stiff." In the West "there has been bred a type of worker who is self reliant to the point of individualism and who is somewhat lacking in the discipline necessary to strong organization. The east shows just the opposite, broadly speaking, and presents the workers with acting en masse but without the individual aggressiveness found among the migratory workers of the newer country. The Western and Eastern types serve to balance one another in the organization and as the spirit of each becomes more diffused the IWW will become more nearly perfected in point of action...." IWW writers admitted that, among the migrants as in the urban slums, there were some workers demoralized by continual defeat, who would not keep clean, who drank too much, who had lost all self-respect and all ability to fight their masters. But The Industrial Worker defended independent workers "who will tramp and suffer, rather than be the servile tools" of capitalist masters, and averred that "a tramp is a thousand times better than a scab, even if the tramp never worked a day."[ci]
In weighing the qualities condusive to organization, and explaining success and failure upon the basis of the alleged qualities of different groups of workers, the IWW recognized that it could not by an act of the will conjure up an organized working class regardless of the pre-existing cultural attributes of the members of that class. Yet the events of history suggest that the one over-riding quality condusive to successful organization is a rationally founded confidence that success is possible. Workers (or blacks or women) fight when their experience (whether, in the case of workers, a temporary abatement of government terrorism or a labor shortage) has convinced them that they can win. Despite the fact that harvest workers were notoriously individualistic and, with their migratory lifestyles, difficult to keep track of, the IWW successfully organized them during World War I. Innovation in the IWW's organizing techniques partly explain this success. The IWW, replacing its ineffective efforts to recruit migratory workers while they were wintering or temporarily stopping in the towns, instituted an effective job delegate system that recruited organizers who followed the harvest from South the North. Yet the decisive factor was the simultaneous demand for soldiers and for massive agricultural production, which produced a labor shortage on the farms of the West. This enabled the IWW to retain the loyalty of the farm laborers even into 1918, when federal repression had virtually destroyed the IWW's organizational infrastructure and imprisoned almost its entire leadership.
A New Social Formation
The IWW appealed to the new proletariat with a new form of unionism, revolutionary in structure, philosophy, and goals. The IWW, "forming the new society within the shell of the old," defined itself in opposition to the conservative craft unionism of the AFL as well as to the conservative electoral strategy of the Socialist parties. Haywood, at the founding convention of the IWW, proclaimed that the AFL "is not a working class movement. It does not represent the working class." The IWW was "a labor organization," not a rival of the AFL. Subsequent experience did not alter this belief. Vincent St. John later stated that the AFL craft unions "have become allies of the employers to keep in subjection the vast majority of the workers. The IWW denies that the craft union movement is a labor movement. We deny that it can or will become a labor movement."[cii] The IWW criticized the AFL unions as a "job trust" which excluded most workers by racial, gender, and skill requirements for membership, by charging exorbitant initiation fees and dues, and by closing their books even against their fellow craftsmen.
The IWW, unlike the AFL, accepted all workers, regardless of race, sex, nationality, or skill. Although the IWW attacked the leadership of the AFL and criticized the narrow prejudices of its membership, the IWW, as Haywood said at the founding convention, was "broad enough to take in all of the working class." Haywood did not "care a snap of my finger whether or not the skilled workers join this industrial movement at the present time. When we get the unorganized and unskilled laborer into this organization the skilled worker will of necessity come here for his own protection." The IWW's vision included skilled craftsmen, white collar workers, and unskilled laborers in one all-inclusve union. "No one," Abner Woodruff said, "is so great or so humble that he should be excluded."[ciii] The IWW accepted an AFL union card, as well as that of any other union, in lieu of an initiation fee, and kept dues so low that the lowest paid worker could join.
The IWW's fundamental structural principle was industrial unionism--that is, organizing workers not according to craft, skill, or job, but place of work. For example, every worker employed at a steel mill--whether steelworker, truck driver, janitor, or payroll clerk--would belong to the same local. When such a union struck, it would completely close the plant. Craft unions, on the contrary, struck in isolation while the other workers (including those in other AFL unions) continued work, thus facilitating capitalist recruitment of scabs and ensuring the defeat of each union separately. IWW literature emphasized that an AFL union card "is nothing more than a scabbing permit." St. John emphasized the necessity of having "the form and structure of the organization correct in order to facilitate the growth of solidarity on class lines among the workers." Only a union that organized all workers on industrial lines could be considered a class organization.[civ]
Even AFL unions that had an industrial structure, such as the United Mine Workers, signed contracts with different companies (or with the same company in different locations) that expired at different times, thus preventing unified, class action. For example, coal miners in different states signed contracts that expired on different dates; when one UMW local was on strike, others, even those working for the same company in different areas, remained at work, in effect scabbing on their co-unionists and allowing the capitalists to transfer production from a struck mine to those still open. The capitalists, knowing when any particular contract expired, stockpiled coal in anticipation of a strike in any district. The Industrial Union Bulletin called the UMW "a monument to the cunning of the capitalist class and its puppets" which "organizes the miners exactly along the lines demanded by the economic interest of the capitalist class." The UMW was as much a bulwark of capitalism as was the army; its check-off system and compulsory membership rendered the miners virtual slaves, who could be expelled from the union (as therefore from their jobs) for criticizing union officials. The IWW aimed to unite all coal miners into a single fighting force which could stike simultaneously all across the nation; it would similarly organize all other miners in the same general Mining Department, so that all miners could come to the aid of any on strike. The IWW also had District Councils that united all the workers of a specific locality, enabling them to strike in unison.[cv]
The form of organization, however, was only one aspect of the IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism. St. John insisted that "without revolutionary principles, Industrial Unionism is of little or no value to the workers." The most practical manifestation of the IWW's revolutionary philosophy, aside for its incessant agitational and educational work, was its refusal to sign time contracts with the capitalists. The IWW considered contracts as virtually conceding the legitimacy of capitalism and acknowledging that "a fair day's wage" was possible under capitalism; the IWW, on the contrary, demanded "abolition of the wage system." More practically, contracts throttled the workers' ability to strike when times were propitious, gave the capitalists advance warning of a possible strike, and in general defused the class war. Workers should take whatever they can from their exploiters, at any time and by any means, and fight the class war with the same unrelenting ferocity as their capitalist masters, who would violate any contract the workers lacked the power to enforce. Most crucially, contracts negated the solidarity of the working class by denying unions the freedom to strike in support of their brothers and sisters. As St. John said, the IWW committed itself "to an unceasing struggle against the private ownership and control of industry. There is but one bargain that the IWW will make with the employing class--COMPLETE SURRENDER OF ALL CONTROL OF INDUSTRY TO THE ORGANIZED WORKERS."[cvi]
The IWW regarded itself not merely as a union, but as an entirely new social formation, the embreyo of the new society, and "the vanguard of the army of labor in its march to economic freedom." As Solidarity averred, "the working class must organize a new social environment out of the materials already at hand" and "ABSORB AND CONTROL EVERY ACTIVITY OF THE WORKING CLASS...." St. John claimed that the IWW was "all-sufficient for the workers needs," and would replace government and every other form of social organization. An editorial in Solidarity agreed, and insisted on the necessity of a wide-ranging, comprehensive organization to combat capitalist hegemony in every area of life. "The upholders of the present order are working old prejudices and traditions overtime and creating new ones in their efforts to maintain themselves as the dominant power in society.... Our only method of combatting them is our ability to develop institutions which will act as antidotes for the poison injected into the workers' minds by these agencies of capitalism"-- the press, the priests, and the politicians. IWW publications must replace the capitalist press, IWW propaganda leagues perform the functions of their churches, and the industrial unions constitute the IWW's army and navy. (The IWW, as we shall see below, also supported alternative schools.) Together these working-class institutions "will make good the declaration of the Preamble and build the structure of industrial democracy within the shell of capitalism, making the workers the owners and rulers of the earth."[cvii]
The IWW faced violence as well as more subtle mechanisms of hegemony; as Solidarity reminded its readers, the capitalist class "is ready to starve, blacklist, club, shoot, jail or hang individuals or groups of workers, as examples to the rest to remain docile under the blood-letting.... The masters' record is one continuous narrative of deeds of violence against the slaves." Solidarity recommended revolutionary industrial unionism as the main antidote to this terrorism, but fully recognized that such unionism must transcend essential shopfloor issues and achieve a total transformation of working-class life and consciousness. Ben Williams averred that the IWW denotes "the logical evolution of the new social system--from below--out of the depths--building upon the firm foundation of working class initiative and constructive genius." As Grover Perry stated in a major pamphlet, the IWW "is a labor union that aspires to be the future society." St. John agreed that the IWW "will eventually furnish the union through which and by which the organized workers will be able to determine the amount of food, clothing, shelter, education and amusement necessary to satisfy the wants of the workers." Woodruff, echoing a sentiment repeatedly voiced by Ben Williams and other IWW leaders, said that "any force in society that lacks a constructive program is a useless--a futile force."[cviii]
The IWW proposed that its members prepare for the new society by democratically governing themselves at the point of production and, through self-education and strikes, assuming more and more responsibility for managing industry. Joseph Ettor called the IWW "the industrial army of occupation and production." Woodruff restated a common IWW theme when he said that the IWW "proposes that the ballot box shall repose first in the Union hall, and then in the shop; and one needs only to function in industry to be a voter there.... The revolution can properly occur, only after the proletariat has had sufficient training in voluntary co-operation and self-government" and demonstrated "its ability to successfully continue production and handle distribution so that all may be fed.... No class has ever yet successfully dominated society unless it deomonstrated its ability to direct industry.... The proletariat must recognize and be prepared to assume the responsibilities of production and distribution, and of social and industrial administration" or accept capitalist rule. "It must have a positive scientific philosophy, a definite conception of the future society, and a practicable program." Arturo Giovannitti asserted that unless the workers could run the factories, after a revolution "the capitalists would wend themselves back to their old positions"; for this reason, the IWW educates the workers so that they can inherit society, "but the socialists merely build air castles."[cix]
Haywood agreed that "it should be the ambition of every industrial worker to possess a technical and practical knowledge of industry" because "learning how to appy labor power in the most scientific way" would allow workers in the present to effectively withhold or redirect their labor, while fitting them for the ultimate operation of industry "for all society rather than for a privileged class of idle stockholders."[cx] Haywood was confident that when the workers inherited the earth, they would transform not only class relations and society but the workplace itself. During the Patterson strike, a conflict usually characterized by concrete organizing rather than abstract theorizing or utopian dreaming, Haywood, contemplating the dreary death-traps in which the workers toiled, told the strikers that when the workers owned and managed the mill,
There will be a wonderful dining-room where you will enjoy the best food that can be purchased; your digestion will be aided by sweet music, which will be wafted to your ears by an unexcelled orchestra. There will be a gymnasium and a great swimming pool and private bathrooms of marble. One floor of this plant will be devoted to masterpieces of art, and you will have a collection even superior to that displayed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. A first-class library will occupy another floor.[cxi]
The IWW's concept of leadership was far more democratic than that of the AFL or other institutions of mainstream society. Flynn, echoing the sentiments of most Wobblies, attacked the AFL's labor leaders as class collaborationists who hobnobed with the rich, feathered their own nests, put the interests of capital above those of the workers, and exercised dictatorial authority over those whom they in theory served. Flynn cited examples of AFL union officials ordering workers back to work under unsafe conditions, sabotaging strikes by making separate agreements with the capitalists, and using union office as a stepping-stone for a political career. Flynn said that "the captains of industry needed lieutenants of labor and through their yearly banquets and continual associations a distinct chasm in interests has been created between workers and their spokesmen. (Tim Healy in the dress suit, a sight for the gods, is not Tim Healy in overalls.) The latter eat and drink with the capitalists, dress, live and finally think like them.... You are fighting for Your pay envelop. He is fighting for His pay envelop. You are fighting for your class. He is fighting for the LABOR LEADER CLASS." Assessing blame for this situation, Flynn highlighted a central ambivilance in radical theory. On the one hand she blamed the capitalist system for deadening the minds and sensibilities of the workers and reducing them to passivity and torpor, and gave a sophisticated analysis of how capitalism, as a total system, molded workers for slavery. On the other hand, she blamed the workers as agents responsible for their own plight. "Physically overworked, they become mentally inert. Accustomed to taking orders, they drift into the habit of letting some one else think for them. It is a noticeable fact that the more subservient and submissive men are in the shop, the easier prey they are to the labor leader outside. The slave mind does not become revolutionary on the street between the shop and the union hall.... The workers alone are responsible. Labor leaders could not lead if there were no sheep-like men to follow." Flynn's solution was IWW workers' democracy, a union in which "the soldiers become the generals and the generals are the soldiers; where all power and orders flow from the mass to and through their representatives...."[cxii]
IWW strikes, therefore, were managed by all the workers, not just IWW members, through democractically elected representatives. The IWW encouraged the strikers to listen to every point of view, and allowed priests, politicians, and capitalists to speak to the mass meetings of the strikers. Flynn advised the Patterson strikes to "listen to them all and then take what you think is good for yourselves and reject what is bad. If you are not able to do that then no censorship over your meetings is going to do you any good."[cxiii] Although IWW agitators, speakers, and leaders often differed from the main body of the strikers, or from the elected strike leadership, the leaders, and even more, the mass meetings of the strikers themselves, exercised ultimate authority in all matters, and sometimes decided against the advice of the IWW's leaders and organizers.
The IWW stressed mass organization and power and disdained the cult of the leader. Solidarity, discussing the recall of Haywood from the SP's NEC, said that IWW papers "keep the individual in the background as much as possible, and emphasize the tactics, forms, and principles of industrial organization. While trying to estimate Haywood and all other prominent workers at their worth, we are most strenuously opposed to the 'great man' conception of the proletarian movement." Haywood and Flynn heartily seconded this emphasis, especially where they were themselves concerned. In the Patterson strike, both leaders downplayed their own significance, claiming that their main use was as outsides who could articulate the workers' own thoughts which the workers could not voice only because of fear of employer retaliation. Haywood told the strikers thaat "I have come to Patterson not as a leader. There are no leaders in the IWW; this is not necessary. You are the members of the union and you need no leaders. I come here to give you the benefit of my experience throughout the country. The union belongs to you." Flynn agreed, saying that "I have nothing to lose so I can say whatever I please about the manufacturers as long as I express your sentiments."[cxiv]
Abner Woodruff, writing in Solidarity, advocated freeing class-war prisoners through publicity and mass action. Reliance on lawyers and the formal legal system, he said, undermined proletarian democracy.
When we hire lawyers we cater to a section of the bourgeoisie and educate the workers to regard them as indispensable to us in the class struggle.... Further, when we voluntarily appear as protagonists in the courts, we evince respect for an institution which we verbally profess to hold in contempt--an utterly inconsistent position.
The fellow worker, so thrown into the limelight, becomes, at once, a sort of TIN JESUS to be revered and idolized. We have enough of such. The democracy of labor is destroyed--the workers look to someone else to do their work. We cannot afford saviors, or leaders, or martyrs. Our special business is to develop the mass--to promote class action and solidarity. Saviors and leaders are inimical to that.[cxv]
Ben Williams similarly averred that the IWW required in its leaders primarily administrative abilities and obedience to the will of the members. Such administrators "are living the life of the working class," which needs no hero worshippers or heroes. "This conception of leadership, in conjunction with the structural form of the economic organization itself, foreshadows the industrial democracy of future society," where selfish individualism will fall before an ethic of service to "the interests of the collectivity." Solidarity, attacking self-styled saviors who gravitated into the labor movement from other classes, heralded "a new concept of labor leadership.... The new leader is an ADMINISTRATOR, chosen by the workers themselves to discharge a certain function in their organization. He comes from the ranks, is living and has lived profoundly the life of the slave," works for both immediate aims and ultimate goals, and is at all times strictly subordinate to the workers he represents. "Whenever the need is imperative, he comes forth from the ranks. Whenever one of his kind disappears thorugh persecution or death, another appears to take his place. His intellectual and moral superiority over the 'professional saviour' is obvious to any intelligent observor" because he is driven by a moral commitment to the movement and class from which he springs, rather than from a desire for applause or wealth. He will throw off his own shackles only "when the workers as a class have broken their chains forever." Solidarity pointed to shabbily-dressed, organic, working-class intellectuals who, without formal schooling, routinely humiliated "educated" intellectuals in debate. The astounded bourgeois intellectuals "ask, 'Where did that fellow come from? Who is he?' And shake their heads when told that he is but one of the many taken from the ranks." Solidarity atttributed the IWW's superiority not only to the intrinsic justice of its cause, but to the rugged independence of its agitators. "A wise man usually has too much spirit to become a hireling, a tool, for corrupt bosses," as editors and other middle class intellectuals must. "It is really cruel to expose such mental castrates before the public". Mary Marcy adduced another element in the IWW agitator's superiority in debate: his practical experience on the job. "Successful tactics are not evolved from the study," she said, "but from the scene of activity.... An industrial organization offers no foothold for those whose interests are not the interests of the proletariat."[cxvi]
The IWW attempted to mold a new class into consciousness of itself and to forge a new social institutional matrix to represent this class and lead it to victory. But its aims went beyond that, to the creation of a new person suited to the world struggling to be born. Working-class triumph would not occur inevitably as the result of impersonal economic and historic processes, but only by conscious, organized effort. The IWW, Odon Por said, would equip the working class to direct the processes of evolution themselves. Educated workers cease regarding labor as merely a means of securing bread, but "consider their work organically in relation to all the problems of life." They recognize "that we may consciously determine upon a new form of society, if its vital tendencies are already living within us--and that we may consciously work out, adopt, and furnish the means necessary for its realization." Conscious workers in line with the forces of economic progress may tap "the hidden source of spiritual power necessary to social progress," which is "now a conscious process to them.... They are convinced that economic and technical progress already offers the material to build the new society, [and that] the only work left to do is to actually build it. They conceive the revolutionary process as totally dependent upon them, and by placing themselves within the process itself they are pushing it on.... Progress does not operate above us and in spite of us, but [occurs] by virtue of our conscious desire and organized action." Workers are active, creative partners in evolution, not passive, inert materials moved by outside forces. Workers must realize "that economic forces are far from being the only determinants in revolutionary action, that in the last analysis the questions before the working class are really pschological and moral, and that the vital problem is to discover and develop those forms of organization which create a revolutionary consciousness in the individual workers."[cxvii]
John Baldazzi, writing in Solidarity almost five years after Por, agreed that the working class required "a very deep psychological transformation" before it could intervene decisively in history and that the IWW must "develop such moral and intellectual revolution among the working masses." Baldazzi, as other IWW writers, grasped the concept of hegemony, the capitalist domination of all areas of life including thought and general culure. Today, "in the intellectual, as well as in the social, political, and industrial field, a privileged class is imposing its own spirit and will. Of course, it is the capitalist class which controls the political, economical, and social life, and is imposing its own conceptions in science, the arts, and public education." Proletarian revolution "will become a reality when an enlightened minority rises from the midst of the morally submerged masses; an aristocracy of thought, of culture and heroism; a body of pioneers fighting for the realization of the proletarian idea, and capable of great achievements in intellectual, industrial, and political fields." Because the capitalists have imbued the workers with a slave mentality, the IWW must build a new society "completely opposite to the institutions of the capitalist system."[cxviii]
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn likewise advocated using strikes and union activity to transform the consciousness of the workers, an achievement she valued more highly than the transient achievement of higher wages. "A labor victory must be economc and it must be revolutionizing," she said. The IWW must make a "strike and through it the class struggle their religion; to make them forget all about the fact that it's for a few cents or a few hours, but to make them feel it is a 'religious duty' for them to win that strike." The IWW "must not only give the workers some solution for their immediate problems," she said on another occasion, but "it must change their attitude towards life. It must make of their humblest daily needs a spur toward a great ideal.... It knows no final agreement, no settlement with the present order. It must therefore unravel the tangled chords of race, craft and color prejudice, or resignation and humility.... It must weave a new mental fabric of solidarity, of militancy and hope." Flynn, like other Wobblies, placed her hopes in a militant minority who could serve as a catalyst for mass action. Ben Williams also viewed the psychological andd moral effects of strikes as more important than their financial results. "Active resistance and aggression develop power," he said, "and so the every-day struggle in the shops is essential to the process of uniting and drilling the working class." Capitalism will perish not by ballots or bullets, "but by replacing the capitalism system of class owned and controlled industry by the organic structure of Industrial Democracy" as demanded by the IWW's Preamble. Haywood thought that a properly conducted strike was "an incipient revolution."[cxix]
The Wobbly, according to these conceptions, was in his agitational and shop activities a prototype of the new person who would inhabit the future world. Some Wobblies claimed that the IWW was virtually their religion, "not only our support for the present" but "our Hope for the future. It is our religion as well as our means of self-defense." Wobblies sometimes talked as if false consciousness, rather than capitalist ownership of the means of production, was the main obstacle to working-class self-emancipation. For example, Clarence Smith said "the only power of the master class lies in the ignorance of the workers as to their economic might." Although Wobblies sometimes asserted that proletarianization and the overthrow of capitalism were inevitable, even those writers asserted that working-class consciousness was a necessary ingredient in their success; historic forces would operate through consciousness rather than independently of it. The IWW, in this scenario, was a necessary aspect of social evolution, the organization destinied to educate, and therefore liberate, the masses of humanity. As Grover Perry said, "we will grow, physically, intellectually, and morally. A new race will result, a race that will live for the joy of living, a race that will look with horror upon the pages of history that tell of our present day society."[cxx]
The IWW's revolutionary industrial unions aimed at forging an autonomous working-class movement that would, independently of capitalists and their state, fulfill all the needs of the working class. The IWW opposed not only the traditional forms of capitalist rule discussed at length above, but relatively new mechanisms of hegemony such as welfare capitalism, government regulation of industry, the welfare state, public education, and mass commercial culture. The IWW warned that capitalism would "introduce all manner of schemes to continue its hold on the working class.... We may look for a sort of benevolent feudalism to be introduced by the masters of bread before the end of capitalist society.... We must be on our guard now more than ever before." Its opposition to virtually the entire institutional matrix of modern industrial capitalism underlay the Socialist complaint that the IWW would "destroy all civilization."[cxxi]
IWW writers quoted capitalist managers and theorists to prove that capitalist "philantrophy" and corporate "welfare" programs were "a bulwark of capitalist slavery." While partly extorted by working-class pressure, pension plans and other programs paid dividends by evoking increased devotion and efficiency from the workers. "That means strengthening the chain that binds the worker to his master," Solidarity claimed. "It tends to weaken the workers' spirit of self-reliance and initiative on his own behalf" and convince the workers of their masters' basic humanity and benefiscence. Anything that the workers seize for themselves "is a positive gain, paving the way for further conquests and greater self-reliance; while what they receive as direct gifts from the enemy, tends to put them to sleep and place them more completely under the control of the masters."[cxxii]
The IWW also opposed social welfare and protective labor legislation as emanating from the capitalist class, protecting some workers at the expense of others, and encouraging the workers to rely on others for their salvation. Solidarity believed that government social insurance, such as that favored by the Socialists, "makes good submissive wage slaves for the exploiting classes and is paid for out of the products stolen from those slaves by those classes."[cxxiii] The capitalists, IWW writers averred, decide which labor laws they allow the government to pass, are decisive in shaping their specific provisions, and eviscerate those of which they disapprove. Unless the workers are sufficiently organized at the point of production to compel obedience to the laws, the capitalists will with impunity disregard them; if the workers are thus organized, they can legislate for themselves directly through their unions. The IWW published in pamphlet form "What Comes of Playing the Game," an article by Charles Edward Russell, himself a political socialist who ran for office on the SP ticket, but who regarded electioneering as merely an educational exercise. Russell said that
A proletarian movement can have no part, however slight, in the game of politics.... If the capitalists had designed the very best way in which to perpetuate their power they could not have hit upon anything better for themselves than this. It keeps the workers occupied; it diverts their minds from the real questions that pertain to their condition; it appeals to their sporting instincts, we want to win, we want to cheer our own victory, we want to stay in; this is the way to get results. And meantime the capitalists rake off their profits and are happy.
Russell examined the activities of the successful Labor parties in Australia and New Zealand and found that they paralyzed the proletarian movement and encouraged the workers to acquiesce in degradation and servitude that the capitalists would not dare inflict unaided; such reforms as did pass only made the workers more content with their condition. "Every pretended release from his chains has been in fact a new form of tether on his limbs... deliberately employed to distract his thoughts from fundamental conditions."[cxxiv]
The IWW also condemned government ownership and regulation of industry as "state capitalism" rather than socialism. Ben Williams averred that government-owned enterprises were often necessary for the survival of capitalism because they performed functions that private capitalists would or could not perform; they also mercilessly exploited workers. Government ownership, he concluded, was "but a phase of capitalist development identical in essence with that of private monopoly or trustification of industry." Abner Woodruff considered state capitalism the despotism of a new class of bureaucrats, while Justus Ebert regarded it as "the Damocles sword" with which a resurgent new middle class extorted concessions from the larger industrialists.[cxxv] Ebert, exasperated with SP exhileration at the collectivism and social engineering generated by World War I, argued that state regulation of industry benefitted the capitalists in war as in peace. He complained that "state action in favor of capitalism" was not socialistic and said that
The way that The Call exalts every federal governmental action in favor of regulation and control as proof of the inevitability of Socialism gives us a heartache as well as a headache. Here is a monstrous capitalism being fastened more firmly on the backs of the working class--the vast majority of society--to the Socialist cry of "Hurrah!"....
In the first place, Socialism is a struggle between the propertied, or capitalist class, and the propertyless, or working class. Present-day federal governmental action tends to kill the class struggle by its deceptive Socialism, the iron heel, and the delusion called national unity. In the second place, Socialism requires a class of workers conscious of their historic mission to transform Capitalism into a society where all shall produce and own. Federal governmental action is not producing such a class; on the contrary, it is making a class of military automatons, both on the battlefield and in the worshop. In the third place, Socialism presupposes social economic administration by the workers in the interests of society. What federal governmental action gives us is a dictatorship advised by a capitalist council, in the interests of the capitalist class....
Socialism is, after all, ownership by the workers for the workers. It is not state action by the shirkers for the shirkers.... It is proletarian administration on the basis of proletarian production and possession.[cxxvi]
The IWW expressed its countercultural revolutionary impetus in its attitudes towards the education of children. Most working-class parents, it is safe to say, are conservative in their educational outlook, and see the public schools as mechanisms for assimilation to dominant American values and for social mobility. Working parents often favor a traditional curriculum and value educational quality as defined by the nation's elite and its dominant instutitions. Most forms of educational innovation find their initial advocates in middle-class intellectuals and reformers, and their early embodiments in the schools for the relatively privileged. The IWW, however, encountered the active opposition of public school teachers in important strikes, a development which only accentuated Wobbly hostility towards the established educational system.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn complained that school teachers made immigrant children "ashamed of their foreign-born, foreign-speaking parents, their old country ways, their accents, their foreign newspapers, and even their strike and mass picketing." At Lawrence, she recounted, the IWW sponsored separate children's meetings to counteract the hostile propaganda of the public schools. "Big Bill, with his Western hat and stories of cowboys and Indians, became an ideal of the kids. The parents were pathetically grateful to us as their children began to show real respect for them and their struggles." During the Patterson strike, the IWW organized a children's boycott of the public schools because of teacher hostility towards the strikers. Yet the Wobblies also regarded the teachers as deluded wage slaves who, like other "professionals," preened themselves on their elevation above the working class. One teacher sorrowfully reported that most teachers succumbed to the soul-numbing educational bureaucracy and "moulded themselves to the pattern" because resistance seemed futile. The product was "the little automatons of our educational system" for whom "obedience is the all-important word.... Until the teacher is economically free, this slavery must continue. She must think as she is told to think, against her finest instincts she must crush young lives; she must in the crowded school-room deal with herds, not individuals."[cxxvii]
The IWW charged that the public schools were instruments of capitalist oppression at all times, not just during strikes. J.S. Biscay, a frequent contributor to the IWW press, criticized the rote learning that "fossilizes the brain so the individual will repeat platitudes instead of thinking" and "accept the present system as being just.... Above all the child is taught the philosophy of passive misery, doglike submissiveness and to accept and never doubt what is taught." Biscay complained that the schools clothed the false ideas of patriotism, American liberty, and the success ethic in beautiful and inspirational phrases. "The whole system of education is based upon the business needs of the system and nothing else," he charged. The capitalists would abolish the public schools "if they did not need to have you trained for their own use along certain lines." Biscay, like other Wobblies, averred that miseducation and false consciousness, rather than armed violence, was "the real force which opposes the working class and supports capitalism.... Our mission, then, is to educate the workers so they can see things as they really are." Another writer complained that the whole educational apparatus was "based upon the idea of class distinctions" and inculcated disdain of labor among the rich and servility by the poor. The teacher was "the personification of imperial power that must be obeyed without question or demur," while the schools created "a slave class whose only chains are false ideas."[cxxviii]
The IWW favored child-centered education based on the needs and aptitudes of the individual child, where students learned by doing. They advocated schools where writing, singing, and painting were vital parts of the curriculum The IWW press praised the Modern School movement, begun by Francisco Ferrer in Spain, "wherein science was applied to the task of unfolding the genius of each particular pupil, rather than to force the child to conform to a set standard." The Modern School in New York was largely an anarchist project staffed largely by middle-class teachers who instructed students from both the middle and working classes. Solidarity reprinted an article from the monthly newsletter of the Ferrer Association touting that school as teaching an evolutionary, scientific worldview and creating "intelligent revolutionists." The Modern School, this article said, "should be frankly a school of the revolution, should be in cordial alliance with the proletarian revolutionary movement of today, though not identified with any particular school of thought."[cxxix]
The IWW also suported the Peoples Work College, "based on the established facts of science, in which the pupil will be a seeker after truth and not a digester of stale rules." The school valued education and ideas over credits and diplomas, and trained labor agitators and a new kind of labor leader suited for a democratic society. Teachers began the Peoples Work College "to free themselves from being the lickspittles and mental prostitutes of the capitalist class.... They are forming the structure of a new educational system, which can be an aid to the workers in their every day struggles and develop into an educational system suitable to the needs of a society free from slavery and parasites of every kind."[cxxx]
IWW writers also occasionally recognized that the capitalists molded popular consciousness through their ownership of the sources of mass commercial culture. The capitalists manufactured mass culture and indoctrinated the workers with ideas useful to the capitalists under the guise of entertainment. The popular press was only the most glaring example of such propagandizing. The IWW did not believe that a conspiracy lay at the root of this process; rather, the capitalists created a whole world that circumscribed and molded consciousness indirectly and surreptiously. Caroline Nelson contrasted the old, indigenous folk culture in which all classes participated with the new, mass-produced commercial culture. Speaking of the demise of old communal festivals, Nelson said that "our modern ruling class has robbed us of something more than the certainty of making a living. It has robbed us of our social life with all its hearty good cheer and fellowship. In its place has come the saloon, the dancing hall, the nickelodeon, the cheap theatres, where body and mind are poisoned to make a profit for a set of human vampires, who never go near those places, but sit in their palaces and talk loftily about virtues and give liberally to churches and charity." B.E. Nilsson, a radical Wobbly, in a 1911 article on "Motion Picture Morality," attacked a certain movie as inculcating capitalist property values--surely a very early example of this kind of critique. Two years later another IWW writer complained that "the drama, the moving picture show, the newspaper, the magazine, the school teacher, the preacher, and all the rest--do their most effective work through suggestion rather than through bald statements." They "insinuate a lie without telling one directly," and thus more effectively poison the minds of the workers. The result of this, another Wobbly complained, was that the capitalists are "the only conscious class in society and the only really effective believers in the class struggle." One IWW writer similarly complained that the official Labor Day, celebrated by the AFL "in the beer garden or dance pavilion of with so-called 'sports,' climbing the greased pole, baseball, and other vulgarities," substituted for the international workers' holiday, May Day. The IWW frequently attacked saloons and "the booze habit--that enemy of the revolution" as demoralizing the workers and providing false solace.[cxxxi]
Radical middle-class intellectuals posed one last threat to the working-class autonomy favored by the Wobblies. Most Wobblies disdained such individuals as members of a doomed class who, displaced by the large capitalists, claimed positions of leadership in the labor movement. Failing in their chosen profession, they railed against monopoly capitalists and sought new meaning, or a new career, in pseudo-revolutionary agitation. The IWW regarded such parlor revolutionaries as imposters who diluted the class-conscious struggle of the workers with extraneous issues and alien concerns. "These people have nothing in common with us and can help us in no way to gain concessions on the job," one Wobbly asserted. "Wage workers should beware of revolutionists that are not wage workers themselves.... The propaganda of the cockroach revolutionist is of words only," whereas the IWW means action at the point of production. Because the IWW, when successful, will "cancel their cockroach class from society," they oppose revolutionary action at the point of production. Austin Lewis described the member of the new, salaried middle class, divested of his ability to make an independent living by the growth of large corporations as "a proletarian in receipt of a salary" who, psychologically and politically, "is no proletarian" but "a good servant of his new master" and "a distinct acquisition to the power of his destroyer." Many of these salaried proletarians, Lewis said, own shares in the giant corporations which have displaced them. This class, rhetorically radical but in fact reactionary, join the Progressive Party and infect the SP in an effort to turn back to clock and restore their antiquated status as independent proprietors. Joseph Biscay agreed that "the intellectual is generally in the employ of the capitalist, a sky pilot or professor usually.... They know absolutely nothing about the needs of the working class. Their very training makes them unfit in the cause of the proletariat." Justus Ebert similarly attacked many avant-garde cultural reforms boosted by such bourgeois radicals, such as anti-religious agitation, marriage reform, and sexual freedom, as "mere excresences of capitalism that affect not its essential character and are, therefore, tolerated by it."[cxxxii]
Despite frequent IWW attacks on intellectuals, however, the IWW highly valued the services of elite men and women who genuinely served the cause of labor. Even Abner Woodruff, who stridently asserted the necessity of strictly proletarian organization, acknowledged that some individuals could transcend their immediate economic interests and throw in their lot with the proletarians. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and William Haywood consorted with upper middle class radicals in Greenwich Village institutions such as Mabel Dodge's salon, The Masses, and Heterodoxy, and enthusiastically accepted their aid in important IWW strikes. Such luminaries as Max Eastman, John Reed, Mabel Dodge, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Jessie Ashley offered access to publicity and money closed to the IWW's proletarian membership. Flynn said, in 1914, that the New York IWW's Propaganda League was accepting non-workers, including even some who were living on inheritances, on an experimental basis.[cxxxiii] IWW leaders valued the help of Democratic party stalwart Frank Walsh, who chaired the Commission on Industrial Relations; the CIR's Final Report proved so helpful to the IWW that it reprinted portions in booklet form. The IWW, therefore, opposed not bourgeois intellectuals as such, but only those who presumed to dictate to the working class and assume positions of leadership. Similarly, it opposed radical cultural reforms only when they replaced, rather than supplementing, workplace organization.
Revolutionary Literature and Art
The IWW did, however, cultivate its own forms of literature and art, much as it fostered the organic intellectuals discussed above. IWW theorists confidently predicted that the new working-class civilization would eclipse the literary and artistic creations of previous epochs. One writer in the Industrial Worker claimed that "the greatest poets and the sweetest singers have been members of the working class" because "the highest aspirations of life are those which, if followed, make for the advancement of the race as a whole" and only the workers embody such ideas. Robin Dunbar, a radical playwright, said that "genius arises from the desire of a sufferer to express his pain, and the courage he shows in his offerance measures his genius. Only those rebel who suffer. Hence the vital drama is always one of protest, of criticism, of pain" and is "from its very nature saturated with struggle." The bourgeoisie cannot produce or appreciate great art because they value mindless ease over life, realism, and struggle. "A soft life is the ambition of a soft head.... Those men go through life best who fight every inch of the way. A warrior lives in a hundred battles; an artist lives in a hundred bodies."[cxxxiv]
The capitalists, Dunbar said, claim to represent taste and culture in literature and the arts, but "neglect and despise a sincere worker in these fields as long as he is working." They buy old masters to buttress their own fragile prestige, but have neither the capacity nor desire to understand new art, which is "always humanistic, proletarian, democratic and "depicts the struggle of the masses to rise, to master nature." Dunbar criticized the sentimental and unrealistic drama of the bourgeosie, which ignored social issues in favor of jejune domestic tragedies, as "the plaything of the pornographic, of the overfed," which serves the purpose of "stimulating jaded appetites.... Like commercialized art it deals in adultery. Its aim and end is profits." The capitalists exclude all that is vital and alive from the stage; for criticism of contemporary life and society we must look "in the halls of the working classes, under their own management, their own acting and their own writing." Dunbar was confident that the proletariat would soon produce such dramatists because "a rising people not only demands courage in her artists, she gives them inspiration besides. When a nation decays, the drama dies. When a people is whipped, it runs from high art to seek solace in low forms of sensationalism.... Slaves lean to futility; freemen seek truth. Naturalism is the rock of literature."[cxxxv]
Justus Ebert placed the evolution of literature in historical perspective, noting that "the drama has evolved with society." Just as bourgeois literature had succeeded the feudal, so proletarian art would replace that of the capitalists. Ebert, discussing Legere's "Hunger," (serialized in Solidarity), adumbrated the idea of proletarian literature. The machine proletariat and their yearnings provide "material for a new drama, at once interesting and inspiring. Here the mass is in action; like another Prometheus bound it struggles for freedom with tragic results." Ebert especially valued dramas written by proletarians about proletarian life, "rich in the aspirations which acuate them and full of the language in which they think." Ebert averred that "propaganda furnishes the content of many great plays and poems," and that any play which accurately depicted working-class life would seem didactic and tendentious to the bourgeoisie. Proletarian life is creating "a new society, whose ideals are foreshadowed in proletarian phrase and psychology." Ebert, however, was not indifferent to aesthetic quality, nor insistent on a narrow range of subjects and emotions, as later proletarian critics were sometimes accused of being. He praised Wobbly poet Covington Hall as best embodying "the poetic spirit of the revolution" because he had "sure power, united with the historical culture of the scholar and the fiery zeal of the revolutionist." Hall's poems ranged widely in subject and mood, including satire, indignation and "the tender, emotional side of life." Ebert felt that the poet was "a creature of moods" for whom "nothing is inconsistent," and praised Hall, "who at times is mournful, philosophical, and even vacillating as the mood may be." Wobbly writers insisted on high aesthetic quality and, in drama and the novel, emphasized realism. One writer complained that "socialists deliberately prostitute their art and their ideals, transforming the beauties of revolutionary theories into mediums for cheap, tawdry pot-boilers.... Radicalism, like crime detection, is something to be exploited." Ben Williams savagely attacked a poem submitted to Solidarity in terms that made it clear that proper ideology was no substitute for aesthetic quality.[cxxxvi]
Ebert did, however, criticize the political content or implications of literature, questioning one of Hall's poems as condescending to Negroes and another for raising doubts about Hall's revolutionary commitment. While Ebert read and appreciated The Masses, he disdained the short stories that John Reed and others wrote about prostitutes, feeling that they misrepresenting working-class life. "Give us something of the fine, manly and womanly side of the workers, that one often meets in their lives," Ebert told Wobbly writers. Richard Brazier, a Wobbly poet, also demanded that revolutionary songs, as tools of mobilization and inspiration, present the hopes and victories of the workers but not their defeats.[cxxxvii]
The IWW's "little red songbook," full of songs "to fan the flames of discontent," contained the IWW's most characteristic literary form, which were sung everywhere Wobblies congregated--in the timber and mining camps, during strikes, in the hobo jungles, and in jails and prisons. The songbook evolved from cards or sheets containing a few songs which were sold at meetings and speeches, and was the brainchild of John Walsh and other members of the Spokane local. The Spokane unions elected a special songbook committee which decided which songs to include, leading Richard Brazier, a poet and sometime member of the committee, to observe that the songbook was "a creation of the rank and file itself." Some doctrinaire Wobblies opposed printing the songbook and singing at meetings, claiming that songs created a circus atmosphere at meetings and, being mere entertainment, detracted from the educational mission of the IWW. Workers could master the complexities of Marxism, such critics averred, only by long and arduous study. But other Wobblies argued that songs attracted an audience for IWW speeches, inspired the workers with a sense of power and solidarity, and themselves educated the workers. One organizer argued that every song "is almost a lecture in itself." The Industrial Worker touted the "Songs of the Miseries That Are. Songs of the Happiness to Be. Songs that strip capitalism bare; show the shams of civilization; mock at the master's morals; scorn the smug respectability of the satisfied class; and drown in one glad burst of passion the profit patriotism of the Plunderbund." Richard Brazier said that "we want our songs to stir the workers to action, to awaken them from an apathy and complacency that has made them accept their servitude as though it had been divinely ordained." Joe Hill, the most famous Wobbly bard, argued that "a pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over," and if a songster can cloth facts "in a cloak of humor to take the dryness off of them, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial on economic science." The little red songbook also contained information on the IWW. The cover sported two IWW mottoes, "an injury to one is an injury to all" and "labor is entitled to all it produces." The Preamble to the IWW Constitution appeared on the inside of the front cover.[cxxxviii]
Although the book contained some classical revolutionary songs such as the "Marseillaise," most songs were the contemporary creations of Wobbly poets, arising out of concrete workplace conditions, strikes, or other incidents. The songbook itself spurred the composition of songs, and for a number of years each revised edition printed new song-poems. As John Walsh predicted, "once you get this songbook launched, there will be no dearth of songwriters, and no shortage of songs." The songs were sung to the tunes of familiar religious hymns (which they sometimes parodied), popular airs, or, in some cases, original music. Brazier remembered that "at times we would sing note by note with the Salvation Army at our street meetings, only their words were describing Heaven above, and ours Hell right here--to the same tune."[cxxxix]
Justus Ebert compared the IWW songs to the emergence of the bourgeois novel, which replaced the feudal court romances. The rising bourgeoisie, Ebert said, had created a literature than reflected and expressed life as they knew it, ridiculed the old romances, and punctured old myths. In turn, the feudal writers castitaged the rising new literature as vulgar. Today, Ebert said, "capitalist romance is just as unreal as the Arthurian one" and "needs to be exposed and laughed out of existence by another and more modern adaptation of a noble art. Cynical ridicule of pretentious and pious frauds, together with a virile presentation of actual conditions among the workers, told in their own language and in their own way, is as necessary now as was the similar preceding effort" of the bourgeoisie. "The result may not be a new literary form, but a new class expression within the old forms, and the beginning of the new thoughts and new ideals necessary to the beginning of a new society. Like the middle class which preceded it, the working class in order to perfect its revolution, must first express itself. The IWW songs are a means to this desireable end." Ebert called Joe Hill "a pioneer in the creation of unique, proletarian song," who satirized and "undermined the state, church, and scabby craft-union to the tune of popular music.... In Joe Hill are the beginnings of a truly working class art; crude, but germinal and sound." Elizabeth Gurley Flynn agreed both with Ebert's assessment of the role of music in the revolutionary movement and with his evaluation of Joe Hill. "Never has there been a movement that made an impress on world history, never a conquering movement, sterile of song. Religion and patriotism have been woven in the warp and woof of daily life, have stirred the masses profoundly, flamed the imagination of the youth and ensnared the memories of the old, not through preached dogma but through melody.... The spirit to do and dare for the labor movement, can be stimulated through the same medium." The capitalists "intuitively sense the menace of strikers who unite, not in sullen apathy, but laughing and singing." Joe Hill's songs "lilt and laugh and sparkle" and "kindle the fires of revolt in the most crushed spirit and quicken the desire for a fuller life in the most humble slave." Hill's songs, and those of other Wobbly bards, expressed the IWW's ideology and reflected the varied work experiences of its members; proletarians were the hero, audience, and composers of these songs.[cxl]
The IWW's little red songbook continued a long tradition of worker song-poems. Workers composed thousands of song-poems in the last half of the nineteenth century. Clark Halker, the historian of these song-poems and their composers, attributes their decline to a variety of circumstances which illuminate the distinctiveness of the IWW and the appropriateness of its response to industrial capitalism. First, Halker says, working-class elan and self-confidence waned due to catastrophic defeats and massive repression in the late nineteenth century; the workers lost the vitality and espirt de corps necessary for the vibrant oppositional culture that had nurtured their songs. In a related development, the AFL's defensive, business unionism had little use for the soaring idealism that had inspired Gilded Age worker-poets. Major changes in the nature of capitalism and the composition of the workforce also undermined the ideology on which the old songs were based. The hardening of class lines, the growth of an unskilled proletariat, and massive immigrantion rendered the traditional transclass ideologies--the producer ethic, American republicanism, and true religion--archiac and meaningless to many workers. The nineteenth century workers had clothed their revolt in the universal language of humanity as well as traditional notions of republicanism, Christianity, and craft pride. They had found allies in an old middle class of professionals and independent proprietors who considered themselves producers like the workers and who feared and distrusted the new corporate, monopolisitic, industrial capitalism as a threat to themselves. By the time of the IWW, however, a new middle and professional class which owed its existence and prosperity to the large capitalists increasingly separated itself from the working class in interest, ideology, and sensibility. Finally, the growth of mass commercial culture undermined traditional, popular working-class forms of culture.[cxli]
The IWW, responding to the very changes in capitalism and the composition of the working class analyzed by Halker, attempted to forge a truly autonomous, revolutionary, and class-based proletarian culture, which sundered all ties between itself and mainstream culture. The IWW faulted the transclass producer ideology of their predecessors as well as their faith in republican institutions and true religion. The IWW called upon the working class to rely upon itself and its fighting organizations alone, repudiated American democratic institutions and ideology as fostering and justifying slavery, and ridiculed religion as preaching "pie in the sky." Active Wobblies definitely considered their brand of revolutionary industrial unionism as a "magic bullet" destinied to topple capitalism, and regarded themselves and their union as progenitors of a new civilization. They replaced the transclass producer ideology with that of proletarian democracy and solidarity and recaptured the world-conquering confidence to write and sing songs. They fostered a vibrant movement culture that moved beyond opposition to revolution. Further, they disdained the emerging hegemonic mass commercial culture. The unskilled immigrant Wobblies of the East usually lacked the money for many commercial amusements. The Western Wobblies usually lived in isolated camps or hobo jungles, and found the commercial amusements of the cities tepid compared to riding the rails and scrounging a living under life-threatening and uncertain conditions. Forrest Edwards, recounting the dangers and precariousness of the itinerant worker's life, said, in a striking reversal of the conventional opinion, that "his appetite for excitement and entertainment cannot be satisfied in such a place as the industrial center. The road offers a measure of freedom and fills his life with excitement."[cxlii] The IWW's hostility to mass commercial culture, and its determination to construct a truly alternative culture, is evident in its suspicion of saloons and grog shops, traditionally not only centers of working-class sociability but of their union activities as well. The IWW halls, with their libraries, social events, and practical accessories such as stoves for boiling the hobo's "mulligan stew," formed a vivid contrast and real alternative to the saloon.
The Wobblies recognized that a merely parallel or alternative culture, even one containing oppositional elements, too often served as a mere sophorific. Such cultures segregated workers within their own mileaux, where they hardly interacted with the dominant culture, or did so on the terms of the mainstream institutions. The IWW advocated a truly autonomous and confrontational working-class culture. It is no surprise, therefore, that although Richard Brazier later justified the IWW's songs on the grounds that "the workers had used songs to relate their grievances and make their demands made through all of recorded history," the IWW's songsters and poets seldom referred to their predecessors, and did not regard themselves as continuing a venerable tradition. When Joe Hill, facing a firing squad, said that "I have lived like an artist and will die like an artist," he evinced a radically different conception of art and life than the most bitter Gilded Age worker-poet.[cxliii]
The Patterson Pageant at Madison Square Garden was the other major IWW contribution to revolutionary art. The idea for the pageant emerged when Mabel Dodge, Big Bill Haywood, and John Reed were discussing the difficulty in securing the publicity necessary to garner outside support for the beleaguered strikers. The Patterson "mass play," as Solidarity called it, was an exercise in democratic, participatory, and proletarian art, performed by over 1000 actual strikers who enacted scenes from the strike itself. The Pageant was on a magnifiscent scale: the stage had a 200 foot backdrop scene of a Patterson mill by John Sloan, and all four corners of the Madison Square Garden Tower were illuminated with "IWW" in 10-foot high red letters. Over 15,000 spectators watched and participated.[cxliv]
There were six scenes: the workers shuffling through the February cold to work ("the mills alive, the workers dead"); the beginning of the strike ("the mills dead, the workers alive"); the funeral of Modestino, shot by police while standing on his front porch; a mass meeting at the Socialist-controlled town of Haledon, with speeches and singing (in which audience joined); the celebration of May Day, including the evacuation of children from the city and their placement with sympathetic families in New York; and a mass strike meeting in which, the Program of the Patterson Pageant stated, "the strikers, men and women, legislate for themselves" by passing "a law for the eight hour day" which no court could declare unconstitutional. Haywood, Tresca, and Flynn repeated some of their impassioned speeches from the strike. Although some people doubted whether a thousand untrained proletarians could, with almost no practice, perform a high dramatic spectacle, a striker captured the mood of the event when he said that "we know we can make a strike pageant because we are strikers. We're rehearsing every day in the strike."[cxlv]
The pageant blurred the distinction between the audience and the performers. The strikers marched down the aisles through the audience--then an electrifying new dramatic technique--in four of the six acts; in the last act Haywood, in back of the auditorium, delivered a speech while facing the strikers and the audience, who thus merged into one vast throng. The Independent called this innovation "an unequalled device for clutching the emotion of the audience.... actors and audience were of one class and one hope." Mabel Dodge later remembered that "the funeral procession marched right through [the audience], so that for a few electric moments there was a terrible unity between all these people. They were one.... I have never felt such a high pulsating vibration in any gathering before or since." The New York Tribune said the funeral scene "worked the actors themselves and their thousands of sympathizers in the audience up to a high pitch of emotion, punctuated with moans and groans and sobs." Phillips Russell, writing in the International Socialist Review, agreed that "the people on the stage had long ago forgotten the audience. The audience had long ago forgotten itself" and "had become part of the scene."[cxlvi]
Everyone, including commentators hostile to the IWW, agreed that the Pageant vastly succeeded as a dramatic spectacle. It communicated the energy, enthusiasm, solidarity, and grievances of the strikers to a large audience. Grace Potter, a sympathetic observor writing in The New Review, described the effect on the audience:
First we saw the mill, stretching its black stoves menacingly to the sky.... Then the unending whirr of iron-hearted machinery began. It seemed to us, waiting out there in the audience, that the machinery was grinding those workers to pieces. We thought of industrial accidents and diseases, of how terrible toil sucked all life, all initiative out of the workers. They were dying, and it was the same all over the world. We held our breath. And then--something happened. The machinery stopped grinding. A faint free cry rises slowly, to deafening hosannas from a thousand throats as the workers rush from the mill. They wave their hands, they shout, they dance, they embrace each other in a social passion the pales individual feeling to nothing.... The strike is on!"[cxlvii]
A contemporary critic said that a pageant "must be judged by its effect upon the performers as well as its effect upon the audience," and art scholar Linda Nochlin says that "in participating in the pageant, [the strikers] became conscious of their experience as a meaningful force in history, and of themselves as self-determining members of a class that shaped history."[cxlviii]
Phillips Russell in the International Socialist Review hailed the pageant as "something new under the sun, a labor play in which the laborers themselves were the actors, managers, and sole proprietors, portraying by word and movement their own struggle for a better world." Some professional theatrical producers who had offered their help were turned down, so that the pageant would be a workers' production. Nevertheless, many Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals gave their talents to the Pageant, and Solidarity stretched a point when it, claiming the Pageant was a working-class production, called John Reed a worker.[cxlix]
The Pageant, like the worker song-poem, was an old art form. In 1913 it was undergoing a revival. Yet most examples of "civic theatre" were designed to acculturate the masses, and particularly immigrants, to dominant American values. As Linda Nochlin says, "the patriotic pageants were all too often merely spectacular rationalizations of the status quo, filling the workers with false promises and false consciousness at the same time." The IWW turned these purposes on their head, and won the admiration even of some of its enemies. The New York Tribune said that "there was a startling touch of ulta modernity--or rather futurism--in the Patterson strike pageant in Madison Square Garden" and acknowledged that it revealed "the IWW leaders as agitators of large resources and original talent."[cl] Many contemporaries, including Mabel Dodge, compared the Pageant as "mental dynamite" with the Armory Show of the same year; both overthrew accepted standards and adumbrated a new world. An anonymous critic in Solidarity exulted that
it marks the beginning of a new epoch in play writing and play acting. It had no plot, no heroes and heroines; yet it was as real of life itself, because it was a transcript from life itself.... Whatever may be its shortcomings from the standpoint of dramatic technique, as at present conceived--and there were many--the pageant possessed social significance as the democratic beginning of the stage as a medium for the presentation and solution of the social problem by those most directly concerned--the workers themselves.... The pageant was a beginning in the right direction and fraught with great future possibilities.[cli]
For Hutchins Hapgood, the pageant represented the unity of "self-expression in industry and art." The IWW was pleased enough with the publicity generated by the pageant to produce other, less celebrated tableaux of strike scenes; a re-enactment of the Everett Massacre was explosive enough to evoke the concern of the San Fransisco police.[clii]
The IWW and the War
When Wilson moved the United States towards war, the IWW, as we have seen, already contained two strains of thought on anti-war activity. A history of anti-patriotic and anti-war agitation competed with equally traditional IWW ideas stressing the primacy of industrial organization and the overthrow of capitalism as requisites for any other achievement. Both of these intellectual currents found forceful advocates as the United States entered the war. Traditional differences in emphasis within the IWW, wartime opportunities, and the dangers of repression all generated disagreements within the IWW. Nevertheless, opinions diverged only on the IWW's practical response to the war. Contrary to the opinions of some prominent historians,[cliii] the IWW remained a stridently revolutionary organization, dedicated to its original program and philosophy.
When Europe plunged into war, Solidarity published a special six-page edition filled with articles advising militant action. Harrison George predicted that the United States would enter the war, and urged preparation for a general strike. "The real enemies are not in foreign lands, but here at home in easy reach," he said, "and the proletariat wouild be worse than foolish if it does not turn upon them and wreak such vengeance upon their persons and their private fortunes as well be most practical under varying circumstances.... The lesson of Europe is that making anti-military speeches and passing resolutions will not stop war. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?" A "John Proletaire" urged mutiny and revolt in the army and navy; "a little ingenuity would find ways to shoot officers in battle. Warships might be sunk in deep water where the sinking is good." Proletaire suggested that, if the United States entered the war, "it is quite possible that it would be good tactics for every revolutionist in the country to enlist in the army and navy and take his wooden shoes for everyday use.... At least, let us not hesitate to sow the seeds of revolt, sabotage, and all." He reminded his readers that "before we are involved in [the war] is the time to agitate for revolt."[cliv]
In this same issue, a F.L. Rhoda, in "Wage Slave's View of War," decried "the women and children slowly tortured to death at the looms, and the great army of unemployed dying the most terrible death of all, slow starvation." Haywood advocated direct individual action to avert the starvation and misery arising out of the industrial depression. "It is up to the workers to meet with grim determination the situation that presents itself. Food, clothing, and shelter are essential to life. Let the message of the IWW be GET THEM! if you have to take pickaxes and crowbars and go to the granaries and warehouses and help yourselves. Rather than congregate around City Halls, Capitols and empty squares, go to the market places and waterfronts where food is abundant. If food is being shipped, confiscate it if you have the power. Where houses are vacant occupy them. If machinery is idle use it, if practical to your purpose. Results can only be achieved through organized effort."[clv]
As the IWW successfully organized thousands of workers during World War I, it focused more on industrial organization even while it distributed unprecedented quantities of its revolutionary literature. At the Tenth Convention, in late 1916, one delegate summarized the general feeling when he said that "the IWW is passing out of the purely propaganda stage and is entering the stage of constructive organization" and that the soapbox agitator was declining as the dominant element. Nevertheless, this same convention, (ending on 1 December 1916, shortly after Wilson had won re-election on a peace platform and before U.S. involvement seemed imminent), unanimously resolved: "We oppose all wars and for the prevention of such we proclaim the anti-militarist propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting class solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the general strike in all industries." This statement, although made when the U.S. was still at peace, had obvious implications if the U.S. entered the European war.[clvi]
Nevertheless, many prominent Wobblies doubted the efficacy of anti-war agitation. Shortly after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, thus making U.S. entry into the war likely, Ben Williams, longtime editor of Solidarity, opposed "meaningless" anti-war gestures. "In case of war, we want the One Big Union... to come out of the conflict stronger and with more industrial control than previously. Why should we sacrifice working class interests for the sake of a few noisy and impotent parades or anti-war demonstrations? Let us rather get on the job of organizing the working class to take over the industries, war or no war, and stop all future capitalist aggression that leads to war and other forms of barbarism." After the U.S. declared war, J.A. MacDonald, the editor of the revived Industrial Worker, wrote privately in a similar vein. He downplayed the IWW's traditional anti-war stance because "if we came out strong there are hundreds of boys who would pull stunts that would do the movement no good and land them on the inside of a jail, when they could be doing effective work on the inside of industry." In a later letter he further averred that "talk against conscription will get us nowhere; Power is what counts.... Power can only be developed on the job." West Coast militant James Rowan agreed that "if we do not have the economic power, it is of little use to raise a ruction about" the draft. The IWW must wait "until we are strong enough the make ourselves felt on the field of production, as that is the only place that the workers have any power." Haywood wrote Frank Little, chair of the General Executive Board and an intransigent opponent of U.S. involvement, "Keep a cool head, do not talk. A good many of us feel as you do, but the world war is of small importance compared to the great class war."[clvii] Although Little opposed the war not only as a capitalist bloodbath but as the precipitator of a wave of repression that would destroy the IWW, Haywood's stress on the class war was equally radical, and possibly more so.
But in early March Solidarity moved to Chicago, the site of the IWW's national headquaters, and newly-elected editor Ralph Chaplin propounded a fervent anti-war policy. On March 24, when war seemed imminent, Chaplin spashed "The Deadly Parallel," a comparison of the IWW's recent anti-war resolution with the AFL's patriotic stance, on page one. Chaplin proclaimed that "ten million human lives stand as a monument to the national patriotic supidity of the working class of Europe!" and hoped that American workers would oppose "the bloodiest slaughter of history." In July, after the passage of the Selective Service Act, Chaplin praised a large group of Wobblies who choose jail rather than submit to the draft, and suffered abuse and torture as a result. Chaplin warned of trouble "if any attempt is made to force members of the IWW to shed their blood in a war that is abhorrent to them."[clviii] Later that month, Chaplin published an even more inflammatory statement, subtitled "Where the IWW Stands on the Question of War."
Since its inception, our organization has opposed all national and imperialistic wars. We have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that war is a question with which we never have and never intend to compromise.
Members joining the military forces of any nation have always been expelled from the organization.
The IWW has placed itself on record regarding its opposition to war, and also as being bitterly opposed to having its members forced into the bloody and needless quarrels of the ruling class of different nations....
All members of the IWW who have been drafted should mark their claims for exemption, "IWW, opposed to war."[clix]
This was a mixed message. It implicitly advised registration--a prerequisite to being drafted--and encouraged open and arguably legal refusal of induction on the grounds of conscientious scruples. But it equated submission to the draft with voluntary enlistment by implicitly threatening expulsion from the IWW of those who fully complied with the law by entering the armed forces when conscripted. The IWW, however, took no action against draftees, and apparently the overwhelming majority of its eligible members registered for the draft and served when called.
The IWW, however, reprinted its own version of one of Gustave Herve's speeches, which it titled "Patriotism and the Worker," about the time the U.S. entered the war, and distributed it at least as late as September 1917, long after passage of the Selective Service and Espionage acts. Herve (who had since become an avid French patriot, and then changed his position again) advocated "Insurrection Rather Than War!" and stated that "We, the anti-patriots, will not sacrifice at your bidding the only possession we have, our lives.... If we must risk our lives, then we will risk them not in defending our country, but in attempting to found the socialist country which we [are] already carrying in our brains." The IWW also distributed Flynn's and Pouget's pamphlets advocating sabotage (the latter translated and introduced by Arturo Giovanitti) until the IWW was suppressed. Chaplin ran powerful and graphic cartoons advocating sabotage on the front page of Solidarity and printed articles extolling such tactics. This inevitably evoked the displeasure of the authorities, especially when combined with militant strikes which paralyzed key war-related industries in the West. Conlin, and Flynn, claimed that the IWW toned down some of its publications and even cancelled others out of fear of wartime repression, but the evidence does not support this assertion.[clx]
Solidarity also argued against the general strike, which the Tenth Convention had endorsed. "War Against War, or War Against Capitalism," argued that "you cannot force ideas of any kind on a slave class so long as in the material conditions of existence there is no source for such ideas. As long as private ownership remains a fact, you will have ideas among the workers adapted to the maintenance of this ownership, ideas taught in capitalistic schools, churches, newspapers, etc." A general strike against war would fail because most workers were patriotic; only a general strike against capitalism could end war. But "ideas as a whole do not move faster than economic development. That means that for the workers as a whole to become anti-patriotic, to become able to deal effectively with war, there must first come into existence an organization among the workers" inculcating such ideas and action. If the IWW succeeds, a general strike against war would probably be unnecessary "because the new society of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers will already be taking the place of capitalism, the cause of war." In June 1917 Solidarity also reiterated the IWW's longstanding opposition to industrial violence, saying that "the tactics used by the IWW are those that make violence most unnecessary." However, this same article asserted that rhetorical opposition to violence was useless until workers "find a better way of enforcing demands for the things they must have in order to survive the nightmare of capitalism" and endorsed sabotage and the general strike as alternatives to violence.[clxi]
Meanwhile, Solidarity, even while advising quasi-legal resistance to conscription, emphasized organization over anti-war work. The war was "one of the most hopeless and idiotic wars in history," but "the slaves had a war on their hands before the Oligarchs started theirs--and the workers' war is of far more importance" and would continue until the workers overthrow capitalism. The revolutionary workers in Russia, Solidarity noted approvingly, were already engaged in that enterprise. In an implicit criticism of the AFL's agreement to cooperate with the government during the war, Solidarity said that "organization on the job is the only thing that ever got the workers anything. To cease fighting, especially under present intolerable conditions, for the necessities of life and comfort, would be criminal as well as idiotic. The capitalists are entering this war to acquire territory, prestige, money, and power," and the workers should do likewise.[clxii] Far from constituting a retreat from revolution, the IWW's policy was a practical application of its revolutionary principles. The IWW never wavered on its repudiation of signed contracts or its advocacy of ceaseless class war, the very practice and doctrine that most alarmed federal aujthorities concerned with maximizing war production through industrial peace.
The IWW, however, woefully underestimated the tenacity of American working-class patriotism. IWW theorists recognized that industry was international and the capitalists relatively cosmopolitan, and asserted that workers must also ignore national boundaries. Even the war in Europe did not convince IWW writers of the enduring power of nationalism over workers; some insisted that capitalism was grinding the different nations of the world into one common industrial, capitalistic culture and that patriotism was a waning force. They believed that similar economic conditions created the same classes and conflicts around the world, thus solidifying proletarian class consciousness and hastening revolution.
The Repression of the IWW
Historians are correct in their assertion that the government destroyed the IWW because of its ideas and its effectiveness in organizing workers, rather than for any actions designed to hamper the war effort. A combination of the IWW's revolutionary pronouncements, its repudiation of war and conscription, and its militant organizing activities in essential war-related industries, evoked the massive repression.
The widespread charges of "German gold" were simply ludicrous, and the government, despite diligent efforts, including seizure of all the IWW's records and correspondence, adduced hardly any evidence of overt acts by any of the hundreds of men on trial. When IWW writers had advocated mutiny or sabotage against war, and the IWW had resolved on a general strike, such words were legal.
Many western states passed "criminal syndicalism" laws (the wording of which closely resembled the Socialist party's Section 6), virtually outlawing the IWW on the basis of its ideas rather than its actions. Capitalists had long terrorized and brutalized the IWW with hired thugs, vigilantes, and local and state police; now, citing the war emergency, they solicited a massive and coordinated federal offensive against the IWW. After some hesitation, the Wilson administration arrested almost the entire national and regional leadership on trumped-up charges, banned Wobbly publications from the mails, and jailed hundreds of local leaders as well. It closed IWW halls, harassed and terrorized individuals involved in legal defense efforts, and refused to deliver mail addressed to the IWW. The army arrested other Wobblies and held them without charging them with any crime; the Labor department arrested and deported non-citizens, also without benefit of a trial. As vigilantes forcibly deported striking workers from strike locations, governments at the national, state, and local levels actively encouraged lynch-law and other extra-legal violence directed against members of the IWW. To undermine IWW strikers, soldiers worked as loggers under military discipline. In 1917 the Supreme Court legalized "yellow-dog" contracts, under which workers agreed as a condition of employment not to join a union; anyone trying to recruit such workers for a union was guilty of soliciting breach of contract. Wobblies were jailed and tried for the crime of belonging to the IWW and adhering to outlawed ideas, rather than for any specific acts or crimes. As James Rowan said, "a rebellious slave is the worst criminal in the eyes of the master." At the same time, the government promoted the formation of AFL unions and employee representation plans, and encouraged employers to raise wages, improve conditions, and otherwise conciliate their workers. When the war emergency had passed, the government acquiesced in an employer's offensive that eradicated these gains.[clxiii]
The IWW responded to this reign of terror by scrupulously obeying the law and cooperating with the authorities, a course which has mystified some historians. Melvyn Dubofsky, author of the standard history of the IWW, harshy condemns the IWW's acquiescence, citing one of Haywood's appeals for justice as "another of the Wobblies' wartime decisions that staggers the imagination." Dubofsky, seeking to explain the IWW's scrupulous legality, says that "only one explanation seems plausible: Wobblies obviously had more faith in American society's commitment to fair play and to due process than their own rhetoric allowed.... The more traditional IWW analyses of the nature and dynamics of the American system would have offered a better guide to action in 1917-18 than an emotional, almost intuitive, belief in the nation's sense of fairness."[clxiv] This is a part of the truth; both Haywood and the IWW's chief attorney, George Vanderveer, vastly underestimated the duplicity and vileness of the government and the government-induced mass hysteria that would make a fair trial impossible. But there was more to the IWW's strategy than merely a naive belief in the system they despised.
A premonition of what was to follow occurred in the early summer of 1917, when an entire IWW local in Rockford, Illinois, surrendered to the authorities rather than register for the draft. Solidarity said that "their judgment in walking into the jaws of the jail has been questioned, but not their sincerity or gameness.... These Rockford rebels voluntarily gave themselves up to be punished" rather than violate their consciences. "They did not wait to be hunted down and arrested....They have been treated as harshly in 'free' America as political prisoners were treated in Russia in her darkest days. They have been beaten with clubs and black-jacks, threatened with guns, they have been fed with food that was revolting in the extreme, or left to starve if they refused it; they have been reviled, lied about and ridiculed by the kept press, and insulted by the instrument of 'justice' that sentenced them." In unintended irony, Solidarity, meaning to refer to militant IWW resistance but instead (grammatically and factually) referring to official brtuality, warned that "this is but a faint foreshadowing of what will happen on a much larger scale if any attempt is made to force members of the IWW to shed their blood in a war that is abhorrent to them."[clxv]
In the summer of 1917, Haywood and Chaplin, anticipating repression, visited the Bureau of Investigation in Chicago and offered the IWW's full cooperation in any investigation. When Wilson appointed Judge Covington to gather evidence against the IWW, Haywood, falsely believing that his mission was "a careful survey and investigation of the Industrial Workers of the World," wrote Covington, "requesting that he first call at Headquarters where he would be given all the assistance possible in his inquiry. He did not come." The IWW also vainly sent three leaders to Washington to ask for justice from the President and his Justice Department. The IWW's attitude was epitomized by Solidarity in late September. "The General office and Solidarity feel that the more they investigate us the better it will be for our organization. We have nothing to hide and have assisted the federal agents in every way to continue their investigation."[clxvi]
The IWW was convinced that an investigation would lay to rest charges of "German gold" and treasonous activities. It was determined to reach the public with its story, win legal vindication, and uphold solidarity among the accused. Therefore, the IWW acquiesced in the government's plans for a massive trial of the entire national leadership, instead of following a more effective and legalistic strategy. Such a strategy would have fought extradition, demanded individual trials, and demanded the severance of those cases where the government had a very weak case even by its own criteria. Above all, it would have entailed delaying the trials until war-time hysteria had abated. That the IWW rejected this course for principled reasons rather than only out of a naive expectation of official justice was demonstrated by its later behavior. After the Chicago trials, which clearly indicated the IWW's inability to secure justice, IWW defendants in Omaha refused the governments offer of a sentence to time already served in exchange for a guilty plea. The defendants rejected this, feeling that guilty pleas would vindicate the government. Years later, when individual Wobblies interned in federal prison were offered a pardon, most refused on the grounds that "any individual application for clemency, pardon, or 'individual' amnesty only offers an opportunity to our oppressors to pretend that there was some element of justice and fairness entering into the circumstances of our alleged trial" and that the future of the IWW depended on solidarity.[clxvii]
The IWW was confident that it could withstand repression for reasons having nothing to do with any alleged justice on the part of the authorities. Expressing the optimism and sense of inevitable victory inculcated by Marxist doctrines of economic determinism, Solidarity proclaimed that "repression has proved to be a rank failure as a means of putting down movements of great historical impulse. And any attempt to put down the One Big Union with blind force will end similarly. The IWW is here to stay and it is going to stay. And no power on earth is powerful enough to put it down until it has fulfilled its destinied mission--the emancipation of the working class from wage slavery." The IWW pointed to earlier movements that had withstood intense persecution--Christianity, modern science as represented by Galileo, the American revolutionists, and the abolitionists. "And we are just as game and ready to go the limit as any of our predecessors in the fight for human freedom." The SPD had not only survived but prospered under Bismarck's "Iron Laws" that virtually outlawed the party and drove it underground and into exile. Solidarity said that "Our men can be jailed and killed. The idea will never die, but will steadily grow until enough workers find it is the only logical solution to the bread and butter question."[clxviii]
The IWW was convinced that it, like previous movements which had surmounted massive repression, represented an irresistable historic force. Solidarity proclaimed that "the relentless progress of the machine process has robbed us of our skill and made the dexterity of our fingers valueless. We have been throw aside to perish--or to organize." The IWW's courage and spirit would see it through. Wobblies "die gamely and willingly whenever the Cause we love demands of us the sacrifice of our lives.... We do not court martyrdom nor are we afraid of it. We are out to 'get the goods.'....There are too many of us for you to handle, no matter how many machine guns, bayonets, and gallows you may array against us." On another occasion it repeated that "The IWW cannot be killed. The rank and file of our organization are in the Union because there is no place else for them to be.... HOLD THE FORT AND VICTORY WILL BE OURS."[clxix] Haywood advised that all indicted Wobblies voluntarily surrender to the authorities, and almost all did.
When almost the entire national leadership was jailed, Haywood optimistically wrote that Cook County jail "is a wireless station sending a rallying cry of Industrial Freedom around the world." Solidarity confidently predicted that the IWW would not surrender "even if every jail and prison in the country be turned into a branch of the organization." Georgia Kotsch, in an article entitled "Why Suppression Only Aids the Growth of the One Big Union," asserted that "the blood of its martyrs will be the seed of the IWW." Frank Woods asserted that suppression would only aid the IWW; if the government locked up its "leaders," it would afford "the best propaganda we have had in years.... it will reveal the sterling qualities of the IWW appeal to the entire world." Other leaders would rise from the ranks, and no arrests could suppress labor discontent or do the work that the capitalists and the government wanted done. War profiteering and repression would alienate other Americans besides Wobblies. The Federal indictment was merely a confession that the local governments and the capitalists could not crush the IWW. The IWW could not be convicted in a fair trial and "can stand the test of an unfair trial."[clxx]
The IWW did occasionally respond to terrorism with threats. Solidarity warned that "the membership of the IWW stands ready to wreck vengeance upon the forces that seek their destruction" and will respond to lawless violence with lawless resistance and sabotage. The word "sabotage" may be outlawed by criminal syndicalism laws, but no statute "will stop the class conscious workers from using a weapon that will better things for themselves and at the same time put a dent in the pocket book of the boss." When vigilantes, organized by the local sheriff in Bisbee, Arizona, forcibly rounded up 1200 striking miners, placed them on cattle cars, and dumped them in the desert, Haywood wired President Wilson, threatening a general strike if the miners were not allowed to return to their homes. This, however, only stiffened Wilson's resolve to crush the IWW. Similarly, when James Rowan called a general strike in Washington state to secure the release of class-war prisoners seized by the army, federal troops raided the IWW headquarters and arrested Rowan and many other Wobblies. Rowan, now himself a military prisoner, called off the general strike, but the army continued its campaign of harassment and arrests.[clxxi]
The Wobblies, however, had few options. The IWW was a hyper-democratic organization that conducted all its business openly so that its members could fully determine policy. It published detailed accounts of its funds, their sources and uses; it debated policy openly at its conventions and in its press, and elected all of its leaders, including the editor of Solidarity. The IWW had scant alternative to a strategy of legality because it had no mechanism for coordinating clandestine activity or underground resistance.
The IWW, as noted above, also felt that it represented a new and irrepressible social force destinied to conquer the world for the working class. Haywood was surprised by the ferocity of the repression, telling members that no one "expected that any such ruthless onslaught would be made as that which happened." But he also indicated that "our persecutors have made [the IWW preamble] as historic as the declaration of Independence." The IWW did not trust the official apparatus of justice so much as an aroused and fighting working class; the IWW attributed previous victories in capitalist show trials to organized labor resistance. The trial of Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone in 1906-7 on trumped-up charges of murder had aroused nation-wide indignation, catalyzed massive labor defense efforts, and made Haywood a national labor celebrity. The Ettor and Giovannitti trial in 1912 had further publicized the Lawrence strike and kept the victorious workers temporarily united and active after they returned to work. The IWW attributed these victories to organized working-class pressure, not to the justice of the capitalist courts. And they did, by and large, win favorable publicity for the IWW and labor radicalism. Even defeats, such as the Mooney and Billings case of 1916-17, aroused widespread indignation against capitalist justice. Eugene Debs had emerged from his prison term in connection with the Pullman strike much more radical than he had entered. Joe Hill's reputation soared, and his songs gained added poignancy and power, after he was executed by firing squad by the state of Utah. Gustave Herve had ended his speech "Patriotism and the Worker," widely circulated in IWW circles, by thanking his persecutors for convicting him, saying that "they have widened the breach between their class and ours; they have dug deeper the pit into which we shall hurl them!" In 1917-1918 anything seemed possible; James Rowan, commenting on the Bolshevik Revolution, said that "what they can do in Russia, we can do in this 'Land of the Free.'"[clxxii]
The IWW confronted the terror of 1917-1019 with a consciouness formed by its past experience of repression. Since its foundation in 1905, the IWW had experienced frequent terrorism, but such brutality had been confined to specific locations where the IWW was conducting a strike or free speech fight. Corporate, vigilante, and official violence had aimed at crushing a particular strike or driving the Wobblies out of a specific town, not destroying the organization nationally. Wobbly leaders, although often arrested on spurious charges and jailed for months while awaiting trial, had at least been ostensibly accused of specific crimes arising out of a concrete situation, rather than tried for their membership in the IWW or their ideas. The IWW's press and its ability to raise funds and conduct a defense had remained intact, and had somewhat limited the ferocity of the capitalists and their government. The IWW had successfully involved a wider public, including prominent reformers and intellectuals, and even, occasionally, society women, in defending their constitutional rights. When the authorities at Lawrence ruthlessly beat women and children, a widespread public outcry forced them to somewhat relent. When the police chief in Patterson banned virtually all public meetings, the strikers marched to the nearby town of Haledon, whose Socialist mayor welcomed them. The IWW was not prepared for a coordinated national attack where the federal, state, and local governments worked together and also encouraged corporate thugs and vigilante terrorists.
The fate of the IWW, as well as of the Socialist party and other radical organizations, suggests that intermittant and sporadic terrorism proved more effective in disarming resistance and suppressing dissent than the more assiduous and unrelenting violence of old-style authoritarian regimes. Selective reinforcement often encourages more consistent acquiescence in the system than does an ineffective attempt at total repression. The fact that the IWW had won many legal battles in the past predisposed it to confine its resistance to legal, authorized channels, contrary to its own analysis of capitalist society. Had the U.S. system been implacably and uniformly hostile, the IWW would have organized with such facts in mind, rather than trusting its ability to beat the system. The SPD survived the anti-Socialist laws largely because those laws, by outlawing the party, gave it no option but illegal resistance; the party lurched towards reformism only after it was legalized and began winning ever-increasing numbers of Reichstag seats. Similarly, the Bolsheviks gained the strength necessary to overthrow the Russian government because, lacking any illusions as to the possibility of legal success, it perfected an underground organization. The American left, on the contrary, won enough legal battles with its oppressors to give leftists confidence that by their own efforts they could prevail within the system. The American political structure, with its seeming openness and its combination of the carrot and the stick, repressed radicals more brutally and effectively than almost any European government before 1918.
In the end, the IWW's revolutionary counterculture was destroyed by the same mechanism that had stimied it at every turn throughout its short existence. Pervasive state terrorism not only repressed IWW unions, but defined the acceptable parameters of discourse on virtually every issue vitally relevant to the IWW. Working-class attitudes towards gender, race and ethnicity, nationalism and religion, work and working-class solidarity, and other key issues were shaped by pervasive state violence that created an entire world, seemingly natural and eternal. This relatively closed and inter-locking system of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, buttressed at every point by visible and more suble forms of violence, reinforced non-class forms of collective identity and also (in seeming contrast) individual striving, at the expense of working-class consciousness and unity. Most American workers became non-class collectivists, identifying themselves upon the basis of shared identities that were legally constructed and forcibly maintained; in addition to these identities, they regarded themselves as individual strivers seeking the American Dream of personal, isolated wealth and social status. In the face of such institutionalized obstacles, the IWW's efforts proved futile.
IWW writers ridiculed the SP for believing that the capitalists would allow the workers to vote capitalism out--that the capitalists would peacefully acquiensce in the will of the majority. The Wobblies themselves, however, thought that the capitalists who would murder and torture workers by the millions for profit, and unceremoniously steal elections by terrorism and fraud, would nonchalently allow the legal growth of a revolutionary union that would topple capitalism. The Wobblies, like most radicals of their era, believed that they had a reified History on their side, and that they were in tune with the inexorable march of progress. But they, and the entire radical movement of their generation, were crushed, never to rise again; and there has never since been in the United States an indigenous, multifaceted radical movement with so widespread an institutional base. The fate of the Wobblies, and the events of subsequent generations, evokes sober reflections on whether genuine change in the United States is realistically possible, whatever the intellectual perspicacy and moral stamina of radical challengers to the capitalist regime.
Notes:
[i] The IWW organized Mexican workers in California (see IW for 5-7-10, 8-20-10, 9-10-10, 12-2-10, and 12-29-10) for some examples. The IWW also demanded freedom for Mexican class-war prisoners in the United States (IUB 2-27-09), endorsed the Mexican revolution (IW 10-5-11), and, as I will discuss later, called for a general strike if the U.S. invaded Mexico. Some Wobblies fought in the Mexican revolution; see IW (4-27-11) for an account of one battle in which Wobblies fought.
[ii] Haywood, "To Colored Working Men and Women," (Sol 3-10-17)
[iii] William Haywood, Big Bill Haywood's Book, (New York, 1977), pp. 241-242. This verbatim self-quote, from a book published in 1927, over 15 years after the event, may represent a quotation from a document (which Haywood did use in composing his autobiography) or may represent the gist of what he said. For Covington Hall's remark see Philip Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1975 (New York, International Publishers, 1976), p. 116.
[iv] Foner, Black Workers, pp. 116, 113.
[v] Supremacy of misery, Brotherhood of Timber Workers, "Negro Workers!", (Sol 9-28-12); Mr. Parker, Mr. Parker's 'White Superiority," (Sol 8-1-14); Northeast, "IWW Invades South Carolina," (Sol 4-25-14).
[vi] Haywood, "To Colored Working Men and Women," (Sol 3-10-17).
[vii] John Macy, an IWW member, wrote, that if everybody shared equally in manual labor, "everybody would have leisure and surplus energy for skilful labor at the arts." Speaking of dirty, manual labor, Macy said that "the curse of it can be removed if it is shared the the able-bodied, if no man is forced to endure an excessive amount of it, and, above all, if the doing of it does not indicate social inferiority.... It is enough to recognize that society debases some kind of work which might be disposed of cheerfully and expeditiously, and that there is no task, however disagreeable in itself, which any healthy man would not tackle with a smile, provided his fellow-workers did their parts and reggarded him as their equal." Macy cited the example of a rich man who, working in his garden, proudly greeted visitors in his sweaty and muck-stained clothes. "He was proud of his work, proud of the evidential muck.... proud because the work was his, because it was done for itself and for himself, because he did not have to do it." Had he been a hired man, working for someone else, he would have been ashamed of his condition. John Macy, Socialism in America, (New York, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1916): pp.231-236.
[viii] Pogroms, editorial comment, (Sol6-9-17); extermination, D. Burgess, "Workers and Racial Hate," (IW, 6-4-10); Haywood, "To Colored Working Men and Women," (Sol 3-10-17); environment, "White Workers, Colored Workers--and Organization," (Sol 7-28-17).
[ix] AFL, "White Workers, Colored Workers--and Organization," (Sol 7-28-17); scabs, "Black Workers for White," (Sol 8-4-17); Ovington, Justus Ebert, "The IWW and the Negro," (Sol 9-20-13). The IWW very occasionally reflected contemporary racist attitudes. The only example I have seen of any IWW writer countenancing segregation is in an article by W.H. Lewis, "'White Supremacy!' What's It Mean?" (Sol 8-15-14). This contradicted IWW policy and practice. The IWW also performed a blackface comedy at one of its social functions during World War I.
[x] Chinaman, "The Chinaman is Coming," (Sol 2-11-11); shades of skin, "The Yellow Peril," (IW, 5-15-13); Japanese, "The Japanese, Land, and Labor," (IW, 5-29-13).
[xi] Japanese, "Example of Japanese Workers," (IW, 8-26-09); rotten food, "'Cheap Asiatic Labor'", (IW, 5-20-09); porters, "Silly Race Prejudice," (IW, 4-22-09).
[xii] "Immigration," (IW 9-23-09). FIND MATERIAL ON SOME CAPITALISTS WANTING TO RESTRICT IMMIGRATION, MAKE WAR ON JAPAN
[xiii] Walsh, J.H. Walsh, "Japanese and Chinese Exclusion, or Industrial Unionism--Which?," (IUB, 4-11-08); capitalist patriotism, "Immigration," (IW 6-19-13).
[xiv] employing class, "Race Prejudice," (IW 7-15-09); Gold, and, world for themselves alone, "Example of Japanese Workers,' (IW, 8-26-09).
[xv] mills and factories, "Immigration," (IW, 9-23-09); Hall, "'Foreigners'", (IW, 11-2-10).
[xvi] poor white, S. R. Darney, "Colored Workers and the IWW," (Sol 4-21-17); Ebert, Justus Ebert, "The Single Moral and Other Codes," (Sol 5-31-13); outdo natives, "Gompers and the 'Race Question'", (Sol 11-26-10).
[xvii] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl, (New York, International Publishers, 1974), pp. 133-134.
[xviii] Walsh, "Japanese and Chines Exclusion, or Industrial Unionism, Which?", (IUB, 4-11-08); a unit, "'Solidarity' and 'Prepardness,'" (Sol 4-15-16); strike itself, "Sin Bad," "Cockroach 'Revolutionists'", (Sol 2-21-14); news, '"News,' Philosophy, and Criticism, (Sol 1-9-15).
[xix] Phillip Foner, Black Worker, pp. 118-119.
[xx] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 255-258, excellently analyzes the reasons for the IWW's decline in Lawrence. The best analysis of the Patterson defeat is Steve Golin's brilliant book, The Fragile Bridge: Patterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Unfortunately, there is a contradiction in Golin's analysis. He shows how the IWW's success in organizing the Patterson workers was conditioned by the prior and existing workers' cultures in Patterson, but then faults the IWW for failing to organize the Pennsylvania silk workers, who, he acknowledges, had a vastly different culture and experience. The IWW tried to organize Pennsylvania, but it could not work miracles. Also, the Pennsylvania state constabulatory was a much more efficient and brutal union-busting outfit than even the Patterson police. QUOTE GOLIN ON PATTERSON AND PA.
[xxi] CITE MAJOR BOOKS ON RACE--WILLIAMSON, TAKIKI, INDISPENABLE ENEMY.
[xxii] "Henry Ford, Speed-Up King," (Sol 2-7-14) says that 600 were fired.
[xxiii] "Women and Civilization," (Sol, 4-17-15); Ashleigh, "Women Wage Workers and Woman Suffrage," (Sol, 4-6-14); Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol, 7-31-15) and Flynn, "Men and Women," (a speech from 1915), in Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (Rutgers University Press, 1987): pp. 100-103.
[xxiv] Ebert, "Have Women Come to Stay," (Sol 7-17-15); Edwards, "What of the Eight Million Women Workers?" (Sol 9-23-16).
[xxv] "'Votes' and 'Women's Wages'", (Sol 2-22-13); Flynn, "Men and Women," in Baxandall, p. 100. For a statement that the suffragists have the right spirit but a tepid goal, see Lilliam Forberg, "Woman's Part in Social Revolution," (IUB, 3-9-07). Katherine Hill, a political Socialist, wrote Solidarity complaining about the IWW's belittling of votes for women. "The woman's movement is NOT a bourgeois movement," she said. "The demand for votes is merely one expression of a struggle for freedom. I don't value a vote unduly, but if there are votes going, I want one, for what it is worth. I object to being shut off from voting, merely because I am a woman. When you go to your shop and find one entrance marked 'For Employees' and another which you are debarred from using, you know well enough that it would be of mighty little practical advantage to you to use the bosses' entrance. Just the same, whenever you notice that sign, it riles you, doesn't it?" She admitted that voting achieved little, but pointed out that it did not take much effort, and averred that if IWW members joined the SP they could capture it. (Sol 5-17-13).
[xxvi] Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol 7-31-15); Ebert, "Woman Labor in Steel Mills," (Sol 6-12-15).
[xxvii] Ashleigh, "Women Wage Workers and Woman Suffrage," (Sol 4-6-14).
[xxviii] Edith Thorpe Adams, "To Help Working Women," (IUB, 7-4-08); Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol 7-31-15).
[xxix] Flynn, "Women in Industry Should Organize," (IW 6-1-11; printed as "Women and Unionism in Sol 5-27-11).
[xxx] "A Joke on Us," (Sol 6-10-16).
[xxxi] "Women and Labor," (Sol 7-1-16); "Illinois Vice Report (Sol 7-29-16).
[xxxii] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16).
[xxxiii] Quoted in Philip Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement (New York, Free Press), p. 422.
[xxxiv] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16).
[xxxv] Vasilo, "Women in the IWW," (IUB, 4-25-08). She asked, "Is a married women of the working class a chattel slave or a wage slave?" Flynn, "To Members and Sympathizers of the IWW," (Sol 1-16-15).
[xxxvi] "Women and Civilization," (Sol 4-17-15).
[xxxvii] Flynn admitted many criticisms of women were true, although also applicable to many men, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16); men and women were asked to change in Agnes Grundel, "The Woman of Today," (Sol 7-1-16) and Mary Shieber, "The Education of Women Workers," (Sol 12-9-16). Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women (Monthly Review Press, 1980) pp. 129-132 discusses the many proposals, never realized, to make a special appeal to women.
[xxxviii] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women" (Sol 7-15-16); co-operative spirit, Flynn, "Women in Industry Should Organize," (IW 6-1-11) and, under the title "Women and Unionism," (Sol 5-27-11).
[xxxix] Joy of fight, and putting the women in front, Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol 7-31-15); tugging at skirts, and, women push themselves to the front, Flynn, "Women on the Picket Line," (Sol 5-1-15); woman's influence is greatest, Flynn, "Women in Industry Should Organize (IW, 6-1-11, also published as "Women and Unionism," (Sol 5-27-11).
[xl] Old world attitude, Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 132; Haywood, Golin, The Fragile Bridge, p. 65 (quoting The Masses, June 1913, p. 5); capitalist paper, Philip Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, p. 443; women's only meetings, Flynn, and Golin.
[xli] Ashleigh, "Women Wage Workers and Woman Suffrage," (Sol 4-6-14); pipe, and economic independence, Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol 7-31-15); sex slaves, Flynn, "Women in Industry Should Organize," (IW 6-1-11), also printed as Women and Unionism (Sol 5-27-11).
[xlii] Flynn, "Men and Women," in Baxandall, Words on Fire, pp. 101-103. Flynn also, bowing to the reality that most women left the labor market when they married, said that "the union factory girl of today is the helpful and encouraging wife of the union man of tomorrow." As we have seen, the IWW organized housewives during strikes, and felt them indispensable to the victory of most strikes.
[xliii] Flynn, "Men and Women," in Baxandall, Words on Fire, pp. 102-103.
[xliv] "The Women Workers of the World," (IW, 7-29-09).
[xlv] Linda Gordon, Women's Body, Women's Right, (New York, Penguin, 1990), 183-244; Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor, (New York, Simon and Shuster, 1992), pp. 74-104. The quote from Margaret Sanger is in Gordon, p. 219.
[xlvi] Not as a solution, and, hampering themselves, and, infant mortality, Flynn, "The Case of Margaret Sanger," (Sol 1-22-16); large family system, Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16); cheap living, "Birth Control Economics," (Sol 7-29-16).
[xlvii] "Sin Bad," "Some Weaknesses of the Western Wobbly," (Sol 1-16-15).
[xlviii] "Birth Control Economics," (Sol 7-29-16); Haywood quoted by Flynn, The Rebel Girl, p. 166. Tresca was later jailed for six months and a day for publishing an ad for a book on birth control.
[xlix] Flynn, The Rebel Girl, p. 152. CITE COLE, GURLEY, BIO OF TRESCA.
[l] Ben Williams, "Editor Responds," (Sol 12-28-12). Williams was replying to Mrs. Floyd Hyde, "Is There a Woman's Question in the Revolutionary Movement?" just above. By "Woman's Movement" Mrs. Hyde meant sexual freedom for women, and her answer was no. I have quoted from her letter in my chapter on Max Eastman.
[li] Fred Tiffany, "IWW and Capitalist Morals," (Sol 10-11-13).
[lii] "'Sex Hysteria' in War," (Sol 5-8-15).
[liii] "The Methods of Comstock," (Sol 3-27-15, reprinted from The Malthusian, London).
[liv] BOOKS ON LEGAL SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN, INC GORDON, HEROES, DOMESTIC TRYANNY, ETC
[lv] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16).
[lvi] Flynn complained that men did not bring their wives to her lectures on birth control. She cited instances where a male Wobbly would not let his wife speak to other Wobblies out of fear that they would give her strange ideas; of a man who forbade his wife, who worked a nine-hour day, to attend IWW meetings on the grounds that she should clean the house; and one who said that a woman should not be elected secretary of an IWW local because she could not evict a drunk from meetings.
[lvii] Jane Street, "We have Got Results," edited by Daniel T. Hobby, in Labor History, (Winter 1976), pp. 103-108.
[lviii] "Rebel Girl Defenders," (Sol 11-25-16).
[lix] Street, "We Have Got Results," Labor History, Winter 1976, pp. 103-108. I have corrected her use of "bourgeoisie" to "bourgeois."
[lx] Hill to the editor of Solidarity, November 29, 1914, in The Letters of Joe Hill, edited by Philip Foner. (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), p. 16; Dawson, "The Hobo Agitator," (Sol 5-17-13).
[lxi] Vasilo, "Women in the IWW," (IUB, 4-25-08). MATERIAL, CITATION FOR ABOLITION OF MIXED LOCAL.
[lxii] God's pocket, Flynn, The Rebel Girl, p. 96; EXAMPLES OF UNWANTED PROTECTION; chivalrous, "The Women Workers of the World," (IW, July 29, 1909); the text of "The Rebel Girl" and other Hill songs are in Foner, The Life and Letters of Joe Hill (p. 92) and Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Ann Arbour, University of Michigan,1968), pp. 145-6. Joe Hill died ostensibly to protect the honor of a woman.
[lxiii] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol, 7-15-16).
[lxiv] Odon Por, "Social Creation Through Conquest," (IW, 5-1-12); "The Practical Idealist," (Sol 5-28-10); Tax, quoted in Ann Schofield, "Rebel Girls and Union Maids," Feminist Studies (Summer 1982), p. 384.
[lxv] Linda Gordon, Pitied but not Envied, 1994.
[lxvi] Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives (New York, Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 272-276. DISCUSS THIS ISSUE OF RULE OF THUMB, LEGAL WIFE BEATING, ETC, GORDON SAYS IT WAS ILLEGAL.
[lxvii] "Patriotism," (IW 8-24-11); "Gustave Herve on the Stuttgart Congress" (IUB 2-29-08); Gustave Herve, "Patriotism and the Workers," (IWW Publishing Bureau, Chicago), p. 1; "An Effect Without a Cause?", (IW 3-28-12); "Immigration from a Capitalist Standpoint," (Sol 4-11-14).
[lxviii] Walker Smith, "Anti-Militarism or Anti-Patriotism--Which?" (IW, 5-1-12, reprinted from Revolt); Smith, "War and the Workers," originally printed in (Sol 5-20-11) and widely reprinted as a leaflet.
[lxix] "'Defenders of the Flag'", (Sol 5-18-12); "The Glorious Fourth," (Sol 7-3-15); "Patriotism is Death," (IW 7-13-11); Smith, "'Patriotism'", (Sol 8-26-11); "Immigration from a Capitalist Standpoint," Sol 4-11-14; "Will 'Democracy" Strangle the Truth About Itself," (Sol 7-7-17).
[lxx] Walker Smith, "Anti-Militarism or Anti-Patriotism--Which?" (IW 5-1-12, reprinted from Revolt); Haywood quoted by Georgia Kotsch, "Haywood's Los Angeles Speech" (Sol 1-25-13); "Wm. D. Haywood Proposes General Strike Against War," (Sol 4-25-14); "War and the General Strike," (Sol 4-25-14).
[lxxi] "Gustave Herve on the Stuttgart Congress," (IUB 2-29-08); St. John, "Is the IWW All-Sufficient for the Workers Needs?", (Sol 7-31-15).
[lxxii] "Symbols--That's All," (IW 5-16-12); J.S. Biscay, "Emblem Worship," (Sol 8-23-13); "Constructive Program of the IWW," (Sol 4-17-15); "Should the IWW Take an Anti-War Pledge?" (Sol 11-13-15).
[lxxiii] Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917 (International Publishers, NY, 1965) p. 362; "'Heroic' Contrasts," (Sol 7-26-13). For other examples of this, see "San Diego 'Patriots,'" (Sol 5-25-12); and an editorial comment in (Sol 6-14-13).
[lxxiv] "The Curtain Raiser," (IW 3-18-09); "The IWW and Religion," (IW 7-1-09).
[lxxv] Flynn, The Rebel Girl pp. 150-151; no impression at all, Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," reprinted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, p. 227.
[lxxvi] "The Birth of Christmas," (Sol 12-23-16 and 12-28-12); Flynn, The Rebel Girl p. 102.
[lxxvii] "Some More 'Militarism and the IWW'" (Sol 12-18-15).
[lxxviii] "'Solidarity' and 'Prepardness'" (Sol 4-15-16).
[lxxix] Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," reprinted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 217-220.
[lxxx] "IWW Invades South Carolina," (Sol 4-25-14); the songs are reprinted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 133, 141.
[lxxxi] "What Should the Unemployed Do?" (Sol 10-31-14, reprinted from the International Socialist Review.)
[lxxxii] "The Only Way to Security," (Sol 2-20-15); "Gustave Herve on the Stuttgart Congress," (IUB 2-29-08).
[lxxxiii] Flynn, "Women on the Picket Line," (Sol 5-1-15); HAYWOOD, THE REV IS AROUND US
[lxxxiv] Abner Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, (quote is on p. 13); Austin Lewis, Proletarian and Petty-Bougeois; Vincent St. John, The IWW, Its History, Structure, and Methods, pp. 22-23, 12.
[lxxxv] Lewis, Proletarian and Petty-Bourgeois, pp. 18-19; Smith, "What is the IWW?, in On the Firing Line, (Industrial Worker, 1912), p. 44.
[lxxxvi] PROPERTY IS MEANS TO OUR SUBJUGATION; Lewis, Proletarian and Petty-Bourgeois, 20-21; Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, pp. 17-18; "Georgia Kotsch, "Haywood's Los Angeles Speech," (Sol 1-25-13).
[lxxxvii] Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, pp. 16-18; "Sabotage and Environment," (Sol 10-10-12); Smith, "What is the IWW" in On the Firing Line, p. 46; Starr Bountar, "I Won't Work," (Sol 9-30-13).
[lxxxviii] Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, pp. 16, 22, 31; "Out of the Abyss," (Sol 3-22-13); "Modern Machine Proletariat,' (Sol 2-12-12).
[lxxxix] Lewis, Proletarian and Petty-Bourgeois, p. 4 and 21; Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, p. 32; Ettor, "The Modern Sileni," (Sol 7-26-13). Albert Brilliant agreed that "no beaten class can be a revolutionary factor." "Modern Machine Proletariat (Sol 2-22-12).
[xc] "The 'Slum Proletariat'", (IUB 2-27-09).
[xci] Smith, "The Floater and the Iconoclast," (IW 6-4-10); "The Blanket Stiff" (IW 5-1-12).
[xcii] Edwards, "The Migratory Worker and the Fighting Instinct," (IW 2-5-16).
[xciii] Dawson, "The Hobo Agitator," (Sol 5-17-13); Bountar, "The Free Footed Rebel," (Sol 9-6-13).
[xciv] Williams, "Editor's Reply," (Sol 9-6-13).
[xcv] "Sin Bad," "Some Weaknesses of the Western Wobbly," (Sol 1-16-15).
[xcvi] E.F. Lefferts, "The Jungles of California," (IW 5-6-09).
[xcvii] "A Tramp's View of Work," (IW 5-1-12).
[xcviii] "Sin Bad," "Cockroach 'Revolutionists'" (Sol 2-21-14) and "Some Weaknesses of the Western Wobbly" (Sol 1-16-15).
[xcix] Ashleigh, "A Few Notes on the 'Migratory'" (Sol 9-30-16).
[c] Edwards, "The Migratory Worker and What He is Up Against" (Sol 1-22-16); Ebert, "The Harvest Worker as Seen by a Home Guard," (Sol 9-30-16).
[ci] "The Blanket Stiff," (IW 5-1-12); "The Slum Proletariat," (9-23-09); see also "The 'Slum Proletariat"" (IUB 2-27-09).
[cii] "Forming the new structure," Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW, 1908 version, in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 12-13; Haywood, Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, pp. 1, 153; St. John, The IWW, Its History, Structure, and Methods, p. 12.
[ciii] Haywood, Proceedings, p. 153; Haywood, quoted in Joseph Conlin, Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement (Syracuse University Press, 1969), p. 50, quoting Big Bill Haywood's book p. 187); Abner, The Advancing Proletariat, p. 30.
[civ] Scabbing permit, Grover Perry, The Revolutionary IWW, p. 5; St. John, The IWW, Its History, Structure, and Methods, p. 11.
[cv] St. John, The IWW..., passim; Jas Thompson, "Glimpses of Capitalist Industry," the Industrial Union Bulletin, 10-19-07.
[cvi] St. John, "Industrial Unionism and the IWW," (Sol 12-23-16) [cf. St. John, "The Economic Argument for Industrial Unionism" (Sol 1-18-13)]; St. John, The IWW, pp. 11-12; fair days wage, Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW (1908), in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 12-13.
[cvii] Vanguard, On the Firing Line, pp. 32-33; new social environment, "A Word Regarding Violence," (Sol 7-18-14); Absorb and control, "One Big Union to End Wars," (Sol 10-31-14); St. John, "Is the IWW All-Sufficient for the Workers Needs?" (Sol 7-31-15); upholders, "'Forming the Structure'", (Sol 11-28-14).
[cviii] "A Word Regarding Violence," (Sol 7-18-14); Williams, "Syndicalism and Socialism," (Sol 4-27-12, reprinted in Eleven Blind Leaders (IWW Publishing Bureau), pp. 30-31; Perry, The Revolutionary IWW (pp. 2-3); St. John, The IWW, p. 14; Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, p. 18.
[cix] Ettor, (Sol 8-14-15); Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, pp. 22-24; Giovannitti, "Socialism v. Syndicalism," [a debate between Giovannitti and John Spargo], (Sol 2-6-15).
[cx] "What Should the Unemployed Do?' (Sol 10-31-14).
[cxi] Quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 69.
[cxii] Flynn, "The Labor Leader," (Sol 10-4-13).
[cxiii] Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, p. 220.
[cxiv] "The 'Call' Editor's Nightmare" (Sol 3-1-13); Haywood and Flynn, quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, pp. 41, 56. Flynn's statement may sound patronizing until we remember that she had no official power of any kind, except in her ability to galvanize the workers, who could reject her advice at any time.
[cxv] Abner, "Food for Thought," (Sol 3-8-13). The IWW did not follow his advice, but often attributed the acquittal of class-war prisoners to publicity and agitation rather than courtroom strategy.
[cxvi] Williams, Eleven Blind Leaders, p. 4; administrator, "'Nothing to Lose"", (Sol 7-22-11); organic, and supposedly wise, "Where the Intellect Is," (Sol 4-27-12); Marcy, "Ladylike Men," (Sol 12-18-09).
[cxvii] Odon Por, "Social Creation Through Conquest," (IW 5-1-12).
[cxviii] John Baldazzi, "The Ethics of Revolutionary Syndicalism," (Sol 1-27-17).
[cxix] Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 214-217; Flynn, "The Value of Propaganda Leagues," (Sol 9-19-14); Williams, Eleven Blind Leaders, p. 28; Haywood, quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, pp. 67-68.
[cxx] "'Supressing' The IWW," (Sol 7-21-17); Smith, "What is the IWW," in On the Firing Line, p. 44; Perry, The Revolutionary IWW, pp. 11-12. Conlin (p. 187) notes that some Wobblies, asked their religion when they were jailed in Chicago, said "The IWW."
[cxxi] W.H. Lewis, "The Beginning of the End?" (Sol 2-7-14); John Spargo, in "Socialism versus Syndicalism," (Sol 2-6-15).
[cxxii] "Capitalist 'Philanthropy'" (Sol 12-17-10).
[cxxiii] "A Confession of Failure," (Sol 6-17-16).
[cxxiv] Charles Edward Russell, "What Comes of Playing the Game," in Proletarian and Petty Bourgeois, pp. 29, 33.
[cxxv] Williams, Eleven Blind Leaders, p. 17; Woodruff, Advancing Proletariat, p. 20; Justus Ebert, "A New Note on a New Review," (Sol 2-7-14).
[cxxvi] Justus Ebert, "Socialism Gone Wrong," (Sol 7-7-17).
[cxxvii] Flynn, The Rebel Girl, pp. 135-136; "Is the Teacher a Wage Slave?" (Sol 7-1-16).
[cxxviii] J.S. Biscay, "Bourgeois Education," (IW 11-21-12); "Slave Psychology," (Sol 7-22-16, from Peoples College News).
[cxxix] "Long Live the Modern School," (IW 10-10-12); "Report of the Modern School," (IW 11-16-11). For general information see Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement (Princeton University Press, 1980).
[cxxx] E.W. Latchem, "Education for Struggle," (Sol 6-24-16). For general information, see Richard J. Altenbaugh, Education for Struggle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) pp. 60-69 and 97-100.
[cxxxi] Caroline Nelson, "The Modern Use of May Day," (IW 5-1-12); B.E. Nilsson, "Motion Picture Morality," (Sol 9-30-11); suggestion, "Boost the IWW Press," (Sol 10-18-13); conscious class, "Legere's Great Play," (Sol 5-9-14); AFL, "Why the First of May," (Sol 5-1-15, I have corrected "fulgarities" to "vulgarities"); booze habit, "The IWW and the Ranchers," (IW 8-12-09).
[cxxxii] "Sin Bad," "Cockroach 'Revolutionists'" (Sol 2-21-14); Austin Lewis, Proletarian and Petty Bourgeois, p. 3; J.S. Biscay, "What Marx Would Say," (Sol 3-19-10); Justus Ebert, "The IWW in the Magazines," (Sol 8-23-13).
[cxxxiii] Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, p. 21; Flynn and Haywood, Golin, Fragile Bridge, 109-178; Flynn, "The Value of Propaganda Leagues," (Sol 9-19-14).
[cxxxiv] "The Poetry of Revolution," (IW 10-27-09); Robin Dunbar, "Modern Drama," (Sol 8-23-13). Ben Williams agreed, saying that "in the fire of the social struggle, great poets are bound to be born and made." Williams, "A Word To Our 'Poets'" (Sol 12-13-13).
[cxxxv] Robin Dunbar, "Revolutionary Drama," (Sol 6-28-13); Dunbar, "Modern Drama" (Sol 8-23-13).
[cxxxvi] Justus Ebert, "'Hunger" by Ben Legere, (Sol 5-16-14); on Hall, "'Songs of Love and Rebellion'", (Sol 5-1-15); Emanuel Julius, "The Need for Idealism in American Socialist Fiction," (4-1-16); Williams, "A Word to Our 'Poets'" (Sol 12-13-13).
[cxxxvii] Ebert on Hall's poems, "'Songs of Love and Rebellion'" (Sol 5-1-15; Hall replies, "Down in Dixie," Sol 5-8-15); Ebert on John Reed, "Special Woman's Edition Planned," (Sol 5-27-15); Richard Brazier, "The Story of the IWW's 'Little Red Songbook,'", Labor History, p. 97. GET THE YEAR AND MONTH
[cxxxviii] Richard Brazier, "Little Red Songbook," pp. 97-99, 103; Philip Foner, Industrial Workers of the World, pp. 151-157; "Songs! Songs!" (IW, 6-6-12); Joe Hill, The Letters of Joe Hill, edited by Philip Foner, p. 16.
[cxxxix] Brazier, "Little Red Songbook," pp. 99, 103.
[cxl] Justus Ebert, "The English Novel and the IWW Songs," (Sol 2-13-15); Justus Ebert, "Joe Hill and the IWW," (Sol 11-18-16); Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, "A Visit to Joe Hill," (Sol 5-22-15).
[cxli] Clark Halker, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest 1865-95 (Urbana, University of Illinois).
[cxlii] Forrest Edwards, "The Migratory Worker and the Fighting Instinct," (Sol 2-5-16).
[cxliii] Brazier, "Little Red Songbook," 97; JOE HILL I LIVED AND DIED LIKE A POET QUOTE.
[cxliv] For accounts of the Pageant see Golin, The Fragile Bridge, pp. 157-178; and Linda Nochlin, "The Patterson Strike Pageant of 1913," Art in America, May/June 1974, pp. 64-68.
[cxlv] "The Program of the Patterson Strike," in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 210-212; Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 162.
[cxlvi] The Independent and the New York Herald Tribune quoted by Nochlin, "Patterson Strike Pageant," pp. 65-67; Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico, 1985), p. 204; Phillips Russell, "The World's Greatest Labor Play," International Socialist Review, July 1913, pp. 7-9.
[cxlvii] Grace Potter, "Max Eastman's Two Books," New Review, September 1913, p. 795.
[cxlviii] Katherine Lord was a critic for the New York Post, quoted in "The Pageant as a Form of Propaganda," Current Opinion, June, 1913, in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 212-213; Nochlin, "Patterson Strike Pageant," p. 67.
[cxlix] Phillips, "World's Greatest Labor Play," (ISR, July, 1913), p. 7; Reed, "IWW Pageant at Madison Square Garden," (Sol 6-7-13).
[cl] Nochlin, "Patterson Strike Pageant," p. 68; NY Tribune, quoted in "The Pageant as a Form of Propaganda," Current Opinion, June 1913, in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, p. 212.
[cli] "The Patterson Mass Play," (Sol 6-14-13).
[clii] HUTCHINS HAPGOOD, UNITY OF SELF-EXPRESSION IN INDUSTRY AND ART. "Frisco Police do not like Everett Massacre," (Sol 1-13-17).
[cliii] QUOTE CONLIN, DUBOFSKY 354, 407
[cliv] Harrison George, "Can America Keep Out of the War?", (Sol 10-31-14); John Proletaire, "The Hour of Opportunity," (Sol 10-31-14). This same issue carried the Ben Williams editorial, "One Big Union to End Wars," quoted above, that advocated industrial unionism, not sabotage and mutiny, as the key to preventing wars.
[clv] F.L. Rhoda, "Wage Slave's View of War," (Sol 10-31-14); the Haywood quotes are from "What Should the Unemployed Do?" (Sol 10-31-14, from ISR). I have combined paragraphs in this quote.
[clvi] "A Declaration," (Sol 12-9-16).
[clvii] "Organization and War," (Sol 2-17-17); MacDonald and Rowan, quoted in Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 354-5, 357; Haywood to Little, quoted by Conlin, Big Bill Haywood, p. 183.
[clviii] "Deadly Parallel" and "War's Toll" (Sol 3-24-17); "Hats off to the Rockford Rebels," (Sol 7-14-17).
[clix] "Were you Drafted?" (Sol 7-28-17).
[clx] Gustave Herve, "Patriotism and the Worker," pp. 29, 26, 19. One edition of this pamphlet advertises "The General Secretary's Report of the Tenth Convention," meaning that it was printed in December 1916 or later; the "Introduction by the Publishers" has a note saying "the above introduction was written in 1912"--an apparent attempt to distance the IWW from the sentiments it expresses. Herve's pamphlet, and those on sabotage by Flynn and Poguet, were advertised regularly in Solidarity until it was suppressed in late 1917. For assertions that the IWW toned down some of its literature, see Flynn, Rebel Girl 227, and Chaplin, Wobbly, p. 206. Flynn and Chaplin both assert that Flynn's Sabotage was not reprinted, but Solidarity advertised it until the IWW was suppressed, months after Flynn and Chaplin claim the IWW discontinued it. Conlin, Big Bill Haywood, pp. 185-6, claims that some changes were made, particularly in Vincent St. John's The IWW: Its History, Structure, and Methods. However, the 1917 retained all of the passages Conlin claims were excised; it was the 1919 edition that omitted them. Even that edition retained the passage about IWW retaliatory killing of Pennsylvania State Constabularies during the McKees Rocks Strike. Justus Ebert, in the 1919 or 1920 edition of The IWW in Theory and Practice (p. 61) says that the war caused the IWW to repudiate sabotage. The massive IWW indictments and trials induced the IWW to repudiate sabotage; it went into the war with its flags flying.
[clxi] "War Against War, or War Against Capitalism," (Sol 5-26-17); "Violence and the IWW," (Sol 6-9-17).
[clxii] "The Workers' War is for Emancipation," (Sol 5-19-17).
[clxiii] For general information on the repression, see Dubofsky, We Shall Be All; Foner, Industrial Workers of the World; and Preston, Aliens and Dissenters. The quote from Rowan is in Dubofsky, p. 430.
[clxiv] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 383-84.
[clxv] "Hats off to the Rockford Rebels," (Sol 7-14-17).
[clxvi] Visit to the Bureau and to Washington, Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 405-406; Haywood's invitation to Covington, "Preamble Still Nailed to our Masthead," (Sol 10-20-17); "An Explanation," (Sol 9-29-17).
[clxvii] For a discussion of the IWW's legal strategy see Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 425-433 and (for a spirited rebuttal) Helen C. Camp, "Gurley: A Biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 1890-1964 (dissertation, Columbia University, 1980) pp. 183-194. For the Omaha defendants see Dubofsky, p. 442; for the rejection of the offer of pardon, see Conlin, Big Bill Haywood, p. 190 (compare to Dubofsky, 461). Helen Camp says 52 of 71 prisoners refused pardon.
[clxviii] "'Suppressing' The IWW," (Sol 7-21-17); A.S. Embree, "To the Membership of the IWW," (Sol 9-29-17).
[clxix] Relentless progress, and, die gamely, "The Wooden Shoe and the Iron Heel," (Sol 8-18-17); Hold the fort, "An Explanation," (Sol 9-29-17).
[clxx] Haywood in (Sol 10-27-17 GET ARTICLE TITLE); Jail a branch, (Sol 10-6-17 GET TITLE); Georgia Kotsch, "Why Suppression Only Aids the IWW," (Sol 9-29-17); Frank Woods, "Fat Chance," (Sol 8-25-17); fair trial, "The Conquering Sign," (Sol 10-20-17).
[clxxi] "The Wooden Shoe vs. the Iron Heel," (Sol 8-18-17), see also "'Suppressing' The IWW" (Sol 7-21-17); "Sabotage," (Sol 10-13-17); Haywood and Rowan, Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 388, 403.
[clxxii] Haywood, "Preamble Still Nailed to Our Masthead," (Sol 10-20-17); Gustave Herve, Patriotism and the Worker, p. 30; Rowan, quoted in Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 430.
The IWW's counterculture far transcended the issues of electoral politics, capitalist property morality, sabotage, and direct action, and encountered problems far more serious than its controversies with the rival Socialist parties. Indeed, the IWW's revolutionary counterculture confronted mainstream American culture at virtually every point. It redefined the very basis of working-class self-identity, their sources of dignity, meaning, and self-respect. In constructing its counterculture, the IWW challenged deeply-engrained American attitudes towards race, gender, patriotism, and religion. The IWW, to a far greater degree than the Socialist party (and even more the AFL) attacked artificial divisions that undercut class consciousness and vitiated effective working-class action. The Socialist party appealed for votes primarily to white, male, American citizens, whose source of community derived from racial, gendered, and national identities more than from class affiliation. The SP therefore downplayed radical attacks on these prefabricated sources of traditional identities. The IWW, however, propounded a new working-class culture based on conscious class struggle, and offered workers a new community based exclusively on their class affiliation, to the virtual exclusion of inherited, traditional forms of personal identity. Non-class sources of personal identity were not only irrelevant to the IWW, but actively obstructed its mission.
While the IWW's philosophical attack on racism, patriarchy, patriotism, and religion employed many arguments current on the left, it focused on their effects in dividing the working class and undermining its struggle against capitalism. The IWW's innovative method was directly tied to its innovations in philosophy. The IWW undermined white supremacy, male dominance, American patriotism, and religious beliefs not only through argument but through a practical demonstration of their perniciousness and falsity. IWW agitators, publicists, and philosophers believed that the working class would transcend prejudice, superstition, and false pride not when logically convinced of their absurdity (IWW writers had scant confidence in the intellectual and moral abilities of most workers), but through a concrete demonstration that the IWW, by uniting all workers regardless of race, gender, nationality, and religion, "delivered the goods." The IWW would recruit all workers, of whatever origin and belief, into One Big Union, and inculcate IWW philosophy by showing that solidarity raised wages, reduced hours, and improved working conditions. Once workers saw such practical demonstration of their power at the point of production, IWW theorists believed, they would perceive that their concerted action, rather than God, Country, skin color, or sex, gave them the blessings of life. Workers would see their essential oneness and their implacable and inevitable conflict with their oppressors.
The IWW, like Max Eastman and Emma Goldman, contended with working-class cultural conservatism. Workers often found solace and pride in their racial, sexual, national, and religious identities rather than in their class position. Yet such cultural conservatism was not a natural or immutable aspect of working-class consciousness; rather, it was assiduously cultivated by ruthless and unremitting ruling-class terrorism and violence, and by capitalist control of the productive process. The capitalists controlled governments at the local, state, and federal levels; they also owned the press, the pulpit, and popular culture. They used these forces to orchestrate a campaign of intimidation, violence, and murder against the IWW throughout the nation. Capitalist terrorism, economic coercion, and cultural hegemony prevented the IWW from achieving lasting success at the point of production, the essential requisite for the IWW's cultural programme. These same mechanisms of control also channelled working-class resentment into the safer channels of racist and national hatreds and gender condescencion.
Towards a Raceless Society
The IWW vociferously repudiated mainstream American norms, including those of the AFL and the SP, in the area of race. The IWW's counterculture included blacks, Mexicans,[i] Asians, and whites, and immigrants and natives, on terms of perfect equality. As Big Bill Haywood told blacks, the IWW "is the only labor union that has never in theory or practice, since its inception twelve years ago, barred the workers of any race or nation from membership.... The IWW is not a white man's union, not a black man's union, not a red or yellow man's union, but A WORKING MAN'S UNION. ALL OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ONE BIG UNION."[ii] From the very beginning the IWW's constitution and practice banned discrimination upon the basis of race. The IWW press skewered the AFL for excluding blacks, thereby creating scabs and helping the capitalists divide the working class. The IWW also criticized the SP's segregated locals in the South; adherence to capitalist legality and the quest for votes fostered SP segregation where integrated unions were illegal and blacks were disfranchised.
IWW industrialism, however, was incompatible with segregation. When Haywood spoke at the convention of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1912, he asked why there were no blacks present; told that Louisiana law mandated separate meetings, Haywood said
You work in the same mills together. Sometimes a black man and a white man chop down the same tree together. You are meeting in convention to discuss the conditions under which you labor. This can't be done intelligently by passing resolutions here and then sending then out to another room for the black man to act upon. Why not be sensible about this and call the Negroes into this convention? If it is against the law, this is one time when the law should be broken.[iii]
Covington Hall, a prominent white Southern Wobbly, agreed. "Let the Negroes come together with us, and if any arrests are made, all of us will go to jail, white and colored together." The white BTW members accepted this suggestion and affiliated with the IWW. When the IWW organized integrated longshoremen's unions in cities such as Philadelphia and New Orleans, blacks and whites alternated in leadership positions.[iv]
The IWW stressed that the capitalists fostered racism to divide the working class. Workers of the South, the BTW said, enjoy "the supremacy of misery and the equality of rags." The capitalists know that "we can never raise our standard of living or better our conditions so long as they can keep us split, whether on race, craft, religious, or national lines, and they have tried and are trying all of these methods of division in addition to their campaign of terror." The IWW attributed "child slavery" and other horrors of the South to the white racism inculcated by the capitalists. When a Mr. Parker, the owner of a textile mill, attacked the IWW as "preaching equality of race," the IWW replied that Mr. Parker would employ blacks and even offer them specially high wages if necessary to break the strike of white workers. Capitalists regard the white worker as superior only "if he shows that he can produce more wealth for the boss, than his colored brother can.... 'White supremacy' means only the supremacy of Mr. Parker and other capitalists over all workers of both colors." After the failure of the Patterson strike, the IWW recognized that southern racism had national implications; "we can't make very much progress in the Northeast until we get the south."[v]
While the IWW published material specifically addressed to blacks, as it did for other groups, it addressed the same arguments for the IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism to blacks as it did to whites. In his pamphlet, "To Colored Working Men and Women," Haywood reiterated the frequent IWW claim that workers of both races were worse off as wage slaves than as chattels; when the masters owned their workers, they cared for them as they would any other property. But, assuming the persona of a black worker, Haywood claimed that "the white wage worker is little, if any, better off. He is a slave the same as we are and, like us, he is regarded by the boss only as a means of making profits.... The employing class seeks to engender race hatred and division by poisoning the minds of both whites and blacks."[vi]
The IWW, like the SP, stressed class to the exclusion of race, and offered no special program for blacks. The IWW's class-only stance, however, was liberating in a way the SP's was not. Blacks did have special needs in the policial arena--disfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, and lynching were problems the political process could address. When the SP downplayed the distinctive experience of blacks and ignored AFL racism, it distorted reality and collaborated in white racism. The IWW, however, created its own institutions and culture and constructed a new society within the shell of the old. The IWW kept dues low and, castigating the AFL's practice of closing the books to new members, guaranteed the right of free transfer from one union to another. When jobs were scarce, it demanded the reduction of working hours so that every worker would have a job. The IWW focused on the poorest paid, least skilled workers, and increased their pay relative to that of more privileged workers. At Lawrence, the IWW secured a 25% increase in the wages of the poorest paid workers, five times that gained by the most skilled. The IWW also called for the collective ownership of the land, a program that would help blacks more than any other group.
The IWW would not reform the capitalist and racist American society, but replace it with a totally new set of institutions and new forms of cultural self-identity. Blacks could join the IWW, vote, and hold office on terms of perfect equality with whites; as the IWW considered itself the nucleus of the new society, such equality was all that blacks required. The IWW's version of industrial unionism made any special compensation of blacks for past injuries superfluous. When industrial unions owned and managed the industries, every worker would have a good job, characterized by high pay, ample leisure, and democratic participation and control at the workplace. This, plus the mingling of workers on the job in the industries they jointly owned, would eliminate the economic and social bases of racism and segregation. The unskilled majority would outvote the skilled minority, eliminate unfair wage and status differentials, shorten hours for everyone, and equalize access to the skilled jobs. The outcome would probably not have been equality of pay for all workers, but higher pay or shorter hours for drudge work that offered no intrinsic satisfactions. Such jobs would be accorded more dignity even as the workers reduced or eliminated them by reorganizing production.[vii] Inherited advantages of race, skill, wealth, and access to apprenticeship programs would have no existence in such a society. The IWW's programme offered far more to blacks than the most ambitious affirmative action programs of recent decades; by re-creating society from scratch, the IWW could deliver the genuine freedom and equality that capitalist race-based reforms cannot.
Race-based affirmative action programs such as those enacted in recent decades were not only inconceivable in the heydey of the IWW. They also assume the continued existence of a stratified, exploitative society where most workers are locked out of good jobs. Affirmative action guarantees blacks preferential access to desirable jobs as compensation for past and present discrimination. It loses all meaning in a society where every worker has a job, every job is characterized by high pay, decent working conditions, and democratic control by the workers, and where allocation of jobs is determined from the bottom up, by the workers themselves, under a system where any worker can automatically join the union of his or her choice. Capitalist affirmative action, even at its best, achieves cosmetic changes in the distribution of decent jobs, while leaving the structure unchanged and relegating most blacks (and huge numbers of other workers) to poorly paid, insecure jobs, or no job at all. Capitalist race-based programs have exacerbated white racism and resentment, especially among the white males whose wages have been steadily plummeting for almost thirty years, even as the condition of a majority of blacks also steadily worsens. Programs fully appropriate for a class society based upon the slow torture of those at the bottom are manifestly inappropriate for a classless society such as the IWW envisioned--a society that would approximate equality of condition rather than granting an illusory equality of opportunity.
The IWW's vision of a classless and raceless society was, therefore, far more radical than any race-based reform program. Yet the IWW, despite its official class-only ideology, did acknowledge the distinctive experiences and disabilities of blacks. For example, it repeatedly condemned lynchings, which, Solidarity said, "correspond to pogroms in Russia.... The idea is that as long as Mr. Block [a Wobbly term for conservative workers] thinks he can better his conditions by bucking the colored slave instead of the boss, the real culprit will go unpunished." Lynching, another Wobbly averred, was "a war of extermination directed against the more rebellious negroes" who "are demanding more of their product." Yet IWW writers only confronted such distinctive experiences reluctantly. Haywood epitomized a common IWW ambiguity when he said that blacks in the north suffered from "the hardest work and poorest pay," only to immediately add that "the white wage worker is little, if any, better off." Another writer repeated the common IWW claim that "environment is omnipotent" and that workers of all races and nationalities will respond identically to the same treatment-- thus denying the long-term relevance of inherited cultural patterns. Then, responding to northern white fears that recently-arrived blacks would remain content with the lower standard of living prevalent in the South, he asserted that the colored man "is well known to like a good life. After he has been up north for a certain period he shows this racial trait in his dress, food, and in all his ways. This kind of worker is the right material for the revolutionary movement.... It is only by wanting more and more that the capitalist system will be overthrown."[viii]
As blacks moved north during World War I, the IWW reminded whites that blacks were discriminated against in housing, public facilities, voting rights, and employment. IWW agitators, worried that this influx would exacerbate the racism of northern white workers, reminded their white members of the special circumstances that would make black workers difficult to organize. The new arrivals were but recently removed from slavery; they were of southern rural background and new to industry. Until they found their bearings, wage rates in the north would initially seem high to them. Blacks were justifiably suspicious of unions because of AFL policies. "Instead of extending the helping hand, [AFL members], in their stupidity, fanaticism, prejudice and loyalty to their property-protecting unions, turned [the blacks] down flat and even joined in the fanatic mob or race rioters in the persecution of these southern workers." The IWW blamed the AFL and the capitalists, rather than the blacks, when black workers scabbed. When capitalists imported black strikebreakers into Illinois in 1917, Solidarity, seeking to avert a pogrom such as that at East St. Louis, reminded its readers that "colored men come here to work and not to scab on anyone.... THEY WERE TOLD THAT THERE WAS NO STRIKE OR LABOR TROUBLE OF ANY KIND" or they never would have come. The blacks were ruthlessly exploited and, if they attempted to quit, intimidated. "Colored workers have as much to gain by organizing as white workers. Many of them are eager to line up. Why not make the attempt before blaming them for things the bosses are really guilty of?" Solidarity proudly publicized the statement of Mary White Ovington, an SP member and founder of the NAACP, that the IWW was the only organization besides the NAACP that cared about blacks.[ix]
The IWW also confronted virulent anti-Asian racism in the West. Asians were persecuted much like blacks in the deep south; they were ravaged by white violence and periodically expelled from entire communities. The United States banned further immigration of Chinese and Japanese, and denied citizenship to those already present; California forbade Japanese owernship of land. The AFL and many Socialists supported these laws, claiming that Asians worked for lower wages, scabbed on white workers, and in general lowered the standard of living of the (white) working class. The IWW disagreed. Solidarity asserted "that wage slavery produces the same state of mind in the working classes of all countries; that under the same shop and life conditions, the Chinaman will act in the same manner and with the same methods as the American and European wage slaves do. He will hate and fight his economic master." The Industrial Worker claimed that "All workers can be organized, regardless of race or color, as soon as their minds are cleared of the patriotic notion that there is any reason for being born of a certain shade of skin or in an arbitrarily fenced off portion of the earth.... There are but two nations: the robbers and the robbed." On another occasion it proclaimed that the IWW "accepts the Japanese to membership on exactly the same terms as other workers. They know that we accept them, not as Japanese, but as members of our own nation--the working class."[x]
Despite their assertion that all workers responded identically to industrial capitalism, the IWW did sometimes make distinctions between races. The Industrial Worker praised the Japanese as "intelligent and class conscious in a high degree.... The personal cleanliness of the Japanese workers is one of the highest and surest marks of their inborn intelligence and their natural refinement of disposition." The difference between the bunkhouses of white and Japanese workers "can easily be detected a half a mile off, especially if the wind is in the right direction. Comparisons are offensive, and we are not praising the Japanese to flatter them," but merely countering "the lies told about them by the common enemy of all working people--the employing class." The Industrial Worker ridiculed white migrant workers who "eat rotten food, and sleep in their masters' straw stacks" and yet fulminate against their fellow workers from Japan. "Yes, indeed, it would be beneath his unwashed and vermin-covered dignity to associate with a 'Jap.'" IWW writers deemed Japanese workers more class conscious than most whites, and extolled their ingenuity in extracting everything they could from the capitalists. When the AFL Porters Union proposed to "eradicate the brown men from industrial competition," the Industrial Worker dryly commented that the porters would not "exterminate the Japanese by murder outright, but would be more humane (?) by letting the Japanese starve to death--providing the Japanese could be so far educated into the AF of L principles as to be willing tamely to starve to death.... If the porters' union were but half as class-conscious as the average Japanese worker, there would be better wages and better conditions for the porter than the wretched ones they now are forced to submit to."[xi] The Wobbly press publicized instances where Asian workers successfully struck for higher wages than their more timid white co-workers.
The IWW reminded its members that the working class lacked the power to exclude Asians or anyone else from the United States. The Industrial Worker asserted that "the employers constitute the government, and immigration will continue as long as it is in the interests of the employing class." Because immigrants were more militant than native-born whites, and only slowly assimilated AFL craft-scabbing principles, some capitalists opposed immigration. Others, especially in the West, feared the class consciousness of the Japanese workers and their tough competition when they became businessmen. Still others hoped that anti-Japanese fervor would translate into a war against Japan for the sake of capitalist markets and empire.[xii]
The IWW had practical arguments against the exclusion of Asian workers. J.H. Walsh, Western organizer for the IWW and leader of the famed "Overalls Brigade" to the 1908 Convention, reiterated a common Wobbly theme in his contention that "capitalism is international and recognizes no boundary lines or race distinctions. The capitalist has only one thing in view--profits." He does not allow patriotism or racism to impede his pursuit of profit, but buys labor as cheaply as he can in the world market and builds factories wherever they are profitable. If the United States prohibited Asians from immigrating here, American capitalists would build--were even now building--factories in China and Japan. Asian workers "are found creating wealth just across the pond, and this wealth created is in competition in the world market." The IWW must organize on the same international scale as the capitalists, and enlist the workers of the entire world in one big union. Walsh concluded that "there is only one correct and scientific position to be taken on this question." The Industrial Worker similarly said that "No capitalist has any patriotism." If they cannot exploit immigrants in the United States, they will "erect factories in other countries to exploit the workers there.... Anti-immigration is a foolish attempt to benefit the workers here at the expense of the balance of the working class."[xiii]
IWW writers frequently asserted that "race prejudice does not extend to the employing class," who merely used it for their own ends. The Industrial Worker observed that the President of the United States would eat with the leaders of China or Japan at a formal banquet, but "is [the worker] not insulted if asked to eat with his Japanese brother, who is almost always cleaner and healthier than the American?" Time and again, IWW publications asserted that the capitalists violated their every professed belief in the superiority of the white race, (or the delicacy and domesticity of women), in their hiring practices; similarly, the capitalists belied their supposed patriotism by building factories overseas. "Gold, at least, knows no flag." The IWW exaggerated the rationality and racelessness of the capitalists, who are, after all, cultural beings. Yet it correctly asserted that many capitalists consciously bolstered their position, and profits, with racist and patriotic appeals. The Wobblies were accurate in their assertion that "the class struggle is world-wide.... Organization of the workers must be on a line with organization of the employers, in order that the workers may win the world for themselves alone."[xiv] IWW analysis and predictions have an eerie, contemporary sound in an age when the internationalization of capital and runaway shops are wrecking havoc on the working class in the United States and throughout the world.
Members of the IWW did not consider the United States their own country. The United States, Wobblies asserted, belonged to their mortal enemies, the capitalists. When a prominent AFL leader used the expression "our mills and factories" to refer to industries located in the United States, the IWW press sarcastically replied that "the IWW is fighting and organizing to take and hold the mills and factories, but it's no use! They are 'ours' already!" The problems of workers anywhere in the world are "of equal importance and concern with those of this part of the employers' world." In the same vein Covington Hall acidly remarked that "If foreigners are men without homes in the land where they happen to be, there is no land on earth today where the workers are not foreigners."[xv]
The IWW's racial egalitarianism contravened widespread white working-class attitudes. IWW writers castigated poor and working-class whites, an important part of the IWW's natural constituency, for their racist attitudes. A writer in Solidarity complained that "the hatred of the negro is found to be the strongest in the 'poor white'--the poor, submissive slave who is willing to admit the 'superiority' of any soft-handed pasasite who possesses more wordly goods than he does." Justus Ebert, a prominent IWW organizer and writer, exclaimed: "It beats the Dutch to hear workingmen who haven't a cent in their pockets discuss banking and currency laws, or listen to their anti-immigrant twaddle when they ought to get off the continent for the Indian's sake, according to their own logic. Just now, a lot of them, who haven't the price of a burial plot, and most likely will be laid away for their final rest in potter's field, are wagging their jaws in favor of California's anti-Japanese land laws." The IWW castigated the racism and anti-immigrant stance of the skilled, mostly white, native-born craft workers of the AFL; but Solidarity noted that immigrants who successfully fought their way into the craft elite "in many cases have outdone the natives" in racism and patriotism.[xvi]
The IWW practiced the inter-racialism it preached. It transcended ethnic and racial divisions to an extent unparalleled in American society at the time, and seldom equalled since. The IWW united whites and blacks in the north and the deep south, and organized nationalities divided by ancient hatreds into fighting unions. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn remembered that the IWW "spoke to nationalities who had been traditionally enemies for centuries in hostile European countries, like Greeks and Turks and Armenians, yet they marched arm-in-arm on the picket line."[xvii] During its famous strikes at Lawrence, Patterson, the Mesabi Range, and elsewhere, the IWW forged unified strikes out of as many as twenty-five different nationalities. It recruited speakers in many languages, ensured diverse ethnic representation on strike committees, and utilized ethnic communities, solidarities, and institutions in strike activities such as soup kitchens and other forms of strike relief. White, native-born workers created the most difficulties; many of these, affiliated with the AFL, refused to strike with their less skilled co-workers, abandoned strikes at the least sign of trouble, or, if unemployed, rushed to scab on strikers. The AFL often actively recruited scabs to break IWW strikes. Other holdouts were poor, unorganized whites whose lack of solidarity stemmed from patriotic and racist conceit. Native-born white males proved the most difficult recruits to the IWW's new working-class culture.
In evaluating the effects of such racism on the success of the IWW, we must remember that the IWW's task differed from that of publicists such as Emma Goldman and Max Eastman, who changed individuals by rational argument. The IWW intended not to win a philosophical disputation, but to create functioning institutions which would embody its ideal. As John Walsh said, the worker "afraid of falling in 'social caste' is generally pretty quick to see the light of identity of interest when his job is at stake." Solidarity averred that "the working class is not a unit on any great proposition; formulas will not make it a unit; only organization that enables the workers to get an ever firmer control of industry will do the trick. All else is subordinate." Another IWW writer belittled the propaganda of words only and asserted that "the strike itself is the best educator" and "the best propaganda.... We attract more attention, arouse a greater interest in industrial unionism, open the eyes of more wage workers and give them more to hope for during a strike with the capitalist class than at any other time." Solidarity averred that news of labor victories, rather than abstract theorizing, "is the most effective means of reaching workers not yet imbued with our philosophy."[xviii]
Despite the IWW's justified complaints, white racism was not a main cause of their defeat in strikes. Rather, capitalist terrorism and control of the productive process prevented the IWW from "building the new society within the shell of the old." Capitalists fired and blacklisted union organizers; they and the governments they controlled (at the local, state, and national levels) routinely clubbed, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered participants in IWW strikes. Law-enforcement authorities often gunned down a striker and imprisoned the strike leaders for murder. The press often incited vigilantee violence against Wobblies, as against southern blacks. The IWW could not show that inter-racial cooperation brought results. The blacklist, the yellow-dog contract, and assiduous terrorism and violence ensured that workers concerned about their lives and jobs avoided the IWW's inter-racial solidarity.
For example, the whites and blacks of the BTW fought together until a capitalist and governmental reign of terror destroyed their union. As Phillip Foner says, "Everywhere in the South the union met the same experience: mob violence, attacks by gunmen, arrests and deportation of union members" followed by blacklisting. White workers experienced the treatment usually meted out to blacks, while the blacks, vulnerable under ordinary circumstances, suffered even more than the usual abuse.[xix] Such terrorism was neither unusual nor confined to the South. The result was that workers lacked the example of a successful, functioning, inter-racial union. John Walsh's worker worried about his job would "see the light" and avoid the IWW.
The black and white longshoremen also remained united until the general proscription of the Wobblies during World War I. The migrant farm laborers of the West, a group conventionally considered unorganizable because of the temporary and transient nature of their work, are another case in point. The Agricultural Workers Organization united whites, Japanese, and blacks when World War I created a labor shortage; this demonstrates that previous economic conditions (an endemic surplus of workers) and not any imagined qualities of the migrants themselves had impeded organization. The AWO achieved spectacular success until massive federal violence destroyed it during World War I. The IWW won similar successes in the lumber and mining industries of the West during World War I, only to suffer destruction at the hands of government and vigilantee terrorism.
Even when the IWW won a strike, the results were often short-lived. After the IWW united twenty-five nationalities and won the Lawrence strike in 1912, overcoming the usual corporate and government violence, the capitalists gradually and quietly fired union activists, advertised widely for more workers than they required, and shifted production to lower-wage areas, thus generating widespread unemployment and desperation. The IWW local at Lawrence virtually disintegrated. The IWW suffered its catastrophic defeat at Patterson in 1913, which virtually ended its career in the East, because of the usual massive repression and because corporations shifted production to mills in Pennsylvania, which the IWW could not organize.[xx] Racism and ethnic prejudice, however real and endemic, do not explain the IWW's defeat; rather, the destruction of the IWW (and of other attempts at inter-racial cooperation, such as the Populists in the 1890's and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in the 1930's) partly explains the persistence of such racial animosities. The IWW failed not so much because of working-class cultural conservatism, much less its own alleged ideological or organizational shortcomings, but because argument is no match for rifles and bayonets.
The same ruling groups that crushed militant working-class resistance also fostered racist and ethnic hatreds. Class organization evoked violent suppression, but racist pogroms won official sanction or acquiescence. The press caricatured and slandered blacks, Asians, and recent immigrants much as it did Wobblies, and inculcated a sense of racial and patriotic pride in native-born white workers. Segregation, disfanchisement, and public festivals of ritual dismemberment and murder in the South officially stigmatized blacks as an inferior and dangerous race. President Woodrow Wilson, in his own historical writings, his hearty endorsement of the racist film Birth of a Nation, and his segregation of the federal civil service, placed the imprimateur of the national government on racist ideology. Elite whites in the universities trumpheted the supposed "scientific basis" for the inferiority of blacks, Eastern Europeans, and women.[xxi]
The capitalists also reinforced racism by their hiring policies. Many companies segregated their workforce by ethnic group, reserving specific jobs for particular jobs, often upon the basis of some supposed "racial trait" of that group. Intended to divide the workers and make communication between them difficult, this policy actually facilitated united resistance during World War I, so the corporations jumbled the various nationalities together in a renewed effort to foster division and a jealous competition beween groups. Most corporations in the north excluded blacks entirely, or relegated them to the hardest, dirtiest, and worst-paying jobs; in this fashion they instilled a sense of superiority in the white workers, gave the whites an economic incentive for racism, and created a reservoir of excluded workers they could import during strikes (thereby further inflaming racial animosity). The textile mills of the South excluded blacks, which similarly gave whites an economic dividend from racism. Native-born whites, and older immigrants, similarly benefitted by policies which relegated blacks and newer immigratants to the lowest jobs; institutionalized racism afforded limited social mobility to a significant portion of the American white workforce, especially inter-generationally. Collective action encountered violent repression, making individual effort seem more likely to improve a worker's personal circumstances. The owners of industry frequently and overtly appealed to racial sentiment, telling their white and native-born workers that association with the "lower races" was degrading and offering them the bonds of racial fellowship. All this illustrates the cardinal rule: the capitalists can arrange and rearrange production so as to divide the working class and diffuse class militancy. The capitalists decide who occupies what slot in a hierarchy of jobs gradated according to pay, status, and skill; they thus encourage both racism and individual striving for success.
Workers also discovered that the authorities tolerated racial, ethnic, and religious organizations much more than class agencies, a circumstance that also channeled working-class activity away from workplace organization into transclass ethnic or racial affinities. Although capitalist ownership of industry greatly undermined ethnic cultures and institutions--witness Henry Ford's summary dismissal hundreds of Orthodox Christians for observing their Christmas in 1913,[xxii] or the attenuation of the veselija (the Lithuanian wedding celebration) depicted by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle--the capitalists and the various levels of government seldom directed massive violence and repression against such institutions. However obnoxious, condescending, and objectionable repressive "Americanization" programs and other pressures to conform, racial and ethnic forms of identity were accorded relative autonomy. Indeed, the partial segregation of ethnic groups in the workplace and the community, and the treatment of such groups as a unit by the press and political machines, reinforced this socially-recognized form of identity at the expense of a consciousness of the proscribed, officially non-existent class forms.
Racial and ethnic groups were not fixed, eternal, or natural, but often reinforced or created by experience in the United States as well as the old country. Italians, for example, forged their national identities as Italians mainly in the United States. When they arrived here, they identified themselves upon the basis of local or regional affiliations; they became conscious of themselves as Italians when they were treated as Italians. Light, ineffectual repression notoriously reinforces the behavior, traits, and cultural identities it seeks to eradicate. Nativism and Americanization programs were just repressive enough to reinforce ethnic loyalties and generate pride and resistance to complete assimilation. They also encouraged striving immigrants to jettison parts of their old-country heritage and fit into the American mold; the mainstream, patriotic form of cultural revolution paid more dividends in the here-and-now than the IWW's more radical restructuring of personality. Ethnic identities are fully compatible with class consciousness on one level, and sometimes generative of industrial militancy--the IWW effectively utilized it in its major strikes. Yet ultimately such forms of identity weaken class consciousness by emphasizing transclass solidarities (the racial, national, or ethnic community) and intra-class enmities. With the capitalists firmly in control of state and industry, ethnic and racial bonds more often undermined than reinforced united class action. A social structure maintained by actual and threatened violence encouraged workers to identify themselves both as individuals pursuing social mobility and as members of racial and ethnic groups--but rarely as workers. The entire state and industrial apparatus thwarted such class identification.
The racism prevalent in the white working class was not, therefore, an essential, unchanging, trans-historical trait; it was constructed as race was constructed and in tandem with it. Racism, like other instruments of mass murder, torture, and degradation, is not "a machine that goes of itself"; it requires assiduous maintenance and encouragement. White, native workers vented their frustrations on blacks and immigrants because the entire social structure encouraged this, even while preventing effective working-class action against the real sources of their miseries. The IWW could not overcome the weight of government, press, and corporation by mere preaching; only a practical demonstration that workers could unite and better their conditions would prove convincing and create examples that other workers could emulate. But the IWW's attempts to create such institutions encountered terrorism and violence very similar to that which created and maintained racism in the first place.
The IWW's Vision of a Genderless World
The IWW's version of feminism resembled its position on racial egalitarianism. The IWW crafted a radical philosophy that demanded absolute equality for women and denied the existence of any essential differences between the sexes. Nevertheless, despite their materialistic, economic, and class-based theories, IWW writers did acknowledge the distinct experiences and requirements of women.
In an era when almost everyone, including most suffragists and many feminists, proclaimed the fundamental difference of the sexes, the IWW asserted their essential sameness. "Given the same class interests and economic environment," a typical Solidarity article claimed, "woman acts no differently than man." Charles Ashleigh, an important IWW writer, averred that "the woman wage-worker is not concerned in a sex war; she is concerned in a CLASS war.... On the industrial field, the woman worker has the same power as the man," that of withdrawing her labor power. "When she learns to do this unitedly, not as a woman, but as a wage-worker," she and her male co-workers will "bring the master class to its knees." The IWW, Ashleigh noted, recruits both sexes, as well as all races, as members of an exploited class who fight "side by side in perfect equality." Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the IWW's most prominent female leader, agreed. The IWW "makes no special appeal to women as such. To us society moves in grooves of class, not sex.... Whatever superficial semblance of sex hatred appears" stems, like racism, from "the struggle for the pay envelope." Flynn specifically compared women to Japanese immigrants who entered the American job market later than white men, and therefore competed with them by working for less money. She also reminded both sexes that women are not free from masculine domination "while mercilessly exploited by an employer."[xxiii]
The IWW therefore organized women in the same manner, and for the same purposes, as men. Justus Ebert told his readers that the capitalists were pushing women into more and more formerly male occupations; the IWW must organize these women and, whenever possible, give them "equal opportunities, duties, and privileges, even to the holding of executive office." Aside from explicitly feminist organizations composed almost exclusively of women, no American organization adhered to such an ideal. Forrest Edwards, an IWW organizer and writer, repeated the IWW's contention that "inside the workshop there is no sex. Women are not considered as women by the boss--just so many slaves. There is no use getting sentimental over the fact that the bosses 'demand their pound of flesh' from women and children. They make the same demand of men.... Men and women must forget their sex when they enter industry. They must organize on the basis of the job. The IWW offers them such a program. It offers them the only such program."[xxiv] The Socialist party, which was concerned about women's issues, had a limited vision of women's freedom that stressed suffrage. Many members, including its generally radical standard-bearer Eugene Debs, adhered to Victorian notions about women's nature and place, and argued for a male "family wage" that would support a traditional housewife in the home.
The IWW believed that revolutionary industrial unionism, rather than the vote or an explicitly gender-based feminist agenda, would genuinely liberate women. "Economic equality precedes any other kind," a writer in Solidarity asserted; "and as long as woman can be made the prey of the employing class, in the shop, her possession of the 'vote' will not in the least free her from bondage." Women pickets and strikers "do more to gain respect and 'recognition' for their sex, than all the suffrage lectures in the country put together." Although some Wobblies praised the spirit and radical tactics of the suffragists, they predicted that the vote would do no more for proletarian woman than men; it would, in fact, tighten her chains by giving her the illusion (shared by men) that the government could help her. Flynn doubted that women would win the vote unless the capitalists sought "to exploit their conservatism and use it against the overwhelming forces of radicalism." Women would vote as men because of their economic dependence on men.[xxv]
The IWW stressed that the capitalists treated women as just another source of cheap, expendable labor; they made no distinctions between the sexes, except that they exploited women more ferociously. The IWW press ran numerous stories detailing the starvation wages, long hours, abominable and unsafe conditions, and sexual harassment inflicted on female workers. Flynn, describing miscarriages, stillborn babies, and a shockingly high infant mortality rate in working-class districts, averred that "the heaviest burden is on the tired frame of the woman." Justus Ebert reiterated a common theme when he said that the capitalists "have no regard for any ideals of womanhood.... They are in business to make all the dividends possible, no matter how much womanhood, or any standard of decency or living, may suffer." Large capitalists may feel that employment of women is morally wrong, "but they will not be deterred from raking in profits, despite such beliefs and feelings." Flynn proclaimed that "the IWW is at war with the ruthless invasion of family life by capitalism"--a statement that many conservative, patriarchal Socialists could endorse as implicitly condemning the presence of women in the workforce. Flynn, however, pointed out that women had done productive labor in the home throughout most of the human history and had recently followed their work as it left the home and became commercialized. Following Engles and Bebel, she believed that the male-dominated family, in which the women was detached from meaningful productive labor, was a recent innovation. She praised its contemporary breakdown as potentially liberating for women, and asserted that women were in the job market permanently. She criticized not women workers but "the unnatural and shameful condition" of men unemployed while children toiled, and vowed that the IWW would organize industry so "that all adults, men and women, may work and receive in return sufficiency to make child labor a relic of barbarism." Flynn thought that childcare would remain the main interest of most women, but insisted that "the free choice of work is the IWW ideal--which does not mean to put women forcibly back in the home, but certainly does mean to end capitalism's forcibly taking her out of the home." Flynn heartily approved of women working outside the home, feeling that, even under capitalism, such paid work broadened her horizons and made her more socially conscious and independent. Although Flynn asserted the equality of women and men, she did not believe that mothers of very young children should have to work outside the home.[xxvi]
The IWW, therefore, denied that women had any common interests opposed to or different from those of men, and it opposed cross-class alliances of women. Charles Ashleigh, stating a common position, claimed that the agitation for suffrage and increased employment opportunities stemmed from the intellectual proletariat, a section of the new middle class. He advised working women to eschew enlistment in crusades, such as suffrage, which would entangle them in alliances with their class enemies for the purposes of those enemies. Ashleigh agreed that middle-class women might gain somewhat by access to the "legislative committee of the master class," but said that proletarian women would not. They are robbed at the point of production, not at the ballot box; they are "the victims of industrial exploitation, not suffrage inequality."[xxvii]
The IWW castigated the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) on the grounds that it organized women separately from men, instead of uniting everyone within a specific industry; this divided the working class and fostered the idea that women wage-earners were competitors, rather than allies, of men. The IWW also savaged the WTUL as a refuge for the idle rich seeking escape from ennui. One Edith Thorpe Adams claimed that WTUL labor activism was "a hobby, a fad, a sport with most of these ladies," who want gratitude for their charity and yet fear genuine class organization of working women with working. This would "take away the means by which these ladies are enabled to live in extravagant luxuries and comfort." WTUL ladies reminded Adams of Mrs. Potter Palmer of the National Civic Federation, who invited labor leaders and industrialists to a banquet and hired private detectives to make sure that labor leaders of their wives did not "swipe some of the silverware or other precious articles in her palatial residence." The WTUL was closely affiliated with the AFL, which Adams castigated as a capitalist tool that facilitated "the exploitation of the major portion of the working class by the minor." The WTUL did ignore most IWW strikes. Flynn, who had far more contacts with privileged women than most IWW members, nevertheless agreed that "the sisterhood of women, like the brotherhood of man, is a hollow sham to labor" and denied that "the queen of the parlor" could ally with "the maid in the kitchen" without diluting working-class revolutionary fervor. Cross-class alliances of women, she felt, were neither possible nor desirable.[xxviii]
The salvation of women, Flynn asserted lay ultimately in revolution, and immediately in unionism. "Nothing short of a social revolution" could liberate women. "I am impatient for it, I realize the beauty of our hopes, the truth of its effectiveness, the inevitability of its realization, but I want to see that hope find a point of contact with the daily lives of the working women, and I believe it can be through the union movement." Unions "can have an immediate, constructive value, and an objective educational value." Properly conducted strikes produce "a revolutionary consciousness through the very struggle with the employers." A class union of all the workers, including women, "inspires the workers through its unity of practical every day needs with the ultimate revolutionary ideal of emancipation. Through it we are able to live our ideals, to carry our revolutionary principles into the shops, everyday of the year; not to the ballot box one day alone."[xxix]
The IWW believed that women needed the IWW; it also acknowledged that the IWW needed women. Solidarity, addressing members skeptical of the need for its special women's issue, said that "women are an increasingly industrial factor, necessary to the industrial organization and working class success. The IWW must interest women if it is to succeed in the realization of its ideals."[xxx] Towards this end, and in recognition of the extremely low pay of most women, IWW dues were lower for women then for men.
The IWW recognized that the capitalist organization of production presented women wage-earners as a threat to men. The capitalists replaced high-skilled and well-paid male workers with machinery and abysmally-paid, unskilled female labor whenever they could. This threatened the jobs and incomes of men and generated male hostility, even as it brutally exploited women. With fewer men earning the "family wage" that could support a wife and children, men postponed or avoided marriage, thus necessitating further female entry into the paid labor market. Capitalists justified the starvation pay of women on the grounds that they had husbands to support them, and then claimed that the men did not need a living wage because other family members worked.[xxxi] To resist this trend, the AFL discouraged the employment of female workers and favored special protective legislation that made women uncompetitive with men. The IWW, however, organized women on terms of equality with men.
Although IWW theory denied any essential difference between male and female workers, some Wobblies did acknowledge the distinctive needs and experiences of women. Flynn, citing IWW literature directed towards specific occupations and language groups, wanted "a special appeal based upon [women's] peculiar mental attitudes and adapted to their environment and the problems it creates." Flynn acknowledged that working women were particularly difficult to organize because most of them were only temporarily in the labor market and hoped for quick escape through marriage. Marriage, however, only presented the class struggle in a different form to proletarian women, who "invariably marry workers."[xxxii] AFL behavior also gave unionism a bad name among women, as among blacks. Finally, working women were burdened with housework and childcare, which greatly limited their participation in union affairs.
IWW writers deplored the extremely low wages paid women and demonstrated that many women, far from having husbands to support them, themselves supported sick or disabled husbands, children, elderly parents, and other family members. The IWW attacked the murderous schedules, incompatible with motherhood, imposed upon women, and stressed that wage work imposed special hardships upon pregnant women and new mothers. The IWW documented widespread sexual harassment of women who suffered abuse and forced sex to gain or keep jobs for themselves or their husbands. A local Catholic priest in McKees Rocks complained, before an IWW strike improved conditions, that
Men are persecuted, robbed, and slaughtered, and their wives are abused in a manner worse than death--all to obtain or retain positions that barely keep starvation from the door. It is a pit of infamy where men are driven lower than the degradation of slaves and compelled to sacrifice their wives and daughters to villainous foremen and little bosses to be allowed to work. It is a disgrace to a civilized country. A man is given less consideration than a dog, and dead bodies are simply kicked aside while the men are literally driven to their death.[xxxiii]
The IWW also harshly criticized AFL indifference and hostility to female workers. Flynn thought that the IWW could address women's concerns by promising a more wholesome family life, based on higher wages for the male breadwinner; the abolition of child labor and of compulsory work for mothers with young children; and legal birth control. Echoing other Wobbly writers, she claimed that the IWW would virtually end prostitution by drying up the demand from young men who cannot afford to marry and the supply of "young women submerged in dirt, squalor, and deprivation until their moral fibre disintegrates."[xxxiv]
The IWW organized not only women workers, but the wives, daughters, and sisters of male workers. Sticklers for theory wondered whether housewives were, technically considered, part of the working class. But one Sophie Vasilo wrote the Industrial Union Bulletin that the housewife "is a social producer. In order to sustain herself, she has to sell her labor power, either in the factory, directly to the capitalist, or at home, indirectly, by serving the wage slave, her husband, thus keeping him in working condition through cooking, washing, and general housekeeping.... And as an industrial factor in society, I believe the wage slave's wife has got a right to belong to a mixed local." The editor agreed that housewives could belong to mixed locals--the propaganda adjuncts composed of workers from various industries before the IWW had recruited enough workers to form industrial unions--but admitted that "no provision is made for such a person when the mixed local ends its activities and the members take their place in industrial unions." No one, apparently, suggested that housewives join the industrial unions of their husbands, composed exclusively of workers in a given industry. But years later Flynn agreed that one of the benefits of the newly-formed Propaganda Leagues was that they gave sympathetic women who were not themselves wage workers an organizational forum from which to reach housewives.[xxxv]
Most Wobbly organizers and writers, whatever the intricacies of theory, regarded all members of a worker's family as members of the working class, and made strenuous efforts to mobilize them during strikes. Solidarity said that "the workers must make their wives and families parts of their movement, by some device or other. Then we'll truly have a working CLASS movement and the broader outlook needed."[xxxvi] But when Wobblies attempted to mobilize housewives, they encountered difficulties based upon the different sensibilities and experiences of such non-workers.
Married women (whether working outside the home or not) were discouraged from extensively participating in union activities by housework, childcare, and social prohibitions. Most Wobbly commentators, male and female, acknowledged that most women were less socially conscious than men, less interested in public affairs, and oblivious to the importance of unions. The IWW blamed men for not talking to their wives and also the stultifying atmosphere and primitive, isolating labor of the home. Activists urged both men and women to change--men to take their wives into their confidence and talk to them about union affairs, and women to overcome their timidity and lack of confidence. They also called upon the IWW to appeal to women with special literature.[xxxvii]
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn described the psychological barriers to female organization. Flynn admitted that many male criticisms of female selfishness, emotionalism, ignorance, and frivolity were justified (although also applicable to many men) because women's personalities had been warped by the denial of social rights and education. Giving a woman a man's chance in contemporary society was insufficient because "a man's chance is not enviable under the present order," and because "ideas do not change automatically with environment, and many hold-over ones, a century behind, aggravate and humiliate self-respecting women. With the past dominating in education, we find girls and boys equipped differently for wage-earning." Men know that they have "a life sentence" to wage slavery; furthermore, "combat and struggle are considered essentially manly endeavors.... Miseducation further teaches girls to be lady-like, a condition of inane and inert placidity." Girls are trained to servility and passivity, boys to independence and activity. Women sometimes seem frivolous and overly concerned with fashions and dances because their sex appeal has traditionally been their only meal-ticket. "Their right to life depended on their sex attraction and the hideous inroads on the moral integrity of women produced by economic dependence are deep and subtle. Loveless marriages, household drudgery, acceptance of loathsome familiarities, [and] unwelcome child-bearing... have marred the mind, body, and spirit of women." If women are competitive rather than solidaric, this is because they are only temporarily in the job market, and the "co-operative spirit engendered in the factory is usually neutralized by the struggle for husbands (livings) outside.... The mental horizon of the average housekeeper is exceedingly limited, because of the primitive form of labor in the household."[xxxviii]
Flynn complained that because the AFL barred housewives from participation in strikes, "the men had the joy of the fight, the women not even an intelligent explanation of it." During strikes, they were left alone at home with their children, subject to the blandisements of the capitalists and priests; they saw their children going hungry, but did not understand why. "If she stays home, ignorant of the causes of the strike, with her children tugging at her skirts, and newspapers and gossips giving her a wrong idea of what it's all about, she beats the strike. The IWW has had women right in the front line of pickets wherever we have had a strike. For this we have been accused to hiding behind women's skirts. The truth is the women push themselves to the front ahead of the men on the picket line when they once get interested." In a similar vein, she claimed that "the IWW has been accused of putting women in the front. The truth is, the IWW does not keep them in the back, and they go to the front." Flynn averred that "woman's influence is one of the strongest in the world.... it must be made an educated influence and used to help on the battle that is for her and hers, if she had but realized it."[xxxix]
The IWW actively mobilized housewives as well as working women during strikes; they picketed, gave speeches, and organized soup-kitchens and other relief work. Flynn testified that this required that the IWW overcome deeply-ingrained attitudes. "The old-world attitude of man as 'lord and master' was strong.... There was considerable male opposition to women going to meetings and marching on the picket line. We resolutely set out to combat these notions." The results were gratifying; women proved tenacious and courageous fighters, who scapped with scabs and police and chose jail over bail. Big Bill Haywood said that "one woman is worth ten men--I never knew it to fail." A capitalist paper marvelled that the IWW taught strikers "some of the fundamental principles of democracy. That is, they are taught to manage their own affairs and in their meetings, they make motions and argue their line of action with much more understanding than was the way at first." The strikers referred to were new immigrants and women, "both of which groups are traditionally viewed as incapable of organizing their own affairs." IWW organizers sponsored strike meetings for women only, and found that attendance quickly soared. Haywood encouraged many hitherto timid women to become strong strike leaders.[xl]
When they considered the plight of the housewife, IWW writers confronted the realities of patriarchy and male oppression, formally denied by their class-only analysis. Charles Ashleigh, in the very same essay in which he denied the existence of "sex war," called the housewife "the slave of a slave," exploited in the home by her husband for the ultimate benefit of his capitalist employer. "She fails to see that, but for her, the husband would have to pay somebody else in the restaurant or boarding house for the cooking and other household work; as he would also have to pay the prostitute for sexual satisfaction." At the very time Flynn was propounding her class-only ideology, she complained of the double duty which husbands exacted from their wives. "While the father smokes his pipe and takes his ease mother has the innumerable household tasks still to do." Elsewhere Flynn modified her class-only thesis, stating that "in the final analysis, women's sufferings and inequalities, at least in the working class which is our only concern, are the results of either wage slavery directly or personal dependence on a wage worker.... Multitudes of wives and mothers are virtually sex-slaves through their direct and debasing dependence upon individual men for their existence, and motherhood is all too often unwelcome and enforced." Flynn painted a bleak picture of the housewife's servile, isolated, degrading and unappreciated work, and, as mentioned above, condemned the soul-numbing horrors of enforced economic dependence. She was confident that although "the exact details of the readjustment of human relations after an economic revolution cannot be mapped out.... economic independence without wage slavery will restore women's ancient place in the councils of the people."[xli]
This seeming departure from Marxian economic determinism was, in fact, based upon the same kind of analysis. The whole IWW philosophy was based upon the assertion that economic freedom and independence underlie every other good. Flynn's feminist analysis applied the IWW's economic, class analysis to the patriarchal household. Flynn proclaimed that
Woman stands in much the same relation of man, as man does to his employer. He runs the industrial system and in return gets a bare living for himself and his family; she runs his home and in return gets her bare living. She is in a proletarian-like position, he in a bourgeois-like position, and [she] must submit to man's government in all its extremes, as the proletarian must submit to bourgeois government to the last limit.... The only sex problem I know of is how are women to control themselves, how to be free, so that love alone shall be the commandment to act, and I can see but one way thru controlling tehir one problem of how to live, be fed and clothed--their own economic lives.... Sexual enslavement then follows economic enslavement, and is but a gentle way of saving prostitution, whether it be for one night or one whole life.... Since economic dependence is the cause of social and sexual enslavement, then economic independence means a free woman socially and sexually, a woman who thinks as she pleases, does as she pleases, speaks as she pleases, and belongs to herself alone.[xlii]
Flynn, borrowing from Engels, Bebel, and especially Charlotte Perkins Gilman, condemned a system that kept a woman "digging the best part of her life in a dirty kitchen; separated from the life current of the civilization, its politics, its culture, its interests," and advocated "the organizing and centralizing of household work" so that women would be freed for renumerative, rewarding work outside the home.[xliii]
The Industrial Worker, published by and for the overwhelmingly male and single members of the IWW in the West, also demanded women's independence from men as well as from capitalists. It criticized religion as "one of the chief influences used to keep the female sex in submission" and said that the suffragists show that women "long for independence and liberty. The more intelligent and pure the woman, the more her mind revolts from the thought of marriage as an economic necessity--a means of getting a supporter, a living.... Marriage for money and social position alone, is legalized prostitution." Because "a thousand rules, laws, and customs" impeded women from competing on a basis of equality with men, "the woman is forced to depend, more or less, on the support of the man who has her at an advantage in the struggle for bread.... Only economic freedom will elevate women.... Not until the mothers of the race are economically independent of the fathers, can there be general equality and mutual respect in the relations of the sexes.... The independence of women from trying to rely on the bread-getting powers of men, may be the cause of fewer marriages of convenience, but the marriages of mutual love and respect will starve the divorce lawyers and the courts." The Industrial Worker reminded its readers that the IWW required no initiation fee for women, and only half the dues that it charged men, but that "every woman member has an equal vote and voice" in the IWW, "the only organization which stands for true freedom for women."[xliv]
The IWW did, however, depart from its class-only analysis in its fervent advocacy of legalized birth control. Conservatives had long accused socialists and feminists of plotting the destruction of the home and family, so by the twentieth century many members of those movements had retreated from their earlier advocacy of sexual radicalism. The IWW, however, fervently backed Margaret Sanger's campaign for legalized contraception, and secretly printed and distributed 100,000 copies of her proscribed pamphlet Family Limitation when she fled into temporary exile. Sanger adapted IWW rhetoric and direct action techniques to her campaign for birth control, including its willingness to publicly break the law, court arrest, and use the courts as a forum for spreading ideas. Sanger proclaimed that "the working class can use direct action by refusing to supply the market with children to be exploited, by refusing to populate the earth with slaves." Her establishment of birth control clinics appropriated the IWW's strategy of living the revolution by building functioning counter-cultural institutions even if they evoked police repression. The IWW, generally hostile to anarchism, also publicized Emma Goldman's lectures on birth control. It advocated birth control as a means of undermining, rather than reinforcing, traditional class and gender hierarchies. It favored contraception as a woman's right and a class weapon, not as a professional monopoly, charitable service, or coerced eugenic instrument as later proponents did. Because the constituency, rhetoric, organizational base, and understanding of a reform largely determine its social meaning--as does the economic system in which it occurs--the destruction of the IWW and other radical organizations vastly redirected the course of the birth control movement.[xlv]
The IWW's version of birth control, as popularized by Sanger, Goldman, and Flynn, was a staunchly feminist and revolutionary reading. Flynn lectured to IWW locals on birth control, touting it "not as a solution of the class war, but as a valuable contribution to that end." Workers should "cease hampering themselves in strikes and class battles with a large number of helpless, hungry children." She averred that "the large family system rivets the chains of slavery upon labor more securely. It crushes the parents, starves the children and provides cheap fodder for machines and cannons." Flynn cited the "infant mortality, abortions, early deaths of mothers, [and] child workers" endemic in textile towns as an argument for birth control. Solidarity claimed that "small families mean a decreasing labor supply with increased labor demand and wages. It is large families that mean cheap living, because they mean cheap wages."[xlvi]
These arguments, although clothed in the rhetoric of class, contravened key elements of the IWW's philosophy. The IWW insisted that the capitalists would always create a reserve army of the unemployed to crush strikes and lower wages; there would always be more workers than jobs, regardless of how few children the workers had. Many Wobblies believed in the "iron law of wages," whereby the capitalists would never, for any length of time, pay more than a subsistence wage. Wobblies opposed to emphasis on birth control pointed out that if workers had smaller families, they would need less to survive, and wage rates would correspondingly decline. Wobblies also recognized that American capitalists had a virtually unlimited source of cheap labor in immigrants from abroad, and could exploit the workers in other countries directly by investing overseas. This implied that for birth control to raise wages by lowering the supply of workers, it would have to be practiced world-wide. When not discussing birth control, IWW writers often insisted that workers with families fought the class war most ferociously exactly because they were tied down and forced to fight for higher wages. They could not easily quit or accept low pay. This argument was usually employed in denigration of the fighting qualities of bachelor hoboes of the West, but one Wobbly pointed out that at Lawrence, "the workers who were oppressed the most fought the hardest and stood the brunt of battle--the women, encumbered with babies and husbands."[xlvii] Finally, Wobbly proponents of birth control ignored the fact that large families consume more than small ones, thus requiring greater production and more workers. If small families would decrease the supply of workers, they would also decrease the need for workers.
The IWW press, however, was almost uniformly hostile to arguments belittling birth control. When Wobblies argued on Marxian grounds that capitalism, not large families, caused poverty, they were told "that is true; but it is also true that large families help to accentuate both the exploitation and the poverty." Arguments against birth control appeared in the IWW press only in the course of being rebutted. This indicates that the IWW, whatever its professions, did concern itself with women as women, and not only as workers and the wives of workers. Big Bill Haywood, one of the IWW's most prominent and beloved leaders, strongly advocated birth control and greatly encouraged Margaret Sanger's early efforts. When Carlo Tresca, dilating on the increased leisure and enjoyment the IWW would win for its members, jokingly referred to "more babies," Haywood corrected him. "No, Carlo, we believe in birth control--a few babies, well cared for."[xlviii]
IWW writers also favored sexual liberation for women on the grounds that women should control their own bodies and enjoy a healthful sex life, rather than facing a Hobson's choice of celibacy or ownership by a man. Flynn, by far the IWW's most prominent and celebrated woman, herself embodied the new woman: she left her first husband when he insisted that she settle down and raise a family, freely consorted (while still formally married) with Calro Tresca, and retained her identity and career as an agitator even while loving that strong-willed and famous man. Later, when a member of the more culturally conservative Communist party, she said, somewhat apologetically, "this was according to our code at that time--not to remain with someone you did not love, but to honestly and openly avow a real attachment."[xlix] Ben Williams, the editor of Solidarity, in replying to a woman who complained about the deleterious effects of sexual freedom on women in the revolutionary movement, summed up the IWW's belief in the primacy of economics, the necessity of direct action towards building the new society in the interstices of the old, and the need for a revolution in every aspect of life.
The ethical code of the future society will not spring full-blown with the advent of that society. On the contrary we find its roots immediately in the general movement of today whose goal is economic freedom. And just as there are political and industrial martyrs to the cause of the new society, so there have been, are, and doubtless will be, sex martyrs to the cause of the new morality whose full fruition can only result from the economic freedom of women.[l]
Williams averred that a George Elliot, in challenging the antiquated divorce law of England, may suffer intensely, but "still her conduct may have effect toward changing that law. Hazardous as the 'new moral code' may be, that will not prevent individual women from attempting its practice" in increasing numbers as economic freedom approaches. Although Williams believed a more liberated sexuality "an inevitable part of the general movement towards emancipation," he agreed that male revolutionists should not butt in "with their advice on this question. It seems to us a problem for the woman to decide for herself."
Williams was not the only advocate of a new sexual morality. One Fred Tiffany complained that "the form of marriage in our present society is based on the sacred rights of property.... It cares nothing about whether the man and wife are happy together or not," as long as the rights of inheritance are safeguarded.[li] Another writer called a woman "the bird born and reared in a cage" and said that civilization
imposes all sorts of restraints upon a normal, healthy sexual life for women. Having deprived her of the right to the disposal of her body, except under bond usually of the most exacting character, it has put a premium upon all the possible misery, shame, disease, crime and other evils that flow from "clandestine relationships" between the sexes.... The hideousness of "civilization" thus stands naked before every intelligent observer. Instead of intelligence and a dissemination of sound knowledge on matters of sex; instead of trying to beget a healthy, normal attitude towards sex relationships; it would retain all the hideous nightmare conceived of ignorance and perversion that has made life miserable for male and female alike since the dawn of civilized life. Contrast that picture with the ideal of a free society, wherein woman shall be the economic and social equal of man; free to direct her own sex life, aided from childhood by a thorough knowledge of sex functions.[lii]
Solidarity also reprinted a letter of Mr. Sanger deploring the invasions of privacy of Anthony Comstock and his spies and Sanger's accompanying comment (made before the full horrors of World War I were apparent) that "whatever this war may cost in suffering and death, it will be small compared to that which Comstockery has imposed upon the world."[liii]
The IWW's ideal of a genderless class culture confronted male and capitalist control of the state apparatus, industrial machinery, and press. Patriarchy was not merely a cultural artifact, but a political and economic reality inculcated and enforced by armed violence.
Women were, to an extent even greater than blacks, a legal and political category as well as a cultural one. The nearly absolute control of the workplace which the state granted the corporations allowed the capitalists to segregate women into the worst jobs, pay them less than men, and displace skilled men with women and machinery. The capitalists used their political and economic power to make women a threat to male wages and status, therefore dividing the working class against itself and vitiating any possible working-class culture based on class alone. The state encouraged the organization of capitalists into huge corporations, while forcefully discouraging the organization of workers, including women, who were beaten and jailed during strikes with the same ferocity meted out to men. The Supreme Court, in allowing special protective legislation for women that it nullified when applied to men, gave official imprimatur to the cultural notion of women as a weaker and inferior sex, unable to provide for themselves. During the IWW's effective existence, women were excluded from the voting booth and jury box in most states--a disability that did not much concern the IWW, but which did further officially stamp them as different and inferior, whatever the ideologists of female virtue might claim.
The law bestowed vast powers on the male "head of the household." A husband had a legal right to the obedience of his wife, a right that included sexual access. Any married man, no matter how degraded at work, was master of his own private domain, much as the poorest white could find artificial dignity and superiority in his color. Poor women were denied access to contraceptive information and devices by the armed violence of the state. Combined with the legal power of a husband over his wife's body, this made many poor women into virtual "breeding machines," who endured one pregnancy and birth after another. This weakened or destroyed the health of many women, and rendered them even more dependent on a male breadwinner for sustenance. A husband had a legal right to rape his wife, and to "discipline" her with violence; and a wife's economic dependence on her husband encouraged acquiescence in a level of domestic brutality that exceeded even that allowed by law.[liv]
This combination of legally-enforced starvation wages, legal subjection in the household, and lack of birth control virtually forced most women (except those from privileged backgrounds with exceptional educations) into legal subordination to a man. Girls and boys were socialized to their respective roles from an early age. Flynn, hearing a boy ridicule his sister, saw in the girl's acquiescence "the germ of a pitiable inability to think and act alone, characteristic of so many women. In the arrogance of the male child was the beginning of a dominance that culminates in the drunken miner, who beats his wife and vents the cowardly spleen he dare not show the boss!"[lv] In such behavior of boys and girls, not consciously related to the imperatives of capitalism, patriarchy seems indeed "a machine that runs of itself," conditioned in human nature itself. Like racism and capitalism, however, it is legally structured into the fabric of life and therefore into consciousness, and assiduously if often unconsciously enforced by armed violence and the threat of violence. If the IWW had difficulty persuading its male (and female) members that women are by nature the equals of men, and not different in their essential nature, it was only partly because such a belief would undermine male self-regard and deprive women of their own accustomed role and identity. Such a belief also seemed to contradict the reality of everyday experience.
The IWW's campaign for gender equality, unlike its racial egalitarianism, encountered opposition in its own ranks. IWW discussions of "the woman question" often rebut arguments of revolutionists, Marxists, and rank-and-file members that belittle women and oppose agitation for birth control. Flynn, despite her denial of conflict between the sexes, complained about the backwardness of male IWW members.[lvi] And it is probable that, had the United States government not destroyed the IWW's records and files in 1923, more evidence of such tension would exist. Jane Street, head of the IWW's Denver Housemaid's Union, privately complained that members of Denver's mixed local gave her more trouble than all her other opponents--rich ladies, the employment agencies, and the YWCA--combined. "They have cut us off from donations from outside locals, slandered this local and myself from one end of the country to another, tried to disrupt us from within by going among the girls and stirring up trouble, they gave our club house a bad name because they were not permitted to come out there, and finally they have assaulted me bodily and torn up our charter." Street complained that "this opposition has spread... to all domestic workers' locals," condemned the "men who forget their IWW principles in their opposition to us," but retained faith that "the great principles and ideals that we stand for can completely overshadow the frailties of human nature."[lvii]
This extraordinary letter--which survived only because it was seized by the U.S. government before it reached its destination--is all the more remarkable because no suggestion of this acrimony made it into the IWW press. Both Solidarity and the Industrial Worker carried glowing accounts of the Denver Housemaid's union and appeals for support, some written by Jane Street herself. Ironically, the only inkling of anything unusual was a strange note in Solidarity by the press committee of the Denver mixed local, entitled "Rebel Girl Defenders," complaining that an article in Solidarity had not given credit to four men who had protected the housemaids. One of the four was the man whom Jane Street singled out as the worse offender, who had "worked with maniacal fervor" to drive her out of the IWW.[lviii]
The IWW men opposed Street's separate hall for housemaids, and her policy of excluding men from that hall. Street did not fear unwanted sexual advances by the men as much as she feared that the housemaids--isolated for the vast majority of the week in their employer's household, and usually allowed only one-half a day off per week--would welcome male attention, and forget the purposes of their union. The housemaids, Street said, were not rebels but conventional workers "having all the earmarks of slavery and the prejudices of bourgeois philosophy. Sex can come rushing into your office like a great hurricane and blow all the papers of industrial unionism out the windows."[lix]
Male Wobblies in the West were as starved for sexual attention as the housemaids were, and for similar reasons. Lacking all the desiderata of a potential husband--a steady job, high or even dependable income, fixed residence, social prestige--Western Wobblies had difficulty finding intimacy, or sexual outlet aside from prostitutes. Joe Hill complained that in the West the IWW "created a kind of one-legged, freakish animal of a union, and our dances and blowouts are kind of stale and unnatural on account of being too much of a 'buck' affair; they are too lacking the life and inspiration which the women alone can produce." Frank Dawson, even while extolling the migrant agitators as the mighty precursors of the new society, lamented that "no wifely smile greets their nightly homecoming, no children bless their eyes and rifle their pockets for candy. Like the Nazarene they are homeless." For these reasons, male Wobblies would find an IWW local composed exclusively of women an inviting social center, and feel aggrieved that they were excluded from its meetings and its hall.[lx]
The Denver local that evoked Street's ire was a Mixed Local, the same one that Sophie Vasilo complained about in 1908. A mixed local was a miscellaneous assortment of individuals from different industries who lacked sufficient numbers in any single industry to form a proper industrial union that could function on the job. Intended as temporary recruiting stations for workers who would soon join functioning industrial unions, the mixed locals became a thorn in the side of the IWW, known as a magnet for undisciplined "freaks" who alienated workers by doctrinal hairsplitting, spectacular publicity stunts, and interminable wrangling over points of doctrine. They were, by structure and composition, incapable of organizing on the job, the primary purpose of IWW locals. For all these reasons, the IWW decreed their abolition in ----.[lxi] Despite the convention's resolution, mixed locals refused to disband. Members of Denver's mixed local, therefore, may have been jealous when women organized themselves into an effective, fighting union, without male help, while the men had achieved nothing. Under such circumstances, some men may have wanted to fulfill the tradtional male role of protector of women, as well as finding opportunities to socialize with women.
The IWW encountered other problems in building its genderless counterculture. Although the IWW recruited and developed many able women leaders during strikes and free speech fights, it had almost no women among the national leadership. Flynn was the only woman among the 168 national leaders indicted in the massive Chicago IWW roundup of 1917. (Ben Fletcher, who had organized Southern lumbermen and Philadelphia longshoremen, was the sole black.) Maltilda Robbins, the only other female organizer, had resigned in 1916. Working-class women usually lacked confidence and skills in leadership, parliamentary procedure, and public speaking. Although the IWW overcame these obstacles at the local level, and found many women who could picket, give speeches, and endure beatings and jail with the best of men, few women could endure the danger, isolation, separation from families, and travel (often hobo-style) of national or regional IWW organizers. Flynn herself came from an extraordinary family which not only socialized and educated her far differently from most girls, but also raised her son so that she could live the life of an itinerant agitator. Despite her own resilience and independence, she found that IWW men often offered her unwanted protection. IWW men prided themselves on their chivalry and respect for women--attitudes certainly not lacking in condescension--and boasted that Flynn was as safe among an assemblage of rough-hewed Wobblies "as if she was in God's pocket." The Industrial Worker once claimed that "true respect for women is mostly confined to the working class.... it is the working men who are chivalrous and the loafers [capitalists] who are curs." Joe Hill's famous song, "The Rebel Girl," dedicated to Flynn, proclaimed that "the only and Thoroughbred Lady is the Rebel Girl."[lxii]
Nevertheless, any woman traveling alone risked humiliation and abuse from non-Wobblies; and capitalist thugs brutalized women with the same nonchalence as they clubbed men. Female organizers confronted a less obvious liability. Male organizers could always return to their old trade if, for whatever reason, they stopped working for the IWW. Women, however, became less marketable at their traditional occupation, that of wife, as they aged, and, if they were working-class, could probably not make a living at women's paid work. Any substantial time spent as an IWW organizer would cut her off from alternative sources of income if she proved unwilling or unable to continue with paid IWW work. As Flynn said, "marriage was their career, and to be an old maid was a lifelong disgrace."[lxiii] And if she was married, the burdens only increased; she simply could not travel unless someone else raised her children. The husband simply could not raise the children, even apart from cultural norms and expectations; the IWW did not pay organizers enough to raise an entire family.
The lack of women among the IWW's national leadership was not, therefore, the IWW's fault. The IWW could not overthrow patriarchy, any more than capitalism, by a mere effort of the will.
Despite these problems, there is no evidence that sexual animosities and jealousies seriously impeded IWW organization. The IWW, braving AFL and capitalist taunts, mobilized women in local unions and strikes, and made them an effective force for working-class solidarity. Even Jane Street's union prospered despite local male hostility until the federal government's wartime and post-war reign of terror virtually destroyed the IWW. The IWW furthered women's equality less than it hoped for the same reason that it could not overcome American racism: its local unions, the countercultural institutions that embodied the new life and demonstrated its benefits, were destroyed by ruling-class terrorism, locally and piecemeal from 1905 to 1916, nationally and wholesale thereafter. Lacking actually existing exemplars of the IWW's philosophy, the working class, of both sexes, socialized to patriarchy, took whatever consolation it could in its inherited, gender-based sources of dignity and identity. Odon Por, in a statement that explains much of history--and is as applicable to blacks and women as to workers--recognized that "what the organized working class thinks, what it wills, is of supreme importance, but what it wills depends on its consciousness of power. And this realization comes as a direct result of its collective activity." The desires of a subjugated group, in other words, depend on its ability to imagine viable alternatives to the status quo, which in turns depends on its power and ability to translate its desires into reality. Many insurgent groups grow more radical with success, as the inadequacy of their initial remedies becomes apparent and their power to affect change becomes manifest. As Solidarity said, the IWW recognizes "a class struggle as bitter as death.... The master class must be overthrown. And this cannot be done by honied words, by appeals to sentiment, by the force of logic or by gentle methods, but [only] on the stern battlefield of industrial war," fought where workers are robbed, at the point of production. Repression which destroyed the IWW unions, the nucleus of the new economy, vitiated the entire revolutionary counterculture, not only in what it could achieve but in what it could hope, imagine, and want. As Meredith Tax has said of working-class women, "when their class went down to defeat, they were the most submerged, for their struggle for equality within the working class was dependent on the success of the class struggle as a whole." The IWW intended to revolutionize all of life, not just the economy; its economic organizations and insurgencies provided the basis for a wide-ranging reconstruction of society. When these were crushed, the other aspects of its revolution necessarily faltered.[lxiv]
Nevertheless, the IWW was one of the most strident feminist organizations of its time, fighting more tenaciously for women's equality than any other working-class or male-dominated organization of its era. Its cultivation of female leadership during strikes, often over male opposition, must have affected the most intimate aspects of the lives of its members. Women who gave speeches, picketed, organized striker relief, and went to jail were unlikely to return unchanged to their old domestic roles once the strike was over.
The IWW's position on gender equality, as on race, was revolutionary. The IWW correctly perceived that the first need of most Progressive Era (and subsequent) women was higher wages and democratic control at the workplace, for themselves and then men in their lives. Only this could afford them economic independence from men (both capitalists and husbands); only this could free them to choose a life of work, motherhood, or a combination of the two. The IWW was also correct that the vote had merely symbolic significance. Suffrage gained almost nothing of importance for women until fifty years had passed and another feminist movement, much more radical than that of the Progressive Era, took to the streets as well as the ballot box and demanded change in boardrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms as well as in the legal structure. Meanwhile, in the thirties, white, middle-class female reformers, of the precise sort ridiculed and loathed by the IWW, constructed a state-managed welfare system for women that degraded, stigmatized, and impoverished the very people it purportedly helped.[lxv] The IWW properly recognized that for women and men to seize the entire product of their labor, and manage the industries for their own benefit, would give women the dignity, self-respect, and leisure, and equality that no state-run welfare bureaucracy or capitalist philanthrophy could offer them.
The reform of marriage, a radical feminist demand that IWW publicists occasionally applauded, has achieved less than its proponents hoped because women are still denied economic freedom and equality. The outlawing of marital rape and spouse abuse, certainly a worthwhile achievement, is vitiated in practice if the wife has no alternative to the rule of her husband. In the IWW's heyday, a battered wife would often petition the court for the early release of her imprisoned husband because she could not live without his wages.[lxvi] Similarly, a woman's best guarantee of equality in the kitchen and bedroom is her ability to make an ample, dignified, and independent living. This enables her to negotiate seemingly "private" aspects of life, such as housework, childcare, and sex, from a position of strength. As to political office, the IWW already offered women full equality in the only place where the IWW felt it mattered, in the industrial unions, embodiments of the new society.
The IWW never succumbed to the illusion that fundamental cultural change could occur independently of economic change. It wrestled with the conundrum that the workers must change their culture if they are to fundamentally improve their condition; but if economics largely produces culture, how could cultural change precede economic transformation? This seemingly abstract, chicken-and-egg question was intensely practical, not vapidly theoretical. The IWW's solution was for simultaneous economic and cultural change within its revolutionary industrial unions, the embryo of the new society. As with racial equality, the success of the IWW's feminist program depended on its overall success in permanently organizing workers of both sexes; obstacles to that success undermined women's equality even within the IWW. Without success in their struggles with mainstream society, the IWW could not overcome the structural and cultural barrier's to women's equality even within their own organization. No mere act of the will could elevate women; no manifestos, programmes, or ideologies could do so; only practical victories on the industrial field would help. The IWW found to its sorrow that "nothing succeeds like success."
The IWW's "equity" feminism based on women's common humanity is a better and safer argument for female equality than any variety of "difference feminism." In a patriarchal society, any differences ascribed to women will be pejoratively interpreted and undermine their position, even if the rhetoric is one of female superiority. In the Progressive Era many men as well as women argued that women were naturally purer, more religious, more moral than men; such arguments were used to exclude, as well as to include, women from the "vulgar" spheres of business and politics. "Difference feminism" was at best a two-edged sword, which had the additional disadvantage of dividing the working class, which employers, the legal system, and Congress already did. It reinforced the precise kind of invidious distinctions that the IWW carefully avoided. The IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism, had it been successful, would have offered women far more benefits than the most ambitious gender-based reforms capitalism can offer. Even the enormous upheavals and reforms of the 1960's and 1970's have not won women even the debased equality of wage-slavery with men, as is evidenced by the huge chasm in wages between the sexes, the feminization of poverty, and the ever-increasing numbers of women and children living on the street and scavenging for garbage.
There is an irony in the historiography of American radicalism of the Progressive Era. Many historians have falsely accused Max Eastman and his Masses crowd of ignoring the economic basis of oppression and of seeking frivilous, dilettante, single-issue reforms meant to enhance their own personal lives. Feminist historians, however, have criticized the IWW as excessively Marxist, economistic, and fixated on class, of ignoring the realities of gender oppression and patriarchy, and of offering no distinct programme for women. This is as misguided as the common critique of Max Eastman. Eastman is commonly accused of lacking a unified, totalistic view of the world which reduces every evil to one fundamental cause; the IWW is accused of propounding such a monotone, simplistic view. As we have seen, there is no necessary virtue in a simmplistic, unitary view of history and society. But the critique of the IWW is relevant only to reformers of the present system, or even to revolutionaries who want to capture existing institutions and transform them. The IWW, however, built its own countercultural institutions outside of existing society, and propounded its own values, and structured women's full equality into the very center of those institutions and values. The IWW did recognize women's position as the worst exploited at the workplace and (by their husbands and indirectly by the capitalists) in the home. It had a solid programme for addressing these multiple exploitations. Margaret Sanger and Antoinette Konikov, who lambasted the SP for its eternal waiting, its deferral of all real change into the indefinite future after the revolution, could make so such complaint against the IWW. The IWW had experience in breaking the law, taking risks, and forging countercultural values and institutions, and it placed this experience at the service of the entire working class.
The IWW's philosophy of gender was, after all, relatively simple: workers should identity themselves exclusively upon the basis of class, tossing all other forms of identity into the "ashcan of history." This alone could win a world in which the workers would have the leisure, education, and democratic control over the bases of life, necessary to become authentic, autonomous individuals for whom all collective identities, including that of class, would become obsolete. It is a lesson that the workers of the world, and especially in the United States, have yet to learn.
The IWW on Patriotism and Religion
In its war against traditional working-class cultures, the IWW necessarily confronted patriotism, and, to a lesser extent, religion. While most IWW writers condemned love of country and religious faith, many doubted whether the IWW should emphasize such issues. Attacks on patriotism and religion, unlike those on racism and sexism, were sometimes regarded as distractions from the class struggle that needlessly alienated potential recruits.
The IWW opposed patriotism because it divides the working class against itself while fostering an illusory community between workers and capitalists of the same nation. The Industrial Worker savagely attacked patriotic workers and asserted that "there are only two nations in the world--a nation of workers, and a nation of blood-suckers. The bloodsuckers have established imaginary lines in order to more easily bamboozle the workers." French radical Gustave Herve, in a speech reprinted in the Industrial Union Bulletin, said that "Patriotism is the collaboration of classes; Socialism... is the class struggle. Patriotism is the linking together of two classes" and "their blood communion on the field of battle; Socialism is the universal proletariat." The editor of another Herve speech, published in pamphlet form by the IWW, said that national pride divided the working class not only internationally but also within the United States. American patriotism, he said, is shallow jingoism "combined with race and nationality prejudices born of proximity rather than distance. The 'foreign enemy' is not beyond our borders, but in our midst." The Industrial Worker complained that national pride helped the capitalists, who encouraged different ethnic groups to outproduce each other and work harder, thereby proving their national superiority. Solidarity stated the IWW's position that "ALL WORKERS ON THE SOIL OF THE UNITED STATES ARE AMERICANS regardless of their birthplaces, and must unite as a CLASS against the only foreigners--that is, the labor skinners.... The newly arrived immigrant worker has a vote and voice in the IWW union, on equal terms with a native or old-time member."[lxvii]
Wobbly writers also attacked militarism, closely linked to patriotism, and condemned modern wars as imperialistic. Walker C. Smith, editor of the Industrial Worker, said that "all wars have an economic basis and heretofore, without a single exception, have been waged in the interests of the master class." In the leaflet "War and the Workers," widely distributed by the IWW, Smith complained that the workers who fight capitalism's wars are treated as mere cannon fodder, fed inferior food, subjected to brutal discipline, and killed and maimed in the service of their masters; after the war, they are uncermemoniously discarded. As victory and conquest do not raise pay, improve working conditions, or shorten hours, Smith advised workers: "LET THOSE WHO OWN THE COUNTRY DO THE FIGHTING."[lxviii] Other Wobblies charged that the armed forces recruited placed recruiting stations in the poorest neighborhoods, hoping that starvation would generate recruits.
The IWW recognized that service in the armed forces inculcated blind obedience and turned a person into a mindless, emotionless murder machine, who would kill not only "foreign" workers but American strikers on command. Wobbly writers often treated patriotism and "flag worship" as irredemiably appropriated by the master class. Solidarity pointed out that strikers who carry the flag find it no protection against violence from their "patriotic masters" and asked "what consolation can an empty stomach find in a piece of red, white and blue cloth that always heads processions of armed murdererers of the working class?" July 4th celebrations, it said on another occasion, enable the capitalists "to keep our eyes riveting on the past while they rob and enslave us in the present. To celebrate such a day is to celebrate one's own slavery." The Industrial Worker, observing that a mining company spent $1000 for flags, bunting, and fireworks for an Independence Day celebration even as workers died from unsafe mines, commented that "Patriotism is death.... It is cheaper to spend a thousand dollars for glags and fireworks once a year than to safeguard the mines and pay decent wages." Walker Smith, referring to the concentration camps in which strikers were interred during a Colorado strike, proclaimed that "a flag that floated over the bull pen in Cripple Creek cannot float for me." The Wobblies frequently asserted that all capitalist governments were equally violent and exploitative, and that the workers had no country except their class. Solidarity claimed that workers experienced "the spirit of American institutions" in the form of "the club, gun, jail, court and blacklist." Months after the U.S. had entered World War I, and compulsory patriotism was the order of the day, Solidarity complained that "America has a world-wide reputation as being a huge slave-pen."[lxix]
The IWW, however, clearly differentiated its position from that of bourgeois pacifists, and opposed only capitalist imperialism, not revolutionary insurrection. "Their patriotism is given to their own nation alone--the workers of the world," Smith averred. "They advocate open rebellion to all capitalist war and choose treason to the capitalist government rather than treason to their class." Haywood similarly felt that "it is better to be a traitor to your country than to your class." These statements were made in times of peace, but in 1914, when President Wilson contemplated war with Mexico, Haywood proposed a general strike, saying that "all that the workers would have to do is to fold their arms and there will be no war." Solidarity, fearing that American plutocrats would crush the Mexican revolution, warned that American workers who participated in this enterprise only forged their own chains more securely. It said that Mexican and American workers should fight together against their common oppressor and that "we shall not only refuse to fight for our masters, but we shall fight against them, with a general strike, in case they declare war upon Mexico." The IWW backed these words with deeds, and supported the Mexican revolutionaries with funds, ammunition, and weapons. Some Wobblies crossed the border and fought besides insurgent Mexicans.[lxx]
Other IWW writers, however, doubted whether anti-patriotic agitation was useful. Thinkers disagreed over whether the workers must reject patriotism before they could unite as a class, or whether class unions would precede and encourage liberation from patriotic and religious superstitions. Herve said that patriotic workers "will be incapable of acquiring the instruments of labor, production, and exchange, which form the real fatherland for you workers." Vincent St. John similarly recognized the irreconciable hostility between class consciousness and patriotism, but reversed cause and effect when he claimed that "the antagonisms between races and nations can only be abolished when the idea of class solidarity has been accepted by the workers."[lxxi]
The Industrial Worker asserted that flags are merely symbols, and that symbols could not affect the outcome of the class war. If all red flags and American flags were destroyed, it would make no difference to the outcome. "Destroy every red flag in the universe and conditions will produce the discontent symbolized in its folds. Destroy every national emblem and the patriotism of profit will still curse the land." The IWW could print 50,000 leaflets for the cost of one red silk flag. Revolutionaries should fight for realities, not symbols; "it is to be hoped that none are so foolish as to risk anything in defense of a piece of cloth, no matter what its color." In a similar vein, J.S. Biscay, a contributor to Solidarity, complained that revolutionaries wasted too much effort attacking patriotic and religious symbols. He argued that if the IWW appropriated traditional cultural forms, such as the American flag, the workers could use these symbols against their masters. "Take away their emblems from them and what will they flaunt? The enemy could not then draw on the superstitious herd to fight the radicals." Biscay was confident that "if we manage to get a religious worker interested in the movement, without beginning to make war on his pet fetish, he soon begins to educate himself in the movement" and would soon discard his superstititions. But if the IWW confronts him with anti-patriotic and anti-religious ideas "without giving him the same opportunity we had in educating ourselves, we only frighten him away" and reinforce his threatened ideas. "If we make him think at all, he will only think how horrible we are and [we] may never understand why." A major article in Solidarity likewise criticized speakers who attack religion, raise other issues extraneous to industrial unionism, and attack their audiences as "slaves" or "scissorbills," thus embittering and misinforming potential recruits. "Speakers who do not know really what the IWW aims at, should be made to find out or get off the box.... Let us learn to throw all the light we can on the wonderful subject of industrial unionism, but waste no more time of non-essentials." In late 1915, Solidarity asserted that "flexibility regarding propositions upon which a common ground of agreement has not been reached is absolutely necessary" to the IWW. Members may go to church, the voting booth, the saloon, or even to war, and must agree only on industrial unionism. Revolutionary industrial unionism would abolish all of these evils in time.[lxxii]
The IWW often acted on such advice. IWW strikers, especially in the East, hopefully marched with U.S. flags, partly as a defense against police clubs and militia bayonets, and partly as an assertion by the largely immigrant workers that they too belonged in the United States and contributed to American society. This tactic seldom worked; at Lawrence, the militia refused to salute the flags carried by strikers, and authorities in most places brutalized and murdered IWW strikers with impunity. But IWW activists were only too aware that the employers capitalized on any lack of patriotism among the Wobblies. During the Patterson strike the capitalists, responding to an anti-flag speech, designated March 19 as "flag day" and proclaimed that "we live under the flag; we fight for the flag; and we will work under the flag." IWW strikers attached miniature flags to their coats and responded "we wove the flag; we dyed the flag; we live under the flag; but we won't scab under the flag!" Some IWW writers used traditional notions to their advantage by asserting (usually when condemning vigilante and state terrorism against workers) that the United States had once been a free country with ample opportunity for the common man, and that the closing of the frontier and the growth of monopoly capitalism constituted a revolution from above that undermined traditional American liberties. Commenting on the Everett massacre of at least five Wobblies, and the subsequent trial of seventy-four Wobblies for these murders, a writer in Solidarity said that "the stars and stripes, like many other things that were born in the struggle for freedom, have been usurped by the ruling class and are being used today as a symbol of oppression."[lxxiii]
Religion was another volatile, potentially divisive issue. The Industrial Worker, written by and for western migrant workers who were often bitterly anti-religious, sometimes attacked religion as deluding workers with promises of "pie in the sky," preaching submission, and validating the deaths of workers in mines and factories as the will of God. Organization, not prayers, would secure workers the good things of life. Yet even the Industrial Worker carefully asserted that "we are not a religious organization, as so neither are we an anti-religious body. We do not quarrel with any man's religious convictions--we have our hands fully trying to make a living in this world." On another occasion it reminded its readers that the IWW had Christians, Moslems, and Confucians as members, "but the position of the IWW is not affected by the religious ideas of any of its members.... We confine ourselves to dethroning the kings of industry--the king of heaven is able to fight for himself." If a person earned heaven by worthy deeds on this earth, then "the IWW is the organization to join to get your hand in for the hereafter.... The preachers can fight out the fine points. The trouble with the church" is not its doctrines but that "it sides with the bosses, and fights the workers.... The IWW is the religion of food, healthy bodies, clean houses, and pure women; of decent enjoyment and care-free affection.... The IWW is the bread-and-butter union of the working people. Questions of religion, of race, or color, of nationality are so many firebrands sown among the workers to keep them from fighting the bosses and seeing where their true bread-and-butter interest lies."[lxxiv]
The IWW devoted no leaflets or pamphlets to attacking religion, as it did to debunking patriotism, and Solidarity, the national organ addressed primarily to the more settled workers in the East, usually disparged religion only in passing, while attacking patriotism, craft unionism, racism, and other divisive prejudices. Discussing the Lawrence strike, Flynn outlined IWW policy. The IWW did not attack the strikers' religious ideas "but we said boldly that priests and ministers should stick to their religion and not interfere in a workers' struggle for better conditions, unless the wanted to help.... The majority of workers were Catholic. We had pursued a correct labor policy during the strike of confining our remarks to answering Father Reilly and others only on strike issues. We did not discuss religion and warned all speakers, regardless of their personal views, not to offend the religious feelings of the people." If the strikers won, the IWW argued, they could contribute more to their churches. After the successful conclusion of the strike, anarchists carrying a banner inscribed "No God! No Master!" created headaches for the IWW, as the mill owners cloaked themselves in the mantle of religion. Flynn preferred that the IWW discredit the state and religious officials in the eyes of the strikers in a more subtle way, by allowing them to speak at meetings and reveal themselves in action. "You know, you may put a thing on a banner and it makes no impression at all, but you let a minister show himself up, let all the ministers show themselves against the workers, and that makes more impression than all the 'No God, No Master' banners from Maine to California. That is the difference between education and sensationalism." Years later, she said that "that banner was worth a million dollars to be employers," and may have been the work of a provocateur.[lxxv]
The IWW sometimes went further than religious neutrality and depicted "fellow worker Jesus," as a communist agitator and hobo who stole corn when he needed food, and whose teachings were later appropriated and distorted by the ruling class. Flynn mentions the Christmas decorations at the IWW hall in Tacoma, Washington, which featured the sayings of Jesus about the common people; ministers "came to criticize but were impressed with the simplicity and sincerety of the tribute."[lxxvi]
Many IWW writers focused on organization at the point of production as the raison d'etre of the IWW, and asserted that other problems would resolve themselves after the destruction of capitalism. Such writers opposed beliefs and prejudices such as racism, sexism, and nativism that actively obstructed working-class organization, but willingly downplayed IWW theories about other issues. In late 1915, Solidarity editorialized that experience proved
that to single out any one of the props of capitalism for attack, will only lead to disaster for the attackers.... "Anti-militarist," "anti-religious," "anti-political," and so forth, suggests a negative attitude only--[but] the IWW attitude is positive, in its most promising aspect. We are not merely against capitalism, we are FOR a new society that must logically be put in the place of capitalism.... The economic instinct--the urge for "food, clothing and shelter"--is at the bottom of all other instincts.... Our only hope, then, lies in the development of class consciousness and class organization on the basis of the economic instinct, among the workers. As this organization and consciousness develop, the relation of the economic instinct, to military, religious, political, and other instincts, will be more clearly perceived, as well as their adaptation to the interests of the capitalist class. Capitalism, as well as its props, will tumble into the ditch.[lxxvii]
Four months later, Solidarity reiterated and elaborated upon this stance. "We cannot see how military, religious, or political institutions will cease before capitalism ceases to exist. We are not certain that any or all of them will end even then. But we do know that there is one possible way only of ending them--along with capitalism. That is through industrial organization, as proposed by the IWW.... The great war has shown how overpowering is the organization of the ruling class to control and direct the affairs of the rest of the people. Industrial control is of course the crux of the whole process.... The working class is not a unit on any great proposition; formulas will not make it a unit; only organization that enables the workers to get an ever firmer control of industry, will do the trick."[lxxviii]
The IWW, therefore, both out of a principled emphasis on industrial organization, and a pragmatic adjustment to the sensibilities of many workers, downplayed its strident opposition to patriotism, religion, and ethnic consciousness during strikes, at times even using them as instruments of class solidarity. "Education is not a conversion, it is a process," Flynn said in describing the Patterson strike. "One speech to a body of workers does not overcome their prejudices of a lifetime. We had prejudices on the national issues, prejudices between crafts, prejudices between competing men and women,--all of these to overcome. We had the influence of the minister on the one side, and the respect that they had for government on the other side.... People are not material, you can't lay them down on the table and cut them according to a pattern. You may have the best principles, but you can't always fit the people to the best principles."[lxxix]
Despite Flynn's eloquent pessimism, there is scant evidence that issues of patriotism or religion figured greatly in IWW defeats. Religious authorities joined schoolteachers, the press, and government officials in denouncing the IWW, and all this vituperation undoubtedly had effect. But even in South Carolina, the miserable "stronghold of Americanism" and of an intense religiosity, the IWW made converts until it was suppressed by violence. Before then, illiteracy and a hopeless passivity, "the nakedness of poverty and absence of intellectual development," proved a greater obstacle to the IWW than either religion or patriotism. Deadened by poverty and discouraged by the defeat of past insurgencies, and lacking any examples of successful collective organization, the South Carolina mill workers were initially passive. But soon they flocked to hear IWW speakers, despite capitalist denunciations of their "un-Americanism." The IWW organizer specifically mentioned "The Preacher and the Slave" and "Stung Right," songs ridiculing religion and patriotism, as popular among the workers.[lxxx]
Flynn, arguing for greater IWW control over strikes and strikers, lashed out at anti-patriotic and anti-religious slogans that, in her estimation, alienated many workers. But Dubofsky and Golin have demonstrated that the disintegration of the IWW in Lawrence after its victory there, and its defeat at Patterson, were unrelated to issues of culture. Capitalist control of industrial and state apparatus, not the attitudes of the workers, decisively shaped events. Workers demonstrated ample ability to reject the advice of their religious leaders when such advice conflicted with the necessities of survival, and successfully resisted use of the flag for the purposes of class oppression. To the extent that religious, patriotic, and ethnic attitudes did affect workers, this perhaps stemmed from the workers' relative freedom to forge identities based on such non-class solidarities. IWW therorists may have underestimated the tenacity of religion and patriotism, and too sanguinely predicted their demise once capitalism was overthrown, but there is no way to know this for certain. We do know, however, that religion and patriotism, like other cultural forms, mean many different things to different communities at different historical moments, and that they take these divergent meanings largely from the social matrix in which they are embeded. They constituted an obstacle to the IWW only because they were constructed within the framework of a murderous and exploitative capitalism, which used them for its own purposes. The entire social system encouraged workers to seek solace and identify in mythic communities rather than in self-created lives and personalities based upon the democratic control of industry and meaningful, participatory citizenship. Had the IWW won the battle at the point of production, workers could more easily have redefined both religion and patriotism, as they did during IWW strikes, or jettisoned them altogether.
The IWW and the New Proletariat
The IWW recruited members of its revolutionary counterculture primarily among the unskilled workers, both the relatively sedentary "machine proletariat" of the East and the Western migratory workers. As Haywood said, "the common laborer at the meanest work is entitled to the same standard of life as the most skilled artisan. The chief work of the IWW is to organize the unskilled and the unorganized. It is upon this great mass of humanity that life depends. The skilled worker is comparatively a small faction" and will have to join the IWW once the unskilled mass are organized.[lxxxi]
The unskilled were not only the most numerous; they were also the worst abused and exploited. "The master cannot but regard him as a mongrel, and treat him with indifference or contempt" Solidarity asserted. "He is an alien dog who must hunt his own bone and kennel. He is not to be fed and kept warm before the household fire or sent to the dog kennel when he gets sick.... It is in this attitude of the master that we find hope" because it generates rebellion in the slaves. Gustave Herve similarly warned proletarians that when they "pass from one land to another" they "will everywhere be so much cattle for laboring purposes, have no other value than a piece of merchandise...."[lxxxii]
Yet the IWW claimed that this despised and degraded class, neglected and abused even by the trade unions, represented the future, and epitomized the condition towards which all workers and many non-workers were tending. The relentless development of machinery, with its concomitant deskilling and subdivision of tasks insured that the unskilled would inherit the earth. As Flynn said, "a skilled worker is a fellow waiting for some machine to run him off his job." This was part of what Haywood meant when he said, "the revolution is already occurring around us," and the workers must become conscious of this.[lxxxiii] IWW writers asserted that, just as the capitalists supplanted the feudal nobility, and large caps were now destroying small ones, so proletarians were overtaking craft workers in numbers, social significance, economic power.
Austin Lewis and Abner Woodruff, in major pamphlets which the IWW reprinted for many years, asserted that craft workers, while members of the working class, were not proletarians. Regarding their skill as a species of property, they upheld bourgeois property morality and law. Seeking improvement within the system, they were petty bourgeois in outlook. They protected themselves not only against capitalists but also against the unskilled by limited apprenticeships, high dues and initiations, and other limits on membership; they even devastated others who possessed their own skill by closing the membership books of their unions and locking fellow craftsmen out. Yet craftsmen, like the petty bourgeoisie, were doomed. As Woodruff said, "any economic system built upon the RIGHTS OF PROPERTY is a confiscatory system, and little property disappears before big property. The property of the craftsman--his skill--tends to evaporate." IWW writers recognized that the huge, modern corporations were restructuring work and oblitterating the skilled crafts, and using their enormous economic power to crush craft unions. Vincent St. John only echoed the certainties of most Wobblies when he said that "the future belongs to the IWW. The day of the skilled worker has passed. Machine production has made the unskilled worker the main factor in industry." Yet the skilled workers organized in the AFL, filled with craft, race, patriotic, and gender pride, "have become allies of the employers to keep in subjection the vast majority of the workers."[lxxxiv]
The unskilled majority, IWW writers asserted, are essential to the operation of industry and the very existence of society. As Lewis said, they "form the definite and indispensable substratum of every industry." The side that wins their loyalty during a strike will win because they can operate the industries, especially in conjunction with scab union craftsmen, who, in obedience to their sacred contracts, remain on the job and even do the work of striking craftsmen. When the unskilled strike, however, the skilled craftsmen cannot do their work, and must walk out whether or not they want to. Lewis concluded that "everything then combines to place the unskilled laborer in the strategic position in the labor struggle. He becomes the one vital factor without which no victory in the fight between the laborer and the capitalist can be won. He who has the unskilled laborer has the victory." The unskilled mass, if organized, "can dislocate an industry whevever it chooses to do so. It can practically dictate the terms on which the so-called skilled trades must operate.... When the unskilled laborer enters the fight he drags the rest of the crafts after him." Once they realize their power, they can conquer industry and society; they already do the work. The IWW, Walker Smith said in another IWW pamphlet, "holds that the only power of the master class lies in the ignorance of the workers as to their economic might." The workers can paralyze industry by withdrawing their labor power or "apply it so that the machine does not function properly."[lxxxv]
The unskilled workers, the IWW felt, were the deracinated proletarians predicted by Marx, and were naturally revolutionary. Having no property, even in their skill, they rejected property morality. Solidarity epitiomized the proletarian's natural attitude: property is "the means of our subjugation, the whip in the hands of our masters, the cause of our misery and degradation." The unskilled worker, Lewis claimed, was "a permanently outlawed class" which came into contact with society only as represented by the policeman who beat and degraded him. "He has no part or lot in the existing social system." The police "inflict every indignity upon him and render his necessary migration through the land as difficult and as dangerous as possible." No municipal socialism, labor legislation, or ameliorative reform could help him. Woodruff said that "his whole attitude is one of opposition--opposition to the property of the master class--an attitude utterly subversive of all modern ethics, morals, religions, and laws, an utterly Revolutionary attitude." The proletariat is "an alien class in modern society, [which] finds itself unable to function agreeably, even tolerably, in conjunction with any other class. Its whole attitude is one of fundamental antagonism." All that the IWW must do, in this view, is expound and popularize the proletarian's natural philosophy and make them realize their strength. In the words of Lewis, "the unskilled laborer knows without any telling that he is exploited at the point of production.... He matches his no-property against all the property of the dominant class, his no-law against the law of the industrial and commercial masters, his ability to starve against all the resources of civilization." Haywood admonished the workers, "remember you hold the power in the shop even if the employer does hold the title.... We can lock the capitalists out and continue to run the machinery."[lxxxvi]
Proletarians, the IWW asserted, have no pride in their output, and indeed have no discernible product they can call their own. They have no pride in their skill or in anything connected to their work. "During the hours of their labor," Woodruff stated, "they are no longer thinking men, but mere automatons, performing their functions mechanically and completely dominated by the will of another." Solidarity averred that "their work consists of some monotonous task, such as feeding raw material into a machine, and consciously or unconsciously they are rebels against the existing order. These workers see no chance for promotion from the ranks. They realize that their wages have no relation to the quality or quantity of the product of their toil. They have, in fact, no product, but simply perform their mechanical part in the vast process of manufacturing commodities for the market." Walker Smith repudiated the traditional craftsman ethic and all cant about the nobility of labor. "Such labor as [the IWW's] members do under capitalism," he said, "is performed unwillingly and they refuse to take pride in their work until such time as they are laboring on their own behalf." Starr Bountar, in an article entitled "I Won't Work" (a defiant reply to capitalist editors who claimed that this was the real meaning of IWW) proclaimed that "a day spent in your workshops and factories is a day wasted. It is only the hour of rebellion that counts, it is only the moments spent in undermining by intelligence and education you citadel of oppression, that makes life worth living." Although the proletarian lacked security of employment of any dignity, his work was, Woodruff said, nevertheless "the only place where he appreciably functions in the scheme of modern life."[lxxxvii]
The proletarians were also suitable revolutionary material because they labored under conditions of "scientific team work" and viewed production as a social, not individual, process. They were free from the craft, racial, patriotic, and gender prejudices appropriate to skilled craftsmen. As Woodruff said, "the free and close association of all the workers [and] their discussion and co-operation for mutual economic and social purposes tend to break down the ancient craft, national, and race antagonisms." This was natural, not a forced, process, that occurred on the job and in the factories. Solidarity said that the proletariat, although recruited out of every nationality, race, and sex, was nevertheless a unit. Despite their diverse origins, "they have one long experience in common--they have been and are slaves of the machines. That enables them to understand one another. Through that experience, on the anvil of attempted social repression, they are being welded into industrial solidarity--the unassailable unity of the working class." On another occasion it heralded the machine proletariat, which "stands alone in the world like a lion, and defies all the law and conventions" of the capitalists and "fights in terms of class."[lxxxviii]
Even more important, the IWW regarded the proletariat as, unlike craftsmen, congruent with mechanization and the organization of modern industry. They welcomed the machine as producing more wealth for themselves, once they have seized it, while the reactionary craftsman regarded machinery as undercutting his property in his skill. The craftsman fights a losing battle against modern machinery and also against the centralized, trustified, and international corporation whose efficiency and economic power dooms him. The IWW, on the contrary, welcomed these developments as massing and solidifying the new working class, expanding output, and divorcing ownership from the control and operation of industry, all of which facilitated the coming revolution.
By making proletarians the basis of organization, the IWW felt that it must only realize the inherent tendencies in modern social and industrial organization and bring existing fact into the consciousness of the rising proletariat. IWW writers looked to the machine proletariat rather than the declining craft worker or the declassed petty bourgeois because, as Lewis said, "there is no revolutionary effectiveness in a beaten class." Woodruff said that "like the bird in the egg, the physical portion of the Industrial Democracy already exists within the framework of modern society.... The quickening of this mass into life is the next step. An awakened Social Conscience, a realization of power, and a desire for true economic freedom must bring about the great change." Joseph Ettor called the new machine proletariat "the modern Sileni," an unprepossessing group which is nonetheless destinied to inherit the world. "It is just these workers whom Industrial evolution has cast on the shores of society in order to work out its redemption.... The capitalists know that they have to contend, not with an enervated, corrupt, pauperized class, but a virile class" born of modern industrial tendencies, and structured into the warp and woof of modern society, indispensable and mighty. Lewis averred that the unskilled worker, used to periodic unemployment, living on a pittance, and moving in search of a job, could survive a strike or series of short strikes much better than the skilled craftsman with a mortgage binding him to his locale. The proletarian, Lewis said, pits "his ability to starve against all the resources of civilization."[lxxxix]
In addition to recruiting the machine proletariat of the East, the IWW also targeted workers in the basic, extractive industries of the West. Farm laborers migrated in pursuit of the harvest, carried all of their possessions on their backs, and lodged in bunkhouses or barns, or simply slept under the stars. Loggers worked at a seasonal industry, usually at a succession of isolated camps, while miners sometimes worked for only part of the year and often lived far from permanent towns. Many of these workers, especially the "harvest stiffs" and loggers, were highly transient, young, single men who "rode the rails" in search of work and had no permanent job or occupation. Many lived at times in "jungles," or hobo camps near the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Western towns, and often begged ("threw their feet") or stole when work was unavailable. Some Wobblies saw them as the very epitome of the new proletariat, and hence a natural constituency of the IWW, while others lamented their excessive individualism.
The Industrial Union Bulletin rhapsodized that the hoboes, "strong limbed, resolute, self-reliant--many of them the finest specimens of American manhood--constitute the leaven of the revolutionary labor movement in the West," whose absence in comparable numbers in the East accounted for the greater conservatism of that region. "With his perception quickened by travel and varied experience," the migrant spreads the gospel of revolutionary unionism everywhere he goes. "Leaving his job whenever conditions do not suit him," he raises "the spirit of revolt" among those who stay behind. In the fall, when the harvest is complete, the hoboes congregate in Western towns, "where they spend much of their leisure in public libraries and show up in large numbers at Socialist and IWW meetings." They buy revolutionary literature which they read and broadcast far and wide on their travels.[xc]
Walker Smith, editor of the Industrial Worker, agreed. The western hoboes were recruited from the "more rebellious of the unmarried men" of the East who travelled west looking for opportunity, or in the aftermath of a long and bitter strike. They were "the real proletarians," lacking property, roots, and conventional attitudes. "The one, last tie that binds other workers to society is lacking; there are no family ties.... Yet among these men are found men with intellect, even college bred and powerful speakers are not rare.... This is the class that the masters fear.... It is to this class, turned down by the AF of L, that the IWW must turn for material to organize." In another article, the Industrial Worker said that "for his labor the blanket stiff receives a miserable wage from his bosses, blows from the police, curses from the middle class, and sneers from the aristocracy of labor. And yet his every action influences all of society and when he tries to shake off his chains all society trembles with the upheaval."[xci]
Forrest Edwards, head of the IWW's union of migrant agricultural workers, extolled their independence and fighting spirit. The migrant, Edwards said, must grow strong or perish. He is too independent for a sedentary job in a permanent location, and "will never again enter the industries as a permanent occupation, except in rare cases. The rules in industry are too strict for him." On the road, the hobo jettisons the entire bourgeois moral code. "He has more time to think. He is more radical than the industrial slave. He is more independent. He has no one depending on him for bread. No property interests or instincts. No home. He is despised and hated.... The IWW offers him a measure of protection impossible in any other organization."[xcii]
Frank Dawson, writing in Solidarity, extolled "the quick moving fellow workers who will jump across the continent to reach the centers of revolution.... Like the Nazarene, they are homeless" and "despised and rejected of men." They are thrown into fetid jails. "Yes, they are bums, tramps, and hoboes. But they carry the most significant doctrine of revolt in the land.... They may be seedy. But their very seediness is the surest sign of a serious social canker." Dawson compared the IWW's hobo agitators to the Cromwells and Luthers of history; Star Bounter likened them to Hebrew prophets, early Christians, the student tramps of the Middle Ages who inspired the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the precursor of the French Revolution, the "tramp-peddlar, pack on shoulder, who sowed the seeds of revolt and insubordination."[xciii]
Bountar's paean to the rootless, wandering agitators evoked a reply from Ben Williams. Bountar, Williams complained, romanticized the individualistic "free footed rebel" who embodies merely the "spirit of revolt" and distrusts organizations and institutions as throttling that spirit. Williams insisted that "the revolt must be ORGANIZED, and take concrete form cell by cell, tissue by tissue, in the framework of a new society" even if that "spoils the poetry of the labor movement." Williams surmised that "the pioneer pathfinders may have to give way to non-fighting conservators and builders," and argued that they should do so willingly when the time arrives.[xciv]
Over a year later, another writer in Solidarity, replying to a similar paean to the restless, wandering rebel, likewise stressed the necessity of discipline, solidarity, and organization. The IWW could not succeed with members who were "half industrial slave, half vagabond adventurer." The spirit of the IWW "is embodied in those whose slavery is complete," those who have families to defend. The man who quits a job when conditions are bad is no hero. "The final argument of a scissorbill [a conservative worker] is that he can quit a disagreeable job.... The privilege of quitting is what keeps the scissorbill from organizing. He will chase the rainbow of a good job.... The ones who stay and agitate on the job and try to organize are the ones who may become the guerillas of the revolution" and the sharpshooters of the class struggle.[xcv]
This same author condemned the philosophy of simplifying wants and working little, and branded its adherents as little better than the phrasemongering middle class radicals. The IWW press occasionally printed jovial and insouciant articles from members who refused to work. The Industrial Worker treated its readers to the musings of a wanderer who was surprised that the propertied remained in California's sweltering Imperial Valley during the summer, while "the knights of the road can go where the oranges grow the sweetest and the breezes blow the coolest; when they get tired of resting under the orange trees and eating the luscious fruit, they can go to the ocean and find some sandy secluded spot on the seashore, and undress and let the cool waves of the peaceful Pacific lave their sturdy bodies." Meanwhile the propertied swelter, "keeping the shade trees growing so that there will be shade for the hoboes next winter.... Several of these tramps have told me personally that as long as the moneyed men and ranchers were heroic and ambitious enough to stay here in the summer, they would always show that they appreciated such heroism by coming here to spend their winters."[xcvi] In a similar vein, the Industrial Worker printed without comment "A Tramp's View of Work," written by a member who had probably read Thoreau and who definitely rejected the entire emerging consumer culture:
I live and enjoy myself--by not working. You live and enjoy yourself by working--so you must admit that it is simply a matter of opinion.... But I do maintain that the work a man does should bear some relation to his wants.... My own wants are few.... I have no desire to increase my wants.... Why, then, if you please, should I be forced to work at a job I do not like, simply for the purpose of providing myself with something I do not want?.... I am looking for the irreducible minimum of artificial desire, and am willing to work to satisfy that minimum. I raise no objections if other people are foolish enough to work themselves to death in order to live, though I reserve the right to sneer.[xcvii]
Such sentiments evoked the ire of "Sin Bad," an IWW writer upset that "a doctrine common among quitters is that the less you work the less you are exploited. In order to be exploited less they adopt a standard of living that keeps them in the collar the shortest part of the time. The application of their doctrine keeps the Western Wobbly poorly dressed, poorly fed and poorly sheltered." The author complained that "this element is going to beat the bosses by starving and depriving themselves of the necessities of life." Such workers lack the vitality and motive to fight the boss, and often disrupt IWW locals with hair-splitting doctrinal disputes. "The propaganda of action is what counts," not mere talk. We cannot rely on "hot air and enthusiasm to build the IWW."[xcviii]
Charles Ashleigh agreed with both the extollers and the critics of the Western rebel. The hobo, he said, is "a worker who moves about because he works in seasonable industries. Just that and nothing more," neither a bum and degenerate nor "a species of wandering superman." He lacked ties to organized society, rejected religion and conventional life and morality, and loathed the law. "On the other hand, it has been rather hard to get the floater to accept the idea of job action and agitation. The stationary worker sees no method of escaping rotten conditions except by bettering them. The floater too often tries to avoid them by quitting the job. Especially on the Pacific coast have the more individual romatic and venturesome features of the working class rebellion attracted the workers. Much too little stress has been laid on organization," and the hallmark of a rebel is too often a defiant attitude rather than effective action through the IWW.[xcix]
Edwards differentiated between three types of hoboes, which he defined as "a migratory person." The tramp was an individualist who worked as little as possible, depended on his wits for a living, and wanted to raise a stake for a start in some small business. The crook, of which there were many varieties "is a real menace to the workers" and "a bar to successful organization." The migratory worker "is the only one who can function on the job" and is the only one interested in improving conditions. Justus Ebert defended the migratory worker as necessary to the very existence of the United States and avereed that he is so mistreated that "it is no wonder that he often prefers idleness to work. And with unemployment often his lot it is not wonder that he steals to defend himself." He sometimes becomes unemployable due to "loss of contact with employment" because he cannot find work. "Without property and few ties and with the instinct of rebellion, he is the best material to bring about a fundamental social change. Born of revolutionary changes in production, he is the advance guard in the revolution to change the ownership and control of production.... His fight against degradation is a guarantee of the part he is bound to play in social transformation."[c]
The ultimate word was probably that of a 1912 Industrial Worker editorial on "The Blanket Stiff." In the West "there has been bred a type of worker who is self reliant to the point of individualism and who is somewhat lacking in the discipline necessary to strong organization. The east shows just the opposite, broadly speaking, and presents the workers with acting en masse but without the individual aggressiveness found among the migratory workers of the newer country. The Western and Eastern types serve to balance one another in the organization and as the spirit of each becomes more diffused the IWW will become more nearly perfected in point of action...." IWW writers admitted that, among the migrants as in the urban slums, there were some workers demoralized by continual defeat, who would not keep clean, who drank too much, who had lost all self-respect and all ability to fight their masters. But The Industrial Worker defended independent workers "who will tramp and suffer, rather than be the servile tools" of capitalist masters, and averred that "a tramp is a thousand times better than a scab, even if the tramp never worked a day."[ci]
In weighing the qualities condusive to organization, and explaining success and failure upon the basis of the alleged qualities of different groups of workers, the IWW recognized that it could not by an act of the will conjure up an organized working class regardless of the pre-existing cultural attributes of the members of that class. Yet the events of history suggest that the one over-riding quality condusive to successful organization is a rationally founded confidence that success is possible. Workers (or blacks or women) fight when their experience (whether, in the case of workers, a temporary abatement of government terrorism or a labor shortage) has convinced them that they can win. Despite the fact that harvest workers were notoriously individualistic and, with their migratory lifestyles, difficult to keep track of, the IWW successfully organized them during World War I. Innovation in the IWW's organizing techniques partly explain this success. The IWW, replacing its ineffective efforts to recruit migratory workers while they were wintering or temporarily stopping in the towns, instituted an effective job delegate system that recruited organizers who followed the harvest from South the North. Yet the decisive factor was the simultaneous demand for soldiers and for massive agricultural production, which produced a labor shortage on the farms of the West. This enabled the IWW to retain the loyalty of the farm laborers even into 1918, when federal repression had virtually destroyed the IWW's organizational infrastructure and imprisoned almost its entire leadership.
A New Social Formation
The IWW appealed to the new proletariat with a new form of unionism, revolutionary in structure, philosophy, and goals. The IWW, "forming the new society within the shell of the old," defined itself in opposition to the conservative craft unionism of the AFL as well as to the conservative electoral strategy of the Socialist parties. Haywood, at the founding convention of the IWW, proclaimed that the AFL "is not a working class movement. It does not represent the working class." The IWW was "a labor organization," not a rival of the AFL. Subsequent experience did not alter this belief. Vincent St. John later stated that the AFL craft unions "have become allies of the employers to keep in subjection the vast majority of the workers. The IWW denies that the craft union movement is a labor movement. We deny that it can or will become a labor movement."[cii] The IWW criticized the AFL unions as a "job trust" which excluded most workers by racial, gender, and skill requirements for membership, by charging exorbitant initiation fees and dues, and by closing their books even against their fellow craftsmen.
The IWW, unlike the AFL, accepted all workers, regardless of race, sex, nationality, or skill. Although the IWW attacked the leadership of the AFL and criticized the narrow prejudices of its membership, the IWW, as Haywood said at the founding convention, was "broad enough to take in all of the working class." Haywood did not "care a snap of my finger whether or not the skilled workers join this industrial movement at the present time. When we get the unorganized and unskilled laborer into this organization the skilled worker will of necessity come here for his own protection." The IWW's vision included skilled craftsmen, white collar workers, and unskilled laborers in one all-inclusve union. "No one," Abner Woodruff said, "is so great or so humble that he should be excluded."[ciii] The IWW accepted an AFL union card, as well as that of any other union, in lieu of an initiation fee, and kept dues so low that the lowest paid worker could join.
The IWW's fundamental structural principle was industrial unionism--that is, organizing workers not according to craft, skill, or job, but place of work. For example, every worker employed at a steel mill--whether steelworker, truck driver, janitor, or payroll clerk--would belong to the same local. When such a union struck, it would completely close the plant. Craft unions, on the contrary, struck in isolation while the other workers (including those in other AFL unions) continued work, thus facilitating capitalist recruitment of scabs and ensuring the defeat of each union separately. IWW literature emphasized that an AFL union card "is nothing more than a scabbing permit." St. John emphasized the necessity of having "the form and structure of the organization correct in order to facilitate the growth of solidarity on class lines among the workers." Only a union that organized all workers on industrial lines could be considered a class organization.[civ]
Even AFL unions that had an industrial structure, such as the United Mine Workers, signed contracts with different companies (or with the same company in different locations) that expired at different times, thus preventing unified, class action. For example, coal miners in different states signed contracts that expired on different dates; when one UMW local was on strike, others, even those working for the same company in different areas, remained at work, in effect scabbing on their co-unionists and allowing the capitalists to transfer production from a struck mine to those still open. The capitalists, knowing when any particular contract expired, stockpiled coal in anticipation of a strike in any district. The Industrial Union Bulletin called the UMW "a monument to the cunning of the capitalist class and its puppets" which "organizes the miners exactly along the lines demanded by the economic interest of the capitalist class." The UMW was as much a bulwark of capitalism as was the army; its check-off system and compulsory membership rendered the miners virtual slaves, who could be expelled from the union (as therefore from their jobs) for criticizing union officials. The IWW aimed to unite all coal miners into a single fighting force which could stike simultaneously all across the nation; it would similarly organize all other miners in the same general Mining Department, so that all miners could come to the aid of any on strike. The IWW also had District Councils that united all the workers of a specific locality, enabling them to strike in unison.[cv]
The form of organization, however, was only one aspect of the IWW's revolutionary industrial unionism. St. John insisted that "without revolutionary principles, Industrial Unionism is of little or no value to the workers." The most practical manifestation of the IWW's revolutionary philosophy, aside for its incessant agitational and educational work, was its refusal to sign time contracts with the capitalists. The IWW considered contracts as virtually conceding the legitimacy of capitalism and acknowledging that "a fair day's wage" was possible under capitalism; the IWW, on the contrary, demanded "abolition of the wage system." More practically, contracts throttled the workers' ability to strike when times were propitious, gave the capitalists advance warning of a possible strike, and in general defused the class war. Workers should take whatever they can from their exploiters, at any time and by any means, and fight the class war with the same unrelenting ferocity as their capitalist masters, who would violate any contract the workers lacked the power to enforce. Most crucially, contracts negated the solidarity of the working class by denying unions the freedom to strike in support of their brothers and sisters. As St. John said, the IWW committed itself "to an unceasing struggle against the private ownership and control of industry. There is but one bargain that the IWW will make with the employing class--COMPLETE SURRENDER OF ALL CONTROL OF INDUSTRY TO THE ORGANIZED WORKERS."[cvi]
The IWW regarded itself not merely as a union, but as an entirely new social formation, the embreyo of the new society, and "the vanguard of the army of labor in its march to economic freedom." As Solidarity averred, "the working class must organize a new social environment out of the materials already at hand" and "ABSORB AND CONTROL EVERY ACTIVITY OF THE WORKING CLASS...." St. John claimed that the IWW was "all-sufficient for the workers needs," and would replace government and every other form of social organization. An editorial in Solidarity agreed, and insisted on the necessity of a wide-ranging, comprehensive organization to combat capitalist hegemony in every area of life. "The upholders of the present order are working old prejudices and traditions overtime and creating new ones in their efforts to maintain themselves as the dominant power in society.... Our only method of combatting them is our ability to develop institutions which will act as antidotes for the poison injected into the workers' minds by these agencies of capitalism"-- the press, the priests, and the politicians. IWW publications must replace the capitalist press, IWW propaganda leagues perform the functions of their churches, and the industrial unions constitute the IWW's army and navy. (The IWW, as we shall see below, also supported alternative schools.) Together these working-class institutions "will make good the declaration of the Preamble and build the structure of industrial democracy within the shell of capitalism, making the workers the owners and rulers of the earth."[cvii]
The IWW faced violence as well as more subtle mechanisms of hegemony; as Solidarity reminded its readers, the capitalist class "is ready to starve, blacklist, club, shoot, jail or hang individuals or groups of workers, as examples to the rest to remain docile under the blood-letting.... The masters' record is one continuous narrative of deeds of violence against the slaves." Solidarity recommended revolutionary industrial unionism as the main antidote to this terrorism, but fully recognized that such unionism must transcend essential shopfloor issues and achieve a total transformation of working-class life and consciousness. Ben Williams averred that the IWW denotes "the logical evolution of the new social system--from below--out of the depths--building upon the firm foundation of working class initiative and constructive genius." As Grover Perry stated in a major pamphlet, the IWW "is a labor union that aspires to be the future society." St. John agreed that the IWW "will eventually furnish the union through which and by which the organized workers will be able to determine the amount of food, clothing, shelter, education and amusement necessary to satisfy the wants of the workers." Woodruff, echoing a sentiment repeatedly voiced by Ben Williams and other IWW leaders, said that "any force in society that lacks a constructive program is a useless--a futile force."[cviii]
The IWW proposed that its members prepare for the new society by democratically governing themselves at the point of production and, through self-education and strikes, assuming more and more responsibility for managing industry. Joseph Ettor called the IWW "the industrial army of occupation and production." Woodruff restated a common IWW theme when he said that the IWW "proposes that the ballot box shall repose first in the Union hall, and then in the shop; and one needs only to function in industry to be a voter there.... The revolution can properly occur, only after the proletariat has had sufficient training in voluntary co-operation and self-government" and demonstrated "its ability to successfully continue production and handle distribution so that all may be fed.... No class has ever yet successfully dominated society unless it deomonstrated its ability to direct industry.... The proletariat must recognize and be prepared to assume the responsibilities of production and distribution, and of social and industrial administration" or accept capitalist rule. "It must have a positive scientific philosophy, a definite conception of the future society, and a practicable program." Arturo Giovannitti asserted that unless the workers could run the factories, after a revolution "the capitalists would wend themselves back to their old positions"; for this reason, the IWW educates the workers so that they can inherit society, "but the socialists merely build air castles."[cix]
Haywood agreed that "it should be the ambition of every industrial worker to possess a technical and practical knowledge of industry" because "learning how to appy labor power in the most scientific way" would allow workers in the present to effectively withhold or redirect their labor, while fitting them for the ultimate operation of industry "for all society rather than for a privileged class of idle stockholders."[cx] Haywood was confident that when the workers inherited the earth, they would transform not only class relations and society but the workplace itself. During the Patterson strike, a conflict usually characterized by concrete organizing rather than abstract theorizing or utopian dreaming, Haywood, contemplating the dreary death-traps in which the workers toiled, told the strikers that when the workers owned and managed the mill,
There will be a wonderful dining-room where you will enjoy the best food that can be purchased; your digestion will be aided by sweet music, which will be wafted to your ears by an unexcelled orchestra. There will be a gymnasium and a great swimming pool and private bathrooms of marble. One floor of this plant will be devoted to masterpieces of art, and you will have a collection even superior to that displayed in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. A first-class library will occupy another floor.[cxi]
The IWW's concept of leadership was far more democratic than that of the AFL or other institutions of mainstream society. Flynn, echoing the sentiments of most Wobblies, attacked the AFL's labor leaders as class collaborationists who hobnobed with the rich, feathered their own nests, put the interests of capital above those of the workers, and exercised dictatorial authority over those whom they in theory served. Flynn cited examples of AFL union officials ordering workers back to work under unsafe conditions, sabotaging strikes by making separate agreements with the capitalists, and using union office as a stepping-stone for a political career. Flynn said that "the captains of industry needed lieutenants of labor and through their yearly banquets and continual associations a distinct chasm in interests has been created between workers and their spokesmen. (Tim Healy in the dress suit, a sight for the gods, is not Tim Healy in overalls.) The latter eat and drink with the capitalists, dress, live and finally think like them.... You are fighting for Your pay envelop. He is fighting for His pay envelop. You are fighting for your class. He is fighting for the LABOR LEADER CLASS." Assessing blame for this situation, Flynn highlighted a central ambivilance in radical theory. On the one hand she blamed the capitalist system for deadening the minds and sensibilities of the workers and reducing them to passivity and torpor, and gave a sophisticated analysis of how capitalism, as a total system, molded workers for slavery. On the other hand, she blamed the workers as agents responsible for their own plight. "Physically overworked, they become mentally inert. Accustomed to taking orders, they drift into the habit of letting some one else think for them. It is a noticeable fact that the more subservient and submissive men are in the shop, the easier prey they are to the labor leader outside. The slave mind does not become revolutionary on the street between the shop and the union hall.... The workers alone are responsible. Labor leaders could not lead if there were no sheep-like men to follow." Flynn's solution was IWW workers' democracy, a union in which "the soldiers become the generals and the generals are the soldiers; where all power and orders flow from the mass to and through their representatives...."[cxii]
IWW strikes, therefore, were managed by all the workers, not just IWW members, through democractically elected representatives. The IWW encouraged the strikers to listen to every point of view, and allowed priests, politicians, and capitalists to speak to the mass meetings of the strikers. Flynn advised the Patterson strikes to "listen to them all and then take what you think is good for yourselves and reject what is bad. If you are not able to do that then no censorship over your meetings is going to do you any good."[cxiii] Although IWW agitators, speakers, and leaders often differed from the main body of the strikers, or from the elected strike leadership, the leaders, and even more, the mass meetings of the strikers themselves, exercised ultimate authority in all matters, and sometimes decided against the advice of the IWW's leaders and organizers.
The IWW stressed mass organization and power and disdained the cult of the leader. Solidarity, discussing the recall of Haywood from the SP's NEC, said that IWW papers "keep the individual in the background as much as possible, and emphasize the tactics, forms, and principles of industrial organization. While trying to estimate Haywood and all other prominent workers at their worth, we are most strenuously opposed to the 'great man' conception of the proletarian movement." Haywood and Flynn heartily seconded this emphasis, especially where they were themselves concerned. In the Patterson strike, both leaders downplayed their own significance, claiming that their main use was as outsides who could articulate the workers' own thoughts which the workers could not voice only because of fear of employer retaliation. Haywood told the strikers thaat "I have come to Patterson not as a leader. There are no leaders in the IWW; this is not necessary. You are the members of the union and you need no leaders. I come here to give you the benefit of my experience throughout the country. The union belongs to you." Flynn agreed, saying that "I have nothing to lose so I can say whatever I please about the manufacturers as long as I express your sentiments."[cxiv]
Abner Woodruff, writing in Solidarity, advocated freeing class-war prisoners through publicity and mass action. Reliance on lawyers and the formal legal system, he said, undermined proletarian democracy.
When we hire lawyers we cater to a section of the bourgeoisie and educate the workers to regard them as indispensable to us in the class struggle.... Further, when we voluntarily appear as protagonists in the courts, we evince respect for an institution which we verbally profess to hold in contempt--an utterly inconsistent position.
The fellow worker, so thrown into the limelight, becomes, at once, a sort of TIN JESUS to be revered and idolized. We have enough of such. The democracy of labor is destroyed--the workers look to someone else to do their work. We cannot afford saviors, or leaders, or martyrs. Our special business is to develop the mass--to promote class action and solidarity. Saviors and leaders are inimical to that.[cxv]
Ben Williams similarly averred that the IWW required in its leaders primarily administrative abilities and obedience to the will of the members. Such administrators "are living the life of the working class," which needs no hero worshippers or heroes. "This conception of leadership, in conjunction with the structural form of the economic organization itself, foreshadows the industrial democracy of future society," where selfish individualism will fall before an ethic of service to "the interests of the collectivity." Solidarity, attacking self-styled saviors who gravitated into the labor movement from other classes, heralded "a new concept of labor leadership.... The new leader is an ADMINISTRATOR, chosen by the workers themselves to discharge a certain function in their organization. He comes from the ranks, is living and has lived profoundly the life of the slave," works for both immediate aims and ultimate goals, and is at all times strictly subordinate to the workers he represents. "Whenever the need is imperative, he comes forth from the ranks. Whenever one of his kind disappears thorugh persecution or death, another appears to take his place. His intellectual and moral superiority over the 'professional saviour' is obvious to any intelligent observor" because he is driven by a moral commitment to the movement and class from which he springs, rather than from a desire for applause or wealth. He will throw off his own shackles only "when the workers as a class have broken their chains forever." Solidarity pointed to shabbily-dressed, organic, working-class intellectuals who, without formal schooling, routinely humiliated "educated" intellectuals in debate. The astounded bourgeois intellectuals "ask, 'Where did that fellow come from? Who is he?' And shake their heads when told that he is but one of the many taken from the ranks." Solidarity atttributed the IWW's superiority not only to the intrinsic justice of its cause, but to the rugged independence of its agitators. "A wise man usually has too much spirit to become a hireling, a tool, for corrupt bosses," as editors and other middle class intellectuals must. "It is really cruel to expose such mental castrates before the public". Mary Marcy adduced another element in the IWW agitator's superiority in debate: his practical experience on the job. "Successful tactics are not evolved from the study," she said, "but from the scene of activity.... An industrial organization offers no foothold for those whose interests are not the interests of the proletariat."[cxvi]
The IWW attempted to mold a new class into consciousness of itself and to forge a new social institutional matrix to represent this class and lead it to victory. But its aims went beyond that, to the creation of a new person suited to the world struggling to be born. Working-class triumph would not occur inevitably as the result of impersonal economic and historic processes, but only by conscious, organized effort. The IWW, Odon Por said, would equip the working class to direct the processes of evolution themselves. Educated workers cease regarding labor as merely a means of securing bread, but "consider their work organically in relation to all the problems of life." They recognize "that we may consciously determine upon a new form of society, if its vital tendencies are already living within us--and that we may consciously work out, adopt, and furnish the means necessary for its realization." Conscious workers in line with the forces of economic progress may tap "the hidden source of spiritual power necessary to social progress," which is "now a conscious process to them.... They are convinced that economic and technical progress already offers the material to build the new society, [and that] the only work left to do is to actually build it. They conceive the revolutionary process as totally dependent upon them, and by placing themselves within the process itself they are pushing it on.... Progress does not operate above us and in spite of us, but [occurs] by virtue of our conscious desire and organized action." Workers are active, creative partners in evolution, not passive, inert materials moved by outside forces. Workers must realize "that economic forces are far from being the only determinants in revolutionary action, that in the last analysis the questions before the working class are really pschological and moral, and that the vital problem is to discover and develop those forms of organization which create a revolutionary consciousness in the individual workers."[cxvii]
John Baldazzi, writing in Solidarity almost five years after Por, agreed that the working class required "a very deep psychological transformation" before it could intervene decisively in history and that the IWW must "develop such moral and intellectual revolution among the working masses." Baldazzi, as other IWW writers, grasped the concept of hegemony, the capitalist domination of all areas of life including thought and general culure. Today, "in the intellectual, as well as in the social, political, and industrial field, a privileged class is imposing its own spirit and will. Of course, it is the capitalist class which controls the political, economical, and social life, and is imposing its own conceptions in science, the arts, and public education." Proletarian revolution "will become a reality when an enlightened minority rises from the midst of the morally submerged masses; an aristocracy of thought, of culture and heroism; a body of pioneers fighting for the realization of the proletarian idea, and capable of great achievements in intellectual, industrial, and political fields." Because the capitalists have imbued the workers with a slave mentality, the IWW must build a new society "completely opposite to the institutions of the capitalist system."[cxviii]
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn likewise advocated using strikes and union activity to transform the consciousness of the workers, an achievement she valued more highly than the transient achievement of higher wages. "A labor victory must be economc and it must be revolutionizing," she said. The IWW must make a "strike and through it the class struggle their religion; to make them forget all about the fact that it's for a few cents or a few hours, but to make them feel it is a 'religious duty' for them to win that strike." The IWW "must not only give the workers some solution for their immediate problems," she said on another occasion, but "it must change their attitude towards life. It must make of their humblest daily needs a spur toward a great ideal.... It knows no final agreement, no settlement with the present order. It must therefore unravel the tangled chords of race, craft and color prejudice, or resignation and humility.... It must weave a new mental fabric of solidarity, of militancy and hope." Flynn, like other Wobblies, placed her hopes in a militant minority who could serve as a catalyst for mass action. Ben Williams also viewed the psychological andd moral effects of strikes as more important than their financial results. "Active resistance and aggression develop power," he said, "and so the every-day struggle in the shops is essential to the process of uniting and drilling the working class." Capitalism will perish not by ballots or bullets, "but by replacing the capitalism system of class owned and controlled industry by the organic structure of Industrial Democracy" as demanded by the IWW's Preamble. Haywood thought that a properly conducted strike was "an incipient revolution."[cxix]
The Wobbly, according to these conceptions, was in his agitational and shop activities a prototype of the new person who would inhabit the future world. Some Wobblies claimed that the IWW was virtually their religion, "not only our support for the present" but "our Hope for the future. It is our religion as well as our means of self-defense." Wobblies sometimes talked as if false consciousness, rather than capitalist ownership of the means of production, was the main obstacle to working-class self-emancipation. For example, Clarence Smith said "the only power of the master class lies in the ignorance of the workers as to their economic might." Although Wobblies sometimes asserted that proletarianization and the overthrow of capitalism were inevitable, even those writers asserted that working-class consciousness was a necessary ingredient in their success; historic forces would operate through consciousness rather than independently of it. The IWW, in this scenario, was a necessary aspect of social evolution, the organization destinied to educate, and therefore liberate, the masses of humanity. As Grover Perry said, "we will grow, physically, intellectually, and morally. A new race will result, a race that will live for the joy of living, a race that will look with horror upon the pages of history that tell of our present day society."[cxx]
The IWW's revolutionary industrial unions aimed at forging an autonomous working-class movement that would, independently of capitalists and their state, fulfill all the needs of the working class. The IWW opposed not only the traditional forms of capitalist rule discussed at length above, but relatively new mechanisms of hegemony such as welfare capitalism, government regulation of industry, the welfare state, public education, and mass commercial culture. The IWW warned that capitalism would "introduce all manner of schemes to continue its hold on the working class.... We may look for a sort of benevolent feudalism to be introduced by the masters of bread before the end of capitalist society.... We must be on our guard now more than ever before." Its opposition to virtually the entire institutional matrix of modern industrial capitalism underlay the Socialist complaint that the IWW would "destroy all civilization."[cxxi]
IWW writers quoted capitalist managers and theorists to prove that capitalist "philantrophy" and corporate "welfare" programs were "a bulwark of capitalist slavery." While partly extorted by working-class pressure, pension plans and other programs paid dividends by evoking increased devotion and efficiency from the workers. "That means strengthening the chain that binds the worker to his master," Solidarity claimed. "It tends to weaken the workers' spirit of self-reliance and initiative on his own behalf" and convince the workers of their masters' basic humanity and benefiscence. Anything that the workers seize for themselves "is a positive gain, paving the way for further conquests and greater self-reliance; while what they receive as direct gifts from the enemy, tends to put them to sleep and place them more completely under the control of the masters."[cxxii]
The IWW also opposed social welfare and protective labor legislation as emanating from the capitalist class, protecting some workers at the expense of others, and encouraging the workers to rely on others for their salvation. Solidarity believed that government social insurance, such as that favored by the Socialists, "makes good submissive wage slaves for the exploiting classes and is paid for out of the products stolen from those slaves by those classes."[cxxiii] The capitalists, IWW writers averred, decide which labor laws they allow the government to pass, are decisive in shaping their specific provisions, and eviscerate those of which they disapprove. Unless the workers are sufficiently organized at the point of production to compel obedience to the laws, the capitalists will with impunity disregard them; if the workers are thus organized, they can legislate for themselves directly through their unions. The IWW published in pamphlet form "What Comes of Playing the Game," an article by Charles Edward Russell, himself a political socialist who ran for office on the SP ticket, but who regarded electioneering as merely an educational exercise. Russell said that
A proletarian movement can have no part, however slight, in the game of politics.... If the capitalists had designed the very best way in which to perpetuate their power they could not have hit upon anything better for themselves than this. It keeps the workers occupied; it diverts their minds from the real questions that pertain to their condition; it appeals to their sporting instincts, we want to win, we want to cheer our own victory, we want to stay in; this is the way to get results. And meantime the capitalists rake off their profits and are happy.
Russell examined the activities of the successful Labor parties in Australia and New Zealand and found that they paralyzed the proletarian movement and encouraged the workers to acquiesce in degradation and servitude that the capitalists would not dare inflict unaided; such reforms as did pass only made the workers more content with their condition. "Every pretended release from his chains has been in fact a new form of tether on his limbs... deliberately employed to distract his thoughts from fundamental conditions."[cxxiv]
The IWW also condemned government ownership and regulation of industry as "state capitalism" rather than socialism. Ben Williams averred that government-owned enterprises were often necessary for the survival of capitalism because they performed functions that private capitalists would or could not perform; they also mercilessly exploited workers. Government ownership, he concluded, was "but a phase of capitalist development identical in essence with that of private monopoly or trustification of industry." Abner Woodruff considered state capitalism the despotism of a new class of bureaucrats, while Justus Ebert regarded it as "the Damocles sword" with which a resurgent new middle class extorted concessions from the larger industrialists.[cxxv] Ebert, exasperated with SP exhileration at the collectivism and social engineering generated by World War I, argued that state regulation of industry benefitted the capitalists in war as in peace. He complained that "state action in favor of capitalism" was not socialistic and said that
The way that The Call exalts every federal governmental action in favor of regulation and control as proof of the inevitability of Socialism gives us a heartache as well as a headache. Here is a monstrous capitalism being fastened more firmly on the backs of the working class--the vast majority of society--to the Socialist cry of "Hurrah!"....
In the first place, Socialism is a struggle between the propertied, or capitalist class, and the propertyless, or working class. Present-day federal governmental action tends to kill the class struggle by its deceptive Socialism, the iron heel, and the delusion called national unity. In the second place, Socialism requires a class of workers conscious of their historic mission to transform Capitalism into a society where all shall produce and own. Federal governmental action is not producing such a class; on the contrary, it is making a class of military automatons, both on the battlefield and in the worshop. In the third place, Socialism presupposes social economic administration by the workers in the interests of society. What federal governmental action gives us is a dictatorship advised by a capitalist council, in the interests of the capitalist class....
Socialism is, after all, ownership by the workers for the workers. It is not state action by the shirkers for the shirkers.... It is proletarian administration on the basis of proletarian production and possession.[cxxvi]
The IWW expressed its countercultural revolutionary impetus in its attitudes towards the education of children. Most working-class parents, it is safe to say, are conservative in their educational outlook, and see the public schools as mechanisms for assimilation to dominant American values and for social mobility. Working parents often favor a traditional curriculum and value educational quality as defined by the nation's elite and its dominant instutitions. Most forms of educational innovation find their initial advocates in middle-class intellectuals and reformers, and their early embodiments in the schools for the relatively privileged. The IWW, however, encountered the active opposition of public school teachers in important strikes, a development which only accentuated Wobbly hostility towards the established educational system.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn complained that school teachers made immigrant children "ashamed of their foreign-born, foreign-speaking parents, their old country ways, their accents, their foreign newspapers, and even their strike and mass picketing." At Lawrence, she recounted, the IWW sponsored separate children's meetings to counteract the hostile propaganda of the public schools. "Big Bill, with his Western hat and stories of cowboys and Indians, became an ideal of the kids. The parents were pathetically grateful to us as their children began to show real respect for them and their struggles." During the Patterson strike, the IWW organized a children's boycott of the public schools because of teacher hostility towards the strikers. Yet the Wobblies also regarded the teachers as deluded wage slaves who, like other "professionals," preened themselves on their elevation above the working class. One teacher sorrowfully reported that most teachers succumbed to the soul-numbing educational bureaucracy and "moulded themselves to the pattern" because resistance seemed futile. The product was "the little automatons of our educational system" for whom "obedience is the all-important word.... Until the teacher is economically free, this slavery must continue. She must think as she is told to think, against her finest instincts she must crush young lives; she must in the crowded school-room deal with herds, not individuals."[cxxvii]
The IWW charged that the public schools were instruments of capitalist oppression at all times, not just during strikes. J.S. Biscay, a frequent contributor to the IWW press, criticized the rote learning that "fossilizes the brain so the individual will repeat platitudes instead of thinking" and "accept the present system as being just.... Above all the child is taught the philosophy of passive misery, doglike submissiveness and to accept and never doubt what is taught." Biscay complained that the schools clothed the false ideas of patriotism, American liberty, and the success ethic in beautiful and inspirational phrases. "The whole system of education is based upon the business needs of the system and nothing else," he charged. The capitalists would abolish the public schools "if they did not need to have you trained for their own use along certain lines." Biscay, like other Wobblies, averred that miseducation and false consciousness, rather than armed violence, was "the real force which opposes the working class and supports capitalism.... Our mission, then, is to educate the workers so they can see things as they really are." Another writer complained that the whole educational apparatus was "based upon the idea of class distinctions" and inculcated disdain of labor among the rich and servility by the poor. The teacher was "the personification of imperial power that must be obeyed without question or demur," while the schools created "a slave class whose only chains are false ideas."[cxxviii]
The IWW favored child-centered education based on the needs and aptitudes of the individual child, where students learned by doing. They advocated schools where writing, singing, and painting were vital parts of the curriculum The IWW press praised the Modern School movement, begun by Francisco Ferrer in Spain, "wherein science was applied to the task of unfolding the genius of each particular pupil, rather than to force the child to conform to a set standard." The Modern School in New York was largely an anarchist project staffed largely by middle-class teachers who instructed students from both the middle and working classes. Solidarity reprinted an article from the monthly newsletter of the Ferrer Association touting that school as teaching an evolutionary, scientific worldview and creating "intelligent revolutionists." The Modern School, this article said, "should be frankly a school of the revolution, should be in cordial alliance with the proletarian revolutionary movement of today, though not identified with any particular school of thought."[cxxix]
The IWW also suported the Peoples Work College, "based on the established facts of science, in which the pupil will be a seeker after truth and not a digester of stale rules." The school valued education and ideas over credits and diplomas, and trained labor agitators and a new kind of labor leader suited for a democratic society. Teachers began the Peoples Work College "to free themselves from being the lickspittles and mental prostitutes of the capitalist class.... They are forming the structure of a new educational system, which can be an aid to the workers in their every day struggles and develop into an educational system suitable to the needs of a society free from slavery and parasites of every kind."[cxxx]
IWW writers also occasionally recognized that the capitalists molded popular consciousness through their ownership of the sources of mass commercial culture. The capitalists manufactured mass culture and indoctrinated the workers with ideas useful to the capitalists under the guise of entertainment. The popular press was only the most glaring example of such propagandizing. The IWW did not believe that a conspiracy lay at the root of this process; rather, the capitalists created a whole world that circumscribed and molded consciousness indirectly and surreptiously. Caroline Nelson contrasted the old, indigenous folk culture in which all classes participated with the new, mass-produced commercial culture. Speaking of the demise of old communal festivals, Nelson said that "our modern ruling class has robbed us of something more than the certainty of making a living. It has robbed us of our social life with all its hearty good cheer and fellowship. In its place has come the saloon, the dancing hall, the nickelodeon, the cheap theatres, where body and mind are poisoned to make a profit for a set of human vampires, who never go near those places, but sit in their palaces and talk loftily about virtues and give liberally to churches and charity." B.E. Nilsson, a radical Wobbly, in a 1911 article on "Motion Picture Morality," attacked a certain movie as inculcating capitalist property values--surely a very early example of this kind of critique. Two years later another IWW writer complained that "the drama, the moving picture show, the newspaper, the magazine, the school teacher, the preacher, and all the rest--do their most effective work through suggestion rather than through bald statements." They "insinuate a lie without telling one directly," and thus more effectively poison the minds of the workers. The result of this, another Wobbly complained, was that the capitalists are "the only conscious class in society and the only really effective believers in the class struggle." One IWW writer similarly complained that the official Labor Day, celebrated by the AFL "in the beer garden or dance pavilion of with so-called 'sports,' climbing the greased pole, baseball, and other vulgarities," substituted for the international workers' holiday, May Day. The IWW frequently attacked saloons and "the booze habit--that enemy of the revolution" as demoralizing the workers and providing false solace.[cxxxi]
Radical middle-class intellectuals posed one last threat to the working-class autonomy favored by the Wobblies. Most Wobblies disdained such individuals as members of a doomed class who, displaced by the large capitalists, claimed positions of leadership in the labor movement. Failing in their chosen profession, they railed against monopoly capitalists and sought new meaning, or a new career, in pseudo-revolutionary agitation. The IWW regarded such parlor revolutionaries as imposters who diluted the class-conscious struggle of the workers with extraneous issues and alien concerns. "These people have nothing in common with us and can help us in no way to gain concessions on the job," one Wobbly asserted. "Wage workers should beware of revolutionists that are not wage workers themselves.... The propaganda of the cockroach revolutionist is of words only," whereas the IWW means action at the point of production. Because the IWW, when successful, will "cancel their cockroach class from society," they oppose revolutionary action at the point of production. Austin Lewis described the member of the new, salaried middle class, divested of his ability to make an independent living by the growth of large corporations as "a proletarian in receipt of a salary" who, psychologically and politically, "is no proletarian" but "a good servant of his new master" and "a distinct acquisition to the power of his destroyer." Many of these salaried proletarians, Lewis said, own shares in the giant corporations which have displaced them. This class, rhetorically radical but in fact reactionary, join the Progressive Party and infect the SP in an effort to turn back to clock and restore their antiquated status as independent proprietors. Joseph Biscay agreed that "the intellectual is generally in the employ of the capitalist, a sky pilot or professor usually.... They know absolutely nothing about the needs of the working class. Their very training makes them unfit in the cause of the proletariat." Justus Ebert similarly attacked many avant-garde cultural reforms boosted by such bourgeois radicals, such as anti-religious agitation, marriage reform, and sexual freedom, as "mere excresences of capitalism that affect not its essential character and are, therefore, tolerated by it."[cxxxii]
Despite frequent IWW attacks on intellectuals, however, the IWW highly valued the services of elite men and women who genuinely served the cause of labor. Even Abner Woodruff, who stridently asserted the necessity of strictly proletarian organization, acknowledged that some individuals could transcend their immediate economic interests and throw in their lot with the proletarians. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and William Haywood consorted with upper middle class radicals in Greenwich Village institutions such as Mabel Dodge's salon, The Masses, and Heterodoxy, and enthusiastically accepted their aid in important IWW strikes. Such luminaries as Max Eastman, John Reed, Mabel Dodge, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Jessie Ashley offered access to publicity and money closed to the IWW's proletarian membership. Flynn said, in 1914, that the New York IWW's Propaganda League was accepting non-workers, including even some who were living on inheritances, on an experimental basis.[cxxxiii] IWW leaders valued the help of Democratic party stalwart Frank Walsh, who chaired the Commission on Industrial Relations; the CIR's Final Report proved so helpful to the IWW that it reprinted portions in booklet form. The IWW, therefore, opposed not bourgeois intellectuals as such, but only those who presumed to dictate to the working class and assume positions of leadership. Similarly, it opposed radical cultural reforms only when they replaced, rather than supplementing, workplace organization.
Revolutionary Literature and Art
The IWW did, however, cultivate its own forms of literature and art, much as it fostered the organic intellectuals discussed above. IWW theorists confidently predicted that the new working-class civilization would eclipse the literary and artistic creations of previous epochs. One writer in the Industrial Worker claimed that "the greatest poets and the sweetest singers have been members of the working class" because "the highest aspirations of life are those which, if followed, make for the advancement of the race as a whole" and only the workers embody such ideas. Robin Dunbar, a radical playwright, said that "genius arises from the desire of a sufferer to express his pain, and the courage he shows in his offerance measures his genius. Only those rebel who suffer. Hence the vital drama is always one of protest, of criticism, of pain" and is "from its very nature saturated with struggle." The bourgeoisie cannot produce or appreciate great art because they value mindless ease over life, realism, and struggle. "A soft life is the ambition of a soft head.... Those men go through life best who fight every inch of the way. A warrior lives in a hundred battles; an artist lives in a hundred bodies."[cxxxiv]
The capitalists, Dunbar said, claim to represent taste and culture in literature and the arts, but "neglect and despise a sincere worker in these fields as long as he is working." They buy old masters to buttress their own fragile prestige, but have neither the capacity nor desire to understand new art, which is "always humanistic, proletarian, democratic and "depicts the struggle of the masses to rise, to master nature." Dunbar criticized the sentimental and unrealistic drama of the bourgeosie, which ignored social issues in favor of jejune domestic tragedies, as "the plaything of the pornographic, of the overfed," which serves the purpose of "stimulating jaded appetites.... Like commercialized art it deals in adultery. Its aim and end is profits." The capitalists exclude all that is vital and alive from the stage; for criticism of contemporary life and society we must look "in the halls of the working classes, under their own management, their own acting and their own writing." Dunbar was confident that the proletariat would soon produce such dramatists because "a rising people not only demands courage in her artists, she gives them inspiration besides. When a nation decays, the drama dies. When a people is whipped, it runs from high art to seek solace in low forms of sensationalism.... Slaves lean to futility; freemen seek truth. Naturalism is the rock of literature."[cxxxv]
Justus Ebert placed the evolution of literature in historical perspective, noting that "the drama has evolved with society." Just as bourgeois literature had succeeded the feudal, so proletarian art would replace that of the capitalists. Ebert, discussing Legere's "Hunger," (serialized in Solidarity), adumbrated the idea of proletarian literature. The machine proletariat and their yearnings provide "material for a new drama, at once interesting and inspiring. Here the mass is in action; like another Prometheus bound it struggles for freedom with tragic results." Ebert especially valued dramas written by proletarians about proletarian life, "rich in the aspirations which acuate them and full of the language in which they think." Ebert averred that "propaganda furnishes the content of many great plays and poems," and that any play which accurately depicted working-class life would seem didactic and tendentious to the bourgeoisie. Proletarian life is creating "a new society, whose ideals are foreshadowed in proletarian phrase and psychology." Ebert, however, was not indifferent to aesthetic quality, nor insistent on a narrow range of subjects and emotions, as later proletarian critics were sometimes accused of being. He praised Wobbly poet Covington Hall as best embodying "the poetic spirit of the revolution" because he had "sure power, united with the historical culture of the scholar and the fiery zeal of the revolutionist." Hall's poems ranged widely in subject and mood, including satire, indignation and "the tender, emotional side of life." Ebert felt that the poet was "a creature of moods" for whom "nothing is inconsistent," and praised Hall, "who at times is mournful, philosophical, and even vacillating as the mood may be." Wobbly writers insisted on high aesthetic quality and, in drama and the novel, emphasized realism. One writer complained that "socialists deliberately prostitute their art and their ideals, transforming the beauties of revolutionary theories into mediums for cheap, tawdry pot-boilers.... Radicalism, like crime detection, is something to be exploited." Ben Williams savagely attacked a poem submitted to Solidarity in terms that made it clear that proper ideology was no substitute for aesthetic quality.[cxxxvi]
Ebert did, however, criticize the political content or implications of literature, questioning one of Hall's poems as condescending to Negroes and another for raising doubts about Hall's revolutionary commitment. While Ebert read and appreciated The Masses, he disdained the short stories that John Reed and others wrote about prostitutes, feeling that they misrepresenting working-class life. "Give us something of the fine, manly and womanly side of the workers, that one often meets in their lives," Ebert told Wobbly writers. Richard Brazier, a Wobbly poet, also demanded that revolutionary songs, as tools of mobilization and inspiration, present the hopes and victories of the workers but not their defeats.[cxxxvii]
The IWW's "little red songbook," full of songs "to fan the flames of discontent," contained the IWW's most characteristic literary form, which were sung everywhere Wobblies congregated--in the timber and mining camps, during strikes, in the hobo jungles, and in jails and prisons. The songbook evolved from cards or sheets containing a few songs which were sold at meetings and speeches, and was the brainchild of John Walsh and other members of the Spokane local. The Spokane unions elected a special songbook committee which decided which songs to include, leading Richard Brazier, a poet and sometime member of the committee, to observe that the songbook was "a creation of the rank and file itself." Some doctrinaire Wobblies opposed printing the songbook and singing at meetings, claiming that songs created a circus atmosphere at meetings and, being mere entertainment, detracted from the educational mission of the IWW. Workers could master the complexities of Marxism, such critics averred, only by long and arduous study. But other Wobblies argued that songs attracted an audience for IWW speeches, inspired the workers with a sense of power and solidarity, and themselves educated the workers. One organizer argued that every song "is almost a lecture in itself." The Industrial Worker touted the "Songs of the Miseries That Are. Songs of the Happiness to Be. Songs that strip capitalism bare; show the shams of civilization; mock at the master's morals; scorn the smug respectability of the satisfied class; and drown in one glad burst of passion the profit patriotism of the Plunderbund." Richard Brazier said that "we want our songs to stir the workers to action, to awaken them from an apathy and complacency that has made them accept their servitude as though it had been divinely ordained." Joe Hill, the most famous Wobbly bard, argued that "a pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over," and if a songster can cloth facts "in a cloak of humor to take the dryness off of them, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial on economic science." The little red songbook also contained information on the IWW. The cover sported two IWW mottoes, "an injury to one is an injury to all" and "labor is entitled to all it produces." The Preamble to the IWW Constitution appeared on the inside of the front cover.[cxxxviii]
Although the book contained some classical revolutionary songs such as the "Marseillaise," most songs were the contemporary creations of Wobbly poets, arising out of concrete workplace conditions, strikes, or other incidents. The songbook itself spurred the composition of songs, and for a number of years each revised edition printed new song-poems. As John Walsh predicted, "once you get this songbook launched, there will be no dearth of songwriters, and no shortage of songs." The songs were sung to the tunes of familiar religious hymns (which they sometimes parodied), popular airs, or, in some cases, original music. Brazier remembered that "at times we would sing note by note with the Salvation Army at our street meetings, only their words were describing Heaven above, and ours Hell right here--to the same tune."[cxxxix]
Justus Ebert compared the IWW songs to the emergence of the bourgeois novel, which replaced the feudal court romances. The rising bourgeoisie, Ebert said, had created a literature than reflected and expressed life as they knew it, ridiculed the old romances, and punctured old myths. In turn, the feudal writers castitaged the rising new literature as vulgar. Today, Ebert said, "capitalist romance is just as unreal as the Arthurian one" and "needs to be exposed and laughed out of existence by another and more modern adaptation of a noble art. Cynical ridicule of pretentious and pious frauds, together with a virile presentation of actual conditions among the workers, told in their own language and in their own way, is as necessary now as was the similar preceding effort" of the bourgeoisie. "The result may not be a new literary form, but a new class expression within the old forms, and the beginning of the new thoughts and new ideals necessary to the beginning of a new society. Like the middle class which preceded it, the working class in order to perfect its revolution, must first express itself. The IWW songs are a means to this desireable end." Ebert called Joe Hill "a pioneer in the creation of unique, proletarian song," who satirized and "undermined the state, church, and scabby craft-union to the tune of popular music.... In Joe Hill are the beginnings of a truly working class art; crude, but germinal and sound." Elizabeth Gurley Flynn agreed both with Ebert's assessment of the role of music in the revolutionary movement and with his evaluation of Joe Hill. "Never has there been a movement that made an impress on world history, never a conquering movement, sterile of song. Religion and patriotism have been woven in the warp and woof of daily life, have stirred the masses profoundly, flamed the imagination of the youth and ensnared the memories of the old, not through preached dogma but through melody.... The spirit to do and dare for the labor movement, can be stimulated through the same medium." The capitalists "intuitively sense the menace of strikers who unite, not in sullen apathy, but laughing and singing." Joe Hill's songs "lilt and laugh and sparkle" and "kindle the fires of revolt in the most crushed spirit and quicken the desire for a fuller life in the most humble slave." Hill's songs, and those of other Wobbly bards, expressed the IWW's ideology and reflected the varied work experiences of its members; proletarians were the hero, audience, and composers of these songs.[cxl]
The IWW's little red songbook continued a long tradition of worker song-poems. Workers composed thousands of song-poems in the last half of the nineteenth century. Clark Halker, the historian of these song-poems and their composers, attributes their decline to a variety of circumstances which illuminate the distinctiveness of the IWW and the appropriateness of its response to industrial capitalism. First, Halker says, working-class elan and self-confidence waned due to catastrophic defeats and massive repression in the late nineteenth century; the workers lost the vitality and espirt de corps necessary for the vibrant oppositional culture that had nurtured their songs. In a related development, the AFL's defensive, business unionism had little use for the soaring idealism that had inspired Gilded Age worker-poets. Major changes in the nature of capitalism and the composition of the workforce also undermined the ideology on which the old songs were based. The hardening of class lines, the growth of an unskilled proletariat, and massive immigrantion rendered the traditional transclass ideologies--the producer ethic, American republicanism, and true religion--archiac and meaningless to many workers. The nineteenth century workers had clothed their revolt in the universal language of humanity as well as traditional notions of republicanism, Christianity, and craft pride. They had found allies in an old middle class of professionals and independent proprietors who considered themselves producers like the workers and who feared and distrusted the new corporate, monopolisitic, industrial capitalism as a threat to themselves. By the time of the IWW, however, a new middle and professional class which owed its existence and prosperity to the large capitalists increasingly separated itself from the working class in interest, ideology, and sensibility. Finally, the growth of mass commercial culture undermined traditional, popular working-class forms of culture.[cxli]
The IWW, responding to the very changes in capitalism and the composition of the working class analyzed by Halker, attempted to forge a truly autonomous, revolutionary, and class-based proletarian culture, which sundered all ties between itself and mainstream culture. The IWW faulted the transclass producer ideology of their predecessors as well as their faith in republican institutions and true religion. The IWW called upon the working class to rely upon itself and its fighting organizations alone, repudiated American democratic institutions and ideology as fostering and justifying slavery, and ridiculed religion as preaching "pie in the sky." Active Wobblies definitely considered their brand of revolutionary industrial unionism as a "magic bullet" destinied to topple capitalism, and regarded themselves and their union as progenitors of a new civilization. They replaced the transclass producer ideology with that of proletarian democracy and solidarity and recaptured the world-conquering confidence to write and sing songs. They fostered a vibrant movement culture that moved beyond opposition to revolution. Further, they disdained the emerging hegemonic mass commercial culture. The unskilled immigrant Wobblies of the East usually lacked the money for many commercial amusements. The Western Wobblies usually lived in isolated camps or hobo jungles, and found the commercial amusements of the cities tepid compared to riding the rails and scrounging a living under life-threatening and uncertain conditions. Forrest Edwards, recounting the dangers and precariousness of the itinerant worker's life, said, in a striking reversal of the conventional opinion, that "his appetite for excitement and entertainment cannot be satisfied in such a place as the industrial center. The road offers a measure of freedom and fills his life with excitement."[cxlii] The IWW's hostility to mass commercial culture, and its determination to construct a truly alternative culture, is evident in its suspicion of saloons and grog shops, traditionally not only centers of working-class sociability but of their union activities as well. The IWW halls, with their libraries, social events, and practical accessories such as stoves for boiling the hobo's "mulligan stew," formed a vivid contrast and real alternative to the saloon.
The Wobblies recognized that a merely parallel or alternative culture, even one containing oppositional elements, too often served as a mere sophorific. Such cultures segregated workers within their own mileaux, where they hardly interacted with the dominant culture, or did so on the terms of the mainstream institutions. The IWW advocated a truly autonomous and confrontational working-class culture. It is no surprise, therefore, that although Richard Brazier later justified the IWW's songs on the grounds that "the workers had used songs to relate their grievances and make their demands made through all of recorded history," the IWW's songsters and poets seldom referred to their predecessors, and did not regard themselves as continuing a venerable tradition. When Joe Hill, facing a firing squad, said that "I have lived like an artist and will die like an artist," he evinced a radically different conception of art and life than the most bitter Gilded Age worker-poet.[cxliii]
The Patterson Pageant at Madison Square Garden was the other major IWW contribution to revolutionary art. The idea for the pageant emerged when Mabel Dodge, Big Bill Haywood, and John Reed were discussing the difficulty in securing the publicity necessary to garner outside support for the beleaguered strikers. The Patterson "mass play," as Solidarity called it, was an exercise in democratic, participatory, and proletarian art, performed by over 1000 actual strikers who enacted scenes from the strike itself. The Pageant was on a magnifiscent scale: the stage had a 200 foot backdrop scene of a Patterson mill by John Sloan, and all four corners of the Madison Square Garden Tower were illuminated with "IWW" in 10-foot high red letters. Over 15,000 spectators watched and participated.[cxliv]
There were six scenes: the workers shuffling through the February cold to work ("the mills alive, the workers dead"); the beginning of the strike ("the mills dead, the workers alive"); the funeral of Modestino, shot by police while standing on his front porch; a mass meeting at the Socialist-controlled town of Haledon, with speeches and singing (in which audience joined); the celebration of May Day, including the evacuation of children from the city and their placement with sympathetic families in New York; and a mass strike meeting in which, the Program of the Patterson Pageant stated, "the strikers, men and women, legislate for themselves" by passing "a law for the eight hour day" which no court could declare unconstitutional. Haywood, Tresca, and Flynn repeated some of their impassioned speeches from the strike. Although some people doubted whether a thousand untrained proletarians could, with almost no practice, perform a high dramatic spectacle, a striker captured the mood of the event when he said that "we know we can make a strike pageant because we are strikers. We're rehearsing every day in the strike."[cxlv]
The pageant blurred the distinction between the audience and the performers. The strikers marched down the aisles through the audience--then an electrifying new dramatic technique--in four of the six acts; in the last act Haywood, in back of the auditorium, delivered a speech while facing the strikers and the audience, who thus merged into one vast throng. The Independent called this innovation "an unequalled device for clutching the emotion of the audience.... actors and audience were of one class and one hope." Mabel Dodge later remembered that "the funeral procession marched right through [the audience], so that for a few electric moments there was a terrible unity between all these people. They were one.... I have never felt such a high pulsating vibration in any gathering before or since." The New York Tribune said the funeral scene "worked the actors themselves and their thousands of sympathizers in the audience up to a high pitch of emotion, punctuated with moans and groans and sobs." Phillips Russell, writing in the International Socialist Review, agreed that "the people on the stage had long ago forgotten the audience. The audience had long ago forgotten itself" and "had become part of the scene."[cxlvi]
Everyone, including commentators hostile to the IWW, agreed that the Pageant vastly succeeded as a dramatic spectacle. It communicated the energy, enthusiasm, solidarity, and grievances of the strikers to a large audience. Grace Potter, a sympathetic observor writing in The New Review, described the effect on the audience:
First we saw the mill, stretching its black stoves menacingly to the sky.... Then the unending whirr of iron-hearted machinery began. It seemed to us, waiting out there in the audience, that the machinery was grinding those workers to pieces. We thought of industrial accidents and diseases, of how terrible toil sucked all life, all initiative out of the workers. They were dying, and it was the same all over the world. We held our breath. And then--something happened. The machinery stopped grinding. A faint free cry rises slowly, to deafening hosannas from a thousand throats as the workers rush from the mill. They wave their hands, they shout, they dance, they embrace each other in a social passion the pales individual feeling to nothing.... The strike is on!"[cxlvii]
A contemporary critic said that a pageant "must be judged by its effect upon the performers as well as its effect upon the audience," and art scholar Linda Nochlin says that "in participating in the pageant, [the strikers] became conscious of their experience as a meaningful force in history, and of themselves as self-determining members of a class that shaped history."[cxlviii]
Phillips Russell in the International Socialist Review hailed the pageant as "something new under the sun, a labor play in which the laborers themselves were the actors, managers, and sole proprietors, portraying by word and movement their own struggle for a better world." Some professional theatrical producers who had offered their help were turned down, so that the pageant would be a workers' production. Nevertheless, many Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals gave their talents to the Pageant, and Solidarity stretched a point when it, claiming the Pageant was a working-class production, called John Reed a worker.[cxlix]
The Pageant, like the worker song-poem, was an old art form. In 1913 it was undergoing a revival. Yet most examples of "civic theatre" were designed to acculturate the masses, and particularly immigrants, to dominant American values. As Linda Nochlin says, "the patriotic pageants were all too often merely spectacular rationalizations of the status quo, filling the workers with false promises and false consciousness at the same time." The IWW turned these purposes on their head, and won the admiration even of some of its enemies. The New York Tribune said that "there was a startling touch of ulta modernity--or rather futurism--in the Patterson strike pageant in Madison Square Garden" and acknowledged that it revealed "the IWW leaders as agitators of large resources and original talent."[cl] Many contemporaries, including Mabel Dodge, compared the Pageant as "mental dynamite" with the Armory Show of the same year; both overthrew accepted standards and adumbrated a new world. An anonymous critic in Solidarity exulted that
it marks the beginning of a new epoch in play writing and play acting. It had no plot, no heroes and heroines; yet it was as real of life itself, because it was a transcript from life itself.... Whatever may be its shortcomings from the standpoint of dramatic technique, as at present conceived--and there were many--the pageant possessed social significance as the democratic beginning of the stage as a medium for the presentation and solution of the social problem by those most directly concerned--the workers themselves.... The pageant was a beginning in the right direction and fraught with great future possibilities.[cli]
For Hutchins Hapgood, the pageant represented the unity of "self-expression in industry and art." The IWW was pleased enough with the publicity generated by the pageant to produce other, less celebrated tableaux of strike scenes; a re-enactment of the Everett Massacre was explosive enough to evoke the concern of the San Fransisco police.[clii]
The IWW and the War
When Wilson moved the United States towards war, the IWW, as we have seen, already contained two strains of thought on anti-war activity. A history of anti-patriotic and anti-war agitation competed with equally traditional IWW ideas stressing the primacy of industrial organization and the overthrow of capitalism as requisites for any other achievement. Both of these intellectual currents found forceful advocates as the United States entered the war. Traditional differences in emphasis within the IWW, wartime opportunities, and the dangers of repression all generated disagreements within the IWW. Nevertheless, opinions diverged only on the IWW's practical response to the war. Contrary to the opinions of some prominent historians,[cliii] the IWW remained a stridently revolutionary organization, dedicated to its original program and philosophy.
When Europe plunged into war, Solidarity published a special six-page edition filled with articles advising militant action. Harrison George predicted that the United States would enter the war, and urged preparation for a general strike. "The real enemies are not in foreign lands, but here at home in easy reach," he said, "and the proletariat wouild be worse than foolish if it does not turn upon them and wreak such vengeance upon their persons and their private fortunes as well be most practical under varying circumstances.... The lesson of Europe is that making anti-military speeches and passing resolutions will not stop war. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?" A "John Proletaire" urged mutiny and revolt in the army and navy; "a little ingenuity would find ways to shoot officers in battle. Warships might be sunk in deep water where the sinking is good." Proletaire suggested that, if the United States entered the war, "it is quite possible that it would be good tactics for every revolutionist in the country to enlist in the army and navy and take his wooden shoes for everyday use.... At least, let us not hesitate to sow the seeds of revolt, sabotage, and all." He reminded his readers that "before we are involved in [the war] is the time to agitate for revolt."[cliv]
In this same issue, a F.L. Rhoda, in "Wage Slave's View of War," decried "the women and children slowly tortured to death at the looms, and the great army of unemployed dying the most terrible death of all, slow starvation." Haywood advocated direct individual action to avert the starvation and misery arising out of the industrial depression. "It is up to the workers to meet with grim determination the situation that presents itself. Food, clothing, and shelter are essential to life. Let the message of the IWW be GET THEM! if you have to take pickaxes and crowbars and go to the granaries and warehouses and help yourselves. Rather than congregate around City Halls, Capitols and empty squares, go to the market places and waterfronts where food is abundant. If food is being shipped, confiscate it if you have the power. Where houses are vacant occupy them. If machinery is idle use it, if practical to your purpose. Results can only be achieved through organized effort."[clv]
As the IWW successfully organized thousands of workers during World War I, it focused more on industrial organization even while it distributed unprecedented quantities of its revolutionary literature. At the Tenth Convention, in late 1916, one delegate summarized the general feeling when he said that "the IWW is passing out of the purely propaganda stage and is entering the stage of constructive organization" and that the soapbox agitator was declining as the dominant element. Nevertheless, this same convention, (ending on 1 December 1916, shortly after Wilson had won re-election on a peace platform and before U.S. involvement seemed imminent), unanimously resolved: "We oppose all wars and for the prevention of such we proclaim the anti-militarist propaganda in time of peace, thus promoting class solidarity among the workers of the entire world, and, in time of war, the general strike in all industries." This statement, although made when the U.S. was still at peace, had obvious implications if the U.S. entered the European war.[clvi]
Nevertheless, many prominent Wobblies doubted the efficacy of anti-war agitation. Shortly after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, thus making U.S. entry into the war likely, Ben Williams, longtime editor of Solidarity, opposed "meaningless" anti-war gestures. "In case of war, we want the One Big Union... to come out of the conflict stronger and with more industrial control than previously. Why should we sacrifice working class interests for the sake of a few noisy and impotent parades or anti-war demonstrations? Let us rather get on the job of organizing the working class to take over the industries, war or no war, and stop all future capitalist aggression that leads to war and other forms of barbarism." After the U.S. declared war, J.A. MacDonald, the editor of the revived Industrial Worker, wrote privately in a similar vein. He downplayed the IWW's traditional anti-war stance because "if we came out strong there are hundreds of boys who would pull stunts that would do the movement no good and land them on the inside of a jail, when they could be doing effective work on the inside of industry." In a later letter he further averred that "talk against conscription will get us nowhere; Power is what counts.... Power can only be developed on the job." West Coast militant James Rowan agreed that "if we do not have the economic power, it is of little use to raise a ruction about" the draft. The IWW must wait "until we are strong enough the make ourselves felt on the field of production, as that is the only place that the workers have any power." Haywood wrote Frank Little, chair of the General Executive Board and an intransigent opponent of U.S. involvement, "Keep a cool head, do not talk. A good many of us feel as you do, but the world war is of small importance compared to the great class war."[clvii] Although Little opposed the war not only as a capitalist bloodbath but as the precipitator of a wave of repression that would destroy the IWW, Haywood's stress on the class war was equally radical, and possibly more so.
But in early March Solidarity moved to Chicago, the site of the IWW's national headquaters, and newly-elected editor Ralph Chaplin propounded a fervent anti-war policy. On March 24, when war seemed imminent, Chaplin spashed "The Deadly Parallel," a comparison of the IWW's recent anti-war resolution with the AFL's patriotic stance, on page one. Chaplin proclaimed that "ten million human lives stand as a monument to the national patriotic supidity of the working class of Europe!" and hoped that American workers would oppose "the bloodiest slaughter of history." In July, after the passage of the Selective Service Act, Chaplin praised a large group of Wobblies who choose jail rather than submit to the draft, and suffered abuse and torture as a result. Chaplin warned of trouble "if any attempt is made to force members of the IWW to shed their blood in a war that is abhorrent to them."[clviii] Later that month, Chaplin published an even more inflammatory statement, subtitled "Where the IWW Stands on the Question of War."
Since its inception, our organization has opposed all national and imperialistic wars. We have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that war is a question with which we never have and never intend to compromise.
Members joining the military forces of any nation have always been expelled from the organization.
The IWW has placed itself on record regarding its opposition to war, and also as being bitterly opposed to having its members forced into the bloody and needless quarrels of the ruling class of different nations....
All members of the IWW who have been drafted should mark their claims for exemption, "IWW, opposed to war."[clix]
This was a mixed message. It implicitly advised registration--a prerequisite to being drafted--and encouraged open and arguably legal refusal of induction on the grounds of conscientious scruples. But it equated submission to the draft with voluntary enlistment by implicitly threatening expulsion from the IWW of those who fully complied with the law by entering the armed forces when conscripted. The IWW, however, took no action against draftees, and apparently the overwhelming majority of its eligible members registered for the draft and served when called.
The IWW, however, reprinted its own version of one of Gustave Herve's speeches, which it titled "Patriotism and the Worker," about the time the U.S. entered the war, and distributed it at least as late as September 1917, long after passage of the Selective Service and Espionage acts. Herve (who had since become an avid French patriot, and then changed his position again) advocated "Insurrection Rather Than War!" and stated that "We, the anti-patriots, will not sacrifice at your bidding the only possession we have, our lives.... If we must risk our lives, then we will risk them not in defending our country, but in attempting to found the socialist country which we [are] already carrying in our brains." The IWW also distributed Flynn's and Pouget's pamphlets advocating sabotage (the latter translated and introduced by Arturo Giovanitti) until the IWW was suppressed. Chaplin ran powerful and graphic cartoons advocating sabotage on the front page of Solidarity and printed articles extolling such tactics. This inevitably evoked the displeasure of the authorities, especially when combined with militant strikes which paralyzed key war-related industries in the West. Conlin, and Flynn, claimed that the IWW toned down some of its publications and even cancelled others out of fear of wartime repression, but the evidence does not support this assertion.[clx]
Solidarity also argued against the general strike, which the Tenth Convention had endorsed. "War Against War, or War Against Capitalism," argued that "you cannot force ideas of any kind on a slave class so long as in the material conditions of existence there is no source for such ideas. As long as private ownership remains a fact, you will have ideas among the workers adapted to the maintenance of this ownership, ideas taught in capitalistic schools, churches, newspapers, etc." A general strike against war would fail because most workers were patriotic; only a general strike against capitalism could end war. But "ideas as a whole do not move faster than economic development. That means that for the workers as a whole to become anti-patriotic, to become able to deal effectively with war, there must first come into existence an organization among the workers" inculcating such ideas and action. If the IWW succeeds, a general strike against war would probably be unnecessary "because the new society of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers will already be taking the place of capitalism, the cause of war." In June 1917 Solidarity also reiterated the IWW's longstanding opposition to industrial violence, saying that "the tactics used by the IWW are those that make violence most unnecessary." However, this same article asserted that rhetorical opposition to violence was useless until workers "find a better way of enforcing demands for the things they must have in order to survive the nightmare of capitalism" and endorsed sabotage and the general strike as alternatives to violence.[clxi]
Meanwhile, Solidarity, even while advising quasi-legal resistance to conscription, emphasized organization over anti-war work. The war was "one of the most hopeless and idiotic wars in history," but "the slaves had a war on their hands before the Oligarchs started theirs--and the workers' war is of far more importance" and would continue until the workers overthrow capitalism. The revolutionary workers in Russia, Solidarity noted approvingly, were already engaged in that enterprise. In an implicit criticism of the AFL's agreement to cooperate with the government during the war, Solidarity said that "organization on the job is the only thing that ever got the workers anything. To cease fighting, especially under present intolerable conditions, for the necessities of life and comfort, would be criminal as well as idiotic. The capitalists are entering this war to acquire territory, prestige, money, and power," and the workers should do likewise.[clxii] Far from constituting a retreat from revolution, the IWW's policy was a practical application of its revolutionary principles. The IWW never wavered on its repudiation of signed contracts or its advocacy of ceaseless class war, the very practice and doctrine that most alarmed federal aujthorities concerned with maximizing war production through industrial peace.
The IWW, however, woefully underestimated the tenacity of American working-class patriotism. IWW theorists recognized that industry was international and the capitalists relatively cosmopolitan, and asserted that workers must also ignore national boundaries. Even the war in Europe did not convince IWW writers of the enduring power of nationalism over workers; some insisted that capitalism was grinding the different nations of the world into one common industrial, capitalistic culture and that patriotism was a waning force. They believed that similar economic conditions created the same classes and conflicts around the world, thus solidifying proletarian class consciousness and hastening revolution.
The Repression of the IWW
Historians are correct in their assertion that the government destroyed the IWW because of its ideas and its effectiveness in organizing workers, rather than for any actions designed to hamper the war effort. A combination of the IWW's revolutionary pronouncements, its repudiation of war and conscription, and its militant organizing activities in essential war-related industries, evoked the massive repression.
The widespread charges of "German gold" were simply ludicrous, and the government, despite diligent efforts, including seizure of all the IWW's records and correspondence, adduced hardly any evidence of overt acts by any of the hundreds of men on trial. When IWW writers had advocated mutiny or sabotage against war, and the IWW had resolved on a general strike, such words were legal.
Many western states passed "criminal syndicalism" laws (the wording of which closely resembled the Socialist party's Section 6), virtually outlawing the IWW on the basis of its ideas rather than its actions. Capitalists had long terrorized and brutalized the IWW with hired thugs, vigilantes, and local and state police; now, citing the war emergency, they solicited a massive and coordinated federal offensive against the IWW. After some hesitation, the Wilson administration arrested almost the entire national and regional leadership on trumped-up charges, banned Wobbly publications from the mails, and jailed hundreds of local leaders as well. It closed IWW halls, harassed and terrorized individuals involved in legal defense efforts, and refused to deliver mail addressed to the IWW. The army arrested other Wobblies and held them without charging them with any crime; the Labor department arrested and deported non-citizens, also without benefit of a trial. As vigilantes forcibly deported striking workers from strike locations, governments at the national, state, and local levels actively encouraged lynch-law and other extra-legal violence directed against members of the IWW. To undermine IWW strikers, soldiers worked as loggers under military discipline. In 1917 the Supreme Court legalized "yellow-dog" contracts, under which workers agreed as a condition of employment not to join a union; anyone trying to recruit such workers for a union was guilty of soliciting breach of contract. Wobblies were jailed and tried for the crime of belonging to the IWW and adhering to outlawed ideas, rather than for any specific acts or crimes. As James Rowan said, "a rebellious slave is the worst criminal in the eyes of the master." At the same time, the government promoted the formation of AFL unions and employee representation plans, and encouraged employers to raise wages, improve conditions, and otherwise conciliate their workers. When the war emergency had passed, the government acquiesced in an employer's offensive that eradicated these gains.[clxiii]
The IWW responded to this reign of terror by scrupulously obeying the law and cooperating with the authorities, a course which has mystified some historians. Melvyn Dubofsky, author of the standard history of the IWW, harshy condemns the IWW's acquiescence, citing one of Haywood's appeals for justice as "another of the Wobblies' wartime decisions that staggers the imagination." Dubofsky, seeking to explain the IWW's scrupulous legality, says that "only one explanation seems plausible: Wobblies obviously had more faith in American society's commitment to fair play and to due process than their own rhetoric allowed.... The more traditional IWW analyses of the nature and dynamics of the American system would have offered a better guide to action in 1917-18 than an emotional, almost intuitive, belief in the nation's sense of fairness."[clxiv] This is a part of the truth; both Haywood and the IWW's chief attorney, George Vanderveer, vastly underestimated the duplicity and vileness of the government and the government-induced mass hysteria that would make a fair trial impossible. But there was more to the IWW's strategy than merely a naive belief in the system they despised.
A premonition of what was to follow occurred in the early summer of 1917, when an entire IWW local in Rockford, Illinois, surrendered to the authorities rather than register for the draft. Solidarity said that "their judgment in walking into the jaws of the jail has been questioned, but not their sincerity or gameness.... These Rockford rebels voluntarily gave themselves up to be punished" rather than violate their consciences. "They did not wait to be hunted down and arrested....They have been treated as harshly in 'free' America as political prisoners were treated in Russia in her darkest days. They have been beaten with clubs and black-jacks, threatened with guns, they have been fed with food that was revolting in the extreme, or left to starve if they refused it; they have been reviled, lied about and ridiculed by the kept press, and insulted by the instrument of 'justice' that sentenced them." In unintended irony, Solidarity, meaning to refer to militant IWW resistance but instead (grammatically and factually) referring to official brtuality, warned that "this is but a faint foreshadowing of what will happen on a much larger scale if any attempt is made to force members of the IWW to shed their blood in a war that is abhorrent to them."[clxv]
In the summer of 1917, Haywood and Chaplin, anticipating repression, visited the Bureau of Investigation in Chicago and offered the IWW's full cooperation in any investigation. When Wilson appointed Judge Covington to gather evidence against the IWW, Haywood, falsely believing that his mission was "a careful survey and investigation of the Industrial Workers of the World," wrote Covington, "requesting that he first call at Headquarters where he would be given all the assistance possible in his inquiry. He did not come." The IWW also vainly sent three leaders to Washington to ask for justice from the President and his Justice Department. The IWW's attitude was epitomized by Solidarity in late September. "The General office and Solidarity feel that the more they investigate us the better it will be for our organization. We have nothing to hide and have assisted the federal agents in every way to continue their investigation."[clxvi]
The IWW was convinced that an investigation would lay to rest charges of "German gold" and treasonous activities. It was determined to reach the public with its story, win legal vindication, and uphold solidarity among the accused. Therefore, the IWW acquiesced in the government's plans for a massive trial of the entire national leadership, instead of following a more effective and legalistic strategy. Such a strategy would have fought extradition, demanded individual trials, and demanded the severance of those cases where the government had a very weak case even by its own criteria. Above all, it would have entailed delaying the trials until war-time hysteria had abated. That the IWW rejected this course for principled reasons rather than only out of a naive expectation of official justice was demonstrated by its later behavior. After the Chicago trials, which clearly indicated the IWW's inability to secure justice, IWW defendants in Omaha refused the governments offer of a sentence to time already served in exchange for a guilty plea. The defendants rejected this, feeling that guilty pleas would vindicate the government. Years later, when individual Wobblies interned in federal prison were offered a pardon, most refused on the grounds that "any individual application for clemency, pardon, or 'individual' amnesty only offers an opportunity to our oppressors to pretend that there was some element of justice and fairness entering into the circumstances of our alleged trial" and that the future of the IWW depended on solidarity.[clxvii]
The IWW was confident that it could withstand repression for reasons having nothing to do with any alleged justice on the part of the authorities. Expressing the optimism and sense of inevitable victory inculcated by Marxist doctrines of economic determinism, Solidarity proclaimed that "repression has proved to be a rank failure as a means of putting down movements of great historical impulse. And any attempt to put down the One Big Union with blind force will end similarly. The IWW is here to stay and it is going to stay. And no power on earth is powerful enough to put it down until it has fulfilled its destinied mission--the emancipation of the working class from wage slavery." The IWW pointed to earlier movements that had withstood intense persecution--Christianity, modern science as represented by Galileo, the American revolutionists, and the abolitionists. "And we are just as game and ready to go the limit as any of our predecessors in the fight for human freedom." The SPD had not only survived but prospered under Bismarck's "Iron Laws" that virtually outlawed the party and drove it underground and into exile. Solidarity said that "Our men can be jailed and killed. The idea will never die, but will steadily grow until enough workers find it is the only logical solution to the bread and butter question."[clxviii]
The IWW was convinced that it, like previous movements which had surmounted massive repression, represented an irresistable historic force. Solidarity proclaimed that "the relentless progress of the machine process has robbed us of our skill and made the dexterity of our fingers valueless. We have been throw aside to perish--or to organize." The IWW's courage and spirit would see it through. Wobblies "die gamely and willingly whenever the Cause we love demands of us the sacrifice of our lives.... We do not court martyrdom nor are we afraid of it. We are out to 'get the goods.'....There are too many of us for you to handle, no matter how many machine guns, bayonets, and gallows you may array against us." On another occasion it repeated that "The IWW cannot be killed. The rank and file of our organization are in the Union because there is no place else for them to be.... HOLD THE FORT AND VICTORY WILL BE OURS."[clxix] Haywood advised that all indicted Wobblies voluntarily surrender to the authorities, and almost all did.
When almost the entire national leadership was jailed, Haywood optimistically wrote that Cook County jail "is a wireless station sending a rallying cry of Industrial Freedom around the world." Solidarity confidently predicted that the IWW would not surrender "even if every jail and prison in the country be turned into a branch of the organization." Georgia Kotsch, in an article entitled "Why Suppression Only Aids the Growth of the One Big Union," asserted that "the blood of its martyrs will be the seed of the IWW." Frank Woods asserted that suppression would only aid the IWW; if the government locked up its "leaders," it would afford "the best propaganda we have had in years.... it will reveal the sterling qualities of the IWW appeal to the entire world." Other leaders would rise from the ranks, and no arrests could suppress labor discontent or do the work that the capitalists and the government wanted done. War profiteering and repression would alienate other Americans besides Wobblies. The Federal indictment was merely a confession that the local governments and the capitalists could not crush the IWW. The IWW could not be convicted in a fair trial and "can stand the test of an unfair trial."[clxx]
The IWW did occasionally respond to terrorism with threats. Solidarity warned that "the membership of the IWW stands ready to wreck vengeance upon the forces that seek their destruction" and will respond to lawless violence with lawless resistance and sabotage. The word "sabotage" may be outlawed by criminal syndicalism laws, but no statute "will stop the class conscious workers from using a weapon that will better things for themselves and at the same time put a dent in the pocket book of the boss." When vigilantes, organized by the local sheriff in Bisbee, Arizona, forcibly rounded up 1200 striking miners, placed them on cattle cars, and dumped them in the desert, Haywood wired President Wilson, threatening a general strike if the miners were not allowed to return to their homes. This, however, only stiffened Wilson's resolve to crush the IWW. Similarly, when James Rowan called a general strike in Washington state to secure the release of class-war prisoners seized by the army, federal troops raided the IWW headquarters and arrested Rowan and many other Wobblies. Rowan, now himself a military prisoner, called off the general strike, but the army continued its campaign of harassment and arrests.[clxxi]
The Wobblies, however, had few options. The IWW was a hyper-democratic organization that conducted all its business openly so that its members could fully determine policy. It published detailed accounts of its funds, their sources and uses; it debated policy openly at its conventions and in its press, and elected all of its leaders, including the editor of Solidarity. The IWW had scant alternative to a strategy of legality because it had no mechanism for coordinating clandestine activity or underground resistance.
The IWW, as noted above, also felt that it represented a new and irrepressible social force destinied to conquer the world for the working class. Haywood was surprised by the ferocity of the repression, telling members that no one "expected that any such ruthless onslaught would be made as that which happened." But he also indicated that "our persecutors have made [the IWW preamble] as historic as the declaration of Independence." The IWW did not trust the official apparatus of justice so much as an aroused and fighting working class; the IWW attributed previous victories in capitalist show trials to organized labor resistance. The trial of Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone in 1906-7 on trumped-up charges of murder had aroused nation-wide indignation, catalyzed massive labor defense efforts, and made Haywood a national labor celebrity. The Ettor and Giovannitti trial in 1912 had further publicized the Lawrence strike and kept the victorious workers temporarily united and active after they returned to work. The IWW attributed these victories to organized working-class pressure, not to the justice of the capitalist courts. And they did, by and large, win favorable publicity for the IWW and labor radicalism. Even defeats, such as the Mooney and Billings case of 1916-17, aroused widespread indignation against capitalist justice. Eugene Debs had emerged from his prison term in connection with the Pullman strike much more radical than he had entered. Joe Hill's reputation soared, and his songs gained added poignancy and power, after he was executed by firing squad by the state of Utah. Gustave Herve had ended his speech "Patriotism and the Worker," widely circulated in IWW circles, by thanking his persecutors for convicting him, saying that "they have widened the breach between their class and ours; they have dug deeper the pit into which we shall hurl them!" In 1917-1918 anything seemed possible; James Rowan, commenting on the Bolshevik Revolution, said that "what they can do in Russia, we can do in this 'Land of the Free.'"[clxxii]
The IWW confronted the terror of 1917-1019 with a consciouness formed by its past experience of repression. Since its foundation in 1905, the IWW had experienced frequent terrorism, but such brutality had been confined to specific locations where the IWW was conducting a strike or free speech fight. Corporate, vigilante, and official violence had aimed at crushing a particular strike or driving the Wobblies out of a specific town, not destroying the organization nationally. Wobbly leaders, although often arrested on spurious charges and jailed for months while awaiting trial, had at least been ostensibly accused of specific crimes arising out of a concrete situation, rather than tried for their membership in the IWW or their ideas. The IWW's press and its ability to raise funds and conduct a defense had remained intact, and had somewhat limited the ferocity of the capitalists and their government. The IWW had successfully involved a wider public, including prominent reformers and intellectuals, and even, occasionally, society women, in defending their constitutional rights. When the authorities at Lawrence ruthlessly beat women and children, a widespread public outcry forced them to somewhat relent. When the police chief in Patterson banned virtually all public meetings, the strikers marched to the nearby town of Haledon, whose Socialist mayor welcomed them. The IWW was not prepared for a coordinated national attack where the federal, state, and local governments worked together and also encouraged corporate thugs and vigilante terrorists.
The fate of the IWW, as well as of the Socialist party and other radical organizations, suggests that intermittant and sporadic terrorism proved more effective in disarming resistance and suppressing dissent than the more assiduous and unrelenting violence of old-style authoritarian regimes. Selective reinforcement often encourages more consistent acquiescence in the system than does an ineffective attempt at total repression. The fact that the IWW had won many legal battles in the past predisposed it to confine its resistance to legal, authorized channels, contrary to its own analysis of capitalist society. Had the U.S. system been implacably and uniformly hostile, the IWW would have organized with such facts in mind, rather than trusting its ability to beat the system. The SPD survived the anti-Socialist laws largely because those laws, by outlawing the party, gave it no option but illegal resistance; the party lurched towards reformism only after it was legalized and began winning ever-increasing numbers of Reichstag seats. Similarly, the Bolsheviks gained the strength necessary to overthrow the Russian government because, lacking any illusions as to the possibility of legal success, it perfected an underground organization. The American left, on the contrary, won enough legal battles with its oppressors to give leftists confidence that by their own efforts they could prevail within the system. The American political structure, with its seeming openness and its combination of the carrot and the stick, repressed radicals more brutally and effectively than almost any European government before 1918.
In the end, the IWW's revolutionary counterculture was destroyed by the same mechanism that had stimied it at every turn throughout its short existence. Pervasive state terrorism not only repressed IWW unions, but defined the acceptable parameters of discourse on virtually every issue vitally relevant to the IWW. Working-class attitudes towards gender, race and ethnicity, nationalism and religion, work and working-class solidarity, and other key issues were shaped by pervasive state violence that created an entire world, seemingly natural and eternal. This relatively closed and inter-locking system of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, buttressed at every point by visible and more suble forms of violence, reinforced non-class forms of collective identity and also (in seeming contrast) individual striving, at the expense of working-class consciousness and unity. Most American workers became non-class collectivists, identifying themselves upon the basis of shared identities that were legally constructed and forcibly maintained; in addition to these identities, they regarded themselves as individual strivers seeking the American Dream of personal, isolated wealth and social status. In the face of such institutionalized obstacles, the IWW's efforts proved futile.
IWW writers ridiculed the SP for believing that the capitalists would allow the workers to vote capitalism out--that the capitalists would peacefully acquiensce in the will of the majority. The Wobblies themselves, however, thought that the capitalists who would murder and torture workers by the millions for profit, and unceremoniously steal elections by terrorism and fraud, would nonchalently allow the legal growth of a revolutionary union that would topple capitalism. The Wobblies, like most radicals of their era, believed that they had a reified History on their side, and that they were in tune with the inexorable march of progress. But they, and the entire radical movement of their generation, were crushed, never to rise again; and there has never since been in the United States an indigenous, multifaceted radical movement with so widespread an institutional base. The fate of the Wobblies, and the events of subsequent generations, evokes sober reflections on whether genuine change in the United States is realistically possible, whatever the intellectual perspicacy and moral stamina of radical challengers to the capitalist regime.
Notes:
[i] The IWW organized Mexican workers in California (see IW for 5-7-10, 8-20-10, 9-10-10, 12-2-10, and 12-29-10) for some examples. The IWW also demanded freedom for Mexican class-war prisoners in the United States (IUB 2-27-09), endorsed the Mexican revolution (IW 10-5-11), and, as I will discuss later, called for a general strike if the U.S. invaded Mexico. Some Wobblies fought in the Mexican revolution; see IW (4-27-11) for an account of one battle in which Wobblies fought.
[ii] Haywood, "To Colored Working Men and Women," (Sol 3-10-17)
[iii] William Haywood, Big Bill Haywood's Book, (New York, 1977), pp. 241-242. This verbatim self-quote, from a book published in 1927, over 15 years after the event, may represent a quotation from a document (which Haywood did use in composing his autobiography) or may represent the gist of what he said. For Covington Hall's remark see Philip Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1975 (New York, International Publishers, 1976), p. 116.
[iv] Foner, Black Workers, pp. 116, 113.
[v] Supremacy of misery, Brotherhood of Timber Workers, "Negro Workers!", (Sol 9-28-12); Mr. Parker, Mr. Parker's 'White Superiority," (Sol 8-1-14); Northeast, "IWW Invades South Carolina," (Sol 4-25-14).
[vi] Haywood, "To Colored Working Men and Women," (Sol 3-10-17).
[vii] John Macy, an IWW member, wrote, that if everybody shared equally in manual labor, "everybody would have leisure and surplus energy for skilful labor at the arts." Speaking of dirty, manual labor, Macy said that "the curse of it can be removed if it is shared the the able-bodied, if no man is forced to endure an excessive amount of it, and, above all, if the doing of it does not indicate social inferiority.... It is enough to recognize that society debases some kind of work which might be disposed of cheerfully and expeditiously, and that there is no task, however disagreeable in itself, which any healthy man would not tackle with a smile, provided his fellow-workers did their parts and reggarded him as their equal." Macy cited the example of a rich man who, working in his garden, proudly greeted visitors in his sweaty and muck-stained clothes. "He was proud of his work, proud of the evidential muck.... proud because the work was his, because it was done for itself and for himself, because he did not have to do it." Had he been a hired man, working for someone else, he would have been ashamed of his condition. John Macy, Socialism in America, (New York, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1916): pp.231-236.
[viii] Pogroms, editorial comment, (Sol6-9-17); extermination, D. Burgess, "Workers and Racial Hate," (IW, 6-4-10); Haywood, "To Colored Working Men and Women," (Sol 3-10-17); environment, "White Workers, Colored Workers--and Organization," (Sol 7-28-17).
[ix] AFL, "White Workers, Colored Workers--and Organization," (Sol 7-28-17); scabs, "Black Workers for White," (Sol 8-4-17); Ovington, Justus Ebert, "The IWW and the Negro," (Sol 9-20-13). The IWW very occasionally reflected contemporary racist attitudes. The only example I have seen of any IWW writer countenancing segregation is in an article by W.H. Lewis, "'White Supremacy!' What's It Mean?" (Sol 8-15-14). This contradicted IWW policy and practice. The IWW also performed a blackface comedy at one of its social functions during World War I.
[x] Chinaman, "The Chinaman is Coming," (Sol 2-11-11); shades of skin, "The Yellow Peril," (IW, 5-15-13); Japanese, "The Japanese, Land, and Labor," (IW, 5-29-13).
[xi] Japanese, "Example of Japanese Workers," (IW, 8-26-09); rotten food, "'Cheap Asiatic Labor'", (IW, 5-20-09); porters, "Silly Race Prejudice," (IW, 4-22-09).
[xii] "Immigration," (IW 9-23-09). FIND MATERIAL ON SOME CAPITALISTS WANTING TO RESTRICT IMMIGRATION, MAKE WAR ON JAPAN
[xiii] Walsh, J.H. Walsh, "Japanese and Chinese Exclusion, or Industrial Unionism--Which?," (IUB, 4-11-08); capitalist patriotism, "Immigration," (IW 6-19-13).
[xiv] employing class, "Race Prejudice," (IW 7-15-09); Gold, and, world for themselves alone, "Example of Japanese Workers,' (IW, 8-26-09).
[xv] mills and factories, "Immigration," (IW, 9-23-09); Hall, "'Foreigners'", (IW, 11-2-10).
[xvi] poor white, S. R. Darney, "Colored Workers and the IWW," (Sol 4-21-17); Ebert, Justus Ebert, "The Single Moral and Other Codes," (Sol 5-31-13); outdo natives, "Gompers and the 'Race Question'", (Sol 11-26-10).
[xvii] Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, The Rebel Girl, (New York, International Publishers, 1974), pp. 133-134.
[xviii] Walsh, "Japanese and Chines Exclusion, or Industrial Unionism, Which?", (IUB, 4-11-08); a unit, "'Solidarity' and 'Prepardness,'" (Sol 4-15-16); strike itself, "Sin Bad," "Cockroach 'Revolutionists'", (Sol 2-21-14); news, '"News,' Philosophy, and Criticism, (Sol 1-9-15).
[xix] Phillip Foner, Black Worker, pp. 118-119.
[xx] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 255-258, excellently analyzes the reasons for the IWW's decline in Lawrence. The best analysis of the Patterson defeat is Steve Golin's brilliant book, The Fragile Bridge: Patterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Unfortunately, there is a contradiction in Golin's analysis. He shows how the IWW's success in organizing the Patterson workers was conditioned by the prior and existing workers' cultures in Patterson, but then faults the IWW for failing to organize the Pennsylvania silk workers, who, he acknowledges, had a vastly different culture and experience. The IWW tried to organize Pennsylvania, but it could not work miracles. Also, the Pennsylvania state constabulatory was a much more efficient and brutal union-busting outfit than even the Patterson police. QUOTE GOLIN ON PATTERSON AND PA.
[xxi] CITE MAJOR BOOKS ON RACE--WILLIAMSON, TAKIKI, INDISPENABLE ENEMY.
[xxii] "Henry Ford, Speed-Up King," (Sol 2-7-14) says that 600 were fired.
[xxiii] "Women and Civilization," (Sol, 4-17-15); Ashleigh, "Women Wage Workers and Woman Suffrage," (Sol, 4-6-14); Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol, 7-31-15) and Flynn, "Men and Women," (a speech from 1915), in Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (Rutgers University Press, 1987): pp. 100-103.
[xxiv] Ebert, "Have Women Come to Stay," (Sol 7-17-15); Edwards, "What of the Eight Million Women Workers?" (Sol 9-23-16).
[xxv] "'Votes' and 'Women's Wages'", (Sol 2-22-13); Flynn, "Men and Women," in Baxandall, p. 100. For a statement that the suffragists have the right spirit but a tepid goal, see Lilliam Forberg, "Woman's Part in Social Revolution," (IUB, 3-9-07). Katherine Hill, a political Socialist, wrote Solidarity complaining about the IWW's belittling of votes for women. "The woman's movement is NOT a bourgeois movement," she said. "The demand for votes is merely one expression of a struggle for freedom. I don't value a vote unduly, but if there are votes going, I want one, for what it is worth. I object to being shut off from voting, merely because I am a woman. When you go to your shop and find one entrance marked 'For Employees' and another which you are debarred from using, you know well enough that it would be of mighty little practical advantage to you to use the bosses' entrance. Just the same, whenever you notice that sign, it riles you, doesn't it?" She admitted that voting achieved little, but pointed out that it did not take much effort, and averred that if IWW members joined the SP they could capture it. (Sol 5-17-13).
[xxvi] Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol 7-31-15); Ebert, "Woman Labor in Steel Mills," (Sol 6-12-15).
[xxvii] Ashleigh, "Women Wage Workers and Woman Suffrage," (Sol 4-6-14).
[xxviii] Edith Thorpe Adams, "To Help Working Women," (IUB, 7-4-08); Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol 7-31-15).
[xxix] Flynn, "Women in Industry Should Organize," (IW 6-1-11; printed as "Women and Unionism in Sol 5-27-11).
[xxx] "A Joke on Us," (Sol 6-10-16).
[xxxi] "Women and Labor," (Sol 7-1-16); "Illinois Vice Report (Sol 7-29-16).
[xxxii] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16).
[xxxiii] Quoted in Philip Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement (New York, Free Press), p. 422.
[xxxiv] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16).
[xxxv] Vasilo, "Women in the IWW," (IUB, 4-25-08). She asked, "Is a married women of the working class a chattel slave or a wage slave?" Flynn, "To Members and Sympathizers of the IWW," (Sol 1-16-15).
[xxxvi] "Women and Civilization," (Sol 4-17-15).
[xxxvii] Flynn admitted many criticisms of women were true, although also applicable to many men, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16); men and women were asked to change in Agnes Grundel, "The Woman of Today," (Sol 7-1-16) and Mary Shieber, "The Education of Women Workers," (Sol 12-9-16). Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women (Monthly Review Press, 1980) pp. 129-132 discusses the many proposals, never realized, to make a special appeal to women.
[xxxviii] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women" (Sol 7-15-16); co-operative spirit, Flynn, "Women in Industry Should Organize," (IW 6-1-11) and, under the title "Women and Unionism," (Sol 5-27-11).
[xxxix] Joy of fight, and putting the women in front, Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol 7-31-15); tugging at skirts, and, women push themselves to the front, Flynn, "Women on the Picket Line," (Sol 5-1-15); woman's influence is greatest, Flynn, "Women in Industry Should Organize (IW, 6-1-11, also published as "Women and Unionism," (Sol 5-27-11).
[xl] Old world attitude, Flynn, The Rebel Girl, 132; Haywood, Golin, The Fragile Bridge, p. 65 (quoting The Masses, June 1913, p. 5); capitalist paper, Philip Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, p. 443; women's only meetings, Flynn, and Golin.
[xli] Ashleigh, "Women Wage Workers and Woman Suffrage," (Sol 4-6-14); pipe, and economic independence, Flynn, "The IWW Call to Women," (Sol 7-31-15); sex slaves, Flynn, "Women in Industry Should Organize," (IW 6-1-11), also printed as Women and Unionism (Sol 5-27-11).
[xlii] Flynn, "Men and Women," in Baxandall, Words on Fire, pp. 101-103. Flynn also, bowing to the reality that most women left the labor market when they married, said that "the union factory girl of today is the helpful and encouraging wife of the union man of tomorrow." As we have seen, the IWW organized housewives during strikes, and felt them indispensable to the victory of most strikes.
[xliii] Flynn, "Men and Women," in Baxandall, Words on Fire, pp. 102-103.
[xliv] "The Women Workers of the World," (IW, 7-29-09).
[xlv] Linda Gordon, Women's Body, Women's Right, (New York, Penguin, 1990), 183-244; Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor, (New York, Simon and Shuster, 1992), pp. 74-104. The quote from Margaret Sanger is in Gordon, p. 219.
[xlvi] Not as a solution, and, hampering themselves, and, infant mortality, Flynn, "The Case of Margaret Sanger," (Sol 1-22-16); large family system, Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16); cheap living, "Birth Control Economics," (Sol 7-29-16).
[xlvii] "Sin Bad," "Some Weaknesses of the Western Wobbly," (Sol 1-16-15).
[xlviii] "Birth Control Economics," (Sol 7-29-16); Haywood quoted by Flynn, The Rebel Girl, p. 166. Tresca was later jailed for six months and a day for publishing an ad for a book on birth control.
[xlix] Flynn, The Rebel Girl, p. 152. CITE COLE, GURLEY, BIO OF TRESCA.
[l] Ben Williams, "Editor Responds," (Sol 12-28-12). Williams was replying to Mrs. Floyd Hyde, "Is There a Woman's Question in the Revolutionary Movement?" just above. By "Woman's Movement" Mrs. Hyde meant sexual freedom for women, and her answer was no. I have quoted from her letter in my chapter on Max Eastman.
[li] Fred Tiffany, "IWW and Capitalist Morals," (Sol 10-11-13).
[lii] "'Sex Hysteria' in War," (Sol 5-8-15).
[liii] "The Methods of Comstock," (Sol 3-27-15, reprinted from The Malthusian, London).
[liv] BOOKS ON LEGAL SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN, INC GORDON, HEROES, DOMESTIC TRYANNY, ETC
[lv] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol 7-15-16).
[lvi] Flynn complained that men did not bring their wives to her lectures on birth control. She cited instances where a male Wobbly would not let his wife speak to other Wobblies out of fear that they would give her strange ideas; of a man who forbade his wife, who worked a nine-hour day, to attend IWW meetings on the grounds that she should clean the house; and one who said that a woman should not be elected secretary of an IWW local because she could not evict a drunk from meetings.
[lvii] Jane Street, "We have Got Results," edited by Daniel T. Hobby, in Labor History, (Winter 1976), pp. 103-108.
[lviii] "Rebel Girl Defenders," (Sol 11-25-16).
[lix] Street, "We Have Got Results," Labor History, Winter 1976, pp. 103-108. I have corrected her use of "bourgeoisie" to "bourgeois."
[lx] Hill to the editor of Solidarity, November 29, 1914, in The Letters of Joe Hill, edited by Philip Foner. (New York: Oak Publications, 1965), p. 16; Dawson, "The Hobo Agitator," (Sol 5-17-13).
[lxi] Vasilo, "Women in the IWW," (IUB, 4-25-08). MATERIAL, CITATION FOR ABOLITION OF MIXED LOCAL.
[lxii] God's pocket, Flynn, The Rebel Girl, p. 96; EXAMPLES OF UNWANTED PROTECTION; chivalrous, "The Women Workers of the World," (IW, July 29, 1909); the text of "The Rebel Girl" and other Hill songs are in Foner, The Life and Letters of Joe Hill (p. 92) and Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Ann Arbour, University of Michigan,1968), pp. 145-6. Joe Hill died ostensibly to protect the honor of a woman.
[lxiii] Flynn, "Problems in Organizing Women," (Sol, 7-15-16).
[lxiv] Odon Por, "Social Creation Through Conquest," (IW, 5-1-12); "The Practical Idealist," (Sol 5-28-10); Tax, quoted in Ann Schofield, "Rebel Girls and Union Maids," Feminist Studies (Summer 1982), p. 384.
[lxv] Linda Gordon, Pitied but not Envied, 1994.
[lxvi] Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives (New York, Penguin Books, 1988), pp. 272-276. DISCUSS THIS ISSUE OF RULE OF THUMB, LEGAL WIFE BEATING, ETC, GORDON SAYS IT WAS ILLEGAL.
[lxvii] "Patriotism," (IW 8-24-11); "Gustave Herve on the Stuttgart Congress" (IUB 2-29-08); Gustave Herve, "Patriotism and the Workers," (IWW Publishing Bureau, Chicago), p. 1; "An Effect Without a Cause?", (IW 3-28-12); "Immigration from a Capitalist Standpoint," (Sol 4-11-14).
[lxviii] Walker Smith, "Anti-Militarism or Anti-Patriotism--Which?" (IW, 5-1-12, reprinted from Revolt); Smith, "War and the Workers," originally printed in (Sol 5-20-11) and widely reprinted as a leaflet.
[lxix] "'Defenders of the Flag'", (Sol 5-18-12); "The Glorious Fourth," (Sol 7-3-15); "Patriotism is Death," (IW 7-13-11); Smith, "'Patriotism'", (Sol 8-26-11); "Immigration from a Capitalist Standpoint," Sol 4-11-14; "Will 'Democracy" Strangle the Truth About Itself," (Sol 7-7-17).
[lxx] Walker Smith, "Anti-Militarism or Anti-Patriotism--Which?" (IW 5-1-12, reprinted from Revolt); Haywood quoted by Georgia Kotsch, "Haywood's Los Angeles Speech" (Sol 1-25-13); "Wm. D. Haywood Proposes General Strike Against War," (Sol 4-25-14); "War and the General Strike," (Sol 4-25-14).
[lxxi] "Gustave Herve on the Stuttgart Congress," (IUB 2-29-08); St. John, "Is the IWW All-Sufficient for the Workers Needs?", (Sol 7-31-15).
[lxxii] "Symbols--That's All," (IW 5-16-12); J.S. Biscay, "Emblem Worship," (Sol 8-23-13); "Constructive Program of the IWW," (Sol 4-17-15); "Should the IWW Take an Anti-War Pledge?" (Sol 11-13-15).
[lxxiii] Philip Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917 (International Publishers, NY, 1965) p. 362; "'Heroic' Contrasts," (Sol 7-26-13). For other examples of this, see "San Diego 'Patriots,'" (Sol 5-25-12); and an editorial comment in (Sol 6-14-13).
[lxxiv] "The Curtain Raiser," (IW 3-18-09); "The IWW and Religion," (IW 7-1-09).
[lxxv] Flynn, The Rebel Girl pp. 150-151; no impression at all, Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," reprinted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, p. 227.
[lxxvi] "The Birth of Christmas," (Sol 12-23-16 and 12-28-12); Flynn, The Rebel Girl p. 102.
[lxxvii] "Some More 'Militarism and the IWW'" (Sol 12-18-15).
[lxxviii] "'Solidarity' and 'Prepardness'" (Sol 4-15-16).
[lxxix] Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," reprinted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 217-220.
[lxxx] "IWW Invades South Carolina," (Sol 4-25-14); the songs are reprinted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 133, 141.
[lxxxi] "What Should the Unemployed Do?" (Sol 10-31-14, reprinted from the International Socialist Review.)
[lxxxii] "The Only Way to Security," (Sol 2-20-15); "Gustave Herve on the Stuttgart Congress," (IUB 2-29-08).
[lxxxiii] Flynn, "Women on the Picket Line," (Sol 5-1-15); HAYWOOD, THE REV IS AROUND US
[lxxxiv] Abner Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, (quote is on p. 13); Austin Lewis, Proletarian and Petty-Bougeois; Vincent St. John, The IWW, Its History, Structure, and Methods, pp. 22-23, 12.
[lxxxv] Lewis, Proletarian and Petty-Bourgeois, pp. 18-19; Smith, "What is the IWW?, in On the Firing Line, (Industrial Worker, 1912), p. 44.
[lxxxvi] PROPERTY IS MEANS TO OUR SUBJUGATION; Lewis, Proletarian and Petty-Bourgeois, 20-21; Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, pp. 17-18; "Georgia Kotsch, "Haywood's Los Angeles Speech," (Sol 1-25-13).
[lxxxvii] Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, pp. 16-18; "Sabotage and Environment," (Sol 10-10-12); Smith, "What is the IWW" in On the Firing Line, p. 46; Starr Bountar, "I Won't Work," (Sol 9-30-13).
[lxxxviii] Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, pp. 16, 22, 31; "Out of the Abyss," (Sol 3-22-13); "Modern Machine Proletariat,' (Sol 2-12-12).
[lxxxix] Lewis, Proletarian and Petty-Bourgeois, p. 4 and 21; Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, p. 32; Ettor, "The Modern Sileni," (Sol 7-26-13). Albert Brilliant agreed that "no beaten class can be a revolutionary factor." "Modern Machine Proletariat (Sol 2-22-12).
[xc] "The 'Slum Proletariat'", (IUB 2-27-09).
[xci] Smith, "The Floater and the Iconoclast," (IW 6-4-10); "The Blanket Stiff" (IW 5-1-12).
[xcii] Edwards, "The Migratory Worker and the Fighting Instinct," (IW 2-5-16).
[xciii] Dawson, "The Hobo Agitator," (Sol 5-17-13); Bountar, "The Free Footed Rebel," (Sol 9-6-13).
[xciv] Williams, "Editor's Reply," (Sol 9-6-13).
[xcv] "Sin Bad," "Some Weaknesses of the Western Wobbly," (Sol 1-16-15).
[xcvi] E.F. Lefferts, "The Jungles of California," (IW 5-6-09).
[xcvii] "A Tramp's View of Work," (IW 5-1-12).
[xcviii] "Sin Bad," "Cockroach 'Revolutionists'" (Sol 2-21-14) and "Some Weaknesses of the Western Wobbly" (Sol 1-16-15).
[xcix] Ashleigh, "A Few Notes on the 'Migratory'" (Sol 9-30-16).
[c] Edwards, "The Migratory Worker and What He is Up Against" (Sol 1-22-16); Ebert, "The Harvest Worker as Seen by a Home Guard," (Sol 9-30-16).
[ci] "The Blanket Stiff," (IW 5-1-12); "The Slum Proletariat," (9-23-09); see also "The 'Slum Proletariat"" (IUB 2-27-09).
[cii] "Forming the new structure," Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW, 1908 version, in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 12-13; Haywood, Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, pp. 1, 153; St. John, The IWW, Its History, Structure, and Methods, p. 12.
[ciii] Haywood, Proceedings, p. 153; Haywood, quoted in Joseph Conlin, Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement (Syracuse University Press, 1969), p. 50, quoting Big Bill Haywood's book p. 187); Abner, The Advancing Proletariat, p. 30.
[civ] Scabbing permit, Grover Perry, The Revolutionary IWW, p. 5; St. John, The IWW, Its History, Structure, and Methods, p. 11.
[cv] St. John, The IWW..., passim; Jas Thompson, "Glimpses of Capitalist Industry," the Industrial Union Bulletin, 10-19-07.
[cvi] St. John, "Industrial Unionism and the IWW," (Sol 12-23-16) [cf. St. John, "The Economic Argument for Industrial Unionism" (Sol 1-18-13)]; St. John, The IWW, pp. 11-12; fair days wage, Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW (1908), in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 12-13.
[cvii] Vanguard, On the Firing Line, pp. 32-33; new social environment, "A Word Regarding Violence," (Sol 7-18-14); Absorb and control, "One Big Union to End Wars," (Sol 10-31-14); St. John, "Is the IWW All-Sufficient for the Workers Needs?" (Sol 7-31-15); upholders, "'Forming the Structure'", (Sol 11-28-14).
[cviii] "A Word Regarding Violence," (Sol 7-18-14); Williams, "Syndicalism and Socialism," (Sol 4-27-12, reprinted in Eleven Blind Leaders (IWW Publishing Bureau), pp. 30-31; Perry, The Revolutionary IWW (pp. 2-3); St. John, The IWW, p. 14; Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, p. 18.
[cix] Ettor, (Sol 8-14-15); Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, pp. 22-24; Giovannitti, "Socialism v. Syndicalism," [a debate between Giovannitti and John Spargo], (Sol 2-6-15).
[cx] "What Should the Unemployed Do?' (Sol 10-31-14).
[cxi] Quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 69.
[cxii] Flynn, "The Labor Leader," (Sol 10-4-13).
[cxiii] Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, p. 220.
[cxiv] "The 'Call' Editor's Nightmare" (Sol 3-1-13); Haywood and Flynn, quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, pp. 41, 56. Flynn's statement may sound patronizing until we remember that she had no official power of any kind, except in her ability to galvanize the workers, who could reject her advice at any time.
[cxv] Abner, "Food for Thought," (Sol 3-8-13). The IWW did not follow his advice, but often attributed the acquittal of class-war prisoners to publicity and agitation rather than courtroom strategy.
[cxvi] Williams, Eleven Blind Leaders, p. 4; administrator, "'Nothing to Lose"", (Sol 7-22-11); organic, and supposedly wise, "Where the Intellect Is," (Sol 4-27-12); Marcy, "Ladylike Men," (Sol 12-18-09).
[cxvii] Odon Por, "Social Creation Through Conquest," (IW 5-1-12).
[cxviii] John Baldazzi, "The Ethics of Revolutionary Syndicalism," (Sol 1-27-17).
[cxix] Flynn, "The Truth About the Patterson Strike," in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 214-217; Flynn, "The Value of Propaganda Leagues," (Sol 9-19-14); Williams, Eleven Blind Leaders, p. 28; Haywood, quoted in Golin, Fragile Bridge, pp. 67-68.
[cxx] "'Supressing' The IWW," (Sol 7-21-17); Smith, "What is the IWW," in On the Firing Line, p. 44; Perry, The Revolutionary IWW, pp. 11-12. Conlin (p. 187) notes that some Wobblies, asked their religion when they were jailed in Chicago, said "The IWW."
[cxxi] W.H. Lewis, "The Beginning of the End?" (Sol 2-7-14); John Spargo, in "Socialism versus Syndicalism," (Sol 2-6-15).
[cxxii] "Capitalist 'Philanthropy'" (Sol 12-17-10).
[cxxiii] "A Confession of Failure," (Sol 6-17-16).
[cxxiv] Charles Edward Russell, "What Comes of Playing the Game," in Proletarian and Petty Bourgeois, pp. 29, 33.
[cxxv] Williams, Eleven Blind Leaders, p. 17; Woodruff, Advancing Proletariat, p. 20; Justus Ebert, "A New Note on a New Review," (Sol 2-7-14).
[cxxvi] Justus Ebert, "Socialism Gone Wrong," (Sol 7-7-17).
[cxxvii] Flynn, The Rebel Girl, pp. 135-136; "Is the Teacher a Wage Slave?" (Sol 7-1-16).
[cxxviii] J.S. Biscay, "Bourgeois Education," (IW 11-21-12); "Slave Psychology," (Sol 7-22-16, from Peoples College News).
[cxxix] "Long Live the Modern School," (IW 10-10-12); "Report of the Modern School," (IW 11-16-11). For general information see Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement (Princeton University Press, 1980).
[cxxx] E.W. Latchem, "Education for Struggle," (Sol 6-24-16). For general information, see Richard J. Altenbaugh, Education for Struggle (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) pp. 60-69 and 97-100.
[cxxxi] Caroline Nelson, "The Modern Use of May Day," (IW 5-1-12); B.E. Nilsson, "Motion Picture Morality," (Sol 9-30-11); suggestion, "Boost the IWW Press," (Sol 10-18-13); conscious class, "Legere's Great Play," (Sol 5-9-14); AFL, "Why the First of May," (Sol 5-1-15, I have corrected "fulgarities" to "vulgarities"); booze habit, "The IWW and the Ranchers," (IW 8-12-09).
[cxxxii] "Sin Bad," "Cockroach 'Revolutionists'" (Sol 2-21-14); Austin Lewis, Proletarian and Petty Bourgeois, p. 3; J.S. Biscay, "What Marx Would Say," (Sol 3-19-10); Justus Ebert, "The IWW in the Magazines," (Sol 8-23-13).
[cxxxiii] Woodruff, The Advancing Proletariat, p. 21; Flynn and Haywood, Golin, Fragile Bridge, 109-178; Flynn, "The Value of Propaganda Leagues," (Sol 9-19-14).
[cxxxiv] "The Poetry of Revolution," (IW 10-27-09); Robin Dunbar, "Modern Drama," (Sol 8-23-13). Ben Williams agreed, saying that "in the fire of the social struggle, great poets are bound to be born and made." Williams, "A Word To Our 'Poets'" (Sol 12-13-13).
[cxxxv] Robin Dunbar, "Revolutionary Drama," (Sol 6-28-13); Dunbar, "Modern Drama" (Sol 8-23-13).
[cxxxvi] Justus Ebert, "'Hunger" by Ben Legere, (Sol 5-16-14); on Hall, "'Songs of Love and Rebellion'", (Sol 5-1-15); Emanuel Julius, "The Need for Idealism in American Socialist Fiction," (4-1-16); Williams, "A Word to Our 'Poets'" (Sol 12-13-13).
[cxxxvii] Ebert on Hall's poems, "'Songs of Love and Rebellion'" (Sol 5-1-15; Hall replies, "Down in Dixie," Sol 5-8-15); Ebert on John Reed, "Special Woman's Edition Planned," (Sol 5-27-15); Richard Brazier, "The Story of the IWW's 'Little Red Songbook,'", Labor History, p. 97. GET THE YEAR AND MONTH
[cxxxviii] Richard Brazier, "Little Red Songbook," pp. 97-99, 103; Philip Foner, Industrial Workers of the World, pp. 151-157; "Songs! Songs!" (IW, 6-6-12); Joe Hill, The Letters of Joe Hill, edited by Philip Foner, p. 16.
[cxxxix] Brazier, "Little Red Songbook," pp. 99, 103.
[cxl] Justus Ebert, "The English Novel and the IWW Songs," (Sol 2-13-15); Justus Ebert, "Joe Hill and the IWW," (Sol 11-18-16); Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, "A Visit to Joe Hill," (Sol 5-22-15).
[cxli] Clark Halker, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest 1865-95 (Urbana, University of Illinois).
[cxlii] Forrest Edwards, "The Migratory Worker and the Fighting Instinct," (Sol 2-5-16).
[cxliii] Brazier, "Little Red Songbook," 97; JOE HILL I LIVED AND DIED LIKE A POET QUOTE.
[cxliv] For accounts of the Pageant see Golin, The Fragile Bridge, pp. 157-178; and Linda Nochlin, "The Patterson Strike Pageant of 1913," Art in America, May/June 1974, pp. 64-68.
[cxlv] "The Program of the Patterson Strike," in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 210-212; Golin, Fragile Bridge, p. 162.
[cxlvi] The Independent and the New York Herald Tribune quoted by Nochlin, "Patterson Strike Pageant," pp. 65-67; Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico, 1985), p. 204; Phillips Russell, "The World's Greatest Labor Play," International Socialist Review, July 1913, pp. 7-9.
[cxlvii] Grace Potter, "Max Eastman's Two Books," New Review, September 1913, p. 795.
[cxlviii] Katherine Lord was a critic for the New York Post, quoted in "The Pageant as a Form of Propaganda," Current Opinion, June, 1913, in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, pp. 212-213; Nochlin, "Patterson Strike Pageant," p. 67.
[cxlix] Phillips, "World's Greatest Labor Play," (ISR, July, 1913), p. 7; Reed, "IWW Pageant at Madison Square Garden," (Sol 6-7-13).
[cl] Nochlin, "Patterson Strike Pageant," p. 68; NY Tribune, quoted in "The Pageant as a Form of Propaganda," Current Opinion, June 1913, in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, p. 212.
[cli] "The Patterson Mass Play," (Sol 6-14-13).
[clii] HUTCHINS HAPGOOD, UNITY OF SELF-EXPRESSION IN INDUSTRY AND ART. "Frisco Police do not like Everett Massacre," (Sol 1-13-17).
[cliii] QUOTE CONLIN, DUBOFSKY 354, 407
[cliv] Harrison George, "Can America Keep Out of the War?", (Sol 10-31-14); John Proletaire, "The Hour of Opportunity," (Sol 10-31-14). This same issue carried the Ben Williams editorial, "One Big Union to End Wars," quoted above, that advocated industrial unionism, not sabotage and mutiny, as the key to preventing wars.
[clv] F.L. Rhoda, "Wage Slave's View of War," (Sol 10-31-14); the Haywood quotes are from "What Should the Unemployed Do?" (Sol 10-31-14, from ISR). I have combined paragraphs in this quote.
[clvi] "A Declaration," (Sol 12-9-16).
[clvii] "Organization and War," (Sol 2-17-17); MacDonald and Rowan, quoted in Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 354-5, 357; Haywood to Little, quoted by Conlin, Big Bill Haywood, p. 183.
[clviii] "Deadly Parallel" and "War's Toll" (Sol 3-24-17); "Hats off to the Rockford Rebels," (Sol 7-14-17).
[clix] "Were you Drafted?" (Sol 7-28-17).
[clx] Gustave Herve, "Patriotism and the Worker," pp. 29, 26, 19. One edition of this pamphlet advertises "The General Secretary's Report of the Tenth Convention," meaning that it was printed in December 1916 or later; the "Introduction by the Publishers" has a note saying "the above introduction was written in 1912"--an apparent attempt to distance the IWW from the sentiments it expresses. Herve's pamphlet, and those on sabotage by Flynn and Poguet, were advertised regularly in Solidarity until it was suppressed in late 1917. For assertions that the IWW toned down some of its literature, see Flynn, Rebel Girl 227, and Chaplin, Wobbly, p. 206. Flynn and Chaplin both assert that Flynn's Sabotage was not reprinted, but Solidarity advertised it until the IWW was suppressed, months after Flynn and Chaplin claim the IWW discontinued it. Conlin, Big Bill Haywood, pp. 185-6, claims that some changes were made, particularly in Vincent St. John's The IWW: Its History, Structure, and Methods. However, the 1917 retained all of the passages Conlin claims were excised; it was the 1919 edition that omitted them. Even that edition retained the passage about IWW retaliatory killing of Pennsylvania State Constabularies during the McKees Rocks Strike. Justus Ebert, in the 1919 or 1920 edition of The IWW in Theory and Practice (p. 61) says that the war caused the IWW to repudiate sabotage. The massive IWW indictments and trials induced the IWW to repudiate sabotage; it went into the war with its flags flying.
[clxi] "War Against War, or War Against Capitalism," (Sol 5-26-17); "Violence and the IWW," (Sol 6-9-17).
[clxii] "The Workers' War is for Emancipation," (Sol 5-19-17).
[clxiii] For general information on the repression, see Dubofsky, We Shall Be All; Foner, Industrial Workers of the World; and Preston, Aliens and Dissenters. The quote from Rowan is in Dubofsky, p. 430.
[clxiv] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 383-84.
[clxv] "Hats off to the Rockford Rebels," (Sol 7-14-17).
[clxvi] Visit to the Bureau and to Washington, Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 405-406; Haywood's invitation to Covington, "Preamble Still Nailed to our Masthead," (Sol 10-20-17); "An Explanation," (Sol 9-29-17).
[clxvii] For a discussion of the IWW's legal strategy see Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 425-433 and (for a spirited rebuttal) Helen C. Camp, "Gurley: A Biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 1890-1964 (dissertation, Columbia University, 1980) pp. 183-194. For the Omaha defendants see Dubofsky, p. 442; for the rejection of the offer of pardon, see Conlin, Big Bill Haywood, p. 190 (compare to Dubofsky, 461). Helen Camp says 52 of 71 prisoners refused pardon.
[clxviii] "'Suppressing' The IWW," (Sol 7-21-17); A.S. Embree, "To the Membership of the IWW," (Sol 9-29-17).
[clxix] Relentless progress, and, die gamely, "The Wooden Shoe and the Iron Heel," (Sol 8-18-17); Hold the fort, "An Explanation," (Sol 9-29-17).
[clxx] Haywood in (Sol 10-27-17 GET ARTICLE TITLE); Jail a branch, (Sol 10-6-17 GET TITLE); Georgia Kotsch, "Why Suppression Only Aids the IWW," (Sol 9-29-17); Frank Woods, "Fat Chance," (Sol 8-25-17); fair trial, "The Conquering Sign," (Sol 10-20-17).
[clxxi] "The Wooden Shoe vs. the Iron Heel," (Sol 8-18-17), see also "'Suppressing' The IWW" (Sol 7-21-17); "Sabotage," (Sol 10-13-17); Haywood and Rowan, Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, pp. 388, 403.
[clxxii] Haywood, "Preamble Still Nailed to Our Masthead," (Sol 10-20-17); Gustave Herve, Patriotism and the Worker, p. 30; Rowan, quoted in Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 430.