CHAPTER VII
Battle Scars

During World War I, and during the troubled xenophobia of the postwar period, Americans withheld all tolerance towards the I.W.W. Federal, state, and local governments, and various vigilante irregulars, attacked the organization and gave it no quarter. It is not surprising that the I.W.W. declined rapidly after the war. With its first and second echelon of leaders in jail—and with hundreds of its rank and file members under indictment in state and municipal courts—the I.W.W. became almost exclusively an organization devoted to its own legal defense. The bludgeoning inevitably induced a certain caution and loss of Ìlan, and many Wobblies understandably sought ways to further the revolution without bringing the police down on themselves. Moreover, the I.W.W. acted in a ritualistic manner when it did act, going through the motions of its earlier triumphs. It seemed at times to be operating from a manual, without the dash and improvisation of the old days.

The I.W.W. also found itself, in this time of travail, face to face with a potent rival, the new Communist movement. The former left-wing Socialists whom Wobblies had disdained before the war attached themselves to the prestigious Bolsheviks of Russia. Odd as it might seem to observers outside the entire Left, the new Communists possessed not only prestige but also an apparent realism from their identification with a successful revolution. Some Wobblies abandoned the I.W.W. and went over to the new movement. In responding to this unexpected threat to its existence, the I.W.W. had to defend the correctness and relevancy of its anarcho-syndicalism against the philosophers of the Left. In the process, the I.W.W. fell further out of action and into the hair-splitting and schismatics that had marked its early history in the days of its conflict with Daniel De Leon before 1908.

To further the work of its enemies and rivals, the stream of history itself cast the I.W.W. high and dry. Social and economic conditions changed with war and growth, ending once and for all the frontier conditions of the lumber industry, of nonferrous mining, and of agriculture. As the society changed, the migratory labor force underwent a change, and the hobo worker—the Wobbly “type”—gave way to a “home guard” or sedentary worker. The lumber worker, in particular, became less migratory, more attached to place and community. If farm labor remained migratory and seasonal, the laborers became increasingly “home guard” types, family men moving from harvest to harvest with wife and children in battered automobiles or the trucks and busses of a labor contractor.

Thus the I.W.W. faced a bewildering array of problems after the war, how to defend itself against persecution, how to demonstrate its relevancy in the face of the world-shaking Communist movement, and how to recruit members and maintain its membership in a society that was destroying the reservoir of manpower from which it had previously drawn.

Besides helping to change the I.W.W. into a society of debaters, the ordeal of the war made the I.W.W. noticeably less militant and more cautious. Communists liked to point out that the I.W.W. had “gone soft” or had lost its nerve.1 The I.W.W., for example, began to edit its most violent propaganda even before the war had ended, and during the criminal-syndicalist trials in the Pacific Northwest it complained with some justification that its members were being convicted on the basis of prewar pamphlets and circulars that had been repudiated or softened after the first assault of the Courts.2 Wobblies also ceased to advocate sabotage as openly or as unequivocally as they once had, and they devoted pages of print to explain that sabotage, or “direct action,” did not really entail the violent acts envisioned in the public accusations. With the possible exception of the furious but essentially defensive struggle in Centralia on Armistice Day 1919, the I.W.W. ceased to provoke the same kind of disturbance that it had before the war.

During the famous Seattle general strike of February 1919, Wobblies as individuals may have acted in accordance with their revolutionary principles but with unusual circumspection. Although anxious conservatives came to blame the strike on Wobbly conspirators in the Seattle unions, the Wobblies had little to do with the inception of the strike. The trouble began after the Shipping Board refused to allow a wage increase to the Seattle AFL Metal Trades Council, a raise that the Council had begun to negotiate with the local ship builders. The I.W.W. during these maneuvers seemed content to blend its distinctive voice into the radical chorus of the Seattle labor movement. For almost two years prior to the strike, Wobblies by the scores had been arrested and rearrested, detained without trial or without charges being brought against them by soldiers, police, sheriffs, vigilantes, and Immigration Bureau officials. It is understandable perhaps that many Wobblies became “two-card” union men, radicals who revealed only their membership in one or another of the Seattle unions affiliated with the AFL

Workers in Seattle’s shipyards had been restive all through the war months. After a threatened strike in 1917, the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board—more commonly called the Macy Board after its chairman, V. Everit Macy—had granted a wage scale very unsatisfactory to the militant Seattle workers who thought a West Coast cost-of-living differential wage was just. But the Macy Board kept to its principle of a uniform national wage scale, although it did try to placate the West Coast shipyard workers by allowing them a “temporary” ten per cent “bonus.” Charles Piez, head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, in July 1918, also agreed, under the pressure of Seattle labor leaders, to permit the Seattle workers to negotiate directly with their employers for a wage increase, as long as any such wage increase did not obligate the Emergency Fleet Corporation in any way.3 Later, however, he reversed himself and insisted that the workers were “under agreement, not with shipyards, but with the Emergency Fleet Corporation not to strike and to accept the award of the Macy Board.”4 The Seattle Metal Trades Council, representing all the shipyard workers, waited with somewhat impatient patriotism for the war to end, and then, shortly after the Armistice, decided to invoke Piez’s original permission to negotiate for a wage increase. The Council began, under the threat of a strike, to negotiate directly with the shipbuilders. Piez thereupon sent an indiscrete telegram to the employers of Seattle, to the Metal Trades Association, urging them to hold firm against any increase in wages on pain of losing their metal allotments from the government. This peremptory telegram to the employers was delivered by mistake to the workers’ organization of similar name, the Metal Trades Council.5 The negotiations, of course, came to an abrupt halt. On January 21, 1919, the shipyard workers went out on strike, much more angry with Piez and the United States government than with their local bosses with whom they had been negotiating.6

Up to this point, the conflict in Seattle showed nothing unusual to distinguish it from ordinary labor-management disputes ending in strikes, except perhaps for the faux pas of the Piez telegram. But on January 22, in a noisy meeting of the Seattle Central Labor Council, the extension of the strike to a general sympathy strike began, and with the general strike came that confusion of ends and that rhetorical hint of revolution which gave off the scent of the I.W.W. to the nervous bourgeoisie. At the meeting of January 22, the crowds in the galleries sang I.W.W. songs and shouted heckling advice. Even on the floor of the meeting, Seattle labor leaders rose to their feet to propose that Seattle unions “go industrial” and cut loose from the parent AFL The representative from the Metal Trades Council, amid the militant hubbub, got the Central Labor Council to pass a resolution for polling all union members in Seattle on the question of a general sympathy strike. The Metal Trades Council speaker tried to specify his intent very carefully. The proposed general strike, he said, should not be considered as a revolutionary act, but only as a just demonstration of labor’s power, as a way to insure labor’s future in Seattle. His appeal for such a definite, stated objective for the general strike went largely unheeded.7

As the sentiment for this amorphous general strike mounted through late January, the conservatives and unorganized workers of Seattle reacted with honest puzzlement. Why were all of Seattle’s local unions voting so overwhelmingly for the strike? Was a kind of test-tube revolution being planned? Why did not the leaders specify what they hoped to accomplish and what would have to be done by whom to bring the strike to an end?

On January 29, the Central Labor Council met again to discuss the question. With its regular leaders back from a Tom Mooney protest meeting in Chicago, the Council conducted its business in this second meeting in a more orderly manner. James A. Duncan, secretary of the Council, led the self-styled “Progressive” faction of Seattle’s union labor. Duncan and his Progressives wrested control of the strike from the hands of the “Radicals.” Duncan and his followers approved the idea of the strike but only if they led it.8 But the Radicals—many of them open or covert Wobblies—succeeded in keeping the objectives of the strike vague. The “General Strike,” of course, as a concept, was a central part of anarcho-syndicalist ideology. The Radicals therefore considered it in their interests to urge the general strike without pettifogging limitations on what it might produce. Although the Progressives won the day by grabbing the reins of leadership, the Radicals won their point to the extent that they kept the purpose of the strike ominously vague.

Last-minute efforts at mediation failed. Piez wired his last word on the matter, an unyielding support of the Macy Board award.9 Efforts at mediation very likely would have failed without the damper by Piez because the first mediator, Henry White, had antagonized the Seattle unionists. He had been during the war the local Commissioner of Immigration responsible for the rounding up of Wobbly aliens. Moreover, he had destroyed his usefulness as a mediator by stating publicly that the shipyard workers’ vote to strike had been dishonest.10 Although he would not give an inch on the issue of the Macy Board award, Piez tried to woo rank-and-file strikers at the last moment by placing advertisements in the local press. The workers, he charged, were being duped by their leaders. They should return to their jobs as patriotic Americans.11 The advertisements had little effect in Seattle. Perhaps Upton Sinclair expressed a common reaction, a rhetorical hope, based on some obvious suspicions, that Piez had paid for the advertisements himself rather than using public Shipping Board money.12

On February 3, the Central Labor Council made its official call for the general strike. The Union Record tried to win the support of Seattle small businessmen in an inept appeal by holding out the lure of a much greater payroll in the city if the strikers won, but most middle-class elements in Seattle easily resisted this bread-and-butter appeal. Rather, they watched the strike develop with foreboding.13 Radical handbills and circulars spread through the shipyards did little to allay their fears. Harvey O’Connor’s “Russia Did It,” for example, urged the strikers to seize the shipyards as the Bolsheviks in Russia had done.14 It was Anna Louise Strong, however, who published in the Union Record the most famous, and frightening, of the radical exhortations. The breathless and exalted tone, the hint of revolution in the document was cited frequently thereafter to “prove” that the I.W.W. or the Bolsheviks had fomented the strike. She ended her editorial with the ominous coda: “And that is why we say that we are starting on a road that leads—NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!15

A front page editorial in the Seattle Star, a paper hitherto neutral or even on occasion sympathetic to labor’s cause, expressed early some of the concern of the middle class in Seattle:

This is plain talk to the common-sense union men of Seattle. You are being rushed pell-mell into a general strike. You are being urged to use a dangerous weapon-the general strike, which you have never used before-which, in fact, has never been used anywhere in the United States. It isn’t too late to avert the tragic results that are sure to come from its use ... Confined to Seattle or even confined to the whole Pacific coast, the use of force by Bolsheviks would be, and should be, quickly dealt with by the army of the United States. These false Bolsheviks haven’t a chance on earth to win anything for you in this country, because this country is America—not Russia.16

The next day the Star became even more outspoken against the strike and adopted in large part the extreme position of the most frightened conservatives in Seattle:

The general strike is at hand. A general SHOWDOWN-A showdown for all of us-a test of Americanism—a test of Your Americanism.

As the Star stated yesterday, this is no time to mince words. A part of our community is defying our government, and is, in fact, contemplating changing that government, and not by American methods. This small part of our city talks plainly of “taking over things,” of “resuming under our government”. . . Under which flag do you stand?17

On February 6 the strike began. Seattle grew very quiet as streetcars stopped running, as stores closed, as the streets emptied of people. What economic life continued—such tasks as delivering milk to hospitals or carrying on the minimal public services—was done with the permission of the Strike Committee. The citizens of Seattle, for the most part, stayed in their homes and waited apprehensively. But nothing much happened. The essential work went on under the sufferance of the Strike Committee, and the streets remained silent, ominously silent perhaps, but nonviolent.

On the second day of the strike, February 7, Mayor Ole Hanson issued his first proclamation.18

By virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor, I hereby guarantee to all the people of Seattle absolute and complete protection. They should go about their daily work and business in perfect security. We have fifteen hundred policemen, fifteen hundred regular soldiers from Camp Lewis, and can and will secure, if necessary, every soldier in the Northwest to protect life, business, and property. THE TIME HAS COME for every person in Seattle to show his Americanism. Go about your daily duties without fear. We will see to it that you have food, transportation, water, light, gas and all necessities. The anarchists in this community shall not rule its affairs. All persons violating the laws will be dealt with summarily.
                    Ole Hanson, Mayor

Two days later, Hanson issued another even stronger proclamation to the nation through the local United Press representative in Seattle. Curiously enough, he did not release it to the local press, perhaps because he realized he would not be believed by his own constituents. In this second proclamation, Hanson branded the strike as revolution. He announced that he would not treat with such revolutionaries, and he implicitly took credit, with his announcement of February 7, for having saved America from red anarchy.19

In spite of Hanson’s blustering advice to Seattle citizens to ignore the strike and to go about their business, the strike continued. Life and liberty were protected more by the Strike Committee than by Mayor Hanson. But strikers began to defect after the second day, not so much in deference to Mayor Hanson’s plea but in response to weariness and confusion. As the workers, local by local, began to abandon the strike, the authorities finally struck forcefully at the edges of the strike, not at the Central Labor Council or the AFL unions still loyal to the strike but at the I.W.W. They arrested Walker C. Smith, editor of the Industrial Worker, on February 8. On the same day, the Central Labor Council voted thirteen to one in favor of a recommendation to the Strike Committee that it take steps to end the strike. The Strike Committee debated the question inconclusively into early Sunday morning, February 9.20 On Sunday, Seattle was quiet for more normal reasons, while the strike leaders had a brief respite in the struggle to reflect on their purposes. On Monday, February 10, the Strike Committee resumed its deliberations and voted to end the strike at noon on Tuesday, the following day.21

As workers returned to work, the authorities stepped up their attack upon the I.W.W., now the scapegoat. They raided and closed the Equity Printing Company, the shop that printed the I.W.W.’s propaganda. They arrested under the newly enacted criminal-syndicalism law thirty-one Wobblies and eight others. James Bruce, the first of the accused, was brought to trial but acquitted on June 5, and the other prisoners were thereupon released.22

The general strike, awesome in its brief effectiveness but vague in its purposes, virtually destroyed the labor movement in Seattle. The unions that survived were to be harder, more pragmatic, and were to eschew the dangerous firewater of Socialist or I.W.W. ideology. An organization called the Associated Industries stepped up its campaign for the open shop, for the “American Plan,” after the general strike. The I.W.W., emboldened by the acquittal of James Bruce under the first test of the state’s new criminal-syndicalism law, briefly doffed its protective coloration of AFL memberships. Wobblies gave up being “two-card” union men, gave up their footholds in many of the local unions in Seattle and began again to organize open “dual” unions. Perhaps they were not even too unhappy over the debacle of unionism in Seattle after the general strike because they hoped to pick up the pieces and put them back together again in I.W.W. unions. But if such were the conscious strategy of the I.W.W., it proved an illusion. No open shop, anti-union counterrevolution would destroy the AFL and then placidly deal with the I.W.W. The I.W.W. could never hope to fill the vacuum left by the diminishing AFL, because Wobblies as individuals and their organizations were persona non grata. By the end of the year the new assault upon the I.W.W. occasioned by the Centralia riot—the “White Terror” as the I.W.W. called it—virtually eliminated the I.W.W. as a force to be reckoned with in Washington. The postwar collapse of Seattle’s industrial boom also tended to throw both the AFL and the I.W.W.—indeed, any labor organization—into the discard.23

In post mortem, the strike leaders, the I.W.W., Mayor Ole Hanson, the press, and the frightened public all agreed that the Seattle general strike had somehow really served radical ends. The I.W.W. probably did play a more important role in the strike than the record immediately reveals, and many of the open leaders of the strike admitted to vague, revolutionary motives.24 The I.W.W. claimed that concealed Wobblies—the “two-card” union men—controlled all of the major Seattle unions.25 Mayor Hanson insisted that a secret “soviet” or “Workers’ Council” of Wobblies in the Metal Trades Council had planned and directed the strike.26 The conservative press agreed that the strike had been the work of radicals and Wobblies in control of the AFL unions. “Whatever may have been the motives of the rank and file of the strikers, those who engineered the strike did so with the hallucination that the whole country would flame into revolt.27 Both the I.W.W. and Mayor Hanson, of course, had their own reasons for either emphasizing or exaggerating the role of the I.W.W. in the strike. In order to advertise himself as the greatest possible “Chamber of Commerce hero,” Mayor Hanson had to make the strike as threatening and sinister as possible.28 The I.W.W., for its part, wanted to take credit for a historic and spectacular strike. But discounting the gaudiest exaggerations on both sides, Wobblies apparently played a significant role in the famous Seattle general strike of 1919, and for the first time they chose to hide their talents under a bushel rather than shout them from a corner soap box. Only in retrospect did the I.W.W. claim that the strike had been theirs.

The I.W.W. revealed its greatest caution and loss of militancy in a grandiose educational and research program it initiated after the war. In 1920 and 1921, it embarked upon a program of educating the workers in the technical and managerial problems of industry, of trying to attract engineers and technicians into the organization, of preparing itself “realistically” for the problems it would face after it expropriated the nation’s industries. From such an organization as the I.W.W.—that had won renown for its bombast and soap box oratory, for “direct action” tactics, for provoking curious violence—the new policy evidenced an obvious change in temper, a significant change from heedlessness to intellection.

Significantly, Wobblies conceived the new policy while imprisoned in Chicago’s Cook County jail awaiting trial under the Espionage Act. The prisoners whiled away their time by conducting informal “educational meetings” in their cells, giving each other the benefit of their practical experience. Facetiously they dubbed these meetings their “Industrial Congress.” But they also talked more seriously of pursuing the idea out of prison, of someday compiling their collective knowledge of American industry into a workers’ “Industrial Encyclopedia.”29 One of the prisoners did pursue the idea when released from prison. While free on bond and touring the country speaking for the I.W.W. defense committee, Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly poet and executive board member, made the acquaintance of Howard Scott, a visionary engineer living in Greenwich Village and a man later to win fame as the seer of Technocracy, Inc. During the course of an evening’s conversation in Scott’s studio, Chaplin heard many shocking but trenchant criticisms of the I.W.W. Scott convinced him that the I.W.W. needed a “research bureau” to compile information on American industry. Chaplin, though impressed, did not leave the studio without misgivings. He felt uneasy about Scott’s obvious bohemianism and his remoteness from the proletariat. “All the time he was discoursing so plausibly about tear-drop automobiles, flying wing airplanes, and technological unemployment, I was looking at the other side of the studio where an appalling phallic water color was displayed among blueprints and graphs on a big easel.”30

Haywood and Tom Boyle, other executive board members, showed little enthusiasm for Scott’s ideas or for the establishment of a research bureau in the I.W.W., but Chaplin won them over to the idea, convincing them that a “high class educational program would add to the prestige of the I.W.W. while it was under attack from so many quarters.”31 The argument would seem to establish, if only tacitly, a connection between the program and the persecutions of the war. Perhaps also Chaplin had in mind the “prestige” of such a program as a competitive advantage over the vaguely “intellectual” Communists. The delegates to the 1920 convention created a new Bureau of Industrial Research.32

In 1920, Scott presented his ideas to the entire membership of the I.W.W. in its press, identifying himself merely as an “industrial engineer.” Scott criticized Wobblies’ reliance upon sabotage, arguing that in terms of the socialist philosophy it was self-defeating. If the revolution were to come as the result of economic crises in the capitalist system, then the withdrawal of efficiency by workers would only cripple and slow production and delay the crises. Scott also pointed out that it made little sense to sabotage an industry you intended to seize and use. He also criticized the traditional emphasis within the I.W.W. of organizing the transient and unskilled workers. He argued that realistic revolutionaries should even agitate for restriction of immigration and Oriental exclusion, since the more scarce, productive, and skilled the labor force the more rapid and severe would be the economic crises.33

During the brief period of Scott’s association with the I.W.W.34 the Department of Industrial Research published a number of articles on such technical matters as economic waste and management theory.35 The One Big Union Monthly, the I.W.W.’s journal of opinion, became in 1921 the Industrial Pioneer, a name more suggestive perhaps of the new technocratic preoccupations of the I.W.W. By 1922, the I.W.W. had terminated Scott’s services and had abolished the Department of Industrial Research, but Scott’s influence remained with the I.W.W. for years. In a curious pamphlet published in 1923 by the Department of Education of the Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union, the I.W.W. still urged an alliance of technicians and proletarians. In the pamphlet, an engineer discusses the I.W.W. preamble with a boyhood friend who is a manual laborer. The two men chew over, almost word for word, the primitive Marxism of the I.W.W. preamble and eventually come to agree that engineers and workers share a revolutionary interest and that greater cooperation from “technician down to the laborers” will be needed to build the new society.36

Even the commercial press noted this new shift in I.W.W. propaganda; the new educational and research program of the I.W.W. impressed one reporter as evidence of an unexpected practicality among radicals. “One’s conception of the visionary type of mind that directs these radical forces gives way to a conception of decided practicality, as he observes the close attention to the minutiae of industrial organization and operation.”37 Another writer described the new program as a peculiar new “conspiracy.” Wobblies had outlined for him a variant of their new “practical” approach to revolution. They intended to hire efficiency experts and engineers to study a selected American industry. With the findings of the experts in their hands, the Wobblies then intended to approach the managers of the plants and say, in effect, “We can increase your production by, say, sixty per cent. How about dividing the increased profits with us?” Wobblies explained that by using this kind of approach in all industries they could eventually seize the means of production “not by mere right of ownership but by the right of knowing what to do with them.” If these tactics failed to deliver the actual ownership of the means of production into the hands of the workers, it would make no real difference. “Huh! It don’t matter who owns these things if we use them. What do I care who owns the cigar if I smoke it?”38

Most Wobblies after 1921 lost their delight in such speculations and in the ambitious research and education program, and most Wobblies in all probability remained anchored to the simpler revolutionary ideas of the prewar era. One historian of the I.W.W., however, thought that Howard Scott had permanently disillusioned many Wobblies with the simple-minded orthodoxy of the early I.W.W.39 The brief excursion into scholarship, whatever its lasting effects upon individual Wobblies, did bespeak a seepage of militancy and a desire to further the revolution without risking jail. After all, Wobblies did not go to jail, nor did they get lynched and beaten, for making economic studies, even if the studies were rationalized as steps toward the ultimate revolution.

The Industrial Worker, the I.W.W.’s newspaper in the Pacific Northwest,40 returned periodically to this early infatuation with technocratic ideas. When in the winter of 1932-1933, Technocracy burst onto the scene from the national magazines and the front page of the New York Times as a depression phenomenon with which all kinds of prominent Americans toyed hopefully, the I.W.W. again took up the matter of revolution and technology. The Industrial Worker covered Howard Scott’s speeches sympathetically, under such headlines as “Howard Scott Strikes Hefty Blows at Price System.” The paper also ran a boxed advertisement urging technicians and industrial engineers to acquaint themselves with the I.W.W., as if to remind all the persons jumping on the bandwagon of Technocracy that the half-forgotten I.W.W. had been through it all before and had even helped to fashion the bandwagon.41 Wobblies of the Pacific Northwest seemed to attach themselves to the technocratic idea more eagerly than the Wobblies of the Chicago headquarters did, perhaps because the Northwestern Wobblies reacted most negatively to the Communists and felt the need for some “ideology” at least as “intellectual” as the Communists’ “Marxism-Leninism.” Perhaps there is some tortuous and obscure pattern of causation—not really worth the effort to dig for—which would explain why Wobblies of the Pacific Northwest became the most “technocratic” as well as why Technocracy itself made its last organizational stand in the region.42

But the Wobblies did not retreat completely into the AFL as “two-card” union men, nor did they devote all their time to safe armchair theorizing about the role of engineers in the class struggle. As the most severe repressions of the war eased, as even the fury accompanying the Centralia trial subsided, the I.W.W. did try to resume its open organizing of workers and did try to conduct strikes as of old. In 1922, for example, its Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union became entangled in a complicated struggle on the docks of Portland, Oregon, a struggle involving both the employers and the International Longshoremen’s Association of the AFL

Before May 1, 1922, Portland ship owners had worked more or less amicably with the I.L.A. and its union hiring hall. But in April 1922, the ship owners, lining up in the nationwide struggle for the open shop, or the “American Plan,” announced that on May I they would establish their own nonunion hiring hall, the “fink hall” as both the I.W.W. and the AFL came to call it. The I.L.A. called a strike in protest. The employers hired strikebreakers and kept them in a special “hotel” ship towed into the harbor, the J. T. Potter.43 The I.L.A. agreed late in April to end its strike and to go back to work on United States Shipping Board ships. At this partial capitulation, the independent longshoremen and the I.W.W.’s Marine Transport Workers charged that the I.L.A. had pusillanimously ended the strike—or half of it—and had agreed to scab on itself. Since that was the case, the I.W.W. would go back to work on all ships and ignore the I.L.A. pickets. In fact, on June 6 fifty Wobblies did go back to work through the picket line, escorted by Portland policemen.44 According to the I.W.W., the I.L.A. was saved from its own stupidity by the even greater stupidity of the ship owners—and, one might add, the Wobblies themselves were saved from the shameful appearance of being strikebreakers protected by the Portland police, when the employers stubbornly decided to boycott the Shipping Board ships worked by I.L.A. crews. At this impasse, with all the parties hurling accusations at each other around a triangle, the moderates worked out a compromise. An I.L.A. man would be permitted to work in the “fink hall” to see that half of all men hired were I.L.A. members. On the ships, the strikebreakers and the I.L.A. workers would work in separated crews at separate hatches.45

The compromise outraged many militant I.L.A. members as well as the Wobblies. The Wobblies’ Marine Transport Workers local grew rapidly to two hundred and seventy-five members, and some I.L.A. workers and the I.W.W. began to plan a jointly sponsored strike. By a close vote, however, the I.L.A. rejected the proposal to strike in partnership with the I.W.W.46 The employers, with the tacit support now of the moderate I.L.A. majority, announced a policy of hiring no “known” Wobblies. It seemed a clever way to control and discipline Wobblies and militant I.L.A. members. The I.L.A. representative in the “fink hall”—a gun-toting former secretary of the Portland local—could insure quiet Wobblies and I.L.A. radicals, because if they complained they immediately became “known” and thus unemployable.47

But the control broke down. In October, the I.L.A. radicals and the I.W.W. went out together on strike. It was almost like old times for the Wobblies. On October 18, the police arrested three hundred and fifty Wobblies, the whole membership of the Marine Transport Workers local. The press trumpeted like a nervous elephant that twenty-five thousand angry Wobblies were bound for Portland to “teach the town a lesson.” The mayor got an appropriation of $10,000 from the council to hire seventy-four special officers.48 On October 19, sixty-five more Wobblies were arrested, many of them aliens, the press announced darkly. Even the native-born prisoners, it said, “possess names with a decided foreign tinge.”49

The Wobblies hung improvised red flags from their cell windows, sang songs to crowds of sympathizers crowded outside. The AFL somewhat reluctantly came to the defense of the I.W.W., pointing out correctly enough that Wobblies had done nothing to deserve their imprisonment. In the previous strike of the summer, Wobblies had, of course, acted as strikebreakers and tools of the ship owners, but now they were being used by ship owners in a different way to discredit and destroy the whole labor movement.50 The K.K.K., a new party to an I.W.W. conflict, offered its services to the mayor.51 Among supporters of labor, if not of the I.W.W., the suspicion grew that the mass arrests and the “emergency” had been carefully staged as a tactic in the 1922 election, the campaign that was to see the K.K.K. win control of the Oregon legislature.52

Wobblies kept at their strike doggedly, pleading regularly for financial aid in the I.W.W. press, but their strike was doomed to slow failure. The picket lines grew progressively thinner, the membership in the Marine Transport Workers local dwindled, and eventually the strike ended without many noticing it. The waning dock strike faded into the ambitious 1923 “general strike.” Perhaps the only achievement of the strike was literary, a new Wobbly song by “Dublin Dan” Liston, entitled “The Portland Revolution”:

The Revolution started, so the judge informed the Mayor,
Now Baker paces back and forth, and raves and pulls his hair,
The waterfront is tied up tight, the Portland newsboy howls,
And not a thing is moving, only Mayor Baker’s bowels.

They were ushered to the court room, bright and early Tuesday morn,
Then slowly entered “Justice,” on his face a look of scorn,
Some “Cat” who had the rigging, suggested to his pard,
“Here’s a chance to line up Baldy,” so they wrote him out a card.

When he spied the little ducat, his face went white with hate,
And he said, “I’ll tell you once for all, this court won’t tolerate
You Wobblies coming in here,” and he clenched his puny fists,
“’Cause Mayor Baker has informed me that an emergency exists.”

The One Ten Cat then wagged his tail, and smiled up at the “law,”
He said, “I am a harvest hand, or better known as 'Straw,'
I’m interested in this wheat, in fact I’m keeping tabs,
I’m here to see, twixt you and me, taint loaded by no scabs.”
The One Ten Cats were jubilant, and fur flew from their tails,
“His Honor” rapped for order, and the next man called was “Rails.”
“I belong to old 'Five Twenty,' I’m a switchman in these yards,
And I’m here to state, we’ll switch no freight,
’Cause we’ve all got red cards.

We’re here to win this longshore strike, in spite of all your law,
That’s all I’ve got to say, except we’re solid behind ’Straw:
“Now I can’t send you men to jail, I can’t find one excuse,
I’ll wash my hands of this damn’d mess,” and turned the whole bunch loose,
Then “dirt” and “sticks” walked arm in arm, with “flirts” and “skirts” and “rails,”
While the One Ten Cats brought up the rear, fur flying from their tails.53

Of course, Wobblies responded variously to persecution and the changing social scene, by softening their tactics and rhetoric, by tinkering with their “ideology,” by pressing ahead as best they could in alliance or out of alliance with the AFL But they also “regressed,” as a psychoanalyst would say. They began to cope with their frustrations by reverting inappropriately to tactics that had once, under different circumstances, served them well. During the latter part of 1922 and the first four months of 1923, the I.W.W. made elaborate plans to call a truly great strike, larger in scope even than the 1917 lumber strike. Delegates to the 1922 convention first discussed the need for a “general strike,”54 and Wobblies all over the country soon took up the hue and cry. The I.W.W. press featured articles on the proposed strike, this time to be truly a general strike and to dwarf all previous I.W.W. strikes. In March 1923, the Industrial Worker published an article by a veteran of the 1917 strike, an article giving the most detailed advice on tactics and methods based on the experience of 1917. The writer, in fact, displayed so much reverence for the strike of 1917 that the proposed strike of 1923 seemed less like a plan to redress present grievances than an effort to recapture past glory in some kind of ritual repetition.55 The I.W.W. could not see that 1923 was not 1917 and that conditions that had made the strike of 1917 a fleeting success had altered by 1923. The strike of 1923 was primarily a revivalistic venture, but the I.W.W., finding some of the bad conditions of 1917 still to protest, added economic demands to the principal demand for the release of wartime political prisoners. “The blanket roll shall go! Rooms and cottages shall be built instead of bunk houses crowded with double-decked bed-bug hatcheries.”56 Where working conditions and wages had already improved to meet the most minimal standards, Wobblies merely made their demands more extensive. In one Oregon logging camp, where the “bindle” or blanket roll had long since disappeared, the Wobblies demanded that the sheets be changed three times a week. The management exploded in wrath, charging that the outrageous demand came from Wobblies who lived in Portland flop houses where the linen was not changed “once a month.”57 Ole Hendricks, the defendant in the 1923 criminal-syndicalism case in Oregon, had been carrying a printed circular of I.W.W. demands at the time he was arrested. The circular listed amnesty for political prisoners as the first demand, but also listed demands for the end of piece-work or “gyppo” systems, for the eight-hour day to include time required to get to and from the job, for clean sheets, for time and a half for Sunday work, for closer observance of safety rules, and for the end of companies’ censorship of workers’ mail.58

The 1923 strike failed to achieve its grandiose purposes and nowhere in the nation or the region approached the effectiveness of the 1917 strike. But Wobblies religiously applied the old tactics. The I.W.W. had to admit a few weeks after the beginning of the strike that the “strike off the job” had been more “noisy” than effective but advised Wobblies that the “strike on the job”—just as in 1917—would be the real test.59 As for the “noisy” strike off the job, in Coos Bay, Oregon, only a few hundred workers out of forty-five hundred left their jobs, and elsewhere in Oregon the strike failed as completely.60 In Washington, the Wobblies put on a somewhat better show; an estimated twenty to fifty per cent of all loggers in the Inland Empire left their jobs for at least a few days, but many of these workers stayed home only to avoid possible trouble.61 For several days, sixty-five per cent of the lumber Workers between Chehalis and British Columbia stayed away from their jobs.62 The Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union, the Wobblies’ sailors’ and longshoremen’s union, joined the “general strike” without greatly extending its scope or effectiveness. Wobbly longshoremen in San Pedro, California, stirred up some excitement, but in the Pacific Northwest they scarcely added a ripple to the strike. In Portland, a few lonely pickets, veterans of the longshoremen’s strike of the previous fall, distributed handbills and circulars but persuaded few workers to leave their jobs.63

Although their great general strike failed, Wobblies tried hard to convince themselves that it had succeeded spectacularly. “Old timers of the 1917 days were surprised. The strike committee was surprised,” one Wobbly publicist wrote, perhaps unwittingly giving away that few Wobblies had really expected much of the strike from the beginning.64 Other Wobbly journalists claimed sweeping success, all the while comparing the strike to the strike of 1917.65 Wobblies mesmerized themselves into viewing the strike as a success because they had repeated, however inappropriately, the same tactics and rhetoric of the strike of 1917 that had established the eight-hour day, abolished the worst conditions in logging camps, and made their name feared in almost very middle-class household.

Only once during the 1923 strike did the I.W.W. show any signs of its former Ìlan, its former improvising spirit. In the Grays Harbor region of Washington, early in the strike, Wobblies published and distributed an unusual circular. “Notice to all bootleggers and gambling houses: You are hereby given notice to close up during the strike or drastic action will be taken against you.”66 The I.W.W. distributed similar handbills in Seattle, Portland, and Spokane the following day. I.W.W. “dehorn squads” volunteered their services to the Seattle mayor to help the city close speakeasies. Then, without waiting for sluggish police cooperation, the I.W.W. temperance fighters and law enforcers closed most of the illegal saloons in lower Seattle.67 In Portland, the Wobbly defenders of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act embarrassed public officials and provoked unusual street riots. A thousand Wobblies and laughing sympathizers staged a demonstration in front of one speakeasy that the reporters chose to call, according to, standard practice of the era, a “soft-drink establishment” Police broke up the demonstration and arrested two Wobblies, both women. Scores of demonstrators then crowded around the patrol wagons crying to be arrested also as the police tried to push them away. The festive crowd even followed the patrol wagons to the police station and continued its agitation outside the building, refusing to disperse when ordered to. The following day, the police and city officials realized that the I.W.W. had made them the butt of a joke, and the mayor, in injured tones, suggested that Wobblies could present complaints and evidence in an “orderly, American fashion” if they wished to help the officials enforce the law. The chief of police left town for a few days to escape the reporters.68 Citizens of Portland began to fashion jokes about the episode, the incongruous spectacle of the I.W.W. as a defender of the law. In sentencing a number of defendants on bootlegging offenses, a Federal judge in Portland wryly interjected an obiter dictum that commended the I.W.W. as a more efficient upholder of the prohibition amendment than the local officials. Wobblies explained their temperance policy as a practical measure to keep strikers sober and out of mischief. Booze was a weapon of the master class.70 But everyone recognized the tactic as a novel, typically I.W.W. way of making trouble. The Nation commented appreciatively: “The wicked, lawless I.W.W. asked to help enforce the law which crooked or incompetent officials fail to respect! Was there anything more comic?”71

In this one tactic, of not much significance to the strike, the I.W.W. revealed some of its former spark, the spark that had once kindled free speech fights and all the rowdy and irreverent songs and folklore of the prewar era. But even this comic improvisation revealed the changed temper of the I.W.W. The essence of the humor lay in provoking disorder by defending the law against the constituted law-enforcers, a surprising tactic but at the same time peculiarly “safe” and of little relevance to the “class struggle.”

But the authorities apparently took the I.W.W.’s claims for its proposed strike at face value and prepared for an impending revolution. The prosecution’s case against Ole Hendricks under the criminal-syndicalism law revealed, for example, the real anxiety of governmental authorities. The press, of course, saw Lenin and Trotsky as the instigators of the strike and the Wobblies as puppets of the Comintern.72 An Oregon official proposed the establishment of machine-gun units all over the state to cope with I.W.W. revolutionary violence.73 The governor of Oregon sent Adjutant-General George A. White and Captain Thomas E. Rilea into the logging camps as spies to gather intelligence on the extent of the revolutionary ferment.74 Somehow the Wobblies got their hands on a photograph of the two secret agents, staring into the camera and looking vaguely uncomfortable and theatrical in their brogans and overalls. The photograph was published in the I.W.W. press under the uncomplimentary headline: “Disguised As Men.” Underneath the photograph the Wobbly headline writer put the revolutionary lesson: “Keep Them In Overalls!”75 But, of course, the strike of 1923 fell far short of any such revolutionary overturn of the master class. White and Rilea returned to their bourgeois lives intact.

One historian of the I.W.W. considered the inroads of the new Communist Party a major cause of its decline.76 The Communists did indeed have glamour and the smell of success from their identification with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, a glamour that the I.W.W. could hardly match. The Communist Party attracted new and old revolutionaries more readily after 1919 than did the I.W.W. The American Communist Party probably accounted for as many lost members as did the persecutions of the war. William D. Haywood, the most famous Wobbly in the country, deserted to the Communists, skipping bond and fleeing to Russia in 1921 while I.W.W. defense attorneys were appealing to the United States Supreme Court his 1918 conviction under the Espionage Act. Eight other prominent Wobblies fled to Russia with him, not only draining the I.W.W. of valuable leadership but also burdening it with $80,000 of forfeited bonds. Communists had assured Haywood that the Soviet government would reimburse the I.W.W. for his forfeited bond out of money from captured Romanov jewels. But the I.W.W. never saw the money and had to repay it from its own slender defense funds.77 Many other less prominent Wobblies also emigrated to the new socialist state, some of them settling in the short-lived Kuzbas cooperative; others like Bill Shatov, the Soviet railroad builder, rising to positions of subaltern importance in the regime. When the I.W.W. decided not to affiliate with the Communist Third International, many Wobblies who up to that time had been both Wobblies and Communists chose to become Communists only rather than Wobblies.

In coping with this problem of Communist competition and rivalry, the I.W.W. displayed a noticeable inability to adapt, a hardening of the arteries that the wartime troubles had certainly helped to produce. The I.W.W. reacted to the Communists by simply purifying and dogmatizing its own traditional anarcho-syndicalism, by sanctifying its opposition to all politics when it was obvious that most radicals surviving into the anti-radical 1920s chose communism rather than the I.W.W. because of communism’s apparent political success in Russia. The I.W.W., even in opposition to communism, might have competed more successfully had it been willing to adapt more creatively to the changing temper of American radicalism, had it “gone into politics” in some ideological sense, at least.

Before the American Communist Party—under the label of the Workers’ Party of the 1920s—appeared as a positive threat to many Wobblies, most of them reacted to the Bolshevik revolution with great enthusiasm. In 1918, the I.W.W. press published eulogistic reports on the progress of the revolution, reprinting a Pravda article of Lenin’s entitled “The Main Problem of the Times,”78 and viewing the November revolution as the “Herald of a New Era.”79 Wobblies did not equivocate in choosing sides between the Bolsheviks and the ousted provisional government of Alexander Kerensky. They called Kerensky a “hysterically screaming petit bourgeois masquerading as a social revolutionary."80 Harrison George, a member of the I.W.W.’s general executive board, wrote an enthusiastic pamphlet on the revolution, The Red Dawn, that the I.W.W. circulated approvingly with its other propaganda until 1920.81

In 1919, during this initial glow of approval, the I.W.W. general executive board voted to establish connections with the new Communist Third International, the Comintern. The board selected a special “Committee of Foreign Relations” to represent the I.W.W. in Comintern affairs and to correspond with the Comintern.82 In its initial proclamation from Moscow, the new Comintern had specifically invited the American I.W.W. to join. In the call for the new international of January 1919, the Bolsheviks proposed that the I.W.W. take a constituent part along with the Spartacus League of Germany and other parties and factions of the international Left that had not besmirched themselves with chauvinism during the First World War.83 But with an invitation in hand, with a clear decision to make—to join or not to join—Wobblies began to lose their initial enthusiasm. They procrastinated. In 1920, Zinoviev, the chairman of the Comintern, sent the American I.W.W. a lengthy “personal” invitation to join:84

The Executive Committee of the Communist International in session at Moscow, the heart of the Russian Revolution, greets the revolutionary American proletariat in the ranks of the Industrial Workers of the World . . .

History does not ask whether we like it or not, whether the workers are ready or not. Here is the opportunity. Take it—-and the world will belong to the workers; leave it-there may not be another for generations.

Now is no time to talk of “building the new society within the shell of the old.” The old society is cracking its shell. The workers must establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which alone can build the new society.

An article in the ONE BIG UNION MONTHLY, your official organ, asks, “Why should we follow the Bolsheviks?” According to the writer, all the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia has done is “to give the Russian people the vote.”

This is, of course, untrue. The Bolshevik Revolution has taken the factories, mills, mines, land and financial institutions Out of the hands of the capitalists and transferred them to the WHOLE WORKING CLASS . . .

And you, fellow-workers of the I.W.W., with your bitter memories of Everett, of Tulsa, of Wheatland, of Centralia, in which your comrades were butchered; with—your thousands in prison—you who nevertheless must do the “dirty work” in the harvest fields, on the docks, in the forests—you must see plainly the process by which the capitalists, by means—of their weapon, the State, are trying to inaugurate the Slave Society . . .

In order to destroy Capitalism, the workers must first wrest the State power out of the hands of the capitalist class. They must not only SEIZE this power, but ABOLISH THE OLD CAPITALIST APPARATUS ENTIRELY . . .

And in place of the capitalist State the workers must build their own WORKERS’ STATE, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Many members of the I.W.W. do not agree with this. They are against the “State in general.”. . .

The Communists are also opposed to the “State.” They also wish to abolish it—to substitute for the government of men the administration of things.

But unfortunately this cannot be done immediately. The destruction of the capitalist State does not mean that capitalism automatically and immediately disappears . . .

The aim of the I.W.W. is “to build the new society within the shell of the old.” This means, to organize the workers so thoroughly that at a given time the capitalist system will be burst asunder, and the Industrial Commonwealth, fully developed, shall take its place.

Such an act requires the organization, the discipline, of the great majority of the workers. Before the war there was reason to believe that this might be feasible—although in the fourteen years of its history the I.W.W. had been able to organize comparatively only a small fraction of the American workers.

But at the present time such a plan is utopian. Capitalism is breaking down, and the Social Revolution is upon us and HISTORY WILL NOT WAIT UNTIL THE MAJORITY OF THE WORKERS ARE ORGANIZED 100 PER CENT ACCORDING TO THE PLAN OF THE I.W.W., OR ANY OTHER ORGANIZATION . . .

In the face of the Social Revolution, what is the immediate important work of the Industrial Workers of the World? . . .

The Communist International holds out to the I.W.W. the hand of brotherhood.

January, 1920
President of the Central Executive Committee,

           G. Zinoviev

The burden of Zinoviev’s letter, rendered in a slightly lecturing tone, was the error of the I.W.W.’s anti-political bias. But he did the I.W.W. the signal honor of addressing a special several-thousand-word plea to it. The I.W.W. press threw its columns open to a general debate on the question of affiliation with the Comintern. The advocates of affiliation argued that the Comintern did not expect Wobblies to “go into politics” but only wanted the I.W.W. to bring its doctrines up to date. The I.W.W. should realize, they argued in echo of Zinoviev’s letter, that the building of the new society solely through economic action required the creation of a too perfect majority organization of workers paralleling capitalist organization. The Bolsheviks had shown that revolutions were not made that way, but rather by militant minorities capturing state power.85

Opponents of affiliation argued with anger or moderation but always from the same tacit assumptions. These assumptions, never expressed explicitly nor perhaps even recognized clearly by the debaters, rested as much on sentiment as on logic. The I.W.W. was an older and more experienced radical group on the American scene; it had forged its program in the heat of actual battle in the American environment; it had suffered pain and martyrdom for its beliefs; to capitulate to the old “political” brand of radicalism would be vaguely contemptible or treasonable. “We view the Russian Revolution with the greatest interest and sympathy,” one Wobbly prefaced his remarks, but Wobblies, he continued, should not try to duplicate Bolshevik tactics in America. Wobblies were not insurrectionists; they were evolutionists in the deepest meaning of the term.86 Another opponent of affiliation resented the Communists’ criticisms of the I.W.W. What had Zinoviev meant when he cited I.W.W.’s errors? Did he think “Soviets” could manage the industrial society of the United States? If the I.W.W. had erred in its diagnoses or programs, Zinoviev should be more explicit in telling how and where.87 The Wobblies of the Pacific Northwest, always the region of greatest anarchical sentiment in the I.W.W., rejected affiliation early, refusing “to permit the I.W.W. to become the tail of the kite of any political organization . . .”88 Indeed, while the debate raged in 1920 within the organization, the Industrial Worker kept its silence. The editor explained that the Western Wobbly had little to do with the debate. His mind was made up, and he had rejected the Communist “politicos.”89

The general executive board finally took a referendum of the membership on the issue of affiliation. It was a complicated referendum, asking the members whether they wished the I.W.W. to join the Comintern outright, whether they wished the I.W.W. to join some other new body such as an “Economic Industrial International,” whether they wished the I.W.W. to join with reservations.90 The general executive board voted first and voted not to join the Comintern outright, but voted affirmatively on the other two motions. The membership, in a small vote, accepted only the third proposition, to join “with reservations.”91

Recognizing the depths of the I.W.W.’s feelings against political involvement, the Comintern next tried to interest it in a new international organization of radical labor unions, the Red International of Labor Unions, or the Profintern. The I.W.W. sent George Williams, a member of the general executive board, to the first congress of the organization in July 1921. Williams returned to the United States and published his first reports on the congress in December 1921, several weeks after the general executive board, without waiting for his advice, had already decided not to join.92 Their invitations spurned, the Communists grew cooler toward the I.W.W. and eventually, during the ferocious Third Period of Comintern policy, the Communists lumped it with other socialist and noncommunist radical groups as “social fascists.”93 Some independent radicals, without accepting the Communist’s orthodox interpretation of the I.W.W. as “objectively” reactionary, noted its increasingly crotchety behavior. One such observer, Max Eastman, attributed the I.W.W.’s troubles to senility rather than the wounds of war. “We have been a little saddened of late years to see the rigidity and lethargy of age creeping over the I.W.W. It seems as though all organizations that do not achieve within ten or fifteen years the purpose for which they were formed begin to be more interested in themselves than they are in their purpose.94 The I.W.W., for its part, grew increasingly hostile toward the Communists in the following years, and it cherished the purity of its pre-Communist radicalism all the more closely as the radicalism receded in influence and relevancy.

The wartime ordeal of the I.W.W. and its rivalry with Communism revived an old, partially submerged trait of Wobblies, their liking for contention and factionalism, a trait that had, of course, marked the early history of the organization. Even after the refining schisms of 1906 and 1908, factionalism did not end. In 1913, a new schism threatened when Western delegates to the national convention moved to abolish the general executive board and give the constituent industrial unions complete autonomy. Even the “bummery” of 1908, that had found De Leon’s politics too rich, thought this decentralizing proposal too extreme and managed to defeat it on the floor of the convention. But the Western decentralizers had warned the convention that their proposal had not been finally defeated.95 During the time of troubles between 1917 and 1920, Wobblies called a truce on internal squabbling, but the final effect of the persecution during the war was not to end such internal disputes but rather to direct the I.W.W. into such safe but sterile conflicts over principle and doctrine, both among themselves and in arguments with Communists. The decentralist dispute of 1913 revived in this postwar atmosphere of Talmudic hairsplitting, and in 1924 it divided the I.W.W. again into two groups.

The charges and counter-charges, the elaborated differences of opinion that arose out of the 1924 schism, make little sense unless related to the impotence of the I.W.W. The heat of the dispute came not from momentous intellectual differences but from the bitterness of defeat, from those urgent compensatory feelings of being “right” if no longer important. As late as 1953 an aging Wobbly expressed with clarity the state of mind that began to characterize the I.W.W. during the 1920s. “But what our union lacks in numbers is amply compensated for in purity of thought.”96

The quarrel came out into the open in 1924. In the summer, five members of the general executive board asked for a special meeting of the full board to discuss the mounting conflicts within the I.W.W. The majority of the board members, probably suspecting disruptionist motives in the proposed “discussions,” refused to call the special meeting. The five petitioners thereupon called the meeting on their own authority. When their rump session of the board convened, the other members, led by Tom Boyle, ejected it from the headquarters, using armed “goons.” The five outraged board members immediately rented a headquarters in Chicago and set themselves up as the “real” I.W.W. The regular executive board—called by the ousted dissenters “the Communist liquidators and their union-wrecking allies”—continued to occupy the old headquarters.97

Other Wobblies on the sidelines, witnessing this unseemly fracas within the executive board, hastily called a special emergency convention. The delegates arrived in Chicago from I.W.W. branches all over the country and found two other “conventions” representing the two antagonistic factions of the board already in session. The delegates to the convention representing the regular executive board, however, voted to join the national convention called by the membership. But the five ousted members of the board, led by James Rowan of the Lumber Workers’ Industrial Union No. 500, remained aloof and held their own little convention in splendid contempt for the joint convention. The joint convention polled all I.W.W. branches to test its authority and then suspended Rowan and his followers, together with the few locals of four industrial unions supporting them. This expelled faction prepared an “Emergency Program” for submission to all I.W.W. branches and continued to call itself the “real” I.W.W.98

In 1925, Rowan began to publish a weekly newspaper, the Industrial Unionist, in Portland, Oregon. In it, Rowan belabored the majority of the I.W.W., ran an interminable serial history of his own reforming faction, and tried to persuade all Wobblies to join his “Emergency Program” to save the I.W.W. In less than a year’s time, however, Rowan had to suspend publication of the paper because the membership in his faction had all but disappeared. In 1930, he could claim only two hundred supporters.99 But even without an official newspaper, the “E. P.,” as Rowan’s faction came to be called, persisted with inflexible self-righteousness. The I.W.W. made several attempts to lure it back into the fold, and in 1930 the E. P. unbent sufficiently to send a delegation to a futile unity conference. In 1933, the E. P. finally died, with Rowan very likely its only member at the end.100

These bitter arguments of 1924 revealed unmistakably the kind of vicarious militancy that many Wobblies began to experience in mere talk. Rowan’s purists pulled all the stops, charging the executive board with fostering political machines, with temporizing with Communism, with cynically betraying I.W.W. principle, with harboring careerists—or “pie card artists” in Wobbly slang.101 The leaders of the I.W.W. majority in turn charged Rowan and his followers with disruption, anarchism, braggadocio, and personal spite.102 The whole intense argument, against the background of I.W.W. weakness and inaction, sounded like sound and fury, a pathetic substitute for action.

When the Western migratory workers captured the I.W.W. after the expulsion of Daniel De Leon in 1908, they molded the peculiar culture of the organization and at the same time saddled it with some of its unique problems. The I.W.W., for example, could never decide whether to be a labor union or some kind of militant, class-conscious elite leading the working class to revolution. Most Wobblies probably never recognized a practical conflict in these two aims, but considered industrial unionism and revolution almost identical. “Let us organize the whole working class into one big union,” Wobblies said, and the natural conflict of the classes, the social war between the workers and the parasites, would insure the revolution. The “one big union” would be organizing itself as the new society “within the shell of the old.” Only once in the Pacific Northwest, during the first several weeks of the lumber strike of 1917, did the revolutionary I.W.W. become also an operating labor union, and this success, cited thereafter by Wobblies as proof of their program, proved really fleeting and accidental. The very effectiveness of the strike, coming as it did while the United States girded for war, stimulated the nationwide assault upon the I.W.W., the bludgeoning from which the I.W.W. never recovered.

More subtly the war created—or revealed—a highly organized and interdependent society mobilizing its complex industries for a vast collective effort. Even without the violent suppression, the I.W.W. would have stood “unmasked” in the face of this monstrous reality as romantic and childish, as a body of “infantile leftists,” to use a phrase of Lenin’s. The I.W.W. needed for its setting the “frontier,” the myth of Jeffersonian yeomen and Jacksonian small entrepreneurs against which to perform. The First World War, alas, made much of that old Americanism obsolete, for Wobbly as well as anti-Wobbly.

But even in its lusty youth, the I.W.W. had never succeeded in building stable unions among settled industrial workers—the “home guards” of its slang. Though it preached industrial unionism and organized itself as a federation of industrial unions, the I.W.W. could never sacrifice its revolutionary principles to the mundane and compromising policies necessary to build durable unions. As a consequence, it attracted mostly those transient workers with chronic grievances against society but without any particular stake in job or community. At the height of its career, the I.W.W. could draw members from a considerable body of such persons in the population. The lumber industry of the Pacific Northwest—especially its logging operations—relied upon the floating worker for much of its labor force, as did other seasonal industries of the region. Before World War I, the farmers in America’s great wheat belt relied upon young transient workers who traveled north following the harvest from Oklahoma to Alberta. On the west coast, similar transients followed the truck and orchard crops from California to British Columbia.

After the war, economic and social changes, the maturing of the American economy, diminished the size of this labor reservoir and altered its character. As Southerners migrated to the mills and camps of the Pacific Northwest, as the population grew, as roads and automobiles made logging camps less isolated from towns and cities, more and more lumber workers became “home guards,” joining those part-time farmers, or “stump ranchers,” who had always supplied logging camps with labor. Agricultural expansion during the war months brought farm machinery into more general use, making the large army of migratory wheat harvesters less necessary. Farm laborers on the west coast and in the wheat belt traveled from job to job increasingly in “jalopies” with wives and children rather than in empty freight trains as hoboes. Though still obviously casuals, the new “jalopy tramps” were more like “home guards” than the young rebels who had once joined the I.W.W.103 The number of hoboes—unmarried transient workers not to be confused with nonworking tramps or sedentary and derelict “bums”—declined after the war. One investigator of migrant labor found that, “In their place came 4,000,000 new migrants, mostly families, and a third of them children.”104 These social changes the I.W.W., of course, could neither hold back nor alter, and the organization’s increasing rigidity precluded its adapting its program and appeals to the new kind of worker with his new kind of problems.

Successful labor unionism in the American environment has always emphasized job control rather than class consciousness. On this thesis most historians of American labor agree. But the I.W.W. defied this pressure of reality by working stubbornly for both revolution and unionism, approaching success in neither goal. Such quixotism probably doomed the I.W.W. to failure from the beginning, and the severe beating it suffered during and immediately after the first world war sealed its fate. As we have seen, the scars and bruises made the I.W.W. even more unadaptable to reality, even more doctrinaire and disputatious, and it destroyed whatever chance the organization might have once had to make changes in itself to meet new conditions, to evolve perhaps into a real industrial union. During the 1920s, the I.W.W. almost disappeared from the American scene, living on as the half-forgotten custodian of a curiously mixed radicalism of “American” individualism and “un-American” class conflict. It seemed to fade into the wallpaper as if part of the decor of that older America, changing painfully from “frontier” to metropolis.

End Notes