A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of Research Collections in American Radicalism General Editors: Mark Naison and Maurice Isserman ^= _ ^ DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE INVESTIGATIVE FILES V =J Part I. The Industrial Workers of the World UNTVERSITY PUBLICATIONS OF AMERICA A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of Research Collections in American Radicalism General Editors: Mark Naison and Maurice Isserman DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE INVESTIGATIVE FILES Parti. The Industrial Workers of the World Edited by Melvyn Dubofsky Associate Editor Gregory Murphy Guide compiled by Martin Schipper A microfilm project of UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS OF AMERICA An Imprint of CIS 4520 East-West Highway • Bethesda, MD 20814-3389 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Department of Justice investigative files [microfilm]. p. cm. -- (Research collections in American radicalism) Accompanied by printed reel guides, compiled by Martin P. Schipper. Includes indexes. Contents: pt. 1. The Industrial Workers of the World / edited by Melvyn Dubofsky • pt 2. The Communist Party / edited by Mark Naison. ISBN 1-55655-055-3 (microfilm : pt. 1) ISBN 1-55655-056-1 (microfilm : pt. 2) 1. Industrial Workers of the World-History-Sources. 2. Communist Party of America-History-Sources. 3. United States. Dept. of Justice-Archives. I. Schipper, Martin Paul. II. Dubofsky, Melvyn, 1934- . m. Naison, Mark, 1946- . IV. United States. Dept of Justice. V. University Publications of America (Firm) VI. Series. [HD8055] 322,.2~dc20 90-12989 CIP Copyright © 1989 by University Publications of America. All rights reserved. ISBN 1-55655-055-3. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction v Source Note - ix Editorial Note ix Scope and Content Note xi Reel Index Reell RG 60•Straight Numerical File Casefde 150139 1 Casefile 185354 1 Casefde 150139 cont 2 Casefde 185354 cont 2 Reel 2 RG 60•Straight Numerical File cont. Casefde 185354 cont 2 Reel 3 RG 60•Straight Numerical File cont. Casefde 185354 cont 3 Casefde 186701 4 Casefde 185354 cont 4 Reels 4-6 RG 60•Straight Numerical File cont. Casefde 186701 cont 4 Reel? RG 60•Straight Numerical File cont. Casefde 186701 cont 13 Casefde 186813 16 ReelS RG 60•Straight Numerical File cont. Caseffle 188032 17 m Reel 9 RG 60•Straight Numerical File cont. Casefile 188032 cont 19 Casefile 188044 20 Casefile 188561 20 Casefile 189152 20 Reel 10 RG 60•Straight Numerical File cont. Casefile 189152 cont 21 Casefile 189738 21 Casefile 193498 21 Casefile 195397 22 Casefile 210791 22 Reel 11 RG 204•Pardon Attorney Files Casefile 35-362 23 Casefile 36-52 23 Casefile [No Casefile Number] 23 Casefile 38-487 23 Reel 12 RG 204•Pardon Attorney Files cont. Casefile 39-240 24 Reel 13 RG 204•Pardon Attorney Files cont. Casefile 39-241 27 Reel 14 RG 204•Pardon Attorney Files cont. Casefile 39-241 cont 30 Casefile 39-242 31 Reel 15 RG 204•Pardon Attorney Files cont. Casefile 39-242 cont 32 Subject Index 33 IV INTRODUCTION In June and July 1905 leading American Socialists, left-wing trade unionists, and assorted radicals met in Chicago to found a new labor organization that would serve as an alternative to the more moderate and exclusive American Federation of Labor (AFL). During the sessions, which featured the contributions of such famous American radicals as Eugene V. Debs, William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, Daniel DeLeon, Lucy Parsons (the widow of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons), and Mary "Mother" Jones (the coal miners' angel), the participants created a new revolutionary labor organization committed to the destruction of capitalism. The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW and Wobblies, as the new organization came to be better known, amalgamated an unlikely and fractious group of radical men and women. For the previous fifteen years Debs and DeLeon, for example, had been the most bitter of enemies; yet in Chicago they shook hands over what DeLeon described as the "bloody chasm of the past." Apparently the parents of the IWW were able to sublimate their often rancorous and divisive personal and political differences in order to reject unanimously AFL-style trade unionism. The result of their common effort was the creation of the most radical, mass labor organization in United States history. At first, however, the IWW seemed to have been stillborn. Between 1905 and 1908, it barely survived infancy. Debs and DeLeon quickly resumed their bloody warfare, as members of the Socialist Party of America (Debs' organization) and the Socialist Labor party (DeLeon's group) brought their political battles inside the IWW. At the same time, so-called "revolutionary" unionists fought with their more moderate trade union brothers and sisters. To compound the internal disarray, "Big Bill" Haywood and Charles Moyer, the leaders of the largest single trade union affiliate of the IWW•the Western Federation of Miners (indeed many observers claimed that the IWW at birth was merely the WFM in disguise)• were imprisoned on murder charges by the state of Idaho in 1906. While Haywood and Moyer spent almost two years in jail and in court before being acquitted of all charges, the IWW tore itself apart. First, Debs and his supporters walked out in anger at DeLeon's influence. Next, the WFM, under an increasingly moderate new leadership, left the IWW. Finally, in 1908, a majority among the remaining members expelled DeLeon and his most fervent followers. Upon his release from prison in 1908, even Haywood, the chair at the 1905 convention, declined to associate with what remained of the IWW. Yet, having barely survived infancy, the IWW after 1909 achieved notoriety as the most militant and dangerous organization on the American left. Under the leadership of Vincent St John (1908-1915) and "Big Bill" Haywood, who returned to active membership in 1911 (1915-1918), the IWW became famous for the type of workers it sought to organize and also for its singular ideology and tactics. At the time when the American labor movement appealed primarily to more skilled workers, the IWW recruited among unskilled and exploited immigrants, nonwhites, and migrant workers. To poverty-wracked workers who often lacked the right to vote and who despised the institutions of government that had so often oppressed them, the IWW promised a nonpolitical revolution that would free them from wage slavery. Its leaders and spokespeople explained that once all the nation's workers combined into one big union they would have sufficient strength to begin the social general strike, which would displace the capitalists from power and place the workers in possession of the means of production and distribution. In Haywood's own words at the moment of the general strike, "control of industry will pass from the capitalists to the masses and the capitalists will vanish from the face of the earth." And when that day came, he added, "diere will be a new society...in which there will be no battle between capitalist and wage earner, but...every man will have free access to land and its resources. In that day...the machinery can be made the slave of the people instead of a part of the people being made the slave of the machinery." The Wobblies called their revolutionary society "in which each worker will have a share in the ownership and a voice in the control of industry, and in which each shall receive the full product of his labor" variously the workers' commonwealth, industrial democracy, and sometimes even industrial communism. Whatever they called it, these American radicals who proposed to make a revolution without political organization and through direct action at the point of production shared a common perspective with those European labor left-wingers known as syndicalists. As one contemporary of the Wobblies noted, notwithstanding superficial variations caused by different economic and political traditions in various countries, the "living spirit of revolutionary purpose unifies French and British syndicalism and American industrial unions (the IWW)." Syndicalism, as preached and practiced in the IWW, was intended to attract and motivate the oppressed, the exploited, the embittered, the poorly paid, overworked, unorganized men and women the Wobblies sought to recruit. It is not intellectuals and elites who count for us, said one Wobbly, no, "it is the obscure Bill Jones on the firing line, with stink in his clothes, rebellion in his brain, hope in his heart, determination in his eye and direct action in his gnarled fist" For ten years between 1909 and 1918 the IWW took its message of direct action and revolutionary aims to hundreds of thousands of Bill and Betty Joneses. It fought with them for free speech on the street comers and public places of such cities as Spokane, Washington, Missoula, Montana, Fresno and San Diego, California, and Minot, South Dakota. After all, it was only in those public spaces that the IWW could directly address large numbers of migratory workers who wintered in cities or lingered there between jobs in the woods, on the farms, and on construction. The IWW's fights for free speech in urban America, moreover, first brought the organization to the attention of the Justice Department during the administration of William Howard Taft (1909-1913). State and local officials urged the federal government to take legal action against subversives who regularly crossed state lines. In 1911 and 1912, however, Washington saw no constitutional grounds for action although federal officials felt equally antipathetic to the Wobblies. While the IWW fought for free speech, it also battled for higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, the woods of the Pacific Northwest and southwest Louisiana, the textile mills of New England and the mid-Atlantic states, and wherever workers needed a union presence. Despite the IWW's rising militancy between 1909 and 1911, despite its constant battles with employers and public officials in every region of the nation, it never numbered more than 18,000 paid-up members in those years.