An Oral History of the IWW Mourn Not the Dead
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Solidarity Forever An oral history of the IWW Mourn not the dead by Ralph Chaplin Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie Dust unto dust- The calm sweet earth that mothers all who die As all men must; Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell Too strong to strive- Within each steel bound coffin of a cell, Buried alive; But rather mourn the apathetic throng The cowed and the meek- Who see the world's great anguish and its wrong And dare not speak! Table of Contents The IWW Reconsidered 1 Fanning the Flames 21 Bruce "Utah" Phillips . 25 Bindlestiffs 31 Jack Miller . 37 Joseph Murphy . 42 Women in Textiles 55 Sophie Cohen . 61 Irma Lombardi . 70 The Home Guard 77 Dominic Mignone . 82 Irving Abrams . 85 Henry Pfaff . 88 Vaino Konga. 93 Timberbeasts 99 Irving Hanson ........................ 104 Jack Miller .......................... 108 Nels Peterson ........................ 116 Violet Miller ......................... 122 Hard Rock Mining 125 Mike Foudy .......................... 130 Katie Pintek ......................... 133 vi Civil Liberties For All 139 Roger Baldwin ....................... 144 Art Shields .......................... 152 Comrade or Fellow Worker? 159 George Hodin ........................ 163 Fania Steelink ........................ 170 Frank Cedervall ...................... 173 On the Waterfronts 177 James Fair .......................... 181 Fred Hansen ........................ 185 Continued Repression and Decline 191 Art Shields .......................... 194 Phil Melman ......................... 197 Art Nurse ........................... 198 Nicolaas Steelink ..................... 199 A Better World 205 Tom Scribner ........................ 209 Fred Thompson ...................... 214 Solidarity Forever 222 Ralph Chaplin Bibliography 225 Notes 227 Index 237 ~ THE l.W.W.,,,, COMING! JOIN THE ONE BIG UNION You don't remember the Wobblies. You were too young. Or else not even born yet. There has never been anything like them, before or since. -James Jones From Here to Eternity THEIWW RECONSIDERED Millions of Americans enjoy liberties off and on the job that were championed by an organization most of them are unfamiliar with-the Industrial Workers of the World. But when the twentieth century was still a newborn, the IWW was a mass popular movement whose challenges to established economic and social power made headlines from coast to coast. Employers considered its demands preposterous, bigots recoiled from its fervent democratic spirit, and established trade unions feared its radicalism. These foes of the IWW united and struck back at the organization in an effort that was capped by an unprecedented campaign of legal terrorism directed by the federal government. Although this assault destabilized the IWW and sent many of its members to prison, the momentum for social change energized by the IWWs (more commonly known as Wobblies) was not permanently derailed.1 IWW veterans became activists in newer and larger mass organizations. IWW songs and IWW tactics were taken wholecloth or in revised forms for new social struggles. The itinerant Wobbly hopping on a moving freight car became identified as the quintessential native American rebel. Since the 1960s, some excellent histories and collections of IWW writing have made it possible to think about how the IWW experience might relate to ongoing and future social movements.2 In the mid-1970s, Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer contributed 2---------------SOLIDARITY FOREVER to this historical inquiry by filming interviews with IWWs who had been active during the organization's glory years. The filmmakers wanted to let these men and women, many of them in their eighties and nineties, tell in their own words what it had meant to be a Wobbly. By combining these oral histories with period photographs, IWW music, historical newsreels, and other materials, Bird and Shaffer hoped their film, The Wobblies, would reanimate for new generations a sense of the passion that had once mobilized working America.3 As their research progressed, Bird and Shaffer became convinced that the IWW was the finest expression of an indigenous radical tradition. They also concluded that the federal program to destroy the IWW was the historic prototype later employed against other movements for social change. In this light, the testimonies of rank and file Wobblies, ordinary workers who had been the blood and sinew of the IWW, seemed all the more important to preserve and understand. The present book carries forward those concerns by providing longer oral histories from IWWs featured in the film, interviews not included in the film, additional photographic documentation of the IWW, and the kind of statistical and historic detailing that is awkward in cinema. Our view is that Americans interested in social justice can profit greatly by examining the IWW for a way of being that might once again inspire the American imagination. When some two hundred men and women convened on June 27, 1905, to found the IWW, the United States was still an adolescent nation freshly emerged from its status as a frontier society and not yet recognized as a major world power. Geronimo had led his last Apache war party less than twenty years earlier; digging on the Panama Canal had just commenced; and Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona were not yet states. The American Federation of Labor, already twenty-five years old, considered itself a remarkable success for having managed to organize a million and a half workers. Although recent European immigration had helped to swell the national population to eighty-two million, the AFL was not at all embarassed that many of its locals excluded non-whites, women, the unskilled, and the foreign-born. The IWW founders who gathered in Chicago, railroad hub of industrial and agricultural America, had a national and world vision which markedly set them apart from their AFL brethren. William D. Haywood, then Secretary of the Western Federation of Miners, brought the convention to order with words that promised a second American Revolution: "Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working class:'4 The IWW Reconsidered----------------3 Of prime concern to the delegates were needs rooted in the realities of everyday American life. The surplus of labor had grown so great that in most years millions of laborers were forced to drift from job to job, virtually defenseless before the dictates of employers, certain only of regular unemployment. Most Americans sought full-time work at age fourteen, and a good many others were forced to seek employment when half that age. Individuals who did find stable jobs often had to suffer wages that were at subsistence level and conditions that were ruinous to their health. Employers were intractable in their resistance to working class organization. They did not recognize the right of their workers to bargain collectively if a majority so desired, much less their right to strike or picket. When workers did attempt to organize themselves, employers did not hesitate to use violent countermeasures. Few strikes took place without loss of life. The resulting bitterness had made the prospect of fundamental change appealing to most workers, and nearly every prominent labor radical came to the founding convention of the IWW in hopes of uniting behind a specific agenda. One of the opening addresses was made by Eugene V. Debs, famed for his leadership of a national railroad strike broken by federal troops and soon to win nearly a million votes as the presidential candidate of the rapidly growing Socialist Party. 5 The program adopted by the convention and later elaborated proved to be a unique blend of trade union and radical ideology. The IWW preamble, which served as a declaration of principles, stated that the working class and the employing class had nothing in common. The solution to economic and social injustice in America and in the world lay in the creation of a worker-controlled political system termed "industrial democracy:' The priority task was to create industrial unions under the banner of the "One Big Union,11 the IWW. These industrial unions would fight for gains in the existing system until the IWW was strong enough to call a general strike that would bring all economic activity to a standstill. The condition for returning to work would be the substitution of industrial unions for all business enterprises and governmental agencies. The means of production would then be run by the unions to satisfy social needs rather than private profit. What had been done in one country would eventually take place in all nations. This vision of a peaceful and democratic revolution would soon touch the lives of millions of Americans, inspiring both incredible devotion and awesome hostility. The IWW was to pass through four phases of decidedly different 4----------------SOLIDARITY FOREVER complexion. From its founding through about 1911, the organization refined its distinctive orientation and strove to establish viable local units. During this period, the IWW achieved renown for its tenaciously fought strikes and fights for freedom of speech. At the same time, it lost the support of industrial unionists solely interested in reform. Beginning with a sensational, but short-lived triumph in textiles in 1912, the IWW began to be increasingly effective as a trade union, winning tremendous support among harvest workers, lumberjacks, miners, longshoremen, and mariners. This spectacular growth was choked off in 1917 by the largest federal and state