Hallelujah, I'm A

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HALLELUJAH, I’M A BUM: INDUSTRIALISM, PROGRESSIVE REFORM, AND THE ROLE OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD AS A HOME FOR MIGRANT WORKERS

A Report of a Senior Study

Randall Puckett

Major: History

Maryville College

Fall, 2014

Date Approved ______, by ______

Faculty Supervisor

Date Approved ______, by ______

Division Chair

ABSTRACT

In June of 1905 a group of over two hundred labor organizers and socialists met in Chicago for the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Their aim was to establish a labor organization founded on the principle of class struggle and devoted to the emancipation of the working class from the “slave bondage” of capitalism. However, the IWW’s radicalism would later alienate the organization from many in the socialist movement as well as constrain its ability to organize semiskilled and skilled workers. Many unskilled workers, however, were drawn to the IWW precisely because of its radicalism. This study explores the factors that contributed to the IWW’s role as a home for those workers who were neglected by Progressive-era reforms and excluded by the mainstream labor movement. Chapter one therefore traces the origins of the industrial revolution in the United States, focusing on the sociopolitical implications of the transition from a handicraft to a factory-based system of production. Chapter two analyzes the Progressive Era, viewing reform as a particular set of responses to the social ills wrought by industrialism. Finally, chapter three examines the formation and development of the IWW, concentrating on its appeal for migrant workers.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page Introduction 1

Chapter I A Brave New World: The Industrial Revolution in America 9

Chapter II The Progressive Era and the Rise of Corporate Liberalism 29

Chapter III No Worker Left Behind: The IWW and the Migrant Worker 55

Conclusion 78

Works Cited 81

INTRODUCTION

On September 1, 1908, a short distance from the Portland, Oregon railroad yards,

James Walsh warmed himself by a campfire, amid the grim surroundings of the city’s hobo “jungle.” Walsh, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), drank a cup of coffee as he waited for his train to arrive. Although the jungle served as a temporary respite from the menacing gaze of railroad security personnel, or “bulls” as they were known by the hoboes, Walsh and his eighteen companions eagerly awaited word from a friendly switchman that their “Special car” – that is to say, an empty cattle car – had arrived. With two piercing “blasts of the locomotive engine,” as Walsh himself remembered, the train was “starting on its journey, and simultaneously nineteen men, all dressed in black overalls and jumpers, black shirts and red ties, . . . [were] in a ‘cattle car’ and on our way.”1

The Overalls Brigade, as they called themselves, barnstormed their way across the

Pacific Northwest, from Portland to Centralia, Spokane to Seattle, hopping the rails and taking refuge in hobo encampments along the way. Undeterred by a night spent in jail for trespassing, these hobo rebels soon shifted their focus toward the east and their ultimate destination: Chicago and the fourth annual convention of the Industrial Workers of the

World. As an organizer for the Spokane local of the IWW, Walsh was determined to consolidate the migrant workers of the American West into the foot soldiers of a revolutionary working-class movement.

1 James H. Walsh, “IWW ‘Red Special’ Overalls Brigade,” Industrial Union Bulletin (September 19, 1908), included in Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 84; see also Tom DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 123-28.

As their journey east progressed, Walsh and his fellow Wobblies (a nickname given to members of the IWW) stopped periodically at union halls to spread their revolutionary message, while financing their trip through the sale and distribution of

IWW literature – the most popular of which was the Little Red Songbook: Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent. Its contents became popular standards among hoboes, even those who were otherwise unfamiliar with the IWW, its principles, ideology, goals, or tactics. When the Overalls Brigade found themselves bereft of a union hall, they would simply commandeer a street corner on which to sing from their secular book of hymns.

This excerpt from a song written by folk singer Harry McClintock would come to be their unofficial anthem:

“Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” (Tune: “Revive Us Again”)

O, why don’t you work Like other men do? How in the hell can I work When there’s no work to do.

(Chorus) Hallelujah, I’m a bum, Hallelujah, bum again, Hallelujah, give us a handout – To revive us again.

O, why don’t you save All the money you earn? If I did not eat I’d have money to burn.

(repeat Chorus)

I can’t buy a job, For I ain’t got the dough, So I ride in a box-car, For I’m a hobo.2

2 Harry McClintock, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” in Rebel Voices, 133.

Such songs were included in many Wobbly publications and serve to powerfully, sometimes irreverently, illustrate the plight of migrant workers during this period. Indeed, by 1910, at the height of the Progressive Era, the United States was home to 10,400,000 unskilled male workers. More than 3,500,000 of them worked as lumberjacks, construction workers, ice cutters, railroad section hands, seasonal harvesters, and numerous other jobs that could be classified as migratory.3 Unstable employment compelled these workers to move across the country from town to town, state to state, in search of work. The majority of itinerants were concentrated in the American West, typically single, young men working in labor camps and company towns owned by logging and mining firms. Many migrant workers travelled along the rails in empty cattle cars, for the railroads served as the arteries of an emerging hobo subculture. Yet they were effectively disfranchised by virtue of their itinerancy, lacking permanent addresses and thereby the ability to vote. They existed instead on the fringes of American life, a wandering class of industrial refugees.4

This study aims to explore how it came to be that the IWW’s role in the

Progressive Era was to serve as a home for those workers who were neglected by progressive reform and excluded by the mainstream labor movement. The IWW had been, since its founding in 1905, committed to the principle of revolutionary industrial unionism. In other words, they objected to the exclusive nature of craft unionism, practiced by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which privileged skilled workers,

3 Carleton H. Parker, Introduction to The Casual Laborer: And Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), 17. 4 Mark Wyman, Hoboes, Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), ch. 3.

most of whom were white, male, and native-born. Craft unionism, they argued, kept the working class divided in its revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Industrial unionism, by contrast, was meant to embrace all workers, including the most marginalized and alienated elements within the American working class: immigrants, racial minorities, women, and unskilled workers in general. The inimitable William “Big

Bill” Haywood, perhaps the most famous Wobbly, would say at the founding convention, it “did not make a bit of difference if he is a negro or a white man . . . an American or a foreigner,” the IWW intended to organize the entire working class.

The IWW leadership was, moreover, composed of radicals from the labor and socialist movements. They were united in their support of industrial unionism; united in their aim of achieving socialism. Again, Haywood at the founding convention:

When the corporations and the capitalists understand that you are organized for the express purpose of placing the supervision of industry in the hands of those who do the work, you are going to be harassed and you are going to be subjected to every indignity and cruelty that their minds can invent.5

By the time of the 1908 convention, however, an ideological rift had developed between anti-political anarchists and political socialists in the IWW on precisely how to bring about the Wobbly’s revolutionary aims.6 The arrival of the Overalls Brigade in

Chicago for the fourth annual convention was therefore no exercise in fancy, but rather a planned maneuver by which the hoboes were to tilt the balance of power within the IWW

5 William D. Haywood, “Opening Speech,” Minutes of the Founding Convention of Industrial Workers of the World, June 27, 1905, accessed at http://www.iww.org/about/founding/part1, n.p.; hereafter referred to as Minutes of the Founding Convention. 6 Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. IV: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917 (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 81-113; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, 2nd ed. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 67-83.

leadership and decidedly change the trajectory of this revolutionary industrial union. In what was a veritable coup d’état, the western migrants, serving as an official delegation to the convention, threw their spirited and militant support behind the so-called “direct actionists.”7 Led by William Trautmann and Vincent St. John, the direct actionists opposed parliamentary tactics and political action in favor of direct action, initiated by the workers themselves without the intervention of politicians, political parties, or other mediators. Such methods came to be associated with an ideology known as anarcho- syndicalism, defined by onetime Wobbly and later general-secretary of the Communist

Party of America, William Z. Foster, in the following manner:

In its basic aspects, syndicalism, or more properly anarcho-syndicalism, may be defined very briefly as that tendency in the labor movement to confine the revolutionary class struggle of the workers in the economic field, to practically ignore the state, and to reduce the whole fight of the working class to simply a question of trade union action. Its fighting organization is the trade union; its basic method of class warfare is the strike, with the general strike as the revolutionary weapon; and its revolutionary goal is the setting up of a trade union ‘state’ to conduct industry and all other social activities.8

The political socialists were led by Daniel De Leon, the erudite but fractious leader of the Socialist Labor Party. Although De Leon repudiated the various iterations of

“reform” socialism, which were in vogue during the Progressive Era, his doctrinaire brand of revolutionary Marxism chiefly emphasized political action. Yet the division within the IWW was a combination of personality and ideological differences. Indeed, De

Leon was a proponent of the Marxist-Leninist concept of political vanguardism.

According to labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky, De Leon envisioned himself as an

American Lenin, sharing the latter’s “iron will as well as his intense desire to command

7 Foner, 102-9. 8 William Z. Foster, “Syndicalism in the United States,” The Communist (July 1937), 1044.

men and to make history.”9 De Leon apparently viewed himself as the leader of the struggle against capitalism. He would derisively refer to the roughhewn itinerants as the

“bummery,” which merely deepened the suspicions of the anarcho-syndicalists that the autocratic De Leon was coopting the IWW merely to serve the purposes of the SLP.

With the support of the Overalls Brigade, Trautmann and St. John led an insurgency to oust De Leon and expurgate the union of the “political socialists.” They successfully, albeit duplicitously, used the Credentials Committee to deny De Leon a seat at the convention, arguing on a technicality that he “was a delegate . . . from the Office

Workers’ Local Union, when, as an editor, he really should have been assigned to the

Printing Workers’ Local Union.”10 De Leon and his followers protested to no avail. In an act of defiance, the recalcitrant De Leon would soon establish a short-lived rival, the

Detroit IWW, which proved to be little more than an ineffectual organ of the SLP. The

Industrial Workers of the World, by contrast, was free to pursue its strategy for emancipating the working class from “the bondage of wage slavery.”11

Yet the story of the IWW’s formative years reveals a substantive disagreement on the efficacy of political action in a society in which the political system was increasingly dominated by corporate interests. Indeed, De Leon would intransigently insist that revolution must be waged through political action, “that the economic organization (that is, the trade union) must be subordinate to the political party.”12 For migrant workers such as James Walsh and his comrades, this ideology was as out of touch with their daily struggles as the reform agenda promulgated by most Progressives.

9 Dubofsky, We Shall be All, 76. 10 Foner, 108. 11 Minutes of the Founding Convention. 12 Dubofsky, 76.

To understand how the IWW came to be associated with the migrant worker, it is important to place the organization in context. Thus, the first chapter explores the transformative effects of the industrial revolution on American life. The second chapter explores the reform movements that began with the Populists in the 1890s and culminated in the Progressive Era, viewing the reform movements as a set of responses to the social ills and labor unrest wrought by industrialism. The final chapter explores the origins and early history of the IWW, likewise viewing it as radical response to both industrialism and reform.

The IWW specifically formed in response to the rise of corporate liberalism in the

Progressive Era. According to historian James Weinstein this new corporate liberal social order was “formulated and developed under the aegis and supervision of those who then, as now, enjoyed ideological and political hegemony in the United States: the more sophisticated leaders of America’s largest corporations and financial institutions.”13

Corporate liberalism was predicated on close relations between leaders in government, business, and labor. Opponents of this new order, such as the IWW, charged that its agenda was primarily to protect corporate interest and stabilize capitalism.

While many workers saw their conditions improved during this period, this study is about those workers who were remained marginalized. Specifically, it is about the

IWW, its ideological framework, its merits and flaws – for it is the combination of these factors which makes the Wobblies so intriguing. The IWW’s uncompromising radicalism espoused international working-class solidarity, yet its leaders disdain for craft unionism often became a disdain for skilled workers. Skilled workers, for their part, wanted more

13 James Weinstein, Introduction to The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), ix.

from their trade unions than mere oratory and ideological purity. Anarcho-syndicalism likewise alienated the IWW from the political socialists, who were the dominant force on the American left. Yet it is these very flaws that made the IWW the ideal advocate for those workers who had the least to lose and the most to gain from fundamental change.

CHAPTER ONE

A BRAVE NEW WORLD: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICA

There is no man of the least reflection, who has not observed, that the effect in all ages and countries, of the possession of great and undue wealth, is, to allow those who possess it, to live on the labor of others. -Thomas Skidmore, The Rights of Man to Property, 182914

The industrial revolution was perhaps the most transformative development in the history of human civilization. It changed the way humans live, interact, and produce what they need to survive. Pockets of the United States began to industrialize in the 1820s and

1830s, resulting in the gradual displacement of the handicraft system of production with that of the factory system. In the coming decades, wealth and power began to concentrate in the hands of those who owned the factories. The resulting inequities contributed to tumultuous intervals of social and labor unrest. Prior to the Civil War, workers created the first trade unions; by the 1880s, they established the first sustained, national labor movement. It is out of that tradition that the Industrial Workers of the World emerged. To understand the IWW, we must first explore the profound changes that visited the country as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth.

The Artisan’s World

As discontent grew evermore palpable in the years preceding the American

Revolution, British Parliament echoed with the popular Tory refrain that the Americans were not oppressed. To this sentiment, the statesman Edmund Burke answered: “Mr.

14 Thomas Skidmore, The Rights of Man to Property: To Make it Equal among the Adults of the Present Generation (New York: Burt Franklin, 1829), 3.

Speaker, the question is not whether the Americans are oppressed or not; but whether they think they are.”15

There was in fact considerable truth in both arguments. While colonial elites stood to benefit greatly from political independence, working-class lives and patterns of work in Britain’s North American colonies significantly resembled those of their

European counterparts. The handicraft, or artisanal, system of production prevailed in most colonial cities. Goods were produced on a custom-order basis in small workshops owned by a master craftsman who, in turn, employed one or two journeymen and an apprentice.16 Artisanal guilds and especially the institution of apprenticeship were very restrictive and could be (for the apprentice) quite oppressive. Founder of the New York

Tribune and famed abolitionist editor, Horace Greely, wrote of the harsh conditions he experienced as a printer’s apprentice during the early national period:

When I was but eleven years hearing that an apprentice was wanted in the newspaper office at Whitehall [N.Y.], I accompanied my father to that office, and tried to find favor in the printer’s eyes; but he promptly and properly rejected me as too young, and would not relent; so I went home downcast and sorrowful. No new opportunity was presented till the Spring of 1826, when an apprentice was advertized for by the publisher of The Northern Spectator, at East Poultney, Vt. . . . I walked over to Poultney, saw the publishers, came to an understanding with them, and returned; a few days afterward . . . my father took me down, and verbally agreed with them for my services. I was to remain till twenty years of age, be allowed my board only for six months, and thereafter $40 per annum in addition to my clothing. So I stopped, and went to work . . . The organization and management of our establishment were vicious; for an apprentice should have one master; while I had a series of them, and often two or three at once . . . we had a succession of editors and of printers. I had not been there a year before my hands were blistered and my back lamed by working off the very considerable edition of the paper on an old-fashioned, tow pull Ramage (wooden) press, - a task beyond my boyish strength, - and I can scarcely recall a

15 Edmund Burke, quoted in John Graham Brooks, American Syndicalism: The IWW (New York: MacMillan Company, 1913), 36. 16 Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin, American Labor: A Documentary History (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 10.

day wherein we were not hurried by our work. . . . While I lived at home, I had always been allowed a day’s fishing, at least once a month in Spring and Summer, and I once went hunting; but never fished, nor hunted, nor attended a dance, nor any sort of party or fandango in Poultney. I doubt that I even played a game of ball.17

There was, however, consolation for the callow apprentice. Indeed, the guild system effectively guaranteed them eventual ascendency to the position of master craftsman. Moreover, strenuous periods in the workshops of preindustrial America often alternated with periods of relative leisure. The workshops themselves nourished a distinctive artisanal culture, often characterized by frequent breaks of eating, drinking, and play. David Johnson, a perceptive chronicler of nineteenth century America, observed around 1830 that drinking was so prevalent in the culture of a shoemaker’s shop that it necessitated a bawdy vocabulary to describe the activity:

The shoemaker’s vocabulary of terms applied to drinking and drunkenness was quite extensive, and some were peculiar to the locality and craft. If a man was very drunk, he was ‘blind as a bat,’ or ‘well corned,’ or ‘well stove in,’ or ‘slewed,’ or ‘cocked,’ or ‘well mashed.’ In later times such were said to ‘carry a heavy turkey,’ or a ‘brick in their hat.’ Various expedients were resorted to, to keep up the supply of black-strap [a rum drink]. The one who made the most or the fewest shoes, the best or the poorest, paid the ‘scot.’ Bets were made on all occasions. . . . Small games of chance, the stakes of which were black-strap were frequently made.18

Intervals of leisure and relaxation were not confined to the shoemaker’s shop, however. A shipwright from the 1820s remembered with fondness the frequent visitations to the shipyard from a local women who brought food and refreshments for the workmen to enjoy:

In our yard, at half-past 8 A.M., Aunt Arlie McVane, a clever kind-hearted but awfully uncouth, rough sample of the ‘Ould Sod,’ would make her welcome appearances in the yard with her two great baskets, stowed and checked off with

17 Horace Greely, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: JB Ford and Company, 1868), 61-3. 18 David N. Johnson, “Work and Play in a Shoemaker’s Shop,” circa 1830, from Sketches of Lynn: The Changes of Fifty Years (Lynn, MA: Thomas P. Nichols, 1880), 47.

crullers, doughnuts, gingerbread, turnovers, pieces, and a variety of sweet cookies and cakes; and from the time Aunt Arlie’s baskets came in sight until every man and boy, bosses and all, in the yard, had been supplied . . . trade was a brisk one. Aunt Arlie would usually make the rounds of the yard and supply all hands in about an hour, bringing the forenoon up to half-past nine, and giving us from ten to fifteen minutes ‘breathing spell’ during lunch; no one every hurried during cake time.19

Given the pleasure with which workers greeted leisure time, it might then seem paradoxical to learn that artisans took considerable pride in the quality of their craftsmanship and the value of hard work. Indeed, skills honed over the many years from apprenticeship to master craftsman combined with a powerful sense of autonomy to create a uniquely artisanal work ethic.

Few Americans of the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries better exemplified artisanal values than Benjamin Franklin. Long before he became the sage of American independence, Franklin was apprenticed in the early 1720s to his older brother James, founder and publisher of the New-England Courant. Aspiring to write and knowing that his brother would refuse to print his pieces, Franklin surreptitiously invented a pseudonym, Silence Dogood, and began submitting articles. The Silence Dogood essays were enthusiastically received by the Courant, subsequently published by the paper, and proved especially popular with readers – inaugurating a prolific literary career for

Franklin during which he would elucidate many of the developing cultural values of late- colonial America.20

19 “A Workingman’s Recollections of America,” circa 1820s, Knight’s Penny Magazine, 1 (1846), 97-112, quoted in Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-class and Social History (New York: Vintage Books, 1976). 20 Walter Isaacson, “Silence Dogood Introduces Herself,” p. 9, in Walter Isaacson, ed., A Benjamin Franklin Reader (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2003).

In his writings, Franklin often denounced idleness as an unpardonable sin while extolling the many virtues of industriousness, such as in this 1757 excerpt from Poor

Richard’s Almanac: “If we are industrious,” he admonishes his readers, “we shall never starve; for At the working man’s house hunger looks in, but dares not enter. . . . If you were a servant, would you not be ashamed that a good master should catch you idle, when there is so much to be done for yourself, your family, your country, your king.”21

The primacy of work ethic permeated artisanal culture, his observations illustrating both the artisan’s pride in manual labor and the growing public ignominy attached to idleness. In an 1811 letter to the Independent Mechanic, a seasoned workman rather truculently denounces the ostentatious manner in which many “young fellows” peruse their daily mail, thus demonstrating that productive labor, in the minds of many workmen, distinguished the industrious worker from the effete aristocrat:

Mr. Editor, there is an evil which I should extremely well like to see some notice taken of. I allude to a certain class of men whom I often observe in my route to my daily labour (being a mechanic) walking with slow and solemn pace, perusing their letters on their way from the post office. I do not mean to complain, Mr. Editor, at their anxiety to see the contents of their letters, for that I know is natural to us all; but it is the affectation and self-consequence displayed in the manner. . . It is to be hoped, Sir, that by thus noticing these pompous, vain and ridiculous practices of a certain class of young men . . . [we can] put a stop to a foolish pride in which they too far indulge themselves, and teach them a lesson, that the honest, blunt, and unaffected manners of a young mechanic, is far more praise-worthy, than the pedantic foppish airs of a would-be gentleman.22

Despite such affectations of populism, political power in the United States remained the near-exclusive domain of the propertied classes. The very land itself conferred political citizenship and social privilege. Moreover, property often entailed, for

21 Benjamin Franklin, except from Poor Richard’s Almanac, in Jared Sparks, ed., The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 2 (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Compay, 1840), 95-6. 22 “A Letter to the Independent Mechanic,” 1811, reprinted in Howard B. Rock, ed., The New York City Artisan, 1789-1825: Documentary History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 50-1.

those who owned it, a sense of social stewardship over the political affairs of a given society. The propertyless, having no stake in society, were susceptible to demagoguery and caprice. Or in the words of New York’s Chancellor James Kent, demagogues appealed to “a tendency in the poor to covet and to share the plunder of the rich; in the debtor to relax or avoid the obligations of contract; in the majority to tyrannize over the minority . . . ; in the indolent and profligate, to cast the whole burthens of society upon the industrious and the virtuous.”23

Similar attitudes about the relationship between property and political power informed the creation of the Constitution of the United States. At the constitutional convention in June of 1787, James Madison, the chief prophetically expounded on the nature and purpose of American government:

Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability. Various have been the propositions; but my opinion is, the longer they continue in office, the better will these views be answered.24

The ideal of a republic guided by the virtues of farmer-statesmen had endured to varying degrees in the likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, but the peculiar set of circumstances surrounding American independence and the constitutional convention had the inadvertent effect of increasing the sphere of democratic participation in the

American polity. After the Revolution, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, the elite

23 Quoted in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Democracy, Liberty, and Property: The State Constitutional Conventions of the 1820s (Indianapolis, IN: N.pub., 1966), 194. 24 James Madison (June 26, 1787), quoted in Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787, Taken by the Late Hon. Robert Yates, Chief Justice of the State of New York, and One of the Delegates from That State to the Said Convention, Yale University’s “Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy,” accessed at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/yates.asp.

statesmen who constituted the federalist and antifederalist factions had led “each of their several members to follow his own interest; and it was impossible to wring the power from the hands of a people which they did not detest sufficiently to brave, their only aim was to secure its good will at any price.”25 This phenomenon led constitutional law scholar Carl B. Swisher to conclude that “the most democratic laws were . . . voted by the very men whose interests they impaired.”26

Consequently, artisanal workers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries stood on the precipice of a transformative political development. From the

1770s to the 1840s every state legislature modified its voting qualifications to give all white males the franchise. White male suffrage had not been a purely “top-down” achievement, however, for it demonstrates the nascent political influence of ordinary

(white male) workers in a preindustrial republic. Increasingly, ordinary Americans were associating equality with freedom, invoking principles from the Revolution to justify

“free suffrage.” This excerpt from a letter that appeared in a Maryland newspaper in 1776 illustrates the upsurge in democratic values that accompanied the Revolution:

Every poor man has a life, a personal liberty, and a right to his earnings, and is in danger of being injured by government in a variety of ways; therefore it is necessary that these people should enjoy the right of voting for representatives, to be protectors of their lives, personal liberty, and their little property which, though small, is yet, upon the whole, a very great object to them. It would be unjust and oppressive in the extreme to shut out the poor in having a share in declaring who shall be the lawmakers of their country, and yet bear a very heavy share in the support of government. Would not the rich complain grievously if they had no power of electing representatives?27

25 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Henry Reeve (New York, 1838), 38. 26 Carl B. Swisher, Roger B. Taney (New York, 1935), 47-8. 27 Letter by “Watchman,” Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), August 15, 1776, in Eric Foner, ed., Voices of Freedom: A Documentary History, Second Edition, Vol. 1 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008), 114-6.

While the political structure of the US was polyarchical, the socioeconomic structure of American society meant that ordinary citizens – armed with the power of the franchise – could exercise considerable influence over their political representatives.

Therefore, the implications of white male suffrage were especially significant for artisans. Responding to artisans’ demands that suffrage be granted to renters as well as householders, “state constitutions in the early nineteenth century . . . did more than simply bestow suffrage on many rural and urban householders: they explicitly enfranchised men who did not own farms, businesses, or even homes of their own.”28

Seeking the endorsement of mechanics’ associations, militia companies, and other such tradesmen, Democratic-Republican politicians were particularly amenable to these interests. In short, the age of Jacksonian democracy had arrived.29

The growing political influence of ordinary white males was due in part to the circumstances they inherited in the aftermath of the Revolution as well as their own activism, but this was facilitated by a preindustrial socioeconomic structure that afforded them a relative freedom that was unmatched by their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. Compared with alternative labor systems, such as indentured servitude and slavery, artisans (as well as yeoman farmers), enjoyed “such autonomy . . . as was seldom to be found in either previous or subsequent human experience,” according to historian

David Montgomery. Yet just as white male suffrage was democratizing American society

28 David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 15. 29 See Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a concurrent set of changes was impinging on the economic relations of the country: following Britain’s lead, the United States was embarking on a path toward industrialization. The question remained to be answered whether the democratic gains of the Jacksonian era would survive the market revolution and the rise of the factory system that followed?

Markets, Factories, and Wage Labor

The American Revolution unleashed three historical developments, which were accelerated after the War of 1812: “the spread of market relations, the westward movement of the population, and the rise of a vigorous political democracy.”30 These developments were not mutually exclusive but emerged in conjunction with one another.

Yet the consequences they reaped were not necessarily compatible. Signs of an imperiled handicraft system emerged in the US as early as the late eighteenth century when in 1790 an immigrant from England, Samuel Slater, established America’s first factory at

Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The artisanal system (and the traditional culture that it nourished) were on the verge of irrevocable changes.

The artisanal system of production that developed in the British North American colonies nevertheless shaped (and was shaped by) an increasingly materialistic and commercial culture. Historian Gordon Wood writes:

Americans had experienced a transformation in the way they related to one another and in the way they perceived of themselves and the world around them. And this transformation took place before industrialization, before urbanization, before railroads, and before any of the technological breakthroughs usually associated with modern social change.31

30 Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History, Vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Seagull Edition, 2009), 303. 31 Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2.

The nascent American nation indeed remained overwhelming agrarian during this period, but American culture, especially in the North, was perhaps the most commercialized in the world. Echoing the values exemplified by Benjamin Franklin, Wood writes that

“nowhere in the Western world was business and working for profit more praised and honored.”32 The ethos of commercialism would give cultural force to a set of interconnected demographic changes and technological innovations that would ultimately result in dramatically new economic relations in the United States; historians refer to these changes collectively as the market revolution.

To appreciate the scope of the market revolution it must therefore be emphasized that during the colonial period “no important alterations were made in sailing ships, no major canals were built, and manufacturing continued to be done by hand, with skills passed on from artisan to journeyman and apprentice.”33 At the turn of the nineteenth century American life thus continued to follow centuries-old patterns work and social relations. In this age of homespun, subsistence agriculture and handicraft production prevailed. Those Americans who had already migrated across the Appalachian Mountains found themselves isolated from the markets of the eastern seaboard and forced to provide for themselves the provisions they needed to survive. Distance and geographical barriers placed nearly insuperable constraints on trade and commerce, such that many rural communities relied on cashless, barter systems of trade well into the nineteenth century.

Yet historian Eric Foner contends that “the market revolution represented an acceleration of developments already under way in the colonial era. . . . : [S]outhern planters were marketing the products of slave labor in the international market as early as

32 Ibid. 33 Foner, 304.

the seventeenth century,” such that, by the eighteenth century, American colonists were fully incorporated into Britain’s commercial empire34 The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a series of innovations that accelerated these changes and radically transformed the very nature of trade and commerce. The steamboat, canal, and railroad made it possible to traverse vast distances of geographical space, linking Americans to international and domestic markets in ways that were previously impossible.

Among the many innovations from this period, it was Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin that most profoundly shaped the social, economic, and political history of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Whitney’s invention revolutionized the process of harvesting cotton, facilitating the political and economic ascendency of the Cotton Kingdom and thereby leaving the ignominious (if unintentional) legacy of bolstering the institution of chattel slavery. In 1793, the US produced 5 million pounds of cotton, but the demand increased exponentially such that, by 1820, nearly 170 million pounds of “white gold” was being harvested. It thus calcified the sectional divisions that would precipitate the Civil War. But, for the purposes of elucidating the rise of the factory system, the cotton gin itself is emblematic of what historian Peter N. Stearns has called “the most important single development in human history over the past three centuries”: the industrial revolution.35

Having begun in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution constituted a gradual (but ultimately complete) reorganization of society around new methods of production. These new methods “progressively replaced

34 Ibid., 305. 35 Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013), 12.

humans and animals as the power sources of production with motors powered [first by water and later] by fossil fuels.”36 This significantly increased the total output of goods as well as the productivity of individual workers. Importantly, the central organizational feature of industrialization was the factory, which increased the number of laborers involved in the production process and therefore the total output of goods. If further

“increased the amount of specialization; tasks were subdivided, so the total production was increased even aside from the new technology.”37 The obvious economic implications nevertheless belie the profound social, cultural, and political implications of industrialization.

It is somewhat misleading to then assert that a particular country has industrialized, for, in truth, industrialization occurs sporadically and unevenly across time and place. In the United States, the first sustained factories emerged in small pockets of the antebellum Northeast. Between 1789 and the 1820s, as indentured servitude virtually disappeared and slavery became entrenched in the southern states, the country’s growing population and expanding markets provided unprecedented economic opportunities.

Responding to these market changes, some master artisans shifted “from custom-order production to manufacture for future demand.”38 This shift must not be underestimated.

These erstwhile artisans were in the process of transforming themselves into a new class of merchant-manufacturers, that is, the first generation of factory-owners and industrial capitalists.

36 Ibid., 16. 37 Ibid. 38 American Labor, 11.

This transition reconfigured the previous relations of production that prevailed under the artisanal system. “No longer working alongside their journeymen and apprentices in the traditional workshop style,” historians Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph

A. McCartin observe that these “new-style capitalists . . . sought to increase productivity among their employees, hence lowering the cost of production and widening profit margins.”39 The very notion of an employer-employee relationship was anathema to the sense of autonomy and personal freedom that had developed within the artisanal culture.

As the factory-based economy developed, scores of journeymen saw their opportunities decrease and their access to positions of authority diminish; consequently, the gap between master and journeyman, employer and employee, grew ever wider.

The ideal of an “agrarian republic” or “artisanal republic” comprised of independent yeoman farmers and producer-citizens was withering before the inexorable reality of industrial capitalism. Three decades after Slater build his factory in Pawtucket,

America’s industrial revolution arrived in earnest when the Boston Manufacturing

Company established several large mills in the 1820s along the Merrimac River in

Lowell, Massachusetts. The Company “relied on large numbers of young women recruited from the economically strapped farms of New England for its workforce.”40 In the ensuing decades, the mass-production system solidified as “household manufactures fell from $1.70 per capita in 1840 to $0.78 in 1860.”41

But the Lowell experience further illustrates the evolving socioeconomic relations of an emergent industrial society, increasingly characterized by class divisions. Yet these

39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 44. 41 Ibid.

early experiments in industrial capitalism were not without their peculiarities. Having been developed as a planned factory town, the Lowell mill owners endeavored to exercise paternalistic control over their predominantly female workforce. The “factory girls” were required to lodge in boardinghouses under the strict supervision of “overseers,” who were, in effect, forerunners of modern factory foremen. “The doors [of the boardinghouses] must be closed at ten o’clock in the evening,” as was stipulated in the

Hamilton Manufacturing Company’s book of regulations, “and no person admitted after that time, without some reasonable excuse.”42

The Lowell factories were, moreover, rather transparent schemes of social engineering: “The keepers of the boardinghouses,” read one set of regulations, “must give an account of the number, names and employment of their borders, when required, and report the names of such as are guilty of any improper conduct, or are not in the regular habit of attending public worship.”43 The Hamilton Manufacturing Company considered its employees engaged for twelve months upon agreeing to a contract. Factory girls who did not comply with regulations or left work before their contract expired were not

“entitled to a regular discharge.”44 In exchange for their labor, Lowell workers were paid

“monthly, including board and wages.”45

But more than this, the factory system attempted to regulate discipline, personal behavior, morality, even time. According to historian E.P. Thompson, industrial practices aimed at inculcating in the working classes an entirely new conception of work habits and

42 From the Handbook to Lowell, reproduced in John R. Commons et al., eds., Documentary History, Vol. 7 (Cleveland: The A.H. Clark Company, 1911), 137-8. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 135-6. 45 Ibid.

time-sense: “In these ways – by the division of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports - new labour habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed.”46

Thus, life in these early factories became synonymous with regimentation and toil. And yet many young unmarried women flocked to factory towns like Lowell, nonetheless. Their reasons were many and varied, but often entailed a desire for educational opportunities as well as a measure of economic independence. In the Lowell

Offering, a worker-edited periodical, one of the workers, Josephine L. Baker observed,

There is a class, of whom I would speak, that work in the mills, and will while they continue in operation. Namely, the many who have no home, and who come here to seek, in this busy, bustling ‘City of Spindles,’ a competency [economic independence] that shall enable them in after life, to live without being a burden to society, - the many who toil on, without a murmur, for the support of an aged mother or orphaned brother or sister.47

Factory life at Lowell afforded young women access to “lectures, evening schools and libraries,” but the work schedule precluded “the time to improve them as we ought,”

Baker writes.48 Many of her objections to the Lowell system foreshadow grievances that would become endemic to industrial capitalism – grievances that would only intensify over the coming decades. She writes,

There are many things we do not like; many occurrences that send the warm blood mantling to the cheek when they must be borne in silence, and many harsh words and acts that are not called for. There are objections also to the number of hours we work, to the length of time allotted to our meals, and to the low wages allowed for labor; objections that must and will be answered; for the time has come when something, besides the clothing and feeding of the body is to be thought of; when the mind is to be clothed and fed; and this cannot be as it should be, with the present system of labor.49

46 E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, No. 39 (Dec., 1967), 90. 47 Josephine L. Baker, “A Second Peep at Factory Life,” Lowell Offering, Vol. 5 (1845), 97-100. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.

In a sense, the Lowell “factory girls” were among the first-generation immigrants to industrial society. But the rapid expansion of markets in the earliest decades of industrialization was delimited by continual labor shortages. In the 1840s and 1850s, however, successive waves of immigration significantly expanded the ranks of industrial wage laborers. Indeed, over 4 million people entered the US during this period, most of them from Ireland and Germany. The preponderance of immigrants settled in the northern states where factory jobs were relatively copious and competition with slave labor was a nonfactor. Economic growth nevertheless concealed an increasingly polarized society. The same growth that created the wealthy merchants and industrialists likewise created the struggling factory workers, unskilled dockworkers, and domestic seamstresses.50

In an influential 1840 essay titled “The Laboring Classes,” transcendentalist preacher and activist Orestes Brownson warned his readers of the looming dangers of extreme socioeconomic inequality: “No one can observe the signs of the times with much care, without perceiving that a crisis as to the relation of wealth and labor is approaching.

It is useless to shut our eyes to the fact, and like the ostrich fancy ourselves secure because we have so concealed our heads that we see not the danger.”51 Departing from fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s emphasis on individualism and self- realization, Brownson’s insistence on the importance of “social arrangements” strikingly presages the ideas of Karl Marx. “The old war between the King and the Barons is nigh

50 Foner, 319-20. 51 Orestes Brownson, “The Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review, Vol. 3 (July 1840), 358-95.

ended,” he writes, “and now commences the new struggle between the operative and his employer, between wealth and labor.”52 He continues,

All over the world this fact stares us in the face, the workingman is poor and depressed, while a large portion of the non-workingmen . . . are wealthy. It may be laid down as a general rule, with but few exceptions, that men are rewarded in an inverse ratio to the amount of actual service they perform. Under every government on earth the largest salaries are annexed to those offices, which demand of their incumbents the least amount of actual labor either mental or manual.53

Anxiety and discontent were not exclusive prerogatives of New England intellectuals, however, for the demise of the artisanal way of life and the rise of mass- production industry affected every conceivable facet of American social and political life.

With workdays averaging from 11.5 to 13.5 hours, the combination of massive immigration and the introduction of machinery drove weekly pay down from $12 in 1835 to $8 in 1845.54 Such were the vicissitudes of the free market. Increasingly vulnerable, workers themselves searched for political language to express their plight. Industrial capitalism, many argued, had imposed upon workers conditions that were akin to slavery.

As ideologues of the system equated wages and contracts with freedom, many industrial workers sought emancipation from “wage slavery.”55

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 American Labor, 45. 55 Philosopher David Ellerman provides a trenchant analysis of the relationship between wage labor and choice in “Capitalism and Workers’ Self-Management,” in G. Hunnius, G.D. Garson, and J. Case, eds., Workers’ Control (New York: Random House, 1973), 10-11. He writes: “It is a veritable mainstay of capitalist thought . . . that the moral flaws of chattel slavery have not survived in capitalism since the workers, unlike the slaves, are free people making voluntary wage contracts. But it is only that, in the case of capitalism, the denial of natural rights is less complete so that the worker has a residual legal personality as a free ‘commodity-owner.’ He is thus allowed to voluntarily put his own working life to traffic. When a robber denies another person’s right to make an infinite number of other choices besides losing his money or his life and the denial is backed up by a gun, then this is clearly robbery even though it might be said that the victim is making a ‘voluntary choice’ between his remaining options. When the legal system itself denies the natural rights of working people in the name of the prerogatives of capital,

The growing disparities between labor and capital consequently precipitated the birth of the labor movement in the United States. The upsurge in trade unionism prior to the Civil War remained localized struggles, however, as erstwhile journeymen fought to improve wages and conditions. Employers often battled fiercely to suppress trade unions, arguing that it represented an attempt to “monopolize labor.” In Philadelphia, for instance, when journeymen carpenters collectively demanded a $1.25 a day wage, master carpenters adopted an invective-laden resolution stating,

A combination of Journeymen Mechanics had been formed, under the name of the Trades’ Union, arbitrary in its measures, mischievous in its effects, subversive of the confidence and good feeling that formerly existed, and equally calculated to destroy the independence of both the master carpenters and journeymen in their contracts and private relations. . . . Combinations of this description are indebted for their origin to the discontented and disorganizers in a monarchical government; they are not of American birth; they are arbitrary and oppressive in their operations, subversive of all regularity of business, and destructive of confidence in the parties concerned; it is the mother of countless evils, and the source of no good.56

Union members responded in turn with an enumeration of their grievances and a defense of collective action, stating that “the constitution of our country secures to all its citizens the right to associate for the promotion of their own interests, . . . [while] the resolutions of the employers have more than ever convinced us of the danger we would be exposed to without our union.”57

The proliferation of workers’ organizations during the antebellum period would be curtailed by an economic downturn of 1837, but the impulse for collective action

and this denial is sanctioned by the legal violence of the state, then the theorists of ‘libertarian’ capitalism do not proclaim institutional robbery, but rather they celebrate the ‘natural liberty’ of working people to choose between the remaining options of selling their labor as a commodity and being unemployed.” 56 “Employers Attack Trade Unions,” in Pennsylvanian (March 17, 1836), reproduced in Commons et al., eds., Documentary History, Vol. 6, 50-4. 57 “Journeymen Carpenters Defend Trade Unionism,” in Pennsylvanian (March 21, 1836), reproduced in Commons et al., eds., Documentary History, Vol. 6, 54-7.

imbued the emergence of a conscious working-class political agenda. Meanwhile, the creation of the National Trades Union in the 1830s heralded an early attempt at a national labor movement. Although the NTU collapsed shortly thereafter, improved economic conditions in the 1850s and 1860s fueled the proliferation of many national labor unions, including the National Typographical Union (1854), United Cigar Makers (1856), and

Iron Molders (1859). Labor shortages during the Civil War further strengthened the hand of northern industrial workers in their attempts to organize for better wages and conditions.

Thus, the United States emerged from the Civil War a strikingly different society from what it had been only fifty year earlier. Industrialization obliterated social and economic patterns that had prevailed for centuries. Although hardly a utopia, the socioeconomic relations under the artisanal system of production nevertheless afforded master craftsmen, journeymen, and even apprentices considerable freedom and autonomy. This is primarily because the distinctions between master and journeyman were minimal, as journeymen (and apprentices) were effectively masters in waiting. Few could have imagined the changes wrought by industrialization or the disparities in wealth and power that these changes entailed. In the post-Civil War era, working people would continue to organize and fight to reassert their dignity. But industrial capitalism would prove to be a resilient and evolving foe.

In the following chapter, one of the major responses to industrial capitalism will be explored: the Progressive movement. Generally speaking, progressives sought to curtail the worst injustices of the system not by fundamental changes but by reform. It would prove to be a time of inclusion for some and exclusion for others in America’s

working class. Just as it is necessary to understand the IWW as a product of industrialization, so too was the IWW shaped by an environment of reform. For the

Wobbly’s role during this period was to serve as a home for those workers neglected by reform.

CHAPTER TWO

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA AND THE RISE OF CORPORATE LIBERALISM

Think for yourselves; ask yourselves whether this widespread fact of poverty is not a crime, and a crime for which every one of us, man and woman, who does not do what he or she can do to call attention to it and do away with it, is responsible. -Henry George, “The Crime of Poverty,” 188558

The industrial revolution transformed American life. Among the many changes, industrialism gradually displaced the traditional handicraft system of production, gave rise to the factory system, and birthed the first industrial proletariat in the United States.

It was out of these conditions that the American labor movement and later the Industrial

Workers of the World developed. Yet the IWW must be understood also in the context of the Progressive Era. Just as reform was a response to industrialism, the IWW was a response to the political, social, and economic implications of reform.

Progress and Its Discontents

The United States had become by the turn of the twentieth century the most dynamic and powerful industrial nation in the world. Its economy boasted unparalleled advancement in those industries which were thought to distinguish a modern, industrial nation: coal and steel, petroleum-based enterprises, chemicals, food processing, and electrical equipment. Whereas canals and railroads had once been built with the aid of foreign investment, American businesses were producing surplus capital in such volumes that it allowed them to pursue opportunities both at home and abroad. Indeed, the late

58 Henry George, “The Crime of Poverty,” in The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition, ed. by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian (New York: The New Press, 2003), 238.

nineteenth century witnessed the concentration of wealth and capital on a scale unimagined in previous historical epochs. Consequently, the US became the home of some of the largest business enterprises in the world, including Standard Oil,

International Harvester, Singer Sewing Machine, and the G. Swift Packing Company.

The zenith of economic consolidation came in 1901 when J.P. Morgan acquired Andrew

Carnegie’s iron and steel interests, combining them with his own to form United States

Steel, the first billion dollar corporation.59

Unprecedented economic growth triggered an equally unprecedented movement of people, for growth would not have been possible without the labor of millions of men and women, native and immigrant alike. From the end of the Civil War to 1920, the

United States transitioned from an overwhelmingly rural society (according to the Census

Bureau, one in four people in 1870 lived in an urban area) to one in which over half the population lived in urban areas. As industrial capitalism subdued the continent, such demographic changes continuously remade the human mosaic of America’s cities. Many native-born Americans, meanwhile, abandoned life on the farms for wage labor in the mines, mills, and factories associated with the industrial city. But these changes were increasingly shaped by a prodigious wave of immigration to the US from regions which had previously contributed relatively few people to American society: “between 1880 and

1920,” notes historian Nell Irvin Painter, “the provenance of the foreign-born population in the United States shifted away from Germany, Ireland, northwestern Europe, and

China to central, eastern, and southern Europe.”60 While some of the arrivals created

59 Dubofsky, American Labor, 89, and We Shall be All, 1. 60 Nell Irvin Painter, Introduction to Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), xxxiv.

thriving middle-class communities, urban poverty became the reality for most immigrant workers.

The result of the changes, moreover, meant that the US claimed the most heterogeneous labor force in the world. New immigrants from southern and eastern

Europe, historian Melvyn Dubofsky reminds us, “satisfied an almost insatiable demand for unskilled laborers willing to work and be paid by the day or hour, and their children flooded the ranks of the machine operators demanded by mass-production industry.”61

Outside of the South, where African Americans provided the principal source of domestic labor, this need was predominantly satisfied by young women of Irish, German, and

Scandinavian ethnicity, as well as by native-born women of rural origins. Numerous

Asian workers toiled in various occupations in the American West, as did their Mexican counterparts in the Southwest. At the same time, multitudes of single, young men, native and immigrant, were recruited by padrones (or labor contractors) to become migrant workers in seasonal, construction, and agricultural industries. The American labor force was consequently as fragmented as it was diverse, with wage and occupational gaps exacerbated by ethnic and racial hierarchies.

Yet despite pervasive divisions within the working class, the systemic challenges of industrial capitalism impinged on all workers irrespective of their racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds. In the workplace, foremen and managers sought to implement rules, incentivize productivity, and generally regulate workers’ behavior in such a way as to increase efficiency and maximize profits. The preindustrial values and work habits, which were detailed in the previous chapter, were to be either extinguished altogether or

61 Dubofsky, American Labor, 90-1.

carefully manipulated. Skilled workers, by force of their knowledge over the production process, continued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to exercise considerable power in the workplace. It was necessary, argued Frederick Winslow

Taylor, the “father of modern management practices,” to harness this power and direct it toward the interests of management. In his 1911 critique of the prevailing inefficiencies of industrial management, The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor wrote,

In an industrial establishment which employs say from 500 to 1,000 workmen, there will be found in many cases at least twenty to thirty different trades. The workmen in each of these trades have had their knowledge handed down to them by word of mouth. . . . This mass of rule-of-thumb or traditional knowledge may be said to be the principle asset or possession of every tradesman. . . . [The] foremen and superintendents [who comprise the management] know, better than anyone else, that their own knowledge and personal skill falls far short of the combined knowledge and dexterity of all the workmen under them. . . . They recognize the task before them as that of inducing each workman to use his best endeavors, his hardest work, all his traditional knowledge, his skill, his ingenuity, and his goodwill – in a word, his ‘initiative,’ so as to yield the largest possible return to his employer.62

As Frank Gilbreth phrased it, the core aim of scientific management, or more precisely Taylorism, was “the establishment of standards everywhere, including instructions cards for standard methods, motion studies, time study, time cards, [and] records of individual output.”63 In addition to Taylorism, historian David Montgomery identified corporate welfare as an alternative type of managerial reform. Welfare reform,

Montgomery argues, was characterized by “paternalistic measures initiated by employers with the primary intention of changing their employees’ social attitudes, work habits, and

62 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1913), 31-2. 63 Frank B. Gilbreth, Primer of Scientific Management, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Van Nostrand Comapany, 1914), 36.

life styles.”64 Again, these measures illustrate a recurrent tension over work habits, which for many immigrant workers continued to be influenced by preindustrial values. New

“sociological departments” were established, as one contemporary observer put it, with the express intent of inculcating “thrift, sobriety, [and] initiative” in immigrant workers.65

It is important, however, to note that scientific management impinged primarily on skilled workers. The President of Remington Typewriter Company, John Calder, said in 1913 that scientific management could “barely be said to have made any impression outside of machine shops.”66 Accordingly, the increasing ubiquity of mechanization meant that skilled trades were in steady decline, and, by extension, that the majority of industrial jobs were in the process of being deskilled. As will be discussed later in this chapter, the gradual disappearance of craft distinctions would greatly influence the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW, given these changing conditions, insisted on the superiority of industrial unionism as an alternative organizing principle to the craft unionism espoused by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the most powerful labor organization of the era.

And yet, perhaps no feature better exemplified the socioeconomic structure of industrial capitalism than a growing disparity of income and wealth. Indeed, in the years

1897 to 1914 a combination of factors – price inflation, immigration, and domestic migration – severely delimited workers’ real wages and incomes. The richest 1 percent of the population, by contrast, controlled approximately one-fourth of the total wealth; the

64 David Montgomery, “Immigrant Workers and Managerial Reform,” in Workers Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 32. 65 W.H. Beveridge, quoted in Don D. Lescohier, The Labor Market (New York: Macmillan Company, 1919), 268. 66 John Calder, “Overvaluation of Management Science,” Iron Age 91 (1913), 605.

top 5 percent, nearly one-half. The social tensions underlying such extreme wealth inequality were exacerbated by cycles of mass unemployment and periodic economic downturns. The latter half of the nineteenth century had been marked by two major depressions (1873-77, 1893-97) and one minor depression (1883-85), the conditions of which exposed many working people to veritable destitution. It is understandable, therefore, that the period was characterized by a degree of labor unrest previously unimagined. Industrial conflict met a tumultuous inauguration in 1877, the “year of violence,” with the great railroad strikes, but a succession of strike waves punctuated the era, reaching explosive crescendos in 1885-6, 1892-95, 1899-1905, and 1910-13.67

At the turn of the twentieth century, therefore, the United States had been transformed by the combined forces of industrialization, technological advances, migration, and urbanization. But rapid change had wrought unanticipated problems for

American society, resulting in a powerful sense among many that something was fundamentally wrong with prevailing social arrangements. “The evils arising from the unjust and unequal distribution of wealth,” wrote the reformer Henry George in 1879,

“are not incidents of progress, but tendencies which must bring progress to a halt.”68

Consequently, George would advocate preemptive measures to ameliorate poverty, lest the victims of injustice become subject to “the manifold evils which flow from it.”69 His popular book, Progress and Poverty, popularized the notion that poverty and wealth inequality had placed insuperable constraints on economic opportunity for most

Americans.

67 Dubofsky, American Labor, 92. 68 Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depression, and of the Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth [1879] (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1886), 489. 69 Ibid.,

In the period from 1890 to 1920, this idea came to imbue many of the loosely affiliated reform movements of the Progressive Era. Progressive concerns ranged from the unfettered growth of corporate monopolies and diminishing opportunities for ordinary

Americans to the problem of rampant political and municipal corruption. Yet these concerns were pervaded by a conscious fear of the recurrent social and labor unrest that characterized the preceding decades. Hence, it must be emphasized that the growing popularity of socialism in the early decades of the twentieth century and the formation of the IWW in 1905 occurred contemporaneously with these broader reform movements. In order to better understand the rise of American socialism and the birth of the IWW, it is first necessary to ask, who were the progressives? What were their objectives? And what was their relationship to the working class?

The Progressive Movement and the Problem of Class

The unfettered excesses of the Gilded Age were a manifestation of the growth and expansion of industrial capitalism, which created enormous wealth and propelled economic growth in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The wealth and economic growth, however, were not evenly distributed but concentrated in the hands of a minority of increasingly powerful industrialists. It created a socioeconomic landscape which was increasingly polarized between rich and poor, employer and employee, capital and labor. Few individuals better epitomized the sense of being “caught in between” the extremes of wealth and poverty, without really trusting either, than

President Theodore Roosevelt. In an article written for Century Magazine when he was only twenty-eight, Roosevelt expressed his disdain for the effete, aristocratic tendencies of rich Americans:

The wealthier, or, as they would prefer to style themselves, the ‘upper’ classes, tend distinctly towards the bourgeois type, and an individual in the bourgeois stage of development, while honest, industrious, and virtuous, is also not unapt to be a miracle of timid and short-sighted selfishness. It is unfortunately true . . . that the general tendency among people of culture and high education has been to neglect and even to look down upon the rougher and manlier virtues, so that an advanced state of intellectual development is too often associated with a certain effeminacy of character.70

Roosevelt’s contempt for the rich should not be misinterpreted to mean that he was an advocate for the masses. In the same article, the future President wrote:

“workingmen, whose lives are passed in one unceasing round of narrow and monotonous toil, not unnaturally are inclined to pay heed to the demagogues and professional labor advocates who promise if elected to try to pass laws to better their condition.”71 His writings often describe the masses as unwieldy, irresponsible, and easily misled. “Any sign of organized power among the people frightened him,” observes historian Richard

Hofstadter, such that Roosevelt’s personal attitude toward the labor movement was unapologetically hostile for many years.72 What Roosevelt venerated above all were what he called the “manly” virtues of courage, bravery, and self-reliance – to be cultivated in the unforgiving environs of nature and war. Yet it was his evolving conception of government as mediator between the competing class interests that would prove most influential for succeeding generations.

While class divisions would continue to influence the nature and course of the progressive movement, it would nevertheless be inaccurate to generalize about progressives based on the predilections of Theodore Roosevelt. Indeed, the President was

70 Theodore Roosevelt, “Machine Politics in New York City,” Century Magazine (Nov. 11, 1886), n.p. 71 Ibid. 72 Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books, 1948), 270.

deeply contemptuous of the most fervent middle-class reformers, “rabble-rousers” as he viewed them, a diverse group encompassing journalistic muckrakers, social workers, enlightened businessmen, and child welfare and labor reformers, as well as issue-oriented political activists. If one were pressed to identify attributes shared by the aforementioned groups, it might be said that the majority were middle-class urbanites, most of them responding to the nascent social ills and political corruption emblematic of industrial cities.73

The spirit of reform, however, first emerged not in the cities but the countryside, as millions of farmers in the 1890s joined the Populist movement in an effort to combat mounting economic hardships and curb corporate influence over government. Established in 1891, the People’s Party (or “Populists”) advocated a variety of reform issues, including the free coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, regulation of railroads, an eight-hour workday, the right of labor to organize, and direct election of US senators.

Calling for the abolition of national banks, moreover, the Populists declared in their

“Omaha Platform” of 1892 that “the land, including all the natural sources of wealth, is the heritage of the people, and should not be monopolized for speculative purposes.”74

Although the Populists tried to appeal to urban laborers, the movement was fundamentally agrarian in its ethos. There was, in this respect, a reactionary element working within the Populist movement, resisting the inexorable advance of industrialism

73 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, ed., Who Were the Progressives? (New York: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2002), 3- 17. 74 “Populist Principles: The Omaha Platform, 1892, in Leon Fink, ed., Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993), 182; the collection hereafter referred to as Major Problems.

by seeking to retain the withering vestiges of Jacksonian democratic values and clinging to the myth of a Jeffersonian republic comprised of independent, small farmers.

As its influence faded, the Populist Party (and much of its platform) was effectively absorbed in 1896 by the Democratic Party during the presidential campaign of

William Jennings Bryan. Yet the Populists’ suspicion of concentrated economic and political power endured and found its highest social and political expression in the form of urban, middle-class reformers. These progressive reformers combined this suspicion with a distinctively middle-class faith in bureaucratic rationalization, social efficiency, the propitious potential of industrialism, and the moral rehabilitation of the downtrodden.

And their energies were channeled primarily into three particular issues: ameliorating urban poverty, municipal and political reform, and challenging corporate monopolies.75

Exposing social ills and political corruption became the preoccupation of progressives, as well as a new generation of reform-minded investigative journalists, pejoratively nicknamed “muckrakers” by Theodore Roosevelt for the manner in which they focused attention on the more unpleasant realities of American life. In one of the earliest and most powerful examples of muckraking, journalist Jacob Riis’ 1890 publication How the Other Half Lives poignantly documented the deplorable living conditions existing in the tenement homes of some of America’s largest cities.

Concerning the relationship between moral and social degradation on the one hand and squalid living conditions on the other, Riis observed the following:

Their large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of

75 Gilmore, 3-17.

tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.76

The complementary forces of urban poverty and moral degradation were given fictional expression in Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which depicts life in the tenement neighborhood of “Rum Alley” and the unfortunate set of circumstances that compel the title character to resort to prostitution.77 In life and literature, progressives sought to demonstrate the (ultimately) destructive and retrograde implications of Social Darwinism, an ideology popular in the Gilded Age which

(mis)applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection to social conditions in order to justify existing class distinctions and explain poverty. Many progressives countered with the

Social Gospel, developed and propounded by liberal Protestant clergy and other like- minded activists, which advocated the application of Christian principles to social problems wrought by industrialization. Working among German immigrants in New

York City, Baptist clergyman, Walter Rauschenbusch, was an outspoken proponent of social Christianity. He argued that “the Christian Church in the past has taught us to do our work with our eyes fixed on another world and a life to come. But the business before us is concerned with refashioning this present world, making this earth clean and sweet and habitable. . . .”78 Rauschenbusch believed that the principles of social reform were deeply rooted in the Biblical tradition in general and the teachings of Jesus in particular.

Access to decent housing, food and public safety, compulsory education, and regulating prostitution – these issues became popular progressive tropes intended to

76 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, 1890 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 77 Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). 78 Walter Rauschenbusch, “Social Christianity” (1912), in Major Problems, 301.

mitigate the deleterious influence of poverty. But in keeping with the Social Gospel, they were tinged with an undercurrent of moral obligation. In consequence, settlement houses, schools, and a variety of other voluntary associations proliferated during the Progressive

Era. These and other issues (notably the women’s suffrage movement) were profoundly influenced by the dedicated and passionate activism of women – mostly from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Perhaps the most celebrated female reformer of the period was Jane Addams, who established Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Built in poor and working-class neighborhoods, settlement houses (such as Hull House) were institutions organized by (mostly) affluent women for the purpose of providing social and educational opportunities for working-class people. The settlement house movement was, therefore, an attempt by progressive reformers to bridge the divides of class and privilege.

Like so many of her generation, solving the “class problem” became Jane

Addams’ raison d'être. Yet the settlement houses (as well as many other philanthropic and reform endeavors) demonstrate the uneasiness with which many middle- and upper- class reformers dealt with the issue of socioeconomic class. Many chose simply to dismiss the notion that American society was divided by class interests. Addams herself wrote “we are not willing, open and professedly, to assume that American citizens are broken up into classes, even if we make that assumption the preface to a plea that the superior class has duties to the inferior.”79 Addams’ statement illustrates a common feature of the progressive ethos: that is, the pervasive interplay of moralism (emanating from the Social Gospel) and paternalism (the notion that affluent citizens had a quasi-

79 Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House: With Autobiographical Notes (New York: Macmillan Company, 1911), 41-2.

parental obligation to uplift their less-fortunate counterparts). Many working-class people, as we will see in the following chapter, resisted such paternalistic overtures, insisting that social uplift be a bottom-up movement.

Before turning to working-class alternatives to progressive reform, however, it is important to note the scope and impact of reform on national political and economic culture. During the Progressive Era, as we have seen, the spirit of reform underwent a decidedly urban makeover. This meant that agrarian concerns were promptly adapted to the new environs of the city, which, in turn, meant that middle-class urbanites replaced farmers as the primary agents of reform. Curiously, however, the progressive movement

– insofar as one may call it a movement – took place amid a period of relative prosperity for the middle class. One of the most insightful scholars of American political history,

Richard Hofstadter, argues that the United States experienced what he calls a “status revolution” in the period following 1870, during which an emergent class of wealthy industrialists came to supplant the old petit bourgeoisie in matters of national political and economic influence. It is during the first decade of the twentieth century, he writes, that “the middle class, most of which had been content to accept the conservative leadership of [US Senator Marcus A.] Hanna and [President William] McKinley during the period of crisis in the mid-nineties, rallied to the support of progressive leaders in both parties in the period of well-being that followed.”80 Hofstadter concludes, therefore, that progressive leaders were responding less to a diminution of their prosperity, per se, than to the changing distribution of power and influence within American society.

80 Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 135.

A contemporary of Theodore Roosevelt, writer and historian Henry Adams wrote of these socioeconomic changes in describing his native New England, but his observations are equally applicable to the nation at large: “Down to 1850, and even later,

New England society was still directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians, professors, merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were clergymen and each profession were a church.”81 In terms of status, however, the small manufacturer, the small merchant, and the various professional men had seen their position steadily decline in relation to the Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Rockefellers, and

Morgans. Paradoxically, although American political culture had long been shaped by localism, the Progressive Era inaugurated, in certain respects, the birth of a national political culture. This is because many progressives, so many of whom constituted the petit bourgeoisie, effectively eschewed localism in favor of national political consolidation as a means of curtailing what many considered to be the corrupting influence of inordinate wealth. Indeed, reformers came to dominate the leadership of both major parties. The successive Presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-9), William

Howard Taft (1909-13), and Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) were, moreover, associated to varying degrees with progressive reform.

Many of the most tangible achievements of reform, however, remained on the state and municipal level. Again, we will turn here to the muckrakers. Shortly after Riis’ treatment of urban poverty, McClure’s Magazine (1893-1929) came to be the institutional home of this journalistic tradition. One of McClure’s most influential exposés was

Lincoln Steffens’ Shame of the Cities, which observed that corruption in America’s cities

81 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1931), 32.

“was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social; the ramification of boodle,” continues Steffens, “were so complex, various, and far-reaching, that one mind could hardly grasp them.”82 Progressives used such reports to arouse popular opinion and mobilize political action against corrupt political machines, in many places successfully abolishing the ward system of city government, which had long facilitated the electoral dominance of neighborhood patronage machines. Progressives themselves achieved local as well as national electoral success, as we have seen, which, among other things, resulted in the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to provide for the direct election of US Senators.83

In economic affairs, progressive energies were equally conspicuous. The corporate trust, for instance, became perhaps the most prominent target of progressive reform. The financial analyst John Moody defined a trust as an “act, agreement, or combination of persons or capital believed to be done, made, or formed, with the intent, power, or tendency to monopolize business, to restrain or interfere with competitive trade, or to fix, influence, or increase the prices of commodities.”84 In 1904, Moody calculated that there were over 440 large, industrial trusts controlling an estimated $20,

379, 162, 511 in capital.85 Such developments, if nothing else, had vindicated Karl

Marx’s theory of capital accumulation, which argued that the expropriation of the labor

82 Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 1904, (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 9. 83 Gilmore, 15. 84 John Moody, Introduction to The Truth about Trusts: A Description and Analysis of the American Trust Movement (New York: Moody Publishing Company, 1904), xiii. 85 Ibid., xi.

process and the means of production by private interests would, through growing margins of surplus-value, result in the eventual “expropriation of many capitalist by few.”86

In many respects, then, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company came to symbolize the corruption of concentrated economic power. Established in 1870, Standard

Oil controlled, by the 1880s, over 90 percent of the nation’s oil industry. And again it was a McClure’s journalist who tilted the balance of public opinion. In a 1904 investigation into the history and business practices of Standard Oil, journalist Ida Tarbell discovered that Rockefeller had accomplished this level of market dominance through an aggressive (and pioneering) strategy of “horizontal integration.” In other words,

Rockefeller outcompeted (and often acquired) rival firms with a cutthroat array of business tactics, such as colluding with railroad companies, as well as fixing prices and production quotas. Tarbell observed:

Mr. Rockefeller was certainly now [1870s] in an excellent condition to work out his plan of brining under his control all the refineries of the country. The Standard Oil Company owned in each of the great refining centers, New York, Pittsburg, and Philadelphia, a large and aggressive plant run by the men who had built it up. These works were, so far as the public knew, still independent. . . . Where persuasion failed then, it was necessary, in his judgment, that pressure be applied – simply a pressure sufficient to demonstrate to these blind or recalcitrant individuals the impossibility of their long being able to do business independently.87

Tarbell’s exposé swayed public opinion to such an extent that it contributed to the prosecution in 1911 of Standard Oil on charges of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, resulting in the dissolution of Rockefeller’s holdings into separate marketing, producing,

86 Karl Marx, “Chapter 26: The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,” Capital, Vol. 1, in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. by Eugene Kemenka (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 490-3. 87 Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: McClure, Phillips, and Co., 1904), 154, 156.

and refining companies.88 Government intervention in economic affairs brings us to a final point on the legacy of the Progressive Era. The effective “nationalization” of

American political culture closely corresponded to the consolidation of national political power. Indeed, such actions as those resulting in the legal dissolution of Standard Oil could not have been possible without the unprecedented growth and expansion of the national state.

The Rise of Corporate Liberalism

The consolidation of state power during this period is but one factor that has compelled many scholars to reevaluate the legacy of the Progressive Era. Some have even chosen to abandon the term “progressive,” arguing that the connotations associated with such value-laden terms obscure the true nature of the reform movements themselves.

And in this respect, it must be said that critics have often depicted the liberal reform tradition as plagued by a combination of insincerity and failure. Reform initiatives are deemed insincere, according to historian Richard L. McCormick, because “they are said to have used democratic rhetoric only as a cloak for elitist purposes.”89 The less-cynical interpretations of liberal failures, moreover, contend that well-meaning moralism and paternalism combined with too much faith in scientific methods and administrative techniques to ever effectively combat the systemic flaws of industrial society.

Many historians take further exception with the very notion of a progressive

“movement,” believing that one should hardly generalize about a set of phenomena as complex and diverse as early twentieth-century reform. While the coherence of these movements is indeed a reproachable topic, McCormick rightly argues that “progressivism

88 Eric Foner, 615. 89 Richard L. McCormick, “Evaluating the Progressives,” in Major Problems, 316.

was characterized, first of all, by a distinctive set of attitudes toward industrialism,” and, moreover, that most progressives sought “to improve and ameliorate the conditions of industrial life.”90 Yet the very nature of liberal reform reflects an ambivalent attitude toward corporate capitalism, for, at its core, the ideological tenets of progressivism posit that it is possible to tame the worst evils of capitalism without fundamentally altering capitalism itself. It is therefore the position of this essay that the scope and direction of progressive reforms were principally guided (or coopted) by business elites who sought to use government for the pursuit and preservation of their own private ends.

Thus, the rise of the liberal state during the Progressive Era witnessed the development of a much closer, more intimate relationship between business elites and government than had existed previously. This runs counter to the popular conception of

“liberalism” propounded by such intellectuals as Arthur M. Schlesinger, who wrote that

“Liberalism in America has been ordinarily the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community.”91 This position, however, is simply inconsistent with the actual role played by large corporations, financial institutions, and business leaders in the formulation of progressive reform and the shape of the national government.

Perhaps the best example of corporate liberalism in action was the National Civic

Federation (NCF), the genesis of which is to be found in the social unrest of the 1890s.

Its forerunner, the Chicago Civic Federation, was organized in 1893 by Ralph M. Easley, a former school teacher and journalist whose experiences with populists and socialists in

Chicago had convinced him of the exigent need to improve relations between labor and

90 Ibid., 319. 91 Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946), 505.

capital. After an 1899 conference on the “trust problem” boosted his public stature,

Easley set out to organize the National Civic Federation the following year. The NCF first established the principle of a tripartite representation of business, labor, and government which would become paradigmatic for future civic and governmental boards, committees, and agencies.92

Importantly, the founding members of the NCF viewed social and labor unrest as an imminent threat to the stability of the corporate order. Tripartite representation therefore became a means of mitigating unrest and ensuring the stability of the system. In

1900 and beyond, however, the NCF was led and dominated by big businessmen. Its membership included US Senator Marcus A. Hanna, its first president (who was also a former businessman as well as William McKinley’s campaign manager), Samuel Insull, a

Chicago banker (and later Secretary of the Treasury), the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and several partners from J.P. Morgan and Company. Its executive committee, moreover, included at various times a panoply of powerful politicians and professional men: Grover

Cleveland, William H. Taft, Charles Bonaparte (Roosevelt’s Attorney General), Charles

W. Eliot (President of Harvard University), Benjamin Ide Wheeler (President of the

University of California), and many other political and economic elites.93

Representation further included leaders of some of the largest and most powerful labor unions in the country. Heads of major railroad brotherhoods were members of the executive committee, for example, and John Mitchell, president of the United Mine

Workers, served as cochairman of the Trade Agreements Department from 1904 to 1908.

In keeping with the progressive desire to overcome class tensions, the NCF sought to

92 Weinstein, Corporate Ideal, 7-8. 93 Ibid., 8.

remediate the competing interests of labor and capital by brokering labor negotiations and promoting such “labor-friendly” policies as collective bargaining and workers’ compensation. Hanna proudly stated in 1903 that the aim of the NCF was to establish mutual trust between employer and employee, to “lay the foundation stone of a structure that will endure for all time.”94 John Mitchell ardently supported these efforts, believing that relations between labor and capital had, in his words, “become strained to the breaking point.” Mitchell referred to the NCF as a “peace movement” and argued that it was his duty as a good citizen to “bring into closer and more harmonious relation these two apparently antagonistic forces.”95

The membership and influence of the NCF grew precipitously after its founding in 1900, with representatives from almost a third of all corporations and constituting a capitalization of over $10,000,000. Yet it should be emphasized that the NCF and the philosophy of corporate liberalism encountered opposition on both the right and the left of the American political spectrum. On the right were the zealots of laissez-faire capitalism represented by organizations such as the National Association of

Manufacturers (NAM), who staunchly opposed both labor rights and government interventionism. On the left was the growing popularity of socialism, which advocated the immediate (or eventual) abolition of the capitalist system altogether. American socialism and the IWW were therefore expressions of working-class hostility to the liberal corporate order and will be discussed in the following chapter.

94 Marcus A. Hanna to a dinner of the Executive Committee of the National Civic Federation, May 13, 1903, National Civic Federation Monthly Review, VI, 2 (June 1903), 7. 95 John Mitchell to the Annual Dinner of the NCF, December 15, 1904, NCF Review, I, 10 (January 1, 1905), 6.

Nevertheless, the legacy of the NCF and corporate liberalism have been profound in subsequent American history. It represents, according to historian James Weinstein, a transformational moment in the development of capitalism in the United States. He writes that “the business leaders who participated in the activities of the NCF had transcended a narrow interest-consciousness [such as that represented by NAM] and were emerging as fully class conscious.”96 That is, the savviest corporate leaders of the Era understood that capitalism was in danger of destroying itself; that corporate interests might be preserved

(or even advanced) by ameliorating the worst social effects of industrial capitalism.

Beyond the NCF, the national government expanded in conjunction with efforts to

“manage” the interests of big business. In an address to Congress on December 2, 1902,

President Roosevelt assured those assembled that “our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism. . . . We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”97 As

Richard Hofstadter observed, Roosevelt’s reputation as a “trust-buster” is difficult to comprehend given such an attitude. Roosevelt’s administration did initiate several carefully chosen antitrust prosecutions, including, for example, bringing charges against the Northern Securities Company in 1902, but the panic it unleashed in the corporate world was followed by a reassuring pledge by the President that only those companies which “have done something that we regard as wrong” will be punished.98 Public opinion during the Progressive Era was overwhelming in favor of using government to quell the despotic influence of big business. And this perhaps accounts for some of the

96 Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal, 10. 97 Roosevelt quoted in Hofstadter, American Political Tradition, 292. 98 Ibid., 294.

Rough Rider’s enduring popularity, a phenomenon which led writer and social critic H.L.

Mencken to quip, Roosevelt “didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.”99

In his Autobiography, however, Roosevelt reveals his reasons for preferring governmental regulation over dissolution, making for an insightful commentary on the forces at play and the agents involved. Two groups, he argued, had sought to confront the

“trust problem.” The first attempted to dismantle the trusts using the “Sherman-law method,” an exercise in folly, according to Roosevelt, because it aimed “to remedy by more individualism the concentration that was the inevitable result of the already existing individualism.”100 This method he regarded as the reactionary impulses of those who viewed themselves as “radical progressives,” but “really represented a form of sincere rural toryism.”101 The corporate “aggregations” were inevitable, he insisted, and attempts to destroy them were futile. “On the other hand,” Roosevelt remarked,

A few men recognized that corporations and combinations had become indispensable in the business world, that it was folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them without thorough-going control. . . . They realized that the government must now interfere to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporation to the public welfare, , and to shackle cunning and fraud exactly as centuries before it had interfered to shackle the physical force which does wrong by violence. . . .102

The American Federation of Labor and Business Unionism

What, then, was the impact of these developments on the working class?

Corporate liberalism, it must be said, was effective for certain sectors of the American

99 H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), 123. 100 Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 424. 101 Ibid., 424-5. 102 Ibid., 425.

labor force. Skilled workers – including all those who merely desired better conditions on the job, higher wages, and certain protections against the vicissitudes of the labor market

– were generally amenable to establishing friendly relations with their employers insofar as it was in their interest to do so. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the American

Federation of Labor had become, since its founding 1881 as the Federation of Organized

Trades and Labor Unions, the most powerful and influential labor organization in the

United States. Samuel Gompers, cofounder and longtime president of the AFL, likewise became the most powerful labor leader in the county. After having survived the depression of the 1890s, the AFL’s membership tripled between 1900 and 1904 to 1.6 million, making it the first sustained mass labor movement in the US.103

The AFL’s founding rhetoric had promised to organize all workers irrespective of craft, nationality, race or gender. By the 1890s, however, craft unions representing the most highly skilled workers had come to dominate the AFL. And as the first vice president of the National Civic Federation, AFL leader Samuel Gompers was keenly adept at navigating the interconnected hierarchies of the new liberal corporate order.

When addressing workers, he would at times invoke radical rhetoric to describe the problems of industrial society. “The laborers know that the capitalist class had its origin in force and fraud,” exclaimed Gompers in an 1893 address before the International

Labor Congress.104 This statement was made at the height of unrest in the 1890s. When in the company of government and business elites, however, the old labor czar was more

103 Dubofsky, American Labor, 94. 104 Samuel Gompers, “What Does Labor Want?,” an address before the International Labor Congress, Aug. 28, 1893, reprinted in Stuart Kaufman, ed., The Samuel Gompers Papers, Vol. 3: Unrest and Depression (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 388-96.

measured. In 1913, for instance, Gompers testified before the US Commission on

Industrial Relations during which he defended labor’s rights to both organize and bargain collectively.105 Yet his invective against the “capitalist class” is noticeably absent.

In practice, the AFL came to represent the most privileged American workers.

Almost by definition, these workers were skilled industrial and craft laborers, the overwhelming majority of them white, male, and native-born.106 Gompers and other leaders of big labor developed increasingly cozy relations with political and corporate leaders, while at the same time many AFL affiliates were actively excluding blacks, women, and unskilled workers from local craft unions. The AFL propounded the notion of a harmony of interests between employer and employee. In this view, it behooved skilled workers to be separated into distinct craft unions, each promoting the interests of a particular trade. This philosophy came to be known as craft (or business) unionism because of the manner in which it emulated the bureaucratic and hierarchical structure of governmental institutions and corporations; its exclusionary practices, moreover, were a powerful reminder of the deeply entrenched racial, ethnic, and gendered divisions that persisted within the American working class.107

Hence, the AFL emphasized conciliation with employers and sought immediate demands such as the eight-hour day, improved conditions, and increased autonomy on the job for its skilled workers. The federation encouraged its affiliates to enter into labor- management contracts, which further tightened the relationship between labor and

105 Gompers testimony before the US Commission on Industrial Relations (1913), from the Final report and testimony, submitted to Congress by the Commission on Industrial Relations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1916), 718-21. 106 Eric Foner, 597. 107 Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall be All, 5-6.

business leaders. Time contracts, for instance, placed constraints on the ability of workers to conduct strike actions and work stoppages. This meant that union locals, in effect, had to negotiate with individual employers the times at which it was permissible to conduct a work stoppage. Somewhat paradoxically, however, such concessions were advocated as a means of pursuing immediate craft interests. While working-class radicals clamored for alternatives to industrial capitalism, AFL members were generally those workers most satisfied with the system.

Ultimately, then, Samuel Gompers and the AFL came to epitomize and defend the new liberal corporate order. And despite a variety of gains in the Progressive Era, large segments of the working class – notably black, female, immigrant, and unskilled workers

– continued to be marginalized by this system. For these workers, the brutalities of industrial capitalism survived the Gilded Age, leaving many to wonder whether reform would ever be sufficient to rectify the inequities of the status quo.

In the summer of 1904, a contingent of labor leaders and political radicals began to express their discontent with the conservative business unionism espoused by Gompers and the AFL. The radicals found consensus on three basic principles. They agreed first that craft unionism, given the concentrated interests of employers, was an outmoded and ineffectual form of labor organization. They argued further that craft unionism created unnecessary and artificial divisions within the working class, which no longer corresponded to the reality of industrial conditions and thereby ignored the growing majority of unskilled, low-wage workers. Finally, they believed that the labor movement was in need of an inclusive organization capable of unifying the working class in a revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Such were the sentiments underlying the

formation of the most radical labor organization in American history: the Industrial

Workers of the World.108

In the following chapter, the IWW and its efforts to recruit migrant workers will be examined, for few elements within the working class better exemplify the implications of political and social alienation. The IWW had unprecedented success organizing migrants, in part because the Wobblies were among the first to embrace a group which many in the mainstream labor movement referred to as the “unorganizable.” It was through a curious combination of internal merits and flaws that the IWW positioned itself as a home for the otherwise homeless. Yet it must be reiterated that this chapter was meant to explore the political, social, and economic conditions that prevailed in the

United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Overwhelmingly, these conditions were shaped by the forces of industrialism. Indeed, the political and social movements that collectively came to be known as the Progressive Era were, in effect, responses to the societal traumas wrought by industrialism. Thus, the IWW developed within the context of industrialism and reform. The Wobblies, however, promised their members a future without greed, self-interest, exploitation, and hardship. In so doing, they became among the most vociferous opponents of industrial capitalism.

108 Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 13.

CHAPTER THREE

NO WORKER LEFT BEHIND: THE IWW AND THE MIGRANT WORKER

We are going down in the gutter to get at the mass of the workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living. -William “Big Bill” Haywood, Founding Convention of the IWW, 1905109

The Formation of the IWW

The sweltering temperature inside Chicago’s Brand’s Hall on June 27, 1905 did little to dampen the spirits of an eclectic mix of radicals, including over two hundred labor organizers and socialists, who had come to forge a new, revolutionary labor organization. At 10:00am that morning, William “Big Bill” Haywood, then secretary of the Western Federation of Miners

(WFM), approached the table at the front of the hall. In want of a proper gavel, Haywood, one of the most charismatic figures in the history of American labor, seized a loose piece of board and loudly hammered on the table in front of him. Having quieted the crowded room, Haywood spoke: “Fellow workers,” he exclaimed, “this is the Continental Congress of the working class.

We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism.”110

The room erupted in applause. And while the diverse ideological composition of those in attendance would foreshadow strife in the coming years, the attendees were enthusiastically united on this June day in the belief that the labor movement was in desperate need of a more militant, more inclusive, more radical alternative to the American Federation of Labor. The AFL,

Haywood continued, “is not a working-class movement” so long as its affiliates deny membership to a growing majority of workers. Denouncing the AFL’s policies of exclusion and class collaboration, Haywood declared that the purpose of the June convention is to “establish . . . a

109 Haywood, Minutes of the Founding Convention. 110 Ibid.

labor organization that will open wide its doors to every man that earns his livelihood either by his brain or his muscle.” The ultimate aim of the new organization was “to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.”111

The room again erupted in applause. Yet Haywood’s comments illustrate a fundamental irony in the history of the organization that would come to be called the Industrial Workers of the

World, an irony that lies at the core of this study. As the previous chapter explored, the rise of corporate liberalism was predicated on intimate, increasingly collaborative relations between the leaders of business, government, and labor. The business unionism of the AFL exemplified this new order, but it effectively excluded large segments of the most disadvantaged workers.

Although the IWW indeed wished to unite the entire working class against the forces of capitalism, its leaders would come to focus their energies on organizing those workers excluded from the mainstream labor movement. For some Wobbly leaders, however, disdain for the AFL manifested itself in an irrepressible disdain for skilled workers – the so-called “aristocrats of labor.” Haywood himself more or less viewed these workers as class traitors, an impediment to working-class emancipation.

“I do not care the snap of my finger whether or not the skilled workman joins this industrial movement,” Haywood said later at the founding convention, for “when we get the unorganized and unskilled laborer into this organization, the skilled worker will of necessity come here for his own protection.”112 It was indeed an uncompromising stance on the direction of the labor movement, a stance that, on the one hand, would effectively alienate the IWW from many of the most stable and successful industrial workers. On the other hand, it meant that the

IWW’s role in the Progressive Era was to serve as a home for those workers who knew little stability, little success. These were workers who were excluded from the advantages of corporate

111 Ibid. 112 Ibid.

liberalism, workers who continued to be subjected to the worst injustices of industrial capitalism.

It is for these reasons that many of the IWW’s greatest organizing successes were focused on migratory laborers. In the main, these were construction, timber, and agricultural workers.

Irregular work forced them to move with the seasons, from one job to the next. Many experienced long periods without regular incomes – hardly the ideal membership for a labor organization. In the IWW, however, many migrant workers found their sole advocate, a community, a promise of a future beyond the conditions that currently oppressed them.

The Debate over Political Versus Direct Action

Before the IWW could become a home for the homeless, its formative years would be characterized by internecine disputes which underscore an old schism within the revolutionary left: between political and direct action. This divide is best illustrated by examining some of the key organizations and individuals who joined Haywood in Brand’s Hall on that warm day in June

1905. In all, two hundred delegates, representing 43 organizations, were present at the founding convention. The most influential included Haywood’s own Western Federation of Miners, representing the most workers (27,000) of any union present, the United Brotherhood of Railway

Employees (UBRE), the United Metal Workers (UMW), the American Labor Union (ALU), and the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA). It is important to note, however, that the ALU had been formed by members of the Western Federation of Miners and operated mainly in the

American west. Its organization along industrial lines – rather than craft – would nonetheless provide a template for the nascent IWW. In practice, however, its influence within the convention was synonymous with the WFM.113

Among those on the speakers’ platform with Haywood were Eugene V. Debs, leader of the Socialist Party of America and that party’ five-time candidate for president of the United

States, “Mother” Mary Jones, the seventy-five year old labor agitator and organizer for the United

113 Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 29.

Mine Workers (UMW), Daniel De Leon, the fractious leader of the Socialist Labor Party,

William Trautmann, editor of the United Brewery Workers’ (UBW) German-language newspaper, Father Thomas J. Hagerty, a Catholic priest and socialist lecturer, and Lucy Parsons, a labor activist and anarchist whose husband, Albert Parsons, had been executed for conspiracy following the 1886 Haymarket riot. Trautmann’s role in the formative years of the IWW was especially influential, for it was he who invited several key figures in the American labor and socialist movements to a clandestine meeting in November 1904 to discuss the possibility of creating a new organization.

With the endorsement of WFM leadership, that preliminary meeting produced a letter inviting 36 persons to a conference on June 2, 1905 “to discuss ways and means of uniting the working people of America on correct revolutionary principles, regardless of any labor organization of the past or present, and only restricted by such basic principles as will insure its integrity as a real protector of the interests of the working class.”114 The January Conference, as it came to be known, received widespread support in leftwing circles. But the support was hardly universal. Two of the most influential socialists in the country, Victor Berger and Max Hayes, were proponents of a “bore-from-within” strategy of converting the AFL into a socialist-led labor organization. They consequently objected to so-called dual unionism, whereby local unions and union members belonged to multiple organizations. Berger, who would later become the first socialist elected to the US House of Representatives, would write in the Social Democratic

Herald that the proposed organization “will bring on a condition of strife in the labor world that will enable Samuel Gompers to keep industrial-union organization away for a much longer time than he would have been able to had the fight for it inside the AFL not been interfered with by

114 Letter included in Vincent St. John, The IWW: Its History, Structure, and Methods (Chicago: IWW Publishing Bureau, 1917), n.p., accessed at University of Arizona web exhibit “The Bisbee Deporation of 1917” http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/docs/019.html.

impatient and shortsighted comrades.”115 Both men naturally declined the invitation, Hayes writing that he was loathe “to be dragged into any more secession movements or fratricidal wars between fractions of workers” and instead preferred to “agitate on the inside of organizations now in existence. . . .”116

For those who attended the January Conference, boring from within was a futile exercise in light of the entrenched conservative leadership of the AFL. To follow the admonitions of

Berger and Hayes would be to delude themselves. Despite such dissent, the Conference had the endorsement of the most prominent socialist in the country: Eugene V. Debs. A former railroad worker and union organizer from Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs rose to national prominence as a result of his leadership of the American Railway Union (ARU) during the 1894 Pullman Strike.

During the strike, which began in response to wage cuts, the federal government issued an injunction against the striking Pullman employees on the pretext that the strike interfered with the shipment of US mail. At the request of the Pullman Company, President Grover Cleveland deployed the National Guard to quell the striking workers. The tactic was successful. Debs, as leader of the ARU, was subsequently tried and convicted of violating the injunction. Debs learned during Pullman what the members of the WFM already knew: that in times of strife workers were pitted not merely against employers but also the state.117

It was during a prison sentence following the strike that Debs was introduced to socialist theory, primarily through the writings of Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky. Debs, a “pure-and- simple” trade unionist from a small-town, middle-class background, had become a socialist convert. Perhaps because of his small-town roots, Debs was keenly familiar with the effects of industrialism on the very fabric of American life. As a cofounder of the Socialist Party of

115 Victor Berger, Social Democratic Herald, December 14, 1904. 116 Max Hayes quoted in Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 16. 117 Dubofsky, We Shall be All, 34-5; see also Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1984); and Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

America in 1901, Debs would become the party’s perennial candidate for president of the United

States, twice garnering over 900,000 votes (1912 and 1920). In late 1904, Debs wrote an influential pamphlet, Unionism and Socialism: A Plea for Both, in which he argued for an amalgamation of trade unionism and socialism and advocated for workers to be organized along industrial lines. Debs was hardly a theoretician himself, but instead a passionate orator who drew as much on the American political tradition – particularly William Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists – as he did from leftwing European theorists. The pamphlet was nonetheless an important manifesto for the American left, Debs reminding readers that “socialism is first of all a political movement of the working class, clearly defined and uncompromising, which aims at the overthrow of the prevailing capitalist class government with socialist administration – that is to say, changing a republic in name to a republic in fact. . . .”118

Debs’ support for the January Conference was therefore invaluable, if only as an affirmation of the meeting’s legitimacy. In all, twenty-one men and one woman – Mother Jones – attended the closed conference at 122 Lake Street in Chicago and set about the task of composing their own manifesto. Daniel De Leon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), was conspicuously not invited. A doctrinaire Marxist, De Leon was an outspoken proponent of revolution guided by a political vanguard. And he naturally believed the SLP to be that vanguard.

It was unlikely, however, that this was the primary reason for his exclusion, for De Leon had proven in the past to be acrimonious and potentially disruptive.119 In his absence, the conferees drafted what they called the “Industrial Manifesto.” The document had multiple purposes: to repudiate the AFL and it policies, to extol the merits of industrial unionism, and to serve as an invitation to those who were in favor of establishing a revolutionary working-class organization,

118 Eugene V. Debs, Unionism and Socialism: A Plea for Both (Terre Haute, IN: Standard Publishing Company, 1904), 30. 119 Charles A. Madison, “Daniel De Leon: Apostle of Socialism,” The Antioch Review 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1945): 403-5; L. Glen Seretan, “Daniel De Leon as American,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 61, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 221-3.

founded on the principle of class struggle and devoted to the abolition of capitalism. Father

Thomas J. Hagerty, who had converted to Marxism even prior to his ordination in 1892, is widely considered to be the chief architect of the Manifesto. The influence of Engels and Marx is substantial:

Social relations and groupings only reflect mechanical and industrial conditions. The great facts of present industry are the displacement of human skill by machines and the increase of capitalist power through concentration in the possession of the tools with which wealth is produced and distributed. Because of these facts trade divisions among laborers and competition among capitalists are disappearing. Class divisions grow ever more fixed and class antagonisms more sharp. Trade lines have been swallowed up in a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend. . . . [The new movement] must be founded on the class struggle, and its general administration must be conducted in harmony with the recognition of the irrepressible conflict between the capitalist class and the working class.120

The influence of Marxian historical materialism is indeed substantial, but the specific grievances and the nature of the movement described in the Manifesto are unquestionably shaped by conditions in the United States. Hence, the Manifesto was essentially a critique of corporate liberalism, of the AFL, of the oligarchical partnerships represented by the National Civic

Federation: “class divisions hinder the growth of class consciousness of the workers, foster the idea of harmony of interests between employing exploiter and employed slave. They permit the association of the misleaders of the workers with the capitalists in Civic Federations, where plans are made for the perpetuation of capitalism.”121 While the Manifesto was intended to be more than a mere polemic aimed at corporate capitalism, the policies it espouses are obviously meant to contrast with those of the AFL.

In addition to anti-capitalist rhetoric, the Manifesto tentatively described the structure of the proposed organization. First, all power should be vested in the collective membership; all union labels, buttons, transfer cards, initiation fees, etc. should be uniform throughout; transfers of membership between unions should be universal, preventing workers from being charged

120 “Industrial Manifesto,” in Rebel Voices, 40, 43. 121 Ibid., 41.

additional fees were they to change jobs; the general administration should issue a publication at regular intervals, representing the entire union and its principles; and a general defense fund should be created to which all members contribute equally. “All workers,” the Manifesto concluded, “who agree with the principles herein set forth, will meet in convention at Chicago the

27th day of June, 1905, for the purpose of forming an organization of the working class along the lines marked out in this Manifesto.”122

The January Conference thus laid the groundwork for the Industrial Workers of the

World, but several questions remained unanswered at the time of the Industrial Union Convention in June of 1905. What, for instance, would be the official position of this new organization on politics and political parties? Members of both socialist parties, the SPA and SLP, were in attendance in June, including Eugene V. Debs and Daniel De Leon. Therefore, the answer to this question had the potential to derail the IWW before it even began. The euphoria of the first convention obscured the deep ideological divisions separating those in attendance, but the divisions were there nonetheless. Vincent St. John, a WFM veteran and later IWW general- secretary, would write that there were four ideological factions present at the founding:

“Parliamentary socialists – two types – impossibilist and opportunist, Marxist and reformist; anarchist; industrial unionist; and the labor union fakir.”123 The fakirs referred to opportunists who endeavored to coopt the labor movement to further their own interests. By virtue of their mere presence at the convention, most attendees were in favor of industrial unionism. The other categories, however, represent more or less sincere but mutually antagonistic ideologies.

Generally speaking, St. John associated the Marxists with the Socialist Labor Party, the reformists with the Socialist Party of America. The parties had clashed previously over principles and tactics, but both advocated political action as a means of pursuing their goals.

122 Ibid., 43. 123 Vincent St. John, IWW, n.p.

There is debate, however, concerning the influence of the anti-political, anarchist faction at the time of the first convention. Paul F. Brissenden, who in 1918 undertook the first scholarly study of the IWW’s early history, argues that the “direct-actionist” group, anti-political and anarchist, had not yet become a prominent force in the nascent IWW. They were outnumbered, he contends, by the political socialists.124 Marian Savage, by contrast, posits in her work, Industrial

Unionism in America, the existence of three distinct ideological groups at the convention: First, there were the members of the Socialist Labor Party who placed chief emphasis on political action. Second, there were the members of the Socialist Party who were less doctrinaire than the

SLP members and wished to subordinate political action to economic organization. And finally, there were the anarchists who eschewed political action altogether in favor of direct, economic action.125

The central lesson from these observations is that a multiplicity of beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies came together at the founding of the IWW. It was indeed a tenuous situation, even if those present failed to acknowledge it. Eugene V. Debs, with his considerable influence, exuded optimism for the prospects of revolutionary industrial unionism and did his best to encourage harmony among the delegates:

I believe it is possible [he said] for such an organization as the Western Federation of Miners to be brought into harmonious relation with the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance [the labor wing of De Leon’s SLP] . . . and I believe it is possible for these elements to combine here and begin the work of forming a great economic or revolutionary of the working class so sorely needed in the struggle for their emancipation.126

Even the fractious De Leon believed that harmony was possible:

During this process of pounding one another we have both learned, and I hope and believe that this convention will bring together those who will plant themselves squarely upon the class struggle and will recognize the fact that the political expression of labor is but the shadow of the economic organization.127

124 Paul F. Brissenden, The IWW: A Study of American Syndicalism (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1919), 78-9. 125 Marian Savage, Industrial Unionism in America (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1922), 145. 126 Debs, Minutes of the Founding Convention. 127 De Leon quoted in Brissenden, 81.

During the first five days of the convention delegates reached a consensus around one issue: their condemnation of the “American Separation of Labor,” an epithet used repeatedly during the convention. Their indictment of the AFL rested on three general counts, which are worthy of additional emphasis. They first charged that craft unionism benefited only a minority of skilled workers, the so-called “aristocrats of labor,” while the majority of working people remained marginalized and defenseless. Moreover, the AFL was charged with promoting a harmony of interests between employer and employee through such associations as the Civic

Federation. The leaders of the AFL, or “lieutenants of capitalism” as they were sometimes called, were a class of elite bureaucrats whose cozy relations with political leaders and captains of industry effectively denied the existence of class struggle. And finally, they charged the AFL with denying the necessity of achieving socialism, which, in theory, would place in the hands of the workers their collective economic fate. Thus, there was considerable agreement among the delegates around their opposition to the AFL, the wage system, and capitalism in general. Yet disagreement emerged once again when the debate turned to the means of pursuing their stated goals of abolishing capitalism and establishing the “cooperative commonwealth.”128

On the sixth day of the convention delegates began to debate the specific wording of the preamble to the constitution of the new organization. The repercussions of this seemingly benign activity would irrevocably alter the course of the IWW. The preamble itself, which also was written primarily by the enigmatic Father Hagerty, is perhaps the best known piece of Wobbly literature. It began with an uncompromising and provocative declaration, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”129 “There can be no peace,” it states in the first clause, “so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.”130 In the second paragraph,

128 Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 32. 129 Preamble to the IWW Constitution, Rebel Voices, 45. 130 Ibid.

however, the old bugbear reappeared. The paragraph stated: “Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take hold that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of the working class without affiliation with any political party.”131 In essence, this clause a compromise between the anarcho-syndicalist ideas of St. John and Trautmann and the parliamentary socialist ideas of De Leon. The former advocated the creation of an economic organization “without affiliation with any political party,” while the latter advocated the use of electoral procedures to bring about socialism. The clause instigated immediate controversy at the convention. Many delegates, for instance, agreed with general-secretary of the American Labor

Union, Clarence Smith, when he exhorted the committee to eliminate that “confusing language about political action at the capitalist ballot box.”132

In the spirit of compromise, however, the political clause was sustained by a majority of delegates. The matter was temporarily resolved, but it foreshadowed conflict to come. This is in part because the anarcho-syndicalists were a more influential element in the formation of the

IWW than some commentators have previously indicated. To corroborate this assertion one need look no further than William Trautmann. Having organized the preliminary conferences,

Trautmann would soon serve as the IWW’s first general-secretary. After the conclusion of the

January Conference, Trautmann was asked by a reporter for the Cincinnati Post about the

Manifesto’s emphasis on economic organization and what this implied about its stance on political action. Trautmann replied: “the document is based on the same principles as organized labor in Continental Europe. The new organization is to be entirely free from party politics.” He explained that by “the same principles as organized labor in Continental Europe,” he specifically meant working-class organization according to “revolutionary syndicalism.”133

131 Ibid. 132 Minutes of the Founding Convention. 133 William Trautmann in Cincinnati Post January 9, 1905.

As an ideology, revolutionary syndicalism or, more precisely, anarcho-syndicalism, first gained traction in France during the 1890s as an amalgam of trade unionism, Marxism, and anarchism. It vehemently rejected the political vanguardism of the Marxist-Leninists, who had come to dominate the European left by this time. Lenin had said in 1895, for example, “the workers cannot wage the struggle for their emancipation without striving to influence the affairs of state, to influence the administration of the state, the passing of laws.”134 Many on the

European left, including activists and workers alike, had become dissatisfied with socialist politics, however. And some came to view participation in the electoral process itself as a violation of the class struggle. In 1901, French theorist Georges Sorel published an important work on the subject of anarcho-syndicalism, L’Avenir socialiste des syndicates, in which he argues that the state is essentially an instrument of capitalism and therefore cannot be used to bring about socialism.135 The implicit assumption in Sorel’s work seems to be that using the mechanisms of the capitalist state will only serve to perpetuate the existing system of oppression and inequality – a stance that influenced many in the IWW. “It is impossible for anyone,” St.

John wrote in 1910, “to be a part of the capitalist class and to use the machinery of the state in the interest of the workers.”136 The trade unions, by contrast, were instruments of the working class and would form the basis of a post-capitalist society. Anarcho-syndicalism therefore entailed the direct seizure of industry by the workers, who would then abolish the political state altogether and manage economic affairs on a democratic basis. Such would be the conditions of the cooperative commonwealth.

If socialism and worker’s self-management were the goals of anarcho-syndicalism, then direct action was invoked as the means of achieving them. As a set of vaguely-defined tactics,

134 Vladimir Lenin quoted in Thomas Taylor Hammond, Lenin on Trade Unions and Revolution, 1893-1917 (New York: n.pub., 1957), 21. 135 Georges Sorel, L’Avenir socialiste des syndicates (Paris: Libraire G. Jacques and Cie., 1901), 57-9. 136 St. John, Political Parties and the IWW (Chicago: IWW Publishing Bureau, c. 1910), reprinted in Rebel Voices, 89.

direct action was, at its core, meant to empower workers who were otherwise powerless, without compromising class solidarity through collaborations with bourgeois political parties, politicians, social reformers, bureaucrats, or even labor leaders. Yet in the years to come, the advocacy of direct action would contribute to a popular image of the IWW and its members as violent. The St.

Louis Republic declared in 1912: “In considering such a movement as the IWW there is no need to pause over its history. . . . Nor is it necessary to consider its philosophy. It has none. It is mere brute ferocity. The tiger which springs on the traveler in the jungle has no philosophy – only a thirst for blood. He cannot be reasoned with – he must be overcome.”137 It is true that some

Wobbly agitators contributed to the image of the IWW as a collection of subversives. This is primarily because they indeed saw themselves as subversives in the working-class struggle against capitalism. “I am not a law-abiding citizen,” Big Bill Haywood roared to a jubilant crowd at Cooper Union in January 1912. “And more than that,” he continued, “no socialist can be a law- abiding citizen.”138 In this view, laws were merely political instruments of the capitalist class, designed to protect their narrow interests.

What then was direct action in practice? And was it necessarily violent? Echoing Marx’s theory of labor power, St. John wrote “the only power that the working class has is the power to produce wealth. The IWW proposes to organize the workers to control the use of their labor so that they will be able to stop the production of wealth except upon terms dictated by the workers themselves.”139 Thus, direct action might pertain to any number of attempts to interfere with the processes of production and distribution, processes which, by definition, enriched the capitalist class. Accordingly, the primary weapon of the working class in its struggle against capitalism was the general strike. A general strike entailed a massive work stoppage by a majority of workers in

137 Reprinted in Industrial Worker, June 26, 1912. 138 Haywood, “Socialism, the Hope of the Working Class,” a speech delivered at Cooper Union January 1912, in Albert Fried, Socialism in America: From the Shakers to the Third International, A Documentary History, Morningside Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 449. 139 St. John, Political Parties and the IWW, 90.

a particular industry or set of industries. It was a strike action that transcended craft lines.

Working-class solidarity therefore provided the unifying basis for a general strike, and the strike in turn cultivated in workers a sense of class consciousness and, by extension, solidarity. If a short-term strike were successful, the Wobblies refused to participate in labor-management contracts, for they believed this would violate the sanctity of class solidarity and undermine the revolutionary struggle. However, a general strike on the national level would, in theory, cripple industry to such an extent that capitalism itself would dissolve, and the workers would build a

“new society” out of the shell of the old. This new society was often referred to interchangeably as the Workers’ Commonwealth, the Industrial Commonwealth, Cooperative Commonwealth,

Industrial Democracy, or Industrial Communism. The general strike was thus a tactic for achieving immediate demands as well as a means to achieving final emancipation from wage slavery.140

Again, the general strike did not necessarily entail physical violence. Indeed, William

Trautmann equated direct action with passive resistance. Direct action, he wrote, was merely “the withdrawal of [workers’] labor power and also their efficiency, from the workshops, the mines, land, etc.”141 Another form of direct action, sabotage, acquired a more sinister reputation in the popular press, but its proponents in the IWW denied that it encouraged physical violence. In

What’s What in the Labor Movement (1921), Waldo Browne provides a summary of the word’s etymology:

Derived from the French work sabot, meaning a wooden shoe, this term is often supposed to have originally denoted the idea of stalling machinery by throwing a wooden clog into it. Probably its more direct derivation is from the French verb saboter, meaning to bungle or to botch; while some find its origin in the French expression ‘Travailler a coups de sabots,’ meaning to work as one wearing wooden shoes, often applied to lazy or slow- moving persons.142

140 Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 141. 141 William Trautmann, Direct Action and Sabotage (Pittsburg, PA: Socialist News Company, 1912), 9. 142 Waldo Browne, What’s What in the Labor Movement: A Dictionary of Labor Affairs and Labor Terminology (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1921), 416.

The emblem of a black cat, designed by Wobbly Ralph Chaplin, became one of the

IWW’s familiar symbols. Its nickname: “Sab-cat,” meant to signify sabotage, anarchism, and wildcat strikes, which is to say strikes initiated not by union leaders but by the workers themselves. While it is difficult to ascertain the prevalence of sabotage in the workplace, the tactic was intended to be a form of direct action that could be implemented by individual workers.

One of the most captivating Wobblies, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an organizer for the IWW from

1906 to 1917, would make the following observation:

Sabotage means primarily: the withdrawal of efficiency. Sabotage means either to slacken up or interfere with the quantity, or to botch in your skill and interfere with the quality, of capitalist production or to give poor service. Sabotage is not physical violence; sabotage is an internal industrial process. It is something that is fought out within the four walls of the shop. And these three forms of sabotage – to affect the quality, the quantity, and the service are aimed at affecting the profit of the employer. Sabotage is a means of striking at the employer’s profit for the purpose of forcing him into granting certain conditions, even as workingmen strike for the same purpose of coercing him. It is simply another form of coercion.”143

In summary, the IWW indeed drew on several European intellectual traditions. Its ideology evolved in its formative years into a peculiar amalgam of Marxism, anarchism, syndicalism, and even Darwinism. From Marx, they derived the concepts of labor value, commodity value, surplus value, and class struggle. Like Marx, Darwinian theories influenced their view of industrial society as undergoing a process of material evolution. But it was in anarcho-syndicalism that the IWW derived its most significant ideological tenets. Importantly, they came to view the state and its political institutions as instruments of capitalism. This compelled them to eschew political action and politics altogether. They instead propounded direct action through economic organizations (i.e. trade unions) of the working class. Through direct action, such as the general strike, the trade unions would form the basis of a stateless, democratic, and cooperative post-capitalist society.

143 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial Efficiency (Cleveland, OH: IWW Publishing Bureau, 1916), 5.

Many Wobbly leaders, propagandists, and ideologues indeed looked to Europe for inspiration, but it would be inaccurate to depict the IWW as a mere facsimile of European workers’ movements. They looked to Europe for abstract notions, but industrial unionism as it was practiced by the IWW was born of conditions in America. As was explored in the previous chapter, the United States was home at this time to the most heterogeneous labor force in the world. Its most disadvantaged workers were increasingly relegated to low-wage, unskilled work.

These were the workers excluded by the corporate liberalism, by the AFL and craft unionism, by the National Civic Federation, by the system. These workers remained marginalized and alienated.

In June of 1905, the IWW held its founding convention. It was intended to be, as Big Bill

Haywood exclaimed, “the Continental Congress of the working class.” Yet the debate over political versus direct action, which went unresolved at the founding, would continue to plague the IWW in its early years. The resolution of that debate would come at the fourth annual convention in 1908, during which the anarcho-syndicalist faction, led by St. John and Trautmann, successfully ousted De Leon from the organization. Many of the so-called “political socialists,”

De Leon’s supporters, dutifully followed their leader and exited the IWW. Four years into its existence, the IWW was free to pursue an undivided strategy for emancipating the working class from the bondage of wage slavery.

In the following section, the implications of this strategy will be explored. Indeed, the

IWW’s uncompromising brand of radicalism created an unbridgeable divide between them and the respective socialist parties. Yet this radicalism also influenced the IWW’s ability to organize workers. In 1912, the Wobblies would burst onto the national labor scene as a result of their leadership during the Lawrence textile strike. The strike, although successful in its immediate goals, revealed several flaws that threatened to undermine the IWW. While the Wobblies developed national reputations in the pre-World War I era as activists and propagandists, it seems that most semiskilled and skilled workers wanted more from their unions than mere strike

leadership or oratory. Moreover, as we have seen, some Wobbly leaders and organizers allowed their disdain for craft unionism to become disdain for skilled workers. As a result, the IWW instead became the home for the most disadvantaged workers: timber beasts, hobo harvesters, itinerant construction workers, eastern and southern European immigrants, and racial minorities.

It was the migratory workers, however, who best embodied the IWW’s radical ethos, who embraced its outlaw image, who were most attracted to its vision of a new society, free from national, occupational, or racial distinctions; free from oppression and free from want; a

Cooperative Commonwealth.

Wobbly Itinerants

There is perhaps another way of conceiving of these early disputes within the IWW.

Indeed, its formative years illustrate a clear divide between East and West, a divide that roughly correlates to American geography but has more to do with worldview. The political socialists were predominately easterners who hailed from large industrial cities. In these cities, working- class poverty and labor unrest were common, but progressive reforms on the local and municipal level had gone far to alleviate many of the worst ills of industrial capitalism – for example, the prohibition of child labor and the creation of workers’ compensation. There was a measure of stability, of home life, and at least the pretense of a social safety net. The East, moreover, was home to the largest and most powerful trade unions in the country, unions such as the

International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the United Mine Workers (UMW). At any rate, it instilled in many on the left the idea that change was possible by working within the system.144

Conditions were considerably different in the American West at this time. After the railroads opened the West in the nineteenth century, extractive industries such as logging and mining quickly followed. In need of labor, companies recruited thousands of mostly single, young

144 David Montgomery Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 74.

men to work in the forests and in the mines, to build the roads and the towns, and to harvest the fields. Urban centers remained few and far between, however, and many of the workers lived in camps or company-owned towns so long as they remained employed. Yet most of these jobs were seasonal at best and employment was therefore irregular. Workers enjoyed few comforts and even fewer protections against the vagaries of industrial capitalism. Movement became an integral feature of working-class life in the West. A unique class of migratory workers emerged from these conditions with an equally unique subculture and worldview. One of those western migrants, T.J. O’Brien, wrote of the East-West divided in the IWW’s Industrial Worker:

In this western country the conditions differ a great deal from those of the East. A majority of the workers in this part of the country do not know what a home is. The only home most of us have is the roll of blankets which we carry on our backs. In ninety-five cases out of one hundred he is single and his work often compels him to travel often as far as three hundred miles in search of employment, while in the East a majority of workers are married and therefore not transients. We must look at the worker from a different point of view here west of the Rockies.145

The same railroads that brought industry to the American West now transported scores of migrant workers across the same terrain and became the arteries of an emerging hobo subculture.

Although an Americanism, the precise origin of the term hobo is uncertain. H.L. Mencken observed in his work The American Language that there existed subtle but important distinctions between terms that many Americans used interchangeably as pejoratives: “Tramps and hobos are commonly lumped together, but see themselves as sharply differentiated. A hobo or bo is simply a migratory laborer; he may take some longish holidays, but soon or late he returns to work. A tramp never works if it can be avoided; he simply travels.”146

Without homes, hobos most often travelled by rail in search employment. They were illegal passengers, however, most stowing away in empty cattle cars. They established in the process of their travels a network of hobo encampments, or “jungles,” in the various towns and

145 T.J. O’Brien, “Organization and Tactics,” Industrial Worker, February 20 and 26, 1910, 2. 146 H.L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), 15.

cities along their path. Typically near a railroad junction, in peripheral areas known as “skid rows,” jungles were places where the migrants could safely congregate, a respite from distrustful townspeople, vagrancy laws, and the police. When at work, the hoboes were under the oppressive thumb of an employer. When on the road, they were at the mercy of a society that preferred to ignore them. Moreover, life on the road was extremely dangerous. Between 1901 and 1905, nearly 24,000 trespassers were killed on the railroads; nearly 25,000 injured.147 A poem by an unknown author, “The Boe’s Lament,” captures the despair of a life lived on the fringes:

O! Lord, you know I’m ‘down and out,’ Forever forced to roam about, From town to town, from state to state, Not knowing what may be my fate.

And frequently I have no bed, On which to rest my weary head; And when at times I have the price, I find it full of bugs and lice.

You know the stem [skid row] is often bad Of course that always makes one mad, For it means that one must carry ‘The banner’ [of labor] in the night so airy.

Now Lord, this is no idle joke, For I am ‘down and out’ and ‘broke.’ I have not got the gall to beg, And not the nerve to be a ‘yegg’ [safecracker].

Unless one has the ready cash, For ‘coffee an’ neckbones’ or ‘hash,’ For ‘liver,’ ‘stew,’ or just ‘pigs feet,’ He surely has no chance to eat.

Now Lord, I’ve often times been told, That Heaven’s streets are paved with gold. To me that doesn’t seem quite fair, When millions here are in despair.

Behold your creatures here below – These multitudes who have no show, From their cradles to their graves, Their doom is that they must be slaves.148

147 Carleton Parker, 121. 148 “The Boe’s Lament,” in Hobo College Press Committee, Hobo Ballads (Cincinnati, OH: n.d.), 8.

As social outcasts, hoboes often found a sense of community only in the jungles. Indeed, the jungles served to cultivate hobo culture and traditions, distinct with their own rules, jargon, mores, and code of ethics. In certain respects, the jungles signified a rejection of mainstream society and served as an alternative mode of living. Hobo poet Harry Kemp observed in 1911 the cooperative nature of hobo jungles:

It is often a marvel of cooperation. Discarded tin cans and battered boilers are made over into cooking utensils and dishes. Each member contributes to the common larder what he has begged for the day. There is usually in camp someone whose occupational vocation is that of cook, and who takes upon himself, as his share of the work, the cooking of meals. Stews are in great favor in trampdom and especially do they like strong, scalding coffee. Usually the procuring of food in such a camp is reduced to a system such as would interest economists and sociologists. One tramp goes to the butcher shop for meat, one goes to the bakers for bread, and so forth. And when one gang breaks up, its members are always very careful to leave everything in good order for the next comers. They will even leave the coffee grounds in the pot for the next fellow so that he can make ‘seconds’ if he needs to. These things are part of tramp etiquette, as is also the obligation each new arrival is under to bring, as he comes, some wood for the fire.149

The jungle consequently functioned as an important – indeed often the only – reliable social institution for migratory workers. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the IWW became one of the few formal organizations on which the migrants could rely. An important factor in this relationship was that, like the hoboes, the IWW was born in the industrial frontier of the American West. It must be remembered that the Western Federation of Miners played an integral role in the formation of the IWW. Indeed, many of the Wobbly leaders were or had previously been members of the WFM, including two of the most influential IWW leaders, Big

Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John. For these western workers, class war was not a figurative expression or an abstract theory. The West became in the 1880s and 1890s a place of genuine industrial warfare.

From 1894 to 1904, the WFM engaged employers in a series of violent clashes. At the gold mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado in 1894, mine owners J. J. Hagerman, David

149 Harry Kemp, “The Lure of the Tramp,” Independent, 70 (June 8, 1911), 1270.

Moffat and Eben Smith announced their intention to lengthen the average workday without a raise in pay. Furthermore, the miners were being asked to perform riskier work in order to increase profit margins for the mining companies. In response, the WFM organized a strike and shut down operations at most of the area mines. Some of the companies yielded to the miners’ demands, but the larger mines soon acquired court injunctions and began to employ strikebreakers. Circumstances turned violent as both sides engaged in a series of firefights. With the help of the sheriff of Colorado City, the mining companies even raised a private army to quell the strikers. In a rare occurrence, the state militia intervened on behalf of the striking miners and brought an end to hostilities. It was a major victory for the WFM, as its popularity soared with locals in the aftermath of the struggle. The long-term effects were mixed, however, for the mining companies increasingly turned to the courts and private detective agencies such as Pinkertons in the coming years. Moreover, as corporate industry increased its influence in the West, state militias more often intervened on behalf of employers. The workers too mobilized, some union locals effectively militarizing themselves with weapons and artillery. Violent conflict between labor and capital erupted again in Leadville, Colorado in 1896, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho in 1899, and many other places across the West.150

The westerners thus imbued the IWW with a militant spirit that their eastern counterparts lacked. The westerners scoffed at the notion of class collaboration. Politics and Civic Federations were tools of the oppressors. They had been brutalized by the system; they therefore saw in it nothing that was redeemable. The IWW viewed migrant workers as possessing the greatest potential for revolution precisely because these nomads were so detached from capitalist society.

In short, they had the least to lose and the most to gain from fundamental change. As one Wobbly publication noted, migrants were the embodiment the IWW:

The nomadic worker of the West embodies the very spirit of the IWW. His cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of bourgeois society, including the more stringent conventions which masquerade under the name of

150 Dubofsky, We Shall be All, 21-32.

morality, make him an admirable exemplar of the iconoclastic doctrine of revolutionary unionism. . . . His anomalous position, half industrial slave, half vagabond adventurer, leaves him infinitely less servile than his fellow worker in the East. Unlike the factory slave of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Central States, he is most emphatically not ‘afraid of his job’ . . . No wife or family encumber him. . . . Nowhere else can a section of the working class be found so admirably fitted to serve as the scouts and advance guards of the labor army. Rather they may become the guerrillas of the revolution – the francs- tireurs of the class struggle.151

As we have seen, the West during this time was a place with few social institutions or mechanisms capable of remediating the disputes between labor and capital. As corporate influence over state governments increased, however, the public institutions that did exist were increasingly biased toward private industry. It was often only as members of trade unions that migrant workers could protect themselves. In the IWW migrant workers found one of the few organizations that not merely supported their interests but celebrated their existence.

Thus, for migrants, the IWW was a symbol of emancipation and self-empowerment, as important for what it represented as it was for any of the tangible benefits it procured. In this story of neglect, migrant workers dreamed of a future beyond greed, exploitation, and want. This was the appeal of socialism, the appeal of the IWW. Perhaps it was best put in a poem called,

“The Migratory IWW,” which was signed J.H.B. The Rambler and appeared in a November 1916 edition of the Industrial Worker:

He’s one of the fellows that doesn’t fit it, You have met him without a doubt, He’s lost to his friends, his kith and his kin, As he tramps the world about.

At night he wanders beneath the stars With the mien of an ancient seer, And often he’s humming a few sweet bars, Of a rebel song soft and clear.

Yes, he’s one of the breed that never fits, And never a dollar can glean, He’s one that a scornful world requites, As simply a might-have-been.

151 Solidarity, November 21, 1914, reprinted in Rebel Voices, 126.

But deep in the heart of his hungry soul, Tho’ the smug world casts him out, There burns like the flames of a glowing coal, The fires of love devout.

Of a world in which all may live, And prosperity be for all, Where no slave shall bow to a parasite’s greed, Or answer a master’s call.152

152 J.H.B. The Rambler, “The Migratory IWW,” Industrial Worker, November 1916.

CONCLUSION

“The IWW can profitably be viewed only as a psychological byproduct of the neglected childhood of industrial America.”153 Carleton Parker, a sociologist who in 1913 conducted an investigation into the plight of migrant workers, devoted a considerable proportion of his intellectual energies to studying the so-called “labor problem” in America. This was a preoccupation he shared with many of his contemporaries in Progressive Era. Indeed, it was a nearly impossible subject to avoid, for the second half of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth centuries had been characterized by tumultuous intervals of social unrest. And much of this unrest emanated from American working class.

Yet a mere eighty years earlier, the United States had been a profoundly different society.

Prior to the industrial revolution, patterns of life and work had endured for centuries more or less unchanged. In what remained a predominately agrarian society, the majority of free persons were small-scale, subsistence farmers. Likewise, manufacturing was done on a small-scale, custom order basis by independent craftsmen. When pockets of the US began to industrialize in the 1820s and 1830s, however, the handicraft system of production was gradually replaced by the factory system. Capital, power, and authority concentrated in the hands of those who owned the factories, while many formerly independent journeymen were compelled to seek employment as wage laborers in these very same factories. In the post-Civil War era, the divide between owner and employer only grew larger. Industrial capitalism was predicated on maximizing profit, which often meant increasing the scale of production while minimizing labor costs. Workers thus labored long hours, for low wages, in sometimes dangerous conditions. In response to such inequities, the first trade unions emerged prior to the Civil War; the first national labor movement would emerge in the 1880s.

153 Parker, 100.

Unrest nonetheless became an endemic feature of industrial society, fueled primarily by both rural and urban poverty. As capital accumulation increased, popular discontent was channeled into a series of reform movements beginning with the Populists in the 1890s and culminating in the Progressive movements in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Decidedly urban in character, the progressive movements were particularly concerned with rectifying the social ills of industrial life. They advocated a variety reforms on the local, municipal, and national levels, most of the measures concerned with cleaning up governmental corruption, improving bureaucratic efficiency, ameliorating poverty, and fighting corporate monopolies. Some observers have argued that the progressive impulse stemmed from middle- class status anxiety, from the sense that the middle-class was being caught in between the dangerous extremes of wealth and poverty, capital and labor.

This observation perhaps explains certain elements of the Progressive Era, but it can hardly be said to encapsulate a set of movements, ideologies, and people as disparate and variegated as those we refer to collectively as “progressives.” Yet it is apparent that many social reformers during the Progressive Era struggled with the dynamics of class in America. Some, like

Jane Addams, for example, preferred to dismiss the notion that the United States was riven by class antagonisms. Others promoted the idea of class collaboration, an idea exemplified by such organizations as the American Federation of Labor and the National Civic Federation. The underlying contention was that there could exist a harmony of interests between employer and employee. The Civic Federation was to be a forum in which government, business, and labor leaders came together in the spirit of compromise and conciliation. Many leaders in the AFL, which was the largest and most powerful labor organization in the country at this time, were active participants in the Civic Federation.

Opponents of these collaborations saw in them, however, the development of a new corporate liberal order: a network of elites in government, business, and labor whose primary intention was to protect their own interests by stabilizing capitalism. Moreover, they charged that

the AFL’s practice of craft unionism privileged only skilled workers and thereby excluded the vast majority of working-class Americans, whether they be women, racial minorities, immigrants, or unskilled workers in general. These peoples, the growing majority of American workers, remained marginalized and excluded by the system.

In late 1904, many in the labor and socialist movements came together to express their discontent about these developments and plan a potential alternative. Their efforts led to the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World in June of 1905. The IWW was formed on the basis of revolutionary industrial unionism, meant to organize all workers irrespective of craft distinctions and ultimately devoted to achieving socialism. Yet the IWW’s formative years were characterized by internal ideological disputes between anarcho-syndicalists and political socialists. At the 1908 convention, the syndicalists successfully ousted the dominate faction of political socialists and were then able to pursue their strategy of emancipating workers from the bondage of wage slavery. Their uncompromising brand of radicalism, which rejected political action altogether, served to alienate not merely the political socialists but also semiskilled and skilled workers who wanted more than oratory and strike leadership from their trade unions.

This was therefore a story of how industrialism transformed American life and how it contributed to unprecedented inequality and unrest. It was the story of how reform attempted to rectify those problems without fundamentally changing their causes. The central aim of this study was intended to explore the factors that contributed to the IWW’s role in the Progressive Era as a home for those workers who were excluded by the system. Thus, it is also a story of neglect; of the failure of institutions to confront the underlying causes of socioeconomic inequality.

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