The Point of Destruction: Sabotage, Speech, and Progressive-Era Politics Rebecca H. Lossin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2020 Rebecca H. Lossin All Rights Reserved Abstract The Point of Destruction: Sabotage, Speech, and Progressive-Era Politics Rebecca H. Lossin Strike waves in the late nineteenth century United States caused widespread property destruction, but strike leaders did not suggest threats to employer property as a comprehensive strategy until the I.W.W. adopted a deliberate program of sabotage. Contrary to historical consensus, sabotage was an intellectually coherent and politically generative response to progressive, technocratic dreams of frictionless social cooperation that would have major consequences for the labor movement. This dissertation treats sabotage as a significant contribution to the intellectual debates that were generated by labor conflict and rapid industrialization and examines its role in shaping federal labor policy. It contends that the suppression of sabotage staked out the limits of acceptable speech and the American political imagination. Table of Contents ! Introduction: The Limits of Change ........................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: No Interests in Common: Sabotage as Structural Analysis .............................. 14 1.1 The Critique of Property..................................... ............. ......................................................24 1.2 Defining Sabotage, Using Sabotage................ ...................................................................... 26 1.3 Worker Sabotage and Capitalist Sabotage: A Critique of Violence... ................... ................31! 1.4 Socialism versus Syndicalism.................................................................................................42 Chapter 2: Job Conscious Sabotage: The Fiction of ‘Pure and Simple’ Unionism ............ 54! 2.1 Emergence of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers ............ 58 2.2 Collective Bargaining by Explosion ..................................................................................... 59 2.3 The Organized Revolt of Employers .................................................................................... 69 2.4 The Utility of Anarchism ...................................................................................................... 79 2.5 Accidental Politics ................................................................................................................ 83 2.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 88 Chapter 3: From Everett to Everest: The 1917 Pacific Northwest Lumber Strike .............. 90 3.1 The Land ................................................................................................................................ 94 3.2 The Strike ............................................................................................................................... 98 3.3 Progressive Allies ............................................................................................................... 105 3.4 “Don’t Do it Boys!” .............................................................................................................. 114 3.5 The Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen (4L) ........................................................... 119 3.6 “You Dared Not Lynch Him in the Light of Day” .............................................................. 123 i Chapter 4: ‘Caused to be Printed’: Civil Liberties, Security of Property, and The Industrial Workers of the World ............................................................................................ 125 4.1 Producing Speech ................................................................................................................. 130 4.2 Life, Liberty, and Property ................................................................................................... 133! 4.3 Civic Investment .................................................................................................................. 138! 4.4 Clear and Present Danger ..................................................................................................... 141! 4.5 Civil Liberties and Uncivil Clients ...................................................................................... 145! 4.6 United States v Haywood ..................................................................................................... 148! 4.7 Criminal Syndicalism ........................................................................................................... 161! Chapter 5: Veblen’s Soviet ....................................................................................................... 166 5.1 Taylorism, Sabotage, and the Machine Question ................................................................. 178! Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 196! Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 201 Appendix A: Preamble to the I.W.W. Constitution…………………………………..……..220 Appendix B: Industrial Union Manifesto……………………………………………….…...221 ii Introduction: The Limits of Change This dissertation is about sabotage: its meaning, its historical importance, and the ways in which it persists and also remains hidden. It was inspired by my interest in the renewal and extension of Taylorism and the cult of productivity that accompanied the rise of the Internet and mobile, networked devices. Alongside the growing popularity of applications and devices that essentially brought the time-study into our most intimate activities was a resurgence of utopian thought in the form of so-called ‘luxury communism’ and fully automated ‘post-work’ societies. These developments, while dazzling at a technological level, were strikingly redundant at a conceptual one—a mindless reproduction of scientific management for a newly dispersed workforce and a recapitulation of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward with new gadgets. Given this cultural landscape, a serious consideration of the politics of technology seemed necessary. Machine-breaking offered a promising way to disentangle narratives of social progress from technological mandates. It has not been a simple task. The art historian Max J. Friedländer once remarked that “it’s easier to change your world view than how you hold your spoon.” Ideology is not a belief system but rather that which appears to be the natural condition of things. It is not one political position among many but the condition of political possibility itself—what can realistically be imagined. It is because technology is a concrete, daily practice that it is such a powerful means of ideological transmission. Hence, the pejorative use of the word ‘Luddite’ at the same moment that ‘anti-capitalist’ protest is a defining feature of the political landscape. This is not to say that technology necessarily transmits a certain belief system to the exclusion of others, but that all this stuff forms an imperceptible yet definite 1" " conceptual boundary within which we might imagine alterations to politics proper and outside of which is sheer wreckage. Sabotage posited a different horizon—the general strike and the end of capitalism. And it therefore suggested tactics that were aimed at the limits laid down by industrial capitalism. This is reminiscent of the debate about revolution and reformism, but sabotage was unique in that it was materialist in a particular and literal sense. Sabotage was concerned with demystifying capitalism. It t distinguished itself from other political interventions of the time, such as the single tax or political socialism, in that it went after the very things that naturalized these beliefs. It was not threatening because it criticized capitalism or state policy but because it identified a target in easy reach of every worker—the property produced under a capitalist state. At the same time, it wasn’t an emotional, individual reaction to working conditions but a class movement. As Arturo Giovannitti explained, sabotage “only becomes dangerous when it becomes the translated practical expression of an idea even though, or rather because, this idea has originated from the act itself.”1 Sabotage , as a theory, arose from longstanding practice that combined political economy and practical tactics into one word. In attacking the actual products of capital, it had located a chink in the economic system’s ideological armor. Sabotage was broadly defined but what differentiated it from other forms of direct action was that it explicitly recommended property destruction. This did not always involve physical wreckage—although it often did—but property was not always a physical entity. Property existed in the form of machines as well as the profits and products that the machine was expected to produce at some future date. 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