Despite intense repression, lockouts, the blacklisting by the employers of several thousand workers, and efforts to divide workers along color lines, by early the union had a membership of around 25,, half of whom were Black.
When Haywood arrived and was told that Black union members were meeting separately according to Louisiana law he replied:. You work in the same mills together. Sometimes a black man and a white man chop down the same tree together.
You are meeting in convention now to discuss the conditions under which you labor. Why not be sensible about this and call the Negroes into this convention?
If it is against the law, this is one time when the law should be broken. These blew up quickly in various cities around the country, including Spokane, San Diego, and Fresno. The IWW responded with a tactic to make the costs of persecuting free speech quite expensive.
IWW branches sent out calls across the country for their members to ride freight trains to the various cities where the free speech fights were taking place, to get arrested in turn and fill up the jails to make more arrests impossible.
Go to Missoula. Fight with the Lumberjacks for Free Speech. Are you game? Are you afraid? Do you love the police? Have you been robbed, skinned, grafted on? If so, then go to Missoula, and defy the police, the courts and the people who live off the wages of prostitution.
In Spokane, the IWW waged a free speech fight throughout for the right to protest fraudulent job placement agencies and the ability to make speeches in favor of unionism. After having several members harassed and arrested, the local IWW put out the call:. As the months wore on, more and more Wobblies rolled into Spokane to join the struggle for free speech and be arrested.
Eventually, several hundred IWW members would be held at one time, stuffed eight or ten into jail cells built for three or four inmates. Despite a successful legal challenge by the IWW, the city fathers banned all public street meetings as well as indoor meetings, and sent police to raid the IWW hall and arrest all of its inhabitants, continuing in their attack on free speech.
Spokane banned the publishing, sale, and distribution of the IWW newspaper and even arrested the newsboys who hawked it on the streets. But the Wobblies held the line, giving educational meetings, agitational speeches and organizing revolutionary sing-alongs under brutal conditions inside the jail.
After an initial lull during the summer, another wave of IWW members descended on the town in the winter of that year, continuing to make the ongoing imprisonment of roving agricultural workers as expensive as ever. Finally, in the early spring of , the city sued for peace, caving in to virtually all of the IWW demands and ending their persecution of free speech. The little minority of the working class represented in the IWW blazed the trail in those ten years of fighting for free speech [] which the entire American working class must in some fashion follow.
Bread and roses In the IWW made its first major breakthrough with the enormous textile workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The IWW acted quickly and sent organizers to Lawrence to help their small local of or so members organize and lead the spontaneous strike.
With an elected strike committee of sixty delegates, representing each of the fifteen major ethnic populations and occupational groupings, the strike was a model for how to organize the immigrant working class. The Greeks and Poles are out so strong and the Germans all the time, But we want to see more Irish in the good old picket line. Forced into shameful living conditions in squalid tenements, working a normal week of fifty-six hours for poverty wages malnutrition was a particularly pernicious cause of death among the children of the mill hands and almost entirely shunned by the AFL, the textile workers of Lawrence had long been expected to explode in angry rebellion, and the wintry month of January would prove to be the time.
For years the employers have forced conditions on us that gradually and surely broke up our homes. They have taken away our wives from the homes, our children have been driven from the playground, stolen out of schools and driven into the mills, where they were strapped to the machines, not only to force the fathers to compete, but that their young lives may be coined into dollars for a parasite class, that their very nerves, their laughter and their joy denied, may be woven into cloth.
The IWW sent a cunning and talented twenty-seven-year-old organizer, Joseph Ettor, to run the strike. Prepared for this battle by previous organizing experience in the western reaches of the IWW, Ettor led a brilliantly organized strike the likes of which had never been seen.
Foner wrote of the Battle of Lawrence that. All mills on strike and their component parts, all crafts and phases of work, were represented. The committee spoke for all workers. The principle of national equality was also carried out in the sub-committees elected: relief, finance, publicity, investigation, and organization. Thus every nationality group had its own organization in the management of the strike, and complete unity was obtained for this working class machine through the general strike committee.
The strikers shut down the mills from wall to wall, with no textiles able to be produced at any point throughout the walkout.
Monster mass meetings were held every weekend throughout the nine-week strike, for the strikers to vote on and ratify the decisions made by the strike committee, facilitated by a small army of interpreters. Continuous mass pickets of thousands patrolled the mill area of the town, completely encircling each mill to ensure that no scabs were able to work. Massive parades took place every few days, with anywhere between 3, to 10, workers marching and singing the Internationale in their own languages.
Ten thousand of the striking workers joined the IWW. Facing armed militias paid for by the hostile mill owners, brutal police attacks, and widespread arrests of hundreds of strikers, as well as the leadership of the competing AFL textile workers union who came to Lawrence in an attempt to call off the strike, the IWW held out. Newspapers carried stories and images of the malnourished and ragged children of the strikers across the country as they arrived at their new temporary homes, which played a role in tipping public opinion in favor of the strike.
When Lawrence police attacked a delegation of the children on their way to the train station with their mothers, ruthlessly beating down and arresting children and parents alike, national outrage ensued, leading to an eventual Congressional investigation of the living and working conditions of the striking families. With every innovative tactic used by the strikers, the mill owners and city leaders oftentimes interchangeable upped the ante. The state militia insituted martial law for a time, leading to the death of an eighteen-year-old Syrian mill hand he was bayonetted in the back while running from advancing troops.
Private detectives from the Pinkerton agency were brought into the town to spy on strike leaders, provoke riots, and terrorize families. Local clergy who would play ball were enlisted on the side of the mill owners, who instructed them to denounce the strike and the IWW. And, at the behest of the city council, the rival AFL union was brought in to attempt to end the strike by signing agreements for the skilled workers and sending them back to work.
The IWW kept calm and held out through all of these challenges to win a stunning victory, wresting pay raises of 5 to 22 percent to all of the striking workers, payment of overtime, and promises of no retaliation from the mill owners.
The Lawrence strike still holds the imagination of radicals today who want to build a multi-ethnic, fighting labor movement, as it certainly did in The success in the Lawrence strike launched the IWW into the national arena, with as the year in which they scored organizing victories in different industries across the country: on the railroads, in textiles, steel, lumber, metalworking, longshore jobs, agriculture, and even cigar rolling, once a bastion of AFL craft unionism.
It is in this period, between and the end of World War I, that the IWW made its most impressive gains in terms of membership and political impact among the American working class. Because of its willingness to organize women, people of color, the unskilled and foreign-born workers oftentimes these overlapped , the IWW grew in numbers and influence. In Philadelphia, the IWW organized longshoremen across color lines to win united multiracial strikes against the shipping bosses.
In Louisiana, it organized lumber mill workers into integrated local unions, breaking Jim Crow segregation laws, a practice not accepted by other unions until decades later. They also organized migrant agricultural laborers in California and across the West, winning some gains in anticipation of later union drives among farm laborers in the s and again in the s and s.
During this period, at its height, the IWW could claim 40, dues-paying members. But there were still nagging political questions which remained unanswered.
And the IWW was still losing plenty of strikes for every victory, as in the large Paterson, New Jersey silk strike which went down to defeat only a year after Lawrence, or the defeat of the rubber workers strike in Akron, Ohio. Was it a betrayal of revolutionary principle to set up permanent strike funds, so the IWW stood a chance of winning long strikes?
Or to sign contracts with management? Within a year of their crowning victory in Lawrence, the IWW local declined from over 10, members to roughly , with most of their militants being driven out of the mills and blacklisted. Within the organization, rumblings could be heard that pointed to a different method, as storm clouds gathered on the horizon. The war The heyday of the IWW began to pass as major political developments played out on the world stage.
World War I erupted across Europe in the fall of , splitting the world socialist movement over support or opposition to the war.
The socialist parties of the Second International had failed the test of history. With the coming US involvement in the war, the federal government began ramping up a Red Scare to use as a bludgeon against all radical forces across the country.
The IWW was organizing and leading strikes in the industries pivotal to the war effort copper mining, lumber, rubber, among others and became a natural target for state repression. While local unions, affiliated publications, and individual members were left free to express their opposition to the mad butchery of the imperialist war, the general executive board officially discouraged open agitation against the war and did not take any open position against it.
Fred Thompson, former general secretary treasurer of the IWW wrote:. The majority felt this would sidetrack the class struggle into futile channels and be playing the very game that the war profiteers would want the IWW to play.
They contended that the monstrous stupidity by which the governments of different lands could put their workers into uniforms and make them go forth and shoot each other was something that could be stopped only if the workers of the world were organized together; then they could put a stop to this being used against themselves; and that consequently the thing to be done under the actual circumstances was to proceed with organizing workers to fight their steady enemy, the employing class.
There was no opportunity for referendum, but the more active locals took this attitude, instructing speakers to confine their remarks to industrial union issues, circulating only those pamphlets that made a constructive case for the IWW, and avoiding alliance with the Peoples Council and similar anti-war movements. Although radicals have long aimed to organize the entire world working class, the idea of only engaging in antiwar organizing through production-halting strikes once the entire global working class has been brought into the ranks of radical unions, can only be interpreted as an intentional avoidance of the issue of the war.
Despite their avoidance of taking a public antiwar stance, various states and the federal government went on the offensive against the IWW. And in September , the Department of Justice raided forty-eight IWW halls across the country, arresting leaders of the group in a single major operation and charged them under the newly passed Espionage Act.
Of those arrested, were convicted and given sentences of up to twenty years in prison, including some who had not been members of the IWW for years. And these were the lucky ones. Those who fared worse were attacked by lynch mobs recruited from local chambers of commerce, brutally beaten or murdered with the silent consent of the government.
In Centralia, Washington on November 11, , IWW member and army veteran Wesley Everest was turned over to a lynch mob by jail guards, had his teeth smashed with a rifle butt, lynched three times in three separate locations, his corpse then riddled with bullets, before being dumped in an unmarked grave.
Revolution The other political development to be a major issue for the IWW was the birth of Soviet power in Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution at the end of And it was a revolution led by a party that shared a vigorous disdain for the opportunistic reformism of the Second International that many in the IWW had always possessed. The Bolshevik Party was an organization which had earned its political leadership in thousands of strikes, mass protests, and rebellions, through hard years of underground activity and struggle.
Our pages of interactive maps locate more than strikes, campaigns, arrests involving the IWW between and These yearbooks provide the most complete account of IWW events -- a day-by-day database of hundreds of strikes, protests, campaigns, and labor political initiatives as recorded in the pages of the Industrial Worker.
Here are more than a dozen interactive maps and charts that track strikes, campaigns, protests, arrests, raids, and trials. So far we have identified union locals, branches, and District Councils in more than cities and towns in 38 states and territories of the United States and 5 Canadian provinces.
These maps and tables detail the ninety known American periodicals officially affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World in the early decades of the 20th century excluding single-issue publications. They were published in 19 different languages and, although many were short-lived and claimed tiny circulations, key newspapers lasted into the s, and the Industrial Worker continues today. We have developed maps, lists, and charts detailing more than incidents in which IWW members were subjected to arrests, trials, assaults, vigilante actions, and other violence.
It was perhaps the deadliest day in the turbulent history of the IWW. At least five Wobblies and perhaps as many as twelve died along with two deputies on the afternoon of November 5, when Sheriff McRea and armed and hastilly deputized men met the steamer Verona at the Everett dock. But the Wobblies were called traitors and became the targets of more vigilante violence.
Based on the documents that were seized, IWW leaders were charged with conspiracy to obstruct America's participation in the war. The defense tried to show that the IWW was only attempting in non-violent ways to improve the pay and conditions of American workers. The Wobblies testified that they were not trying to obstruct the war effort or to incite a revolution.
Although the prosecution had a weak legal case, the radical reputation of the Wobblies influenced the jury, which found all of them guilty. Big Bill Haywood and the others were sentenced to prison terms ranging from five to 20 years plus heavy fines. Big Bill was released from prison on bail to work on the IWW court appeal. But when the court upheld the IWW convictions in , he and several others fled to Russia rather than return to prison.
With most of their leaders in prison or exile, huge fines and court costs to pay, and disagreements over the future of the IWW, members began to abandon the union. By , the IWW had dwindled to fewer than members. Four years later, Big Bill Haywood died in Moscow, a broken and forgotten man.
Despite the failure of the IWW, the Wobblies did prove that large numbers of unskilled industrial workers could be successfully unionized. The Wobblies also pioneered non-violent tactics like large public demonstrations and the sit-down strike. The IWW's failure to attract a strong, permanent membership set the course for unions in the United States.
American workers didn't try to overthrow capitalism and take control of industry themselves. Higher pay and better working conditions, not "one big union--one big strike," became the main priorities of most union members in the 20th century. Many people and events played an important role in the labor movement at the turn of the 20 th century.
Among them were:. In this activity, form pairs to each research one of the people, organizations, or events named above. Group members should use library resources and the Internet to investigate their subject. They should prepare a brief presentation to the class on their subject. It should include:. Alumni Volunteers The Boardroom Alumni. Curriculum Materials. Add Event. Main Menu Home. The Struggles of the "Wobblies" The willingness of the IWW to sign up almost anyone gave it the reputation of being a union of hoboes, drifters, and other lowlifes.
One Big Strike In Lawrence, Massachusetts, more than 40, immigrant textile mill workers, including women and children, worked hour weeks at low wages between 12 and 16 cents per hour. For Discussion and Writing What was the meaning of "one big union--one big strike"?
Do you think the federal government was justified in putting the IWW leaders on trial in ? Why or why not? What do you think was the most important reason for the failure of the IWW? Explain your answer. It should include: 1. An interesting profile of the person, organization, or event. The reason why this person, organization, or event is important in the history of American labor. Each pair should report its findings and conclusions to the class.
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