Copyright, 1920
BY
PAUL FREDERICK BRISSENDEN

TO
R. O. L. B.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

No very extensive changes are made in the new edition. The chart of early radical labor organizations, which appeared in the first edition as Appendix I, has been omitted in this edition. There is reproduced in its place a copy of the original industrial organization chart prepared by "Father" T. J. Hagerty at the time of the launching of the I. W. W. in 1905 and sometimes referred to as "Father Hagerty's Wheel of Fortune". This chart is believed to be of some importance as illustrating the earlier ideas of the revolutionary industrial unionists on industrial organization in relation to union structure. It has been considerably amplified by W. E. Trautmann and published in his pamphlet One Great Union, and still further developed by James Robertson who has very recently built extensions upon it in furtherance of the shop-steward propaganda in the Pacific Northwest. His version is published in a pamphlet entitled Labor unionism and the American shop steward system (Portland, Oreg., 1919).

The organization held its eleventh national convention in Chicago in May, 1919. This was the first convention held since December, 1916. It was attended by fifty-four delegates and it has been reported that forty-eight of them had never before attended a general convention of the organization. The General Executive Board reported that the organization in 1919 comprised fourteen Industrial Unions, each with its locals in various parts of the country, and a General Recruiting Union, with a total membership of 35,000. Since the convention it is reported that three new Industrial Unions have been formed: an Oil Workers' Industrial Union, a Coal Miners' Union and a Fishery Workers' Union. Nearly fifty amendments to the constitution were adopted by the delegates at the May convention. Most if not all of these have been since approved in a referendum to the membership. The proceedings of the convention have not yet been published. Since the first edition of this book appeared the I. W. W. has launched a monthly magazine called The One Big Union Monthly and several new weekly newspapers.

The writer's attention has been called to the erroneous statement (on page 235) in regard to Daniel DeLeon's theory of industrial unionism. This has been revised to accord with the facts. There is added on page 241 some interesting comment from Lenin, the Bolshevik premier of Russia, on DeLeon and on the relation between revolutionary industrial unionism, and the soviet system in Russia.

P. F. Brissenden

Washington, D. C., September, 1919.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This is a descriptive and historical sketch of the present drift from parliamentary to industrial socialism—as epitomized in the career of the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States. The I. W. W. is now thirteen years old. During the first half of its existence the general public hardly knew that there was such an organization. A few local communities, however, were startled into an awareness of it quite early in its history. The city of Spokane had an I. W. W. "free-speech fight" on its hands in 1909. Fresno, California, McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, and Missoula, Montana, all had their little bouts with the "Wobblies" long before the Lawrence strike of 1912 made the I. W. W. nationally prominent.

Just now the Industrial Workers of the World, as represented by more than one hundred of its members and officials, is on trial for its life in Chicago. The indictment charges the defendants with conspiring to hinder and discourage enlistment and in general to obstruct the progress of the war with Germany. The specific number of crimes alleged to have been intended runs up to more than seventeen thousand. Since the war-time activities of the I. W. W. most concern us now, it is regretted that this book cannot be brought up to the minute with a final chapter on the I. W. W. and the war. But this is impossible. The trial is still in progress and almost no trustworthy evidence regarding the alleged anti-war activities is available outside of the court records.[1]

Though nowadays well aware of the existence of the I. W. W., the public still knows little about the organization and its members. Moreover, a great deal of what it does know is false. For thirteen years the I. W. W. has been rather consistently misrepresented—not to say vilified—to the American people. The public has not been told the truth about the things the I. W. W. has done or the doctrines in which it believes. The papers have printed so much fiction about this organization and maintained such a nation-wide conspiracy of silence as to its real philosophy—especially as to the constructive items of this philosophy—that the popular conception of this labor group is a weird unreality.

The current picture is of a motley horde of hoboes and unskilled laborers who will not work and whose philosophy is a philosophy simply of sabotage and the violent overthrow of "capitalism," and whose actions conform to that philosophy. This appears to be about what the more reactionary business interests would like to have the people believe about the Industrial Workers of the World. If, and to the extent that these reactionary employing interests can induce the public not only to believe this about the I. W. W. but also to believe that the picture applies as well to all labor organizations, they will to that extent ally the public with them and against labor.

The negative or destructive items in the I. W. W. program are deliberately misconstrued and then stretched out and made to constitute the whole of I. W. W.-ism. In reality they are only a minor part of the creed. There are immense possibilities of a constructive sort in the theoretic basis of the I. W. W., but the Press has done its best to prevent the public from knowing it. And it must be said that the I. W. W. agitators have themselves helped to misrepresent their own organization by their uncouth and violent language and their personal predilection for the lurid and the dramatic. Even what the Wobblies say about themselves must be taken with a certain amount of salt. This matter of the currently-received opinion of the I. W. W. has been dwelt on because the writer believes that it is not alone important to know what an organization is like; it is also very important to know what people think it is like.

The popular attitude toward the Wobblies among employers, public officials and the public generally corresponds to the popular notion that they are arch-fiends and the dregs of society. It is the hang-them-all-at-sunrise attitude. A high official of the Federal Department of Justice in one of our western states gave the writer an instance. On a recent visit to a small town in a distant part of the state he happened upon the sheriff. That officer, in reply to a question, explained that they were "having no trouble at all with the Wobs." "When a Wobbly comes to town," he explained, "I just knock him over the head with a night stick and throw him in the river. When he comes up he beats it out of town." Incidentally it may be said that in such a situation almost any poor man, if he be without a job or visible means of support, is assumed to be, ipso facto, an I. W. W. Being a Wobbly, the proper thing for him is pick-handle treatment or—if he is known to be a strike agitator—a "little neck-tie party."

Since we have been at war certain groups of employers, particularly those in the mining and lumber industries, have still further confused the issue and intensified the popular hostility to the Industrial Workers of the World. They have done this by re-enforcing their earlier camouflage with the charge of disloyalty and anti-patriotism. Wrapping themselves in the flag, they have pointed from its folds to "those disloyal and anarchistic Wobblies" and in this way still further obscured the underlying economic issues. Whatever the facts about patriotism on either side, it appears to be true that the greater part of the I. W. W.'s activities have been ordinary strike activities directed toward the securing of more favorable conditions of employment and some voice in the determination of those conditions. These efforts have been met by charges of disloyalty and by wholesale acts of violence by the employers, that is to say, they have been met by the night-stick and neck-tie party policy—as witness the wholesale deportation of "alleged Wobblies" from Bisbee, Arizona, and the hanging of Frank Little in Butte, Montana. As the President's Mediation Commission reported, "the hold of the I. W. W. is riveted, instead of weakened, by unimaginative opposition on the part of employers to the correction of real grievances."[2]

By means of an insidious extension of the I. W. W. bogey idea, either that organization itself or some other labor body or both of them are made the "goat" in disputes in which the I. W. W., as an organization, has no part. If a lumber company, for example, gets into a controversy with the shingle-weavers union of the American Federation of Labor, it has only to raise a barrage and shout through its controlled news columns that "they are 'Wobblies!'" and public opinion is against them. Nor does the misrepresentation stop there. All who openly sympathize with the alleged Wobblies are, forsooth, themselves Wobblies!

Naturally the liberals in this country have no sympathy with this night-stick attitude toward I. W. W.'s nor with the night-stick interpretation of I. W. W.-ism. The writer is bound to say, however, that he considers the liberal interpretation entirely inadequate. The liberal attitude is expressed and judgment pronounced when it has been said that the I. W. W. is a social sore caused by, let us say, bad housing. It must be evident (unless we are prepared to take the position that any organization which purposes a rearrangement of the status quo—the Single Tax League, for example—is a social sore) that the I. W. W. is much more than that. The improvement of working conditions in the mines and lumber camps would tend to eliminate the cruder and less fundamental I. W. W. activities, but it would not kill I. W. W.-ism.

We can no more dispose of the Industrial Workers of the World by saying that it is a social sore on the body politic than we can dispose of the British Labor Party or our National Security League by saying that they are sores on the Anglo-Saxon body politic. We can only completely and fairly handle the I. W. W. problem by dealing with its more fundamental tenets on their merits and acting courageously upon our conclusions. We shall be obliged seriously to study the problem of the organization of the unskilled; the question of the relative merits of craft unionism, mass unionism and industrial unionism; the question of the sufficiency of political democracy and of the possible future modifications of it and, not least, the question of democracy versus despotism in our economic and industrial life. The Wobblies insist that no genuine democracy is possible in industry until those who do the work in a business (from hired president to hired common laborer) control its management. It so happens that the British Labor Party, in its reconstruction report on Labor and the New Social Order, insists upon practically the same thing. The fact that the B.L.P. insisted in a more refined and intelligent manner than the I. W. W. may explain the almost universal obliviousness of our liberals to this item in I. W. W.-ism. The Industrial Workers of the World have even developed a structure and mechanism (crude and inadequate, naturally) for this control. The industrial union, they say, is to be the administrative unit in the future industrial democracy. All these will be dominant issues when peace breaks out, and if the Wobblies are no longer in existence the radical end of each issue will be championed by their successors in the field.

The most important item in the affirmative part of the I. W. W. program is this demand that some of our democracy—some of our representative government—be extended from political into economic life. They ask that industry be democratized by giving the workers—all grades of workers—exclusive control in its management. They ask to have the management of industrial units transferred from the hands of those who think chiefly in terms of income to those who think primarily in terms of the productive process. The Wobblies would have "capitalism" (the monarchic or oligarchic control of industry) supplanted by economic democracy just as political despotism has been supplanted by political democracy in nearly all civilized states. When the British Labor Party asks for representative government in industry, those who do not ignore the request give it serious attention. When the I. W. W. echoes the sentiment in the phrase: "Let the workers run the industries," the editors are thrown into a panic, the business world views the I. W. W. menace with aggravated alarm and the more reactionary employers hysterically clamor to have "these criminal anarchists shot at sunrise."

Perhaps the very best way to run an industrial enterprise is on the currently accepted model of the Prussian State. It is simply a moot point and the I. W. W. has challenged the Prussian method. Whatever intrinsic merit there may be in the affirmative program of the Industrial Workers of the World, it must be admitted by even its most enthusiastic members that were they today given the power they ask, they would be no less relentless Prussians than are the corporations we have with us. Even though capitalism may be ripe for replacement, the I. W. W. are a long way from being fit to replace it. The Wobblies are grotesquely unprepared for responsibility. So far their own members do not understand how relatively unimportant is their much-talked-of sabotage method. They have challenged the autocratic method, but they have done it very crudely and with a weird misplacement of emphasis. They whisper it in a footnote, as it were, to their strident blackface statements about method. "If labor is not allowed a voice in the management of the mines—apply sabotage!"

Unquestionably the I. W. W. ask too much when they ask that the producers be given exclusive control of industry. As to certain phases of management the workers (including, of course, all hand and brain workers connected with the industry) should perhaps be given entire control. The hours of labor and the sanitary conditions in any productive enterprise are primarily, if not exclusively, the concern of the producers. But the amount of the product which ought to be turned out and the price at which it ought to be sold are matters in which the consumers have no little interest. Consumers, therefore, should share in the management of the industry so far as it relates to prices and the determination of the amount to be produced.

The following pages are devoted to a mere matter-of-fact description of the Industrial Workers of the World as an organization and to a record of the facts of its history. The purpose has been throughout to write from the sources. The writer has tried to have the "Wobblies" themselves do the telling, through interviews, soap-box speeches, convention proceedings and official papers and pamphlets. The bulk of the record is based upon documents and other materials collected and impressions received since 1909 when the writer first became interested in the I. W. W.

The writer has endeavored throughout to abstain from philosophizing about the I. W. W. He is not unmindful of the fact that the interpretation of such a significant movement as is embodied in the Industrial Workers of the World is of very great importance. Indeed the time has now come when it is urgently necessary. The first intention in writing this book was to incorporate in it an attempt at an analysis and interpretation of I. W. W.-ism, as well as its orientation with other economic isms. But the bony skeleton of historical record has crowded out almost everything else and perhaps filled more pages than its importance justifies. In spite of all this the temptation to comment has been strong and sometimes irresistible. Despite the effort that has been made to be accurate and entirely fair the writer realizes that the book probably contains errors both of fact and judgment. He would greatly appreciate having his attention called to these.

The writer is under great obligation to the secretaries of scores of the local unions of the organization in various parts of the country for their valued assistance in the task of gathering the material for this study. He is especially grateful to Mr. Vincent St. John, formerly General Secretary-Treasurer of the I. W. W., for his generous response to repeated requests for documents and information. Thanks are also due for like favors to Mr. William D. Haywood, General Secretary-Treasurer of the I. W. W. and to Mr. Herman Richter, General Secretary-Treasurer of the Workers International Industrial Union (formerly the Socialist Labor Party or Detroit wing of the I. W. W.). Finally the writer wishes to express his grateful appreciation of the numerous and helpful suggestions made during the later stages of the work by Professor Henry R. Seager of Columbia University. He has also to thank Professor Seager and Mrs. C. A. Stewart for their kindness in the tiresome work of reading the proof, and Mrs. M. A. Gadsby, of the staff of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, for her assistance in the preparation of the Bibliography.

P. F. B.

San Francisco, June 9, 1918.

CONTENTS