"We hold," says this official, "that our organization is The I. W. W. Chicago headquarters, and those who follow that organization, became a different body since 1908."[460]

At the International Socialist Congress at Vienna in 1914 the Socialist Labor party made a report in which it was declared that

Such a characterization of the Chicago faction is hardly to be wondered at in view of some of the statements made by organs representing the direct-actionists. Thus we are told that what "the now famous 'Hobo Convention' ... actually did was to restore the preamble to its pristine syndicalist purity...."[462]

The break was not, however, entirely caused by disagreement over political and economic principles. It was partly a matter of personal temperament—and primarily the personal temperament of Daniel DeLeon. We have seen that, rightly or wrongly, DeLeon has been, time after time charged with being the instigator of trouble and dissension. It's difficult to say just why his presence so often seemed to bring friction and revolt. It was partly due, no doubt, to the really heroic and rigidly uncompromising way in which he adhered to his beliefs. It must be attributed in part, the writer believes, to defects of temper. "The strain of love and hate aroused by DeLeon's peculiar personality," writes one who knew him, "colors all judgments of his career."[463] The same writer says that DeLeon was temperamentally a Jesuit, and that his personal attacks were Jesuitical.[464] This fact surely should be kept in mind when considering the controversies in the socialist movement which have been laid at his door. The present Socialist party broke away from DeLeon's leadership nearly twenty years ago,[465] and has since thrived, while the Socialist Labor party has been reduced to a negligible quantity. In the same way, in 1908, the followers of DeLeon seceded and their fate has been about the same.

Eugene Debs thought that DeLeon's critics made too little allowance for his peculiar temper. He insists that whatever "opposition to the Industrial Workers [is] inspired by hatred for Daniel DeLeon and the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, is puerile, to say the least.... DeLeon is sound on the question of trade unionism," Debs continues, "and to that extent, whether I like him or not personally, I am with him."[466] In another place Debs writes:

It may be [he continues] that DeLeon has designs upon the Socialist party and expects to use the I. W. W. as a means of disrupting it in the interest of the Socialist Labor party, and if he succeeds it will be because his enemies in the Socialist party, in their bitter personal hostility to him, are led to oppose ... the revolutionary I. W. W. and support the reactionary A. F. of L....[467]

DeLeon's personal character and intellectual leanings were curiously reflected in the party to which he so unselfishly gave the best years of his life. The Socialist Labor party is doctrinaire, unyielding, Jesuitical as was its leader. It has always seemed to be suspended after a fashion in an atmosphere charged with a kind of a pedantic essence of the Marxian dialectic. It is so impressed with the importance of its own "mutterings in the Marxian law," that when, for example, one of Fellow Worker Walsh's "blanket stiffs" asks what the western lumberjack is to do when he is "fleeced" for a three-day job, the party, metaphorically speaking, simply loses its temper and rails at him and all the rest of the "Overalls Brigade." The Socialist Labor party has been pretty accurately summed up by Fraina:

Since the first edition of this book was published some references to DeLeon have appeared in the dispatches from Russia. Robert Minor, in an interview with Nikolai Lenin, quotes him as declaring that "the American Daniel DeLeon, first formulated the idea of a soviet government, which grew up in Russia on his, DeLeon's idea." In the same interview Lenin is further quoted as saying: "Future society will be organized along soviet lines. There will be soviet [occupational] rather than geographical boundaries for nations. Industrial unionism is the basic state...."[471]

Additional light on the relation between Bolshevism and I.W.W-ism as conceived by Lenin appears from the following account given by Arthur Ransome:

Lenin said he had read in an English socialist paper a comparison of his own theories with those of ... DeLeon. He

Finally, mention should be made of the fact that the National Labor Committee of the Socialist Labor party has just published a memorial volume on DeLeon. It is written by a group of his friends and co-workers in the Socialist Labor party.[473]

CHAPTER X
The I. W. W. on the "Civilized Plane"
(1908-1915)

The Detroit faction of the I. W. W. which in 1915 changed its name to the Workers' International Industrial Union, never attained a strength at all comparable to that of the direct-actionist group. In Appendix IV are given what membership figures are available for both locals and individual members. For the total membership, the figures in columns 3 and 4 (Table A) are probably the most accurate. They show that the Detroiters had in 1910, two years after the schism of 1908, about 3,500 members. The following year their membership was about the same, but in 1912 it very nearly reached 11,000. That was the year of maximum membership, as it was also, except possibly for the year 1916, for the Chicago faction. In every year the figures show a very much smaller membership for the Detroit than for the Chicago faction. The difference in favor of the direct-actionists is still more marked in regard to the number of local unions. The Secretary-Treasurer of the Detroit faction says that only one new local was organized in 1909—the year following the split.[474] The following table shows the growth of local union membership:[475]

Detroit I. W. W.—Membership Figures

The reports of membership from the Detroit office are probably generous, to say the least. The Secretary wrote on October 23, 1911: "Our membership at present is about 10,000. Locals ... in nearly all states as well as Canada. Organizations identical with ours ... in principle and method are active in England, Australia and Africa."[477] On March 30, 1912, he wrote that the membership had "passed the 20,000 mark." When the Detroiters held their national convention in 1913—it was called by them the Sixth I. W. W. Convention—there were 17 locals represented by delegates and the Secretary reported a membership of 11,584. Twenty-two new locals had been organized, he said, during the year ending September, 1913.[478] "The principal reverse," says the correspondent of the Weekly People, "was the lapsing of 14 locals, an unfortunate occurrence caused solely by the financial inability of headquarters to send out organizers...." The local unions represented at the convention included the silk workers of Paterson, N. J.; car and foundry, carpenters', and a "mixed" union in Detroit; a metal and machinery, and a "mixed" local in Chicago; metal workers of Erie, Pa.; hotel and restaurant, "public service" and lumber workers in Seattle; mattress makers in Columbus, Ohio; and "mixed" locals in Lynn, Mass., San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, and New York City. The convention voted down a resolution to change the name of the organization and alter the "political clause" of the Preamble—the vital part of it which kept the I. W. W. high and dry on the civilized plane.[479] The Secretary reports that while the membership of the Detroit faction includes workers from nearly all industries the chief industries represented are the following: textile, garment making, metal and machinery, tobacco, food stuffs, furniture, transportation, automobile, building, lumber, printing, shoe making, and public service.[480]

The DeLeonites probably held a convention in 1914, but the writer has not come across any report of it. In September, 1915, they held an "Eighth I. W. W. Convention" in Detroit. A brief report of the proceedings in their official organ indicates that, in addition to three officers, there were present seven accredited delegates from the following cities: Hartford, Conn., St. Louis, Columbus, Detroit and Cristobal, Panama.[481]

Not only were DeLeonite locals fewer in number than the direct-actionist locals, but their average length of life was undoubtedly shorter. The General Secretary-Treasurer says that the more important reasons for the disbanding of locals were opposition by employers after strikes, the removal of members to other cities in search of work, and the lack of men and women for the work of organizing.[482] In reply to a letter addressed to the secretary of a certain local in New York, the writer was informed that "there is now no such local union."

Another typical case is that of a cigarmakers' local in Baltimore, which, according to its former secretary, started in November, 1913, with 22 members and "increased the wages of all the cigarmakers in the city from 50 cents to $1.00 per thousand." In January, 1914, the local had 350 members. Then came evil days. "The strike forced on us by the Royal Havana ... demoralized the membership [and] the S[ocialist] P[arty] members added to the confusion by creating dissensions. In the year 1915 the organization was non-existent," and remains so, probably.[484]

The Detroit faction being much less exclusively reliant on the more strictly economic methods of carrying on the labor struggle, was naturally much less addicted to strikes. Nevertheless they did conduct a number of them. In May, 1910, the laborers of the Michigan Malleable Iron Company of Detroit, after being on strike two weeks, were given an increase in wages. In April, 1911, the DeLeonites conducted a strike of structural-iron painters in New York, in which 200 men were involved. The following month they called out 40 machinists in Canton, Ohio. Their most important strike efforts were made in 1911 and 1912 in the silk mills of Paterson and Passaic, N. J., and Easton, Pa. In these strikes the two I. W. W.s very often clashed. Rudolph Katz, of the Detroiters, reports that during the silk strike of 1911-12 "the silk workers of Paterson ... joined the Detroit I. W. W. en masse" but that "in the midst of the strike Wm. D. Haywood was brought to Paterson and Passaic ... and the apple of discord was thrown among the strikers."[485] The Socialist Labor party reported the Paterson-Passaic situation to the Socialist Congress at Vienna in 1914: "In the big textile strike in Passaic, N. J.," their report says, "this organization [i. e., the S. L. P. or Detroit I. W. W.] was fought by both the Socialist party and the Chicago I. W. W.-ites, with Haywood leading this opposition and the capitalist press ably supporting their flank.... That strike of 4,000 men, women and children was lost through such treachery." The report adds that a few months earlier in 1912 "the Detroit I. W. W. won a great strike of 6,000 silk weavers."[486] On December 20, 1913, one of the Paterson members of the DeLeonite faction sent the following dispatch to the Weekly People: "Local 152, Bummery Bunch, did their best to pack last night's meeting [of the Paterson silk workers] but only partly succeeded. Many legitimate delegates raised their voices against anarchy expressed through sabotage and direct action...."[487] Contrary to the foregoing evidence, the testimony of Adolph Lessig before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations seems to indicate that there were no serious differences between the two I. W. W.s during the Paterson strike. Lessig says that there was no attempt to either quarrel or get together.[488]

In 1913 the Detroiters were also concerned in several smaller strikes. They report a successful strike of textile workers at Mystic, Conn., in January; a successful strike involving 50 Philadelphia mechanics in August, and one involving 16 cigarmakers in Baltimore, who won the wage increase demanded. In 1914 and 1915 a few San Francisco ladies' tailors were on strike against the piecework system and alleged bad treatment. They were both reported as successful.

The two I. W. W.s continued to hate each other quite as much as they hated the capitalists, reformers, progressives, and Socialists. St. John has a paragraph in his historical sketch of the (Chicago) I. W. W. which may very well stand as the official expression of the direct-actionists' opinion of the doctrinaires. He says:

In May, 1914, St. John testified as the official representative of the I. W. W. before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. The Detroit I. W. W.s, he said, "have no information—do not give out any information; have no organization except on paper, and are committed to the program of capturing plates at the political pie-counter ... and trading ... on the name of the I. W. W. That is the way they keep alive."[490] At the Seattle hearings of the Commission in August, 1914, James P. Thompson, at one time the General Organizer of the Chicago I. W. W., expressed himself on the subject of the other I. W. W. He said that the Detroiters were "quite different from the I. W. W."

What the doctrinaires thought of the direct-actionists—or at least what their leaders wanted workingmen in general to think of them—is of equal importance. In a leaflet published by the Detroit faction we are told that "the anarchist element that still calls itself the I. W. W. proceeded from the close of the 1908 convention to reveal its true nature by its actions. The western official organ of this element 'The Industrial Worker,' of Spokane, Wash., began to advocate theft, petty larceny, chicken-stealing, breaking up small employment agencies, and also advised the workers to 'strike at the ballot-box with an ax.'"[492]

When the doctrinaires held their 1915 convention (the "Eighth I. W. W. Convention") General Secretary Richter, in his report, took pains to pay his compliments to the direct-actionists.