Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) - Wobblies
The IWW was founded on 27 June 1905 when some 200 anarchists, socialists, and radical trade unionists from all over the United States attended the Industrial Union Congress in Chicago. According to Patrick Renshaw, the IWW's effective life span was from 1905 to 1924, but its activities continued off and on into the 21st Century. The IWW has long been known as "the singing union" for good reason. Since the early 1910s, the IWW has published at least 38 editions of this famous collection of labor hymns and anthems, and always with a bright red cover.
But the vision of One Big Union faded quickly amid bitter divisions following the founding convention, and by 1908 the organization had split into two groups, both calling themselves the Industrial Workers of the World, one headquartered in Chicago, the other in Detroit. The IWW with which most Americans are familiar is the Chicago, or "red" IWW. The Detroit IWW was organized upon the departure (or expulsion, depending upon whose history one reads) of Socialist Labor Party leader Daniel DeLeon and his adherents from the union after the fourth convention. Also known as the "yellow" IWW, this doctrinaire faction rechristened itself "The Workers International Industrial Union" in 1915 and finally expired in 1925.
The etymology of the nickname "Wobbly" is unknown. By one account, the term "Wobbly" as nick-name for IWW came into use in 1912, during a "thousand mile picket line" railway strike in British Columbia). Previously they had been called many things from International Wonder Workers to I Won't Works. Legend assigns origins of the expression "Wobbly" it to the lingual difficulties of a Chinese restaurant keeper with whom arrangements had been made during this strike to feed members passing through his town. When he tried to ask "Are you I.W.W.?" it is said to have come out: "All loo eye wobble wobble?" The IWW was the first labor union in North America to refuse to discriminate against Chinese and Chinese Americans.
William D. Haywood was an early champion of race-blind unionism. Like Mother Jones, Haywood's organizing ranged across the U.S. workforce, but centered on extractive workers. The son of a hardrock miner, "Big Bill" Haywood was born in Salt Lake City in 1869. At age 15, he was digging for silver in the Ohio Mine at Rebel Creek, Nevada, a remote site more than 50 miles from any sizable town. While staying in the company bunkhouse, isolated from commercial culture, Haywood and his fellow employees entertained themselves with long discussions. In this setting, he learned what he called "my first lessons in unionism" from a co-worker who was a member of the Knights of Labor and a veteran of the miners’ unions in Bodie, California, and Virginia City, Nevada.
Frustrated with defeated strikes in his own industry and with the defeatist attitude of the mainstream labor movement, Haywood played a prominent role in launching the IWW. In fact, it was he who called to order the first session of the founding convention in Brand's Hall in Chicago on June 27, 1905. For the next 16 years, Haywood deployed a repertoire of leadership skills — recruiting, negotiating, troubleshooting, restructuring, even recordkeeping — attempting to build a radical movement open to all wage-earners. He continued to devote a large share of his time to organizing campaigns and labor-management disputes in the extractive sector. These included the western Louisiana lockout against the Brotherhood of Timber Workers of 1912, the iron miners’ strike on the Mesabi Range in 1916, the Bisbee events, and other no-holds-barred affairs.
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.
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—at least a share 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.
The negative or destructive items in the I.W.W. program were deliberately misconstrued and then stretched out and made to constitute the whole of I.W.W.-ism. In reality they were 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 had done its best to prevent the public from knowing it. And it must be said that the I.W.W. agitators had themselves helped to misrepresent their own organization by their uncouth and violent language and their personal predeliction for the lurid and the dramatic. Even what the Wobblies said about themselves must be taken with a certain amount of salt. This matter of the received opinion of the I.W.W. has been dwelt on because 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 was the hang-them-all-atsunrise attitude. The picture was of a motley horde of hoboes and unskilled laborers who will not work and whose philosophy was simply of sabotage and the violent overthrow of capitalism'and whose actions conformed to that philosophy, This was about what the more reactionary business interests would like to have the people believe about the IWW.
But the liberal interpretation of the time was also entirely inadequate. The liberal attitude was expressed and judgment pronounced when it was said that the I.W.W. was a social sore caused by, for instance, bad housing. It must be evident (unless one was prepared to take the position that any organization which purposes a rearrangement of the status quo — the Single Tax League, for example — was a social sore) that the I.W.W. was 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.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, organizers of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) led strikes of immigrant textile workers, including the dramatic strikes of woolen workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 and silk textile workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913.
One of the challenges facing labor leaders in the extractive sector was that of transcending ethnic and racial divisions in the workforce. Although hardly free from the racial and ethnic prejudices that pervaded American society, extractive unions made pioneering advances toward multiracial harmony. The western hardrock organizations, especially under the banner of the IWW, recruited Mexican-American laborers and Asian immigrants. In organizing African-Americans, the UMW led the way in many respects. By 1900, the UMW had approximately 20,000 black members, making it one of the largest biracial organizations in an increasingly segregated society.
One method of displacement was mass deportation. To defeat a strike by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, vigilantes ran at least 200 people out of Merrysville, Louisiana, between February 16 and February 18, 1912. A quarter century later, mobs expelled striking lumberjacks and sawmill workers from Newberry and other towns on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In hardrock mining, forcible expulsion of strikers and even non-striking activists occurred in the course of numerous labor-management confrontations.
In the midst of a regional strike for the eight-hour day, a boatload of timber and sawmill workers organized by the IWW traveled to Everett, Washington, on November 5, 1916. They were met at the docks by a hail of gunfire from local police and vigilantes. The exact death toll remains unknown — the bodies of five Wobblies were found, and other casualties may have been lost in the waters of Port Gardner Bay.
Joel Hagglund, better known as Joe Hill, organized for the Industrial Workers of the World and penned radical songs to aid the labor movement. His trial on murder charges sparked a national controversy as labor leaders insisted Hill was being framed by the copper bosses. His conviction prompted widespread national outrage and precisely the type of publicity the valley had tried so diligently to overcome. President Woodrow Wilson requested a stay of execution granted by the governor; but when the stay ran out, Hill died in a fury of bullets on 19 November 1915. Since Hill had told the IWW's "Big Bill" Haywood (born in Utah in 1869) that he "didn't want to be caught dead in Utah," his ashes went to IWW groups in every other state. Huge funeral demonstrations took place throughout the nation in answer to his admonition, "Don't mourn, organize!" and Hill became labor's martyr.
Once America was at war certain groups of employers, particularly those in the mining and lumber industries, further confused the issue and intensified the popular hostility to the Industrial Workers of the World. They did this by re-enforcing their earlier camouflage with the charge of disloyalty and anti-patriotism. Wrapping themselves in the flag, they 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 were ordinary strike activities directed toward the securing of more favorable conditions of employment and some voice in the determination of those conditions. These efforts were 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.
In the early years of the Great War, among rising demand for spruce to build airplanes for the war effort, the lumber industry of Oregon was crippled by clashes between management and workers. Workers, organized by the Industrial Workers of the World, demanded better working and living conditions. In response, the Federal government intervened with the Spruce Production Division (SPD) project from 1917 to 1918. They put soldiers to work for the logging industry of the state, making uniform demands for the labor and living conditions of all workers. They also constructed massive infrastructure improvements in the area. Though the SPD only lasted for a few years, it had a massive effect on the landscape of the Northwest coast, administering nearly one hundred separate locations in which soldiers and loggers lived and worked. The project is also believed to have been the model for later generations of Federal work programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC.
In the most notorious incident, vigilantes acting on behalf of management rounded up 1,186 copper workers and sympathizers in Bisbee, Arizona, on July 12, 1917. The detainees were placed in cattle and boxcars with minimal amounts of food and water and transported through the desert to the tiny, remote town of Hermanas, New Mexico. There the strikers were released with the warning not to return to their homes. The next day the U.S. Army took the deportees to Columbus, New Mexico, where they were housed in tents for two months. This affair was one of several expulsions of IWW members and supporters during the summer of 1917.
Taken together, these episodes of confinement, eviction, and deportation demonstrate the way in which industrial disputes in extraction were invariably contests to control territory, as well as to control the terms and conditions of employment.
Other extreme instances of lethal violence by public authorities and private parties abounded. (The public-private distinction blurred when vigilantes, private detectives, and private guards were deputized en masse.) On September 10, 1897, sheriff's deputies shot and killed 19 unarmed coal miners, all Slavic immigrants, who had peacefully marched from Harwood, Pennsylvania, to the company village of Lattimer, six miles away.
In the midst of a regional strike for the eight-hour day, a boatload of timber and sawmill workers organized by the IWW traveled to Everett, Washington, on November 5, 1916. They were met at the docks by a hail of gunfire from local police and vigilantes. The exact death toll remains unknown—the bodies of five IWW workers were found, and other casualties may have been lost in the waters of Port Gardner Bay.
Taken together, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Bisbee Deportation, the Ludlow Massacre, the Everett Massacre, and similar episodes form a pattern of conflict. Unlike industries where one or a handful of major confrontations punctuated labor-management relations, extraction’s competitive economic conditions, routine risks of death on the job, isolation, and quasi-feudalism combined explosively to set the tone of industrial relations in the century up to World War II.
More than one hundred of its members and officials were put on trial 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. On 30 August 1918 Judge K. M. Landis imposed sentence. W. D. Haywood and fourteen others were sentenced to twenty years imprisonment and $20,000 fine each. Thirty-three others were given six years and fined $5,000 each on the first count; ten years and $5,000 each on the second count; two years and $10,000 each on the third count; and ten years and $10,000 each on the fourth count.
Even though capitalism may be ripe for replacement, the I.W.W. were a long way from being fit to replace it. The Wobblies were grotesquely unprepared for responsibility. So far their own members did not understand how relatively unimportant is their much talked-of sabotage method. They have challenged the autocratic method, but they had done it very crudely and with a weird misplacement of emphasis. They whisper it in a footnote, as it were, to their strident statements about method. "If labor is not allowed a voice in the management of the mines — apply sabotage!"
Sometimes also known as the "sabot" the root word of "sabotage" is explained, but it does not actually derive from incidents of workers throwing these wooden clogs into machines to hinder their operation, despite romantic myth.
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