THE REAL MOVEMENT

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Communism is free time and nothing else!

ABOUT

A blog devoted to considering the real movement of society as described by Karl Marx:

This “alienation” (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

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Yours for Industrial Freedom”: Women of the IWW, 

1905–1930
Article (PDF Available) in Women s Studies 43(2) · February 2014 with 141 Reads 
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2014.863105Cite this publication

Anne Mattina
Stonehill College

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263460236_Yours_for_Industrial_Freedom_Women_of_the_IWW_1905-19301

1912 LAWRENCE STRIKE BREAD & ROSES

Fab: Personal Fabrication, Fab Labs, and the Factory in Your ComputerApril 2005

April 2005

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• Author:
 
• Neil Gershenfeld

Publisher:

• Basic Books, Inc.
• Division of HarperCollins 10 E. 53rd St. New York, NY
• United States

ISBN:978-0-465-02745-3

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

The Humongous Fungus Among Us Issue

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

A four-hour workday could solve a lot of our problems. If everyone worked fewer hours, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn't be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn't be able to pollute as much...

By Nathan Schneider
30 December 2014, VICE

All illustrations are re-creations of four-hour-workday flyers from the 1930s and 40s. Original images courtesy of Industrial Workers of the World

Alex is a busy man. The 36-year-old husband and father of three commutes each day to his full-time job at a large telecom company in Denver, the city he moved to from his native Peru in 2003. At night, he has classes or homework for the bachelor's in social science he is pursuing at a nearby university. With or without an alarm, he wakes up at 5 AM every day, and it's only then, after eating breakfast and glancing at the newspaper, that he has a chance to serve in his capacity as the sole US organizer and webmaster of the Global Campaign for the 4 Hour Work-Day.

"I've been trying to contact other organizations," he says, "though, ironically, I don't have time."

But Alex has big plans. By the end of the decade he envisions "a really crazy movement" with chapters around the world orchestrating the requisite work stoppage.

A century ago, such an undertaking would have seemed less obviously doomed. For decades the US labor movement had already been filling the streets with hundreds of thousands of workers demanding an eight-hour workday. This was just one more step in the gradual reduction of working hours that was expected to continue forever. Before the Civil War, workers like the factory women of Lowell, Massachusetts, had fought for a reduction to ten hours from 12 or more. Later, when the Great Depression hit, unions called for shorter hours to spread out the reduced workload and prevent layoffs; big companies like Kellogg's followed suit voluntarily. But in the wake of World War II, the eight-hour grind stuck, and today most workers end up doing more than that.

The United States now leads the pack of the wealthiest countries in annual working hours. US workers put in as many as 300 more hours a year than their counterparts in Western Europe, largely thanks to the lack of paid leave. (The Germans work far less than we do, while the Greeks work considerably more.) Average worker productivity has doubled a couple of times since 1950, but income has stagnated—unless you're just looking at the rich, who've become a great deal richer. The value from that extra productivity, after all, has to go somewhere.

It used to be common sense that advances in technology would bring more leisure time. "If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something useful," Benjamin Franklin assumed, "that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life." Science fiction has tended to consider a future with shorter hours to be all but an axiom. Edward Bellamy's 1888 best seller Looking Backward describes a year 2000 in which people do their jobs for about four to eight hours, with less attractive tasks requiring less time. In the universe of Star Trek, work is done for personal development, not material necessity. In Wall-E, robots do everything, and humans have become inert blobs lying on levitating sofas.

During the heat of the fight for the eight-hour day in the 1930s, the Industrial Workers of the World were already making cartoon handbills for what they considered the next great horizon: a four-hour day, a four-day week, and a wage people can live on. "Why not?" the IWW propaganda asked.

It's a good question. A four-hour workday with a livable wage could solve a lot of our most nagging problems. If everyone worked fewer hours, for instance, there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn't be able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn't be able to pollute as much, either; rich countries where people work fewer hours tend to have lower carbon footprints. Less work would leave plenty of time for family and for child care, ending the agony over "work-life balance." Gone would be the plague of overwork, which increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, a historian at the University of Iowa, has devoted his career to undoing the "nationwide amnesia" about what used to constitute the American dream of increasing leisure—the Puritans' beloved Sabbath, the freedom to ramble that Walt Whitman called "higher progress," the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Hunnicutt's latest book, Free Time, traces how this dream went from being thought of as a technological inevitability, to becoming the chief demand in a century of labor struggles, to disappearing in the present dystopia where work threatens to invade every hour of our lives.

Hunnicutt himself has the bearing of a Whitmanesque sage, with a thick gray beard and a full-bellied chuckle. "These dreams seem to be completely forgotten, lost in a mad scramble for work and money," he laments. 

There's a hint of what happened in an essay that the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, titled "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." By 2030 he expected a system of almost total "technological unemployment" in which we'd need to work as few as 15 hours a week, and that mostly just to avoid losing our minds from all the leisure. In the meantime, however, "avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still," Keynes believed. "For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

With this, he proposed a deal with the devil: Trust in greed for a while more, and it would save us from itself. To illustrate, Kenyes made the rather anti-Semitic observation that, just as the Jew Jesus brought access to eternal life into the world, the Jews' genius for compound interest would produce so much plenty as to deliver us all from wage slavery forever. Keynes didn't expect, however, that like most deals with the devil, the devil had the upper hand: Greed managed to suck up most of the benefits of almighty progress for itself.



Hunnicutt has spent much of his career detailing exactly how. Over the course of the Depression, pressure from the captains of industry turned President Roosevelt against shorter hours. He made sure that the Black-Connery Bill for a 30-hour week, which had passed in the Senate, would die in the House. With the help of Keynes's own notion of deficit spending, FDR's New Deal set the goal of employing everyone "full-time," and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 enshrined the eight-hour day as the norm. That was to be the last in a century of reductions. The onset of the Cold War meant that those in the labor movement who kept calling for shorter hours were derided as subversives and communists. Fewer and fewer workers were able to join a union at all. Every hour of work became more and more productive, while the owning class gobbled up an ever greater share of the benefits.

A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything—from environmental destruction to prison construction—for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they'll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.



The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don't bother organizing with our co-workers. We're made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we'd squander it.

The more we are told to value work, meanwhile, the less it's actually worth. When women began entering the workforce, two incomes started to be necessary to support a family, and women are still stuck doing the bulk of housework and child care. Overtime has become mandatory for many people, and having a part-time job usually means having to work one or two others.
"Some workers got shorter work hours, but what they didn't get was stable pay," says Karen Nussbaum, who directs the AFL-CIO affiliate Working America. In what's left of the labor movement, nobody is even bothering to ask for shorter workdays; it's hard enough to win a living wage, paid sick days, a bit of vacation time, and parental leave. Compared with when she began organizing women workers in the 1970s, Nussbaum says, "the crisis is different—more acute and more widespread."

You've heard of The 4-Hour Workweek, surely. Or at least you've seen it in an airport bookstore, with businessmen glancing sidelong at the cover as if it were a lingerie catalog. It's a lonely yet best-selling fascination, the hope that by working smarter, not harder, one might join author Timothy Ferriss among the "New Rich" with some solid investments and a modicum of maintenance. And it can happen—but only to a lucky few among the million-plus suckers who've bought the book.

The idea of the four-hour workday that workers imagined a hundred years ago was different. It was for everyone—the natural consequence of advancing technology. But in the decades since World War II, capitalism has not handed over a shorter workday freely. The coming kingdom of leisure used to be considered a mainly technological problem; it has turned out to be a political one.

The Industrial Workers of the World considered shorter workdays with no cut in pay to be, in the words of one pamphlet, "THE Revolutionary Demand." The so-called Wobblies recognized that fewer hours would make sure workers reap the benefits of progress rather than let them trickle upward. To win an eight-hour day around the time of the First World War, IWW-organized loggers in the Pacific Northwest blew a whistle and walked off the job when eight hours had passed. A recent IWW pamphlet suggests another tactic to highlight the impact of long workdays on families: Have workers' children picket outside the job, carrying signs about how much they miss their parents.

In the past few months there have been small indications of progress. After much pressure from organized labor, President Obama announced stricter federal rules on overtime pay; meanwhile, the government estimated that millions of workers might switch to part-time rather than full-time jobs because they can buy their own health insurance through the new system. Congressman Paul Ryan quickly expressed fears that, with affordable coverage, "the incentive to work declines." Just the thought of the non-rich working less than all the time, and still having health insurance, was an affront to his idea of the American way. He actually said, "It's adding insult to injury."

In this way, the most practical approach to winning shorter workdays may be to detach necessities, like insurance, from employment. Peter Frase, an editor of Jacobin magazine and one of the shorter workday's most capable advocates, calls for a universal basic income. People able to cover their essential needs could choose for themselves how much they want to work as a supplement to that. But unless there are powerful, disruptive movements demanding such measures, politicians and other elites will keep on claiming that there isn't enough to go around.

Workers in countries with stronger labor organizations know better. Gothenburg, Sweden, is experimenting with a six-hour workday for municipal workers, while in France, where a 35-hour week is already common, unions are trying out a rule against checking work email after hours.

The time-saving gizmos that Benjamin Franklin hoped for are here. But rather than liberating anyone, they've become a clever disguise for corporate greed to sneak ever more into our days and nights. Few subcultures revel in staying at the office after hours so much as Silicon Valley engineers. But who really benefits from their late nights of coding?

It's probably the same people who prevent Silicon Valley's underlings from forming a union, who don't mind a single mother working two jobs, who expect you to check email at all hours, who say we need more growth rather than let the unemployed lighten whatever work already needs to be done. Those who believe these profiteers from on high, and who neglect to organize with their co-workers, are stealing the four-hour workday from themselves.

ANOTHER VICTIM OF POLICE BRUTALITY IWW FREE SPEECH FIGHT 1910

http://www.weneverforget.org/tag/james-p-thompson/

Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Spokane IWW Gives Impressive Farewell to Free Speech Fighter F. J. Ferry

18th April 2020 Janet Raye Free Speech Fights

———-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 18, 1910
Spokane, Washington – Impressive Funeral Honors Free Speech Martyr F. J. Ferry

From the Industrial Worker of April 16, 1910:

Once again the Grim Reaper Death has visited the ranks of the gallant band of men who valorously defended their principles during the recent Spokane free speech fight, and has claimed as its latest victim Fellow Worker F. J. Ferry, a member of L. U. No. 222.

Fellow Worker S. O. Chinn, the first martyr to Spokane police brutality, who died four weeks ago as a result of the hardships suffered in jail, was a young man not yet in the prime of life. He was a mere youth-the prospect of life stretched before him full of possibilities; he hadn’t begun to live yet. He had just started on “Life’s fitful dream” when he was cut off. He was out of place in this capitalistic world, as is every man of principle, so he had to be sacrificed. Not for him was the boon of life enjoyed by all animated nature; he was an intruder, a revolutionist; he interfered with the smooth working of the well-laid plan of the master class to hold the workers in subjection; his presence in life was a danger to their organized system of exploitation; therefore he, the merest stripling, with every natural right to life, was ruthlessly murdered.

In the mad career of the suicidal capitalist class, not only is the seed of the future society thus wantonly, but the old and storm-twisted oaks of the working class-men who have earned every right to peaceful old age-are also destroyed on the slightest pretext when the interest of the modern juggernaut demands it. Fellow Worker Ferry was an old man 62 years of age. He was a life-long veteran of the cruelest struggle in history-the struggle for existence in a capitalist society. Ever since early boyhood he has been robbed and abused by an insatiate parasite. In common with his fellow-slaves of the working class, he was denied the luxuries and necessaries that make life worth living. He was reduced to the condition of a machine, being given only enough of the product of his labor to simply keep life in his body. After many years of killing slavery as a baker, he became worn out and was cast aside to make room for a younger victim-like an old machine he was “scrapped.”

An old and battle-scarred victim of capitalism-deprived of home and family and all the natural attributes of a worthy old age-he earned his scanty living as best he could with seemingly no other goal in store for him than that of so many workers-an apologetic exit from life-a hurried trip to Potters’ Field.

But he became imbued with the philosophy of the new society; he joined the I. W. W.; he became a rebellious slave. For this he was made a social outcast-even more so than simply as a discarded slave-he became an object of loathing and hatred to his masters-a creature to be eradicated if possible.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Spokane IWW Gives Impressive Farewell to Free Speech Fighter F. J. Ferry”→

Hellraisers Journal: Fellow Worker Ferry is Second to Die Due to Brutal Treatment at Spokane’s Franklin School Prison

11th April 2020 Janet Raye Free Speech Fights

———-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 11, 1910
Spokane, Washington – FW Ferry Dead Due Brutal Treatment at Franklin School

From The Spokane Press of April 8, 1910:

—–

34 DAYS ON BREAD THE CAUSE
—–

F. FERRY, AN INVALID AFTER JAIL EXPERIENCE,
SUCCUMBS TO PNEUMONIA.
—–

Another death is chargeable to the brutality of the system of Chief of Police John Sullivan and the members of the Spokane police department.

Another agonizing face will await the coming of these men in the Great Beyond, where they will face the responsibility that they so shrewdly shift here below, in the name of the majesty of the law.

The latest victim of police inhumanity to man is an aged man named F. Ferry, a resident of Spokane for years, who died last night at the Spokane general hospital, Third and Washington, following a brief but deadly attack of pneumonia.

—–

Ferry took part in the free speech fight last fall and was among the first arrested and sent to the Franklin school. There, by order of chief Sullivan, he was placed on bread and water for 34 days and left the prison a physical wreck. He has since been an invalid, unable to work, and barely able to crawl around. Wednesday night he took suddenly sick with pneumonia, which found in his worn and emaciated body an easy victim, and all that medical science could do to save him was of no avail.

True, Ferry was an I. W. W. Yet he was an American citizen, a resident of Spokane for many years, whose only offense was that he thought the right of free speech should be accorded his fellow workingmen. He was a quiet, inoffensive man, past 60 years of age, and even in a Russian prison his gray hairs would have been respected and less harsh treatment shown than was manifested by the cowardly police force of Spokane.

Continue reading “Hellraisers Journal: Fellow Worker Ferry is Second to Die Due to Brutal Treatment at Spokane’s Franklin School Prison”→

Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Funeral of S. O. Chinn, Spokane Free Speech Martyr, Largely Attended

8th April 2020 Janet Raye Free Speech Fights

———-

Hellraisers Journal – Friday April 8, 1910
Spokane, Washington – S. O. Chinn Gets Grand I. W. W. Send-Off

From the Industrial Worker of April 2, 1910:

—–

CHINN’S FUNERAL LARGELY ATTENDED
—–
Many Watch Procession on Riverside Avenue
-Strains of the Marseillaise Heard-I. W. W.
Members Who Attend Funeral Wear Red Neckties.
—–

Funeral services for S. O. Chinn, age 27, which were held from the I. W. W. hall proved a magnate as the procession of men, women and children following the hearse and the brass band moved down Riverside Avenue. The last tribute was paid by James Thompson, national organizer of the Industrial Workers at the I. W. W. Hall at 616 Front Avenue, in which he declared that the man had given his life in the interest of the working class.

Three hundred Fellow Workers packed the hall to capacity and after the services followed the hearse and band to Riverside Avenue and Monroe Street, from which point the hearse and pall bearers proceeded to Greenwood cemetery, where Chinn was buried. The casket was draped with the flag of the organization of which Chinn was a member and an officer. Chinn came to Spokane last fall to participate in the free speech fight. His home was originally at Hutchinson, Kansas.

The funeral proceedings attracted a great deal of attention. Before the hearse walked four officers of the I. W. W. with red neckties and red badges of the organization in their buttonholes, while the band before pealed out the martial strains of the “Marseillaise.” Stretching behind for four or five blocks marched the members of the organization, who came out to pay their last respects to the man that had sacrificed his life for the cause of  Free Speech.

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http://www.weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-from-the-industrial-worker-funeral-of-s-o-chinn-spokane-free-speech-martyr-largely-attended/#more-14037
“Hellraisers Journal: From the Industrial Worker: Funeral of S. O. Chinn, Spokane Free Speech Martyr, Largely Attended”

The Revolutionary I. W. W.

---

What kind of an organization is the Industrial Workers of the World? Why is it organized? Where is it organized? How is it organized?

These are questions that are being asked all over the country today by workers, students and men and women from all walks of life.

Thousands of columns of newspaper publicity have been given to the Industrial Workers of the World as a result of its activity. Countless magazine articles have been devoted to it and its alleged principles. Still the reading public has at best but a hazy conception of what the organization really is or what it stands for.

These questions the writer will try to deal with in his own way. First of all, however, it is necessary to show a few of the things "which we are not."

The I. W. W. is not a political organization in the sense that political organizations are today understood. It is not an anti-political sect. It is not a reform body. Its membership is not made up of anarchists, as some writers have stated. Its ranks are not exclusively composed of socialists, as others have asserted. True some of its members may have accepted the anarchist philosophy. Others may have accepted the socialist faith. However, to the organization of the Industrial Workers of the World they are known only as workers, as members of the working class.

What "One Big Union" Means

The Industrial Workers of the World is a labor union that aspires to be the future society. It is a labor organization that holds that craft, district, or other forms of division are harmful to the workers. It teaches that an industrial system of organization must replace the antiquated forms.

Every man, woman or child who works in a given industry must be organized into the one big industrial union of his or her industry. The "ONE BIG UNION" slogan of the I.W.W. does not mean mass unionism. It does not mean that the railroad worker, the plumber, the teamster and the baker will be all in the same local union. That form of organization has been proven a failure. It has been shown to be unsound. Mass organization, irrespective of industrial needs, is too unwieldy to produce results.

The "one big union" slogan of the I. W. W. means CLASS organization according to industry. It has been proven practical by the capitalists themselves. All the great trusts and monopolies are organized according to industry. The steel trust, for example, not only own the mills wherein steel rails and other products are made, but also the mines from which the iron ore is taken. It owns the railroads leading from the mines to the lakes. It owns the steamship lines that haul the ore. It owns the blast furnaces that smelt the ore. In short, the steel trust is an industrial organization, covering every branch of the industry. The I. W. W. proposes to follow the boss' plan and scope of organiz­a­tion for the benefit of the worker.

READ ON 
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/iww/1913/perry.htm

THE BLACK WORKING CLASS IS UNDER ASSAULT BY THE POLICE 
JUST LIKE THE IWW WAS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, 
POLICE BRUTALITY
HAS BEEN AROUND A LONG TIME

The Justice Department Campaign Against the IWW, 1917-1920

by Steven Parfitt

 IWW picnic to raise funds for "class war prisoners," Seattle, July 20, 1919. UW Libraries, Labor Archives and Special Collections. (click to enlarge)

The Palmer Raids are usually remembered as the high water mark of the First Red Scare. Under the leadership of A. Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General from 1919 to 1921, the Bureau of Investigation launched raids in November 1919 and January 1920 against anarchists, members of the new Communist and Communist Labor Parties, and others seen as supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Hundreds of foreign nationals were deported to Soviet Russia with the help of immigration officials from the Department of Labor. The Palmer Raids have been immortalised in literature and cinema. They launched the career of J. Edgar Hoover, then only twenty-four but a rising star within the Bureau of Investigation. They also launched the Bureau as the federal government’s first line of defence against Bolshevism in particular and left-wing radicalism in general.

All the attention given to the Palmer raids, however, has obscured the first great use of the Bureau of Investigation several years earlier against a domestic enemy: the Industrial Workers of the World. On September 5, 1917, agents of the Bureau of Investigation, in conjunction with local law enforcement, raided every office of the IWW across the United States within the space of twenty four hours, with possibly the widest-ranging search warrant in US history. They took five tons of material from the national headquarters of the IWW in Chicago alone, and took tons more from 48 local offices and the homes of leading Wobblies (IWW members). Federal agents seized everything from office furniture to paper clips. The District Attorney for Detroit complained to Thomas Gregory, Attorney General from 1914 to 1919, that it ‘became necessary to procure wagons to haul the stuff’ removed from the home of only one Wobbly, Herman Richter.[1]

Steven Parfitt is a Teaching Associate at the Universities of Nottingham and Loughborough and Associate Lecturer at University of Derby in the UK. He is author of Knights Across the Atlantic: The Knights of Labor in Britain and Ireland, forthcoming in 2016 with Liverpool University Press. He has written articles on American, British and global labour and social history (including the IWW) in journals including Labor, International Review of Social History and Labour History Review, and is currently working on a global history of the Knights of Labor. He can be reached at spar232@aucklanduni.ac.nz .

Some government officials claimed that the seized material ‘was sought by the government as evidence tending to connect I.W.W. leaders with the German war office.’ The District Attorney for Philadelphia hinted at other motivations when he described the September raids as done ‘very largely to put the I.W.W. out of business.’[2] Justice Department officials then used the captured documentation to prosecute more than a hundred IWW leaders at Chicago. The Chicago trial became one of the largest show trials held outside Stalin’s Russia. The defendants were all found guilty, after less than an hour’s deliberation by the jury, of more than 10,000 individual violations of federal law. Fifteen of them received twenty-year prison sentences, and though some of these sentences were later commuted the raids, trials, and other repression hamstrung the IWW at one of the most promising times in its history. This essay concerns the September raids, the trial that followed, and the elaborate mix of censorship, propaganda and other methods that federal agents used to secure the conviction of the Chicago defendants. It is, in other words, the story of an unprecedented attack by the federal government against a political movement on more or less explicitly political grounds.

 Raids, Censorship and Surveillance

 The reasons behind the federal government’s campaign against the IWW stretched back almost to the foundation of the IWW in 1905, but the immediate cause of that campaign lay in the wider war in Europe. When the United States entered the First World War in April, 1917, the IWW became one of the leading voices against the conflict. IWW organisers roamed the United States and established powerful branches in two crucial wartime industries in particular – copper mining and lumber. They did so in the context of an industrial boom, stimulated by the demand for war material from the United States and Allied governments. That boom brought unemployment down from 15% in 1914 to 8% in 1917 and, at the same time, encouraged a wave of unrest across the entire country that broke all records for industrial conflict.[3] Three thousand strikes took place between April and November 1917.[4] Business and government leaders worried that these battles might hamper if not completely disrupt the war effort, and the Wilson Administration moved to grant concessions to unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in return for industrial peace. The IWW, the most radical, anti-war and uncompromising section of the American labor movement, was marked out for repression instead.

Click to see the University of Arizona Special Collections web exhibit

That repression came from several quarters. Employers, particularly the Phelps Dodge Corporation, which owned a string of copper mines in Arizona, were not about to let the Wobblies lead their employees on strike. In July 1917, after IWW locals called strikes at Phelps Dodge mines in Bisbee and Jerome, Arizona, the company and biddable sheriffs struck back. On July 10, mine supervisors and vigilantes rounded up more than a hundred men in Jerome and deported 67 of them to Needles, California. On July 12, the local sheriff and a posse of more than 2,200 men rounded up more than a thousand suspected IWWs at Bisbee and left them in the desert 200 miles beyond the city limits, in cattle cars helpfully provided by the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad. A kind of corporate-vigilante axis got to work on the Wobblies in other parts of the country as well. In August 1917, masked men broke into the hotel room of an IWW organiser, Frank Little, in Butte, Montana. They hanged him from a railroad trestle and left a warning to other labor agitators on his body. Little had arrived in the town to support miners on strike against the Anaconda Mining Company, and the company was almost certainly implicated in his murder.

The military joined the anti-IWW crusade in earnest. The War Department claimed that during hostilities its soldiers put down twenty-nine revolts, most of which actually referred to strikes called by the IWW. Lawmakers gave army units the power to use force in defence of anything that state governors declared a “public utility.” In practice this meant that, as Robert Goldstein writes, military personnel ‘began a massive program of strike-breaking, including raids on IWW headquarters, breaking up meetings, arresting and detaining hundreds of strikers under military authority without any declaration of war, and instituting a general reign of terror against the IWW.’[5] Military Intelligence, which grew from 2 to 1300 employees from the beginning to the end of the war, contained a domestic counter-intelligence service, MI-4, which spent a large fraction of its resources in spying on and disrupting IWW branches across the United States. This included the Plant Protection Service, made up of informants at all the major munition plants in the country that kept tabs on the political activities of their co-workers and paid particularly close attention to the doings of the IWW.[6]

The Justice Department went farthest of all in their repression of the Wobblies. The Bureau of Investigation, founded in 1908, had only 141 employees in 1914. As war loomed the Bureau rapidly increased its force of special agents, quintupling them between 1916 and mid-1918. They could also draw on the services of 150,000 volunteer patriots grouped into the American Protective League, which acted as an auxiliary to the Bureau’s more reliable and effective force of special agents. Attorney General Gregory did not boast idly when he claimed, in the Justice Department’s annual report for 1918, that ‘it is safe to say that never in its history has this country been so thoroughly policed as at the present time.’[7] Once Congress voted to declare war on Germany in April 1917 the Justice Department turned to the IWW as Enemy No.1. Congress also provided the main legislative weapon that the Department used against the IWW: the Espionage Act.

It is easy to see why the Espionage Act has re-emerged as the weapon of choice for Attorney Generals in the Bush and Obama Administrations against whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Passed in June 1917, the Act contained provisions that prosecutors could use in almost any conceivable contingency. It demanded harsh sentences for causing or attempting to cause ‘insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States,’ and allowed for conspiracy charges for this crime. The Act further allowed the Post Office Department to restrict from the mails any material ‘advocating or urging treason, insurrection or resistance to any law of the U.S.’[8] William Fitts, a senior attorney working for the Justice Department, quickly noted the relevance of the Act to the Department’s campaign against the Wobblies. Along with several presidential proclamations and congressional resolutions the Act contained, as he later wrote to a colleague in July 1918, ‘the only statutes known to this Department which bear upon the activities of the I.W.W.’[9]

The Department soon acted on this enormous expansion of their legal powers. A memorandum from Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren to all Justice Department attorneys and agents on July 16 urged the use of every possible means to build up a complete picture of the IWW organisation, its plans and its leadership.[10] In September, the Los Angeles Times claimed that ‘for many weeks past, the activities of Industrial Workers of the World leaders have been under close scrutiny of the department’s bureau of investigation. Scores of field workers, chiefly in the West and Middle West, have devoted their undivided attention to alleged attempts on the part of leaders to embarrass the government in the conduct of the war by strikes and other disturbances called in the name of labor.’[11]

That report appeared just after the Bureau of Investigation conducted the September raids. They did so, as we saw at the start of this essay, partly to paralyse the IWW and partly to build up a more detailed picture of their activities. The raids certainly deprived the Wobblies of all the bureaucratic tools needed to run a national movement, from the pens, pencils and typewriters needed to write out reports and correspondence to the desks used to write them on, and the filing cabinets intended to catalogue and store them. The raids also netted the Justice Department an enormous volume of internal correspondence, mailing lists and other valuable information.

Attorneys scoured through the captured material and quickly drew up an indictment of 166 leading Wobblies that charged them with violating provisions of the Espionage Act, various presidential proclamations, and a number of other congressional resolutions and federal statutes. Taken together, the New York Times claimed, the Justice Department charged the defendants with ‘‘the crime nearest to treason within the definition of the criminal code.’[12] They proved these charges with a series of “overt acts,” which consisted, as Philip S. Foner has described it, ‘entirely of official statements, policy declarations, newspaper articles, and personal expressions of opinion in private and organization correspondence.’[13]  This novel definition of an overt act certainly rested on shaky constitutional grounds. Perhaps realising this, the Justice Department put together an impressive collection of attorneys to bring the prosecution to a successful finish. The Chicago Daily Tribune declared that ‘the array of legal talent now in Chicago working on these cases is perhaps the greatest which the government has called together since the famous “Beef Trust” case.’[14]

While the lawyers put together their case the Bureau of Investigation directed Special Agent George N. Murdock to arrange and classify the great mass of material captured in September. Murdock’s work must rank as one of the great bureaucratic triumphs of the FBI’s history. He drew up lists, arranged in alphabetical order, of all the newspapers, stickers and pamphlets captured during the raids. He compiled a dossier on each individual defendant, using seized correspondence, and listed and annotated the wide range of minute books, mailing lists, convention proceedings, account books and financial statements taken by federal agents. Murdock even made an “Incomplete Inventory Office Furniture,” giving historians an unrivalled view upon the table, chair and desk situation that Wobblies faced in the summer of 1917.[15] On a more serious note, Murdock’s labors allowed the Justice Department to build up a very sophisticated picture of the IWW’s finances, the number and names of its members, and its organising activities and plans. This knowledge allowed the Department to refine its indictment of the 166 defendants at Chicago and prepare new legal assaults against other Wobblies.

The federal campaign against the IWW did not stop there. The Espionage Act, along with the power to raid and indict subversives of various kinds, also gave the government the power to deny the use of the US Postal Service to publications and correspondence deemed harmful to the war effort. Justice Department officials began by harassing the IWW defence campaign and threatening foreign-born Wobblies with immigration proceedings.[16] With the date of the Chicago trial set for April 1918, the prosecution decided to prevent the IWW from using the postal service to send out their newspapers, circulate defence literature, or even solicit contributions through the post for their defence fund.

In this June 30, 1917 issue, Solidarity avoided outright opposition to the war mobilization while promoting lumber and copper strikes that the government claimed hurt the war effort. Click to see maps and details about IWW newspapers.

Prosecutors had a reliable friend in Postmaster-General Albert Burleson, a Texan who was no friend of organised labor. Burleson ordered the Solicitor General of the Post Office, W.H. Lamar, to decide whether IWW material was fit to pass through the mails.[17] That order had predictable results. Lamar banned the IWW’s two main publications, Solidarity and Industrial Worker, as well as all IWW defence bulletins and most of the organisation’s other correspondence. In one notable instance he declared that an IWW resolution against sabotage could not pass through the Postal Service on the grounds that it used the word sabotage.  Burleson reported to Congress in 1919 that all of the items that the IWW deposited for circulation at the Chicago Post Office ‘was of a questionable character and approximately 99 per cent was of a character prohibited by law.’[18] Indeed, Lamar lamented to the prosecutors that the sheer volume of IWW literature impounded by Post Office inspectors caused ‘congestion’ in the Chicago Post Office![19]

The IWW was not the only victim of Lamar, Burleson and the Justice Department. The Socialist Party was denied the use of the mails for its own publications and circulars. Lamar impounded certain issues of liberal journals like the Nation and threatened the New Republic with similar consequences. He banned a National Civil Liberties Bureau (predecessor of the ACLU) pamphlet that challenged one of his earlier decisions. He banned an Irish-American magazine that quoted Thomas Jefferson in support of Irish independence, on the grounds that it would embarrass America’s wartime ally, Britain. The director of a movie was even arrested under the Espionage Act for depicting a massacre of civilians by British redcoats during the American Revolutionary War. The title of the film, subsequently banned, was The Spirit of ’76.[20]

But the IWW always remained at the front of the censors’ minds. When Carlton Parker, Dean of the Business School at the University of Washington, wrote an article mildly sympathetic to their plight in the December 1917 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the Justice Department sprang into action. Frank Nebeker, a leading member of the team prosecuting the Wobblies at Chicago and a former attorney for copper mine companies like Anaconda and Phelps Dodge, raged to the Attorney General that Parker’s article had failed to highlight the ‘anti-patriotic, anti-war and essentially criminal’ character of the IWW.[21]Claude Porter, another member of the prosecution team, urged serious action against ‘a propaganda... being organized that has for its object creating public sentiment favourable to the I.W.W. with a view of influencing the verdict of the jury in the Haywood case.’ Nebeker further demanded that anti-IWW censorship be extended to all federal employees. They should not, he told the Attorney General, be allowed to say anything in public that might be construed as sympathetic to the Wobblies.[22]

The IWW received a brief respite from this all-pervasive censorship just before the Chicago trial was due to start. In late March 1918, their defence attorneys attempted to use federal censorship as part of a general attack on the constitutionality of the methods used by the Justice Department to obtain the evidence displayed in their indictment. Attorney General Gregory reassured the prosecution that this was temporary. ‘Move for search warrants demanded by Post Office Department soon as you can safely do so,’ he wrote to them on March 18, ‘without complicating issue respecting the papers in Haywood case.’[23] After that temporary blip the programme of surveillance and censorship went on unabated.

 Trials and Lost Opportunities

William "Big Bill" Haywood was the lead defendant in the Chicago trial that opened April 1, 1918.

 The trial of IWW leaders at Chicago finally began, appropriately enough, on April Fools’ Day, 1918. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis presided. The 166 defendants, led by their leader, William “Big Bill” Haywood, had been reduced to 113 between September and April, and this number was further reduced when one of the defendants charged with convincing Americans to resist the draft, A.C. Christie, turned up to court in military uniform and on leave from his army unit. Eleven others were also dismissed, leaving 101 defendants in all. The trial almost collapsed at the outset when the court came to choose a jury. Obvious irregularities in that process aided the prosecution. There are suggestions that Attorney General Gregory had privately urged Landis to start the selection procedure all over again after the prosecution quickly used up their challenges on prospective jurors. The selection process was indeed halted, and the existing pool of jurors dismissed, after it was discovered that members of the defence team had approached one of their relatives. The new pool proved more amenable to the prosecution than the first might have been.[24]

The trial lasted for more than four months, from April 1 through to the middle of August. The prosecution made no attempt to prove the charges listed in the indictment. Prosecutors instead read out inflammatory passages from IWW newspapers, circulars and pamphlets to the court. They ‘indicted the organization,’ Melvyn Dubofsky writes, ‘on the basis of its philosophy and its publications.’[25] Guilt by the written word replaced guilt by deed. The defence team did its best under the circumstances. George Vanderveer, the IWW’s principal attorney, brought Wobblies to the witness stand by the score. J.T. “Red” Doran, one of the IWW’s most popular agitators, lightened the mood in the courtroom when he gave testimony in June and illustrated his lecture on political economy with chalk and blackboard. ‘Usually we have questions and literature for sale and collections,’ he finished, to laughter from the court, ‘but I think I can dispense with that today.’[26]

Vanderveer refused to give a closing statement, possibly on the grounds that as the prosecution had not attempted to prove their case there was no point rebutting arguments that had not been made. It probably made no difference to the outcome of the trial. In mid-August, Judge Landis, who had studiously maintained an air of impartiality throughout the proceedings, instructed the jury on how to go about determining guilt or innocence in a case involving more than 10,000 violations of federal law. The jury retired to consider their verdict on August 17.

"Fellow workers we are in Jail for you. What are you doing for us?" reads the inscription on this photo of IWW members on their way to prison, probably 1919. UW Libraries, Labor Archives and Special Collections

They did not make the defendants wait very long. Less than an hour later they returned and found all 101 Wobblies guilty on every charge that the prosecution had thrown at them. The defence was naturally shocked; but on reflection they probably should not have been. The government and press had carefully nurtured a public image of the IWW as anarchist bomb-throwers, pro-German saboteurs and slavish supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the prosecution team had successfully reinforced that image in the minds of the jurors even if they didn’t choose to substantiate the contents of their indictment. The defendants were the kind of people who might do such dastardly things, even if nobody had proved that they had done them; this was probably the line of reasoning that led twelve jurors to find the Wobblies guilty on all counts. On August 31, Judge Landis handed the accused their sentences. Fifteen received the legal maximum of twenty years in jail, thirty-three received ten years, thirty-one received five, eighteen received lesser sentences, and together they incurred more than $2 million in fines. It later transpired than one of them, 19-year-old Ray Fanning, was not even an IWW member. Guilty or not, the defendants were quickly bundled off to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas.[27]

Other trials followed the one at Chicago. More than forty IWWs went on trial at Wichita, Kansas, in December 1919 after two years in prison conditions so poor that some of the defendants died before appearing in court. All surviving defendants were found guilty and were sentenced to between three and nine years.[28] Around twenty Wobblies initially faced similar charges at Sacramento, California, before thirty more joined them after unknown arsonists bombed the Governor’s Mansion. The police then added members of the IWW defence campaign to the indictment. Theodora Pollak, for instance, arrived to pay the bail of some of the IWW defendants. She was promptly robbed of the money by police, arrested, forced to undergo a medical exam usually performed on prostitutes, and locked up with the people she had come to set free. Again, all of the defendants were found guilty and given prison time.[29] IWW members who attended the 1917 convention of the Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union in Omaha, Nebraska were slightly luckier than the others. They were all arrested on 17 November, 1917, and were released in April 1919 without ever appearing in court.[30]

Wobblies outside prison suffered defeats as well. The mining companies, vigilantes and local, state and federal police conspired to keep them from returning to the copper mine towns of Arizona and Montana. Federal army units entered the lumber camps of the Northwest to remove the IWW’s influence there, and by the end of the war the production of lumber was carried out partly by uniformed soldiers operating under military discipline.[31] The Wilson Administration spared no expense, and left no means untried, in their campaign to root out the Wobblies wherever they happened to raise their heads and organise. Ongoing surveillance, the knowledge gleaned from the material captured in September 1917, and the removal of the entire national leadership to prison made this task much easier. The vast majority of victories that IWWs won against the federal government at this time were moral rather than actual ones. After a year of protests, for instance, an IWW local in Salt Lake City forced the Justice Department to return a typewriter, a waste paper basket and two lead pencils that federal agents had carried away in the September raids.[32]

IWW prisoners just before surrendering at federal penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas. UW Libraries, Labor Archives and Special Collections

The “guilty” Wobblies remained in prison during the great strikes of 1919, the Palmer Raids and all the repression of the First Red Scare. They remained there even when the new Republican Administration of Warren G. Harding decided to release Eugene Debs, the four-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party who had been tried under the Espionage Act for making an anti-war speech in 1918, from jail in 1921. Their cause suffered further when Big Bill Haywood and eight of their other leaders skipped bail and escaped to Soviet Russia in 1921, even as the question of whether the IWW should support or oppose the Bolshevik government divided Wobblies in and out of prison.

Justice Department attorneys exacerbated these splits with an offer to commute the sentences of all IWWs on the condition that they promised to ‘be law-abiding and loyal to the Government of the United States and will not advocate or encourage disloyalty or lawlessness in any form.’[33] Some of the defendants, mentally and physically exhausted by their treatment by the federal government, gave in and made that promise, which essentially prevented them from engaging in IWW activities in the future. The rest refused to surrender in this way and remained behind bars. Eventually, in the mid to late 1920s, the last holdouts were released from jail and the federal government’s wartime suppression of the IWW concluded, more than half a decade after the end of the war. 

The raids, trials, censorship and surveillance of the IWW during the First World War did not destroy the organisation, which actually reached its peak membership in the early 1920s and still survives into the present. But the federal campaign against the IWW in wartime deprived it of its entire national leadership, its records and correspondence, and even the tools needed for routine administrative tasks, at a crucial time in its history. There is no way to tell whether, in the absence of this concerted and almost certainly unconstitutional attack by the state against a political movement, the IWW might have ever come close to achieving its aim of a society run by the workers for the workers. They might, at least, have imbedded themselves more deeply within the American labor movement. The federal campaign against the Wobblies certainly made sure that neither outcome ever became possible.

At a time when the Espionage Act has again become the tool of choice for dealing with dissent, and when government surveillance of the people has reached levels undreamt of a century ago, the fate of the IWW during the First World is a cautionary tale that we can still learn from today. We should not take from that tale the lesson that radical movements are always destined to be smashed by state repression. It does mean, however, that these movements must be able to exploit divisions within that state if they wish to survive and get what they want. Lenin once wrote that a revolutionary situation occurred when the lower classes did not want to live in the old way and the upper classes could not continue in the old way. The IWW was a revolutionary movement, with revolutionary aims, but it never found itself during the First World War in a revolutionary situation that it had any chance to exploit. The upper classes were very happy to continue in the old way and used any and all means to preserve it. IWWs found themselves instead in a counter-revolutionary situation, pursued by counter-revolutionary forces. The fact that they survived after the war in any form at all is a tribute to the idealism, the determination, and the militancy of Wobblies across the United States and beyond.

 Copyright (c) Steven Parfitt, 2016

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[1]  “US District Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan to the Attorney General,” October 31, 1917. Note: all correspondence cited here is from Melvyn Dubofsky and Mark Naison (eds), Department of Justice Investigative Files: Part 1, The Industrial Workers of the World (University Publications of America, Frederick MD, 1989).

[2] “Charges of Treason in Warrants Served on the Pacific Coast,” The Washington Post, September 6, 1917.

[3] David Montgomery, “The “New Unionism” and the Transformation of Workers Consciousness in America, 1909-22,” Journal of Social History 7:4 (1974), 513.

[4] Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 39.

[5] Robert Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America From 1870 to the Present (Boston, 1978), 116.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Michael R. Belknap, “The Mechanics of Repression: J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau of Investigation and the Radicals 1917-1925,” Crime and Social Justice 7 (1977), 50;  “1918 Report of the Attorney General,” 14 -15. Note: all congressional reports cited here are sourced from the US Congressional Serial Set (Readex). Available at: http://www.readex.com/content/us-congressional-serial-set-1817-1994.

[8] “The Espionage Act.” Available at: http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/espionageact.htm.

[9] “William C. Fitts to Frank Nebeker,” July 30, 1918.

[10] Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago, 1969) p505.

[11] “Government Suppresses "Reds" In Many Cities,” The Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1917.

[12] “I.W.W. Indictments Charge Crime Nearest to Treason,” The New York Times, September 19, 1917.

[13] Philip S. Foner, “United States of America Vs. Wm. D. Haywood, et. al.: The I.W.W. Indictment,” Labor History 11:4 (1970), 505.

[14] “High Official Working Here on I.W.W. Cases,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1917; “The Daily Bulletin of the IWW Defense News Service,” April 8, 1918. The Beef Trust Case was an antitrust proceeding by the Justice Department against an alleged interstate meat monopoly in 1905.

[15] “Affidavit of George S. Murdock at the Chicago District Court,” March 1918.

[16] Goldstein, Political Repression in America, 118.

[17] For Burleson’s battles against a union whose members fell under the wartime administration of the Post Office Department, the Commercial Telegraphers Union of America, see my essay “Whither Industrial Democracy? The Federal Government and Organized Labour in the Telegraph Industry During the First World War,” Journal of American Studies 48:2 (2014), 517-39.

[18] “1919 Report of the Postmaster General,” 112-3.

[19] “William H. Lamar to William C. Fitts,” March 15, 1918.

[20] For a fuller description of the federal censorship and propaganda campaign against the IWW during the First World War see my essay “Bringing the IWW Back In: Industrial Democracy and the Repression of Radicalism in the United States During the First World War,” Socialist History, 46 (2015).

[21] “Frank Nebeker to the Attorney General,” December 4, 1917.

[22] “Frank Nebeker to the Attorney General,” February 21, 1918.

[23] “Attorney General to Charles F. Clyne,” March 18.

[24] For a fuller account of the trial see Philip Taft, “The Federal Trials of the IWW,” Labor History 3:1 (1962), 57-91.

[25] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 435.

[26] Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York, 1967), 229-30.

[27] Taft, “Federal Trials of the IWW,” 75.

[28] Ear Bruce White, “The United States v. C.W. Anderson et al.: The Wichita Case, 1917-1919,” in Joseph Robert Conlin (ed), At the Point of Production: The Local History of the IWW (Westport, CN, 1981), 153-60; Clayton R. Koppes, “The Kansas Trial of the IWW, 1917-1919,” Labor History 16:3 (1975), 342-54.

[29] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 438-41.

[30] Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 442-3; David G. Wagaman, “’Rausch Mit’: The I.W.W. in Nebraska During World War I,” in Joseph Robert Conlin (ed), At the Point of Production: The Local History of the IWW (Westport, CN, 1981), 127-31.

[31] For the army-run union that the government set up in the Western lumber camps see Robert Tyler, “The Government as Union Organizer: The Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47:3 (1960), 434-451.

[32] “Isaac Blair Evans to Attorney General Gregory,” December 18, 1918; “Claude Porter to William V. Ray,” December 26, 1918

[33] “Memorandum for the Attorney General by James Finch,” November 28, 1922.

. Copyright (c) Peter Cole, 2015