UK Britain, Anarchist Federation ORGANISE! #84 - Book review: The Wobblies in their Heyday

(en) Britain, Anarchist Federation ORGANISE! #84 - Book
review: The Wobblies in their Heyday - The rise and destruction of the
Industrial Workers of the World during the Word War One Era. by Eric
Thomas Chester.

Praege ---- This book is refreshing in that it is written by an actual member of the IWW, 
currently active in Glasgow and thus marks itself off from the usual detached academic 
approach. ---- The Industrial Workers of the World was a mass workers’ organisation that 
emerged in 1905 in the USA. It soon gained the nickname of The Wobblies. It led two bitter 
strikes in Lawrence and Paterson in 1913 that established its radical and fighting 
reputation. Despite the Paterson and Lawrence strikes, it failed to get as much traction 
in the eastern States as it hoped. In the West it was a different matter. Here large 
numbers of miners, loggers, and farmworkers joined up to the IWW, some leaving the 
established unions for an organisation that openly proclaimed the abolition of the wages 
system: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no 
peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working
people and the few, who make up the employing
class, have all the good things of life. Between these
two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of
the world organize as a class, take possession of the
means of production and abolish the wage system”

(from the IWW Preamble)

Chester is convinced that this radical stance
led, not to failure as standard accounts
maintain, but to many workers joining because
they did indeed want to transform society.

With the coming of the First World War the IWW actually
increased its influence, particularly in the Western
states, where the war was unpopular. An economic
boom accompanied and was indeed set off by the war,
which raised the fighting morale of workers. By August
1917 IWW membership had increased to 150,000.
Until the coming of the war the Federal government
only regarded the IWW as an irritant. However
this changed quickly once the United States had
entered the War. In particular the IWW organisation
of copper workers was seen as a threat because
copper was essential for the war effort, as it was
used in guns, bullets, vehicles, and warships.
Government officials and advisers now began
to focus on the IWW. John W. Davis, the
solicitor general and acting attorney general,
talked about the “extermination” of the IWW.

A relentless attack began on the IWW until it was
greatly reduced in size and influence, and was rent
by bitter divisions. The Federal Government also
attacked the Socialist Party of America, but this party
did not have the organisational cohesion of the IWW.

Only particular sections of the SP, the most vociferously
anti-war, were targeted, and the federal authorities
did not aim at its destruction lock, stock, and barrel.
Chester says: “The coordinated campaign of
repression directed at the IWW was a unique
occurrence in U.S. history. In the ferocity of the assault
and the scope of the attack, the government’s offensive
on the IWW remains unequalled.” In order to do this
the U.S. Government flouted many civil liberties.

The book deals with the strike of copper miners in
Bisbee, Arizona, which led to an unprecedented
mass deportation of said strikers - 1200 in total! -
in 1917 and the horrific lynching of IWW organiser
Frank Little in Butte, Montana. Butte was the largest
copper-mining area in the USA and Wobblies, in
alliance with left-wing socialist miners, created a
strong local workers organisation. In response,
company gunmen and the Army bloodily intervened.

The IWW stance on the War is also dealt
with in detail. The IWW had always opposed
war and militarism, but its leadership now
peddled a muted approach in the hope that
this would deflect the mounting repression.
It was militants like the martyred Frank Little
who pushed for a clear anti-war stance.

In 1917 the Federal government, in coordination
with state governments, made membership of
the IWW a crime. The Army intervened in many
areas, and soldiers were ordered to disrupt IWW
meetings. The Post Office banned IWW papers in
the mail. Some foreign members were arrested
and deported. Hundreds of Wobblies were
jailed with mass trials in Chicago, Sacramento,
and Wichita. Many IWW leaders received long
sentences at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas,
with punitive hard labour that affected their health.

As a result of this the IWW was crippled and
weakened. Chester claims that in 1924 internal
dissensions as a result of this repression, fostered by
the authorities among the prisoners in Leavenworth,
caused a damaging split.

But should we accept this scenario. Yes, there was
bitterness between those who stood by a collective
amnesty and those who obtained an individual one.
But many other factors were at work with the 1924
disaster. Not least of these were the differences
between the decentralisers and the centralisers
within the IWW, between the local branches and the
Industrial Unions and the General Executive Board
and General Headquarters. Also in play were those
IWW members who had now joined the Communist
Party and who backed the centralisers. It should
be borne in mind that the IWW had refused to join
the Moscow-backed Red International of Labour
Unions. As a result the American Communist Party
worked actively towards the destruction of the IWW.

Some of Chester’s other theses should be questioned
too. He says that the IWW was wed to “the macho
bravado” of the idea of sabotage as developed by
French anarchists like Emile Pouget and supported
by leading Wobblies like Big Bill Haywood. He
claims this helped initiate the repression that came
down on the IWW during the War. Sabotage was
used in various ways to support strikes in the pre-
WW1 period but really should it not be argued that
the repression that the IWW suffered was because
it was damaging the war effort, which Chester
himself clearly states. Whether the IWW advocated
sabotage or not was a by the by, as the Federal
Government were looking for any excuse to attack it.

Did the IWW’s failure to develop a clearer
stanceon the War haveaneffectonits ability
to attract more support as Chester claims?

He asserts that anti-war feeling was strong in
the Western states and that “millions of workers
were looking to the IWW for leadership”. Certainly
Haywood and the General Executive Board refused
to oppose the draft and refused to come out openly
in support of draft resisters. But would the IWW have
been able to act as an organising force for workers?
Was anti-war feeling as strong as Chester claims?

Certainly whether the IWW adopted a clear anti-
war position on all fronts, it was victimised because
it affected the war effort full stop. As Chester
argues, it would have been better to have taken a
clear position to “uphold its commitment to building
a social movement pointing to a new society”.

Certainly whilst the repression against the IWW
during WW1 was unprecedented, perhaps more
could be made of the fact that this opened the way for
a following wave of repression known as the Palmer
Raids, in the period after the war. A. Mitchell Palmer,
the new Attorney General launched a series of raids
against radicals (and not primarily the Communist
Party as Chester states but in particular anarchists)
resulting in the deporting of 500 radicals from the
USA, including anarchists like Emma Goldman.

Perhaps also a comparison with the FBI
Cointelpro campaign against Black Panthers, civil
rights groups, the American Indian Movement
etc. in the 1960s could have been made.
There is much of interest in this book, in particular
much information about the debates on the
War within the IWW, and it certainly deserves a
read, despite the criticisms made in this review.