HALLELUJAH, I’M A BUM: INDUSTRIALISM, PROGRESSIVE REFORM, AND

THE ROLE OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD AS A HOME FOR

MIGRANT WORKERS

A Report of a Senior Study

By

Randall Puckett

Major: History

Maryville College

Fall, 2014

Date Approved _____________, by ________________________

Faculty Supervisor

Date Approved _____________, by ________________________

Division Chair

   

 

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ABSTRACT

In June of 1905 a group of over two hundred labor organizers and socialists met

in Chicago for the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Their aim was to establish a labor organization founded on the principle of class struggle

and devoted to the emancipation of the working class from the “slave bondage” of

capitalism. However, the IWW’s radicalism would later alienate the organization from

many in the socialist movement as well as constrain its ability to organize semiskilled and

skilled workers. Many unskilled workers, however, were drawn to the IWW precisely

because of its radicalism. This study explores the factors that contributed to the IWW’s

role as a home for those workers who were neglected by Progressive-era reforms and

excluded by the mainstream labor movement. Chapter one therefore traces the origins of

the industrial revolution in the United States, focusing on the sociopolitical implications

of the transition from a handicraft to a factory-based system of production. Chapter two

analyzes the Progressive Era, viewing reform as a particular set of responses to the social

ills wrought by industrialism. Finally, chapter three examines the formation and

development of the IWW, concentrating on its appeal for migrant workers.

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Introduction 1

Chapter I

A Brave New World: The Industrial Revolution in America 9

Chapter II

The Progressive Era and the Rise of Corporate Liberalism 29

Chapter III

No Worker Left Behind: The IWW and the Migrant Worker 55

Conclusion 78

Works Cited 81

 

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INTRODUCTION

On September 1, 1908, a short distance from the Portland, Oregon railroad yards,

James Walsh warmed himself by a campfire, amid the grim surroundings of the city’s

hobo “jungle.” Walsh, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),

drank a cup of coffee as he waited for his train to arrive. Although the jungle served as a

temporary respite from the menacing gaze of railroad security personnel, or “bulls” as

they were known by the hoboes, Walsh and his eighteen companions eagerly awaited

word from a friendly switchman that their “Special car” – that is to say, an empty cattle

car – had arrived. With two piercing “blasts of the locomotive engine,” as Walsh himself

remembered, the train was “starting on its journey, and simultaneously nineteen men, all

dressed in black overalls and jumpers, black shirts and red ties, . . . [were] in a ‘cattle car’

and on our way.”1

The Overalls Brigade, as they called themselves, barnstormed their way across the

Pacific Northwest, from Portland to Centralia, Spokane to Seattle, hopping the rails and

taking refuge in hobo encampments along the way. Undeterred by a night spent in jail for

trespassing, these hobo rebels soon shifted their focus toward the east and their ultimate

destination: Chicago and the fourth annual convention of the Industrial Workers of the

World. As an organizer for the Spokane local of the IWW, Walsh was determined to

consolidate the migrant workers of the American West into the foot soldiers of a

revolutionary working-class movement.

                                                                                                                         1  James  H.  Walsh,  “IWW  ‘Red  Special’  Overalls  Brigade,”  Industrial  Union  Bulletin  (September  19,  1908),  included  in  Joyce  L.  Kornbluh,  ed.  Rebel  Voices:  An  IWW  Anthology  (Oakland,  CA:  PM  Press,    2011),  84;  see  also  Tom  DePastino,  Citizen  Hobo:  How  a  Century  of  Homelessness  Shaped  America  (Chicago:  University  of  Chicago  Press,  2003),  123-­‐28.  

 

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As their journey east progressed, Walsh and his fellow Wobblies (a nickname

given to members of the IWW) stopped periodically at union halls to spread their

revolutionary message, while financing their trip through the sale and distribution of

IWW literature – the most popular of which was the Little Red Songbook: Songs to Fan

the Flames of Discontent. Its contents became popular standards among hoboes, even

those who were otherwise unfamiliar with the IWW, its principles, ideology, goals, or

tactics. When the Overalls Brigade found themselves bereft of a union hall, they would

simply commandeer a street corner on which to sing from their secular book of hymns.

This excerpt from a song written by folk singer Harry McClintock would come to be their

unofficial anthem:

“Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” (Tune: “Revive Us Again”)

O, why don’t you work

Like other men do? How in the hell can I work

When there’s no work to do.

(Chorus) Hallelujah, I’m a bum, Hallelujah, bum again,

Hallelujah, give us a handout – To revive us again.

O, why don’t you save

All the money you earn? If I did not eat

I’d have money to burn.

(repeat Chorus)

I can’t buy a job, For I ain’t got the dough,

So I ride in a box-car, For I’m a hobo.2

                                                                                                                         2  Harry  McClintock,  “Hallelujah,  I’m  a  Bum,”  in  Rebel  Voices,  133.  

 

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Such songs were included in many Wobbly publications and serve to powerfully,

sometimes irreverently, illustrate the plight of migrant workers during this period. Indeed,

by 1910, at the height of the Progressive Era, the United States was home to 10,400,000

unskilled male workers. More than 3,500,000 of them worked as lumberjacks,

construction workers, ice cutters, railroad section hands, seasonal harvesters, and

numerous other jobs that could be classified as migratory.3 Unstable employment

compelled these workers to move across the country from town to town, state to state, in

search of work. The majority of itinerants were concentrated in the American West,

typically single, young men working in labor camps and company towns owned by

logging and mining firms. Many migrant workers travelled along the rails in empty cattle

cars, for the railroads served as the arteries of an emerging hobo subculture. Yet they

were effectively disfranchised by virtue of their itinerancy, lacking permanent addresses

and thereby the ability to vote. They existed instead on the fringes of American life, a

wandering class of industrial refugees.4

This study aims to explore how it came to be that the IWW’s role in the

Progressive Era was to serve as a home for those workers who were neglected by

progressive reform and excluded by the mainstream labor movement. The IWW had

been, since its founding in 1905, committed to the principle of revolutionary industrial

unionism. In other words, they objected to the exclusive nature of craft unionism,

practiced by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which privileged skilled workers,

                                                                                                                         3  Carleton  H.  Parker,  Introduction  to  The  Casual  Laborer:  And  Other  Essays  (New  York:  Harcourt,  Brace,  and  Howe,  1920),  17.  4  Mark  Wyman,  Hoboes,  Bindlestiffs,  Fruit  Tramps,  and  the  Harvesting  of  the  West  (New    York:  Hill  and  Wang,  2010),  ch.  3.    

 

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most of whom were white, male, and native-born. Craft unionism, they argued, kept the

working class divided in its revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Industrial

unionism, by contrast, was meant to embrace all workers, including the most

marginalized and alienated elements within the American working class: immigrants,

racial minorities, women, and unskilled workers in general. The inimitable William “Big

Bill” Haywood, perhaps the most famous Wobbly, would say at the founding convention,

it “did not make a bit of difference if he is a negro or a white man . . . an American or a

foreigner,” the IWW intended to organize the entire working class.

The IWW leadership was, moreover, composed of radicals from the labor and

socialist movements. They were united in their support of industrial unionism; united in

their aim of achieving socialism. Again, Haywood at the founding convention:

When the corporations and the capitalists understand that you are organized for the express purpose of placing the supervision of industry in the hands of those who do the work, you are going to be harassed and you are going to be subjected to every indignity and cruelty that their minds can invent.5 By the time of the 1908 convention, however, an ideological rift had developed

between anti-political anarchists and political socialists in the IWW on precisely how to

bring about the Wobbly’s revolutionary aims.6 The arrival of the Overalls Brigade in

Chicago for the fourth annual convention was therefore no exercise in fancy, but rather a

planned maneuver by which the hoboes were to tilt the balance of power within the IWW

                                                                                                                         5  William  D.  Haywood,  “Opening  Speech,”  Minutes  of  the  Founding  Convention  of  Industrial  Workers  of  the  World,  June  27,  1905,  accessed  at  http://www.iww.org/about/founding/part1,  n.p.;  hereafter  referred  to  as  Minutes  of  the  Founding  Convention.      6  Philip  S.  Foner,  History  of  the  Labor  Movement  in  the  United  States,  Vol.  IV:  The    Industrial  Workers  of  the  World,  1905-­‐1917  (New  York:  International  Publishers,  1965),  81-­‐113;  Melvyn  Dubofsky,  We  Shall  Be  All:  A  History  of  the  Industrial  Workers  of  the  World,  2nd  ed.  (Urbana,  IL:  University  of  Illinois  Press,  1988),  67-­‐83.    

 

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leadership and decidedly change the trajectory of this revolutionary industrial union. In

what was a veritable coup d’état, the western migrants, serving as an official delegation

to the convention, threw their spirited and militant support behind the so-called “direct

actionists.”7 Led by William Trautmann and Vincent St. John, the direct actionists

opposed parliamentary tactics and political action in favor of direct action, initiated by

the workers themselves without the intervention of politicians, political parties, or other

mediators. Such methods came to be associated with an ideology known as anarcho-

syndicalism, defined by onetime Wobbly and later general-secretary of the Communist

Party of America, William Z. Foster, in the following manner:

In its basic aspects, syndicalism, or more properly anarcho-syndicalism, may be defined very briefly as that tendency in the labor movement to confine the revolutionary class struggle of the workers in the economic field, to practically ignore the state, and to reduce the whole fight of the working class to simply a question of trade union action. Its fighting organization is the trade union; its basic method of class warfare is the strike, with the general strike as the revolutionary weapon; and its revolutionary goal is the setting up of a trade union ‘state’ to conduct industry and all other social activities.8

The political socialists were led by Daniel De Leon, the erudite but fractious

leader of the Socialist Labor Party. Although De Leon repudiated the various iterations of

“reform” socialism, which were in vogue during the Progressive Era, his doctrinaire

brand of revolutionary Marxism chiefly emphasized political action. Yet the division

within the IWW was a combination of personality and ideological differences. Indeed, De

Leon was a proponent of the Marxist-Leninist concept of political vanguardism.

According to labor historian Melvyn Dubofsky, De Leon envisioned himself as an

American Lenin, sharing the latter’s “iron will as well as his intense desire to command

                                                                                                                         7  Foner,  102-­‐9.  8  William  Z.  Foster,  “Syndicalism  in  the  United  States,”  The  Communist  (July  1937),  1044.  

 

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men and to make history.”9 De Leon apparently viewed himself as the leader of the

struggle against capitalism. He would derisively refer to the roughhewn itinerants as the

“bummery,” which merely deepened the suspicions of the anarcho-syndicalists that the

autocratic De Leon was coopting the IWW merely to serve the purposes of the SLP.

With the support of the Overalls Brigade, Trautmann and St. John led an

insurgency to oust De Leon and expurgate the union of the “political socialists.” They

successfully, albeit duplicitously, used the Credentials Committee to deny De Leon a seat

at the convention, arguing on a technicality that he “was a delegate . . . from the Office

Workers’ Local Union, when, as an editor, he really should have been assigned to the

Printing Workers’ Local Union.”10 De Leon and his followers protested to no avail. In an

act of defiance, the recalcitrant De Leon would soon establish a short-lived rival, the

Detroit IWW, which proved to be little more than an ineffectual organ of the SLP. The

Industrial Workers of the World, by contrast, was free to pursue its strategy for

emancipating the working class from “the bondage of wage slavery.”11

Yet the story of the IWW’s formative years reveals a substantive disagreement on

the efficacy of political action in a society in which the political system was increasingly

dominated by corporate interests. Indeed, De Leon would intransigently insist that

revolution must be waged through political action, “that the economic organization (that

is, the trade union) must be subordinate to the political party.”12 For migrant workers

such as James Walsh and his comrades, this ideology was as out of touch with their daily

struggles as the reform agenda promulgated by most Progressives.

                                                                                                                         9  Dubofsky,  We  Shall  be  All,  76.    10  Foner,  108.  11  Minutes  of  the  Founding  Convention.  12  Dubofsky,  76.  

 

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To understand how the IWW came to be associated with the migrant worker, it is

important to place the organization in context. Thus, the first chapter explores the

transformative effects of the industrial revolution on American life. The second chapter

explores the reform movements that began with the Populists in the 1890s and

culminated in the Progressive Era, viewing the reform movements as a set of responses to

the social ills and labor unrest wrought by industrialism. The final chapter explores the

origins and early history of the IWW, likewise viewing it as radical response to both

industrialism and reform.

The IWW specifically formed in response to the rise of corporate liberalism in the

Progressive Era. According to historian James Weinstein this new corporate liberal social

order was “formulated and developed under the aegis and supervision of those who then,

as now, enjoyed ideological and political hegemony in the United States: the more

sophisticated leaders of America’s largest corporations and financial institutions.”13

Corporate liberalism was predicated on close relations between leaders in government,

business, and labor. Opponents of this new order, such as the IWW, charged that its

agenda was primarily to protect corporate interest and stabilize capitalism.

While many workers saw their conditions improved during this period, this study

is about those workers who were remained marginalized. Specifically, it is about the

IWW, its ideological framework, its merits and flaws – for it is the combination of these

factors which makes the Wobblies so intriguing. The IWW’s uncompromising radicalism

espoused international working-class solidarity, yet its leaders disdain for craft unionism

often became a disdain for skilled workers. Skilled workers, for their part, wanted more

                                                                                                                         13  James  Weinstein,  Introduction  to  The  Corporate  Ideal  in  the  Liberal  State:  1900-­‐1918  (Boston:  Beacon    Press,  1968),  ix.    

 

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from their trade unions than mere oratory and ideological purity. Anarcho-syndicalism

likewise alienated the IWW from the political socialists, who were the dominant force on

the American left. Yet it is these very flaws that made the IWW the ideal advocate for

those workers who had the least to lose and the most to gain from fundamental change.

 

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CHAPTER ONE

A BRAVE NEW WORLD: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICA

There is no man of the least reflection, who has not observed, that the effect in all ages and countries, of the possession of great and undue wealth, is, to allow those who possess it, to live on the labor of others.

-Thomas Skidmore, The Rights of Man to Property, 182914 The industrial revolution was perhaps the most transformative development in the

history of human civilization. It changed the way humans live, interact, and produce what

they need to survive. Pockets of the United States began to industrialize in the 1820s and

1830s, resulting in the gradual displacement of the handicraft system of production with

that of the factory system. In the coming decades, wealth and power began to concentrate

in the hands of those who owned the factories. The resulting inequities contributed to

tumultuous intervals of social and labor unrest. Prior to the Civil War, workers created

the first trade unions; by the 1880s, they established the first sustained, national labor

movement. It is out of that tradition that the Industrial Workers of the World emerged. To

understand the IWW, we must first explore the profound changes that visited the country

as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth.

The Artisan’s World

As discontent grew evermore palpable in the years preceding the American

Revolution, British Parliament echoed with the popular Tory refrain that the Americans

were not oppressed. To this sentiment, the statesman Edmund Burke answered: “Mr.

                                                                                                                         14  Thomas  Skidmore,  The  Rights  of  Man  to  Property:  To  Make  it  Equal  among  the  Adults  of  the  Present  Generation  (New  York:  Burt  Franklin,  1829),  3.  

 

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Speaker, the question is not whether the Americans are oppressed or not; but whether

they think they are.”15

There was in fact considerable truth in both arguments. While colonial elites

stood to benefit greatly from political independence, working-class lives and patterns of

work in Britain’s North American colonies significantly resembled those of their

European counterparts. The handicraft, or artisanal, system of production prevailed in

most colonial cities. Goods were produced on a custom-order basis in small workshops

owned by a master craftsman who, in turn, employed one or two journeymen and an

apprentice.16 Artisanal guilds and especially the institution of apprenticeship were very

restrictive and could be (for the apprentice) quite oppressive. Founder of the New York

Tribune and famed abolitionist editor, Horace Greely, wrote of the harsh conditions he

experienced as a printer’s apprentice during the early national period:

When I was but eleven years hearing that an apprentice was wanted in the newspaper office at Whitehall [N.Y.], I accompanied my father to that office, and tried to find favor in the printer’s eyes; but he promptly and properly rejected me as too young, and would not relent; so I went home downcast and sorrowful. No new opportunity was presented till the Spring of 1826, when an apprentice was advertized for by the publisher of The Northern Spectator, at East Poultney, Vt. . . . I walked over to Poultney, saw the publishers, came to an understanding with them, and returned; a few days afterward . . . my father took me down, and verbally agreed with them for my services. I was to remain till twenty years of age, be allowed my board only for six months, and thereafter $40 per annum in addition to my clothing. So I stopped, and went to work . . .

The organization and management of our establishment were vicious; for an apprentice should have one master; while I had a series of them, and often two or three at once . . . we had a succession of editors and of printers. I had not been there a year before my hands were blistered and my back lamed by working off the very considerable edition of the paper on an old-fashioned, tow pull Ramage (wooden) press, - a task beyond my boyish strength, - and I can scarcely recall a

                                                                                                                         15  Edmund  Burke,  quoted  in  John  Graham  Brooks,  American  Syndicalism:  The  IWW  (New  York:  MacMillan  Company,  1913),  36.  16  Melvyn  Dubofsky  and  Joseph  A.  McCartin,  American  Labor:  A  Documentary  History  (New  York:  Palgrave  MacMillan,  2004),  10.  

 

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day wherein we were not hurried by our work. . . . While I lived at home, I had always been allowed a day’s fishing, at least once a month in Spring and Summer, and I once went hunting; but never fished, nor hunted, nor attended a dance, nor any sort of party or fandango in Poultney. I doubt that I even played a game of ball.17

There was, however, consolation for the callow apprentice. Indeed, the guild

system effectively guaranteed them eventual ascendency to the position of master

craftsman. Moreover, strenuous periods in the workshops of preindustrial America often

alternated with periods of relative leisure. The workshops themselves nourished a

distinctive artisanal culture, often characterized by frequent breaks of eating, drinking,

and play. David Johnson, a perceptive chronicler of nineteenth century America,

observed around 1830 that drinking was so prevalent in the culture of a shoemaker’s shop

that it necessitated a bawdy vocabulary to describe the activity:

The shoemaker’s vocabulary of terms applied to drinking and drunkenness was quite extensive, and some were peculiar to the locality and craft. If a man was very drunk, he was ‘blind as a bat,’ or ‘well corned,’ or ‘well stove in,’ or ‘slewed,’ or ‘cocked,’ or ‘well mashed.’ In later times such were said to ‘carry a heavy turkey,’ or a ‘brick in their hat.’

Various expedients were resorted to, to keep up the supply of black-strap [a rum drink]. The one who made the most or the fewest shoes, the best or the poorest, paid the ‘scot.’ Bets were made on all occasions. . . . Small games of chance, the stakes of which were black-strap were frequently made.18 Intervals of leisure and relaxation were not confined to the shoemaker’s shop,

however. A shipwright from the 1820s remembered with fondness the frequent visitations

to the shipyard from a local women who brought food and refreshments for the workmen

to enjoy:

In our yard, at half-past 8 A.M., Aunt Arlie McVane, a clever kind-hearted but awfully uncouth, rough sample of the ‘Ould Sod,’ would make her welcome appearances in the yard with her two great baskets, stowed and checked off with

                                                                                                                         17  Horace  Greely,  Recollections  of  a  Busy  Life  (New  York:  JB  Ford  and  Company,  1868),  61-­‐3.    18  David  N.  Johnson,  “Work  and  Play  in  a  Shoemaker’s  Shop,”  circa  1830,  from  Sketches  of  Lynn:  The  Changes  of  Fifty  Years  (Lynn,  MA:  Thomas  P.  Nichols,  1880),  47.  

 

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crullers, doughnuts, gingerbread, turnovers, pieces, and a variety of sweet cookies and cakes; and from the time Aunt Arlie’s baskets came in sight until every man and boy, bosses and all, in the yard, had been supplied . . . trade was a brisk one. Aunt Arlie would usually make the rounds of the yard and supply all hands in about an hour, bringing the forenoon up to half-past nine, and giving us from ten to fifteen minutes ‘breathing spell’ during lunch; no one every hurried during cake time.19 Given the pleasure with which workers greeted leisure time, it might then seem

paradoxical to learn that artisans took considerable pride in the quality of their

craftsmanship and the value of hard work. Indeed, skills honed over the many years from

apprenticeship to master craftsman combined with a powerful sense of autonomy to

create a uniquely artisanal work ethic.

Few Americans of the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries better exemplified

artisanal values than Benjamin Franklin. Long before he became the sage of American

independence, Franklin was apprenticed in the early 1720s to his older brother James,

founder and publisher of the New-England Courant. Aspiring to write and knowing that

his brother would refuse to print his pieces, Franklin surreptitiously invented a

pseudonym, Silence Dogood, and began submitting articles. The Silence Dogood essays

were enthusiastically received by the Courant, subsequently published by the paper, and

proved especially popular with readers – inaugurating a prolific literary career for

Franklin during which he would elucidate many of the developing cultural values of late-

colonial America.20

                                                                                                                         19  “A  Workingman’s  Recollections  of  America,”  circa  1820s,  Knight’s  Penny  Magazine,  1  (1846),  97-­‐112,  quoted  in  Herbert  G.  Gutman,  Work,  Culture,  and  Society  in  Industrializing  America:  Essays  in  American  Working-­‐class  and  Social  History  (New  York:  Vintage  Books,  1976).  20  Walter  Isaacson,  “Silence  Dogood  Introduces  Herself,”  p.  9,  in  Walter  Isaacson,  ed.,  A  Benjamin  Franklin  Reader  (New  York:  Simon  and  Shuster,  2003).    

 

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In his writings, Franklin often denounced idleness as an unpardonable sin while

extolling the many virtues of industriousness, such as in this 1757 excerpt from Poor

Richard’s Almanac: “If we are industrious,” he admonishes his readers, “we shall never

starve; for At the working man’s house hunger looks in, but dares not enter. . . . If you

were a servant, would you not be ashamed that a good master should catch you idle,

when there is so much to be done for yourself, your family, your country, your king.”21

The primacy of work ethic permeated artisanal culture, his observations

illustrating both the artisan’s pride in manual labor and the growing public ignominy

attached to idleness. In an 1811 letter to the Independent Mechanic, a seasoned workman

rather truculently denounces the ostentatious manner in which many “young fellows”

peruse their daily mail, thus demonstrating that productive labor, in the minds of many

workmen, distinguished the industrious worker from the effete aristocrat:

Mr. Editor, there is an evil which I should extremely well like to see some notice taken of. I allude to a certain class of men whom I often observe in my route to my daily labour (being a mechanic) walking with slow and solemn pace, perusing their letters on their way from the post office. I do not mean to complain, Mr. Editor, at their anxiety to see the contents of their letters, for that I know is natural to us all; but it is the affectation and self-consequence displayed in the manner. . .

It is to be hoped, Sir, that by thus noticing these pompous, vain and ridiculous practices of a certain class of young men . . . [we can] put a stop to a foolish pride in which they too far indulge themselves, and teach them a lesson, that the honest, blunt, and unaffected manners of a young mechanic, is far more praise-worthy, than the pedantic foppish airs of a would-be gentleman.22

Despite such affectations of populism, political power in the United States

remained the near-exclusive domain of the propertied classes. The very land itself

conferred political citizenship and social privilege. Moreover, property often entailed, for

                                                                                                                         21  Benjamin  Franklin,  except  from  Poor  Richard’s  Almanac,  in  Jared  Sparks,  ed.,  The  Works  of  Benjamin  Franklin,  Vol.  2  (Boston:  Hilliard,  Gray,  and  Compay,  1840),  95-­‐6.  22  “A  Letter  to  the  Independent  Mechanic,”  1811,  reprinted  in  Howard  B.  Rock,  ed.,  The  New  York  City  Artisan,  1789-­‐1825:  Documentary  History  (Albany,  NY:  State  University  of  New  York  Press,  1989),  50-­‐1.  

 

 14

those who owned it, a sense of social stewardship over the political affairs of a given

society. The propertyless, having no stake in society, were susceptible to demagoguery

and caprice. Or in the words of New York’s Chancellor James Kent, demagogues

appealed to “a tendency in the poor to covet and to share the plunder of the rich; in the

debtor to relax or avoid the obligations of contract; in the majority to tyrannize over the

minority . . . ; in the indolent and profligate, to cast the whole burthens of society upon

the industrious and the virtuous.”23

Similar attitudes about the relationship between property and political power

informed the creation of the Constitution of the United States. At the constitutional

convention in June of 1787, James Madison, the chief prophetically expounded on the

nature and purpose of American government:

Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability. Various have been the propositions; but my opinion is, the longer they continue in office, the better will these views be answered.24

The ideal of a republic guided by the virtues of farmer-statesmen had endured to

varying degrees in the likes of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, but the peculiar set

of circumstances surrounding American independence and the constitutional convention

had the inadvertent effect of increasing the sphere of democratic participation in the

American polity. After the Revolution, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, the elite

                                                                                                                         23  Quoted  in  Merrill  D.  Peterson,  ed.,  Democracy,  Liberty,  and  Property:  The  State  Constitutional  Conventions  of  the  1820s  (Indianapolis,  IN:  N.pub.,  1966),  194.    24  James  Madison  (June  26,  1787),  quoted  in  Notes  of  the  Secret  Debates  of  the  Federal  Convention  of  1787,  Taken  by  the  Late  Hon.  Robert  Yates,  Chief  Justice  of  the  State  of  New  York,  and  One  of  the  Delegates  from  That  State  to  the  Said  Convention,  Yale  University’s  “Avalon  Project:  Documents  in  Law,  History,  and  Diplomacy,”  accessed  at  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/yates.asp.    

 

 15

statesmen who constituted the federalist and antifederalist factions had led “each of their

several members to follow his own interest; and it was impossible to wring the power

from the hands of a people which they did not detest sufficiently to brave, their only aim

was to secure its good will at any price.”25 This phenomenon led constitutional law

scholar Carl B. Swisher to conclude that “the most democratic laws were . . . voted by the

very men whose interests they impaired.”26

Consequently, artisanal workers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries stood on the precipice of a transformative political development. From the

1770s to the 1840s every state legislature modified its voting qualifications to give all

white males the franchise. White male suffrage had not been a purely “top-down”

achievement, however, for it demonstrates the nascent political influence of ordinary

(white male) workers in a preindustrial republic. Increasingly, ordinary Americans were

associating equality with freedom, invoking principles from the Revolution to justify

“free suffrage.” This excerpt from a letter that appeared in a Maryland newspaper in 1776

illustrates the upsurge in democratic values that accompanied the Revolution:

Every poor man has a life, a personal liberty, and a right to his earnings, and is in danger of being injured by government in a variety of ways; therefore it is necessary that these people should enjoy the right of voting for representatives, to be protectors of their lives, personal liberty, and their little property which, though small, is yet, upon the whole, a very great object to them. It would be unjust and oppressive in the extreme to shut out the poor in having a share in declaring who shall be the lawmakers of their country, and yet bear a very heavy share in the support of government. Would not the rich complain grievously if they had no power of electing representatives?27

                                                                                                                         25  Alexis  de  Tocqueville,  Democracy  in  America,  translated  by  Henry  Reeve  (New  York,  1838),  38.  26  Carl  B.  Swisher,  Roger  B.  Taney  (New  York,  1935),  47-­‐8.  27  Letter  by  “Watchman,”  Maryland  Gazette  (Annapolis),  August  15,  1776,  in  Eric  Foner,  ed.,  Voices  of  Freedom:  A  Documentary  History,  Second  Edition,  Vol.  1  (New  York:  W.W.  Norton  and  Company,  2008),  114-­‐6.  

 

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While the political structure of the US was polyarchical, the socioeconomic

structure of American society meant that ordinary citizens – armed with the power of the

franchise – could exercise considerable influence over their political representatives.

Therefore, the implications of white male suffrage were especially significant for

artisans. Responding to artisans’ demands that suffrage be granted to renters as well as

householders, “state constitutions in the early nineteenth century . . . did more than

simply bestow suffrage on many rural and urban householders: they explicitly

enfranchised men who did not own farms, businesses, or even homes of their own.”28

Seeking the endorsement of mechanics’ associations, militia companies, and other such

tradesmen, Democratic-Republican politicians were particularly amenable to these

interests. In short, the age of Jacksonian democracy had arrived.29

The growing political influence of ordinary white males was due in part to the

circumstances they inherited in the aftermath of the Revolution as well as their own

activism, but this was facilitated by a preindustrial socioeconomic structure that afforded

them a relative freedom that was unmatched by their counterparts in Europe and

elsewhere. Compared with alternative labor systems, such as indentured servitude and

slavery, artisans (as well as yeoman farmers), enjoyed “such autonomy . . . as was seldom

to be found in either previous or subsequent human experience,” according to historian

David Montgomery. Yet just as white male suffrage was democratizing American society

                                                                                                                         28  David  Montgomery,  Citizen  Worker:  The  Experience  of  Workers  in  the  United  States    with  Democracy  and  the  Free  Market  during  the  Nineteenth  Century  (New  York:  Cambridge  University  Press,  1994),  15.  29  See  Michael  F.  Holt,  The  Rise  and  Fall  of  the  American  Whig  Party:  Jacksonian  Politics  and    the  Onset  of  the  Civil  War  (New  York:  Oxford  University  Press,  1999);  and  Lawrence  Frederick  Kohl,  The  Politics  of  Individualism:  Parties  and  the  American  Character  in  the  Jacksonian  Era  (New  York:  Oxford  University  Press,  1989).  

 

 17

in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a concurrent set of changes was impinging

on the economic relations of the country: following Britain’s lead, the United States was

embarking on a path toward industrialization. The question remained to be answered

whether the democratic gains of the Jacksonian era would survive the market revolution

and the rise of the factory system that followed?

Markets, Factories, and Wage Labor

The American Revolution unleashed three historical developments, which were

accelerated after the War of 1812: “the spread of market relations, the westward

movement of the population, and the rise of a vigorous political democracy.”30 These

developments were not mutually exclusive but emerged in conjunction with one another.

Yet the consequences they reaped were not necessarily compatible. Signs of an imperiled

handicraft system emerged in the US as early as the late eighteenth century when in 1790

an immigrant from England, Samuel Slater, established America’s first factory at

Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The artisanal system (and the traditional culture that it

nourished) were on the verge of irrevocable changes.

The artisanal system of production that developed in the British North American

colonies nevertheless shaped (and was shaped by) an increasingly materialistic and

commercial culture. Historian Gordon Wood writes:

Americans had experienced a transformation in the way they related to one another and in the way they perceived of themselves and the world around them. And this transformation took place before industrialization, before urbanization, before railroads, and before any of the technological breakthroughs usually associated with modern social change.31

                                                                                                                         30  Eric  Foner,  Give  Me  Liberty!  An  American  History,  Vol.  1,  2nd  ed.  (New  York:  W.W.  Norton  and  Company,  Seagull  Edition,  2009),  303.  31  Gordon  S.  Wood,  Empire  of  Liberty:  A  History  of  the  Early  Republic,  1789-­‐1815  (New    York:  Oxford  University  Press,  2009),  2.  

 

 18

The nascent American nation indeed remained overwhelming agrarian during this period,

but American culture, especially in the North, was perhaps the most commercialized in

the world. Echoing the values exemplified by Benjamin Franklin, Wood writes that

“nowhere in the Western world was business and working for profit more praised and

honored.”32 The ethos of commercialism would give cultural force to a set of

interconnected demographic changes and technological innovations that would ultimately

result in dramatically new economic relations in the United States; historians refer to

these changes collectively as the market revolution.

To appreciate the scope of the market revolution it must therefore be emphasized

that during the colonial period “no important alterations were made in sailing ships, no

major canals were built, and manufacturing continued to be done by hand, with skills

passed on from artisan to journeyman and apprentice.”33 At the turn of the nineteenth

century American life thus continued to follow centuries-old patterns work and social

relations. In this age of homespun, subsistence agriculture and handicraft production

prevailed. Those Americans who had already migrated across the Appalachian Mountains

found themselves isolated from the markets of the eastern seaboard and forced to provide

for themselves the provisions they needed to survive. Distance and geographical barriers

placed nearly insuperable constraints on trade and commerce, such that many rural

communities relied on cashless, barter systems of trade well into the nineteenth century.

Yet historian Eric Foner contends that “the market revolution represented an

acceleration of developments already under way in the colonial era. . . . : [S]outhern

planters were marketing the products of slave labor in the international market as early as

                                                                                                                         32  Ibid.  33  Foner,  304.  

 

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the seventeenth century,” such that, by the eighteenth century, American colonists were

fully incorporated into Britain’s commercial empire34 The early decades of the nineteenth

century witnessed a series of innovations that accelerated these changes and radically

transformed the very nature of trade and commerce. The steamboat, canal, and railroad

made it possible to traverse vast distances of geographical space, linking Americans to

international and domestic markets in ways that were previously impossible.

Among the many innovations from this period, it was Eli Whitney’s 1793

invention of the cotton gin that most profoundly shaped the social, economic, and

political history of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Whitney’s

invention revolutionized the process of harvesting cotton, facilitating the political and

economic ascendency of the Cotton Kingdom and thereby leaving the ignominious (if

unintentional) legacy of bolstering the institution of chattel slavery. In 1793, the US

produced 5 million pounds of cotton, but the demand increased exponentially such that,

by 1820, nearly 170 million pounds of “white gold” was being harvested. It thus calcified

the sectional divisions that would precipitate the Civil War. But, for the purposes of

elucidating the rise of the factory system, the cotton gin itself is emblematic of what

historian Peter N. Stearns has called “the most important single development in human

history over the past three centuries”: the industrial revolution.35

Having begun in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, the

industrial revolution constituted a gradual (but ultimately complete) reorganization of

society around new methods of production. These new methods “progressively replaced

                                                                                                                         34  Ibid.,  305.  35  Peter  N.  Stearns,  The  Industrial  Revolution  in  World  History,  4th  ed.  (Boulder,  CO:  Westview  Press,  2013),  12.  

 

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humans and animals as the power sources of production with motors powered [first by

water and later] by fossil fuels.”36 This significantly increased the total output of goods as

well as the productivity of individual workers. Importantly, the central organizational

feature of industrialization was the factory, which increased the number of laborers

involved in the production process and therefore the total output of goods. If further

“increased the amount of specialization; tasks were subdivided, so the total production

was increased even aside from the new technology.”37 The obvious economic

implications nevertheless belie the profound social, cultural, and political implications of

industrialization.

It is somewhat misleading to then assert that a particular country has

industrialized, for, in truth, industrialization occurs sporadically and unevenly across time

and place. In the United States, the first sustained factories emerged in small pockets of

the antebellum Northeast. Between 1789 and the 1820s, as indentured servitude virtually

disappeared and slavery became entrenched in the southern states, the country’s growing

population and expanding markets provided unprecedented economic opportunities.

Responding to these market changes, some master artisans shifted “from custom-order

production to manufacture for future demand.”38 This shift must not be underestimated.

These erstwhile artisans were in the process of transforming themselves into a new class

of merchant-manufacturers, that is, the first generation of factory-owners and industrial

capitalists.

                                                                                                                         36  Ibid.,  16.  37  Ibid.  38  American  Labor,  11.  

 

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This transition reconfigured the previous relations of production that prevailed

under the artisanal system. “No longer working alongside their journeymen and

apprentices in the traditional workshop style,” historians Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph

A. McCartin observe that these “new-style capitalists . . . sought to increase productivity

among their employees, hence lowering the cost of production and widening profit

margins.”39 The very notion of an employer-employee relationship was anathema to the

sense of autonomy and personal freedom that had developed within the artisanal culture.

As the factory-based economy developed, scores of journeymen saw their opportunities

decrease and their access to positions of authority diminish; consequently, the gap

between master and journeyman, employer and employee, grew ever wider.

The ideal of an “agrarian republic” or “artisanal republic” comprised of

independent yeoman farmers and producer-citizens was withering before the inexorable

reality of industrial capitalism. Three decades after Slater build his factory in Pawtucket,

America’s industrial revolution arrived in earnest when the Boston Manufacturing

Company established several large mills in the 1820s along the Merrimac River in

Lowell, Massachusetts. The Company “relied on large numbers of young women

recruited from the economically strapped farms of New England for its workforce.”40 In

the ensuing decades, the mass-production system solidified as “household manufactures

fell from $1.70 per capita in 1840 to $0.78 in 1860.”41

But the Lowell experience further illustrates the evolving socioeconomic relations

of an emergent industrial society, increasingly characterized by class divisions. Yet these

                                                                                                                         39  Ibid.  40  Ibid.,  44.  41  Ibid.  

 

 22

early experiments in industrial capitalism were not without their peculiarities. Having

been developed as a planned factory town, the Lowell mill owners endeavored to exercise

paternalistic control over their predominantly female workforce. The “factory girls” were

required to lodge in boardinghouses under the strict supervision of “overseers,” who

were, in effect, forerunners of modern factory foremen. “The doors [of the

boardinghouses] must be closed at ten o’clock in the evening,” as was stipulated in the

Hamilton Manufacturing Company’s book of regulations, “and no person admitted after

that time, without some reasonable excuse.”42

The Lowell factories were, moreover, rather transparent schemes of social

engineering: “The keepers of the boardinghouses,” read one set of regulations, “must give

an account of the number, names and employment of their borders, when required, and

report the names of such as are guilty of any improper conduct, or are not in the regular

habit of attending public worship.”43 The Hamilton Manufacturing Company considered

its employees engaged for twelve months upon agreeing to a contract. Factory girls who

did not comply with regulations or left work before their contract expired were not

“entitled to a regular discharge.”44 In exchange for their labor, Lowell workers were paid

“monthly, including board and wages.”45

But more than this, the factory system attempted to regulate discipline, personal

behavior, morality, even time. According to historian E.P. Thompson, industrial practices

aimed at inculcating in the working classes an entirely new conception of work habits and

                                                                                                                         42  From  the  Handbook  to  Lowell,  reproduced  in  John  R.  Commons  et  al.,  eds.,  Documentary  History,  Vol.  7  (Cleveland:  The  A.H.  Clark  Company,  1911),  137-­‐8.  43  Ibid.  44  Ibid.,  135-­‐6.  45  Ibid.  

 

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time-sense: “In these ways – by the division of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money

incentives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports - new labour

habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed.”46

Thus, life in these early factories became synonymous with regimentation and

toil. And yet many young unmarried women flocked to factory towns like Lowell,

nonetheless. Their reasons were many and varied, but often entailed a desire for

educational opportunities as well as a measure of economic independence. In the Lowell

Offering, a worker-edited periodical, one of the workers, Josephine L. Baker observed,

There is a class, of whom I would speak, that work in the mills, and will while they continue in operation. Namely, the many who have no home, and who come here to seek, in this busy, bustling ‘City of Spindles,’ a competency [economic independence] that shall enable them in after life, to live without being a burden to society, - the many who toil on, without a murmur, for the support of an aged mother or orphaned brother or sister.47 Factory life at Lowell afforded young women access to “lectures, evening schools

and libraries,” but the work schedule precluded “the time to improve them as we ought,”

Baker writes.48 Many of her objections to the Lowell system foreshadow grievances that

would become endemic to industrial capitalism – grievances that would only intensify

over the coming decades. She writes,

There are many things we do not like; many occurrences that send the warm blood mantling to the cheek when they must be borne in silence, and many harsh words and acts that are not called for. There are objections also to the number of hours we work, to the length of time allotted to our meals, and to the low wages allowed for labor; objections that must and will be answered; for the time has come when something, besides the clothing and feeding of the body is to be thought of; when the mind is to be clothed and fed; and this cannot be as it should be, with the present system of labor.49

                                                                                                                         46  E.P.  Thompson,  “Time,  Work-­‐Discipline,  and  Industrial  Capitalism,”  Past  &  Present,  No.  39  (Dec.,  1967),  90.  47  Josephine  L.  Baker,  “A  Second  Peep  at  Factory  Life,”  Lowell  Offering,  Vol.  5  (1845),  97-­‐100.  48  Ibid.  49  Ibid.  

 

 24

In a sense, the Lowell “factory girls” were among the first-generation immigrants

to industrial society. But the rapid expansion of markets in the earliest decades of

industrialization was delimited by continual labor shortages. In the 1840s and 1850s,

however, successive waves of immigration significantly expanded the ranks of industrial

wage laborers. Indeed, over 4 million people entered the US during this period, most of

them from Ireland and Germany. The preponderance of immigrants settled in the

northern states where factory jobs were relatively copious and competition with slave

labor was a nonfactor. Economic growth nevertheless concealed an increasingly

polarized society. The same growth that created the wealthy merchants and industrialists

likewise created the struggling factory workers, unskilled dockworkers, and domestic

seamstresses.50

In an influential 1840 essay titled “The Laboring Classes,” transcendentalist

preacher and activist Orestes Brownson warned his readers of the looming dangers of

extreme socioeconomic inequality: “No one can observe the signs of the times with much

care, without perceiving that a crisis as to the relation of wealth and labor is approaching.

It is useless to shut our eyes to the fact, and like the ostrich fancy ourselves secure

because we have so concealed our heads that we see not the danger.”51 Departing from

fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s emphasis on individualism and self-

realization, Brownson’s insistence on the importance of “social arrangements” strikingly

presages the ideas of Karl Marx. “The old war between the King and the Barons is nigh

                                                                                                                         50  Foner,  319-­‐20.  51  Orestes  Brownson,  “The  Laboring  Classes,”  Boston  Quarterly  Review,  Vol.  3  (July  1840),  358-­‐95.  

 

 25

ended,” he writes, “and now commences the new struggle between the operative and his

employer, between wealth and labor.”52 He continues,

All over the world this fact stares us in the face, the workingman is poor and depressed, while a large portion of the non-workingmen . . . are wealthy. It may be laid down as a general rule, with but few exceptions, that men are rewarded in an inverse ratio to the amount of actual service they perform. Under every government on earth the largest salaries are annexed to those offices, which demand of their incumbents the least amount of actual labor either mental or manual.53 Anxiety and discontent were not exclusive prerogatives of New England

intellectuals, however, for the demise of the artisanal way of life and the rise of mass-

production industry affected every conceivable facet of American social and political life.

With workdays averaging from 11.5 to 13.5 hours, the combination of massive

immigration and the introduction of machinery drove weekly pay down from $12 in 1835

to $8 in 1845.54 Such were the vicissitudes of the free market. Increasingly vulnerable,

workers themselves searched for political language to express their plight. Industrial

capitalism, many argued, had imposed upon workers conditions that were akin to slavery.

As ideologues of the system equated wages and contracts with freedom, many industrial

workers sought emancipation from “wage slavery.”55

                                                                                                                         52  Ibid.  53  Ibid.  54  American  Labor,  45.  55  Philosopher  David  Ellerman  provides  a  trenchant  analysis  of  the  relationship  between  wage  labor  and  choice  in  “Capitalism  and  Workers’  Self-­‐Management,”  in  G.  Hunnius,  G.D.  Garson,  and  J.  Case,  eds.,  Workers’  Control  (New  York:  Random  House,  1973),  10-­‐11.  He  writes:  “It  is  a  veritable  mainstay  of  capitalist  thought  .  .  .  that  the  moral  flaws  of  chattel  slavery  have  not  survived  in  capitalism  since  the  workers,  unlike  the  slaves,  are  free  people  making  voluntary  wage  contracts.  But  it  is  only  that,  in  the  case  of  capitalism,  the  denial  of  natural  rights  is  less  complete  so  that  the  worker  has  a  residual  legal  personality  as  a  free  ‘commodity-­‐owner.’  He  is  thus  allowed  to  voluntarily  put  his  own  working  life  to  traffic.  When  a  robber  denies  another  person’s  right  to  make  an  infinite  number  of  other  choices  besides  losing  his  money  or  his  life  and  the  denial  is  backed  up  by  a  gun,  then  this  is  clearly  robbery  even  though  it  might  be  said  that  the  victim  is  making  a  ‘voluntary  choice’  between  his  remaining  options.  When  the  legal  system  itself  denies  the  natural  rights  of  working  people  in  the  name  of  the  prerogatives  of  capital,  

 

 26

The growing disparities between labor and capital consequently precipitated the

birth of the labor movement in the United States. The upsurge in trade unionism prior to

the Civil War remained localized struggles, however, as erstwhile journeymen fought to

improve wages and conditions. Employers often battled fiercely to suppress trade unions,

arguing that it represented an attempt to “monopolize labor.” In Philadelphia, for

instance, when journeymen carpenters collectively demanded a $1.25 a day wage, master

carpenters adopted an invective-laden resolution stating,

A combination of Journeymen Mechanics had been formed, under the name of the Trades’ Union, arbitrary in its measures, mischievous in its effects, subversive of the confidence and good feeling that formerly existed, and equally calculated to destroy the independence of both the master carpenters and journeymen in their contracts and private relations. . . . Combinations of this description are indebted for their origin to the discontented and disorganizers in a monarchical government; they are not of American birth; they are arbitrary and oppressive in their operations, subversive of all regularity of business, and destructive of confidence in the parties concerned; it is the mother of countless evils, and the source of no good.56 Union members responded in turn with an enumeration of their grievances and a

defense of collective action, stating that “the constitution of our country secures to all its

citizens the right to associate for the promotion of their own interests, . . . [while] the

resolutions of the employers have more than ever convinced us of the danger we would

be exposed to without our union.”57

The proliferation of workers’ organizations during the antebellum period would

be curtailed by an economic downturn of 1837, but the impulse for collective action

                                                                                                                         and  this  denial  is  sanctioned  by  the  legal  violence  of  the  state,  then  the  theorists  of  ‘libertarian’  capitalism  do  not  proclaim  institutional  robbery,  but  rather  they  celebrate  the  ‘natural  liberty’  of  working  people  to  choose  between  the  remaining  options  of  selling  their  labor  as  a  commodity  and  being  unemployed.”  56  “Employers  Attack  Trade  Unions,”  in  Pennsylvanian  (March  17,  1836),  reproduced  in  Commons  et  al.,  eds.,  Documentary  History,  Vol.  6,  50-­‐4.  57  “Journeymen  Carpenters  Defend  Trade  Unionism,”  in  Pennsylvanian  (March  21,  1836),  reproduced  in  Commons  et  al.,  eds.,  Documentary  History,  Vol.  6,  54-­‐7.  

 

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imbued the emergence of a conscious working-class political agenda. Meanwhile, the

creation of the National Trades Union in the 1830s heralded an early attempt at a national

labor movement. Although the NTU collapsed shortly thereafter, improved economic

conditions in the 1850s and 1860s fueled the proliferation of many national labor unions,

including the National Typographical Union (1854), United Cigar Makers (1856), and

Iron Molders (1859). Labor shortages during the Civil War further strengthened the hand

of northern industrial workers in their attempts to organize for better wages and

conditions.

Thus, the United States emerged from the Civil War a strikingly different society

from what it had been only fifty year earlier. Industrialization obliterated social and

economic patterns that had prevailed for centuries. Although hardly a utopia, the

socioeconomic relations under the artisanal system of production nevertheless afforded

master craftsmen, journeymen, and even apprentices considerable freedom and

autonomy. This is primarily because the distinctions between master and journeyman

were minimal, as journeymen (and apprentices) were effectively masters in waiting. Few

could have imagined the changes wrought by industrialization or the disparities in wealth

and power that these changes entailed. In the post-Civil War era, working people would

continue to organize and fight to reassert their dignity. But industrial capitalism would

prove to be a resilient and evolving foe.

In the following chapter, one of the major responses to industrial capitalism will

be explored: the Progressive movement. Generally speaking, progressives sought to

curtail the worst injustices of the system not by fundamental changes but by reform. It

would prove to be a time of inclusion for some and exclusion for others in America’s

 

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working class. Just as it is necessary to understand the IWW as a product of

industrialization, so too was the IWW shaped by an environment of reform. For the

Wobbly’s role during this period was to serve as a home for those workers neglected by

reform.

 

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CHAPTER TWO

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA AND THE RISE OF CORPORATE LIBERALISM

Think for yourselves; ask yourselves whether this widespread fact of poverty is not a crime, and a crime for which every one of us, man and woman, who does not do what he or she can do to call attention to it and do away with it, is responsible.

-Henry George, “The Crime of Poverty,” 188558 The industrial revolution transformed American life. Among the many changes,

industrialism gradually displaced the traditional handicraft system of production, gave

rise to the factory system, and birthed the first industrial proletariat in the United States.

It was out of these conditions that the American labor movement and later the Industrial

Workers of the World developed. Yet the IWW must be understood also in the context of

the Progressive Era. Just as reform was a response to industrialism, the IWW was a

response to the political, social, and economic implications of reform.

Progress and Its Discontents

The United States had become by the turn of the twentieth century the most

dynamic and powerful industrial nation in the world. Its economy boasted unparalleled

advancement in those industries which were thought to distinguish a modern, industrial

nation: coal and steel, petroleum-based enterprises, chemicals, food processing, and

electrical equipment. Whereas canals and railroads had once been built with the aid of

foreign investment, American businesses were producing surplus capital in such volumes

that it allowed them to pursue opportunities both at home and abroad. Indeed, the late

                                                                                                                         58  Henry  George,  “The  Crime  of  Poverty,”  in  The  Radical  Reader:  A  Documentary  History  of  the  American  Radical  Tradition,  ed.  by  Timothy  Patrick  McCarthy  and  John  McMillian  (New  York:  The  New  Press,  2003),  238.  

 

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nineteenth century witnessed the concentration of wealth and capital on a scale

unimagined in previous historical epochs. Consequently, the US became the home of

some of the largest business enterprises in the world, including Standard Oil,

International Harvester, Singer Sewing Machine, and the G. Swift Packing Company.

The zenith of economic consolidation came in 1901 when J.P. Morgan acquired Andrew

Carnegie’s iron and steel interests, combining them with his own to form United States

Steel, the first billion dollar corporation.59

Unprecedented economic growth triggered an equally unprecedented movement

of people, for growth would not have been possible without the labor of millions of men

and women, native and immigrant alike. From the end of the Civil War to 1920, the

United States transitioned from an overwhelmingly rural society (according to the Census

Bureau, one in four people in 1870 lived in an urban area) to one in which over half the

population lived in urban areas. As industrial capitalism subdued the continent, such

demographic changes continuously remade the human mosaic of America’s cities. Many

native-born Americans, meanwhile, abandoned life on the farms for wage labor in the

mines, mills, and factories associated with the industrial city. But these changes were

increasingly shaped by a prodigious wave of immigration to the US from regions which

had previously contributed relatively few people to American society: “between 1880 and

1920,” notes historian Nell Irvin Painter, “the provenance of the foreign-born population

in the United States shifted away from Germany, Ireland, northwestern Europe, and

China to central, eastern, and southern Europe.”60 While some of the arrivals created

                                                                                                                         59  Dubofsky,  American  Labor,  89,  and  We  Shall  be  All,  1.    60  Nell  Irvin  Painter,  Introduction  to  Standing  at  Armageddon:  The  United  States,  1877-­‐1919  (New  York:  W.W.  Norton,  1987),  xxxiv.  

 

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thriving middle-class communities, urban poverty became the reality for most immigrant

workers.  

The result of the changes, moreover, meant that the US claimed the most

heterogeneous labor force in the world. New immigrants from southern and eastern

Europe, historian Melvyn Dubofsky reminds us, “satisfied an almost insatiable demand

for unskilled laborers willing to work and be paid by the day or hour, and their children

flooded the ranks of the machine operators demanded by mass-production industry.”61

Outside of the South, where African Americans provided the principal source of domestic

labor, this need was predominantly satisfied by young women of Irish, German, and

Scandinavian ethnicity, as well as by native-born women of rural origins. Numerous

Asian workers toiled in various occupations in the American West, as did their Mexican

counterparts in the Southwest. At the same time, multitudes of single, young men, native

and immigrant, were recruited by padrones (or labor contractors) to become migrant

workers in seasonal, construction, and agricultural industries. The American labor force

was consequently as fragmented as it was diverse, with wage and occupational gaps

exacerbated by ethnic and racial hierarchies.

Yet despite pervasive divisions within the working class, the systemic challenges

of industrial capitalism impinged on all workers irrespective of their racial, ethnic, or

religious backgrounds. In the workplace, foremen and managers sought to implement

rules, incentivize productivity, and generally regulate workers’ behavior in such a way as

to increase efficiency and maximize profits. The preindustrial values and work habits,

which were detailed in the previous chapter, were to be either extinguished altogether or

                                                                                                                         61  Dubofsky,  American  Labor,  90-­‐1.  

 

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carefully manipulated. Skilled workers, by force of their knowledge over the production

process, continued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to exercise

considerable power in the workplace. It was necessary, argued Frederick Winslow

Taylor, the “father of modern management practices,” to harness this power and direct it

toward the interests of management. In his 1911 critique of the prevailing inefficiencies

of industrial management, The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor wrote,

In an industrial establishment which employs say from 500 to 1,000 workmen, there will be found in many cases at least twenty to thirty different trades. The workmen in each of these trades have had their knowledge handed down to them by word of mouth. . . . This mass of rule-of-thumb or traditional knowledge may be said to be the principle asset or possession of every tradesman. . . . [The] foremen and superintendents [who comprise the management] know, better than anyone else, that their own knowledge and personal skill falls far short of the combined knowledge and dexterity of all the workmen under them. . . . They recognize the task before them as that of inducing each workman to use his best endeavors, his hardest work, all his traditional knowledge, his skill, his ingenuity, and his goodwill – in a word, his ‘initiative,’ so as to yield the largest possible return to his employer.62

As Frank Gilbreth phrased it, the core aim of scientific management, or more

precisely Taylorism, was “the establishment of standards everywhere, including

instructions cards for standard methods, motion studies, time study, time cards, [and]

records of individual output.”63 In addition to Taylorism, historian David Montgomery

identified corporate welfare as an alternative type of managerial reform. Welfare reform,

Montgomery argues, was characterized by “paternalistic measures initiated by employers

with the primary intention of changing their employees’ social attitudes, work habits, and

                                                                                                                         62  Frederick  Winslow  Taylor,  The  Principles  of  Scientific  Management  (New  York:  Harper  and  Brothers  Publishers,  1913),  31-­‐2.    63  Frank  B.  Gilbreth,  Primer  of  Scientific  Management,  2nd  ed.  (New  York:  D.  Van  Nostrand  Comapany,  1914),  36.    

 

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life styles.”64 Again, these measures illustrate a recurrent tension over work habits, which

for many immigrant workers continued to be influenced by preindustrial values. New

“sociological departments” were established,  as one contemporary observer put it, with

the express intent of inculcating “thrift, sobriety, [and] initiative” in immigrant workers.65

It is important, however, to note that scientific management impinged primarily

on skilled workers. The President of Remington Typewriter Company, John Calder, said

in 1913 that scientific management could “barely be said to have made any impression

outside of machine shops.”66 Accordingly, the increasing ubiquity of mechanization

meant that skilled trades were in steady decline, and, by extension, that the majority of

industrial jobs were in the process of being deskilled. As will be discussed later in this

chapter, the gradual disappearance of craft distinctions would greatly influence the

formation of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW, given these changing

conditions, insisted on the superiority of industrial unionism as an alternative organizing

principle to the craft unionism espoused by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the

most powerful labor organization of the era.

And yet, perhaps no feature better exemplified the socioeconomic structure of

industrial capitalism than a growing disparity of income and wealth. Indeed, in the years

1897 to 1914 a combination of factors – price inflation, immigration, and domestic

migration – severely delimited workers’ real wages and incomes. The richest 1 percent of

the population, by contrast, controlled approximately one-fourth of the total wealth; the

                                                                                                                         64  David  Montgomery,  “Immigrant  Workers  and  Managerial  Reform,”  in  Workers  Control  in  America:  Studies  in  the  History  of  Work,  Technology,  and  Labor  Struggles  (New  York:  Cambridge  University  Press,  1979),  32.  65  W.H.  Beveridge,  quoted  in  Don  D.  Lescohier,  The  Labor  Market  (New  York:  Macmillan  Company,  1919),  268.  66  John  Calder,  “Overvaluation  of  Management  Science,”  Iron  Age  91  (1913),  605.    

 

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top 5 percent, nearly one-half. The social tensions underlying such extreme wealth

inequality were exacerbated by cycles of mass unemployment and periodic economic

downturns. The latter half of the nineteenth century had been marked by two major

depressions (1873-77, 1893-97) and one minor depression (1883-85), the conditions of

which exposed many working people to veritable destitution. It is understandable,

therefore, that the period was characterized by a degree of labor unrest previously

unimagined. Industrial conflict met a tumultuous inauguration in 1877, the “year of

violence,” with the great railroad strikes, but a succession of strike waves punctuated the

era, reaching explosive crescendos in 1885-6, 1892-95, 1899-1905, and 1910-13.67

At the turn of the twentieth century, therefore, the United States had been

transformed by the combined forces of industrialization, technological advances,

migration, and urbanization. But rapid change had wrought unanticipated problems for

American society, resulting in a powerful sense among many that something was

fundamentally wrong with prevailing social arrangements. “The evils arising from the

unjust and unequal distribution of wealth,” wrote the reformer Henry George in 1879,

“are not incidents of progress, but tendencies which must bring progress to a halt.”68

Consequently, George would advocate preemptive measures to ameliorate poverty, lest

the victims of injustice become subject to “the manifold evils which flow from it.”69 His

popular book, Progress and Poverty, popularized the notion that poverty and wealth

inequality had placed insuperable constraints on economic opportunity for most

Americans.

                                                                                                                         67  Dubofsky,  American  Labor,  92.  68  Henry  George,  Progress  and  Poverty:  An  Inquiry  into  the  Cause  of  Industrial  Depression,  and  of  the  Increase  of  Want  with  Increase  of  Wealth  [1879]  (New  York:  D.  Appleton  and  Company,  1886),  489.  69  Ibid.,    

 

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In the period from 1890 to 1920, this idea came to imbue many of the loosely

affiliated reform movements of the Progressive Era. Progressive concerns ranged from

the unfettered growth of corporate monopolies and diminishing opportunities for ordinary

Americans to the problem of rampant political and municipal corruption. Yet these

concerns were pervaded by a conscious fear of the recurrent social and labor unrest that

characterized the preceding decades. Hence, it must be emphasized that the growing

popularity of socialism in the early decades of the twentieth century and the formation of

the IWW in 1905 occurred contemporaneously with these broader reform movements. In

order to better understand the rise of American socialism and the birth of the IWW, it is

first necessary to ask, who were the progressives? What were their objectives? And what

was their relationship to the working class?

The Progressive Movement and the Problem of Class

The unfettered excesses of the Gilded Age were a manifestation of the growth and

expansion of industrial capitalism, which created enormous wealth and propelled

economic growth in the United States during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The

wealth and economic growth, however, were not evenly distributed but concentrated in

the hands of a minority of increasingly powerful industrialists. It created a socioeconomic

landscape which was increasingly polarized between rich and poor, employer and

employee, capital and labor. Few individuals better epitomized the sense of being “caught

in between” the extremes of wealth and poverty, without really trusting either, than

President Theodore Roosevelt. In an article written for Century Magazine when he was

only twenty-eight, Roosevelt expressed his disdain for the effete, aristocratic tendencies

of rich Americans:

 

 36

The wealthier, or, as they would prefer to style themselves, the ‘upper’ classes, tend distinctly towards the bourgeois type, and an individual in the bourgeois stage of development, while honest, industrious, and virtuous, is also not unapt to be a miracle of timid and short-sighted selfishness. It is unfortunately true . . . that the general tendency among people of culture and high education has been to neglect and even to look down upon the rougher and manlier virtues, so that an advanced state of intellectual development is too often associated with a certain effeminacy of character.70 Roosevelt’s contempt for the rich should not be misinterpreted to mean that he

was an advocate for the masses. In the same article, the future President wrote:

“workingmen, whose lives are passed in one unceasing round of narrow and monotonous

toil, not unnaturally are inclined to pay heed to the demagogues and professional labor

advocates who promise if elected to try to pass laws to better their condition.”71 His

writings often describe the masses as unwieldy, irresponsible, and easily misled. “Any

sign of organized power among the people frightened him,” observes historian Richard

Hofstadter, such that Roosevelt’s personal attitude toward the labor movement was

unapologetically hostile for many years.72 What Roosevelt venerated above all were what

he called the “manly” virtues of courage, bravery, and self-reliance – to be cultivated in

the unforgiving environs of nature and war. Yet it was his evolving conception of

government as mediator between the competing class interests that would prove most

influential for succeeding generations.

While class divisions would continue to influence the nature and course of the

progressive movement, it would nevertheless be inaccurate to generalize about

progressives based on the predilections of Theodore Roosevelt. Indeed, the President was

                                                                                                                         70  Theodore  Roosevelt,  “Machine  Politics  in  New  York  City,”  Century  Magazine  (Nov.  11,  1886),  n.p.  71  Ibid.  72  Richard  Hofstadter,  The  American  Political  Tradition:  And  the  Men  Who  Made  It  (New  York:  Vintage  Books,  1948),  270.  

 

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deeply contemptuous of the most fervent middle-class reformers, “rabble-rousers” as he

viewed them, a diverse group encompassing journalistic muckrakers, social workers,

enlightened businessmen, and child welfare and labor reformers, as well as issue-oriented

political activists. If one were pressed to identify attributes shared by the aforementioned

groups, it might be said that the majority were middle-class urbanites, most of them

responding to the nascent social ills and political corruption emblematic of industrial

cities.73

The spirit of reform, however, first emerged not in the cities but the countryside,

as millions of farmers in the 1890s joined the Populist movement in an effort to combat

mounting economic hardships and curb corporate influence over government. Established

in 1891, the People’s Party (or “Populists”) advocated a variety of reform issues,

including the free coinage of silver, a graduated income tax, regulation of railroads, an

eight-hour workday, the right of labor to organize, and direct election of US senators.

Calling for the abolition of national banks, moreover, the Populists declared in their

“Omaha Platform” of 1892 that “the land, including all the natural sources of wealth, is

the heritage of the people, and should not be monopolized for speculative purposes.”74

Although the Populists tried to appeal to urban laborers, the movement was

fundamentally agrarian in its ethos. There was, in this respect, a reactionary element

working within the Populist movement, resisting the inexorable advance of industrialism

                                                                                                                         73  Glenda  Elizabeth  Gilmore,  ed.,  Who  Were  the  Progressives?  (New  York:  Bedford-­‐St.  Martin’s,  2002),  3-­‐17.  74  “Populist  Principles:  The  Omaha  Platform,  1892,  in  Leon  Fink,  ed.,  Major  Problems  in  the  Gilded  Age  and  the  Progressive  Era  (Lexington,  MA:  D.C.  Heath  and  Company,  1993),  182;  the  collection  hereafter  referred  to  as  Major  Problems.  

 

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by seeking to retain the withering vestiges of Jacksonian democratic values and clinging

to the myth of a Jeffersonian republic comprised of independent, small farmers.

As its influence faded, the Populist Party (and much of its platform) was

effectively absorbed in 1896 by the Democratic Party during the presidential campaign of

William Jennings Bryan. Yet the Populists’ suspicion of concentrated economic and

political power endured and found its highest social and political expression in the form

of urban, middle-class reformers. These progressive reformers combined this suspicion

with a distinctively middle-class faith in bureaucratic rationalization, social efficiency,

the propitious potential of industrialism, and the moral rehabilitation of the downtrodden.

And their energies were channeled primarily into three particular issues: ameliorating

urban poverty, municipal and political reform, and challenging corporate monopolies.75

Exposing social ills and political corruption became the preoccupation of

progressives, as well as a new generation of reform-minded investigative journalists,

pejoratively nicknamed “muckrakers” by Theodore Roosevelt for the manner in which

they focused attention on the more unpleasant realities of American life. In one of the

earliest and most powerful examples of muckraking, journalist Jacob Riis’ 1890

publication How the Other Half Lives poignantly documented  the deplorable living

conditions existing in the tenement homes of some of America’s largest cities.

Concerning the relationship between moral and social degradation on the one hand and

squalid living conditions on the other, Riis observed the following:

Their large rooms were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation, the rate of rent being lower in proportion to space or height from the street; and they soon became filled from cellar to garret with a class of

                                                                                                                         75  Gilmore,  3-­‐17.  

 

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tenantry living from hand to mouth, loose in morals, improvident in habits, degraded, and squalid as beggary itself.76 The complementary forces of urban poverty and moral degradation were given

fictional expression in Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which

depicts life in the tenement neighborhood of “Rum Alley” and the unfortunate set of

circumstances that compel the title character to resort to prostitution.77 In life and

literature, progressives sought to demonstrate the (ultimately) destructive and retrograde

implications of Social Darwinism, an ideology popular in the Gilded Age which

(mis)applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection to social conditions in order to justify

existing class distinctions and explain poverty. Many progressives countered with the

Social Gospel, developed and propounded by liberal Protestant clergy and other like-

minded activists, which advocated the application of Christian principles to social

problems wrought by industrialization. Working among German immigrants in New

York City, Baptist clergyman, Walter Rauschenbusch, was an outspoken proponent of

social Christianity. He argued that “the Christian Church in the past has taught us to do

our work with our eyes fixed on another world and a life to come. But the business before

us is concerned with refashioning this present world, making this earth clean and sweet

and habitable. . . .”78 Rauschenbusch believed that the principles of social reform were

deeply rooted in the Biblical tradition in general and the teachings of Jesus in particular.

Access to decent housing, food and public safety, compulsory education, and

regulating prostitution – these issues became popular progressive tropes intended to

                                                                                                                         76  Jacob  A.  Riis,  How  the  Other  Half  Lives:  Studies  among  the  Tenements  of  New  York,  1890  (New  York:  Charles  Scribner’s  Sons,  1914),    77  Stephen  Crane,  Maggie:  A  Girl  of  the  Streets  (New  York:  D.  Appleton  and  Company,  1896).    78  Walter  Rauschenbusch,  “Social  Christianity”  (1912),  in  Major  Problems,  301.  

 

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mitigate the deleterious influence of poverty. But in keeping with the Social Gospel, they

were tinged with an undercurrent of moral obligation. In consequence, settlement houses,

schools, and a variety of other voluntary associations proliferated during the Progressive

Era. These and other issues (notably the women’s suffrage movement) were profoundly

influenced by the dedicated and passionate activism of women – mostly from middle-

and upper-class backgrounds. Perhaps the most celebrated female reformer of the period

was Jane Addams, who established Hull House in Chicago in 1889. Built in poor and

working-class neighborhoods, settlement houses (such as Hull House) were institutions

organized by (mostly) affluent women for the purpose of providing social and

educational opportunities for working-class people. The settlement house movement was,

therefore, an attempt by progressive reformers to bridge the divides of class and

privilege.

Like so many of her generation, solving the “class problem” became Jane

Addams’ raison d'être. Yet the settlement houses (as well as many other philanthropic

and reform endeavors) demonstrate the uneasiness with which many middle- and upper-

class reformers dealt with the issue of socioeconomic class. Many chose simply to

dismiss the notion that American society was divided by class interests. Addams herself

wrote “we are not willing, open and professedly, to assume that American citizens are

broken up into classes, even if we make that assumption the preface to a plea that the

superior class has duties to the inferior.”79 Addams’ statement illustrates a common

feature of the progressive ethos: that is, the pervasive interplay of moralism (emanating

from the Social Gospel) and paternalism (the notion that affluent citizens had a quasi-

                                                                                                                         79  Jane  Addams,  Twenty  Years  at  Hull  House:  With  Autobiographical  Notes  (New  York:  Macmillan  Company,  1911),  41-­‐2.  

 

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parental obligation to uplift their less-fortunate counterparts). Many working-class

people, as we will see in the following chapter, resisted such paternalistic overtures,

insisting that social uplift be a bottom-up movement.

Before turning to working-class alternatives to progressive reform, however, it is

important to note the scope and impact of reform on national political and economic

culture. During the Progressive Era, as we have seen, the spirit of reform underwent a

decidedly urban makeover. This meant that agrarian concerns were promptly adapted to

the new environs of the city, which, in turn, meant that middle-class urbanites replaced

farmers as the primary agents of reform. Curiously, however, the progressive movement

– insofar as one may call it a movement – took place amid a period of relative prosperity

for the middle class. One of the most insightful scholars of American political history,

Richard Hofstadter, argues that the United States experienced what he calls a “status

revolution” in the period following 1870, during which an emergent class of wealthy

industrialists came to supplant the old petit bourgeoisie in matters of national political

and economic influence. It is during the first decade of the twentieth century, he writes,

that “the middle class, most of which had been content to accept the conservative

leadership of [US Senator Marcus A.] Hanna and [President William] McKinley during

the period of crisis in the mid-nineties, rallied to the support of progressive leaders in

both parties in the period of well-being that followed.”80 Hofstadter concludes, therefore,

that progressive leaders were responding less to a diminution of their prosperity, per se,

than to the changing distribution of power and influence within American society.

                                                                                                                         80  Richard  Hofstadter,  The  Age  of  Reform:  From  Bryan  to  F.D.R.  (New  York:  Vintage  Books,  1955),  135.  

 

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A contemporary of Theodore Roosevelt, writer and historian Henry Adams wrote

of these socioeconomic changes in describing his native New England, but his

observations are equally applicable to the nation at large: “Down to 1850, and even later,

New England society was still directed by the professions. Lawyers, physicians,

professors, merchants were classes, and acted not as individuals, but as though they were

clergymen and each profession were a church.”81 In terms of status, however, the small

manufacturer, the small merchant, and the various professional men had seen their

position steadily decline in relation to the Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Rockefellers, and

Morgans. Paradoxically, although American political culture had long been shaped by

localism, the Progressive Era inaugurated, in certain respects, the birth of a national

political culture. This is because many progressives, so many of whom constituted the

petit bourgeoisie, effectively eschewed localism in favor of national political

consolidation as a means of curtailing what many considered to be the corrupting

influence of inordinate wealth. Indeed, reformers came to dominate the leadership of both

major parties. The successive Presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-9), William

Howard Taft (1909-13), and Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) were, moreover, associated to

varying degrees with progressive reform.

Many of the most tangible achievements of reform, however, remained on the

state and municipal level. Again, we will turn here to the muckrakers. Shortly after Riis’

treatment of urban poverty, McClure’s Magazine (1893-1929) came to be the institutional

home of this journalistic tradition. One of McClure’s most influential exposés was

Lincoln Steffens’ Shame of the Cities, which observed that corruption in America’s cities

                                                                                                                         81  Henry  Adams,  The  Education  of  Henry  Adams  (New  York:  Modern  Library,  1931),  32.  

 

 43

“was not merely political; it was financial, commercial, social; the ramification of

boodle,” continues Steffens, “were so complex, various, and far-reaching, that one mind

could hardly grasp them.”82 Progressives used such reports to arouse popular opinion and

mobilize political action against corrupt political machines, in many places successfully

abolishing the ward system of city government, which had long facilitated the electoral

dominance of neighborhood patronage machines. Progressives themselves achieved local

as well as national electoral success, as we have seen, which, among other things,

resulted in the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to provide for the direct

election of US Senators.83

In economic affairs, progressive energies were equally conspicuous. The

corporate trust, for instance, became perhaps the most prominent target of progressive

reform. The financial analyst John Moody defined a trust as an “act, agreement, or

combination of persons or capital believed to be done, made, or formed, with the intent,

power, or tendency to monopolize business, to restrain or interfere with competitive

trade, or to fix, influence, or increase the prices of commodities.”84 In 1904, Moody

calculated that there were over 440 large, industrial trusts controlling an estimated $20,

379, 162, 511 in capital.85 Such developments, if nothing else, had vindicated Karl

Marx’s theory of capital accumulation, which argued that the expropriation of the labor

                                                                                                                         82  Lincoln  Steffens,  The  Shame  of  the  Cities,  1904,  (Mineola,  NY:  Dover  Publications,  2004),  9.  83  Gilmore,  15.  84  John  Moody,  Introduction  to  The  Truth  about  Trusts:  A  Description  and  Analysis  of  the  American  Trust  Movement  (New  York:  Moody  Publishing  Company,  1904),  xiii.  85  Ibid.,  xi.  

 

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process and the means of production by private interests would, through growing margins

of surplus-value, result in the eventual “expropriation of many capitalist by few.”86

In many respects, then, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company came to

symbolize the corruption of concentrated economic power. Established in 1870, Standard

Oil controlled, by the 1880s, over 90 percent of the nation’s oil industry. And again it

was a McClure’s journalist who tilted the balance of public opinion. In a 1904

investigation into the history and business practices of Standard Oil, journalist Ida Tarbell

discovered that Rockefeller had accomplished this level of market dominance through an

aggressive (and pioneering) strategy of “horizontal integration.” In other words,

Rockefeller outcompeted (and often acquired) rival firms with a cutthroat array of

business tactics, such as colluding with railroad companies, as well as fixing prices and

production quotas. Tarbell observed:

Mr. Rockefeller was certainly now [1870s] in an excellent condition to work out his plan of brining under his control all the refineries of the country. The Standard Oil Company owned in each of the great refining centers, New York, Pittsburg, and Philadelphia, a large and aggressive plant run by the men who had built it up. These works were, so far as the public knew, still independent. . . . Where persuasion failed then, it was necessary, in his judgment, that pressure be applied – simply a pressure sufficient to demonstrate to these blind or recalcitrant individuals the impossibility of their long being able to do business independently.87 Tarbell’s exposé swayed public opinion to such an extent that it contributed to the

prosecution in 1911 of Standard Oil on charges of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act,

resulting in the dissolution of Rockefeller’s holdings into separate marketing, producing,

                                                                                                                         86  Karl  Marx,  “Chapter  26:  The  Historical  Tendency  of  Capitalist  Accumulation,”  Capital,  Vol.  1,  in  The  Portable  Karl  Marx,  ed.  by  Eugene  Kemenka  (New  York:  Penguin  Books,  1983),  490-­‐3.  87  Ida  M.  Tarbell,  The  History  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company  (New  York:  McClure,  Phillips,  and  Co.,  1904),  154,  156.  

 

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and refining companies.88 Government intervention in economic affairs brings us to a

final point on the legacy of the Progressive Era. The effective “nationalization” of

American political culture closely corresponded to the consolidation of national political

power. Indeed, such actions as those resulting in the legal dissolution of Standard Oil

could not have been possible without the unprecedented growth and expansion of the

national state.

The Rise of Corporate Liberalism

The consolidation of state power during this period is but one factor that has

compelled many scholars to reevaluate the legacy of the Progressive Era. Some have

even chosen to abandon the term “progressive,” arguing that the connotations associated

with such value-laden terms obscure the true nature of the reform movements themselves.

And in this respect, it must be said that critics have often depicted the liberal reform

tradition as plagued by a combination of insincerity and failure. Reform initiatives are

deemed insincere, according to historian Richard L. McCormick, because “they are said

to have used democratic rhetoric only as a cloak for elitist purposes.”89 The less-cynical

interpretations of liberal failures, moreover, contend that well-meaning moralism and

paternalism combined with too much faith in scientific methods and administrative

techniques to ever effectively combat the systemic flaws of industrial society.

Many historians take further exception with the very notion of a progressive

“movement,” believing that one should hardly generalize about a set of phenomena as

complex and diverse as early twentieth-century reform. While the coherence of these

movements is indeed a reproachable topic, McCormick rightly argues that “progressivism

                                                                                                                         88  Eric  Foner,  615.  89  Richard  L.  McCormick,  “Evaluating  the  Progressives,”  in  Major  Problems,  316.    

 

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was characterized, first of all, by a distinctive set of attitudes toward industrialism,” and,

moreover, that most progressives sought “to improve and ameliorate the conditions of

industrial life.”90 Yet the very nature of liberal reform reflects an ambivalent attitude

toward corporate capitalism, for, at its core, the ideological tenets of progressivism posit

that it is possible to tame the worst evils of capitalism without fundamentally altering

capitalism itself. It is therefore the position of this essay that the scope and direction of

progressive reforms were principally guided (or coopted) by business elites who sought

to use government for the pursuit and preservation of their own private ends.

Thus, the rise of the liberal state during the Progressive Era witnessed the

development of a much closer, more intimate relationship between business elites and

government than had existed previously. This runs counter to the popular conception of

“liberalism” propounded by such intellectuals as Arthur M. Schlesinger, who wrote that

“Liberalism in America has been ordinarily the movement on the part of the other

sections of society to restrain the power of the business community.”91 This position,

however, is simply inconsistent with the actual role played by large corporations,

financial institutions, and business leaders in the formulation of progressive reform and

the shape of the national government.

Perhaps the best example of corporate liberalism in action was the National Civic

Federation (NCF), the genesis of which is to be found in the social unrest of the 1890s.

Its forerunner, the Chicago Civic Federation, was organized in 1893 by Ralph M. Easley,

a former school teacher and journalist whose experiences with populists and socialists in

Chicago had convinced him of the exigent need to improve relations between labor and

                                                                                                                         90  Ibid.,  319.    91  Arthur  M.  Schlesinger,  The  Age  of  Jackson  (Boston:  Little,  Brown  and  Company,  1946),  505.  

 

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capital. After an 1899 conference on the “trust problem” boosted his public stature,

Easley set out to organize the National Civic Federation the following year. The NCF

first established the principle of a tripartite representation of business, labor, and

government which would become paradigmatic for future civic and governmental boards,

committees, and agencies.92

Importantly, the founding members of the NCF viewed social and labor unrest as

an imminent threat to the stability of the corporate order. Tripartite representation

therefore became a means of mitigating unrest and ensuring the stability of the system. In

1900 and beyond, however, the NCF was led and dominated by big businessmen. Its

membership included US Senator Marcus A. Hanna, its first president (who was also a

former businessman as well as William McKinley’s campaign manager), Samuel Insull, a

Chicago banker (and later Secretary of the Treasury), the industrialist Andrew Carnegie,

and several partners from J.P. Morgan and Company. Its executive committee, moreover,

included at various times a panoply of powerful politicians and professional men: Grover

Cleveland, William H. Taft, Charles Bonaparte (Roosevelt’s Attorney General), Charles

W. Eliot (President of Harvard University), Benjamin Ide Wheeler (President of the

University of California), and many other political and economic elites.93

Representation further included leaders of some of the largest and most powerful

labor unions in the country. Heads of major railroad brotherhoods were members of the

executive committee, for example, and John Mitchell, president of the United Mine

Workers, served as cochairman of the Trade Agreements Department from 1904 to 1908.

In keeping with the progressive desire to overcome class tensions, the NCF sought to

                                                                                                                         92  Weinstein,  Corporate  Ideal,  7-­‐8.  93  Ibid.,  8.  

 

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remediate the competing interests of labor and capital by brokering labor negotiations and

promoting such “labor-friendly” policies as collective bargaining and workers’

compensation. Hanna proudly stated in 1903 that the aim of the NCF was to establish

mutual trust between employer and employee, to “lay the foundation stone of a structure

that will endure for all time.”94 John Mitchell ardently supported these efforts, believing

that relations between labor and capital had, in his words, “become strained to the

breaking point.” Mitchell referred to the NCF as a “peace movement” and argued that it

was his duty as a good citizen to “bring into closer and more harmonious relation these

two apparently antagonistic forces.”95

The membership and influence of the NCF grew precipitously after its founding

in 1900, with representatives from almost a third of all corporations and constituting a

capitalization of over $10,000,000. Yet it should be emphasized that the NCF and the

philosophy of corporate liberalism encountered opposition on both the right and the left

of the American political spectrum. On the right were the zealots of laissez-faire

capitalism represented by organizations such as the National Association of

Manufacturers (NAM), who staunchly opposed both labor rights and government

interventionism. On the left was the growing popularity of socialism, which advocated

the immediate (or eventual) abolition of the capitalist system altogether. American

socialism and the IWW were therefore expressions of working-class hostility to the

liberal corporate order and will be discussed in the following chapter.

                                                                                                                         94  Marcus  A.  Hanna  to  a  dinner  of  the  Executive  Committee  of  the  National  Civic  Federation,  May  13,  1903,  National  Civic  Federation  Monthly  Review,  VI,  2  (June  1903),  7.  95  John  Mitchell  to  the  Annual  Dinner  of  the  NCF,  December  15,  1904,  NCF  Review,  I,  10  (January  1,  1905),  6.  

 

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Nevertheless, the legacy of the NCF and corporate liberalism have been profound

in subsequent American history. It represents, according to historian James Weinstein, a

transformational moment in the development of capitalism in the United States. He writes

that “the business leaders who participated in the activities of the NCF had transcended a

narrow interest-consciousness [such as that represented by NAM] and were emerging as

fully class conscious.”96 That is, the savviest corporate leaders of the Era understood that

capitalism was in danger of destroying itself; that corporate interests might be preserved

(or even advanced) by ameliorating the worst social effects of industrial capitalism.

Beyond the NCF, the national government expanded in conjunction with efforts to

“manage” the interests of big business. In an address to Congress on December 2, 1902,

President Roosevelt assured those assembled that “our aim is not to do away with

corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of

modern industrialism. . . . We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”97 As

Richard Hofstadter observed, Roosevelt’s reputation as a “trust-buster” is difficult to

comprehend given such an attitude. Roosevelt’s administration did initiate several

carefully chosen antitrust prosecutions, including, for example, bringing charges against

the Northern Securities Company in 1902, but the panic it unleashed in the corporate

world was followed by a reassuring pledge by the President that only those companies

which “have done something that we regard as wrong” will be punished.98 Public

opinion during the Progressive Era was overwhelming in favor of using government to

quell the despotic influence of big business. And this perhaps accounts for some of the

                                                                                                                         96  Weinstein,  The  Corporate  Ideal,  10.  97  Roosevelt  quoted  in  Hofstadter,  American  Political  Tradition,  292.  98  Ibid.,  294.  

 

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Rough Rider’s enduring popularity, a phenomenon which led writer and social critic H.L.

Mencken to quip, Roosevelt “didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in

government.”99

In his Autobiography, however, Roosevelt reveals his reasons for preferring

governmental regulation over dissolution, making for an insightful commentary on the

forces at play and the agents involved. Two groups, he argued, had sought to confront the

“trust problem.” The first attempted to dismantle the trusts using the “Sherman-law

method,” an exercise in folly, according to Roosevelt, because it aimed “to remedy by

more individualism the concentration that was the inevitable result of the already existing

individualism.”100 This method he regarded as the reactionary impulses of those who

viewed themselves as “radical progressives,” but “really represented a form of sincere

rural toryism.”101 The corporate “aggregations” were inevitable, he insisted, and attempts

to destroy them were futile. “On the other hand,” Roosevelt remarked,

A few men recognized that corporations and combinations had become indispensable in the business world, that it was folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them without thorough-going control. . . . They realized that the government must now interfere to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporation to the public welfare, , and to shackle cunning and fraud exactly as centuries before it had interfered to shackle the physical force which does wrong by violence. . . .102

The American Federation of Labor and Business Unionism

What, then, was the impact of these developments on the working class?

Corporate liberalism, it must be said, was effective for certain sectors of the American

                                                                                                                         99  H.L.  Mencken,  Prejudices:  Second  Series  (New  York:  Alfred  A.  Knopf,  1920),  123.  100  Theodore  Roosevelt,  Theodore  Roosevelt:  An  Autobiography  (New  York:  Charles  Scribner’s  Sons,  1922),  424.  101  Ibid.,  424-­‐5.  102  Ibid.,  425.  

 

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labor force. Skilled workers – including all those who merely desired better conditions on

the job, higher wages, and certain protections against the vicissitudes of the labor market

– were generally amenable to establishing friendly relations with their employers insofar

as it was in their interest to do so. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the American

Federation of Labor had become, since its founding 1881 as the Federation of Organized

Trades and Labor Unions, the most powerful and influential labor organization in the

United States. Samuel Gompers, cofounder and longtime president of the AFL, likewise

became the most powerful labor leader in the county. After having survived the

depression of the 1890s, the AFL’s membership tripled between 1900 and 1904 to 1.6

million, making it the first sustained mass labor movement in the US.103

The AFL’s founding rhetoric had promised to organize all workers irrespective of

craft, nationality, race or gender. By the 1890s, however, craft unions representing the

most highly skilled workers had come to dominate the AFL. And as the first vice

president of the National Civic Federation, AFL leader Samuel Gompers was keenly

adept at navigating the interconnected hierarchies of the new liberal corporate order.

When addressing workers, he would at times invoke radical rhetoric to describe the

problems of industrial society. “The laborers know that the capitalist class had its origin

in force and fraud,” exclaimed Gompers in an 1893 address before the International

Labor Congress.104 This statement was made at the height of unrest in the 1890s. When in

the company of government and business elites, however, the old labor czar was more

                                                                                                                         103  Dubofsky,  American  Labor,  94.  104  Samuel  Gompers,  “What  Does  Labor  Want?,”  an  address  before  the  International  Labor  Congress,  Aug.  28,  1893,  reprinted  in  Stuart  Kaufman,  ed.,  The  Samuel  Gompers  Papers,  Vol.  3:  Unrest  and  Depression  (Urbana,  IL:  University  of  Illinois  Press,  1986),  388-­‐96.  

 

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measured. In 1913, for instance, Gompers testified before the US Commission on

Industrial Relations during which he defended labor’s rights to both organize and bargain

collectively.105 Yet his invective against the “capitalist class” is noticeably absent.

In practice, the AFL came to represent the most privileged American workers.

Almost by definition, these workers were skilled industrial and craft laborers, the

overwhelming majority of them white, male, and native-born.106 Gompers and other

leaders of big labor developed increasingly cozy relations with political and corporate

leaders, while at the same time many AFL affiliates were actively excluding blacks,

women, and unskilled workers from local craft unions. The AFL propounded the notion

of a harmony of interests between employer and employee. In this view, it behooved

skilled workers to be separated into distinct craft unions, each promoting the interests of a

particular trade. This philosophy came to be known as craft (or business) unionism

because of the manner in which it emulated the bureaucratic and hierarchical structure of

governmental institutions and corporations; its exclusionary practices, moreover, were a

powerful reminder of the deeply entrenched racial, ethnic, and gendered divisions that

persisted within the American working class.107

Hence, the AFL emphasized conciliation with employers and sought immediate

demands such as the eight-hour day, improved conditions, and increased autonomy on the

job for its skilled workers. The federation encouraged its affiliates to enter into labor-

management contracts, which further tightened the relationship between labor and

                                                                                                                         105  Gompers  testimony  before  the  US  Commission  on  Industrial  Relations  (1913),  from  the  Final  report  and  testimony,  submitted  to  Congress  by  the  Commission  on  Industrial  Relations  (Washington,  DC:  Government  Printing  Office,  1916),  718-­‐21.  106  Eric  Foner,  597.  107  Melvyn  Dubofsky,  We  Shall  be  All,  5-­‐6.  

 

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business leaders. Time contracts, for instance, placed constraints on the ability of workers

to conduct strike actions and work stoppages. This meant that union locals, in effect, had

to negotiate with individual employers the times at which it was permissible to conduct a

work stoppage. Somewhat paradoxically, however, such concessions were advocated as a

means of pursuing immediate craft interests. While working-class radicals clamored for

alternatives to industrial capitalism, AFL members were generally those workers most

satisfied with the system.

Ultimately, then, Samuel Gompers and the AFL came to epitomize and defend the

new liberal corporate order. And despite a variety of gains in the Progressive Era, large

segments of the working class – notably black, female, immigrant, and unskilled workers

– continued to be marginalized by this system. For these workers, the brutalities of

industrial capitalism survived the Gilded Age, leaving many to wonder whether reform

would ever be sufficient to rectify the inequities of the status quo.

In the summer of 1904, a contingent of labor leaders and political radicals began

to express their discontent with the conservative business unionism espoused by Gompers

and the AFL. The radicals found consensus on three basic principles. They agreed first

that craft unionism, given the concentrated interests of employers, was an outmoded and

ineffectual form of labor organization. They argued further that craft unionism created

unnecessary and artificial divisions within the working class, which no longer

corresponded to the reality of industrial conditions and thereby ignored the growing

majority of unskilled, low-wage workers. Finally, they believed that the labor movement

was in need of an inclusive organization capable of unifying the working class in a

revolutionary struggle against capitalism. Such were the sentiments underlying the

 

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formation of the most radical labor organization in American history: the Industrial

Workers of the World.108

In the following chapter, the IWW and its efforts to recruit migrant workers will

be examined, for few elements within the working class better exemplify the implications

of political and social alienation. The IWW had unprecedented success organizing

migrants, in part because the Wobblies were among the first to embrace a group which

many in the mainstream labor movement referred to as the “unorganizable.” It was

through a curious combination of internal merits and flaws that the IWW positioned itself

as a home for the otherwise homeless. Yet it must be reiterated that this chapter was

meant to explore the political, social, and economic conditions that prevailed in the

United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Overwhelmingly, these conditions were

shaped by the forces of industrialism. Indeed, the political and social movements that

collectively came to be known as the Progressive Era were, in effect, responses to the

societal traumas wrought by industrialism. Thus, the IWW developed within the context

of industrialism and reform. The Wobblies, however, promised their members a future

without greed, self-interest, exploitation, and hardship. In so doing, they became among

the most vociferous opponents of industrial capitalism.

                                                                                                                         108  Philip  S.  Foner,  History  of  the  Labor  Movement,  13.  

 

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CHAPTER THREE

NO WORKER LEFT BEHIND: THE IWW AND THE MIGRANT WORKER

We are going down in the gutter to get at the mass of the workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living.

-William “Big Bill” Haywood, Founding Convention of the IWW, 1905109

The Formation of the IWW

The sweltering temperature inside Chicago’s Brand’s Hall on June 27, 1905 did little to

dampen the spirits of an eclectic mix of radicals, including over two hundred labor organizers and

socialists, who had come to forge a new, revolutionary labor organization. At 10:00am that

morning, William “Big Bill” Haywood, then secretary of the Western Federation of Miners

(WFM), approached the table at the front of the hall. In want of a proper gavel, Haywood, one of

the most charismatic figures in the history of American labor, seized a loose piece of board and

loudly hammered on the table in front of him. Having quieted the crowded room, Haywood

spoke: “Fellow workers,” he exclaimed, “this is the Continental Congress of the working class.

We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall

have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of

capitalism.”110

The room erupted in applause. And while the diverse ideological composition of those in

attendance would foreshadow strife in the coming years, the attendees were enthusiastically

united on this June day in the belief that the labor movement was in desperate need of a more

militant, more inclusive, more radical alternative to the American Federation of Labor. The AFL,

Haywood continued, “is not a working-class movement” so long as its affiliates deny membership

to a growing majority of workers. Denouncing the AFL’s policies of exclusion and class

collaboration, Haywood declared that the purpose of the June convention is to “establish . . . a

                                                                                                                         109  Haywood,  Minutes  of  the  Founding  Convention.  110  Ibid.    

 

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labor organization that will open wide its doors to every man that earns his livelihood either by

his brain or his muscle.” The ultimate aim of the new organization was “to put the working class

in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production

and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.”111

The room again erupted in applause. Yet Haywood’s comments illustrate a fundamental

irony in the history of the organization that would come to be called the Industrial Workers of the

World, an irony that lies at the core of this study. As the previous chapter explored, the rise of

corporate liberalism was predicated on intimate, increasingly collaborative relations between the

leaders of business, government, and labor. The business unionism of the AFL exemplified this

new order, but it effectively excluded large segments of the most disadvantaged workers.

Although the IWW indeed wished to unite the entire working class against the forces of

capitalism, its leaders would come to focus their energies on organizing those workers excluded

from the mainstream labor movement. For some Wobbly leaders, however, disdain for the AFL

manifested itself in an irrepressible disdain for skilled workers – the so-called “aristocrats of

labor.” Haywood himself more or less viewed these workers as class traitors, an impediment to

working-class emancipation.

“I do not care the snap of my finger whether or not the skilled workman joins this

industrial movement,” Haywood said later at the founding convention, for “when we get the

unorganized and unskilled laborer into this organization, the skilled worker will of necessity

come here for his own protection.”112 It was indeed an uncompromising stance on the direction of

the labor movement, a stance that, on the one hand, would effectively alienate the IWW from

many of the most stable and successful industrial workers. On the other hand, it meant that the

IWW’s role in the Progressive Era was to serve as a home for those workers who knew little

stability, little success. These were workers who were excluded from the advantages of corporate

                                                                                                                         111  Ibid.  112  Ibid.  

 

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liberalism, workers who continued to be subjected to the worst injustices of industrial capitalism.

It is for these reasons that many of the IWW’s greatest organizing successes were focused on

migratory laborers. In the main, these were construction, timber, and agricultural workers.

Irregular work forced them to move with the seasons, from one job to the next. Many experienced

long periods without regular incomes – hardly the ideal membership for a labor organization. In

the IWW, however, many migrant workers found their sole advocate, a community, a promise of

a future beyond the conditions that currently oppressed them.

The Debate over Political Versus Direct Action

Before the IWW could become a home for the homeless, its formative years would be

characterized by internecine disputes which underscore an old schism within the revolutionary

left: between political and direct action. This divide is best illustrated by examining some of the

key organizations and individuals who joined Haywood in Brand’s Hall on that warm day in June

1905. In all, two hundred delegates, representing 43 organizations, were present at the founding

convention. The most influential included Haywood’s own Western Federation of Miners,

representing the most workers (27,000) of any union present, the United Brotherhood of Railway

Employees (UBRE), the United Metal Workers (UMW), the American Labor Union (ALU), and

the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA). It is important to note, however, that the ALU

had been formed by members of the Western Federation of Miners and operated mainly in the

American west. Its organization along industrial lines – rather than craft – would nonetheless

provide a template for the nascent IWW. In practice, however, its influence within the convention

was synonymous with the WFM.113

Among those on the speakers’ platform with Haywood were Eugene V. Debs, leader of

the Socialist Party of America and that party’ five-time candidate for president of the United

States, “Mother” Mary Jones, the seventy-five year old labor agitator and organizer for the United

                                                                                                                         113  Philip  S.  Foner,  History  of  the  Labor  Movement,  29.  

 

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Mine Workers (UMW), Daniel De Leon, the fractious leader of the Socialist Labor Party,

William Trautmann, editor of the United Brewery Workers’ (UBW) German-language

newspaper, Father Thomas J. Hagerty, a Catholic priest and socialist lecturer, and Lucy Parsons,

a labor activist and anarchist whose husband, Albert Parsons, had been executed for conspiracy

following the 1886 Haymarket riot. Trautmann’s role in the formative years of the IWW was

especially influential, for it was he who invited several key figures in the American labor and

socialist movements to a clandestine meeting in November 1904 to discuss the possibility of

creating a new organization.

With the endorsement of WFM leadership, that preliminary meeting produced a letter

inviting 36 persons to a conference on June 2, 1905 “to discuss ways and means of uniting the

working people of America on correct revolutionary principles, regardless of any labor

organization of the past or present, and only restricted by such basic principles as will insure its

integrity as a real protector of the interests of the working class.”114 The January Conference, as it

came to be known, received widespread support in leftwing circles. But the support was hardly

universal. Two of the most influential socialists in the country, Victor Berger and Max Hayes,

were proponents of a “bore-from-within” strategy of converting the AFL into a socialist-led labor

organization. They consequently objected to so-called dual unionism, whereby local unions and

union members belonged to multiple organizations. Berger, who would later become the first

socialist elected to the US House of Representatives, would write in the Social Democratic

Herald that the proposed organization “will bring on a condition of strife in the labor world that

will enable Samuel Gompers to keep industrial-union organization away for a much longer time

than he would have been able to had the fight for it inside the AFL not been interfered with by

                                                                                                                         114  Letter  included  in  Vincent  St.  John,  The  IWW:  Its  History,  Structure,  and  Methods  (Chicago:  IWW  Publishing  Bureau,  1917),  n.p.,  accessed  at  University  of  Arizona  web  exhibit  “The  Bisbee  Deporation  of  1917”  http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/docs/019.html.    

 

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impatient and shortsighted comrades.”115 Both men naturally declined the invitation, Hayes

writing that he was loathe “to be dragged into any more secession movements or fratricidal wars

between fractions of workers” and instead preferred to “agitate on the inside of organizations now

in existence. . . .”116

For those who attended the January Conference, boring from within was a futile exercise

in light of the entrenched conservative leadership of the AFL. To follow the admonitions of

Berger and Hayes would be to delude themselves. Despite such dissent, the Conference had the

endorsement of the most prominent socialist in the country: Eugene V. Debs. A former railroad

worker and union organizer from Terre Haute, Indiana, Debs rose to national prominence as a

result of his leadership of the American Railway Union (ARU) during the 1894 Pullman Strike.

During the strike, which began in response to wage cuts, the federal government issued an

injunction against the striking Pullman employees on the pretext that the strike interfered with the

shipment of US mail. At the request of the Pullman Company, President Grover Cleveland

deployed the National Guard to quell the striking workers. The tactic was successful. Debs, as

leader of the ARU, was subsequently tried and convicted of violating the injunction. Debs learned

during Pullman what the members of the WFM already knew: that in times of strife workers were

pitted not merely against employers but also the state.117

It was during a prison sentence following the strike that Debs was introduced to socialist

theory, primarily through the writings of Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky. Debs, a “pure-and-

simple” trade unionist from a small-town, middle-class background, had become a socialist

convert. Perhaps because of his small-town roots, Debs was keenly familiar with the effects of

industrialism on the very fabric of American life. As a cofounder of the Socialist Party of

                                                                                                                         115  Victor  Berger,  Social  Democratic  Herald,  December  14,  1904.  116  Max  Hayes  quoted  in  Philip  S.  Foner,  History  of  the  Labor  Movement,  16.  117  Dubofsky,  We  Shall  be  All,  34-­‐5;  see  also  Nick  Salvatore,  Eugene  V.  Debs:  Citizen  and  Socialist  (Champaign,  Ill:  University  of  Illinois  Press,  1984);  and  Ernest  Freeberg,  Democracy’s  Prisoner:  Eugene  V.  Debs,  the  Great  War,  and  the  Right  to  Dissent.  Cambridge,  MA:  Harvard  University  Press,  2008.  

 

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America in 1901, Debs would become the party’s perennial candidate for president of the United

States, twice garnering over 900,000 votes (1912 and 1920). In late 1904, Debs wrote an

influential pamphlet, Unionism and Socialism: A Plea for Both, in which he argued for an

amalgamation of trade unionism and socialism and advocated for workers to be organized along

industrial lines. Debs was hardly a theoretician himself, but instead a passionate orator who drew

as much on the American political tradition – particularly William Lloyd Garrison and the

abolitionists – as he did from leftwing European theorists. The pamphlet was nonetheless an

important manifesto for the American left, Debs reminding readers that “socialism is first of all a

political movement of the working class, clearly defined and uncompromising, which aims at the

overthrow of the prevailing capitalist class government with socialist administration – that is to

say, changing a republic in name to a republic in fact. . . .”118

Debs’ support for the January Conference was therefore invaluable, if only as an

affirmation of the meeting’s legitimacy. In all, twenty-one men and one woman – Mother Jones –

attended the closed conference at 122 Lake Street in Chicago and set about the task of composing

their own manifesto. Daniel De Leon, leader of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), was

conspicuously not invited. A doctrinaire Marxist, De Leon was an outspoken proponent of

revolution guided by a political vanguard. And he naturally believed the SLP to be that vanguard.

It was unlikely, however, that this was the primary reason for his exclusion, for De Leon had

proven in the past to be acrimonious and potentially disruptive.119 In his absence, the conferees

drafted what they called the “Industrial Manifesto.” The document had multiple purposes: to

repudiate the AFL and it policies, to extol the merits of industrial unionism, and to serve as an

invitation to those who were in favor of establishing a revolutionary working-class organization,

                                                                                                                         118  Eugene  V.  Debs,  Unionism  and  Socialism:  A  Plea  for  Both  (Terre  Haute,  IN:  Standard  Publishing  Company,  1904),  30.  119  Charles  A.  Madison,  “Daniel  De  Leon:  Apostle  of  Socialism,”  The  Antioch  Review  5,  no.  3  (Autumn  1945):  403-­‐5;  L.  Glen  Seretan,  “Daniel  De  Leon  as  American,”  The  Wisconsin  Magazine  of  History  61,  no.  3  (Spring  1978):  221-­‐3.  

 

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founded on the principle of class struggle and devoted to the abolition of capitalism. Father

Thomas J. Hagerty, who had converted to Marxism even prior to his ordination in 1892, is widely

considered to be the chief architect of the Manifesto. The influence of Engels and Marx is

substantial:

Social relations and groupings only reflect mechanical and industrial conditions. The great facts of present industry are the displacement of human skill by machines and the increase of capitalist power through concentration in the possession of the tools with which wealth is produced and distributed.

Because of these facts trade divisions among laborers and competition among capitalists are disappearing. Class divisions grow ever more fixed and class antagonisms more sharp. Trade lines have been swallowed up in a common servitude of all workers to the machines which they tend. . . . [The new movement] must be founded on the class struggle, and its general administration must be conducted in harmony with the recognition of the irrepressible conflict between the capitalist class and the working class.120

The influence of Marxian historical materialism is indeed substantial, but the specific

grievances and the nature of the movement described in the Manifesto are unquestionably shaped

by conditions in the United States. Hence, the Manifesto was essentially a critique of corporate

liberalism, of the AFL, of the oligarchical partnerships represented by the National Civic

Federation: “class divisions hinder the growth of class consciousness of the workers, foster the

idea of harmony of interests between employing exploiter and employed slave. They permit the

association of the misleaders of the workers with the capitalists in Civic Federations, where plans

are made for the perpetuation of capitalism.”121 While the Manifesto was intended to be more

than a mere polemic aimed at corporate capitalism, the policies it espouses are obviously meant to

contrast with those of the AFL.

In addition to anti-capitalist rhetoric, the Manifesto tentatively described the structure of

the proposed organization. First, all power should be vested in the collective membership; all

union labels, buttons, transfer cards, initiation fees, etc. should be uniform throughout; transfers

of membership between unions should be universal, preventing workers from being charged

                                                                                                                         120  “Industrial  Manifesto,”  in  Rebel  Voices,  40,  43.    121  Ibid.,  41.  

 

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additional fees were they to change jobs; the general administration should issue a publication at

regular intervals, representing the entire union and its principles; and a general defense fund

should be created to which all members contribute equally. “All workers,” the Manifesto

concluded, “who agree with the principles herein set forth, will meet in convention at Chicago the

27th day of June, 1905, for the purpose of forming an organization of the working class along the

lines marked out in this Manifesto.”122

The January Conference thus laid the groundwork for the Industrial Workers of the

World, but several questions remained unanswered at the time of the Industrial Union Convention

in June of 1905. What, for instance, would be the official position of this new organization on

politics and political parties? Members of both socialist parties, the SPA and SLP, were in

attendance in June, including Eugene V. Debs and Daniel De Leon. Therefore, the answer to this

question had the potential to derail the IWW before it even began. The euphoria of the first

convention obscured the deep ideological divisions separating those in attendance, but the

divisions were there nonetheless. Vincent St. John, a WFM veteran and later IWW general-

secretary, would write that there were four ideological factions present at the founding:

“Parliamentary socialists – two types – impossibilist and opportunist, Marxist and reformist;

anarchist; industrial unionist; and the labor union fakir.”123 The fakirs referred to opportunists

who endeavored to coopt the labor movement to further their own interests. By virtue of their

mere presence at the convention, most attendees were in favor of industrial unionism. The other

categories, however, represent more or less sincere but mutually antagonistic ideologies.

Generally speaking, St. John associated the Marxists with the Socialist Labor Party, the reformists

with the Socialist Party of America. The parties had clashed previously over principles and

tactics, but both advocated political action as a means of pursuing their goals.

                                                                                                                         122  Ibid.,  43.  123  Vincent  St.  John,  IWW,  n.p.  

 

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There is debate, however, concerning the influence of the anti-political, anarchist faction

at the time of the first convention. Paul F. Brissenden, who in 1918 undertook the first scholarly

study of the IWW’s early history, argues that the “direct-actionist” group, anti-political and

anarchist, had not yet become a prominent force in the nascent IWW. They were outnumbered, he

contends, by the political socialists.124 Marian Savage, by contrast, posits in her work, Industrial

Unionism in America, the existence of three distinct ideological groups at the convention: First,

there were the members of the Socialist Labor Party who placed chief emphasis on political

action. Second, there were the members of the Socialist Party who were less doctrinaire than the

SLP members and wished to subordinate political action to economic organization. And finally,

there were the anarchists who eschewed political action altogether in favor of direct, economic

action.125

The central lesson from these observations is that a multiplicity of beliefs, attitudes, and

ideologies came together at the founding of the IWW. It was indeed a tenuous situation, even if

those present failed to acknowledge it. Eugene V. Debs, with his considerable influence, exuded

optimism for the prospects of revolutionary industrial unionism and did his best to encourage

harmony among the delegates:

I believe it is possible [he said] for such an organization as the Western Federation of Miners to be brought into harmonious relation with the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance [the labor wing of De Leon’s SLP] . . . and I believe it is possible for these elements to combine here and begin the work of forming a great economic or revolutionary of the working class so sorely needed in the struggle for their emancipation.126

Even the fractious De Leon believed that harmony was possible:

During this process of pounding one another we have both learned, and I hope and believe that this convention will bring together those who will plant themselves squarely upon the class struggle and will recognize the fact that the political expression of labor is but the shadow of the economic organization.127

                                                                                                                         124  Paul  F.  Brissenden,  The  IWW:  A  Study  of  American  Syndicalism  (New  York:  Longmans,  Green,  and  Company,  1919),  78-­‐9.  125  Marian  Savage,  Industrial  Unionism  in  America  (New  York:  The  Ronald  Press  Company,  1922),  145.  126  Debs,  Minutes  of  the  Founding  Convention.  127  De  Leon  quoted  in  Brissenden,  81.  

 

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During the first five days of the convention delegates reached a consensus around one

issue: their condemnation of the “American Separation of Labor,” an epithet used repeatedly

during the convention. Their indictment of the AFL rested on three general counts, which are

worthy of additional emphasis. They first charged that craft unionism benefited only a minority of

skilled workers, the so-called “aristocrats of labor,” while the majority of working people

remained marginalized and defenseless. Moreover, the AFL was charged with promoting a

harmony of interests between employer and employee through such associations as the Civic

Federation. The leaders of the AFL, or “lieutenants of capitalism” as they were sometimes called,

were a class of elite bureaucrats whose cozy relations with political leaders and captains of

industry effectively denied the existence of class struggle. And finally, they charged the AFL with

denying the necessity of achieving socialism, which, in theory, would place in the hands of the

workers their collective economic fate. Thus, there was considerable agreement among the

delegates around their opposition to the AFL, the wage system, and capitalism in general. Yet

disagreement emerged once again when the debate turned to the means of pursuing their stated

goals of abolishing capitalism and establishing the “cooperative commonwealth.”128

On the sixth day of the convention delegates began to debate the specific wording of the

preamble to the constitution of the new organization. The repercussions of this seemingly benign

activity would irrevocably alter the course of the IWW. The preamble itself, which also was

written primarily by the enigmatic Father Hagerty, is perhaps the best known piece of Wobbly

literature. It began with an uncompromising and provocative declaration, “The working class and

the employing class have nothing in common.”129 “There can be no peace,” it states in the first

clause, “so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few,

who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.”130 In the second paragraph,

                                                                                                                         128  Philip  S.  Foner,  History  of  the  Labor  Movement,  32.  129  Preamble  to  the  IWW  Constitution,  Rebel  Voices,  45.  130  Ibid.  

 

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however, the old bugbear reappeared. The paragraph stated: “Between these two classes a

struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial

field, and take hold that which they produce by their labor, through an economic organization of

the working class without affiliation with any political party.”131 In essence, this clause a

compromise between the anarcho-syndicalist ideas of St. John and Trautmann and the

parliamentary socialist ideas of De Leon. The former advocated the creation of an economic

organization “without affiliation with any political party,” while the latter advocated the use of

electoral procedures to bring about socialism. The clause instigated immediate controversy at the

convention. Many delegates, for instance, agreed with general-secretary of the American Labor

Union, Clarence Smith, when he exhorted the committee to eliminate that “confusing language

about political action at the capitalist ballot box.”132

In the spirit of compromise, however, the political clause was sustained by a majority of

delegates. The matter was temporarily resolved, but it foreshadowed conflict to come. This is in

part because the anarcho-syndicalists were a more influential element in the formation of the

IWW than some commentators have previously indicated. To corroborate this assertion one need

look no further than William Trautmann. Having organized the preliminary conferences,

Trautmann would soon serve as the IWW’s first general-secretary. After the conclusion of the

January Conference, Trautmann was asked by a reporter for the Cincinnati Post about the

Manifesto’s emphasis on economic organization and what this implied about its stance on

political action. Trautmann replied: “the document is based on the same principles as organized

labor in Continental Europe. The new organization is to be entirely free from party politics.” He

explained that by “the same principles as organized labor in Continental Europe,” he specifically

meant working-class organization according to “revolutionary syndicalism.”133

                                                                                                                         131  Ibid.  132  Minutes  of  the  Founding  Convention.  133  William  Trautmann  in  Cincinnati  Post  January  9,  1905.  

 

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As an ideology, revolutionary syndicalism or, more precisely, anarcho-syndicalism, first

gained traction in France during the 1890s as an amalgam of trade unionism, Marxism, and

anarchism. It vehemently rejected the political vanguardism of the Marxist-Leninists, who had

come to dominate the European left by this time. Lenin had said in 1895, for example, “the

workers cannot wage the struggle for their emancipation without striving to influence the affairs

of state, to influence the administration of the state, the passing of laws.”134 Many on the

European left, including activists and workers alike, had become dissatisfied with socialist

politics, however. And some came to view participation in the electoral process itself as a

violation of the class struggle. In 1901, French theorist Georges Sorel published an important

work on the subject of anarcho-syndicalism, L’Avenir socialiste des syndicates, in which he

argues that the state is essentially an instrument of capitalism and therefore cannot be used to

bring about socialism.135 The implicit assumption in Sorel’s work seems to be that using the

mechanisms of the capitalist state will only serve to perpetuate the existing system of oppression

and inequality – a stance that influenced many in the IWW. “It is impossible for anyone,” St.

John wrote in 1910, “to be a part of the capitalist class and to use the machinery of the state in the

interest of the workers.”136 The trade unions, by contrast, were instruments of the working class

and would form the basis of a post-capitalist society. Anarcho-syndicalism therefore entailed the

direct seizure of industry by the workers, who would then abolish the political state altogether and

manage economic affairs on a democratic basis. Such would be the conditions of the cooperative

commonwealth.

If socialism and worker’s self-management were the goals of anarcho-syndicalism, then

direct action was invoked as the means of achieving them. As a set of vaguely-defined tactics,

                                                                                                                         134  Vladimir  Lenin  quoted  in  Thomas  Taylor  Hammond,  Lenin  on  Trade  Unions  and  Revolution,  1893-­‐1917  (New  York:  n.pub.,  1957),  21.  135  Georges  Sorel,  L’Avenir  socialiste  des  syndicates  (Paris:  Libraire  G.  Jacques  and  Cie.,  1901),  57-­‐9.  136  St.  John,  Political  Parties  and  the  IWW  (Chicago:  IWW  Publishing  Bureau,  c.  1910),  reprinted  in  Rebel  Voices,  89.    

 

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direct action was, at its core, meant to empower workers who were otherwise powerless, without

compromising class solidarity through collaborations with bourgeois political parties, politicians,

social reformers, bureaucrats, or even labor leaders. Yet in the years to come, the advocacy of

direct action would contribute to a popular image of the IWW and its members as violent. The St.

Louis Republic declared in 1912: “In considering such a movement as the IWW there is no need

to pause over its history. . . . Nor is it necessary to consider its philosophy. It has none. It is mere

brute ferocity. The tiger which springs on the traveler in the jungle has no philosophy – only a

thirst for blood. He cannot be reasoned with – he must be overcome.”137 It is true that some

Wobbly agitators contributed to the image of the IWW as a collection of subversives. This is

primarily because they indeed saw themselves as subversives in the working-class struggle

against capitalism. “I am not a law-abiding citizen,” Big Bill Haywood roared to a jubilant crowd

at Cooper Union in January 1912. “And more than that,” he continued, “no socialist can be a law-

abiding citizen.”138 In this view, laws were merely political instruments of the capitalist class,

designed to protect their narrow interests.

What then was direct action in practice? And was it necessarily violent? Echoing Marx’s

theory of labor power, St. John wrote “the only power that the working class has is the power to

produce wealth. The IWW proposes to organize the workers to control the use of their labor so

that they will be able to stop the production of wealth except upon terms dictated by the workers

themselves.”139 Thus, direct action might pertain to any number of attempts to interfere with the

processes of production and distribution, processes which, by definition, enriched the capitalist

class. Accordingly, the primary weapon of the working class in its struggle against capitalism was

the general strike. A general strike entailed a massive work stoppage by a majority of workers in

                                                                                                                         137  Reprinted  in  Industrial  Worker,  June  26,  1912.    138  Haywood,  “Socialism,  the  Hope  of  the  Working  Class,”  a  speech  delivered  at  Cooper  Union  January  1912,  in  Albert  Fried,  Socialism  in  America:  From  the  Shakers  to  the  Third  International,  A    Documentary  History,  Morningside  Edition  (New  York:  Columbia  University  Press,  1992),  449.  139  St.  John,  Political  Parties  and  the  IWW,  90.  

 

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a particular industry or set of industries. It was a strike action that transcended craft lines.

Working-class solidarity therefore provided the unifying basis for a general strike, and the strike

in turn cultivated in workers a sense of class consciousness and, by extension, solidarity. If a

short-term strike were successful, the Wobblies refused to participate in labor-management

contracts, for they believed this would violate the sanctity of class solidarity and undermine the

revolutionary struggle. However, a general strike on the national level would, in theory, cripple

industry to such an extent that capitalism itself would dissolve, and the workers would build a

“new society” out of the shell of the old. This new society was often referred to interchangeably

as the Workers’ Commonwealth, the Industrial Commonwealth, Cooperative Commonwealth,

Industrial Democracy, or Industrial Communism. The general strike was thus a tactic for

achieving immediate demands as well as a means to achieving final emancipation from wage

slavery.140

Again, the general strike did not necessarily entail physical violence. Indeed, William

Trautmann equated direct action with passive resistance. Direct action, he wrote, was merely “the

withdrawal of [workers’] labor power and also their efficiency, from the workshops, the mines,

land, etc.”141 Another form of direct action, sabotage, acquired a more sinister reputation in the

popular press, but its proponents in the IWW denied that it encouraged physical violence. In

What’s What in the Labor Movement (1921), Waldo Browne provides a summary of the word’s

etymology:

Derived from the French work sabot, meaning a wooden shoe, this term is often supposed to have originally denoted the idea of stalling machinery by throwing a wooden clog into it. Probably its more direct derivation is from the French verb saboter, meaning to bungle or to botch; while some find its origin in the French expression ‘Travailler a coups de sabots,’ meaning to work as one wearing wooden shoes, often applied to lazy or slow-moving persons.142

                                                                                                                         140  Philip  S.  Foner,  History  of  the  Labor  Movement,  141.    141  William  Trautmann,  Direct  Action  and  Sabotage  (Pittsburg,  PA:  Socialist  News  Company,  1912),  9.  142  Waldo  Browne,  What’s  What  in  the  Labor  Movement:  A  Dictionary  of  Labor  Affairs  and  Labor  Terminology  (New  York:  B.W.  Huebsch,  1921),  416.  

 

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The emblem of a black cat, designed by Wobbly Ralph Chaplin, became one of the

IWW’s familiar symbols. Its nickname: “Sab-cat,” meant to signify sabotage, anarchism, and

wildcat strikes, which is to say strikes initiated not by union leaders but by the workers

themselves. While it is difficult to ascertain the prevalence of sabotage in the workplace, the

tactic was intended to be a form of direct action that could be implemented by individual workers.

One of the most captivating Wobblies, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an organizer for the IWW from

1906 to 1917, would make the following observation:

Sabotage means primarily: the withdrawal of efficiency. Sabotage means either to slacken up or interfere with the quantity, or to botch in your skill and interfere with the quality, of capitalist production or to give poor service. Sabotage is not physical violence; sabotage is an internal industrial process. It is something that is fought out within the four walls of the shop. And these three forms of sabotage – to affect the quality, the quantity, and the service are aimed at affecting the profit of the employer. Sabotage is a means of striking at the employer’s profit for the purpose of forcing him into granting certain conditions, even as workingmen strike for the same purpose of coercing him. It is simply another form of coercion.”143 In summary, the IWW indeed drew on several European intellectual traditions. Its

ideology evolved in its formative years into a peculiar amalgam of Marxism, anarchism,

syndicalism, and even Darwinism. From Marx, they derived the concepts of labor value,

commodity value, surplus value, and class struggle. Like Marx, Darwinian theories influenced

their view of industrial society as undergoing a process of material evolution. But it was in

anarcho-syndicalism that the IWW derived its most significant ideological tenets. Importantly,

they came to view the state and its political institutions as instruments of capitalism. This

compelled them to eschew political action and politics altogether. They instead propounded direct

action through economic organizations (i.e. trade unions) of the working class. Through direct

action, such as the general strike, the trade unions would form the basis of a stateless, democratic,

and cooperative post-capitalist society.

                                                                                                                         143  Elizabeth  Gurley  Flynn,  Sabotage:  The  Conscious  Withdrawal  of  the  Workers’  Industrial  Efficiency  (Cleveland,  OH:  IWW  Publishing  Bureau,  1916),  5.  

 

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Many Wobbly leaders, propagandists, and ideologues indeed looked to Europe for

inspiration, but it would be inaccurate to depict the IWW as a mere facsimile of European

workers’ movements. They looked to Europe for abstract notions, but industrial unionism as it

was practiced by the IWW was born of conditions in America. As was explored in the previous

chapter, the United States was home at this time to the most heterogeneous labor force in the

world. Its most disadvantaged workers were increasingly relegated to low-wage, unskilled work.

These were the workers excluded by the corporate liberalism, by the AFL and craft unionism, by

the National Civic Federation, by the system. These workers remained marginalized and

alienated.

In June of 1905, the IWW held its founding convention. It was intended to be, as Big Bill

Haywood exclaimed, “the Continental Congress of the working class.” Yet the debate over

political versus direct action, which went unresolved at the founding, would continue to plague

the IWW in its early years. The resolution of that debate would come at the fourth annual

convention in 1908, during which the anarcho-syndicalist faction, led by St. John and Trautmann,

successfully ousted De Leon from the organization. Many of the so-called “political socialists,”

De Leon’s supporters, dutifully followed their leader and exited the IWW. Four years into its

existence, the IWW was free to pursue an undivided strategy for emancipating the working class

from the bondage of wage slavery.

In the following section, the implications of this strategy will be explored. Indeed, the

IWW’s uncompromising brand of radicalism created an unbridgeable divide between them and

the respective socialist parties. Yet this radicalism also influenced the IWW’s ability to organize

workers. In 1912, the Wobblies would burst onto the national labor scene as a result of their

leadership during the Lawrence textile strike. The strike, although successful in its immediate

goals, revealed several flaws that threatened to undermine the IWW. While the Wobblies

developed national reputations in the pre-World War I era as activists and propagandists, it seems

that most semiskilled and skilled workers wanted more from their unions than mere strike

 

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leadership or oratory. Moreover, as we have seen, some Wobbly leaders and organizers allowed

their disdain for craft unionism to become disdain for skilled workers. As a result, the IWW

instead became the home for the most disadvantaged workers: timber beasts, hobo harvesters,

itinerant construction workers, eastern and southern European immigrants, and racial minorities.

It was the migratory workers, however, who best embodied the IWW’s radical ethos, who

embraced its outlaw image, who were most attracted to its vision of a new society, free from

national, occupational, or racial distinctions; free from oppression and free from want; a

Cooperative Commonwealth.

Wobbly Itinerants

There is perhaps another way of conceiving of these early disputes within the IWW.

Indeed, its formative years illustrate a clear divide between East and West, a divide that roughly

correlates to American geography but has more to do with worldview. The political socialists

were predominately easterners who hailed from large industrial cities. In these cities, working-

class poverty and labor unrest were common, but progressive reforms on the local and municipal

level had gone far to alleviate many of the worst ills of industrial capitalism – for example, the

prohibition of child labor and the creation of workers’ compensation. There was a measure of

stability, of home life, and at least the pretense of a social safety net. The East, moreover, was

home to the largest and most powerful trade unions in the country, unions such as the

International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the United Mine Workers (UMW). At any

rate, it instilled in many on the left the idea that change was possible by working within the

system.144

Conditions were considerably different in the American West at this time. After the

railroads opened the West in the nineteenth century, extractive industries such as logging and

mining quickly followed. In need of labor, companies recruited thousands of mostly single, young

                                                                                                                         144  David  Montgomery  Workers'  Control  in  America:  Studies  in  the  History  of  Work,  Technology,  and  Labor  Struggles  (New  York:  Cambridge  University  Press,  1979),  74.  

 

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men to work in the forests and in the mines, to build the roads and the towns, and to harvest the

fields. Urban centers remained few and far between, however, and many of the workers lived in

camps or company-owned towns so long as they remained employed. Yet most of these jobs were

seasonal at best and employment was therefore irregular. Workers enjoyed few comforts and even

fewer protections against the vagaries of industrial capitalism. Movement became an integral

feature of working-class life in the West. A unique class of migratory workers emerged from

these conditions with an equally unique subculture and worldview. One of those western

migrants, T.J. O’Brien, wrote of the East-West divided in the IWW’s Industrial Worker:

In this western country the conditions differ a great deal from those of the East. A majority of the workers in this part of the country do not know what a home is. The only home most of us have is the roll of blankets which we carry on our backs. In ninety-five cases out of one hundred he is single and his work often compels him to travel often as far as three hundred miles in search of employment, while in the East a majority of workers are married and therefore not transients. We must look at the worker from a different point of view here west of the Rockies.145 The same railroads that brought industry to the American West now transported scores of

migrant workers across the same terrain and became the arteries of an emerging hobo subculture.

Although an Americanism, the precise origin of the term hobo is uncertain. H.L. Mencken

observed in his work The American Language that there existed subtle but important distinctions

between terms that many Americans used interchangeably as pejoratives: “Tramps and hobos are

commonly lumped together, but see themselves as sharply differentiated. A hobo or bo is simply

a migratory laborer; he may take some longish holidays, but soon or late he returns to work. A

tramp never works if it can be avoided; he simply travels.”146

Without homes, hobos most often travelled by rail in search employment. They were

illegal passengers, however, most stowing away in empty cattle cars. They established in the

process of their travels a network of hobo encampments, or “jungles,” in the various towns and

                                                                                                                         145  T.J.  O’Brien,  “Organization  and  Tactics,”  Industrial  Worker,  February  20  and  26,  1910,  2.  146  H.L.  Mencken,  The  American  Language:  An  Inquiry  into  the  Development  of  English  in  the  United  States  (New  York:  Alfred  A.  Knopf,  1919),  15.  

 

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cities along their path. Typically near a railroad junction, in peripheral areas known as “skid

rows,” jungles were places where the migrants could safely congregate, a respite from distrustful

townspeople, vagrancy laws, and the police. When at work, the hoboes were under the oppressive

thumb of an employer. When on the road, they were at the mercy of a society that preferred to

ignore them. Moreover, life on the road was extremely dangerous. Between 1901 and 1905,

nearly 24,000 trespassers were killed on the railroads; nearly 25,000 injured.147 A poem by an

unknown author, “The Boe’s Lament,” captures the despair of a life lived on the fringes:

O! Lord, you know I’m ‘down and out,’ Forever forced to roam about,

From town to town, from state to state, Not knowing what may be my fate.

And frequently I have no bed,

On which to rest my weary head; And when at times I have the price,

I find it full of bugs and lice.

You know the stem [skid row] is often bad Of course that always makes one mad,

For it means that one must carry ‘The banner’ [of labor] in the night so airy.

Now Lord, this is no idle joke,

For I am ‘down and out’ and ‘broke.’ I have not got the gall to beg,

And not the nerve to be a ‘yegg’ [safecracker].

Unless one has the ready cash, For ‘coffee an’ neckbones’ or ‘hash,’ For ‘liver,’ ‘stew,’ or just ‘pigs feet,’

He surely has no chance to eat.

Now Lord, I’ve often times been told, That Heaven’s streets are paved with gold.

To me that doesn’t seem quite fair, When millions here are in despair.

Behold your creatures here below –

These multitudes who have no show, From their cradles to their graves,

Their doom is that they must be slaves.148                                                                                                                          147  Carleton  Parker,  121.  148  “The  Boe’s  Lament,”  in  Hobo  College  Press  Committee,  Hobo  Ballads  (Cincinnati,  OH:  n.d.),  8.      

 

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As social outcasts, hoboes often found a sense of community only in the jungles. Indeed,

the jungles served to cultivate hobo culture and traditions, distinct with their own rules, jargon,

mores, and code of ethics. In certain respects, the jungles signified a rejection of mainstream

society and served as an alternative mode of living. Hobo poet Harry Kemp observed in 1911 the

cooperative nature of hobo jungles:

It is often a marvel of cooperation. Discarded tin cans and battered boilers are made over into cooking utensils and dishes. Each member contributes to the common larder what he has begged for the day. There is usually in camp someone whose occupational vocation is that of cook, and who takes upon himself, as his share of the work, the cooking of meals. Stews are in great favor in trampdom and especially do they like strong, scalding coffee. Usually the procuring of food in such a camp is reduced to a system such as would interest economists and sociologists. One tramp goes to the butcher shop for meat, one goes to the bakers for bread, and so forth. And when one gang breaks up, its members are always very careful to leave everything in good order for the next comers. They will even leave the coffee grounds in the pot for the next fellow so that he can make ‘seconds’ if he needs to. These things are part of tramp etiquette, as is also the obligation each new arrival is under to bring, as he comes, some wood for the fire.149 The jungle consequently functioned as an important – indeed often the only – reliable

social institution for migratory workers. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the IWW

became one of the few formal organizations on which the migrants could rely. An important

factor in this relationship was that, like the hoboes, the IWW was born in the industrial frontier of

the American West. It must be remembered that the Western Federation of Miners played an

integral role in the formation of the IWW. Indeed, many of the Wobbly leaders were or had

previously been members of the WFM, including two of the most influential IWW leaders, Big

Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John. For these western workers, class war was not a figurative

expression or an abstract theory. The West became in the 1880s and 1890s a place of genuine

industrial warfare.

From 1894 to 1904, the WFM engaged employers in a series of violent clashes. At the

gold mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado in 1894, mine owners J. J. Hagerman, David

                                                                                                                         149  Harry  Kemp,  “The  Lure  of  the  Tramp,”  Independent,  70  (June  8,  1911),  1270.  

 

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Moffat and Eben Smith announced their intention to lengthen the average workday without a

raise in pay. Furthermore, the miners were being asked to perform riskier work in order to

increase profit margins for the mining companies. In response, the WFM organized a strike and

shut down operations at most of the area mines. Some of the companies yielded to the miners’

demands, but the larger mines soon acquired court injunctions and began to employ

strikebreakers. Circumstances turned violent as both sides engaged in a series of firefights. With

the help of the sheriff of Colorado City, the mining companies even raised a private army to quell

the strikers. In a rare occurrence, the state militia intervened on behalf of the striking miners and

brought an end to hostilities. It was a major victory for the WFM, as its popularity soared with

locals in the aftermath of the struggle. The long-term effects were mixed, however, for the mining

companies increasingly turned to the courts and private detective agencies such as Pinkertons in

the coming years. Moreover, as corporate industry increased its influence in the West, state

militias more often intervened on behalf of employers. The workers too mobilized, some union

locals effectively militarizing themselves with weapons and artillery. Violent conflict between

labor and capital erupted again in Leadville, Colorado in 1896, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho in 1899, and

many other places across the West.150

The westerners thus imbued the IWW with a militant spirit that their eastern counterparts

lacked. The westerners scoffed at the notion of class collaboration. Politics and Civic Federations

were tools of the oppressors. They had been brutalized by the system; they therefore saw in it

nothing that was redeemable. The IWW viewed migrant workers as possessing the greatest

potential for revolution precisely because these nomads were so detached from capitalist society.

In short, they had the least to lose and the most to gain from fundamental change. As one Wobbly

publication noted, migrants were the embodiment the IWW:

The nomadic worker of the West embodies the very spirit of the IWW. His cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of bourgeois society, including the more stringent conventions which masquerade under the name of

                                                                                                                         150  Dubofsky,  We  Shall  be  All,  21-­‐32.  

 

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morality, make him an admirable exemplar of the iconoclastic doctrine of revolutionary unionism. . . . His anomalous position, half industrial slave, half vagabond adventurer, leaves him infinitely less servile than his fellow worker in the East. Unlike the factory slave of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Central States, he is most emphatically not ‘afraid of his job’ . . . No wife or family encumber him. . . . Nowhere else can a section of the working class be found so admirably fitted to serve as the scouts and advance guards of the labor army. Rather they may become the guerrillas of the revolution – the francs-tireurs of the class struggle.151 As we have seen, the West during this time was a place with few social institutions or

mechanisms capable of remediating the disputes between labor and capital. As corporate

influence over state governments increased, however, the public institutions that did exist were

increasingly biased toward private industry. It was often only as members of trade unions that

migrant workers could protect themselves. In the IWW migrant workers found one of the few

organizations that not merely supported their interests but celebrated their existence.

Thus, for migrants, the IWW was a symbol of emancipation and self-empowerment, as

important for what it represented as it was for any of the tangible benefits it procured. In this

story of neglect, migrant workers dreamed of a future beyond greed, exploitation, and want. This

was the appeal of socialism, the appeal of the IWW. Perhaps it was best put in a poem called,

“The Migratory IWW,” which was signed J.H.B. The Rambler and appeared in a November 1916

edition of the Industrial Worker:

He’s one of the fellows that doesn’t fit it, You have met him without a doubt,

He’s lost to his friends, his kith and his kin, As he tramps the world about.

At night he wanders beneath the stars

With the mien of an ancient seer, And often he’s humming a few sweet bars,

Of a rebel song soft and clear.

Yes, he’s one of the breed that never fits, And never a dollar can glean,

He’s one that a scornful world requites, As simply a might-have-been.

                                                                                                                         151  Solidarity,  November  21,  1914,  reprinted  in  Rebel  Voices,  126.  

 

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But deep in the heart of his hungry soul, Tho’ the smug world casts him out,

There burns like the flames of a glowing coal, The fires of love devout.

Of a world in which all may live,

And prosperity be for all, Where no slave shall bow to a parasite’s greed,

Or answer a master’s call.152

                                                                                                                         152  J.H.B.  The  Rambler,  “The  Migratory  IWW,”  Industrial  Worker,  November  1916.  

 

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CONCLUSION

“The IWW can profitably be viewed only as a psychological byproduct of the neglected

childhood of industrial America.”153 Carleton Parker, a sociologist who in 1913 conducted an

investigation into the plight of migrant workers, devoted a considerable proportion of his

intellectual energies to studying the so-called “labor problem” in America. This was a

preoccupation he shared with many of his contemporaries in Progressive Era. Indeed, it was a

nearly impossible subject to avoid, for the second half of the nineteenth and the start of the

twentieth centuries had been characterized by tumultuous intervals of social unrest. And much of

this unrest emanated from American working class.

Yet a mere eighty years earlier, the United States had been a profoundly different society.

Prior to the industrial revolution, patterns of life and work had endured for centuries more or less

unchanged. In what remained a predominately agrarian society, the majority of free persons were

small-scale, subsistence farmers. Likewise, manufacturing was done on a small-scale, custom

order basis by independent craftsmen. When pockets of the US began to industrialize in the 1820s

and 1830s, however, the handicraft system of production was gradually replaced by the factory

system. Capital, power, and authority concentrated in the hands of those who owned the factories,

while many formerly independent journeymen were compelled to seek employment as wage

laborers in these very same factories. In the post-Civil War era, the divide between owner and

employer only grew larger. Industrial capitalism was predicated on maximizing profit, which

often meant increasing the scale of production while minimizing labor costs. Workers thus

labored long hours, for low wages, in sometimes dangerous conditions. In response to such

inequities, the first trade unions emerged prior to the Civil War; the first national labor movement

would emerge in the 1880s.

                                                                                                                         153  Parker,  100.  

 

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Unrest nonetheless became an endemic feature of industrial society, fueled primarily by

both rural and urban poverty. As capital accumulation increased, popular discontent was

channeled into a series of reform movements beginning with the Populists in the 1890s and

culminating in the Progressive movements in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Decidedly urban in character, the progressive movements were particularly concerned with

rectifying the social ills of industrial life. They advocated a variety reforms on the local,

municipal, and national levels, most of the measures concerned with cleaning up governmental

corruption, improving bureaucratic efficiency, ameliorating poverty, and fighting corporate

monopolies. Some observers have argued that the progressive impulse stemmed from middle-

class status anxiety, from the sense that the middle-class was being caught in between the

dangerous extremes of wealth and poverty, capital and labor.

This observation perhaps explains certain elements of the Progressive Era, but it can

hardly be said to encapsulate a set of movements, ideologies, and people as disparate and

variegated as those we refer to collectively as “progressives.” Yet it is apparent that many social

reformers during the Progressive Era struggled with the dynamics of class in America. Some, like

Jane Addams, for example, preferred to dismiss the notion that the United States was riven by

class antagonisms. Others promoted the idea of class collaboration, an idea exemplified by such

organizations as the American Federation of Labor and the National Civic Federation. The

underlying contention was that there could exist a harmony of interests between employer and

employee. The Civic Federation was to be a forum in which government, business, and labor

leaders came together in the spirit of compromise and conciliation. Many leaders in the AFL,

which was the largest and most powerful labor organization in the country at this time, were

active participants in the Civic Federation.

Opponents of these collaborations saw in them, however, the development of a new

corporate liberal order: a network of elites in government, business, and labor whose primary

intention was to protect their own interests by stabilizing capitalism. Moreover, they charged that

 

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the AFL’s practice of craft unionism privileged only skilled workers and thereby excluded the

vast majority of working-class Americans, whether they be women, racial minorities, immigrants,

or unskilled workers in general. These peoples, the growing majority of American workers,

remained marginalized and excluded by the system.

In late 1904, many in the labor and socialist movements came together to express their

discontent about these developments and plan a potential alternative. Their efforts led to the

creation of the Industrial Workers of the World in June of 1905. The IWW was formed on the

basis of revolutionary industrial unionism, meant to organize all workers irrespective of craft

distinctions and ultimately devoted to achieving socialism. Yet the IWW’s formative years were

characterized by internal ideological disputes between anarcho-syndicalists and political

socialists. At the 1908 convention, the syndicalists successfully ousted the dominate faction of

political socialists and were then able to pursue their strategy of emancipating workers from the

bondage of wage slavery. Their uncompromising brand of radicalism, which rejected political

action altogether, served to alienate not merely the political socialists but also semiskilled and

skilled workers who wanted more than oratory and strike leadership from their trade unions.

This was therefore a story of how industrialism transformed American life and how it

contributed to unprecedented inequality and unrest. It was the story of how reform attempted to

rectify those problems without fundamentally changing their causes. The central aim of this study

was intended to explore the factors that contributed to the IWW’s role in the Progressive Era as a

home for those workers who were excluded by the system. Thus, it is also a story of neglect; of

the failure of institutions to confront the underlying causes of socioeconomic inequality.

 

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