The first editor that is named in the paper is James Wilson March 18, December 15, He then turned the reigns over to F.
Schleis December 25, May 14, Next Hartwell S. Shippley May 21, Nov 9, took up the project. Shippley then passed the job to Fred W. Hulewood November 17, January 25, , one of the only two editors to serve for longer than one year. When Hulewood retired, Walker C. Smith February 1, July 10, resumed as publisher followed by John F.
Leheney July 17, July 24, who had the shortest stint, being publisher for only two issues. Following three years of silence, Thomas Whitehead April 1, May 6, appeared as publisher when the paper resumed. The last named publisher, J. MacDonald May 13, July 6, , served for almost two years. He may have served longer but after July 6, , there is no listing of the staff. There are a few possible reasons for all this changing of staff.
The first is that during this early part of the I. The editors may have been arrested and therefore unable to perform their duties. That would explain the lack of staff detail after a certain point. They listing of staff members would make it easy for the police to find members and arrest them.
A second possibility could have to do with the philosophy of the I. At its heart, the I. The less centralized and established the power of the editor was the better it would reflect the organization.
In all likelihood if the paper was run like the I. That would be the ideal situation. Whether it was actually run that way would warrant further research and interviews with the staff. If that was the case, then the editor would be editor in name only and after a certain point, the paper would cease to need one at all, corresponding to the papers cessation of naming the editors.
The news of the Industrial worker was about sixty percent devoted to the western U. It contained accounts of strikes, local radical direct action and activism, and other labor and political movements, including socialists and communists, which they seemed to view in a somewhat affectionate light. There was also national and international news about labor and radicalism. There were editorials about wage slavery in China and Mexico next news about national labor law and the I.
In addition to the normal news there were a number of special issues. Every year there was a May Day issue that took a step back and looked at the progress of the labor movement and the future.
There was a special supplement from March 9, to April 20, called the Lumberjack supplement, which was devoted to labor as it related to people in the timber industry.
In its early years, the Industrial Worker carried many advertisements. Most were for hotels, restaurants, bookstores, and clothiers primarily located in the Seattle area. This seems to suggest that the paper was primarily circulated in this area.
Until the end of the collection usually half of the fourth page of every issue is given over to ads like the following:. Advertisements disappear n the s, reflecting the changing pattern of public opinion after the years of suppression. The I. This would mean that business would be less likely to want to be associated with the I. W or the paper. In addition to all the news, there was a section devoted to job news.
This was basically reports of working conditions and pay in local areas for use by people looking for employment. The reports dripped with sarcasm and hints at an adversarial relationship with management. An example of this appears in the January 15, issue of the Industrial Worker :. Port Arthur, Ont. So a fair warning should be given to the worker to steer away from this vicinity, as there is no other work to be gotten and the town is overrun by men.
Quite a few are broke and steming is very poor. Senic, Wash—Great Northern R. Guthrie and Company the contractors. The board is fair, but sleeping conditions are rotten.
Themes and strategies of The Industrial Worker :. A radical, revolutionary paper, the Industrial Worker is characterized throughout by distinct and blatant propaganda. As the voice of the IWW, or at least the Washington branch , the paper aimed to further the development of one big union through the recruitment of all workers. The reader is encouraged to support strikes, to organize and to spread the word. The first issue in particular relies heavily on propaganda rather than reporting.
This article compares the life of a pet dog with one of the workingman. The dog, unsurprisingly, is portrayed as having an easy life while the workers have nothing.
Keep on working for nothing. What we want to establish at this time is a labor organization that will open wide its doors to every man that earns his livelihood either by his brain or his muscle. The aspiration to unite the workers upon the political field is an aspiration in line and in step with civilization. Civilized man, when he argues with an adversary, does not start with clenching his fist and telling him, 'smell this bunch of bones'. He does not start by telling him, 'feel my biceps'.
He begins by arguing; physical force by arms is the last resort. That is the method of the civilized man, and the method of civilized man is the method of civilized organization. The barbarian begins with physical force; the civilized man ends with that, when physical force is necessary.
Civilized man will always here in America give a chance to peace; he will, accordingly, proceed along the lines that make peace possible. But civilized man, unless he is a visionary, will know that unless there is Might behind your Right, your Right is something to laugh at.
And the thing to do, consequently, is to gather behind the ballot, behind that united political movement, the Might which is alone able, when necessary, to 'take and hold'. Without the working people are united on the political field; without the delusion has been removed from their minds that any of the issues of the capitalist class can do for them permanently, or even temporarily; without the working people have been removed altogether from the mental thralldom of the capitalist class, from its insidious influence, there is no possibility of your having those conditions under which they can really organize themselves economically in such a way as to 'take and hold'.
And after those mental conditions are generally established, there needs something more than the statement to 'take and hold'; something more than a political declaration, something more than the capitalist political inspectors to allow this or that candidate to filter through.
You then need the industrial organization of the working class, so that if the capitalist should be foolish enough in America to defeat, to thwart the will of the workers expressed by the ballot - I do not say 'the will of the workers, as returned by the capitalist election inspectors', but the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box - then there will be a condition of things by which the working class can absolutely cease production, and thereby starve out the capitalist class, and render their present economic means and all their preparations for war absolutely useless.
The most serious danger to the American democratic future which may issue from aggressive and unscrupulous unionism consists in the state of mind of which mob-violence is only one expression. The militant unionists are beginning to talk and believe as if they were at war with the existing social and political order - as if the American political system was as inimical to their interests as would be that of any European monarchy or aristocracy.
Whether this aggressive unionism will ever become popular enough to endanger the foundations of the American political and social order, I shall not pretend to predict. The practical dangers resulting from it at any one time are largely neutralized by the mere size of the country and its extremely complicated social and industrial economy. The menace it contains to the nation as a whole can hardly become very critical as long as so large a proportion of the American voters are land-owning farmers.
But while the general national well-being seems sufficiently protected for the present against the aggressive assertion of the class interests of the unionists, the local public interest of particular states and cities cannot be considered as anywhere near so secure; and in any event the existence of aggressive discontent on the part of the unionists must constitute a serious problem for the American legislator and statesman.
The unionist leaders frequently offer verbal homage to the great American principle of equal rights, but what they really demand is the abandonment of that principle.
What they want is an economic and political order which will discriminate in favor of union labor and against non-union labor; and they want it on the ground that the unions have proved to be the most effective agency on behalf of the economic and social amelioration of the wage-earner. The unions, that is, are helping most effectively to accomplish the task, traditionally attributed to the American democratic political system - the task of raising the general standard of living; and the unionists claim that they deserve on this ground recognition by the state and active encouragement.
Obviously, however, such encouragement could not go very far without violating both the Federal and many state constitutions - the result being that there is a profound antagonism between our existing political system and what the unionists consider to be a perfectly fair demand.
Like all good Americans, while verbally asking for nothing but equal rights, they interpret the phrase so that equal rights become equivalent to special rights. My own feeling is that immigrants bring us ideals, cultures, red blood, which are an asset for America or would be if we gave them a chance.
But what is undesirable, beyond all peradventure, is our great bottom-lands of quick-cash, low-income employments in which they are bogged. Petty magistrates and police, state militia and the courts - all these were brought to bear by the great commonwealth of Massachusetts, once the Lawrence strikes threatened the public peace. But what had the great commonwealth of Massachusetts done to protect the people of Lawrence against the insidious canker of subnormal wages which were and are blighting family life?
Nor have the trade-unions met any large responsibility toward unskilled labor. Through apprenticeship, organization, they have endeavored to keep their own heads above the general level.
Common labor has been left as the hindmost for the devil to take. For the most part common laborers have had to look elsewhere than to the skilled crafts for succor. They have had it held out to them by the Industrial Workers of the World, which stands for industrial organization, for one big union embracing every man in the industry, for the mass strike, for the benefits to the rank and file here and now, and not in some far-away political upheaval.
There are about one hundred I. Only a few of the I. Some of the best speakers were tried and convicted of vagrancy, by juries of business men.
Four of them got six months apiece, although they proved that they were not vagrants. Many of the boys have been imprisoned for fifty-one days, today, without trial. This happened not in Russia, but in sunny California. Frank Little was arrested on the charge of vagrancy. Frank is one of the 94 I. The officers of the state board of health say that there is air enough in the pen for 5 men.
Most of the men confined in the bull pen have been out in the open air only once or twice since they were arrested. A good many of the men have been in there 53 days today. Were the offenders punished? A high government official has publicly condoned this murder, thereby upholding lynch-law and mob rule. And when they made sure it was he whom they wanted, they dragged him from his bed with blows, tho' he was willing to walk,.
And there was no moon and no star and not any visible thing, and even the faces of the men were eaten with the leprosy of the dark, for they were masked with black shame,. And nothing showed in the gloom save the glow of his eyes and the flame of his soul that scorched the face of Death.
Through the years he was to repeat that bribe offer to kill Frank Little so many times, that I came to believe, knowing him now, that it was a kind of key to his life. It was in a boardinghouse in Butte, Montana, in that the owner, Mrs. Nora Byrne, was awakened one night by voices in the room next to hers, room 30, men's voices saying there must he some mistake here, and then feet in the hall, then men at her door, pushing it open, and Mrs. Byrne, having jumped out of bed, held her door with all her strength as some men with guns pushed it in anyway.
They held the gun on her, saying, "Where is Frank Little? Then they went away again, and kicked down the door of room 32 and went in and woke the man sleeping there, who made no outcry or objection and demanded no explanation. Because he had a broken leg, they had to carry him out. Then, in the morning, he was found hanging from the trestle with a warning to others pinned to his underwear.
Some people said his balls had been cut off. The warning came from the Montana vigilantes, though it was hard to see what the citizens of Montana stood to gain from the death of this poor man.
Only the mine owners stood to gain from the death of this agitator, a Wobbly. Wobblies were stirring up a lot of trouble among the miners at Butte. Little had brought his lynching on himself. The mine owner's lawyer, noticing no contradiction, inconsistency or irony, proclaimed that the Wobblies "have invariably shown themselves to be bullies, anarchists and terrorists.
These things they do openly and boldly," unlike he did not add all the decent American vigilantes who came masked by night. The young Hammett, in Montana at the time, noticed the ironies and inconsistencies with particular interest because men had come to him and to other Pinkerton agents and had proposed that they help do away with Frank Little.
Hammett's inclinations had probably always been on the side of law and order. His father had once been a justice of the peace and always went to the law when necessary with confidence, for instance, when his buggy was damaged by the potholes on the public road; and he worked for a lock-and-safe company, and at other times as a watchman or a guard.
There was thus in the family a brief for caring about the property of others, putting oneself at risk so that things in general should be safe and secure. But at some moment - perhaps at the moment he was asked to murder Frank Little or perhaps at the moment that he learned that Little had been killed, possibly by other Pinkerton men - Hammett saw that the actions of the guards and the guarded, of the detective and the man he's stalking, are reflexes of a single sensibility, on the fringe where murderers and thieves live.
Monster mass meetings were held every weekend throughout the nine-week strike, for the strikers to vote on and ratify the decisions made by the strike committee, facilitated by a small army of interpreters.
Continuous mass pickets of thousands patrolled the mill area of the town, completely encircling each mill to ensure that no scabs were able to work. Massive parades took place every few days, with anywhere between 3, to 10, workers marching and singing the Internationale in their own languages. Ten thousand of the striking workers joined the IWW.
Facing armed militias paid for by the hostile mill owners, brutal police attacks, and widespread arrests of hundreds of strikers, as well as the leadership of the competing AFL textile workers union who came to Lawrence in an attempt to call off the strike, the IWW held out.
Newspapers carried stories and images of the malnourished and ragged children of the strikers across the country as they arrived at their new temporary homes, which played a role in tipping public opinion in favor of the strike. When Lawrence police attacked a delegation of the children on their way to the train station with their mothers, ruthlessly beating down and arresting children and parents alike, national outrage ensued, leading to an eventual Congressional investigation of the living and working conditions of the striking families.
With every innovative tactic used by the strikers, the mill owners and city leaders oftentimes interchangeable upped the ante. The state militia insituted martial law for a time, leading to the death of an eighteen-year-old Syrian mill hand he was bayonetted in the back while running from advancing troops.
Private detectives from the Pinkerton agency were brought into the town to spy on strike leaders, provoke riots, and terrorize families. Local clergy who would play ball were enlisted on the side of the mill owners, who instructed them to denounce the strike and the IWW. And, at the behest of the city council, the rival AFL union was brought in to attempt to end the strike by signing agreements for the skilled workers and sending them back to work.
The IWW kept calm and held out through all of these challenges to win a stunning victory, wresting pay raises of 5 to 22 percent to all of the striking workers, payment of overtime, and promises of no retaliation from the mill owners.
The Lawrence strike still holds the imagination of radicals today who want to build a multi-ethnic, fighting labor movement, as it certainly did in The success in the Lawrence strike launched the IWW into the national arena, with as the year in which they scored organizing victories in different industries across the country: on the railroads, in textiles, steel, lumber, metalworking, longshore jobs, agriculture, and even cigar rolling, once a bastion of AFL craft unionism.
It is in this period, between and the end of World War I, that the IWW made its most impressive gains in terms of membership and political impact among the American working class. Because of its willingness to organize women, people of color, the unskilled and foreign-born workers oftentimes these overlapped , the IWW grew in numbers and influence. In Philadelphia, the IWW organized longshoremen across color lines to win united multiracial strikes against the shipping bosses. In Louisiana, it organized lumber mill workers into integrated local unions, breaking Jim Crow segregation laws, a practice not accepted by other unions until decades later.
They also organized migrant agricultural laborers in California and across the West, winning some gains in anticipation of later union drives among farm laborers in the s and again in the s and s. During this period, at its height, the IWW could claim 40, dues-paying members.
But there were still nagging political questions which remained unanswered. And the IWW was still losing plenty of strikes for every victory, as in the large Paterson, New Jersey silk strike which went down to defeat only a year after Lawrence, or the defeat of the rubber workers strike in Akron, Ohio.
Was it a betrayal of revolutionary principle to set up permanent strike funds, so the IWW stood a chance of winning long strikes? Or to sign contracts with management? Within a year of their crowning victory in Lawrence, the IWW local declined from over 10, members to roughly , with most of their militants being driven out of the mills and blacklisted.
Within the organization, rumblings could be heard that pointed to a different method, as storm clouds gathered on the horizon. The war The heyday of the IWW began to pass as major political developments played out on the world stage. World War I erupted across Europe in the fall of , splitting the world socialist movement over support or opposition to the war. The socialist parties of the Second International had failed the test of history. With the coming US involvement in the war, the federal government began ramping up a Red Scare to use as a bludgeon against all radical forces across the country.
The IWW was organizing and leading strikes in the industries pivotal to the war effort copper mining, lumber, rubber, among others and became a natural target for state repression. While local unions, affiliated publications, and individual members were left free to express their opposition to the mad butchery of the imperialist war, the general executive board officially discouraged open agitation against the war and did not take any open position against it.
Fred Thompson, former general secretary treasurer of the IWW wrote:. The majority felt this would sidetrack the class struggle into futile channels and be playing the very game that the war profiteers would want the IWW to play. They contended that the monstrous stupidity by which the governments of different lands could put their workers into uniforms and make them go forth and shoot each other was something that could be stopped only if the workers of the world were organized together; then they could put a stop to this being used against themselves; and that consequently the thing to be done under the actual circumstances was to proceed with organizing workers to fight their steady enemy, the employing class.
There was no opportunity for referendum, but the more active locals took this attitude, instructing speakers to confine their remarks to industrial union issues, circulating only those pamphlets that made a constructive case for the IWW, and avoiding alliance with the Peoples Council and similar anti-war movements.
Although radicals have long aimed to organize the entire world working class, the idea of only engaging in antiwar organizing through production-halting strikes once the entire global working class has been brought into the ranks of radical unions, can only be interpreted as an intentional avoidance of the issue of the war.
Despite their avoidance of taking a public antiwar stance, various states and the federal government went on the offensive against the IWW. And in September , the Department of Justice raided forty-eight IWW halls across the country, arresting leaders of the group in a single major operation and charged them under the newly passed Espionage Act.
Of those arrested, were convicted and given sentences of up to twenty years in prison, including some who had not been members of the IWW for years. And these were the lucky ones.
Those who fared worse were attacked by lynch mobs recruited from local chambers of commerce, brutally beaten or murdered with the silent consent of the government. In Centralia, Washington on November 11, , IWW member and army veteran Wesley Everest was turned over to a lynch mob by jail guards, had his teeth smashed with a rifle butt, lynched three times in three separate locations, his corpse then riddled with bullets, before being dumped in an unmarked grave.
Revolution The other political development to be a major issue for the IWW was the birth of Soviet power in Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution at the end of And it was a revolution led by a party that shared a vigorous disdain for the opportunistic reformism of the Second International that many in the IWW had always possessed.
The Bolshevik Party was an organization which had earned its political leadership in thousands of strikes, mass protests, and rebellions, through hard years of underground activity and struggle. The political impact of the October Revolution is difficult to overstate, in that radicals the world over began to identify either with or against the Revolution. Big Bill Haywood was one of those who were immediately sympathetic to the victory of Bolshevism in In his autobiography, he recalled:. This letter spoke of the situation of capitalism after the imperialist war, outlined the points in common held by the IWW and the Communists, warned of the coming attacks on the workers, pictured the futility of reformism, analyzed the capitalist state and the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat and told how the Soviet state of workers and peasants was constructed.
After being arrested under the Espionage Act, Haywood fled his bail and boarded a ship for the Soviet Union. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn joined a few years later. William Z. Revolutionary unionism? While the prestige and appeal of a successful revolution certainly played a role in attracting American radicals to the CP, much of the process of winning members to the new party revolved around tough political debates and questions, argued out and voted on in the sessions of the Communist International.
Central to this for the US Left was the question of revolutionary unions and the method of Communist involvement in the labor movement. To refuse to work in the reactionary trade unions means leaving the insufficiently developed or backward masses of the workers under the influence of the reactionary leaders.. Faced with massive persecution by all levels of government and an exodus of many of their best leaders and cadres, the IWW began to decline.
The organization split in , hemorrhaging members in the process. By , the IWW had dwindled to below 10, members, and as the working class upsurge of the decade exploded across the national arena with the rise of the CIO, the IWW continued to lose numbers. Indeed, the CIO organized by many former Wobblies who joined the CP would quickly take the last few remaining locals of the IWW, which, because of its refusal to sign contracts, allowed the CIO to easily win over entire locals to its own powerful and growing new industrial unions.
The last significant membership base was concentrated among metal workers in Cleveland, who wound up splitting away and going into the CIO. Conclusion James P. Cannon praised the IWW but also recognized the problems it had trying to build an organization that had features of both a union and a revolutionary organization.
Whereas unions, as the basic fighting forces of the working class, are only effective when all workers in a given trade or industry are embraced in their ranks regardless of whether each individual worker believes in the political principle of class struggle, revolutionary groups are effective when their own membership maintains a high degree of political agreement and clarity, enabling the group or party to operate with effective flexibility and coherence:.
One of the most important contradictions of the IWW, implanted at its first convention and never resolved, was the dual role it assigned to itself.
They withstood these attacks, as well as pressure from the mill owners one of whom was the governor, Eugene Foss and Pinkerton infiltrators, and won pay increases and overtime pay. The infamous conviction and subsequent execution of Joe Hill, an IWW member wrongfully accused of shooting a store clerk and his son in Salt Lake City, Utah, has been widely seen as a deliberate attempt by government authorities to remove a prominent organizer and songwriter from the IWW rolls.
Despite attempts at repression, membership grew during and immediately after World War I. By , membership had declined from a peak in of nearly , to just over 10, Further government repression, including Taft-Hartley and other anti-labor laws, hurt the IWW, but it saw a slight resurgence when the civil rights and antiwar movements opened the door once again for radical politics.
In recent decades the union has still played an important part in labor actions—it attempted to instigate a general strike in Wisconsin in , for instance—and it has nearly 6, members today.
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