beaut losers

History of the Labor Movement in the United States

suggesting that the IWW songwriter and martyr Joe Hill, executed for

murder in Utah in 1915, may have been guilty as charged.[18] Stegner had

fictionalized the case in his 1945 novel The Preacher and the Slave

(also the title of one of Hill’s best-known revolutionary ballads).[19]

This aroused the righteous indignation of what was left of the IWW and a

few other leftists as well,[20] but the controversy did nothing to

revive interest in the IWW or influence how historians interpreted it.

There is no doubt that once his political affiliation became known, Hill

got a trial unfair even by the standards of the day, but nobody now

living can say for sure if he was guilty or innocent. He was picked up

initially, not because he was a Wobbly, but because he was an unemployed

drifter with no explanation for a gunshot wound received the night of

the murder. He didn’t take the stand, and his absurd public position was

that his lips were sealed in order to protect a lady’s honor. The IWW

made Hill the organization’s most famous martyr. In the 1960s, a new

generation formed a taste for combining politics, humor and song as Hill

had done, sparking a modest revival of interest in his case. Ironically,

the main scholarly manifestation of the renewal originated, not in the

New Left or the counter-culture, but with the prolific Communist Party

historian Philip S. Foner. In

The Case of Joe Hill

(1965)[21] Foner affirmed Hill’s innocence but without finding the

smoking gun in someone else’s hand either. By now it seems unlikely we

will ever know much more about the case than Foner relates.

Foner spun the book off from his larger

of which the fourth volume, also published in 1965, is devoted to the

IWW, 1905-1917.[22] In over 600 pages of prose he would probably be

flattered to have called workmanlike, Foner narrates the history of the

organization, for the years covered, in more detail than any other book.

No other volume, for instance, collects within its covers accounts of

nearly as many of the IWW “free speech fights,” its efforts to spread

its message in public places, meeting arrest and repression with massive

nonviolent civil disobedience. If it happened, and if he can find out

anything about it, Foner reports it. And “reports” is the right word for

it. The book reads like solid investigative journalism, only a few

decades after the fact. Not that it lacks a theoretical, or at least an

ideological orientation: Foner writes like what he is, an

unreconstructed Stalinist.

The result makes for an occasionally disconcerting mismatch between

theory and practice. In theory, Foner writes as a dialectical

materialist, but his methodology is positivist, and the result comes off

as quaint. As for his many other books, his sources are resolutely

traditional. He has an enormous appetite for digesting published

sources, especially newspapers and magazines. The presentation is mainly

chronological. As a Marxist, he might be expected to probe deeply into

developments of American capitalism to which the IWW was a reaction, and

explore in some detail the organization’s class base, but he does less

of this than the authors of any other general IWW histories. Instead he

tells two stories: one is about how IWW-led workers confronted capital

and the state, the other is about the internal politics of the

organization, the conflicts among ideologues to determine its “line.”

The formerly invariably comes off as more heroic, although Foner, as a

Leninist, cannot help but be keenly concerned with the latter. This is

where Foner’s Communist Party loyalism comes in.

The Communists adopted a rather convoluted attitude toward the IWW. In

its heyday the IWW was almost the only game in town for anti-capitalist

revolutionaries. Its goal of working-class solidarity through industrial

unionism in a sense preserved , through Progressive reform and

conservative reaction, elements of Marxism and a continuity with earlier

labor movements like the Knights of Labor which might otherwise have

been sundered. Important early leaders of the Communist Party, such as

Big Bill Haywood and Helen Gurley Flynn — Foner’s volume is dedicated to

the “rebel girl” — had been prominent Wobblies, and a substantial number

of rank-and-file Wobblies seem to have ended up in the newer

organization which, judging from developments in Russia, knew the way to

the revolutionary future.[23] The IWW had, in the words of one of its

favorite songs, “held the fort” for the revolutionary left.

On the other hand, the IWW was not Leninist. It was not, and it would

not support, a political party. The IWW rejected Lenin’s theory that it

required an intellectual vanguard of bourgeois origins to convey

class-consciousness to the benighted workers. And there was a

significant if minority presence within the IWW of the anarchists,

ancient rivals and enemies of the Marxists, and many more Wobblies had

some anarchist tendencies. But the Communist Party, USA could afford to

look with indulgence on the IWW as it was being destroyed during the Red

Scare: it was no serious rival, indeed, the Party could pick up some of

the pieces. The 1924 split lost the IWW many of its not so numerous

remaining members to the CP; the anarcho-syndicalists were left in

possession (they still are) of an almost empty shell. It served the

Party’s purposes condescendingly to cast the pre-CP IWW as its valorous

and well-meaning if somewhat misguided precursor. So it appears in

Foner’s book. The CP is to the IWW what Jesus was to John the Baptist,

the greater one who follows. The title of a 1956 pamphlet by Communist

James P. Cannon confirms the point: The I.W.W.: The Great

Anticipation.[24] Space limitations certainly suggested concluding

Foner’s narrative when it did, if not sooner, but it was also convenient

to usher the IWW off the stage before the greatest hero made a

debut.[25]

THE SIXTIES, OR, HISTORY FROM THE BOTTOM UP

Although Foner’s IWW history came out in the 1960’s, and for that reason

probably enjoyed a larger audience than it would have had earlier, its

kind of history was as out-of-date as its politics. A new generation of

historians, including some Marxists, began to write labor history in a

new way. Following E.P. Thompson, they reconceived class as something

more complicated than occupying a certain slot at work. Where Marx,

Engels and Lenin had distinguished the “class in itself,” defined in

economic terms as propertyless wage-labors, from the “class for itself”

— the class conscious of itself as a class with its own economic (and

political) interests — Thompson and likeminded historians believed that

the distinction had cost more in meaning than it was worth in analytic

clarity. Class was in important part constituted by class consciousness.

That doesn’t mean that people can wish themselves into or out of the

bourgeoisie or the proletariat by creative visualisation or by clicking

their heels together three times. Class, according to E.P. Thompson and

Herbert Gutman, does have an essential subjective component — but it is

mainly not a private psychological experience but a collective shared

sense of identity. In other words, the making of the working class is

very much a matter of the making of working-class culture. And this

implies that in some degree the working class is its own maker.

With respect to the IWW, however, and indeed for most of the new

American working-class history of the 1960’s, this is running ahead of

the story. The thoroughgoing culturalist conclusions which would later

be drawn by some historians were for a time masked by the perception

that the main lessons of the labor history version of the new

non-institutional, from-the-bottom-up history were different. There was

first the overcoming of the institutionalist equation of the history of

workers with the history of unions. At no time in American history have

most workers belonged to unions. To confine labor history to union

history is at one stroke to dismiss the experience of most American

workers, past and present, as beneath notice. As if that were not bad

enough, the dismissal is systematically discriminatory inasmuch as it

systematically understates the importance of strata of workers who have

always been underrepresented, if not unrepresented, by the unions:

women, children, nonwhites, the foreign-born , the unmarried, the

transient, and the unskilled. In the 1960’s these critical failings in

labor history were noticed and began to be corrected, and there were

those who also noticed that the IWW was by 60’s standards the most

radically egalitarian organization of any consequence in American

history. And it was a time to “do your own thing” both individually and

collectively. Stonefaced sacrificial Stalinism lost what little

attraction it ever had for idealistic youth or for idealistic academics,

including those with leftist pretensions. The Wobbly boast — “Leaders?

We got no leaders!” — was not really true, except by comparison with the

Old Left, but it was in tune with the anti-authoritarian temper of the

decade. Joyce Kornbluh’s 1964 IWW anthology could not have been better

timed.

John Higham wrote in 1965 that “it is reasonable to assume that a

country gets, for the most part, the sort of history that it wants.”[26]

If so, America wanted history with a social and cultural flavor,

sympathetic to popular movements, and what could be more congenial than

an ethnically and sexually inclusive counter-movement, not only hostile

to authority but irreverent toward it, whose goal was participatory

democracy? In 1969, radical historian Staughton Lynd made the analogy

explicit: like the Wobblies, the student left sought to build “the new

society within the shell of the old.”[27] For awhile, some SDS theorists

called for “student syndicalism,” a phrase which would have baffled the

old-time Wobblies. And since the student movement was above all an

antiwar movement, it was easy for its more erudite participants to liken

the government repression of antiwar Wobblies which commenced, with the

support of the pro-war AFL, in 1917, to the government repression of

their own movement opposing the Vietnam War — a war supported by the

AFL-CIO. This is not to say that the IWW heritage influenced events in

the 60’s — or that it did not. That is one of those subjects about which

too much has not been written, indeed, not nearly enough, no matter what

Morton Keller thinks. But there were good reasons for interest in the

IWW to revive in the 60’s.

Two general narrative histories of the IWW appeared in the 1960’s. The

less important one was Patrick Renshaw,

The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States

(1967),[28] a sympathetic 300-page popular history by an English

journalist. It’s not at all bad for being what it is, and it does not

pretend to be anything more. Several subsequent academic historians have

faulted him for errors of fact, such as erroneously putting certain

Wobblies in times and places they were not, but nobody claims that these

errors in detail seriously devalue the book. It would be interesting to

know how well it sold (there was also a paperback edition). Its

“Postscript: Workers of the World”[29] discusses briefly, but less

briefly than any other general narrative, IWW presence or influence in

other countries such as Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Britain,

and Norway as well as among Mexicans on both sides of the border with

the United States.

By general agreement, the foremost general history of the IWW is Melvyn

Dubofsky,

We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World

(second edition 1988),[30] whose first edition appeared in 1969. In 561

pages it tells the story of the IWW from its origins among Western hard

rock miners to the 1924 split. In far more detail than anyone else,

Dubofsky relates the founding of the IWW in 1905 to the preceding

fifteen years of often violent class conflict in the Western mines. By

far the most important organization involved in the founding of the IWW,

the Western Federation of Miners, was a product of that struggle.

(Although the WFM soon took a cautious, even conservative turn and

pulled out of the IWW, nearly aborting the infant organization.)

Dubofsky’s insistence on the “industrial frontier” origins of the IWW

has been criticized as an attempt to provide the IWW with an

immaculately American pedigree, as Brissenden had done in a period of

nativist xenophobia. But not every evocation of the frontier commits the

Turnerist heresy.[31] Granted that at this late date the Americanism of

the IWW should not be critical to understanding it, some of the credit

belongs to historians like Brissenden and Dubofsky who, by downplaying

the foreign character of the IWW, downplayed the issue itself.

If only — but not only — because of the chronological limits of the

general histories by Brissenden and Foner, Dubofsky provides the most

detailed as well as the most up-to-date account of the repression of the

IWW from 1917 to 1924. The next best account is by Gambs, but many more

sources were available to Dubofsky. (Strictly speaking, the most

detailed account is William Preston,

Aliens and Dissenters

,[32] but it is confined to the Federal government’s role. So is Paul L.

Murphy,

World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States

(1979),[33] which examines the wartime repression as the context in

which judicial enforcement of constitutional guarantees of free

expression and association originated, although the early decisions were

usually not very libertarian.) The Federal government, the states, and

private powers ranging from the American Legion to the AFL all assailed

the I.W.W. Hundreds of Wobblies went to prison, often for mere

membership in the IWW, which violated the newly minted “criminal

syndicalism” statutes whose very name announced their purpose to target

the organization.[34] Justice Department officials seized all the

records and correspondence at the Chicago headquarters in 1917 and they

were burned by court order in 1923 — a serious loss to historians.[35]

In the second edition of his book, Dubofsky recants one of his original

theoretical perspectives. He was at first much taken with anthropologist

Oscar Lewis’ concept of a “culture of poverty” which, according to

Lewis, explained the self-defeating fecklessness and powerlessness of

poor peasants in places like Mexico and Puerto Rico recently relocating

to urban slums. Dubofsky originally thought that this concept

illuminated the social base of the IWW. Wobblies, especially Western

Wobblies, were rootless, footloose people, people with nothing to call

their own and no place to call home. So some hobos and migrant workers

noticed that they had nothing to lose but their chains and drew from

this insight the political conclusions the Wobblies suggested. The Lewis

thesis drew a storm of criticism, as Dubofsky soon saw, and acknowledged

in the 1973 paperback edition.[36] The main criticism was that the

adverse effects Lewis attributed to a “culture of poverty” were more

plausibly attributable to poverty itself. Dubofsky confessed to this sin

and also to another. The United States in the early twentieth century

was not an underdeveloped or developing Third World country, it was the

world’s greatest industrial power. Even if the culture-of-poverty theory

had some merit as applied to the Third World, it was unlikely to

contribute very much to the understanding of the development of the

twentieth-century United States.

Dubofsky nonetheless concluded that he had not led his readers “down an

intellectual dead end.” Like today’s poor, the workers to whom the IWW

appealed had to contest a hegemonic ideology which blamed their

deprivation on their own shortcomings. The Wobblies were not culturally

deprived: they openly articulated oppositional values.[37] Here, as

elsewhere in the book, Dubofsky comes tantalizingly close to a cultural

interpretation of the Wobblies, but never quite gets there. He does

something more to reveal the social roots of the I.W.W., but does not

really add much to what labor economist Carleton H. Parker wrote during

World War I about migratory workers and their relationship to the

I.W.W.[38] Basically Dubofsky confirms the traditional portrait of the

I.W.W. as consisting of an Eastern wing of immigrant factory workers and

a Western wing of miners and migratory workers, mostly native-born.

There is no reason to think that any historian will ever challenge the

substantial accuracy of this portrait.

Although it is not a history of the IWW as a whole, Robert L. Tyler,

Rebels of the Woods

(1967)[39] is a narrative history of the union in one of its major

regions of activity, the Pacific Northwest. There its appeal was

primarily to lumberjacks and secondarily to lumber mill workers,

although it was also involved with other workers, such as seamen. The

“overalls brigade” from this region played a key role in ejecting Daniel

de Leon and his pro-political faction from the IWW in 1908 (De Leon

thereafter referred to this stratum of workers as “the bummery”). Tyler

contends that this marked the onset of Western predominance in the

organization (he should have said: its restoration, since the Western

Federation of Miners dominated the founding convention). [40] The

free-speech fights which for several years preoccupied the IWW were

almost entirely Western phenomena, although not just Pacific Northwest

phenomena. A rare victory in Spokane, Washington not only secured the

Wobblies’ freedom of public speech, it substantially achieved what they

were speaking for, revocation of the licenses of most of the labor

“sharks” who sold nonexistent jobs to migratory workers.[41] Later this

was the scene of a great Pyrrhic victory by the IWW, a 1917 strike won

against the labor industry — employers as reactionary, exploitative and

violent as any in the country. Unfortunately, it coincided with United

States entry into World War I, and the lumber industry was considered a

critical war industry. Lumbermen and their allies in state and local

government badgered the Federal Government to suppress the IWW as a

menace to national security, although their motives were clearly not

entirely disinterested and patriotic. The Wobblies of the Pacific

Northwest suffered probably the most severe repression of any

Wobblies.[42]

Tyler ventures an intriguing point of interpretation. Like Dubofsky, he

appreciates the IWW as a radical response to large-scale, rapid social

change. In the Pacific Northwest, the transformation from frontier to

factory, and from many small entrepreneurs to near-oligopoly, was speedy

even by the heady timetable of the Gilded Age. But there was also a

conservative reaction to industrialization by the IWW’s enemies, the

industrialists themselves, with eerie similarities to the IWW critique.

Both drew upon an agrarian and egalitarian heritage whose values were

threatened by industrialization. Workers and bosses both craved the

economic independence supposedly enjoyed by the frontiersmen and yeoman

farmers of old; unfortunately, for each side that could only come at the

other side’s expense. And both bosses and workers, especially Wobbly

workers, in this all-male economic sector asserted the rights they

claimed with manly truculence and swagger.[43] Tyler is suggesting that

there was an element of the agonistic Wild West reaction to an affront

to honor which honed what was already, on purely economic grounds, a

sharp conflict between capital and labor.

A sure sign that the IWW had arrived as a topic for historians was the

publication in 1969 of Joseph Robert Conlin’s

Bread and Roses Too

,[44] not another narrative history but a topical, “an analytical

study.”[45] Insofar as the essays have a general theme, it is that

historians have not sufficiently appreciated the IWW for what it

professed to be: a labor union. (Although Foner, whatever his other

limitations, cannot be criticized on this ground.) The IWW can only be

understood as a conscious alternative to AFL craft unionism. That was

the felt need which drew otherwise disparate trade-unionists and

radicals to the founding convention in 1905. The primary demand was

“bread” — the “roses too” were secondary. The implication is that

emphasis should shift from the more colorful, more violent, more

alienated Westerners to the Eastern factory workers whose strikes were

more like ordinary union strikes (insofar as any strikes at that time

could be said to be ordinary) than the mini-insurrections in the Western

fields and forests. Conlin believes that around 1916, after years of

false starts and internal strife, the IWW was settling into the primary

role of a, so to speak, congress of industrial organizations —

politically radical to be sure, but in that respect not fundamentally

different from its CIO successors, industrial unions some of which were

Socialist or Communist in their politics. The wartime and postwar

repression, however, acknowledged no such evolution or distinctions: it

fell heavily on the IWW everywhere.

The notion that, but for the unpleasantness of American intervention in

World War I, instead of the AFL-CIO we would now have the AFL-IWW is

calculated to titillate those charmed by counterfactuals (what if the

South had won the Civil War or, as in the Thurber story, what if Grant

had been drinking at Appomatox?). One consideration which lends some

credence to the Conlin scenario is that in some respects there was more

difference between the AFL and the IWW in theory than in practice. At

that time the legitimacy of any kind of union movement was by no means a

part of any American consensus. The IWW had a reputation for violence —

which, as Thompson, Conlin, Dubofsky and others have noticed, is largely

undeserved — but in fact AFL and independent unionists were at least as

likely to resort to violence as the Wobblies.[46] On several occasions,

IWW competition goaded the AFL into organizing drives and the founding

of industrial unions.[47] There is even a certain parallelism in the

organizations’ aversion to electoral politics and their assignment of

primacy to economic organization. The “pure and simple unionism” of the

AFL of Gompers, like the anti-political industrial unionism of the IWW,

held that workers should rely upon their own power, the independent

power they wielded at the workplace, not on divisive, compromising and

subordinating alliances with parties or politicians. The AFL may not

have sought to smash the state, but it sought to keep it at a safe

distance — until 1917, when it joined government and big business in

wartime corporatist collaboration. If the AFL’s hope that this episode

would inaugurate a new era of union respectability and influence went

unfulfilled in the 1920s, it at least preserved the AFL from the

destruction which befell its IWW rival.

In some respects, Conlin’s avowed revisionism was ill-timed. He

announced his intention to correct certain misinterpretations common to

previous IWW history up to and including Foner. But Dubofsky’s big book

came out in the same year and, as Conlin has since acknowledged, it too

made some of the requisite revisions.[48] Dubofsky’s book also induced

Conlin to correct one of his own corrections. Conlin had earlier argued

for retiring the word “syndicalism” from discussion of the IWW (his

first chapter is titled “A Name That Leads to Confusion”). Some Wobblies

had repudiated the term, others never used it, and there is some reason

to doubt whether it always meant to Wobblies what it meant to European

syndicalists. And too often the argument whether the Wobblies were

really syndicalists got caught up in the argument over how American they

were. Unlike, say, “industrial democracy” — another IWW catchphrase with

no precise single meaning — “syndicalism” has a foreign sound to it. By

1981, Conlin admitted that this had been one of his own motives for

shunning the word, but Dubofsky had persuaded him that insistence on the

“peculiarly American origins and character of the I.W.W.” — a conclusion

he shared with Dubofsky — was compatible with Dubofsky’s

“latitudinarian” conception of syndicalism as unions as the vehicles of

social revolution and the embryonic forms of the future society.[49] As

Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, the meaning of a word is its use.

Syndicalists may be concerned to distill the essential meaning of their

ideology, but historians have no urgent need to do so. Scholars from

Brissenden to Renshaw who put the word “syndicalism” in the subtitles of

their books about the IWW were not just imposing an abstract word on the

Wobblies, they spoke a word which was already in the IWW vocabulary. If

it had, and has, no certain single meaning, it is like most words for

matters that matter.

FROM IDEOLOGY TO CULTURE

According to anthropologist Everett C. Hughes, “Wherever some group of

people have a bit of common life with a modicum of isolation from other

people, a common corner in society, common problems and perhaps a couple

of common enemies, there culture grows.”[50] The Wobblies satisfied all

these conditions, and among them culture grew.

The third age of American labor history is cultural history. Although it

is always easy to predict events after they have happened, there is

nonetheless something all too predictable, indeed something

overdetermined, about how the new social labor history of the 60s and

70s mutated into the newer cultural labor history of the 80s and 90s.

The prophets, Thompson and Gutman, had already inserted working-class

culture into working-class history.[51] Culture interested them mainly

as a field for resisting the encroachments of industrial capitalism.

Workers insisted upon their traditional prerogatives, even in very

untraditional new industries, to preserve some control over their

working time and the conditions of their toil. In an article first

published in 1974, historian (and former union activist) David

Montgomery explicitly identified the IWW as one manifestation of the

“New Unionism” of the early twentieth century whose general aim was

workers’ control of industry.[52] This approach satisfied the

intellectual and emotional needs of the chastened Marxist historians.

Workers were in part the makers of their own lives and ways of life, not

just raw material worked upon by determining objective forces. They were

engaged in the class struggle, although not always in familiar forms.

They were not, in their resistance to capital or the state, the dupes of

alien ideologies, they acted on the basis of their own healthy

indigenous plebeian traditions. [53]

There was one fatal flaw in this otherwise so satisfying and so 60s a

scenario. The new story ended, it had to end, the same way the old story

had: the workers lost. There is no getting around that. Sooner or later,

radical labor was everywhere defeated, and usually so was nonradical

labor. Culture might have retarded but it never averted labor’s defeat.

“Saint Monday” is not just history, it is just history. Labor historians

are invariably pro-labor historians. They would like to report good news

about, and maybe even to, the workers,[54] but the news is not very good

by any hitherto accepted progressive standard. Even the Commons-school

liberals, were any still around, would be dismayed by the current state

of organized labor. Thompson and Gutman would be even more unhappy. The

only way to make the answer come out right is to change the question.

Culturalism can do that. As a means to an end, such as social change,

working-class culture has been a resounding flop, but if working-class

culture is an end in itself, it is self-validating. The workers,

especially the radical workers, may have been losers, but at least they

were (borrowing a phrase from

Leonard Cohen

) beautiful losers. The means justify the ends if they are one and the

same. The Wobblies may have nothing lasting to show for their struggles

except their culture, but no one can take that away from them. I dreamed

I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me . . .

That is surely not the only source of the recent allure of cultural

history, which is not always or even usually a gloss on working-class

history. Historians are also recovering the cultures of abolitionists,

Prohibitionists, lesbians, Communists and many more. Wider intellectual

fashions have played upon the writing of history in a period of

professional self-doubt and thus vulnerability. If the professionalizing

historians of the late nineteenth century had a rather shaky claim to

the methods of science, they all the more stridently affirmed their

devotion to its objectivity. But by the 1960s, even the reflective

portion of the scientific community was catching up with what

philosophers of science at least since Mach had done to the notion of an

objective reality “out there” absolutely independent of theory or

perspective.[55] That is just not how practicing scientists work, no

matter what they think they’re doing. Even the social scientists have

reluctantly parted with the claim to objectivity which they took from

the natural sciences for the same reason the historians took it: to

legitimate their disciplines.[56] A dogma the historians had long

proclaimed to affirm their loyalty to science now threatened to reveal

their backwardness, their epistemological naivete, reducing them to the

intellectual level of journalists.[57]

Only 23 years separate two respected histories of American history, John

Higham’s

History

(1965)[58] and Peter Novick’s

That Noble Dream

(1988),[59] but they are ages apart in their judgments and even in mood.

Surveying the scene in the early 60’s — as yet apparently unaffected by

the turmoil of the times — Higham found reason for qualified

satisfaction in the development of the profession. If there was not much

genius in evidence, there was nonetheless plenty of talent. There were

more historians writing more history, and more kinds of history, than

ever before. The assimilation of select social science methodologies

proceeded apace, and most historians no longer feared that this

threatened history as a distinct discipline, whether or not they used

the new tools themselves. No grand syntheses appeared imminent — and

none ever did appear — but there was no urgently felt need for them.

There was plenty of detail work to be done. The situation resembled what

historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn has called “normal science”: the

long stretch after the adoption of a guiding paradigm in which research

is directed to working out its implications.[60] The only difference is

that historians were elaborating a paradigm without having one, at

least, none that was explicit. Doing “normal history” meant applying not

a theory so much as an approved methodology.[61]

Even as Higham was writing his overview, the academy came under assault

from without and within. Scholarly claims to objectivity fell subject to

the same skepticism as Establishment claims to uphold liberty, equality

and democracy. Indeed it drew notice that prominent historians, among

other academics, were pushing both causes.[62] There was a widespread

loss of trust in authorities and experts, who might have other than

objective grounds for promoting objectivity and, in so doing, promoting

its presumptive guardians, themselves. Subjectivity reasserted itself in

the general culture, as in scholarship, as one of the legitimate doors

of perception, and feelings gained respect for their own sake. It was a

neo-Romantic decade and a psychologizing decade, among many other

things. One of the first repercussions for history, “psychohistory,” was

mercifully short-lived. But the new labor history, with its

culture-conscious conception of class, swept the subfield and went far

toward leading the new social history, of which it formed the vanguard,

into primacy over American history generally. Thompson, Gutman and their

followers brought the subject back into labor history, but not by

himself. The subjectivity that interested them was not so much

individual psychology — although Gutman did not entirely forego

biography[63] — as the socially shared attitudes and values of people

collectively interpreting and coping with a common experience of the

process of production.[64] Another word for that — Gutman’s word for it

— is culture.

Culture was so conspicuous a dimension of the new labor history that

“culturalism” appears to have originated as a “term of abuse” for

it.[65] But there’s a fork in the road of the new labor history. As

practiced by, say, Herbert Gutman, the new labor history was novel for

focusing on social relations at the point of production, especially

worker struggles to assert some collective autonomy there, and for

focusing on the cultural resources which workers drew upon to sustain

their solidarity on the job and their class community after hours. Their

common themes are working-class agency, autonomy and authenticity. Both

imply that working-class history is much more than just union

history.[66] But the relation between workplace resistance and cultural

autonomy may be contingent, not necessary. Culture might be

compensatory, not empowering. For example, that is how Marxists have

traditionally interpreted religion, a thoroughly cultural phenomenon.

Even if the reality is more complex, as it surely is, there is ample

evidence that religion can be a hindrance to or a distraction from class

consciousness.[67] It must be possible to write workplace-oriented new

labor history without devoting much attention to culture, since some has

been written — for example, David Montgomery’s

Workers’ Control in America

. Conversely, there is cultural history of workers when they are not

working, such as Robert E. Weir’s book on the culture of the Knights of

Labor.[68] This pure culturalism has now been applied to the IWW in,

among other places, two monographs: Donald E. Winters, Jr.,

The Soul of the Wobblies

(1985)[69] and Salvatore Salerno,

Red November, Black November

(1989).[70]

Pure culturalism is not so completely original as its advocates and

detractors seem to think, not even with respect to as specialized a

topic as the IWW. One component of culture is ideology, and almost every

major historian of the IWW except for Gambs, beginning with Brissenden,

has devoted a chapter or more to the organization’s ideology.[71] An

unpublished 1962 dissertation by Donald M. Barnes[72] was entirely

devoted to IWW ideology as a chapter in intellectual history. Barnes

made several positive contributions to some still-ungoing controversies

respecting the IWW. A few years later, Conlin would argue that calling

the IWW “syndicalist” was more confusing than enlightening, basing his

case on the disparate ways Wobblies seemed to use the word and the

varying attitudes they adopted toward whatever they thought it

meant.[73] Barnes found enough coherence in IWW ideology to conclude

that it was broadly syndicalist, the only serious difference from

European syndicalism being the IWW’s rejection of the strategy of

“boring from within” existing unions, an exercise in futility in

American conditions.[74] For most of the kinds of workers organized by

the IWW, there were no existing unions to bore into. Conlin later

repudiated what by then seemed to him to be his “futile little

campaign.”[75]

Barnes also weighed in on the once-raging question of foreign

inspiration and influence: he thought that they mainly supplied a

radical vocabulary, although if one cares to characterize the biological

determinism of Darwin and the economic determinism of Marx as foreign

influences, then Wobbly ideology was very much under alien sway.[76]

(Why is it that nobody ever frets over whether the Social Darwinism so

influential in later nineteenth-century America represented foreign

influence? And why is Karl Marx a foreign influence but Adam Smith is

not?) Barnes ventured the first serious academic criticism of the

quasi-Turnerian frontier activism theory of IWW origins — and this

before Dubofsky presented the thesis in its most persuasive form. As he

purported to be doing nothing more than intellectual history, Barnes

could not actually challenge the thesis on social or economic grounds,

but he denied its plausibility: harsh exploitation in the Western mines

times frontier Western rugged individualism equals organized radical

working-class resistance. Whether taken straight up as economic

determinism or mixed with psychological determinism, the explanation

“presupposes a deterministic epistemology.”[77]

It would be easy, though, to charge this intellectual historian with his

own determinism: idealism. The basic failure of the IWW, he maintains,

was its doctrinal rigidity, its refusal to compromise with “any more

stable leftist group.”[78] Such as? It takes two to compromise. The AFL,

which was not leftist anyway, had no more interest in compromising with

the IWW than the IWW had in compromising with the AFL, and is difficult

to imagine what the terms of such a compromise might be. Not even the

nonrevolutionary CIO, after all, formed by industrial unions expelled by

the AFL, reunited with it until twenty years had passed, and the IWW

never had that much time. It was the Socialist Party which expelled Bill

Haywood for belonging to the IWW, not the IWW which expelled Haywood for

belonging to the Socialist Party. Eugene Debs was not expelled from the

IWW, he resigned. There is reason to believe that at certain times and

places there was substantial overlap in IWW and SP membership. The IWW

did, it is true, expel Daniel De Leon in 1908, but he was notoriously

the most rigid dogmatist on the American left, and he made sure that his

miniscule Socialist Labor Party never compromised or cooperated with any

other organization; its record of impotent ideological purity remains

unsullied to this day. More important, with no argument for doing so,

Barnes virtually ignores the impact of government, business and

vigilante repression, abetted by the press, the AFL and pro-war

Progressives, in smashing the IWW. Also ignored are structural changes

in the American economy which are increasingly coming to the fore in

explanations of the IWW’s demise. The feeble position of AFL unions in

the 1920s suggests that even taking the course of abject expediency

would not have made a success of the IWW, it would only have stripped

the Wobblies of the only thing no one else could ever take from them,

their honor and pride.

Even aside from consideration of its ideology, the IWW did not have to

await the cultural turn in labor history for its culture to be noticed.

More conspicuously and self-consciously than any American labor movement

before, and maybe any one since, the Wobblies appreciated what Herbert

Thompson, Gutman and the culturalists have emphasized, the use of

culture as a resource, even a weapon.[79] Their contemporaries, even

those with no sympathy for their ideas and actions, were fascinated by

the Wobblies’ songs, slogans, cartoons, quips and “silent agitators”

(tiny gummed paper stickers cheap to produce and easy to stick up

everywhere).[80] It was especially the songs which were heard. Although

the typical Wobbly was more often an avid reader than an illiterate,[81]

and IWW halls were libraries as well as meeting-places (and sometimes

crash pads) — nonetheless, the popular culture of which the Wobblies

partook was more aural and oral than our more visually-oriented culture,

and also more participatory. In 1907, a young Canadian arrived in

Spokane, Washington, where — as he recalled 61 years later — “What first

attracted me to the I.W.W. was its songs and the gusto with which its

members sang them.” Richard Brazier soon became involved in the

preparation of the first edition of the IWW

Little Red Songbook

, which has gone through more than forty editions. It included a few

ditties sung by American workers at least since the Knights of Labor,

such as the “Internationale” and “Hold the Fort” (originally “Storm the

Fort”), augmented by newly written lyrics set to the music of current

pop tunes or familiar hymns. Within a few years, other Wobblies

contributed classics like Joe Hill’s “The Preacher and the Slave” (which

added to the language the expression “pie in the sky”) and Ralph

Chaplin’s “Solidarity Forever” (still the national anthem of American

labor).[82] Even arch-institutionalists Paul Brissenden and Joseph

Gambs, presumably the polar opposite of the culturalists, appended

selections from the Songbook to their books.[83] And even Donald Barnes,

the most hostile historian of the Wobblies in the last sixty years,

grudgingly granted that “on the positive side, songs, legends,

personalities and the idea of solidarity practically sum up their major

contributions.”[84]

A still more important proto-culturalist source is Joyce L. Kornbluh’s

1964 Wobbly anthology

Rebel Voices

. This oversized volume of 419 pages is still, as when published, by far

the richest single accessible collection of primary sources on what we

would now refer to as the culture of the Wobblies, 191 texts

interspersed with scores of cartoons and equipped with concise but

helpful commentary. One chapter reprints songwriter Joe Hill’s greatest

hits. Others commemorate the free speech fights, the great Lawrence

victory, the great Paterson defeat, the miners, the farm-laborers, the

lumberjacks — and the Wobblies put behind bars in wartime and for long

afterwards. Although she was apparently never a Wobbly herself, Kornbluh

had been a union activist in Detroit, and she disdained to conceal her

admiration for the IWW.

The first full-length monograph on the IWW in what I call the pure

culturalist mode is Donald E. Winters’

The Soul of the Wobblies

, which attempts to represent the relationship of the IWW to the

Christianity of its time (1905-1917) as something more complex than

reflexive hostility. He disclaims what he calls the “reductionist

fallacy” of equating the revolutionary union movement with religion, but

claims that the religious characteristics of the IWW went beyond mere

fellowship and shared values.[85] But if he is prepared to concede the

obvious — that the IWW was not a church — Winters does maintain that IWW

ideology was, by a “functional” definition, a religion whose fundamental

tenet was class solidarity. He supposes that most sociological

definitions of religion are wanting because they assert that it is

necessarily connected to a church. Whether or not that is true — it

isn’t[86] — all this does for Winters is establish that the IWW, since

it was not a church, was not by definition non-religious.[87] But the

same could be said about other non-churches such as the Little League or

the Better Business Bureau without doing much to substantiate claims

that they are “functionally” religious: “If the Industrial Workers of

the World is to be viewed, in any sense, as religious, the central tenet

of its faith must be seen as solidarity . . . The working definition of

religion, then, that will serve for this study is as follows: a system

of beliefs and symbols which seeks to develop in the working class a

sense of solidarity and class consciousness, and a motivation to engage

in a class struggle against the evil force of capitalism toward the end

of creating a new order, a ‘commonwealth of toil,’ in the shell of the

old.”[88]

This is a pristine example of what logicians call affirming the

consequent. Winters didn’t notice that he assumed (that’s what “if”

means) what he purports to prove, that the IWW was “in any sense”

religious. Nor does his “working definition of religion” work, since it

implies, not only that IWW ideology is religion, but that belief-systems

universally agreed to be religions — Christianity, Judaism, Islam,

Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. — are not religions because none of them seek

to develop in the working class a sense of solidarity and class

consciousness, etc., etc. The reader might suspect that I have left out

some minor premiss in Winters’ syllogism — such as a general definition

of what religion is (not what it is not) which does not define religion

as IWW ideology — in order to make him look like a fool. I didn’t: he

did. So it hardly even matters that, after demanding a functional

definition of religion, Winters never provides one. What is the defining

function or functions of religion? Inasmuch as he never says, there is

no way of evaluating his claim that the IWW was in any sense religious.

It seems only fair and reasonable to adhere to the received view, also

vociferously affirmed by the Wobblies themselves and by their

contemporaries, that the IWW was (from the standpoint of the godly) at

best non-religious, at worst anti-religious. Sometimes the conventional

wisdom is right after all.

So conceptually and logically flawed is the Winters book that if the

validity of its thesis were its only claim to attention, no one should

bother to read it. However, Winters did delve into IWW sources —

especially its West Coast newspaper, the Industrial Worker — with

questions no other historian had asked. Frankly, the book is not much

better in detail than in its overall analysis, but some of its

inadequately addressed topics are not without interest. Better

historians might follow up on them later.

Winters’ evidence for attributing a religious character to the Wobblies

is very scattered and miscellaneous, as it would have to be. He begins

with a chapter on an individual remarkable even by Wobbly standards:

Father Thomas J. Hagerty, a suspended but not unfrocked Catholic priest,

a revolutionary socialist who had been a popular stump speaker in the

West during the brutal class conflicts in the mines. Hagerty did not

regard his religion and his revolutionism as incompatible, although his

ecclesiastical superiors not surprisingly thought otherwise. Hagerty’s

importance to IWW history is that, as a delegate to the founding

convention in Chicago, he was the principal author of the celebrated

Preamble to its Constitution, then and ever since the single most widely

read IWW text. And he was also the creator of the “Wheel,” a pie chart

of all sectors of the economy intended to describe both the organization

of the One Big Union by industry which the IWW aspired to be and the

blueprint for the post-revolutionary reorganization of society as a

cooperative commonwealth of the producers.[89] Samuel Gompers ridiculed

“Father Hagerty’s Wheel of Fortune” as a utopian pipe-dream, and later

historians have sometimes criticized their institutionalist

predecessors, such as Brissenden, for according it too much attention.

Certainly the IWW never organized anywhere near enough workers in enough

industries to put any flesh on Hagerty’s skeleton. Nonetheless, the

Wheel was widely disseminated and may well have concretized for some

Wobblies the abstractions of syndicalism. And this suggests that there

was something recognizably syndicalist about the IWW from the very

beginning.

What it does not suggest is that there was anything recognizably

religious about the IWW from the very beginning. Father Hagerty was

momentarily prominent, but nothing he said or did at the convention, or

anywhere else, evidenced any religious influence on his politics, or the

politics of the IWW. Shortly after the convention he disappeared, never

to be seen again, unless possibly as a skid row alcoholic in Chicago

many years later.[90]

In a chapter on Wobbly “hymnody,” Winters sees a “striking parallel

between the Wobblies’ use of music and that of American

Protestantism.”[91] Wobblies loved to sing. Richard Brazier recalled:

“What first attracted me to the I.W.W. was its songs and the gusto with

which its members sang them. Such singing, I thought, was good

propaganda, since it had originally attracted me and many others as

well; and also useful, since it held the crowd for Wobbly speakers who

followed.”[92] Wobblies often put their own words to the tunes of

familiar hymns, especially the simple, emotionally direct gospel songs

which had become an important expression of popular Protestantism in the

1870s. Even Winters cannot deny that parody was part of the purpose of

these expropriations: in other words, they evidence not the religious

but the anti-religious orientation of the Wobblies. But he prefers to

dwell upon the “common purpose” of gospel songs and Wobbly songs:

“developing group consciousness and cohesiveness,” a point “which is,

perhaps, extremely obvious.”[93] That it is. Also obvious is Winters’

lapse into the reductionist fallacy he promised to avoid. Of course when

people sing together they are expressing solidarity, whether they are

singing the Doxology in church, the national anthem at a political

convention,[94] “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” on a bus en route to

summer camp, or the choruses at a Grateful Dead show. If the collective

expression of solidarity is religious, then there is little if anything

social which is not religious. When baseball fans do “the wave” in the

stands, or punk rockers slam-dance in the mosh pit, they act as

religious celebrants whether they know it or not. To define religion so

broadly is to empty the word of specific meaning and render it useless

as a tool for understanding what is non-religious, since there is no

independent phenomenon to which it might be compared. When you compare

something to itself, it is hardly surprising to discover stunning

parallels.

More mundane, non-circular explanations for Wobbly hymnody have been

provided by the Wobblies themselves and by those who knew them at first

hand. As sociologist and ex-tramp Nels Anderson wrote: “There are many

types of tramp songs but most conspicuous are the songs of protest. The

I.W.W. have done much to stimulate song writing, mostly songs of the

struggle between the masses and the classes. Most hobo songs are

parodies on certain popular airs or on hymns. One can easily determine

when certain songs were written if he knows when certain popular airs,

to which they are fitted, were the rage. The tunes most used by the

tramp song writers are those that are so well known that the song may be

sung by any group of transients. When the songs are parodies on hymns

there is usually a note of irony running through them.”[95] Here we have

the makings of a sub-celestial explanation. Wobblies appropriated gospel

tunes for the same reason they appropriated pop tunes: everybody already

knew them. And when it was gospel tunes that they borrowed, their new

lyrics were usually “ironic,” i.e., anti-religious.

A serious deficit in IWW scholarship, especially of a cultural turn, is

the almost total absence of quantification. Although the destruction of

so many records, including those of the national headquarters, does

impede quantitative analysis, there have been few efforts to apply it

even to what evidence survives. It would not seem to be an unduly

daunting research project, for instance, to undertake content analyses

of IWW songs, cartoons, even editorials and pamphlets. No one has ever

even bothered to determine how many of the melodies in the successive

editions of the Little Red Songbook were gospel tunes, pop tunes or

original compositions. There is likewise no way of knowing how

representative are the samples of IWW culture which historians have

previously referred to, including the selections in the most extensive

anthology of IWW culture, Joyce Kornbluh’s Rebel Voices. Winters, for

instance, predictably tries to make much of a few references in IWW

literature to Jesus as a working man, a carpenter, a poor man, a

homeless man. The Social Gospel movement had already made cliches of

these rhetorical gambits by the time the IWW got going. Similarly, if

persecuted Wobblies occasionally likened themselves to Jesus, that is

only to be expected in a cultural context in which Christianity was

still ambient and the analogy was instantly and universally meaningful.

The back wards are full of paranoids who identify with Jesus, but

Christian historians like Winters — if Winters is a historian[96] — are

not rushing forward with volumes on the religious essence of mental

illness. Freud long ago made the connection in The Future of an

Illusion.[97]

Even Winters acknowledged a very practical function of IWW hymnody: it

was a weapon in the IWW’s public struggle against “its despised

antagonist, the Salvation Army.” Both organizations went out into the

streets to seek the support of the down-and-out. The IWW preached

revolution, the “Starvation Army” (as the Wobblies referred to it)

preached submission. Band music and hymn-singing were prominent aspects

of Salvation Army outreach, and were used for the specific purpose of

drowning out IWW soapbox speakers.[98] As Ralph Brazier remembered, J.H.

Walsh, “the ‘Father of the Little Red Songbook,’” proposed a battle of

the bands: “we have as many tunes and songs as they have hymns; and

while we may borrow a hymn tune from them, we will use our own words. If

they do not quiet down a little we will add some bagpipes to the band,

and that will quiet them.”[99]

Winters cannot seem to imagine that it is possible for a counter-culture

“to turn the system’s images against it,” to detourne (“divert”) them,

as the Situationists used to say. Rather he supposes that only the

opposite is possible, recuperation — to again employ Situationist

terminology — the system’s “recovery” or cooptation of insurgent

tendencies.[100] But if, for the Christian, all roads lead to Rome, the

historian should be open to following other trails too. Usually, when an

historian ascribes a religious character to a secular movement, he is

trying to discredit it, as Carl Becker sought to discredit the

Enlightenment and assorted Cold Warriors have sought to discredit

Communism. Winters is unusual among those taking this tack in that he

means no disrespect — his book is dedicated to the Wobblies — he must

believe (as few of them would have) that in disclosing their supposed

spiritual dimension he is humanizing them, or at least Americanizing

them. But though the spirit is willing, the flesh — the evidence and

argument — is weak. Christianizing the Wobblies is really too heavy a

cross for anyone to bear.

The latest culturalist monograph on the IWW, Salvatore Salerno’s

Red November, Black November

(1989), resembles in form the books of Conlin and Winters — a fairly

brief collection of interpretive essays. Salerno is quite convinced that

all previous histories of the IWW are fundamentally flawed, especially

in exaggerating the indigenous American origins of the IWW: “Concerned

chiefly with establishing the indigenous character of the I.W.W,

historians have uniformly argued that the I.W.W. owed its birth to an

interaction between exceptional economic and political conditions in the

United States and the responses of American labor activists.”[101] Now

this is manifestly untrue, if only because none of the major historians

of the IWW made its origins his chief concern. A chapter on the

“forerunners” of, plus a chapter on the “birth” of the IWW occupy 52

pages of Brissenden’s 350 pages. Foner devotes one chapter out of 24 to

the founding, and he displays no interest in how American the IWW was.

Fred Thompson (himself foreign-born) devotes proportionately perhaps the

greatest attention to IWW origins — just over 25% of the pages on the

history of the organization to 1921 — but no attention to its national

origins. [102] Renshaw devotes a little over 20% of his pages to the

antecedents and founding of the IWW.[103] In absolute terms, Dubofsky

has written more than any narrative historian on IWW origins, but that

only occupies about one-sixth of his book. And he soon came to think

that he had not stressed enough the indigenous origins of the IWW:

“Those who read this book for the first time should also bear in mind a

point not emphasized sufficiently in the original edition. The IWW was a

movement in the American mainstream, never an alien aberration.”[104] He

might be wrong and Salerno right about where his emphasis fell, but

Dubofsky’s own judgment of the direction of his bias, diametrically

opposed to Salerno’s, carries some weight.

In strategy, Salerno resembles Winters (whom he unexplainably fails to

reference — unless the resemblance is the explanation). Each propounds a

major revisionist thesis but provides only pot shots by way of

substantiation. Winters flits from scrap to scrap, from Father Hagerty’s

clerical credentials to IWW borrowing of gospel melodies, for shreds and

patches of religion to relate to the Wobblies. Salerno does the same in

his quest to overthrow a nonexistent scholarly preoccupation with

indigenous origins. It may well be true that many historians assign less

weight to foreign influences on the IWW than Salerno does, but it is not

true that they attach the importance to the point that Salerno does.

Like Winters, Salerno only cobbles together miscellaneous details, and

not even a lot of them, to illustrate an argument they are insufficient

to prove even if the argument had merit. And this additive approach —

even if it added , or added up to, much — is the antithesis of what the

concept of culture was supposed to provide to history, a holistic

perspective in which the facts receive meaning from, and provide meaning

to, one another within a more comprehensive frame of reference.

Salerno’s Exhibit A for foreign influence is his report — relying

exclusively upon an “unpublished manuscript” by George Carey whose

location is not indicated — that in the three years before the IWW

founding convention in 1905, a group of Italian and Spanish anarchists

with syndicalist leanings in Paterson, New Jersey (the “Right to

Existence” group) made contact with the embattled miners of Colorado.

The group reportedly publicized both the miners’ struggles and

syndicalist ideology its “organ” which had some distribution among the

Western miners. Carey, according to Salerno, claims that members of the

group went West to assist the organizing efforts of the United Mine

Workers and the Western Federation of Miners.[105] As is well known, the

WFM (but not the UMW) played a role, and an important one, in the

founding of the IWW, but soon broke away. Salerno fails to demonstrate

the Paterson anarchists’ influence on the WFM, much less the

transmission of that influence on to the IWW. Nor does he claim any

direct contact between the Right to Existence group and the IWW itself,

although that should have been possible. The Paterson group apparently

lasted until 1908, the year in which the IWW expelled the pro-political

De Leonists and rewrote the Preamble to excise an ambiguous reference to

working-class political action — moves which, without making the IWW

anarchist, certainly made it more anarcho-friendly. No other published

historian of the IWW mentions the Paterson anarchist group.

Salerno’s Exhibit B is Johann Most, a German-born socialist who, in

London exile, turned his newspaper the Freiheit into an anarchist

journal between 1879 and 1880 and, after a serving a term in prison, he

moved it to New York in 1882. Salerno says that “Most played a seminal

role in the origins and development of American syndicalism” one page

before acknowledging exactly the opposite. Most drafted the “Pittsburgh

Manifesto” of the ephemeral International Working People’s Association

(1883), but the Chicago anarchists led by Albert Parsons and August

Spies secured the removal of those parts of Most’s text which rejected

trade-unionism. By the 1890s, though, Most was an anarcho-syndicalist

who in 1905 “expressed enthusiasm for the I.W.W., but died before the

I.W.W. had gone through its first year.”[106] But Most’s influence

declined after 1886,[107] notwithstanding his later conversion to

syndicalism. Many blamed the Haymarket bombing of that year, with its

disastrous consequences for the anarchist and labor movements, on his

violent rhetoric.[108] When Most was influential he was not a

syndicalist, and when he was a syndicalist he was not influential. As

with Exhibit A, with his Exhibit B Salerno equates influence with the

mere opportunity for influence. Just because somebody is talking does

not prove that somebody else is listening, much less believing.

Salerno’s other evidence for foreign influences on IWW ideology is also

flimsy. He identifies several prominent figures at the founding

convention who were foreign-born, such as Brewers’ Union leader William

Trautmann and Socialist Labor Party leader Daniel de Leon.[109] Their

birthplaces (New Zealand and Venezuela, respectively) hardly prove them

to be vectors of alien ideologies, any more than were foreign-born

Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and James Wilson. Nor does the fact

that they had some familiarity with current European ideological

fashions: so did some native-born founders. Salerno also devotes a

chapter to the closely related issue of the IWW’s syndicalism, arguing

for an “earlier” and “more complex” influence on the IWW of the French

syndicalist organization, the CGT, than his predecessors report.

Trautmann, for example, invited CGT attendance at the founding

convention; Emile Pouget declined for reasons of distance and expense

but extended his sympathy. This may be “earlier” than the 1908 date

which Paul Brissenden assigned to the onset of CGT influence, but does

not seem to be terribly “complex.” The IWW press suggested that

knowledge of the French experience might avert some mistakes.

Revolutionary industrial unionism was home-grown. The word “sabotage”

was a recent import but the practice was not.[110] Salerno pretends to

be radically revising the regnant history of the IWW, but really just

quibbles with it. His assessment of foreign influence on the IWW is

indistinguishable from that of Barnes,[111] and not significantly

different from those of Brissenden, Dubofsky and everybody else.

Not for its intrinsic interest — no part of this book has much of that —

but as a case study in Salerno’s shortcomings, let me review in much

more detail than it deserves his chapter on “Anarchists at the Founding

Convention.” Here is his most of his case for significantly raising

prevailing estimates of anarchist influence on the IWW. He first cites

the expressions of solidarity with the Haymarket anarchists martyred two

decades before which issued from the podium; there was even a pilgrimage

to their graves. Indeed , one of the opening speakers was Lucy Parsons,

widow of executed Haymarket defendant Albert Parsons.[112] Mrs. Parsons,

however, was so far from speaking as an anarchist that she actually

apologized for using the word “anarchy.” As Joseph Conlin described the

scene, “while almost all the delegates claimed to be socialists, there

was also present a small group of anarchists, the remnants of the

Chicago group. Lucy Parsons was honored by a prominent seat and spoke

several times. But she functioned primarily as platform decoration and

had little influence on the proceedings. Her ignominious role

characterized the dilemma of the less eminent anarchists: tolerated in

attendance, they went all but unheard. Mrs. Parsons sheepishly

apologized for employing the term ‘anarchy’ in a speech, and the few

avowedly anarchist proposals that reached the floor were summarily

rejected.”[113]

None of this is evidence of anarchist influence at the founding

convention. The Haymarket labor martyrs had been anarchists — although

even that has been called into question[114] — but they were

commemorated in Chicago, not as anarchists, but as labor martyrs. By

then, their anarchism long since interred with them, they were

remembered as heroic leaders of the eight-hour movement, a lowest common

denominator cause any unionist could rally around at a convention bent

on forging unity. [115] That they assembled in Chicago made it only that

much more obligatory as a matter of common courtesy to pay homage to the

local heroes. The presence of Lucy Parsons on the platform had exactly,

and only, the honorific significance of the presence of, say, Coretta

King on the platform of a Democratic Party convention. Coretta King has

no influence on the Democrats and Lucy Parsons had none on the Wobblies.

Salerno identifies by name five anarchist delegates to the founding

convention (there might have been several more) — out of 186 delegates.

They included, in addition to Lucy Parsons, Jay Fox (“who did not play a

major role in the proceedings”), Josef Peukert, Florecia Bazora and,

most importantly — Father Hagerty![116] Like Winters, Salerno conscripts

Hagerty for his own polemic purposes, but since their purposes are so

disparate, so are the ways they take the measure of the man. Salerno

claims Hagerty as an anarchist without ever mentioning that he was a

priest. Winters claims Hagerty as a priest without ever mentioning that

he was an anarchist. That Hagerty was a priest nobody denies. That

Hagerty was an anarchist is, if true, the only new fact of any interest

which Salerno has dredged up out of all the archives he claims to have

delved into. But is it true?

As Salerno and other historians have related, Hagerty formed ties with

the Western Federation of Miners around 1902 and briefly itinerated as a

Socialist Party speaker until his increasingly revolutionary and

anti-political rhetoric placed him outside even the relatively broad

ideological bounds of the party at that time. He went on to edit two

labor journals. At the Chicago convention he represented a shadowy

organization about which nothing is known, the Industrial Workers Club

of Chicago.[117] Its members included both socialists and anarchists, so

the affiliation implies nothing as to Hagerty’s own ideology. Hagerty

spoke frequently at the convention, but said nothing explicitly

anarchist. Salerno would have us believe that this circumspection was

deliberate deference to the unity theme, but that’s just self-serving

speculation.

Salerno presents exactly one piece of hard evidence of Hagerty’s

anarchism: a letter he wrote to Joseph Labadie dated March 31, 1889 —

fifteen years before the founding convention. Hagerty says he had been

active in Haymarket defense work but “inactive” since the execution of

four of the defendants. He explains that his anarchism derived from

reading Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty (which is a bit odd, since Tucker was

an individualist anarchist) and his own sense of justice. He doubted he

was equal to Labadie’s request that he write a pamphlet exposition of

anarchism, and apparently he never did.[118] Even assuming that this was

the same Hagerty, fifteen years can change a man and clearly did. The

anarchist of 1889 was later ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, a

bizarre and, so far as I know, unique transit. Salerno does not even

mention it, an omission which verges on scholarly malpractice. Anarchism

and Catholicism were bitter enemies in those days.[119] Conceivably a

priest could be an ex-anarchist, but for a priest to continue to be an

anarchist is so improbable that Salerno just ducks the issue. That

Hagerty may have once been an anarchist does not carry even a

presumption that he still was one in 1905. Bruce Nelson’s history of

Chicago anarchists (which does not mention Hagerty) devotes an entire

chapter, the final chapter, to “Ex-Anarchists in the Gay Nineties”[120]

: they were numerous, maybe Hagerty was one of them.

The IWW press often disparaged anarchism.[121] The IWW cartoon printed

on the very cover of Salerno’s book does so. Heads-in-the-clouds

visionaries with such labels as “Communist,” “Socialist,” “Sky-Pilot” —

and “Anarchist” — raise their arms heavenwards. A worker in overalls

points to a factory labelled “Industries” and roars, “Organize!”

(Remarkably, all are left-handed.) On this as on other topics, Salerno

writes as if desperate to make a name for himself by debunking

something, anything.

And he writes badly, producing jargon-riddled verbiage he may not even

understand. He complains that “little [evidence] has survived to provide

a sense of the lived activity and culture of the Wobbly.” If so, his own

book on IWW “Culture and Community” must be an exercise in futility, but

my present point is that Salerno is parroting catchphrases without

noticing their meaninglessness. “Lived activity” — as opposed to what,

unlived activity? In the last sentence of his book, he asserts that IWW

art “actively shaped a dynamic and revolutionary conception of workers’

culture.” Shaping is always active. And does Salerno really mean to say

that Wobbly art shaped a “conception” of workers’ culture, or rather

that it shaped workers’ culture itself? He provides some scanty evidence

that the Wobblies had a culture, but no evidence that they had a

conception of culture. They had not, after all, read Gramsci or even

Lukacs. The book is littered with pretentious sentences like this one:

“Wobblies replaced the institutional base of unionism with a conception

[that word again!] of culture and community that was primary and

constitutive.” Taken literally, this says that Wobblies “replaced”

organizing with philosophizing about culture, which is ridiculous. And

again, he says “conception of culture” when he seems to mean culture,

although it is difficult to be sure and hardly worth puzzling over. What

Dwight Macdonald wrote about Raymond Williams is even more true of

Salerno: he has an “appalling prose style” and his “prose is that of a

propagandist; it is fuzzy on principle, swathed in circumlocutions,

emitting multisyllabic words as the cuttlefish does clouds of ink, and

for very much the same purpose.”[122]

Salerno’s subtitle is “Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers

of the World,” but there is little on culture and less on community in

his slim volume. About it might be said, as I have said of another book

on left culture, that, “much too short to do justice to its subject,

considering its content one wishes it were shorter.”[123] It is mainly

about ideology, which is only one dimension of culture, and one which

historians of the IWW have always dealt with. There is only one chapter

specifically devoted to “Art and Politics,” wherein the author uses some

big words to say not very much besides the obvious about the ideology

expressed in Wobbly songs and cartoons.[124] Salerno argues that the

content of these artifacts, which are not quoted or reprinted in any

quantity, reveals the IWW to be in a broad sense syndicalist, but in a

pluralistic, nondoctrinaire way. The emphasis is on conveying simple

fundamentals like class solidarity. That’s true enough, but obviously

expressive forms like songs and cartoons necessarily simplify meaning.

The IWW’s immense periodical and pamphlet literature could be, and was,

more sophisticated and specific. But in any event, once again culture

turns out to be just ideology, not the wider-ranging disclosure of

attitudes, values and world-views promised by culturalist historians. As

for “community,” Salerno makes only perfunctory references to such

settings of solidarity as hobo jungles and IWW halls, adding nothing to

the sources he cites. These are among the places (jails[125] and

workplaces are some of the others) to find Wobbly community and to

anchor IWW culture.

Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought about Western

civilization. “I think it would be a good idea,” he replied. Similarly,

culturalist history of the IWW would be a good idea. The IWW is an ideal

subject. It was rich with songs, poetry, cartoons, slogans, parades,

legends, sound-bites, and publicity stunts. It consciously created

culture and deployed it for its purposes. And there was so much of this

material that, despite much that was lost or destroyed, far more remains

than any historian has yet exploited. Miles’ IWW bibliography, which is

certainly incomplete, especially as regards foreign-language

publications, lists 42 English-language periodicals and another 49 in

other languages.[126] It’s unfortunate that the first self-consciously

culturalist monographs on the IWW, by Winters and Salerno, are so

wretched. There is no reason why better work in this vein cannot be

done.

Ever since E.P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, historians have usually

related working-class culture to working-class community. While Winters

and Salerno have added little to the understanding of IWW community,

several older works provide at least prolegomena to IWW sociology, such

as Carleton Parker’s

The Casual Laborer and Other Essays

and, especially, Nels Anderson’s The Hobo. Neither deals exclusively

with Wobblies, but both relate them to the ambulatory community and

culture of the migratory workers of the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries from whom the IWW drew much support, especially in

the West. Introducing a 1984 anthology on tramps,[127] Eric H. Monkonnen

discusses the social composition and economic role of these transient

workers. There were many of them; in an earlier monograph, Monkonnen

estimated that 10-20% of families in the late nineteenth century

included at least one member who had at some time been lodged in the

Gilded Age equivalent of homeless shelters, local police stations.[128]

Prior to World War I, most tramps were “neither outcasts nor deviants,”

they were just workers going wherever work could be found. They were the

most mobile, and most conspicuously mobile, members of an American

working class which was in general remarkable for its spatial

mobility.[129] These tramps (or hobos[130] ) were usually young, single,

American-born (but not Southern-born) white males, and most of them

tramped for only part of their lives. They were both the products and

among the producers of the most accelerated phase of American

industrialization. The communications facilities of cities and the

long-distance transportation made possible by the railroads (which

usually winked at tramps “riding the rails” without paying) made it

possible for tramps to locate and travel to short-term employment

opportunities. At a time when industry was in general rapidly expanding,

but also subject to severe fluctuations, transient workers formed a

crucial component of the workforce.[131]

One article in the Monkonnen anthology, by John C. Schneider, takes an

explicitly “subcultural view” of tramping between 1890 and 1920.[132] By

his definition, “members of a subculture share relatively distinct

personal traits, engage in relatively unconventional behavior, and

associate with one another on a relatively segregated basis.”[133]

Tramping workers met the definition. As to shared personal traits, they

were mostly male, single, homeless, white, young (20s to 30s), native-

or Canadian- or British-born manual laborers. They were unconventional

in being unsettled, outside traditional homes, and living in a same-sex

milieu (which, to an undetermined but not insignificant extent, was also

a homosexual milieu). And they were segregated from the larger society

not only by gender and transience but even in the winter off-season when

they holed up in what the tramps called “the main stem,” neighborhoods

where they found “all the places they needed, not only cheap hotels and

lodging houses but also second-hand clothing stores, employment

agencies, saloons, inexpensive cafes and restaurants, and

brothels.”[134]

Schneider clearly proves that tramps formed, by his definition, a

subculture, but he begs off establishing to what extent “such an

inarticulate group” shared attitudes or beliefs. He does not mention the

IWW. The contemporary observers Parker and Anderson assigned a prominent

place to the IWW in their accounts of transient workers, and it is

plausible, indeed tempting, to regard the Wobbly as the class-conscious

tramp. To call tramps “an inarticulate group” begs the question whether

they articulated their attitudes and aspirations through the IWW. Still,

considered along with the other articles in the anthology, the Davis

article raises an important challenge to the conventional wisdom about

the relation of mobility to culture and community. It is almost

axiomatic for most social scientists and historians that culture is

grounded in community, and community is grounded in relatively stable,

spatially concentrated primary relations. Geographical mobility

(immigration, for instance) therefore disrupts community, and

geographical mobility as a way of life virtually precludes it.[135] This

explains the initial attraction of the culture-of-poverty thesis to

Dubofsky. The people Lewis based the thesis on were not just poor, they

were recent migrants to the city, uprooted from their traditional

peasant cultures. Permanently migratory workers without kin should

represent an even more extreme form of loss of community and culture.

But the evidence is ample that tramps in general, and Wobbly tramps in

particular, took their culture and community with them. Wherever he

went, a tramp knew where to look for, and could expect to find, the main

stem or a hobo jungle. There, as when working, he consorted with men

like himself who tended to think as he did. Tramps clearly had a sense

of group identity which could only have been reinforced by the anxiety

and hatred they inspired in settled society. It may well be true that

community and culture are more fragile and precarious among the

geographically mobile, but that need not make them any less precious. No

wonder the fundamental IWW value — class solidarity — had such a strong

appeal to them.[136]

It is too soon to judge the culturalist contribution to the

understanding of the IWW. Were one to base the judgment only on the

avowedly culturalist studies of Winters and Salerno, it would have to be

negative. In their faults these books — though so different in content —

are painfully similar, which might suggest there is something inherently

flawed about culturalist history, at least as applied to the IWW. Both

vulgarize and misapply half-digested fragments of social theories. Both

are blatantly tendentious, driven by extraneous ideological commitments

— in Winters’ case to socially progressive Christianity, in Salerno’s to

some melange of anarchism, syndicalism and internationalism. Both betray

the promise of the concept of culture for historians. Granted that, as

Peter Burke says, “‘Culture’ is a concept with an embarrassing variety

of definitions,”[137] most of them share an orientation toward

comprehending social life as a meaningful whole. Winters and Salerno, in

contrast, dart from detail to detail, refuting one here, asserting one

there, each ending up with a short collection of essays exhibiting, at

best, a very loose thematic unity. And how is it that these culturalists

come to such dramatically different conclusions, not only about IWW

culture in general, but even about the significance in particular of

someone like Hagerty, to whom they both assign great importance as

evidence for their utterly disparate theses?

If, however, one looks beyond the dubious first productions of the overt

culturalists, there is a substantial if scattered corpus of cultural

evidence and interpretation relating to the Wobblies to be gathered from

Parker, Anderson, Barnes, Kornbluh, Conlin, Dubofsky, the Monkonnen

anthology and other sources. Insofar as ideology is an aspect of

culture, for instance, this dimension of IWW culture has been well and

carefully scrutinized by scholars from several disciplines. Memoirs and

autobiographies by one-time Wobblies abound. [138] Admittedly their

authors are usually leaders or longtime militants, not rank-and-file

Wobblies, and such sources are notoriously self-serving, but historians

of the IWW have long made substantial if cautious use of them. If

anything, they may be even more useful to cultural historians of the IWW

than to IWW historians with other orientations, because what these

authors say (and don’t say) discloses more, in retrospect, than the

authors intended (if they even understood) about their own assumptions,

ideas and purposes. Decoding such covert meanings is one of the things

in which good culturalist history excels. And there are also some

published oral histories taken from less illustrious ex-Wobblies in

their senior years.[139] Despite the destruction of many records, “large

holdings” from the IWW headquarters survive and were deposited in 1963

in the Reuther Library at Wayne State University,[140] and there are

also extensive collections in other libraries. There are ample

accessible sources for further explorations of IWW culture.

CONCLUSION

If there is any discernible trend, aside from culturalism, in recent IWW

historiography, it is a turn toward local history. The former may even

encourage the latter. Thus Robert E. Weir’s study of the culture of the

Knights of Labor turned out to be, to an unforeseen degree, a study of

the several cultures of the Knights of Labor. This, in fact, is a stock

criticism of culturalism: that its inherent tendency is to particularize

and thus fragment worker history to the detriment of the broader

understanding of workers as a class formed by a common experience. As

yet it has not worked out that way in IWW historiography, but then, the

self-consciously culturalist study of the Wobblies is still in its

infancy. There are other spurs to the localist turn. Introducing

Dynamite, the Story of Class Violence in America

, an important 1981 anthology of local IWW histories, editor Joseph R.

Conlin identifies one of them: the effect of Dubofsky’s book “is to

close the general subject of the I.W.W. for a while, just as

Brissenden’s book did in 1919.”[141] But plenty of details remain to be

filled in. Even aside from culturalism, community studies are the growth

sector in labor history — relatively compact in scope and convenient to

research, they are ideal topics for the dissertations from which so many

monographs emerge. And — an important concern at the outset of an

academic career — they are unlikely to give offence. If a local study

confirms the generally accepted interpretation, that alone verifies its

merit. If it does not, it is meritorious for qualifying the general

interpretation, which is always appropriate in the practice of history,

the science of the particular.

The Conlin anthology begins to redress the imbalance Conlin complained

of in

Bread and Roses Too

, the overemphasis on the more picturesque Western Wobblies. Actually,

had there never been any Western Wobblies, the Eastern Wobblies at

Lawrence and Paterson and the Southern Wobblies in Louisiana would have

sufficed to inscribe the IWW in labor history as the most radical and

romantic of all American unions. It is only by comparison with the wild

Westerners that other Wobblies seem staid. The anthology commences with

four articles on IWW strikes in Northern industrial cities — Akron,

Paterson, Pittsburgh, and Little Falls, New York — only one of which

(the Paterson strike) figured prominently in earlier IWW histories. The

next three articles about the IWW “on the extractive fringe” deal with

activity in the South, in Nebraska and in Kansas, not in the far West.

The last three articles do address particular IWW struggles in

Washington and Colorado, but under the rubric “The I.W.W. After the

Fall” — that is, they deal with local strikes (all unsuccessful)

conducted in a few pockets of local IWW strength which for awhile

outlived the organization’s general demise. (By then IWW membership was

concentrated mainly in the East and Midwest.[142] )

Unlike the culturalist approach, the localist approach got off to a good

start with Robert Tyler’s

Rebels of the Woods

(1967), a careful, detailed and thoughtful narrative of the trajectory

of the IWW in the Pacific Northwest. A recently published article by

Richard A. Rajala improves upon Tyler by following the history of the

loggers through the 1920’s. By then, state repression of the IWW was

minimal. Economic causes, according to Rajala, were much more important

in the decline of the IWW in this region where it was once so

formidable. Although the 20’s, like the late 90’s, were generally a

prosperous period, like the late 90’s they contained pockets of economic

decline, and the Northwest lumber industry was one of them. Unless (as

in the 30’s) government promotes unions, unions decline during

depressions, and depression was the normal condition of the Northwest

lumber industry in the 20’s.

Another development — something Dubofsky and Tyler had earlier

identified as a cause of IWW decline — was the implementation in some

sawmills and logging camps of the rudiments of what labor historians

call welfare capitalism. During the war, the Federal government had

imposed some improvement in wages and hours on the industry which it

found to be not so intolerable after all. Some employers belatedly

provided their workers with decent shelter, bedding and food, and

sometimes other amenities, and experimented with company unionism. In

1923 they improved the implementation of the blacklisting of Wobblies.

But most important, according to Rajala, were the years of low demand

for labor. Workers had little choice but to accept the employers’ terms

or seek their livelihoods elsewhere.[143]

One implication of Rajala’s article is that the causes of IWW decline

may not have been uniform even if their effects seem to be. Even the

nationwide causes which have dominated previous explanations, such as

repression and internal schism, may not have operated with equal force

everywhere. After all, the organization had survived earlier schisms and

bouts of repression. Unfortunately, all recent historians confine

themselves to the pre-war IWW (Foner, Conlin, Winters, Salerno) or else

conclude the story, as Dubofsky, Renshaw and Tyler do, by 1924.[144] It

may be necessary to follow up on the IWW into the late 20’s and even the

30’s, as do Rajala and three contributors to the Conlin anthology, if

not for the specific significance of later IWW activism then at least

for the light it might shed on the causes of IWW decline. More

respectable unions also languished in the 1920’s, although they were not

unduly afflicted with repression or splits. Left-wing radicalism was

certainly unpopular in that decade, but that cannot explain why, as

Joseph Gambs noticed, the movement of members between two unpopular

leftist organizations, the IWW and the Communist Party, was completely

one-way.[145] Clearly the IWW was seen as a relic of the past, and the

CP seen as the wave of the future.

Ironically, when large-scale labor militance resumed in the 1930’s, it

was under the leadership of Communists, Socialists, independent radicals

and nonradicals who, through the Congress of Industrial Organizations,

implanted a version of the industrial unionism espoused by the IWW in

the heart of America’s heavy industries. To be sure, Federal government

support was crucial to the success of “labor’s giant step,” and the

statist leftists were obviously more amenable to state involvement in

labor relations than were the vestigial Wobblies, who were by then

anarcho-syndicalists who as a matter of principle rejected defiling

dealings with the state. But IWW anti-statism may not be the full

explanation for the organization’s failure to revive on any significant

scale during the Great Depression. At no time, after all, had there ever

been much love lost between the IWW and the state. And while the

Wobblies’ Communist rivals, for instance, had (to say the least) no

objection to the state as such, they were as hostile to the existing

capitalist form of the state as it was to them. Yet the Communists and

other left-wing statists played a prominent part in the triumph of the

union movement in the 1930’s, the Wobblies played almost none. The

relationship between revolutionism and industrial unionism proved to be

contingent. IWW revolutionary industrial unionism was a failure, CIO

reformist industrial unionism was a success.

Or so it seemed until recently. It is not so obvious any more that labor

got the better of the deal when it accepted legal limitations in return

for legal legitimation.[146] What the state gives, the state can take

away — and it took a lot back, for instance, with the Taft-Hartley Act.

By the 1970’s, worker militance was not only increasingly expressed

outside of union channels, unions were often in the forefront of its

repression.[147] Nor did it enhance the influence or image of organized

labor when, in the 60’s, the AFL-CIO strongly supported the Vietnam War

while the once-militant Teamsters in effect merged with the Mafia.

Structural changes in the economy, which played an increasingly

recognized role in the decline of the IWW, have even more conspicuously

contributed to the decline of business unionism from the 70’s onward.

Unions are mostly absent from the growth sectors of the economy — except

government, whose employees are forbidden to strike and who have

economic interests inherently at variance with those of the taxpayers.

Twelve years of Republican administrations more anti-labor than any

since the 1920’s revealed how weak the unions really are without the

government support they’d been taking for granted. Contrary to the

sophisticated arguments of historians of “corporate liberalism,”[148] it

turns out that many sophisticated American businessmen do not really

value the services of class-collaborationist unions as their junior

partners after all. They would just as soon dispense with unions — any

sort of unions — altogether. The anti-statism and class-struggle

orientation of the IWW no longer look so silly. The argument that

nothing succeeds like success refutes itself when success turns to

failure. The Wobblies lost, but they were beautiful losers. The business

unions are losing too, but they are not beautiful.

Whither IWW historiography? Toward the recovery of the “many I.W.W.’s,”

which in the short run can only complicate, or even confuse, such

coherence as Dubofsky reimposed on IWW historiography.[149] This is not

a bad thing, just one of those things. The conventional distinction

between the Wobblies of East and West is a standing invitation to

comparative history. The Conlin anthology includes an 81-page

bibliography on sources for the local history of the IWW.[150] Some

local studies, among others, will undoubtedly be culturalist in

orientation, an approach which holds great promise with respect to the

Wobblies.

A strangely neglected aspect of IWW history, considering current

historical fashions, is the role of women in the IWW and the IWW’s

conception of women’s roles. The IWW stood for equality between male and

female workers; Lucy Parsons and Mother Jones spoke from the podium at

the founding convention; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was for a time a leading

IWW agitator; and several major IWW strikes, such as the Lawrence and

Paterson strikes, involved thousands of female workers. On the other

hand, most IWW strikes involved male workers only, all its most

important leaders were male, and the vast majority of Wobblies must have

been men. In IWW iconography, its cartoons for instance, the Wobbly

worker is always male, usually white, and either a humbly-dressed

hayseed or a burly, bare-chested super-hero. There are certainly

unexplored opportunities here for historians of gender and culture

alike.

I have suggested that it is also worthwhile to push past the traditional

1924 terminus of IWW history by a decade or so to improve upon existing

explanations of IWW decline. A few of the union’s twilight struggles are

also important in their own right. Several are recounted in the Conlin

anthology. One which is not is the brutal two-year Harlan County

coal-miners’ strike in which Wobblies were heavily involved. The pattern

of general decline should not obscure episodes of local vitality.

In his novel

From Here to Eternity

, James Jones has an old soldier tell a young one about the Wobblies:

“There has never been anything like them before or since.”[151] That is

an eminently researchable proposition. Historians have never

systematically compared the IWW with its predecessor the Knights of

Labor or its successor the Congress of Industrial Organizations. There

might be more continuity than historians specializing in particular

organizations are in a good position to appreciate. Some Wobblies had

been Knights and some CIO unionists had been Wobblies. The song

tradition from the Knights to the IWW to the CIO and forward to the

contemporary union movement is direct.

But no amount of research and no revisionist interpretation is likely to

ever qualify by much the distinctiveness of the IWW. The novelist

expressed, maybe not the literal truth, but the essential truth. The IWW

was by any standard as remarkable and radical an organization of any

importance as the United States has ever produced. The Wobblies knew it

and so did their enemies, who regarded the Wobblies with fear and

loathing not unmixed with a certain fascination and grudging respect.

The historian of the culture of the Knights of Labor, Robert Weir,

argues that the KOL counter-culture was swamped by the emergent general

culture of mass consumption. The IWW counter-culture, in contrast,

successfully withstood those tides when they were even stronger. Indeed,

IWW culture has for all practical purposes outlasted the

organization.[152]

Nobody ever had to romanticize the Wobblies. They really were romantic.

Their heroes and martyrs were the real thing. Their undoing was in part

an ironic aspect of their own success in forcing themselves upon public

opinion. They made themselves seem more powerful, more organized, and

more violent than they ever were. The time came when it served the

purposes of their enemies to pretend to take IWW pretensions at face

value. As Robert Tyler put it, the Wobblies fell victim to their own

mythology.[153] That was far from the only thing they fell victim to,

but it did contribute to their downfall.

The IWW was at once all-American and anti-American, individualist and

collectivist, reformist and revolutionary. It demanded bread and roses

too. James Jones got it about right: there was never anything quite like

the IWW. But exactly what the IWW was, and what it was like, is

something well worth further historical investigation.

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ENDNOTES

Morton Keller,

Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933

(Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 116.

Dione Miles, comp.,

Something in Common — An IWW Bibliography

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 41, 525.

Melvyn Dubofsky,

The I.W.W.: Its First Seventy Years, 1905-1975

, 1865-1920 (2d ed.; Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1985), 108.

Paul F. Brissenden, The I.W.W.: A Study in American Syndicalism (2d ed.;

New York: Columbia University Press, 1920).

Fred Thompson & Patrick Murphin,

(Chicago, IL: Industrial Workers of the World, 1976). It is to this

“corrected” edition of Thompson’s 1955 book, augmented with an updating

chapter by Murphin, to which reference will subsequently be made.

Paul Brissenden, The I.W.W.: A Study in American Syndicalism (New York:

Russell & Russell, 1957), vii-xi.

Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology

(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1964). I attended U of M

in 1969-1973 and my recollection is that this book was assigned reading

in a number of courses and was rather widely read by students and/or

leftists, although I didn’t read it back then. Possibly this was a local

phenomenon; I’m only passing along my recollection for what, if

anything, it’s worth.

“Conceived some three decades apart and the products of diametrically

opposed ideological perspectives, the two histories [by Commons et al.

and by the Marxist Philip Foner] ironically resemble each other in many

ways.” Malvyn Dubofsky,

Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935

(2d ed.; Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1985), 144.

Andy Dawson, “History and Ideology: Fifty Years of ‘Job Consciousness,’”

Literature and History 4 (Autumn 1978): 223-241; Maurice Isserman, “’God

Bless Our American Institutions’: The Labor History of John R. Commons,”

Labor History 17 Summer 1976): 309-328; John Schacht, “Labor History in

the Academy: A Layman’s Guide to a Century of Scholarship,” Labor’s

Heritage (Winter 1994): 4-21.

10.

The AFL was formally condemned at the IWW’s founding convention. The

Founding Convention of the I.W.W. — Proceedings (New York: Merit

Publishers, 1969).

11.

John S. Gambs, The Decline of the I.W.W. (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1932).

12.

Harry N. Scheiber, The Wilson Administration and Civil Liberties,

1917-1921 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960).

13.

Gambs, ch. 1.

14.

Ibid., 125.

15.

Gambs, chs. 3-4. Fred Thompson writes that “most IWW oldtimers” —

presumably including himself — “consider this 1924 split the definitely

worst thing that ever happened to it.” It is therefore amazing that he

devotes all of one paragraph to the split and does not mention its

ideological cause! Thompson, 151 (quoted), 150-151. Thompson himself is

playing politics here. Since 1924, the official IWW ideology has been

that the IWW has no official ideology; in fact, its unacknowledged but

dogmatically upheld ideology has been anarcho-syndicalism.

16.

Nels Anderson, “Introduction to the Phoenix Edition,” The Hobo: The

Sociology of the Homeless Man (Chicago, IL & London: University of

Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1961), xiv (originally published in 1923);

Erik H. Monkonnen, “Introduction,”

, ed. Erik H. Monkonnen (Lincoln, NE & London: University of Nebraska

Press, 1984), 2-3, 6-8.

17.

Devra Weber, Dark Sweat,

White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 63-66.

18.

Wallace Stegner, “Joe Hill, the Wobbly Troubadour,”

118 (January 5, 1948),: 20-24, 38.

19.

Wallace Stegner, The Preacher and the Slave (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,

1945).

20.

Friends of Joe Hill Committee, “Joe Hill: IWW Martyr,”

History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. IV: The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917

119 (November 15, 1948), 15-20.

21.

Philip S. Foner,

The Case of Joe Hill

(New York: International Publishers, 1965).

22.

Philip S. Foner,

(New York: International Publishers, 1965).

23.

Gambs estimated that the IWW had lost up to 2,000 members to the

Communists, and that 10-20% of the CP was by 1932 “composed of former

I..W.’s or former active sympathizers.” Gambs, 89.

24.

James P. Cannon, The I.W.W.: The Great Anticipation (New York: Progress

Publishers, 1956).

25.

In the 1920’s the CP engineered an even more egregious hijacking of

martyrs to other cases. It expropriated the politico-legal defense of

the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, convicted of murder in Massachusetts

. The CP represented the defendants as generic working-class radicals to

leftists and liberals, among them Felix Frankfurter, not as what they

were, because the prostrate American anarchist movement lacked the

organization and resources to lead the fight for its own.

26.

John Higham, with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert,

History

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 68.

27.

Quoted in Alice Echols, “Nothing Distant about It: Women’s Liberation

and Sixties Radicalism,” in

The Sixties: From Memory to History

, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill, NC & London: University of North

Carolina Press, 1994), 159.

28.

Patrick Renshaw,

The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States

(Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1967).

29.

Ibid., 275-293.

30.

Melvyn Dubofsky,

We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World

(2d ed.; Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

31.

No one could say so, for instance, about Patricia Nelson Limerick’s

The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West

(New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988).

32.

William Preston,

Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933

(2d ed.; Urbana, IL & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

33.

Paul L. Murphy,

World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States

(New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979).

34.

Eldridge Foster Donelly, A History of Criminal Syndicalism Legislation

in the United States (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1939).

Such legislation was held to be unconstitutional in 1969. Brandenburg v.

Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) (per curiam).

35.

Dubofsky, “A Note on Sources,” 531.

36.

Dubofsky, “Preface to the 1973 Paperback Edition,” v.

37.

Ibid., v-vi.

38.

Carleton H. Parker,

The Casual Laborer and Other Essays

(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920).

39.

Robert L. Tyler,

Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest

(Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press, 1967).

Ibid., 5, 23-24.

Ibid., 33-39.

Ibid., ch. 5.

Ibid., ch. 1, esp. at p. 3.

44.

Joseph Robert Conlin,

Bread and Roses Too: Studies of the Wobblies

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1969).

45.

Ibid., xiv.

46.

Louis Adamic,

Dynamite, the Story of Class Violence in America

(rev. ed.; New York: The Viking Press, 1934), ch. 18 & passim.

Occasionally the AFL resorted to tactics associated with the IWW. In

1910 the local AFL trade council led a 20-day general strike in

Philadelphia involving up to 146,000 workers. Montgomery, 93.

47.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Private Eyes, Public Women: Images of Class and

Sex in the Urban South, Atlanta, Georgia, 1913-1915,” in

Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor

, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press, 1991),

248-250.

48.

Joseph R. Conlin, “Introduction” to

At the Point of Production: The Local History of the I.W.W

, ed. Joseph R. Conlin (Westport, CT & London, England: Greenwood Press,

1981), 19.

49.

Ibid., 19-20.

50.

Everett Cherrington Hughes, Students’ Culture and Perspectives: Lectures

on Medical and General Education (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Law

School, 1961), 28, quoted in Howard S. Becker,

Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance

(New York: The Free Press, 1963), 80.

51.

Lynn Hunt, “Introduction: History, Culture, Text,” in

The New Cultural History

, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989),

4-5.

52.

David Montgomery,

Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 91-93.

53.

Herbert G. Gutman,

Work, Culture & Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History

(New York: Vintage Books, 1977), esp. ch. 1.

54.

As Gutman and his proteges attempted in American Social History Project,

Who Built America?

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).

55.

Thomas S. Kuhn,

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

(2d ed., enlarged; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 206.

56.

Reviewing two recent anthologies, anthropologist Jay Ruby writes that no

contributor to either volume contends that “an objective reality exists

outside of human consciousness that is universal.” “Objectivity

Revisited,” American Anthropologist 98(2) (June 1996), 399. The

anthologies were

Social Experience and Anthropological Knowledge

, ed. Kirsten Hastrup & Peter Hervik (New York: Routledge, 1994) and

Rethinking Objectivity

, ed. Allan Megill (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press,

1994).

57.

Jay Ruby — ironically, I suspect — claimed to regret that one of the

anthology editors had not sought out a believer in absolute objective

reality “for they can easily be found among journalists — print and

broadcast, documentary filmmakers, Marxists, and the political and

religious right.” “Objectivity Revisited,” 399. This is the historian’s

haunting fear: that he is only a journalist who has missed his deadline

or, as Karl Kraus defined him, someone who doesn’t write well enough to

work for a daily.

58.

Op. cit., note -----.

59.

Peter Novick,

That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

60.

Thomas S. Kuhn,

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

(2d ed., enlarged; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970). It

might be significant that Higham never mentions the first edition of

this book, although it was to exert immense influence on the practice of

history and the social sciences.

61.

Is it possible that this is true of natural science too — that the

normal course of research is guided more by established methods of

investigation than by what high theory directs investigation into?

There’s an old joke about a drunk who lost his keys and was found

looking for them under a lamp-post. Why was he looking for them there,

since there was no reason to think that’s where he lost them? “Because

the light was better.” Why not look where the light is better? It might

not be the likeliest place to find anything, but there’s no point

looking where you can’t see anything even if it’s there.

62.

Jesse Lemisch,

On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the American Historical Profession

(Toronto, Canada: New Hogtown Press, 1975).

63.

Gutman,

Work, Culture & Society

, ch. 3 (about black United Mine Workers leader Richard L. Davis);

Herbert G. Gutman,

Power & Culture: Essays on the American Working Class

, ed. Ira Berlin (New Press: 1987), ch. 2 (about Paterson union activist

Joseph P. McDonnell).

64.

“Thompson’s understanding of class as the precipitate of common

experiences within a system of productive relations, and of class

consciousness as the cultural articulation of those experiences, was

also Gutman’s.” Ira Berlin, “Introduction: Herbert G. Gutman and the

American Working Class,” in Gutman,

Power & Culture

, 19.

65.

Leon Fink, “Culture’s Last Stand? Gender and the Search for Synthesis in

American Labor History,” Labor History 34 (Spring-Summer 1993), 178-179.

66.

Ava Baron, “Gender and Labor History: Learning From the Past, Looking to

the Future,” in Baron, ed.,

Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor

, 2-3.

67.

For example, Gary Gerstle,

Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), suggests that the

persistent religiosity of French-Canadian workers in a Rhode Island

manufacturing city played an important part in deradicalizing its highly

effective labor movement.

68.

Robert E. Weir,

Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Nights of Labor

(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

69.

Donald E. Winters, Jr.,

The Soul of the Wobblies: The I.W.W., Religion, and American Culture in the Progressive Era, 1905-1917

(Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1985).

70.

Salvatore Salerno,

Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World

(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989).

71.

E.g., Brissenden, ch. 3; Foner, chs. 5 & 6: Dubofsky, ch. 7.

72.

Donald M. Barnes, “The Ideology of the Industrial Workers of the World,

1905-1921” (Ph.D diss., University of Washington, 1962).

73.

Conlin, ch. 1 (“A Name That Leads to Confusion”).

74.

Barnes, ch. 6.

75.

Conlin, “Introduction,”

History and Social Theory

, 19-20.

76.

Barnes, 5, 99-100; Kornbluh, “Preface,” v.

77.

Barnes, 198. Of course, this is not self-evidently wrong, but not many

historians employ a deterministic epistemology, and fewer still admit

it. That is almost as shameful as admitting to be present-minded or

Whiggish.

78.

Barnes, 13.

79.

Peter Burke,

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 119-120.

80.

During the 1970s, an elderly IWW typesetter, Dick Ellington of Oakland,

California, was still reproducing these stickers. I put up scores of

them around the Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C.

during a long and bitter strike, finally defeated, against that liberal

daily. I later had a chance to meet Ellington, who has since passed

away, at a science fiction convention. The trouble with these stickers

is the trouble with the IWW since 1924: they are the same stickers in a

different world.

81.

Regarding the type of worker most drawn to the IWW, the transient worker

— the hobo or tramp — sociologist Nels Anderson (who had been a hobo)

wrote that he “is an extensive reader” in the first sentence of a

chapter titled “The Intellectual Life of the Hobo.” Anderson, The Hobo,

ch. 13 (quotation at p. 185). To the extent the average Wobbly was more

politicized than the average non-Wobbly , he was probably that much more

avid of a reader.

82.

Richard Brazier, “The Story of the I.W.W.’s ‘Little Red Songbook,” Labor

History 9 (Winter 1968): 91-105 (quotation at p. 91).

83.

Brissenden, App. X, 370-380; Gambs, App. 5, 233-240.

84.

Barnes, 10.

85.

Winters, 7-8. Winters accuses Wallace Stegner of committing the fallacy

in writing, in 1950, that “no thoroughly adequate history of the I.W.W.

exists,” in part because existing histories are “lacking in the kind of

poetic understanding which should invest any history of a militant

church.” Winters, 7, 1 (quoting Stegner, Preacher, vii). This is like

saying that when Karl Marx referred to religion as the opiate of the

people, he meant that religion is literally a physiologically addicting

drug. Even more obviously than Marx, Stegner — a novelist penning what

was, after all, the introduction to a work of fiction — wrote

metaphorically. He meant that there were respects, hitherto neglected by

historians, in which the IWW was like a militant church — which is the

entire burden of Winters’ own monograph. Winters sets up Stegner as his

straw man to make it look as if he, Winters, was not the one who comes

as close as anyone ever has to committing the reductionist fallacy.

86.

Winters’ own example of what he calls “church-oriented analysis” (p. 9)

refutes him: Ronald L. Johnstone’s definition of religion as a “system

of beliefs and practices by which a group of people interprets and

responds to what they feel is supernatural and sacred.” A “group” is not

necessarily a formal organization such as a church or a corporation.

There have certainly been religions previous to their

institutionalization, there were Christians, for instance, before there

was a Christian Church. For Winters the problem with the definition is

not the group character of religion but its orientation toward the

supernatural and sacred, which emphatically rules out the IWW as

religious. Durkheim was the main inspiration for sociological

functionalism, although he did not use the f-word. Percy S. Cohen,

Modern Social Theory (London: Heinemann, 1968), 35-37.

87.

As if this were not confusionist enough, Winters goes on to characterize

the IWW as a church after all — or rather, as a “sect.” Winters, 89,

101, 105. Winters is making a highly selective use of the sect/church

distinction drawn by Liston Pope,

Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), ch. 7, who had in turn

borrowed it from Ernst Troeltsch. Winters badly abuses it. It was never

intended as a typology of anything but Christian denominations, so

several of the distinguishing criteria are nonsensical as applied to the

IWW, such as “adherence to strict Biblical standards” versus “acceptance

of general cultural standards as a practical definition of religious

obligation.” Pope, 123. Of the 21differences between sects and churches

identified by Pope, 122-124, Winters specifically claims only a few

which apply to the IWW: a membership drawn from the poor; a “psychology

of persecution”; a sense of alienation from the mainstream; a spirit of

protest; and a stance of conflict, not reconciliation. Winters, 89-92,

101. Almost any organization seeking political or social change can

satisfy enough of these criteria to qualify as a sect. Winters does not

mention an important criterion which renders his argument ridiculous. A

church aspires to be an all-embracing social institution, whereas a sect

is an exclusivist fellowship of the worthy. By that measure the One Big

Union was a church and the AFL was a sect.

Whether or not Winters has misapplied the church/sect distinction, what

is more important is that it represents a covert definitional shift

which lends spurious support to his earlier claim that the IWW was

religious. When he made that claim, Winters tried to preclude the

inevitable reaction that this is ridiculous by defining religion in such

a way that it did not imply any necessary connection to a church. There

he meant by “church” any organized group of believers, a sect or (in

Pope’s sense) a church — a distinction irrelevant in that context. But

even if there can be religion without a church in the broad sense, there

cannot be a church in any sense without religion. To ask whether the IWW

was a sect or a church begs the question whether it was a religious

organization at all.

Winters, 11.

Winters, ch. 2.

Dubofsky, 93.

Winters, ch. 3 (quotation at p. 37).

92.

Brazier, 91-92.

93.

Winters, 41.

94.

The IWW song “The Banner of Labor” was set to the tune of “The

Star-Bangled Banner,” Kornbluh, 13-14, but that evidences the cynicism,

not the nationalism, of the IWW.

95.

Anderson, 207-208. Curiously, Winters never cites Anderson and omits him

from his bibliography.

96.

Winters is identified as a faculty member in Humanities at the College

for Working Adults of Minneapolis Community College. His book is a

volume in the “Contributions in American Studies” series published by

Greenwood Press. There is no indication where (if anywhere) or in what

field he earned his Ph.D.

97.

Sigmund Freud,

The Future of an Illusion

, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1975).

98.

Winters, 48-56

99.

Brazier, 95, 94, quoted in Winters, 51.

100.

Robert C. Black, “The Realization and Suppression of Situationism,” 7(1)

Journal of Unconventional History (Fall 1995), 43. For some of the

Situationists’ own expositions of detournement, see Guy Debord and Gil

J. Wolman, “Methods of Detournement,” in

Situationist International Anthology

, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 8-14;

“Detournement as Negation and Prelude,” ibid., 55-56; Mustapha Khayati,

“Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary,” ibid., 170-175.

101.

Salerno, 1.

102.

Brissenden, chs. 1-2; Foner, ch. 1; Thompson, chs. 1-2. Gambs,

recounting the decline of the IWW, naturally has nothing to say about

its origins.

103.

Renshaw, chs. 1-2.

104.

Dubofsky, chs. 1-4; “Preface to the 1973 Paperback Edition,” vi.

105.

Salerno, 49-50.

106.

Salerno, 50-51, 53.

107.

Thompson, 82. “It was only with great difficulty that Most kept alive

Die Freiheit, which vanished after his death in 1906.” George Woodcock,

Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements

(Cleveland, OH & New York: Meridian Books, 1962), 465. Like other

historians of anarchism, Woodcock is either unaware of Most’s conversion

to anarcho-syndicalism or else adjudges it, considering his waning

influence, not important enough to mention.

108.

Woodcock, 461-462. Most’s stock with anarchists fell even further in

1892 when anarchist Alexander Berkman tried to assassinate industrialist

Henry Clay Frick. Most, hitherto the most vehement exponent of

“propaganda by the deed,” now found it expedient to repudiate it.

Berkman’s lover Emma Goldman was so infuriated by Most’s about-face that

she horsewhipped him. Emma Goldman,

Living My Life

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), 1: 105-106.

Salerno, 58-62.

Salerno, ch. 4.

Barnes, 5.

Salerno, ch. 3, esp. 71-73.

113.

Conlin,

Bread and Roses Too

, 43 (cited but not quoted by Salerno, pp. 72 & 171 n. 9 as an

unconvincing argument Salerno does not, however, directly address).

114.

Bruce C. Nelson, in his history of the Chicago anarchists from 1870 to

1900, argues that these self-styled anarchists, despite how they

referred to and regarded themselves, were really part of a generic

radical socialist trade-union movement which took little interest in,

for instance, the emergent conflict between Marxists and anarchists. The

Haymarket defendants, after all, were not just anarchists, they were the

leaders of the Chicago trade-union movement in its strong drive for a

legislated reform, the eight-hour day. Bruce C. Nelson,

Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago’s Anarchists, 1870-1900

(New Brunswick, NJ & London: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Salerno

does not reference Nelson’s book, which came out the year before his own

— maybe there was not enough time to do so, but there was time to take

into account the articles Nelson published in 1986 in two journals and

an anthology, articles which were substantially incorporated into

Nelson’s book. Nelson, xii.

115.

Unity between former (and, as it turned out, future) antagonists was the

prearranged theme of the founding convention, but “the pleas for unity

evinced a recognition of disunity as much as of anything.” Conlin,

, 42.

Salerno, 81-83.

Salerno, 73-77.

Salerno, 73-75. The letter is in Labadie’s papers in the University of

Michigan library. Salerno, 171 n. 13.

119.

Mainstream anarchism has always been atheistic and vehemently

anticlerical — more so than Marxism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail

Bakunin and Johann Most all produced anti-religious diatribes. In

Hagerty’s time the only significant exception was Leo Tolstoy, but —

even aside from the fact that Tolstoy declined to identify himself as an

anarchist — their views on two fundamental issues were incompatible.

Tolstoy, although a Christian, was anti-clerical; Hagerty was a cleric.

And Tolstoy affirmed nonviolence, whereas Hagerty had ranted to a

Socialist Party rally that “we must have revolution, peaceable if

possible, but, to tell the truth, we care not how we get it.” Salerno,

73. In later years there were a handful of Catholic anarchists, such as

Dorothy Day and Ammon Hennacy (a former Wobbly), but the overwhelming

majority of anarchists considered them freaks. “No God, No Master” is a

traditional anarchist slogan. At the outset of the Spanish Civil War,

the anarchists torched hundreds of churches and executed every priest

they could get their hands on.

A Father Schneider, rector of St. Alphonsus Church in Manhattan, is more

typical than Hagerty of the attitude of the Catholic clergy toward the

IWW. In 1914 the IWW was organizing among the unemployed. Led by the

Wobbly Frank Tannenbaum (later a prominent scholar), a procession of the

unemployed went to the church asking for food and shelter. The priest

refused this request for Christian charity. Since there was no room in

the inn — not for them, anyway — the men (who had been sitting quietly

in the pews) got up to leave, but detectives stopped them until 20

paddy-wagons arrived to cart off Tannenbaum and 190 of the unemployed.

The New York Sun praised the priest for refusing to dispense false

philanthropy: “A priest has put into operation the machinery to suppress

this portentous and carefully contrived onslaught on the institutions of

law and order.” Foner, 445-447.

120.

Nelson, ch. 10.

121.

Barnes, 181-183.

122.

Dwight Macdonald,

Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture

(New York: Da Capo Press, 1983), 231. One of Macdonald’s quotations from

Williams sounds like Salerno: “The extension of culture has to be

considered within the real social context of our economic and political

life” — as opposed to, say, the fake political context of our economic

and social life.” Ibid.

123.

Bob Black,

Beneath the Underground

(Portland, OR: Feral House, 1994), 75 — referring to Labor’s Joke Book,

ed. Paul Buhle (St. Louis, MO: WD Press, 1986).

124.

Salerno, ch. 5.

125.

Most of the major IWW poets “produced a good deal of their work while

confined in prison.” Winters, 100.

126.

Miles, 486-495. There were IWW periodicals in every major European

language and also other languages such as Bulgarian, Lithuanian,

Hungarian, Finnish, Croatian, Portuguese, Slavonian, Yiddish, Flemish,

Romanian, Polish, Czech, and all the Scandinavian languages except

Icelandic.

127.

Eric H. Monkonnen, ed.,

Walking to Work: Tramps in America, 1790-1935

(Lincoln, NE & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

128.

Eric H. Monkonnen,

Police in Urban America, 1860-1920

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 96. These people were not

under arrest: they voluntarily sought overnight shelter on the floors of

police stations. Ibid., ch. 3. Monkennen is the first historian of

American policing to have noticed this once-important police service

function, what he called “police welfare.”

129.

Dubofsky,

If You Don’t Weaken: The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer

, 13-14.

130.

Some have attempted definitions distinguishing tramps and hobos, such as

Anderson, ch. 6, but judging from the Monkonnen anthology, present-day

historians aren’t doing so.

131.

Eric H. Monkonnen, “Introduction” to Monkonnen,

Walking to Work

, 1-17.

132.

John C. Schneider, “Tramping Workers, 1890-1920: A Subcultural View,” in

Monkonnen,

Walking to Work

, 212-234.

133.

Ibid., 212 — a definition of subculture which is very close to Howard

Becker’s definition of a subculture as a deviant culture. Becker,

Outsiders

, 79-82.

134.

Schneider, 213-226 (quoted at p. 225).

135.

Eric H. Monkonnen, “Afterword,” in Monkonnen,

Walking to Work

, 235-247.

136.

Sociologists had already identified (deviant) subcultures which were not

necessarily geographically localized, such as those of marijuana smokers

and dance musicians, Becker, chs. 4-7. Becker and his school,

preoccupied with promoting their own theory (that society, not the

deviants, defines and so creates deviance), never noticed that some of

their research called into question some implications of the master

theory of sociology.

137.

Burke, 188.

138.

E.g., Oscar Ameringer,

(New York: H. Holt & Co., 1940); Fred Beal,

Proletarian Journey: New England, Gastonia, Moscow

(New York: Hillman-Curl, 1937); Ralph Chaplin,

Wobbly: The Rough-and-Tumble Story of an American Radical

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948); Len De Caux,

Labor Radical: From the Wobblies to the CIO, a Personal History

(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970); Floyd Dell,

Homecoming: An Autobiography

(New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933); Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,

Rebel Girl: An Autobiography

(3d. rev. ed.; New York: International Publishers, 1973); William

Zebulon Foster, From Bryan to Stalin (New York: International

Publishers, 1937); George Hardy, Those Stormy Years: Memories of the

Fight for Freedom on Five Continents (London: Laurence and Wishart,

1956); William D. Haywood,

Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood

(New York: International Publishers, 1929); Ammon Hennacy, The Book of

Ammon (Salt Lake City, UT: the Author, 1965). A minor controversy swirls

around Haywood’s book, the product of his exile in the USSR: some claim

that it was ghost-written by Stalinists. Possibly the answer may be

found in the archives of the former Soviet Union.

Even Philip Foner, who — to his credit — does try to catch up with

advances in labor history, assembled an anthology of mostly first-person

accounts of some of the IWW free-speech fights, although he was not so

up-to-date as not to misdescribe the collection as “an early form of

what, may be called ‘Oral History.’ “ Philip S. Foner, ed., Fellow

Workers and Friends: I.W.W. Free-Speech Fights as Told by Participants

(Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 1981), viii. His sources had

all been previously published and none had originated as interviews.

139.

Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas, & Deborah Shaffer,

Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW

(Chicago, IL: Lake View Press, 1985).

140.

Miles, 9.

141.

Conlin, “Introduction” to

, 23.

142.

Renshaw, 263.

143.

Richard A. Rajala, “A Dandy Bunch of Wobblies: Pacific Northwest Loggers

and the Industrial Workers of the World, 1900-1930,” Labor History 37

(Spring 1996): 205-234.

144.

Conlin, “Introduction” to

The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America

, 15.

145.

Gambs, 89.

146.

Christopher L. Tomlins,

, 1880-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

147.

John Zerzan,

Elements of Refusal

(Seattle, WA: Left Bank Books, 1988), esp. chs. 12, 13 & 16.

148.

E.g., James Weinstein,

The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State

(Boston: XXXXX, 1968).

149.

Conlin, “Introduction,” 24.

150.

Dione Miles, “Sources for the Local History of the I.W.W.,” in Conlin,