The terse mottoes, the defiant songs. These were the liturgy and hymnody of the One Big Union’s cause.To the hard-bitten laborers of the I.W.W., the union was a home, a church, and a holy crusade.It lived always in the blast furnace of conflict and was battered into helplessness over eighty years ago. But, the central idea, to form the structure of a new society within the shell of the old has been dormant, but never really died. “Big Bill” Haywood was the union’s chief strategist and toughest campaigner, strike leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a battling Wobbly at sixteen, Carlo Tresca acquired his fiery radicalism in his native Italy, Joseph Ettor was a bold organizer, Arturo Giovannitti preached the radical Wobbly gospel in flowery verse…
---In November 1919 American Legion members in the logging town of Centralia decided to destroy the local IWW office. After a gunfight, the office was taken over and union members arrested. That evening one of the Wobblies was taken from jail and lynched. Nothing was done about it. During the Red Scare of the 1920's federal and local authorities raided IWW offices and destroyed records and files. Members were arrested and prosecuted. Joe Hill lived during this time of power struggles between the Wobblies and industry.... the IWW, writing songs and writing poems. In 1914 Hill was charged with murder and attempted robbery. After a controversial trial, he was convicted and was executed. Read More:http://www.paulluvera.com/weblog/2010/08/joe-hill-the-wobblies-and-in-the-sweet-by-and-by.html
Where are my boys?
They are in deepest water
Where are they now?
They are over the hill and far away
But they are broken men who lie low
Waiting for miracles
Old men of rock and roll
Came bearing music
Where are they now?
They are over the hill and far away
But they’re still gonna play guitars
On dead strings, and old drums
They’ll play and play to pass the time
The old wild men
Old wild men
Old wild men, waiting for miracles ( Old Wild Men, 10cc )
---In late 1919, following a period of labor turbulence and several bombing incidents, post-World War I antiradical hysteria reached fever pitch. In November 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a series of raids targeting the most vulnerable radical and progressive organizations. By early 1920, more than five thousand people were arrested in what became known as the "Palmer Raids." Goldman's Mother Earth office was among the first to be ransacked in 1917. Rumor has it that J. Edgar Hoover used her confiscated library and manuscripts to educate himself on the radical Left. Apparently, most of the material was later destroyed.--- Read More:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/Exhibition/deportation.html
Old men still muttering “no” to the status quo. “An injury to one is an injury to all” was the motto of The Industrial worker. The Industrial Workers of the World, the working class crusade came to birth and grew amid storms of dissent in 1905 after a proclamation by William D. Haywood, “a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism.”
We can look back, and see that old society still here; in fact thriving more vigorously than ever. Has invidious comparison, status and distinction ever gone out of style? Today’s so-called social revolutionaries are pitching all manner of goods and services. The I.W.W’s young radicals attempts to burst the bonds is now history: full of poets and tramps, bloodshed and cruelty, and roads not taken by the labor movement. Its a history not merely of an organization but of an impulse that stirred men from the lower depths of the economy; the vagrants, craftsmen, loggers, harvest hands, immigrants, millworkers, and set them marching in step with Greenwich Village literary radicals to the tune of gospel hymns and innocent ballads fitted with new, class-conscious verses.
---1917:The Harlem River Casino, at 126th Street and Second Avenue, was the scene last night of a wild anti-conscription demonstration, in the course of which the Government of the United States was denounced and referred to as a tool of the capitalist classes. Young men liable to military service under the selective draft act were urged to defy the Government and refuse to serve if called to the colors. A general strike on the part of all working people as a protest against the entry of the country into the European war, and a nation-wide campaign to frustrate the efforts of the Government to raise armies for the defense of the country's rights would be among the things the future has in store for the country if those who packed the Casino had their way. An appeal to the workingmen to follow the example of the Russians and form a workingmen's committee to run the country was also urged. The meeting was addressed by anarchists, I.W.W. agitators, and persons who styled themselves Socialists. Emma Goldman was one of them. Alexander Berkman, who served a term in the penitentiary for attempting to assassinate Henry C. Frick, was another. Leonard D. Abbott, well known as an I.W.W. sympathizer, was another. Harry Weissberger, who says no power on earth can make him fight, was another. Also present and among the talkers was Leonora O'Reilly, while among those listed but who did not speak was Carlo Tresca, the Italian I.W.W. leader, and Jacob Panken. ...Read More:http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Emma_Goldman__Articles_in_the_New_York_Times.html image:http://www.library.gsu.edu/spcoll/collections/av/19cLabor/19clabor01.htm
But it was not all ballads and broadsides. The I.W.W. was radical in the word’s truest sense. When it denied that the working and employing classes had anything in common, it meant precisely what it said. The I.W.W. put no faith in the promises of bourgeois politicians or in the fairness of bourgeois courts. It made no contracts with employers, and it spurned other unions, such as those enrolled in the American Federation of Labor, that did. It was composed of hard, hard working men, little known to respectability. As a result, it badly frightened millionsof middle-class Americans, and it meant to.
Yet, it must be understood that the I.W.W. did not grow magically out of a card trick or sleight of hand; a Houdini gesture of smoke and mirrors. The industrial situation for which the adjective, “grim” is pallid and hardly an illusion. In the America that moved to productive maturity between 1880 and 1920, there was little room or time to care about the workers at the base of it all. It was an America in which children of ten to fourteen could and did work sixty hour weeks in mine and factory; in which safety and sanitation regulations were virtually unknown, in which industrial accidents took a horrible toll, in which wages were set by the market place and people lived by cramming themselves into sickening tenements or company owned shacks. In fact, conditions similar to American outsourcing of work to China, India and beyond.
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