Always on Strike

Frank Little and the Western Wobblies

Arnold Stead

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781608462209
• eBook ISBN:
  9781608462261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Though widely recognized as one of the Industrial Workers of the World's leading members and one of its most prominent militants, this is the first book-length biography of Frank Little. Little's life offers innumerable lessons for working class people facing many of the same economic injustices in today's world.

Arnold Stead, PhD, is a poet, fiction writer, historian, playwright, and jazz and film critic. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife and family.

Chapter One

The Western Wobblies

The roots of the western Wobbly are found in the “placer miner,” men who lived and worked in Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, and Idaho during the latter half of the nineteenth century. He was a prospecting miner. His basic tool, a wash pan, allowed him to sample creek beds and other locations for precious metals. If he found something worth his trouble, he set to work building a “rocker” with hammer, nails, wire, other simple items he carried in his pack, and whatever wood he could find. Occasionally a placer miner struck it rich, like Marcus Daly, one of the founders of Anaconda Copper Company, who began as a prospector. Usually a placer miner made little more than a bare living, but he was his own man. Then the scent of money and cheap labor brought mining companies into the West. Melvyn Dubofsky speaks of industrial cities rapidly replacing frontier boom camps and heavily capitalized corporations striking up where placer miner/prospectors had been. With the arrival of the corporations, mining became a massive industrial undertakening, requiring railroads, milling and smelting facilities and a host of capital. By the time Frank Little was born (most sources say 1879 while a few others say 1880), many so-called frontier-mining settlements were anything but frontier.

Resentful and ready to rebel, the miners saw themselves as victims of an invasion by men with full bellies and soft hands, representatives of the real capitalists, who seldom came west and, when they did, were very unlikely to confront any miners face to face. These toadies of capitalist power smelled of cologne and threw around ten-dollar words as they might have pocket change. Condescending and sweet smelling, they had come to the West with dollar signs in their eyes. But let their swagger take them too far and a westerner with clenched fists and a dog-off-his-leash gleam in his eyes step too close to those condescending smirks and the swagger began to wobble at the knees, the voice suddenly cracked, and the face too often presented an obscenely frightened smile. That fear told the westerner somewhere, not so very deep inside, the easterner was empty. The invaders were on strange ground while the miners were at home, sure of their necessary place in the scheme of things, at the center of which was their independence and mining. I do not mention freedom because as one of the men might have told you: “If a man’s got his independence, what he digs is his own and he goes his own way. And if that ain’t freedom, I don’t know what you’d call it. Working for wages is nothing but slavery without the whip.”

A placer miner commonly wore a pistol on his hip as protection against bandits, renegades, claim jumpers, and wildcats. A few sticks of dynamite could be found in his pack. When he went into town for supplies, he often indulged in a bottle of whiskey and a woman, or a game of stud poker, or maybe a good old-fashioned brawl just to take the edge off. You have no doubt seen a version of the character I am describing in any number of western movies and television. Gun Smoke’s Festus comes to mind. He might treat himself to clean sheets, a hot bath, and a soft bed, but not so often as to get the habit. For a placer miner, a wife and children were at best consolation prizes and at worst traps to be avoided. A wife and family usually destined a man to the necessity of working for wages. Sidestepping those kinds of traps could be difficult, but it was at least something a man had some control over. The mining companies threw a much wider and far tighter net. By the beginning of the twentieth century, if you wanted to make a living as a miner you worked for a company. Consequently an attitude developed: “What choice have I got? A man’s got to keep body and soul together.” But working for wages only took care of the body. The soul is another matter entirely, and for these men it was not being nourished by a church. The food it craved—independence—had been taken away by the mining companies. From most miners’ point of view only a “Scissor Bill,” a worker who accepts anything and everything the boss visits upon him, could be anything but restive and resentful.1

The men who founded the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in 1893 in Butte, Montana, were figuratively and in some cases literally the sons of placer miners. They embraced the agenda “products for all, profits for none.” They had no desire to be a business union, interested exclusively in better pay, safer working conditions, and shorter working hours. Instead, the WFM wanted an end to the wage system entirely. The union echoed the cowboy motto—“Anything’s better than wages.” In fact, Big Bill Haywood briefly attempted to organize cowboys.2

In a discussion of anti-intellectualism among US socialists during the opening decades of the twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Hofstadter accuses western Socialists of adapting “a veritable proletarian mucker pose.” He writes:

The most extreme anti-intellectual position in the party—a veritable proletarian mucker pose—was taken not by the right wingers nor by the self-alienated intellectuals but by Western party members affected by the IWW spirit. The Oregon wing was a good example of this spirit. The story is told that at the party’s 1912 convention in Indianapolis the Oregon delegates refused to have dinner in a restaurant that had tablecloths. Thomas Sladden, their state secretary, once removed the cuspidors from the Oregon headquarters because he felt hard boiled, tobacco-chewing proletarians would have no use for such genteel devices.

One wonders how not wanting to eat off tablecloths in a public venue is anti-intellectual. Isn’t it more likely the Wobbly-influenced Westerners objected to the tablecloths because they were not accustomed to them in so public and commercial a setting? Their experience of eating with tablecloths would have been on special occasions in an intimate, family setting. To break bread on a tablecloth under the circumstances described by Hofstadter could very well have been viewed by those workingmen as a betrayal of something they held dear. Likewise, Hofstadter’s use of the expression “proletarian mucker” demands some interrogation; specifically his choice of the word “mucker,” which Webster’s New World Dictionary (Third Edition) defines as “[slang] a coarse or vulgar person, esp. one without honor; cad.” In defense of so severe an epithet one expects more than two anecdotes; the first of which implies that rejecting the use of tablecloths is somehow dishonorable and anti-intellectual, while the second tells us far more about Thomas Sladden’s expectations than it does about the attitudes of the workers in question. A sense of how deep class-cultural frictions and prejudices run renders itself visible when a thinker of Richard Hofstadter’s caliber rather off-handedly issues so harsh a judgment.

The law assumed violence was standard operating procedure for the Western Federation of Miners. Unsolved murders were habitually considered the union’s doing, which made it all the easier for the mining companies to obtain state militia and federal troops when there was “labor unrest.” The governors of Idaho, Montana, and Nevada routinely provided militia to employers. The exception is Colorado Governor “Bloody Bridles” Waite, who employed militia to protect strikers from company goons. The other governors used militia to break strikes and fatten campaign contributions. The miners union often had sheriffs and mayors on their side, but those local officials had no control over state militia.

The Western Federation of Miners, which Frank Little joined in 1900, became the soul of the Industrial Workers of the World when that union was founded in 1905. The IWW was assumed to be as violent as the WFM, if not more so. The violence question is particularly germane to a discussion of the western Wobblies as they stand accused of being the most aggressive faction of a union reputed to have a propensity for violence.

Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence is usually said to have provided the newly founded IWW with its “philosophical underpinnings,” although journalist J. Anthony Lukas writes that Bill Haywood was “uncomfortable” with radical syndicalism and its French origins. For Sorel, proletarian violence makes “future revolution certain;” said violence “seems to be [the] only means by which the European nations—at present stupefied by humanitarianism—can recover their former energy.” According to Sorel, violence will reestablish class divisions, which is the great aim of those “who think of tomorrow and are not hypnotized by the event of the day.” The world may be saved, in his view, if the proletariat remains true to revolutionary ideas and “as much as possible” realizes Karl Marx’s vision.

Sorel believed he was helping to “ruin the prestige of middle-class culture . . . which up to now has been opposed to the complete development of the ‘class war.’” He describes justice as “created to secure the prosperity of production and to permit its free and constantly widening development.” He portrays the middle class as devotees to “the principles of the Monarchy and the church.” He condemns violence for its own sake: “the acts of savagery performed by the revolutionaries of 1893” were the result of the perpetrators being “middle-class revolutionaries” [my emphasis].

The Industrial Workers of the World was severely criticized (and slandered) for its lack of patriotism. Sorel believed syndicalists must deny the idea of patriotism if they are to avoid being corrupted by a middle class bent on alienating workers from revolutionary ideas. This denial of patriotism is not so much a choice but a necessity “imposed by external conditions.” Sorel writes: “The essential thing is that for the revolutionary workers anti-patriotism appears [to be] an essential part of Socialism.” He is critical of socialists who speak of the flag symbolizing “patriotic, sacred duty” and fiercely opposes a “noisy, garrulous, and lying socialism, which is exploited by ambitious people of every description.”

“No God! No Master!”—a slogan employed by militant anti-religious/anti-patriotic Wobblies—offended and oftentimes frightened that portion of the rank and file who had not shed their religious and patriotic sensibilities. Labor historian Philip S. Foner attributes the axiom to a small sect of anarchists. It seems unlikely that a working organizer like Frank Little would publicly support such a statement whatever his private feelings might have been. Raised in a Quaker household, the groundwork for religious belief must certainly have been laid, but there’s no evidence of Little practicing a faith apart from the IWW.

On the question of democracy, Sorel believes the greatest danger facing syndicalism was attempting to imitate democracy. Better to remain content, for a time, with “weak and chaotic organizations” rather than be led by syndicates that “would copy the political forms of the middle class.” Sorel’s central importance to the IWW is found in the following remarks on the general strike: “If no myths are accepted by the masses talking of revolt indefinitely will never provoke revolutionary action. The general strike is the myth required.” In his view, socialist politicians “so roundly oppose the general strike because they fear losing their power to the workers.” A strike was, for Sorel, not just “a temporary rupture of commercial regulations,” but a “phenomenon of war,” a step toward replacing rather than reforming the system.3

Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” emphasizes the importance of Sorel’s distinction between the “political general strike,” which the former describes as little more than a changing of the guard, and the “proletarian general strike,” which is bent on destroying state power. Benjamin goes on to remind us that so far as “the state, the law” is concerned, the right to strike does not include the right to commit violence, “but rather to escape from a violence indirectly exercised by the employer.” When strikers commit violence, the legitimacy of the strike is revoked or criminal charges are filed or, sometimes, both.

On the question of “police violence,” Benjamin writes that police violence is “violence for legal ends . . . but with the simultaneous authority to decide these ends itself within wide limits.” He continues: “The assertion that the ends of police violence are always identical or even connected to those of general law is utterly untrue. Rather, the ‘law’ of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanent connections within any legal system, can no longer guarantee through the legal system empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain [my emphasis]. Therefore, the police intervene for ‘security reasons’ in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists . . . [thereby] accompanying the citizen as a brutal encumbrance through a life regulated by ordinances, or simply supervising him.” Benjamin is of course describing police violence as an instrument of social control.

Perhaps we discover the key to the IWW’s use of what is routinely described as violence by considering the relationship of violence to action. Toward this end, political theorist Hannah Arendt offers some useful ideas when she writes: “All the properties of creativity ascribed to life in manifestations of violence and power actually belong to the faculty of action, and I think it can be shown that no other human activity has suffered to such an extent by the Progress of the modern age.” Arendt recognizes that violence, like power, is a form of action; and action has been severely hampered by “the Progress of the modern age.” If violence and power are manifestations of action, and modern Progress impedes action, what else might we say about modern Progress? Is it dependent on the administration of justice as defined above by Georges Sorel? In The Illusions of Progress Sorel describes progress as “the adornment of the mind that, free of prejudice, sure of itself, and trusting in the future, has created a philosophy assuring the happiness of all those who possess the means of living well” [my emphasis]. For such a progress to endure must action on the part of those who do not “possess the means of living well” be suppressed?4

Frank Little’s devotion to direct action is beyond question. Like his western fellow workers, Little was essentially a collectivist and an anti-centralist. On the question of action, Arendt observes: “[It] is the function of all action, as distinguished from mere behavior, to interrupt what otherwise would have proceeded automatically and therefore predictably.” By attempting to act rather than just behave, the Wobblies clashed headlong with an automatic, predictable, business-as-usual credo that World War One did a great deal to solidify.5

The IWW adopted the WFM policy of taking in any worker who could produce a valid union card regardless of race, color, or creed. The union went a step further by organizing migratory workers, particularly the wheat harvesters of the great plain states, who had been pointedly ignored by the other unions. These workers moved from job to job by hopping freight trains and living in what they themselves described as “hobo jungles.” In November 1914, Solidarity, the IWW newspaper, described them as “nomadic workers of the West. They embody the very spirit of the IWW. Half industrial worker, half vagabond adventurer. They may become the guerrillas of the revolution.” This statement, made the year war began in Europe, stepped into dangerous territory. There was no place for a workers’ revolution in what would become a mythologized American West of cowboys and Indians. Revolution conjured up images too topical and frightening for the American middle class and its politicians. Nigel Anthony Sellars in Oil, Wheat, and Wobblies seriously questions IWW assumptions about the western migratory worker’s radical inclinations. He believes the union too easily accepted “the erroneous idea that migratory workers were the vanguard of the revolution.” One could readily place Frank Little among those who made such an error—if indeed it was an error.

By examining more closely the environment in which he lived and worked, and by discussing the IWW out west in relation to the IWW back east, we can gain a deeper understanding of Frank Little, the man often described as “Half-Indian, Half-white man, and all Wobbly.”6

Writing in 1915, University of Washington economist Carleton H. Parker said that western Wobblies were recruited from among the homeless, men with “no sex life except the abnormal . . . hunted and scorned by society; normal leadership, emulation, constructiveness is unknown to them.” Reading the above one would think the professor was a psychologist rather than an economist.7 Parker’s description does, however, offer an explanation of why the other unions believed these particular workers could not be organized. But by 1914–15, “emulation” and “constructiveness” were not “unknown” to a sizable number of these workers as by then they had emulated Frank Little and other free-speech fighters by participating in several free speech actions. (Fighting for the First Amendment of the US Constitution seems constructive to me.) If by “normal leadership” Parker means a leadership issuing orders from on high and treating those to whom said orders are issued as subordinate and inferior, then his use of the term is accurate. Of course a collectivist western IWW did not care to have any such “normal leadership.”

Despite the remarks mentioned above, Parker was far more sympathetic to the western migratory worker than most of his peers. In the titular essay of The Casual Laborer and Other Essays, Parker refers to 1913–1914 as “the period of the migratory worker.” He points out that by 1910 there were ten million four hundred thousand unskilled male workers in the United States. Three and a half million of them “moved, by discharge or quitting, so regularly from one work town to another that they could be called migratory labor.” Among the unskilled “one-fourth of the adult fathers of families” earned under $400 annually while half earned less than $600 a year. At the time, $800 a year was needed if a family was to live decently. Parker writes: “Unemployment, destitution, uncared-for-sickness was a monotonous familiarity to them.” Workers without children to support often earned a “jungle stake” then quit. The stake (usually $15) was enough to live in a hobo jungle for months. Parker tells us western Wobblies routinely severed all connection with blood kin. Might they have thought such a rupture necessary if they were to truly shed capitalist America’s influence on them, or might their rootless, kinless way of life been the closest thing to freedom they believed available to them? Whatever the reasons behind their alienation, Frank Little often lived among and became known to many of them as the hobo agitator.

According to a study Parker conducted for California Governor Hiram W. Johnson, 67 percent of the hoboes were “floating” and did not want steady work. He found that 76 percent were unmarried, although a Chicago study put that figure at 90 percent. Seventy-seven percent were alcoholics, and 26 percent admitted to having jail records. He goes on to say an unnamed “California state official believes data shows a widespread practice of homosexual acts” in the overcrowded, heatless hobo jungles. Parker believed the western Wobblies consisted entirely of migratory workers, who were thought of at the time as hobo-laborers: “a hobo miner, hobo lumberjack, the blanket stiff [farm laborer].” He wrote: “the American [western] IWW is a neglected and lonely hobo worker, usually undernourished and in need of medical care.” Again he analyzes Wobblies from a psycho-social perspective, and his only comment on the IWW’s goal of abolishing the wage system and introducing industrial democracy is to call it “bizarre.”

Historian Robert L. Tyler’s assessment of the western Wobbly parallels Carlton Parker’s but without the pathology. Tyler speaks of the IWW as “a small fraternity of itinerant rebels and hoboes” who turned to the union “because it supplied a home and a meaning for their aimless lives.” He continues: “Structurally, the I.W.W. appealed to them because it made no political demands upon them, because it charged low initial fees and du...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Western Wobblies
• Chapter Two: Free-Speech Fights
• Chapter Three: Iron Miners, Harvest Hands, and Oil Worker
• Chapter Four: Urgency and Conspiracy
• Chapter Five: Big Bill Haywood and Frank Little
• Chapter Six: Three Western Wobbly Martyrs
• Conclusion: Frank Little, Where Are You Now that We Need You?
• Acknowledgments
• Sources
• Notes
• About the Author