Wobblies of the World

A Global History of the IWW

Peter Cole, David Struthers, Kenyon Zimmer

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786801524
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Industrial Workers of the World is a union unlike any other. Founded in 1905 in Chicago, it rapidly gained members across the world thanks to its revolutionary, internationalist outlook. By using powerful organising methods including direct-action and direct-democracy, it put power in the hands of workers. This philosophy is labeled as 'revolutionary industrial unionism' and the members called, affectionately, 'Wobblies'. This book is the first to look at the history of the IWW from an international perspective. Bringing together a group of leading scholars, it includes lively accounts from a number diverse countries including Australia, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden and Ireland, which reveal a fascinating story of global anarchism, syndicalism and socialism. Drawing on many important figures of the movements such as Tom Barker, Har Dayal, Joe Hill, James Larkin and William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, and exploring particular industries including shipping, mining, and agriculture, this book describes how the IWW and its ideals travelled around the world.

Part I

Transnational Influences on the IWW

1

“A Cosmopolitan Crowd:” Transnational Anarchists, the IWW, and the American Radical Press

Kenyon Zimmer

It is no coincidence that Salvatore Salerno’s groundbreaking study of transnational influences on the Industrial Workers of the World, Red November, Black November, devoted much space to the role of anarchists. Within the constellation of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century radical movements that gave rise to the IWW, anarchism was the most transnational in its activities and internationalist in its commitments. Anarchists, Jose Moya notes, “formed the world’s first and most widespread transnational movement organized from below and without formal political parties,” and both anarchism and syndicalism spread across the globe through the same international migrations of workers, exiles, activists, and students. Many transnational anarchists were therefore instrumental in shaping the IWW and its ideology, at both the institutional and local levels. To a great extent, globetrotting anarchists were responsible for forging the IWW into “a diverse, multilingual, transnational organization.”¹

This aspect of the IWW’s history, however, remains largely unknown. Most scholarship on the Wobblies in the United States relies on English-language sources, whereas the vast majority of anarchists—and a great number of Wobblies—were immigrants. In particular, Mexican, Italian, Spanish, Finnish, and Russian immigrants were over-represented in the union, and anarchism ran strong within each of these ethnic groups. Moreover, as Davide Turcato observes, “a key reason for … the inherent difficulty in studying anarchist organization, is that anarchism is often an opaque movement,” and deliberately so. Anarchist involvement in the IWW is no exception.²

For example, the Paterson silk strike of 1913 is typically portrayed as beginning with a spontaneous work stoppage, after which IWW organizers were invited to the city to aid the strikers. Even Steve Golin’s excellent study of the strike, which emphasizes Paterson’s strong IWW presence leading up to the conflict, concedes that the union’s local leaders “remain largely unknown.”³ English-language IWW sources are, in fact, conspicuously evasive on this topic. Organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn noted, “the preparation and declaration as well as the stimulation of the strike was all done by the I.W.W., by the militant minority among the silk workers,” but gave no specifics, and when a Paterson rabbi asked William D. Haywood who belonged to the strike committee, the IWW co-founder replied, “I don’t know; and if I did I wouldn’t tell.” There was a simple reason for this obfuscation, as organizer Adolf Lessig told the Commission on Industrial Relations: “I should not care to mention anybody’s name outside of those that to-day are free from losing their position” in Paterson’s silk mills.⁴

But in 1914 Margaret Sanger, who had aided the strike, described in an anarchist publication how “the Italian anarchists had been working among the silk workers for years, sowing the seeds of dissatisfaction and rebellion against their slavery, and when the strike was called this small minority formed the backbone of the strike.” Italian-language sources confirm this claim, and show that Paterson’s immigrant anarchists had been organizing their fellow silk workers into militant, revolutionary unions since the 1880s, and expounded syndicalist ideas and tactics years before the formation of the IWW. In 1906 Paterson’s anarchists founded one of the first stable IWW locals in the country and proceeded to lead a series of strikes under its auspices. They also emblazoned the masthead and storefront offices of their newspaper, La Questione Sociale, with the union’s logo, and spent more than a year quietly laying the groundwork for the general strike that broke out in 1913—a task that included forming shop committees in most of the city’s mills.⁵ During the struggle, Flynn lodged with Firmino Gallo and Ninfa Baronio, weavers who had belonged to an anarchist circle in Italy, were founding members of Paterson’s anarchist Gruppo Diritto all’Esistenza, and ran the local radical bookstore in their off hours. Likewise, Haywood stayed with Paolo Guabello, another Italian anarchist weaver, who was arrested for picketing during the strike. Paolo’s brother Alberto was also a veteran anarchist as well as the IWW’s leading local organizer, and one of the strike committee members whom Haywood refused to name.⁶ In 1919, former La Questione Sociale editor and Wobbly organizer Ludovico Caminita boasted, “damn modesty, the I.W.W. enjoys the glory which to a great extent is due to us.”⁷

Offices of La Questione Sociale, Paterson, New Jersey, 1908. Note the IWW logo on the windows. Courtesy of the Newark Public Library.

The same year of Caminita’s outburst, One Big Union Monthly editor John (Johan) Sandgren penned an article on “The importation of ideas in the labor movement.” He declared social democracy, anarchism, syndicalism, craft unionism, and communism to be European creeds unfit for “purely American conditions,” whereas the indigenous IWW was “the correct expression of the form needed here in America.” Sandgren neglected to mention that he was himself a Swedish immigrant and “self-admitted anarchist” who, after helping to organize the founding convention of the IWW, had argued in favor of removing all references to “political action” from the union’s constitution. He also wrote for Swedish anarchist and syndicalismst newspapers, and authored two Swedish-language books that “became important for political development of the Swedish syndicalists during the 1920s.”⁸ In other words, Sandgren concealed—even disparaged—the very strands of transnational radicalism that animated his participation in the IWW. The contributions of Sandgren and the Paterson anarchists are emblematic of two overlapping spheres in which immigrant anarchist influence was simultaneously pervasive and opaque: the IWW’s formation and doctrinal evolution, and its multilingual press. Anarchist members pushed the organization in a more decentralized direction, disseminated libertarian socialist ideas among its membership, and connected the union to international anarchist currents and struggles.

Anarchists in the Making of the IWW

Vincent St John listed anarchists as one of four major factions at the union’s founding convention, in addition to socialists, industrial unionists, and opportunistic “labor union fakirs.” At least 14 anarchist delegates participated—fewer than 7 percent of the representatives present, but wielding more than 14 percent of the convention’s total votes. At least seven of these anarchists were foreign-born, out of only “thirty emigrants” among the delegates, making anarchists substantially over-represented among the union’s immigrant founders.⁹ At this and subsequent conventions, they rallied to infuse the new union with anarcho-syndicalist values.

Several delegates were local Chicago anarchists: veteran anarchist agitator and Haymarket widow Lucy Parsons; Haymarket riot survivor and editor Jay Fox; Julia Mechanic, a former editorial board member (along with Fox) of the anarchist newspaper Free Society; Jean E. Spielman, a Romanian bookbinder who immigrated in 1902; and one A. Wrink or Wermich, about whom few details are known.¹⁰ Spanish-born anarchist Florencio Bazora attended from St Louis, and Italian anarchists Joseph Corna and Antonio Andrà came from Spring Valley, Illinois, where they organized for the United Mine Workers and Corna later formed a small IWW local. This pair reported on the proceedings (and the anarchists present) for Paterson’s La Questione Sociale.¹¹

Josef Peukert, once a leader of the extreme “autonomist” faction of German-speaking anarchists, represented the Chicago Debaters Club, an organization “composed of socialists and anarchists.” However, he voted against affiliation with the new union. By contrast, Slovene anarchist Andrew (“Al”) Klemencic played a major role in the proceedings and voted to install the Pueblo, Colorado local of the Journeymen Tailors’ Union that he represented in the IWW. Born near Trieste in 1860, Klemencic was an experienced, multilingual radical organizer whose activism had taken him across most of Europe as well as to San Francisco and Hawai’i, and he regularly contributed to anarchist publications in both the United States and Europe.¹² The largest anarchist-controlled bloc of votes, however, belonged to three delegates from the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and American Labor Union (ALU) whom Corna and Andrà identified as fellow anarchists: ALU Executive Board member M. E. White, Arizona mine organizer Albert Ryan, and WFM member John Riordan of Phoenix, British Columbia (also discussed by Leier in Chapter 9). Thomas J. Hagerty, another ALU member, had been involved in Chicago anarchist circles in the 1880s, but then entered a semina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Transnational Influences on the IWW
• Part II: The IWW in the Wider World
• Part III: Beyond the Union: The IWW’s Influence and Legacies
• Notes on contributors
• Index