By 1914 there was growing acknowledgement within the ranks of the IWW that despite the part that it had played in the class struggle in the United States, the strikes it had led and the campaigns it had organised, the union had not succeeded in becoming a mass revolutionary force. It had failed to sweep aside the American Federation of Labour (AFL) and lead the American working class to socialism. Great strikes had been followed by a failure to consolidate the union’s position. The great victory in Lawrence had seen the IWW recruit 14,000 members, but within a year the membership had fallen to only 700.
In 1914, after years of struggle, the IWW had only 11,000 paid-up members across the country and was being written off. Its only activity in the east was among Italian bakers in New York and on the Philadelphia docks.
At this point, Bill Haywood was elected general secretary and launched organising drives in a number of industries with a determination to establish strong union organisation and to fix it permanently in place. As much effort was to be put into consolidating victories as was to be put into winning them.
The IWW put a tremendous effort into organising migratory agricultural workers, then moving into iron and copper mining, lumber, construction and oil.
As Ralph Chaplin put it, in a number of industries the IWW was taking control on “the job”. This was in the face of often fierce employer resistance, violent repression and AFL scabbing. By September 1917 the IWW had over 100,000 paid up members. So successful was the union that a growing number of state governors demanded that the federal government take action to suppress the IWW.
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 provided the spectacle of socialist parties and trade unions rallying to their respective governments. The Russian Bolsheviks and a handful of others resisted the tide of jingoistic patriotism. In the United States there was massive opposition to becoming involved in the European conflict. The Democrat Woodrow Wilson secured re-election as President in 1916 on the promise of keeping the country out of the war. Once elected, in the best traditions of bourgeois politics, he promptly took the United States into the war.
Despite his ill-deserved reputation as a liberal, Wilson was in reality a racist and segregationist, an authoritarian who was determined to crush any and all domestic opposition to the war. Draconian laws, the 1917 Espionage act and the 1918 Sedition Act, effectively criminalised dissent. And these laws were reinforced by the actions of vigilantes who in many ways were a forerunner of post-war European fascism.
While the reformist Socialist Party took a strong antiwar stance, Haywood was opposed to the IWW becoming involved in anti-war campaigning. He was certainly opposed to the war himself but nevertheless argued that the war provided ideal conditions for building the IWW and that they should therefore focus on organising and not give the state an excuse for repression. Other leading Wobblies disagreed, with Frank Little, a strong opponent of the war, arguing that repression was going to come anyway. Little was to fall victim to the rising tide of repression himself when he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered, in Butte, Montana, in August 1917.
On 12 July 1917 in Bisbee, Arizona, a miners’ strike was put down by the illegal rounding up and mass deportation of the strikers and their supporters from the town. Some 2,000 armed men rounded up hundreds of Wobblies and supposed sympathisers, including AFL members and shopkeepers. Some of them were savagely beaten in the process. Eventually some 1,200 men were herded into cattle trucks, 50 to a truck, and taken across the state line into New Mexico and abandoned in the desert. They were effectively interned in a US Army camp where they were deliberately kept half-starved and cold. Many of those deported had families, wives and children back in Bisbee.
Meanwhile a number of states, beginning with Idaho, passed anti-syndicalism laws effectively banning the IWW. The federal government finally took action on 5 September 1917 with coordinated raids on IWW offices in 33 cities. In Chicago alone, the authorities seized five tons of “evidence”. IWW membership lists were handed over to the AFL so they could assist employers in the process of blacklisting.
Instead of going on the run, going underground, Haywood ordered those indicted to surrender and to fight the charges they faced in court. He actually seems to have believed that the Wobblies could successfully defend themselves. They had not campaigned against the war and the authorities would find no evidence that the union was being financed by the Germans. But while there had been notable courtroom victories in the past, not least Haywood’s own July 1907 defeat of an attempted judicial lynching in Idaho, the war had changed everything.
The full-weight of the federal government was thrown against the IWW at a time when the country was in the grip of a jingoistic patriotic hysteria. It did not matter that the union had not opposed the war because the government had decided to destroy it because of its militancy and radicalism. The IWW fell victim to a “Red Scare” that was to be intensified in the post-war years as a response to the Russian Revolution.
The Chicago trial saw the defendants testify to the hardness of their lives and the brutality of bosses, police and vigilantes. One labour spy actually admitted in the dock that the arrival of the IWW always led to better pay and conditions for the workers. And the defence even bought before the court a succession of IWW members in military uniform to testify that the organisation had not campaigned against the war. When Haywood himself took the stand, he insisted that while he was personally opposed to the war, the IWW most certainly did not because it was not “an organisation matter”. As he told the jury, “The fight of the IWW is on the economic field”. When the IWW led strikes in wartime, it was not to damage the war effort but to improve pay and conditions at a time when the bosses were profiteering from the war.
After four months, the great Chicago trial came to an end on 17 August 1918. It took the jury one hour to find the defendants guilty on all the charges against them. IWW leaders were sentenced to punitive jail terms. Haywood and 14 others got 20 years, 33 others got ten years, another 35 got five years and 12 got one year. And these sentences were to be served in the harshest conditions. So much for Woodrow Wilson’s liberalism! This was little better than lynch law.
There were other mass trials in Sacramento, Wichita and Omaha, Nebraska. The Sacramento trial of 54 Wobblies saw the police relentlessly harass the defence campaign. The secretary of the defence committee was arrested no fewer than 15 times and when Theodora Pollok, a middle class sympathiser, attempted to arrange bail for some of the prisoners, she was arrested, the bail money was confiscated and she was subjected to a sexual examination normally reserved for prostitutes. The Sacramento prisoners (five died in prison) all got from one to ten years in January 1919. This was, of course, long after the war had ended. Pollok got a US$100 fine for her impertinence. Alongside this judicial repression, IWW members were subject to a nationwide campaign of violent intimidation, ranging from beatings to lynching. All this during and after a war ostensibly fought “for democracy”.
The IWW was successfully beaten down, forced onto the defensive and into retreat. The repression continued into the post-war years.