The Wobblies

Organized to unite the working class,

the Industrial Workers of the World helped secure
First Amendment rights in the face of persistent government persecution.
by James MacGregor Burns and Stewart Burns

n the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville warned Americans of the

rise of an industrial aristocracy that would impoverish and
brutalize the men it uses. The Civil War spurred industrial
growth, which continued afterward at an astonishing pace. Fueled by federal subsidies and by vast land grants amounting to
an area larger than Texas, railroad corporations monopolized
the transport of people and goods. Entire regions lay in their
grip, as well as government at all levels, notes historian Philip
Foner. These empires set the tone for the giant enterprises that
took control of coal, oil, iron, steel and other staples of industrialization.

The program cover of a pageant at Madison Square Garden in

New York City to support striking silk workers of Paterson,
N.J. Directed by journalist John Reed, the event was sold out.

Labor activists saw alarming parallels between the money

kings and robber barons who ran these enterprises and the
British tyrants fought by political rebels a century before. The
new lords of capital flagrantly denied their employees rights to
life, liberty and happiness, these activists concluded, and also
strove to make the Constitution serve their interests exclusively. The enemy was not only the rapacious capitalist but also
that new phenomenon, the corporation. When the Supreme
Court, a bastion of ex-corporation lawyers, used the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to make
the property rights of corporations nearly invulnerable, reformers realized that workers would not be allowed to organize to
defend their liberties if this infringed upon capitalists freedom
of contract and right of due process, both broadly construed.
The Fourteenth Amendment, enacted after the Civil War, had
been designed to protect the rights of freed slaves, but in the

CONSTITUTION/WINTER 1992

Why Wobbly?
The nickname Wobbly was apparently first used in
print by Harrison Gray Otis, the staunchly anti-labor editor
of the Los Angeles Times, whose offices were dynamited
during an open shop dispute in 1911. But its origin is a
matter for contention. Legend ascribes it to a Chinese restaurant keeper who agreed to feed some IWW strikers.
When he tried to ask Are you IWW? all he could manage
was All loo eye wobble wobble? Wobbly Mortimer
Downing told this story, adding, Thereafter the laughing
term among us was I Wobbly Wobbly. ... The initials
IWW were variously interpreted by opponents as I Wont
Work, I Want Whiskey, International Wonder Workers, Irresponsible Wholesale Wreckers, and (during
World War I) Imperial Wilhelms Warriors. The most
common error among historians is to refer to the IWW as
the International Workers of the World.
from The Wobblies by Patrick Renshaw

Charismatic Wobbly leader, William D. (Big Bill) Haywood.

next half-century, it was used far more often to enlarge the

rights of corporations and defend them against workers and the
public. The Constitution thus provided no moral or legal support for workers economic rights. Even their right to associatesupposedly guaranteed by the Bill of Rightswas frequently violated when workers and unions engaged in collective action.
Among those shouting loudest for economic rights during
the early decades of the 20th century were the Wobblies, members of a new labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW). The group fought hard for the right to organize
and for the First Amendment rightsfree speech, press and
assemblythat made organizing possible.
In June 1905, two hundred trade unionists and socialists
gathered in Chicago to create a labor union of a new kind. The
group included such labor luminaries as Eugene Debs, leader of
the recently formed Socialist Party, Daniel DeLeon of the rival
Socialist Labor Party, and Mother Jones, legendary organizer
of mine workers, then in her seventies. The delegates put aside
their differences and supported the common cause of workers
unity. William D. (Big Bill) Haywood from Idaho, the charismatic, 36-year-old leader of the Western Federation of Miners, pounded with a piece of wood as a gavel to open what he
called the Continental Congress of the working-class. They
were assembled, he declared, to confederate the workers of
this country into a working-class movement that shall have for

its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the

slave bondage of capitalism. Haywood later became the
IWWs most popular and influential leader.
The constitution of the IWW proclaimed its mission. The
working class and the employing class have nothing in common.... Between these two classes a struggle must go on until
the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of
the earth and the machinery of production, and abolish the
wage system. By organizing One Big Union of industrial
workers, which eventually would replace the bosses and directly manage all production, we are forming the structure of
the new society within the shell of the old. The vision of One
Big Union combining all workers inspired Wobbly organizers
for the next two decades.
The unions philosophy was grounded in its members experience of class conflict and reflected a Jeffersonian allegiance
to the producers of wealththe men and women who actually
did the work. Generally not Marxists, Wobblies tended to be
homegrown libertarian or communitarian socialists. In contrast
to the influential American Federation of Labor, which had
built separate craft unions open only to skilled workers and was
led, according to Wobblies, by the labor lieutenants of capitalism, the IWW welcomed all workers, regardless of skill, language, nationality, color or gender. Its ranks included women,
blacks, Chinese and Mexicans. The IWW advocated strikes for
higher wages, better conditions and the eight-hour day, but its
leaders spurned bargaining contracts, which they considered
no more binding than the title deed to a negro slave is just.
Their fiery language notwithstanding, Wobbly leaders counseled passive resistance, the equivalent of nonviolent direct

of Free Speech, Free Press and Free Assemblage are at stake. Already in this benighted
city these three so-called rights are merely
dreams of the future or recollections of the
past.... Even the right to organizethe very
breath of life to the working classis being
denied the workers in Spokane.
One of hundreds heeding the summons
was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 19 and pregnant, fresh from arrest in a Montana freespeech fight. Descended from radical Irish
immigrants, Flynn, who would become a
celebrated figure in American labor and
radical history (first as a Wobbly and later as
a Communist), had already gained notoriety
in New York and other cities as a magnetic
orator. Charged in Spokane with criminal
conspiracy, along with other Wobbly leaders, to incite men to violate the law, she
testified that she based her speeches on the
Bill of Rights. An appeals jury overturned
her conviction, even though she was depicted as one of the most dangerous of the
IWWs, [the one who] makes all the trouble
[and] puts fight into the men.
The men did not get off so lightly. Four
This cartoon suggests the brutality Wobblies encountered in their San Diego free- hundred were jailed for up to six months
one for reciting the Declaration of Independspeech fight, staged to protest the citys ordinance banning public demonstrations.
ence. Twenty-five or 30 were squeezed into
each tight, steaming cell, surviving on bread
action, and considered violence a last resort in self-defense.
and water. They were routinely beaten, many were hospitalWithin four years of the 1905 Chicago meeting, IWW loized, and many were left with lasting wounds and missing
cals spanned the continent from Skowhegan, Maine, to Seattle.
teeth. Yet union members kept filling the jails until March
The union had organized workers abandoned by the labor es1910, when the city fathers finally negotiated an agreement
tablishment, especially timber cutters, hobo harvesters and
with them. Hailed as the Treaty of Spokane, the measure
other seasonal labor in the West, as well as textile workers and
permitted IWW organizers to speak in public places and publongshoremen in the East. To recruit widely scattered migrant
lish their newspaper.
laborers in the western states, the Wobblies held street meetThe Spokane victory invigorated kindred crusades for poings in cities where the workers gathered during the winter. In
litical freedom. In Fresno, California, migrant farm and condozens of these western cities the authorities banned the meetstruction workers hunted for jobs in the fertile San Joaquin
ings and arrested the soapbox orators. In response, the union
Valley. In 1910 the states strongest IWW local, which had
waged free-speech fights.
organized Mexican laborers, held peaceful street meetings
The most fruitful battle erupted in 1909 in Spokane, Washthere. The grower-controlled city hall arrested dozens of speakington, heart of the Inland Empire, a region rich in ore, agriers, put them in jail, turned fire hoses on them and otherwise
culture and lumber, industries dependent on itinerant labor.
physically abused them. Mobs assaulted union gatherings and
When a thriving IWW local conducted street corner meetings,
burned down its camp outside town. As in Spokane, help
one speaker after another was jailed for violating an ordinance
poured into Fresno from all points; some Wobblies hopped
specially concocted for the occasion. Cells were crammed with
freight trains and arrived on what was called the box car speorganizers who refused to work on the rock pile and instead
cial. After nearly a year of combat the city knuckled under and
held jailhouse meetings, made speeches and sang Wobbly
recognized the unions right to organize.
songs day and night. The conflict calmed with the coming of
The IWW lost its battle for First Amendment rights in
summer, but as laborers returned to Spokane that fall, the IWW
some places, notably in San Diegothe hardest one in which
called for reinforcements from all over the country.
we have been involved, one veteran reported. During the winOn to Spokane! headlined the IWW journal, Solidarity,
ter and spring of 1912, San Diego authorities brutalized prisonwhere the organized Capitalists are trying to steal from the
ers and used vigilante violence to keep Wobbly forces from
unorganized workers, basic rights that the working class has
invading the city. They also pressured the attorney general in
won by long centuries of struggles. The fundamental principles
Washington to conduct a conspiracy investigation, but he called

CONSTITUTION/WINTER 1992

IWW was winning converts among low-paid

immigrant workers in the East, notably in
the vast woolen mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Many workers in the Lawrence
mills came from southern Europe. More
than half were women and children. In
January 1912, a Massachusetts law reduced
weekly hours for women and children from
56 to 54. When mill owners cut the workers
pay proportionally, long-smoldering grievances ignited.
Polish women abandoned their looms
and walked out, followed by Italians, as a
strike by more than thirty thousand shut
down the mills. When two popular Italian
union members were imprisoned on a false
murder charge, Big Bill Haywood, IWW
editor and organizer William Trautmann,
and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn took over strike
leadership. Flynn had been in Lawrence for
several months already, urging workers to
weave the shroud of capitalism. During one
of the colorful musical parades to drum up
publicity and community support, young
women carried a banner with words that
immortalized their sense of entitlement:
We
want bread and roses too.
Wobbly Elizabeth Gurley Flynn addresses a crowd of strikers in Lawrence, Mass.
The banner inspired a poem by a sympathetic observer, the poet and novelist James
it off. To hell with your courts. I know what justice is, WobOppenheim, about the womens aspirations for a better life:
bly agitator Jack Whyte exclaimed to a San Diego judge before
being sentenced for speaking illegally in public. You have beAs we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
come blind and deaf to the rights of man to pursue life and
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
happiness, and you have crushed those rights so that the sacred
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
right of property shall be preserved.
For the people hear us singing: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!
Even when the IWWs protests were successful, the freespeech fights in the cities did not contribute much to organizing
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
workers on the job. New union members would leave town in
For they are womens children and we mother them again.
the spring for remote and isolated work places that were diffiOur lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
cult to organize. Yet, according to Roger Baldwin, the social
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
worker and pacifist who founded the American Civil Liberties
Union, the Wobblies wrote a chapter in the history of American
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead.
liberty comparable to that written by abolitionists and suffraGo crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
gists. The IWWs direct action of open conflict, Baldwin
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
contended, proved far more effective than all the legal maneuYes, it is bread we fight forbut we fight for roses, too!
vers in the courts to get rights that no government willingly
grants. Power wins rightsthe power of determination, backed
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
by willingness to suffer jail or violence. Although its influence
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
was indirect, the unions legacy of activism contributed signifiNo more the drudge and idlerten that toil where one reposes,
cantly to the attainment of legal rights to organize in the 1930s
But a sharing of lifes glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!
through the Norris-LaGuardia and Wagner acts and subsequent
Supreme Court rulings, particularly the right of workers and
To fashion solidarity among women and men of two dozen
unions to engage in collective free speech and other concerted
nationalities, a barrier that had blocked many such ventures,
action.
Wobbly organizers conducted separate meetings in every lanWhile the free-speech fights were erupting in the West, the
guage, and delegates from each nationality served on the strike

Lawrence, Mass., 1912: the state militia was called out to cow the striking textile workers. Here the guard approaches a mill.

and relief committees. These communes created an efficient

system that helped tens of thousands survive the winterbut
something more had to be done. Leaders decided to send hundreds of the ill-clad, ill-fed children to New York and other
cities, where sympathetic families were eager to take them in.
The first trainload of children to arrive at Grand Central station
was welcomed by thousands of cheering supporters. But the
mill owners could not tolerate the favorable publicity brought
by the Childrens Crusade, and Lawrence officials soon forbade the departures. When two hundred youngsters were about
to board a Philadelphia-bound train, a phalanx of police surrounded them.
Children were clubbed and torn away from their parents,
Flynn recalled, and a wild scene of brutal disorder took place.
Thirty-five frantic women and children were arrested, thrown
screaming and fighting into patrol wagons. They were beaten
into submission and taken to the police station, which was
besieged by strikers. The repression backfired, however, as the
nations eyes fastened on Lawrence and leading opinion makers denounced the mill owners. After two months of mounting
pressure capped by a congressional investigation, the owners
caved in and agreed to the workers demands.
The following year, 1913, the union tried to replicate the
Lawrence triumph in Paterson, New Jersey, the nations silk
capital. Impoverished workers laboring 60-hour weeks, mostly
immigrants and in large part women and children, launched a
strike against long hours and a sudden speed-up that doubled

CONSTITUTION/WINTER 1992

the number of looms per operator. Haywood and Flynn assisted

a strong core of local Wobblies, who formed a multinational,
multilingual strike committee: six hundred delegates representing half as many silk shops. It was so egalitarian that when reporters asked who the leaders were they were told, We are all
leaders. Indeed, Flynn remembered that our plan of battle
was very often nullified by the democratic administration of the
strike committee. The owners refused to talk and retaliated
against nonviolent tactics with mass arrests, beatings and the
killing of two workers.
With morale and funds hitting bottom, strike leaders, supported by the philanthropist Mabel Dodge, gambled on a wild
idea to draw dollars and publicity to the waning revolt. In June
1913, twelve hundred strikers marched 20 miles to New York
City where, turning life into art, they reenacted the strike
storyreplete with police clubbings and killings, a mass funeral and orations by Haywood and Flynnbefore a full house
at Madison Square Garden. For weeks the workers had rehearsed the pageant, directed by the young journalist, John
Reed, and a group of left-wing Greenwich Village artists. The
one-night stand did not make money, however, and in using up
scarce time and resources, the pageant may have made matters
worse.
One month later the wearied ranks split apart. Skilled English-speaking workers accepted company terms and returned to
work on a shop-by-shop basis; the less-skilled immigrant majority soon followed.

The Childrens Crusade: children of strikers in Lawrence were sent to New York to be taken in by sympathetic families.

Failing to take hold in the industrial Northeast, the IWW

redoubled its efforts in more familiar terrain. During the next
six years, it organized farm workers on the West Coast and in
the midwestern granary, iron and coal miners in Minnesotas
Mesabi range, and lumberjacks in the Northwest. On the eve of
Americas entrance into World War I, with membership close
to 100,000 and a newly centralized structure under Haywoods
direction, Wobbly leaders felt confident that the One Big Union
was coming to fruition. The booming economy and a labor
shortage brought by war mobilization fueled the IWW resurgence. But war also created the opportunity for a fierce judicial
attack, in the name of patriotism, that left the union mortally
wounded.
It had long been constitutional wisdom, or at least folklore,
that if liberty were threatened locally, the federal government
would stand above parochial intolerance to protect it. Extend
the sphere, James Madison had written in the Tenth Federalist, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests;
you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have
a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.... This
fine principle did not hold in World War I. Having encouraged
and exploited American doubts about involvement in Europes
war since it began in 1914, presenting neutrality as the noblest
path and winning re-election in 1916 on the slogan, He kept us
out of war!, President Woodrow Wilson faced the formidable
task of leading an unprepared people into the war and marshaling popular support for it. He set up a massive propaganda machine to whip up anti-German feeling, and his administration
and the Congress led the charge against opposition to the war,
with no effective resistance from the Supreme Court.

10

Nowhere was the power and determination of the federal

government to crush dissent more nakedly demonstrated than
in the wartime campaign against the IWW. Shortly after war
was declared, army troops advanced on union centers in the
mining and lumber regions of the West to repress labor conflicts that might hamper war production. Soldiers raided IWW
headquarters, arrested and interned organizers and prevented
strikes.
In September 1917, despite an intensive investigation that
failed to substantiate allegations that the Wobblies were paid
German agents or had violated the espionage or conscription
acts, the Justice Department took action against them. Its agents
swept down on union offices and the private homes of union
members from Chicago to Spokane and seized every document
they could findincluding the love letters of Ralph Chaplin,
the editor of Solidarity. From the several tons of evidence
collected in the raids, the government constructed charges that
the IWWif not directly paid by the Germanswas at any
rate a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the war effort, advocating
draft refusal and military desertion. Federal indictments were
brought in Chicago and four other cities. When the Chicago
trial opened in April 1918, more than 100 Wobbly leaders were
in the dockBig Bill Haywood among them. Each faced more
than a hundred separate charges. The government did not intend, nor did it have evidence, to prove the guilt of every individual on all counts. Instead, for a month and a half prosecutors
took turns reading from the captured documents and lecturing
the jury on the subversive and atheistic nature of Wobbly doctrine. The defense attempted to put its accuserthe capitalist
systemon trial. A succession of union members took the

Sad twilight of an idealistic movement: Wobbly headquarters in New York City following a raid in November 1919. Wartime fears of subversion provided a ready pretext for President Woodrow Wilsons Justice Department to move aggressively against the Wobblies.

stand to testify about their experiences in the struggle against

the exploitation of man by man.
The outcome was a foregone conclusion. After four
months of testimony, the jury needed less than an hour to return
with guilty verdicts on all 10,000 charges. Stiff prison terms
were handed out to most of the defendants, with Haywood and
Chaplin among those receiving the maximum 20 years.
Haywood, his health deteriorating, jumped bail and fled to exile
in the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928. The other convicted Wobblies were incarcerated at Leavenworth federal
prison until their sentences were commuted in 1922 and 1923
by Republican Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
The government obtained similar results in trials in Sacramento and Wichita. In Omaha, 64 Wobblies languished in jail
for a year and a half, until six months after the wars end, when
all charges were dropped. The Wobblies, President Wilson had
written to Attorney General Thomas Gregory when the trials
were in preparation, certainly are worthy of being suppressed. But for how long? Suppressed during the war by
the full force of federal and state power, the IWW was dealt a
blow from which it would never recover.

CONSTITUTION/WINTER 1992

Both in the free-speech fights that made the IWW famous

and in the wartime conspiracy trials that brought its demise, the
Wobblies learned that economic rights could neither be obtained nor sustained without political rights to undergird them,
in particular the protections of the Bill of Rights. Thus, although committed to economic action, especially strikes, as the
means of fundamental social change, they fought as hard for
the First Amendment as for economic liberties; these causes
were simultaneous and inseparable. Americans have long been
taught to see rights as compartmentalized into separate categories, such as political, civil and economic. The Wobblies
embodied an alternative vision of rights as interwoven and
mutually reinforcing and thus, when actively asserted, capable
of establishing both freedom and social justice.
James MacGregor Burns is Woodrow Wilson Professor of
Government, Emeritus, at Williams College and Senior
Scholar, Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of
Richmond. Stewart Burns is Associate Editor of the Martin
Luther King, Jr., Papers at Stanford University. This article is
based on material from their book, A Peoples Charter: The
Pursuit of Rights in America (Alfred A. Knopf).

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