Another ‘labor historian’ writes a book about the Wobblies – so what else is new? - Fred Thompson

“We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW” by Melvyn Dubofsky, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1969; 484 pages plus 72 pages of footnotes and index; $12.50

This book is an ample, very readable, and well-documented history of the IWW up to 1918, and very sketchy, misinformed, crowded comment on the IWW since that year.

Up to and through the big trial of Wobblies in 1918, Dubofsky builds on the previous digging of Brissenden, Hoxie, Levine, Gambs, and such later books as Dowell’s 1939 account of criminal syndicalism laws, Preston’s 1963 exposure of how government subserved the corporations in attaching the IWW, Tyler’s 1967 “Rebels in the Woods”, Foner’s 1966 history, and Renshaw’s more journalistic 1967 book “The Wobblies”. He makes use of the scholarly articles by Ingham on our 1909 strike at McKees Rocks and Norman Clark on our battle for the right to speak and organize in Everett, Washington 1916 (both published in 1966), and of the extensive digging that other historical articles in the last 15-or-so years have recorded. He has looked into our periodicals, our convention minutes, and various as yet unpublished doctoral dissertations; explored the National Archives for Department of Labor and Department of Justice letters and reports; and found much new material in the papers of Frank P. Walsh of Industrial Commission fame and in the records of various lumber companies.

Dubofsky has organized this massive data into the most complete and readable account so far of the IWW up to the end of World War I. But even in that period there are some odd omissions. For 30 pages he elaborates on the already well-established fact that we didn’t win in Paterson in 1913, forgets that this was chiefly one can’t win where the industry is moving to more modern plants in other places, and emphasizes an alleged lack of IWW practicality in getting into such troubles. But he forgets to write about the places where the opposite would be shown. There is only one short and misinforming paragraph about our obviously practical although unsuccessful efforts in Akron that same year which he could find detailed in Robert’s history of the Rubber Workers, a book he doesn’t even mention – and only one sentence (Page 318) about IWW continuous job control on the docks of Philadelphia from 1913 to 1925 – plus a later cramped and inaccurate account (Page 448) of how that control ended. There is no mention of Solvay Process, a very practical victory in 1916, or of the host of practical actions that kept the IWW alive and that are at least mentioned for this period in Brissenden or my own too-cramped “First Fifty Years”. And of course eyes shut to much major evidence of IWW practicality and stability as steady representation of workers at various Cleveland metal working plants from 1934-1950. This does not seem to arise from any wish to harm, for his chapter on the Lawrence strike of 1912 outshines all previous accounts and treats our inability to hold the membership after the victory far more kindly than Wobblies themselves are likely to, for he has found documentary evidence to add to our own explanations: Employers shifted orders to mills in other places – evidence admittedly of the inadequacy of anything short of the One Big Industrial Union we haven’t built yet but are still trying to.

The book is enlivened with numerous biographical sketches that I hope are accurate that the almost complete mish-mash I find about myself. These include some odd errors. Herman Suhr (Page 298) was certainly not “mentally retarded” when I knew him. Haywood was not a lush (Page 460) here, nor pushed out of IWW activity prior to his flight to Russia; members simply felt he could do more good on the public platform than tied down to administrative detail. Dubofsky redeems himself somewhat by reference to items in D of J files showing that soon after WDH got to Russia he offered to return here if the Government would return the forfeited bond money, but got turned down. E.G. Flynn was not the only woman convicted under the Smith Act; so was Trotskyite Grace Carlson, and rather disgracefully with no protest from EGF. This book does disprove the Flynn account of how she escaped the Chicago indictment. Joe Hill was not buried at Waldheim or anywhere else, but was cremated at Graceland; and his ashes were scattered over the world. (And why the comment on Page 312 that Joe’s innocence was never established? Neither was the innocence of thousands of others who might have killed Morrison; that is why guilt, not innocence, needs to be proved.) The Non-Partisan League set out to reach in agreement with the Agricultural Workers in 1917, but were pressured by anti-NPL elevator “paytriots” in to voting the agreement down. And the IWW didn’t due in 1939 either, as indicated in the strangely-garbled note in Page 528, and did have industrial union representation at its conventions through 1950.

If this book cut off at 1918 and purported to be a history of the IWW only to 1918, then a little patching would make it a most commendable history for that period. It should correct the errors and omissions already noted, and surely give some fairly complete account of the still untold Philadelphia story, and say something about such women as Matilda Robbins in the 1913 Studebaker strike, or Jane Street organizing the Denver housemaids in 1916; and something about the girls who made the Pittsburgh stogies, and the workers in the Pittsburgh packing plants; and something about IWW efforts in the garment trades and the coal mines, completely omitted here; and something about IWW activities and influence in other countries, so far dealt with among our critics only Renshaw and something about the Duluth-Superior dock strikes – and this time giving credit to a newspaper reporter for rescuing the kidnapped Frank Little.

But why should the account end with the big trails of 1918? Yes, they were supposed to end us, but we had even more numerous arrests and trials under the criminal syndicalism laws from 1920 to 1923, and still we weren’t ended. Dubofsky almost overlooks all maritime IWW activity either before or after 1920, and his references do not include Taft’s piece on them in the June 1939 Political Science Quarterly. He overlooks the fact that from 1920 to 1924 we completed a major job of changing camp conditions in construction and lumber camps – something that had only gotten started during the war. He speaks of “the sterility of the IWW during the 1920s”, saying nothing of the 1922 strike at Hetch-Hetchy, making just a brief mention of the Colorado coal strike of 1927 and 1928, and forgetting that this was a decade in which the AFL was getting nowhere.

“With the depression the IWW foundered,” Dubofsky says. But by a battery of soapboxers and a million leaflets, the IWW reversed the previous pattern of union decline in a depression, getting the unemployed to assure those who still had jobs they would show up at a strike only to reinforce the picket line and not to scab. In those depression years we conducted organizing campaigns in Detroit and Cleveland and elsewhere that showed we had learned something from our own history; we really started something nationwide with those little cards at Hudson Body “Sit DOwn and Watch Your Pay Go Up” in 1934; achieved a hitherto-unmatched stability in the Cleveland shops; negotiated an agreement with US Vanadium; and fought Weyerhauser in the woods of Idaho – all, it might seem, to disprove a series of myths persistently served up by labor historians. Sure, we have not yet accomplished what we set out to do in 1905, and that is why we are still in there trying – for what we set out to do needs more urgently today than ever to be done.

Many of the shortcomings of this big book come from the tendency of historians to mirror previous accounts – and to hell with the facts. A document fits nicely into the process, much more readily than the safety devices that are still on the ore docks since they were put there after Frank Little’s fight in 1913, or wet mining drills, or standard accommodations in lumber camps, or the recurrent idea on job problems – “Let’s do it Wobbly style.” This account also shows a sort of death wish for the subject under study. In his preface Dubofsky speaks of the IWW’s “contemporary relevance”, but implies that we are unacquainted with the young dissidents of today (He should come to a Wobbly meeting or social!), and he winds up here, much as in his Nation article of September 8, with a foreboding that when I and a few of my contemporaries “pass away, the IWW will die, for unlike the neighborhood, it cannot be renewed” All opposed to this notion vote Nay by keeping their dues paid.

Another recurrent idea in the book is the argument that by imporving conditions we readicals undermine our efforts to radicalize our class. I want to express my hearty and well-established disagreement with this anti-labor argument in a sperate article one of these days. But despite all these horrendous errors, there is a lot of good reading in this book, and if you don’t feel like plunking down $12.50 for it, putsome pressure on your local library to buy a few copies. Non-members reading it are likely to decide they ought to help the IWW go ahead with its unfinished business.

Transcribed by Juan Conatz