The Industrial Union Bulletin: an introduction and appraisal - Melvyn Dubofsky

In June 1905, more than one hundred individuals reflecting every nuance of American radicalism met in Chicago to declare total war on American capitalism. Resolving that "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common," they founded the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) in order to carry on their struggle against the established order. Created in the same year that revolution stunned Tsarist Russia, the I.W.W. was born in a burst of optimism. After its blissful birth, however, the I.W.W. existed perilously: internal dissension-not unlike the sectarian warfare common to other leftwing organizations-at times paralyzed it; secessionist movements took away its largest affiliates and the bulk of its membership; and the violent opposition of private employers, combined with governmental hostility, recurrently threatened its total destruction. Yet, somehow or other, the I.W.W. maintained a precarious life.

The founders of the I.W.W. had anticipated a day when American Federation of Labor affiliates would desert the house that sheltered them to seek more spacious room in the I.W.W.'s mansion. They expected skilled workers to unite with the unskilled in a common labor front based upon industrial unionism that would destroy American capitalism. But no A.F.L. affiliates flocked to the I.W.W. and few skilled workers evinced an interest in a united labor front. Indeed, the only I.W.W. affiliate that resembled an industrial union and that included masses of unskilled workers-the Western Federation of Miners (W.F.M.)-seceded in 1907, taking with it the bulk of the I.W.W.'s membership. Precisely how the I.W.W. leaders responded to this series of disappointments can be gleaned from a careful reading of the Industrial Union Bulletin.

First published on March 2, 1907, the Industrial Union Bulletin appeared on a regular weekly basis until August 8, 1908, after which date it was published semi-monthly until November 12, 1908. Between November 12, 1908, and March 6, 1909, the paper appeared only four more times, the I.W.W. discontinuing publication with the issue of March 6, 1909. Published in Chicago and initially edited by A. S. Edwards, one of the I.W.W.'s founding members, the Industrial Union Bulletin, after Edwards' resignation as editor on April 25, 1908, was apparently edited collectively by the organization's general executive board, or at least the board members then resident in Chicago.

When the Industrial Union Bulletin first prepared to print, the I.W.W. seemed on the verge of total collapse. At its 1906 convention, the organization had split in two, an insurgent faction through extraconstitutional means having successfully purged the officials elected at the 1905 convention. As a result of this 1906 split, two factions battled in the streets and in the courts for control of the organization, while the Western Federation of Miners simply withdrew from affiliation with the I.W.W. The victors at the 1906 convention themselves formed a shaky coalition, consisting on the one hand of the followers of Vincent St. John, formerly a prominent figure in the W.F.M., who were committed to direct economic or trade-union action as opposed to parliamentary politics, and on the other of the admirers of Daniel DeLeon, one of the most dogmatic and controversial personalities in the history of American radicalism and the then unchallenged leader of the puny Socialist Labor Party, who were dedicated to revolutionary political action. During its initial year of publication, the Industrial Union Bulletin highlighted the controversy raging between the followers St. John and those of DeLeon.

Indeed, for the period from March 1907 to August 1908, no better guide than the Industrial Union Bulletin exists to the I.W.W.'s evolving ideology. As pro- and anti-DeLeonites debated their respective positions in the journal's pages, the ideological position of the I.W.W. leaders came into clear focus. The contenders discussed a wide spectrum of questions, ranging from the proper relationship of the labor movement to political parties and legislatures, to the ability of trade unions to increase real wages, to the relevance of the Marxian analysis of social economic change to the American system. Anyone seeking to discover the questions and issues that most concerned American labor radicals early in the twentieth century would be hard pressed to find a source superior to the Industrial Union Bulletin. Anyone eager to understand the basis of the split between St. John and DeLeon and also to comprehend the ideology, or lack of it, in the post-DeLeon I.W.W. can locate no better starting place than the columns of this paper.

From the first, the Industrial Union Bulletin's reports demonstrated an obvious trend within the I.W.W. away from the advocacy of socialist political action and from support of DeLeon and his Socialist Labor Party. Two of the I.W.W.'s most prominent ideologues of the 1908-1917 era-Ben H. Williams, editor of Solidarity, and Justus Ebert, a German immigrant and radical theoretician-first expressed their growing syndicalist commitment in the Industrial Union Bulletin's pages. One-time supporters of DeLeon and members of the Socialist Labor Party, Williams and Ebert regularly vented their displeasure at De Leon's attempt to transform the I.W.W. into an adjunct of the political party, and they analyzed carefully, and at some length, the reasons why trade-union organization on an industrial basis and direct economic action at the point of production must necessarily precede working-class political organization or action. Most important, their analyses set the scene for DeLeon's expulsion from the I.W.W. at its 1908 convention, the only reports of which, in fact, appeared in the Industrial Union Bulletin. Interestingly enough, the convention struggle, as described in that journal, revealed the I.W.W.'s peculiar amalgam of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Although the Industrial Union Bulletin's columns were ordinarily filled with abstruse treatises on economic and social theory written by self-proclaimed intellectuals, the debate between Vincent St. John and Daniel DeLeon at the 1908 convention was printed under the titles: "The Worker (St. John) vs. the Intellectual" and "The Intellectual (DeLeon) vs. the Worker. In a labor organization, the worker naturally triumphed.

The Industrial Union Bulletin also offers unmistakable evidence of other important trends in the evolution of the I.W.W. Unable to appeal successfully to craft unionists or to organize the skilled, the I.W.W. of necessity sought different recruits, which it soon discovered among migratories and immigrant industrial workers. The western migratory, or freewheeling hobo, of I.W.W. legend makes his first appearance in the Industrial Union Bulletin in the reports of Washington state organizer J. H. Walsh. Walsh recruited a delegation of western migratories, known to history as the "Overalls Brigade,"that "rode the rods" east to the 1908 Chicago I.W.W. convention. En route, "Brigade" members sang working-class songs of rebellion, which the Industrial Union Bulletin printed and which later became part of the now famous I.W.W. Little Red Song Book. At the same time, stories published in the Bulletin described I.W.W. efforts to organize immigrant industrial workers in such cities as Paterson, New Jersey, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Schnectady, New York, where perhaps the first recorded sit-down strike in American history occurred.

In short, for students and scholars interested in discovering why the Industrial Workers of the World became increasingly syndicalist in orientation after 1907, and how and why American syndicalism assumed its particular historical configuration, the Industrial Union Bulletin is a vital and unsurpassed source.

Transcribed by Juan Conatz