President Moyer said that this letter was found among Ryan's effects "after he had received a sentence of life imprisonment in San Quentin penitentiary for having applied direct action in Los Angeles, which resulted in the death of two men."[415] These or similar charges had evidently been made at about the time this letter was supposed to have been written. St. John, in his report to the fourth I. W. W. Convention as General Organizer, denied certain "insinuations of a serious nature" which had been made against him.[416]
The question of "political action" and the bitter and disruptive controversy which waged on that subject at the fourth convention had now become the overshadowing issue. The "Wobblies" use the expression "political action" in referring to almost every conceivable form of political activity, voting, elections, legislation, etc., and also, more vaguely, in regard to the relationship which does or should obtain between labor organizations and political parties, particularly between radical labor bodies and radical political parties. For some time before this gathering it was evident that the administration was becoming fatally divided against itself. The DeLeon-St. John-Trautmann faction had survived in 1906, to be the administration—the I. W. W.—but in less than two years the sentiment in the organization had developed two sub-factions, so to speak. The I. W. W. appears to develop by fission. The organization originally was a compound of adherents of
| Sherman | DeLeon | St. John or Haywood. | Trautmann. |
| Socialist Party. | Socialist Labor Party. | Anarchist, or Industrial Socialist. | Nihilist. |
The Socialists were "abandoned" in 1906, leaving the field to the "proletarian rabble":
DeLeon ... St. John ... Trautmann.
The "Socialist Laborites" were sloughed off (or they "ditched the Anarchists," as they themselves would put it) in 1908, and we had
| I. | II. |
|---|---|
| The DeLeonites. | The St. John-Trautmann group. |
| (S. L. P. or Detroit I. W. W.) | (Chicago I. W. W., "Bummery.") |
Later Trautmann abandoned the "Bummery" and joined the DeLeonites. We now have in 1917: