The reports of membership from the Detroit office are probably generous, to say the least. The Secretary wrote on October 23, 1911: "Our membership at present is about 10,000. Locals ... in nearly all states as well as Canada. Organizations identical with ours ... in principle and method are active in England, Australia and Africa."[477] On March 30, 1912, he wrote that the membership had "passed the 20,000 mark." When the Detroiters held their national convention in 1913—it was called by them the Sixth I. W. W. Convention—there were 17 locals represented by delegates and the Secretary reported a membership of 11,584. Twenty-two new locals had been organized, he said, during the year ending September, 1913.[478] "The principal reverse," says the correspondent of the Weekly People, "was the lapsing of 14 locals, an unfortunate occurrence caused solely by the financial inability of headquarters to send out organizers...." The local unions represented at the convention included the silk workers of Paterson, N. J.; car and foundry, carpenters', and a "mixed" union in Detroit; a metal and machinery, and a "mixed" local in Chicago; metal workers of Erie, Pa.; hotel and restaurant, "public service" and lumber workers in Seattle; mattress makers in Columbus, Ohio; and "mixed" locals in Lynn, Mass., San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, and New York City. The convention voted down a resolution to change the name of the organization and alter the "political clause" of the Preamble—the vital part of it which kept the I. W. W. high and dry on the civilized plane.[479] The Secretary reports that while the membership of the Detroit faction includes workers from nearly all industries the chief industries represented are the following: textile, garment making, metal and machinery, tobacco, food stuffs, furniture, transportation, automobile, building, lumber, printing, shoe making, and public service.[480]
The DeLeonites probably held a convention in 1914, but the writer has not come across any report of it. In September, 1915, they held an "Eighth I. W. W. Convention" in Detroit. A brief report of the proceedings in their official organ indicates that, in addition to three officers, there were present seven accredited delegates from the following cities: Hartford, Conn., St. Louis, Columbus, Detroit and Cristobal, Panama.[481]
Not only were DeLeonite locals fewer in number than the direct-actionist locals, but their average length of life was undoubtedly shorter. The General Secretary-Treasurer says that the more important reasons for the disbanding of locals were opposition by employers after strikes, the removal of members to other cities in search of work, and the lack of men and women for the work of organizing.[482] In reply to a letter addressed to the secretary of a certain local in New York, the writer was informed that "there is now no such local union."
We had an organization [the former secretary says] under the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, which was begun in 1897 and which, though greatly reduced, was continued until the I. W. W. was organized in 1905. [Then] ... it grew to about 250 members, but after the split in 1908 it began to decline, and though we tried several times to reorganize, we failed and it has gone out of existence.[483]
Another typical case is that of a cigarmakers' local in Baltimore, which, according to its former secretary, started in November, 1913, with 22 members and "increased the wages of all the cigarmakers in the city from 50 cents to $1.00 per thousand." In January, 1914, the local had 350 members. Then came evil days. "The strike forced on us by the Royal Havana ... demoralized the membership [and] the S[ocialist] P[arty] members added to the confusion by creating dissensions. In the year 1915 the organization was non-existent," and remains so, probably.[484]
The Detroit faction being much less exclusively reliant on the more strictly economic methods of carrying on the labor struggle, was naturally much less addicted to strikes. Nevertheless they did conduct a number of them. In May, 1910, the laborers of the Michigan Malleable Iron Company of Detroit, after being on strike two weeks, were given an increase in wages. In April, 1911, the DeLeonites conducted a strike of structural-iron painters in New York, in which 200 men were involved. The following month they called out 40 machinists in Canton, Ohio. Their most important strike efforts were made in 1911 and 1912 in the silk mills of Paterson and Passaic, N. J., and Easton, Pa. In these strikes the two I. W. W.s very often clashed. Rudolph Katz, of the Detroiters, reports that during the silk strike of 1911-12 "the silk workers of Paterson ... joined the Detroit I. W. W. en masse" but that "in the midst of the strike Wm. D. Haywood was brought to Paterson and Passaic ... and the apple of discord was thrown among the strikers."[485] The Socialist Labor party reported the Paterson-Passaic situation to the Socialist Congress at Vienna in 1914: "In the big textile strike in Passaic, N. J.," their report says, "this organization [i. e., the S. L. P. or Detroit I. W. W.] was fought by both the Socialist party and the Chicago I. W. W.-ites, with Haywood leading this opposition and the capitalist press ably supporting their flank.... That strike of 4,000 men, women and children was lost through such treachery." The report adds that a few months earlier in 1912 "the Detroit I. W. W. won a great strike of 6,000 silk weavers."[486] On December 20, 1913, one of the Paterson members of the DeLeonite faction sent the following dispatch to the Weekly People: "Local 152, Bummery Bunch, did their best to pack last night's meeting [of the Paterson silk workers] but only partly succeeded. Many legitimate delegates raised their voices against anarchy expressed through sabotage and direct action...."[487] Contrary to the foregoing evidence, the testimony of Adolph Lessig before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations seems to indicate that there were no serious differences between the two I. W. W.s during the Paterson strike. Lessig says that there was no attempt to either quarrel or get together.[488]
In 1913 the Detroiters were also concerned in several smaller strikes. They report a successful strike of textile workers at Mystic, Conn., in January; a successful strike involving 50 Philadelphia mechanics in August, and one involving 16 cigarmakers in Baltimore, who won the wage increase demanded. In 1914 and 1915 a few San Francisco ladies' tailors were on strike against the piecework system and alleged bad treatment. They were both reported as successful.
The two I. W. W.s continued to hate each other quite as much as they hated the capitalists, reformers, progressives, and Socialists. St. John has a paragraph in his historical sketch of the (Chicago) I. W. W. which may very well stand as the official expression of the direct-actionists' opinion of the doctrinaires. He says:
The politicians [i. e., the Socialist Laborites] attempted to set up another organization claiming to be the real industrial movement. It is nothing but a duplicate of their political party and does not function at all. It is committed to a program of the "civilized plane," i. e., parliamentarism. Its publications are the official organs of a political sect that never misses an opportunity to assail the revolutionary workers while they are engaged in combat with some division of the ruling class. Their favorite method is to charge the revolutionists with all the crimes that a cowardly imagination can conjure into being. "Dynamiters, assassins, thugs, murderers, thieves," etc., are stock phrases. Their only virtue is that they put their assertions into print, while the other wing of the politicians [the Socialist party men] spread their venom in secret.[489]
In May, 1914, St. John testified as the official representative of the I. W. W. before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations. The Detroit I. W. W.s, he said, "have no information—do not give out any information; have no organization except on paper, and are committed to the program of capturing plates at the political pie-counter ... and trading ... on the name of the I. W. W. That is the way they keep alive."[490] At the Seattle hearings of the Commission in August, 1914, James P. Thompson, at one time the General Organizer of the Chicago I. W. W., expressed himself on the subject of the other I. W. W. He said that the Detroiters were "quite different from the I. W. W."