The I. W. W.: A Study of American Syndicalism

by Paul F. Brissenden

some 30,000 textile mill employees in Lawrence secured an increase in wages of from 5 to 20 per cent; increased compensation for overtime; and the reduction of the premium period from four weeks to two weeks. Also, as an indirect result of the Lawrence strike, material increases in wages were granted to thousands of employees in other textile mills throughout New England.[577]

It is a significant fact that the highest percentages of increases in wages were given to the unskilled employees. The General Executive Board of the I. W. W. reported the range of wage increases as being "from 5 per cent for the highly paid workers to 25 per cent for the lowest paid workers."[578] Moreover, there were other effects, no less important. This strike demonstrated that it was possible for the unskilled and unorganized workers (preponderantly immigrants of various nationalities) to carry on a successful struggle with their employers. It showed what latent power there is in the great masses of semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Moreover, it demonstrated the power of a new type of labor leaders over the ignorant and unskilled immigrant workers. A writer who has little sympathy for revolutionary unionism says concerning Joseph J. Ettor:

This man ... steeped in the literature of revolutionary socialism and anarchism, swayed the undisciplined mob as completely as any general ever controlled the disciplined troops ... [and was able] to organize these thousands of heterogeneous, heretofore unsympathetic and jealous nationalities, into a militant body of class-conscious workers. His followers firmly believed, as they were told, that success meant that they were about to enter a new era of brotherhood, in which there would be no more union of trades and no more departmental distinctions, but all workers would become the real bosses in the mills.[579]

The Lawrence Citizens' Association reports that Ettor

avowed himself an advocate of the doctrine of "direct action," of violence, as a believer in the philosophy of force, for he proclaimed time and again ... that "he who has force on his side has the law on his side." He also advocated destroying the machinery of employers who did not grant all the demands of the strikers.[580]

The effect of the strike on the membership of the I. W. W. in Lawrence was to increase it greatly but only temporarily. Just after the strike the organizers claimed 14,000 members in Lawrence. In October, 1913, there were 700.[581] An investigator for the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations reports that they had over 10,000 members immediately after the strike.[582] The I. W. W. itself claimed 20,000 in Lawrence in June, 1912, as well as 28,000 in Lowell, and boasted that "in nearly every town in the New England states there are locals ranging from 800 to 5,000 in membership."[583] The Federal investigator referred to puts the Lawrence membership of the I. W. W. in 1914 at about 400 and says that local I. W. W. officials attribute this low figure to unemployment, but he himself thinks that other factors entered.[584] The wage increase gained was, he said, offset by the increased speed required on the machines.

This amounted to 50 per cent. Another factor was the forced scattering of I. W. W. leaders after the strike. He found in 1914 only one of eight local I. W. W. leaders who were there at the time of the strike and reports that the employers established a system of espionage in the mills.[585]

Lawrence made the I. W. W. famous, especially in the East. It stirred the country with the alarming slogans of a new kind of revolution. Socialism was respectable—even reactionary—by comparison. The "Wobblies" frankly abjured the rules under which, as they would express it, the capitalist game is played. They said: "If it serves our interests as members of the working class to obey certain accepted canons of conduct, we will obey them because it would be detrimental to our class to disobey them." Lawrence was not an ordinary strike. It was a social revolution in parvo. St. John is said to have written to Haywood, "a win in the Lawrence mills means the start that will only end with the downfall of the wage system."[586] This was a class war and the I. W. W. insists that the principle of military necessity justifies it in a policy of schrecklichkeit, at least to property, which on the syndicalist hypothesis was stolen anyway, in the beginning. The I. W. W. abjures current ethics and morality as bourgeois, and therefore inimical to the exploited proletarian for whom a new and approved system of proletarian morality is set forth. In this proletarian code the sanctions of conduct are founded on the (material) interests of the proletarian, as such. The criterion is expediency—effectiveness to one particular end, the overthrow of the wage system and the establishment of—something else—the words industrial democracy or coöperative commonwealth are commonly used in reference to that nebulous future state that all radicals see as in a glass, more or less darkly. This means that staid old New England was confronted with an organization which derided all her fond moralities. The most shocking défi of these I. W. W.s was the défi they hurled at the church. Only less so was the défi they leveled at the flag. The I. W. W. said that the church, obedient to the dictates of big business, preached to the workers a servile obedience now for the sake of a hypothetical heaven of comfort later; "ergo," they said, "the church is unethical and we abjure it for a superior proletarian ethics." It considered that the flag was being made the excuse for a jingo patriotism which made the enlargement and conquest of markets and the further exploitation of labor the end and aim of patriotism. In brief, the church and the flag are made to serve commercialism. Commercialism is evil because unjust. Therefore, its servants are, pro tanto, evil also and rightly to be repudiated.