Staten Island, N. Y., were both lost, the cause assigned by the strikers for their defeat being the fact that they could get no support from the General Organization.[198]
There was a disproportionate amount of energy given to strikes at this time. Moreover, most of this energy was misdirected. President Sherman, in his report to the convention, said: "There has been no time since August, 1905, but what we have had one or more strikes to contend with, which has been more or less responsible for our organization not being in a position to place more organizers in the field than what it has maintained."[199]
In discussing the I. W. W. strike record, Secretary Trautmann declared that "there was not a single solitary strike that the I. W. W. won." They were not rightly conducted, nor called at the right time.
Those organizations [he explained] formed in the last year on a strict observance of the laws and principles of the I. W. W. did not have a strike while those organizations organized on the craft union principle of immediate gains without voluntary coöperation of the membership, those organizations were the only ones that were plunged into a fight immediately after we were organized.[200]
There was certainly little or no coöperative planning of strikes, especially no careful timing of them, between the local unions and the general administration. Often during the first year "strikes were called in times when the general organization was least prepared, and when it required strenuous efforts to meet the requirements of such a conflict with the employers."[201]
President Sherman believed that the strike activities had been too exclusively confined to the eastern states, and even suggested that it might be better for the time being to conduct strikes only in the West. He explained his position as follows:
Nearly all the strikes which have taken place during the life of the organization have been in the eastern States. The workers at those points, being so poorly paid, it has been necessary for them to immediately appeal for benefits, which demonstrates the fact that we must prepare for war before war is declared. Many of our strikes ... have taken place immediately after the local union was organized, before the members involved in such strikes were hardened and drilled in the principles of industrial unionism.... One local union in the East ... becomes a greater responsibility to the general organization than three local unions in the West.[202]
At the same time that the industrial unionists were pushing their strike propaganda some of them who were also members of the radical political parties were trying to bring those parties (viz., the Socialist party and the Socialist Labor party) together. To do this they realized that the two parties must agree upon a policy in regard to the attitude which the party should assume toward the trade unions. With this object in view representatives of the two socialist parties called a conference which was afterwards known as the New Jersey Socialist Unity Conference. The sessions of this conference were held in various New Jersey towns—Orange, Paterson, West Hoboken, Newark—at irregular times between September 10, 1905, and March 4, 1906. The purpose of the conference, as expressed in the Manifesto issued at the close of its sessions, was "to consider the causes of the division between the two [socialist] camps and ascertain, if possible, whether solid grounds could be found for a union of the militant socialist forces ... of the State...."[203]