[260] Report of General Secretary-Treasurer, Proceedings, Second I. W. W. Convention, pp. 57-8.
[261] For complete itemized statement cf. the report of the auditing committee, vide Proceedings, Second I. W. W. Convention (1906), pp. 579-94. The cash balance was for some time after the close of the convention inaccessible to the general officers. Cf. supra, p. 145.
[CHAPTER VI]
The Structure of a Militant Union
With its "house-cleaning" job off its hands, the convention now turned its attention to some of the specific problems of policy and constructive work. The activities of the past fourteen months had brought new and challenging questions to the fore. One of the most important was the problem of the agricultural laborer. Attention centered upon the farm laborers and the lumber workers. Most of the industrialists agreed that the coöperation of the country workers—farm laborers and lumbermen—and the city proletariat was absolutely necessary for the success of revolutionary industrialism.
The agricultural elements of the working class [said one of the delegates at the second convention] are going to be the last and hardest to be organized into this economic organization, and ... while we may have the wage slaves of the industrial centers organized, when the crisis comes we will find [them] ... in an economic organization and bucking against a combination of capitalists and agriculturists, and when that time comes we will of necessity have to exercise our political rights and overthrow that opposition.[262]
The I. W. W. had already made some headway among the lumber workers, and it was in connection with this element that many believed it most feasible to organize the farm laborers. Secretary Trautmann devoted two solid pages of his report to the discussion of the relation of the farm and forest workers with the city proletariat. He believed that the failure of revolutionary movements was often due to the lack of coöperation between these sections of the working class. He urged the organization to follow among the farm laborers those methods which had already been applied with some success in the lumber camps.
For this work of organizing the farm laborers [he said] we must look for actual support to the thousands and hundreds of thousands of wage-earners in the lumber camps of the United States and Canada. No element is so faithful to the principle, when once understood, as the hard-working pioneer proletarians in the woods, nor a group of toilers who will fight more vigorously ... than those who ... call themselves "lumberjacks." Their relation with the farm laborers and the ... [seasonal] character of their employment should serve as the key to open the field for the organizing of the farm wage slaves. In the summer months most of the lumbermen work as farm hands or in the saw-mills, and many a blacklisted mechanic from industrial centers seeks as a last refuge from the master's persecution employment as constantly shifting farm laborer and lumberman. The Industrial Workers of the World have organized and are organizing with astonishing success the lumbermen in different parts of the country.... But ... their condition will be jeopardized if the I. W. W. fails to organize the workers in the fields in which they seek and secure employment during the remainder of the year, that is mostly in agricultural occupations, ... [and] ... to assure a successful protection of farm laborers and lumbermen, it is absolutely necessary to get the organizations so organized into direct touch through the general administration of the I. W. W. with the organizations of the Industrial Workers in the cities.[263]
An important change in the geographical distribution of propaganda and organizing activities was that suggested to the convention by President Sherman. He thought that these activities of the Industrial Workers of the World should not be immediately spread indiscriminately over all parts of the country, believing it to be most expedient to allow the eastern section of the United States to lie fallow for a time, so to speak. He recommended that
the greater part of the money expended for paid organizers be devoted to the western States for the next six months, for the following reasons: West of the Missouri River the industrial conditions are in a far better state ... than they are in the eastern States and organizing can be done there without endangering turmoil in the way of lockouts and strikes.... We must get a substantial organization in the West ... before we will be prepared to make a general campaign in the East, as in the eastern States the workers in many of the industries are so poorly paid that a strike or lockout means starvation if finance is not forthcoming.... Hence I feel the necessity of first fortifying ourselves with a good Western membership before exposing the organization to a general assault by the employers of the East.[264]