Goldfield, I. W. W. miners received $5.00 for eight hours; bakers, $8.00 per eight hours and board; dishwashers, $3.00 per eight hours and board. After three years of I. W. W. prosperity the Nevada employers, with the aid of the A. F. of L. scabs and organizers, conservative Irish-Catholic I. W. W. members(!), detectives, spies, state police and Federal troops, broke up the I. W. W.[369]
St. John also looks back to the Goldfield period as a kind of an I. W. W. Golden Age. In his historical sketch of the I. W. W., he writes:
Under the I. W. W. sway in Goldfield the minimum wage for all kinds of labor was $4.50 per day and the eight-hour day was universal. The highest point of efficiency for any labor organization was reached by the I. W. W. and W. F. M. in Goldfield, Nevada. No committees were ever sent to any employers. The unions adopted wage scales and regulated hours. The secretary posted the same on a bulletin board outside of the union hall, and it was the LAW. The employers were forced to come and see the union committees.[370]
The I. W. W. member quoted above does not agree with St. John as to the cause of the downfall of the I. W. W. in Goldfield. The latter attributes it to the occurrence of a strike during the financial panic of 1907.[371]
Oddly enough, these anti-political, direct actionist I. W. W.s figured rather prominently in Nevada state politics at this time. Among the candidates on the Socialist party ticket in 1906 were the following:
- For Governor, Thos. B. Casey, miner, W. F. M.
- For State Treasurer, J. W. Smith, waiter, I. W. W.
- For Register, General Land Office. T. Chambers, laundry worker, I. W. W.
- For Regent, State University, Frank Myrtle, shoemaker, I. W. W.[372]
Despite the success which mass organization met with in Goldfield, the I. W. W. was not at that time at all partial to the idea of mass organization. F. W. Heslewood declared that he was opposed to taking into one local union every worker around a town, believing as he did that the Goldfield practice was contrary to "the very fundamental principles of industrial unionism...."[373] Another member said:
I claim that we have left the field of mass organization and have got down to the field of industrial integral organization. I claim that industrial organization as it shall be exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World is of an organic nature.... We recognize that mass organization is a thing that is to be abjured when we come into an industrial organization.... The difference between a mass organization and an industrial organization is that the mass organization is destructive ... [whereas the integral] industrial organization is constructive. It proposes to recognize the laws to the minutest details that environ, govern and control the working class.[374]
The reality of the sentiment in favor of some modification of the original structural form of the I. W. W. in the direction of a more simple or mass form of organization is evidenced by the long discussion on the floor of the convention of a proposal to abolish the departments. Since 1908 the I. W. W. has had a precarious foothold in Goldfield. The combined effects of the exhausting struggles which have been described and the financial panic of 1907 were overwhelming for an organization which at the best had little in the way of reserve resources. "The strike of the W. F. M. in October, 1907," says St. John, "took place during a panic and destroyed the organization's [i. e., the I. W. W.'s] control in that district."[375]