In regard to the general organizing activity of the I. W. W., it was proposed in one of the resolutions adopted, that the organization confine its work for the time being to the smaller cities where the A. F. of L. was comparatively weak, and in connection with this that efforts in organization be concentrated for the present on certain selected industries.[397] Fred Heslewood, member of the General Executive Board, in his report to the convention, said:
I believe it is an entire waste of money at the present time to keep said organizers in cities where the A. F. of L. has the workers divided and organized into crafts. We are not financially able to tear down this barrier of fakerism at present. I do not mean that we should not fight it. I mean that we should pay special attention to the lumber industry before they [sic] are rent into fragments by the American Federation of Labor.[398]
It was urged that special attention be directed to the mining and lumber industries and that for the general organizing propaganda one-half of the income of the general administration be devoted to the payment of organizers and the printing of literature.[399] The editor of the official organ of the I. W. W. declared that the third convention was
free from the sentimentalism and bourgeois reaction which characterized the gathering of 1905, and the pure-and-simple, destructive tactics of the [1906] assembly; ... [that] it marked a distinct advance in an understanding of the philosophy and structure of the movement and was a gathering typically working-class and loyal ... to the workers....
and that for these reasons there could be no possible doubt of the stability of the organization.[400]
A few weeks after the third convention had adjourned the panic of 1907 struck the country. The I. W. W. was nearly wiped out of existence. Its only organ, The Industrial Union Bulletin, was obliged first to appear fortnightly instead of weekly and finally to suspend publication. "Its locals dissolved by the dozens and the general headquarters at Chicago was only maintained by terrific sacrifice and determination...."[401] The report of the General Secretary to the fourth convention explained that when the third convention closed, General Headquarters expected to collect the moneys due from the local unions, but before collections could be arranged "the industrial panic struck the country with all its force, and the misery following in the wake of that collapse was mostly felt in places where the Industrial Workers of the World had established a stronghold." The Secretary went on to say that the revenue for December, 1907, was not more than half what it had been the year before.[402] To aggravate the situation still more were rumors of internal friction between a group of Socialist Labor party followers of Daniel DeLeon and the rest of the organization. Indeed, very soon after the convention, charges were made that the Weekly People, the official organ of the Socialist Labor party, was being used against the I. W. W.[403]
This was the beginning of the most serious internal fight in the career of the I. W. W. It was to turn on that same vexed question that seems eternally to plague those who want to construct labor organizations along radical lines—namely, the relationship that should exist between the union and the political parties, especially the Progressive, Labor and Socialist parties. The second clause of the Preamble (spoken of among the "Wobblies" as "the political clause") held the seeds of discord in its apparently harmless assertion that the class struggle "must go an until all the toilers come together on the political as well as on the industrial field." Here we have the phrase which, at the 1908 convention, was to make the revolutionary syndicalists see red and which was finally to result in a bifurcated I. W. W.