In 1905, a small group of leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, members of other unions,
and socialists had gathered in Chicago to implement a big idea. They saw a vast nation of American workers, and indeed workers in all nations, with much less influence than their numbers should have allowed.
Divided into craft or skill groups since its start in the mid-nineteenth century, the labor movement lacked broader unity. Moreover, white workers usually excluded black workers from their unions. Women, too, often were unwelcome or just unconsidered. The same was true of the foreign-born. Many unions, notably those allied with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), focused narrowly on wages and working conditions, leaving more general political issues to members’ consciences.
Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), the first and longest-tenured president of the AFL, had been a cigar maker as a boy and then a leader in the New York local of the cigar makers’ union by age twenty-five. He helped found the forerunner of the AFL in his early thirties. He was a tiny man but a titan in labor history. Still, his rigid wariness of political radicals and his conventional belief in organizing by craft or trade assured him many detractors in the labor movement for the nearly forty years he ran the AFL.
By contrast, the small group of unionists and socialists in Chicago instead saw militarism, nationalism, economic freedom, and all the important inequities of life as inseparable from the capitalist system that made “wage slaves” of millions. They saw political action as inseparable from economic action. They saw workers divided by craft or skill, but ready to be amassed and called to unity by industry as a whole instead. And worker collectives in one industry would be natural allies of workers in every other industry.
Given all of that, what if they could create one big union—an industrial union, not a craft union—that would unite all wage workers, regardless of trade or skill, race, sex, or nation? A union that would forge workers into a potent political force that could hasten the fall of capitalism and deliver ownership and control of the means of production into workers’ hands? An aggressive union that would flex in unison the muscles of millwrights, farm hands, lumberjacks, longshoremen, seamstresses, miners, and millions of other workers every day? That would eschew labor contracts altogether, agreeing to work on Tuesday only if wages and conditions had been satisfactory on Monday, with no promise that employment terms would suffice when the sun rose on Wednesday? That would lay down tools and idle machines within minutes, any time owners and bosses failed to heed workers’ voices?
Those were the dreams, or at least the spoken aspirations, of twenty-two tough men and one tough woman, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, who gathered in icy Chicago just after New Year’s Day, on January 2, 1905. Their meeting was secret. After three days, the conferees agreed on an Industrial Union Manifesto—and on meeting again in Chicago in late June. Before scattering, the group elected William D. “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners its permanent chair.
Returning to Chicago that June, wary allies in the labor and socialist movements gathered to quell rivalries and disagreements for a time, and to act on their New Year’s manifesto. Many of the biggest names on the American left were there. Eugene V. Debs, the gentle socialist from Terre Haute, Indiana, whose experience leading the American Railway Union in the 1890s (and going to jail for his efforts) had made him as straight in his socialist ideology as a length of rail, was among the most widely known delegates. He had gotten 400,000 votes as the Socialist candidate for President the year before, his second presidential campaign, and would run three more times through 1920.
From the Western Federation of Miners, Frank Little came with others, including Big Bill Haywood. Mother Jones, the Irish immigrant and former dressmaker, was back; at age sixty-eight, she was the oldest and perhaps the most famous labor organizer in the group. The charismatic Vincent St. John was there; he was a likeable Colorado miner and organizer who had become president of the Western Federation of Miners at just twenty-four. There, too, was the divisive, self-absorbed Daniel DeLeon, a socialist hardliner who, in spite of a “very mild” character and his history as a law professor, had a remarkable gift for infuriating his supporters as readily as his opponents.
In time, the upstart union also would become known, both affectionately and angrily, as the Wobblies.
Some 203 delegates in all from forty-three organizations gathered at the intersection of present-day North Clark Street and West Ontario Street in Brand’s Hall on June 27. Haywood opened the conference, declaring, “This is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism.”
They were there to create the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW. In time, the upstart union also would become known, both affectionately and angrily, as the Wobblies.
It was, on the whole, a gathering of the left edge of the American left. Centrist socialists like Milwaukee’s Victor Berger refused to participate, and almost all the delegates shared broad hostility to Gompers and the compliant socioeconomic views and patriotism of his AFL. Not a few anarchists and incipient anarchists were present, both in summer of 1905 and in the years to come. Socialists were present in large numbers, although they were split among the DeLeon and Debs factions and along other lines as well.
By the time they scattered on July 8, 1905, the founding delegates had erected the spindly framework of something really new. Delegates overwhelmingly had approved a constitution and a grand name, the Industrial Workers of the World. They had elected a president and a secretary-treasurer. Haywood and other westerners, interestingly, had no formal position. Most of all, they had given skeletal structure to an idea: one big union. That idea was the core of an even bigger idea.
The preamble they wrote began and ended, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common . . . . By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”
The IWW’s ideals were sweeping. Longshoremen would ally with lumberjacks. Migrant farm hands bringing in the wheat in Kansas or South Dakota would ally with millwrights in the biggest cities. Within one industry, copper miners in sunbaked Arizona would join efforts with iron-ore miners snowbound on the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota. More, white workers theoretically would stand with black workers, side by side in union halls. Immigrants from every nation would find the same place in the union as the native-born. Women would be as welcome as men.
The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown.
And all would aim not just at living wages, shorter hours, or a fair shake from capital. They would aim to abolish the capitalist system and to replace it with “industrial democracy,” a term perhaps deliberately undeveloped but suggesting direct democratic control of industry by workers’ majority votes. In sum, those who produced the nation’s wealth would, for the first time, control it.
The preamble to the IWW constitution that the Chicago convention adopted proclaimed these purposes in stark, unmistakable terms: “There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.”
Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” the preamble urged that workers must inscribe on their banner the revolutionary goal, “Abolition of the wage system.” The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially, workers would rebuild society itself from within.
Membership, then, would consist only of wage earners, in any field. The salaried man, the employer, and the owner would be unwelcome, regardless of sympathies. Employers of just a single worker would be barred from IWW membership.
In time, a certain pragmatism would take hold as to those sympathies. The IWW would come to need friends among the wealthy and the comfortable. It would need liberal scions of great fortunes who would post bail for workers, speak to politicians whom they knew well, and lard the union’s coffers.
At the outset, though, the lines were drawn rigidly and the class conflict was pure.