American Notebook: The Haunted Hall: the I. W. W. At fifty
Wakefield, Dan
You don't remember the Wobblies. You were too young. Or else not even born yet. There has never beeii anything like them, before or since. They called themselves materialisteconomists but what...
...The old fellows used to drop by for old times sake, even though they didn't belong anymore...
...To ask why the IWW is almost dead is perhaps to ask where the "old worker," the generic type "Wobbly" has gone—for his disappearance, more than all the deadly events that befell the organization, lies at the root of the IWW's obsolescence in 1955...
...It is the meeting hall of the Manhattan branch of the Industrial Workers of the World—"the Wobblies"—an organization sustained by a vision that refuses to die in the face of all facts and funeral rites...
...The lead story of the issue of September 19, 1955 is topped by a triple-deck head that reads "REMEMBER THE GREAT UNNAMED WHO LABORED IN OBSCURITY FOR HUMAN ADVANCEMENT...
...They called themselves materialisteconomists but what they really were was a religion...
...It occupies a fading lime-colored room above a Chinese laundry on Broad Street, and by the rules and traditions of the IWW, Bob Willock can't get paid more to run it than the average wage of the workers who belong...
...It was placed on the Attorney-General's list of subversive organizations because its membership, estimated at 1400 at the time, was feared as a group that...
...The reports now are few because the fellow workers are few, but there are still scattered words in the fiery traditions of the past, like the message beneath the bold "Organize Idaho" head on the front page of the October 31, 1955 issue...
...and to lose Joe Hill to a firing squad in Salt Lake City and be able to tell the world his last words were "Don't mourn for me—organize...
...The stories that aren't reprints from other publications usually reach toward the glories of the past, often with an uneasy sense that they might be lost in the vast indifference of the present...
...Churning against it from every side are tidal waves pouring from a dark region labeled "Reaction" and written in the waves are the symbols "CIO," "AFL," "NLRB," a swastika, and a hammer-and-sickle...
...As long as they live, the IWW will live, and when they die, the IWW will die...
...IT IS TYPICAL Of current issues of the paper, anchored so deeply in days gone by...
...You may shout reactionary, yellow, to the top of your breath, but after it is all over, the IWW will still be the IWW that it was when you were third cook in that lumbercamp in the Northwest...
...The bindle stiff had to roll his blankets in a bundle and hoist it on his back for the long hard journeys from camp to camp, but even with dirty bedding his plight was more romantic, if more difficult, than that of the lumbermen Idaho Jack sees working today...
...after the first world war were one of the vital drains on the health of the IWW...
...This union's mostly transient, though, you know...
...It was one of the deepest blows of all, in the way that Haywood's exile was, to see old Wobbly leaders exchange the grass-roots American radicalism of the IWW for the Sovietgrown dream of the party...
...W. H. Westman, the IWW General Secretary-Treasurer, wrote to Tom Clark to ask for a reversal of the ruling, or at Ieast an explanation of it, but was granted neither, and the ailing Wobbly treasury was too weak to do battle with the govern...
...The dates, the pictures, the oldstyle seven-column makeup, the poetry, bear that unmistakable flavor of the past that is a part of all yellowing papers...
...They stood outside the plant with their portable radios, listening to the latest rock-and-roll music...
...Listen Bob, how much do I owe on my dues...
...The Industrial Worker still pushes for recruitment, and many of its loyal readers try—though there seems to be only frustration for the effort, whether the prospective recruits be young men or old...
...They called him a reactionary and finally drowned out his voice by singing "Solidarity Forever"—the song he had written years before for the IWW...
...How much do I owe now?'" "I ask em how long it's been since they paid and they say 'I dunno, Bob, it's been a good while...
...He keeps a pot of coffee on and passes the time with the few who walk in from the past, like the "fellow who used to be a cellmate of Big Bill Haywood at Leavenworth, drops by just about every Sunday, just to talk...
...But we know, unhappily, that no one today is named "Idaho Jack"— and we have to surmise that this faithful fellow worker is one who knew the west in the days when "Wobbly" was a dangerous and glorious word, and action by the IWW was bringing shorter hours, livable housing facilities, and enough clean bedding to eliminate the "bindle stiff" from the woods...
...For the last six years he has alternated between the sea and the job of secretary of the IWW Marine Transport Workers Union, No...
...0 • • THERE is a tall, straight lighthouse with bold initials "IWW" and two white beams shining out from its tow er...
...Their old friends on the waterfront must now risk a taint by even coming to see them, and Manhattan Branch 510 hasn't had enough men to hold a meeting in a year...
...The men are few—but the miracle is that there are any left at all...
...11, 1919...
...ment it threatened by carrying the matter into court...
...But then, a few years back, the other unions moved their halls uptown, and it was too far to come...
...The IWW is fifty years old now and largely forgotten, but the vision that made it the greatest radical movement in American labor still holds men like Bob Willock, who stared at it once, to the several scattered halls across the country that are so full of memories and empty of men...
...They're in debt with cars and television sets," he said...
...His dream was big and that moment it was bright and untroubled by the blood-dimmed future of the organization that would find itself huddled in an almost empty room in Chicago fifty years later with sixteen delegates representing something like 600 men from nine branches across the country...
...The new woodsmen drive their cars to the mountains and sleep overnight in the back seat, cooking their meals close by...
...and the Wobblies who carried the picket signs in spite of bullets and tar and feathers at Lawrence and Paterson, McKees Rock and Butte, Bingham Canyon and Everett, became official ghosts of history...
...Their counterparts of the water front are the men Bob Willock found when he went to sea the last time...
...Or else not even born yet...
...and for their efforts the Wobblies now bear a "subversive" brand, and that is one more factor in their loneliness...
...And they say 'Well, listen, Bob, I'll be up to settle with you, see...
...BOB WILLOCK went to sea out of Galveston in 1925 on the old Savannah line (like most of the stuff of his past, it is gone now) and by the time he docked in Boston a fellow on board had persuaded him to take out a Wobbly book...
...The most recent date is 1927...
...They sat around after mess according to who had what kind of cars—the Fords in one corner, the Pontiacs over here, maybe a fellow with a Mercury talking to a fellow with a Dodge...
...It used to be we had to have fifteen men for a quorum," Bob Willock told his visitor...
...They got him a ship on condition he'd strike with the other Wobbly crewmen against the line's plan for cutting the deckhands and lengthening the watch, and he did, and the ship sailed with full crew and customary hours and Bob has been a Wobbly ever since...
...On the first page of the paper is a black-bordered list of 18 IWW members killed while serving the union on various dates of past Novembers, and the heading is "In November We Remember...
...The afternoon the visitor came to ask questions, there were only two men, besides Bob...
...The Wobblies had lost their leaders before, but this was a different kind of loss...
...that its aim was to organize industrially to "form the structure of the new society within the shell of the old...
...BOB WILLOCK wasn't able to get to the fiftieth anniversary convention of the IWW held last year in Chicago, and the Manhattan seamen's branch was represented by "a fellow who used to be here with us who's out in the west now...
...Elizabeth Gurley Flynn went, too, and Earl Browder, and many others...
...19, 1915...
...The Marxist sense of history was heavily upon him, and he told the assembled delegates that this was "The Continental Congress of the Working Class...
...There has never beeii anything like them, before or since...
...All of 'em telling about what they get to the gallon...
...In 1923 the IWW paper Industrial Solidarity called across the ideological miles to its former Fellow Worker William Z. Foster with a kind of brotherly message to a black sheep who'd strayed away from home for good: Willie, you may print a ton of Labor Heralds each month in the year, and fill them from cover to cover with robber, thief, highjack...
...Those that remained were often bruised and bullied by the Communists who stole so much of their thunder and used it against them...
...Bob Willock has tried the old, and he says it's like this: "I see 'em around the waterfront and they come up and slap me on the back and say 'Hey, Bob, how's about having a drink...
...It is a summary straight from the point of production describing the state of disorganization among the Idaho lumbermen, and it is signed by "Idaho Jack...
...One was of Wesley Everest (killed by a mob in a raid on his union hall at Centralia, Wash., Nov...
...The paper depends by tradition and financial necessity on contributions from fellow workers, reporting conditions "at the point of production...
...While Walter Reuther negotiated for the Guaranteed Annual Wage with Ford in the Spring of '54, the auto workers hoped their leaders would let them off picket duty so they could get in some fishing and ball games...
...C. D. Van Nostrand has tried the young, and he wrote from Des Moines that "I have talked to workers of the plant about lining up with the IWW but it was like talking to little boys who could not understand what I was talking about...
...The fellows who still belong, it's mostly an ideal with them...
...The words were proud and conceivably true, for when Haywood looked from the speaker's stand out across the faces of several hundred delegates he knew they represented more than 100,000 workers...
...It takes some of them four hours to drive to the woods but they don't want to batch it or camp any more, and the eyes of Idaho Jack must be sore for the sight of a bindle stiff...
...The world has moved up the street but Bob Willock stays fast to his drafty hall, like his fellow survivors in the outposts remaining...
...Bob wouldn't pay and went around to the Wobbly hall...
...I been meaning to come up and pay back the dues I owe...
...THE CAUSE lost most of its remaining missionaries in 1949 when the U.S...
...From Here to Eternity by JAMES JONES Bob Willock is a man in an empty room whose windows provide slanting glimpses of Wall Street towers, to the east, and the waterfront, to the west...
...Ralph Chaplin, the IWW poet and editor, was speaking for the Wobblies at a soapbox meeting in Chicago in the Thir ties when a Communist youth group tried to lead his crowd away...
...government administered the most recent of the many deathblows that the IWW has absorbed...
...What sort of men in our practical times have the heart to stay loyal to a vision the world all around them laughs off as obsolete...
...He didn't think much about it at the time but two years later he was trying to ship from the gulf again and a fellow from the International Seamen's Union tried to shake him down for extra dough to get an ISU book...
...We changed it to seven a few years back, but there hasn't been that many to hold a meeting with for well, I guess about a year now...
...They were workstiffs and bindlebums like you and me, but they were welded together by a vision we don't possess...
...But the pages are neither yellowing nor flaking—they are white, and the date of the issue is November 14, 1955...
...I'll be up real soon.' And then they find somebody else to have a drink with and that's the end of it...
...There were others, later, who didn't go physically to Russia but moved spiritually to the Communist Party, and the Party's activities in the U.S...
...You can't keep paying dues in two unions, and the one that gets you a job is the one you take...
...Don't you have the records up there at the hall?' " "Some," I say...
...It was quite another thing to lose Haywood and Andreytchine to a foreign land...
...We really aren't doing any organizing now," Bob told a visitor not long ago...
...Those leaders were left to form the new society within the jails of the old, and when Warren Harding granted a commutation of sentence four years later, the leaders came out with their vision clouded, and the IWW was never quite the same...
...The talk was mainly memories, some of them stretching back to 1905 when 203 delegates met for the first IWW convention, and listened to Big Bill Haywood open the proceedings...
...Haywood and George Andreytchine went to Russia, and the loss was the deepest the IWW had to bear...
...The scene appears in a three-column, page one cartoon of The Industrial Worker, official fortnightly newspaper of the IWW...
...Assignment to the subversive list was a particularly unpleasant irony for the Wobblies, who had fought the Communists right down the line, and were battered by them as they were battered by employers, and the ranks of Respectability...
...Big Bill Haywood had tried to explain back in 1918 at the trial of the 101 Wobbly leaders indicted for subversive activities that the Wobbly dream was not political at all...
...that it didn't seek to change the form of government, but the form of economy...
...seeks to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means...
...510, Manhattan Branch...
...At the back of the hall a partition creates his home and office, which consists of a hotplate, a folding bed, a large cluttered desk, and a bookcase...
...That is almost all they have left, and that is primarily what Bob Willock's job is...
...the other was of Joe Hill (shot by a firing squad in Salt Lake City for a disputed murder case after organizing a strike nearby, Nov...
...The fellow was one of sixteen delegates who met in the IWW national headquarters hall at 2422 Halstead Sreet...
...It was one thing to lose Frank Little to a lynching mob when he tried to organize the miners in Butte, Montana...
...Haywood said to Ralph Chaplin once that "The hands of our people are calloused and scarred from trying to make a dream come true," and after four years at Cook County Jail and Leavenworth, the hearts were scarred too...
...The visitor picked up an issue from the pile at the front, unfurled the four pages to their flag-like width, and noticed two large portraits...
...The MTWU of the IWW had fought them on the waterfront throughout the thirties when not many others were fighting them...
...The Wobblies still read —just as they did in the early days when IWW migratory workers took their books from harvest to harvest in the west—and they talk, and remember...
...The memories are many—riding the rails to Spokane to support fellow workers in the free speech fights of the west, following the harvest with the dreams of better wages and the songs of Joe Hill, striking and picket...
...Not too many years ago," he said, "this hall was so crowded you couldn't get inside the door at this time of night...
...ing the textile mills at Lawrence, Mass., when Joe Ettor raised his voice above the jailings and killings to tell the employers that "You can't weave cloth with bayonets...
...Unread copies, stacked in piles according to dates, clutter a table in the corner of the Manhattan Wobbly hall...
Vol. 3 • September 1956 • No. 4
