The IWW -- Always opposed to violence

Note by Hunterbear:  This is with especial respect to an interesting
discussion on Red Youth [YPSL] Discussion List but may have broader
interest.

Just a contributing note to the sparky discussion on violence.

The Industrial Workers of the World was definitely non-violent  [as is the
present-day IWW] -- not in the Gandhian sense but very much tactically so.
It consistently and effectively discouraged violence  -- including any
violent sabotage.  I speak from two perspectives:  the IWW is very much an
academic "specialty" of mine -- but, far more to the point, I was an active
IWW member in the old-time Wobblies at a point where its Sun was still
bright, but just above the western horizon.  That time period of mine was
from the very beginning of 1955 through 1960 -- at a point where there were
many experienced old-timers in the West eager to talk at length with a very
eager kid.  I learned much from them and I will never forget them -- the
finest friends.

Consistently, at every point, the IWW discouraged violence.  Its literature
often contained these three slogans:  "You can't fight booze and the boss at
the same time;"  "Better to be called Red than be called Yellow"
[cowardly]; and "Watch the man who advocates violence."  The latter was
based on the contention that many advocates of violence are either police or
company agents -- or are off their rocker.

The most authoritative history of the IWW is that of its own great organizer
and editor -- and meticulous historian:  the late Fred Thompson's  The IWW:
Its First Fifty Years [1905-1955] , IWW, Chicago, 1955 -- and a couple of
updated editions.  In it, Fred completely dispels, in  great detail and in
many sections, the false allegations of "violence" so often thrown at the
Wobblies -- frequently in venomous courtrooms and in poorly done and hostile
books. The charge of "violent" sabotage was spuriously  used -- with not a
shred of foundation -- by "Yellow" Socialists to force  William D Haywood
and his followers -- the Reds -- out of the SP in 1912.

IWW tactics --  e.g., strikes and sit-downs and sit-ins, slow-downs
[non-violent sabotage], mass picketing, mass marches, mass jail-ins -- were
among the rich array of very effective tactics developed and/or used by the
IWW and later emulated by the CIO --  and then by the very non-violent
Southern Movement and its successors.  I spent six years -- 1961-67  --
actively involved in civil rights organizing in Mississippi and other
hard-core Deep South settings.

A now very rare book is Professor Eldridge Foster Dowell's extremely
detailed  A
History of Criminal Syndicalism Legislation in the United States
[Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1939] which carefully covers the
IWW situation from its inception in 1905 right through the 1930s.

I have a copy.

Among other areas, his very thorough work [176 pages]  studies
the witch-hunting "legal" attacks so often levied against the IWW: e.g., the
Federal Espionage Act prosecutions [along with Debs] in 1918 and the various
"criminal syndicalism" attacks concocted primarily in the Western states and
used extensively against the Wobblies in the 1920s and into the 1930s.
[Idaho, where I live, still maintains its far-flung criminal syndicalism
law.]

Professor Dowell, in his book, on page 30:  ". . .the organization's [IWW]
stand on violence is clear.  They were opposed to its use except in
self-defense and did not advocate it."

He clearly and repeatedly points out that that no acts of violent sabotage
were ever proven against any member of the IWW.  For example, on pages
34-35, Professor Dowell states, "The three great Federal trials of the
I.W.W. and the state criminal syndicalism trials
yield, in the writer's opinion, no reliable evidence of the commission of
sabotage by the I.W.W. . ."


 While I'm on this topic of false allegations against the IWW, let me
briefly elaborate on the Wobbly conception of "sabotage" --  which was
always non-violent: slow-down strikes "on the job;" telling patrons at a
restaurant
what is really in the food they're getting ready to eat, etc.  But the
enemies of
the IWW -- bosses, Feds, states et al. -- consistently twisted and distorted
Wobbly  nonviolent "sabotage" into totally ungrounded charges of violence:
burning down wheatfields [a myth propagated by the fictional writer, Zane
Grey] or putting spikes in sawmill logs.  No known Wobbly, as Fred Thompson
and Professor Dowell and many other authorities have consistently said,
ever used violent sabotage.

Fraternally -- and In Solidarity

Hunter Gray  [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org  ( social justice )
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´









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