The View From 1776

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Some individual Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sympathizers have threatened, or wished upon me, financial ruin via IWW legal action for my alleged libel against the IWW.  The IWW website carries a post that demands a full retraction of what I had to say about the IWW in IWW – Organized Crime in the Labor Market and More IWW Violence.

Anyone who actually reads what I wrote will discover that most of what I had to say about the IWW came from the IWW itself: from its constitution or from documents published by the IWW.  The remainder came from websites referenced on an American IWW website, from books written in the 1930s by liberal-Progressives who supported labor unions including the IWW, or from a University of Missouri website.  In short, everything that I wrote came from the public record.

It’s interesting that liberal-Progressive socialists invariably use the term “hysterical” to describe views to which they object.  From the start, before World War I and in the 1920s, whenever anyone denounced the efforts of the ACLU (a strong IWW backer) and its allies to sabotage American military preparations, liberal-Progressives shrieked “hysterical Red scare.”

Is there perhaps a liberal gene that predisposes them to this knee-jerk usage? 

It’s also surprising that feminist groups haven’t battered them about sexual discrimination.  Hysteria is defined as “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, esp. among a group of people; the term has a controversial history as it was formerly regarded as a disease specific to women.” The root is the Greek word meaning suffering in the uterus, i.e., the presumed natural disposition of women to fainting spells.

The following is the text of the IWW implied threat:

Response to Hysterical Right Wing Blogger Thomas Brewton

Recently, Thomas Brewton, an ultra rightist blogger, published a hysterical screed accusing the IWW (and most American business unions for that matter) of the usual bogeymen that hysterical right wingers find under every bed (i.e. “Communism”, “Bolshevism”, “Terrorism”, “Anti-Americanism”, etc). 
Brewton’s daitribe can be read in its entireity here:  http://www.americandaily.com/article/10974
Lumped in with these usual over the top nonsensical fantasies were blatantly false accusations of “organized crime” by the IWW.  These accusations are completely groundless.  Here is the a response to these misconceptions and lies:

Sir:

Your article, “The I.W.W.--Organized Crime in the Labor Market” has come to the attention of the General Executive Board.  We will not waste time disputing your naive and bigoted opinions, or your fallacious statements about the labor struggle in general.  Our concern is with your misrepresentations of the history and aims of this organization, and your libellous accusation that the Industrial Workers of the World is or has been engaged in organized crime.
The former can be disposed of without much effort.  Your article charges the I. W. W. with seeking the violent overthrow of the United States government, or to seize control over it.  The I. W. W. has never advocated the overthrow of any government except the tyrannical government of industry by unelected capitalists, and it has never advocated violence in any form.  Our goal is not to overthrow or control political government, but to make it irrelevant by placing the administration of production in the hands of the workers who operate industry.  If it would leave us alone, political government would be of no concern to us.
Your article charges the I. W. W. with violence in four cases:  the murder of Frank Steunenberg, the McKees Rocks Strike, the Everett massacre, and the deaths of John Morrison and his son, for which Joe Hill was executed.
Steunenberg was murdered by a police agent and confessed murderer known as Harry Orchard, who implicated officers of the Western Federation of Miners in exchange for leniency from a prosecutor bought and paid for by the mining interests of Idaho.  The officers, Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone, were kidnapped in Colorado by Idaho authorities and illegally taken across State lines to stand trial for the killing.  Two separate juries acquitted Haywood and Pettibone, and the charges against Moyer were dropped. Any person who believes in the United States Constitution and the principles of liberty, as you claim to do, must acknowledge that acquittal by a jury is a complete exoneration.
At McKees Rocks, the threat to kill a Pennsylvania Cossack for every worker killed by them was a matter of self-defense, and came in response to the unprovoked shooting of a worker by one of the Cossacks--well-known at the time as the most violent and oppressive of the State police forces.  The threat came, not from the I. W. W., but from the “Unknown Committee”, a secret group of strikers organized before the I. W. W. became involved in the strike and never controlled by the I. W. W.  Moreover, the threat was never carried out.  Three police officers were later killed, along with four workers, in a shoot-out with strikers, which had been provoked by the violence of the police.  Some seventy-six persons, mostly strikers, were wounded.  Nobody who knew anything about the case has ever claimed that the strikers killed anybody in revenge.  What is indisputably true, and attested by numerous witnesses, is that the I. W. W.’s organizers consistently urged the strikers not to use violence.
Your description of the Everett massacre is so far divorced from fact that we would be unable to recognize the incident if you had not named the town.  The “existing law” you refer to was an unconstitutional prohibition on the rights of free speech and assembly--rights the revolutionaries of 1776 fought and died to secure for us.  Business owners in Everett, angry that workers had dared to oppose their tyranny, hired armed thugs to raid the I. W. W. hall.  These forced forty-one union members to run a gauntlet of whips and axe-handles, causing them severe and sometimes permanent injuries.  When the workers called for a rally in protest against this violence, the business owners’ stooge, Sheriff Don McRae, declared that free speech and assembly would not be allowed in Everett.  A ferry bearing I. W. W. members from Seattle arrived at the dock and was met by a mob of vigilantes whom the sheriff had deputized and armed. Even hostile accounts admit that the deaths of two of these thugs were caused by members of the same mob, the drunken sheriff having arrayed his men so that they stood in one another’s line of fire.  The non-union-members whose deaths you mentioned were passengers aboard the ferry, murdered by the “respectable citizens” of Everett, not by the I. W. W.
As for Joe Hill, most of the evidence has been “lost” by the Utah authorities, so it is impossible to prove the truth of the case.  The best studies, however, indicate that Hill was most likely framed in order to cover up an embarassing revenge-killing, probably committed by some of John Morrison’s former comrades on the Salt Lake City police force.  In any event, even if Hill had been guilty of the killings, the incident cannot serve as evidence of I. W. W. policies or methods:  other than yourself, nobody, not even the prosecution in the case, has suggested that the killings themselves had anything to do with the I. W. W.
Your other accusation is a more serious matter, and cannot be put down to simple ignorance or bigotry.  The ugly history of mafia involvement in the (pro-capitalist) labor unions of the A. F. of L. and C. I. O. makes any accusation of “organized crime” on the part of a labor organization a very grave charge indeed.  Such an accusation in an open forum such as yours, which has now been republished by over a dozen web sites, is damaging to our organization’s reputation, and must be dealt with decisively.

We accordingly demand that you immediately publish a categorical retraction of that accusation, as prominently as you published the accusation itself, and that you require all persons who have reproduced the accusation to withdraw it and to publish your retraction with equal prominence.

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