Читать книгу Left of the Left - Anatole Dolgoff - Страница 12

So Sam became a Wobbly—an anarchist Wobbly—the rest of his life. He joined and founded other groups as well, but his sense of belonging, his deepest affection, his love for the IWW never abated—even as the One Big Union faded to a few old-timers such as himself. The reasons were social as well as ideological. He joined as a young man, a “working stiff” in Wobbly terms, sometime in the early- to mid-1920s—his early membership probably overlapping with his time at Road to Freedom. The Wobbly greeting, their term of respect was “fellow worker,” and he found fellowship there indeed. It was his passage into true adulthood and his time of personal liberation.

His early days with the Wobblies coincided with a return to his life on the bum, to the way he had lived when he skipped out as a boy to San Francisco on his way to Shanghai. “I became a migratory worker—a working hobo.” These men worked on “railroads and waterfronts, in lumber camps, canneries, steel mills, factories, farms, construction camps, hospitals, hotels, restaurants.” At the time automobiles were not within reach of poor men, and roads had not evolved into an efficient nationwide network. These men had but a single means of getting from job to job: to hit the rails. They led a hard, lonely life. They were the foot soldiers in the vast army of manual labor that made America run during a time when technology had not fully revolutionized modern life and abject wage slavery was not yet exported to China. Disdained by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), they were prime candidates for IWW recruitment.

Sam explains, “There is a world of difference between a working hobo as a migratory worker and a derelict, a hobo as a ­non-­working vagrant, an aimless wanderer sleeping in box cars, abandoned shacks near railroad freight yards, a panhandler, subsisting on handouts begged from passing people, leftovers scrounged from restaurants and markets”—though at times Sam did some of that, short of panhandling. “But the working migratory hobo is a rebellious cuss.… The lumberjacks, the ‘harvest stiffs,’ the ‘gandy dancers,’ the itenerant laborers and so many other migratory workers who have fought for ‘a place in the sun’ have surely earned a heroic place in the American labor movement.” They were Sam’s kind of men, which explains why skid-row held no disgrace or terror for him.

Neither were the hobo “jungles” a jungle, if by that we mean a lawless place of fear, brutality, and tooth and claw predation. They were simply more or less established campsites near freight train terminals where the men congregated around fires that burned into the night in order to share food, blankets, and human company.

Throughout my years growing up, his hobo life having faded into his retreating youth, Sam would recite/sing this little ditty, with an impish expression:

They flopped in the jungle together,

The Hosier, the Wise Guy, and John,

The Wino, the Dino, the Ding Bat,

The Gazuni was also around…

I forget the rest and never knew who these guys were, only that Sam relished this long-forgotten bit of doggerel.

“People cooperated and helped one another,” Sam always said, and there were unwritten but strict rules of etiquette and behavior concerning privacy, belongings, and food portions. People organized themselves. A good example is the Fraser River railway strike in Canada that began in March 1912, about which Wobbly poet and martyr Joe Hill wrote several songs, including “Where the Fraser River Flows.” By April 2, eight-thousand men were on strike and work had ceased on 397 miles of construction line. The unskilled immigrant workers were demanding strict enforcement of the Provincial Health Act, a nine-hour day, and a minimum wage of $3 per day. The Wobblies who organized the strike were migrant workers. It was natural that the camps they and their fellow strikers constructed to feed and shelter themselves were a more tightly organized version of the hobo jungles. In his definitive book about Joe Hill, William Adler quotes an eye-witness journalist who called the isolated camps, strung over four-hundred miles of Canadian forest, “socialistic, egalitarian societies in miniature.”

Also, remarkable for their time, the hobo jungles run by the Wobblies were free of racism. In The Messenger (a black radical publication) of July 1923, George S. Schuyler claimed that, “There was no discrimination in the ‘jungles’ of the I.W.W. The writer has seen a white hobo, despised by society, share his last loaf with a black fellow-hobo.”

Sam made his way, he said, “by stealing rides on railway box cars, and ‘shipping out’ as a gandy dancer (or track maintenance man, a pick and shovel guy). The railroad provided free transportation to the job site, sleeping quarters, dining facilities, meals and bedding.” Not a bad deal considering the times. But Sam was sometimes a bad boy. “I remember shipping out from New York City to Hornell, New York, near Buffalo, on the Erie Railroad. When we arrived we were given a ‘nose bag’ (lunch to be eaten on the job)…practically all of us would-be employees, ignoring the pleas of the foreman to return, took our nose bags and simply disappeared.”

Work was not usually a scam. The job he most hated was at the Montgomery Ward depot in Rochester, New York. Ward at the time was the world’s largest mail order house. Packages and crates of all sizes were piled high as a small hill in the center of a wide warehouse floor. Radiating from the pile, like the spokes of a gigantic wheel, were lanes labeled for the States of the Union. Sam’s job was to load packages onto a huge wheel barrel, push it to the end of a lane, unload, and return to the pile to reload. A foreman drove him and the other men like horses.

Working when he had to, drifting here and there, Sam immersed himself in the IWW, which has been described by many historians as an organization in irrevocable decline at the time he joined, its back broken by Red Scare persecution—most especially the imprisonments and crackdowns of the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918). Hundreds of men were given long terms in Federal prisons: Leavenworth Penitentiary—“hells 100 acres”—being especially notorious. We must add to that outrage the forced deportations of radical immigrants under the auspices of Attorney General Palmer and his protégé, J. Edgar Hoover. And then there were the “patriotic” initiatives of private citizens: the lynchings and other forms of abuse orchestrated by those with vested interest in seeing Wobblies dead. The McCarthy witch hunts of the post-World War II era pale in comparison to what the Wobblies, radical Socialists, and religious nonconformists were put through.

There is no denying the impact of these actions, and, later, the “criminal syndicalism laws” passed by many states to protect the citizenry against the menace of the IWW. But most of the men imprisoned were rebels to the core and came right back. I think the reasons for the Wobbly decline were more complex. How else are we to explain that the IWW reached its maximum membership of 100,000 in 1923? And all historians would agree the Wobbly influence reached much further than formal membership. The union churned and discarded members like a threshing machine does wheat, but many of the ex members did not fall far. “Once a Wobbly, always a Wobbly,” said the poet Ralph Chaplin who wrote “Solidarity Forever.” He was speaking of himself as an old man near death, but the remark applies as well to thousands of others.

I think the decline of the IWW had as much to do with a disastrous internal split in 1924—over an issue never resolved. Where should ultimate authority rest, with local branches or with the General Executive Board (GEB) in Chicago? The centralizers versus the decentralizers; it is an issue that goes to the core of anarchism—indeed of all organizations. This lofty conflict hid nasty personal ones and opened the door to enough procedural wrangling to cross the eyes of a Philadelphia lawyer. Who would suspect that of Wobblies, of all people?

Then there was the rise of the Communist Party, which did more than siphon off members. The IWW was the first target of opportunity of its boring-from-within, rule-or-ruin strategy repeated on large and small scale in the United States and throughout the world. The Party was disciplined. When it could not capture the IWW it did all in its power to destroy the IWW—relatively easy to do because of the Wobblies’ open democratic tradition and fluid structure. The subject is worthy of a PhD thesis and I will not go into details. Fred Thompson and Jon Bekken offer numerous examples in The IWW: Its First 100 Years. This passage summarizes matters:

Of the 46 on bond (while waiting appeal on the 1918 espionage conviction), Bill Haywood and eight others did not show up; they had been spirited away to Russia. The communists said they would make good on the bond losses, but never did, though publicly announcing that Haywood went to Russia on orders of the Communist Party. It soon became plain that the communists in the IWW were operating under instructions to wreck it.

They did help clarify IWW thinking. It became recognized that putches and insurrections cannot achieve industrial democracy….The chief damage done by the Communists to the IWW was the cultivation of the notion of a militant minority, priding itself on its revolutionary consciousness and holding in contempt…the majority of its members.

There were other reasons for the decline, the most important, I think, being the modernization of American life—which played out to the disadvantage of the IWW in many ways. On the most direct level, it is clearly harder to organize a timber wolf who drives to work and sleeps at home, than one who sleeps in a camp. Modernization included, later, the reforms of the New Deal and the rise of government favored unions—such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The CIO had an industry-wide organization plan similar to the IWW, and many Wobblies crossed over. They kept dual membership in the beginning, but in time let the Red Card slip.

Whatever the causes, IWW membership declined to ten thousand by 1930, and in 1932 Sam, who was on close terms with the Chicago fellow workers of the General Executive Board, learned that the organization’s treasury consisted of the grand total of twenty-nine dollars. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to judge the vitality of an anarchistic organization solely on membership, which can fluctuate wildly, or on money, which comes and goes. The Wobblies kept kicking, and they organized and led many significant strikes through the rest of the 1920s and 1930s and into the 1940s:

 The state-wide, Colorado coal miners’ strike of 1927–1928, involving thousands of men. It was highly successful, despite the Columbine Massacre, during which state police shot and killed six striking miners, and injured many others.

 The North Idaho IWW lumber strike in 1936, also successful, despite the killing of three strikers and the wounding of a dozen—and threats by the Idaho governor to deport Wobblies from the state en masse.

 The major IWW activity during the construction of the massive Boulder Dam. The men shunned the radical Wobblies because they were fearful of losing their jobs in the pit of the Great Depression, and the employers scorned and ridiculed them, but in the end all the Wobbly demands were instituted—without credit or thanks, of course.

 The major presence of the IWW among the longshoremen and seamen of the West, East, and Gulf Coasts. Harry Bridges, an ex-Wobbly, led the militant West Coast longshoreman’s union, which kept the old IWW slogan: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

 The significant job activity among the machinists in the industrial plants of Ohio; the IWW represented a number of locals, especially in the Cleveland area, very effectively, into the early 1950s. (More on this later.)

I leave for last the Wobbly organizing drive in 1929 among the soft coal miners of southern Illinois. The organization, out-manned and out-gunned, pitifully lacking in resources in comparison to the dictatorial and corrupt United Mine Workers of America, nevertheless made inroads. The first-generation Italian miners, a rebellious lot who fought to remain independent, formed their own union, The Progressive Mine Workers Union, which was closely affiliated with the IWW. But the Communist Party, sensing fertile ground, sent in teams of disciplined, well-financed Bolsheviks from New York to sway the miners toward their outfit, the National Miners Union (NMU). They were experts at strong-arming, taking over public meetings, silencing opposition, and manipulating policy.

The Wobblies fielded a particularly effective organizer by the name Sam Weiner: that is, Sam Dolgoff. If a man is known by his enemies, Sam figured he drew blood. The Communist Party official mouth-piece, The Daily Worker, published a libelous article charging that Sam Weiner was a paid agent of the mine owners. The mine owners posted notices warning miners to beware of that communist agitator, Sam Weiner. Although he downplayed the threat, we can read between the lines: “Upon my arrival, I was assured that the rank-and-file defense committee was well able to insure order at meetings, silence hecklers, repulse attempts to throw me off the platform and protect me against threatened physical assaults. In this, the comrades were entirely successful.”

Sam had developed into a first-rate speaker at forums and street meetings by his trip to the soft coal fields. He knew how to handle hostile crowds and he knew how to handle himself in debate—an art form, as he called it. There was the night he annihilated the well-dressed, sarcastically devastating trial lawyer Max Shachtman before an audience of several-hundred people. The debate concerned the nature of the Soviet State, whether it was heading toward true communism. To a present-day audience this might seem nonsensical, like a debate over whether the Pope is Catholic. But “communism” meant something else to a leftist audience of the late 1920s and early 1930s; the issue was whether the Soviet Union would ever become a free and truly socialistic society under Bolshevik rule. Shachtman fervently thought so; he was an ardent supporter of Lenin’s right hand man, Trotsky, who referred to the Soviet Union as a degenerate worker’s state but a worker’s state nonetheless. Sam answered to the contrary, and Shachtman, after calling Sam a political imbecile, proceeded to demolish his argument eloquently. Unbeknownst to him, Sam had quoted his answer verbatim from a revealing passage by Trotsky.

Sam, facing the audience, shrugged off the Shachtman’s contempt, and said pleasantly, “I happen to agree with you. Argue with Trotsky! He wrote it!”

“Prove it!”

As Sam proceeded with theatrical flourish to open the passage from Trotsky he had memorized, the lawyer, stung, lunged across the stage for the book. The audience roared. Sam moved away, shielding the book. “You can see it in a minute, but let me first read some more!” The man had been reduced to a clown. Nothing he said after that escaped without deflating chuckles coming from the audience.

If it seems I am concentrating on the light side of things you are correct. That is how Sam recounted his youth: a man in his twenties during the ’20s, on the loose, with nobody to feed or satisfy but himself. I think the escapade that tickled him most began as he ran across a soapbox orator while on the bum in Kansas City Missouri, around 1925 or so. The fellow stood on the “tailboard of a big hearse mounted on a Ford chassis flamboyantly marked: JUSTICE IS DEAD IN CALIFORNIA! FREE TOM MOONEY.”

Mooney and Warren Billings were socialists framed for planting a bomb that killed ten people in the Embarcadero of San Francisco in 1916. The trial was conducted in a hysterical atmosphere; the convictions were based on perjured testimony; the prosecution suppressed exculpatory evidence; a Presidential Commission concluded there was no evidence to bring a case—and yet Mooney spent twenty-two years in prison before his pardon in 1939. The case was an international cause célèbre, one of a long line of labor/civil rights frame ups.

After the meeting Sam introduced himself and made a fast friend, Harry Meyers. “Are you loose?” Harry asked. “I need help.”

Sam had one problem. How were they to get along selling and “spouting this stuff” in the reactionary small towns of the heartland? The police often as not partook of the disconcerting practice of making a man chew and swallow his Red Card—which was not a card at all, rather a dues booklet—before pounding the piss out of him.

“No trouble!” Harry assured him. “The cops in these towns, every last one of them, are Irish! They’ll never arrest us for trying to free a guy named Mooney!”

And Meyers was right. Sam sold the literature and acted as chairman; Harry spouted-off and drove the hearse from town to town. At night, to his lifelong delight in the telling, Sam climbed into the coffin.

When they finally got to Chicago, Harry parked his beloved hearse in the garage across the street from Wobbly headquarters, at “three nickels,” that is 555 West Lake Street.

Chicago became Sam’s home base for the next six or seven years. He worked for a small-time painting contractor, slept at his house, and hung with the skid-row Wobblies and the anarchists. In keeping with his communal-anarchistic philosophy, and also because he had many friends there, he became active in the IWW Unemployed Union. We are skipping ahead to the pit of the depression, 1931 or so, before the New Deal reforms, when the capitalist economy teetered on collapse. Millions were living on the street and lining up for bread. You must be made of stone not to admire what the IWW did.

As Sam described it, “The Unemployed Union at 2005 West Harrison Street collected food from markets and large wholesalers to sustain unemployed members. If an unemployed worker found himself and family on the street for non-payment of rent, Union members would pack up their belongings and go right back into their home with them; let the land-lord think twice before throwing them out again.” The food gathering procedure was equally direct. “An unemployed worker joining the Union was welcomed to free lodging and food, no questions asked. After two or three days he was given an empty sack after breakfast and told he would get no more help if he did not collect food before supper.” The Unemployed Union distributed thousands of their popular leaflet Bread Lines or Picket Lines, which reminded those with jobs that all workers were in the same leaky boat. It urged them to help their unemployed brothers: not to work overtime, not to scab, to strike for shorter hours, to join with the unemployed in demanding cash allotments and unemployed benefits, to stage demonstrations outside plants and picket to publicize demands.

It is interesting from the perspective of our “individualistic”—synonym for selfish?—age that thousands of people with jobs helped the Unemployed Union.