Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
By Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn addressed students and faculty members of Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, on November 8, 1962, less than two years prior to her death. Her talk was sponsored by the History Club of the University and its chapter of the Student Peace Union. The occasion was chaired by Kenneth Owens, an assistant professor of history at the University.

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Memories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

. . .I was asked to speak about primarily the IWW. Well, those are the initials for the Industrial Workers of the World which used to be called the "I Won't Work" which was extremely incongruous because actually the people who belonged to the organization were in the basic, most difficult hard-working industries of our country. To call it the workers of the World was rather an ambitious name as actually it never did go beyond the confines of the United States and it grew out of the desire of American workers to continue the traditions and the form of organization of the old Knights of Labor.

I was very young when I first came in contact with the IWW. It was organized in Chicago in the year 1905 and I left school. I am not putting myself forward as any example to you because I felt that Socialism was just around the corner and had to get into the struggle as fast as I could. My father and mother were Socialists, members of the Socialist Party. So all of us of the younger generation were impatient with it. We felt it was rather stodgy. Its leaders were, if you will pardon me for saying so, professors, lawyers, doctors, minister, and middle-aged and older people, and we felt a desire to have something more militant, more progressive and more youthful and so we flocked into the new organization, the IWW.

It was not only the inheritor of many of the traditions of the 1880's but personalities who were identified with the 1880's were present at the early conventions of the IWW. The names may not be known to you unless you are students of labor history but included were such figures as Gene Debs, Daniel DeLeon and Mrs. Lucy Parsons, who was the widow of Albert Parsons, one of the Chicago Anarchists in the 1880's, who was hung, during the very fierce struggles for the 8-hour day. Now, in addition to these Socialists and Knights of Labor figures, there were also figures from unions, unions that were more industrial in character than the craft unions that were identified with the AFL, such unions as the Brewery Workers, the Western Federation of Miners and others.

The IWW and the Fight for Free Speech

Now, the IWW, strangely enough, could be divided into two sections and the two sections didn't always, were not always identified in the same kind of struggle. In the west, west of Chicago, it consisted mostly of American-born migratory workers, young workers, young men who had followed the advice of Horace Greeley, "Go west, young man" and grow up with the country. Well, they might not have needed to grow up with it, they helped the country to grow up. They were engaged in agriculture, in the construction industries, in maritime, and they were miners, hard-ore miners in the far west, and iron-ore miners in the far range of Minnesota.

These workers were transients, practically no roots in the communities of the areas where they worked. In fact, it was said that they seldom left the IWW halls to go uptown into what they called the scissors belt sections of the city. Naturally, as transients, they did not vote so they had little or no interest in the politics of the areas. There was a tendency on the IWW's to become more and more limited, to organize in the industries and [show] less and less concern in political action of any sort. This was strangely in contradiction to the fact that many of the struggles in which they were engaged were actually political struggles. There were many free speech fights. I had to pronounce that very distinctly, not because some of you come from speech classes but because I was also very seriously misunderstood by an attorney in the Subversive Committee Control Board who said, "How many of these street fights were you engaged in?" "Oh, I didn't say street fights, I said, free speech fights", and he looked rather confused. They usually arose over city ordinances that were passed in communities like Missoula, Montana, where I happened to be at one time and also Washington, where these city ordinances forbade street meetings in the area of the employment agencies, and said that the IWW might go way out some place where there was a very nice park and no ordinance, of course, and speak there.

Well, their techniques were something like the Freedom Riders of today. They would send out telegrams, and; I am explaining, you understand, I am not agitating, they would send out telegrams something like this, and say: "Foot Loose Wobblies, come at once, defend the Bill of Rights", and they would come on top of the trains and beneath the train, and on the sides, in the box cars and every way that you-didn't have to pay fare, and by the hundreds literally they would land in these communities, to the horror and consternation of the authorities and they would stand up on platforms or soap box and they would read part of the Constitution of the United States or the Bill of Rights.

I remember one big and strong lumberjack who, frightened to death, went up on the box and read the First Amendment to the Constitution and then looked around rather helplessly for the cops, but the cops went elsewhere so he read it again and when he read it about three times, the policeman came along and yanked him down, much to his relief, and these performances were repeated innumerable times. They would fill the jails and, of course, that was quite an expense to a small community. Eventually the citizens would say, let them speak, why not, and the ordinance would be declared null and void and a great victory was won for Civil Liberties, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and they would go back to their criticisms of these employment shops which, they said, had discovered perpetual motion, who always had a gang of workers going to a job, a gang on the job and a gang coming away from the job, all of whom had paid for the job.

The IWW Organizes Immigrant Workers, the Lawrence Strike of 1912

Well, those were the free-speech fights that are very well known and very characteristic of the IWW in the western part of the country. In the eastern part of the country the IWW dealt with workers, mainly, who were not eligible to join the AFL and which the AFL did not want. The AFL was the skilled workers' organization and its form and methods and principles were not the same as the IWW. The IWW believed in the class struggle. They didn't believe in the brotherhood of capital and labour and they believed that these unorganized foreign-born mass producation workers should be organized in an industrial union - all together in one union and not split up into a dozen or more organizations.

These foreign-born workers in the eastern part of the country at one time were men and women who just came off the boats. In fact, many of these big companies actually imported them. I saw, when I was in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, I saw posters that had been put up in Montenegro, and these posters showed the workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts coming out of the mill on one side with bags of money under their arm and going into the bank on the other side. Well, naturally, when you lived in the sparse hillsides of Montenegro, that was quite an inducement, and there were actually in the City of Lawrence alone, twenty-five different nationalities who spoke forty-five different languages, but hardly any English.

Now these foreign-born immigrant workers naturally did not possess any political rights. They were not yet naturalized or enfranchised and therefore any protest that they might perchance make went unheeded because they did not represent any power, political power in their community. However, what precipitated the big strike in 1912, {which was known as the Bread & Roses Strike} which is one of the great historical struggles in our country, was a political act on the-part of the State. The hour of labor were reduced to 54 hours. You can imagine what they were before. That was only for women and children, but it affected something like 75% of the workers in the mills.

On the first day after the law went into effect, the employers cut the wages proportionately to the cut in-hours and the wages were on the average of $7 and $8 a week at that time, and the highest pay to loom fixers and more highly skilled were getting possibly, $15 and $20. It was a margin between mere subsistence and starvation and so there was a spontaneous strike. Now, many people say such things don't happen, that they are really organized in advance but, sometimes, as one writer, Richard Rostran Childs, who afterwards became the Ambassador of our country to Italy, said, the melting pot boiled over and so they poured out of the mills. And, the AFL didn't want anything to do with them so they sent for the IWW and the IWW came on feet of lightning, and there came first Ettor and Giovannitti and they were there about three weeks or four weeks and then there was violence on the picket line as there often was. Not only the police were there but the State Militia was there. These two strike leaders were arrested and charged with incitation to murder although the person killed was a woman striker so they went out of the battle and they were charged many months after the strike was over and were acquitted.

William D. Haywood, who had been the leader of the Western Federation of Miners, who had been tried out there on a similar framed-up charge of murder, came into Lawrence to lead the strike. Well, it seems like ancient history to say, but the man who subsequently became president of the United States, Mr. Coolidge, was then in the Legislature of Massachusetts and came on the investigation committee to see what the strike was all about. Well, I have been asked, because I understand some of you are interested in personalities, as well as this rather dry history, to explain something about what kind of person was Big Bill Haywood. Well, Big Bill Haywood was, as his name implied, a man over six feet tall, he was a miner from the State of Utah and he had always organized and spoken to English speaking people out there in the Western area. So we were a little dubious as to whether he would be able to handle the difficult task for all of us, of speaking to strikers who hardly understood English.

We did have interpreters in these forty-five different languages, but half the time we didn't know whether the interpreters were telling them to stay out on strike or go back to work. So you had to have other interpreters to watch the interpreters and it got pretty complicated. So Bill Haywood decided that we had to speak English so these people could understand it. And I will never forget the lesson he gave to us. I was very young at that time, I was 22, and he said, now listen here, you speak to these workers, these miners in the same kind of English that their children who are in the primary school would speak to them and they would understand that. Well, that's not easy -- to speak to them in primary school English.

Well, we learned how to do it. The only trouble is with me it kind of stuck and when I go to speak to a college audience I feel at a little bit of a disadvantage because I don't know all the big words. The small words, the short words, were the ones I was drilled in by William Haywood. Well, I will give you an example of how he used to speak. We had to explain to them why we wanted them to be in the IWW, one big union and not in the AFL. Well, he would say, {showing his hand fingers spread} the American Federation of Labor, the AFL is like that, each one separated, but the IWW is like that, {he would make a fist} and they would all say, three cheers for the IWW and he had made his point.

Well, he was a tower of strength. He was way head and shoulders above the average worker, and they followed him around from place to place and admired him and followed his advice and actually the strike was won, in spite of all the difficulties; the strike was won, however, at great suffering and sacrifice. We took some of the children away from Lawrence to other cities once or twice. And then they tried to stop us and they beat up the children and the mothers and the committee in the railroad station in Lawrence (and took them to jail and a protest and roar went up from one end of the country to the other).

They tore down that railroad station later. I am sure one reason is that they didn't want people to be pointing it out as the place where the police and the soldiers had beaten the women and the children. The result was a Congressional investigation which was brought into being by Victor Berger, the Socialist Congressman from Wisconsin, and the condition of those workers were so exposed to the whole country that the employers were only too happy to call it a day and bring the strike to a close. There were sixteen witnesses down there before the Committee. Children, and every one of those children were actually workers in the mills. It was before the days when we had any regulation on child labor. You see it is a long time ago, I am speaking of, but these are the flesh and blood struggles that made the labor movement as it is today. At the same time that this Lawrence strike was going on, there was a great strike of timber workers in Louisiana, also under the auspices of the IWW, and I single that out, although we had strikes all over the place, we were just hopping all over from one place to another, because there for the first time the discrimination, the segregation rules were-broken down.

William D. Haywood went down there to speak and he said every striker sits wherever he wants to sit. Segregation in this hall of the IWW and the Negro and white workers, I think for the first time in American labor history, broke that taboo and met together.

I worked with many interesting people in those days. I really wish I had time to tell you about all of them, but I am singling out those that I think are better known to you possibly and are of interest to you. It wasn't long after those big strikes in the east, the Lawrence strike, and the Paterson silk strike, that there was a great strike of workers in the State of Utah. And it was there that Joe Hill, I am sure that all of you have heard of Joe Hill, the song writer, troubadour of the IWW, was arrested. The little red song book, which never dies, apparently any more than the memory of Joe Hill, has many of his songs. And if there is really one thing that I am proud of in my long labor history, it is that while he was in prison, before he was executed, he wrote a song for me dedicated to me, that was called, the "Rebel Girl" and that song, I hope you will do it here some time, it may not be the best of words or the best of music, but it came from the heart and it was certainly so treasured. . .