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
