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
