old-time Wobblies I knew as a boy would tell of these struggles that raged across the American landscape—in the mines, lumber camps, factories, wheat fields, and waterfronts of a tooth-and-claw nation. The recitation of these forgotten battles, unadorned and at random, can bring a lump to the throat in the manner of a Whitman poem.
I go into this history because the Wobbly glories were a distant thunder by the time the three of us entered the Five-Ten Hall those sleepy Sunday mornings when I was a boy. Outright murder, state sponsored persecution and imprisonment, induced mass hysteria, internal dissension, mistaken tactics, the rise of the Communist Party, the Roosevelt New Deal with its social programs and favored treatment of “responsible” unions, and, above all, WWII and the general modernization of American life—these things conspired to bring the Wobblies low. The Five-Ten Hall was little more than a social club: a place for seaman who shared each other’s values to spend time together, to play silent games of pinochle, to gossip, to discuss the latest outrage, to speak of the past as if it were still happening. All this while waiting to “ship out.” The sea was their true home.
They were lonely men for the most part, childless, so they made a fuss over Abe and me. Huge shiny packages labeled Baby Ruth and Hershey would magically appear to my delight. Abe, who has four years on me, would immediately make a bee line for an empty card table, where waiting for him was Nick the Greek: a thick, powerful, middle-aged man in a turtle-neck sweater, with a skull bald as a turtle’s. They would lay out the chess board without exchanging a word and play for hours in silence.
Abe had another game going with a seafaring Wobbly named J. B. Chiles. Chiles made it a point to send him a postcard from every port he visited. Each morning Abe would race down stairs to the front of our building and wait for the mailman to deliver his card.
Ah, Abe, you are lucky. One arrived today, and Abe clutches it to him. On the back of the card: “Dear Abe, Here I am in Valparaiso, J. B. Chiles” On the front: a grainy black-and-white photograph of the harbor of Valparaiso, Chile.
The cards did not arrive on a regular basis. But Abe stuck with it and in time he filled a shoe box with cards from all the exotic places of the world: cards that were sent to him alone in an age devoid of TV, computer, and iPod. It was a collection he prized beyond value. He had a large map of the world taped to the wall beside his bed. Valparaiso, Chile? There it is! Abe stabs Valparaiso with a pin, like an insect, and stands back to admire all the pins scattered across his map.
I had my game, too—checkers, with a short, wiry ex-prize fighter known, perhaps insensitively but nevertheless accurately, as Punch Drunk Morse. His mashed in face fascinated me: flattened nose, unnaturally thick brow, scar tissue, pinned back ears, tight curly hair. It was hard to tell how old he was. But he was obviously an adult and I was able to beat him every time! Probably that was the best Morse could do, although now that I am old it pleases me to think he let me win because he enjoyed seeing a small boy happy, for he was a kind and gentle man.
Though Morse wouldn’t swat a fly in anger and certainly not a “civilian,” his face was an advertisement for trouble. Everywhere the poor fellow went he encountered an ass spoiling to prove his “manhood” in public by punching him out. There was the night my father loved telling about when a drunk they encountered in a bar gave Morse no peace. He taunted him, interrupted him when he was in conversation with other people, shoved him on the shoulder. Finally it became intolerable. So Morse stepped to the center of the saw-dust floor.
“You want to hit me? Here, hit me,” he says to the guy, sticking out his chin. The bar grows silent as a church.
Morse weighs maybe 140lbs. His tormentor is a lumbering water buffalo with a huge gut. He proceeds to swing a round house right at Morse, then a round house left, a right again, and so on, huffing and puffing. All of them fan the air, of course, as Morse stands in one spot with his hands in his pockets and weaves side to side, at times crowding and nudging the drunk off balance with his shoulder.
“Here I am. Hit me. Hit me. Get it out of your system.”
The drunk swings himself to exhaustion, red faced, gasping. Morse leaves him stationary as a confused bull amid-the sawdust. It is a Buster Keaton farce come to life.
“Remember Sammy Weinstein?” my father would call out to Morse across the silent Five-Ten Hall.
Weinstein, I learned later, was a small-time “club fighter,” a lightweight from the early 1930s, when a Jewish boxer was not an oddity. He was also a Wobbly and proud of it, so he had “IWW” sewn in red letters onto the back of his black trunks. The crowd would roar when they saw it.
“In the long run it wasn’t good propaganda” was my father’s growled appraisal. “Poor Sammy spent too much time on his ass.” Morse would nod in sad agreement.
That was how I remember talk went at the Five-Ten Hall. Spare. Ironic. Things heated up, however, if the talk turned to political philosophy, literature, history; seafaring Wobblies were generally far better educated than mainstream college folk. They took advantage of their years of confinement on the high seas to read, read, read. They would not parrot what a literature professor might say about Dickens, for example; most never saw the inside of a college classroom nor benefited from the guidance of the learned man up front. Instead they actually read Dickens, maybe five of his novels, and formed their own opinions. I can remember more than one Wobbly quote verbatim long passages of Marx, of Shakespeare, of Whitman, of the Old Testament. There was a savage quality to their learning.
The Wobblies would not let the expectations of others define them. A migratory farm worker was called a “bindle stiff” because he carried his bed on his back. He rode freight trains, dodging the brutal railroad “bulls” and murderous “hijackers,” to get to the vast grain fields, where he and his fellow stiffs harvested the nation’s bread for a pittance. Decades before the world heard of Cesar Chavez—before he was born—the Wobblies led thousands of these homeless men in a series of violent strikes that raged across the American West. Many were imprisoned. Around our dinner table I heard stories of how their jailers observed them conduct disciplined meetings inside their crowded cells, according to Robert’s Rules of Order—and from then on treated them with respect.
I loved the Five-Ten Hall for reasons that ran deeper than a boy can express. It was there that my father introduced me to the adult world of men, and that I began to learn the importance of honor and bravery in this world. I also learned as I grew older that the Wobblies had their share of bad actors. But, taken as a whole, they were men who sacrificed in the just cause of others without expectation of reward or fame, which meets my definition of nobility. With the passage of time, I have come to realize how privileged I was to know these men, albeit from a boy’s perspective. There was a certain dignity to the best of them, a certain grace. Their speech, their bearing, carried echoes of a lost nineteenth-century America. All of them were poor, long forgotten, if ever known. They were the best of America, although America largely spat upon them.
In the broader sense, there is no such thing as a foreigner. We are all native born members of this planet, and for the members of it to be divided into groups or units and to be taught that each nation is better than the other leads to clashes and the world war. We ought to have in place of national patriotism—the idea that one people is better than another—a broader conception, that of international solidarity.… The IWW believes that in order to do away with wars we should remove the cause of wars; we should establish industrial democracy instead of commercialism and capitalism and the struggles that come from them. We are trying to make America a better land, a land without child slaves, a land without poverty, and so also with the world, a world without a master and without a slave.
James P. Thompson, a big, square-shouldered man and a co-founder of the IWW said this at a trial in the run-up to World War One. For this and similar statements he was sentenced to ten years in
