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| The IWW General Headquarters had not changed much since this photo from the 1950s. Left to right Walter Westmann, Alice Westmann, Charlie Velsek, Ginny Velsek, Fred Thomson, and John Russell. |
Note: Fifth in a series of memoirs. Monday of Convention week turned out, oddly,
to be a kind of personal Labor Day.
Back at the Movement Center Church on Diversey,
the kids stirred on Monday morning. Some of them, the ones with bumps and
bruises and clothes reeking of tear gas, assumed the demeanor of grizzled
veterans adopting an air of almost condescension to the uninitiated. Even
the ones who threw up after getting in late from the Battle of Lincoln Park/Old Town the night before were hungry.
Maybe even hungrier than the rest.
Staffers like me rustled grub.
It was running low and we weren’t sure how to re-stock the larder.
Someone suggested dumpster diving the bakeries and grocery stores. May be
a couple of folks went out and tried it. I can’t remember.
Back at the dumpsters behind the
church again that morning, I had another visitor. This one quite
different from the cops the day before. She rode up on a battered girl’s Schwinn painted baby blue—almost the
exact color of Chicago cops’ shirts—and festooned with oversize wire baskets on
the handle bars and hanging over the rear fenders like saddle bags. She
was old. The olderst person I may have ever seen back then on a
bicycle. Which in retrospect means that she was somewhere north of 50,
but probably not too far. Her grey hair was cut in a short pixie style,
and wore turquoise pedal pushers and white canvas shoes. She had a wide smile
and bad teeth.
When she spoke, she had a lisp. “Do
you guys need any food?” she asked. “We just had our big annual picnic
and there is plenty left over at the Hall.”
I readily acknowleged that she was a god send. She invited me to walk her
bike back to the Hall to fill the baskets and my arms with the aforementioned
food.
Her name was Ruth Sheridan. I learned later that she came from a big,
sprawling family of Irish radicals. Her two older brothers Jimmie and
Jack, tiny men in tweed caps who were former hobos and sometimes jockeys, were
two of the last of the orators at Chicago’s Bug House Square. All three of them were Wobblies, members of the legendary labor union the Industrial Workers of the World. We
were headed to the IWW General
Headquarters on the second floor of a run-down building on Halsted Street at Fullerton over the Assyrian
American Restaurant.
We trudged up the stairs and entered
a large room with a slightly musty smell. Up front by three large windows
overlooking the street was an island of five mammoth old wooden desks pushed
together. A long clerk’s desk with high stools hugged one wall and file
cabinets and antique safes the other. Toward the rear were some antique
office machines—an open drum, hand cranked Mimeograph;
an Addressograph plate maker
operated with a spinning wheel to select letter and a cast iron treadle to
punch them into plates, and a machine to stamp the plate through thick ribbons
onto envelopes or sheets of paper. I learned that all had been
purchased by Big Bill Haywood himself
and reluctantly returned to the union by the Feds after busting up the offices
in the 1919 Red Scare Raids.
There was a large table where the Industrial Worker was laid out and
later wrapped in manila sheets stamped with addresses and pasted for mailing.
A row of glass fronted books shelf
units partitioned the front of the Hall from the rear, where there was a
kitchen, a table, a cot for visiting Wobs, and a barely functioning bathroom.
Three men sat at the desks.
All of them well on in years. One practically leapt from his desk to come
and greet me. “Welcome, Fellow Worker!” he said as he pumped my hand
vigorously as if he expected to see me. In retrospect, it is clear that
he did. He was a small man with a gleaming bald head and fringe of gray
hair. He introduced himself as Carl
Keller—seemed to be a lot of Carl’s that week—the General Secretary-Treasurer of the international union.
Sitting opposite to him was a large
man with rumpled shirt and a shock of gray hair. He had a cigarette hand rolled
in yellow wheat paper dangling from his lips. When he smiled he displayed
a snagle of bad, yellow teeth. He did not get up. Turns out he lost
a leg at the thigh hopping freight in Omaha
about 1929 and had come to Chicago to work at General Headquarters.
His name was Walter Westmann and he
had served as General Secretary or his current position as Bookkeeper and Office
Manager most of the years since. I learned that he kept his spare
wooden leg and a broken Lugar locked
up in the smaller of the two safes.
At the smallest desk, nearest the
window was a youthful looking man with an impressive high salt and pepper flat
top haircut and bushy eyebrows. He had a soft, high voice and the mien of
a scholar. That was Fred W.
Thompson, editor of the Industrial
Worker, a man destined to play a huge role in my life.
When the three old men discovered
that not only was I a demonstrator and a student, but a genuine industrial
worker myself, they got truly excited. For the next two hours they spun
tales of the fighting union. They pointed at the oil portrait of Joe Hill staring down at us from a wall
above the clerk’s desk and filled my hands with red pamphlets with covers by Ralph Chaplin and back issues of the Industrial Worker, an eight-page
broadsheet monthly newspaper.
All I knew about the IWW was from a
paragraph or so in a high school history text that pictured Wobblies as
dangerous radicals and virtual terrorists and what I had gleaned from studying Clarence Darrow to prep for a school
production of Inherit the Wind. I
was intrigued at first and after an hour or two enchanted. This seemed
like just the kind of organization I was looking for. Too bad, I thought,
that it was just a remnant of these old men.
After a while Ruth reminded me of
the errand. We went to the kitchen and began packing up. There was
a good deal left from that picnic—or perhaps they had run out to buy it just to
lure a prospect like me into their lair. There were strings of butcher
shop hot dogs, pounds of ground beef wrapped in white paper and tied with
string, packages of bologna and salami, two big bricks of cheese, bags of buns
and sandwich bread, paper cartons of potato salad and cold slaw from the deli,
industrial sized cans of Amour’s Pork
and Beans, and a huge jar of pickled eggs—a delicacy I was fairly sure had
never been sampled by any of the kids back at the church. We filled paper
grocery bags and then filled the baskets of Ruth’s bicycle with them. I
was given a paper carton full of stuff to carry. Carl and Fred waved us
good bye at the front door as we made our way the few blocks back to Diversey.
***
Back at the church unpacking the
food, I discovered that I was not the only one with labor on his mind.
The SDSers were planning a field
trip.
Most people forget that there was a CTA strike going on during Convention
Week. Actually, it was a wildcat
strike. Most Black bus
drivers and some motormen had walked
out as much to protest the failure of their union, Amalgamated Transit Union, to strongly represent them in grievance
procedures against the CTA as against the agency itself. An organization
called the Concerned Transport Workers called
the strike after 143 of their members were suspended for a job action and had
received no support for their union. The strike shut down most bus
routes, particularly on the South and
West Sides, but also some on the North
Side. Most rail service was only spottily affected.
The strike was a resumption of an
earlier 5 day protest walk-out and started on August 25, coincidental with the
Convention. There was some thought that despite the inconvenience to city
residents and the embarrassment that a strike in “The City That Works” would
mean during a period of national attention, that Mayor Daley might not have been totally displeased. The
disruption of bus service made it much more difficult for protestors to move
freely around the city. It also might have been a deterrent to Daley’s
greatest fear—that Blacks, who had rioted the summer before and again when Martin Luther King was assassinated,
would pour out of the ghettos and join the protestors in a virtual
insurrection.
At any rate, the SDSers were eager
to forge ties with both the Black community and with left wing labor.
Word went out that the strikers were having a hard time maintaining picket
lines on the North and Northwest side due to mass arrests of strikers.
Given the morning I had just experienced, I was happy to go with the SDS folk
to the picket line.
We piled into somebody’s VW Bus. I didn’t know the city
well enough then to tell where we were going, except that it was somewhere
north and west. We piled out at a bus barn somewhere within sight of an
expressway, don’t ask me where. There were a dozen nervous picketers on
the line and signs stacked against a chain link fence. We took up our
signs and joined the line. Other SDS members from other sites joined.
The picketers were glad for the
support, but more than a little bewildered by the sudden appearance of a bunch
of White kids. And more than a little reluctant to join in chants like
“2,4,6,8 Organize and Smash the State!” I was a little squeamish about
that one myself.
Our presence attracted extra police
attention. Squadrolls and lots of baby blue helmets began to line the
street across the street from us.
Push came to shove at shift
change. The cops warned us to keep moving. The strikers wanted us
to mass at the gate to prevent mostly white drivers from breaking the
strike. This is where arrests had been common. That day there was a
good deal of pushing and shoving. A line of cars pushed slowly through
the crowd and into the welcome of a mass of CTA security at the gate.
But before things came to a head,
the squadrolls began to pack-up and leave. They evidently were needed
elsewhere, probably along the Lake Front for another round of battle
there. There were no arrests that afternoon at our gate and after most of
the police left, cars began to turn back rather than run the gauntlet of
pickets.
After it was over there were high
fives and hugs all around. We felt great. We piled back into the VW
bus. On the ride back to the Church, the SDSers were scornful of the Yippies and Mobe. By making
common cause with labor, they said, we were making the real revolution.
***
Despite the
dismissive attitude, I was eager to rejoin the main protests that evening. After slapping together a quick dinner of hot
dogs and beans for the few kids not already out, I headed for Lincoln Park where everyone expected
another big confrontation.
It was a chilly,
damp night and pitch dark by the time I made the park on foot. A thick fog rolled in off the Lake. The later it got, the thicker it got. There was no program, no performances, or
speech making, at least where I circulated.
The crowd grew, milled around, and tried occasional chants. The enemy—the police—were invisible behind
those fog banks. Some folks began to
build barricades of park benches, picnic tables and trash cans. That made me nervous, I moved away from them.
Not long before
11 o’clock, my attention was drawn to drumming and a flickering fire away from
the main crowd. It was further south in
the park, close to where La Salle Street turned east-west and formed the
edge. My guess is that we were not far
from Cardinal Cody’s mansion. It was hard to tell. And my memory might be faulty.
As I got close
enough to see what was going on, I found a knot of maybe a couple of hundred
people. At the center, sitting cross
legged and looking serene, was Alan
Ginsberg chanting “Om, Om, Om, Om, Om Mani Padme Om.”
As he droned, the tension seemed to drain a bit among those surrounding
him even as the moments to a sure assault ticked by.
Ginsberg
was there with a posse of writers, supposedly as observers and journalists, not
demonstrators. With him that night were
the Beat novelist and junkie William Burroughs, the French playwright and novelist Jean Genet—always
described in the press as the “hoodlum poet”—and the American satirist Terry Southern. Of course, I could not have picked any of
them out of a line up. But Ginsberg was
easy to recognize.
I learned
later from a story that Southern published in Esquire that the
band had arrived in the park not long before me after a day of drinking.
Despite
the calming effect of Ginsberg droning chant, tension rose as 11 PM passed
without apparent police action. I’m not
sure how much time passed, but eventually I decided to head back to the
Movement Center thinking that maybe the cops had decided to pass up a battle in
the fog.
Once
again I was wrong. Not long after I was out of the area, teargas mixed with the
fog and formations of police attacked the makeshift barricades, clubs
swinging. Ginsberg and company evidently
eluded the police, but under cover of that fog some of the worst beatings of
the week were administered that night.
Press members, especially photographers,
were singled out and attacked so successfully that I know of no pictures taken
in the park that night after the attack began. Eventually the cops once again
pushed demonstrators out of the park and into the streets of Old Town. They continued to fire tear gas in the
neighborhood. When local residents began
to offer shelter to fleeing protestors, cops stormed front porches and beat
them senseless on their own
doorsteps.
For the
second night in a row I had missed the main battle. When the kids straggled into the Movement
Center with fresh horror stories, I began to feel like a deserter under fire.
I woke up sore as hell on Tuesday morning in
the Church basement. Even when you are 19, days of fitful sleep on a cold, hard
floor will get to you. Not that anyone slept a lot.
