Why Wobblies Filled the Jail in Spokane Free Speech Fight

 

 The IWW relied on street meetings like this one in New York state to organize workers.  When Spokane, Washington authorities tried to shut them down in 1909 they sparked a legendary Free Speech Fight.

It didn’t start out to be probably the greatest landmark battle for free speech and free assembly in American history.  It grew out of the practical, if militant concerns of a labor union trying to establish itself in an all important local industry—the lumber trade of the Pacific Northwest.  But on November 2, 1909 the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) launched a Free Speech Fight in the streets of Spokane, Washington.  Before the first day was out 103 workers who tried to mount a literal wooden soap box on Stevens Street had been hauled off to jail.  Many were beaten or roughed up in the process.

The IWW was still a new outfit, but it was rapidly gaining a reputation for militancy and a willingness to organize unskilled laborers as well as skilled craftsmen and those employed in seasonal industries with unstable work forces.  The timber industry, in which the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had a small and ineffective presence limited to mill men and mechanics and which hired large gangs of workers off the streets of local towns in the months between the snows, was an enticing target.  Spokane was the center of the industry in western Washington.

 

Stevens Street in Spokane in 1909 before all hell broke out. 

By 1908 the union had established a branch with its own meeting hall, news stand, and canteen.  Members were mostly conducting regular educational meetings, hoping to build an organization.  They had also established a weekly newspaper, The Industrial Worker which eventually became the union’s chief western journal and eventually relocated to Chicago as the official organ of the whole organization.  It’s the same paper to which I contributed and edited in the 1970’s.

Progress was steady and the local members were convinced that given great dissatisfaction over the employment agency system through which men were hired for the lumber camps or big railroad construction jobs.  General Secretary William D. “Big Bill” Haywood and the General Executive Board in Chicago decided to dispatch one of the union’s top organizers to Spokane to help.

James H. Walsh was something of a firebrand organizer, but an effective one.  He had been working in Seattle and other lumber centers.  He felt that the leadership in Chicago had become too preoccupied with eastern factory struggles and were slipping toward “plain and simple” unionism devoid of class struggle and consciousness.  That summer he led a group of 20 men, lumberjacks, construction workers, casual laborers, to the IWW General Convention in Chicago.  The Overalls Brigade, as they came to be known, traveled across country riding the rails.  Their arrival at the convention in rough work clothes and dusty from days on the road grabbed everyone’s attention.  As did their demands for action in the West.  

 

Dolly Reed Walsh, wife of organizer James Walsh, made the trip to the 1908 IWW General Convention in Chicago hopping freight trains with the Overalls Brigade.  That was new in the Chicago Inter-Ocean.  She was photographed with 18 year old Wobbly orator Elizabeth Gurly Flynn.  Flynn did not make the trip, but went to Spokane for the Free Speech Fight and was arrested.  Confirmed photos of James Walsh hard to find.  Perhaps wisely, he was camera shy. 

Some officials may have been a bit intimidated. The Overalls Brigade literally drove Daniel DeLeon and his Socialist Labor Party faction to bolt the convention and set up a rival IWW in Detroit. Haywood was impressed.  He gave Walsh General Organizing Credentials and sent him to Spokane with a promise of support.

When Walsh arrived in September, he found a riot on Stevens Street.  The job sharks, as the 31 employment agencies that lined that strip were known, were up to their old tricks.  They would charge a man a dollar for a hiring ticket to remote lumber or construction camps.  They camps would only hire men referred by the agencies.  Corrupt foremen would keep men for a few days then find an excuse to fire them, making them beat their way back to town on their own.  The agencies paid the foremen kickbacks for churning the labor force.  The system was thoroughly corrupt, and everyone knew it.

 

Wobbly street meetings were aimed a attacking the job shark hiring system in the lumber industry.  The locally published Industrial Worker was another key organizing tool.  

On his first day in town Walsh found nearly 2000 men milling on Stevens street.  Rocks were  thrown through windows and some were gathering fuel and torches to burn down the agencies.  Walsh mounted a wagon and convinced the near mob that violence would only lead to suppression.  He must have been a hell of a speaker.  He invited the crowd to come to the IWW hall to discuss what to do or go home. 

All fall meetings at the hall were jammed as workers learned the basics of unionism and plans were hatched to find a way to end the agency system and replace it with an honest union hireling hall.  But disturbances still occasionally flared up on the street.  Walsh suspected Pinkertons or other spies were acting as provocateurs to open the door for the kind of mass armed suppression that was common in western labor struggles.

Walsh and other members regularly conducted street meetings. More and more men were taking out Red Cards and it was obvious that the union would soon conduct a major campaign. On January 17, 1909 the biggest mob yet, estimated at upwards of three thousand men, formed outside the Red Cross Agency—no relation to the venerable organization—one of the worst of the job sharks.  They had already shattered the windows with chunks of ice when Walsh arrived around 6 PM.  According to the local pro-business daily, The Spokesman Review, Walsh once again calmed the crowd telling them “There were a lot of hired Pinkertons in the crowd.  All they wanted you fellows to do was to start something and then they would have an excuse for shooting you down or smashing your heads in…You can gain nothing by resorting to mob rule.”

 

Halleluiah I'm a Bum by Haywire "Mac" McClintock was one of eight song printed on a song card in Spokane of tunes sung at IWW meetings.  It was the ancestor of the union's famous Little Red Songbooks. 

Even though the IWW’s street meetings were a demonstrably a brake on violence, the City Council was easily persuaded by the employment agencies and lumber interests to enact a local ordinance banning street meetings and protests.  By in large, the union tried to obey.  They scheduled almost daily meetings and educational programs at the hall and conducted most of their organizing on the street by selling copies of the Industrial Worker and the popular red card printed with union songs—the ancestor of the famous Little Red Song Book.

In the summer workers not in the lumber and construction camps largely left town to follow the crops as fruit pickers or in the threshing crews that so that the union hall easily accommodated most meetings.  But as migrants drifted back into town looking for work in the woods, it became apparent that outdoor meeting would be needed again.

Still, Walsh was reluctant to challenge the city—until they allowed the Salvation Army to conduct street meeting despite the law.  When appealing to the city council for fair and equal treatment failed the union decided it had to act.

In the October 23 issue of the Industrial Worker, which by then was widely circulated in the Northwest, the union issued its famous call:

Wanted:  Men to fill the jails of Spokane…Nov. 2 is Free Speech Day—IWW local will be notified by wire how many men to send, if any…Meetings will be orderly and no irregularities of any kind will be permitted.

 

Wobblies in Spokane getting their day in court. 

So, what has been described as the first mass peaceful civil disobedience in American history was on.  Hobos, bindle stiffs, and footloose Wobblies poured into town not waiting for direction from IWW locals.

The union set up its soap box on Stevens street.  One after another, men mounted it and began to speak.  Most got no further than announcing “Fellow Workers…” before they were dragged away.  The police, however, were so busy that one shy worker took his turn and when no one was on hand to immediately arrest him and too tongue-tied to give a speech simply bleated, “Where are the cops?”

 

An IWW cartoon depicting members marching into jail proclaiming that they were all "leaders and editors."  This Spartacus inspired declaration galvanized more "Footloose Wobblies" to flood the city. 

On day two there were plenty more men lined up to join their first 103 comrades.  And more every day after that.  Eventually more than 500 jammed the jail and second holding facility in a school.  Some men even refused to be released when their sentences were up.  The men were brutalized, under fed, subjected to horrific sanitation conditions.  Many showed up in court still bleeding from wounds.

Not all the Wobblies were men.  The original Rebel Girl, 16 year old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, already known as one of the union’s greatest speakers, chained herself to a lamp post so that she could actually get her speech in before she was arrested.

 

A Free Speech fighter whose health was broken by brutal jail conditions in Spokane. 

Eight consecutive members got the Industrial Worker out with full reports on the campaign.  Each in turn was arrested.  City authorities tried to seize and suppress the December 10 issue of the paper which included Flynn’s scandalous charges that jailers were operation the women’s section of the jail as brothel and police were pimping.  The paper had to be temporarily moved to Seattle to continue printing.

The national press began to pay attention and sympathy for the Free Speech fighters grew.  Men still in the camps boycotted Spokane business.  The city’s reputation was being ruined and the cost of keeping so many in jail and paying for extra police was bankrupting the city, just as the union knew it would.

On March 4, 1910 the city ran up the white flag—it revoked the ordinance and released all the prisoners.  In addition, the worst 19 agencies lost their city licenses.  The union did not win a hiring hall, but the system of direct hires by the companies either in town or at the camps was established.  That allowed the IWW to effectively organize on the job, concentrating on tactics of direct action and solidarity.  Within a few years the union was strong enough to enforce an 8 hour day in the camps by the expediency of simply refusing to work longer or evacuate the camps if fired.  When workers burned filthy bedding on one day across the region, employers were forced to provide clean blankets, linens, and mattress pads.  Food improved.  The desperate timber beasts of old were transformed into clean and self-respecting working men.

The tactic of the Free Speech fight spread as other cities attempted to squelch public meetings.  A big one in Fresno, California erupted right on the heels of Spokane.  Over the next few years there would be dozens more, the largest in Seattle.  The results were always the same.

Eventually, at least until the post-World War I Red Scare, cities mostly gave up trying to restrict street meetings.  As for the union, it was glad to be able to refocus energy from the Free Speech fights and constant campaigns to support the class war prisoners, to be able to concentrate more on job action.

The sites of many IWW events in the Pacific Northwest have been commemorated with official state or local historical markers but not in Spokane where attempts to erase the memory of the fight continue.

But the IWW in these fights won the admiration and loyalty of a lot of workers, and the fear and hatred of the bosses.

 

The 1912 Lawrence Strike—Waifs, Wops, and Women Led IWW Triumph

Labor activist and artist Ralph Fasanella's painting shows a column of Militia marching to confront a mass march during the 1912 Lawrence Strike.

The Lawrence Textile Strike began when thousands of skilled and unskilled workers alike walked off their jobs on January 11, 1912.  Two months later one of the largest employers in the city caved into the demands of mere women, children, and immigrants.  One by one over the next couple of weeks the others fell into line.  Something astonishing had happened, something, dare we say it, revolutionary.

Lawrence was founded in 1845 to take advantage of waterpower of the Merrimack River in Massachusetts by Abbott Lawrence, a wealthy Unitarian from Boston who built the first woolen textile mill there. He was soon joined by others of his class.  Within decades the river was lined with massive mills which produced much of the nation’s cloth.

Originally Lawrence and the others imported skilled craftsmen from England and Scotland to build, maintain and set up the complex machines.  But cheap, unskilled hands were needed to tend them and keep them operating.  That labor at first was recruited from the young women of New England, mostly the daughters of famers and working men.  They were housed in clean dormitories and their “moral character” was well attended to.  The wages were considered fair—enough to send home to help the family and still save for a self-earned dowry to start off a married life.  Most of the girls—they usually entered the mills at 16—worked for five years or so and then left to start families.

But beginning with the Civil War, this system was unable to supply enough workers for burgeoning demand.  Mill owners also found the altruism of uplifting young women less appealing than maximizing profits by seeking cheaper sources of labor.  That labor would soon be found in the flood of immigrants in the later 19th Century, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe.

By 1900 the Town of Lawrence and its neighbors was teeming with Italian, Slavic, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Syrian immigrants who made up most of the unskilled workforce.  The mills employed not only the men, but their children, as young as eight, and their women.  Half of the workers at the four giant American Textile mills were girls between 14 and 18. 

 

Children tend looms in a textile mill.

Gone were the tidy dorms of old.  In their place were tenements and virtual shanty towns.  Twelve and fourteen hour days, six days a week in lint filled air around dangerous moving machinery meant that 36% of mill workers died by the time they were 25 years old.

If there was a hell on Earth, Lawrence may have been it.  The bosses knew they were sitting on a powder keg, but depended on keeping their workers divided  by nationality, religion, and sex to prevent widespread labor trouble.

Native Yankees, English, Scottish, Irish (mostly Scots-Irish Protestants), and Germans dominated the skilled trades.  Many of them belonged to three local unions of the A.F.L.’s United Textile Workers, but only about 208 of these were in good standing in 1912.  Various unskilled jobs were divided by ethnicity.

The American Woolen Company's Washington Mill was one of the largest in Lawrence.

By 1905 the mills employed over 40,000 workers.  The introduction of the two loom system in the cotton mills, in which a single worker had to attend two machines, sped up work, made it more dangerous and held costs down.  Real wages began to be cut.  The average wage in the industry by 1911, including skilled workers, foremen, and office workers was only $8.76 for a work week of up to 56 hours a week.  The vast majority of unskilled workers made barely half of that.

Conditions were becoming a public scandal.  Do-gooders were demanding reform. Responding to public pressure, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law limiting the work week to 54 hours for women and children effective on January 1, 1912.  But the law did not guarantee the same wages as the longer work week, which were barely enough to live on as it was.

Beginning in December, mill operators began to speed up the machines to make sure production remained at the same levels as before.  Then they unilaterally decreed that male workers would also be limited to the 52 hour week.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had been organizing among the unskilled workers of Lawrence since 1907.  Like the AFL locals, it had relatively few dues paying members in 1912—maybe 800 or so.  Most workers simply could not afford even the modest dues charged by the IWW Textile Workers Union.  But unlike the AFL, the IWW had organized language sections for each major ethnic group.  Newspapers, pamphlets, and leaflets were circulated by the IWW in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Hungarian.  Some material was available in Arabic for the Syrians and in Yiddish for the relatively small numbers of Eastern European Jews.  Meetings conducted in these languages included not only paid up members, but all who were interested.

The small English language section of the IWW often represented all language groups in communicating with the bosses and authorities.  It drafted a letter to the President of American Woolen Company demanding to know if wages would be reduced when the reduced hours went into effect.  When they got no response, all IWW language groups were alerted to be prepared for cuts.

When Polish women workers at the Everett Company mills discovered their pay packets short by 32 cents on January 11, they dropped their tools and walked out with shouts of “Short Pay! Short Pay!”  Other workers followed.  The next day the strike spread to most of the other mills.

Women and children on the picket line in the snow early in the strike.

Late in the afternoon a mass meeting was held in the Franco-Belgian hall.  Although the strike had not been called by the IWW, most of the workers were aware of the radical union and sympathetic to it.  They knew they could not count on the support of the AFL, which had instructed its members to stay on the job.  The meeting resolved to send a telegram to Joseph Ettor, an IWW organizer, editor, and General Executive Board member in New York.  Ettor had earned a reputation leading one of the first great IWW strikes, the 1909 strike against the Pressed Steel Car Company in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. Most importantly, Ettor had experience working with foreign born workers and could speak Italian and Polish fluently and get by in Hungarian and Yiddish.

Upon speedy arrival, Ettor quickly helped organize the chaotic walk-out into a well-disciplined strike.  Mass meetings were held in the morning and late afternoon to plot strategy and formulate demands.  Those demands eventually included a 15 percent wages boost for a 54 hour work week, double time for overtime work, and no discrimination against any workers for their strike participation.  Mass pickets, the first ever seen in Lawrence, began in front of all of the mills.  Even most of the AFL men now came out.

Despite an AFL attempt to wrest leadership from the IWW, the strikers had confidence only in Ettor and the One Big Union. 

 

A labor cartoon protested the police brutality in Lawrence.

The mayor of Lawrence called out a local Militia company to support police against the picketers.  The Fire Department turned their hoses on strikers in the sub-freezing January temperatures.  33 picketers were promptly arrested and quickly sentenced by a local magistrate to a year in jail.

From the beginning, the Boston press raged against the strikers and called for severe measures against them.  The leading clergymen of Boston, Unitarian and Congregationalist alike echoed the sentiments.  The Governor ordered out the State Police and more units of Militia.  That included a company of Harvard students, including the sons of the Unitarian Brahmin elite, who were among the most eager to “have at” the strikers.

Another leading Italian, Arturo Giovannitti, editor of the Italian Socialist Federation paper Il Prolitorio arrived to bolster IWW strike leadership. Giovannitti went to work organizing strike kitchens and relief and sending off furious letters pleading for support and money to Socialist ethnic federations and IWW locals alike.

In the early weeks of the strike, it held firm against daily assaults on the picket lines and harassment by troops and police.  Giovannitti’s relief efforts set up medical clinics staffed by sympathetic doctors, minimal strike pay, and food rations.

Observers like labor reporter Mary Heaton Vorse noted that the strikers seemed almost gay, “always marching and singing. The tired, gray crowds ebbing and flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their months to sing.”

Early in the strike local police found dynamite in three locations, including a shoemakers shop next to the print shop Ettor used as his mailing address. The Boston American actually reported the story before the explosives were supposedly located.  Despite efforts to tie Ettor and strike leaders to it, a local school board member was eventually arrested and charged with planting the dynamite in an effort to discredit the strikers.

 

The funeral of Anna LoPizzo, shot by police on January 29.

On January 29 Ettor led one of the largest marches yet through the center of the Lawrence business district.  Before the march he addressed the workers and urged them to avoid violence at any cost.  When the Militia blocked a main road, Ettor simply steered the marchers onto side streets to avoid a confrontation.  Later that afternoon as Ettor and Giovannitti addressed a regular strike meeting, a young woman, Anna LoPizzo, was shot and killed during a police charge on a regular picket line.  Witnesses saw a police officer fire the shot.

Despite this Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested and charged with LoPizzo’s murder.  They were held without bail.  In April they were joined by a local striker, Joseph Caruso, who police alleged actually fired the shot that killed her.

Strike leaders Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giavaniti were addressing a mass march when Anna LoPizzo was shot and killed on  a picket line blocks away, but both were charged with her murder.

Martial Law was declared and all public meetings and marches officially banned.  The governor called out 22 more Militia companies.  Two days later a 15 year old Syrian boy was bayoneted to death.

If Authorities thought jailing the leaders would end the strike, they were mistaken.  The IWW General Secretary Treasurer, the legendary Big Bill Heywood himself, arrived.  He brought with him veteran unionist William Trautman and a slip of an 18 year old Irish girl, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn already noted for her fiery oratory.  Her work in Lawrence would catapult her to fame.  She would be memorialized by IWW troubadour Joe Hill himself as the original Rebel Girl.  A few days later the Italian anarcho-syndicalist Carlo Tresca arrived to bolster the IWW team.

15,000 strikers met Heywood and company at the railway station and conducted an illegal parade to Lawrence Common where they all gave rousing speeches.  In all of his addresses Heywood counseled peaceful resistance and against violence.  He also determined to demonstrate the strikers’ patriotism for their adopted nation by making sure that they carried plenty of American Flags.  The most widely circulated photograph of the strike shows Militia with leveled bayonets at massed flag carrying strikers.

 

Massachusetts Militia met a flag carrying mass march of strikers with leveled bayonets.

Women and girls represented more than half of all of the strikers.  They often took the lead on picket lines and were creative in their actions.  One parade of women was led by a large placard reading, “We Want Bread but We Want Roses Too!”  The women probably were inspired by the poem by James Oppenheim that was published in December 1911 in The American Magazine, although popular mythology has it that the strike inspired the poem which was set to music by Caroline Kohlsaat a few years later and became an IWW and later feminist classic.

The turning point of the strike came when strike leaders decided to send children of strikers to be safely cared for by IWW members and supporters in New York.  Margaret Sanger, a volunteer nurse, accompanied the first 120 children to the city on February 10.  Their train was met by thousands of members of the Italian Socialist Federation and the Socialist Party who escorted them through the streets singing The Internationale and Les Marsaillaise.  A second group of 90 children received a similar welcome a few weeks later.  The image of the half-starved children dressed in tatters against the winter chill helped swing public sentiment away from the mill owners and to the strikers.  Alarmed, Lawrence officials announced that no more children would be allowed to leave town.

 

Children evacuated from Lawrence were escorted by Elizabeth Gurly Flynn and Big Bill Haywood to union foster homes in New York City.  The publicity and sympathy generated by the move drove employers into a frenzy.

On February 24 150 children escorted by their mothers attempted to board a train to take them to supporters in Philadelphia.  Local police and three companies of Militia charged the orderly line beating the women and children indiscriminately.  They tried to tear children from their mothers.  Dozens of women and many children were thrown into the backs of Militia trucks where they continued to be beaten.  Thirty of the women, most of them seriously injured were jailed.  Children were removed from the custody of their parents.  The attack was observed by several reporters and was soon widely publicized.

Public outrage at the brutality erased most support for the bosses.  Wisconsin Socialist Congressman Victor Berger and Democrat William Wilson from Pennsylvania demanded a Congressional investigation, which got under way in March.  Public testimony by child workers to the inhumane conditions of the mills stirred the conscience of the Country. 

At the urging of his wife, who attended the hearings, President William Howard Taft announced a nationwide investigation into conditions at industrial plants across the country.  There was talk of stripping the mills of the heavy tariff protections that kept the companies competitive with European producers.

On March 12 the American Woolen Company acceded to all of the strikers’ demands.  By the end of the month even the most recalcitrant owners had fallen into line.  The great Lawrence Strike ended with an unprecedented total victory for the strikers and huge prestige for the IWW.

 

The striker's victory parade on March 13, 1912.

There were still loose ends.  Ettor, Giovannitti, and Caruso remained in jail and no trial date seemed to be coming.  Ettor read voraciously, making a study of the philosophy of organization.  The theatrical Giovannitti staged daily readings from Shakespeare and European poets for the entertainment of fellow prisoners and guards alike.  Heywood threatened a general strike unless they were released and the IWW organized its General Defense Committee to raise funds for their legal team and to support their families. 

 

A Giovanitti and Ettor pin sold to raise money for their defense.

$600,000 was raised, mostly in nickels and dime donations and inexpensive dues and assessment stamps in GDC membership books.  Mass rallies in New York City and Boston addressed by Heywood and Flynn drew thousands.

In August Ernest Pitman, a Lawrence contractor who had built the Wood mill of the American Woolen Company, confessed to a district attorney that the dynamite frame-up had been planned in the Boston offices of Lawrence textile corporations. Pitman committed suicide shortly after he was served papers ordering him to appear and testify before a grand jury.  American Wool Chairman William Wood was eventually cleared of charges against him—only because Pitman was dead.

On September 30 Lawrence workers went out on a one day demonstration strike after John Breen, the local man who tried to frame union leadership by planting dynamite was released with just a $500 fine.  Thousands of other workers at mills in nearby towns joined them.

An attempt to organize a counter demonstration by “Loyal Americans” wearing little American flags as boutonnieres largely fizzled.  But it was memorialized as heroic by the Lawrence establishment and “re-enacted by schools and civic organization during the 50th and 75th anniversaries of the strike during which the IWW was denounced as “the Red blight.”  In 2013 for the centennial, however, with much new research published on the strike, the workers and even the IWW got the attention and respect they deserved.

Despite this, authorities pressed on with the murder trial of the Italians, which began in Salem at the end of the month.  It dragged on for two months.  The highlight of the trial was a long speech by Giovannitti, the first he ever gave in English that was so eloquent that it drove hardened reporters to tears.

On November 12, to almost no one’s surprise all three defendants were acquitted and released.

By the end of the year the IWW local in Lawrence had grown to 10,000 members.  But the union had a hard time sustaining that over the long haul.  A depression later in the decade threw many out of work and experienced IWW unionists turned their attention to other battle grounds. Within four years only 400 dues payers remained, although the influence of the union continued to extend well beyond its reduced membership.