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.

 

Those Warbling Wobblies Are a Singing Union With Little Red Songbooks

A vintage edition of the IWW Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent a/k/a The Little Red Songbook.  This version featured a cover illustration by Ralph Chaplin based on the poster for the Patterson Pageant in 1913.

There have been at least 38 editions of the working people’s hymnal popularly known as the Little Red Songbook since it appeared in 1909.  Here is the story of those remarkable little books.

The Wobblies—members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—were always part of a singing union.  From the earliest strikes and job actions after the union’s founding in 1905 music was a part of meetings, rallies, marches, and picket lines.  Nowhere was this truer than in the Pacific Northwest for early organizing drives among lumber workers who were often called timber beasts because of their ragged appearance and often near starving conditions. 

Unable to effectively get to remote logging camps, IWW organizers relied on street meetings in cities like Spokane, Washington to protest the job shark hiring agencies that dispatched men to the camps collecting fees from the ax men and employers alike.  They found that songs helped attract crowds for the union’s soapbox orators. When Salvation Army Bands were often sent to drown out the meetings workers would sing the old hymns with new words.

The Spokane local issued a song card featuring four selections in 1906.  The sold for a penny, but most were probably handed out for free at the street meeting.  The card featured already familiar labor songs and one original— Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.  McClintock was a former Texas cowboy, harvest worker, and hobo who had become a lumber worker while also working as a musician in saloons.  The song was originally written in the 1890’s but was popular with all sorts of migratory workers.  McClintock also penned another popular Hobo song, The Big Rock Candy Mountain.  

A rare and battered copy of the Songbook's first edition published by the Spokane, Washington IWW local.

The song cards were so successful that the local decided to assemble and sell a small songbook designed to easily fit into a shirt pocket.  It sold for 10¢, not an insignificant sum in those days when a dime could generally buy a meal at Skid Road diners, but not a prohibitive one.  The first edition did not have the now familiar red cover but did have red lettering.  The songbook hit the streets in January of 1909 and was an immediate success. The book’s official title was a mouthful—Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops – Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Subsequent editions shortened that to Songs of the Workers and/or Songs of the IWW to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Three editions were printed in Spokane over the next three years and were bound in heavy red stock, giving it the enduring nickname, The Little Red Song Book.  But that title appeared on only two of the subsequent 38 official editions.

Each new songbook added new songs like the labor standards The Red Flag sung to the tune of O Tannenbaum, the global Socialist anthem The Internationale, and the easily adapted Civil War song Hold the Fort.

When the Spokane local was under siege during aftermath the 1909 Free Speech Fight, issuing and printing new editions shifted to Seattle.  It was in an early Seattle edition that Joe Hill’s song The Preacher and the Slave was published in 1911.  Mac McClintock claimed to be the first to sing it at a street meeting because Hill was too shy to perform publicly.  

                                    Carlos Cortez's linocut poster tribute Wobbly bard and martyr Joe Hill.

Joel Hägglund a/k/a Joseph Hillstrom and Joe Hill was a young Swedish-born itinerate worker who had been involved with the IWW for a few years.  Several of his songs were added to editions of the Songbook including The Tramp, Stung Right, Where the River Frazier Flows, There is Power in a Union, Mr. Block, and Casey Jones Union Scab all of which have become labor standards.  Hill was famously framed on a murder charge in Salt Lake City, Utah.  While being held he was inspired by young IWW orator Elizabeth Gurly Flynn who worked tirelessly on his defense committee and who had visited him in jail to write The Rebel Girl.

After Hill’s execution by firing squad on November 19, 1915 his poem Final Will was included in all subsequent editions of the Songbook.  At least two later versions of the book were officially named Joe Hill Memorial Edition, including one issued by the Cleveland Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union 440 in the early 1950’s.  By popular demand later editions have also included I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson which was popularized by Paul Robeson and Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs’ long ballad Joe Hill.

Industrial Worker editor Ralph Chaplin wrote the enduring labor anthem Solidarity Forever.

Other notable early additions to the Songbook included Dump the Bosses off Your Back by John Brill.  Industrial Worker editor and commercial artist Ralph Chaplin’s rousing Solidarity Forever was included in a 1916 edition and has become the leading labor anthem of all time.  Chaplin’s illustrations were also used on the covers of several editions.  The powerful We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years with words by an “Unknown Proletarian” and music by Rudolph Von Liebich appeared in 1919.

Somewhat surprisingly a song closely associated with the IWW’s 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike did not make it into the Songbook until 1984 although it appeared in the union magazine Industrial Pioneer in 1946.  James Oppenheimer’s Bread and Roses was first published as a poem in the American Magazine in December of 1911 shortly before the strike.  The mostly women mill workers adopted Bread and Roses as their strike slogan.  It wasn’t until the 1940’s that Carolyn Kohlsatt adapted the song to the melody most Wobblies still sing, although an alternative tune by Mimi Fariña in 1976 is gaining popularity.  In the 1970’s the song became a Women’s Liberation anthem as much as a labor one and it has even been included in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.

Production of the Songbooks moved to IWW General Headquarters in Chicago and resumed after the great post-World War I Red Scare sent most Wobbly leaders, including Ralph Chaplin, to prison.  The ‘20s saw the appearance of another notable contributor, Matt Valentine Huhta, who signed is contributions T-Bone Slim including The Popular Wobbly, Mysteries Of A Hobo’s Life, and The Lumberjack’s Prayer.

Editions of the Songbook have also included labor songs from other sources notably Woody Guthrie’s Union Maid with an updated final verse by Nancy Katz, The Banks are Made of Marble by Lee Rice and popularized by the Almanac Singers with more contemporary lyrics added, Which Side are You On by Florence Resse, and the old British rouser The Black Leg Miner as sung by Billy Brag.

The "double tall" 1995 36th edition featured music from around the world as well as old favorites an music for each song.

In 1995 the union issued an unusual “double tall” International Edition, one of only two editions to use the words Little Red Songbook on the cover.  In addition to most of the standard songs included more modern music and songs from around the world including songs in Spanish.  It also included for the first and only time the full musical notation of each song.

Wobblies have continued to add new songs and adapted old ones, especially with more gender inclusive language.  Bruce “Utah” Phillips was the union’s popular balladeer, philosopher, storyteller, and inveterate agitator who died much loved and mourned in 2008.  His contributions to the book included Larimer Street, Starlight on the Rails, and All Used Up.  He also introduced the music from the Songbook to whole new generations.  

Bruce "Utah" Phillips introduced the IWW and its songs to  new generations.

Other newer contributors include Anne Feeney, Scabs and Whatever Happened to the Eight Hour Day; Kathleen Taylor, The LIP Song and Soul Stealers; Goddard Graves, Go I Will Send Thee; Leslie Fish, Babylon Updated and Freedom Road; Carlos Cortez, Outa Work Blues; Darryl Cheney, Where Are We Gonna Work When the Trees Are Gone and Who Bombed Judi Bari; and Tom Morello, Union Song.

Hell, even I made an appearance under the moniker The Irish Cowboy with a rock & roll picket line song Roll the Hours Back and The Dark and Dreary Slum Where I Was Born, a take-off on Woody Guthrie’s Oklahoma Hills.

Rebel Voices was the realization of a long cherished dream to produce a "Little Red Record."

Utah Phillips gathered both touring and Chicago-based member of the IWW’s Entertainment Workers Industrial Union #630 for a concert performance at Holstein’s on Lincoln Avenue to record a long dreamed of “Little Red Record.”  Released under the title Rebel Voices in 1988 the record included performances by Phillips, Faith Petric, Fred Holstein, Bruce Brackney, Marion Wade, Bob Bovee, Jeff Cahill, Kathleen Taylor, J. B. Freeman, Robin Oye, Eric Glatz, and Mark Ross.  It is still available on CD or by Download.

Almost all of the songs included in the first 36 editions of the Songbook are included in The Big Red Songbook published by Charles H. Kerr & Company.

In 2007 noted folklorist Archie Green published The Big Red Songbook which included 250 songs culled from the various editions of the IWW songbook.  In 2016 a new edition was co-edited by Green, labor historian David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Solerno with an introduction by Tom Morello, the Wobbly rocker of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, and posthumous afterward by Utah Phillips.