Today in Labor History August 23, 1909: IWW strikers boarded a streetcar in McKees Rock, Pennsylvania looking for scabs, during the Pressed Streetcar Strike, in the Mckees Rock borough of Pittsburgh. A deputy sheriff shot at them and was killed in the return fire. A gun battle ensued that killed 12-26 workers. IWW cofounder, William Trautman, led the Wobbly contingent during the strike. He later wrote a novel, “Riot,” based on the strike. After the authorities arrested Trautman during the strike, Big Bill Haywood and Joe Ettor came to organize the strikers.

Pressed Streetcar employed 6,000 people, mostly immigrant, from 16 different ethnic backgrounds. It was the second largest streetcar manufacturer in the country. Working conditions were horrendous, even by Pittsburgh standards. Locals referred to it as the slaughterhouse. The local coroner estimated that workers were dying at a rate of one per day, mostly by cranes. Slavic immigrants complained that company officials forced their wives and daughters to perform sexual favors in exchange for debts owed to the company for food and rent.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #strike #union #IWW #pittsburgh #riot #massacre #police #PoliceBrutality #PoliceMurder #BigBillHaywood #immigration #books #author #writer @bookstadon

Today in Labor History August 11, 1894: Federal troops drove over 1,000 jobless workers from the nation's capital. Led by Charles "Hobo" Kelley, an unemployed activist from California, and Jacob Coxey, they camped in Washington D.C. starting in July. Kelley's Hobo Army included a young journalist named Jack London and a young miner-cowboy named Big Bill Haywood. Frank Baum was an observer of the protest and some say it influenced his Wizard of Oz, with the Scarecrow representing the American farmer, the tin man representing industrial workers and the Cowardly Lion representing William Jennings Bryan, all marching on Washington (Oz) to demand redress from the president (the Wizard). 650 miners, led by a "General" Hogan, captured a Northern Pacific train at Butte, Montana, en route to the protest. The Feds caught up with them at Billings, forcing a surrender, but a few eventually made it to Washington.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #washington #unemployed #poverty #JackLondon #BigBillHaywood #WizardOfOz #union #solidarity #fiction #novel #author #writer #books @bookstadon

Sabotage means to push back, pull out or break off the fangs of Capitalism.

--William "Big Bill" Haywood

#Workingclass #LaborHistory #BigBillHaywood #sabotage #IWW #capitalism #ClassWar #union #DirectAction

Today in Labor History July 10, 1894: The Pullman Rail Car strike was put down by 14,000 federal and state troops. Over the course of the strike, soldiers killed 70 American Railway Union (ARU) members. Eugene Debs and many others were imprisoned during the strike for violating injunctions. Debs founded the ARU in 1893. The strike began, in May, as a wildcat strike, when George Pullman laid off employees and slashed wages, while maintaining the same high rents for his company housing in the town of Pullman, as well as the excessive rates he charged for gas and water. During the strike, Debs called for a massive boycott against all trains that carried Pullman cars. While many adjacent unions opposed the boycott, including the conservative American Federation of Labor, the boycott nonetheless affected virtually all train transport west of Detroit. Debs also called for a General Strike, which Samuel Gompers and the AFL blocked. At its height, over 200,000 railway workers walked off the job, halting dozens of lines, and workers set fire buildings, boxcars and coal cars, and derailed locomotives. Clarence Darrow successfully defended Debs in court against conspiracy charges, arguing that it was the railways who met in secret and conspired against their opponents. However, they lost in their Supreme Court trial for violating a federal injunction.

By the 1950s, the town of Pullman had been incorporated into the city of Chicago. Debs became a socialist after the strike, running for president of the U.S. five times on the Socialist Party ticket, twice from prison. In 1905, he cofounded the radical IWW, along with Lucy Parsons, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and Irish revolutionary James Connolly. In 1894, President Cleveland designated Labor Day a federal holiday, in order to detract from the more radical May 1st, which honored the Haymarket martyrs and the struggle for the 8-hour day. Legislation for the holiday was pushed through Congress six days after the Pullman strike ended, with the enthusiastic support of Gompers and the AFL.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #railway #strike #union #EugeneDebs #socialism #anarchism #IWW #massacre #SCOTUS #prison #GeneralStrike #boycott #afl #haymarket #conspiracy #MotherJones #LucyParsons #BigBillHaywood #Revolutionary

Today in Labor History June 27, 1905: The Industrial Workers of the World (AKA IWW or the Wobblies) was founded at Brand's Hall, in Chicago, Illinois. The IWW was a radical syndicalist union, that advocated industrial unionism, with all workers in a particular industry organized in the same union, as opposed by the trade unions typical today. Founding members included Big Bill Haywood, James Connolly, Eugene V. Debs, Lucy Parsons, and Mother Jones. The IWW was and is a revolutionary union that sought not only better working conditions in the here and now, but the complete abolition of capitalism. The preamble to their constitution states, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” They advocate the General Strike and sabotage as two of many means to these ends. However, sabotage to the Wobblies does not necessarily mean bombs and destruction. According to Big Bill Haywood, sabotage is any action that gums up the works, slowing down profits for the bosses. Thus, working to rule and sit-down strikes are forms of sabotage. The IWW is the first union known to have utilized the sit-down strike. They were one of the first and only unions of the early 20th century to organize all workers, regardless of ethnicity, gender, nationality, language or type of work (e.g., they organized both skilled and unskilled workers).

There are lots of great books about the IWW artwork and music. The Little Red Songbook. The IWW, Its First 50 Years, by Fred Thompson. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, by Joyce Kornbluth. But there are also tons of fictional accounts of the Wobblies, too. Lots of references in Dos Passos’, USA Trilogy. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, was influenced by his experience working as a Pinkerton infiltrator of the Wobblies. The recent novel, The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter, has a wonderful portrayal of Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, during the Spokane free speech fight.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #anarchism #iww #LucyParsons #BigBillHaywood #MotherJones #EugeneDebs #union #strike #GeneralStrike #DirectAction #sabotage #Revolutionary #book #novel #writer #fiction #author @bookstadon

Today in Labor History June 13, 1914: A riot erupted at the Miner's Union Day parade in Butte Montana. Frustration and mistrust of the primary union, WFM, had been growing for decades. In 1914, miners were being paid only $3.50 a day, the same as in 1878, despite the fact that the price of copper had more than doubled in that same time period. Also, the WFM failed to get hundreds of Finnish miners reinstated after they were fired en masse, or to call a strike in support of these workers. Dissident union members, led by the IWW, accused WFM members of ballot stuffing and being in the pay of the copper bosses. They destroyed WFM headquarters, burned records and stole $1,600. Cops watched and laughed, but did nothing to stop the rioting. During the riot, acting mayor Frank Curran was pushed out of second-story window. And the home of P.K. Sullivan, a WFM official, was dynamited. Overall, however, the riot was a disaster for all the miners. The bosses exploited the conflict by recognizing no unions, making the Butte mines open shops, without any official union representation, from 1914 to 1934.

The conflict between the two unions went back many years. Two of the WFM’s best organizers, Big Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John, helped cofound the more radical IWW in 1905. Initially, the WFM affiliated with the IWW and became their mining section. However, many WFM didn’t like the radicalness of the IWW and later voted to unaffiliate. In 1908, St. John tried to organize a stealth takeover of the WFM, but failed. In 1911, the WFM affiliated with the conservative American Federation of Labor.

#LaborHistory #WorkingClass #IWW #wfm #union #riot #montana #BigBillHaywood #corruption

Today in Labor History June 10, 1904: The National Guard deported 79 striking Colorado miners to Kansas, following a battle between the Colorado Militia and striking miners at Dunnville that had occurred two days prior. The battle ended with six union members dead and 15 taken prisoner. Dozens were arrested without warrants and held without formal charges. All this occurred during the infamous Colorado Labor Wars (1903-1904) in which dozens of striking workers were slaughtered by cops, national guards and vigilantes and hundreds were deported. The miners, organized by the Western Federation of Miners, and led by future IWW founders Big Bill Haywood and Vincent Saint John, often fought back with guns, and engaged in sabotage, blowing up mines.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #mining #colorado #police #PoliceBrutality #acab #IWW #wfm #BigBillHaywood #militia #union #strike #massacre #vigilante #deportation

Today in Labor History May 18, 1928: Big Bill Haywood died in exile in the Soviet Union. He was a founding member and leader of both the Western Federation of Miners and the IWW (the Wobblies). During the first two decades of the 20th century, he participated in the Colorado Labor Wars and the textiles strikes in Lawrence and Patterson. The Pinkertons tried, but failed, to bust him for the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg. However, in 1918, the feds used the Espionage Act to convict him, and 101 other Wobblies, for their anti-war activity. As a result, they sentenced him to twenty years in prison. But instead of serving the time, he fled to the Soviet Union, damaging his image as a hero among the Wobblies. He ultimately died from a stroke related to his alcoholism and diabetes. Half his ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. The other half of his ashes were sent to Chicago and buried near the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #IWW #union #strike #BigBillHaywood #soviet #haymarket #kremlin #sabotage #mining

Today in Labor History April 19, 1913: Modestino Valentino, a bystander, was shot and killed by company detectives during a conflict between IWW strikers and scabs in Patterson, N.J., during the infamous Silk Strike, which the workers ultimately lost on July 28, 1913. During the strike, 1,850 workers were arrested, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #IWW #patterson #strike #union #PoliceBrutality #BigBillHaywood #ElizabethGurleyFlynn

Today In Labor History April 3, 1913: Pietro Botto, socialist mayor of Haledon, N.J., invited the Paterson silk mill strikers to assemble in front of his house. 20,000 showed up to hear speakers from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Upton Sinclair, John Reed and others, who urged them to remain strong in their fight. The Patterson strike lasted from Feb. 1 until July 28, 1913. Workers were fighting for the eight-hour workday and better working conditions. Over 1800 workers were arrested during the strike, including IWW leaders Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Five were killed. Overall, the strike was poorly organized and confined to Paterson. The IWW, the main organizer of the strike, eventually gave up.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #Patterson #strike #IWW #union #anarchism #PoliceBrutality #socialism #UptonSinclair #JohnReed #BigBillHaywood #ElizabethGurleyFlynn

Today in Labor History March 23, 1918: 101 IWW members went on trial in Chicago for opposing World War I and for violating the Espionage Act. In September, 1917, 165 IWW leaders were arrested for conspiring to subvert the draft and encourage desertion. Their trial lasted five months, the longest criminal trial in American history up to that time. The jury found them all guilty. The judge sentenced Big Bill Haywood and 14 others to 20 years in prison. 33 others were given 10 years each. They were also fined a total of $2,500,000. The trial virtually destroyed the IWW. Haywood jumped bail and fled to the USSR, where he remained until his death 10 years later.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #IWW #communism #anarchism #ussr #soviet #BigBillHaywood #antiwar #FreeSpeech #prison #deportation #RedScare

Today in Labor History March 12, 1912: The IWW won their Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, MA. This was the first strike to use the moving picket line, implemented to avoid arrest for loitering. The workers came from 51 different nationalities and spoke 22 different languages. The mainstream unions, including the American Federation of Labor, all believed it was impossible to organize such a diverse workforce. However, the IWW organized workers by linguistic group and trained organizers who could speak each of the languages. Each language group got a delegate on the strike committee and had complete autonomy. Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn masterminded the strategy of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, drawing widespread sympathy, especially after police violently stopped a further exodus. 3 workers were killed by police during the strike. Nearly 300 were arrested.

The 1911 verse, by Poet James Oppenheim, has been associated with the strike, particularly after Upton Sinclair made the connection in his 1915 labor anthology, “The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest”

As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,

For they are women's children, and we mother them again.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;

Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #IWW #BreadAndRoses #PoliceBrutality #union #ElizabethGurleyFlynn #BigBillHaywood #strike #picket #immigrants #poetry #novel #UptonSinclair @bookstadon

Today in Labor History March 7, 1942: IWW cofounder and anarchist labor organizer Lucy Parsons died on this date in Chicago, Illinois. Lucy Parsons was part African American and part Native American. Her mother had been a slave. In 1871, she married Albert Parsons, a Confederate soldier, in Waco, Texas. Soon after, they were forced to flee due to racism, moving to Chicago. There they participated in the Great Upheaval of worker rebellions that swept across the U.S. in 1877. They were also active in the movement for the 8-hour day and other worker movements. In 1887, the authorities executed Albert, along with several other anarchists, for the Haymarket bombing, even most hadn’t been present at the bombing. In 1905, Lucy Parsons cofounded the IWW, along with Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood and others. In 1915, she organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations. They were so effective that they pushed the AFL, the Socialist Labor Party and the Hull House to participate. In 1925, she participated in the International Labor Defense, which defended workers, communists, the Scottsboro Nine and others.

#LaborHistory #WorkingClass #LucyParsons #IWW #haymarket #anarchism #communism #racism #rebellion #8HourDay #MotherJones #EugeneDebs #execution #BigBillHaywood

Today in Labor History March 1, 1907: The Industrial Workers of the World struck sawmills in Portland, Oregon. Earlier in the year, they held a demonstration to support Big Bill Haywood, who was on trial on bogus murder charges for the assassination of former Idaho Governor Frank Stuenenberg.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #IWW #portland #union #strike #BigBillHaywood

Today in Labor History February 25, 1913: The IWW-led silk strike began in Paterson, New Jersey. 25,000 immigrant textile workers walked out when mill owners doubled the size of the looms without increasing staffing or wages. Workers also wanted an 8-hour workday and safer working conditions. Within the first two weeks of the strike, they had brought out workers from all the local mills in a General Strike of weavers and millworkers. Over the course of the strike, 1,850 workers were arrested, including Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Five workers were killed during the 208-day strike. The strike ended in failure on July 28.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #PattersonSilkStrike #IWW #ElizabethGurleyFlynn #BigBillHaywood #massacre #strike #GeneralStrike #8HourDay

Today in Labor History February 17, 1906: The authorities arrested "Big Bill" Haywood and two others on trumped up charges for the murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Stuenenberg. Clarence Darrow successfully defended them, telling jurors, "If at the behest of this mob you should kill Bill Haywood, he is mortal, he will die, but I want to say that a million men will grab up the banner of labor where at the open grave Haywood lays it down . . ." The actual perpetrator was a one-time WFM union member named Harry Orchard, who was also a paid informant for the Cripple Creek Mine Owners' Association.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #BigBillHaywood #IWW #WFM #union #strike #mining #socialism #ClarenceDarrow

Today in Labor History February 4, 1869: Labor leader and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) co-founder William D. "Big Bill" Haywood was born. Haywood started mining at age nine. He became secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) in 1900 and co-founded the IWW in 1905. He was a WFM organizer during the Colorado Labor Wars (1903-1904), in which 33 miners were killed.

At the IWW’s first convention (1905), he said, “We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working-class from the slave bondage of capitalism. The aims and objects of this organization shall be to put the working-class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.” With the IWW, he came up with the propaganda ploy of sending workers’ kids out of town, for their own safety, during the Lawrence Textile Strike (1912), leading to a media backlash against the mill owners and the ultimate victory for the workers.

In 1907, he was falsely charged with the bombing murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg, but was acquitted with the counsel of Clarence Darrow. The WFM dismissed him in 1918 because of his radicalism. That same year, the Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (future first commissioner of Major League Baseball) convicted him of violating the Alien and Sedition acts during the first Red Scare for his antiwar activism. They sentenced him to 20 years in prison. However, he jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928 from heart failure and alcoholism. His ashes were split between the Kremlin Wall Mausoleum and the Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Chicago.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #bigbillhaywood #IWW #wfm #haymarket #kremlin #union #strike #capitalism #antiwar #socialism #soviet #sabotage

Today in Labor History February 1, 1913: The IWW Patterson silk workers’ strike began. They were fighting for an 8-hr work day and better working conditions. Over the course of the strike, 1,850 workers were arrested, including Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Within the first two weeks of the strike, they had brought out workers from all the local mills in a General Strike of weavers and millworkers. Two workers died in the struggle, one shot by a vigilante and the other by a private guard. The strike ended in failure on July 28.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #patterson #strike #IWW #ElizabethGurleyFlynn #8hourday #generalstrike #police #prison #BigBillHaywood #vigilantes

Today in Labor History January 11, 1912: The Bread and Roses textile strike began in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The IWW organized and led this strike of 32,000 women and children after management slashed wages. A group of Polish women walked out after receiving their pay and realizing they’d been cheated. Others soon joined them. The strike lasted 10 weeks. Many sent their children to live with family, friends or supporters during the strike to protect them from the hunger and violence. Members of the Modern School took in many of these kids. During the strike, the cops kept arresting the women for loitering. So, they began to march as they protested. This was the first known use of the moving picket line. The strike was led by IWW organizers Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood, Joe Etter and Arturo Giovannitti. Hundreds were arrested, including Etter and Giovannitti, who were charged with murder. 3 workers died.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #union #strike #IWW #breadandroses #immigrants #picket #bigbillhaywood #elizabethgurleyflynn #prison

Today in Labor History December 30, 1905: Governor Frank Steunenberg of Idaho was assassinated by a bomb. Steunenberg had been elected on a Populist Party "defend the working man" ticket. But then he called on federal troops to crush the 1899 miners’ strike. Authorities promptly blamed members of the radical WFM, including Big Bill Haywood. The actual assassin was Harry Orchard, a WFM union member who was also a paid informant and agent provocateur for the Cripple Creek Mine Owners’ Association. The investigation was conducted by Pinkerton agent James McParland, the same man who infiltrated the Ancient Order of Hibernians in eastern Pennsylvania and acted as an agent provocateur, leading to the wrongful executions of 20 Irish miners. After interrogation by McParland, Orchard signed a 64-page typed confession claiming that he had been hired to kill Steunenberg by the WFM leadership ("Big Bill" Haywood; General Secretary, Charles Moyer; and President George Pettibone). Superstar labor lawyer Clarence Darrow got all three WFM defendants acquitted. Orchard pled guilty and received a death sentence in a separate trial, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison. McParland also plays prominently in my novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” about the period leading up to the wrongful executions of the Irish miners.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #bigbillhaywood #union #strike #wfm #Pinkertons #assassination #irish #racism #miners #historicalfiction @bookstadon