Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Duluth, Minnesota 1908 4- ir + £ jL 5K«a p&ftt'Ss ILL sw*UH»

In 1915, ten years after the IWW came into existence, there began to develop a self-critical attitude in the organization. Articles appeared on “Why doesn’t the IWW Grow?” Debates grew on why we failed to hold our membership. The cold fact was that 300,000 membership cards had been issued during the decade. Workers passed through the IWW—but they did not stay. The most glowing figure set our membership at 50,000 in 1915. There was a growing demand by then to get out of the purely agitational state and build constructive and permanent organization. The first try at this was the setting up of the Agricultural Workers Organization, known as the AWO, in April 1915. It opened its own headquarters in Kanas City, Missouri. It drew up a plan to organize the farm laborers and harvest hands in a belt of mid- western states—“the breadbasket of America” and during the war years a producer of food for many other lands.

The soap box approach was abandoned. Skid row was no longer the forum of the IWW, a situation which had precipitated so many of the free speech fights. (One of the last of these was in Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1914, the second struggle in that town in two years.) A job delegate system was organized, a mobile setup of men who worked on the jobs and followed the harvest, starting at the Mexican border in early Spring and finishing up in late fall at the Canadian border and beyond it. It functioned as a union, with a schedule of work and wages it was able to enforce, because of the highly seasonal nature of the work and perishable quality of the crops harvested. It moved its headquarters to Minneapolis, with Walter Nef as secretary, and by 1915 it numbered 18,000 members.

The AWO came into the 1916 IWW convention as the strongest group there. This stimulated similar plans among the lumber workers and metal miners, with concentration on wages, hours and working conditions. The lumber workers planned an industry-wide campaign for the eight-hour day and set May 1, 1917, as “bundle burning day”—all rolls of blankets, which the men carried on their backs, were to be burned and the camps forced to furnish clean bedding. This was considered a most revolutionary demand on the part of the “bindle stiffs.” In 1916 the IWW made a real turn in the West toward job organization and union demands. If there had not been a war it might still have been able to anticipate the CIO by two decades, at least in

The strike of 1916 on the Mesabi Range involved some 16,000 iron-ore miners, employed by the Oliver Iron Mining Company. It was a vital spot, the raw material supply for the U.S. Steel Trust. A thousand plug-uglies from Duluth and other places were deputized as marshals and had virtually taken over the Range, which swarmed with them and with gunmen of the companies. Fortunately some of the towns had progressive mayors—like Powers of Hibbings, and Boylon of Virginia—who kept them out of the towns. The Finnish organizations owned excellent halls, even opera houses in some places, which the strikers used as headquarters and where we held mass meetings.

The strike had started in June. Joe and I went there in July, and it wasn’t easy to assemble a new core of leaders after all the known local leaders had been arrested. But they were good fighters. Many of them then on strike had been brought in from the Baltic states ten years before to break a strike of the Western Federation of Miners. Conditions had then driven them to revolt, as happened in Lawrence and in most IWW strikes—retributive justice for the employers. They were demanding an eight-hour day, a minimum wage of $3.00 for underground mining, $3.50 in wet places and $2.75 on the open-pit surface, abolition of the contract system and payday twice a month. Men were working on the open-pit surface for $2.60 for a ten-hour day. A system of graft on the part of the mine captains, where those who paid for them got the better jobs, and abuses such as “raffles”—held by the captains and paid for on a compulsory basis by the miners for non-existing prizes—aggravated the conditions. The miners had to pay for powder, fuses, tools, etc., but no proper accountings were given to them.

While the Range towns were clean and quite attractive, a great many of the miners lived in isolated settlements called “locations,” with tumble-down shacks, outhouses, and no sidewalks. These were unincorporated company towns. Water was from a community pump or well, owned by the company , where the water was sometimes shut off in reprisal for the strike. Brutal clashes occurred between deputies and strikers on the desolate locations, often involving women and children of strikers as well. Mary Heaton Vorse describes one of the locations and the gunmen in her book, Footnote to Folly, as follows:

Vincent St. John came to Chicago in 1907 after he had been shot in Goldfield. On his recovery, he became general organizer of the IWW and then its secretary. He remained at this post until July 1915. He was one of the clearest thinkers in the IWW and fought consistently to save it from becoming a tail to the kites of Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party on the one hand and what he contemptuously called “the anarchist freaks” on the other. He tried hard to make it a militant industrial union. Most of the big and dramatic struggles led by the organization occurred in this period—the steel strike at McKees Rocks, the Spokane and San Diego free speech fights, the lumber strikes in Louisiana and the Northwest, the textile strikes of Lawrence, Little Falls and Paterson, the Akron rubber strike, the struggle to free Ettor and Giovannitti. At the helm in the Chicago national office was

He felt frustrated and dissatisfied because permanent organization failed to materialize from all of these heroic efforts. He had been an organizer and a strike leader, identified closely with the rank and file of the militant Western Federation of Miners. Now he felt he was on the side lines. He disliked the East and big cities; he longed for the wide open spaces of the West, and cast around for a successor. William D. Haywood, still far from well, had indicated his desire to take over the office. St. John came East to testify before the Industrial Relations Commission, of which Frank P. Walsh, a progressive lawyer, was co-chairman with ex-President William Howard Taft. The change-over to Haywood was discussed by all of us, then St. John resigned and Bill Haywood was proposed and accepted at the next IWW convention. Joe Ettor was elected general organizer.

St. John was weary of the routine of indoor work and decided to become a prospector. He went to Jicarilla in Lincoln County, New Mexico, to take up the development of a copper mining property there. As a self-employer, he automatically ceased to be a member of the IWW.

He knew Haywood was “touchy” as to his authority and resentful of the hold “the Saint” had on the love and loyalty of the members. Therefore his correspondence with me and a few others was personal and casual. A stockholding company had been set up around Saint’s project, many old-time ex-miners became interested and some went down there to work with the Saint. He made trips to stockholders’ meetings in Chicago, one in 1917, and naturally paid a friendly visit to the IWW office. But when he came he was careful to keep it on that basis. He had once advised me on lawyers for the Mesabi Range and we both incurred the wrath of Haywood in consequence.

“Prospecting” was the dream of every hard-rock miner in those days. Tucked away in their memories were likely locations and untapped veins, which might spell striking it rich. Many old-timers who had worked in rich mines of big corporations would struggle for years like this in the hope of hitting the “mother lode” in some other areas. Saint had one spot called “Red Mountain,” where they worked hard for several years, but unsuccessfully, on such a project. His hope was to make enough money to finance the revolutionary movement. He had no personal ambitions. He and his wife had separated and she re


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mained in Chicago and eventually remarried. His one weakness was a good hat—a common trait in male Westerners then. They wore their hats like Walt Whitman, “indoors and out.”

When the IWW campaign among the copper miners began many of them urged the Saint to become an organizer, but he refused. Haywood did not consult him on any of the new policies and the only link between St. John and the IWW was that Haywood placed his name on the list of persons who could take over the office of secretary in case the incumbents were arrested. Saint did not know of this. To prevent the possibility of Saint resuming leadership of the IWW in the event of Haywood’s arrest, he was included in the Chicago indictment of 1917 and arrested on October 31, at Jicarilla, New Mexico, where he was working in the shaft. He was held in jail in that state until December 13, when he was taken to the Cook County jail in Chicago. We raised his bail by March 23, 1918, and he was at liberty until the trial ended and he was convicted. They were taken in a special train to Leavenworth Prison.

The charge was “seditious conspiracy,” under the wartime emergency law. I tried very hard to persuade him to do what we had done in New York—move for a severance of his case on the legal ground of nonmembership and inactivity during the entire period of the indictment. But he was confident that his case would be dismissed without a trial or that a trial would result in his acquittal. He vainly hoped that his “good case” would help focus attention on the flimsy nature of the whole conspiracy charge. He testified during the trial as a defense witness. In an atmosphere of wild hysteria, before a sadistic and erratic judge, Vincent St. John was not tried for any words or deeds after the United States entered World War I. He had simply worked in his mine, and he could hardly be tried for that. But this man, who was modest to a fault, his name unheralded by any halo of heroes, was called in the press “the brains of the IWW.” Even more sinister hatreds operated against him, especially among the mine owners of the West, than against any other of the defendants. The head hunters were out to get him.

He was tried solely for his activities and reputation as an organizer in former years and as the ex-secretary of the IWW. He was sentenced to ten years and a $30,000 fine by Judge Kenesaw M. Landis. (Thirty- four years later a nephew of Judge Landis was on the jury that con

While he was at liberty he helped raise bail for the ones still in prison, making a trip East for this purpose. He stopped off at Pittsburgh to visit Foster who was then leading the nation-wide steel strike. I knew his visit to the Iron City pleased him very much but I heard the details from Foster years later. Saint said: “You’ve got a bunch of AFL organizers here. They must all own war bonds. Let’s tackle them for bail.” Foster introduced Saint to them and he collected a substantial amount while there, but it was all “sub rosa” at that time.

His mining project was ruined by this interruption and his two years of hard labor were wasted. When the Supreme Court rejected the appeal, he returned to Leavenworth in 1921. He was extremely bitter, as were many of the IWW prisoners, when “the Big fellow,” as he called Haywood, left for Russia, especially after Haywood had insisted on all the men surrendering for trial in 1917. Big Bill had a 20-year sentence, was sick with diabetes and wanted to die in freedom. He died in the Soviet Union in 1928.

In retrospect, many of them felt that our course in New York had been more sensible and effective. Because of the particularly outrageous aspects of St. John’s case and my personal devotion to him, I made a special campaign on his behalf. I had tried to get Judge Hilton to handle his appeal. But no motions for severance and other necessary legal moves had been made to protect the rights of individual defendants and there was no peg to hang an appeal on. But I secured the services of Clarence Darrow to make a try at it. He presented a special brief to the Supreme Court on Saint John’s behalf. After the Saint went to Prison, I arranged for Harry Weinberger of New York to handle further legal efforts on his behalf. We were greatly disappointed when he was not released at Christmas, 1921. Sydney Lanier had written a letter to the President characterizing Saint’s imprisonment as “a gross miscarriage of justice and an outrage that every consideration of right and the peace and good order of society demand should be corrected.” Later, in 1922, the good news came through that St. John’s application for a commutation of sentence had been signed by the President. A few days later Carlo called me at my office and said: “Guess who’s here? The Saint.” We took him to the beach with us for a few weeks, where he began to recuperate from the effects of prison.

No strike passed in those days without bloodshed, caused by vicious attacks on strikers. “Force and violence” was not advocated by the IWW. It was frankly advocated and freely used by the employers. This was true on the Mesabi Range. When the striker John Alar was shot by the deputies feeling ran high. At the funeral, strikers carried banners which read: “Murdered by the Oliver Iron Mining Company.” This was the company dominant on the Range—named after Henry W. Oliver, who had squeezed out the original local owners in the panic of 1893, shortly after the ore beds were discovered. Bitter speeches advocating self-defense against attack were made at the graveside. Deputies, who lounged nearby in menacing attitudes, were reminded of the Biblical proverb: “An eye for an eye.” Pictures were taken by a self-styled “IWW photographer” from New Castle, Pennsylvania, named Dawson. These pictures were later used in a preliminary hearing against the strike leaders. The photographer was subsequently revealed as a stool pigeon for the U.S. Steel Company.

Shortly after the funeral a group of four deputies raided the home of a striker, Nick Masonovich, in Biwabik. In a letter I wrote on July 21, 1916, to my friend Mary Heaton Vorse, after my arrival on the Range, I described what had happened as it was reported to us by the strikers.

Four deputies entered a striker’s home without a warrant and attempted to arrest him. His wife objected and they clubbed her into insensibility. The husband and three boarders (Montenegrins) jumped to her defense and in the fracas a deputy, Myron, and a strikers’ sympathizer, sitting on a pop wagon outside the door, were killed. No guns were in the crowd but the deputies, and an eleven-year-old son testified that he saw the mine guard, Nick Dillon (ex-bouncer of a disorderly house), fire directly at the man on the wagon. The boarders were all shot and lay in jail wounded for days. The woman had to be taken to a hospital. The strike speakers were at once arrested, charged with murder on the theory that their speeches had incited violence. It is like the Ettor-Giovannitti case—except that in this state, accessories are guilty in the first degree and are liable to life imprisonment. No arrests were made for the murder of the popman; the death of the deputy is the only one the state concerns itself with.

The ranks are unbroken, and the ore production is crippled. Of course,


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relief is becoming a pressing problem and we hope the East will realize this and help financially.

When Joe Ettor and I arrived in Duluth we found that Mr. and Mrs. Masonovich and the baby, the three boarders and 15 organizers and local IWW leaders—all they could round up—were in the county jail in Duluth. I went to see Sheriff Meining in his office to get permission to see Carlo Tresca. He was a much worried man, not too bright, as is usual with sheriffs. But he gave me the desired consent to go to the jail. When I was leaving he asked: “Do you plan to go up to the Range?” and I replied: “I was there in 1909 and in 1915 and I plan to go now. That’s what I’m here for and I demand protection from you against any attacks.” He seemed astounded at my audacity—an IWW organizer demanding protection—and he growled: “Nothing will happen to you there.”

That evening I took a train to the Range, escorted by a local coworker. But not trusting the sheriff, I got off at a siding near Virginia, where the train made a short stop. Devastated by lumber companies and the steel corporation, it is a stark, bleak country, relieved by the red earth and the evergreen trees. We were met by a strikers’ committee who took me directly to a Finnish striker’s home. For quite a few days I stayed first in one home and then in another. I was not welcome at the local hotels. Finally, during the hot days of July and August, I slept the weary sleep of exhaustion at an Italian boarding house. The wife of the family was a fat, jolly, perspiring woman who cooked and cleaned for a group of boarders—12 or 14 men—who slept, barracks fashion, in one big attic room upstairs. She banished her husband to this masculine retreat and took me in with her in a little bedroom off the dining room. There was not much air, the room was festooned with their clothes, working and Sunday best. The men sat up late, playing cards, drinking wine and talking about the strike. Finally they clumped off to bed. It seemed no time at all until they were cheerily making coffee and starting out for the picket line in the gray dawn. When Mary Heaton Vorse came, I sneaked into a hotel room with her, without registering, and enjoyed some quiet and the luxury of regular baths.

I considered it my first task to secure the release on bail of Mrs. Masonovich. I made a trip to Minneapolis, where I contacted some prominent club women who became interested in her plight. One, Mrs. Hamlin, was the daughter of former Governor Austin of Minnesota

All that summer the strike dragged out a dogged existence. We raced up and down the Range from one end to the other in an old bakery truck driven by a couple of young Italian strikers, who often forgot we were not bread and bounced us unmercifully over the unpaved rocky roads. The deputies came to know the truck and took pot shots at us, so we had to stop using it, much to our relief. There were about 14 towns from one end to the other, which we covered. Several times the strikers marched the length of the Range, holding meetings in each town. On one occasion some towns shut off the drinking water while they were there.

Mrs. Hamlin accompanied me on one trip to Crosby, Minnesota, on the Cuyuna Iron Range, adjoining the Mesabi. No sooner were we settled in a hotel than an anonymous message was shoved under my door threatening bodily violence if I did not leave town at once. A few minutes later I was informed the sheriff of that county wanted to see me. With Mrs. Hamlin by my side we went downstairs to find the parlor full of deputies. The sheriff started very belligerently—if I had come to make trouble, he would arrest me forthwith, he threatened. But when Mrs. Hamlin told him who she was and that she had come from St. Paul, delegated by a group of women’s clubs, to see that I was not assaulted as other women had been while picketing, and insisted that I had the right to speak and that no harm must come to me, he quieted down very quickly and was quite apologetic. We had a large, enthusiastic meeting of local workers that night who supported the Mesabi strike generously.

On another occasion, Mrs. Vorse accompanied me on a trip to the iron mining county of Michigan, where all male organizers who went there, including Frank Little, had been deported. But we got by without incident and held a very good meeting at Iron Mountain, raising considerable funds. Our only concern, as she humorously de