The Old Left

THE WOBBLIES by Paftrick Renshaw. 312 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

For bindle stiffs on the West Coast trudging from mine to logging camp, the Wobblies were a sacred symbol. For immigrants just off the boat and tending looms in New England textile mills,

"Wobbly" was often the first word of English they could speak. The term stood for Industrial Workers of the World, founded in Chicago in 1905 by a hot-eyed collection of Socialists, anarchists and native radicals, ranging from Big Bill Haywood to Eugene Debs --who had led the Pullman strike, the first nationwide confrontation of capital and labor in U.S. history.

As a national movement, the Wobblies lasted barely 50 years, but they made it a lively half-century. Their story is sufficiently rich and vivid to survive even the unfortunate cast of academic language employed by the author, a British scholar and an editor of the Oxford Times. To some extent, the Wobblies were the progenitors of today's New Left. They shared the same detestation of contemporary society and the same desire to build a better world.

But there are vast differences as well: the Wobblies, for example, were drawn almost totally from the working classes; they were men with callused hands and confident hearts.

Massed Choirs. They were remarkable radicals, for they had a sense of humor and a singing voice. Many of their songs--Casey Jones, Joe Hill, Solidarity Forever--are still heard. Their goal was one big worldwide trade union, and eventually they established branches from Australia to Scandinavia.

But the major drama was played out in the U.S. The Wobblies organized the migratory workers of the Far West and fully integrated the locals of whites and Negroes in the Deep South; they staged combative strikes in eastern mills and among the farm hands of the Midwest. They were theatrical by nature. To dramatize the issues in the 1913 general strike in Paterson, N.J., they took over Madison Square Garden for a Paterson Pageant. Massed choirs sang a funeral march as red carnations were piled on the caskets of slain strikers.

Glorious Blaze. The Wobbly martyrs had a flair for last words. Convicted on debatable evidence of the murder of a

Salt Lake City shopkeeper, Joe Hill was sentenced to death. Before he faced a firing squad, he wired Big Bill Haywood: "Don't waste time mourning. Organize!" Frank Little, "half Indian, half white and all I.W.W.," was lynched by masked men in Butte, Montana, but not before he had said: "Better to go out in a blaze of glory than to give in." When a mob of war veterans stormed I.W.W. head quarters in Centralia, Wash., Wesley Everest was cornered and caught. He sneered: "You haven't got the guts to hang a man in the daytime." He was right: the mob came back that night, snatched him from jail and hanged his bullet-riddled body from a bridge.

It is remarkable that the I.W.W. accomplished anything, so great were its built-in weaknesses. It was torn by factional fights and filled with company spies and agents provocateurs. Basically, they could never decide whether they were a revolutionary movement or a trade union. Their contemptuous distrust of the employer made it impossible for them to handle the bread-andbutter details of rates, hours or factory disputes. Faced with any industrial problem, the Wobblies solved it by going out on strike or sabotaging machinery.

Bad English. The great Red scare after World War I hastened their end. In 1918, after a series of mass deportations and jailings, 101 Wobbly chieftains were tried in Chicago on a five-count indictment charging them with various conspiracies. The presiding judge was Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who, according to Wobbly John Reed, had "the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead." The accused were found guilty and their sentences ran up to 35 years' imprisonment. Wobbly wit flickered a last time when Ben Fletcher, the only Negro defendant, cracked: "Judge Landis has been using bad English today--his sentences are too long."

What repression could not fully accomplish, inner dissension did. Some Wobblies--including Helen Gurley Flynn and John Reed--drifted toward Communism. Others slowly eased their way back into society. Ralph Chaplin, as great a labor poet as Joe Hill, turned both conservative and Catholic. English-born Charles Ashleigh became a gold prospector in Mexico.

By 1955, the I.W.W. did not have job control in a single U.S. factory, and its position as a mass union had been taken over by the C.I.O. Even so, the C.I.O. long depended on many techniques originated by the Wobblies, ranging from the sitdown strike to integrated locals to a lively interest in civil rights. In the era of the twelve-hour day and child labor in mines and mills, the I.W.W. was one of labor's more effective weapons. The Wobblies engendered real fear and antagonism in many quarters, and perhaps intensified antilabor prejudice. But over the long run, the Wobblies undoubtedly helped to open the nation's eyes to the imperfections of the age.

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