Radical Wobblies found support among loggers

0:00Good morning, Oregon. I'm Finn J.D. John F.J. at OffbeatOrgan.com, and this is the daily Offbeat Oregon History Podcast. Thanks for tuning in, and I hope you enjoy it. The story was first published on January 27th of 2012 under the headline Radical Wobbodies found support among Oregon loggers. Here we go. In early 1917, shortly after the US declared war on Germany, the first detachment of US soldiers was dispatched to the forest of Western Oregon. It turned out that the wildest, boldest stand if you were a capitalist, most terrifying labor union in US history had

1:00got its hooks deep into the logging business just as demand for timber reach its peak, and as the rest of the country was marching off to war, the loggers were marching off the job. That union was the industrial workers of the world, better known as the wobblies. The year and a half that followed would be eventful ones in Oregon and Washington, they'd see the US Army actually chartering a labor union of its own. US soldiers taken from the trenches of Europe and deployed with axes and saws to cut timber in the woods, industrial sabotage, even some violence in the woods. They'd also result in the adaptation of the eight-hour workday, something the mill and logging owners had fought bitterly to stop since they paid their men by the day rather than the hour. The IWW was founded in 1905 and was, by all accounts, an extraordinary outfit. It was a labor union fully committed to the concept of class warfare, the need for workers to seize the means of production and fully convinced of the hopelessness of trying to effect change by working within the system. The wabs didn't bother fielding political candidates

2:05to get labor laws changed. They preferred, quote, direct action, street demonstration strikes, industrial sabotage. They used stickers with a black cat printed on them, called the Sabotabby, to let everyone know when they broke something on purpose. They were known for ferocious street preaching in which members would shout about the need for a revolution and for a general war against the, quote, clowns and the, quote, barons. That would be police and capitalists respectively. But IWW people quickly figured out that the timber industry was ready to hear their message. Real wages in the woods had been sliding for some time, and conditions were getting worse every year. Bunk houses were getting smaller and less hygienic. Camp food was getting cheaper and less plentiful. Working hours were stretching into the 12 to 14 hour range. The timberlands had all been snapped up by trusts like warehouse and there were few opportunities left for bright eyed young men to work their way into the middle and upper classes through a logging camp. It had become a dead end, a hobo's job. The workers were itinerant so getting fired was no big deal. You just

3:09hired on somewhere else. They had nothing to lose. So the IWW started working logging camps in mill towns pretty hard. They found some members, but mostly what they found was a lot of sympathy for what they were saying among men who didn't want to get directly involved. And that's where things stood on the eve of the First World War. What happened then was simply this. The timber markets exploded. Prices shot through the roof. Suddenly the government was buying finished lumber by the cubic acre and not being price sensitive about it at all. An Oregon in particular was the primary source for the most desirable would of all. The straight, true, stable, lightweight, splinter-resistant sitka spruce. Overjoyed the factory and logging company owners started making plans to save and spend the torrents of lovely money that would soon be coming their way as the market price per board foot doubled and doubled again, and it never occurred to them that their low-level employees would even be aware of their good fortune. If it had, they wouldn't have considered it to any of their business. It was the workers' job to cut the wooden cash their paychecks,

4:11regardless of how much their bosses were making by selling it. So no, wages were not going to go up. If anything, they'd go down because of the powerful incentive to lengthen the work day. In the logging camps, though, the slaves, as the IWW's newspapers called them, started simmering with rage. Their wobblies had preached the concept of class conflict for a decade, and now it looked an awful lot like they were right. The bigs were about to gather in a massive windfall of profits made possible by their work, and it was clear that the rising tide was not going to be allowed to lift all the boats. It wasn't fair, they fumed. And the fight was on. The logger started striking, spiking logs, sabotaging equipment. They wanted an eight-hour work day, they wanted bunk houses with beds in them, they wanted better wages, and a few other things. The owners of the mills and logging outfits were furious and frantic about the opportunities for profit they were passing them by every single day, but they refused a budge because, after all, if you give a mouse a cookie, it will just keep wanting more cookies, right? Well, as spring blossomed into summer, the US Army started taking notice

5:14of the fact that they were getting less lumber out of the west rather than more. So they sent a general named Bruce Diske out to investigate. Diske figured out several things. First, the wobbly's had several very legitimate beefs. Wages were really low, bunk houses were nasty and full of bedbugs, and 12 hours is a long time to be out cutting timber with a cross-cut misery whip saw. But he also figured out that with their earnest advocacy of armed insurrection, the wabs were a dangerous organization, and as long as they had legitimate beefs, they would remain dangerous, if not get more so. And he also learned that as long as it was the wabs arguing for these changes, the owners wouldn't budge for fear of empowering their enemy. So Diske did two things. First, he sent army troops into the woods to start cutting timber, and second, he started labor union. The army's union was called the loyal legion of Lagerson Lumberman, four Ls. Technically, it wasn't really a union because its bylaws forbade it to go on strike, but it was an organization that soon included hundreds of thousands of workers.

6:17And one that quickly developed a reputation for being reasonable, and thanks to the active backing of the United States army, it was fairly effective in trimming away the more egregious violations of 1910's industrial management. Many of the owners were furious. They were especially angry about having the eight-hour workday more or less crammed down their throats. But there was a point beyond which, if they resisted, they would simply have had their businesses nationalized, after all there was a war going on. So they had to swallow hard and go along. But if the army's plan was to take the wind out of the IWW sales, as many believe it was, it worked. From a membership of around 100,000 card carrying members in 1917, the union collapsed to just a few thousand, and those that remained felt a bitter internessing fighting. Their advocacy of sabotage and hoosuring, which is deliberately working very slowly, during a national shooting war, had focused on them the ire of an aroused population, and many of them went to jail under the Espionage and Sedition Act, which was passed soon after this. A bloody shootout with the American legionans and trailier after the war, which appears to have

7:22been provoked by a rogue wobbly, put the final nail in the coffin of the wobbly's reputation with the public. And then the communists, comicals in wobbly speak, rose up on their left and stole away their more extreme members, and by the mid-1920s the wobblies were spanned as a serious political force. But the eight-hour workday, that was here to stay. Key sources in this story included works by Stuart Holbrooke, James Rowan, and Robert Tyler. That's our show for today. Thanks again for listening. This podcast is part of Offbeat Oregon History, a public history resource for the state we love. Say are you an audiobook listener, and do you enjoy old pre-war pulp stories like Tarzan of the Apes and Conan the Barbarian and the Call of Cthulhu and stuff like that? Or do you like early Victorian penny-readful fiction, like Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampire and Highwayman Dick Turpin? If so, you might enjoy the audiobooks I have out there in the world. The easiest way to find them is for the search for my name

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