Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [282]
In the United States the employers’ counter-offensive also gathered force, backed by court decisions which used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to outlaw picketing, boycott and strikes as restraint of trade. Like the hilltop signal fires of ancient times, Syndicalism sent its message across the Atlantic and it flared into existence in America with the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. Created by Debs and “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners in strange alliance with De Leon, the IWW was, by European standards, an impossible combination of Syndicalism and Socialism. It preached the doctrine of direct action, while Debs, its hero, campaigned as Socialist candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
American Socialism, like Russian, since it had no representatives in Congress and no role in government even at the municipal level, was protected from the temptations of collaboration. Debs by now had completely espoused the doctrine of class war to the end. Workers must be revolutionaries, not compromisers with the existing order. Their object was not merely to raise wages but to abolish the wage system. He saw Syndicalism as taking over the revolutionary spirit of original Socialism and as offering the means to achieve the promised goal through the trade-union methods in which he had grown up. In a letter to thirty trade-union leaders in December, 1904, he invited them to join in discussing “ways and means of uniting the working people of America on correct revolutionary principles.” At its opening convention in Chicago on June 27, 1905, attended by miners, lumbermen, railwaymen, brewery workers and other industrial unions and Socialist factions, the IWW declared itself to be “the Continental Congress of the working class” which would unite skilled and unskilled in one great industrial union to overthrow capitalism and establish a Socialist society. Declaring for the ultimate weapon of Syndicalism, its slogan was “One big Union and one big Strike.” According to Haywood—a one-eyed giant and “a bundle of primitive instincts”—the IWW would go down into the gutter to reach the “bums” and migratory workers and bring them up along with the whole mass of labour to a “decent plane of living.” Scorning collective bargaining, agreements and political effort, it would work through propaganda, boycott, sabotage and the strike. Government, politics, elections were the bunk; the country should be run by the unions.
The IWW’s rejection of political action set off a series of schisms and secessions which flew like woodchips from an ax. Debs was violently attacked by some Socialist colleagues for splitting the labour movement. De Leon broke away in 1908 and continued from his diminished outpost to fight for pristine principle. For Debs the goal was everything and any method which led to it, political as well as direct action, acceptable. Despite the Syndicalist principles of the IWW he ran again for President as the candidate of the Socialist party in 1908. In meetings across the country Haywood and others raised money in pennies and nickels to rent a locomotive and sleeping car to carry Debs on his campaign. Passing locomotive engineers tooted their whistles as the Red Special with red banners streaming from its roof and rear platform went by. Debs had a way of making people believe in the attainability of Socialism. Without brass bands or loud-speakers, his voice, smile and outstretched arms were enough. He “actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man,” said a hard-bitten organizer who confessed himself pained when anyone else called him Comrade. “But when Debs says Comrade, it’s all right. He means it.” Families in wagons with