Ultra right wing blogger Thomas E Brewton, who recently published an attack on the IWW full of inaccuracies and outright lies (IWW – Organized Crime in the Labor Market) is at it again, having published more of his anti-IWW screeds. These represents Brewton's desperate attempt to defend his untenable position, that the IWW was (and is) a violent organization that engages in terrorist attacks.

In fact, the opposite is true. The IWW was and is a non-violent, revolutionary union whose goal is to expose and undermine capitalism for what it is: a violent and terroristic economic system. Historically, the IWW has been on the receiving end of violent attacks by capitalist interests and national governments, in particular, the United States government.

No doubt these statements alone will make Brewton's blood boil. One look at Brewton's blog reveals life as seen through distorted ultra right wing, theocratic lenses. In Brewton's world, evolution is an atheistic plot, labor unions (even conservative trade unions) are communist conspiracies, and anyone not sufficiently reactionary is under the influence of socialism. To Brewton, George W Bush's illegal and immoral war on Iraq is a noble cause and anyone who opposes it is a terrorist. This should give rational people an indication of just how delusional this man is.

Here are several documented examples of how the IWW has been the victim of capitalist and government sponsored terrorism and violence in America:

• The Centralia Conspiracy - by Ralph Chaplin
• The Truth About the IWW - by the National Civil Liberties Bureau
• The Everett Massacre, a History of the Class Struggle in the Lumber Industry - by Walker C Smith
• The Bloodstained Trail - Ed Dalaney and M.T. Rice

Response to "More IWW Violence"

Brewton refers to the testimony of WFM member Harry Orchard in the trial of William "Big Bill" Haywood for the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg as proof that the IWW is a violent organization.

He references an historical account given by University of Missouri Law School website. Here is Brewton's chosen excerpt:

"The 1890’s had been a time of unprecedented violence in Idaho’s silver mines. Federal troops were called to Idaho three separate times to combat union-sponsored terrorism that had resulted in many deaths and extensive property damage to mining company property, the last time being an eighteen-month occupation from May, 1898 to November, 1899 undertaken at the urging of Governor Frank Steunenberg. Steunenberg asked President McKinley to send troops after union miners hijacked a train and planted sixty boxes of dynamite beneath the world’s largest concentrator, owned by the Bunker Hill Mining Company of Wardner, Idaho, blowing it and several nearby buildings to smithereens."

Brewton makes it sound like the US Government and the mine owners were innocent victims and the unions (all predating the IWW which formed in 1905) were clearly the criminal element. This of course, is the result of taking information out of context. Had Brewton quoted the first paragraph, the article has a significantly different context:

The struggle between the Western Federation of Miners and the Western Mine Owners' Association at the turn of the twentieth century might well be called a "war." When the state of Idaho prosecuted William "Big Bill" Haywood in 1907 for ordering the assassination of former governor Frank Steunenberg, fifteen years of union bombings and murders, fifteen years of mine owner intimidation and greed, and fifteen years of government abuse of process and denials of liberties spilled into the national headlines. Featuring James McParland, America's most famous detective; Harry Orchard, America's most notorious mass murderer turned state's witness; Big Bill Haywood, America's most radical labor leader; and Clarence Darrow, America's most famous defense attorney, the Haywood trial ranks as one of the most fascinating criminal trials in history (emphasis added).

When the government breaks its own laws and when business owners engage in illegal activities, it should not come as any surprise that union members are prone to respond in kind.

It would also not be out of line to point out that those who fought in the American Revolution and those who fought for the abolition of slavery also engaged in violent acts (usually in response to violent acts committed by those they opposed). If Brewton honestly saw the "view from 1776" has his website title suggests, he'd know this.

The violent acts referred to in the article are those of individual union members, and these took place well before the establishment of the IWW in 1905. There is absolutely no record of IWW members engaging in such violent acts, let alone any official IWW policy condoning such activity.

There is substantial evidence, furthermore, that many of these violent acts were carried about by agent provocateurs hired by the capitalists and U.S. government to undermine the union movement. Pinkerton detective James McParland's own writings detail numerous examples of such activities often carried out by the Pinkerton detective agency itself.

Brewton refers to Harry Orchard as an "IWW union member". While that may have been technically true (because Orchard was a dues paying member of the Western Federation of Miners which affiliated with the IWW), Orchard was not at the IWW's founding convention, nor was he likely to have been an ardent supporter of the IWW for the following reasons:

• The WFM left the IWW (in 1906) almost as quickly as it affiliated with the IWW. The reasons for this are complex, but well documented.
• The case against Haywood was clearly fabricated. Any genuine supporter of the IWW would not have willingly participated in a deliberate attempt to railroad an innocent man.

Brewton essentially regurgitates the prosecution's case in the trial:

In 1904, [Orchard] dynamited the train depot in Independence, Colorado, killing thirteen non-union miners. Later, under orders of Haywood and Pettibone, Orchard said that he attempted assassinations of the governor of Colorado, two Colorado Supreme Court justices, and the president of a mining company.

A little later, Brewton writes:

Orchard testified that he was the fifth man hired by Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone to assassinate Steunenberg. He testified that when he was hired Haywood said to him, "Steunenberg has lived seven years too long." His reward for a successful job was to be several hundred dollars and a ranch. (emphasis added)

However, if one were to actually read the entire University of Missouri Law School's account, they would find this paragraph:

The defense called nearly a hundred witnesses to refute various points of Orchard's confession or cast doubt on his motives. Among those called was Morris Friedman, Pinkerton Detective James McParland's private stenographer and author of a book, Pinkerton Labor Spy. Friedman described dirty tricks used by the Pinkertons to subvert the WFM, including the use of undercover operatives within the WFM who padded bills to drain the Federation treasury and reduced payments to miners to build dissatisfaction with Haywood. The purpose of the testimony was to suggest to jurors that Pinkerton infiltrators may have committed some of the crimes Orchard attributed to the WFM in order to bring the labor organization into disrepute. Charles Moyer and George Pettibone also testified and denied many of Orchard's specific allegations about their complicity in crimes. (emphasis added)

As stated in our original response to Brewton:

Steunenberg was murdered by a police agent and confessed murderer known as Harry Orchard, who implicated officers of the Western Federation of Miners in exchange for leniency from a prosecutor bought and paid for by the mining interests of Idaho. The officers, Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone, were kidnapped in Colorado by Idaho authorities and illegally taken across State lines to stand trial for the killing.

The truth of this statement is verified by documented historical records. A fairly detailed account is provided by Philip S. Foner in Chapter 2 his History of the American Labor Movement, Volume 4, The Industrial Workers of the World (International Publishers © 1965).

The entire case against Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone was a essentially political show trial designed to railroad the IWW and drag the labor movement through the mud. The prosecution's case was so flimsy, despite the bribery and corrupting effects of the capitalists, that it fell apart completely. Two separate juries acquitted Haywood and Pettibone, and the charges against Moyer were dropped.

Brewton ignores all of the important details and twists a few cherry picked "facts" to draw a conclusion completely divorced from reality.

The rest of Brewton's aforementioned blog entry represents pure reactionary nonsense. He spews several paragraphs accusing the ACLU of undermining the very U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights that it attempts so courageously to defend. Predictably, he cites no evidence whatsoever to support his ridiculous claims.

Brewton denigrates Clarence Darrow by citing a lengthy quotation where Darrow essentially argues that the end justifies the means in labor's cause. That Darrow's beliefs are not the official position of the IWW or echoed in any official IWW publication are completely ignored by Brewton.

Brewton concludes his screed with the following sophistry:

Even Mr. Darrow did not deny the violence of labor union radicals, but in typical ACLU fashion, suggested that unionists (and their anarchist and socialist allies) were justified in any degree of violence by the existence of a government that supported private property rights.

The notion that the IWW sought to subvert "a government that support(s) private property rights" is Orwellian in the extreme. What the IWW and the labor movement are actually struggling against is organized thuggery. "Private Property" (as opposed to personal property, i.e. things individuals possess for their personal need and survival) is the use of coercive state power to enforce the theft of land and natural resources for the benefit of a wealthy few.

One should always ask themselves what exactly are the origins of the "private property" in question. In North and South America, every piece of "private property" is land that was taken from the indigenous inhabitants by European invaders though the use of force, trickery, and deceit. Most of that property continues to be held by an elite few and passed on to their descendents through inheritance. The wealth that is generated from these lands and the resources taken from them is done by workers, but the majority of the profit is taken by capitalists through a system enforced largely by laws drafted by those very same capitalists. There is little, if any moral justification for this system despite its numerous defenders.

Essentially "private property" is the end product of a system of organized terrorism. When workers struggle against this system of organized thuggery we call it class struggle. Most of the violence that takes place in the process of class struggle is committed by the capitalist class. This is documented quite extensively in just about any accurate historical source one can find (but of course, since this reality is unpalatable to reactionary theocratic fascists like Thomas Brewton, they simply dismiss these historical accounts as "socialist propaganda").

Occasionally individual workers and sometimes groups of workers engage in violent responses to the organized thuggery of the capitalist class. The IWW does not now, and never has condoned such violent acts. Not only are they immoral and contrary to the IWW's mission, they are strategically ineffective. The IWW recognizes that it is not the individual capitalist itself that represents the problem, but the institution of capitalism that must be replaced.

Brewton offers one last parting shot:

What the IWW stood for was Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, a war of all against all, in which life was nasty, brutish, and short.

This is, in fact, the opposite of what the IWW stands for. Hobbesian rhetoric is generally used by the capitalist class to justify the suffering endured by workers under the yoke of capitalist economics. The IWW argues, contrarily, that life needn't and shouldn't be this way. The IWW believes that the wealth of the world should be shared (not hoarded by a few brutish parasites), that since labor produces all wealth, labor is entitled to all wealth, that human nature is essentially cooperative rather than competitive. The IWW's ideal society is the polar opposite of the hell described (and championed) by Thomas Hobbes.