Soapbox Rebellion: The Hobo Orator Union and the Free Speech Fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909-1916

By Matthew S. May

Soapbox Rebellion, a new critical history of the free speech fights of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), illustrates how the lively and colorful soapbox culture of the “Wobblies” generated novel forms of class struggle.
 
From 1909 to 1916, thousands of IWW members engaged in dozens of fights for freedom of speech throughout the American West. The volatile spread and circulation of hobo agitation during these fights amounted to nothing less than a soapbox rebellion in which public speech became the principal site of the struggle of the few to exploit the many. While the fights were not always successful, they did produce a novel form of fluid union organization that offers historians, labor activists, and social movement scholars a window into an alternative approach to what it means to belong to a union. Matthew May coins the phrase “Hobo Orator Union” to characterize these collectives.
 
Soapbox Rebellion highlights the methodological obstacles to recovering a workers’ history of public address; closely analyzes the impact of hobo oratorical performances; and discusses the implications of the Wobblies’ free speech fights for understanding grassroots resistance and class struggle today—in an era of the decline of the institutional business union model and workplace contractualism.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780817386962

Book preview

RHETORIC, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE

SERIES EDITOR

John Louis Lucaites

EDITORIAL BOARD

Barbara Biesecker

Carole Blair

Joshua Gunn

Robert Hariman

Debra Hawhee

Steven Mailloux

Raymie E. McKerrow

Toby Miller

Austin Sarat

Janet Staiger

Barbie Zelizer

Soapbox Rebellion

The Hobo Orator Union and the Free Speech Fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909–1916

MATTHEW S. MAY

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2013

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Goudy Old Style

Cover photograph: The Battle for Bread at Lawrence. Front cover illustration of The International Socialist Review, March 1912, Volume 12, No. 9.

Cover design: Gary Gore

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

May, Matthew Scott.

    Soapbox rebellion : the Hobo Orator union and the free speech fights of the industrial workers of the world, 1909–1916 / Matthew S. May.

         pages cm. — (Rhetoric, culture, and social critique)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8173-1806-2 (trade cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8696-2 (e book) 1. Labor movement—United States—History—20th century. 2. Industrial Workers of the World—United States—History. 3. Radicalism—United States—History. 4. Social conflict—United States—History. 5. Freedom of speech—United States. I. Title.

    HD8072.M3149 2013

    331.88'60973—dc23

2013010845

To Janice Odom, Brian Lain, and Ronald Greene

For the Possible

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

1. Nothing in Common: Militant Rhetorical History

2. Sparks from a Live Wire: The Origins of the Free Speech Fights and the Battle of Spokane, 1909–1910

3. A Class the Masters Fear: Fresno, 1910–1911

4. A Spectacle of Agitators: San Diego, 1912

5. Timber-beast Lament: The Everett Massacre, 1916

6. Orator War Machines and the Will to Revolution

Notes

Glossary of Hobo Terms Used

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

1. On the Road to Spokane, International Socialist Review, December 1909

2. Which Side Is Your Hump On? Industrial Worker, June 1909

3. Fleecing the Workers, Industrial Worker, March 1910

4. When Will It Strike Next? Industrial Worker, October 1910

5. Sulpher Smoke Grabs a Rattler, International Socialist Review, May 1912

6. The Reason, Industrial Worker, December 1912

7. Where We Have Them, Industrial Worker, 1909

Acknowledgments

I am very fortunate to have been part of communities of intellectuals, organizers, agitators, educators, comrades, friends, critics, and fellow workers that have supported me throughout the composition of this book. Many of the ideas for Soapbox Rebellion were generated in common: during graduate seminars, reading groups, affinity groups, conferences, union and community organizing meetings, on picket lines, campouts, dumpster dives, archive trips, coffee breaks, occupations, and in many conversations that extended late into the night. To borrow a phrase from Lawrence Weiner, which incidentally may be found on the southeast wall of the Walker Art Museum in uptown Minneapolis, it was, however, only my intellectual training at the University of Minnesota that enabled me to put these bits and pieces of ideas together to present a semblance of a whole. Special thanks to my friend and mentor Ronald W. Greene, for patience, grace, and intellectual rigor. Thanks also to Edward Schiappa, Kirt Wilson, Lisa Disch, and Cesare Casarino for intellectual inspiration and thoughtful feedback. I am deeply grateful to the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota for a grant funding initial archival research at the Walter P. Reuther Library during the summer of 2007. I would also like to thank the graduate school at Minnesota for a fellowship that funded all of my research activities during the academic calendar year of 2008–9. I am grateful to have received an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Writing and Rhetoric Department at Colgate University. I would like to thank all of my colleagues at Colgate, especially Margaret Darby, Suzanne Spring, Kermit Campbell, Jennifer Lutman, and Pat Kane, for intellectual support and friendship during my fellowship. Thanks also to John Adams, coordinator of the Colgate Speaking Union, and all of his wonderful debaters, for supporting my courses in public address. Most recently, colleagues in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University have provided invaluable support as I have pursued the completion of this project, including a course release and summer research leave. The North Carolina State Office for Research, Extension, Engagement, and Economic Development provided me with an important grant that funded on-the-ground research at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City in 2011. Special thanks to Kenneth Zagacki, department head, for his mentorship and enthusiastic support of my academic efforts. Thanks also to Jeremy Packer, Steve Wiley, and David Zonderman for thoughtful advice and friendship. I owe a special thanks to the many librarians, interlibrary loan staff, and archivists at the following institutions: North Carolina State University, Colgate University, University of Minnesota, Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, Minnesota Historical Society, Fresno County Public Library, New York Public Library, University of Washington (Everett Massacre Collection), San Diego Public Library, Spokane Public Library, and Everett Public Library. Special thanks to William Lefevre for spending many hours assisting me at the Reuther. Thanks also to Salvatore Salerno, author of the important book Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World, for sharing personal archival material (and many insights). Throughout the years, I have been stimulated, inspired, and challenged by many colleagues and friends in the field of rhetoric. Special thanks to James Aune, Barbara Biesecker, Daniel Brouwer, Charles Morris III, and Mary Anne Trasciatti for their support and guidance at various stages of my career. Thanks to the University of Alabama Press, the anonymous reviewers, Editor-in-Chief Dan Waterman, and Series Editor John Louis Lucaites for their wisdom and guidance through this process. This book would not have been possible without the affection and support of my dearest comrades, Casey Kelly and Travis Neal, with whom I have passed many hours of necessary leisure time. Thanks to my family, for all of their encouragement and support. A previous version of the second chapter appeared as Hobo Orator Union: Class Composition in the Spokane Free Speech Fight of the Industrial Workers of the World in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (97) 2011: 155–77. Portions of this article are reprinted here by permission of the publisher, Taylor and Francis, Ltd. Special thanks to Wendy A. May for proofreading. Finally, my sincere and profound thanks to Jess, for her enduring love and tireless encouragement of all of my efforts.

Preface

This book represents my efforts to rethink Rhetorical Marxism, not through engaging in theoretical or metatheoretical debate with other scholars in my field, at least not primarily, but rather through the concrete act of writing rhetorical history. The act of writing and rewriting history is always informed by the selection of one story out of the infinite story, so to speak, and the choice to tell that story in one way rather than another. History is therefore always motivated by a previous decision, one that involves a question of exclusion and voice; hence, it is always political, always violent. My own politics will no doubt become clear by the end of the book, when I turn directly to consider the way in which the hobo orators of the free speech fights might speak to contemporary activists. While important debates about Rhetorical Marxism in the discipline of communication studies remain unresolved, at least for some, my hope is that this text speaks for itself and on its own terms, laying out a field of possibilities in which the memory of stories of resistance can communicate with emerging class struggles. This hope is no doubt based on my understanding of critique as an affirmative act, a saying yes that is not first predicated on a saying no that negates the other. I am nevertheless painfully aware that certain theoretical formulations throughout the book will leave some of my comrades nonplussed or agitated—but is there really any other way to be when faced with the tremendous burden of thinking revolution? Other readers may balk at the detailed histories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the evolution of the hobo orator union—but isn't organizational (and disorganizational) history the mundane reality of anticapitalism? Readers are invited to use the book in the manner that Brian Massumi invites readers to use the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.¹ Whatever the case may be, explore the potential of the book in your own way: make use of what works, discard what doesn't, repurpose formulations and connect them up with other projects, or perhaps simply consider the value of perspective acquired through incongruity.

1

Nothing in Common

Militant Rhetorical History

I can think of no better way to introduce readers to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) than this statement in the preamble to their constitution: The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. It is a bold statement—perhaps the boldest statement of working class autonomy and struggle in the history of the labor movement in the United States. There can be little doubt that the IWW developed many novel expressions of this statement, in word and deed, throughout the many storied battles they have waged, and continue to wage, against bosses everywhere. In this book, I reconsider how and to what extent the major free speech fights that the IWW undertook in the American West from 1909 to 1916 gave expression to class struggle through public address and the establishment of a lively culture of soapbox oratory among migratory workers.¹ Indeed the volatile spread and circulation of hobo agitation during the free speech fights amounted to nothing less than a soapbox rebellion in which speech and its conditions of possibility were the site and the stake of the struggle of the few to exploit the many. As far as I know, I am the first to characterize the mobile and often ad hoc collectives of soapbox orators and audiences, forged in the fires of these struggles, as a hobo orator union. It is important to indicate, therefore, that unlike the familiar nickname for members of the IWW, Wobblies, hobo orator union is a new characterization that is intended to describe the organization of relations of solidarity and the way of being together in the world that is made possible through the material affordances of this particular rhetorical culture. As I hope to demonstrate, this method of reading class struggle into rhetorical history—not through penetrating speech texts to assess levels of consciousness but through attending carefully to how collective assemblages of enunciation confront the regulation of speaking beings and the uses to which the social surplus of communication is put—is also performative, laying out a plane of consistency in which the past is no longer simply before but instead consists of the unrealized potential of the present moment.

A colleague once remarked that the very idea of a hobo orator is oxymoronic, for nothing contrasts more with the romantic image of the orator-statesman than the displaced and downtrodden wandering poor. It might be added that nothing contrasts more to the business union collaborationism of today than the open anticapitalism and solidarity of the Wobblies. Now, at the centennial anniversary of this series of struggles, if we can clear away the foggy hubris of the present long enough so that a fresh look at the hobo agitators of the IWW becomes possible, we may yet gain insight into communication and more specifically oratorical practice, not simply as a vehicle through which class consciousness is conveyed, but itself a direct enactment of class struggle, that is to say, struggle over the conversion of labor power into capital.² We may discern in the transformations of the struggle over time the increasing ability to mobilize the state of exception in defense of the threats and potential threats to the interests of capital, if only to arrive at a provisional understanding of how to avoid the unwitting repetition of the ultimate demise of the hobo orator union in bloodshed and protracted legal battles.³ We may see indeed that it is not we who are returning to the Wobblies but the Wobblies who are returning to us, spots of light on the dark radar of the future, sabots, thought long-forgotten, slowly rusting away the mainframe, enough for hope, anyway.

The IWW stood alone in the early years of the twentieth century as the only union to coordinate a serious and sustained attempt to organize the millions of unorganized (waged and unwaged) migratory workers circulating throughout the American West. They were founded in Chicago in 1905 with the fundamental objective of overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with a more democratic system, modeled after workplace democracy and industrial organization. The founders, including such notable figures as William D. Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, Daniel DeLeon, Mary Harris Mother Jones, Thomas Father Haggerty, and many other important left-wing socialists and industrial unionists, envisioned the IWW as the vehicle through which all workers could be organized, industry by industry, into One Big Union, commonly known as the OBU. Through this model of organization, adapted to the circumstances of modern industrial production, the working class could build the capacity to alter the balance of power between themselves and the employing class and carry on production when capitalism is overthrown. It is crucial to note the difference between the IWW and forms of unionism that are underwritten by an identity of interest between workers and capitalists. While the American Federation of Labor (AFL), known by the IWW as the "A F of Hell or the American Separation of Labor, believed in a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, the Wobblies declared that there would be no peace until the workers of the world enjoyed the full product of their toil, the goods. The Wobblies opposed any compromise or contract except to gain a tactical or strategic advantage in the class struggle. They rejected artificial divisions of the working class by craft, nationality, race, or sex, and even, in the case of the hobos, employment status. Furthermore, the Wobblies were a revolutionary organizing union but not in the contemporary sense of developing mass membership campaigns; instead they put into practice Marx's dictum that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself" and organized so as to develop and nurture the collective capacities of the class for self-organization and direct action.⁴

I should mention that this book only constitutes a slice of colorful Wobbly history, and a partial one at that. When possible, I have attempted to include the many breathtaking moments in the story of the free speech fights: hundreds and even thousands of hobos riding above or below boxcars to stand on a box and say a few words in spite of imminent threats of beatings and arrests, organizing pitched battles against hired thugs around pots of beans in the jungle camps outside of town, taking flight to Mexico to liberate Tijuana and establish the Baja Commune, and, of course, steaming into Everett, Washington, on the ill-fated voyage of the Verona, only to be massacred at the city docks by the local sheriff, to name only a few examples. I have tried to permit the eventfulness of this cycle of struggles to be affirmed in the writing of their history. To the extent that this sort of endeavor is possible it is informed by the idea, proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, that events do not release their full potential in their historical actualization—that there persists unspent potential in an event that can not so much be signified but rather affirmed in the concrete act of repetition and difference (in this case, through writing).⁵ The approach does not involve reading symbols for the secrets of history or hidden ideological agendas. It does not seek to cure its object through any method of therapeutic reading. It seeks neither to correct its object nor to speak on its behalf.⁶ As it happens, to paraphrase Baruch Spinoza, it is not we who affirm the event but rather the event that affirms something of itself in us.⁷ John Durham Peters has shown that in the Gospel of John, the ‘ontological dative’ is a form that makes it possible to speak of one person's being ‘in’ another, as God is in Christ, or Christ is in his disciples.⁸ If in the Christian tradition the ontological dative relates to sharing a spiritual consubstantiality and thus partakes in the kind of ontological dualism that is at the heart of the idealist philosophical project, my concern is writing as material extension of the subjective transformation that was effected during this cycle of struggles and doing so in the hope of unleashing residual potential for theorizing the conditions of possibility of class struggle—after all, nobody knows what the body can do, as Spinoza has said. In short, this is a book that does not imagine itself as separate from the compositional ontology of which it and its subject are both a part.⁹

With these objectives in mind, I now turn to review a sample of the existing literature on the free speech fights and to further outline some of the theoretical principles that govern my approach to writing militant rhetorical history. On the one hand, in Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, a book that to its credit provides the only extensive scholarly investigation of the free speech fights, David Rabban argues that the free speech fights suggest an emerging vernacular rights consciousness that stood in contrast to the long-held conservative views of the prewar Supreme Court.¹⁰ Indeed, the regular violence and bloodshed committed by the deputized thugs of western militias against Wobblies generated some popular sympathy for the cause of free speech, paving a discursive context for the liberalization of national attitudes. Despite the profound importance of this work, the focus on the evolution of constitutional issues in public discourse shifts the focus from the recomposition of the productive forces within capital that these struggles effected. On the other hand, the most common interpretation among sympathetic labor historians and postwar Wobblies is that fighting for free speech distracted workers from their proper task of organizing workers at the point of production. Too much time, argues Fred Thompson, was spent fighting for free speech on its own account.¹¹ Greg Hall's recent and acclaimed book, Harvest Wobblies, argues that it was a mistake to consider a public, street appeal for union membership an actual organizing strategy. He further argues that such appeals could not lead to substantive organizing but rather to mere publicity for free speech.¹² The iconoclastic hobo, riding the rails, singing the praises of bumming and sabotage was perhaps too unruly, even for the later IWW, in their attempt to coordinate the universal organization of workers, industry by industry. In either case, the dislocation of the orators from the context of migratory production within which they circulated may have the unfortunate effect of casting the hobos as mere bums, or worse, as mere free speech activists.

Mobilizing themselves through public oratorical practices provided hobos with a technology for self-organization through which they could partake in a common resistance to the attempts of capital in collusion with employment agents to capture hobo labor power in the process of small scale circulations. Drawing on Marx, I use the term small-scale circulation to refer to the process through which wages paid for time in production are exchanged for subsistence and the means of reproducing the workers capacity to work.¹³ Since labor power (that is, the capacity to work) by structural necessity can never exchange itself, the payment of a wage for time in production represents only the exchange of labor power in an objectified form. As Antonio Negri explains, This means that the capitalist relation, exchange and exploitation do not annul the independence of the proletarian subject.¹⁴ In an important sense, the objectification and exchange of labor power (that is, the conversion of labor power into capital), involves a constant struggle over time. As Marx writes, The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor power he has bought from him.¹⁵ The worker is paid a wage and given time outside of the immediate point of production in order to reproduce his or her capacity to resume anew the objectification and consumption of labor power as a commodity each day. Adrian Wilding argues that, by this logic, the fragments of qualitative time spent in projects which neither valorize capital (through work or consumption) nor simply reproduce labor power not only rob the capitalist but also constitute the possibility of communism in the here and now.¹⁶ Negri describes the materialization of the actuality of communism through a resistance that does not consist of simply a point of immobility, but rather is itself a cycle, a movement, a growth, as self-valorization.¹⁷

Class struggle, formulated as a movement of self-valorization, should not be confused with appeals to the dignity of labor, which can still be heard in the most recent battles of the labor aristocracy (for example, in the losing battle against Scott Walker's antiunion legislation in Wisconsin), because these are appeals to labor power in its objectified form, that is, as capital, or at least insofar as it can be converted into capital; and this is precisely what the concept of self-valorization is meant to combat.¹⁸ Moreover, the idea of communism as the time of the jetzeit (here and now) presents an important corrective to the teleological version of historical materialism that posits communism in some future and subsequently bypasses the short circuit between the hobo orators of the IWW and the black bloc insurrectos marching against global financial institutions and smashing the windows of a multi-national corporation. The human microphones of Occupy Wall Street. The liberators of the Baja Commune. Joe Hill. Chuck D. Free Speech in Spokane. The Battle of Seattle. The Massacre at Everett. Bloody Genoa. The battle at Frankenhausen. Hobo Jungles. Zuccotti Park. Mic check: One Big Union. Omnia Sunt Communia.¹⁹ What holds these seemingly disparate historical actors together, their virtual plane of consistency, is the sense in which they partake in a constitutive movement of history, a performative enactment in which the potential of a new world becomes imaginable in the ashes of the old. A world beyond capitalism.

Through a critical engagement with and analysis of the historical sources at hand, I will show that the free speech fights represent a form of struggle—not within the shop, but within the circuits of circulation through which the social relations that produce and reproduce capital take shape (i.e., small-scale circulation). In this regard, while they take place technically outside the immediate point of