Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff the podcast. We're in between parts one and two. We talk about our dogs for an extended period of time, because dogs are great. I hope that if you have a dog in your life, you are nice to it. If you're not nice to the dogs in your life, I hope redacted. So our guest today is Miriam Him Miriam Hi. Our producer is Sophie Hi, Sophie Hi. Our audio engineer is Daniel Hi, Daniel Hi, Daniel Hi, Danel.
Our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And this is part two and a two parter. And you know what that means. It means that if you didn't listen to part one, it nothing makes sense. And I'm as always impressed by your ability to move through the world without knowing everything about the thing that came before the thing in order to understand the thing. I'm just it's really impressive. All you care about is the effects of World War One on Local eight in Philadelphia in
nineteen seventeen and onward. I that's all you care about, then this is a good place to start listening. And I don't understand you.
And if you're like, what's Local eight? Go back and listen to part one.
Yeah, they'd be like, isn't that band that's Bound for the Floor And you're like, no, because that's Local H. Just not about Heroin. That was that. I always assumed Local H was about Heroin.
That's it about.
It's like two ram songs mixed together. Is when they got there. I spent up. I looked it up this week.
You're bringing us absolutely all the context I know.
Well, okay, so I had this Local eight shirt when I was a kid, and the front of it as a teenager, and the front of us is Local H and the back just says fuck you amazing, And I was like the coolest, edgiest kid in the world. Right because I had this shirt, I got a concert I went to and so one day, I guess I'm committed to telling this story. I would wear it to school, but I would have to change it before I got home,
right because if my dad's very upset. No, I actually don't tell stories about my family anyway, I'll tell you that I wore it at school because I'm that kind of cool kid, always been super cool.
You got away with that if you were in a shirt with an offensive statement on it. At my school, they would send you to the principal's office and dig something out of the lost and found and make you wear that instead.
We had like kind of a competition, me and one of my friends where we would like, I had to try it out to get caught, right, So I wore my like cool army coat over it, you know, so you couldn't see the back most of the time. But then but then when there's like no teachers around or anything, right, I'd take it off and see how, like what high percent of the day I could walk around with a
big fuck you on my back. And then one of my friends we would both make our own T shirts that'd be as like edgy or whatever and clever as possible, and he would always get busted more, and so they would go and make him turn his shirt inside out, so he started putting other stuff like this school is fascist on the inside of the shirt.
God, I love that. Yeah, I'm so glad teenagers do stuff like that. It just it warms my heart every time. Do you have to write it backwards if it's going to be on the inside.
I don't know, because you just inside out.
Yeah.
Sure, okay, yeah, that rules.
I'm yeah, I don't know what happened to him. I can't remember whether they at that point. It is probably lost and found time. This is a pre Columbine world. Then Columbine happened, and they took the doors off of the stair while we all hung out in and no one was allowed to wear trench goats anymore.
You want to know what I got in trouble for post Columbine at my school?
What this was.
I was in study hall. I was very bored, and I had a rubber band and some paper clips and a chalkboard eraser, and I fashioned the rubber band and the paper clips into a little bow and arrow and I shot paper clips at the chalkboard eraser. Hell yeah, and I got detention. Hell yeah, because it was post Columbine and a bow and arrow made out of paper clips was a little too violent.
Hell yeah, sounds super cool, though, I know.
Yeah, as you can tell, I was extremely cool.
Yeah, we were all really cool. No, no one should look up anything, but now, yeah, we're just always cool. So what was cool was AWW And what wasn't cool but was morally complex was World War One. People love that I have opinions about the high water mark of the labor union in the early twentieth century. This is why I get invited to lots of things. The high water mark, from my point of view worldwide was immediately
before World War One. I can definitely hold on to that being true when it comes to the United States. It's a bit fussier when you look elsewhere around the world. But World War One initiated the Red Scare in America, and the Russian Civil War initiated the Bolshevik counter revolution that shifted the socialist project from one that sought to empower the working class to one that sought to empower a privileged minority and sucked away energy from working class organizing.
So the high water mark of the labor movement immediately before World War One.
Yeah, I think that's a solid opinion, and I think that that is exactly why people invite you to stuff.
Yeah. Absolutely, there were strikes everywhere in the nineteen tens in the US at the lead up to and the start of the war. The working class even gained some relative power because of the warps and so many people were off to war. There was more labor to be done and fewer people to do it. Sadly, this increased power did not last too long. In February nineteen seventeen, a couple months before the US entered the war, sugar
workers went on strike in Philly. It started near the docks and then spread out from there because the docks were such a hotbed of organizing. Right, Like, it's like if you have a place where you're like see organized labor working constantly, it's like more in your head that that's a possibility, right right. Local eight got involved and they helped the strike cross color lines, and they refused to unload ships transporting sugarcane to the factories on strike.
A Wobbly was killed in that fight, I believe by cops. The strike won its rays, but it did not when pay for the time lost striking, and it was seen as kind of a draw. Then the US declared war and nationalism swept the country. The working class was divided and shit started falling apart. Most of the leadership of the IWW was against the war, but there was no official Wobbly party line. And I think that this was intended as like pragmatic, but it was also basically democratic.
The IWW might not have seen itself as really capable of taking a position on the war that all the constituents of it were expected to abide by, right, Like, who are we to say that the dock workers have to be against us intervention in the war. That's not part of what we're talking about necessarily, right, because we're not a political organization, we're a labor organization.
I mean, that's interesting because I think so much of the left at the time saw World War One as the working class of every country going and killing each other at the behest of the ownership class.
Yep. But so much it also didn't. And that's the thing is that that was a very divisive issue. And again most of the organizers of the IWW felt exactly that. I like, it is divisive of the working class for a German worker to be in a shooting war with a Russian worker, you know, right, But a majority of the rank and file were either in favor of the war or they at least comply with the law that required them to register for the draft.
Well, and I wonder also if not having a party line on this, and maybe this is jumping ahead a little, but I know that among anarchists of the time, arguing against the draft was illegal and got you, for example, deported if you were not born in the US. And so I wonder if not having a party line on that was like a way to keep the IWW as a whole safe from the accusation that they were encouraging people not to register for the draft.
I believe that I was part of it and at one hundred percent did not work.
Yeah.
Local eight was actually one of the most pro war, or at least not anti war locals. They voted to not strike during the war lest they disrupt the war effort. Loading ships, after all, is a pretty major part of the logistics of war. The army was segregated, of course, and black longshoremen who were drafted often weren't allowed to fight, but were instead shipped to Europe to unload boxes off
of ships to continue to be longshoreman. Ben Fletcher's younger brother, Clarence, was a private in an all black infantry unit in France, but because they were black, they were forced to dig trenches in graves instead of fight, and he survived the war. Ben Fletcher himself, along with the rest of Local eight, wasn't particularly anti war. Some of their German fellow workers were actually wildly pro war because they fucking hated the Kaiser and like, just everything's messy, right. This is just
like probably the biggest, first huge division. I mean, there's like other divisions in the labor movement, especially around like I'm going to go with the actual labor movement at the white supremacist organizations that call themselves labor unions, you know.
Yeah, I'm sure they were all pro war. Yeah, they were like, yeah, it's good for business, fuck human life.
I haven't read enough about the AFL and World War One, but I've like I expect that to be the case.
I let's just say I read it and that's what it said.
Yeah, fuck them. Yeah. So, participation in World War One completely splintered the left, both into pro and anti war sides, because involving yourself in a war well and also because yeah, it splinters the working class to have the working class shoot itself. Right. Despite the IWW not being an anti war organization and both ben and Local eight being indifferent at worst to the issue, the state absolutely used World War One as an excuse to try to destroy the
IWW completely, and frankly they kind of succeeded. They obviously didn't totally succeed or I wouldn't have joined the IWW today.
But Joy howdy, did they strike at a blow. As we've talked about a couple times on the show, the first ever Red Scare was at least as much aimed at anarchists and Wobbley's, like, right, like we've talked about on the show, and as you pointed out, like a lot of anarchists, especially Jewish anarchists, got deported, you know during this Red scare, right, And yeah, it was aimed as much at anarchists and Wobbley's as it was at
socialism and communism more broadly. It is the second red scare that comes for the communists specifically, on September fifth, nineteen seventeen, FEDS and cops rated Local eight and the other Wobbly Hall in Philly, plus offices of the Wobblies and a dozen other cities, including the main headquarters in Chicago. Literally tons of records were stolen by the Feds. They even stole the furniture, what like.
What is their justification for that? Is it seditious furniture? Is it like furniture? Where they're going to be like, Oh, we're going to really get some information out of this or are they just fucking with people?
I assume they're just fucking with people. They stole a wobbly Joe Hill's ashes.
Holy shit, I can't believe I didn't know that.
Yeah, they're like, we're taking your dad. Well, okay, so his ashes were like I think, in a bunch of different envelopes. I think it was like everyone gets some ashes, you know, is the implication.
Yeah, everyone gets a little bit of Joe Hill.
Yeah. One hundred and sixty six Wobblies were charged with violating the Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen for interfering with the draft. Innocence did not save them was an important thing to remember, unfortunately, during times of political repression. Mm hmmm. The war on the IWW was waged by the government,
but it was supported by an interesting alliance. The bosses got together with the government, and they also got together with the white supremacist organization that called uself a labor union, the AFL, and they together formed the Adjustment Commission, and its goal was to get the IWW out.
The Adjustment Commission sounds evil, Like.
I know, straight up, I don't know much more about it than the name of it, right, and what it did in this particular context, I don't know of it. At other broader goals, it was definitely described as this is its purpose is to destroy the IWW. Ben Fletcher was the only black wobbly brought up on charges during the Red Scare Part one. Okay, here's the funny thing. Well, there's a bunch of funny. He gets in some good jokes around the time he's going to jail.
You did promise me jokes.
Yeah, okay, But first the joke is the government. The thing about being black in America is that you're somehow both the most evil villain imaginable to white people, and you're also invisible, which gets the funniest part of this whole story. It took them four months to find and arrest him. He did not hide.
Incredible.
Ben and his family had just moved from Boston to Philly in with Ben's dad, and he found work under his own name, working on the railroads, and all he did was not turn himself in. It took them four fucking months.
Yeah, that's incredible. He's so he's not only like working under his own name, he is living with his father, so like, yeah, the first person you would check with if you were looking for somebody.
Yeah. Yeah. I think he just like was like, well, if I'm going to go down, I should be near my family. You know. It's like the best read I have on it.
I love it. I love that He's like, no, I'm not hiding, You're just stupid.
Yeah, it gets better. So in mid February nineteen eighteen, the fence found him and arrested him at his home. He spent two weeks in jail before Local eight got his bail together and got him out. But the Invisible Man shit did not end here. I'm going to quote historian Robin D. G. Kelly, who's going to then quote Fletcher himself. So it's a quote within a quote, but I believe in y'all we can handle it. One and a quote within the quote has quotes within it. Oh
my god. Oh no, it's still very readable. So quote well. Out on bail. He received a summons to appear in court in Chicago in April first, nineteen eighteen. Delayed by a train accident, Fletcher arrived at the court house a couple hours late. And then now I'm quoting Ben Fletcher. Making my way through the federal agents and police who swarmed the corridors. I was blocked at the courtroom door by the chief bailiff, who inquired, what do you want in here? Well, I belong in here. Oh a wise
boy from the south Side. Want to see the show? No, I'm one of the actors. Take that stuff away. You can't get in here. Continuing the quote, but now back to the historian quote. He had to produce identification and his summons just to prove he was the one and only Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. It was enough to finally persuade the chief bailiff to let him enter, and then I walked into the courtroom and into the federal penitentiary.
Oh my god, cops are They're so stupid. They're so stupid.
I know. They're like, there are two races to let him get arrested twice, he's twice. The cops are too fucking like, oh my god, a wise boy from the south Side. Huh.
Also, like I have within my lifetime still heard cops be like, oh, wise guy, huh when like people talk shit, which is like amazing, Like you've had one hundred years to come up with a better comeback than that, and you're still going, oh, wise guy.
Yeah.
I would like to think that that bailiff was very embarrassed, but I suspect that he did not have the capacities for Yeah.
No, the thought never crossed his mind that he did anything wrong. The wobblis formed. I think it's their first general defense committee, which still often exists, right to defend their members. And Fletcher's family got ten dollars a week to keep them going while Ben was unable to work. This is about twenty five cents an hour at forty hours a week, so probably a little bit less than when he was brought in when he was working. To be clear, twenty five cents an hour is a totally
normal rate. That is around eleven thousand dollars a year today. People were struggling. I think is something that like, obviously an awful lot of people are struggling right now, right, but I think that people don't quite. The left is richer than it was one hundred years ago, and we have nothing to show for it, and I think people should step it up more. Middle class radicals should be
giving a higher percentage of their income to like actual organizing. Yeah, fundraisers and benefits for individuals and things like that are great, but like actual organizing, good, good user help.
It's all well and good to keep passing around the same twenty dollars to different people's healthcare go fundmes, but yeah, we gotta we gotta put some money towards actual long term change.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I absolutely have friends who live off of eleven thousand dollars a year, right, but like a lot of people live off of more than that too. Anyway, whatever, I'm just I just had like this kind of epiphany looking at this, like being like, oh, yeah, right,
these like people who change the fucking world. Right, You'll read about Emma Goldman and then like Emma Goldman will be like and then and I was vaguely supported in a shitty apartment in France in my old age because I couldn't work anymore, and the movement pitched in to make sure it did and starve to death. And you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, like there's a working class movement, you know.
Yeah.
Anyway, so this trial was absolutely just about destroying IWW. And one of the reasons we know that is because they included Ben Fletcher and Local eight organizers because Local eight while this is happening, is dutifully loading war cargo and a ton of its members were overseas fighting or digging ditches due to racism. But like the whole you know, the press is just full of like the IWW's agents of the Kaiser, you know.
Right, Anyone I don't like is agents of the Kaiser.
Yeah. The trial dragged on is the longest federal trial up to that point in US history, oh, which is only like four months or something like that. And the defendants were held in Cook County Jail where the Haymarket ruders had been held. The defendants made jokes the entire time they were on trial. This is like how wobblies do. Is they're just constantly singing and joking as they're like dying and like lives are ending around them and shit,
they're just like singing and laughing to their graves. It's kind of it's kind of hot.
Yeah, I love.
That they know that this is a farce. One guy, Jack Walsh, kept referring to the prosecutor, a guy named Nebacker, as fellow worker Nebecker. He's not an owner, he's a worker.
Yeah.
Four months of trial, and the evidence that is used against the Wobblies is pretty much just all the anti war statements they made before the war started and before the law that outlawed anti war statements.
Hmmm.
And then after forty five minutes of jury deliberation, all of the Wobblis were found guilty on all counts. Classic fair trial system as it should. Yeah. Ben Fletcher was given ten years and Ben told his friend the judge has been using very ungrammatical language. The friend said, how's that, Ben? And Ben said, his sentences are much too long?
Oh my god, it's so good Ben. That rules.
I know he didn't have his own kids, but he brought out the dad energy. He is twenty seven years old. I like it.
Yeah, God, And that's like, I mean, you must have had that in his back pocket the whole time, like just waiting.
Yeah, no, I'm certain he is just like giggling to himself as he's imagining his life being destroyed. But he's like, I got a good joke though, you know.
Yep, and the worst like punishment you give me, the funnier my joke will be so heads.
Up for that, Yeah, I got you. Eddy direction but you know what else the wobbley said?
What else did the Wobbleys have.
They put advertising in their newspapers?
Did they?
Yeah, a lot of old radical presses and newspapers and shit had advertising. It's a thing that people don't talk about. But that's how the sausages. This is vegan sausages. Here's ads,
and we're back. So I actually don't know if all of the wobbly newspapers always had it, but I remember reading about it specifically when I was doing episode about the Spokane free speech fight, and because it like really stood out to me, and there's been a couple other times, like different black radical papers in the sixties and things like that a lot of people have Anyway, it was just a thing that I didn't expect. So when I like learned about it, I was like, oh, interesting, you know.
Ooh, a fact that will make for a good ad transition. You probably don't run across too many of those.
Yeah, we'll put that one away.
Yeah, But before we went on break, I just realized what we didn't shout out was Ben's friend, who was like playing the perfect straight man to his joke. Because Ben said this judge's sentences are very ungrammatical, and the friend could have just gone yeah, or who gives a fuck? Or okay, but no, he went, how's that Ben? Like he was working a fucking vaudeville stage, And I love that.
Hell yeah. And it's funny because it's like they are actually experienced comedians. That's the other thing that I think people like, I know we talked about earlier, but it's like they are practice showmen, you know.
Yeah.
So most of the Wobbles, including Ben, were sent off to Levenworth, Kansas, the first ever federal prison. While they're on the train, whenever they're like stopped on the tracks near some factories, they would sing wobbley songs so loud that the workers from the factories would like come out to the tracks to listen, because that's how wobblies do amazing. The jail was full of political prisoners, including two different types of political prisoners. At the time I didn't know about,
but I'll get to that. It's not just the Wobbles there, and the guards constantly tried and I think sometimes succeeded at getting the ordinary criminal prisoners to get into fights with the quote political prisoners Jay Edgar Hoover personally made sure that Fletcher's correspondence was like extra monitored, both because he was a wobbly and extra extra because he's black. He was afraid of quote Negro agitation. This didn't stop Ben from corresponding with all the black socialists at the time.
After Marcus Garvey, Ben was the most prominent black political prisoner in the country, and most of what we have about him in paper comes from the fact that he was in prison for two and a half years. That's how we know his height and weight five four, one hundred and fifty pounds. The Wobblis read books, They taught one another. They wrote the outside world as much as
they could. Their correspondence was being intentionally limited, and they were like weren't allowed to like write articles for things, and all kinds of limitations on them. They tried to organize in prison with some success, and they weren't the only political prisoners. One historian, Christina Heatherton called Levenworth at the time the University of radicalism, and it had quote Bulgarian communists, Indian Gadarites, Mexican and Arco syndicalists, and African American socialists.
That's a party.
I know, it's an even better party because veteran of the POD, one of the greatest anarchist militants in history, Ricardo Flores mcgone and his brother Enrique in there with Ben.
Hell yeah, that is a good party.
Yeah, imagine, just like it's got to be wild, right because you're just like, oh, wait, your movements in here, Like he oh shit, I heard of you, you know, like yeah, you're like, oh.
I'm like this sucks. I'm in prison, but like, wait, the Floris McGowan brothers are in here. Yeah, like, holy shit.
Now, had you heard of the Indian Gahataites?
I had not.
I hadn't either. I had to look it up. All they teach about Indian independence in the US schools is Gandhi. Why would you bother telling Americans about the militant revolutionary movement founded in Oregon by Diaspris, Sikhs and Hindus that worked to smuggle arms in India to try to overthrow the empire.
Holy shit? Yeah, why would anybody want to know about that?
I know, it's not like it happened in America. Oh wait, it fucking did. But no one cares about non white people in America.
So are you going to do an episode on those guys? Because I want to know everything.
Probably, I mean, they might have been awful, but they seem pretty cool.
Only one way to find out, I know, by declaring them cool, doing an episode on them, and finding out whether they hold up to them.
And then halfway through being like, ah, shit, Yeah, there's also an entire black regiment of the army in there with them.
What the fuck?
Yeah, sixty two members of the Black twenty fourth Infantry were in there. This is not the entire regiment, it is a fuck ton of them. They had been imprisoned for life because of the Houston riot. You ever heard of the Houston riot? I also hadn't.
No.
This is when one hundred and fifty six black soldiers mutant need after a white cop beat a black soldier who tried to interfere with the violent arrest of a black woman in Houston. Because during the war, they like stationed a bunch of black soldiers to protect something in Houston, and a black soldier saw a white cop being a racist piece of shit interfered, so white cops beat the
shit out of him. So one hundred and fifty six black soldiers mutine need They marched on Houston and they shot and killed all captain of the Illinois National Guard because they thought he was the cop. And then they fought a white militia and a bunch of cops. Fifteen white people were killed, five black soldiers were killed. After this, nineteen of the mutineers were hanged. Another sixty three were hanging out with Ben Fletcher and Levenworth for life. Yeah.
Holy shit.
Yeah, America likes racist white cops more than it likes black Millie Harry people.
America likes racist white cops more than pretty much anything. Yeah, that's awful. Yeah, No, I'd never heard of that.
Yeah I had neither. So outside the jail, people worked tirelessly to free the Wobblis and all the other political prisoners of the war. The newly created ACLU champion their cause, and in nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty one most of the prisoners got out, but the US had it in for one group in particular. Well, the black soldiers didn't get out, but by nineteen twenty two most of the
remaining political prisoners were the Wobblies. Because these are the worst of the worst, even though again they're the ones who didn't actually try and fight against the draft.
Right, they're like the ones who are factually innocent.
Yeah, and like some of them had been anti draft, but they had all kind of like shut up once it became illegal to say something about the draft because they were busy with labor organizing. You know. Yeah, as my best read, I've only read the Ben Fletcher version of this story, but I trust him. I do too. You have some interesting, fucking hot takes. I'm gonna give you the hottest take.
I can't wait.
I'm gonna give it to you right now, and then I'm gonna prove it later. Do you know this Lennon's fault, the IWW fell apart plausible? Go on, Oh, I'll tell you later. Yeah, there's one more thing we can point at, the fucking Tankies about Ben Flescher did not like Tankies.
A great I like him more and more every time you say a thing about him. I like him more.
I know eventually they get out. By the end of nineteen twenty two, they're all out.
So how much of his tenure sentence did he do two.
And a half years? Okay, the war ending and everyone being like, wait, is completely illegal to throw people in prison for free speech, and then the US is like, well, we kind of only need them to shut up because we were in the war. You know. It's like the way that the state does everything. They're like, well, just arrest them, and then by the time that they get
proven innocent, it's too late, you know. So IWW never fully recovers from this blow, or rather from the one, two, three, four punch of state repression, boss repression, AFL opportunism, and authoritarian communist infiltration and undermining, and a fifth punch that actually Ben mostly blames on the communists, and I think he's probably right, which is infighting and arguing about complicated bureaucratic shit.
Oh, communists do love.
That they do. After the war, things almost went back to normal for Local eight for a few years, though most of their most experienced organizers had been in prison. Local eight was trying to cope with a shifting culture and an increasing number of the dock workers were black workers coming from the US South, where all they'd known of unions was that their white supremacist organizations, and the white workers, even in Local eight, weren't always proving them wrong. Again, overall,
pretty fucking good about this stuff. Not always perfect. There was also cultural tensions between Local eight and the rest of the IWW, because Local eight is like, was more racially integrated, and it's also in some ways more moderate, right, they're a little bit more likely. The most committed wobblies are all these anarchists and socialists of various stripes whose primary purpose is to organize the working class into force
that could end wage labor once and for all. A ton of them are unmarried, married only to the movement. A lot of the workers, especially in Philly, are like, look, I just want to feed my family, right. And there's also a bunch of arguments that they start having between the Local eight and i WW about how to hold
onto money. Philly wants to maintain its own war chest rather than sending money to Chicago, where they would argue it was hard to then requisition the money back when they needed it, partly because they went on strike like all the fucking time, right, because they were actually, when I say they were a little bit more moderate, they're still a fighting union and militant is hell, right, But so they like they're like, hey, we need some of our own money back. More often you know, right.
Like if your strike fund is in Chicago and it's the nineteen twenties, like, you're not getting it when you need.
It, Yeah, especially if you have to argue for it, you know.
Yeah.
In nineteen twenty, for some complicated reason, Ben was out on bay all waiting an appeal. He went to jail for totally two and a half years, but he like got out for a little while, I think a couple of months during this appeal, But I'm not entirely sure. He was very much not allowed to do labor organizing or go on strike and shit like that. While he's out right he won one hundred percent did labor organizing and went on strike and shit like that.
I expect nothing less.
His participation was under the radar. He wasn't like, Hey, I'm Ben Fletcher and I'm here to say, you know well.
And I assume again that the cops were just like, who's that guy?
Yeah, I think that happened too, What are you doing here? Yeah, that's another black speaker. Can't tell him apart I'm a racist.
They know they've already failed to recognize him at his own trial. I can't imagine that when he pops up doing organizing. They're like, I've put it all together and I know who that is.
I know.
Also, like the bailiff is like, you literally only have to know what one black man looks like. There is only one black man on trial, and he's late to the trial. You think they'd be like, holy shit, they're.
Waiting for him, You're looking for him.
Yeah, they might have been, and then just I don't know whatever.
Anyway, I assume that he could have been wearing like a name tag, like a hello my name is, like a jersey with his name on it, like the whole thing. Yeah, in a wobbly pit, and they still would have looked right past him.
Yeah. And So there's this other strike that happens with Local eight on the docks in Philly in nineteen twenty, and this one was hard as fuck. It dragged on, it got really violent, and on June seventh, nineteen twenty, during a union workers versus cops and scabs fight, a black strike breaker I believe up from Baltimore, killed a Polish worker and injured a black worker. And this is where some of the racial tensions start to show. I
believe I'm kind of reading between the lines here. I could be more certain about exactly how the racial solidarity fell apart, because I also don't totally trust some of the white authors who've talked about this in their analysis about like, right, some of the white authors talk about this are like, Oh, it's those black people from the South don't know about being anti racist.
Well, it would be very convenient for the bosses who are trying to break the union if after, you know, the dust settles after a conflict, and there's one dead white guy and one injured black guy, it would be very convenient for the bosses to point to a black strike breaker from the South and be like, oh, it's definitely him, right. Their whole deal is that division.
Yeah, and it absolutely could have been the black strike breaker defending himself, right. Because that's the thing is when we're talking about like, oh, all the old unions and people are like why do they get treated so bad? And like sometimes it's like because they're throwing rocks at people, right, Like it's like not legal to throw rocks at key people. And I understand that, I'm still okay with it sometimes, but it's like conflict is a violent conflict.
Yeah, and it's a conflict that has been set in motion by the people with all the power in this situation. So, like, absolutely, I don't feel in a position to judge anybody in this situation, right, Like right, the guy from Baltimore was taking whatever work he could get, which he had been kept out of union work by white supremacist.
Unions right in Baltimore. Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah.
The ultimate responsibility for this is in the hands of the people with the power in the situation.
I absolutely agree, And so again by my reading between the lines, the worker's funeral was like not good in terms of some of what came out of it. This is like where fault lines appear. The strike continues regardless, racial solidarity is not yet broken. Two women who are supporting the strikers and the fights on the docks are killed by cops. This does not fall along racial lines in a way that makes people angry. I don't know the races of anyone involved in that.
I mean it should make like whatever the racial lines are there, that should make people angry that the cops.
Oh yeah, no, people are very angry about it. Yeah yeah, No. What I'm saying is that it's like I'm not using that as evidence of the dissolution of the union. Instead, I'm saying, it's just the escalation of violence of what's happening, gotcha. After forty one days, negotiations end the strike and it's sort of a draw where some folks get some raises but no other demands are met. And immediately after the strike ends, the bosses rescind the promised raised wages and
the workers don't have enough power to stop this. Unity is starting to fall apart. The strike had killed three people and one very little. It's around this point that the Bolsheviks start fucking with the left worldwide. They are trying to tell everyone what to do. And the IWW is Dowa Marxism, and it is down with anarchism and is down with socialism. It is not in like ideologically formed union right right, They weren't down with what gets
shorthand called communism like the Communist Party of Russia. The Bolsheviks they start off being kind of curious, right, like everyone is, and then they're pretty quickly like, oh, this is anti democratic, authoritarian bullshit, right. And the IWW is far and away the most competent militant leftist organization in the US in the nineteen twenties, even after it took
a b in the war. So the Bolsheviks wants to punish the IWW for not supporting them enough, and in particular they come after Local eight.
That's astoundingly petty.
It's part of a thing where Lenin decides that he wants to get the support of the AFL, and so he takes the Bolsheviks are now participating in the conflict between the moderate not anti capitalist, but authoritarian and power hungry AFL. He has more in common with the AFL than he does with the IWW. Right, so, oh yeah, no, I've never been a big Lenin girl. I'm like just
super extramat at the Bolsheviks again today, you know. Yeah, you don't got to wait till Stalin comes around before they fuck everything up.
Yeah, yeah, no, it was sucked way earlier.
Yeah, and okay, so they decided to come after Local eight. It's possible, but incredibly unlikely that Local eight doc workers loaded a military ship bound for supporting the White Army in Siberia in the Russian Civil War. Like historians don't know, right, there's not a proof that anyone seems to have. We do know that they said they wouldn't do such a thing, and that Ben says it was a fabrication and that this boat was going to Siberia, which is famously not close to Philadelphia.
Yeah, that's true. That's one of the things I know about Siberia.
Yeah, if you ever like, hey, what's close to Philly? Like, it takes me a while before I get to Siberia, you know. Yeah, there's like a whole two continents in the way. I don't remember when the Panama Canal got made, but it would have loaded from Seattle with the rest of the support for the White Army. It seems far
and away most likely. Regardless, the Bolsheviks in New York City told the IWW to suspend Local eight, and the IWW, in the biggest l I've ever seen them take in the history of writing about them for this show, ignored their own rules on how to handle this sort of thing and briefly suspended Local eight.
She is they just they were just like, well, the Bolsheviks said it, we gotta go with that.
Yeah, And there's like a little bit more sort of bureaucratic arguing going back and forth about it than that. But they come to their senses for a moment, and they like unsuspend Local eight until they turn around and suspend Local eight again.
This is definitely the most disappointing thing I've ever heard about the IWW.
I know this second one is more of a like classic leftist arguing thing that's like not as malicious, it seems, although Ben is absolutely like, not the comedies were behind this shit too, and like, I don't know he was there, he might be right, yeah, but what happened was Local eight started charging a like initiation, you know, like membership fee, and nationally the IWW says if you charge that, it can't be more than two dollars.
They're charging two fifty, aren't they.
Thirty five dollars? They're actually charging a fair amount.
Oh okay, that's that is more.
And they are consciously doing it for a couple reasons. One is that like non union labor is flooding in and they're like the labor pool is getting so big that they like feel like they're losing control of what's happening. Right, They're like, there's not enough work for all of these people. We need to like limit the work pool, right, you know, And Ben absolutely stands by this and is like this is a necessary step. I read some analysis that kind of makes sense to me that if you're like looking
out for the Philly dock workers, this makes sense. If you're looking out for building a revolutionary solidarity among the working class to overthrow capitalism and wage labor, this does not make sense, right, I mean.
And it definitely sounds like the kind of thing where it's like the AWW could be like, hey, stop doing that. But it does kind of sound like if they're gonna suspend Local eight, it has more to do with what's been going on with the Bolsheviks than it has to do with this.
That seems to me to be likely. And there's also just like a lot of arguments that are happening about Ben Fletcher actually, like nineteen ten, actually used to argue for the centralization of the IWW. But as it becomes a more experienced organizer or is, it becomes more invested in Philly. But he's not even super invested Philly, because he's going around all over the place, right, he starts arguing more and more for decentralization, and so it's also
this defense of decentralization. Yeah, much like the decentralized system that comes up with advertising for this show, over which we also have very little control.
I snuck up on me.
Yeah, that's because I realized how far in the timestamp we were. Here's ads and we're back. So basically, the Wobblies suspend Local eight and for a year Local aid to suspended, and then locally AI it's like fine, whatever, will drop it, and they lower their their membership fee. Then they rejoin the IWW. Ben Fletcher holds that even this fuckery was the result of Bolshevik interference, which is hard to prove, but some of this stuff is very real.
Looking at the US left, the two biggest forces are the IWW, which is a bit smaller and way fightier but also very democratic, and the AFL, which is moderate, not even anti capitalists, but larger and more generally hierarchical.
Lenin backs the power hungry guy supports the Power Group, and at this point, again according to Ben Fletcher, but knowing Lenin, I half expect he wrote in it self somewhere, and it's like kind of implied in that Lenin piece Left communism and infantile disorder, where Lenin gets mad at communists. Ben says, at this point Lenin is trying to destroy the IWW, and Local eight is a very logical place to start, because the other thing that's happening Local eight
might be the biggest and most powerful part of the IWW. Really, I have read a thing that specifically says that it does the like, huh, I want to read more sources about that before I feel strong saying that. You know, but the final destruction of Local eight was in the autumn of nineteen twenty two. They were still fighting for the eight hour workday, and they decided to strike. And they did this strike in the classic wobbly fashion. They just showed up an hour late rather than negotiating with
the bosses ahead of time. And when you're like on top of your shit, this is like a really good power move. Yeah, the balance of power had shifted. The bosses locked them out of work, and instead of bringing in non union strike breakers, the bosses brought in can you guess.
Is it AFL strike breakers?
They did? They brought in union strike breakers.
Fuck yeah, union strike breakers. They had union strike breakers. Yeah, Oh my god.
It's basically at this point, the bosses, the government, the AFL, and the fucking Bolsheviks are all trying to destroy a four thousand member fucking inter racial union in Philly.
I like, how do you, as an AFL aligned worker, Like, how do you fucking sleep at night? As a union scab?
You know. It's like they're just like, we're gonna make this a union thing, but it'll be for us instead, you know.
Oh God, what they should have done is kicked their own asses.
Yeah, and basically the union fell. ILA workers from New York came in and it lost the monopoly on hiring militants, were blacklisted, and most importantly, unity between black and white workers was gone for basically good or for decades at least in Philadelphia because they absolutely AFL also played racial like tensions against everything, and like you start getting these like splits where whatever I wrote it out down and then I was like, I'm not keeping track of all
of that. After the ILA broke Local eight, the bosses immediately turned on the ILA too.
Oh no way, I know.
I voted for the leopards eating other people's faces.
Party can't believe the bosses didn't show loyalty to their workers at the expense of their own finances.
What even though we're union, we're supposed to know that.
Oh, my god, I'm so mad.
I know, I know. For years the docs were ununionized. It was only in nineteen twenty eight that the ISLA, which was at this point joined by former local aid organizers. Because people are like, Ben's a wobbly to his core, right, yeah, or he's an industrial unionist to his core, he actually forms a in part of the splits, they like, form this other thing at some point that I'm not going to get into. But overall people are like, I'm a union organizer, I'm a doctor. I want a union here.
This is what exists, right, And so former local aid organizers eventually end up joining the ILA, and they won the eight hour day and they unionized the docks. But within only a couple of years, the ILA lost all pretensive workers democracy and became corrupt. The way it was phrased is like there were no longer contested elections h within it, the workplace was segregated into racial picnics were
a distant and fading memory. And this didn't stop the IWW nationally, and it didn't stop Ben Fletcher in the changing landscape of the nineteen twenties. Ben actually started off like really early in nineteen twenties before all this shit kind of started going down. He started off willing to work with the Communist Party. Right, he doesn't have a label besides industrial unionist, right that I've been able to figure out.
Yeah.
Well, and the Communist Party hadn't done like ninety percent of the bad things the Communist Party would go on to do.
Yeah. He was one of the principal speakers at the first American Negro Labor Congress that was put on by the Communist Party USA, And originally he was apparently slated to be the leader of the an LC, but a more solidly Communist like with a capital C, black man named Lovett Fort Whiteman blocked it from happening. And the history that I read seemed to sum it up as a like epigmism, right, like I want to be the
black guy, but I don't. I don't buy it because it's about a black organization within the Communist Party.
Right, it's a black organization. It's not like.
There's Yeah, I think it is far more likely that love It was just a party line guy and knew that Ben was not. Ben was hard to pigeonhole ideologically. He was a socialist in the broadest sense, but not the political party sense. He was friends with anarchists and socialists and syndicalists. He was also anti communist in that he was anti Bolshevik. He was, if anything else, a wobbly.
I know I've already said this, but it's in the script of like Free I've just said it randomly before and I was in the scripts.
So just going forward, Sure, wobbled to his core.
Yeah, the guy who blocked him love at Fort Whiteman. He died in the way that more or less all tankies.
Die murdered by communists.
He was He was murdered by communists.
Surprisingly common cause of death among communists.
I think Nazis and Communists are like just going neck and neck about who's killed more Communists. He moved to the USSR and then he was accused of being a Trotskyist and was caught up in the Great Purge, sent off to Siberia, where he died of malnutrition in a war camp.
Damn.
And I like genuinely feel sorry for this man, right, But it's like because people didn't know the Great Purge was coming, but like they were watching lots of little purges and they were participating in lots of fuckery.
Right, but like the fuckery of you know, taking leadership of this American organization, like that is a level of fuckery that is like, eh, sucks. But okay, yeah, you do not deserve to die in Siberia.
For that, now, Jesus, absolutely not.
But if you're a communist, people deserve to die in Siberia for pretty much anything.
I know, especially communists deserved to die in Siberia. Ben himself, he falls out of the Communists pretty quick as he starts to realize they're trying to take the IWW over. He stays very active with the Wobbles until his death. Well, his health starts failing him, but he's like he never leaves, right, He's less and less of an organizer for many years, he remains a powerful speaker. Sometime in the nineteen twenties,
he and his first wife divorced. In nineteen thirty one, he moved to New York City, where he participated in the black political socialist stuff that was happening there in the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty three, he suffered a stroke and never recovered his health. At some point in the nineteen thirties, he married his second wife, a black woman named Clara. No one is sure what work he did after he left the docks. Some folks say he sold hand rolled cigars. Others say that he was a
janitor or maybe a building super. I think is entirely possibly did all of these things. He seemed to have been happy in his later years. He was surrounded by family, he was hanging out with his anarchist friends and old wobbles. His health never recovered, and he died at age fifty nine in nineteen forty nine, and the author Robin Kelly I think sums him up well. Ben Fletcher believed in
the working class in its capacity to win. He never wavered from his belief that capitalism would come to an end, but only an organized working class could end it. A truly organized working class would have to eliminate all vestiges of racism and xenophobia, redirecting our collective anger towards the capitalist class. His was not a blind optimism, a naive belief that persuasive arguments could wipe away color, prejudice and
unite the proletariat. Rather, he knew our survival depended on the overthrow of capitalism, and Ben himself sums up his political beliefs, at least around race and things like that very well himself. Quote, no genuine attempt by organized labor to rest any worthwhile in lasting concessions from the employing class can succeed as long as organized labor, for the most part, is indifferent and in opposition to the fate
of Negro labor. He had respect from both like kind of separate ven diagram spheres right of like socialism and industrial unionism and anarchism and stuff cyndicalism, as well as the black community and not just the black leftist community. He was a very important person talking about race in America at the time, and that's like the other thing that history is forgotten. Right.
Yeah.
After he died, a conservative black owned newspaper called the Atlanta Daily World called him, quote one of the most brilliant negroes ever associated with a leftist organization.
So when even the conservatives have to say nice things about you, you're probably doing great.
Yeah. Wow, that's Ben Fletcher. That's the there's a couple figures that I would just like interject into the history books. Yeah, you know, and obviously there's a show about figures that I believe should be interjected in the history books. But there's like two levels of it, right, There's a way that like old black radicals are erased from everyone who isn't studying black radicalism, and like old anarchists are erased
from everyone who isn't studying anarchism. And then there's the people who are like erased from those histories too, yeah, or rather not included. And I think a lot of it is the one too of being both black and leftist, you know.
Yeah.
And also that he like wasn't a like man of letters, you know. I mean he wrote a lot, right, I.
Mean, but he was like a he was a worker, Like he really was doing this on the ground organizing because he was actually working in these places. He wasn't coming in to make a speech.
It was socialism with his work and pants on.
Yeah, exactly, he had his working pants on the whole time.
Yeah.
He's amazing and I'm so happy to know about him and about this organizing that he was a part of, because yeah, I had no idea about Local eight or about any of that. That was amazing.
Yeah. All I knew is like because I had read I've read mostly about the IWW out west, just because Hobos and the Mexican Revolution are two things that I care a lot about and I've read a lot about, you know. Yeah, but I'd always like known. I was like, oh, and then there was like a ton of black wobblies on the East coast doing doc work stuff. That was like what I knew? You know?
Yeah, I think all I knew was that when the waterfront would try to get organized, a big thing that the bosses would do would be to bring in black strike breakers when white unions were organizing. And I never knew about a situation where people had actually successfully prevented that by having a union that represented everybody.
Yeah.
That rules.
It's a cool idea, and it's one that people can continue to do. Yeah, because capitalism is kind of trying to kill us all.
Oh, it's it's doing its best.
Yeah. Well, guy, anything you want to plug.
As you mentioned on the last episode, if people want to hear more of me, they can come on over to live like the world is dying on strangers in a tangled wilderness.
Hell yeah.
When I first started guesting on this podcast, I was very proud to be like the only guest who is like, no, I don't have anything to plug on nobody, but like around podcasters too long, you just acquire, just like you just acquire things to plug. They got me so.
Real, We got you a mic and it was over.
I will have to eventually let you turn me into a vampire. I've already let you turn me into a podcast.
Or you know. Hell yeah, that's what the red card of the Wobblings is, is the vampire card. No, oh, oh my god. I've always held that I would be morally I'm incredibly squeamish, but I would absolutely become a vampire if I was offered the choice, because I feel like I have a moral obligation to like become very powerful immortal with which to fight the owning class.
I think you can come up with whatever political justification you want, Magpie.
I agree. No, I don't actually want to be a vampire than that blood is so gross. Yeah, but you are.
The gothist person I know, and not just like I mean I know people who like visually, like walking down the street, you'd be like, oh, that person is more goth, Like they're wearing more black, they have more eyeliner, But like you are goth in your soul. And if offered the opportunity to be a vampire, I just don't see you being able to turn it down.
No, I wouldn't be able to turn it down. One of my friends tried to name my house Dracula Factory, and I was like, what is why that doesn't I don't get it. And then like one night I was like walking through my hallway where I have electric candelabra that come on at eight pm every night and flicker w Wisconsins, not Candelabrum, and I was like, oh, oh, I get it. I figured it out. Yeah, that's it's called like workers come over to like help me with
my plumbing. And there's like the corner of my house that's a stone wall covered in axes. But that's because I'm cool.
Yeah, that's you have I think a standard number of battle axes.
Yeah, three, three is true? One two? Yeah, we have three battle axes.
Only three?
I mean batle axes. You all have one? Okay, okay, I.
Mean I have none, and that's a problem.
Well, you did give me a flail with a spiked ball on it.
I did, I mean, because that was yours. Like I came across it and was like, well, this belongs to Margaret. I don't know what it's doing here. I have to get it to Margaret.
Okay, what do I want to plug? At the end? I want to plug two things. One swords. Why not own a sword? There's no reason not to. There's so many reasons not to. But do any of them really matter? Not that I can think of.
I can't think of a single good reason not to own a sword.
And join the IWW. Why not? What could go wrong? It might not be the thing that unites the working class. It's certainly not if you don't join it. So that's what I gotta plug.
People with swords join the IWW, and people in the IWW acquire swords.
There you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, and listen to Weird Little Guys.
Yeah, listen to Weird Little Guys. Cool Zone Media's newest podcast. It's a weekly show and it's hosted by Molly Conger and it takes you behind the headlines to examines of the worst people on the planet that none of us have ever heard of.
Whoo the opposite of this show. But it's a good time. Oh No, I'm excited about it. I'm very excited about it.
I bet all of those shitty little guys' lives will become a lot worse once people know about them.
So especially if they have swords. Wait, no, violence is wrong, illegal, that's the word. The podcast is sober. Bye Bye Bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.