By Brett Warnke

On the books, May 1^st is officially Law Day, whose origins (like the holy portions of the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust”) came out of the Eisenhower Administration’s rhetorical battle against the Soviet Union.  Of course, the silent smear was that radical workers lacked respect for a nation of laws.  But for those with a sense of history May 1 is and shall be a day of observance for workers mourned after the bloody Haymarket Affair in 1886 which later became memorialized when strikers pushed for an eight-hour work day.

Is it so hard to imagine an era of endless work?  Of plutocrats and bought government?  Of a used, dispirited and duped population?  Jack Beatty’s incomparable Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America 1865-1900, a history of the Gilded Age from Reconstruction to 1900, describes a parallel world to our own era.  In one of his many perfectly crafted paragraphs he writes:

It was easier to credit the virgin birth than believe that the government could serve the general welfare.  Republican government serviced business.  The Democrats wanted a weak federal government so that the southern oligarchy could maintain the institutions—lynching, convict labor, fraudulent elections, disenfranchisement, racial apartheid—that lone gave it popular legitimacy.

In that same era, the steely Scot Andrew Carnegie worked his men every day of the year except for the 4^th of July and Christmas.  Twelve hours a day they worked.  Seven days a week.  By their mid-30s their labor slowed and by 40 years old the industry had chucked them out as industrial waste.  After that, they were “free” and had the “liberty” to do with their lives as they wished.  Working people fought back.

A novel to read this month if you want to hear about those who did not remain silent or if you wish to see even more parallels between that bygone age and our own is Flash by San Diego Free Press columnist Jim Miller, published by AK Press.  It’s a short but packed novel that fuses past and present with a reporter’s eye.  Miller’s narrator is Jack Wilson, a San Diego reporter, who traces a mystery that reaches back a century. The story winds its way through Jack’s own biography and into San Diego’s past.

In that tumultuous age as well as in our own strange time there was a united front against millions of working people: the reactionary media, state governments, police, the federal government, employer associations, private detective agencies, middle class smugness, legal injunctions, patriotic hooey, Christian preachment, desperate scabs, paid interrupters, and the zombie myth of the self-made man.

In 1911 local merchants pushed for an ordinance banning street speaking in San Diego.  Fifty blocks were closed to the soap-boxers who urged a struggle against the boss class.  Hundreds of speakers and their fellow travelers were jailed across the city and this small town became a headline.  In one notorious episode discussed in Flash, a radical is captured by vigilantes, taken out to the outer reaches of San Diego County and forced to kiss a flag before being beaten, humiliated, and dropped off.

This was a reliable tactic and an appropriate one for the bosses who, like the Germans transporting Lenin in a sealed train across Europe, believed organizers to be a filthy contagion, a bacillus that would infect the peace and harmony of their money-making operations.  In Dynamite:  A Century of Class Violence in America, Louis Adamic writes about the Wobbly loggers and timber men accused of treason and arrested for striking:  “Thousands were herded into box cars and deported,” he wrote, “that is, taken into lonely country, hundreds of miles away from habitation, and then driven out.  Scores of people were tarred and feathered.  Several were taken to lonely bridges at night and hanged.”

In that tumultuous age as well as in our own strange time there was a united front against millions of working people: the reactionary media, state governments, police, the federal government, employer associations, private detective agencies, middle class smugness, legal injunctions, patriotic hooey, Christian preachment, desperate scabs, paid interrupters, and the zombie myth of the self-made man.

It’s a miracle that laborers won as much as they did in the face of such stalwart opposition.

True, there was not the breezy understanding of “equality” today, when a review of a Britney Spears show appears above a review of literature.  Turn of the century America was an age of outright class warfare, especially in the unseen outer reaches where pesky photographers and unpurchased scribblers could not travel.

One Kansas City editor of a Republican paper wrote in the 1890s of a convention of populists, the mostly agrarian workers who thundered against monopoly and the banks.  What did he see?

Men whose feet stank, and the odor from under whose arms would have knocked down a bull, women with voices like a gong , women with…dirty fingernails, women with stockings gone out at the heels…gray-haired, scrawny, yellow-skinned women appeared upon the stage dressed in hideous and indecent costumes…To wind up the whole thing delegates were brought up like the hogs they were.

Like countless other radicals and organizers throughout history, Miller’s character, Bobby Flash, personifies a generation of working-stiff ghosts. They were regular men and women out of a Studs Terkel collection, political and social radicals who took no shit, suffered no fools, and clung together to shake the heavens.

By the early 1900s Gilded Age economics had led to a working-person’s desire for cohesion under “one big union.”  One historian argued “it was a ‘typically Western idea—big:  the sky was the limit.’ ”  And from 1906-1916 the International Industrial Workers of the World, nicknamed “The Wobblies”, took on capital and the conservative union establishments like the AFL—organizations that sometimes even furnished strikebreakers against Wobbly actions.

Flash’s narrator finds a Wanted poster for a “bronco buster” and “cow puncher” at odds with the law in that seismic era.  “What interested me,” Jack Wilson says of the Wobblies he is researching, “was not the story of these legendary anarchists, but the unknown stories of those who were lost to history.”

Like countless other radicals and organizers throughout history, Miller’s character, Bobby Flash, personifies a generation of working-stiff ghosts.  They were regular men and women out of a Studs Terkel collection, political and social radicals who took no shit, suffered no fools, and clung together to shake the heavens.

One cannot understand the history of urbanization, transportation, and labor in the West without knowing about the radical movements of this period.  Tragically, the men and women involved have vanished in the popular culture despite their fights and heroism in the roar and fury of industrial America.

Flash’s contemporary San Diego is one where the decrepit urban landscape gives way to artisanal cheeses and the wine cafes the professional class calls “vibrant” or simply “progress.”  It is a city where communes bloom in the desert, the homeless despair on sidewalks, and the city’s corrupt media and real estate developer puppeteer events from their towers.  In the novel of one man’s investigations through the chaos of contemporary California, the reader learns the strange aftermath of a Wobbly life, a single story from a generation of radicals.

Music was the counterstroke to the Carnegie-plutocrat era, symbolized in a little red book which appeared with songs of hope and fights to come. It was smuggled into hellish labor camps and flashed like secret butterflies across every strike action.

Miller keenly understood that any fictionalization of the IWW or Wobbly radical movement would need the songs.  For many of these working people—uneducated, illiterate, constantly on the move—music was a form of cohesion in a liquid modern world.

In Utah, the great Wobbly songster Joe Hill, before he was framed-up and shot, wrote songs for the men in San Pedro as he did for miners:

Workers of the world, awaken!
Break your chains!  Demand your rights!
All the wealth you make is taken
By exploiting parasites. 

Music was the counterstroke to the Carnegie-plutocrat era, symbolized in a little red book which appeared with songs of hope and fights to come.  It was smuggled into hellish labor camps and flashed like secret butterflies across every strike action. Within the songbook were tunes clarifying the struggles and educating the workers (many from distant lands) on the history and principles of equality and combat.

Strikes, inspired by leaders like Big Bill Haywood and Emma Goldman, whom Miller discusses, flashed across the western labor wars and the Wobblies inspired the impoverished and immiserated multitude with music.  They sang with bindles along the tracks and hummed on the trains that reached across prairies and deserts toward work.

Wobblies sang past stewbums who would scab against them for booze and the sheriffs who were paid off to fill the jails with their brothers.  And if Wobbly stomachs and pockets were empty, their hearts brimmed with music even as the employers set their families’ tents on fire or used the Congress and nation’s courts to make raw power appear respectable.

In Ivan Doig’s novel Work Song, a narrator on the run finds himself in Butte, Montana as a Wobbly-inspired strike erupts in 1919 from a 22% wage cut.  It’s no coincidence that he’s immediately hired to work for the undertaker.  He meets workers united by song and class and a fight with a rapacious mining company.

The struggle for workers in the American economy is the most elided, dodged, and overtly ignored subject in popular and political culture today.

It was an age of racist riots, broken strikes, cynical demagogues, of thwarted revolutions.  In those free speech fights in San Diego and Seattle where Robert Houston writes in the novel Bisbee ’17, the law “stuff[ed] the jails with Wobblies like chickens in a breeder.”

But The Wobblies were ripped apart by government–directed Red Scares internally and the external trauma of the Russian Revolution, splintering the movement like an ax against ice.  As in Wilson’s detective-like narrative, radicals in Flash were cast out and forced to starve or wander across miles of terrain.

In a sense, this long march into the wilderness has not ended.  The struggle for workers in the American economy is the most elided, dodged, and overtly ignored subject in popular and political culture today.  The history of American labor, like parallel struggles in the GLBT, women’s, and civil rights struggle, is one of fanatical and inveterate opposition from America’s institutions and elites.  But never since the New Deal have American workers and their organizations found themselves at such a low point. Their history and platforms are ignored.  Labor is a captured constituency on the left and a target on the right.

Democrats, for example, from President Obama to Secretary Clinton seem visibly uneasy speaking about class issues, even in the hammy rhetoric of the campaign trail.  True, the evanescent Bernie Sanders has walked the picket lines and pushed for higher wages, but try and remember a labor leader being invoked, a historic strike being broached, or a radical turn of phrase being uttered in this or any campaign in recent history.

The break-up of the New Deal Coalition—founded in part by outsiders and progressives—saw the country shift rightward and the liberal dead-end of the Clintonoid mantra:  “You have no where else to go.”

Free trade deals gave way to mass incarceration, deregulation, corporate boodle, and a cynical age of politics as theater and management.  Yet, the earlier, neglected era saw the pain of the market pushing workers into a range of radical and social theories where, at one turn of the century convention, antagonisms flared between socialists, Marxists, anarchists, industrial unionists, trade unionists, and anarchists!  Real challenges to the power structure were being discussed.

There is an eternal return where justice is concerned.  The ghosts of injustices past do not disappear.  They reemerge as the rhymes of history play on.  In Flash, Jack Wilson is a reporter who sees the contemporary myths as clearly as the Wobblies saw their own predicaments.  In the end, power discovers a way to justify itself:  Whether in “Americanism” and “property rights” or “the rule of law” and humanistic fantasies of “the free market”.

The last century saw a war of ideologies and this century will be no different.  As philosopher Slavoj Zizek has repeatedly said regarding the wised-up “postmodern” cynicism of recent years, “We believe today more than ever today.”

At one point in Flash’s story, Wilson mentions the scattered ashes of Joe Hill, a type of secular relic for radicals, everyone hoping for a pinch of the great bard.  Similarly, in Wallace Stegner’s biographical novel Joe Hill the author writes that a puff of breeze caught those sacred ashes.  “It seemed to us like the dust of a great volcano thrown high into the upper air, that pinch of white ash might blow all the way around the world.”

Flash is a story of discovery and of almost magical-like parallels. Today, there are no IWW workers recommended for our currency.  There are few statues or popular shows to their memory.  Most Wobblies are nameless and forgotten.

One real Wobbly, Harry Renton Bridges, joined the labor movement in Australia shortly before he hopped a ship to San Francisco.  A tall, chain-smoking steel-longshoreman the stevedores and roustabouts called “Limey” or “Limo,” Bridges used the IWW’s “one big union” idea to organize his own ILA local in 1933-34.

It was in the summer of ’34 that former-Wobbly Harry Bridges organized a waterfront strike that shut down the West Coast from Seattle to San Pedro and precipitated a general strike in San Francisco after the police-murder of two unionists.  And like the Wobblies of old, Bridges demanded a union undivided by religion or color that was united in solidarity against the city’s employers, Hearst’s Press, the Industrial Association or its many creatures.

Even as the Wobblies faded from memory it was their survivors, men like Bridges, who used their militancy on strike committees—men who learned tactics and ideas from an earlier era to organize across trade and geography.  In those pairings with Communist organizers like Karl and Elaine Yoneda  or with writers like Jessica Mitford, the Wobbly spirit lived on.

The labor organization that emerged from that strike, the ILWU, is still one of the most progressive unions in the country—opposing militarism, crony capitalism and blind bigotry of all quarters—and chugs on even as the industries that sustained it wither and shrink.

Miller’s novel reminds radicals that in the seeming “flash” of past radical collisions a flickering light burns, one whose glow we must carry high through the darkness we see in our own future.  Carry the light.

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Brett Warnke

Brett Warnke is a fiction writer and freelancer who lives in San Diego. He lives in Ocean Beach and can be reached at brettwarnke@gmail.com

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