Left of the Left by Andrew Cornell

Author:Andrew Cornell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2016-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

31: Ben on Trial

In 1918, Ben Fletcher was sentenced to prison for ten years in a sensational Chicago trial that dragged on for months. The offence was violation of the Espionage Act passed a year earlier in the run-up to World War I. He was found guilty along with a hundred other prominent Wobblies, including many who worked closely with him on the Philadelphia waterfront: Jack Walsh, Walter Nef, E. F. Doree, and Manuel Rey (later Sam’s Stelton buddy). There were similar mass trials in Kansas and California. Eugene V. Debs was convicted under the same Act in a separate trial.

The years 1917–1922, roughly, bracket the Red Scare: the paranoid fear that the nation was being subverted by radicals, socialists, foreign elements. It is a chronic disease, latent in the national bloodstream, that erupts from time to time with sudden ferocity—a political malaria akin to the bouts of hysterical anti-Semitism of other cultures. The hysteria is whipped up and orchestrated by interested parties: the Federal Government, business interests, demagogic politicians, and so on. The Red Scare meant open season on the IWW, on the Socialist Party, on all political nonconformists—or alternately on those people the dominant culture simply did not like, such as the devout Mennonites, the homeless, and the undeserving poor.

The IWW marked a dividing line in American society, Helen Keller wrote. You hated them or loved them and that was that. She came to the defense of the IWW in a remarkable document written on the eve of the 1918 Chicago trial and in the midst of the Great War To End All Wars.

The Wobblies were regarded as no better than vermin by the powerful and “respectable” elements of society. I am not speaking metaphorically. It is a literal truth that reflects the foul odor of the times.

A Tulsa, Oklahoma newspaper wrote: “The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the IWWs. Kill them, just as you would kill any other kind of a snake. It is no time to waste money on trials.… All that is necessary is evidence and a firing squad.” Another paper referred to the IWW simply as “America’s cancer sore.” On the other hand, we have the impeccable standard of journalism of the Los Angeles Times: “A vast number of I.W.W.’s are non-producers. I.W.W. stands for I Won’t Work, and I Want Whisky. The average Wobbly, it must be remembered, is a sort of half-wild animal. He lives on the road, cooks his food in rusty tin cans…and sleeps in ‘jungles,’ barns, outhouses, freight cars.… They are all in all a lot of homeless men wandering about the country without fixed destination or purpose, other than destruction.”

The myth of the Rootless Wobbly Wild Man! Yes, many of them were indeed rootless—a byproduct of their poverty. But not all of them by any means. I suspect most of those who were not migrant workers—and many of those as well—were family men. It was true of Ben and E. F. Doree and Walter Nef and Herbert Mahler and Ralph Chaplin and Big Jim Thompson and Bill Haywood.

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