UNITED STATES HISTORY 74 i 



During the summer of 1912, 2,500 marines were sent to Nicaragua to protect the lives 

 and property of Americans; they took part in several engagements. 



In December 1911 the treaty of 1832 with Russia was abrogated because of the 

 refusal to give proper recognition to the passports of American Jews in Russia. 



The high cost of living has naturally led to demands for increased wages and to 

 labour disturbances throughout the country. Acts of violence attended many of the 



strikes. Early in 1912 some 25,000 operatives employed in the mills of 

 Labour Lawrence, Massachusetts, left work on account of a reduction in wages 

 faces. " following the passage of a state law which limited the hours of labour. 



The strike ended with the concession of higher wages, but not before the 

 militia had been ordered out and some bloodshed had occurred. In this struggle the 

 operatives were led by a new organisation known as the Industrial Workers of the 

 World. This organisation, though it has been in the public eye little except in 191 i-i 2, 

 dates further back. Its prototypes were the Knights of Labor, the Western Federation 

 of Miners which struck in Idaho in 1899, the American Railway Union, which carried 

 through the great railway strike of 1894, and, in form, the United Mine Workers. 

 Each of these attempted to unite all the workmen, skilled and unskilled, in an industry. 

 As a result of a conference of six active labour leaders in the autumn of 1904, the Indus- 

 trial Workers of the World, with Debs of the American Railway Union and Haywood 

 of the Western Federation of Miners, attempted to organise the workers of all industries, 

 and in January 1905 published an Industrial Union Manifesto. There was a serious 

 split in the Industrial Workers of the World, in 1906, when the radicals broke with the 

 officials, whom they accused of too great conservatism but who kept control of the 

 organisation. The Goldfield strike of 1907-08 (see E. B. xii, 210) centered about the 

 I.W.W. In 1909 there was another schism; Daniel De Leon (b. 1852), a member of 

 the Knights of Labor in 1888-95 an d a leader in the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance 

 from 1895 to its fusion (1905) with the I.W.W., founded an "indirect" (or political) 



action branch with headquarters at Detroit, which is very different from 



t ^ ie direct act ion policy of the Chicago School. There is the bitterest 

 of the World, feeling between the two branches, almost as strong as their enmity to 



the trades unions. The Detroit branch nearly coincides with the Socialist 

 Labor party, of which also De Leon is the leader. The Chicago branch would probably 

 have amounted to little had not William D. Haywood been disowned early in 1908 

 (after his acquittal on the charge of murdering Governor Steunenberg) by the West- 

 ern Federation of Miners. He thereupon devoted himself to the I.W.W. In 1909 

 the organisation engineered the McKees Rocks (Penn.) strike of the workers of the 

 Pressed Steel Car Company including 16 nationalities, where success was largely 

 due, as in 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts (q.v.), to the arousal of public sympathy, 

 partly because of gross errors of the authorities in dealing with the trouble. In 

 1911-12 the workers campaigned for "free speech" in Oregon and California (q.v.). 

 There are two national unions, the Textile and the Lumber, affiliated with the 

 I.W.W., and its appeal has been to the lower paid and more unskilled workman, the 

 newer immigrant, and in its free speech propaganda on the Pacific Coast to the 

 tramp. The basic principles of the I.W.W. are that "the working class and the em- 

 ploying dass have nothing in common " and that between them a struggle must go 

 on, through the organisation of all the members of all industries if necessary, until 

 capitalism is overthrown and the wage system abolished. It considers a strike a 

 mere incident in a prolonged warfare, to be followed, when strikers return to work, 

 by " sabota'ge," i.e., idling at work, the British " ca' canny," and various ingenious 

 methods of spoiling the machinery, business, market, etc., of the capitalist employer. 

 The question of right and wrong is not to be considered. No agreements with an 

 employer are sought and none are final. 



The dynamiting work of the McNamaras and their associates (see CALIFORNIA and 

 INDIANA) was done, not by members of the I.W.W., but by officials of unions affiliated 

 with the Anierican Federation of Labor which the I.W.W. has always opposed. 



