The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is a union of wage workers which was formed in Chicago in 1905. The IWW experienced a number of divisions and splits during its early history.
When the office of the IWW president was abolished at the convention in 1906, deposed President Sherman and his supporters, many from the Socialist Party and the Western Federation of Miners, formed a rump IWW, which ceased to exist after about a year.Paul Frederick Brissenden, The I.W.W. A Study of American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1919, pages 174-184
After the 1908 convention of the original IWW, at which Socialist Labor Party (SLP) head Daniel DeLeon was barred from voting via credentials challenges, DeLeon and the SLP bolted to form another rump IWW, which came to be called the Detroit IWW. In 1915, the Detroit IWW changed its name to the Workers' International Industrial Union (WIIU). The WIIU continued its close relationship with the SLP, but ceased to exist in 1924.
There was another division within the original Chicago IWW which caused political infighting for many years, and finally split the organization in 1924. This time, the two groups were referred to as the centralizers and the decentralizers. This split was in part responsible for a serious decline in membership — a decline from which the organization has never fully recovered. The decentralizers' faction ceased to exist as a separate group in 1931.
For the existing IWW, the results of the splits were, in part, the abolition of the office of president; the departure of the Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party; a constitutional provision barring alliance with any political party; a reliance on direct (economic) action rather than political petition; and a focus on using creative tactics to organize low-wage, itinerant, unskilled, migratory, and immigrant workers.
Eastern Wobblies, western Wobblies
The divisions in the early days of the IWW were based upon differing philosophies and ideologies, and to a considerable extent these differences could be traced to regional particularities.
The Western Wobblies were often casual workers from the mines, mills, lumber camps, and agricultural regions of the West and Midwest. These were largely male, unattached, footloose, and open to adventure. In 1918, just after the United States had entered World War I and the government charged IWW leaders with violation of the espionage law for their anti-war expressions, Robert W. Bruere wrote in Harper's Magazine that,
The Industrial Workers of the World are most numerous among the migratory workers of the West; among the homeless, wayfaring men who follow the harvests from Texas across the Canadian border; among the lumberjacks who pack their quilts from camp to distant camp in the fir and pine and spruce forests of the Northwest; and among the metalliferous miners of Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, and Old Mexico. In other words, they are strongest among the men upon whom the nation depends for three of its basic raw materials—materials of fundamental importance at all times; of crucial importance in time of war.
According to our best information, approximately four-fifths of these migratory workers are men whose family ties have been broken—"womanless, voteless, and jobless men." Competent authorities estimate that about one-half of them are native Americans, and the other half men who have been uprooted by labor brokers and padrones from their native ethnic and social environments; voluntary or forced immigrants from the agricultural districts of Ireland, from the Welsh and Cornish mines, from the hungry hills of Italy, Serbia, Greece, and Turkish Asia Minor.Robert W. Bruere, The Industrial Workers of the World, An Interpretation, Harper's magazine, Volume 137 Making of America Project Harper & Brothers, 1918
Bruere wrote of a "pernicious system of sabotage" by railroad corporations and other business interests, creating "hobos, vagabonds, wayfarers—migratory and intermittent workers, outcasts from society and the industrial machine, ripe for the denationalized fellowship of the I. W. W."
Typical IWW tactics in the West were soap boxing and, where they found it necessary, the free speech fight. As a direct result of their working class experiences in western states, Western Wobblies developed a bitter hostility toward political parties.While this hostility toward politics was developed independently, it mirrored the sentiments of syndicalists in France. Paul Frederick Brissenden, The I.W.W. A Study of American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1919, page 231 The most conspicuous example of these anarchistic sentiments among Western Wobblies was the Overalls Brigade, who were suspicious of all political parties; believed voting and legislating a ritual aimed at deluding workers; were antagonistic toward craft unions, referring to them as coffin societies; and, were generally opposed to leaders of any kind, even within the IWW.Paul Frederick Brissenden, The I.W.W. A Study of American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1919, page 233
In the East, the IWW became the champion of ethnic solidarity and the focus of immigrant discontent, during a strike of women mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. One notable struggle in Paterson, New Jersey involved the production of a pageant in Madison Square Garden, performed by the strikers themselves. Many Eastern IWW members tended to be more supportive of radical state socialist principles of the Socialist Labor Party variety. They did not care for anarchy, and tended to dismiss the Socialist Party's reformist philosophy. According to Paul Brissenden, a labor historian who wrote about the IWW in 1919, the Eastern Wobblies were "revolutionary Marxists — doctrinaire to the bone — saturated with the dialectic."Paul Frederick Brissenden, The I.W.W. A Study of American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1919, page 234
From 1905 on, many workers in the West were unable to vote. This created a different dynamic from the experiences of early IWW supporters in the East. However, by the time the IWW began to organize textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, the IWW would confront the same circumstance in the East. In 1913, IWW organizer Bill Haywood would declare, "I advocate the industrial ballot alone when I address the workers in the textile industries of the East where a great majority are foreigners without political representation. But when I speak to American workingmen in the West I advocate both the industrial and the political ballot."Helen Marot, Industrial Workers of the World, American labor unions, H. Holt and company, 1914 But by this time, regional differences had already exerted a significant impact on the organization.
In some sense, the Western Wobblies would evolve into the Chicago IWW after the split of 1908. The Eastern Wobblies, whom Brissenden believed held most closely to the ideals of the first convention, became the Detroit IWW after the same division.Paul Frederick Brissenden, The I.W.W. A Study of American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1919, pages 234-236
These two factions became the most visible manifestations of a divided IWW. The Chicago, or "Red IWW" was referred to variously as the direct action, the economic, the bummery, or the anarchist faction. The Detroit, or "Yellow IWW" faction was called the doctrinaire, the political, or the socialist faction. However, there were other splits, both before and after this most significant split, in which some of the same philosophical differences played a role.
1906 split
For the first several years the differences between those who favored political action via electoral politics, and those who believed that working people could never obtain justice through political action, played out within the IWW.
However, other divisions wracked the young organization, initially over the leadership style and practices of President Charles O. Sherman, the first (and only) president of the IWW. Sherman, a failed AFL union leader who sought redemption in the IWW, was accused of expensive habits and financial improprieties, but was also faulted for favoring "pure and simple unionism" of the AFL variety. IWW organizer James P. Cannon observed that members questioned Sherman's commitment to revolutionary principles espoused at the organization's founding:
Charles O. Sherman, the first general president of the IWW, was an exponent of the industrial-union form of organization. But that apparently was as far as he wanted to go, and it wasn’t far enough for those who took the revolutionary pronouncements of the First Convention seriously.James P. Cannon, The IWW, Fourth International, Summer 1955 http://www.iww.org/en/history/library/Cannon/iww/2 retrieved July 24, 2011
According to Melvyn Dubofsky, Sherman was duplicitous, and used his position as president of the IWW "to increase his power and line his own pockets."Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, University of Illinois Press Abridged, 2000, page 60
Sherman was supported by conservative elements in the WFM. He was opposed by IWW Secretary Treasurer William Trautmann, Vincent St. John, and Daniel DeLeon, head of the Socialist Labor Party, who averred that they sought to rescue the organization's stated purpose and philosophy—revolutionary working class solidarity. The more "radical" element within the IWW — composed of those referred to as "beggars, tramps, and proletarian rabble" — specifically, those who favored direct action, some organization leaders, plus DeLeon's group — adopted a member's proposal published in the Industrial Worker which called for abolishing the office of president.Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, University of Illinois Press Abridged, 2000, page 61 The proposal was agreed to at the 1906 convention.
Paul Brissenden believed, however, that the issues behind divisions in the first two years were more personality than principle, complicated by intrigue on the part of individuals in the two socialist parties.Paul Frederick Brissenden, The I.W.W. A Study of American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1919, page 136 Brissenden weighed the arguments of the two sides, and concluded that neither side acted charitably toward the other. Furthermore, Bill Haywood, writing from prison in Idaho before his acquittal, emphatically condemned "Shermanism", but then chided that with a bit of diplomacy, the troubles could have been smoothed over.Paul Frederick Brissenden, The I.W.W. A Study of American Syndicalism, Columbia University, 1919, pages 141-142 However, with Big Bill's charismatic leadership skills temporarily unavailable, the die had been cast. Haywood would later write (in his autobiography, published in 1929), "Sherman had proved incapable, and if not actually dishonest, he had used an enormous amount of the funds for unnecessary purposes."Bill Haywood, The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, International Publishers, 1929, page 202 ppbk