TIMBER! Today In Labor History: March 16, 1907

A post about wood.

Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash

On March 16, 1907, timber workers in Portland went on strike. This was one of the first actions organized by people affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was small, but the American Federation of Labor already saw them as a massive threat and would unite with employers to crush the radical workers. This was the beginning of a 30-year battle for Northwestern timber workers to get a union.

The Industrial Workers of the World formed in 1905, with radicals from around the country meeting in Chicago. But the most important group was the Western Federation of Miners, a left-leaning industrial union that had just suffered a brutal defeat thanks to state-sponsored union-busting in Colorado that ended a decade of success there. In the aftermath, they realized the entire working class would need to be organized on an industrial basis in order to achieve working-class liberation. The WFM soon withdrew back to its Rocky Mountain base and the IWW had to figure out what it wanted to be, which it didn’t really until 1908. But it would be in itinerant western workers where these principles of industrial organizing would take hold. The first real actions of workers attempting to act on these ideas happened in 1907. In Goldfield, Nevada, the state and President Theodore Roosevelt gladly engaged in state-sponsored union-busting, including sending in the military, to end any kind of radical action. Then you had the Portland timber workers.

We don’t know a lot of the specific details of how the IWW started to grow on a local level in its early years. For one, the IWW did not tend to center itself among workers who had a tendency to write a lot. The Wobblies, as they were nicknamed, found their home with workers who were not among the skilled workers the American Federation of Labor and its affiliated craft unions thought were worthy of organization. Of course, the AFL also opposed anyone else organizing those unions, but we will get to that more in a bit. The point is that a lot of early IWW workers were itinerant workers, often immigrants, often with questionable literacy no matter the language. This is part of the reason the IWW would develop such rich visual and sing-along cultures that still resound today, much more than the stodginess of AFL unions.

So these were not people who wrote much down. Moreover, the IWW was really disorganized in these early years. Like most leftist organizations, it was riven with internal factions that had to work themselves out, and that took a few years.

The IWW first appeared in the timber industry in 1907 when workers demanding shorter hours and a minimum of $2.50 per day went on strike. In fact, it seems that at least a few radicals identified with the IWW a bit earlier, as there was an action to support Big Bill Haywood in the attempt to railroad him to death for murdering the former governor of Idaho, Frank Steunenberg, a crime he very much did not commit. The timber strike started at the Eastern and Western Lumber Mill. We don’t honestly know that many details. This was before the IWW became propaganda masters, so the level of leftist reporting on this strike isn’t very high. But what we do know is still important and a good way to get at issues that would define working class history in the early 20th century.

Within two weeks the Wobblies claimed a membership of over 1,500 men in Portland. The IWW had opened an office on Burnside Avenue, in what is today downtown Portland, and then moved to the North End. The strike collapsed in April after mill owners hired strikebreakers with the approval of the AFL. This is probably the most important piece of information about this strike. The mainstream labor movement would hate everything to do with the IWW. Even before the federal government took radicalism seriously as a threat, the AFL did so. In this case, the AFL actively worked to bring in scabs — their own union members, I think — to eliminate the IWW.

What’s crazy about all of this is not that the AFL hated competition per se. It’s that the AFL also refused to organize these workers. In other words, the older and more snobbish organization believed that it and only it should have the right to organize American workers. But also, even if those workers wanted a union, if the AFL didn’t think they deserved one, and they weren’t going to organize one. For timber workers — largely itinerant, often moving from the woods to the mills to the farms and doing other kinds of work as well, often traveling from the Great Plains to the West and back — they didn’t get unions. The aristocracy of labor really believed in itself that way. This would not be a class-conscious labor movement, or it sort of would be, but it identified enemies among the rest of the working class as much as it did in employers.

By late 1907, Wobbly organizers worked in the Grays Harbor area of southwestern Washington, Bellingham, western Montana, the redwood forests of California, and Vancouver, British Columbia. For the next several years, the IWW would sort of be around and sort of not, beginning to gain greater traction with the Spokane Free Speech Fight in 1909, which spread to other free speech actions across the West over the next few years. It hit its real height on a national scale in the timber industry after 1912, when its organizers began to realize that most rank-and-file workers didn’t actually care about syndicalism or any other ideology, and it would be more effective to organize them around their lived conditions, like the horrible food and housing and working conditions of the forests and mills.

By the mid 1910s, the hatred of the AFL, the employers, and the government toward workers trying to organize had grown due to the IWW’s increasing success in organizing workers who, again, the AFL refused to even recognize as legitimate members of the working class. This led to serious violence and repression. In Everett, Washington, in 1916, cops opened fire on a group of IWW members seeking to land a boat to organize the town, killing several of them. In 1917, with the IWW successfully organizing enough workers to threaten spruce production for airplanes in World War I, the government sent in the military to create the Spruce Production Division and effectively strike-break, but also recognized that the IWW was correct about the conditions, and forced the companies to change. In 1919, when the IWW attempted to defend its union hall in Centralia, Washington, from American Legion members trying to ransack it and opened fire, killing four, the Legion responded by lynching Wesley Everest and railroading other leading Wobblies into prison.

Northwestern timber workers would not get their unions until the 1930s and even then had to fight against the AFL’s hostility to these workers, this time with the Congress of Industrial Organizations a much more effective conduit to organizing than the IWW had been.

FURTHER READING:

Erik Loomis, Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests

Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World

Robert L. Tyler, Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest