OUR PROGRESSIVE LEGACY: THE SOUTHERN WOBBLIES
Facing South
One of the biggest reasons progressives are so easily driven to despair about prospects for change in the South is because we're so cut off from the region's progressive history. Consciously or unconsciously, too many buy into the myth of a monolithically conservative and unchanging South, a mindset which in turn lowers our vision of what's possible in the region now and in the future.
That's why here at the Institute we've always had a special interest in bringing to light stories of the region's rich legacy of progressive politics and social movements. Today's case study: the International Workers of the World, or the "Wobblies."
As
Max Sawicky and others have noted, 2005 is the
100th anniversary of the IWW, whose organizing efforts from 1905 to about 1917 is one of the brighter chapters in American progressive history. (The
union still exists, doggedly organizing local Starbucks shops and similar operations)
But while folks may know about Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, "Solidarity Forever," and other pieces of the Wobblies' fascinating tale, how many know about the IWW's historic, cross-racial campaign to organize lumber workers in the South from 1907 to 1912?
Although the IWW's involvement with loggers and mill workers is usually associated with California and the Pacific Northwest, historian Philip Foner argues in his History of the Labor Movement in the United States (Vol. 4) that "one of its most interesting inspiring chapters relates to the lumber industry of the South."
At the turn of the century, timber and lumber barons snatched up millions of acres of forests in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and East Texas (paying the U.S. government 12.5 to 75 cents an acre), and went to work cutting down some 90% of the region's native tree land (one of the nation's greatest environmental disasters).
By 1910, 262,000 workers toiled in the Southern lumber empire, half of them African-American. Not only were wages in Southern lumbering 15 to 25 percent below the national average, workers existed in a near-feudal domain of company towns marked by poverty, violence and fear. As one complaint read, "The timber and lumber workers ... are being practically held as peons within barbed wire enclosures; where there is no law except the will of the Lumber Trust's imported thugs and gunmen."
But in 1907, the Southern timber workers launched their revolt.
READ THE REST at Facing South, the blog of the progressive South:
http://www.southernstudies.org/facingsouth