American Mercury/Volume 7/Wobbly Talk

by Stewart Hall Holbrook

WOBBLY TALK

BY STEWART H. HOLBROOK

A WOBBLY, as every man, woman and west knows, is a member of the great order of Industrial Workers of the World. The East knows him only as an I. W. W. He has developed, within his group, a peculiar argot, and it is little known outside the ranks. Originally it was a hybrid, a combination of underworld slang and hobo phrases, but though a few of these early expressions are still current, wobbly neologists have manufactured a great many new ones. They are used not only in conversation, but also in the various wobbly newspapers and propaganda pamphlets. Thus they have acquired a sort of official status.

The word wobbly, although it is not dignified by an official act of the General Executive Board of the I. W. W., nevertheless is the usual designation of a member by his fellows and himself. There are half a dozen theories about its origin, but only two of them have much credence among the rank and file. Most of the boys will tell you that it was conceived, if only unconsciously, by a Chinaman. This Chink was the proprietor of a small and portable eating establishment with which he fol- lowed the large crews of Swedes, Irishmen and hunkies who pushed the Canadian Northern rails into the far wastes of Saskatchewan, twelve years ago. Many of the laborers were either "packing red cards" or at least had leanings toward the I. W. W., so the Chink, being a go-getter and a believer in Service, lined up with the gang. In a laudable effort to cash in on his affiliation he would show his card to all potential customers, telling them that he was a member of the I. W. W. But the heathen tongue was not equal to the letter w. "Me likee I Wobbly Wobbly," was the best it could do. It proved enough. Wobbly spread from man to man and, by mysterious, unseen jungle news-channels, from camp to camp, until now it is used by all the Western headline writers. WOBS PULL STRIKE AT HARBOR CAMPS and WOB- BLY HALL WRECKED BY POLICE are familiar to every literate resident of the Pacific Coast. A smaller school of wobbly etymologists holds that the word came over from Australia, and is a corruption. of wallaby. But this theory lacks the sup- port of a specific legend and I am of the opinion that it is unsound.

One of the broadest and most useful terms in the wobbly language is deborn. This word originally had a surgical meaning in Texas, but since its adoption by the wobblies it has become as wide as the concept of 100 per cent Americanism. In general it designates anything in opposition to I. W. W. teachings. When one has no horns, i. e., no class-consciousness, then one has no weapons to battle with the monster of capitalism. Dehorn goes further. Rum in any form, gambling, Ford auto- mobiles, fiction magazines, the Kept Press, femmes de joie-all these are deborn. They take the worker's mind off the class struggle. A dehorn committee is one which, during a wobbly strike, pickets bootleg-joints and proletarian seraglios, keeps workmen away therefrom, and thus, in theory at least, prevents members from throwing themselves too quickly upon the strike fund.

A gyppo is anyone who works by the piece, or by any sort of contract whereby volume of production and not time of labor is considered. Like the widely used

verb, to gyp, it was suggested by the well known propensity of gypsies to take everything not nailed down. "He was gypsied out of it;" i. e., crooked, hornswoggled. The analogy is clear if you understand the I. W. W. philosophy of labor under capitalism: the least and poorest work for the highest wages. A piece or contract worker will perform a lot more in eight hours than a man working by the day. The contract worker gets up a big sweat and works from early to late, and though he makes more money than the wage slave, he at the same time produces more for the boss. And the wobbly decalogue says that "all wealth belongs to labor, which creates wealth." Therefore, the contract worker is not only being unmercifully gypoed by the boss, but he is himself gyping another man out of a job.

The gyppo felling and bucking of timber, where workmen are paid by a standard timber scale, is variously known as working by the inch, or working by the mile, or by the bushel. Scissorbills, generally speaking, are workmen who do not accept the wobbly's sociological concepts. The term is widely used, especially in reference to hillbillies and other yokels who will not join any sort of labor organization. Its etymology I don't know. lent of the familiar quadruplex expression which, when used by one Brother Elk to another, should always be accompanied by a smile.

The popular hijack, a word that has reached wide circulation since the advent of Volsteadism, may not be pure wobbly, but its earliest use was largely within the I. W. W. ranks. It comes from "High, Jack!", a command to throw up the arms, and originated among the gangs of small crooks which used to traverse the harvest belt at the close of the wheat season. These yeggs, in groups of a dozen or more, would ride the freights and rob the returning migratory workers of their wages. In an effort to combat them the I. W. W. organized protective and retaliatory gangs which hijacked the crooks.

Dating from the famous Homestead strike of 1892 is the odious fink. It is by far the most derogatory term in the wobbly lingo. Fink, according to one version, was originally Pink, a contraction of Pinkerton, and referred to the army of strike-breakers recruited by the detective agency and sent to Homestead to subdue the striking steel-workers. Many of these workers were foreigners and understood little of the Amer- ican language. But they tried to pick up the battle cry, "Th' goddam Pinks are comin'!" and "the goddam finks" was the result. The word has since been used to designate a member of a private gendarm- erie, a strike-breaker, a mine-guard, a company operative, or a plain stool-pigeon. Among the wobblies it is a mean word, a nasty, scrap-starting word, the equiva- I.

Another sort of hijack is used by the W. W. for extending membership and gathering in dollars. Crowds of wobbly organizers gang up and ride the freights east and west. They close in on a gondola or box-car full of scissorbills and by threats of violence hijack them into paying initiatory fees and current dues for what are termed red cards, the official membership credentials of the I. W. W. Thus coffers are filled and “membership" extended. On many railroad lines, where the freight shacks (i. e., train crews) are wobbly sympathizers, it is almost imperative that a hobo carry a red card.

The expressive clown, as applied to constables, sheriffs and deputies, is always used in the wobbly press. The same holds true of cutor, the name for a prosecuting attorney, although the word had its origin in crook circles. Jungle and jungle buzzard are also used, but these were coined by some knight of the road long before the I. W. W. came into existence. Packing the rigging is pure wobbly. It means carrying I. W. W. organization supplies-propaganda literature and other material for getting new members. The rigging-packers are the evangelists of the organization, the Spreaders of the Word. As such, they may be either paid delegates at $4 a day-the

official daily wage of all wobs, from the general chairman down to the office boy- or voluntary delegates with no official pay.

A good part of the argot of construction and logging camps comes from wobbly neologists. There is much of it which, though rich in humor and philosophy, unfortunately could not appear in a magazine designed for reading in Christian homes. Most of it contains more of real worth than one finds in anything yet produced by soldiers, crooks, or the sporting fraternity. Who, for example, could better gut-hammer? This instrument is the triangular piece of iron on which the cook beats his signal for supper. If you have ever watched a gang of two hundred hunkies attack a meal of mulligan, you will appreciate the dramatic value of a word like gut-hammer. It is superb.

A cook, no matter who or where, is a boiler or a sizzler. A plate of hash is a load of culls. Hotcakes are flats. Highball-camps are those where work is speeded up by a superintendent or foremen or by straw- bosses. A logging superintendent is the bull of the woods. A foreman is the push. The straw-boss, or foreman of a small crew, is known as a king snipe when he has charge of a track-laying gang. Steel gang laborers are gandy dancers. All wage earners are slaves. Horses are hay-burners. Teamsters are hair-pounders. Carrying a balloon is wob talk for carrying a bed-roll or blankets. Since the installation of company bedding at most camps in the West, carrying a balloon has been considered very bad form. Bunyan camps, so named in memory of a pioneer if mythical logger, are those at which bedding is not furnished. The term is also applied to camps in which living conditions are not up to the wobbly standard. These are often known as haywire outfits. When a worker is obliged to carry his lunch in a bucket, it is known as a nosebag show. The age-old and mutual scorn with which wanderers and stay-at-homes regard each other is found in boomer and homeguard. A boomer is a short staker, a very transient worker who makes the logging camps, the harvest, the construction jobs and even a trip on a marine transport, all in one season. Homeguards are steady employés who year in and year out work for one concern. There is much antipathy between the two. The footloose boomer looks down on the homeguard with the condescending scorn of a globe-trotter for the village yokel, and the homeguard considers the boomer a tramp.

Hoosier is applied to any man who does not know his job. Its use in this way is said to have had its origin in an advertisement inserted a dozen years ago in Indiana country newspapers, asking for "men to learn the lumber industry in one of the largest lumber manufacturing plants in the world; situated on the Pacific Coast; plenty of chance for advancement." The company responsible for this advertisement is still in business in the State of Washington and is widely if not favorably known as the Western Penitentiary. Its go-getting and optimistic announcement brought to the Swede-infested Western country a small army of farm-hands who had never seen a sawmill, much less "one of the largest lumber manufacturing plants in the world." Their efforts to handle lumber, if one is to believe eye-witnesses, were pathetic. Hence, the word boosier is applied to anyone who is incompetent. When a crew of workmen purposely hoosier up on the company, it means what experts in sabotage term a "conscious withdrawal of efficiency."

The wobbly press, which has weekly papers in Chicago, Duluth, Seattle and Portland, and one monthly magazine, has a cant distinctly its own. The style of its editors is not cramped by a style-sheet. To successfully hold their jobs they need only "make it hot for the goddam parasites." Like Hearst editors, they must have a cause célèbre on tap at all times. During the past ten months I have seen but one edition of an I. W. W. paper which did not have a large, black scare-head across its front page. By brass check sheets the wobbly press

refers to daily newspapers of the parasitic or non-proletarian class. Upton Sinclair's book, "The Brass Check," is the source of the phrase. Pie in the sky is a somewhat cynical reference to the bourgeois heaven. Daytonesque needs no gloss. CS is used extensively; it is wob for the famous Criminal Syndicalism Act of California.

The Industrial Worker, wobbly organ of the imminent revolution of the proletariat, has for its columnist one T-Bone Slim, a gentleman I strongly suspect of originating many of the newer wobbly words and phrases. In a recent number he wrote:

A working stiff often gets it into what he thinks is his head that by merely saving what money he can spare from his $3.50 per day, and investing it in Just Some Good Safe stocks, he will some day surely become a Ford or a Rockefeller. Such a working stiff, gentlemen, should be treated at once. He is suffering from the first stages of hydro- forbesia.

A great Hearst publicist comes in for much razzing at the hand of Slim, and brisbanalities is now official in the wobbly thesaurus.

But wobbly editors are always complaining about the lack of good reporters and correspondents. They say that the fellow workers have not good news-sense and are prone to be both vague and verbose in their news items. I feel that such criticism is hardly justified. Consider the following from the Job News department of the Industrial Worker (Seattle):

Another report from the same paper:

Aberdeen, Wash.-Coates-Fordney Camp.-High- lead layout; two sides, rig-up crew and steel gang. Wages: gandy dancers, $3.75; rigging, $4.25 to $6.50. Garbage: $1.45 per day. Mattress furnished; carry your own balloon. Slaves dissatisfied with conditions, but talk nothing but dehorn and World's Series. Two of us Fellow Workers just started to line up a few of the boys when the push hit us on the behind with pay-checks. He has the wobbly horrors bad. Fellow Workers coming this way should lay off the bull bucker here. He is a fink. Pretends to favor the One Big Union and when you ask to stamp him up he turns you in.

There is surely nothing the matter with that reporting. It tells everything a camp- going wob needs to know in a clear, concise manner, and its contribution to the American language is better than anything to be found in the sporting pages of the newspapers or in the Tom-show advertisements in the Billboard. The trouble is, I fear, that the wob editors don't know good reporting when they see it.