closest sympathetic touch with a disciplined socialism, leave syndicalism without a foothold, except for a few harmless eccentrics.
In France many of the unions are notoriously so unstable and unbuttressed by funds as to give every advantage to syndicalist experiments. To hold office in a "pure and simple" trade union, is to be excluded from I. W. W. membership. There are no editors admitted except those on their own journals. Though their entire conception is based upon trained skill within the shops and everywhere "at the point of production," they glory in their appeal to the unskilled—to those hitherto unreached by labor associations.
But a few months after their first convention in 1905, they attacked the hotels and restaurants in Goldfield, Nevada, In rapid succession follow Youngstown, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; and again Goldfield in 1907, where they claim to have secured eight hours and $4.50 per day. We have throughout the same story of enfeebled unionism or none at all. If the American Federation has some partial hold, that of itself brings war with the I. W. W., as at Skowhegan Mills in 1907, Youngstown and Bridgeport. To the I. W. W. any unionist of the American Federation of Labor is a scab and an outlaw.
In the desperate eleven weeks' strike in 1909 at McKees Rocks, Pa., unionism had been crippled.[1]
- ↑ It was at this strike that the I. W. W. met the most efficient State Constabulary yet evolved in the States. Between seven and eight thousand men with 14 or 15 nationalities met this body. On the killing of the first striker, the war was on. The General Secretary of the I. W. W. thus comments on it:
