When The Wobblies Bloomed

When The Wobblies Bloomed

 

Sam Eaton comment:

Everybody, or practically everybody, knows the story of how my old friend Ralph Morris from Troy, New York and I met on May Day 1971 so I will just give the highlights since what I want to really talk about is what we discussed and decided to do as a result of what happened that day. See I had gone down to Washington D.C. with several groups (collectives, was what we called them) of red-hot “reds” and radicals from Cambridge in order to “capture” the White House. That is not as weird as it sounds now since what we were trying to do along with thousands of others who opposed the Vietnam War (and shared similar positions on other social questions as well) was to “shut down the government, if it did not shut down the war.” We were angry, we were desperate and some of us, not me then anyway, were acting under the impression that we were opening a second front here in America in aid of the liberation fighters in Vietnam.   

Ralph, an ex-veteran with eighteen months under his belt in Vietnam, had become totally disgusted with what he had done there, what his buddies had done there, and what the American government had made them do to people who were not bothering anybody, at least nobody in America.  He had joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization and had come down to Washington with a group from New York state who were going to shut down their old boss, the Pentagon, as part of that same May Day action. They at least had enough sense, unlike us, to realize that this would be a symbolic action. In either case what we all got for our troubles was tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and as Ralph put it once, sent to the bastinado, the RFK football stadium then being used as a holding pen for all those arrested that day. And there is where Ralph and I met when he saw I had a VVAW supporter button on (in respect for my friend Jeff Mullins from my hometown of Carver, Massachusetts who got blown away in Vietnam and got me out in the streets as a result).      

Like I said what was important was not so much that we met, although that did start a lifetime personal friendship and politically active association, but that we began what would be a several years stretch of activity and study in order to see what had gone wrong that day, and what we really needed to do when the government went to war and we needed to stop it in its tracks. After we left RFK and hitchhiked back up North we continued to talk and to make study plans which due to one thing or another didn’t get a big boost until the summer of 1972. That summer I had been living in a Cambridge commune, a very common living arrangement during those years for comradery and to share the bills among people who had little dough. I invited Ralph over from Troy to stay with me and to join a study group/ action group run by one of the many “red collectives” that were sprouting up around Cambridge in those days. He came and spent the summer, although his father who ran a high precision electrical shop was furious since Ralph had been cheap labor for him.

Not everything that we learned that summer, or later when we studied with other groups or on our own, was etched in gold, had a lot of relevance to what we were trying to do but a lot did. A grounding in the basics of classical Marxism except for the book sealed with seven seals Das Capital, the experiences of the Bolsheviks and the three Russian revolutions, the work of Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky on colonial revolutions, closer to home the American Civil War, and the early labor movement here. And of course a drill through of what were called questions, questions with a big “Q” like the black question, the Russian question, the women question, the gay question, the labor party question and so on.         

We wound up not joining any particular group, including not joining the Socialist Workers Party that we were interested in because of its connection with the heroic figure of Leon Trotsky and his windmill facing tasks to save the Russian revolution and because of James P. Cannon whose work in the political prisoner field, especially when he was with the International Labor Defense and its central involvement in the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s. While we had political disagreements with most groups we were in contact with (and disagreements between us especially on the Labor Party question since I was red-hot to try and use the Democratic Party as a way to change things and Ralph would have none of that since it was a Democrat, LBJ, who sent his “young ass” [his term] to Vietnam) would join and unjoin various ad hoc groups around particular issues much preferring that avenue to joining a hard political organization. The real reason though was that sometime in the mid-1970s while we were still deep in trying to figure things out the glow of the big 1960s jail break-out was beginning to lose steam. And we were beginning to lose steam as well wanting to get on with careers and starting families.

Ralph, who still lives in Troy as I still live around Boston, since we are both practically retired and the kids are grown have gotten together more recently when he makes periodic trips to Boston. One night not long ago we were sitting in our favorite bar, Jack Higgins’ Grille down by the Financial District downtown, talking about this and that, you know of course political this and that, when Ralph mentioned that he had run into Hugo Gans, the old Industrial Workers of the World organizer (IWW, Wobblies) who was out there trying to organize some small restaurant in Saratoga Springs. That got us talking about those old study groups and about the process we went through trying to figure out what group we would join in order to do more effective political work (remember we wound up not joining any on-going group).          

No question we were under the sway of Che and Leon Trotsky and that it would be hard to see ourselves in an organization hostile to the work of either men but we paid very close attention in one study class run by an anarchist who went root and branch through the virtues of the old time Wobblies. We caught some of the fever he put out, if only as an historical moment. We stood in thrall to guys like Big Bill Haywood and his Western miners who went through hell to get what they wanted. We admired Frank Little and the others who were martyred to the cause and the heroic struggle against great odds of the IWWs opposition to World War I which put the organization right in the cross-hairs of the government bent on war and which basically crushes organization as an effective pole of attraction for young labor militants. We admired Jim Cannon as well for making the big move from the Wobblies but shared his old time sentimental feeling that the organization grabbed some very good cadre in the early days.

And of course there was Hugo who could always be counted on to bring whoever he could round-up to add bodies to whatever protest we were planning. So it was something of a treat to pick up a copy of a newspaper from one of the young earnest Marxists hocking their wares at an anti-war Iraq and Syria rally that featured some words by Cannon on the subject of the Wobblies. He had a good sense of their strengths in the early day and their limitations when things changed and the deal went down. Read on.