The Continental Congress of the Working Class

Brand Hall, Chicago, the morning of June 27, 1905. William "Big Bill" Haywood, an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners, picked up a loose board off the floor, banged it on a table, and called the room to order. More than 200 delegates had come from 43 labor organizations across the country. Haywood told them they were sitting in "the Continental Congress of the working class."

He meant it straight. No irony. They were there to write a new American union from scratch.

The room was not what the American Federation of Labor would have recognized as a labor convention. The AFL at that time organized white craftsmen and kept most of the working class out. At Brand Hall there were metal miners, socialists, anarchists, a Catholic priest in a collar, Eugene V. Debs, who had done six months in an Illinois jail a decade earlier for leading the Pullman railway strike, Mary "Mother" Jones, then in her late sixties and already a legend in the coal camps, Daniel De Leon of the Socialist Labor Party, and Lucy Parsons, a Black and Mexican and Indigenous anarchist organizer who had edited the Chicago anarchist paper The Alarm, lectured across the country for 20 years, and yes, been widowed in 1887 when the state of Illinois hanged her husband Albert for the Haymarket bombing he did not commit.

The Preamble

The Constitution Committee seated a secretary named Thomas J. Hagerty, a Catholic priest from New Mexico who was also a socialist and who would be suspended by his bishop for it. Hagerty drafted the Preamble. It opens, "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common."

That sentence is not metaphor and it is not rhetoric. It is the organizing premise of the union. No labor-management partnership. No craft walls. One Big Union, open to Black workers, immigrant workers, women workers, farmhands, and the unskilled, every category the AFL shut out. The Preamble names the class war as the fact of the case and sets the union's job as ending it.

Lucy Parsons on the floor

On June 28, 1905, Lucy Parsons took the floor. She was the only woman who addressed the convention, though Mother Jones was also in the hall. Her speech is preserved in the official Proceedings.

She told the men to organize women workers. "We are the slaves of the slaves," she said. "We are exploited more ruthlessly than men." She laid out a revolutionary program in one line: "The land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers."

That was what a founding convention sounded like when the floor was given to someone the AFL would never have seated.

What came after

The honest arc. The IWW organized lumberjacks in the Northwest, migrant wheat harvesters on the plains, textile workers in Lawrence in 1912, miners on the Mesabi Range, dockers, and silk weavers, and it was hit harder by the state than any American union before or since. The Espionage Act trials of 1917 and 1918 put over 100 IWW leaders in federal prison. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 deported organizers by the shipload. Vigilantes lynched Wesley Everest in Centralia, Washington in 1919. De Leon was expelled in 1908. Debs drifted toward the Socialist Party. Membership peaked around 1923 and then collapsed.

The union is still here. Smaller. Still organizing. The Preamble's first line is still printed on the card.

The state crushed the IWW, the workers rebuilt it, and the opening sentence has never stopped being true.

Sources

• First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wikipedia, as a pointer to Haywood's Autobiography (1929), Brissenden's The I.W.W.: A Study of American Syndicalism (1919), and the 1905 Proceedings)
• Lucy Parsons on Women and Revolutionary Socialism, 1905 (The American Yawp Reader, Stanford University Press, reproducing Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, New York Labor News Co., 1905, pp. 167-172)
• Thomas J. Hagerty (Wikipedia, sourcing Robert Doherty's scholarship and IWW primary documents)
• Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (Marxists Internet Archive mirror of the 1905 New York Labor News Company edition)
• IWW Preamble to the Constitution (Industrial Workers of the World)
• Lucy Parsons (Chicago History Museum / Encyclopedia of Chicago)
• Eugene V. Debs and the Pullman Strike (Library of Congress)