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The IWW Trial

In September 1917, agents raided the union headquarters of the IWW (also known as the Wobblies), near skid row at 1001 W. Madison in Chicago. The agents seized documents, pamphlets, songbooks and all manner of propaganda. There were 165 arrests for violation of the Espionage Act and interference with the Selective Service Act—the Wobblies, who were pacifists, had not only advocated draft dodging, but had supported the sabotage of American industry to slow down the war effort.

Though many of those arrests were thrown out, the raid still left the government with the largest group of defendants ever in a single federal indictment. When jury selection began on April 1, 1918, there were 115 Wobblies on trial, and it was estimated that the cost of the prosecution would top $1 million. By the time the trial ended, 30,000 pages had been typewritten and court stenographers entered 7.5 million words into the record.

Initially, the defendants could not have been happy with the judge who was assigned to the case—Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was as far away as possible from the Wobblies on the political spectrum. Landis was known as a conservative and had given several strong speeches in IWW Union Leader The trial of union leader “Big Bill” Haywood and his fellow IWW members was one of the biggest in Chicago’s history. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.) favor of the American war effort. But, surprisingly, Landis was amicable to the Wobblies. He even made a tobacco concession to the largely foreign-born and generally rough-hewn defendants. “I think we will have a row of spittoons moved in tomorrow,” he said. “We must not deprive these men of their comforts.” Landis ordered that the IWW defendants be well-fed and given razors and a place to shave each day. Over the course of the trial, Landis also let about 70 of the defendants out of jail on their own recognizance.

The IWW was a target of the government because it differed sharply from the nation’s mainstream labor movement, the American Federation of Labor, which sought incremental improvements to workers’ conditions. The Wobblies, though, had a different idea of what labor’s goal should be. Led by Big Bill Haywood, the one-eyed leader of the Western Federation of Miners, the Wobblies were far more radical, seeking a complete overthrow of the wage system through class warfare. The Wobblies were not organized by trade, like the AFL, but, rather, saw all workers as part of a whole. Frequently victims of violence themselves, the Wobblies accepted the use of violence and advocated industrial sabotage as means of attacking capitalism—and as a means of resisting the country’s entrance into the war.

For more than two months, the trial dragged on. Federal prosecutors freely mixed truth about the IWW with fiction. It was true that the Wobblies were anti-war, and sought to fight war through sabotage of industry. An IWW tract read during the trial described the use of sabotage: “It may mean the destroying of raw materials destined for a scab factory or shop. It may mean the spoiling of a finished product. It may mean the destruction of parts of machinery or the disarrangement of a whole machine. … In the case of wars, which every intelligent worker knows are wholesale murders of workers to enrich the master class, there is no weapon so forceful to defeat the employers as sabotage by the rebellious workers.”

But the government wove in those actual words and pamphlets from the Wobblies with grotesque exaggerations. It was charged that IWW was plotting to replace President Wilson with Kaiser Wilhelm, that they were funded by Germany, that they were planning to invade Arizona with the help of Mexico, that they had plotted with the Irish rebel group Sinn Fein in Butte, Montana, that they were run by the Russian Bolsheviks. No actual evidence of any of these plots or associations were presented, but merely mentioning them in court helped the government accomplish its real aim in the case—to make the Wobblies look so scary that no one could sympathize with them.

The trial hit its climax when Haywood was called to the stand. Haywood denied the more absurd testimony and made a pretty good point in response: If the IWW was anti-war, how could they be pro-German? “I regard the German socialists as more responsible for the war than any other body,” Haywood said. “They refused to vote for the general strike against the war. If they had refused to fight in August 1914, this war would never have been. … I have learned to despise autocracies of all kinds and that includes governmental autocracies. Germany today is the worst autocracy in the world.”

Still, the government’s use of fear-mongering in the trial was effective. Most Chicagoans were probably sympathetic to the IWW goal of workers’ rights, but Wobblies were scary to many—in part because they were mostly foreign, often unshaven, crude and with a violent reputation. On April 14, a Tribune editorial warned about Chicago’s lax attitude toward the IWW: “Farther West, on the coast, there is a different idea of the IWW There people know what the virtual terrorization of a town by the incursion of violent revolutionaries can be. … The indulgent humor of this region is not found where the IWW has been felt as an applied force and where it is not known solely as a ludicrous vagary, pink whiskered and long haired.”

On August 13, Haywood’s testimony ended. Four days later, the trial came to a jolting stop. The prosecution made its final argument and the defense, in a move that sent a wave of confusion and surprise throughout the courtroom, declined to make a final argument. Just after 4 p.m., with the trial having dragged for four and a half months, the jury retired for what was expected to be a proportionately long deliberation. But they returned in just 65 minutes. All 100 IWW defendants were found guilty.

“It had been feared by court attaches that, were the 100 convicted, there would be a riot in court,” the Tribune reported. “Instead, there was a dead, almost breathless silence.”

Landis, who had been so accommodating during the trial, was far less so during sentencing. He gave Haywood and 14 of his top deputies 20 years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, plus a fine of $20,000 each. Landis sentenced 33 others to 10 years in prison, including Ben Fletcher, the trial’s only black defendant. Afterward, Fletcher said, “Judge Landis uses poor English. His sentences are too long.”

Sean Deveney

Sean Deveney currently reports for The Sporting News. He covers Major League Baseball and professional basketball for the Sporting News. The Original Curse is Sean's first published book. Sean grew up outside Boston, MA and currently lives in Chicago, IL.

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