Haunted Halls

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    AMER ICAN Some Brief CommentsN O T E B O O K On the Domestic Scene

    The Haunted Hall: I.W.W. of Fifty

    Dan WakefieldYou don't remember the Wobblies. Y ou were too young. Orelse not even born yet. There has never beeii anything likethem, before or since. They called themselves materialist-economists but what they really were was a religion. Theywere workstiffs and bindlebums like you and me, but theywere welded together by a vision we don't possess.

    From Here to Eternity by JAMES JONESBob Willock is a

    man in an empty room whose win-dows provide slanting glimpses ofWall Street towers, to the east, andthe waterfront, to the west. It is themeeting hall of the M anhattan branchof the Industrial Workers of theW orld "the Wobblies" an organiza-tion sustained by a vision that refusesto die in the face of all facts andfuneral rites. The IWW is fifty yearsold now and largely forgotten, but thevision that made it the greatest radi-cal movem ent in Am erican labor stillholds men like Bob Willock, whostared at it once, to the several scat-tered halls across the country that areso full of mem ories and empty of men .The mem ories are many riding therails to Spokane to support fellowworkers in the free speech fights ofthe west, following the harvest withthe dreams of better wages and thesong s of Joe Hill, striking and picke t.

    ing the textile mills at Lawrence,Ma ss., when Joe Ettor raised his voiceabove the jailings and killings to tellthe employers that "You can't weavecloth with bayonets."The men are fewbut the miracleis that there are any left at all. Whatsort of men in our practical timeshave the hea rt to stay loyal to a visionthe world all around them laughs offas obsolete?BOB WILLOCK wen t to sea out of Gal-veston in 1925 on the old Savannahline (like m ost of the stuff of his past,it is gone now) and by the time hedocked in Boston a fellow on boardhad persuaded him to take out aWobbly book. He didn't think muchabout it at the time but two ye ars laterhe was trying to ship from the gulfagain and a fellow from the Interna-tional Seamen's Union tried to shakehim down for extra dough to get an

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    ISU book. Bob wouldn't pay and wentaround to the Wobbly hall. They gothim a ship on condition he'd strikewith the other Wobbly crewmenagainst the line's plan for cutting thedeckhands and lengthening the watch,and he did, and the ship sailed withfull crew and customary hours andBob has been a Wobbly ever since.For the last six years he has alter-nated between the sea and the job ofsecretary of the IWW Marine Trans-port Workers Union, No. 510, Man-hattan Branch.

    It occupies a fading lime-coloredroom above a Chinese laundry onBroad Street, and by the rules andtraditions of the IWW, Bob Willockcan't get paid more to run it thanthe average wage of the workers whobelong. At the bac k of the hall a par-tition creates his home and office,which consists of a hotplate, a fold-ing bed, a large cluttered desk, anda bookcase. The Wobblies still readjust as they did in the early dayswhen IWW migratory workers tooktheir books from ha rvest to harvest inthe west and they talk, and remem-ber. That is almost all they have left,and that is primarily what Bob Wil-lock's job is. He keep s a pot of coffeeon and passes the time with the fewwho walk in from the past, like the"fellow who used to be a cellmate ofBig Bill Haywood at Leavenworth,drops by just about every Sund ay, justto talk.""W e really aren't doing any organ -izing now," Bob told a visitor notlong ago. "The fellows who still be-long, it's mostly an ideal with them.You can't keep paying dues in twounions, and the one that gets you ajob is the one you take."THE CAUSE lost most of its rem aining

    missionaries in 1949 when the U.S.government administered the most re-cent of the many dea thblows that theIWW has absorbed. It was placed onthe Attorney-General's list of subver-sive organizations because its member-ship, estimated at 1400 at the time,was feared as a group that " ... seeksto alter the form of governm ent of theUnited States by unconstitutionalmeans." W. H. Westman, the IWWGeneral Secretary-Treasurer, wrote toTom Clark to ask for a reversal ofthe ruling, or at Ieast an explanationof it, but was granted neither, andthe ailing Wobbly treasury was tooweak to do battle with the govern.ment it threatened by carrying thematter into court.

    Big Bill Haywood had tried to ex-plain back in 1918 at the trial of the101 W obbly leaders indicted for sub-versive activities that the Wobblydream was not political at all; that itdidn't seek to change the form of gov-ernment, but the form of economy;that its aim was to organize indus-trially to "form the structure of thenew society within the shell of theold."Those leaders were left to form thenew soc iety within the jails of the old,and when Warren Harding granted acommutation of sentence four yearslater, the leaders came out with theirvision clouded, and the IW W was nev-er quite the same. Haywood said toRalph Chaplin once that "The handsof our people are calloused an d scar-red from trying to make a dream cometrue," and after four years at CookCounty Jail and Leavenworth, thehearts were scarred too. Haywood andGeorge Andreytchine went to Russia,and the loss was the deepest the IW Whad to bear.The W obblies had lost their leaders

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    before, but this was a different kindof loss. It was one thing to lose FrankLittle to a lynching mob when hetried to organize the miners in Butte,Montana; and to lose Joe Hill to afiring squad in Salt Lake City and beable to tell the world his last wordswere "Don't mourn for meorgan-ize!" It was quite another thing tolose Haywood and Andreytchine to aforeign land.

    There were others, later, who didn'tgo physically to Russia but movedspiritually to the Communist Party,and the Party's activities in the U.S.after the first world war were one ofthe vital drains on the health of theIWW. It was one of the deepest blowsof all, in the way that Haywood's exilewas, to see old Wobbly leaders ex-change the grass-roots American radi-calism of the IWW for the Soviet-grown dream of the party. In 1923the IWW paper Industrial Solidaritycalled across the ideological miles toits former Fellow Worker William Z.Foster with a kind of brotherly mes-sage to a black sheep who'd strayedaway from home for good:

    Willie, you may print a ton ofLabor Heralds each month in theyear, and fill them from cover tocover w ith robber, thief, highjack.You m ay shout reactionary, yellow,to the top of your breath, but aft-er it is all over, the IWW will stillbe the IWW that it was when youwere third cook in that lumber-camp in the Northwest.

    Elizabeth Gurley Flynn went, too,and Earl Browder, and many others.Those that remained were often bruis-ed and bullied by the Communistswho stole so much of their thunderand used it against them. Ralph Chap-lin, the IWW poet and editor, wasspeaking for the Wobblies at a soap-box meeting in Chicago in the Thir-

    ties when a Communist youth grouptried to lead his crowd away. Theycalled him a reactionary and finallydrowned out his voice by singing "Sol-idarity Forever"the song he had writ-ten years before for the IWW.Assignment to the subversive listwas a particularly unpleasant irony forthe Wobblies, who had fought theCommunists right down the line, andwere battered by them as they werebattered by employers, and the ranksof Respectability. The MTWU of theIWW had fought them on the water-front throughout the thirties when notmany others were fighting them; andfor their efforts the Wobblies nowbear a "subversive" brand, and thatis one more factor in their loneliness.Their old friends on the waterfrontmust now risk a taint by even comingto see them, and Manhattan Branch510 hasn't had enough men to holda meeting in a year.

    "It used to be we had to have fif-teen men for a quorum," Bob Willocktold his visitor. "This union's mostlytransient, though, you know. Wechanged it to seven a few years back,but there hasn't been that many tohold a meeting with for well, I guessabout a year now."

    The afternoon the visitor came toask questions, there were only twomen, besides Bob. "Not too many yearsago," he said, "this hall was so crowd-ed you couldn't get inside the doorat this time of night. The old fellowsused to drop by for old times sake,even though they didn't belong any-more. But then, a few years back, theother unions moved their halls up-town, and it was too far to come."0 THERE is a tall, straight lighthousewith bold initials "IWW" and twowhite beams shining out from its tow-

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    er. Churning against it from everyside are tidal waves pouring from adark region labeled "Reaction" andwritten in the waves are the symbols"CIO," "AFL," "NLRB," a swastika,and a hamm er-and-sickle.The scene appears in a three-col-umn, page one cartoon of The Indus-trial Worker, official fortnightly news-paper of the IWW. Unread copies,stacked in piles according to dates,clutter a table in the corner of theManhattan Wobbly hall.The visitor picked up an issue fromthe pile at the front, unfurled the fourpages to their flag-like width, and no-ticed two large portraits. One was ofW esley Everest (killed by a m ob in araid on his union hall at Centralia,W ash., Nov. 11, 1919); the other wasof Joe Hill (shot by a firing squad inSalt Lake City for a disputed murdercase after organizing a strike nearby,Nov. 19, 1915). On the first page ofthe paper is a black-bordered list of18 IW W mem bers killed while servingthe union on various dates of pastNovembers, and the heading is "InNovember We R emember." The m ostrecent date is 1927.The dates, the pictures, the old-style seven-column makeup, the poetry,bear that unmistakable flavor of thepast that is a part of all yellowingpapers. Bu t the pages are neither yel-lowing nor flakingthey are white,and the date of the issue is Novem-ber 14, 1955.IT IS TYPICALOf current issues ofthe paper, anchored so deeply in daysgone by. The stories that aren't re-prints from other publications usuallyreach toward the glories of the past,often with an uneasy sense that theymight be lost in the va st indifferenceof the present. The lead story of the

    issue of September 19, 1955 is toppedby a triple-deck head that reads "RE -MEMBER THE GREAT UNNAMEDWHO LABORED IN OBSCURITYFOR HUMAN ADVANCEME NT."

    The pap er depends by tradition andfinancial necessity on contributionsfrom fellow workers, reporting condi-tions "at the point of production."The reports now are few because thefellow w orkers are few, but there arestill scattered w ords in the fiery tradi-tions of the past, like the m essage be-neath the bold "Organize Idaho" headon the front page of the October 31,1955 issue. It is a summary straightfrom the p oint of production describ-ing the state of disorganization amon gthe Idaho lumberm en, and it is signedby "Idaho Jack."

    But we know, unhappily, that noone today is named "Idaho Jack"and w e have to surmise that this faith-ful fellow w orker is one who knew thewest in the days when "W obbly" wasa dangerous and glorious word, andaction by the IWW was bringingshorter hours, livable housing facili-ties, and enough clean bedding to elim-inate the "bindle stiff" from the w oods.The bindle stiff had to roll his blan-kets in a bundle and hoist it on hisback for the long hard journeys fromcamp to camp, but even with dirtybedding his plight was more roman-tic, if more difficult, than that of thelumbermen Idaho Jack sees workingtoday.The new woodsm en drive their carsto the mountains and sleep overnightin the back seat, cooking their mealsclose by. It takes some of them fourhours to drive to the woods but theydon't want to batch it or camp any-more, and the eyes of Idaho Jack m ustbe sore for the sight of a bindle stiff.Their counterparts of the water-

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    front are the men Bob W illock foundwhen he went to sea the last time."They're in debt with cars and tele-vision sets," he said. "They sat aroundafter mess according to who had whatkind of cars the Fords in one corner,the Pontiacs over here, maybe a fel-low with a Mercury talking to a fel-low with a Dodge. All of 'em tellingabout what they get to the gallon."

    To ask why the IWW is almostdead is perhaps to ask whe re the "oldworker," the generic type "Wobbly"has gone for his disappearance, morethan all the deadly events that befellthe organization, lies at the root ofthe IWW 's obsolescence in 1955. W hileWalter Reuther negotiated for theGuaranteed Annual Wage with Fordin the Spring of '54, the auto work-ers hoped their leaders w ould let themoff picket duty so they could get insome fishing and ball games. Theystood outside the p lant with their por-table radios, listening to the latestrock-and-roll music; and the W obblieswho carried the picket signs in spiteof bullets and tar and feathers atLawrence and P aterson, McKees Rockand Butte, Bingham Canyon andEverett, becam e official ghosts of his-tory.BOB W ILLOC K wasn't able to get tothe fiftieth anniversary convention ofthe IWW held last year in Chicago,and the Manhattan seamen's branchwas represented by "a fellow whoused to be here with us who's out inthe west now." The fellow was one ofsixteen delegates who met in the IW Wnational headquarters hall at 2422Halstead Sreet.The talk was mainly memories, someof them stretching back to 1905 when203 delegates met for the first IWWconvention, and listened to Big Bill

    Hayw ood open the proceedings. TheMarxist sense of history was heavilyupon him, and he told the assembleddelegates that this was "The Conti-nental Congress of the WorkingClass."The words were proud and con-ceivably true, for when Hayw ood look-ed from the sp eaker's stand out acrossthe faces of several hundred delegateshe knew they represented more than100,000 workers. His dream w as bigand that moment it was bright anduntroubled by the blood-dimmed fu-ture of the organization that wouldfind itself huddled in an alm ost emp tyroom in C hicago fifty years later withsixteen delegates representing some-thing like 600 m en from nine branch-es across the country.

    The Industrial Worker still pushesfor recruitment, and m any of its loyalreaders try though there seems to beonly frustration for the effort, whetherthe prospective recruits be young menor old. C. D. Van Nostrand has triedthe young, and he wrote from DesMoines that "I have talked to work-ers of the plant about lining up withthe IWW but it was like talking tolittle boys who could not understandwhat I was talking about."Bob Willock has tried the old, andhe says it's like this:"I see 'em around the waterfrontand they come up and slap me onthe back and say 'Hey, Bob, how'sabout having a drink? Listen Bob, howmuch do I owe on my dues? I beenmeaning to come up and pay backthe dues I owe. How much do I owenow?'"

    "I ask em how long it's been sincethey paid and they say 'I dunno, Bob,it's been a good while. Don't you havethe records up there at the hall?' ""Some," I say. "And they say 'W ell,

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    listen, Bob, I'll be up to settle withyou, see? I'll be up real soon.' Andthen they find som ebody else to havea drink with and that's the end of it."The world has moved up the street

    but Bob W illock stays fast to his draf-ty hall, like his fellow survivors in theoutposts remaining. As long as theylive, the IWW will live, and whenthey die, the IW W will die.

    The Politics of Psychological Testing

    John Bennet

    In September 1954Fortune magaz ine ran an article severe-ly criticizing the use of psyc hological"personality tests" on business execu-tives. It was not simply a run-of-the-mill attack upon science as science,or even upon pseudo-science as science.Instead, it was relatively temperate,and at times even penetrating in itsanalysis. But a small furor resultedbecause the article had the tem erity toraise questions about the ethical pro-priety of personality testing, as wellas about its validity and usefulness.Of cou rse, as long as psychologicaltesting w as restricted to w orkers andjob applicants, Fortune had seen nocause for alarm. It was the extensionof these tests to executives them selveswhich appeared disturbing. So dis-turbing, in fact, that a full-page treat-ment was reserved for a section en-titled "How to Cheat on the Tests."And there, for all executives to see,were a large number of the "correctanswe rs" which clinical psychologistshave jealously guarded for manyyears. It may not have been ethical,but apparently Fortune assumed thatfire had to be fought with fire.THE USE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS formanpower control found its earliestopp ortunities in the selection of mili-tary personnel. Screening proced ures

    were employed to weed out the psy-chological undesirablesthose unfit tobe soldiers. It was consequently ob-served that success in selecting menfor their ability to endure militaryhardships might foreshadow similarsuccess in selecting those most likelyto endure on the economic front.Since then the practice of testing em -ployees and job applicants has be-come an important business. Person-nel departments now rely largely uponpsychological instruments. But evenmore important has been the mush-rooming of private testing organiza-tions representing them selves as psy-chological "institutes." These ag enciesoffer prompt mailorder service: afour- or five-page report is returnedwithin forty-eight hours after receiptof the tests.In add ition to the relatively reliableand v alid tests for aptitude and inter-est, it is now largely standard prac-tice to give job applicants question-naires which purport to be tests ofpersonality. These questionnaires arefar easier to administer than are themore cos tly but more reliable methodsof personality diagnosis used by reput-able clinical psychologists. That theuse of such questionnaires is wide-spread can be gathered from the factthat the 1953 sales of the BernreuterPersonality Inventory alone, by one

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