Page:American Syndicalism (Brooks 1913).djvu/34

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
22
AMERICAN SYNDICALISM

rather than contemptuously and excludingly to work against them.

Local, legal and other authorities, during the last two years in the United States, have done more for the growth of this revolutionary group, shading into anarchy, than it has done for itself. This assistance has been rendered because the most important thing in the I. W. W. was misconceived by frightened property owners and by the officials who represented them. Social authorities on the Pacific coast insisted that the whole I. W. W. "bunch" was composed of "bums," and on that theory used the legal machinery in their control to harry them out of town. If the "Great Bad" is in "mixing things that do not belong together," this attitude accurately defines the Great Bad.

The I. W. W. movement is strictly a revolutionary uprising against that part of the present order which is known as capitalism. Its ground-swell is felt in many very different types of nationality. Like every revolution, it attracts the most unselfish and courageous, together with the self-seeking and the semi-criminal. Garibaldi's famous "Thousand" had in it as large a percentage of this latter class as the I. W. W. at its worst. The King of Naples tried to treat Garibaldi's followers like "bums." It proved a most damaging error, because these revolutionists began to excite powerful sympathy. It was a sympathy that soon passed into political action, as many of our own great strikes pass into politics, forcing employers to yield to a new and hated influence. As the revolt of labor increases, popular sympathy