in many trades. They managed strikes in widely scattered parts of the Union, and as they grew bolder, they planned in war times a general strike of all branches of labor, all over the United States. They first began work among the lumber-jacks, then among the miners. They meant to include all harvest hands in harvest time, all agricultural labor, indeed, labor of every sort. It was the plan to demand a six hour day and $6.00 a day, even for all farm labor; which, as all Americans now carrying the war prices of living can see, would inevitably have raised the price of food unspeakably had it succeeded. When opposed, they wrecked and burned and ruined, maimed, murdered.
"Big Bill" Haywood, the I. W. W. leader, execrated "military preparedness." He called sabotage—that is to say, secret industrial wrecking—the "weapon of the disinterested." Perhaps in peace times our fatuousness as a people would have caused us to pay small attention even to the series of I. W. W. outrages. We would have absorbed the discomforts and the crimes in our old careless, cowardly way. But now we were at war. We were making ships and airplanes, cannon and small arms and munitions and clothing and equipment. We needed the labor of every loyal man as much as we needed money and soldiers. And it was about this time that Frank H. Little (an I. W. W. leader who was lynched in Butte, Montana, soon after) wrote a letter to the general board of the I. W. W., demanding that the board should take action against the draft law requiring service in the Army.
This, coupled with the evidence of strikes, and the prospect of paralysis in many essential government activities, was going too far. It was known that the I. W. W. intended to get at the marine workers, then all allied industries. That would have meant the end of the war, or of our activity in the war.
Now, therefore, these arrogant and lawless men, never else than malcontents, became traitors. In order to work out to the quotient of ruin these vague theories about the "rights of man," they cast aside what shred of patriotism they ever may have had to cover their nakedness of manhood, and declared themselves ready to cripple and leave helpless before her merciless foe this republic of America,
