all for one, and one for all: earning free speech

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_fights



The IWW engaged in free speech fights during the period from approximately 1907 to 1916. The Wobblies, as the IWW members were called, relied upon free speech, which in the United States is guaranteed by the First Amendment, to enable them to communicate the concept of One Big Union to other workers.

 In communities where the authorities saw their interests in avoiding the development of unions, the practice of soapboxing was frequently restricted by ordinance or by police harassment. The IWW employed a variety of creative tactics, including the tactic of flooding the area of a free speech fight with footloose rebels who would challenge the authorities by flouting the ordinance, intentionally getting arrested in great numbers.

 With the jails full and a seemingly endless stream of union activists arriving by boxcar and highway, the local communities frequently rescinded their prohibitions on free speech, or came to some other accommodation.

The Free Speech League, a progressive group which functioned at the same time as (and occasionally together with) the IWW, worked in conjunction with the IWW prior to World War I in many of their free speech fights, which generated a good deal of controversy.

The free speech fights of the IWW were highly publicized, as they were designed to garner attention: they frequently started when local communities interjected to attempt to prevent the IWW from occupying street corners from which they would use provocative language to detail their radical beliefs.

The free speech fights began occurring in 1906 and drew to a close by 1917—over that period of time, at least 26 communities played host to the IWW’s free speech fights, and the years of 1909 to 1913 were particularly active, with at least 21 free speech fights happening.


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The ideology of the Wobblies who fought for free speech rights across America was deeply indebted to their core beliefs regarding the provenance of the First Amendment rights of the Constitution. In their estimation, they were fighting with the Constitution on their side while those who opposed them, such as city officials, were disregarding the fundamental laws of the country.

The Wobblies frequently used phrases such as “Have you ever read the Constitution?” and “What is this, Czarist Russia, or Free America?”

The Wobblies held that the free speech rights granted by the First Amendment had been abridged over time, and they felt that it nowhere more evident than it was in the case of the laborers for whom they worked tirelessly—capitalism had conspired with the judicial system in the United States to deny agency and the Constitutionally-granted freedom of speech to American laborers.

Not all Wobblies subscribed to such idealistic ideology, though, since some argued the more pessimistic belief that the Constitution had been written by the elites and that free speech was merely an illusion that worked to uphold the power of those same elites.

 By adopting aggressive tactics which flaunted local ordinances against free speech, the Wobblies courted arrest, which they used as a demonstration of how far the abridgement of free speech had come. The official attempts to silence the IWW in the free speech fights, they argued, were totally opposed to the spirit of the First Amendment.

According to the Wobblies, the fact that they even had to fight for free speech rights was evidence of the corrupting effect of capitalism in America and of its legal system. They argued that the Constitution was not being applied to American laborers, just as it had not been applied to slaves in the century prior

. Rather than take their fights to the courts, which they felt were substantially corrupted by capitalist influence, they took their fight to the streets and urged other Americans to do the same.

The publications of the IWW urged people to “Educate, Agitate, Organize!!!” which led their opponents to see the fights for free speech as precursors to more insidious desires such as those for unionization and, especially, for the abolition of capitalism.
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Sioux City was considered a very strategic town for workers to stage free speech fights in because it was “a gateway for laborers entering and leaving summer employment in agriculture and construction in the Dakotas.” Since those employment opportunities for the workers were seasonal, many of them returned to spend the winter in Sioux City, where the Wobblies attempted to provide them incentives to join their Free Speech Fight such as by educating them and helping feed them over the tough winter. Over a thousand men were unemployed in Sioux City at the time during the winter of 1915. There had been a real push to get workers to come to Sioux City by business leaders there, but workers who arrived found that there were barely enough jobs for the local laborers. On the 15th of January, after facing even harsher conditions and struggling with unemployment, roughly 150 of the IWW-associated unemployed stormed the Commercial Club where many business leaders listened to them demand work and watched them take food. In response to the direct action of the IWW, Sioux City increased enforcement of vagrancy laws and began arresting more of the IWW members engaged in the Free Speech Fights.

Their goal in doing so was to attempt to drive the IWW out of town, but, unsurprisingly, they achieved the opposite. The IWW demanded free speech rights to be granted in the city. They Wobblies were filling the city’s jails and forced the hand of the city officials to attempt to strike a deal with them. Ultimately, they won the fight and free speech rights were granted to workers in Sioux City.

Other free speech fights of the IWW
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The IWW followed with other free speech fights in Kansas City, Missouri; in Aberdeen, Washington; and in Fresno, California. In San Diego, California, there was a particularly brutal free speech fight between the IWW and its allies, and large groups of vigilantes supported by the authorities. Tar and feathers, beatings, clubbings, and forcible deportations were used in addition to incarceration. The San Diego free speech fight was unique in that the IWW did not have a specific organizing campaign at stake.

The IWW won all of these free speech fights.[2]

In early 1913, IWW members in Denver, Colorado fought a lengthy free speech fight. Denver authorities had refused to allow the Wobblies to speak on street corners, so union members filled the jails for months. The union won the right to speak to workers, and within a year had formed two Denver branches.[11]

Other locations of free speech fights by the IWW included Duluth, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; New Castle, Pennsylvania, and New Bedford, Massachusetts.