Double podcast episode about Ben Fletcher, a very important but little-known dock worker and labour organiser in the US with the Industrial Workers of the World union.

In these episodes, we speak with historian Peter Cole, author and editor of Ben Fletcher: The Life And Times Of A Black Wobbly. We also hear words written by Fletcher, voiced by fellow Wobbly, Alki. We learn about his life, as well as his union branch, Local 8, which in the early 20th-century organised thousands of workers on the Philadelphia docks and was the most powerful multiracial union in the country at the time.

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You can listen to our podcast on the below links, or on any major podcast app. Links to a few below.

  • Part 1: Fletcher’s life, and Local 8 organising the docks.

E73: Ben Fletcher, part 1 – Working Class History

  • Part 2: Fletcher’s imprisonment, later life, and the demise of Local 8.

E74: Ben Fletcher, part 2 – Working Class History

More information

Sources

Sources used by WCH over the course of these episodes.

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands and Jamison D. Saltsman.
  • Words of Ben Fletcher voiced by Alki. Check out his YouTube channel here, or follow him on Twitter here.
  • Episode graphic: Ben Fletcher in 1918, enhanced by WCH. Courtesy US National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons.
  • Theme music: “Solidarity (Forever)”, written by Ralph Chaplin, performed by The Nightwatchman, Tom Morello. Buy or stream it here.
  • Edited by Louise Barry

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Transcript

Part 1

In early 20th century PhiIadelphia, Black and white dock workers defied segregation and racism, organised themselves, and took action to win better pay and conditions. One of them, Ben Fletcher, became one of the most important labour activists in the United States, feared by employers, surveilled by the FBI, thrown in jail, and then largely forgotten, until recently. This is Working Class History.

[Intro music]

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This is the first part of a double episode about the most important US labour organiser you’ve never heard of, Ben Fletcher, who was a member and activist in the Industrial Workers of the World union, known as the Wobblies.

I am from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The city of Brotherly love. While that might sound facetious it is a fact nevertheless, that a little more unity has prevailed there during the present maelstrom of Labor oppression, than in most cities.

These were Ben’s words, penned in January 1920 from inside Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas and sent to one Othelia Campbell of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His words are read by Alki, a Wobbly, historian, retail worker and YouTuber.

The IWW is very strongly represented in the Marine Transportation Industry of Philadelphia — We have about seven thousand longshoremen and seamen, there… Like yourself, I suppose I was born a rebel, though I have had varied experiences some which would have caused me to align myself with the employing class if I could have forgotten the place from which I sprung. While I do not countenance against the working class striking at the ballot box, I am firmly convinced that foremost and historical mission of Labor is to organize as a class, Industrially, train and develop our own technicians “scientific” men and woman and thereby prepare ourselves to successfully continue the operation of Industry, when capitalist Society [dies it will be] of ‘dry rot.’ Of course any political gain, redress or concession that we can secure is the meanwhile and should not be ignored. And so political unity follows industry unity, being its shadow— we go marching onward to certain victory. “We are living in stirring times

Given Fletcher’s importance, people may ask why he has been forgotten. This question is addressed by Robin DG Kelly, who wrote the foreword for an excellent recent book, Ben Fletcher: the Life and Times of a Black Wobbly.

Peter Cole: Robin Kelly’s essay is very interesting in that he also talks about how, essentially, the Left has been whitewashed. That word is really a good word in this context because what it means is that non-white people have been eliminated from or made invisible to; whereas, in fact, during the 19-teens and ‘20s and then ever since, African Americans and other people of colour have been instrumental to the communist movement, the syndicalist and anarchist movement and other movements on the Left.

This is Peter Cole, professor of History at Western Illinois University, and author of the aforementioned book on Fletcher. It’s a really great book, we highly recommend you get hold of it, and as luck would have it it’s available in our online store, link in the show notes.

So Ben Fletcher is the most important African American who was ever in the IWW and one of the most important Black labour leaders and early Black leftists in American history but he’s almost entirely unknown, even among those who know a lot about the history of American labour and the history of American radicalism, forgetting about the history of world-wide labour and radicalism. Fletcher is wildly unknown but I have suggested that that’s a mistake. For those of us who are interested in capitalism and the struggle against it but also racial capitalism, these twin concepts that were foundational and in constant conversation which you can’t really separate, let us dig deep into why it would be that an African American, a working-class man from Philadelphia, became a Wobbly and then how he helped to lead the most successful interracial union of his time.

So, who was Ben Fletcher and where did he come from?

Ben Fletcher was born Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. At that time, in 1890, the President of the United States was a man named Benjamin Harrison who was a white man, like every president except one, and he was a Republican. For those of us who know our US history and political history, since Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party was the ‘party that freed the slaves’ which is correct if a bit general. Almost every single African American was a Republican and so Fletcher was named after the Republican president. That’s actually normal. Fletcher’s parents were both migrants from the South in Virginia. His mother was from Virginia or maybe Maryland and his father was from a place called the Eastern Shore of Virginia which is a maritime province.

Peter has been unable to find conclusive proof one way or the other, but given their location, it’s most likely that both of Fletcher’s parents were born into enslavement.

This was ended after the civil war in 1865.

They moved to Philadelphia which is a city in the Lower North, you might think of it. Ben Fletcher was born in Philadelphia in 1890 and so was a native Philadelphian. His parents went on to have a number of other kids and actually, his mother lost several children at birth and his mother died when he was in his teens. They moved around a lot like typical working class or poor people with multiple apartments that they rented. Fletcher, by around 1910 at 20 years old, was a working man. He never graduated from high school which would have been normal at that time. That’s when we can pick him other. Other than that, it’s just little tidbits from census records but around 1910, he joins the Industrial Workers of the World. He also joins, around that time, the Socialist Party of the United States led by Eugene Debs. Why is actually a fascinating question which we can guess at perhaps in an educated way but not for sure because he never actually makes clear why or when precisely 1910 or 1911.

The IWW was a union unlike any other at that time. Founded in 1905, unlike nearly all other unions in the US, it sought to organise all workers, regardless of race, nationality or gender, into One Big Union. To fight for better conditions now, and to take over society and build a new world, run by workers, for workers. We give an introduction to them in our podcast episode 6, also with Peter.

Debs was one of the founders of the IWW, who also served as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party, receiving at its peak over 900,000 votes, about 6% of the total. Although Debs didn’t actually put too much stock in electoralism, or leaders in general, believing it much more important for workers to organise themselves. In one of his famous quotations, he declared that he was “not a labour leader” and said that “I would not be a Moses to lead you into a promised land, for someone would lead you out again.”

But back to Fletcher…

But we know he’s working manual labour jobs, including on the waterfront in Philadelphia which was one of the largest and busiest ports in the country at that time in Philadelphia, the third largest city in the country at that time. It had the largest African American population outside of the South at that time and also has a long history of being a large ‘free Black community’ going back to the 18th century. So Fletcher is a part of this urban Black milieu but he wouldn’t have lived in an all-Black neighbourhood, although people clustered together in South Philadelphia which is where he lived for most of his life. There were many, many Italian migrants, many, many East European Jewish immigrants and many Irish immigrants as well as maybe second and third-generation Irish Americans. There were some Poles, Lithuanians and Anglo-Americans. Philadelphia is actually pretty physically small and it would have been a very diverse area. Even street by street, according to census records, he lived in places where, on the same block as he lived, there were people different from him. In other words, it was not racially segregated in the way it later came to be. He would have been able to even walk to the waterfront because it’s a small city and because you could save five or ten cents by walking a mile or two instead of taking the streetcar. He would have very likely walked to the Delaware River which was the main river on the East side of the city. The other side of the Delaware is New Jersey. He would have lived and worked there and along the way, he joined the IWW and joined the socialists and a few years later, he helped found the branch of the IWW that I focus upon. That was Fletcher’s life which would have been a very typical life of a Black Philadelphian at that time.

Of course, the experience of Black residents would always be substantially different from that of white residents.

They definitely suffered from racism. Most jobs were simply denied to Black people. Most employers simply didn’t hire Black men or women for them. The famous African American intellectual and activist, W. E. B Du Bois’ first book was actually called The Philadelphia Negro published in the 1890s. He basically argued that the number one factor that defines the experience of Black people in Philadelphia was racism. So that would have been Fletcher’s milieu in which he grew up.

Soon after joining the IWW, scraps of information about Fletcher to appear in the union’s press.

So Ben Fletcher was already in the IWW no later than 1911 and he shows up in 1911, 1912 and then in early 1913 in IWW publications. One of them is called Solidarity and another is called The Industrial Worker. So we know that Fletcher was already in the IWW and already was an activist. He’s named by others who are writing reports about what’s going down in Philadelphia. He actually wrote several short pieces for IWW publications that came out nationally or were read nationally and even internationally. We know he was considered to be a really great speaker. One of the first documents about Ben Fletcher is by one of his fellow workers, as Wobblies refer to each other, as being a dynamic speaker. He very likely was among the very few African Americans in Philadelphia who were in the IWW. Although we don’t really have demographic information on their membership, we generally know that there weren’t many Black people in the Wobblies at that time. We also know, like I said, that he was a longshoreman or at least some of the time, you could go down to the waterfront on the Delaware or to the West on the Schuylkill River and if you were a man (and in this time, it was an all-male occupation) and you were willing to work hard physically doing manual labour that was dangerous and also if you were willing to accept low wages but if you had nothing better, there were thousands and thousands of men (immigrants, migrants and local people) who would have basically seemed to pick up jobs where even though you don’t have skills, you might have enough labour and savvy to lift and load cargo in and out of ships.

The first significant industrial action which is recorded Fletcher took part in, began in 1913.

In May of 1913, dockworkers in Philadelphia go on strike. They go on strike because they need or want a raise. They also have other demands but as in the majority of cases, the strike’s primary demand was usually about making more money. We know that before the strike that there was not a chapter of the IWW representing dockworkers. There were already Wobbly locals in the city of Philadelphia but in other industries. The largest industry in Philadelphia is textiles.

Lots of people worked in textile factories in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the north-east, like New York and Massachusetts, but these were segregated and excluded Black workers. So Black workers had to seek employment in other industries, like the docks.

So African Americans work on the waterfront and about a third of dockworkers in Philadelphia in that era were Black, maybe a third were Irish and/or Irish American and maybe about a third were other sorts of European immigrants but particularly Polish and Lithuanian people and some of those were Jews. In May 1913, workers go on strike. That strike shuts down the waterfront meaning that ships that are in the Delaware River are stuck. They’re not going to get loaded or unloaded for several weeks. We know that in the midst of that strike, the IWW and representatives of the American Federation of Labour, which has a dockworker union as well called the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA), both apparently show up to try to convince strikers to join their union and for that union to lead that strike. Now the AFL’s dockworker union, the ILA, actually represents workers in almost every other port in the country; not necessarily all the workers but they are present.

Now, while the IWW had dockworker members in Canada, as we discuss in our episode 52, the union didn’t have any dockworker members in the US at this time.

However, in the middle of this strike in May 1913, workers who were on strike, approximately 4,000 of them, voted to affiliate with the IWW and then were given a charter and they become known as Local 8. They’re not the eighth union in the IWW. At that time, the numbers are confusing but they might have been the eighth charter perhaps in marine transportation. Nevertheless, Local 8 is the name that we know them by. Fletcher is actually present but he’s not named as a leader. Because the strike was so important to the local economy, the local newspapers covered the strike every day and we also have other sorts of documentation. But in the aftermath of this two-week strike, workers win. Employers concede to the demands of the workers which is to grant a raise but also to actually not discriminate against hiring strikers or union members. We know that by the end of the strike, the Employers’ Association was negotiating with Local 8 and that the Local 8 negotiating committee intentionally had representatives of every ethnic group that had significant numbers on the waterfront. From their inception, this diverse group of strikers chose to affiliate with the IWW which was this radical, anti-capitalist, militant union. We know this union was anti-racist and if we just read their constitution, literally, Article 1 is that no one will be denied membership based on race, creed or colour. We know that Fletcher is there. It’s very reasonable to conclude that Fletcher was crucial to convincing those 1,500 or so Black people that the IWW was legit. The ILA, in other ports, often does not organise African Americans or puts them in all-Black locals and puts white people in a separate segregated local. We know that the strike wins and a raise is granted and then we know that the IWW, Local 8, immediately pushes to integrate the gangs, i.e. the workplaces on the waterfront. Before the strike, as was the case in most American workplaces, jobs but also work within job sites were often segregated by race, ethnicity and gender. So there would have been an Irish gang, a Polish gang, an Italian gang, etcetera, but not necessarily always. There would definitely have been separate Black gangs.

Employers in the US at this time would frequently encourage racial and ethnic divisions in their workforce, and use this to discourage organisation. And then they would use workers of different ethnicities to scab on each other’s strikes. So to avoid this happening the IWW would attempt to breakdown ethnic and racial divisions within the workforce.

The Wobblies, Local 8, immediately says, ‘We are going to integrate our gangs,’ which is incredibly radical and incredibly unusual for the United States in 1913. We know that Fletcher immediately is touted before but also after this moment as being the leader of Local 8. Very quickly, Local 8 doesn’t just, in other words, say that they believe in racial equality. Very quickly, Local 8 demonstrates this through its policies, including pushing employers to change how they do their work… this integration. This would, of course, be 50 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which ended legal segregation based on race in the United States. Many unions also were dragging their feet on racial equality both in the 19-teens and for decades after. Very quickly, we see Local 8 demonstrating power and demonstrating some material gains for the members but also inserting this other matter into the conversation, you might say, even though it wasn’t required by anyone. They just pushed this issue because it seemed that the IWW generally, and Local 8 particularly, put this front and centre. Fletcher was immediately the most prominent African American and, for that matter actually, the most prominent member of Local 8 in the entire IWW.

In addition to dockers, boatmen joint local 8 as well. Boatmen are basically responsible for getting boats and safely connecting them to moorings in the docks. After the May 1913 strike of dockworkers, boatmen went on strike in autumn. Some employers gave into the workers’ demands, while others didn’t. After the dispute, authorities tried to crack down on the workers. Here is a short article written by Fletcher about how workers tried to defend themselves. In it he mentions miner and IWW leader “Big” Bill Haywood. Like every other reading we are including in these episodes, this extract is from Peter’s book.

Another victory was scored by the IWW last week in Philadelphia. McKelvey, Loux and Wilmot were liberated from the capitalist hellhole, Moyamensing prison, February 19. Although sentenced to one year on probation, we are more than confident that the subservient lickspittles of the shipping trust will not dare lay their hands again on these fellow workers for that account. McKelvey, Loux and Wilmont were convicted December 13, 1913, on a charge of mentally conspiring to beat scabs and “get Tucker.” Tucker is one of the shipowners that refused to grant the demands of the workers during the boatmen’s strike last fall. A defense conference was organized shortly after their imprisonment. For obvious reasons the conference at first pursued the method of “watchful waiting.” The judge, a faithful lieutenant of the parasites, took advantage of the conference’s policy. He kept McKelvey and the other two fellow workers in jail for nine weeks, while making up his mind as to what sentence should be pronounced upon them, without arriving at any conclusion. The up till now, somewhat slumbering rebels began to feel aggravated. The conference changed its tactics. The IWW began to manifest itself. A local newspaper, sympathizing with the working class, gave publicity to the case, arousing public sentiment. The different labor organizations readily answered the call for support. But the most essential factor that contributed to the release of the three fellow workers is the mighty weapon possessed by the waterfront slaves— the Marine Transport Workers’ Union of the IWW. The judge before sentencing the prisoners questioned Tucker as to his feelings toward McKelvey, Loux and Wilmont, to which he replied that he no longer held any grievance against them. The reason for it is as follows: As it reached the ear of the shipping trust that Bill Haywood was coming to Philadelphia March 1st, to have a consultation with the Marine Transport Workers relative to the imprisonment of the three fellow workers, Tucker’s heart suddenly expanded to make room for a “Christian magnanimity” that was traveling with lightning speed towards his auricles and ventricles. This is what labor can do everywhere if organized. Make the bosses become “magnanimous.”

Local 8’s organising across racial and ethnic lines was particularly important in Philadelphia, which has a long history of deep internal divisions.

Going back to the 1800s, African Americans often worked in the maritime industries of Philadelphia. It’s really a port city, even though it’s on a river as opposed to on an ocean. It’s about 100 miles downriver from Philadelphia to get out to the Chesapeake Bay. Even in the mid-1800s, there are a lot of racial tensions in the city of Philadelphia, in particular, between working-class Irish and working-class African Americans, including multiple different incidents before the Civil War of violence in which Irish and Irish Americans perpetrate violence against Black people, including in waterfront jobs because those jobs are valuable. Even though they pay badly, they pay better than nothing. So there’s a long history actually, going back into the 1840s at least, of racial tensions between working-class Blacks and working-class Irish. There’s simultaneously persecution of Irish immigrants by the Anglo-American majority, including in Philadelphia. In fact, the deadliest riot in Philadelphia before the Civil War was one in which Protestant Philadelphians killed 20 Irish Catholic Philadelphians in 1844. What we’ve got is a city that’s rife with tensions and simultaneously, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there was a major increase in immigration to the United States, including port cities like Philadelphia. There is simultaneously an increasingly diverse local population in a country where racism is the norm but also xenophobia where immigrants are often treated hostilely by Americans, even though immigration is ‘open’ and generally speaking, employers love immigration for two reasons. One is that it increases the population numbers and a larger labour supply means you can pay workers less. Secondly, employers, time and time again in Philadelphia and other cities, would play different ethnic and racial groups off of each other. We see this actually repeatedly during strikes that the Local 8 pulls off where workers are ethnically and racially diverse and employers will try to make a pitch to one group like the Irish, the Italians or the Poles in order to peel them off. In other words, they used ethnicity and race as a wedge to weaken workers. Now if you’re clever, you think to yourself, ‘I’m smarter than the boss. I know that they’re going to do this.’ Unfortunately, even though you might know it, the prejudices are not just coming from the top down and not just from the elite. Unfortunately, working-class people also have some prejudices. So Local 8, from its inception, will have to struggle with this issue of how to overcome the mainstream racism and xenophobia in Philadelphia and across the country. Generally speaking, the IWW is committed to doing so but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy and that’s never not an issue. After World War I, in fact, racism will re-emerge in the country but also on the Philadelphia waterfront. That’s a bit later but we’re mindful that there are people like Fletcher who are crucial to keeping this together. There’s lots of evidence, including in my book, of how Fletcher was giving talks all the time and that he was considered to be very good at appealing to workers, not just Black workers, and explaining the logic of being interracial and that, essentially, racism weakens workers and, therefore, disempowers them. It’s really central to the whole story. I’m mindful that, in 2020, racism and diversity continue to be divisive issues, including among unions and working people. To me, constantly, the lessons of the 19-teens and Ben Fletcher’s book seem to resonate with people a century on.

After the first big dispute, Local 8 really got busy trying to organise on the docks. And they did so in a democratic way, under the control of the workers themselves.

After Local 8 is established, Fletcher is not the only leader and the IWW nationally, as well as locally, was committed to democracy which meant that you could only be elected for one year at a time. You never were paid more than anyone who worked in the industry that you toiled in. So these organisers, like most members of the IWW, are true believers in the cause. Everybody who is a member is an activist; a bit less so if you’re just in Local 8. Once the union is established, if you want to work on the waterfront, you have to actually be a member of Local 8. One of the ways that Local 8 organised is fascinating. It’s not unique to them by any means. After Local 8 got established, they did a bunch of things to the benefit of workers. One of the things they did is they radically changed the hiring process. Before Local 8, the system was nicknamed the ‘Shape Up’ and so if you wanted a job, you’d go down to maybe the pier. In some cases in some port cities, there might be specific locations where workers, who wanted to get hired, would be picked by the boss or hiring bosses. There could be 200 people who show up for 40 jobs. How does the boss pick? Well, the boss picks who they like, who they know, who is the same ethnic or racial group, who is the same religious group or who is willing to pay a bribe or a kickback to the hiring boss, etcetera. So, in other words, from the jump, you see your fellow workers as rivals as opposed to friends. Local 8 obliterates the Shape Up. Dockworkers hated the Shape Up. Everybody hated the Shape Up. If you were a worker, there was just nothing you could do about it. However, once Local 8 gets established, the system changes and now you have to call the Local 8 hall as telephones already existed. You call the hall and you say, ‘I want 40 guys to come down to Pier 20 tomorrow to load coal.’ Local 8 picks members, who are in good standing, to go down to the hall. They also, of course, would pick a diverse workforce to do that. They would issue buttons on a monthly basis if you paid your dues. They were very low but nevertheless, you had to pay them, then you got a new button saying ‘January 1914, Local 8.’ That way also, because there are thousands of guys who work on the waterfront and you don’t know everybody, you look around and you make sure that everybody in your group has your button. If not, you’re not a loyal member. The boss, of course, doesn’t give a crap about who’s paid up and who’s not. Local 8 members would constantly be enforcing basically their own ranks and they would tell the bosses, ‘You can’t be hiring people otherwise. They have to be Wobblies.’

In true IWW fashion, if bosses didn’t do what the workers wanted, the union would respond, not by filing a grievance, but by taking direct action on-the-job.

Famously in the story, one interview was done with a Black dockworker named Abraham Moses who said, ‘You know what the Local 8 would do if the boss tried to hire non-Wobblies, they’d wait a few hours into the shift and then in the middle of a shift, without announcing to the boss, they would put some cargo in slings, pull up the ropes and cut the ropes or attach them and leave all this cargo hanging in the air. They’d walk off the ships and say, ‘Until you are willing to do what we tell you to do, then we’re not going to work.’ The bosses were faced with a situation. You either listen to the workers and get your work done or you’re stuck.’ In the industry of shipping, where time is money, that’s a very powerful tactic. So the Wobblies, not just in Philadelphia by any means, on the waterfront would use these direct action tactics which were sometimes nicknamed quick strikes or ‘quicky strikes’ where they would be able to prove their power to the bosses and the bosses would, therefore, basically back off. We know that the bosses hated the IWW, as they did everywhere, but we also know that they continued to basically play with the Wobblies because Wobblies had enough power to maintain their ranks but also impose their will, to some extent, on employers. We also know that Fletcher was instrumental to this not just in Philadelphia.

In addition to these everyday, guerrilla actions on-the-job, there were also other significant disputes on the docks which broke out.

For example, on 27 January 1915, a mass meeting of grain trimmers in the port of Philadelphia voted to go on strike demanding a pay increase from $0.20 per hour to $0.60 per hour, with $0.90 per hour for overtime and $1.20 per hour for work on Sundays and public holidays.

Most employers soon caved in and agreed to increases up to $0.40 per hour base pay, $0.60 overtime and $0.80 on Sundays and holidays. But one employer, Chas Taylor, refused to permit the increase and instead locked out union workers. So the IWW continued the strike. Fletcher wrote a report of the strike for Solidarity, and recounted a visit by Irish socialist, James Larkin, who addressed a crowd of striking workers:

He arrived on the following Tuesday and spoke that evening. In an able and eloquent manner he portrayed the conditions of the workers generally and clearly showed how by industrial organization on the job it was possible for workers to gain control of industry. His recital of how the marine transport workers of Dublin after striking for twenty odd weeks were forced to give up the struggle and go back to work apparently defeated— yet won the strike in a few hours when they got back to work again by practicing “ca canny” that is going easy — brought round after round of applause which bodes no good for Chas. M. Taylor if the strikers go back to the docks defeated. Fellow Worker Larkin pledged the support of the Irish Transport Workers if necessary and promised to present the situation in this port of dockers across the sea with a request that they hold themselves in readiness and refuse to discharge any grain or cargo from ships loaded by scab labour.

A few days later, amidst high unemployment and easy availability of scab labour, the IWW decided to go back to work without having achieved the new rate at Taylor, but instead quote” “renew the fight at some more favourable time”, having got agreement from Taylor to discharge all of the scabs and take back all of the union workers.

In addition to organising on the docks where he works, Fletcher also travelled around the country for the IWW, public speaking and organising.

Thanks to his recollections as well as documentary evidence in Wobbly newspapers as well as the Federal Government spies, he was regularly sent up and down the Atlantic Coast. He was in Norfolk, Virginia, a major port; Baltimore; New York City occasionally; Providence, Rhode Island which is not a huge port but, nevertheless, Southern New England and Boston. Fletcher was dispatched from 1912 through 1917 on a regular basis. He would travel up and down the coast probably by rail but maybe by ship to organise more dockworkers and more Black workers specifically. For example, in Providence, Rhode Island, those of us who know Southern New England, there are more Portuguese in that part of the US than in other places and some of those Portuguese people are of African descent, especially those who are from Cape Verde and the Azores. Racism being racism, Black Portuguese had limited job opportunities and a lot of those people in Rhode Island also worked on the waterfront. Fletcher is sent up there to essentially prove… because it’s one thing for the Wobblies to say that they believed in racial equality but unlike the ILA or most labour unions at that time, they could actually demonstrate through Philadelphia and often Fletcher that the Wobblies are committed to Black inclusion and Black equality. Fletcher is considered to be – not the best as I wouldn’t say that – a premier organiser and he was trying to constantly overcome the ethnic, racial and national divisions that plagued the American working class. That also was the case in Baltimore where Fletcher was repeatedly sent and where there was a significant Black population but also Irish and Poles who didn’t necessarily get along with each other.

Typically, Wobbly speaking engagements would involve setting up a pitch on a street corner, and just starting to talk to people, normally after having advertised the meeting at that particular spot. The IWW waged fierce battles for the right to free speech in public places, which we spoke about in our episode 6. Sometimes, however, Fletcher’s meetings  could get a bit hairy.

In early 1917, he’s in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk, of course, is in the South and in the so-called Jim Crow South, it’s more overtly racist and more actually racist perhaps than Pennsylvania. According to reports of stories he tells, he’s giving a speech one day, in early 1917, in Norfolk when white hecklers, who might be just provocateurs of a sort, start asking him provocative questions about his opinion about interracial sex which is a no-go zone and actually illegal for Black and white people to marry in the state of Virginia. That was actually the famous 1967 Loving v. Virginia supreme court case that overturned bans against mixed-race marriage. Fletcher happened to be a very dark-skinned Black man which is to say that he probably had less white blood in him than many other African Americans who probably were lighter-skinned due to the rape of Black women who had been enslaved by their white masters. So that all comes around because when this heckler asks Fletcher’s opinion on interracial marriage, he responded with his brief explanation and said something to the effect of, ‘Well, I’m about the darkest guy in this room around here.’ Actually, it was open air but he turned it back on him and pointed out, ‘Don’t ask me about interracial marriage. White men are the ones who, of course, are the ones engaged in interracial sex all the time, even if it’s against the will of Black women.’ Well, it might have been that response or it might have been the fact that he was a radical labour organiser but according to Fletcher, he heard that he was threatened with a lynching and that he might be killed. So friends of his in Norfolk quickly got him aboard a ship to Boston. In early 1917, he ends up living in Boston and starts to organise there.

Later that year, Fletcher was up in Providence, Rhode Island. He wrote a brief report of goings-on there for an IWW journal.

In the port of Providence, Rhode Island, the Marine Transport Workers are getting ready to lock out the scabs and riffraff hereabouts in their second attempt to unionise the port in the IWW. They are determined to win for themselves a better life, working conditions and more job control, regardless of whether the costs be great or small.

[Outro music]

Well, that’s all the time we have for part 1. Next episode were going to be looking at how Fletcher ended up in prison, what became of Local 8 on the docks, and what Fletcher did later in life. Our patreon supporters can listen to that now, as well as a bonus episode with more information about Fletcher’s life, and his views on the fight against racism. For everyone else it will be out in the next couple of weeks.

If you haven’t already, I would highly recommend getting hold of Peter’s book, Ben Fletcher: the Life and Times of a Black Wobbly. It’s available from our online store, link in the show notes. And as a listener of this podcast, you can get 10% off it and everything else in our store using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Also check out our friend, Alki’s YouTube channel, where he has loads of great videos about working class history and workplace organising. Link in the show notes.

As always, we’ve got sources, links to more info, transcripts, and more on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

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Our theme tune is ‘Solidarity Forever’originally written by Ralph Chaplin, and performed by Tom Morello, The Nightwatchman. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Louise Barry.

Finally, thanks to you for listening. Catch you next time.

Part 2

This is the second part of a double podcast episode on the life and activism of Ben Fletcher. If you haven’t listened to part 1 yet, I would go back and listen to that first.

[Intro music]

Where we left off last time, Local 8 of the Industrial Workers of the World union had successfully organised workers at the Port of Philadelphia, with the leadership of Black dockworker and organiser, Ben Fletcher.

Soon after their first successful strike, across the Atlantic in Europe, major upheaval was about to begin.

Peter Cole: World War One, of course, began in Europe in 1914 even though the United States didn’t declare war until April 1917. The IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), as were many other Left organisations in the United States and other countries, was critical of the war from the outset. That proved important because the Federal Government later made use of the IWW’s pre-war criticisms of the US in its wartime trial. However, during the war, US shipping will benefit because American ships are sending off food, military supplies and other things to Britain and France, even though, technically, America was neutral. During the war also, the United States ports on the Atlantic coast are booming and so Fletcher will be dispatched more than once to different ports.

Before the war began, most of the European left and workers’ movement opposed the impending war, declaring that it would be a fight between rival imperialisms, with working-class people sent to fight and kill one another for the benefit of a wealthy elite.

However, when the war actually broke out, most left parties and trade unions in Europe quickly abandoned their principles and lined up behind their local ruling class. But the fighting had not directly involved the United States as yet.

This changed in April 1917, when the US officially declared war on Germany. The government then passed the Espionage Act, which essentially criminalised people for even verbally criticising the war.

While the IWW in some countries, like Australia as we discussed in our episode 19, was heavily involved in organising against World War I, in the US, after the war began, the union didn’t say much about it.

The Federal Government’s fear was that the IWW was trying to organise and was planning to pull off a mass strike during the war which would undermine the war effort. There is no evidence that that was the case and the Federal Government actually didn’t present any evidence of that. They just presented evidence that the IWW was anti-war, rhetorically speaking. But it is true that the Wobblies had actually organised in a number of industries important for this war effort like shipping, agriculture, mining and timber. Those are all really pivotal industries for a country, including a country at war. It’s also true that Wobblies didn’t really care about the war and so there were strikes that the Wobblies were pulling during the war, including out West, that, by implication, did impact the war effort. There’s never been any evidence and I seriously doubt that there was any plan to conduct some mass strike to undermine the US during the war, even though most Wobblies were not very sympathetic to the war. Although there were divisions within the IWW, the IWW never took an official stand against the war, even though the Socialist Party was more openly principled against the war. Most Wobblies probably personally were against the war. Most famously, the Wobbly leader Frank Little was lynched in Montana for being probably the most outspoken anti-war activist in the IWW, as well as organising copper miners in Butte which was the centre of the nation’s copper industry and was very much a site of organising on the part of radical miners.

As for Ben Fletcher, we don’t really know if he was pro or anti-war per se. We do know that he and other Wobbly leaders in Philadelphia did hold a meeting where they encouraged members of Local 8, early in the war, to not resist and to register for the draft which was legal or I should say was required and other things. Actually, I explore this issue much more in my book, Wobblies on the Waterfront. Some people considered Local 8’s stance to be not very principled anti-war and it’s true. I mean Local 8 didn’t take a stand against the war and many of the ships that they loaded probably in 1917 and 1918 did have cargo that might have helped the United States Armed Forces in France. Were they just trying to keep their heads down and, therefore, not bring attention to themselves and maybe survive wartime persecution? Well, if that was their hope, that didn’t happen. They were still persecuted even though they hadn’t actively undermined the war effort.

This lack of actual anti-war agitation didn’t prevent the IWW being targeted by law enforcement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began heavy surveillance of IWW members and activists, including Fletcher.

For example, this was a report by an agent Henry Bowen, about a visit to Fletcher’s apartment in Boston on 3 July 1917.

Pursuant to instructions of Special Agent Keller to further pursue the investigation of Ben Fletcher, organizer of the IWW who it was alleged by Patrolman Allen of Police Station 5 had been passing out IWW literature, and when Patrolman Allen searched the room of Fletcher he stated he saw some IWW literature in a suitcase. Agent today made a second visit to the room of Ben Fletcher and his white wife and white daughter, about ten years of age, and plainly stated the allegations to Fletcher, and asked him if he was willing to show me the contents of his suitcase, etc. He willingly submitted to a search of all of his effects on the premises. Upon leading Fletcher into conversation he stated he had been organizer of IWW longshoremen, but has discovered the folly of this as he has been unable to secure or keep any kind of a job, since his connection as organizer of the IWW. He is now employed in a soap factory in Cambridge, working nights. Fletcher did admit that he formerly kept some IWW literature at his home but when he moved recently from 542 Shawmut Ave., to 5 Medford Court he threw out all of this literature he then had. Fletcher is the real type of “Southern N-word agitator” with no education, poor grammar. He is about 5 ft. 9 in. in height, weighs 185 lbs.; and is reputed by the police as a bad man or gun fighter. He did not display any of that to agent. In reference to other matters about articles purported to be written by a “Colored Citizen” in which the Draft Act is criticised does not think Fletcher capable of expressing himself in the same manner as these matters have been expressed. Agent feels that Fletcher is not very harmful to the United States government.

Of course the actual report includes the full racial slur. And the racism in the rest of the report is pretty obvious as well. From the creepy reference to the race of Fletcher’s wife and daughter, even to his size. In reality, Fletcher was only around 5’4” tall (1.63m), and weighed around 150 lb (68kg). US law-enforcement and their bizarre goggles which seem to make Black men and boys considerably bigger, or older, than they actually are, is something which has not changed at all over the past hundred years. As has been shown in repeated tragic recent instances, like the police killing of Tamir Rice[MW1] , a 12-year-old Black boy in Cleveland in 2014.

And there is also a bizarre allegation of him being a “Southern agitator”. When he was from Philadelphia. Reading this report, it made me think of Sojourner Truth, the famous abolitionist. Probably her most famous speech is commonly known as “Ain’t I a Woman?” But that wasn’t something she said. The most popular transcription of the speech, which is most cited today, was written in the typical dialogue of an English-speaking Black person from the US South. But Truth was from New York, and her first language was low Dutch. So this perception of Northern Black people as being somehow Southern was not just a one-off.

Furthermore, his claim of Fletcher having no education and poor grammar is also clearly incorrect. While he didn’t graduate high school, he did attend for two years, and the quality of his English is clear from his written works.

Anyway, soon after this report was filed, IWW activists started being rounded up.

In September 1917, there are mass raids on Wobbly offices and mass arrests or, at the least, the issuing of arrest warrants. Many Wobblies were arrested in the fall of 1917. Fletcher wasn’t. When he heard he was supposedly going to be arrested, he chose to travel back to his home city of Philadelphia with his wife and child and then just took up residence there. He found a job in a railroad yard in Philly. He didn’t hide but he didn’t voluntarily turn himself in to a police or a federal agent office. It took the Federal Government about four months but eventually, like I said, even though he was hiding in plain sight, he was found in early 1918 in Philadelphia and was arrested. He was then imprisoned in Philly for a while. He then got out and the mass trial of approximately 100 IWWs was set for Chicago in April 1918. April Fool’s Day is I believe when the trial began. Apparently, Fletcher was late to get to Chicago, according to him, because there was a train wreck on his train from Philadelphia to Chicago. So when he showed up, he basically just showed up by himself. He wasn’t escorted by federal agents. When he gets into the federal courthouse in Chicago, they said, ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m here for the trial,’ and they said, ‘Are you just some uppity Black from the South Side?’ That’s the South Side of Chicago. That was a subtle racist remark and he said, ‘No, I’m one of the defendants.’ He showed him his ID and then he shows up at his own trial.

On trial, Ben Fletcher is the only African American member of the IWW among the approximately 100 IWW leaders and activists who are put on mass trial on charges of espionage and sedition which was another law passed by the Federal Government in 1918 that further criminalised dissent. After what was the longest federal trial in the history of the United States of over four months in which 100 people, on five counts each, were brought up on charges, there was no evidence implicating Fletcher with really anything honestly.

This complete lack of evidence didn’t particularly seem to matter to the court.

A jury found all of the defendants guilty on all counts and then sentenced them to 10-20 years in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. Their sentences are to begin immediately and also $10-30,000 fines which, when you adjust for inflation, means you’re talking about like $150-300,000 fines which none of these people had.

In fact, the inflation-adjusted figures for the fines are more like $200-600,000, or even more if you compare the amounts relative to property prices, for example.

The terrible outcome aside, Fletcher still managed to keep a sense of humour about the whole thing.

Fletcher also became famous during the trial because he made multiple comments that were repeatedly quoted subsequently and provided further evidence of his humour. One time during the trial, he supposedly leaned over to Haywood while the sentencing was being read and he said to ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, who was the most famous defendant on trial, ‘Jeez, the judge doesn’t use very good grammar.’ Big Bill said, ‘Why is that, Ben?’ He said, ‘It’s because his sentences are way too long.’ He also remarked during the trial, ‘If it wasn’t for me, there would be no colour at all in this trial.’

Fletcher is sentenced to ten years in prison and with his fellow workers, who are found guilty of these ‘crimes’, and are sent on a special train of Wobblies only, two days from Chicago or 24 hours I should say, to Eastern Kansas where then, in late 1918, they all are incarcerated there. The cover of my book is Ben Fletcher’s prison photos from when he was being registered for prison and they are also images that I hadn’t seen or knew existed earlier in my long time doing work on this subject. They’re really the best photos I’ve ever seen of Ben Fletcher. When he’s looking at the camera, it sort of feels to me that he’s looking at me.

Indeed, his mugshot is a powerful photo. In general, I’ve got mixed feelings about mugshots. Because while it’s obviously sad that so many people I look up to, good people who tried to make the world a better place, got arrested for their beliefs, in a lot of cases police mugshots are the only records still existing of what they looked like. Another good source is often trial records. Unfortunately there is not much about Fletcher personally in these trial records because for whatever reason he didn’t take the stand.

After his conviction, Fletcher is detained in Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas, but fortunately he didn’t have to serve his whole term.

Fletcher’s time in prison, from when he’s incarcerated to the time of his release, is four years but he, and a number of other Wobblies, actually got out on bond a few years into their time. Although, from 1918 to 1922, he was actually in Leavenworth for about two and a half years in total, if I count correctly.

To some of our listeners, you may be familiar with Leavenworth prison, because it crops up often because of how many workers and political activists got locked up there.

So Fletcher and all these other Wobblies are far from the only political prisoners. Even though they weren’t overtly Political, they were clearly political prisoners and tried for their beliefs and in prison for their beliefs. There is no evidence they committed any crime of a real sort. They weren’t alone. There were other political prisoners like conscientious objectors, including religious conscientious objectors, some left-wingers, communists and anarchists who were also dragooned by the Federal Government due to espionage and sedition. The most famous of these people was Eugene Debs. He didn’t go to Leavenworth. He served time in West Virginia and then Atlanta in a different federal prison. There were African Americans in Leavenworth who were US military soldiers and who were convicted of murder due to a complicated situation in Houston, Texas in 1917 in which Black soldiers in a segregated unit were feeling persecuted by local people and killed a number of local Houstonians, like I said earlier, in a complicated situation.

This incident is generally known as the Houston riot. In 1917, white police in Houston, Texas, violently arrested a Black woman, and when a couple of Black soldiers tried to find out what was going on, one of them was beaten and arrested and the other was beaten and shot by officers. Hearing this, as well as rumours that a white mob was approaching, the soldiers armed themselves and headed towards the city. Clashes followed leaving 16 whites dead, including five police, and four Black soldiers were killed.

In the wake of the incident, 110 soldiers were court-martialed and found guilty. 19 were executed and 63 sentenced to life imprisonment. No white people were convicted of anything.

Dozens of these Black soldiers were thrown into Leavenworth. Leavenworth, the full name of Fort Leavenworth, went back to the 19th century and was built by the US Army as part of its Indian wars on the frontier and is still an army base in addition to being a federal prison. He rubbed shoulders with some of these Black army men and, according to some recent research, actually smuggled out some correspondence from some of these Black soldiers to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) when he left prison in 1922 because these guys all felt that they were falsely imprisoned. Fletcher also met and apparently became friendly with Earl Browder who later became the head of the Communist Party of the United States. Browder actually writes a very thoughtful and very sympathetic essay about Fletcher in 1925, even though the Wobblies and the Communists already had come to hate each other in the early ‘20s.

Now, we spoke more about the antipathy between the IWW and the Communist Party in our episode 6, and we’re going to go into it a bit more in the bonus episode for our patreon supporters as well.

Another famous revolutionary who was imprisoned in Leavenworth alongside Fletcher was Ricardo Flores Magón, an anarchist and one of the leaders of the PLM (Mexican Liberal Party). Flores Magón and the PLM, in exile in the US, organised alongside the IWW, and during the Mexican Revolution launched a joint invasion and takeover of Baja California.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence Peter is aware of of Fletcher meeting with Flores Magón. But given their political allegiances and close proximity for such a long time, it seems that they must have had some sort of contact.

In any case, despite appalling conditions, which ultimately led to Flores Magón’s death, Leavenworth was a hotbed of activism.

Some people called this the ‘university of radicals’ that operated because there were hundreds of these revolutionaries of various stripes who would have interacted on a regular basis. Although, in what ways… some of that is lost, if you will, to history. E. F. Doree talks about how they would have reading groups and some of the things they read were literature without a political nature. I mean prison life is boring and you have a lot of time more than anything else. There’s also, of course, the racism of the guards that a number of people remark upon. Fletcher was punished on numerous occasions according to Leavenworth’s records which I’ve looked at and some of which are included in the book. The punishments are ‘minor’ but were things like denying him privileges and the like. We also get to see, thanks to surveillance, who Fletcher corresponded with while he was in Leavenworth. We know that Fletcher corresponded with A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen who co-published a magazine called The Messenger out of New York City that was sort of a left-leaning Black magazine. A. Philip Randolph later went on to found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and became the best-known Black unionist in America. The Messenger frequently wrote about the plight of Ben Fletcher and more generally, about Local 8. We know that Fletcher wrote to a man named William Monroe Trotter who was a Black radical newspaperman based in Boston.

One article Fletcher wrote was published in April 1920 by the Baltimore Afro-American. In it he talks about trying to get Baltimore dockworkers in the ILA to not carry cargo to avoid the strike by Philadelphia dock workers.

When this situation was brought to the attention of the rank and file of these organizations and they, in any instance, took steps to stop this union scabbing tactics in order to present a united front in their struggles for a better life in industry, their officials immediately drove home the fact that they had a contract and agreement with the employer and must not violate same even to secure solidarity of labor. Thousands of strikes and hundreds of labor unions were lost as a direct result of this situation. Then aside from this organized scabbery there was another factor that prevented a successful outcome of the trade unions’ attempts to get results worthwhile. This factor was the Negro worker who constitute 15 per cent of the actual wage workers in these United States and produce three fifths of the wealth in the South. It is common knowledge to the readers of this paper that the Negro worker was almost completely divorced and ignored by the trade unions, mostly affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The leaders of the American Federation of Labor are for the most part as bitterly opposed to the Negro worker becoming a factor in the affairs of the labor movement as the Employer himself. Naturally the Negro worker welcomed any opportunity to take the places of members of this organization that was so hostile and prejudiced against the Negro. Therefore the founders of the IWW having obtained these facts from their inquiry were determined that the organization they would put on foot would meet these issues squarely and solve them. Hence, the IWW was organized as an Industrial Union, it being the avowed aim of the organization to assemble Labor in the Union as is assembled on the job. Instead of organizing the hod-carriers, bricklayers and carpenters on a building as separate organized workers— organize them as Building Construction Workers. Second, the IWW was to organize Labor regardless of its race, color or trade. It was held then that race prejudice must not and will not be permitted to play any part in the IWW. Needless to state these principles have never been compromised; and that is the REASON WHY the IWW is damned, persecuted and lied about by the employing class and their minions. That is why Haywood and ninety-three others including the writer (who is now at liberty on $ 40,000 bail) were sentenced to terms of years as high as twenty years. Concentration of industry makes the American Federation of Labor unable to cope with the growing power of trust magnates. The IWW by organizing the workers, regardless of race, color or trade is forming the structure of another society. Not being organized to just secure more wages the IWW holds that it is the historic mission of the working class to abolish the wage system. It is the abolition movement of the twentieth century, and if sufficient number of workers rally to its standard complete industrial emancipation will be the heritage of all us workers and we will become disenthralled from the thralldom of the rich.

I think this is a great article. Because it doesn’t just spell out Fletcher’s views on how to build a new society, but it also gets across his frustration with the mainstream labour movement, and the anti-working class straitjacket it was, and indeed, largely still is, confined to.

By signing contracts with employers, unions in the US would then mostly give up their ability to flex their only real power: their ability to withdraw their labour, and strike. This was one of the main reasons the IWW didn’t sign contracts, as they always refused to give up that power.

The workers in Local 8 walked out again in the summer of 1920 in pursuit of a maximum eight-hour working day, as well as for pay rises to match high inflation. After a month-long shutdown without victory, the IWW members decided to go back to work, to try the fight again another day.

We know that Fletcher corresponded with Wobblies in Philadelphia, Chicago and other places. It’s really interesting as we don’t see all these letters per se but they keep a list, among other things, of who he corresponded with. He also, of course, corresponded with family. Thankfully, some of the best ways to get at the internal life of Fletcher is to read what his spies kept on him.

As one example of this, while the organisers were all in prison, the IWW kept trying to get them out. In December 1921, the Department of Justice wrote a report recommending that Fletcher not be given clemency which had been requested.

He was a negro who had great influence with the coloured stevedores, dock workers, firemen, and sailors, and materially assisted in building up the Marine Transport Workers Union which at the time of the indictment had become so strong that it practically controlled all shipping on the Atlantic Coast.

Despite this, Fletcher does eventually have his sentence commuted by President Warren G Harding and gets out early. He then promptly resumes his activity with the IWW. But the economic and political situation had changed drastically since before the war, and Local 8’s days were numbered.

There had been a large number of strikes across the US, many of them trying to defend workers from cuts to pay and conditions, and they had pretty much all been defeated. In spite of this, the IWW tried to go on the offensive, and win a better deal.

In 1922, the IWW still was hoping, in Philadephia, to have an eight-hour work day. So rather than ask, Local 8 informed employers, ‘We are going to show up for work an hour later than normal,’ and starting day whatever.

In typical Wobbly style, rather than just ask for an eight-hour day, workers decided to try to implement it for themselves. So rather than work their usual hours of 7 AM to 6 PM, dockers decided to work from 8 AM to 5 PM, thus implementing the eight-hour day (with one hour for lunch). If the employers wanted them to begin work at 7 AM, the workers resolved that they would only do so if paid at the overtime rate.

Not surprisingly, employers weren’t really happy. I should also note, in case people are unaware, there were a huge number of strikes in 1919 but also in ’20, ’21 and ’22 in the United States in steel, mining and textiles. Most of those strikes were defeated and the ‘20s becomes this very low ebb for unionism in the United States. So late ’22 is on the tail end of this wave of labour activism in the United States and at that time, unionism is growing weaker. The city and Federal Government are more willing to engage in repressive tactics as demonstrated during World War One years. Employers had somewhat consolidated in Philadelphia and in shipping. So in 1913, for example, there were more local shipping companies but by 1922, they were really more multinational which also means that they can move cargo around from port to port. If there’s a strike in Philadelphia, no problem; they can actually ship to Baltimore and New York instead and then put things on the rail. The power of capital had increased and racism had increased in America. There is a wave of racial violence against Black people in Philadelphia and other places in 1919 and beyond. The Ku Klux Klan had grown dramatically during and after World War One and so, in other words, white racism is growing. Xenophobia was on the rise too. The US Government actually cut down radically on the number of people who could move to the United States from foreign countries and then employers start playing this card again.

With this background, the employers decided to try to break IWW organisation on the docks once and for all. And so they locked out the workers. They then engaged the local police to assist them, as well as hiring Pinkerton private detectives. The AFL-affiliated union, the International Longshoreman’s Association, also provided large numbers of scab replacement workers. The federal government also intervened on behalf of the employers, paying shipping companies additional money to help them weather the dispute. The government also used its own ships to bring in Black workers, with no union experience, from the South, to work to replace strikers.

The employers then started to try to drum up division between different groups of workers again. They wrote letters to particular ethnic groups of dockworkers, appealing separately to Irish, Polish and Black workers, playing them off against one another.

And the union was already divided, with a majority of Black workers opposed to calling an all-out strike in response to the lockout, and a majority of white workers in favour. But eventually, Local 8 members did vote to strike, on 27 October.

Winter is coming, just like in the TV show, and so what that means is that there is less shipping in the winter because back before climate change, the Delaware River would freeze up and so there was a lot less work in the winter but also, your expenses go up and you have to buy coal for your apartments. So workers are needing to make more money prior to winter’s start which is arguably not a good time to pull a strike. Nevertheless, what is also going on is that the Local 8 leadership was arguably less effective than it had been previously. Their wartime leaders had all been imprisoned and although most of them had gotten out of prison by late ’22, they all seemed to be nervous about being thrown back into prison. I can’t really blame them. I’d be nervous too. It’s a newer generation of leaders who were leading Local 8 as opposed to Fletcher, Neff, Doree and Jack Walsh.

Racial tensions within the union were worsening, as antipathy to Black strikebreakers by white strikers spilled over against their Black colleagues. By this point a significant number of Black members of Local 8 were also recent arrivals in the Great Migration from the South, and so were less committed to the union, and most likely had less money saved to weather a work stoppage. So some began to drift back to work, further dividing the strikers.

Later, IWW organisers from elsewhere criticised the Local 8 leadership. Their view was that the strike was clearly faltering, and so to keep the union together, they should have called off the strike and returned to work, in order to resume the struggle under more favourable conditions at a later stage, as the union had done before.

But the strike wasn’t called off, and after 10 days it basically collapsed in defeat.

So the AFL will play the Federal Government in order to take out the rival union. It’s a complicated series of events but by the end of ’22, Local 8 no longer represents the great majority of Philadelphia dockworkers and although they will remain and Philadelphia will remain a site of organising, including Fletcher in the ‘20s, they’re always hoping to return to their pre-war heights. That never occurs and so by the late ‘20s, the AFL’s dockworkers’ union has consolidated its grip over the Philadelphia waterfront.

With the employers having successfully broken the IWW organisation on the docks, they could then begin attacking workers’ conditions, and further dividing the workers to prevent future organising.

The shape-up returns because the ILA apparently doesn’t feel strong enough or willing to fight to protect the workers’ hiring system. Gangs are resegregated maybe with the support of employers but not with the opposition of the ILA. The union local is integrated but the gangs are segregated. The hiring system declines and democracy ends. If you’ve ever seen or heard of the film On The Waterfront set in New York, New Jersey in the 1950s, the ILA was run by New York City bosses who didn’t really care for democracy and used violence and the threat of violence to intimidate their members. They didn’t hold regular meetings and they didn’t publish a newspaper for their members because they weren’t sharing information. So really, the work experience of Philadelphia dockworkers diminishes and according to some reports, racial tensions increase in waterfront neighbourhoods which is where most dockworkers lived. Although a union will exist and that union still represents dockworkers in Philadelphia, it’s a very different union. Arguably, Philadelphia dockworkers were never as powerful as during the time of Local 8.

As for Fletcher, he was still working on the waterfront in 1922, but he wasn’t in the leadership during the strike. But he continued to be an IWW organiser and public speaker.

We know that he continues to be a speaker and every time that I find something documenting a speech, he probably gave many others. One of the interesting ones I came across was a speech he gives in 1927, five years after the heyday of Local 8. He goes on a tour of the Great Lakes. He gives several talks in Detroit that received tremendous compliments from those in attendance and even from one man, who recalls in an interview in the late ‘60s his time back in Detroit in the late ‘20s, talks about seeing Fletcher. He apparently also gave multiple speeches on that same tour on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. He shows up in the Finnish language press in Canada and in Minnesota. There are a lot of Finns in the Upper Midwest, Lower Ontario and also in Upper Ontario in Quebec. I have friends, luckily, who are Finnish Canadians and who were able to translate. In Finland, there is a group of Finns who are sometimes nicknamed the Red Finns because Finns are overrepresented in left-wing organising in the US and Canada in the teens, ‘20s and ‘30s.

We actually speak more about working class Finnish communities in the IWW in our episode 9 while episode 1 of our sister-podcast, Working Class Literature, focuses on the Finnish Wobbly waterfront worker – and friend of Ben Fletcher – T-Bone Slim. In 1933, Fletcher and everyone else convicted under the World War I Espionage Act got a full pardon from President Franklin D Roosevelt.

Peter also managed to piece together snippets about Fletcher’s later life over the course of his research.

I also found him in a German language newspaper in New York City giving a talk in solidarity with the Harlan County mine struggle in Eastern Kentucky in the mid-‘30s and again, he’s on the bill with Roger Baldwin who was the leader of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and with various other prominent figures at Irving Plaza which also is a music concert venue but was used for many political purposes and speaking events. I would love to have known or love to know how Fletcher shows up in, say, the European press or the Latin American press but I’ve never found or been shared if he was reported on. He was friends with at least one, probably multiple, Spanish anarchists in Philadelphia before the war because there is a bunch of Spanish sailors who made Philadelphia their home in the mid-teens. One of them was a man named Manuel Rey who was part of the group arrested and then because he was a foreign national, he was deported rather than imprisoned. Although, he then snuck back into the United States and lived under a different name for another 50 years in New Jersey and he became a good friend, of course, of Sam Dolgoff. So it’s reasonable to conclude, because he worked with various Spanish Wobbly sailors that were Philly-based in the teens, that some of those people probably wrote for the Spanish press but I’ve never learned of Fletcher showing up in Spanish publications, even though the Wobblies produced multiple different Spanish language newspapers. I would love to find him in South Africa because the IWW travels to South Africa, exports its motto and becomes very influential in Southern Africa but there is no direct evidence that Ben Fletcher is known in that region, even if he could be considered to be a spiritual father of sorts. In fact, the largest union that’s formed in South Africa in the late 19-teens is Cape Town dockworkers in what became known as the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) that adopted the IWW motto which is ‘an injury to one is an injury to all.’

So we could guess maybe, by word of mouth, that Wobblies bring Fletcher to other places. We can definitely say that in North America, he was a very well-known figure and beyond that, it’s sort of guesswork or even more so but he was a well-known figure. The last thing I would say is that actually, he shows up in the mid-‘20s speaking at the Communist-affiliated American Negro Labour Congress and supposedly, he was very well-received which is very interesting because Fletcher already was very anti-Communist, which we know this from his writings, because the communists really sort of stole the thunder of the Wobblies but also actively undermined the IWW and other anarchistic organisations in many countries in an attempt to seize control of the Left which ultimately worked.

By anti-Communist here, Peter is referring to opposition to the official Moscow-linked Communist Party line, so what some people would refer to as anti-Stalinist. Sam Dolgoff is a famous Russian Jewish anarchist who moved to the US. He was a real character who mingled with just about every prominent lefty and revolutionary in the US over the course of the 20th-century. We talk more about this stuff in the bonus episode for our patrons.

By the ‘30s, we know that Fletcher moves to New York City and continues to be committed to the IWW and is actually an organiser, although his health declines very early on. In the early ‘30s, he has a stroke – maybe a major stroke – and it’s not clear if he ever holds down a steady job again. It’s also not clear why he moved to New York nor when he gets divorced but I know that happens. I know that somewhere along the way, he finds a Black wife as his second wife and they live in Brooklyn for the better part of 20 years together in a neighbourhood that’s well-known called Bedford-Stuyvesant, or Bed-Stuy, which, at that time, was not a Black majority. At that time, Walter Neff and E. F. Doree and their wives and children, who were other Local 8s who had been part of the wartime persecution, also live in Bed-Stuy even though in the mid to late ‘40s, that neighbourhood starts to become more and more heavily Black. Also, the Dolgoffs live in Bed-Stuy before they move to Manhattan later.

Fletcher continues to believe in the IWW and occasionally, passionately speaks about it but his wife, very likely, was the breadwinner due to his poor health. As the depression heats up and there’s a lot of labour and radical organising, Fletcher is probably sympathetic and probably paying attention closely. He still hangs out with Wobbly friends but he’s not a leader and he’s not an activist on the level he really had been for 20 years from 1910, say, until the early ‘30s.

It’s quite likely that Fletcher’s time in Leavenworth would have contributed to his poor health. He became considerably weakened in his early 40s.

All we know really is that he was often ill and he hung out in his brownstone that he and his wife might or might not have owned. Maybe they were the managers and it was common in New York City to have a manager/resident who would take care of the building. Those sorts of details are just little bits. A number of people comment on his often poor health and he does too in a few letters that he writes in the ‘30s, ‘40s or even in the late ‘20s to various people that are in the book in which he comments on various ailments that he has. It’s sad. Of course, for working-class people and people who work in tough jobs, it’s not uncommon for them to have a low life expectancy, especially at a time when access to healthcare for working people, including Black working people, is poor.

He eventually died at his home in Brooklyn on 10 July 1949, aged just 59. Over 100 people attended his funeral, including many current and former IWW members who sung “Solidarity Forever”. An extensive obituary including numerous tributes to him was published in the IWW newspaper.

Even though it had been well over 20 years since he had stopped being a prominent union leader, he did have an obituary written in the New York Times, which is powerful evidence of his importance, especially given the coverage bias of the Times towards rich and powerful white men. That said, they did get details wrong like claiming he was involved in the Bread and Roses strike of women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Despite the biggest battles of Ben Fletcher and Local 8 being over 100 years ago, Peter thinks there are still important things we can learn from them.

Well, I think a lot of different people might draw different ones. I think, for me, it strikes me that racial capitalism, as a concept, is deeply important for us to consider and even though Fletcher himself was perhaps less convinced of it, that was central. I think a lot of us might actually push back on that; the idea, in other words, that not only do we, as believers in socialism but also equality (maybe that’s redundant), believe that you can’t take for granted that white workers, who have benefited for so long from a society and a world in which whiteness matters, You can’t just simply say that it’s going to disappear, even if we are able to push our society and world in a more human-centred direction. I think, actually, one of the lessons is that we might need to think about that more seriously. Even Local 8, after nearly ten years of forming what, I suggest, is the most powerful, interracial, multi-ethnic union of its time in the United States, ultimately fell prey to internal and external prejudices that really ripped apart the union. Of course, the employers played that up as much as possible and, sadly, the government contributed to that but we can’t entirely give the workers themselves a free pass. I think we always need to be thinking about these matters, in particular, in 2020 in America but in many, many countries that as societies become more diverse and because the working class in many countries – I’m speaking here about the US – remains much more diverse than the ruling class, we have to put front and centre the fact that we are of many different backgrounds, ethnically, racially and nationally and we can’t simply assume that we’re all going to see each other as allies. The IWW was, in my opinion, spot on in being anti-racist but maybe even prioritising that among its own members could have been done more. I think the fact that Ben Fletcher was, in 1913, a Black man who led a white-majority organisation is also fascinating because it’s so rare, even a hundred years on. I mean it’s surprising if a Black person leads a Black-majority organisation. Local 8, over time, actually became more Black because the Black population of Philadelphia grew in the war years but at its birth, Ben Fletcher was maybe one of a third of Local 8 that was African American. That’s fascinating for us to keep in mind. Of course, some people might say that another lesson is that we need these sorts of unions. The IWW has been experiencing a small resurgence in recent years but it’s still a pretty small organisation, although it’s grown and returned to many countries where it had operated previously. I think there are dozens of countries where the IWW exists now and we might, therefore, need to be thinking concretely even about the policies. I didn’t even mention this but Local 8’s policies at its meetings, for instance, was that they would always mandate, essentially, that one of the chairs at a meeting be Black and one of the chairs be white and the fact that they very intentionally integrated their gangs. So instead of having voluntary self-segregation, which sometimes happens in groups, they tried to root that out, even if that might be common. Of course, the direct action tactics are a whole other component of lessons you might say. This is not unique to the IWW or Local 8. Other unions and even other groups of organised workers, who were not in formal unions, engaged in these tactics. That’s deeply important to keep in mind. For Local 8, and again, not uniquely, was the central importance of the strike. Local 8 was born out of a strike which is not unusual for a union but it engaged in repeated strikes. It actually took a day off every birthday to the chagrin of the employers and without asking permission. On their first anniversary, second anniversary and third anniversary, they simply refused to work and instead, held a parade for themselves or a party and took a day off. They were constantly threatening to strike and as we may know, but many of us probably don’t, the IWW, historically, never signed contracts. They never signed contracts because in many union contracts, including in the US, there is always a no-strike provision or a no-strike clause. So generally, in America, strikes happen in unionised places only in between contracts. However, the IWW believed and believes, as do many of us, that the most powerful weapon that workers have is to strike. The threat or the actual withholding of labour is what employers hear best and so the IWW used that tactic repeatedly, including on the Philadelphia waterfront. So I think the tactics of direct action are really important and that, of course, demands a level of engagement and commitment on the part of the members that many unions don’t have because unions have, in too many cases, become paper organisations in which you pay your dues but you don’t actively engage and participate. That was not the case on the Philadelphia waterfront or in other IWW locals. I think those are two or three different ways that I think Fletcher and Local 8’s stories are important for us to consider in our times.

And not only that, but Local 8 occupies a unique role in US history.

It is amazing that Ben Fletcher and the union, as I’ve said already… I don’t know if there was a more racially integrated union or institution. Forget the union, right? Name an organisation in America in 1915 that was more multi-ethnic and multi-racial where everyone was equal. I can’t. Not that I’ve ever tried very hard to pick out every organisation. Why is this organisation forgotten? Obviously, this is part of a larger story. The IWW is forgotten. Even though there are still some people in the IWW, even though it’s grown a little and even though the stories of the Wobblies are so dramatic and inspirational for many of us, massive repression during the war and then the ascension of a rival Left tradition, communism, that had no desire to keep the flame of IWW ideas alive – far from it – results in basically… who is their audience? In Philadelphia, it’s the same thing. Really, there’s no memory of Local 8 and Fletcher. It’s long enough ago that most people, of course, aren’t even around or it’s even the sons and the grandsons. A few people know from family stories. I occasionally meet someone who had a great-grandfather but they’re utterly forgotten.

Since we carried out this interview and Peter’s book has come out, there has been renewed interest in Fletcher in Philadelphia. And Peter is now working with local activists, including the IWW branch which is still there, to have a mural and historical marker put up, commemorating Fletcher and Local 8.

[Outro music]

Well, that brings us to the end of this double podcast episode. For our patreon supporters, we have an exclusive bonus episode for you about Fletcher’s views on race and racism, as well as more information about his personal life, and Peter’s research. You can listen to that by supporting us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

To learn more about Ben Fletcher, you should definitely get hold of Peter’s excellent book, Ben Fletcher: the Life and Times of a Black Wobbly. It’s available from our online store, link in the show notes.

To learn more about Local 8, Peter has written another book called Wobblies on the Waterfront. Get that as well on the link in the show notes.

As always, we’ve got sources, links to more info, transcripts, and more on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

Again, this podcast is only made possible because of support from you, our listeners on patreon. So if you can, please consider joining us for as little as two dollars a month at patreon.com/workingclasshistory. Supporters get great benefits like exclusive early access to episodes, as well as exclusive bonus episodes, free and discounted books and merch, and more.

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Thanks again to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands and Jamison D. Saltsman.

Our theme tune is ‘Solidarity Forever’originally written by Ralph Chaplin, and performed by Tom Morello, The Nightwatchman. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Louise Barry.

Finally, thanks to you for listening. Catch you next time.

Interview transcribed by PODTRANSCRIBE

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