Anatole Dolgoff tried to give the great labor organizer, Ben Fletcher, his due in this First post. Dolgoff, who’s in his mid-eighties, worried that Fletcher’s legacy was at risk of being lost. Perhaps this next post, by a twenty-year old, will help put Dolgoff’s mind at ease…
In 1959, Anatole Dolgoff told his father Sam, a veteran Wobbly, about meeting the up-and-coming Rev. Martin Luther King—“He’s an impressive fellow”.[1] Sam harrumphed, in response: “Let’s see if he measures up to half the man of Ben Fletcher.” Ben Fletcher was one of the leaders of Local 8—a multi-racial Philadelphia longshoremen’s union—and a wide-traveling IWW writer and soap boxer. His life would have made for a riveting autobiography. We do not have one, but saucy stories of his wit and the wonder of his organizing live on through the works of historian Peter Cole and Anatole Dolgoff. Fletcher ought to be part of the constellation of American Civil Rights leaders that we look up to. The history of Local 8 is not only inspiring, but also deeply educative, as the union was called into being and shaped by the trajectory of 20th century American labor politics.
Longshoremen played a large role in the development of American coastal cities. Across the Atlantic seaboard’s metropolises, immigrant ethnic groups—Irish, Italian, Poles, Hungarians and other Eastern Europeans—battled each other for jobs on the waterfront. Black workers were an industrial force in the North’s big cities, even before the Great Migration. Factory bosses exploited racial and ethnic tensions to hamper unionizing efforts—a common gripe against African American workers was that they were strikebreakers undermining unions of white ethnic workers. In reality, black workers tended to be subject to hiring discrimination by white bosses, who generally preferred white workers and excluded blacks from the more skilled, higher paying jobs. White unions, like the American Federation Labor (AFL) barred black workers. And even if the odd union accepted blacks, they were rarely allowed to participate as fully equal members or assume leadership roles.[2]
In Philadelphia, black workers made up the majority of the longshoremen, whereas in Boston, the Irish controlled the docks and in New York, the Italians. Philadelphia took in a range of white European immigrants, too, but it had had a considerable Black population throughout the 1800s. Ben Fletcher grew up in the city’s mainly black south side, the largest black community of any city above the Mason Dixon line.[3]
On May 14, 1913, four thousand Philadelphia Longshoremen, at least half were black, went on strike. The IWW and the AFL’s International Longshoremen Association (ILA) tried to convince the strikers to join their respective unions. At this point, Fletcher had already been working with the IWW for some years in Philadelphia. When Philadelphia longshoremen chose the racially inclusive and more radical IWW, Fletcher most likely had a large role in convincing black strikers to go for his union. He might have underscored the AFL’s documented racism.[4] Reports on the longshoremen’s deliberations, however, do not feature Fletcher nor does his own writing about the vote highlight his personal contribution. (Historian Peter Cole suggests that Fletcher’s low profile in the historical record testifies to his modesty and organizer’s instincts.) Local 8’s coalition managed to hold together for a two-week strike, and brought Charles M. Taylor & Sons, one of Philadelphia’s largest stevedore companies, to the bargaining table. Fred Taylor, the business’s chief executive, conceded general wage increases, overtime pay, and double pay for Sundays and holidays.
Local 8 went on to implement IWW’s democratic principles. Each of the fifteen nationalities making up the union were represented on the Union’s board, and Fletcher was elected secretary of the IWW District Council in Philadelphia. Local 8’s desegregation of the longshoremen’s work gangs fostered workers’ solidarity and defused the competition bosses had baked in as they aimed to cultivate tension between races and different ethnic groups. The union eliminated the shape-up—the corrupt and humiliating system employers used for hiring workers—replacing it with the union hall, an honest institutional broker (without perverse incentives) that notified Local 8 members about available work. The wage increases the union achieved dramatically changed the lives of its members:
Many a man told us that he had been able to maintain his children in high school on the wages Local 8 had secured for him, and at the thought of anyone attacking the organization, his eyes flashed—a hissing fire of hate—regarding such an attack as an attack upon his life and the lives of his wife and children.[5]
Striking became an everyday tool for the new Wobblies. They would conduct “quickies” to force bosses to adjust work assignments—rearranging inefficient or dangerous tasks. “Quickies” were used to get strikebreakers, dues-evaders, and super-exploiters fired. The union men even struck to change the location of their dinners on the job.[6]
Fletcher and Local 8 organizers branched out from Philadelphia to spark union uprisings in other cities along the East Coast. Workers in Local 8 were impelled to reach out to workers in other ports because they knew they would lose their own bargaining power if their harbor could be treated as an outlier. Efforts to recreate Local 8’s success in Baltimore and New York may have failed, but Fletcher helped convince other cities’ longshoremen, from Norfolk to Boston, not to unload “hot cargo” from Philadelphia’s strikebreakers.[7]
Fletcher became well known for his speeches and writing. In one piece for the IWW paper, Solidarity, urging Wobblies to strike in Boston, his mix of humor, clarity and grit comes through. Always positive, Fletcher assured readers “endeavors to extend the organization among the longshoremen of the port will be crowned with certain victory.” He punned “International Longshoremen’s assassinators,” a twist on the ILA’s initials. Fletcher’s approach might complicate contemporary understandings of activism, as he urged “Live wires should take notice and get on the ground here just as soon as possible. Work is brisk.”—Fletcher was working on the docks as he organized. He was living on a worker’s wages. This proximity to the daily life of longshoremen must have informed Fletcher’s plain eloquence: “It just requires a little more effort to prove to the other marine transport workers that the IWW is the ship and that all else is the deep blue sea.”[8]
Off the page, on soap boxes and in union halls Ben riveted audiences. John Nicholas Beffel, another IWW man, noted Fletcher’s “deep organ tones”: “he not only made himself heard above the regular traffic, but above the fire department going by. I think of that incident as a symbol—of Ben’s voice reaching out and sounding its vibrant message where other voices might not be heard.”[9] Even past his prime, Fletcher was a force. Harry Haywood remembered Fletcher was not allowed to speak at the Communist American Negro Labor congress, because “had he been allowed to participate, Fort-Whittman [the prominent black Communist organizing the event] would have been overshadowed.”[10]
Toward the end of the 1910s, the Local 8 faced a federal crackdown on the IWW and internal Communist infiltration, along with rising pro-Garveyite sentiment that undermined the interracial coalition central to the union’s success. The first blow came when the federal government arrested and charged Fletcher along with 165 other Wobblies with espionage and draft dodging. The case against the IWW was unfounded. The State’s trumped-up charges for Fletcher and other Local 8 members actually ran counter to their union’s surprising patriotism. Local 8’s appeal to free Fletcher and fellow Philadelphia Wobblies upheld Local 8’s work during the war: every member was registered for the draft, a good number saw combat; union members subscribed for $115,000 in liberty bonds; there were no accidents/sabotage when they loaded ammunition at the docks; the union even swung a service flag and canceled their anniversary celebration “to not hamper the war effort.”[11] Despite the IWW’s efforts, the trial’s jury judged all the Wobblies (and one woman) guilty. Yet Fletcher would not allow himself to be beat down. His legendary (in anarchist circles, at least) lines from the trial must have been uplifting in the moment. Fletcher supposedly quipped “If it wasn’t for me, there’d be no color in this trial at all.”[12] Even better, after learning he had been convicted, Fletcher wittily critiqued his Judge’s grammar (and decisions)—“The Judge has been using very ungrammatical language… His sentences are much too long.”[13]
In 1920, Fletcher’s union became embroiled in internal disputes with the IWW’s newly pro-communist General Executive Board (GEB). Local’s 8’s sovereignty came under attack from the more centralized IWW. The GEB suspended Local 8 over rumors they had knowingly loaded ammunition destined for White Russian forces. The claim turned out to be unfounded (and illogical, why would White military aid headed for Siberia, depart from Philadelphia?) The GEB suspended the Local 8 again because the union charged higher initiation fees—$25 as opposed to the $2 figure decreed by the IWW constitution. Fletcher and other Local 8 leaders defended their Philly policy because it stopped “Foot Loose Wobblies” from joining the union for a season and overriding decisions taken by workers who’d made their lives on the waterfront. Local 8’s leaders, in their appeal to the GEB, cited their union’s successes and its high enrollment despite the fee. The GEB had no interest in taking in the complexities of the union’s local situation and refused to lift the suspension. In response, Fletcher and Local 8 leadership created their own new Philadelphia Longshoremen’s Union (PLU) that stayed true to the IWW’s original democratic principles.[14] Fletcher maintained if it were not for the “disruptive influence of the Communists” the IWW/PLU split would never have happened.[15] Fletcher was not a die-hard, true believer in local sovereignty. He featured prominently at an early IWW congress, talking up of the uses of the GEB and defending a “centralist” position. His history on this issue hints he was not a dogmatic type. The IWW would eventually break with the Communist Party and welcome Local 8 back into the fold, but by then, the union was barely there.
Race relations in Philadelphia had deteriorated due to riots, lynch mobs, and other incidents of race-based violence on the south side. Racial terror pushed more black workers toward Garvey’s black nationalist politics and, in turn, to the State-backed AFL-ILA’s segregated unions.[16]
Local 8 continued, however, to preach inter-racial solidarity in A. Phillip Randolph’s radical, anti-Garveyite black paper The Messenger. Fletcher would eventually have some sharp words for Randolph whose union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, affiliated with the AFL. In a 1929 letter addressed to historian Abram L. Harris, Fletcher wrote: “those of us in the know know, that the AFL is committed to preserving the status quo between Capital and Labor… despite all, we note Phil Randolph freeing this drivel off his chest. Wm. Green, [AFL’s President] another Lincoln, it is to laugh.”[17] Fletcher didn’t believe segregated unions could take on bosses. Or, as William Dan Jones–another black Philadelphian Wobbly–put it, “the fact is that all Negro unions are failures.”[18] By the same token, though, white unions could not achieve their goals without black participation. The solution to this bind was interracial solidarity. Jones elucidated the pragmatic argument:
This equality has nothing to do with private social intercourse as has been stated by the employers to keep the workers divided. There is nothing to hinder an individual from selecting his or her social group or personal associates. The sooner the workers learn that they are workers, and that all workers are the same in the employers’ eyes, the better off they will be.[19]
Jones’ angle seems undeniable, yet it diminishes Local 8’s best moments outside the factory and beyond the picket line. Every May 14th, marking the anniversary of the union’s founding, members would leave work without permission and parade, with three bands in tow, through the streets of Philadelphia: “Workers representing most European countries, many who could not speak the English language, together with natives, both colored and white… After the speeches, the members danced, played baseball, and listened to music.”[20] At these picnic-parties, union members bonded in ways that went even beyond shared material interests and economic imperatives: “it was mixed, white and black were there, everybody knew one another, and we had a good time.”[21]
The Messenger saw immense promise in Local 8’s forums. One article detailed how these meetings “democratize[d] knowledge” by sponsoring genuine political discussion and education—lecturers were met with lively questions from the worker audience and discussion raced from one topic to another. There was no place for racist nonsense: “With a sound working-class instinct they laid the cause of the Tulsa massacres at the door of the labor-hating, profiteering, conscienceless Ku Klux Klan predatory business interests of the South”. But the presence of members quite acquainted with “John Barleycorn” suggested a stifling formality wasn’t the rule. The Messenger noticed something more than an efficient union was developing out of Local 8’s community: “a living example of the ability of white and black people to work, live and conduct their common affairs side by side. There were black and white men and black and white women in this meeting. No rapes, no lynchings, no race riots occurred! Isn’t it wonderful!”[22]
Historian Peter Cole asserts that Fletcher and local 8 focused on “bread-and-butter” issues. The fight for better wages, hours, conditions, and worker control might not have been all that appealing to those glamoured by the ideal of revolution, but Fletcher’s pragmatic approach cut through. (It’s important to note it took immense courage and imagination to be so commonsensical in 1910-20s America—an era when the KKK had their own march on Washington and “progressives” like Woodrow Wilson were segregating the civil service.) In letters to Agnes Inglis, the first curator of the Labadie Collection, Fletcher lets his idealistic side show: “Unlike many folks I am always certain that Humanity is on its way upward and I even have abiding faith in the ability of the American people to secure better rewards for their efforts and contributions to this thing we term Progress.”[23] Fletcher, though, was primarily a man who got to work. He was not locked on a national political program or a doctrinal vision, as we learn in his letter to another socialist friend Othelia Hampel: “any political gain, redress or concession that we can secure is the meanwhile and should not be ignored.”[24] It was Local 8’s pragmatic direct action—strike first, then negotiate—that was transformative. One of Fletcher’s favorite IWW catch phrases was “get busy.” His and his union’s history prompts workers today to do just that.
Notes
1 Anatole Dolgoff. Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff. AK Press, 2016.
2 Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris. The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement. Columbia University Press, 1931.
3 Peter Cole. Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021.
4 ibid., p. 31.
5 “Colored and White Workers Solving the Race Problem for Philadelphia,” The The Messenger, July 1921, 214–15.
6 Peter Cole. Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. University of Illinois Press, 2007., p. 174.
7 Peter Cole. Ben Fletcher., p. 33.
8 “Marine Transport Workers Line-Up in Boston,” Solidarity, April 14, 1917, 4.
9 “Many Tributes to Ben Fletcher,” Industrial Worker, July 22, 1949, 4.
10 “Browder, Earl R. “A Negro Labor Organizer,” Workers Monthly, May 1925, 294.
11 “To the President of the United States,” The Messenger, March 1922, 377.
12 Haywood, William D. Bill Haywood’s Book: The Autobiography of William D. Haywood. New York: International Publishers, 1929, 324–25
123 Ibid.
14 Peter Cole. Ben Fletcher., p. 26-30.
15 “Some People Are Taken to Jail, But Ben Fletcher Just ‘Went In,’” Amsterdam News December 30, 1931, 16.
16 Peter Cole. Ben Fletcher., p. 32.
17 Abram Lincoln Harris Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Archives, Howard University, Washington, DC.
18 Jones, William D. “The Mixed Union: Merits and Demerits,” The Messenger, September 1923, 812.
19 Ibid.
20 Peter Cole. Ben Fletcher, p. 14.
21 Krupsky, Bill “Willy.” “Labor on the Delaware: The Longshore Experience.” June 29, 1980. Delaware River Oral History Project, Independence Seaport Museum, Philadelphia.
22 “The Forum of Local 8,” The Messenger, July 1921, 234.
23 Agnes Inglis Papers, Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor.
24 Fletcher, Ben H. Case Number 29434, Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation 1908–1922, Old German Files, 1909–21, National Archives and Record Administration.
Works Cited
Anatole Dolgoff. “Black Docker.” First of the Month, n.d.
Anatole Dolgoff. Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff. AK Press, 2016.
Peter Cole. Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021. *Peter Cole’s book is mostly a compilation of primary source documents about, or written by Fletcher.
Peter Cole. Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. University of Illinois Press, 2007.
Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris. The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement. Columbia University Press, 1931.