the (Chicago) I. W. W. considers their method—political action—a snare and a delusion, and (here both the Detroit and Chicago factions come together) absolutely impotent when used alone. It is rather significant that every member of the provisional board elected at the convention was a member of the Socialist party. But they emphatically declared that the Socialist party was not to be involved in any way; and it never did become involved except as an enemy. On the other hand, the Socialist Labor party did, through the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, indirectly affect the work of the first convention. 1 The anarchistic element was weak in 1905, and the anarchistic leanings now so prominent in the direct-actionist wing of the organization were then quite overshadowed by the socialistic and industrial phases of the movement. Carlton says that "the Industrial Workers may be compared with the Knights of Labor shorn of their idealism and saturated with class-conscious Socialism"; and, he might have added, with their decentralized administrative system replaced by a very strongly centralized one-this constituting a fundamental distinction between the I. W. W. and the Confédération Générale du Travail, a decentralized organization. Nor should the Industrial Workers of the World be quite shorn of idealism. That must surely be idealistic which is "saturated with class-conscious socialism." This was amply demonstrated at the constitutional convention. Their idealism was given more of a pragmatic character by the persistent tendency to place socialism on an industrial rather than a political basis. The immediate struggle must take place primarily in the shop at the point of production-only secondarily at the polls. "By organizing industrially," claims the Industrial 1 F. T. Carlton, History and Problems of Organized Labor (New York, 1911), p. 82. 1 Worker, "we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." And here he evidences an idea of the future state of society and the method of its realization, rather new even to the socialist, and somewhat akin to that of the anarchists. The First Convention surely laid its plans, crude as they were, with an eye to the future. The scope of organization implied that the proletariat of the future would include more, by far, than the unskilled; that all those gainfully employed in whatever kind or grade of work would some day become proletarians, in spirit at least, and get together in this "one big union." The first constitution, crude and provisional as it was, made room for all the world's workers and so at the beginning is a vast and nearly empty structure, with groups of the lower grades of workers in some of the basic industries in their proper places in the scheme, but with all the rest a hollow shell. Whether this empty structure will ever be "filled up" is a question which time will decide. George Speed, formerly a member of the General Executive Board (direct-actionist wing), has characterized this convention as the "greatest conglomeration of freaks that ever met in convention." This may have been true, for freak ideas often did bob up in the convention and some of them got fixed in the constitution, but at heart this was a vital move, impelled by high and serious motives.2 1 This clause was inserted in the preamble at the 1906 convention. Cf. Constitution I. W. W. as amended to 1908. 2" C'était la première préparation pratique en Amérique à la révolution qui doit conduire la société de la tempête économique au port de la république coopérative." L'Internationale ouvrière et socialiste (ed. français), vol. i, p. 63, Stuttgart, 1907 (Report of the Socialist Labor Party of America to the Congress). CHAPTER IV MAIDEN EFFORTS ON THE ECONOMIC FIELD 66 THE adjournment of the organizing convention in July, 1905, left the body it had created in a very chaotic condition. The time and attention of the delegates was so exclusively taken up with the problem of building up one big union" out of many little unions and the task of working out a harmony platform of law and policy on which all could come together, that the matter of business management was almost entirely neglected. Indeed some of the circumstances surrounding the I. W. W. at its inception quite precluded the ordered and efficient procedure possible to a well manned and adequately financed organization. The I. W. W. was not well manned and was practically destitute of financial resources. The dearth of ability and especially the want of honesty in its managing personnel were to become all too evident long before the second convention had come to a close, as was also its practically bankrupt financial status. Although there were three rather formidablelooking departments nominally organized as such — viz.: mining, metal and machinery, and transportation-none of these except the mining department represented material accessions either numerically or financially, and the early defection of the Western Federation of Miners quite broke down this one and, what was even more important, cut off from the Industrial Workers of the World the great bulk of its financial resources. The industrial-union idea made marked headway among |