Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

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Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

Postby elfismiles » Sat Jun 04, 2011 4:59 pm

Thanks to my friend Jimmy for the headsup on this NYTimes article from last week...

Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target


For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target
Caleb Bryant Miller for The New York Times
Image
For at least three years, counterterrorism agents monitored the comings and goings at Scott Crow's home in Austin, Tex.
By COLIN MOYNIHAN and SCOTT SHANE
Published: May 28, 2011

ImageAUSTIN, Tex. — A fat sheaf of F.B.I. reports meticulously details the surveillance that counterterrorism agents directed at the one-story house in East Austin. For at least three years, they traced the license plates of cars parked out front, recorded the comings and goings of residents and guests and, in one case, speculated about a suspicious flat object spread out across the driveway.

“The content could not be determined from the street,” an agent observing from his car reported one day in 2005. “It had a large number of multi-colored blocks, with figures and/or lettering,” the report said, and “may be a sign that is to be used in an upcoming protest.”

Actually, the item in question was more mundane.

“It was a quilt,” said Scott Crow, marveling over the papers at the dining table of his ramshackle home, where he lives with his wife, a housemate and a backyard menagerie that includes two goats, a dozen chickens and a turkey. “For a kids’ after-school program.”

Mr. Crow, 44, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of anticorporate demonstrations, is among dozens of political activists across the country known to have come under scrutiny from the F.B.I.’s increased counterterrorism operations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Other targets of bureau surveillance, which has been criticized by civil liberties groups and mildly faulted by the Justice Department’s inspector general, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When such investigations produce no criminal charges, their methods rarely come to light publicly.

But Mr. Crow, a lanky Texas native who works at a recycling center, is one of several Austin activists who asked the F.B.I. for their files, citing the Freedom of Information Act. The 440 heavily-redacted pages he received, many bearing the rubric “Domestic Terrorism,” provide a revealing window on the efforts of the bureau, backed by other federal, state and local police agencies, to keep an eye on people it deems dangerous.

In the case of Mr. Crow, who has been arrested a dozen times during demonstrations but has never been convicted of anything more serious than trespassing, the bureau wielded an impressive array of tools, the documents show.

The agents watched from their cars for hours at a time — Mr. Crow recalls one regular as “a fat guy in an S.U.V. with the engine running and the air-conditioning on” — and watched gatherings at a bookstore and cafe. For round-the-clock coverage, they attached a video camera to the phone pole across from his house on New York Avenue.

They tracked Mr. Crow’s phone calls and e-mails and combed through his trash, identifying his bank and mortgage companies, which appear to have been served with subpoenas. They visited gun stores where he shopped for a rifle, noting dryly in one document that a vegan animal rights advocate like Mr. Crow made an unlikely hunter. (He says the weapon was for self-defense in a marginal neighborhood.)

They asked the Internal Revenue Service to examine his tax returns, but backed off after an I.R.S. employee suggested that Mr. Crow’s modest earnings would not impress a jury even if his returns were flawed. (He earns $32,000 a year at Ecology Action of Texas, he said.)

They infiltrated political meetings with undercover police officers and informers. Mr. Crow counts five supposed fellow activists who were reporting to the F.B.I.

Mr. Crow seems alternately astonished, angered and flattered by the government’s attention. “I’ve had times of intense paranoia,” he said, especially when he discovered that some trusted allies were actually spies.

“But first, it makes me laugh,” he said. “It’s just a big farce that the government’s created such paper tigers. Al Qaeda and real terrorists are hard to find. We’re easy to find. It’s outrageous that they would spend so much money surveilling civil activists, and anarchists in particular, and equating our actions with Al Qaeda.”

The investigation of political activists is an old story for the F.B.I., most infamously in the Cointel program, which scrutinized and sometimes harassed civil rights and antiwar advocates from the 1950s to the 1970s. Such activities were reined in after they were exposed by the Senate’s Church Committee, and F.B.I. surveillance has been governed by an evolving set of guidelines set by attorneys general since 1976.

But the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 demonstrated the lethal danger of domestic terrorism, and after the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. vowed never again to overlook terrorists hiding in plain sight. The Qaeda sleeper cells many Americans feared, though, turned out to be rare or nonexistent.

The result, said Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent now at the American Civil Liberties Union, has been a zeal to investigate political activists who pose no realistic threat of terrorism.

“You have a bunch of guys and women all over the country sent out to find terrorism. Fortunately, there isn’t a lot of terrorism in many communities,” Mr. German said. “So they end up pursuing people who are critical of the government.”

Complaints from the A.C.L.U. prompted the Justice Department’s inspector general to assess the F.B.I.’s forays into domestic surveillance. The resulting report last September absolved the bureau of investigating dissenters based purely on their expression of political views. But the inspector general also found skimpy justification for some investigations, uncertainty about whether any federal crime was even plausible in others and a mislabeling of nonviolent civil disobedience as “terrorism.”

Asked about the surveillance of Mr. Crow, an F.B.I. spokesman, Paul E. Bresson, said it would be “inappropriate” to discuss an individual case. But he said that investigations are conducted only after the bureau receives information about possible crimes.

“We do not open investigations based on individuals who exercise the rights afforded to them under the First Amendment,” Mr. Bresson said. “In fact, the Department of Justice and the bureau’s own guidelines for conducting domestic operations strictly forbid such actions.”

It is not hard to understand why Mr. Crow attracted the bureau’s attention. He has deliberately confronted skinheads and Ku Klux Klan members at their gatherings, relishing the resulting scuffles. He claims to have forced corporate executives to move with noisy nighttime protests.

He says he took particular pleasure in a 2003 demonstration for Greenpeace in which activists stormed the headquarters of ExxonMobil in Irving, Tex., to protest its environmental record. Dressed in tiger outfits, protesters carried banners to the roof of the company’s offices, while others wearing business suits arrived in chauffeured Jaguars, forcing frustrated police officers to sort real executives from faux ones.

“It was super fun,” said Mr. Crow, one of the suits, who escaped while 36 other protesters were arrested. “They had ignored us and ignored us. But that one got their attention.”

It got the attention of the F.B.I. as well, evidently, leading to the three-year investigation that focused specifically on Mr. Crow. The surveillance documents show that he also turned up in several other investigations of activism in Texas and beyond, from 2001 to at least 2008.

For an aficionado of civil disobedience, Mr. Crow comes across as more amiable than combative. He dropped out of college, toured with an electronic-rock band and ran a successful Dallas antiques business while dabbling in animal rights advocacy. In 2001, captivated by the philosophy of anarchism, he sold his share of the business and decided to become a full-time activist.

Since then, he has led a half-dozen groups and run an annual training camp for protesters. (The camps invariably attracted police infiltrators who were often not hard to spot. “We had a rule,” he said. “If you were burly, you didn’t belong.”) He also helped to found Common Ground Relief, a network of nonprofit organizations created in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Anarchism was the catchword for an international terrorist movement at the turn of the 20th century. But Mr. Crow, whose e-mail address contains the phrase “quixotic dreaming,” describes anarchism as a kind of locally oriented self-help movement, a variety of “social libertarianism.”

“I don’t like the state,” he said. “I don’t want to overthrow it, but I want to create alternatives to it.”

This kind of talk appears to have baffled some of the agents assigned to watch him, whose reports to F.B.I. bosses occasionally seem petulant. One agent calls “nonviolent direct action,” a phrase in activists’ materials, “an oxymoron.” Another agent comments, oddly, on Mr. Crow and his wife, Ann Harkness, who have been together for 24 years, writing that “outwardly they did not appear to look right for each other.” At a training session, “most attendees dressed like hippies.”

Such comments stand out amid detailed accounts of the banal: mail in the recycling bin included “a number of catalogs from retail outlets such as Neiman Marcus, Ann Taylor and Pottery Barn.”

Mr. Crow said he hoped the airing of such F.B.I. busywork might deter further efforts to keep watch over him. The last documents he has seen mentioning him date from 2008. But the Freedom of Information Act exempts from disclosure any investigations that are still open.

“I still occasionally see people sitting in cars across the street,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve given up.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/us/29 ... lance.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference ... index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011 ... tml?ref=us
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/9 ... llance.pdf


Description
Scott Crow, 44, of Austin, Tex., is a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of anticorporate demonstrations. He is among dozens of political activists across the country who have come under intense scrutiny by the F.B.I.’ s increased counterterrorism operations since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Contents

Round-The-Clock Coverage p.1
Banal Busywork? p.2
'Smelled of Bad Odor' p.4
Request for Tax Information p.5
Searching the Trash p.7

Original Document (PDF)
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/9 ... llance.pdf



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Re: Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

Postby elfismiles » Sat Jun 04, 2011 5:09 pm

D'oH! Shoulda guessed Agent Fruh was already on the case since it involved the FBI ...

FBI WATCH MAKING CRUELTY VISIBLE
viewtopic.php?p=405362#p405362
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Re: Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

Postby elfismiles » Sat Jun 04, 2011 5:36 pm

Apparently Mr. Crow came into contact with many of the FBI's snitches including ... Brandon Darby


elfismiles wrote:
FBI Informant Plotted to Firebomb Brave New Books
by Harlan D.

At one time, Austinite Brandon Darby was regarded as a legendary activist, a revolutionary, working as an active community organizer for the Common Ground Relief organization in the post-Katrina New Orleans. Nowadays, Darby is considered by many activists to be a turncoat, a traitor to the cause, probably due to the fact that Darby decided to be an informant for the FBI. Flyers have been seen in coffeehouses across Austin reading “Wanted: Brandon Darby An Informant Rat Loose in Austin.” The vitriol that seems to chase Darby to this day is due to the fact that two young activists David McKay and Bradley Crowder have been sentenced to a combined six years in prison for possessing several Molotov cocktails that were to be used during demonstrations at the 2008 Republican National Convention and were convicted in large part through the testimony of Brandon Darby. The possession of the cocktails is not in question, but what seems peculiar is why Darby an older, seasoned activist would agree to take part in a plan to firebomb a flock of police cars at the RNC, according to the FBI, and not just persuade the younger protégés to avoid instigating violent action? According to the defendants, Darby had encouraged the violence and had provoked the younger activists to take this direction, an allegation Darby denies. Darby admits that he was asked by the bureau to be the “eyes and ears" to monitor the small, loose-knit group of activists that included McKay. Jeffrey DeGree, the defense attorney for Mckay is quoted as saying it was more accurate that "he wasn't the eyes and ears. He was the mouth — a violent, firebomb-obsessed mouth."

More recently, one of Darby’s closest friends, Scott Crow, a fellow anarchist activist and member of Common Ground, confessed that Brandon Darby had a long history of trying to recruit activists for what the two men were eventually convicted of. Crow’s admission, that in 2006 Brandon tried to recruit Crow and others “to firebomb a bookstore in Austin called Brave New Books,” was discovered on the Internet site PMPress.org. This plan was hatched at a time when Darby was already in the employ of the Feds according to FBI documents. Crow says, “that for years he [Darby] advocated ‘blowing things up’ and later using arson.” Scott was unsure that Darby had ever committed any acts of terrorism but according to him, Brandon was intent “on getting others to do it.” So according to Scott Crow’s testimony, a known FBI informant with a history for provoking violent action had his sights set on Brave New Books. Scott Crow was so adamant about Darby’s plan to bomb Brave New Books that he was willing to testify under oath in David McKay’s second trial to show that Darby had a history for initiating terrorist actions which would have given the defense the precedent needed to prove that Darby was in fact the instigator and not the innocent spectator he claimed he was. It also speaks to the fact that Scott Crow was very likely telling the truth about the plot to firebomb the bookstore, due to his willingness to testify under oath.

Why was Darby choosing a bookstore as a target for a direct action? Was his plan a way to ensnare fellow activists in a plot that would eventually be foiled by the heroic FBI? Or was this plan another classic government provocateur attempting to firebomb an actual threat to the FBI and the state, wielding his useful idiots as his accomplices all the while knowing he would be provided the full protection of the FBI? The latter seems justifiably more accurate given the history of the FBI and its long train of abuses using agent provocateurs to carry out its dirty work. One need not look any further than the FBI’s clear infiltration of Elohim City using Timothy McVeigh as their asset. One could also look at the semi-retarded young religious men in Florida that were drafted by the U.S. government through the work of a joint terrorism task force agent who had infiltrated their group and persuaded them to express that they would be willing to help the terrorism task force blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Also, one should never forget that the FBI helped train an informant and provided materials to the informant that were used in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The bombing was allowed to occur with full knowledge of its planning by the FBI. There are loads of other examples that support the notion that the FBI routinely uses agent provocateurs in an effort to undermine its political enemies and swell its rank and budget.

In regrards to Brandon Darby, it is interesting to note that he was committed to seeing the Molotov cocktail bombing through at the RNC. According to the radio show This American Life, that featured Darby and people who knew him, Darby was willing to go ahead with the plan to bomb the police cars with David McKay in the early morning hours but the younger McKay never materialized and the plot was called off. This doesn't describe the behavior of an innocent observer and sounds more like the actions of an active participant willing to commit an act of terrorism and then scapegoat a pair of useful idiots. So would Darby's same zeal for terrorism had occurred if there would have been someone that would have been willing to help in Darby's plan to attack the bookstore? Luckily, we will never know because he was never able to execute his plans.

So with a review of the bureau’s history still fresh in one’s mind, considering Brandon Darby’s wavering personality in the mind of the public between the heroic Dudley Do-Right and nefarious government spook we see that Brandon Darby fits neatly into the second camp as a classic model for a government provocateur. So why did this FBI employee allegedly target Brave New Books for bombing? Is it possible that the bookstore was targeted because Brave New Books represents a genuine populist revolution, based on individual liberties and freedom of information? Or was it targeted because it threatens the state monopoly on violence and the fake opposition’s monopoly on dissent? This author for one thinks so.


This article was published on Monday 07 December, 2009.
http://www.bravenewbookstore.com/articl ... icles_id=5



Man Found Dead in Lake Claimed FBI Tracked Him (Austin)
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viewtopic.php?p=303865#p303865



More links on Brandon Darby...

Suppression of Dissent in the U.S.- A Snitch Emerges
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22746

Anatomy of a Provocateur: Brandon Darby
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22264
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Re: Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

Postby elfismiles » Fri Aug 26, 2011 11:48 am


How a Radical Leftist Became the FBI's BFF
—By Josh Harkinson


Image
Illustration: Jeffrey SmithTo many on the left, Brandon Darby was a hero. To federal agents consumed with busting anarchist terror cells, he was the perfect snitch.

September/October 2011 Issue

For a few days in September 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters' hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was "a leader who's not looking for a fight, but sure isn't afraid of one either."

The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush's Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they'd come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration's assault on civil liberties.

St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling tear-gas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin's big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.
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Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an "FBI informant rat loose in Austin."

The allegation came as a shocker; Darby was a known and trusted member of the left-wing protest crowd. "If Brandon was conning me, and many others, it would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus," wrote Scott Crow, one of many activists who rushed to defend him at first. Two months later, Darby came clean. "The simple truth," he wrote on Indymedia.org, "is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Darby's entanglement with the feds is part of a quiet resurgence of FBI interest in left-wingers. From the Red Scare days of the 1950s into the '70s, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO, monitored and sabotaged communist and civil rights organizations. Nowadays, in what critics have dubbed the Green Scare, the bureau is targeting the global-justice movement and radical environmentalists. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked groups like the Earth Liberation Front ahead of jihadists as America's top domestic terror threat.

FBI stings involving informants have been key to convicting 14 ELF members since 2006 for a string of high-profile arsons, and to sentencing a man to 20 years in prison for conspiring to destroy several targets, including cell phone towers. During the St. Paul protests, at least two additional informants infiltrated and helped indict a group of activists known as the RNC Eight for conspiring to riot and damage property.


Brandon Darby. Courtesy Loteria FilmsBut it's Darby's snitching that has provided the most intriguing tale. It's the focus of a radio magazine piece, two documentary films, and a book in the making. By far the most damning portrayal is Better This World, an award-winning doc that garnered rave reviews on the festival circuit and is slated to air on PBS on September 6. The product of two years of work by San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, it dredges up a wealth of FBI documents and court transcripts related to Darby's interactions with his fellow activists to suggest that Darby acted as an agitator as much as an informant. (Watch the trailer and read our interview with the filmmakers here.)

The film makes a compelling case that Darby, with the FBI's blessing, used his charisma and street credibility to goad Crowder and McKay into pursuing the sort of actions that would later land them in prison. Darby flatly denies it, and he recently sued the New York Times over a story with similar implications. (The Times corrected the disputed detail.) "I feel very morally justified to do the things that I've done," he told me. "I don't know if I could have handled it much differently."

Darby "gets in people's minds and can pull you in," one activist warned me. "He's a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him."Brandon Michael Darby is a muscular, golden-skinned 34-year-old with Hollywood looks and puppy-dog eyes. Once notorious for sleeping around the activist scene, he now often sleeps with a gun by his bed in response to death threats. His former associates call him unhinged, a megalomaniac, a manipulator. "He gets in people's minds and can pull you in," Lisa Fithian, a veteran labor, environmental, and anti-war organizer, warned me before I set out to interview him. "He's a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him."

The son of a refinery welder, Darby grew up in Pasadena, a dingy Texas oil town. His parents divorced when he was 12, and soon after he ran away to Houston, where he lived in and out of group homes. By 2002, Darby had found his way to Austin's slacker scene, where one day he helped his friend, medical-marijuana activist Tracey Hayes, scale Zilker Park's 165-foot moonlight tower (of Dazed and Confused fame) and unfurl a giant banner painted with pot leaves that read "Medicine." They later "hooked up," Hayes says, and eventually moved in together. She introduced him to her activist friends, and he started reading Howard Zinn and histories of the Black Panthers.

Some local activists wouldn't work with Darby (he liked to taunt the cops during protests, getting them all riled up). But that changed after Hurricane Katrina, when he learned that Robert King Wilkerson, one of the Angola Three—former Black Panthers who endured decades of solitary confinement at Louisiana's Angola Prison—was trapped in New Orleans. Darby and Crow drove 10 hours from Austin towing a jon boat. When they couldn't get it into the city, Darby somehow harangued some Coast Guard personnel into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became part of the foundation myth for an in-your-face New Orleans relief organization called the Common Ground Collective.

It would eventually grow into a national group with a million-dollar budget. But at first Common Ground was just a bunch of pissed-off anarchists working out of the house of Malik Rahim, another former Panther. Rahim asked Darby to set up an outpost in the devastated Ninth Ward, where not even the Red Cross was allowed at first. Darby brought in a group of volunteers who fed people and cleared debris from houses while being harassed by police, right along with the locals who had refused to evacuate. "If I'd had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people," he declared in a clip featured in Better This World. He said he'd since bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: "There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents."

Next Page: Darby: "They are complete fucking liars."

But Common Ground's approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims.

Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. "They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana," he told "This American Life" reporter Michael May. "And I was like, 'I don't think so.'" It turned out armed revolution wasn't really his thing.

David McKay. Courtesy Loteria Films
Darby's former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground's interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. "He could only see what's in it for him," Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number.

The flyers led to a meeting between Darby and Major John Bryson, the New Orleans cop in charge of the Ninth Ward. In time, Bryson became a supporter of Common Ground, and Darby believed that they shared a common dream of rebuilding the city. But he was less and less sure about his peers. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, I've replicated every system that I fought against,'" he recalls. "It was fucking bizarre."

By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims.

Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. "I talked," he told me. "And it was the fucking weirdest thing." He knew his friends would hate him for what he'd done. (The FBI raided Hamad's home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin's Lady Bird Lake two months later—an apparent suicide.)

McKay and Crowder first encountered Darby in March 2008 at Austin's Monkey Wrench Books during a recruitment drive for the St. Paul protests. Later, in a scene re-created in Better This World, they met at a café to talk strategy. "I stated that I wasn't interested in being a part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much," Darby emailed his FBI handlers. "I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down."

"My biggest impression from that meeting was that Brandon really dominated it," fellow activist James Clark told the filmmakers. Darby's FBI email continued: "I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren't going to be able to fight anybody until they did so." At one point Darby took everyone out to a parking lot and threw Clark to the ground. Clark interpreted it as Darby sending the message: "Look at me, I'm badass. You can be just like me." (Darby insists that this never happened.)

"The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use" the Molotovs, Crowder told me.When the Austin activists arrived in St. Paul, police, acting on a Darby tip, broke open the group's trailer and confiscated the sawed-off traffic barrels they'd planned to use as shields against riot police. They soon learned of similar raids all over town. "It started to feel like Darby hadn't amped these things up, and it really was as crazy and intense as he had told us it was going to be," Crowder says. Feeling that Darby's tough talk should be "in some ways, a guide of behavior," they went to Walmart to buy Molotov supplies.

"The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use them," Crowder told me. They stored the firebombs in a basement and left for the convention center, where Crowder was swept up in a mass arrest. Darby and McKay later talked about possibly lobbing the Molotovs on a police parking lot early the next morning, though by 2:30 a.m. McKay was having serious doubts. "I'm just not feeling the vibe on the street," he texted Darby.

"You butt head," Darby shot back. "Text me when you can." He texted his friend repeatedly over the next hour, until well after McKay had turned in. At 5 a.m., police broke into McKay's room and found him in bed. He was scheduled to fly home to Austin two hours later.


Bradley Crowder. Courtesy Loteria FilmsThe feds ultimately convicted the pair for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn't have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.

At South Austin's Strange Brew coffeehouse, Darby shows up to meet me on a chromed-out Yamaha with flames on the side. We sit out back, where he can chain-smoke his American Spirits. Darby is through being a leftist radical. Indeed, he's now an enthusiastic small-government conservative. He loves Sarah Palin. He opposes welfare and national health care. "The majority of things could be handled by people and by communities," he explains. Climate change is "a bandwagon" and the EPA should be "strongly limited." Abortion shouldn't be a federal issue.

He sounds a bit like his new friend, Andrew Breitbart, who made his name producing sting videos targeting NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and others. About a year after McKay and Crowder went to jail, Breitbart called Darby wanting to know why he wasn't defending himself against the left's misrepresentations. "They don't print what I say," Darby said. Breitbart offered him a regular forum on his website, BigGovernment.com. Darby now socializes with Breitbart at his Los Angeles home and is among his staunchest defenders. (Breitbart's takedown of ACORN, he says, was "completely fucking fair.")

"No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative," Darby says. "And I've quit giving a shit."Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs. "No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative," he says. "And I've quit giving a shit."

The fact is, Darby says, McKay and Crowder considered him a has-been. His tofu comment, he adds, was a jocular response after one of them had ribbed him for being fat. "I constantly felt the need to show that I was still worthy of being in their presence," he tells me. "They are complete fucking liars." As for those late-night texts to McKay, Darby insists he was just trying to dissuade him from using the Molotovs.

He still meets with FBI agents, he says, to eat barbecue and discuss his ideas for new investigations. But then, it's hard to know how much of what Darby says is true. For one, the FBI file of his former friend Scott Crow, which Crow obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request last year, suggests that Darby was talking with the FBI more than a year before he claims Bryson first put him in touch. Meanwhile, Crow and another activist, Karly Dixon, separately told me that Darby asked them, in the fall of 2006, to help him burn down an Austin bookstore affiliated with right-wing radio host Alex Jones. (Hayes, Darby's ex, says he told her of the idea too.) "The guy was trying to put me in prison," Crow says.

Such allegations, Darby claims, are simply part of a conspiracy to besmirch him and the FBI: "They get together, and they just figure out ways to attack." Believe whomever you want to believe, he says. "Either way, they walk away with scars—and so do I."

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08 ... -terrorism





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Terrorists for the FBI
Inside the Bureau's Secret Network that Surveils and Entraps Americans

http://motherjones.com/special-reports/ ... informants

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Re: Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

Postby fruhmenschen » Fri Aug 26, 2011 12:27 pm

We brought professor Bud Schultz to speak on two different occasions to our conference dealing with crimes committed by FBI agents.
How many of you reading this know who your local FBI SAC is? What your local FBI agents look like? Where your local FBI agents live?
Where your retired FBI agents live? What local companies are members of the FBI Infra Gard program? (does the word boycott mean anything)
What teachers and schools collaborate with the FBI Adopt a School program? What local police chiefs and cops are graduates of the FBI Academy?


Right, I thought so..........

see link first we brought Scott Camil to speak at our conference after reading about him in Bud Schultz's book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Camil

The Price of Dissent
Testimonies to Political Repression in America
Bud Schultz (Author)
Bud and Ruth Schultz's vivid oral history presents the extraordinary testimony of people who experienced government repression and persecution firsthand. Drawn from three of the most significant social movements of our time--the labor, Black freedom, and antiwar movements--these engrossing interviews bring to life the experiences of Americans who acted upon their beliefs despite the price they paid for their dissent. In doing so, they--and the movements they were part of--helped shape the political and social landscape of the United States from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century.

The majority of the voices in this book belong to everyday people--workers, priests, teachers, students--but more well-known figures such as Congressman John Lewis, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Abbie Hoffman, and Daniel Ellsberg are also included. There are firsthand accounts by leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, active early in the century; Southern Tenant Farmers Union of the 1930s; Women's Strike for Peace, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the 1950s and 1960s; and the Hormel meatpackers' Local P-9 in the 1980s. Lively introductions by the authors contextualize these personal statements.

Those who tell their stories in The Price of Dissent, and others like them, faced surveillance and disruption from police agencies, such as the FBI; brutalization by local police; local ordinances and court injunctions limiting protest; inquisitions into beliefs and associations by congressional committees; prosecution under laws that curbed dissent; denaturalization and deportation; and purges under government loyalty programs. Agree with them or not, by dissenting when it was unpopular or dangerous to do so, they insisted on exercising the precious American right of free expression and preserved it for a new

Part One

Subverting the Organization of Labor

The right of labor to organize without interference, coercion, and intimidation derives from the exercise of the rights of free speech, peaceable assembly, and freedom of the press enumerated in the Constitution of the United States.
La Follette Committee, U.S. Senate, 1939
The man was lying on the ground, defenseless. The policemen stood over him, beating his limp body with long clubs while fellow officers watched. This scene, captured on film, was one among many in South Chicago on Memorial Day 1937. The beatings—along with a barrage of tear gas and a hail of bullets—were part of an unprovoked police attack on workers who were striking against the Republic Steel Corporation.

Union members and their families and supporters had come that day to picnic and then to demonstrate before the struck plant. As the strikers and their wives and children marched, Chicago police began to advance toward them. "Then suddenly, without apparent warning, there is a terrific roar of pistol shots, and men in the front ranks of the marchers go down like grass before a scythe," the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported, describing a Paramount newsreel of the event that was not released to the public at the time.1 "Instantly police charge on the marchers with riot sticks flying. At the same time tear gas grenades are seen sailing into the mass of demonstrators, and clouds of gas rise over them." The police are "appallingly businesslike" in their attack; one strikes a marcher "horizontally across the face, using his club as he would wield a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on the top of his head, and still another is whipping him across the back." Ten workers were killed and ninety or more were wounded that day, in what came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre. Within weeks, more strikers were killed by police at Republic Steel plants in Ohio and Michigan.

Two years later, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, then chaired by Congressman Martin Dies, held hearings in Chicago to investigate Communist influence in the labor movement. (*Note: The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) has also been known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and, after 1969, as the House Internal Security Committee (HISC). We have used the more common designation HUAC throughout.) The unwarranted police violence against strikers and the hearings of the congressional investigating committee stand as examples of two facets of the government's attack on labor. The Memorial Day Massacre was the culmination of sixty years of assaults by the armed forces of the government, a campaign conducted on behalf of employers in their disputes with workers over the right to representation and the often grievous conditions of work. The Dies Committee hearings were the renewal of an assault by the legislative and executive branches of the federal government on those within the labor movement who were said to harbor forbidden radical visions of America—an assault that would last another twenty years.


The Class War Against Labor
Whether they were lumberjacks of the Pacific Northwest; coal miners of Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Colorado; migrant farm laborers of Wheatland, California; or needle trades workers of New York City, their work early in the twentieth century was grueling and life-threatening. In the textile factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts, "thirty-six out of every hundred of all men and women who worked in the mills died before they were twenty-five years of age."2 At the Pressed Steel Car Company in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, one man a day on average was killed by the brutalizing pace of a giant, newly designed production line. To improve their conditions—indeed, to reclaim their humanity—American workers had no option but to act collectively, to unionize.

Success in attaining the right to union representation depended squarely on the efficacy of the workers' primary weapon: the strike. Undercutting strikes meant condemning workers to the absolute control of employers and to insufferable conditions on the job. Yet that was the practice of government in America for decades before the turn of the century and for at least three decades afterward. "The existing attitude of the courts and government officials," the congressional Commission on Industrial Relations wrote in 1916, "generally is that the entire machinery of the State should be put behind the strike breaker."3 Because that machinery included the various armed forces of the state, which the government was quick to deploy, violent conflict often broke out. In what could rightfully and literally be called a "class war," the government's alignment with one side doomed the other to defeat.

Louisiana timber workers, South Carolina textile workers, West Virginia coal miners, Pittsburgh steel workers, San Francisco dock workers, Minneapolis teamsters, Detroit auto workers, Chicago packinghouse workers were gunned down by local police, state constabularies, National Guardsmen, and federal troops. From 1877, the year of labor's Great Upheaval, when more than one hundred railway strikers and their supporters were killed by police, state militia, and the U.S. Army, to 1937, the year of the Memorial Day Massacre, the employers' privileged access to the power of the state was most dramatically evident in the form of military force.

But it was also evident in judicial decisions and legislative enactments. "During strikes," the Commission on Industrial Relations said, "innocent men are in many cases arrested without just cause, charged with fictitious crimes, held under excessive bail, and treated frequently with unexampled brutality for the purpose of injuring the strikers and breaking the strike." Employer groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers had succeeded, the commission reported, "in preventing the enactment of practically all legislation intended to improve the conditions or advance the interests of workers." The "economic bias" of the courts in labor disputes was evident in the "long list of statutes, city ordinances, and military orders abridging freedom of speech and press" that have "almost uniformly been upheld" and in the "injunctions [that] have in many cases inflicted grievous injury upon workmen."4

In extreme cases, employers enjoyed more than the privileged access to state power—they usurped state power. "We unearthed a system of despotic tyranny reminiscent of Czar-ridden Siberia at its worst," the New York Daily News wrote of Pennsylvania's coal patches and steel towns in 1925. "We found police brutality and industrial slavery."5 This assessment was confirmed by the La Follette Committee of the U.S. Senate a decade later. In company-owned and company-controlled towns, workers lived in conditions that approximated "industrial peonage." The police, paid by the companies but "vested with the authority of the State," were "used to abridge the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly and freedom of the press," the La Follette Committee added. "In times of strike these private armies have often assumed the attitude of the State toward a foreign enemy at war, or the attitude of public police toward criminals, shooting and killing union people in an effort to compel submission to the wishes of employers."6

In 1935, however, under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the passage of the Wagner Act shifted government away from its uncritical support of industry. This legislation guaranteed collective bargaining; barred unfair labor practices that interfered with workers' rights; outlawed industrial espionage, yellow-dog contracts (*Note: Under a yellow-dog contract, workers, in order to be hired, were required to sign a statement swearing that they would not join a union. After a Supreme Court decision in 1917 legalized yellow-dog contracts, all strikes by employees who had signed such statements became illegal. and employers could get injunctions forbidding union organizers from even speaking to those workers), blacklists, provocateurs, private police, and arms stockpiles—all powerful weapons in the employers' arsenal—and established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enforce the law's provisions and carry out the election of union representatives.

Corporations denounced the law and "recognized it only after a near-revolutionary wave of sit-down strikes rolled through mills and plants in 1936 and 1937."7 First at Goodyear Tire Company in Akron, Ohio, and then at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, workers put down their tools and occupied the stilled factories. They won a significant victory—union recognition—that energized spontaneous strikes elsewhere. Six thousand at Chrysler, twenty thousand at Hudson sat down. During two weeks in March 1937, Chicago experienced almost sixty sit-downs: motormen, waitresses, candy makers, cab drivers, clerks, peanut baggers, stenographers, tailors, truck drivers, and factory hands. In St. Louis, it was electrical and furniture workers; in Tennessee, shirt workers; in Philadelphia, silk hosiery workers; in Pueblo, Colorado, broom makers; and in Seminole, Oklahoma, oil workers.

These strikes, which the American Federation of Labor (AFL) largely ignored or denounced, took place amid the ferment of building a different kind of union organization—the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The older craft unions of the AFL typically restricted membership to skilled workers in a particular occupation, leaving great numbers of unskilled workers in the expanding mass-production industries unrepresented. The CIO's new industrial unions, in contrast, aimed to organize all workers in a particular industry: all workers in the auto, steel, or electrical industry, for example. The CIO's drive to organize the unorganized industrial workers brought great numbers into the union movement as the 1930s drew to a close.

Many employers grudgingly accepted union recognition as a fact of life. And the emphasis on physical brutality and deadly force as ways of suppressing the right to organize lessened. It was a significant if bittersweet victory. "Lifting the suffocating burden of absolute managerial control from the working lives of Americans," labor historian David Montgomery writes, "was one of the greatest chapters in the historic struggle for human liberties in this country." But, he adds, "the government's intervention also opened a new avenue through which the rank-and-file could in time be tamed and the newly powerful unions be subjected to tight legal and political control."8

To maintain industrial production during World War II, unions agreed to a no-strike pledge and a virtual wage freeze. In return, the Roosevelt administration, through the War Labor Board, assured unions of support for a modified union shop, one with an escape clause that allowed workers to withdraw from the union during the first fifteen days of an agreement, and a dues check-off system that swelled union rolls. (*Note: In a union shop, all workers must join the union aftger working on the job for a specified time. In a closed shop, the employer can hire only persons who are already members of a union. The concept dates back to 1794, when the shoemakers of Philadelphia demanded that their employers hire only union workers. An open shop is one in which there is no union security. Early in the twentieth century, for example, the National Association of Manufacturers led a drive to impose open shops where unions had previously existed.) But these reforms, together with other measures such as the ability to take disputes over grievances and contracts before government agencies, reduced union officials' dependence on rank-and-file support. Leaders also became distanced from, and opposed to, their memberships by having to discipline workers who rebelled against shop-floor conditions. Thus government intervention fostered a change in the character of unions, shifting them away from democratic participation and rank-and-file action.9 The Taft-Hartley Act, passed after the war, subjected union leaders to fines and arrest for failing to break wildcat strikes and made forms of union militancy and solidarity that had been potent weapons against management illegal. The conditions were taking shape for a low-intensity class war that would continue for three more decades.


The Ideological War Against Labor
Historically, the government's hostile actions against unions had an ideological quality about them. The revolutionary character of workers' movements was often wildly exaggerated in order to lay them open to attack from courts, legislatures, and troops. In 1877, the Great Upheaval, a strike of railway workers, was quickly labeled "Communistic." In its aftermath, attempts to reform the conditions of labor were termed "un-American" and, as political scientist Robert Goldstein notes, "the myth of attributing the disturbances to an international communist conspiracy was firmly enshrined in contemporary American histories."10 A surge of strikes after World War I fed into and was affected by the rising tide of postwar hysteria. Referring to the 1919 general strike in support of higher wages for shipyard workers, Seattle mayor Ole Hansen charged: "The sympathetic revolution was called in the exact manner as the revolution in Petrograd." It threatened, he said, to "spread all over the United States," unless the "traitors and anarchists" understood that "death will be their portion if they start anything."11 To oppose business was to oppose Americanism; to support unions was to support Bolshevism. Even as unlikely a group as the Boston police force was branded as "Soviet!" "Bolshevist!" when officers struck to demand representation by the conservative American Federation of Labor. On the heels of the police strike, thousands of steel workers struck for the right to be represented by the AFL and to bargain over wages and hours. But employers, the press, and the government made the strike turn on ideology, not on the bona fide grievances of steel workers. The U.S. Justice Department conducted "red raids" against immigrant steel workers, while a young J. Edgar Hoover slipped "proof" of the red conspiracy to the press and began accumulating a centralized file of "radicals," two habits that he used successfully for more than half a century.12

For their part, radicals in the labor movement felt the special repression reserved for them. Troops in St. Louis raided the headquarters of Socialists who supported strikers during the Great Upheaval. Socialist gatherings were attacked violently in Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago, where police killed at least one person attending such a political meeting. Sheriff's deputies abducted members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during a strike in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917 and shipped them deep into the desert. Earlier, in Everett, Washington, IWW members were killed in a hail of bullets fired by deputies. The Wilson administration marshaled the departments of War, Labor, and Justice against the IWW, setting up a competing union under the auspices of the U.S. Army, undercutting the radical union in negotiations with employers, and imprisoning hundreds of its leaders. The nation's first red scare climaxed with the Palmer raids of 1920, when up to ten thousand suspected alien radicals—many of them members of workers' groups—were seized simultaneously in cities across the nation and held for deportation. The country was riding high on a wave of political intolerance that would be equaled only in the McCarthy era.13

Although this red scare subsided, its grip on the national consciousness was lasting. It resurfaced in the years before World War II, notably in the form of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Texas Congressman Martin Dies. Established in 1938, partly in response to the sit-down strikes by automobile workers, much of the Dies Committee's first year of hearings was directed at the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations and at radicals in the labor movement.

As World War II ended, workers across the country, pressed by inflation, the loss of overtime, and the burden of accumulated unresolved grievances, began to walk off their jobs in spontaneous actions. The year 1946 also brought a historic wave of sanctioned strikes in the auto, steel, electrical, packinghouse, and other industries by more than a million and a half workers, amid corporate calls for the repeal of the Wagner Act. President Harry Truman, who had proposed legislation for the selective use of military conscription against strikes, seized the oil refineries, the railroads, and the packinghouses to break strikes of workers in those industries. Thirty states passed anti-labor laws, and sixty bills to curb labor were before a Congress that eventually passed the Taft-Hartley Act. It was a crucial reversal.

Standing before the AFL convention, John L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers Union, thundered against Taft-Hartley: The statute contained "only two lines that say labor has the right to organize and thirty-three pages of other additional restrictions that dare labor to organize."14 It outlawed the closed shop, sympathetic strikes, and secondary boycotts; it held union leaders liable for fines and arrests if their memberships engaged in wildcat strikes; it allowed strikebreakers to call for the decertification of striking unions and then vote in the subsequent NLRB elections; and it required all elected union officials to sign an affidavit swearing that they were not members of the Communist Party or any organization that believed in or taught the overthrow of the government by force and violence.

"We would not merit the name of free Americans if we acquiesced in a law which makes it a crime to exercise rights of freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of assembly," the CIO executive board stated. The board then pledged: "We will not comply with the unconstitutional limitations on political activity which are written into the Taft-Hartley Act."15 But Taft-Hartley's anti-Communist provision both wielded a stick (threatening to deny unions access to the NLRB) and dangled a carrot (offering union leaders an opportunity to squelch opposition within their own ranks), and the resolve of CIO and AFL leaders collapsed quickly.

Few could resist being swept up in the mounting hysteria that took hold of the nation in the Cold War era. Truman's loyalty program empowered the attorney general to designate any American organization as "subversive," without allowing the group an opportunity to defend itself; the FBI was unleashed to ferret out from among the millions in government employ those who might in the future perform a disloyal act; Dies's old House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), rejuvenated and made permanent, debuted in Hollywood; and Communist Party leaders were indicted under the Smith Act on the basis of beliefs the government ascribed to them.16 States moved to protect themselves from the now imminent threat of subversion: Texas outlawed any party that "entertained any thought" contrary to the Constitution; Tennessee enacted the death penalty for advocating the unlawful overthrow of the government; and loyalty oaths were required to fish in New York City reservoirs, to get unemployment compensation in Ohio, or to box, wrestle, barber, or sell junk in Indiana. As John Henry Faulk, the blacklisted radio personality and leader of the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, said of the moment, "Hysteria took the form of a frothing insanity."17

It became a Cold War crusade that the CIO joined with a passion. From 1946 to 1949, the CIO formulated what amounted to a "party line," a strict litmus test of orthodoxy, the centerpiece of which was support for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and opposition to the third-party presidential bid of former vice president Henry Wallace. Then came the climax: the CIO, whose founding unions had been expelled from the AFL, itself expelled eleven dissident, left-wing unions in 1950, including two that had been among its founders. In all, close to one million workers were affected.

Many of the remaining unions, as well as others from the AFL, set upon the banished unions in bitterly fought jurisdictional battles. These raids were given credence and sustenance by government intrusions. Officers of ousted unions were indicted for perjuring themselves when they signed Taft-Hartley oaths; unions whose leaders refused to sign the oath were denied a place on certifying ballots by the NLRB; leaders of expelled unions were indicted under the Smith Act; foreign-born leaders and members were threatened with deportation. FBI harassment added to the intimidation; and congressional committees, especially HUAC, timed their investigations of the expelled unions to coincide with NLRB elections, placing the weight of government emphatically on the side of the raiders. Many of the ousted unions were unable to survive the ordeal, and those that did were left with their resources and leadership depleted, their memberships decimated.

Purged of its radical element and much of its militant presence and bound by the Taft-Hartley Act's restrictive provisions, American labor faced the second half of the twentieth century shorn of important forces and forms of struggle that had brought significant victories in the past. "Business unionism," while acclimating to the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, sought partnerships with employers in the period of relative prosperity that followed, and the government's actions against labor abated. But its iron hand, whether gloved or not, made its presence felt again in the closing decades of the century, after business once again assumed its aggressive anti-union stance and after a new generation of rank-and-file militants arose to press labor's age-old demands against speedup, wage cutbacks, and dangerous work conditions.


Prologue

Attacks on Labor Before the Triumph of Industrial Unions

The Unrelenting Campaign Against the Industrial Workers of the World

The nation had never before seen such a sustained, concerted attack against a legal, if dissident, organization as the attack that was directed against the Industrial Workers of the World (commonly known as the "Wobblies"). Nor would the nation again see, across the course of the twentieth century, a union that advocated a fundamental restructuring of the social relations of industry to create an industrial democracy controlled by workers. The limits of acceptable debate by labor were set in large measure by the denial of constitutional rights to these early dissenters. The IWW and the workers it organized were assaulted by police, company gunmen, and vigilantes.18 As the organization grew in strength, and as the patriotic fervor of World War I mounted, attacks by the government became coordinated and national, aimed at no less than the eradication of the radical union. Federal troops patrolled the timberlands of the Northwest, raiding and occupying Wobbly halls, breaking up the Wobblies' street meetings, holding Wobblies in bull pens beyond the reach of civil authority, and even setting up a competing union, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, that workers were forced to join in order to be hired. One hundred sixty-six IWW leaders were indicted under the Espionage and Selective Service Acts in September 1917. "The Justice Department was indeed fortunate that public hysteria convicted the Wobblies before the jury heard the prosecution's evidence," historian Melvyn Dubofsky writes, "for the prosecution, in fact, had no evidence."19 A Chicago jury took less than an hour to convict more than one hundred Wobblies on four separate, complex counts, amounting altogether to over ten thousand offenses.

The attempts to suppress the IWW continued. By 1920, twenty states, at the behest of employers, had enacted criminal syndicalism laws. Criminal syndicalism was defined as the commission of a crime in order to effect any change in industrial ownership or control or any political change. Persons who became members of an organization that advocated criminal syndicalism or who themselves spoke, published, or circulated such ideas were held liable for heavy jail terms. The laws attached harsh penalties to what the Supreme Court fifty years later described as "mere advocacy not distinguished from incitement to imminent lawless action."20 In 1922 and 1923, in California alone, 265 people were arrested under such a law. It was then that Fred Thompson was tried for criminal syndicalism. His imprisonment in San Quentin only strengthened his commitment to the Wobbly cause. He went on to edit the IWW newspaper, Industrial Worker, and became the union's official historian.

Fred Thompson
My early years were spent in Canada. My father died when I was three. There were seven of us kids, but my mother always managed somehow to have something for us to eat. She had to do a lot of planning to make sure of that. Those were very rough times, when many of my friends went hungry. I came home one night in 1913, took off my shoes, which were wet, with holes in the bottom, put my feet by the coal stove, and picked up the paper. It told about this wonderful harvest all over Canada. I thought that everything was going to be better now. When my feet got warmed, I went upstairs to ask my mother about it. "No," she told me, "it doesn't quite work that way." I couldn't figure that. When my brother came home, I asked him about it. "She's right," he said. "Having lots of big crops doesn't mean that people will eat." He said it was economics.

We had a small encyclopedia in the house, and there I read about economics for the first time. My father had a few books, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was one of them. That's where I got my radicalism, by the way—from Adam Smith. He described what I could see going on around town. Pretty soon I was reading John Stuart Mill and Malthus. I tried to figure things out. Then I got to know a family that introduced me to Marx's writings. But I think my economics came from the fact that my mother made good use of the available resources. Now, here is a planet with resources; people could live comfortably. Why don't they? That question has been the focus of my life.

I was active in the labor movement in Halifax and out west in 1919, so I was familiar with the IWW. From the beginning, the IWW championed the idea of one union for all in the same work. Then when I came down here in the spring of 1922, I heard some cockeyed stories that the IWW went around burning barns and haystacks. I figured, if they're that nutty, I don't want to belong to them. But I traveled around on a number of jobs where Wobblies worked. I found that they were sensible people, so I joined them in San Francisco later that year. And I've been paying my dues ever since.

In the development of industrial life in America, there were certain areas where it didn't seem strange to have a union. At first, that was confined to the railroads and to machine shops and to a few places where the hired hands were mostly English-speaking skilled craftsmen. We Wobblies were ordinarily working in territory—either geographic or occupational territory—where unionism was not taken for granted. That's why we experienced more hostility than other unions did. When other unions got into similar situations, they experienced the same type of repression. So it wasn't simply our radical philosophy that provided the excuse for going after the Wobblies, but rather that we organized in territories where a union was an alien thing.

In the western logging industry, the IWW made a transformation in conditions. I don't think most people appreciate what we did there. As of 1916, the West Coast logger was a guy who carried his worldly possessions, including his bedding, on his back. He had no facilities for washing his clothes. The "timber beast," they called him. And he was the timber beast. He wore calked shoes that were good for walking along a fallen tree but would wreck a floor. The old saying was that when the logger came into town, you could smell him before you could hear him, and you could hear him before you could see him. He was viewed as a subhuman being, and he felt such. We changed all that to where about the best-paid, best-dressed, best-liked workers on the West Coast were the lumber workers. That was a human transformation the IWW made. I'd say that was one of our major achievements.

Much the same thing happened in metal mining and tunnel work. A lot of the early drilling machinery was very dangerous. The miners drilled with a dry machine, so they inhaled all that powder from the rock. We demanded that be changed by using wet drills. Even after the IWW was gone, replaced by another union, certain habits like that remained. I don't think any miner has changed from dry drilling to wet drilling and then reverted. And all those other safety devices are still there. You institute something that lasts long after you're gone.

Those were the days before radio, before television. Outdoor speaking wasn't an unusual thing. Single tax, women's suffrage, socialism, all kinds of things were promoted. Vegetarianism. You name it. All these heretical ideas were advocated from soapboxes. For example, the IWW objected to workers having to pay a fee to the employment shark to get a job. Ordinarily, the employment sharks had a deal with the foremen about how many days a guy was going to work before he would be canned. They had a system between them so that you wouldn't last too long. We wanted to be able to hire out at a company without having to pay a fee. The place we did our soapboxing about that was right in the skid road area, where working stiffs came into town, spent their money, and got another job.

The Salvation Army was in that area, too, saving souls. Old General Booth, who was a humanitarian, would have been shocked had he been around to see how the Salvation Army he started was in cahoots with the employment sharks. They'd come along with their big bass drum and try to drown out the Wobbly speakers. That's how the Wobbly songbook really got going. We made parodies of all the songs the Salvation Army played. When they played their hymn "In the Sweet Bye and Bye," we'd sing back, "You'll get pie in the sky when you die. That's a lie!"

The fact is that a large number of these free speech fighters were people who had just recently joined the IWW. You have to realize that we were usually organizing migratory workers who hoboed, rode trains through the country. Well, I've done that. On a warm day, you come into the east end of a town and get off the freight train. You walk through town in the hot summer's sun with a heavy coat over your arm. You describe yourself with that coat: a drifting worker who has no place to sleep. Everybody knows that you are not "one of us." But if the IWW could win free speech in those towns, if the IWW could state its aims as a champion of those workers, it meant that they might be considered real human beings, the same as those who slept under a roof every night. I think that's why it was largely the migratory workers who furnished the manpower for the free speech fights, even though they were beaten and jailed for it.

The IWW encountered one or another form of repression from its very beginning. In the early days, one was far more likely to meet up with plug-uglies who beat up organizers. I've been knocked down more than once in my life when I passed out handbills. But it was really during the First World War that the IWW faced its worst repression. I think the motivation is fairly clear. Here the IWW was stepping on the toes of very powerful people: the lumber barons and the copper kings. The IWW was making them spend more money on workers, and that's exactly what they didn't want to do. And these were people who had clout in Washington. In September 1917, federal agents raided the IWW offices all over the country and arrested several hundred people. They charged them with interfering with the war. The motive was evidently not to stop us from interfering with the war effort; it was to discourage us from getting workers to demand better working conditions.

I was arrested in April of 1923. I had been working up on the project that supplies water to San Francisco. If you ever get a drink of water there, remember I helped dig the hole that it comes through. I got fired on that job for distributing Wobbly papers. Then I heard that there was a free press fight in Oroville. That's in the Feather River Canyon in California. So I and a couple of others headed up there. I had been a member of the IWW for only a few months, and this was my first experience with anything of that sort. I went up to the jungles, the places where hoboes cooked and slept under the trees. There must have been about a hundred of us who came; we had heard that the people who were selling IWW papers were getting arrested. Our feeling was that if they were going to arrest people for selling our papers, they would have to arrest a lot of us. So we sent a committee to the sheriff, and he agreed that we could peddle our papers if we weren't too "objectionable." That was a little victory.

Then one of the people there said, "Somebody ought to distribute papers in Marysville." I figured, okay, I'd stop off in Marysville. I went down to the skid road there and passed out a few papers. I was arrested right away. When I got to jail, somebody said, "Don't you know this is the town where they killed the sheriff?" There had been a strike up at a nearby hop ranch in 1913. During the strike, some unknown person shot the sheriff when he disrupted a meeting. That sheriff's son was now the district attorney.

The first charge against me was having in my possession papers that advocated illegal ideas according to the state criminal syndicalism law. Well, they couldn't find anything in those papers to fit that description, so they changed the charge. When they arrested me, I had in my hip pocket membership cards and stamps to bring people up to date in their dues books. Now they charged me with being an organizer for a union that did in secret teach doctrines in violation of the state syndicalism law.

"Syndicalism" is simply French for unionism. But the word has been used, even by historians and sociologists in this country, to mean the type of unionism practiced by major labor unions in France from the 1890s up to World War I. That was a unionism that relied on direct job action. If you were working in a restaurant and you couldn't win an increase in wages, you told customers the truth about what happened in the kitchen. I think there was a sense of humor that went along with it.

Even the word "sabotage" is a French term. A sabot is a wooden shoe. An odd misconception grew out of this: that French weavers wore wooden shoes, and if they wanted to spoil the product, they would throw their wooden shoe into the loom. Well, that is about as incredible a story as I can think of. The use of the term actually came about when the workers in a town went on strike. The boss would get people from the countryside to replace them, people who hadn't absorbed the work ethic that it's wrong to scab on a guy who's gone on strike. The wooden shoes marked the peasants, who wore those clumsy shoes that were not suitable for the factory floor. To act like those country-bred scabs who didn't know the work—that's what "sabotage" originally meant. It meant slowing down, creating an inferior product, or going against the big brass.

But World War I, of course, changed the meaning of "sabotage" altogether. It became associated with dynamiting and blowing up ships. Sabotage was something the army engaged in, not something the labor movement did. So we quit using the word.

Now here was our old literature that mentioned that sabotage, as a job action, was not too bad an idea to use at times. And here was the jury that thought in terms of sabotage in the sense that they had read about it in the newspapers during the war years. That helped stack the case against us.

At the trial, they used two paid informers, Coutts and Townsend. Just those two were all they could find, despicable characters altogether. They went around from trial to trial telling the same damn lies, that we advocated burning barns and so forth. Well, the IWW certainly did not. You don't win improved conditions by burning barns. You win them by getting people organized who will demand, "Either you raise our wages or nobody's going to do the work here."

I think I made that clear to the jury. You know, you read a juror's face when you're on the stand. I talked about how I'd worked as a building laborer putting up foundations for houses. In a hurry-up job, the concrete wasn't completely mixed and it wasn't tamped down thoroughly. We'd see all kinds of defects that we had to cover over with cement slurry. I said to the jury: As working people, we'd much prefer to do good work. But the contractors' motives were to make as much money as possible. And making as much money as possible for the contractors and providing people with good foundations for their homes weren't consistent. I think I made a fairly convincing presentation, for I could tell that I had won some of the jury over.

The first trial ended with a hung jury. The second trial included two more Wobblies they had arrested. They brought Coutts and Townsend in again to give their lies. Then I went on the stand to explain, just as I did in the first trial, what we were trying to do and how we were trying to do it. This time, the jury convicted two of us and freed one of us. I happened to be one of the two convicted. I heard the jury stood four for acquittal, eight to convict, so they settled it among themselves that way.

I don't know why juries convict in one case and not in another. I think a little detail may have made the jury more inclined in the first trial to acquit me. The prosecuting attorney was the crux of this thing. Everybody knew he was the son of the man who'd been shot in the Wheatland riot some years earlier. He was really venomous. He ended his last speech to the jury dramatically, sort of crouching down, and because I came from Canada he said: "This man from foreign shores comes into this country and gnaws at the foundations of our society like a rat." Well, it struck me so funny that I burst out laughing, and the jury started laughing, too. It was self-defeating for the prosecutor.

At the second trial, the prosecutor didn't make the long-winded speech he had at the first. Instead he said, "It's a hot day. Let's let the jury go out and get some refreshments." I was told that when they went outside, newsboys, who didn't usually sell their papers there, were hollering, "IWW sets fire to the rice fields of California!" The jury came back rather quickly and convicted us. And there had been no rice field fires.

On November 7, they took us to San Quentin, Dawes and I. I was in that prison for three years and four months. I forget just how many, but there were well over a hundred IWW members like me in San Quentin at that time, all for no real offense.

My experience there made me reevaluate things. I had thought that there was a criminal class, a special species of wicked people who were different from the rest of us. I found that the people in prison were like people I had worked with on the jobs and met with in the towns. These certainly weren't the large successful crooks. Many were just young people who were broke and took something that didn't belong to them.

A prison is an ideal place for bureaucracy to foster. They had all kinds of petty rules. When some guards took a dislike to certain prisoners, they'd find one reason or other to give them a hard time. They had a dark hole under the ground, with no light, no mattress to sleep on, no nothing. They just had a floor there and a bucket for toilet facilities. They'd throw people inside and keep them there. They had me in there for thirty days. It was not really the physical discomfort that was the worst of it. The hardest part was to keep your mind operating. I always had an interest in geography as a kid. When I was in the hole, I tried to recall how all the rivers in North America flowed to the sea. I would construct maps in my mind, such things as that.

Ordinarily, we were thrown in the hole for going on strike about something. When some injustice was done to one of the Wobblies, we would take a vote: Do we want to go on strike or don't we? Because they added a month every time we did, we actually sentenced ourselves to extra time when we went on strike. But when they mistreated our fellow workers, we figured it was the only thing to do.

We had our gripes, and we dealt with them in an organized way. You had beans almost every meal. Somebody put me wise when I landed there: On Mondays, don't eat too many beans because they're not quite cooked and you're likely to have digestive disturbances. Tuesdays, eat lots of beans because that's the day they're done. Wednesdays, they're sour. And then it was Thursdays, beans are raw again. Sundays, we did get corn pone and gravy, with a little sample of meat to remind us what it used to be like. Of course, that meat always had the iridescence of a rainbow on it. But we ate it.

I figured that the cycle of beans was amusing, so I got it out into the newspapers through visitors. We found that the San Francisco papers made a hullabaloo of what went on in the big house if it was something amusing. So we made sure the newspapers were supplied with all the details of our life. They gave us oatmeal sometimes with maggots in it—that would get into the Chronicle. As a result of the publicity, they did improve our diet. We were even beginning to get a few vegetables toward the end.

I still think a great deal could be done to make prisons more humane places if the labor movement would get involved. It is working people who go to prison, not millionaires. And I think working-class organizations ought to be concerned with conditions there. Four people in a cell that's really a small place for one is an impossible situation. It isn't just the physical crowding, but four personalities clashing. When you lock these same people up day and night, even if they were four saints, they would sooner or later be after each other. It cultivates the worst that there is, the most unsociable traits. But the Wobs got along fairly well because we were people in the habit of organizing.

I had a bifocal view of things. I knew how unconstitutional the law against syndicalism was, how contrary it was to the Bill of Rights. But even as that law was written, it said that you should be convicted only when you do certain things. We hadn't done any of those things. According to the rules of their game, as they declared them, we shouldn't have been in jail. But the other part of my own attitude ran this way: Here is a minority of people who have grabbed this round ball we live on, and since I wanted you and me and the rest of us to take it back from them, I expected they were going to react. So it didn't surprise me that they threw me in jail.

I haven't changed my views. I look at the world today with unemployment and starvation, literally starvation. There are millions of people on this globe dying for the lack of enough food, and yet we don't know what to do with the food we grow. We told the farmers not to plant so much, and even at that, they're going to have crops that are "too big." Well, can I think of anything crazier than a world where people are dying for lack of food and farmers are worrying because their crops are going to be too big? It's institutionalized, organized, well-established insanity, isn't it? That's what the economic system is. And most people think that's the way it has to be. The whole thing is bizarre, ridiculous.

Well, there were all kinds of things done to discourage us from organizing. But we Wobs were sort of irrepressible. We had little regret that we stood our ground and spoke our mind rather than bow down to Mammon. On a San Quentin cell wall, I saw a line from the Aeneid: "Haec olim meminisse iuvabit." It brought to mind Aeneas cheering his fellows on in the shipwreck: "Perhaps it will give pleasure to remember even these things." Yes, it is more pleasant to remember that we resisted than that we didn't.


NOTES FOR PART ONE
Epigraph quoted from Robert M. La Follette Jr., Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor: Preliminary Report, 76th Cong., 1st sess., report no. 6, pt. 2, February 13 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), p. 3.

1. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor's Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1955), p. 314.

2. Dee Garrison, Rebel Pen: The Writings of Mary Heaton Vorse (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), p. 29.

3. Senate Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, 64th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916), vol. 1, p. 94.

4. Ibid., pp. 54, 41, 11, 43, 53.

5. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920{-}1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 130. Also see Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1978), p. 190.

6. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, pp. 4, 6, 11. For a firsthand account of repression by company-town police systems, see Pete Muselin's story in Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 65{-}74.

7. Thomas R. Brooks, Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor (New York: Delacorte, 1964), p. 180.

8. David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 165.

9. See Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 19{-}20, 26{-}35; Montgomery, Workers' Control in America, pp. 161{-}169; and Brooks, Toil and Trouble, pp. 201{-}208.

10. Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, p. 33.

11. Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 132.

12. Murray B. Lavin, Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 41.

13. For an account of the Palmer raids by Sonia Kaross, one of the victims, see Schultz and Schultz, It Did Happen Here, pp. 159{-}164.

14. Saul Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Putnam, 1949), p. 337.

15. Lee Pressman, Eugene Cotton, and Frank Donner, Analysis of the Taft-Hartley Act (Washington, D.C.: Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1947), p. 49.

16. The HUAC investigation into the film industry began with the case of the Hollywood Ten. Ring Lardner Jr. and Frances Chaney Lardner describe those hearings and the subsequent blacklisting in Schultz and Schultz, It Did Happen Here, pp. 101{-}116. See also pp. 75{-}90 in the same volume for an account of the Smith Act trial of leading Communists by one of the defendants, Gil Green.

17. Ibid., p. 397.

18. Jack Miller recounts his experience in the 1916 Everett Massacre, in which sheriff's deputies opened fire on a ferryboat loaded with IWW workers as it docked in Everett, Washington; see ibid., pp. 237{-}248.

19. Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 432.

20. The 1969 Supreme Court ruling in Brandenburg is quoted in Thomas Emerson, The System of Freedom of Expression (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 156. The Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism law, which was "similar in text," Emerson says, to the California law.
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Re: Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

Postby Marie Laveau » Sat Aug 27, 2011 9:18 am

This is facinationg.

It says a lot, I suppose, that one can still go to the FBI and ask for "their file" and receive one, rather than being told, "What file?" or some such.

I've often thought of asking for mine.
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Re: Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

Postby fruhmenschen » Sat Aug 27, 2011 11:41 am

fruhmenschen wrote:We brought professor Bud Schultz to speak on two different occasions to our conference dealing with crimes committed by FBI agents.
How many of you reading this know who your local FBI SAC is? What your local FBI agents look like? Where your local FBI agents live?
Where your retired FBI agents live? What local companies are members of the FBI Infra Gard program? (does the word boycott mean anything)
What teachers and schools collaborate with the FBI Adopt a School program? What local police chiefs and cops are graduates of the FBI Academy?


Right, I thought so..........

see link first we brought Scott Camil to speak at our conference after reading about him in Bud Schultz's book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Camil

The Price of Dissent
Testimonies to Political Repression in America
Bud Schultz (Author)
Bud and Ruth Schultz's vivid oral history presents the extraordinary testimony of people who experienced government repression and persecution firsthand. Drawn from three of the most significant social movements of our time--the labor, Black freedom, and antiwar movements--these engrossing interviews bring to life the experiences of Americans who acted upon their beliefs despite the price they paid for their dissent. In doing so, they--and the movements they were part of--helped shape the political and social landscape of the United States from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century.

The majority of the voices in this book belong to everyday people--workers, priests, teachers, students--but more well-known figures such as Congressman John Lewis, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Abbie Hoffman, and Daniel Ellsberg are also included. There are firsthand accounts by leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, active early in the century; Southern Tenant Farmers Union of the 1930s; Women's Strike for Peace, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Berkeley's Free Speech Movement of the 1950s and 1960s; and the Hormel meatpackers' Local P-9 in the 1980s. Lively introductions by the authors contextualize these personal statements.

Those who tell their stories in The Price of Dissent, and others like them, faced surveillance and disruption from police agencies, such as the FBI; brutalization by local police; local ordinances and court injunctions limiting protest; inquisitions into beliefs and associations by congressional committees; prosecution under laws that curbed dissent; denaturalization and deportation; and purges under government loyalty programs. Agree with them or not, by dissenting when it was unpopular or dangerous to do so, they insisted on exercising the precious American right of free expression and preserved it for a new

Part One

Subverting the Organization of Labor

The right of labor to organize without interference, coercion, and intimidation derives from the exercise of the rights of free speech, peaceable assembly, and freedom of the press enumerated in the Constitution of the United States.
La Follette Committee, U.S. Senate, 1939
The man was lying on the ground, defenseless. The policemen stood over him, beating his limp body with long clubs while fellow officers watched. This scene, captured on film, was one among many in South Chicago on Memorial Day 1937. The beatings—along with a barrage of tear gas and a hail of bullets—were part of an unprovoked police attack on workers who were striking against the Republic Steel Corporation.

Union members and their families and supporters had come that day to picnic and then to demonstrate before the struck plant. As the strikers and their wives and children marched, Chicago police began to advance toward them. "Then suddenly, without apparent warning, there is a terrific roar of pistol shots, and men in the front ranks of the marchers go down like grass before a scythe," the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported, describing a Paramount newsreel of the event that was not released to the public at the time.1 "Instantly police charge on the marchers with riot sticks flying. At the same time tear gas grenades are seen sailing into the mass of demonstrators, and clouds of gas rise over them." The police are "appallingly businesslike" in their attack; one strikes a marcher "horizontally across the face, using his club as he would wield a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on the top of his head, and still another is whipping him across the back." Ten workers were killed and ninety or more were wounded that day, in what came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre. Within weeks, more strikers were killed by police at Republic Steel plants in Ohio and Michigan.

Two years later, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, then chaired by Congressman Martin Dies, held hearings in Chicago to investigate Communist influence in the labor movement. (*Note: The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) has also been known as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and, after 1969, as the House Internal Security Committee (HISC). We have used the more common designation HUAC throughout.) The unwarranted police violence against strikers and the hearings of the congressional investigating committee stand as examples of two facets of the government's attack on labor. The Memorial Day Massacre was the culmination of sixty years of assaults by the armed forces of the government, a campaign conducted on behalf of employers in their disputes with workers over the right to representation and the often grievous conditions of work. The Dies Committee hearings were the renewal of an assault by the legislative and executive branches of the federal government on those within the labor movement who were said to harbor forbidden radical visions of America—an assault that would last another twenty years.


The Class War Against Labor
Whether they were lumberjacks of the Pacific Northwest; coal miners of Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Colorado; migrant farm laborers of Wheatland, California; or needle trades workers of New York City, their work early in the twentieth century was grueling and life-threatening. In the textile factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts, "thirty-six out of every hundred of all men and women who worked in the mills died before they were twenty-five years of age."2 At the Pressed Steel Car Company in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, one man a day on average was killed by the brutalizing pace of a giant, newly designed production line. To improve their conditions—indeed, to reclaim their humanity—American workers had no option but to act collectively, to unionize.

Success in attaining the right to union representation depended squarely on the efficacy of the workers' primary weapon: the strike. Undercutting strikes meant condemning workers to the absolute control of employers and to insufferable conditions on the job. Yet that was the practice of government in America for decades before the turn of the century and for at least three decades afterward. "The existing attitude of the courts and government officials," the congressional Commission on Industrial Relations wrote in 1916, "generally is that the entire machinery of the State should be put behind the strike breaker."3 Because that machinery included the various armed forces of the state, which the government was quick to deploy, violent conflict often broke out. In what could rightfully and literally be called a "class war," the government's alignment with one side doomed the other to defeat.

Louisiana timber workers, South Carolina textile workers, West Virginia coal miners, Pittsburgh steel workers, San Francisco dock workers, Minneapolis teamsters, Detroit auto workers, Chicago packinghouse workers were gunned down by local police, state constabularies, National Guardsmen, and federal troops. From 1877, the year of labor's Great Upheaval, when more than one hundred railway strikers and their supporters were killed by police, state militia, and the U.S. Army, to 1937, the year of the Memorial Day Massacre, the employers' privileged access to the power of the state was most dramatically evident in the form of military force.

But it was also evident in judicial decisions and legislative enactments. "During strikes," the Commission on Industrial Relations said, "innocent men are in many cases arrested without just cause, charged with fictitious crimes, held under excessive bail, and treated frequently with unexampled brutality for the purpose of injuring the strikers and breaking the strike." Employer groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers had succeeded, the commission reported, "in preventing the enactment of practically all legislation intended to improve the conditions or advance the interests of workers." The "economic bias" of the courts in labor disputes was evident in the "long list of statutes, city ordinances, and military orders abridging freedom of speech and press" that have "almost uniformly been upheld" and in the "injunctions [that] have in many cases inflicted grievous injury upon workmen."4

In extreme cases, employers enjoyed more than the privileged access to state power—they usurped state power. "We unearthed a system of despotic tyranny reminiscent of Czar-ridden Siberia at its worst," the New York Daily News wrote of Pennsylvania's coal patches and steel towns in 1925. "We found police brutality and industrial slavery."5 This assessment was confirmed by the La Follette Committee of the U.S. Senate a decade later. In company-owned and company-controlled towns, workers lived in conditions that approximated "industrial peonage." The police, paid by the companies but "vested with the authority of the State," were "used to abridge the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly and freedom of the press," the La Follette Committee added. "In times of strike these private armies have often assumed the attitude of the State toward a foreign enemy at war, or the attitude of public police toward criminals, shooting and killing union people in an effort to compel submission to the wishes of employers."6

In 1935, however, under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the passage of the Wagner Act shifted government away from its uncritical support of industry. This legislation guaranteed collective bargaining; barred unfair labor practices that interfered with workers' rights; outlawed industrial espionage, yellow-dog contracts (*Note: Under a yellow-dog contract, workers, in order to be hired, were required to sign a statement swearing that they would not join a union. After a Supreme Court decision in 1917 legalized yellow-dog contracts, all strikes by employees who had signed such statements became illegal. and employers could get injunctions forbidding union organizers from even speaking to those workers), blacklists, provocateurs, private police, and arms stockpiles—all powerful weapons in the employers' arsenal—and established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enforce the law's provisions and carry out the election of union representatives.

Corporations denounced the law and "recognized it only after a near-revolutionary wave of sit-down strikes rolled through mills and plants in 1936 and 1937."7 First at Goodyear Tire Company in Akron, Ohio, and then at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, workers put down their tools and occupied the stilled factories. They won a significant victory—union recognition—that energized spontaneous strikes elsewhere. Six thousand at Chrysler, twenty thousand at Hudson sat down. During two weeks in March 1937, Chicago experienced almost sixty sit-downs: motormen, waitresses, candy makers, cab drivers, clerks, peanut baggers, stenographers, tailors, truck drivers, and factory hands. In St. Louis, it was electrical and furniture workers; in Tennessee, shirt workers; in Philadelphia, silk hosiery workers; in Pueblo, Colorado, broom makers; and in Seminole, Oklahoma, oil workers.

These strikes, which the American Federation of Labor (AFL) largely ignored or denounced, took place amid the ferment of building a different kind of union organization—the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The older craft unions of the AFL typically restricted membership to skilled workers in a particular occupation, leaving great numbers of unskilled workers in the expanding mass-production industries unrepresented. The CIO's new industrial unions, in contrast, aimed to organize all workers in a particular industry: all workers in the auto, steel, or electrical industry, for example. The CIO's drive to organize the unorganized industrial workers brought great numbers into the union movement as the 1930s drew to a close.

Many employers grudgingly accepted union recognition as a fact of life. And the emphasis on physical brutality and deadly force as ways of suppressing the right to organize lessened. It was a significant if bittersweet victory. "Lifting the suffocating burden of absolute managerial control from the working lives of Americans," labor historian David Montgomery writes, "was one of the greatest chapters in the historic struggle for human liberties in this country." But, he adds, "the government's intervention also opened a new avenue through which the rank-and-file could in time be tamed and the newly powerful unions be subjected to tight legal and political control."8

To maintain industrial production during World War II, unions agreed to a no-strike pledge and a virtual wage freeze. In return, the Roosevelt administration, through the War Labor Board, assured unions of support for a modified union shop, one with an escape clause that allowed workers to withdraw from the union during the first fifteen days of an agreement, and a dues check-off system that swelled union rolls. (*Note: In a union shop, all workers must join the union aftger working on the job for a specified time. In a closed shop, the employer can hire only persons who are already members of a union. The concept dates back to 1794, when the shoemakers of Philadelphia demanded that their employers hire only union workers. An open shop is one in which there is no union security. Early in the twentieth century, for example, the National Association of Manufacturers led a drive to impose open shops where unions had previously existed.) But these reforms, together with other measures such as the ability to take disputes over grievances and contracts before government agencies, reduced union officials' dependence on rank-and-file support. Leaders also became distanced from, and opposed to, their memberships by having to discipline workers who rebelled against shop-floor conditions. Thus government intervention fostered a change in the character of unions, shifting them away from democratic participation and rank-and-file action.9 The Taft-Hartley Act, passed after the war, subjected union leaders to fines and arrest for failing to break wildcat strikes and made forms of union militancy and solidarity that had been potent weapons against management illegal. The conditions were taking shape for a low-intensity class war that would continue for three more decades.


The Ideological War Against Labor
Historically, the government's hostile actions against unions had an ideological quality about them. The revolutionary character of workers' movements was often wildly exaggerated in order to lay them open to attack from courts, legislatures, and troops. In 1877, the Great Upheaval, a strike of railway workers, was quickly labeled "Communistic." In its aftermath, attempts to reform the conditions of labor were termed "un-American" and, as political scientist Robert Goldstein notes, "the myth of attributing the disturbances to an international communist conspiracy was firmly enshrined in contemporary American histories."10 A surge of strikes after World War I fed into and was affected by the rising tide of postwar hysteria. Referring to the 1919 general strike in support of higher wages for shipyard workers, Seattle mayor Ole Hansen charged: "The sympathetic revolution was called in the exact manner as the revolution in Petrograd." It threatened, he said, to "spread all over the United States," unless the "traitors and anarchists" understood that "death will be their portion if they start anything."11 To oppose business was to oppose Americanism; to support unions was to support Bolshevism. Even as unlikely a group as the Boston police force was branded as "Soviet!" "Bolshevist!" when officers struck to demand representation by the conservative American Federation of Labor. On the heels of the police strike, thousands of steel workers struck for the right to be represented by the AFL and to bargain over wages and hours. But employers, the press, and the government made the strike turn on ideology, not on the bona fide grievances of steel workers. The U.S. Justice Department conducted "red raids" against immigrant steel workers, while a young J. Edgar Hoover slipped "proof" of the red conspiracy to the press and began accumulating a centralized file of "radicals," two habits that he used successfully for more than half a century.12

For their part, radicals in the labor movement felt the special repression reserved for them. Troops in St. Louis raided the headquarters of Socialists who supported strikers during the Great Upheaval. Socialist gatherings were attacked violently in Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago, where police killed at least one person attending such a political meeting. Sheriff's deputies abducted members of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during a strike in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917 and shipped them deep into the desert. Earlier, in Everett, Washington, IWW members were killed in a hail of bullets fired by deputies. The Wilson administration marshaled the departments of War, Labor, and Justice against the IWW, setting up a competing union under the auspices of the U.S. Army, undercutting the radical union in negotiations with employers, and imprisoning hundreds of its leaders. The nation's first red scare climaxed with the Palmer raids of 1920, when up to ten thousand suspected alien radicals—many of them members of workers' groups—were seized simultaneously in cities across the nation and held for deportation. The country was riding high on a wave of political intolerance that would be equaled only in the McCarthy era.13

Although this red scare subsided, its grip on the national consciousness was lasting. It resurfaced in the years before World War II, notably in the form of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Texas Congressman Martin Dies. Established in 1938, partly in response to the sit-down strikes by automobile workers, much of the Dies Committee's first year of hearings was directed at the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations and at radicals in the labor movement.

As World War II ended, workers across the country, pressed by inflation, the loss of overtime, and the burden of accumulated unresolved grievances, began to walk off their jobs in spontaneous actions. The year 1946 also brought a historic wave of sanctioned strikes in the auto, steel, electrical, packinghouse, and other industries by more than a million and a half workers, amid corporate calls for the repeal of the Wagner Act. President Harry Truman, who had proposed legislation for the selective use of military conscription against strikes, seized the oil refineries, the railroads, and the packinghouses to break strikes of workers in those industries. Thirty states passed anti-labor laws, and sixty bills to curb labor were before a Congress that eventually passed the Taft-Hartley Act. It was a crucial reversal.

Standing before the AFL convention, John L. Lewis, leader of the United Mine Workers Union, thundered against Taft-Hartley: The statute contained "only two lines that say labor has the right to organize and thirty-three pages of other additional restrictions that dare labor to organize."14 It outlawed the closed shop, sympathetic strikes, and secondary boycotts; it held union leaders liable for fines and arrests if their memberships engaged in wildcat strikes; it allowed strikebreakers to call for the decertification of striking unions and then vote in the subsequent NLRB elections; and it required all elected union officials to sign an affidavit swearing that they were not members of the Communist Party or any organization that believed in or taught the overthrow of the government by force and violence.

"We would not merit the name of free Americans if we acquiesced in a law which makes it a crime to exercise rights of freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom of assembly," the CIO executive board stated. The board then pledged: "We will not comply with the unconstitutional limitations on political activity which are written into the Taft-Hartley Act."15 But Taft-Hartley's anti-Communist provision both wielded a stick (threatening to deny unions access to the NLRB) and dangled a carrot (offering union leaders an opportunity to squelch opposition within their own ranks), and the resolve of CIO and AFL leaders collapsed quickly.

Few could resist being swept up in the mounting hysteria that took hold of the nation in the Cold War era. Truman's loyalty program empowered the attorney general to designate any American organization as "subversive," without allowing the group an opportunity to defend itself; the FBI was unleashed to ferret out from among the millions in government employ those who might in the future perform a disloyal act; Dies's old House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), rejuvenated and made permanent, debuted in Hollywood; and Communist Party leaders were indicted under the Smith Act on the basis of beliefs the government ascribed to them.16 States moved to protect themselves from the now imminent threat of subversion: Texas outlawed any party that "entertained any thought" contrary to the Constitution; Tennessee enacted the death penalty for advocating the unlawful overthrow of the government; and loyalty oaths were required to fish in New York City reservoirs, to get unemployment compensation in Ohio, or to box, wrestle, barber, or sell junk in Indiana. As John Henry Faulk, the blacklisted radio personality and leader of the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, said of the moment, "Hysteria took the form of a frothing insanity."17

It became a Cold War crusade that the CIO joined with a passion. From 1946 to 1949, the CIO formulated what amounted to a "party line," a strict litmus test of orthodoxy, the centerpiece of which was support for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and opposition to the third-party presidential bid of former vice president Henry Wallace. Then came the climax: the CIO, whose founding unions had been expelled from the AFL, itself expelled eleven dissident, left-wing unions in 1950, including two that had been among its founders. In all, close to one million workers were affected.

Many of the remaining unions, as well as others from the AFL, set upon the banished unions in bitterly fought jurisdictional battles. These raids were given credence and sustenance by government intrusions. Officers of ousted unions were indicted for perjuring themselves when they signed Taft-Hartley oaths; unions whose leaders refused to sign the oath were denied a place on certifying ballots by the NLRB; leaders of expelled unions were indicted under the Smith Act; foreign-born leaders and members were threatened with deportation. FBI harassment added to the intimidation; and congressional committees, especially HUAC, timed their investigations of the expelled unions to coincide with NLRB elections, placing the weight of government emphatically on the side of the raiders. Many of the ousted unions were unable to survive the ordeal, and those that did were left with their resources and leadership depleted, their memberships decimated.

Purged of its radical element and much of its militant presence and bound by the Taft-Hartley Act's restrictive provisions, American labor faced the second half of the twentieth century shorn of important forces and forms of struggle that had brought significant victories in the past. "Business unionism," while acclimating to the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, sought partnerships with employers in the period of relative prosperity that followed, and the government's actions against labor abated. But its iron hand, whether gloved or not, made its presence felt again in the closing decades of the century, after business once again assumed its aggressive anti-union stance and after a new generation of rank-and-file militants arose to press labor's age-old demands against speedup, wage cutbacks, and dangerous work conditions.


Prologue

Attacks on Labor Before the Triumph of Industrial Unions

The Unrelenting Campaign Against the Industrial Workers of the World

The nation had never before seen such a sustained, concerted attack against a legal, if dissident, organization as the attack that was directed against the Industrial Workers of the World (commonly known as the "Wobblies"). Nor would the nation again see, across the course of the twentieth century, a union that advocated a fundamental restructuring of the social relations of industry to create an industrial democracy controlled by workers. The limits of acceptable debate by labor were set in large measure by the denial of constitutional rights to these early dissenters. The IWW and the workers it organized were assaulted by police, company gunmen, and vigilantes.18 As the organization grew in strength, and as the patriotic fervor of World War I mounted, attacks by the government became coordinated and national, aimed at no less than the eradication of the radical union. Federal troops patrolled the timberlands of the Northwest, raiding and occupying Wobbly halls, breaking up the Wobblies' street meetings, holding Wobblies in bull pens beyond the reach of civil authority, and even setting up a competing union, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, that workers were forced to join in order to be hired. One hundred sixty-six IWW leaders were indicted under the Espionage and Selective Service Acts in September 1917. "The Justice Department was indeed fortunate that public hysteria convicted the Wobblies before the jury heard the prosecution's evidence," historian Melvyn Dubofsky writes, "for the prosecution, in fact, had no evidence."19 A Chicago jury took less than an hour to convict more than one hundred Wobblies on four separate, complex counts, amounting altogether to over ten thousand offenses.

The attempts to suppress the IWW continued. By 1920, twenty states, at the behest of employers, had enacted criminal syndicalism laws. Criminal syndicalism was defined as the commission of a crime in order to effect any change in industrial ownership or control or any political change. Persons who became members of an organization that advocated criminal syndicalism or who themselves spoke, published, or circulated such ideas were held liable for heavy jail terms. The laws attached harsh penalties to what the Supreme Court fifty years later described as "mere advocacy not distinguished from incitement to imminent lawless action."20 In 1922 and 1923, in California alone, 265 people were arrested under such a law. It was then that Fred Thompson was tried for criminal syndicalism. His imprisonment in San Quentin only strengthened his commitment to the Wobbly cause. He went on to edit the IWW newspaper, Industrial Worker, and became the union's official historian.

Fred Thompson
My early years were spent in Canada. My father died when I was three. There were seven of us kids, but my mother always managed somehow to have something for us to eat. She had to do a lot of planning to make sure of that. Those were very rough times, when many of my friends went hungry. I came home one night in 1913, took off my shoes, which were wet, with holes in the bottom, put my feet by the coal stove, and picked up the paper. It told about this wonderful harvest all over Canada. I thought that everything was going to be better now. When my feet got warmed, I went upstairs to ask my mother about it. "No," she told me, "it doesn't quite work that way." I couldn't figure that. When my brother came home, I asked him about it. "She's right," he said. "Having lots of big crops doesn't mean that people will eat." He said it was economics.

We had a small encyclopedia in the house, and there I read about economics for the first time. My father had a few books, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was one of them. That's where I got my radicalism, by the way—from Adam Smith. He described what I could see going on around town. Pretty soon I was reading John Stuart Mill and Malthus. I tried to figure things out. Then I got to know a family that introduced me to Marx's writings. But I think my economics came from the fact that my mother made good use of the available resources. Now, here is a planet with resources; people could live comfortably. Why don't they? That question has been the focus of my life.

I was active in the labor movement in Halifax and out west in 1919, so I was familiar with the IWW. From the beginning, the IWW championed the idea of one union for all in the same work. Then when I came down here in the spring of 1922, I heard some cockeyed stories that the IWW went around burning barns and haystacks. I figured, if they're that nutty, I don't want to belong to them. But I traveled around on a number of jobs where Wobblies worked. I found that they were sensible people, so I joined them in San Francisco later that year. And I've been paying my dues ever since.

In the development of industrial life in America, there were certain areas where it didn't seem strange to have a union. At first, that was confined to the railroads and to machine shops and to a few places where the hired hands were mostly English-speaking skilled craftsmen. We Wobblies were ordinarily working in territory—either geographic or occupational territory—where unionism was not taken for granted. That's why we experienced more hostility than other unions did. When other unions got into similar situations, they experienced the same type of repression. So it wasn't simply our radical philosophy that provided the excuse for going after the Wobblies, but rather that we organized in territories where a union was an alien thing.

In the western logging industry, the IWW made a transformation in conditions. I don't think most people appreciate what we did there. As of 1916, the West Coast logger was a guy who carried his worldly possessions, including his bedding, on his back. He had no facilities for washing his clothes. The "timber beast," they called him. And he was the timber beast. He wore calked shoes that were good for walking along a fallen tree but would wreck a floor. The old saying was that when the logger came into town, you could smell him before you could hear him, and you could hear him before you could see him. He was viewed as a subhuman being, and he felt such. We changed all that to where about the best-paid, best-dressed, best-liked workers on the West Coast were the lumber workers. That was a human transformation the IWW made. I'd say that was one of our major achievements.

Much the same thing happened in metal mining and tunnel work. A lot of the early drilling machinery was very dangerous. The miners drilled with a dry machine, so they inhaled all that powder from the rock. We demanded that be changed by using wet drills. Even after the IWW was gone, replaced by another union, certain habits like that remained. I don't think any miner has changed from dry drilling to wet drilling and then reverted. And all those other safety devices are still there. You institute something that lasts long after you're gone.

Those were the days before radio, before television. Outdoor speaking wasn't an unusual thing. Single tax, women's suffrage, socialism, all kinds of things were promoted. Vegetarianism. You name it. All these heretical ideas were advocated from soapboxes. For example, the IWW objected to workers having to pay a fee to the employment shark to get a job. Ordinarily, the employment sharks had a deal with the foremen about how many days a guy was going to work before he would be canned. They had a system between them so that you wouldn't last too long. We wanted to be able to hire out at a company without having to pay a fee. The place we did our soapboxing about that was right in the skid road area, where working stiffs came into town, spent their money, and got another job.

The Salvation Army was in that area, too, saving souls. Old General Booth, who was a humanitarian, would have been shocked had he been around to see how the Salvation Army he started was in cahoots with the employment sharks. They'd come along with their big bass drum and try to drown out the Wobbly speakers. That's how the Wobbly songbook really got going. We made parodies of all the songs the Salvation Army played. When they played their hymn "In the Sweet Bye and Bye," we'd sing back, "You'll get pie in the sky when you die. That's a lie!"

The fact is that a large number of these free speech fighters were people who had just recently joined the IWW. You have to realize that we were usually organizing migratory workers who hoboed, rode trains through the country. Well, I've done that. On a warm day, you come into the east end of a town and get off the freight train. You walk through town in the hot summer's sun with a heavy coat over your arm. You describe yourself with that coat: a drifting worker who has no place to sleep. Everybody knows that you are not "one of us." But if the IWW could win free speech in those towns, if the IWW could state its aims as a champion of those workers, it meant that they might be considered real human beings, the same as those who slept under a roof every night. I think that's why it was largely the migratory workers who furnished the manpower for the free speech fights, even though they were beaten and jailed for it.

The IWW encountered one or another form of repression from its very beginning. In the early days, one was far more likely to meet up with plug-uglies who beat up organizers. I've been knocked down more than once in my life when I passed out handbills. But it was really during the First World War that the IWW faced its worst repression. I think the motivation is fairly clear. Here the IWW was stepping on the toes of very powerful people: the lumber barons and the copper kings. The IWW was making them spend more money on workers, and that's exactly what they didn't want to do. And these were people who had clout in Washington. In September 1917, federal agents raided the IWW offices all over the country and arrested several hundred people. They charged them with interfering with the war. The motive was evidently not to stop us from interfering with the war effort; it was to discourage us from getting workers to demand better working conditions.

I was arrested in April of 1923. I had been working up on the project that supplies water to San Francisco. If you ever get a drink of water there, remember I helped dig the hole that it comes through. I got fired on that job for distributing Wobbly papers. Then I heard that there was a free press fight in Oroville. That's in the Feather River Canyon in California. So I and a couple of others headed up there. I had been a member of the IWW for only a few months, and this was my first experience with anything of that sort. I went up to the jungles, the places where hoboes cooked and slept under the trees. There must have been about a hundred of us who came; we had heard that the people who were selling IWW papers were getting arrested. Our feeling was that if they were going to arrest people for selling our papers, they would have to arrest a lot of us. So we sent a committee to the sheriff, and he agreed that we could peddle our papers if we weren't too "objectionable." That was a little victory.

Then one of the people there said, "Somebody ought to distribute papers in Marysville." I figured, okay, I'd stop off in Marysville. I went down to the skid road there and passed out a few papers. I was arrested right away. When I got to jail, somebody said, "Don't you know this is the town where they killed the sheriff?" There had been a strike up at a nearby hop ranch in 1913. During the strike, some unknown person shot the sheriff when he disrupted a meeting. That sheriff's son was now the district attorney.

The first charge against me was having in my possession papers that advocated illegal ideas according to the state criminal syndicalism law. Well, they couldn't find anything in those papers to fit that description, so they changed the charge. When they arrested me, I had in my hip pocket membership cards and stamps to bring people up to date in their dues books. Now they charged me with being an organizer for a union that did in secret teach doctrines in violation of the state syndicalism law.

"Syndicalism" is simply French for unionism. But the word has been used, even by historians and sociologists in this country, to mean the type of unionism practiced by major labor unions in France from the 1890s up to World War I. That was a unionism that relied on direct job action. If you were working in a restaurant and you couldn't win an increase in wages, you told customers the truth about what happened in the kitchen. I think there was a sense of humor that went along with it.

Even the word "sabotage" is a French term. A sabot is a wooden shoe. An odd misconception grew out of this: that French weavers wore wooden shoes, and if they wanted to spoil the product, they would throw their wooden shoe into the loom. Well, that is about as incredible a story as I can think of. The use of the term actually came about when the workers in a town went on strike. The boss would get people from the countryside to replace them, people who hadn't absorbed the work ethic that it's wrong to scab on a guy who's gone on strike. The wooden shoes marked the peasants, who wore those clumsy shoes that were not suitable for the factory floor. To act like those country-bred scabs who didn't know the work—that's what "sabotage" originally meant. It meant slowing down, creating an inferior product, or going against the big brass.

But World War I, of course, changed the meaning of "sabotage" altogether. It became associated with dynamiting and blowing up ships. Sabotage was something the army engaged in, not something the labor movement did. So we quit using the word.

Now here was our old literature that mentioned that sabotage, as a job action, was not too bad an idea to use at times. And here was the jury that thought in terms of sabotage in the sense that they had read about it in the newspapers during the war years. That helped stack the case against us.

At the trial, they used two paid informers, Coutts and Townsend. Just those two were all they could find, despicable characters altogether. They went around from trial to trial telling the same damn lies, that we advocated burning barns and so forth. Well, the IWW certainly did not. You don't win improved conditions by burning barns. You win them by getting people organized who will demand, "Either you raise our wages or nobody's going to do the work here."

I think I made that clear to the jury. You know, you read a juror's face when you're on the stand. I talked about how I'd worked as a building laborer putting up foundations for houses. In a hurry-up job, the concrete wasn't completely mixed and it wasn't tamped down thoroughly. We'd see all kinds of defects that we had to cover over with cement slurry. I said to the jury: As working people, we'd much prefer to do good work. But the contractors' motives were to make as much money as possible. And making as much money as possible for the contractors and providing people with good foundations for their homes weren't consistent. I think I made a fairly convincing presentation, for I could tell that I had won some of the jury over.

The first trial ended with a hung jury. The second trial included two more Wobblies they had arrested. They brought Coutts and Townsend in again to give their lies. Then I went on the stand to explain, just as I did in the first trial, what we were trying to do and how we were trying to do it. This time, the jury convicted two of us and freed one of us. I happened to be one of the two convicted. I heard the jury stood four for acquittal, eight to convict, so they settled it among themselves that way.

I don't know why juries convict in one case and not in another. I think a little detail may have made the jury more inclined in the first trial to acquit me. The prosecuting attorney was the crux of this thing. Everybody knew he was the son of the man who'd been shot in the Wheatland riot some years earlier. He was really venomous. He ended his last speech to the jury dramatically, sort of crouching down, and because I came from Canada he said: "This man from foreign shores comes into this country and gnaws at the foundations of our society like a rat." Well, it struck me so funny that I burst out laughing, and the jury started laughing, too. It was self-defeating for the prosecutor.

At the second trial, the prosecutor didn't make the long-winded speech he had at the first. Instead he said, "It's a hot day. Let's let the jury go out and get some refreshments." I was told that when they went outside, newsboys, who didn't usually sell their papers there, were hollering, "IWW sets fire to the rice fields of California!" The jury came back rather quickly and convicted us. And there had been no rice field fires.

On November 7, they took us to San Quentin, Dawes and I. I was in that prison for three years and four months. I forget just how many, but there were well over a hundred IWW members like me in San Quentin at that time, all for no real offense.

My experience there made me reevaluate things. I had thought that there was a criminal class, a special species of wicked people who were different from the rest of us. I found that the people in prison were like people I had worked with on the jobs and met with in the towns. These certainly weren't the large successful crooks. Many were just young people who were broke and took something that didn't belong to them.

A prison is an ideal place for bureaucracy to foster. They had all kinds of petty rules. When some guards took a dislike to certain prisoners, they'd find one reason or other to give them a hard time. They had a dark hole under the ground, with no light, no mattress to sleep on, no nothing. They just had a floor there and a bucket for toilet facilities. They'd throw people inside and keep them there. They had me in there for thirty days. It was not really the physical discomfort that was the worst of it. The hardest part was to keep your mind operating. I always had an interest in geography as a kid. When I was in the hole, I tried to recall how all the rivers in North America flowed to the sea. I would construct maps in my mind, such things as that.

Ordinarily, we were thrown in the hole for going on strike about something. When some injustice was done to one of the Wobblies, we would take a vote: Do we want to go on strike or don't we? Because they added a month every time we did, we actually sentenced ourselves to extra time when we went on strike. But when they mistreated our fellow workers, we figured it was the only thing to do.

We had our gripes, and we dealt with them in an organized way. You had beans almost every meal. Somebody put me wise when I landed there: On Mondays, don't eat too many beans because they're not quite cooked and you're likely to have digestive disturbances. Tuesdays, eat lots of beans because that's the day they're done. Wednesdays, they're sour. And then it was Thursdays, beans are raw again. Sundays, we did get corn pone and gravy, with a little sample of meat to remind us what it used to be like. Of course, that meat always had the iridescence of a rainbow on it. But we ate it.

I figured that the cycle of beans was amusing, so I got it out into the newspapers through visitors. We found that the San Francisco papers made a hullabaloo of what went on in the big house if it was something amusing. So we made sure the newspapers were supplied with all the details of our life. They gave us oatmeal sometimes with maggots in it—that would get into the Chronicle. As a result of the publicity, they did improve our diet. We were even beginning to get a few vegetables toward the end.

I still think a great deal could be done to make prisons more humane places if the labor movement would get involved. It is working people who go to prison, not millionaires. And I think working-class organizations ought to be concerned with conditions there. Four people in a cell that's really a small place for one is an impossible situation. It isn't just the physical crowding, but four personalities clashing. When you lock these same people up day and night, even if they were four saints, they would sooner or later be after each other. It cultivates the worst that there is, the most unsociable traits. But the Wobs got along fairly well because we were people in the habit of organizing.

I had a bifocal view of things. I knew how unconstitutional the law against syndicalism was, how contrary it was to the Bill of Rights. But even as that law was written, it said that you should be convicted only when you do certain things. We hadn't done any of those things. According to the rules of their game, as they declared them, we shouldn't have been in jail. But the other part of my own attitude ran this way: Here is a minority of people who have grabbed this round ball we live on, and since I wanted you and me and the rest of us to take it back from them, I expected they were going to react. So it didn't surprise me that they threw me in jail.

I haven't changed my views. I look at the world today with unemployment and starvation, literally starvation. There are millions of people on this globe dying for the lack of enough food, and yet we don't know what to do with the food we grow. We told the farmers not to plant so much, and even at that, they're going to have crops that are "too big." Well, can I think of anything crazier than a world where people are dying for lack of food and farmers are worrying because their crops are going to be too big? It's institutionalized, organized, well-established insanity, isn't it? That's what the economic system is. And most people think that's the way it has to be. The whole thing is bizarre, ridiculous.

Well, there were all kinds of things done to discourage us from organizing. But we Wobs were sort of irrepressible. We had little regret that we stood our ground and spoke our mind rather than bow down to Mammon. On a San Quentin cell wall, I saw a line from the Aeneid: "Haec olim meminisse iuvabit." It brought to mind Aeneas cheering his fellows on in the shipwreck: "Perhaps it will give pleasure to remember even these things." Yes, it is more pleasant to remember that we resisted than that we didn't.


NOTES FOR PART ONE
Epigraph quoted from Robert M. La Follette Jr., Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor: Preliminary Report, 76th Cong., 1st sess., report no. 6, pt. 2, February 13 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), p. 3.

1. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor's Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1955), p. 314.

2. Dee Garrison, Rebel Pen: The Writings of Mary Heaton Vorse (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), p. 29.

3. Senate Commission on Industrial Relations, Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, 64th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916), vol. 1, p. 94.

4. Ibid., pp. 54, 41, 11, 43, 53.

5. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920{-}1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 130. Also see Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1978), p. 190.

6. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, pp. 4, 6, 11. For a firsthand account of repression by company-town police systems, see Pete Muselin's story in Bud Schultz and Ruth Schultz, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 65{-}74.

7. Thomas R. Brooks, Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor (New York: Delacorte, 1964), p. 180.

8. David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 165.

9. See Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 19{-}20, 26{-}35; Montgomery, Workers' Control in America, pp. 161{-}169; and Brooks, Toil and Trouble, pp. 201{-}208.

10. Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, p. 33.

11. Robert L. Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), p. 132.

12. Murray B. Lavin, Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 41.

13. For an account of the Palmer raids by Sonia Kaross, one of the victims, see Schultz and Schultz, It Did Happen Here, pp. 159{-}164.

14. Saul Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Putnam, 1949), p. 337.

15. Lee Pressman, Eugene Cotton, and Frank Donner, Analysis of the Taft-Hartley Act (Washington, D.C.: Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1947), p. 49.

16. The HUAC investigation into the film industry began with the case of the Hollywood Ten. Ring Lardner Jr. and Frances Chaney Lardner describe those hearings and the subsequent blacklisting in Schultz and Schultz, It Did Happen Here, pp. 101{-}116. See also pp. 75{-}90 in the same volume for an account of the Smith Act trial of leading Communists by one of the defendants, Gil Green.

17. Ibid., p. 397.

18. Jack Miller recounts his experience in the 1916 Everett Massacre, in which sheriff's deputies opened fire on a ferryboat loaded with IWW workers as it docked in Everett, Washington; see ibid., pp. 237{-}248.

19. Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), p. 432.

20. The 1969 Supreme Court ruling in Brandenburg is quoted in Thomas Emerson, The System of Freedom of Expression (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 156. The Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism law, which was "similar in text," Emerson says, to the California law.



Bud Schultz's 1st book is called IT DID HAPPEN HERE a collection of interviews with people who survived FBI assassination attempts funded
by your tax dime, eh. I guess that makes you a collaborator.

2 links for the price of 1
http://www.amazon.com/Did-Happen-Here-R ... 0520071972

http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archi ... art_1.html
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Re: Austin Anarchist Details Life as FBI Target

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jun 22, 2018 9:42 am

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http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/06/ ... nizations/

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https://twitter.com/freejeremynet/statu ... 3188555776

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/381/turncoat/act-two
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/381/turncoat/act-two-1

Brandon Darby was a radical activist and one of the founders of the incredibly effective relief organization Common Ground. Michael May reports on how Darby changed from a revolutionary who wanted the overthrow of the U.S. government into an informant working with the FBI against his former radical allies. (17 minutes)


'Informant' takes us inside the life of Brandon Darby - Austin360.com
https://www.austin360.com/entertainment ... 5QHG8kJrO/
Oct 18, 2012 - ... differing opinions about Brandon Darby, the former left-wing activist ... was doing a “This American Life” piece looking at Darby's personal, ...

How a Radical Leftist Became the FBI's BFF – Mother Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... terrorism/
To many on the left, Brandon Darby was a hero. .... me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana,” he told “This American Life” reporter Michael May.

'Informant' Gives Brandon Darby An Unnecessary Propaganda ...
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... -magaphone
Sep 13, 2013 - But, anyone who knows the Brandon Darby narratives (emphasis on the plural there), who has heard NPR's This American Life program on the ...

Brandon Darby - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Darby

Brandon Michael Darby (born November 2, 1976) an American conservative blogger and .... series P.O.V. · "Turncoat," This American Life, Chicago Public Radio, May 22, 2009 · "Informant", a 2012 documentary film directed by Jamie Meltzer.



Anarchism, Violence, and Brandon Darby's Politics of Moral Certitude
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... itude.html

Brandon Darby's turncoat story, now popularized most conspicuously on state-funded radio's This American Life, [4] and the flagship newspaper of the corporate ...
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