Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Magon once angrily wrote his brother from
prison: "The norteamericanos are incapable of feeling enthusiasm
or indignation. This is truly a country of pigs ... If
the norteamericanos do not agitate against their own
domestic miseries, can we hope they will concern
themselves with ours?"(39)
In outlining these things we are, of course, not just
discussing the I.W.W. Primarily we are looking at the forming
consciousness and leadership of a new class: the
white industrial proletariat. The same general weaknesses
of this class can be seen outside the I.W.W. even more
sharply: lack of revolutionary leadership, inability to
withstand the sabotage of the labor aristocrats of the
"native-born" Euro-Amerikan workers, opposition to the
anti-colonial struggles. The great industrial battles in steel
at the end of this period show not only these weaknesses,
but emphasize the significance of what this meant.
This was evident in the 1919 steel strike, for example,
in which for the first time fifteen A.F.L. unions called
an industry-wide strike. On Sept. 22, 1919 some 365,000
steelworkers walked out. But while the mass of nonunionized,
immigrant European laborers held firm, the
unionized Euro-Amerikan skilled workers were a weak element.
Capitalist repression had an effect - most notably
in Gary, Indiana, where a division of U.S. Army troops
broke the'strike - but the defeat was due to the incredibly
bad leadership and the betrayal by the better-paid settler
workers. The disaster of the strike shows why even the inadequate
politics of the I.W.W. looked so good to the proletarians
of that day.
72 Many of the skilled Euro-Amerikan workers never