T

HIS is a recital of conditions on the San Pedro waterfront before the great strike of marine transport workers and longshoremen took place. I leave it to the intelligence and judgment of all sane man and women whether or not these workers had sufficient cause to strike.

I registered as a stevedore on March 21 at the office of the Pacific American Steamship and Ship Owners' Association. The slave number given me was 1313. The blue employment card was signed by E. Nichols; card revocable any time Nichols thinks the slave shows radical symptoms.

On this eventful morning over four hundred workers had been waiting outside since daybreak, in the hope of getting work cards. Inside the big building once known as the "slave pen" or "fink hall," over eight hundred workers were crowding, pushing, milling, like a drove of cattle on the range, holding their blue cards out to stevedore foremen pedestaled above them like medieval kings on thrones. The bosses looked down on the workers with critical eyes, sizing them up and picking them out, the same as did the plantation owners prior to the Civil War with their black slaves before buying them.

The job seekers are yelling: "Here I am, Alex!" "Over here, Bull Dog!" "You know me, Knuteson!" "Oh, boss, give me a chance!" "I'll give you two dollars for a job-three dollars-five dollars!"

Another yells out: "I'll give you ten per cent of what I make-take me!" Some slave way back in the crowd cries out: "I'm nice and fat, take me!

Then a big six foot stevedore tramples over the smaller workers, like a big bull plunging through the steers on the range. The bosses see him stampeding the other wage slaves and make a rush to give him a work card. This slave, they well know, will make the others run on the job-he'll "speed 'em up." He gets his card and with proud arrogant air crowds "the little fellers" out of his way again. One man who had been knocked down by this husky fellow worker said to me:

"I don't know what I'll do if I don't connect with a work card today-I have a wife and three children in San Pedro and all I've made in two weeks is $4.00. Every morning I get here before six and stand up against this iron rail all day. I'm getting desperate. It's hard to see your wife and babies hungry when a few have all the good things of life."

An old gray-headed man was trying to fight his way to the boss. His shrunken body and wrinkled face made a pathetic appeal as he tried to bravely grin with toothless gums. He was just a worn-out old wage slave. The master's greed for gold had stripped him of all that he once held

precious. Now forsaken by the masters, he waits the final call to the morgue-homeless, friendless; remembered for a day, the great curtain will soon close over him and some young husky stevedore will step up to the iron rail in the slave market to take his place.

As I turned away with a heavy, sinking feeling, a nauseating disgust against a system that would throw on the social rubbish heap this old man after almost every drop of blood had been squeezed out of him," a cripple limped up to me.

"It's tough to see men like you stand up in competition with these husky stevedores," I remarked. .

"I was alright till a dock boss jerked a truck out of my hands and a heavy piece of iron broke my ankle."

"But why didn't you sue the company? The employers are responsible for the actions of their foremen."

This touched a sore spot. "Sue the company, hell! I went to a lawyer and he told me the most I could get was $200, and I'd never get a chance to work on the docks again. The company has all the slaves insured, and although I was entitled to $16.00 a week I never got it. Now the boss says when there are lots of boats and they're short of men he might take me on. I'm hoping so."

Another fellow was cussing the system that would cause him to stand up in the slave market and be bid upon like a chattel slave.

"I am from Nebraska," he said. "I came out here looking for work, and this is all I could find. I put in two years at the University of Nebraska. I have learned that a lot of things they taught me in college are not true. The old professor in economics said that labor is not a commodity. He might as well have said that water will not freeze. Labor is a commodity under this present system. The law of supply and demand governs the price they pay the wage slave."

"Young man," I replied, "you have been listening to some of these I. W. W. speakers up at Fourth and Beacon streets in San Pedro."

"Speakers, nothing! It's not the talk that makes radicals-it's the damn conditions under which we work. Say, I've learned more about the real principles of economics in one month here on the slave market than all those subsidized high-brow professors taught me in all my days at school and college. It's coming.'

"What's coming?" I asked, looking around, expecting to be trampled under foot by a gang of stevedores.

"Why, a changed system, you damn fool!"

I admitted I had been a fool, but that I was beginning to take on a little education since I had

INDUSTRIAL PIONEER

Fred R. Wedge, a Striking Stevedore and the Author of This Article

left Harvard. I wanted to just stay and hear these men talk and get some facts from them, for they dealt not in theories, but in the hard, cold facts of everyday life; these class-conscious men had been educated in the university of hard knocks.

*

I suggest to every high school teacher and college professor of economics and sociology to put on a pair of overalls and handle a longshoreman's hook for a few months, and see if his parlor theories on economics will stand the test. Today one looks almost in vain among business men, editors, school teachers, clergymen and politicians for an intelligent understanding of the demands of the industrial workers. The ruling class hastens its own downfall by the manner in which it deals with the masses. The leaders in power seek to draw public attention back to old issues and faiths which are dead. The fact that the old charms and shibboleths no longer work, that the industrial laborer of today is intelligent enough to see right through them, to discover hid

den motives which they attempt to disguise, and to laugh at them, is stoutly denied by these self-appointed leaders.

As I went into the inner office of the Pacific American Steamship Association, I wondered if this man Nichols, into whose presence I was about to be ushered, really knew what those men in the slave pen were thinking. The ship owners, hungry for dividends, placing the dollar far above human values, and blinded by greed, fail to read the hand-writing on the wall.

Nichols did not impress me either by his appearance or intelligence. I have less respect for these sleek, well fed, well groomed tools of the masters than for the masters themselves. The masters accumulate millions, the go-betweens like Nichols drive the wage slaves-play the Judas Iscariot to their fellow men, and don't even get any dividends to placate their consciences with.

"What's your name?"

"F. R. Wedge."

"Ever work for this company before?" "No."

"Are you a member of the I. W. W.?"

The truth is, at that time I was not a member, nor did I possess very definite ideas about the aims and objects of the organization. I showed him my Elks card. This seemed to satisfy him that I was an obedient slave. But his satisfaction was but for a moment. When he started to write my name in the slip which was to O. K. me with the registration clerk, somehow my name seemed to look different on paper.

"Wedge-Wedge-say, are you the fellow that has been speaking for the I. W. W's. in San Pedro?"

I replied that I had been doing some lecturing on economics, that teaching was my profession. Nichols rang the buzzer. I thought it was for a policeman, but Kelly, another company official, answered the ring.

"Do you know this man?"

"Yes, I've been expecting him here for several months. I knew he'd get here sooner or later. You're the man who gets $15 a night for speaking for the I. W. W."

I felt highly complimented to think the Pacific Steamship Manager placed such a high value on my services, but I was forced to admit that the Industrial Workers of the World place no such money value on my lectures. In fact, that I received no remuneration, but had begun to speak in defense of the working men who had been unjustly imprisoned on a fake charge of criminal syndicalism. So I told him that from a monetary standpoint my work had not been a success, that I was now forced to seek a job in order to support a wife and son. In the medieval days they considered it no sin to lie to a heretic and now the heretic was prevaricating to a representative of the master class.

The point is that I had made up my mind to get a job and see with my own eyes what's what on

the San Pedro water front, so after I had lied to E. Nichols and his tool Kelly, I added to my infamy by handing him a paper which I had written on the I. W. W. while I was studying at Harvard in Dr. Wm. McDougal's class in abnormal psychology. I wrote this paper before I ever met an I. W. W., when I was as innocent of the great idea of the one big union as my distinguished professor was ignorant of the struggles of the workers. I read to Nichols and Kelly some of the hottest Harvard arguments against the I. W. W., taking particular care not to reveal the fact that the thesis was a year old. In this paper I tried to prove that the I. W. W. idea was not caused by economic conditions but was merely an attitude of mind; that the "crowd ideas" of the radicals were "fixations," indicating that their leaders were neurotics and paranoiacs. In fact, in that paper I called the I. W. W's. every long scientific term I could steal from learned professors who had "Harvard ideas" about the workers.

I could tell immediately that Nichols and Kelly were greatly impressed by those psychological jawbreakers. I am sure they understood not a word of it, but they both expressed the thought they considered I was on the right line—that I had taken a very reasonable and rational view against the I. W. W.

So I exchanged my Harvard thesis on the I. W. W., written before I ever met a member of the organization, for a blue card. Nichols made it perfectly clear that I was not to be considered a common worker, that as soon as I became familiar with the stevedore business, I would be made a boss and would make from $70 to $80 a week. Kelly invited Mrs. Wedge and son to his Long Beach home, and I left the office of the Pacific American Steamship Owners with a very poor opinion of the intelligence of Nichols and Kelly, and a greater respect for the workers in the slave pen. I pondered upon the ignorance of those two men in that inner office about the great amount of knowledge among the workers on the slave market. Nichols had just told me that the present unrest among the seamen and stevedores was all uncalled for, that everything would be all right, were it not for the I. W. W. agitators who make the workers discontented. That when they succeed in silencing them by the use of force, by charging them with criminal syndicalism and sending them to San Quentin for ten or twenty years, that then everything will be "fine and dandy." "All will then be peace in the ranks of the seamen and stevedores forever and ever. Amen."

In writing of my experiences during the past four weeks on the slave market, before the slaves rebelled and went on strike, I have cast behind me proprieties usually held sacred. I have spared no one. I have considered principles and human values more sacred than personal confidences. Personally, I have nothing against either of the two company officials men

JUNE, 1923

tioned; they promised to give me the best of it and they tried to live up to that promise. In that inner office they told me that some of their most trusted men were once sympathetic to the I. W. W. but that now they are strongly against the wobblies. Sold out for thirty pieces of silver-O, Judas, thou art still alive! When the strike was called, some of these renegades to the working class became scab herders for the Pacific American Steamship Owners, they perjured their souls with acts of violence against the men who are trying to bring about a new and better system of society by organizing and educating the workers to the end of abolishing wage slavery.

*

On the following morning I was at the iron rail of the slave pen in the fink hall at six o'clock. There were men who had come even earlier. True to his word, Kelly stood beside one of the foremen and pointed me out. There was nothing fair in that method. I was told of the blue ribbon gangs -the men who have steady work. I thought they hold these jobs because they were better workers than the others, but I found that it is not so. Many of them never show up in the slave market. Most of them are personal friends of the bosses; they will stay on the job and scab when others strike. Some of them furnish wine and whiskey to the boss when he visits their homes, which happens quite frequently. Free eats, free booze, free cigars and cigarettes, at every visit. It is commonly reported and alleged that some of the more ignorant workers in these blue ribbon gangs, whose sense of justice and morality has been dulled through generations of slave philosophy, even permit familiarity of the bosses with their women folks at home.

Verily, verily, the modern stevedore boss is a regular feudal lord. In the dark ages, the serf had to get the consent of his master before he could marry, and often the lord of the manor got the first night. I hope the stevedore boss is more considerate. But the ethics of the dark ages still

flourish.

To pass rapidly over the experiences of the last four weeks before the strike-when day after day I lined up with hundreds of workers in the slave pen and scarcely made starvation wages. I worked for a while on boats carrying cement and fertilizer, until I saw some men faint-who were not as strong and healthy as I. A few years of such toil will throw anybody on the social scrap heap. The policy of the Pacific American Steamship Company has been to keep hundreds of extra workers ready for extra boats, but with no thought as to how these workers are to live.

Then came the great day, the day when the slaves on the San Pedro water front asserted their manhood, when they looked each other square in the eyes and called themselves men. The strike was called on Wednesday, April 25. The vote was taken