(This text is Chapter 32 of the Rebel Press reprint of Louis Adamic's 'Dynamite! A Century of Class Violence In America 1830-1930'.)
In 1920, following my discharge from the Army, I became, under bread-and-butter compulsion, a young working 'stiff' (I was just 20) with no particular trade. For several months I hung around the employment agencies - the 'slave market' in Chicago. There I met a couple of rather articulate IWW members who, seeing that I was a young ex-soldier, palpably 'on the bum' and a 'scissor bill' with a radical trend of mind, set out to make me into a class-conscious proletarian, a wobbly. They urged me to give up all ideas of ever being anything else than a working stiff for the chances of my becoming a capitalist or a bourgeois, in however modest a way, were extremely slender, indeed, almost nil. I was a foreigner and the number of opportunities was decreasing rapidly even for native Americans. I should make up my mind to remain a worker and devote such abilities as I had to the hastening of the decay of the capitalist system, which was doomed to collapse, they said, within a very few years whether I joined the IWW or not.
I learned of the methods by which, it appeared, sooner or later the workers would attain to power and abolish capitalism and wage slavery. At first I did not understand everything I was told. The wobblies used a word - sabotage - which, as I recalled, I had read some time before in Frank Harris's Pearson's Magazine without knowing its meaning. At the public library I did not find it in the dictionary.
Then, in a dingy IWW reading room I came upon a little book entitled Sabotage, written originally in French by Emile Pouget and translated into English by Arturo Giovannitti, in 1912, while he was in jail at Lawrence, Massachusetts, on framed-up charges for his part as a wobbly leader in the famous textile workers' strike. There I found sabotage defined as:
any conscious or wilful act on the part of one or more workers intended to reduce the output of production in the industrial field, or to restrict trade and reduce profits in the commercial field by the withdrawal of efficiency from work and by putting machinery out of order and producing as little as possible without getting dismissed from the job.The book was a sort of wobbly gospel.
Now that the bosses have succeeded in dealing an almost fatal blow to the boycott; now that picket duty is practically outlawed in many sections of the country, free speech throttled, free assemblage prohibited and injunctions against labor are becoming epidemic - now sabotage, this dark, invincible, terrible Damocles' sword that hangs over the head of the master class, will replace all the confiscated weapons and ammunition of the workers in their war for economic justice. And it will win, for it is the most redoubtable of all, except for the general strike. In vain will the bosses get an injunction against strikers' funds, as they did in the great steel strike - sabotage, as we practice it, is a more powerful injunction against their machinery. In vain will they invoke old laws and make new ones against it - they will never discover sabotage, never track it to its lair, never run it down, for no laws will ever make a crime of the 'clumsiness and lack of skill' of a scab who bungles his work or 'puts on the bum' a machine he 'does not know how to run', but which has really been 'fixed' by a class-conscious worker long before the scab's coming on the job. There can be no injunction against sabotage. No policemen's club. No rifle diet. No prison bars.It was some time before I realized how effective - and significant -sabotage really was.
You sea in the magazines that the United States is having great difficulties in establishing a merchant marine of any consequence because in America shipbuilding costs exceed those elsewhere; because American investors would expect a larger return on capital invested in shipping than foreign companies make, and because the wages of American crews are higher than those paid by the lines of other countries - with the logical result, so they say, that the American freight and passenger rates must be higher, and consequently shippers find it advantageous to deliver their goods in foreign bottoms I'm no high-powered executive, only a fo'c's'le stiff; but I know enough to realize that all these alibis are only superficially true; the last alibi, perhaps, not even superficially. In point of fact, American officers and men do receive higher wages than the ships' crews of other countries except Canada; but in relation to the wages ashore American crews are hardly as well paid as the Japanese. And, to my mind, therein lies one of the primary causes of the sad state of the American merchant marine. The American go-getter in the shipping business, as his brothers in other lines, is stupidly greedy; for those who, caught between the circumstances of their environment and their own innate qualities and shortcomings, are compelled to sell him their brains and brawn, he usually has small consideration and rewards them as meagerly as he can manage for all the effort he can exact from them - with the result that in the long run his slaves get back at him, some of them through conscious sabotage, such as our lWW sabotage, which nibbles away at the vitals of the capitalist system; others, half-unwittingly, through sabotage which has no social aim and is purely personal revenge, but which blindly attains the same purpose - hastens the decay of the system. It is true that the so-called maintenance of American ships is higher than of most foreign ships, but that is solely because the crews don't give a damn for the ships or the owners and willfully waste. I don't doubt but that more is wasted on American ships than the shippers manage to get out of the government in subsidies.A few months after he had said this to me -- it was in 1922 - my wobbly sailor friend and I signed on the Oskawa at Philadelphia. She was a United States shipping board freighter, 6100 gross tons, built in 1 91 8 at a cost of nearly two million dollars and equipped with an up-to-date refrigeration system. We sailed to Hamburg with a small cargo. The trip there was uneventful. The crew was the usual crew that one found on American freighters, perhaps a little worse. The half dozen wobblies I found in the fo'c's'le unquestionably were the best men aboard. The skipper was an old man, not in the best of health, somewhat bewildered by his responsibility. The mates, engineers and the steward were a collection of bleary-eyed 'lime-juicers' and overbearing 'squareheads', licensed during the war emergency when almost anybody could have obtained a ticket. There was much drunkenness and brawling, along with poor navigation. In Hamburg we picked up an enormous cargo of champagne and liqueurs for South America. Then, four or five days after leaving Germany, bottles began to pop in the officers' rooms and the mess-rooms; finally' even on the bridge and in the chart-room, and cases of the marvelous liquids found their way into the crew's quarters.