Soapbox Rebellion: The Hobo Orator Union and the Free Speech Fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909–1916 by Matthew S. May (review)

In the closing pages of this critical history of public address as a mechanism for class organization, Matthew S. May makes a telling comparison between the stump, the conventional fixed locus of state-sanctioned political speech, and the soapbox, a cheap, inherently mobile and accessibly democratic platform for public speech and organizing. By adopting the soapbox as the material/rhetorical site of his analysis, May positions himself to draw compelling parallels between the International Workers of the World's (IWW) battles over free speech and the right to pubic assembly in the American West between 1909–1916 and budding conflicts over the increasingly mobile and digitized "shared" labor economy of the twenty-first century, as illustrated through the various Occupy movements of 2011–2012. This is in part accomplished through May's repurposing of Rhetorical Marxism in order to tell the history of a "technology for self-organization," which he terms the "hobo orator union," through which a loosely-bonded network of migrant workers transformed themselves into a political assemblage of bodies and labor that "could partake in a common resistance to the attempts of capital in collusion with employment agents" to trap these workers in the cycles of small-scale circulation (4). By focusing on these material mechanisms of organization and mobilization rather than the ideological content of the hobo orator union's soapbox speeches, May advances recent work in the field of communications that argues against reducing rhetorical culture to texts read within a "plane of meaning" and instead insists on locating discursive practices within the context of social relations and lived human reality (7).

May organizes his book both historically and geographically to trace the development of the hobo orator union, located outside the immobile structures of traditional labor organizing, as a technology of resistance that transforms in response to localized conflicts over access to public speech and organizing. Following a brief introductory chapter, this approach builds primarily on Deleuze and Guattari's critique of the war machine in class struggles and expands to include the stories and histories of the individual workers involved in these conflicts, told in their own words to the extent possible—much of this history was lost through "red scare" raids on the IWW's records in the following decades (36). Beginning in Spokane in 1909 and culminating with the "Bloody Sunday" Everett Massacre of 1916, the four chapters comprising the body of the book each examine a particular site where coalitions of capitalist bosses, employment sharks, and state agents converged to prevent the class organization of the migrant labor force, and the hobo orator union's corresponding mobilizations played out through battles—some legal, some militarized—over access to the public discourse of the soapbox.

In the first of these chapters, "Sparks from a Live Wire: The Origins of the Free Speech Fights and the Battle of Spokane, 1909–1910," May identifies the first of the IWW's major free speech fights to serve as a class struggle organized "within and against the networked spatio-temporal logics of [. . .] mobility" (16–17). Pitted against a capitalist structure designed to produce a surplus of "floating" labor through employment offices that routinely oversold job locations, the IWW instructed and encouraged hobos to utilize the soapbox address as a highly democratized mechanism for organizing "fighting committees" that could be called upon to mobilize a "Don't Buy Jobs" campaign and subsequent fights for free speech. Chapters 3 and 4 trace two significant points of transformation the hobo orator union underwent when, following the success of their tactics in Spokane, local authorities in Fresno and San Diego moved to block the IWW's access to public address and assembly. Chapter 3 considers how the Industrial Worker, the IWW's weekly newspaper, supplemented the soapbox as...