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Revolt of the“TimberBeasts”: IWWLumberStrike in Minnesota John E. Haynes By 1900 only a very small percentage of the labor force was unionized; there were deep divisions within the“movement”as to whom to include : skilled and unskilled,male and female,white and black,ethnic groups.The work force was also constantly shifting and many workers did not consider themselves part of a“permanent”labor force,thus they saw less relevance in organizing,instead searching for a“better run” logging camp, for example.With a steady supply of immigrants arriving in the country looking forwork,employers usually could find scab replacements.The corporate forces against the movement had vast resources and power and usually had the support of local,state,and national authorities who might send in troops to restore order and protect company property. One ideology seeking a more just order for both capitalists and workers was socialism.Some radical socialists led by“Big Bill”Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners founded the International Workers of the World or IWW (“Wobblies”) in Chicago in 1905.By 1916 the Wobblies were working in northern Minnesota after the Mesabi iron miners in Virginia walked out.The strike was soon over but a union was established.Local Wobbly organizers persevered,the most colorful and militant being Jack Beaton,who planned agitation at the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company by the mill workers.A precipitous strike occurred there at the end of December,and Beaton realized any chance of success might depend on a total shutdown of the whole lumber industry. Given the living and working conditions for the lumberjacks that John Haynes describes in this essay,the“Timber Beasts”did not need “foreign agitators”to realize they were being exploited.The worker turnover in the Virginia and Rainy Lake Company was 74 men a day! Thus when the call went out for a walkout on Monday,January 1,1917, many lumberjacks walked.However,employers reacted swiftly,newspapers hysterically described terrorist attacks by the strikers (though 285 none was ever proved),and the company subsidized deputies,paying them three times what the jacks generally earned,to break the strike. When local farmers did not wish to be the company’s gunmen,the company recruited aliens in Twin Cities bars and pool halls. The brawny lumberjack who tells tall tales, fells giant trees,wears checkered shirts, and loves flapjacks is familiar in American folklore.This romantic image ,though based partly on fact,glosses over dark and frightful features of the lumberjack’s life that in 1917 prompted Minnesota’s sons of Paul Bunyan to down their saws and axes and walk out of their camps. Led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor group advocating industrial unions and the overthrow of capitalism through strikes, sabotage, and eventual revolution, the jacks’ strike for a time paralyzed the lumber industry of northern Minnesota.The resolution of that strike helped redefine the boundaries of permissible political and economic dissent in Minnesota, virtually erased the specter of strong IWWinfluence on the iron range,and served as a precedent for the state’s treatment of dissenters during World War I.1 The inciter of the strike, the IWW,was a national organization formed in Chicago in 1905 by western socialists and miners.The IWWmade few inroads into the lumber industry of the Great Lakes states during the first ten years of its existence.A lumber workers’ local was active in Deer River, Minnesota, by 1910, and “Wobblies” (as IWW members were popularly called) became involved in free-speech fights in 1911 and 1912, but it was the actions of mine workers atVirginia,Minnesota,that first awakened the lumberworkers of the area to the power of united action.2 The spark for the lumberjacks’ 1917 strike was ignited in Virginia,a city of more than 10,000 people, in the summer of 1916 when Mesabi Range iron miners spontaneouslywalked oJ their jobs in protest against the contract wage system, long hours, and private mine police. Caught unprepared, the IWW tardily established headquarters for an energetic task force atVirginia to try to unite the unorganized miners into a viable strike force.The miners were forced to return to work by September,however,because of insuIcient funds and repressive police actions against their leaders. Salvaged from the defeat was an organization known as Metal Mine Workers’ Industrial Union No.490.Local 490 continued to hold the allegiance of some 2,000 miners out of...

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