Part One: Ben Fletcher, Local 8, and the Fighting, Antiracist Union of Philadelphia

Margaret talks to Miriam about maybe the coolest union local in US history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that where there's bad things, there's good things,
and some things are neither good nor bad, but are
instead your host like me, Marta Kiljoy and my guest
who is good. I don't know why I'm ontologically describing
everything all of a sudden, but Hi, Miriam, how are you?

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Hi? I think you're good.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Oh. Thanks. I got called a paladin by my ex
and I think it was like in parentheses, derogatory, but
so it goes.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
I could see it. I could see it.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
You know, it's just actually accurate. It took me by surprise.
I thought it was a bard, but it turns out
I'm a paladin.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
I know a lot of paladins who think they're rogues,
and it's like, listen, yeah, just because you do a
lot of crime doesn't mean you're not a paladin.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah. Well, we do like talking about people who live
and die by their moral code. But before I introduce
what this episode is about, first I want to say, Miriam,
you might recognize from this show or as my new
co host on Live Like the World Is Dying, my
individual Community Preparedness podcast, or rather our individual Community Preparedness podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Also you might recognize from this very podcast our producer
Sophie Hi, Sophie, Welcome back, Hi, happy to be here.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Hi, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Miriam, our audio engineers Daniel Hi, Danel Hi, Daniel Hi, Danel.
Our theme music is written forced by unwoman. And before
we tell Miriam what we're talking about, a fun preamble. Yay.
No one can see as I gesticulate except the people
who are on the call with me.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Margaret just made a gesture that should have been accompanied
by like twinkly music and like animated sparkles.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Fame, prominence, notoriety. These are fickle things. Time and time
again in my research, I'll run across this thing that's
like the best selling novel of its generation and I
have never heard of it, right, And they'll be like
the most prominent revolutionary in all of sixteenth century France,
and I'll be like, I, Nope, I've never heard of
this person whatsoever. And what or who we remember is

(02:21):
a political choice made by historians, because I often find
things that are pretty recent that were a very big
deal at the time, that are completely gone. Now. The
story we're going to talk about today is not a
story that's well known, even though it's about one of
the most prominent black men in America in the nineteen
tens and nineteen twenties. It's a story about a labor

(02:41):
organizer who pulled together the most diverse union the country
had ever seen, who went to prison for doing that
work and became the second most prominent black political prisoner
of his generation after Marcus Garvey, who is more remembered today,
although not enough people remember things. But of course I
say that because my job is to read history books,

(03:03):
and I'm very convinced that it matters.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
If we all already remembered these things. Margarete, you would
have no job.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
So oh interesting, Well, okay, hear me out. It could
be like folklore, or we just tell the same stories
over and over again.

Speaker 3 (03:17):
Okay, Like we'd all just be sitting around the fire
and we'd be like, tell us about the IWW.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Again And you would be like, I will you read
the script? How do you know that?

Speaker 3 (03:28):
So I still don't know who we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, the man we're going to talk about today, we
know very very little about his life. We know a
little bit more about his work because he was a
working class black man who kept no journal and had
no children, so there was no one specifically like who
made it their job to try and make sure he
was remembered. And also the political positions that he took
became very unpopular from both the right and the left,

(03:54):
and so he's not remembered so much. Most of the
letters we have from him are ones that he wrote
in prison. I'm gonna tell you who he is, but
I'm not gonna tell you yet. We know that he
was funny, we know that he was fierce. We know
that he fought tirelessly for class solidarity across racial lines,
and we know that he fought hard for Dear listener,
get ready to either take a drink or mark off

(04:16):
a space on your Bengo cards. He fought hard for
his union, the Industrial Workers of the World.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Thank god you didn't say tuberculosis the other square on
the Bigo card.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
There is no tuberculosis in today's episode, so I'm afraid
you're gonna have to play without your free space. Everyone incredible.
Today we're going to talk about Ben Fletcher. You ever
heard of Ben Fletcher?

Speaker 3 (04:42):
I have not heard of Ben Fletcher, and that surprises
me because I've read, you know, not as much as you,
but I've read about the iww a bit.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, people don't know or talk about Ben Fletcher. I
wouldn't have remembered his name a year ago. If you
had told me the outline of this story, I'd be like, oh, yeah,
that guy. And you know, it's been a like little
thing on my list of potential subjects for a very
long time, right, and like always, like I started reading

(05:12):
about this and I'm like, no, seriously, why don't I
know more about this? Why don't more people know about this?
Ben Fletcher was one of the organizers of the infamous
at the time and completely not remembered today. Philadelphia Dock
Workers Union Local eight and I absolutely picked this because
it has boats in it.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
I love boats. I love a Philadelphia dock Workers Union
for sure.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
I thought about giving you more Pirates just to troy you,
and then I was like, no, I'm going to be nice.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
I like pirates too.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
One day I'll give you more Pirates. Local eight is
not where the one hit wonder band Local AH from
the nineteen nineties got its name. No one thought that
except me, But what was their one hit Bound for
the floor. This is I'm just older than everyone in
the world. Okay, were a perfectly fine alt rock band

(06:02):
of the late nineteen nineties that had a song that
was on the radio.

Speaker 3 (06:06):
Anyway, honestly perfectly fine alt rock bands. We didn't know
how lucky we were in the nineties. We were spoiled
for perfectly fine alt rock bands. They were everywhere, you.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Mean, because they weren't like Nazis or whatever or like,
cause they.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
Were just like were on the radio and stuff. I
feel like you don't hear that stuff anymore.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
I hate it. I hate alt rock. I grew up
in like the worst time musically from my point of view, like.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Your contrarian music point of view, you're accordionist music point
of view, but.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
In my mind, like pop music was better ten years
earlier and ten years later. But whatever. Anyway, nothing to
do with Local eight. We can't piece together an entire
biography for him, but historian Peter Cole has done the
closest that can be done with his book Ben Fletcher,
The Life and Time Is of Black Wobbly, And that
was probably the core of my research, supplemented by a

(06:58):
bunch of articles written by the labor historians, mostly mostly
on Libcom and a few other places that get into
the broader context around some of the other unions that
were going on and things like that, and strikes in
Philadelphia in general. But what we do know about him,
we know, for example, that Benjamin Harrison Fletcher was born

(07:18):
on April thirteenth, eighteen ninety in Philadelphia. Do either of
you know who Benjamin Harrison Fletcher is named after.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
I mean, I'm assuming somebody named Benjamin Harrison.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
But did you know that we had a president of
the United States named Benjamin Harrison? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (07:33):
Wait, No, I knew about William Henry Harrison because he
was had the best presidential.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
Tim Oh, this makes so much more sense. Okay, we
had William Henderson. I guess I take your word for it.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
I mean, I know, you know there was that Simpsons
where they had the song about the mediocre presidents, and
one of them was William Henry Harrison. I died in
thirty days, you know.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
No, I looked it up Benjamin Harrison. I was right.
My script was right. The twenty third president of the
United State dates was named Benjamin Harrison.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Oh shit, I'm like doing the song in my head
of all the presidents that my mom had to learn
in school and would sing to me and there he is.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
Wow, Wait did I make up William Henry Harrison? Did
the Simpsons make up William Henry Harrison.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
I have no idea who William Harrison is. Maybe there
is one. I don't know. I don't know all the presidents.
This is what everyone's learning.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
I mean, fuck presidents whatever.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
No William Henry, No, William hen I'm doing the song
about it was like the ninth president. There's two Harrisons. Oh, okay, okay,
get an original last name people.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
I know.

Speaker 3 (08:36):
If there's one thing that America seems to love doing,
it's electing people with the same last name as previously
elected people and then wondering why nothing ever changes now.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
I want to know if they're related.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
William Henry Harrison is the ninth president and Benjamin Harrison
was the twenty third.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Twenty third, so there's a big space.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
Then.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
Sorry, Margaret, your podcast has been hijacked by us trying
to solve the mystery of the Harrisons.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
No, no, no, this is now a Benjamin Harrison podcast.
We are actually just going to talk about the original
Benjamin Harrison. Instead are they related.

Speaker 1 (09:16):
Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of Old Tip a Canoe
Henry Harrison, ninth President of the United States.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
Oh, we're just making things up now, Old tip a Canoe.

Speaker 2 (09:28):
We're just gonna be.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
Making up facts about presidents. Now, that's a word I've
never had to say out loud.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
So if I said it wrong, I'm sorry. I've never
even seen that in writing.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
You know, you know what, I just unbidden. The campaign
slogan tipp a Canoe and Tyler too has entered my head,
and I realized I have read about that president at
some point. This is so I don't want to I
don't care about this. I want to know about this guy.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
No, we're gonna go onward.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, let's get away from this weird, fucking authoritarian nepotism.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
So I'm going to tell you a little bit about
the president really quickly.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
I described him in the script as AKA the president.
That made me be like, there was a president named
Benjamin Harrison, And I had to put that back in
because it's like my best joke in the script, so
I had to like shoehorn it in. Anyway, President Harrison
was a Republican and that party was riding high on
the were the party that freed the slaves. Thing just then, right,
So Republicans were understandably popular with Black Americans, popular enough

(10:24):
that Ben was named after the guy. That's it. That's
all we're going to talk about, the president.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
Yeah, I'm desperately hoping for us to get away from
these presidents.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah. No. His parents were Dennis and Esther, and they
were born before emancipation in Virginia and Maryland, respectively. The
overwhelmingly most likely scenario here is that they were enslaved.
There's no evidence one way or the other about this,
and they were most likely freed by the thirteenth Amendment.
Many people have claimed that Ben Fletcher also had indigenous
ancestry as well. This would not be surprising based on

(10:54):
where his family was from, but the historian who talked
about it wasn't able to confirm Its and Esther fled
their respective states to get the fuck away from the
failure of reconstruction in the South. They had both given
it a shot, and they were like, oh, okay, emancipations,
all right, this is going all right. And then they're like, oh, fuck,
here comes the end of reconstruction. This is bad. The
races are taking over. We're getting the fuck out here.

(11:15):
So they went to Philly sometime in the eighteen eighties.
They got married in eighteen eighty nine. They only met once.
They were in Philly separately, and they had little Ben
in eighteen ninety. His mom passed away sometime between nineteen
hundred and nineteen oh five. He was like ten to fifteen,
but his dad stayed very much a figure in Ben's
life most of the time. I'm aware of Ben living

(11:35):
somewhere as an adult, it's with his father and his
wife in a multi generational household. As a little kid,
Ben Fletcher who always went by Ben and not Benjamin
Harrison or whatever. Ben was smart as fuck, but there
weren't exactly a lot of educational opportunities available to him,
and he never graduated high school. He was incredibly well

(11:58):
read and worldly, and it was all self taught. Therefore,
I like him. He's cool.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Yeah, he sounds great.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
So far. He grew up to be all of a
towering five foot four tall, a short king, just like
our man John Henry. Inasmuch as anywhere in America could
be a decent place to grow up as a black
person from the working class. At the turn of the century,
Philly was a decent place. There had been a healthy
black community in Philly for a very long time. It

(12:27):
was also one of the most segregated. I'm not trying
to paint a rosy picture here, right, but there had
been a healthy black community in Philly for a very
long time. Pennsylvania has Quaker roots, and the Quakers were
pretty big into the like what if owning people is
the wrong idea morally? So eighteen thirties, Philly was one
of the centers of the abolitionist movement. By the time

(12:49):
Fletcher was born in eighteen ninety, Philly had the largest
black community in any US city besides the South. It
was still racist as fuck structurally, more or less, the
only job black men could get was laborer because white
people only hired white people. Skilled labor mostly went to
native born white Americans of English, Irish and German descent,

(13:10):
while textile factory work was mostly Italian and Eastern European
Jewish immigrants, which left black men in particular with laborer
or sometimes long Shorman. And we'll get to that. We
don't know a lot about Ben's teenaged years. We know
when he was twenty, so he kind of like appears

(13:32):
in history when he's twenty fully formed from the brain
of I don't know enough mythology to know what I'm
trying to say here, of the like people who appear
fully formed. Sure, yeah, great, he told the census his
job was laborer in nineteen ten, and that's like kind
of like where he shows up in the historical record.

(13:52):
As was fairly typical of pre redlining Philly. He lived
in a racially diverse neighborhood and his next door neighbor
was white, which I always think is like kind of
worth pointing out, just because I think people have this
conception of racial progress as linear in the United States
and forget that there was this massive back turn in
the beginning of the twentieth century. Yeah, one of the

(14:13):
primary sources of employment for black workers in Philly was
the docks. A longshoreman basically means someone who loads and
unloads cargo off of boats. You might know this better
than me. I tried to do a whole thing about
the difference between Steve ADOR's longshoremen and dockers, and then
I was like, no, I'm not trying to learn.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
My Yeah, I mean my understanding is Steve Adoor's work
on ships. Long Shoremen work on docks, and I've always
thought dockers and long shoremen were kind of the same thing, but.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
That maps with the like I just didn't want to
be wrong. Yeah, it seems like the stevedors are the
people who go with the boat to where it's going yea,
and the longshoremen slash dockers take stuff on and off
the boat.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, they're a long shore.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
You want to hear me talk shit on the labor
movement of the early twentieth century late nineteenth century.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
Love to what do you think I showed up for?

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Most of the docks on the East Coast at this
time were unionized. Technically. I'm going to call this technically
because the more I'm reading about these unions, the more
accurate I think it would be to describe the American
Federation of Labor at this time as a white supremacist
organization instead of a labor organization. It was a segregated union.

(15:29):
Many unions that were whites only entirely were part of it,
and the unions affiliated with the International Longshoreman's Union the ILA,
which is actually a totally separate origin than the modern
ILW whatever, the current Longshoreman's Union, which is like way
more red. By and large, the ILA served as job
trusts for people of certain ethnicities, the quote historian Peter Cole,

(15:52):
because the role of unions was to protect white workers,
and at least as much to protect them from non
white workers as for the bosses. You would think point
of a union is to protect you from the bosses,
But nah, just maintaining white supremacy.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
I know.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
For a while, the move among white union organizers was like,
let's not let black people into the union, and then
black people would work non union and they'd be like,
oh my god, they're scabs. Yeah, and it's like, do
you see how you have created this problem by being
a racist piece of shit?

Speaker 2 (16:27):
And they were like, no, no, I don't understand. Why
would I think that you don't understand they've offered me whiteness.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, exactly. I just got this and it's great.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah. All I had to do was give up everything
about everything that I love from where my family comes from,
and then in exchange, I get to be better than
someone else.

Speaker 3 (16:45):
No one will regret this, No, it'll.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Never go badly. We're going to talk a lot about
how it went badly. There's this idea in systems theory
that I learned about recently that I love. I don't
know shit about systems theory, but I know this quote.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and
it is the way of looking at something where you
can be like, I don't care what you claim that

(17:09):
this system has as a purpose. The thing that the
system does is the purpose of the system, and it
is like useless to pretend otherwise.

Speaker 3 (17:18):
Yeah, No, that tracks.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
Therefore, I'm arguing the purpose of the AFL at this
point in history was white supremacy.

Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah, that sounds exactly right.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah. So, in the eighteen forties, the Irish had physically
fought to take over working the docks in Philly, but
they never actually formally unionized in Philly, unlike in Baltimore
and New York, where the Irish took over the docks
and unionized with the ILA. So this an ununionized workplace,

(17:51):
actually wound up better. Black migrants from the South and
Eastern European immigrants showed up willing to work for less,
and the docks were diversified right, which meant that the
Philly dock workers by the time that they wanted a union.
They wanted an anti racist union. They wanted the Industrial
Workers of the World, the IWW aka the Wobbleys. Much

(18:14):
like you, dear listener, want to take advantage of all
of the things the offers services. Advertisement is exciting to you,
just like this. It's the same. Here's ads and we're back.

(18:40):
So we you talked about the IWW a thousand times
on this show, and so we're not going to deep
dive it, but it's worth understanding. We have to do
it enough. For this is the first time you've listened
to this show. I want you to be able to
understand what we're talking about. The IWW is going to
go on to change the face of the world in
a way that I didn't realize before I started doing
this show. Right, they're like, Oh, it's a cool old

(19:01):
radical union from back in the day that's technically still around.
The more you see how all of these things are connected,
the more you realize that this idea that came out
of the United States of the IWW changed twentieth century history.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
Yeah, they were. I mean they don't just like pop
up in everything like in that way of It's not
like random that they pop up in everything. They pop
up in everything because they were involved in everything, because
they were awesome.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Right, and they inspired everyone, And they introduced revolutionary unionism
that organizes across national, gender, racial, and ideological lines. The
core idea of the IWW is summed up in the
preamble of its constitution, quote, the working class and the
employing class have nothing in common. There can be no

(19:48):
peace as long as hunger and want are found among
the millions of working people, and the few who make
up the employing class have all the good things in life.
Between these two classes, a struggle must go on until
the workers of the world organize as a class, take
possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system,
and live in harmony with the earth. You know, I'm

(20:09):
in my head, I like go with like owning class
rather than employeing class, right because like middle management's not
my issue. They're working for a living. If you make
your money by working, That's what I'm looking for as
compared to making your money by owning shit.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
Yeah, do you work for a living is like really
the fundamental question that I think divides people Like I'm
sure Elon Musk probably says he works for a living,
but like, you know, like just because you go into
a place and do stuff like that's not why you
have money.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah, totally. The IWW is formed nineteen oh five by
a collection of socialist anarchists and Marxists who are all
fed up with the racist, sexist, and gradualist labor organizing
that was going on around them. Among its founders were
veterans of the POD, Lucy Parsons, who is a black
and indigenous anarchist who kind of changed everything, and James Connolly,

(21:01):
another veteran of the POD, who is a Catholic socialist
who did at least as much as anyone in history
to free Ireland from England and therefore promote the dissolution
of the British Empire.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
So, according to star Trek, this is the year the
Irish Unification of twenty twenty four.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
It's oh shit, that's true.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
We got a few months left, but got to make
this happen.

Speaker 2 (21:20):
Where's our next James Connolly or mass movement whatever?

Speaker 3 (21:24):
I mean. I don't know how it's going to happen.
I just note that data isn't usually wrong about things,
So that's true.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
Yeah, I love that every time there's like things eke
a little bit more towards I mean, Ireland is closer
to uniting now than it was twenty years ago. Absolutely,
and Brexit did a real number on it, right because
a lot of people were like, wait, what, No, we
like being European. What why do we need to do
what you fuckers want?

Speaker 3 (21:47):
Yeah? I think it made a lot of people like,
look at the options around them.

Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah. The IWW fights for industrial unionism and I always
misunderstood this. I always was like industrial workers of the world.
I was like, oh, it's like people who like listen
to throbbing gristle. No, like people who like I.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
Should have known you were gonna make that joke, And
yet it caught me completely off guard.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
That was perfect, excellent. No, Like I always assumed, it
was like, Oh, it means people who like work in
industry where they are there's gears involved in like smelting.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
You know, yeah you have a wrench.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
Yeah, if you don't have a wrench, are you an
industrial worker? And the answer is yes, by old timey standards.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
Oh, I have.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
You heard this? The difference between industrial unionism and trade unionism.
It's the kind of thing that everyone talks about at parties.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Tell me more, let's party.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Okay. So, prior to industrial unionism, unions would be like
the brakeman's union, and that is separate than the conductor's union,
and that's separate than the like schmoe who lays the
tracks union. Right, hmm, okay. Industrial unionism is instead of
organizing by trade, you organized by industry. Oh so now

(23:00):
it's like rail workers.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
Union, right, one big union as it.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Were, because one of the primary tools of the bosses
is to privilege certain classes of workers over other classes, right,
And so then the conductors will be like, I got mine,
fuck you schmoe who lays the track union, because if you're.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Driving a train, you really want to piss off the
guy laying the track.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, okay, fair enough. But you know, it's like when
you tangle power in front of people, people usually fall
for it.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
People fall for it every goddamn time. It's just very
disappointing and stupid when they do.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah. Yeah, So the IWW fights for industrial unionism and
they also fight for anti racist and anti sexist unionism
for the exact same reason. It is both a moral imperative,
but it's also a strategic one. You do not want
to give fault lines to your enemy. I've been talking
about the IWW on the show for years. So guess

(23:57):
what I did today, Miriam.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
In the IWW.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
I did. I joined the IWW today. Yay. There's a
freelance journalist union as part of the IWW.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
Hell yeah, you're a wobbley.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
I know.

Speaker 3 (24:12):
Love that for you.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, they haven't sent me the welcome pack yet, but
they took my money. I'm not actually complaining about this.

Speaker 3 (24:18):
Step one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Literally, the reason I never joined the union is that
I like, don't particularly like need to. I don't like
I'm fine, you know. And then I was like, oh right.
The whole point of unions is to not just look
for what's good for you, but to you know, yeah,
try and create something. Hell yeah, so you, dear listener
can join the IWW.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Two.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
It excels at organizing and fields that traditional unions won't touch,
such as freelancers, prisoners, and sex workers. But there are
wobblies organizing in every industry.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
They've been doing some good work on organizing Starbucks employees
right most recently.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
I think, so I don't pay attention to things that
happened in the twenty first century.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
Oh yeah, good point.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
I'm not trying to sho the modern WW. They actually do
a lot of good work.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
Yeah, they're great.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
But I read more about the IWW from one hundred
years ago.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
You know, well in one hundred years check back. Let
me know how the IWW's done with Starbucks workers.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
I will once you finally let me convince you to
make you a vampire. Two the sun is. You don't
need it. You'll be fine.

Speaker 3 (25:20):
I really really don't like working the night shift.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
I know, but you'll get used to it. Just take
some cognitive behavioral therapy to adjust to the changes.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
All right, I'm on the fence. I'll get back to.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
You, Okay, Okay. So the IWW sets up in nineteen
oh five and they hit the ground running. They've been
on the show a bunch of times because they did
a bunch of cool shit. There was the militant free
speech fights on the West Coast, especially in Spokane, Washington,
where a bunch of hoboes showed up and like insisted
on the right to organize and went to prison in
mass and it was beautiful and wild. We also talked

(25:55):
about the wobblies who crossed the border to join in
the anarchist revolution in Mexico with rifles. They were in
conflict not just with the bosses and the government, but
also the white supremacist organizing that call itself Unionism, including
at the docks. So Ben Fletcher we know about him
because he's a wobbling as far as we can tell,

(26:15):
he gets political in nineteen ten he joins two organizations.
He joins the IWW Local twenty seven, which is sort
of the catch all wobbly union that was Wobbly Union,
Tall Local, whatever the fuck that was in Philly at
the time. He also joined the Socialist Party. The IWW
is not an electoral organization and it doesn't fuck around
with party politics. But there's also like you're allowed to

(26:39):
do a different organization and be you know, you can
sure you can cross class that's a D and D reference,
not a classes of capitalism thing. Also, I got it wrong.
It's a multi it's called multi classing and D and D.
I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry everyone. A lot of
Wobblis started off in the Socialist Party and a lot
of Wobbley's left Socialist Party. Not all of them did.

(27:02):
Some people went the other way. Some people started in
both and left the wobblies and joined the Socialists.

Speaker 4 (27:05):
Whatever.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
The Socialist Party was better than average at race politics
in the US, and this is not saying much. W. E.
Du Bois, for example, left the Socialist Party after two
years because he was sick of all the racism within it. Also,
the Socialist Party was far more middle class, just like
literally in terms of who was in it. Some folks
called the IWW socialism with its working clothes on.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
Ooh, I like that.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
I know, it's such a good zing too, Like, oh,
you want to put on overalls and get some shit done.

Speaker 3 (27:36):
Yeah, like some socialism that's actually working. I am working
in both senses of the term.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Uh huh. The two groups soon started to drift apart.
The IWW was fine with sabotage. The Socialist Party was
not fine with sabotage. The Socialist Party was concerned first
and foremost with electoral politics. The IWW's line on it, well,
they kind of didn't have an official party line, but
Ben for example, put it in nineteen twenty quote, well,

(28:07):
I do not countenance against the working class striking at
the ballot box. I am firmly convinced that first and foremost,
the historical mission of labor is to organize as a
class industrially, which is to say, voting is fine, it's
not where change comes from. Right, we could learn a
lesson from Ben Fletcher.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Yeah, every few years, I guess every four years round
about this time, there's just like the endless discourse around
should should an anarchist vote? Should an anarchist not vote?
And it's like the most boring conversation and the most
pointless one, because the issue isn't whether anarchists do or
do not vote. The issue is what they do in

(28:50):
addition to voting or not voting.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Right, yep, I firmly believe that electoral politics is not
the way to make change. That does not, from my
point of view, mean that electoral politics don't matter and
don't impact the world like it seems an ahistorical perspective
to take. And so it's just not where change comes from.

(29:13):
Sometimes change for the worst things would get worse than
the ballot box. That happens a lot. Oh yeah, So
Ben Fletcher is in the IWW and right away he's
a speaker and an organizer, but there's scant documentation about
what he's up to and that's probably because he was
probably a sault.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
Oh cool, that's like the coolest thing you can be.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
I know, it's a little like it's funny because I'm
very into being honest about shit, and there's like a
little bit of like sketchiness with salts. But like the
idea of assault is that you go get a job
to organize it, and you're like, oh, hello, I'm just
here because I needed a job, and oh wow, you
don't seem to have a union. I do have some cards,
would you like some information?

Speaker 3 (29:53):
I think it's like absolutely the coolest thing, and I
would suck at it so bad.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
Yeah, me too.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
I would be like at the job interview like, hello,
I'm here to be exploited. Y yes, I enjoy being
exploited and will not say that we are being exploited
to anybody else here. I'm sure they love their job,
thank you.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
You know.

Speaker 2 (30:16):
I would.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
I would just suck at it.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
I would love to sell my precious hours that I
have on this planet for as little as possible, please, just.

Speaker 3 (30:24):
Like just like at the orientation meeting and you're like, sneezing,
organize that?

Speaker 1 (30:28):
What?

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah? Yeah, so that's probably what he's doing, because we
know there's a bunch of other places he's popping up
in documentation, but not at the place where the strike
is about to kick off.

Speaker 4 (30:42):
Like always six months before the strike kicks off. Well okay,
so it's like a different place. Like we just don't
know whether or not he worked at the docks. I mean,
we know eventually works at the docks, right, okay, and
we suspect he primarily worked at the docks, but.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
He's not in a lot of that. He's not being like, hello,
I'm Ben Fletcher, and I would like to say, you
know whatever. But he's speaking at rallies. He's the secretary
of the local of Local twenty seven, which is not
the dock workers union, it's the catchall union. And he's
going to the IWW national convention in Chicago. So he
is like doing the thing.

Speaker 3 (31:14):
Yeah, he's very involved.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Yeah, okay. So the Wabbles start specifically as an anti
racist and anti sexist union, right, there are not a
lot of black wobbleys at first. The interracial nature of
the union has been more proven out West, where there
are Chinese and Mexican wobblies of plenty. I think that
Fletcher was one of two men at the nineteen twelve

(31:38):
convention in Chicago. This doesn't mean there's only two black Wobblis.
It means that two locals had the representatives that they
sent be black.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
I mean, that's still a very very low number.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
It is absolutely Ben's going to change that, or maybe
Philly's going to change it, depending on how you want
to you want to say, the Wobblies of all races
were working hard to organize black workers. They wrote articles
that hold up today about how white employers would play
white and black workers off of each other in order
to build white solidarity instead of class solidarity. Right, they

(32:11):
knew what was happening. They're around for the creation of whiteness.
I mean, whiteness has been around for a long time,
but they're around to watch it expand you know.

Speaker 3 (32:18):
Yeah, they it was happening right in front of them.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Yeah, and antagonistically against their organizing and against many of
the individuals within their movement, you know.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
And this is like also, this is the era when
like bosses are like dudes with like cigars and gold
diamond studied watch chains who like publicly say things like, well,
what we have to do is get all the white
workers to turn against the black workers. Wahahahaha, Like they're
they're not subtle villains, these guys.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, they're not subtle. Yeah, but you know it is
subtle the insistent, constant stream of advertising that shapes our
perspective about what is possible, this stream of advertising. And

(33:09):
we're back and I'm always wondering whether I still have
a job. So have you.

Speaker 3 (33:15):
Gotten calls from advertisers before? Have you gotten complaints?

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Not a once on this or any show?

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah, then you're killing it and they love what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
Yeah, or they know it just doesn't matter, or they
don't listen and just keep sending money.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Ideal.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
Yeah, either way, a win is a win.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yep. So soon the IWW starts organizing on the docks.
The life of a longshoreman at the turn of the
century was this will be shocking to you, Miriam, not great. Yeah,
it was not a really good job.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
I mean, if I can speak personally as somebody with
experience in the maritime industry, still the worst injuries that
I've ever seen a person get on the job was
a dock worker. Like it's a rough job today, still.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
Makes sense to me and I am very glad that
it is a primarily unionized job in the US, because
then theoretically, at least if someone gets injured on the job,
they at least get like some pay for it. I hope,
that's my hope. I haven't paid attention.

Speaker 3 (34:23):
You're you know, you're operating incredibly heavy machinery, often over
or adjacent to water. Like there's everything, like stuff is
under incredible amounts of strain. It's just like it's incredibly
dangerous and like, yeah, and that's in an era that
like has safety regulations and yeah, you know, people paying
attention to that stuff ostensibly.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
So if you're listening to this in about fifteen years,
it's more like what you're dealing with now than what
we were dealing with while we recorded this, because we
still have some safety regulations. Okay, So their jobs involved
a bit of job in security. They would have long
days of unemployment followed by endless twelve hour shifts. Sometimes

(35:07):
they had twenty four hour shifts.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
Oh, everyone loves those.

Speaker 2 (35:11):
Sometimes they had thirty six hour shifts. Oh oh no,
I can't imagine how people got hurt.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah, what could go wrong when a sleep deprived person
is handling things that weigh more than a car, like.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
Yeah, I think it's fine.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
Yeah, you probably don't start to hallucinate until hour thirty seven, right.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
Yeah, I'm trying to remember I have hallucinated from lack
of sleep before. It was right around the thirty six
hour mark. I think, Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (35:40):
Have also hallucinated from lack of sleep, and I don't
remember what hour it was because I was a little
disoriented by lack of sleep at the time. Yeah, but
I wouldn't have trusted myself to operate heavy machinery, I
tell you what.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
No, but I was running security on a social space
surrounded by police. That's why I wasn't sleep is that
it makes sense everyone else is sleeping elsewhere, and I
was like a squatter, and so I was like, I'm
used to getting woken up by cops. I'll sleep in
the space that's under siege by the police. It's fine.
And by sleep, I mean stay up all night. Anyway,

(36:15):
Being twenty was fun. So dock workers have no permanent contracts,
not even month to month. They are working shift to shift.
You are told to stand around the docks and wait
unpaid for when ships arrive, and then they start paying you. Jesus,
there's three shifts per day. You basically like show up

(36:36):
and try to get hired. Each day at seven am,
there's like a hiring at seven am, one pm, and
seven pm. And in Philly at this point they're not unionized.
Half of Philly's longshoremen were black, so it wasn't a
great fit for the ILA. Most ILA unions were whites only,
while those like in New Orleans that had to allow
black workers because otherwise it wouldn't have worked. They kept

(36:58):
black people segregated and like you know, second class workers.
One day in nineteen thirteen, the Philly dock workers had
decided they'd had enough. How much of this was pure
spontaneous revolt and how much of it was the result
of agitation of Ben and other people like him. We
will likely never know exactly how the strike began, Like

(37:20):
the first day of it. I'm having trouble sorting out.
Here's the most likely version that I can piece together.
Dockers weren't organized yet, not formally, but they were agitated,
whether entirely organically or otherwise. Soon enough, in May nineteen thirteen,
they wanted to strike. On May fourteenth, they put down

(37:41):
their cargo hooks and walked off the job. Hell yeah, yeah,
I'm excited for them. I know, fifteen hundred of them
start Within hours, they were talking about how they should
organize soon enough they have all about four there's about
four thousand dock workers for most of time we're going
to be talking about I think it peaks at six
thousand or so in about ten years or we're talking.

(38:02):
And as soon as they're talking about organizing, both the
ILA and the IWW are like, all right, vote for us,
we'll organize it.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Is the ILA like, vote for us, we'll represent like
half of you. Is that like their selling point?

Speaker 2 (38:19):
Their selling point is literally, we brought you free booze, compelling,
and we will pay salaries to branch officers.

Speaker 3 (38:30):
White supremacy and free booze.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Yeah, which has worked. And if it had been a
majority white place, you know, it would have worked.

Speaker 3 (38:37):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
And they were willing to organize the black workers just
it would have been segregated.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Okay, So they were offering a deal, but a shitty
deal yes to black workers.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
The IWW's promise was radical equality, that they all fellow workers,
men and women. There's no women dockers, but there's women
in the IWW black and white would advance towards a
world without wage labor. The ILA would have formed segregated unions,
leaving black workers and second class members. So the dockers

(39:07):
formed the Industrial Workers of the World Local number eight.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Hell yeah, I'm so proud of them for not being
swayed by the free booze. That's I know. I'm so
glad they were better than that.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
I know, better than how the Simpsons would have done it.

Speaker 3 (39:20):
You know, you just I mean, you just know that
that has to have worked a bunch of times.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Oh yeah, they're probably like, oh, just do what we
always do. What could go run? I keep saying ILA
and ILU, and I don't remember which one it is,
and I put it in the script both ways. And
I'm terribly sorry, old racist union, but we're gonna get
your name wrong. You don't exist anymore.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
Like we could just say, like ILS for international long
short shitheads, like we don't care, we don't like them.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Ilkkk. Yeah. So the workers went on strike and they
did it fucking right. The most privileged workers, the deep
sea dockers, they got paid a little better, they like,
got treated a little better. The these are the people
who started the strike, the first people who walked off
the job, and when they did, they said, the demands

(40:06):
that we're making are for everyone. Everyone will be treated
as well as we are going to be treated at
the end of the strike, not just how good we
have it. Now, we're going to get it better, and
everyone else is also going to get it better equal
to us.

Speaker 3 (40:19):
Nice, we're bringing everybody with us.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Because right away the owners were like, our understand, we
would have just if it had been a normal strike,
we would have just paid off the deep sea doggers
and it would have ended.

Speaker 3 (40:30):
You know, It's like these guys have seen the playbook.
They know what the strategy is.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah. They demanded thirty five cents an hour, which works
out to roughly like eighteen thousand dollars a year in
modern money.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
Oh my god, that still sucks.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Oh, Like they're basically asking for the poverty line, you know.

Speaker 3 (40:51):
Yeah, they're like, oh, we would like to do this
backbreaking and dangerous job for like shit money. And I
guess at this point we're getting half shit money, Like damn.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah. And they want a radical reduction in their hours.
They only want to work ten hours a day. They
want night work, paid time and a half. They want
double pay on Sundays and holidays, and they want recognition
of the union.

Speaker 3 (41:14):
That is like tragically reasonable demands.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
I know, I know. Decisions were made democratically by the
rank and file workers. The IWW organizers who showed up
didn't tell people what to do, They just helped facilitate it.
The strike committee of fifteen people was elected, with at
least one representative from each nationality, so that all languages
were represented. Oh that rules, Yeah, no, I like fucking

(41:38):
did it right. The day they organized a one hundred
ships were prevented from loading or unloading.

Speaker 3 (41:42):
And what's cool about a dock workers strike is that
those ships are being loaded and unloaded, a lot of
them with perishable goods.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Oh yeah, that's gonna come up, yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
And like it's one of those like there are some
types of strike where like if you're at a factory
or whatever and you're like, we're not going to make
the objects. Yeah, then it's like okay, well then those
won't be made for a while, you know. But if
you're a farm worker or like a transport worker, stuff
just keeps piling up and chaos ensues and it fucking rules.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
Yeah, that's a fucking good point. The next day, the
bosses attack physically. One wobbly organizer, a guy named Mkelvey,
was beaten unconscious and then jailed for two months. And
only three years earlier, he'd been involved in the Spokane
free speech fight and been prisoned in that that we
talked about the show a while ago. Oh wow, we'd
like seeing people die in the jails out there while

(42:34):
he was fighting, you know. Yeah, the boss has used
every dirty trick they could. The owners of the various
shipping and docking companies. There's a thing that happens time
and time again, where like capitalism pretends to be in competition,
they're like, oh, I'm a company in your company, so
we hate each other, you know, Like, no they have
class solidarity, why don't we is basically what's happening, right, Yeah,

(42:55):
the rich the owners of the various companies united to
form at Owners Union of sorts.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Wow, I hate that.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
Yeah. The other dirty trick they would always use they
hired black strike breakers from Baltimore. And to be clear,
this is on white supremacist labor organizing that this works
so well, right, Like if they weren't white supremacist organizations.
It would not work to hire black which is why
it doesn't work this time. Yay, they hire pinkertons to

(43:23):
like infiltrate and agent provoctur and shit, there's gun battles
with the strikers and they re route their ships so
they like send the ships to Baltimore and New York.
And Ben Fletcher actually goes down to Baltimore to help
convince dockers there not to touch hot cargo.

Speaker 3 (43:40):
Awesome.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Meanwhile, the ISLA is trying to snipe workers into its
own ranks, but had no success at that. And when
I say that we have won all the rights we
have in this country by fighting, I mean with violence.
A week into the strike, on May twenty first, six
hundred strikers and their supporters fought off seventy five scabs
by the police. Hundreds of women were throwing bricks at cops,

(44:04):
most likely the family members of the all Mail workforce.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
Amazing. Yeah, that's a supportive family thing to do. I know,
somebody is trying to interfere with a member of your
famili's you know, yeah, way of making a living, Like, yeah,
you might need to throw bricks at that person.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, and then on May twenty eighth, solid already cracked
among the bosses. Ah, the companies that transported perishable goods
were the first to crack. I bet yeah, And once
the owning class was splintered, the rest of the companies
fell to The strike was one in two weeks.

Speaker 3 (44:41):
Hell yeah, which is probably about as long as it
takes for the ship full of whatever it was they
were trying to ship to start to smell terrible.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, totally. The pace stayed at thirty cents an hour
for the but I think that's a raise for most
of the workers and the rest of their demands, which
were actually more important to and then even their base rate.
The overtime, the recognition of union's anti discrimination, all that shit,
all that was one. The overtime was particularly important, of course,
because people were working twenty four and thirty six hour shifts. Yeah.

(45:12):
The joke I wrote in here is what are they doctors?
I don't want a sleepy doctor.

Speaker 3 (45:19):
I mean I don't want a sleepy nurse either. I
don't want anybody sleepy. I don't want a sleepy guy
making a sandwich. Like, we should all be at our
best when we do things.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Yeah, dreamer is a good job for sleepy. But actually
I don't want to work a twenty four hour shift sleeping.

Speaker 3 (45:35):
Mm hm.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
The other time I want to sleepy guys. When it's
you know, a puppy, a puppy's tired, he can be
a sleepy guy.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like my dog's job is mostly I
mean he does a few part time things, but like
mostly couch snuggles.

Speaker 1 (45:51):
Who he's a sleepy guy.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
He's a sleepy guy. He does he crushes it, you know.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
Great job.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah. So the strikes, the union forms, and local aid
does not waste any time. In IWW fashion, they don't
sign contracts with employers because they don't want to give
up any right to strike and things like that. Right,
they're like, instead of being like, hey, we won't strike,
into our contracts up, they're like, now you treat us
like shit, we're gonna strike. What the fuck do you want?

(46:19):
And their contracts are oral and renewed yearly. Anytime the
bosses would treat them like shit, the doctors would hoist
the goods up off the ship and then walk away.

Speaker 3 (46:29):
Hell yes, yeah, oh my god, I love that. Yeah,
just leave them in suspense there, uh huh oh literally
because this suspended.

Speaker 2 (46:40):
Yeah, exactly, And the Wobblies did a lot more than
just interrupt work. They planned strategically. They fought to maintain
unity between different races of workers, and they organize cultural
events for the workers, doing that thing that organized workers
have done so well in history, which is making sure
that the working class has as much of an opportunity
for education and culture as the owning class. As always

(47:01):
at the time, the racial tension that they were dealing
with was a three way thing. There were white people
who were Protestants, then there were black people, and then
there were the Catholics in the Slavs, who are neither
white nor black. Local eight worked hard to keep them
all united by having like family picnics and shit. Right,
everyone comes, everyone gets to know each other, All the
languages of different people are there and hanging out.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
By August nineteen thirteen, they supported the tugboat sailors in
a strike for fifteen dollars a week, ten hour days,
six days a week. Nice, So twenty five cents an
hour is what they thought had to fight for what
radical demands.

Speaker 3 (47:39):
Tugboat workers are also some of the most hardcore people
you will ever meet.

Speaker 2 (47:44):
I believe it. This strike was successful and soon the
sailors were in Local eight. By November they also had
the docks firefighters in the union. Nice yeah. Local eight
solved the hiring problem and got DOC workers monthly contracts
instead of daily ones, and they reversed the power dynamics
of how hiring worked before. If you're a docker, you

(48:06):
had to line up to get hired every day, and
the system is called the shape up, and all the
workers are basically in competition with each other. It's like
you know, schoolroom recess soccer. Now the employers have to
come to the union hall, show up and be like, hey,
I need one hundred and twenty people today, and only
workers with an iwwpen on their clothes could work. Most

(48:29):
of the docks. There was like one or two on
unionized docks on the docks. Peer, I don't know how
the terminology works. The union hall was open every day
of the week and they offered free classes on all
sorts of topics for the workers and all sorts of languages.
Any important meetings they had were live translated or I
guess interpreted as the word for that into Polish, Lithuanian, Spanish,

(48:51):
and Italian. The Spanish, apparently was the tugboat sailors. Interesting,
whenever radicals from other countries passed through the port, they
were invited to come talk. So the working class doc
workers were like worldly and abreast of the politics of
the world because like, here's an Argentinian socialist talking about
what's going on there? Yeah, and by general agreement. So

(49:14):
leadership is very constantly rotated in the wilds at least
this time period. The president of the union was always
black and the secretary was always white, and that was
like a conscious choice that they made. Cool about fifty
two percent I think of the workers are black in
this union. On the first anniversary of the union, they

(49:35):
decided to throw themselves a party, and the bosses were like, no,
you got to come to work, And they were like, no, i'
is just not going to come to work. What are
you going to do?

Speaker 3 (49:42):
I think they've established pretty well that the bosses cannot
make them come to work if they don't want to.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, twenty five hundred of the workers decided to go
to the party instead.

Speaker 3 (49:53):
Good call.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
None of them got fired. They marched through Philly with
three bands in tow and now, like the content of
their chance, but I can't work it out rhythmically. One
of their chants was no creed, no color can borrow
you from membership.

Speaker 3 (50:09):
Oh yep.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
No.

Speaker 3 (50:10):
It was doing well for the first couple syllables there
and then it really went off the rails.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Yep. The other motto is a chance, was the classic.
An injury to one is an injury to all, and
that one that one could probably work.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
That one works, yeah, yeah, not if you mess with us,
we'll turn your goods into giant pinatas hanging over the ocean.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Maybe it works really well in another language, you know,
like could have been the Italian chant. Yeah, and there
would be like speeches given, which you know, it's like
now like when you go to a thing and their
speech is at it, you're like, oh god, damn it.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
Right, Oh I tune out. Unfortunately I'm the worst.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
But it's a world without the internet and TV.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Oh yeah, good point.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Everyone's used to listening to people give talks as that's
how bad their entertainment were. Wait we podcast totally listening
to people was great. Everyone should do oh wit, well.

Speaker 3 (51:01):
This, you know, I'm guessing also there are people who
were giving speeches that those are good at it and
not always. Is it the case that when you go
to a rally, Yeah, the people who will get up
to give a speech are good at that. Often they are,
but not always.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
I actually think that that's an important thing because like
old fashioned speech, like soapboxers, and that's how Ben Fletcher
gets a start, right as soapboxing. You're a stand up comic, Yeah,
like your job is to keep the audience paying attention
and laughing at the bosses. And like I only have
a few of Ben Fletcher's jokes in here. It'll be
mostly in the second half, but they're good, you know.

(51:39):
So speeches were probably good. And they also played baseball
and they also danced. They had three bands with them.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
Baseball's terrible, but the rest of that sounds great, I know.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
But it's like Philly in America in the like old
America times. Like I'm sure everyone likes it. They probably
have like striped outfits and.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
Those baseball caps with little like little tiny.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
Brim Yeah, and they're like slow pace of it somehow
works for them. It's hard to overstate how big of
a deal the fact that they weren't segregated was like
it's one of those things where you like look back
and you're like, oh, yeah, they hit the bare minimum, right,
because that is kind of the bare minimum we ask
for people in history, at least white people, is to
like not be segregated. Right, This is a really fucking

(52:21):
big deal. This scares people. Philly is one of the
more segregated cities in the country, according to wb du Boys.
And it's nineteen fourteen in the US. This is a
segregated time.

Speaker 3 (52:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
Most every year, for the nine years of the union's heyday,
they went on strike to celebrate their birthday.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
That's great, you know what that we should bring back,
just like annual strikes because like, no, we're not striking
for anything, we're just reminding you that we can.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
I don't know if it's still the case, but the
trash union in Amsterdam would strike. I think every year.
They'd like basically be like no, there's just not gonna
be any trash pick up next week, and the city
of Amsterdam fills with garbage, Like the streets are just
full of garbage, and it works. Everyone's like, ah, yeah,
we should probably treat the trash workers pretty good.

Speaker 3 (53:10):
Huh, yeah, we sure do. Suddenly appreciate the work you
guys put in.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
Yeah, so they go on strike to celebrate their birthday
almost every year. There's I feel like I've read both
ways about whether or not during the war they went
on strike every year of the war or just one
year of Oh, the US was only involved in the
war for one year, that's why. Yeah, I'm smart. So
I used to reading about European countries in World War
One that I'm like, World War One was many years, But.

Speaker 3 (53:35):
Weren't strikes illegal during World War One? How did they
get did they?

Speaker 2 (53:40):
Oh, we'll get to that, Okay. Meanwhile, Ben Fletcher and
the other organizers go around the Eastern Seaboard and they're
trying to organize the dock workers there into the IWW.
They never managed to unseat the ILA, though they managed
to sign up hundreds of workers, mostly black. Since the
Baltimore ILA was a white supremacist organization, was pretty easy
to get black workers to sign up for the union.

Speaker 3 (53:59):
That'll let them come, Yeah, I would imagine.

Speaker 2 (54:02):
So Ben was down in Norfolk, Virginia, which I keep
wanting to call like Nuffolk or something. I don't know,
it just looks so British. Anyway, when he ran a
foul of the other enemy of black organizers, racist white mobs,
a black man and a labor organizer both this is
too much for sensitive white Southern racists. He was giving

(54:23):
a speech in an open air meeting that some racists
came to heckel A Matt and they asked him, quote,
do you approve of intermarriage or sexual intercourse between whites
and blacks? Heavin enward marry a white woman. Fletcher responded,
I don't see anyone as black as I am, but
we all damn no. Well the reason, oh damn yeah,

(54:45):
because he's he's not light skinned, right, yeah, and so
he's the racists don't like hearing that miscegenation had been
the norm consentially or otherwise for hundreds of years.

Speaker 3 (54:54):
Yeah, he basically said. Instead of answering whether he approved
of it, he said, well, it sure looks like some
of your dad's approved of it.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
So they decided to lynch him. He does not get lynched,
And all I know is he has one sentence about this.
This is what the historical record seems to have on it.
He said, quote oh not quote paraphrase. His friend smuggled
him onto a ship bound for Boston. Great.

Speaker 3 (55:21):
I like that he devoted more time to telling us
about his good z sick line. Yeah that like he was, like,
I had a really good singer. You're gonna hear it
in its entirety. And then yeah, I got to Boston.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Yeah fucked off. Yeah I left. Yeah. So by March
nineteen seventeen, he's living up in Boston doing his organizing. There,
he starts working in a soap factory and he gets
married to a white widow named Carrie Dano Bartlett from
New York City.

Speaker 3 (55:47):
Working in the soap factory is handy for a soapbox speaker.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Oh that's true, access to boxes.

Speaker 3 (55:52):
He has seized control of the means of production.

Speaker 2 (55:55):
Oh that's true. That's why he did it. Uh, his
personal life, doesn't. I have hints of his personal life
here and there, but not a lot about it.

Speaker 3 (56:05):
Wife's guy of history.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Not bad to either of his wives. Oh, he does
not stay. He's married to Carrie for about five years.
His second wife happy with to the end of his days. Great,
and he seemed to be also supportive of Carrie had
a six year old daughter. They all lived together with
his dad for a while in Baltimore. His married life however,
did not start off super easy. He was only married

(56:28):
two weeks when the law came after him because of
the war. Right, And we'll talk about that on Wednesday.
There's my cliffhanger, and Wednesday's so far away.

Speaker 3 (56:42):
I don't want to wait till Wednesday.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Well you can wait like five minutes, Magpie.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
I personally think you need like a cliffhanger sound effect.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
Yeah, like like an old trashy like TV like I
don't even know what it'd be like.

Speaker 1 (56:57):
I was thinking, like, but it's just on my brain
from the Creature in the Black Lagoon when the monster
comes out and it's.

Speaker 3 (57:03):
Like baa yeah, absolutely, yeah, Daniel, like a scare cord.

Speaker 2 (57:09):
Daniel, what you got?

Speaker 3 (57:10):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (57:11):
It plays now? Okay, So you know anything you want
plug here at the end of part one, or anything
you want to say about our man Ben.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
I'm excited to see where this goes. I love him
so far, and I like you, surprised that I hadn't
heard all about this guy before. I know for plugs.
As you mentioned, I'm podcasting over it live like the
world is dying from strangers in a tangled wilderness. Check
it out. Yeah, it's cool.

Speaker 2 (57:45):
You can also find me also on Love like the
World Is Dying, published by Strangers and Tanglederness. It's another podcast.
If you're like I don't here Margaret enough and you
already listen to this and you also listen to Cools
on Media Book Club, well, I'm one of three year
four hosts of Love like Doorlstein, so I'm sometimes on it.

Speaker 3 (58:03):
And we got other podcasts over there.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
Too, That's true. If you like nerd stuff and hate cops,
we have the Spectacle and if you like weird cultural think, God,
how do I describe the podcast Rangers in the Tangled Wlderness?
You think I know the elevator pitch for our podcast
with our name in it. Who knows. But we're a
collectively run publisher and we publish things, and every zne
that we put out we put out also an audio format,

(58:26):
so you can listen to all kinds of scenes of
like poetry and fiction and theory and fun things also
unlike those boring things like poetry and history and oh wait, hmmm, Sophia,
you got anything.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
I mean, if you understood the part about whether people
were paladins or whatever, then you should probably just come
on over to Strangers in a tangled wilderness.

Speaker 2 (58:47):
It's true. Yeah, I think sovy.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
Yeah. We at Coolcar Media have a new podcast. It
is called Weird Little Guys and it is hosted by
investigative journalist Molly Conger, who has been on this podcast
and is at socialistog Mom on Twitter, which a lot
of people know. Molly as and Mollie will take you
beyond the headlines to examine some of the worst people

(59:10):
on the planet, most of whom you've never heard of.
These are the weird little guys trying to ruin life
as we know it. And it's really good. I don't
mean to brag, but it's really good. Mollie's so good.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
I'm so excited.

Speaker 3 (59:23):
This is actually the first time hearing about this, and
this rules. I can't wait.

Speaker 1 (59:27):
You have Mollie's a delight.

Speaker 3 (59:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
Weird Little Guys trailer August first, so it should be
out already if you're listening on the day this drops,
and then episodes weekly, not a limited run, but a
continuous weekly show. Hell yeah until the wheels fall off.

Speaker 2 (59:42):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:43):
Awesome.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
We we gotta go, but we'll see you all on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (59:53):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our upsite folezonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.