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

Margaret finishes talking 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
the podcast. We're in between parts one and two. We
talk about our dogs for an extended period of time,
because dogs are great. I hope that if you have
a dog in your life, you are nice to it.
If you're not nice to the dogs in your life,
I hope redacted. So our guest today is Miriam Him

(00:26):
Miriam Hi. Our producer is Sophie Hi, Sophie Hi. Our
audio engineer is Daniel Hi, Daniel Hi, Daniel Hi, Danel.
Our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And
this is part two and a two parter. And you
know what that means. It means that if you didn't
listen to part one, it nothing makes sense. And I'm

(00:49):
as always impressed by your ability to move through the
world without knowing everything about the thing that came before
the thing in order to understand the thing. I'm just
it's really impressive. All you care about is the effects
of World War One on Local eight in Philadelphia in
nineteen seventeen and onward. I that's all you care about,
then this is a good place to start listening. And

(01:10):
I don't understand you.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
And if you're like, what's Local eight? Go back and
listen to part one.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Yeah, they'd be like, isn't that band that's Bound for
the Floor And you're like, no, because that's Local H.
Just not about Heroin. That was that. I always assumed
Local H was about Heroin.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
That's it about.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
It's like two ram songs mixed together. Is when they
got there. I spent up. I looked it up this week.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
You're bringing us absolutely all the context I know.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Well, okay, so I had this Local eight shirt when
I was a kid, and the front of it as
a teenager, and the front of us is Local H
and the back just says fuck you amazing, And I
was like the coolest, edgiest kid in the world. Right
because I had this shirt, I got a concert I
went to and so one day, I guess I'm committed
to telling this story. I would wear it to school,

(01:58):
but I would have to change it before I got home,
right because if my dad's very upset. No, I actually
don't tell stories about my family anyway, I'll tell you
that I wore it at school because I'm that kind
of cool kid, always been super cool.

Speaker 3 (02:10):
You got away with that if you were in a
shirt with an offensive statement on it. At my school,
they would send you to the principal's office and dig
something out of the lost and found and make you
wear that instead.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
We had like kind of a competition, me and one
of my friends where we would like, I had to
try it out to get caught, right, So I wore
my like cool army coat over it, you know, so
you couldn't see the back most of the time. But
then but then when there's like no teachers around or anything, right,
I'd take it off and see how, like what high
percent of the day I could walk around with a
big fuck you on my back. And then one of

(02:41):
my friends we would both make our own T shirts
that'd be as like edgy or whatever and clever as possible,
and he would always get busted more, and so they
would go and make him turn his shirt inside out,
so he started putting other stuff like this school is
fascist on the inside of the shirt.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
God, I love that. Yeah, I'm so glad teenagers do
stuff like that. It just it warms my heart every time.
Do you have to write it backwards if it's going
to be on the inside.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
I don't know, because you just inside out.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Sure, okay, yeah, that rules.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
I'm yeah, I don't know what happened to him. I
can't remember whether they at that point. It is probably
lost and found time. This is a pre Columbine world.
Then Columbine happened, and they took the doors off of
the stair while we all hung out in and no
one was allowed to wear trench goats anymore.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
You want to know what I got in trouble for
post Columbine at my school?

Speaker 2 (03:29):
What this was.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
I was in study hall. I was very bored, and
I had a rubber band and some paper clips and
a chalkboard eraser, and I fashioned the rubber band and
the paper clips into a little bow and arrow and
I shot paper clips at the chalkboard eraser. Hell yeah,
and I got detention. Hell yeah, because it was post
Columbine and a bow and arrow made out of paper

(03:53):
clips was a little too violent.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Hell yeah, sounds super cool, though, I know.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Yeah, as you can tell, I was extremely cool.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, we were all really cool. No, no one should
look up anything, but now, yeah, we're just always cool.
So what was cool was AWW And what wasn't cool
but was morally complex was World War One. People love
that I have opinions about the high water mark of
the labor union in the early twentieth century. This is
why I get invited to lots of things. The high

(04:22):
water mark, from my point of view worldwide was immediately
before World War One. I can definitely hold on to
that being true when it comes to the United States.
It's a bit fussier when you look elsewhere around the world.
But World War One initiated the Red Scare in America,
and the Russian Civil War initiated the Bolshevik counter revolution
that shifted the socialist project from one that sought to

(04:43):
empower the working class to one that sought to empower
a privileged minority and sucked away energy from working class organizing.
So the high water mark of the labor movement immediately
before World War One.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
Yeah, I think that's a solid opinion, and I think
that that is exactly why people invite you to stuff.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah. Absolutely, there were strikes everywhere in the nineteen tens
in the US at the lead up to and the
start of the war. The working class even gained some
relative power because of the warps and so many people
were off to war. There was more labor to be
done and fewer people to do it. Sadly, this increased
power did not last too long. In February nineteen seventeen,

(05:24):
a couple months before the US entered the war, sugar
workers went on strike in Philly. It started near the
docks and then spread out from there because the docks
were such a hotbed of organizing. Right, Like, it's like
if you have a place where you're like see organized
labor working constantly, it's like more in your head that
that's a possibility, right right. Local eight got involved and

(05:46):
they helped the strike cross color lines, and they refused
to unload ships transporting sugarcane to the factories on strike.
A Wobbly was killed in that fight, I believe by cops.
The strike won its rays, but it did not when
pay for the time lost striking, and it was seen
as kind of a draw. Then the US declared war

(06:08):
and nationalism swept the country. The working class was divided
and shit started falling apart. Most of the leadership of
the IWW was against the war, but there was no
official Wobbly party line. And I think that this was
intended as like pragmatic, but it was also basically democratic.
The IWW might not have seen itself as really capable

(06:30):
of taking a position on the war that all the
constituents of it were expected to abide by, right, Like,
who are we to say that the dock workers have
to be against us intervention in the war. That's not
part of what we're talking about necessarily, right, because we're
not a political organization, we're a labor organization.

Speaker 3 (06:45):
I mean, that's interesting because I think so much of
the left at the time saw World War One as
the working class of every country going and killing each
other at the behest of the ownership class.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Yep. But so much it also didn't. And that's the
thing is that that was a very divisive issue. And
again most of the organizers of the IWW felt exactly that.
I like, it is divisive of the working class for
a German worker to be in a shooting war with
a Russian worker, you know, right, But a majority of

(07:19):
the rank and file were either in favor of the
war or they at least comply with the law that
required them to register for the draft.

Speaker 3 (07:25):
Well, and I wonder also if not having a party
line on this, and maybe this is jumping ahead a little,
but I know that among anarchists of the time, arguing
against the draft was illegal and got you, for example,
deported if you were not born in the US. And
so I wonder if not having a party line on

(07:46):
that was like a way to keep the IWW as
a whole safe from the accusation that they were encouraging
people not to register for the draft.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
I believe that I was part of it and at
one hundred percent did not work.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Local eight was actually one of the most pro war,
or at least not anti war locals. They voted to
not strike during the war lest they disrupt the war effort.
Loading ships, after all, is a pretty major part of
the logistics of war. The army was segregated, of course,
and black longshoremen who were drafted often weren't allowed to fight,

(08:23):
but were instead shipped to Europe to unload boxes off
of ships to continue to be longshoreman. Ben Fletcher's younger brother, Clarence,
was a private in an all black infantry unit in France,
but because they were black, they were forced to dig
trenches in graves instead of fight, and he survived the war.
Ben Fletcher himself, along with the rest of Local eight,

(08:44):
wasn't particularly anti war. Some of their German fellow workers
were actually wildly pro war because they fucking hated the
Kaiser and like, just everything's messy, right. This is just
like probably the biggest, first huge division. I mean, there's
like other divisions in the labor movement, especially around like
I'm going to go with the actual labor movement at

(09:05):
the white supremacist organizations that call themselves labor unions, you know.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
Yeah, I'm sure they were all pro war. Yeah, they
were like, yeah, it's good for business, fuck human life.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
I haven't read enough about the AFL and World War One,
but I've like I expect that to be the case.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
I let's just say I read it and that's what
it said.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, fuck them. Yeah. So, participation in World War One
completely splintered the left, both into pro and anti war sides,
because involving yourself in a war well and also because yeah,
it splinters the working class to have the working class
shoot itself. Right. Despite the IWW not being an anti
war organization and both ben and Local eight being indifferent

(09:44):
at worst to the issue, the state absolutely used World
War One as an excuse to try to destroy the
IWW completely, and frankly they kind of succeeded. They obviously
didn't totally succeed or I wouldn't have joined the IWW today.
But Joy howdy, did they strike at a blow. As
we've talked about a couple times on the show, the

(10:05):
first ever Red Scare was at least as much aimed
at anarchists and Wobbley's, like, right, like we've talked about
on the show, and as you pointed out, like a
lot of anarchists, especially Jewish anarchists, got deported, you know
during this Red scare, right, And yeah, it was aimed
as much at anarchists and Wobbley's as it was at
socialism and communism more broadly. It is the second red
scare that comes for the communists specifically, on September fifth,

(10:27):
nineteen seventeen, FEDS and cops rated Local eight and the
other Wobbly Hall in Philly, plus offices of the Wobblies
and a dozen other cities, including the main headquarters in Chicago.
Literally tons of records were stolen by the Feds. They
even stole the furniture, what like.

Speaker 3 (10:46):
What is their justification for that? Is it seditious furniture?
Is it like furniture? Where they're going to be like, Oh,
we're going to really get some information out of this
or are they just fucking with people?

Speaker 2 (10:57):
I assume they're just fucking with people. They stole a
wobbly Joe Hill's ashes.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
Holy shit, I can't believe I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, they're like, we're taking your dad. Well, okay, so
his ashes were like I think, in a bunch of
different envelopes. I think it was like everyone gets some ashes,
you know, is the implication.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
Yeah, everyone gets a little bit of Joe Hill.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
Yeah. One hundred and sixty six Wobblies were charged with
violating the Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen for interfering with
the draft. Innocence did not save them was an important
thing to remember, unfortunately, during times of political repression. Mm hmmm.
The war on the IWW was waged by the government,
but it was supported by an interesting alliance. The bosses

(11:40):
got together with the government, and they also got together
with the white supremacist organization that called uself a labor union,
the AFL, and they together formed the Adjustment Commission, and
its goal was to get the IWW out.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
The Adjustment Commission sounds evil, Like.

Speaker 2 (11:57):
I know, straight up, I don't know much more about
it than the name of it, right, and what it
did in this particular context, I don't know of it.
At other broader goals, it was definitely described as this
is its purpose is to destroy the IWW. Ben Fletcher
was the only black wobbly brought up on charges during
the Red Scare Part one. Okay, here's the funny thing. Well,
there's a bunch of funny. He gets in some good

(12:18):
jokes around the time he's going to jail.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
You did promise me jokes.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
Yeah, okay, But first the joke is the government. The
thing about being black in America is that you're somehow
both the most evil villain imaginable to white people, and
you're also invisible, which gets the funniest part of this
whole story. It took them four months to find and
arrest him. He did not hide.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
Incredible.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
Ben and his family had just moved from Boston to
Philly in with Ben's dad, and he found work under
his own name, working on the railroads, and all he
did was not turn himself in. It took them four
fucking months.

Speaker 3 (13:01):
Yeah, that's incredible. He's so he's not only like working
under his own name, he is living with his father,
so like, yeah, the first person you would check with
if you were looking for somebody.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah. Yeah. I think he just like was like, well,
if I'm going to go down, I should be near
my family. You know. It's like the best read I
have on it.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
I love it. I love that He's like, no, I'm
not hiding, You're just stupid.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, it gets better. So in mid February nineteen eighteen,
the fence found him and arrested him at his home.
He spent two weeks in jail before Local eight got
his bail together and got him out. But the Invisible
Man shit did not end here. I'm going to quote
historian Robin D. G. Kelly, who's going to then quote
Fletcher himself. So it's a quote within a quote, but
I believe in y'all we can handle it. One and

(13:45):
a quote within the quote has quotes within it. Oh
my god. Oh no, it's still very readable. So quote well.
Out on bail. He received a summons to appear in
court in Chicago in April first, nineteen eighteen. Delayed by
a train accident, Fletcher arrived at the court house a
couple hours late. And then now I'm quoting Ben Fletcher.
Making my way through the federal agents and police who

(14:06):
swarmed the corridors. I was blocked at the courtroom door
by the chief bailiff, who inquired, what do you want
in here? Well, I belong in here. Oh a wise
boy from the south Side. Want to see the show? No,
I'm one of the actors. Take that stuff away. You
can't get in here. Continuing the quote, but now back

(14:26):
to the historian quote. He had to produce identification and
his summons just to prove he was the one and
only Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. It was enough to finally persuade
the chief bailiff to let him enter, and then I
walked into the courtroom and into the federal penitentiary.

Speaker 3 (14:41):
Oh my god, cops are They're so stupid. They're so stupid.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
I know. They're like, there are two races to let
him get arrested twice, he's twice. The cops are too
fucking like, oh my god, a wise boy from the
south Side. Huh.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Also, like I have within my lifetime still heard cops
be like, oh, wise guy, huh when like people talk shit,
which is like amazing, Like you've had one hundred years
to come up with a better comeback than that, and
you're still going, oh, wise guy.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
I would like to think that that bailiff was very embarrassed,
but I suspect that he did not have the capacities
for Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:25):
No, the thought never crossed his mind that he did
anything wrong. The wobblis formed. I think it's their first
general defense committee, which still often exists, right to defend
their members. And Fletcher's family got ten dollars a week
to keep them going while Ben was unable to work.
This is about twenty five cents an hour at forty
hours a week, so probably a little bit less than

(15:45):
when he was brought in when he was working. To
be clear, twenty five cents an hour is a totally
normal rate. That is around eleven thousand dollars a year today.
People were struggling. I think is something that like, obviously
an awful lot of people are struggling right now, right,
but I think that people don't quite. The left is
richer than it was one hundred years ago, and we

(16:08):
have nothing to show for it, and I think people
should step it up more. Middle class radicals should be
giving a higher percentage of their income to like actual organizing. Yeah,
fundraisers and benefits for individuals and things like that are great,
but like actual organizing, good, good user help.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
It's all well and good to keep passing around the
same twenty dollars to different people's healthcare go fundmes, but yeah,
we gotta we gotta put some money towards actual long
term change.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Yeah, I mean, you know, I absolutely have friends who
live off of eleven thousand dollars a year, right, but
like a lot of people live off of more than
that too. Anyway, whatever, I'm just I just had like
this kind of epiphany looking at this, like being like, oh, yeah, right,
these like people who change the fucking world. Right, You'll
read about Emma Goldman and then like Emma Goldman will
be like and then and I was vaguely supported in

(17:01):
a shitty apartment in France in my old age because
I couldn't work anymore, and the movement pitched in to
make sure it did and starve to death. And you're like, oh, yeah, yeah,
like there's a working class movement, you know.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Anyway, so this trial was absolutely just about destroying IWW.
And one of the reasons we know that is because
they included Ben Fletcher and Local eight organizers because Local
eight while this is happening, is dutifully loading war cargo
and a ton of its members were overseas fighting or
digging ditches due to racism. But like the whole you know,

(17:41):
the press is just full of like the IWW's agents
of the Kaiser, you know.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Right, Anyone I don't like is agents of the Kaiser.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Yeah. The trial dragged on is the longest federal trial
up to that point in US history, oh, which is
only like four months or something like that. And the
defendants were held in Cook County Jail where the Haymarket
ruders had been held. The defendants made jokes the entire
time they were on trial. This is like how wobblies do.
Is they're just constantly singing and joking as they're like

(18:13):
dying and like lives are ending around them and shit,
they're just like singing and laughing to their graves. It's
kind of it's kind of hot.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
Yeah, I love.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
That they know that this is a farce. One guy,
Jack Walsh, kept referring to the prosecutor, a guy named Nebacker,
as fellow worker Nebecker. He's not an owner, he's a worker.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
Four months of trial, and the evidence that is used
against the Wobblies is pretty much just all the anti
war statements they made before the war started and before
the law that outlawed anti war statements.

Speaker 3 (18:49):
Hmmm.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
And then after forty five minutes of jury deliberation, all
of the Wobblis were found guilty on all counts. Classic
fair trial system as it should. Yeah. Ben Fletcher was
given ten years and Ben told his friend the judge
has been using very ungrammatical language. The friend said, how's that, Ben?

(19:13):
And Ben said, his sentences are much too long?

Speaker 3 (19:20):
Oh my god, it's so good Ben. That rules.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
I know he didn't have his own kids, but he
brought out the dad energy. He is twenty seven years old.
I like it.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
Yeah, God, And that's like, I mean, you must have
had that in his back pocket the whole time, like
just waiting.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Yeah, no, I'm certain he is just like giggling to
himself as he's imagining his life being destroyed. But he's like,
I got a good joke though, you know.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yep, and the worst like punishment you give me, the
funnier my joke will be so heads.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Up for that, Yeah, I got you. Eddy direction but
you know what else the wobbley said?

Speaker 3 (20:00):
What else did the Wobbleys have.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
They put advertising in their newspapers?

Speaker 3 (20:05):
Did they?

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, a lot of old radical presses and newspapers and
shit had advertising. It's a thing that people don't talk about.
But that's how the sausages. This is vegan sausages. Here's ads,

(20:29):
and we're back. So I actually don't know if all
of the wobbly newspapers always had it, but I remember
reading about it specifically when I was doing episode about
the Spokane free speech fight, and because it like really
stood out to me, and there's been a couple other times,
like different black radical papers in the sixties and things
like that a lot of people have Anyway, it was
just a thing that I didn't expect. So when I
like learned about it, I was like, oh, interesting, you know.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Ooh, a fact that will make for a good ad transition.
You probably don't run across too many of those.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah, we'll put that one away.

Speaker 3 (20:59):
Yeah, But before we went on break, I just realized
what we didn't shout out was Ben's friend, who was
like playing the perfect straight man to his joke. Because
Ben said this judge's sentences are very ungrammatical, and the
friend could have just gone yeah, or who gives a fuck?
Or okay, but no, he went, how's that Ben? Like
he was working a fucking vaudeville stage, And I love that.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Hell yeah. And it's funny because it's like they are
actually experienced comedians. That's the other thing that I think
people like, I know we talked about earlier, but it's
like they are practice showmen, you know.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
So most of the Wobbles, including Ben, were sent off
to Levenworth, Kansas, the first ever federal prison. While they're
on the train, whenever they're like stopped on the tracks
near some factories, they would sing wobbley songs so loud
that the workers from the factories would like come out
to the tracks to listen, because that's how wobblies do amazing.

(21:59):
The jail was full of political prisoners, including two different
types of political prisoners. At the time I didn't know about,
but I'll get to that. It's not just the Wobbles there,
and the guards constantly tried and I think sometimes succeeded
at getting the ordinary criminal prisoners to get into fights
with the quote political prisoners Jay Edgar Hoover personally made

(22:20):
sure that Fletcher's correspondence was like extra monitored, both because
he was a wobbly and extra extra because he's black.
He was afraid of quote Negro agitation. This didn't stop
Ben from corresponding with all the black socialists at the time.
After Marcus Garvey, Ben was the most prominent black political
prisoner in the country, and most of what we have

(22:41):
about him in paper comes from the fact that he
was in prison for two and a half years. That's
how we know his height and weight five four, one
hundred and fifty pounds. The Wobblis read books, They taught
one another. They wrote the outside world as much as
they could. Their correspondence was being intentionally limited, and they
were like weren't allowed to like write articles for things,

(23:02):
and all kinds of limitations on them. They tried to
organize in prison with some success, and they weren't the
only political prisoners. One historian, Christina Heatherton called Levenworth at
the time the University of radicalism, and it had quote
Bulgarian communists, Indian Gadarites, Mexican and Arco syndicalists, and African

(23:23):
American socialists.

Speaker 3 (23:25):
That's a party.

Speaker 2 (23:27):
I know, it's an even better party because veteran of
the POD, one of the greatest anarchist militants in history,
Ricardo Flores mcgone and his brother Enrique in there with Ben.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Hell yeah, that is a good party.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yeah, imagine, just like it's got to be wild, right
because you're just like, oh, wait, your movements in here,
Like he oh shit, I heard of you, you know,
like yeah, you're like, oh.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
I'm like this sucks. I'm in prison, but like, wait,
the Floris McGowan brothers are in here. Yeah, like, holy shit.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Now, had you heard of the Indian Gahataites?

Speaker 3 (24:00):
I had not.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
I hadn't either. I had to look it up. All
they teach about Indian independence in the US schools is Gandhi.
Why would you bother telling Americans about the militant revolutionary
movement founded in Oregon by Diaspris, Sikhs and Hindus that
worked to smuggle arms in India to try to overthrow
the empire.

Speaker 3 (24:19):
Holy shit? Yeah, why would anybody want to know about that?

Speaker 2 (24:22):
I know, it's not like it happened in America. Oh wait,
it fucking did. But no one cares about non white
people in America.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
So are you going to do an episode on those guys?
Because I want to know everything.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
Probably, I mean, they might have been awful, but they
seem pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Only one way to find out, I know, by declaring
them cool, doing an episode on them, and finding out
whether they hold up to them.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
And then halfway through being like, ah, shit, Yeah, there's
also an entire black regiment of the army in there
with them.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
What the fuck?

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Yeah, sixty two members of the Black twenty fourth Infantry
were in there. This is not the entire regiment, it
is a fuck ton of them. They had been imprisoned
for life because of the Houston riot. You ever heard
of the Houston riot? I also hadn't.

Speaker 1 (25:06):
No.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
This is when one hundred and fifty six black soldiers
mutant need after a white cop beat a black soldier
who tried to interfere with the violent arrest of a
black woman in Houston. Because during the war, they like
stationed a bunch of black soldiers to protect something in Houston,
and a black soldier saw a white cop being a
racist piece of shit interfered, so white cops beat the

(25:28):
shit out of him. So one hundred and fifty six
black soldiers mutine need They marched on Houston and they
shot and killed all captain of the Illinois National Guard
because they thought he was the cop. And then they
fought a white militia and a bunch of cops. Fifteen
white people were killed, five black soldiers were killed. After this,
nineteen of the mutineers were hanged. Another sixty three were

(25:49):
hanging out with Ben Fletcher and Levenworth for life. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Holy shit.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah, America likes racist white cops more than it likes
black Millie Harry people.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
America likes racist white cops more than pretty much anything. Yeah,
that's awful. Yeah, No, I'd never heard of that.

Speaker 2 (26:09):
Yeah I had neither. So outside the jail, people worked
tirelessly to free the Wobblis and all the other political
prisoners of the war. The newly created ACLU champion their cause,
and in nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty one most of
the prisoners got out, but the US had it in
for one group in particular. Well, the black soldiers didn't

(26:30):
get out, but by nineteen twenty two most of the
remaining political prisoners were the Wobblies. Because these are the
worst of the worst, even though again they're the ones
who didn't actually try and fight against the draft.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Right, they're like the ones who are factually innocent.

Speaker 2 (26:44):
Yeah, and like some of them had been anti draft,
but they had all kind of like shut up once
it became illegal to say something about the draft because
they were busy with labor organizing. You know. Yeah, as
my best read, I've only read the Ben Fletcher version
of this story, but I trust him. I do too.
You have some interesting, fucking hot takes. I'm gonna give
you the hottest take.

Speaker 3 (27:03):
I can't wait.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
I'm gonna give it to you right now, and then
I'm gonna prove it later. Do you know this Lennon's fault,
the IWW fell apart plausible? Go on, Oh, I'll tell
you later. Yeah, there's one more thing we can point at,
the fucking Tankies about Ben Flescher did not like Tankies.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
A great I like him more and more every time
you say a thing about him. I like him more.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
I know eventually they get out. By the end of
nineteen twenty two, they're all out.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
So how much of his tenure sentence did he do two.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
And a half years? Okay, the war ending and everyone
being like, wait, is completely illegal to throw people in
prison for free speech, and then the US is like, well,
we kind of only need them to shut up because
we were in the war. You know. It's like the
way that the state does everything. They're like, well, just
arrest them, and then by the time that they get
proven innocent, it's too late, you know. So IWW never
fully recovers from this blow, or rather from the one, two, three,

(27:56):
four punch of state repression, boss repression, AFL opportunism, and
authoritarian communist infiltration and undermining, and a fifth punch that
actually Ben mostly blames on the communists, and I think
he's probably right, which is infighting and arguing about complicated
bureaucratic shit.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
Oh, communists do love.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
That they do. After the war, things almost went back
to normal for Local eight for a few years, though
most of their most experienced organizers had been in prison.
Local eight was trying to cope with a shifting culture
and an increasing number of the dock workers were black
workers coming from the US South, where all they'd known
of unions was that their white supremacist organizations, and the

(28:36):
white workers, even in Local eight, weren't always proving them wrong. Again, overall,
pretty fucking good about this stuff. Not always perfect. There
was also cultural tensions between Local eight and the rest
of the IWW, because Local eight is like, was more
racially integrated, and it's also in some ways more moderate, right,

(28:57):
they're a little bit more likely. The most committed wobblies
are all these anarchists and socialists of various stripes whose
primary purpose is to organize the working class into force
that could end wage labor once and for all. A
ton of them are unmarried, married only to the movement.
A lot of the workers, especially in Philly, are like, look,
I just want to feed my family, right. And there's

(29:18):
also a bunch of arguments that they start having between
the Local eight and i WW about how to hold
onto money. Philly wants to maintain its own war chest
rather than sending money to Chicago, where they would argue
it was hard to then requisition the money back when
they needed it, partly because they went on strike like
all the fucking time, right, because they were actually, when
I say they were a little bit more moderate, they're
still a fighting union and militant is hell, right, But

(29:40):
so they like they're like, hey, we need some of
our own money back. More often you know, right.

Speaker 3 (29:45):
Like if your strike fund is in Chicago and it's
the nineteen twenties, like, you're not getting it when you need.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
It, Yeah, especially if you have to argue for it,
you know.

Speaker 3 (29:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
In nineteen twenty, for some complicated reason, Ben was out
on bay all waiting an appeal. He went to jail
for totally two and a half years, but he like
got out for a little while, I think a couple
of months during this appeal, But I'm not entirely sure.
He was very much not allowed to do labor organizing
or go on strike and shit like that. While he's
out right he won one hundred percent did labor organizing
and went on strike and shit like that.

Speaker 3 (30:18):
I expect nothing less.

Speaker 2 (30:19):
His participation was under the radar. He wasn't like, Hey,
I'm Ben Fletcher and I'm here to say, you know well.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
And I assume again that the cops were just like,
who's that guy?

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, I think that happened too, What are you doing here? Yeah,
that's another black speaker. Can't tell him apart I'm a racist.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
They know they've already failed to recognize him at his
own trial. I can't imagine that when he pops up
doing organizing. They're like, I've put it all together and
I know who that is.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
I know.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Also, like the bailiff is like, you literally only have
to know what one black man looks like. There is
only one black man on trial, and he's late to
the trial. You think they'd be like, holy shit, they're.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Waiting for him, You're looking for him.

Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah, they might have been, and then just I don't
know whatever.

Speaker 3 (31:05):
Anyway, I assume that he could have been wearing like
a name tag, like a hello my name is, like
a jersey with his name on it, like the whole thing. Yeah,
in a wobbly pit, and they still would have looked
right past him.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
Yeah. And So there's this other strike that happens with
Local eight on the docks in Philly in nineteen twenty,
and this one was hard as fuck. It dragged on,
it got really violent, and on June seventh, nineteen twenty,
during a union workers versus cops and scabs fight, a
black strike breaker I believe up from Baltimore, killed a

(31:38):
Polish worker and injured a black worker. And this is
where some of the racial tensions start to show. I
believe I'm kind of reading between the lines here. I
could be more certain about exactly how the racial solidarity
fell apart, because I also don't totally trust some of
the white authors who've talked about this in their analysis
about like, right, some of the white authors talk about

(32:00):
this are like, Oh, it's those black people from the
South don't know about being anti racist.

Speaker 3 (32:05):
Well, it would be very convenient for the bosses who
are trying to break the union if after, you know,
the dust settles after a conflict, and there's one dead
white guy and one injured black guy, it would be
very convenient for the bosses to point to a black
strike breaker from the South and be like, oh, it's
definitely him, right. Their whole deal is that division.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
Yeah, and it absolutely could have been the black strike
breaker defending himself, right. Because that's the thing is when
we're talking about like, oh, all the old unions and
people are like why do they get treated so bad?
And like sometimes it's like because they're throwing rocks at people, right,
Like it's like not legal to throw rocks at key people.
And I understand that, I'm still okay with it sometimes,
but it's like conflict is a violent conflict.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
Yeah, and it's a conflict that has been set in
motion by the people with all the power in this situation. So, like, absolutely,
I don't feel in a position to judge anybody in
this situation, right, Like right, the guy from Baltimore was
taking whatever work he could get, which he had been
kept out of union work by white supremacist.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Unions right in Baltimore. Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
The ultimate responsibility for this is in the hands of
the people with the power in the situation.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
I absolutely agree, And so again by my reading between
the lines, the worker's funeral was like not good in
terms of some of what came out of it. This
is like where fault lines appear. The strike continues regardless,
racial solidarity is not yet broken. Two women who are
supporting the strikers and the fights on the docks are
killed by cops. This does not fall along racial lines

(33:39):
in a way that makes people angry. I don't know
the races of anyone involved in that.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
I mean it should make like whatever the racial lines
are there, that should make people angry that the cops.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Oh yeah, no, people are very angry about it. Yeah yeah, No.
What I'm saying is that it's like I'm not using
that as evidence of the dissolution of the union. Instead,
I'm saying, it's just the escalation of violence of what's happening, gotcha.
After forty one days, negotiations end the strike and it's
sort of a draw where some folks get some raises
but no other demands are met. And immediately after the
strike ends, the bosses rescind the promised raised wages and

(34:14):
the workers don't have enough power to stop this. Unity
is starting to fall apart. The strike had killed three
people and one very little. It's around this point that
the Bolsheviks start fucking with the left worldwide. They are
trying to tell everyone what to do. And the IWW
is Dowa Marxism, and it is down with anarchism and
is down with socialism. It is not in like ideologically

(34:35):
formed union right right, They weren't down with what gets
shorthand called communism like the Communist Party of Russia. The
Bolsheviks they start off being kind of curious, right, like
everyone is, and then they're pretty quickly like, oh, this
is anti democratic, authoritarian bullshit, right. And the IWW is
far and away the most competent militant leftist organization in

(34:57):
the US in the nineteen twenties, even after it took
a b in the war. So the Bolsheviks wants to
punish the IWW for not supporting them enough, and in
particular they come after Local eight.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
That's astoundingly petty.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
It's part of a thing where Lenin decides that he
wants to get the support of the AFL, and so
he takes the Bolsheviks are now participating in the conflict
between the moderate not anti capitalist, but authoritarian and power
hungry AFL. He has more in common with the AFL

(35:32):
than he does with the IWW. Right, so, oh yeah, no,
I've never been a big Lenin girl. I'm like just
super extramat at the Bolsheviks again today, you know. Yeah,
you don't got to wait till Stalin comes around before
they fuck everything up.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
Yeah, yeah, no, it was sucked way earlier.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, and okay, so they decided to come after Local eight.
It's possible, but incredibly unlikely that Local eight doc workers
loaded a military ship bound for supporting the White Army
in Siberia in the Russian Civil War. Like historians don't know, right,
there's not a proof that anyone seems to have. We

(36:16):
do know that they said they wouldn't do such a thing,
and that Ben says it was a fabrication and that
this boat was going to Siberia, which is famously not
close to Philadelphia.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah, that's true. That's one of the things I know
about Siberia.

Speaker 2 (36:33):
Yeah, if you ever like, hey, what's close to Philly? Like,
it takes me a while before I get to Siberia,
you know. Yeah, there's like a whole two continents in
the way. I don't remember when the Panama Canal got made,
but it would have loaded from Seattle with the rest
of the support for the White Army. It seems far
and away most likely. Regardless, the Bolsheviks in New York
City told the IWW to suspend Local eight, and the IWW,

(36:57):
in the biggest l I've ever seen them take in
the history of writing about them for this show, ignored
their own rules on how to handle this sort of
thing and briefly suspended Local eight.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
She is they just they were just like, well, the
Bolsheviks said it, we gotta go with that.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
Yeah, And there's like a little bit more sort of
bureaucratic arguing going back and forth about it than that.
But they come to their senses for a moment, and
they like unsuspend Local eight until they turn around and
suspend Local eight again.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
This is definitely the most disappointing thing I've ever heard
about the IWW.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
I know this second one is more of a like
classic leftist arguing thing that's like not as malicious, it seems,
although Ben is absolutely like, not the comedies were behind
this shit too, and like, I don't know he was there,
he might be right, yeah, but what happened was Local
eight started charging a like initiation, you know, like membership fee,

(37:52):
and nationally the IWW says if you charge that, it
can't be more than two dollars.

Speaker 3 (37:57):
They're charging two fifty, aren't they.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Thirty five dollars? They're actually charging a fair amount.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
Oh okay, that's that is more.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
And they are consciously doing it for a couple reasons.
One is that like non union labor is flooding in
and they're like the labor pool is getting so big
that they like feel like they're losing control of what's happening. Right,
They're like, there's not enough work for all of these people.
We need to like limit the work pool, right, you know,

(38:27):
And Ben absolutely stands by this and is like this
is a necessary step. I read some analysis that kind
of makes sense to me that if you're like looking
out for the Philly dock workers, this makes sense. If
you're looking out for building a revolutionary solidarity among the
working class to overthrow capitalism and wage labor, this does
not make sense, right, I mean.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
And it definitely sounds like the kind of thing where
it's like the AWW could be like, hey, stop doing that.
But it does kind of sound like if they're gonna
suspend Local eight, it has more to do with what's
been going on with the Bolsheviks than it has to
do with this.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
That seems to me to be likely. And there's also
just like a lot of arguments that are happening about
Ben Fletcher actually, like nineteen ten, actually used to argue
for the centralization of the IWW. But as it becomes
a more experienced organizer or is, it becomes more invested
in Philly. But he's not even super invested Philly, because
he's going around all over the place, right, he starts
arguing more and more for decentralization, and so it's also

(39:23):
this defense of decentralization. Yeah, much like the decentralized system
that comes up with advertising for this show, over which
we also have very little control.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
I snuck up on me.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
Yeah, that's because I realized how far in the timestamp
we were. Here's ads and we're back. So basically, the
Wobblies suspend Local eight and for a year Local aid

(39:56):
to suspended, and then locally AI it's like fine, whatever,
will drop it, and they lower their their membership fee.
Then they rejoin the IWW. Ben Fletcher holds that even
this fuckery was the result of Bolshevik interference, which is
hard to prove, but some of this stuff is very real.
Looking at the US left, the two biggest forces are
the IWW, which is a bit smaller and way fightier

(40:18):
but also very democratic, and the AFL, which is moderate,
not even anti capitalists, but larger and more generally hierarchical.
Lenin backs the power hungry guy supports the Power Group,
and at this point, again according to Ben Fletcher, but
knowing Lenin, I half expect he wrote in it self somewhere,
and it's like kind of implied in that Lenin piece

(40:39):
Left communism and infantile disorder, where Lenin gets mad at communists.
Ben says, at this point Lenin is trying to destroy
the IWW, and Local eight is a very logical place
to start, because the other thing that's happening Local eight
might be the biggest and most powerful part of the IWW. Really,
I have read a thing that specifically says that it

(41:02):
does the like, huh, I want to read more sources
about that before I feel strong saying that. You know,
but the final destruction of Local eight was in the
autumn of nineteen twenty two. They were still fighting for
the eight hour workday, and they decided to strike. And
they did this strike in the classic wobbly fashion. They
just showed up an hour late rather than negotiating with

(41:24):
the bosses ahead of time. And when you're like on
top of your shit, this is like a really good
power move. Yeah, the balance of power had shifted. The
bosses locked them out of work, and instead of bringing
in non union strike breakers, the bosses brought in can
you guess.

Speaker 3 (41:42):
Is it AFL strike breakers?

Speaker 2 (41:44):
They did? They brought in union strike breakers.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Fuck yeah, union strike breakers. They had union strike breakers. Yeah,
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
It's basically at this point, the bosses, the government, the AFL,
and the fucking Bolsheviks are all trying to destroy a
four thousand member fucking inter racial union in Philly.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
I like, how do you, as an AFL aligned worker, Like,
how do you fucking sleep at night? As a union scab?

Speaker 2 (42:21):
You know. It's like they're just like, we're gonna make
this a union thing, but it'll be for us instead,
you know.

Speaker 3 (42:29):
Oh God, what they should have done is kicked their
own asses.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
Yeah, and basically the union fell. ILA workers from New
York came in and it lost the monopoly on hiring militants,
were blacklisted, and most importantly, unity between black and white
workers was gone for basically good or for decades at
least in Philadelphia because they absolutely AFL also played racial

(42:57):
like tensions against everything, and like you start getting these
like splits where whatever I wrote it out down and
then I was like, I'm not keeping track of all
of that. After the ILA broke Local eight, the bosses
immediately turned on the ILA too.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Oh no way, I know.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
I voted for the leopards eating other people's faces.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
Party can't believe the bosses didn't show loyalty to their
workers at the expense of their own finances.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
What even though we're union, we're supposed to know that.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Oh, my god, I'm so mad.

Speaker 2 (43:35):
I know, I know. For years the docs were ununionized.
It was only in nineteen twenty eight that the ISLA,
which was at this point joined by former local aid organizers.
Because people are like, Ben's a wobbly to his core, right, yeah,
or he's an industrial unionist to his core, he actually
forms a in part of the splits, they like, form

(43:55):
this other thing at some point that I'm not going
to get into. But overall people are like, I'm a
union organizer, I'm a doctor. I want a union here.
This is what exists, right, And so former local aid
organizers eventually end up joining the ILA, and they won
the eight hour day and they unionized the docks. But
within only a couple of years, the ILA lost all

(44:19):
pretensive workers democracy and became corrupt. The way it was
phrased is like there were no longer contested elections h
within it, the workplace was segregated into racial picnics were
a distant and fading memory. And this didn't stop the
IWW nationally, and it didn't stop Ben Fletcher in the

(44:39):
changing landscape of the nineteen twenties. Ben actually started off
like really early in nineteen twenties before all this shit
kind of started going down. He started off willing to
work with the Communist Party. Right, he doesn't have a
label besides industrial unionist, right that I've been able to
figure out.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:54):
Well, and the Communist Party hadn't done like ninety percent
of the bad things the Communist Party would go on
to do.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
Yeah. He was one of the principal speakers at the
first American Negro Labor Congress that was put on by
the Communist Party USA, And originally he was apparently slated
to be the leader of the an LC, but a
more solidly Communist like with a capital C, black man
named Lovett Fort Whiteman blocked it from happening. And the

(45:23):
history that I read seemed to sum it up as
a like epigmism, right, like I want to be the
black guy, but I don't. I don't buy it because
it's about a black organization within the Communist Party.

Speaker 3 (45:35):
Right, it's a black organization. It's not like.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
There's Yeah, I think it is far more likely that
love It was just a party line guy and knew
that Ben was not. Ben was hard to pigeonhole ideologically.
He was a socialist in the broadest sense, but not
the political party sense. He was friends with anarchists and
socialists and syndicalists. He was also anti communist in that
he was anti Bolshevik. He was, if anything else, a wobbly.

(45:58):
I know I've already said this, but it's in the
script of like Free I've just said it randomly before
and I was in the scripts.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
So just going forward, Sure, wobbled to his core.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
Yeah, the guy who blocked him love at Fort Whiteman.
He died in the way that more or less all tankies.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
Die murdered by communists.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
He was He was murdered by communists.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
Surprisingly common cause of death among communists.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
I think Nazis and Communists are like just going neck
and neck about who's killed more Communists. He moved to
the USSR and then he was accused of being a
Trotskyist and was caught up in the Great Purge, sent
off to Siberia, where he died of malnutrition in a
war camp.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
And I like genuinely feel sorry for this man, right,
But it's like because people didn't know the Great Purge
was coming, but like they were watching lots of little
purges and they were participating in lots of fuckery.

Speaker 3 (46:49):
Right, but like the fuckery of you know, taking leadership
of this American organization, like that is a level of
fuckery that is like, eh, sucks. But okay, yeah, you
do not deserve to die in Siberia.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
For that, now, Jesus, absolutely not.

Speaker 3 (47:04):
But if you're a communist, people deserve to die in
Siberia for pretty much anything.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
I know, especially communists deserved to die in Siberia. Ben himself,
he falls out of the Communists pretty quick as he
starts to realize they're trying to take the IWW over.
He stays very active with the Wobbles until his death. Well,
his health starts failing him, but he's like he never leaves, right,
He's less and less of an organizer for many years,
he remains a powerful speaker. Sometime in the nineteen twenties,

(47:31):
he and his first wife divorced. In nineteen thirty one,
he moved to New York City, where he participated in
the black political socialist stuff that was happening there in
the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty three, he suffered a
stroke and never recovered his health. At some point in
the nineteen thirties, he married his second wife, a black
woman named Clara. No one is sure what work he

(47:52):
did after he left the docks. Some folks say he
sold hand rolled cigars. Others say that he was a
janitor or maybe a building super. I think is entirely
possibly did all of these things. He seemed to have
been happy in his later years. He was surrounded by family,
he was hanging out with his anarchist friends and old wobbles.
His health never recovered, and he died at age fifty

(48:14):
nine in nineteen forty nine, and the author Robin Kelly
I think sums him up well. Ben Fletcher believed in
the working class in its capacity to win. He never
wavered from his belief that capitalism would come to an end,
but only an organized working class could end it. A
truly organized working class would have to eliminate all vestiges

(48:36):
of racism and xenophobia, redirecting our collective anger towards the
capitalist class. His was not a blind optimism, a naive
belief that persuasive arguments could wipe away color, prejudice and
unite the proletariat. Rather, he knew our survival depended on
the overthrow of capitalism, and Ben himself sums up his
political beliefs, at least around race and things like that

(48:58):
very well himself. Quote, no genuine attempt by organized labor
to rest any worthwhile in lasting concessions from the employing
class can succeed as long as organized labor, for the
most part, is indifferent and in opposition to the fate
of Negro labor. He had respect from both like kind

(49:20):
of separate ven diagram spheres right of like socialism and
industrial unionism and anarchism and stuff cyndicalism, as well as
the black community and not just the black leftist community.
He was a very important person talking about race in
America at the time, and that's like the other thing
that history is forgotten. Right.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
After he died, a conservative black owned newspaper called the
Atlanta Daily World called him, quote one of the most
brilliant negroes ever associated with a leftist organization.

Speaker 3 (49:52):
So when even the conservatives have to say nice things
about you, you're probably doing great.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Yeah. Wow, that's Ben Fletcher. That's the there's a couple
figures that I would just like interject into the history books. Yeah,
you know, and obviously there's a show about figures that
I believe should be interjected in the history books. But
there's like two levels of it, right, There's a way
that like old black radicals are erased from everyone who

(50:18):
isn't studying black radicalism, and like old anarchists are erased
from everyone who isn't studying anarchism. And then there's the
people who are like erased from those histories too, yeah,
or rather not included. And I think a lot of
it is the one too of being both black and leftist,
you know.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
And also that he like wasn't a like man of letters,
you know. I mean he wrote a lot, right, I.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
Mean, but he was like a he was a worker,
Like he really was doing this on the ground organizing
because he was actually working in these places. He wasn't
coming in to make a speech.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
It was socialism with his work and pants on.

Speaker 3 (50:57):
Yeah, exactly, he had his working pants on the whole time.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:01):
He's amazing and I'm so happy to know about him
and about this organizing that he was a part of,
because yeah, I had no idea about Local eight or
about any of that. That was amazing.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah. All I knew is like because I had read
I've read mostly about the IWW out west, just because
Hobos and the Mexican Revolution are two things that I
care a lot about and I've read a lot about,
you know. Yeah, but I'd always like known. I was like, oh,
and then there was like a ton of black wobblies
on the East coast doing doc work stuff. That was
like what I knew? You know?

Speaker 3 (51:33):
Yeah, I think all I knew was that when the
waterfront would try to get organized, a big thing that
the bosses would do would be to bring in black
strike breakers when white unions were organizing. And I never
knew about a situation where people had actually successfully prevented
that by having a union that represented everybody.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:56):
That rules.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
It's a cool idea, and it's one that people can
continue to do. Yeah, because capitalism is kind of trying
to kill us all.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
Oh, it's it's doing its best.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
Yeah. Well, guy, anything you want to plug.

Speaker 3 (52:16):
As you mentioned on the last episode, if people want
to hear more of me, they can come on over
to live like the world is dying on strangers in
a tangled wilderness.

Speaker 2 (52:28):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
When I first started guesting on this podcast, I was
very proud to be like the only guest who is like, no,
I don't have anything to plug on nobody, but like
around podcasters too long, you just acquire, just like you
just acquire things to plug. They got me so.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Real, We got you a mic and it was over.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
I will have to eventually let you turn me into
a vampire. I've already let you turn me into a podcast.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
Or you know. Hell yeah, that's what the red card
of the Wobblings is, is the vampire card. No, oh,
oh my god. I've always held that I would be
morally I'm incredibly squeamish, but I would absolutely become a
vampire if I was offered the choice, because I feel
like I have a moral obligation to like become very
powerful immortal with which to fight the owning class.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
I think you can come up with whatever political justification
you want, Magpie.

Speaker 2 (53:20):
I agree. No, I don't actually want to be a
vampire than that blood is so gross. Yeah, but you are.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
The gothist person I know, and not just like I
mean I know people who like visually, like walking down
the street, you'd be like, oh, that person is more goth,
Like they're wearing more black, they have more eyeliner, But
like you are goth in your soul. And if offered
the opportunity to be a vampire, I just don't see
you being able to turn it down.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
No, I wouldn't be able to turn it down. One
of my friends tried to name my house Dracula Factory,
and I was like, what is why that doesn't I
don't get it. And then like one night I was
like walking through my hallway where I have electric candelabra
that come on at eight pm every night and flicker
w Wisconsins, not Candelabrum, and I was like, oh, oh,
I get it. I figured it out. Yeah, that's it's

(54:08):
called like workers come over to like help me with
my plumbing. And there's like the corner of my house
that's a stone wall covered in axes. But that's because
I'm cool.

Speaker 3 (54:19):
Yeah, that's you have I think a standard number of
battle axes.

Speaker 2 (54:24):
Yeah, three, three is true? One two? Yeah, we have
three battle axes.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Only three?

Speaker 2 (54:30):
I mean batle axes. You all have one? Okay, okay, I.

Speaker 3 (54:35):
Mean I have none, and that's a problem.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Well, you did give me a flail with a spiked
ball on it.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
I did, I mean, because that was yours. Like I
came across it and was like, well, this belongs to Margaret.
I don't know what it's doing here. I have to
get it to Margaret.

Speaker 2 (54:54):
Okay, what do I want to plug? At the end?
I want to plug two things. One swords. Why not
own a sword? There's no reason not to. There's so
many reasons not to. But do any of them really matter?
Not that I can think of.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
I can't think of a single good reason not to
own a sword.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
And join the IWW. Why not? What could go wrong?
It might not be the thing that unites the working class.
It's certainly not if you don't join it. So that's
what I gotta plug.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
People with swords join the IWW, and people in the
IWW acquire swords.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
There you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, and listen to Weird
Little Guys.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
Yeah, listen to Weird Little Guys. Cool Zone Media's newest podcast.
It's a weekly show and it's hosted by Molly Conger
and it takes you behind the headlines to examines of
the worst people on the planet that none of us
have ever heard of.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Whoo the opposite of this show. But it's a good time.
Oh No, I'm excited about it. I'm very excited about it.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
I bet all of those shitty little guys' lives will
become a lot worse once people know about them.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
So especially if they have swords. Wait, no, violence is wrong, illegal,
that's the word. The podcast is sober. Bye Bye Bye.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.