Socialist Action /May 2002
What Will I do on May Day
By BOB MATTINGLY
OAKLAND, Calif.-Not far from where I live is a cemetery that I visit
on May Day. I go there to place some flowers, red of course, alongside the
marker that identifies a grave as the final resting place of Vincent St.
John (1876-1929), once a general secretary of the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW), a rugged union whose militant influence still lingers on
in the American labor movement, awaiting its time to flare up once more,
though certainly in a new form.
It was only a few years ago that I read that some "Bay Area labor
history buffs" recently had put the gravestone in place. For most
of my life then, the "Saint", as he was called when he headed
the revolutionary industrial union, occupied an unmarked grave beneath the
sod of a slightly sloping rise in a pleasantly landscaped graveyard, not
far from Oakland's busy streets.
Vincent St. John isn't remembered as often as Mother Jones, Big Bill
Hayward, Eugene V. Debs, and Lucy Parsons-widow of one of the Haymarket
victims-but they all knew each other on a first name basis and shared a
profound vision of humankind's eventual liberation from ignorance, poverty,
and war. But none of them believed that progress could be won without a
fight.
Not yet 30 years old, St. John was elected president of a Western Federation
of Miners (WFM) local union and led bitter strikes in Colorado. In 1905,
St. John help to organize the IWW and the next year was elected to represent
the WFM on the IWW's general executive board.
During his years as general secretary (1909-1915), the IWW was front-page
news, as its organizers led some hugely popular strikes (popular with workers,
that is) such as the Lawrence, Mass., strike of 1912 supported by nearly
30,000 textile workers.
It's been said that the IWW restored Americans' First Amendment rights
to assemble peacefully and address public gatherings, as it fought time
and again against free speech restrictions. St. John was dead by the time
of the great 1930s industrial organizing victories, but it was the Wobblies
that pioneered many of the tactics that were so important in those organizing
struggles, such as sit-down strikes and roving pickets.
I read that the Saint's family was too poor to pay for a headstone. Still,
it's not at all clear why the Saint's grave remained unmarked for so long,
especially in a region with a distinct radical labor past.
In 1946, at least 100,000 workers hit the bricks in a general strike
provoked by strike busting. Earlier in 1934 there was the "Big Strike"
of San Francisco's longshore workers, headed by Harry Bridges. And, of course,
Oakland is the hometown of Jack London, the famed author of "The Iron
Heel," and my favorite, "The Apostate."
I've joked to myself that perhaps the area's radicals took the dictum,
"Don't mourn, organize!' a bit too narrowly.
That battle cry, often repeated still today, was given the world's workers
by one of the Saint's fellow workers, Joe Hill, who in 1915 was legally
murdered by a Utah firing squad. Hill's ashes were divided into small packets
and sent to many countries, where they were scattered by fellow workers
on May Day, 1916.
Truth to tell, I wouldn't have given the press account about St. John's
marker more than a passing notice, if years before I had not read a short
commentary on the Wobblies, as they were most popularly known, by James
P. Cannon.
Cannon was a one-time Wobbly but mostly remembered as a founder of the
Communist Party in the U.S., a leading founder of American Trotskyism, and
a Smith Act victim who, as did many Wobblies before and after him, paid
the price for his dedication to the workers' movement in a federal prison.
What I remember about Cannon's remarks was his affectionate appraisal
of St. John, unusually personal I thought. Cannon was a native of Kansas,
raised in a family that backed the Knights of Labor, then the Populists,
and finally the Socialists. So it was that on the seemingly boundless American
Prairie the youthful Cannon found inspiring aims and goals that lasted him
a lifetime.
Cannon not only was imbued with socialist fervor, he also came by a lifetime
admiration and respect for working-class fighters. I don't remember where
I read it, but I recall Cannon's admiration for a bunch of loggers. They
were Reds for sure, and most of them had seen the inside of jail cells,
he said. Naturally then, they were Cannon's kind of people and on both counts.
Cannon's respect and admiration for the Saint was well developed before
St. John's arrest during the World War I roundup of radicalized workers
and activists during the administration of the Democratic Party's Woodrow
Wilson, who proclaimed that "the world must be made safe for Democracy,"
even as cell doors closed behind his working-class political opponents.
St. John was sent to Leavenworth for several years, obviously a frame-up
since he had left the IWW two years before and was trying his hand at mining
and prospecting in Arizona. Eventually, he wound up in San Francisco, poor
in health and in the pocket.
If he died in San Francisco, it's not clear why he was buried in an unmarked
grave in Oakland, then a ferry ride away. Nor is it clear why he wasn't
buried in a pauper's plot, but was buried in a cemetery that reportedly
"is famous as the final resting place of millionaires like Charles
Crocker, Henry J. Kaiser, and 'Borax' Smith."
What the press account left out is more interesting, by far. The cemetery
land that once had an unobstructed view of the bay was once part of a Spanish
land grant, and earlier for 2000 years had been the homeland of tribes that
feasted on the bay's shellfish, and bested the bay's bone-chilling fogs
inside temescals, or sweat lodges.
As I say, on May Day I'll visit the Saint's grave.
Socialist Action /May 2002 |