Caroline Nelson was a Danish-born revolutionary Socialist, feminist and birth control activist, west coast I.W.W. leader, writer and lecturer. Here she provides insights into the particular situation labor in California found itself in.

‘The Workers in California’ by Caroline Nelson from Industrial Worker. Vol. 4 No. 25 September 12, 1912.

There is no state in the Union which has where they daily attempt to catch suckers. According to these advertisers, who are paid by the M. & M. or the railroads, any worker in California may become a small farmer with independence for life. In the Ferry Building the land boosters have a free lecture room where they daily attempt to catch suckers. According to them all you need to have in order to start on your career of independence is a hundred dollars. Just hand it over to one of the numerous land companies and with your two bare hands they will allow you to raise anything you fancy on a patch of their land. They sell this land to you on the installment plan. They always tell you that you must grab with your money for this land right away because tomorrow it is going to double in value. It is surprising how many workers bite on this hook. From all over the world they come to this supposed Mecca of riches and sunshine, and unload their little hoard into the lap of the real estate shark. Very often he never even sees the land before he hands over his hard earned money. He has just enough money to pay the first installment before this mythical doubling in value. It is his last chance. He either has a job or wants a job to earn enough to put up a little shanty and buy food enough until his first harvest. Often he has a family, and the real estate shark uses this family to play upon the credulity of the prospective victim. “Does he want to raise chickens? Why nothing pays like chickens, and the wife and children can attend to them and make a comfortable living while he attends to some other business. Fruit trees? Why, they grow in no time here in this wonderful soil in California. An orchard is a fortune any day. While you grow an orchard you can raise vegetables between the trees. There are fortunes in vegetables each year. I know a fellow that bought five acres last year and raised a thousand dollars’ worth of watermelons to start. Why, man, don’t be a wage slave.” This is the way the shyster talks.

The result is that these real estate shysters have become so rich and powerful that they practically rule every town and section and boom up the land in prices to the great glee of those who own even a small patch, for they are sure that some sucker will come along and fill their pocket some day. That is why in every valley and canyon one sees those forlorn looking, unpainted shanties, with a few straggling fruit trees around it, standing out like so many wrecks. And they are wrecks, human wrecks. They are not the result of drunkenness and shiftlessness, but lies and robbery of the fat respectables who ride by them in their big touring cars, while their victims most likely trudge on and on with blankets on their backs. This blanket brigade is a perpetual Institute in California.

This blanket man calls himself the “jungle man.” This name he has certainly a right to, for he travels like the jungle man did. As far as he is concerned, all the transportation due to ages of work and thought by the working class might as well never have been. Stiff and footsore he trudges to his destination, and rolls in his blanket whenever and wherever darkness and weariness overtakes him. Empty cans which he finds by the wayside are his cooking utensils. Quite often he is alone, more often he has a partner. Old men are usually alone, while young men and boys form jungle parties. Many an old man here in California has found his deathbed under a tree.

But why all this wandering of the workers here on the coast? All over the world we have tramps. In California, too, we have tramps. Men who go from place to place and come to the back door for hand-outs. But as a rule they don’t carry blankets. The blanket man seldom presents himself for a handout. He is also called a migratory laborer, and that is exactly what he is. By the respectable public in general and the foolish worker in particular, he is called a “hobo.”

The first time I became aware of these numerous workers in California was one summer about ten years ago. I went to a summer resort near Santa Barbara to work. The room in which I worked faced the county road. All day long I observed this blanket man going by. Upon inquiry I got but one answer: “Oh, it’s only them hobos what ain’t fit to do nothin’.” But by asking the men themselves I found that they had either finished some work in field and orchard or was going to places where work was starting in. In short, they were the most useful workers in California. Without them her millions of dollar fruit crop would rot and be ungathered. The same fruit ripens at different times in different places often miles apart. The same way with the hay and the grain. All summer long these “hobos” go from place to place at the right time. Sometimes the work only lasts a week or two, sometimes only a few days, then on to the next place. These men as a rule don’t actually pick any fruit. The towns and large cities are relieved of the poorer workers’ wives, sisters and children to do this. They make all the way from twenty-five cents to a dollar and a half a day. These men do the hauling and lifting and trucking. They very seldom work on piece work, whereas the women and children in field and factory work exclusively on piecework. I was talking to a girl working in a cannery in Sebastopol. With all her frantic effort she could only make sixty cents a day. She then went out in the blackberry field and there made two dollars a day, at the rate of four cents for five pounds, which shows that she was an unusually good worker. The men in the same cannery were paid $1.50 per day. This wage was so small that the men as a rule only worked long enough to enable them to get to the next place. This cannery, therefore, was always short of help and occasionally dumped a load of fruit rotting on their hands, rather than pay decent wages. Besides, the cannery owner set up a perpetual howl about not being able to get workers. “California is short of workers.”

The small farmer who occasionally needs a man or two gets mad because the hobo asks two dollars a day when he only gets $1.50 in the cannery. It shows what a greedy, lazy mortal this hobo is, says the farmer. Mr. Farmer usually wants his temporary help at the same time that the work season is in full blast and can’t always get it; he, too, then sets up a howl about no workers or lazy tramps. In the rainy season practically no work in the country goes on for these migratory workers and they all come into town. The capitalist press now reminds the virtuous citizens of the fact that there is always plenty of work in the country; that the farmers can’t get help, because they have said so over and over again. These respectable citizens as a rule have absolutely no idea of seasons of work and no work in the country, and a regular campaign of vilification is gotten up against this “hobo,” who in the winter crowd the cheap lodging houses and employment offices, where he is often robbed of his little hoard by various means, and “mooches” or begs until the season opens, when he starts on his weary journeys again.

One can never stand upon the public highway and watch this innocent, weary brigade go by without swallowing hard the lumps that rises in one’s throat. As a whole they remind one of the hard-working peasants in Northern Europe. Their stolid faces reproach one. If you have on good clothes they walk by you as though you were of another world. The peasant is a great singer and whistler, but if our “hobo” should relieve his mind upon the public highway by singing and whistling, the county sheriff would immediately use this as an excuse to make a few dollars as “mileage” and put him in the nearest jail for disturbing the public peace. In silence he walks and even then he runs the risk of being arrested as a vagrant.

The Fair in the last year has been used as a bait to run suckers and workers into California, and will be worked to the limit. The capitalist figures that here in California with its mild climate the workers in the last analysis can live cheaper. That is why he begins to look to this state as a paradise for investment and marvelous manufacturing possibilities.

That is the chief reason for that gigantic free speech fight in San Diego. We have had free speech fights many places before, but not any like that. It was carefully planned. That kind of terror was to scare all the workers in every city into silence. The capitalists had a kind of notion that the industrial workers consisted of this “hobo” exclusively, and after all could be eastly whipped by a little firmness. For if he wasn’t whipped in time he would become a school master of the future “hobo,” with which the state must be flooded, who might then be industrially organized and beyond their control. The industrial workers here in California, however, contrary to the belief of most people, do not consist chiefly of the migratory worker. In our organization are all sorts and conditions of workers, from the dainty bookkeeper to the street laborer. I know at least two who are actually not wageworkers, but who were so anxious to get in that they stretched the point and made themselves out as such. I saw a woman not long ago whose husband gets three hundred dollars a week, affectionately examine an I.W.W. button, regretting that she could not be entitled to wear it. The idea that industrial unionism only appeals to a certain kind of worker is the silliest bosh. Industrial unionism will sweep the world.

The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1907 until 1913. First printed in Joliet, Illinois, IUB incorporated The Voice of Labor, the newspaper of the American Labor Union which had joined the IWW, and another IWW affiliate, International Metal Worker.The Trautmann-DeLeon faction issued its weekly from March 1907. Soon after, De Leon would be expelled and Trautmann would continue IUB until March 1909. It was edited by A. S. Edwards. 1909, production moved to Spokane, Washington and became The Industrial Worker, “the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism.”

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/industrialworker/iw/v4n25-w181-sep-12-1912-IW.pdf