The ‘Red Summer’ of 1919 with its mass deportations, mob violence, political repression, and racist pogroms was not an outlier, but a pattern-setter.

‘The Ku Klux Government’ from One Big Union Monthly. Vol. 1 No. 6. August, 1919.

THERE is nothing like the sense of security in a country where there is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The liberty loving person can simply not breathe freely in any other kind of country. Such a country, the U.S. of America is supposed to be and was perhaps intended to be, but as a matter of fact, it has ceased to be a refuge of those who seek liberty. Over and above the government, federal and state, instituted by the vote of the people, there is a secret and invisible government, which affects our daily life in a most disastrous manner. When the necessities of life suddenly spring up so that you stand aghast, then you immediately get a vision of the profiteer and your blood surges in resentment. Little did you think that at that instant the black hand of the invisible government was on your throat. This same invisible government left traces at Homestead, at Ludlow, in Everett, on the Mesaba Range and in Lawrence, etc. It left traces behind at the hanging of Frank Little, at the legal murder of Joe Hill, at the numerous lynchings thruout the country, at the repeated Ku Klux visits, such as recently in Lawrence, when the editor of the textile workers’ paper was beaten almost to death by the Ku Klux gang. It is leaving traces in the imprisonment in Kansas jails for nearly two years of two score fellows without trial. The same invisible government is leaving traces in the tar and feather party at Tulsa, in the illegal closing of I.W.W. halls at Seattle, and in the equally illegal mass arrests of I.W.W. men in California. The latest grewsome evidence of the existence and the activity of this secret and invisible government ‘is contained in the following special telegram from Virginia, Minn., dated July 8th.

Telegram:

“Ludnick Satina, delegate of Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union Number 800 was yesterday taken by force by a gang of men and carried away in an auto fifteen miles outside Gilbert, Minn. He was terribly beaten up and told that if he returned to the city they would hang him. It was the stools of the mining company that did it. Signed, A.W. Thorne.”

As long as this secret and invisible government can with absolute impunity commit such acts almost daily in all parts of the country without serious effort to trace and punish them, we are compelled to consider the governments of the states and the nation, as outlined in the various constitutions, as mere camouflage governments while the real government is the secret and invisible one which can be traced only by the trail of violence and bloodshed and murder which it leaves behind. With the camouflage government, the I.W.W. has no fight. We don’t fight wind mills, mirages or paste governments. We only take this opportunity to accuse them of not fulfilling their part of the contract which calls for the protection of the citizens and bringing to justice of the criminals.

Our fight is with the secret and invisible government which to us is neither secret nor invisible. We know where that government is located and we know of what persons it is composed. Its capitol is in Wall Street, and its officials are the defenders of the private ownership of the means of production thruout the country. Its executive servants are stools, finks, gunmen and murderers. That government, we frankly confess, we intend to overthrow and that is going to be accomplished by organizing the productive and distributive forces of the world along industrial lines, so that the people themselves can take over production and distribution.

One Big Union Monthly was a magazine published in Chicago by the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World from 1919 until 1938, with a break from February, 1921 until September, 1926 when Industrial Pioneer was produced. OBU was a large format, magazine publication with heavy use of images, cartoons and photos. OBU carried news, analysis, poetry, and art as well as I.W.W. local and national reports.

PDF of full issue: https://archive.org/download/sim_one-big-union-monthly_1919-08_1_6/sim_one-big-union-monthly_1919-08_1_6.pdf