The experience of a strike inevitably crosses paths with the forces of law and order. Experience is the greatest teacher.

‘The Functioning of the Police’ by Frank Dawson from Solidarity. Vol. 4 No. 20. May 24, 1913.

Apparently the hour when all candidates for the police force will be asked, “Are you a professional strike breaker?” is nigh. For that is the most indispensable qualification for the thing we call a cop none but the most stupidly blind can deny.

Lawrence, Little Falls, and recently Akron have been the barometers by which this latent side of the police forces has been registered; and they have shown a surprisingly high water mark of thuggery existing in the forces whom we have always thought preservers of the public peace, until, looking back through the mists of the bygone years, we can hardly discern the day when the police really were useful members of the community; organized by one Robert Peel to protect the lives of the citizens. Indeed so strong and vivid are our impressions of the brutality of the police towards those they have sworn to protect that the age when they really did defend those who had placed faith in them seems almost as mythical as the pagan gods. A thing to speak of but not to believe; merely a beautiful visionary grandmother’s tale. The only remnant of their one time service to the community being the traffic duty they perform in the large cities.

Now looms on the horizon Paterson. The evening scare heads, for that matter the morning ones, too, announce that Paterson is on the eve of a revolt. From their hysterics and dementia one would be tempted to believe some rapacious, blood-sucking, implacable social lion were on the warpath, looking with the intensity and keenness of the king of beasts for blood. Instead of which, closer scrutiny reveals the fact that what really is the trouble is some 20,000 slaves have lost their taste for the whip of economic mastery. Withal, this is not so terrible, for they merely demand a few cents more a week, a little shorter working day and a little longer life as a consequence. Besides which even if their demands were more adequate to their needs, or as the slave owner would think, more atrociously grasping, such fear need not be displayed. For they are a sorry, miserable set of humans, showing in their ragged, pinched aspect the effect of years of subjection and silent misery. Yet my kept ladies of the press set forth and enlarge to a front page item the strike. Why? There have been such strikes before, there will be such again until the workers emerge triumphant. But these other strikes did not get such free advertising. Why? Simply because the police have been functioning and as a result Paterson threatens to be a dead city–plunged into darkness by the folded hands of the electrical and other lighting workers.

That is the why of it all. The Paterson police have been functioning. Bravely and to great effect. Pinching pickpockets, jailing thieves, catching murderers? Not at all. But they have managed to get arrested, with a prospect of railroading to jail, the leaders who have led the Paterson strikers in their fight for more bread, a little more life and a little less hell. Their leader is a worthy if infamous specimen of the modern chief of police. They call him Bimson. This same Bimson is a strong individual who knows his own and other people’s place, too. He has come to realize that the antiquated idea that policemen are for the protection of the life of the community is no longer so important. That the new duties of the police consist vitally in the protection of the factories and workshops of the nations, of the murderers who scab, and of the precious captains of industry under whose divine benevolence industry is so well managed that strikes are reckoned on as very possible contingencies, to be met with threats, those failing with clubs, and in extreme cases with bullets. That in short is Bimson’s conception of duty. Being a brave man he does it with ardor.

Though the clubs of his men reek with the blood of the people, though his ears are assailed by the plaint of people, who have asked for bread and got stones, his hand is not stayed. For his masters have spoken, the fiat has gone forth and ’tis but a policeman’s duty. “To do and to die and not ask the reason why.” So, why blame poor Bimson because the Lord did not bless him with reasoning faculty? Nor is Bimson’s activity limited to a negative defense of capitalist property. He has his finger on the tortuous processes of the law; knows the meaning of a disorderly person. Hence Quinlan is convicted and Bill Haywood faces a seven year term for offending capital. As a result of which even the marvelous patience of the American people breaks down and it has come to be realized that patience can reach such limits where it ceases to become a virtue and is a vice.

Threats of a general strike are heard, talk of plunging the city into darkness are the common topic in Paterson. In which predicament the new powers of the police are best seen. They will man the power stations. For what, to ensure peaceful picketing? ‘Tis to smile at the idea. They will man the power stations to prevent, at the point of the bayonet, any such thing as picketing. To compel the workers in the stations to continue their operations, that men may be railroaded and capitalism survive another shock due to its rottenness: For this do the deluded taxpayers delve into their slender purses; for this they spend much hot air and waste valuable time on elections. The police will man the stations, so enabling light and power be supplied the city. They will forbid the strikers going within speaking distance of the stations, and escort, as though they were guests of honor, the scabs every night and morning to their work; where light and death are furnished at one and the same time. For this is the new power of the police. Well expressed in the play, “The Third Degree,” where the lawyer astounded at police law, turns to a captain and says “Yes, but this is not the law of the land,” only to be answered by the effective retort, “No, but it is police law.” Paterson is under police law. By means of this handy instrument of oppression and suppression all citizens are stripped of their rights; the far-famed first amendment to the Constitution receives its quietus; and we are back in the dark days of Russian tyranny. How? Well, there are ordinances in Paterson as there were ordinances in Lawrence, Little Falls, etc., and just as ordinances can be passed by scared alderman in any city or town in the United States. These ordinances provide for the nuisance of the itinerant beggar and confirmed hobo, making it a misdemeanor to assemble or loiter. But the science of law lies essentially in stretching a point. Hence the police stretch disorderly person to mean all persons not liked by capitalism. You may have been born in Ohio, have lisped the stories of Lincoln’s fight against privilege and even have an idea that the Declaration of Independence would be all right for more than the 4th of July. Still if you go inciting the workers to be men and resist the imposition of wages which mean economic death you are an undesirable citizen. Not being of the elect you must be a disorderly person. If you insist that you are not the police will soon convince you that you suffer from delusions, more dangerous than optical ones.

Again, there is a riot act. Most blessed tool and thrice useful peg of the lords of bread. This riot act was intended to take care of insurrections where physical violence was likely to be or the avowed intention of being the outcome. Such as if people assembled with pistols, guns, swords or other implements of war.

A strikers’ meeting cannot be stretched by even distention of the imaginative powers to come within the category of the riot act. Excepting always, of course, the convenient police hallucinations. When, two, three or even ten thousand men meet together to discuss the means, strictly peaceful, of attaining their ends, the riot act or even the thought of it is an insult to the intelligence of a people who pride themselves on their Republicanism. Yet the degraded and bought police intelligence balks not at this depth of degradation. For if here is no semblance of a riot a reasonable appearance of one can be organized by unscrupulous thugs. All necessary is a little pushing and shoving, a few harsh words, the descent of a club on some defenseless fellow man, the cries of execration at the deed; then the bloody field. A riot has been incited, nursed into furious life, quenched with brutality unspeakable. And a people demanding their rights clubbed and shot into submission, some few in the process into the beyond from which there is no return. Such is a police riot. Out of these “manufactured in the United States articles” anything can be done. Men, dangerous because of their powerful personalities, arrested and railroaded as “Accessories before the Fact.” The literature of the strikers confiscated; their organizations broken up; their spirit broken. Capitalism propped up.

We have seen halls raided without warning; seen three or four people beaten up regularly every day without charges being preferred; seen property confiscated; men thrown into jail for a day or two, then allowed to go, no explanation being forthcoming we have seen men, aye, and women, too, denied a lawyer and railroaded on the evidence of police harlots. All by this same police law, which allows an ignorant police chief to decide where a strikers meeting ends and a social revolution commences.

You say we have a picketing law, a right of free speech, and a Declaration of Independence. Bah, you American fools! The scales of ignorance cloud your sight. How much good are your precious rights when there is a greater might than all these idealisms. A policeman’s club thinks not of rights, nor does a police bullet pick its way to the unjust. You, answer, the police usurped these rights. What of it? They have and use them to your detriment. Moreover, the municipalities permit this vicious growth; their existence depending on it. Rights! The very angels smile at your childish folly. The only, rights are those backed up by might. The police know this. You, groping about in the fogs of your windy ideals, do not. Hence your pitiable plight.

The conditions of today are the inevitable development of the system of capitalism, based on the exploitation of the workers by the shirkers. Its judges, its lawyers, its whole system of jurisprudence is intended to keep the workers in their abject and subject state. When the laws necessary to permit the capitalists to have their little revolution become useful to new revolutionists against capitalism they must be cleared away somehow. If impossible to wipe them out on paper and in constitutions without arousing the populace they can be set aside in emergencies by the police. So we have the growth of police law; a menace of more serious import than ever before, threatened freedom. Allowed to continue the horrors of czardom will sink into insignificance. It will grow in scope and vigor just so long as the social war makes it necessary; there being economic classes to be kept under. You, the workers, are the kept under today. How long are you going to stand for it?

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1913/v04n20-w176-may-24-1913-solidarity.pdf