Religion, Socialism, and the Industrial Workers of the World

RELIGION, SOCIALISM, AND THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD

An Army of Church Invaders

"Six hundred unemployed men crept into the Labor Temple at Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street last night, while the lights were out for a moving picture show," The New York Times reported on 1 March 1914. When asked what they wanted, their leader, Frank Tannenbaum, replied, "We have come to take possession of this place for the night. We intend to stay.…If you try to put us out, the floor of this place will run with blood." The church capitulated somewhat to the demand, agreeing to house sixty-five men who said they had nowhere else to sleep for the night and peacefully dispersing the rest. Between 1 March and 5 March, Tannenbaum led his "army of the unemployed" into a series of churches in New York City, demanding food and shelter. They were welcomed by the pastor of St. Mark's Protestant Episcopal Church on behalf of the parish's socialist fellowship, but elsewhere, including a tony Fifth Avenue Protestant church, they were turned away or even arrested. Many churches simply postponed their regularly scheduled evening meetings that week and locked their doors, because "they feared a visit from Tannenbaum's army." The New York Times editorialized against these invaders, charging Tannenbaum with inciting lawlessness and anarchy. Tannenbaum had struck a nerve; he brought sharply to the public eye the growing struggle between established religion and the burgeoning socialist labor movement in America. At the age of twenty-one, Tannenbaum already served as the perfect symbol for this battle. An active leader of a radical new union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Tannenbaum marched his army into New York City's churches demanding Christian charity—and, as he had suspected would be the case, often found the churches unresponsive.

CHURCH MEMBERSHIP IN THE 1910s

Between 1911 and 1918 total church membership in the United States increased from 36 million to 41.5 million, with most religious bodies enjoying modest growth. Catholicism continued to expand at the most prodigious rate, adding two million members in this seven-year period.

Denomination	Members in 1911	Members in 1918
Seventh-Day Adventist	95,808	123,768
Baptist	5,775,358	7,213,922
Congregationalist	738,761	815,396
Disciples of Christ	1,533,962	1,511,160
Eastern Orthodox	424,000	472,794
Episcopal	947,320	1,072,321
Society of Friends (Quakers)	122,796	119,233
Latter-Day Saints	400,650	435,797
Lutheran	2,289,897	2,443,812
Methodist	6,819,660	7,579,311
Presbyterian	1,944,181	2,259,358
Roman Catholic	12,778,707	14,927,466

Sources:

The American Year Book, 1912 (New York: Applcton, 1913); The American Year Book, 1919 (New York: Appleton, 1920).

A Foreign Peril

Tannenbaum threw into bold relief the contrast that had existed implicitly within main-stream Protestantism since the founding of the IWW. On the one hand the Social Gospel movement continued to expand in the 1910s, calling for labor and economic reforms to ameliorate the conditions under which people lived and worked. On the other hand, even liberal Protestant ministers took care to distance themselves from the IWW and the socialism and "anarchy" it represented. The New York church "invasions" served only to deepen this division, particularly after Tannenbaum expressed sentiments such as, "If it is against the law to break windows behind which is bread, then I say that when I am hungry I refuse to be a law-abiding citizen." By the time World War I broke out, the IWW had become a symbol for every foreign peril feared by Americans. Many pacifists, including some famous pacifist ministers, had socialist leanings or sympathies; some, like the Congregationalist Sydney Strong, had expressed their support for the IWW. Thus, aside from not supporting the war effort, such men and women faced questions about their patriotic loyalty for other reasons as well. The symbolic connections between pacifism and anarchism were well established but also highly flexible. Thus when Shirley Jackson Case, a liberal theologian and committed patriot, wanted to attack premillennialists for not supporting the war, he published an article in June 1918 titled "The Premillennial Menace," in which he charged that premillennialism was "a short step" from the IWW and anarchy—despite the fact that many premillennialists were staunchly opposed to socialism (as their response to the Red Scare of 1919-1920 would show). In a time when Christianity and civilization were equated by many Protestants, so that religion and patriotism went hand in hand, the IWW represented a serious challenge to both. It was a challenge that, by and large, religion did not meet gracefully.

"Sky-Pilots."

Nor, for that matter, did the IWW issue its challenge subtly. The church invasions under Tannenbaum were only a small part of a much larger campaign launched by the IWW to call Protestant churches to task for their "hypocrisy." They seemed to accept Christianity in a general sense—indeed, Jesus, the radical carpenter from Nazareth, provided them with a powerful role model—but felt that established religious bodies utterly failed to embody Christ's teachings. The "Wobblies," as the IWW members were called, took to the pages of their publications to lambaste any and all religious leaders who failed to live up to Jesus' ethical demands. The IWW press denounced religious leaders from Gen. William Booth of the Salvation Army to evangelist Billy Sunday, all of whom, it was charged, amassed small (or large, in Sunday's case) fortunes in the course of their religious work. Such religious leaders were compared by the Wobblies to Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus; and Ananias, a figure from the New Testament book of the Acts of the Apostles who was struck down for refusing to turn all his property over to the early Christian church. Tannenbaum and his fellow IWW members also resented the preaching that often went along with relief work in the early twentieth century—the before-meal sermons delivered at urban missions throughout the country, in which the unemployed and downtrodden were exhorted to examine their own moral track records and look to salvation in the next life rather than in this one. This led the Wobblies to coin their pejorative nick-name for ministers: "sky-pilots." It also made the preachers tools of the status quo, in the eyes of the IWW; it was no wonder, one editor wrote, that when Billy Sunday toured the state of Washington, "some of the sawmill companies allowed their slaves to attend the services at the tabernacle on the company's time." When Tannenbaum led his army into New York's churches, then, he was insisting on receiving Christian charity without what he considered Christian claptrap. "He complained that on the night before religion had been forced on them at the Bible Study Class Mission, after they had received food." He exhorted his followers, in his own kind of, sermon, "And, men, don't go to the missions. Don't become men who are converted every night for the sake of a place to sleep. We're tired of that, too."

War and Peace

The Wobblies were also tired, they discovered as the decade wore on, of religion being used to glorify war. This was another respect in which they felt they had caught the churches red-handed in hypocrisy. "We claim to worship the Prince of Peace, / But trust in the sword and gun" ran part of one IWW poem. The editor of the Industrial Worker made it even clearer: "Even the devil, bad as his reputation is, would not be guilty of the crimes with which they are trying to saddle God. No God or devil would ever fall so low as to fight for the American munition trusts." The Protestant mainstream had, to a large extent, thrown its lot in wholeheartedly with progressive American culture as a perfect meshing of values. Some conservative Protestants claimed that this alliance made the churches every bit as corrupt as the culture was. For almost exactly the opposite reasons, the IWW came to much the same conclusion in the 1910s. American Christianity was clearly, to them, far too comfortable in a valueless economic system. The churches unintentionally helped to prove the point by locking their doors when the Wobblies came, in the name of the carpenter of Nazareth, the great friend of the poor and of the peacemakers, seeking food and a place to spend the night.

Sources:

"Unemployed Invade the Labor Temple," New York Times, 1 March 1914, p. 1;

"Urges Workless on to Anarchy," New York Times, 3 March 1914, p. 1;

Donald E. Winters Jr., The Soul of the Wobblies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985).