This temporary membership consists mostly of foreign workmen who
are recent immigrants. What may be termed the permanent
membership is difficult to estimate. In 1913 there were about
14,000 members. In 1917 the membership was estimated at 75,000.
Though this is probably a maximum rather than an average,
nevertheless the members are mostly young men whose revolutionary
ardor counterbalances their want in numbers. It is, moreover, an
organization that has a wide penumbra. It readily attracts the
discontented, the unemployed, the man without a horizon. In an
instant it can lay a fire and put an entire police force on the
qui vive.
The organization has always been in financial straits. The source
of its power is to be sought elsewhere. Financially bankrupt and
numerically unstable, the I.W.W. relies upon the brazen cupidity
of its stratagems and the habitual timorousness of society for
its power. It is this self-seeking disregard of constituted
authority that has given a handful of bold and crafty leaders
such prominence in the recent literature of fear. And the members
of this industrial Ku Klux Klan, these American Bolsheviki,
assume to be the "conscious minority" which is to lead the ranks
of labor into the Canaan of industrial bliss.
CHAPTER X. LABOR AND POLITICS
In a democracy it is possible for organized labor to extend its
influence far beyond the confines of a mere trade policy. It can
move the political mechanism directly in proportion to its
capacity to enlist public opinion.
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