In President Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address on Feb. 7, there was one honest moment. Biden said, “I am a capitalist.” Well, he fudged a bit; he should have said, I am a capitalist and a servant to capitalism. But that’s a quibble.
Behind all of the rhetoric of “leave nobody behind,” almost everyone — with the exception of the wealthiest 1%, including the arms dealers, big oil and gas, and, of course, the Pentagon — have been left behind.
On this day, 4 February 1924, around 175 radical Industrial Workers of the World union members took on the Ku Klux Klan, patrolling the streets of Greenville, Maine, after the KKK tried to threaten IWW union organisers.
Logging workers in the area were organising for better pay and conditions when around 40 Klansmen had visited a boardinghouse where IWW members (known as Wobblies) were staying and ordered them to leave. Local wobbly organiser Bob Pease charged that the KKK was doing the bidding of lumber companies, and told the local Press Herald that they opposed the IWW “because we want good wages, eight hours a day in the lumber camps and clean linen on our bunks".
The IWW was also ordered to leave the town by local authorities, but they defied both the government and the KKK, and instead organised and took to the streets, declaring “We are going to stick, and if the Klan wants to start something, the IWW are going to finish it”.
Learn more about the IWW in our podcast series: https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/iww/https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2202503223268149/?type=3
