| January 27, 2006 Alaska's Radical Labor History: 1905-1920 by Brian Yanity, insurgent49 Never heard of the Alaska Socialist Party, or how big (proportionately) it was nine decades ago? As George Orwell once said, who controls the past controls the future. To begin, we must go back to the Alaska of a century ago. In 1906, Morgan-Guggenheim Alaska Syndicate consolidated its hold on mineral lands, salmon canneries, and steamships. Price-gouging by the Northern Commercial Company was the result of another monopoly in Alaska’s towns and mining camps. Socialism and labor radicalism were relatively popular in the western U.S. at the time, due to the obvious dependency upon resource-extraction corporations controlled by East Coast capital. Seattle and San Francisco, whose ports were the economic lifeline of Alaska, were also hotbeds for radical labor activism. After the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an anarcho-syndicalist union, initiated strikes in Seattle and Everett, corporate spies looked for radicals as far north as Alaska’s mines. The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) led union organizing efforts in Nome, the Tanana Valley, and Juneau between 1906 and 1908. Formed in 1893 in Butte, Montana, the WFM officially became a socialist union in 1902. In 1905, the WFM was one of the charter unions at the Chicago founding conference of the Industrial Workers of the World. The peak Alaska membership of the WFM was 6,000 around 1908, and the majority of Alaskan miners during this time were unionized.
The Nome Mine Workers Union (WFM Local 240) became very active in local politics. The Nome Labor Party was started as an electoral cooperation between the Nome locals of the WFM and the more conservative American Federation of Labor. In April 1906, the Nome Labor Party ticket won the mayoralty and five out of seven seats on the city council, running on an anti-corruption platform. The Labor party won a majority of Nome city council seats again in 1907. A leading Nome Labor Party council member, Joseph Chilberg, was an Alaska-wide candidate for the territory’s U.S. Congress representative in 1908. Chilberg won 25% of the votes cast in the territory, coming in second place. However, the Nome Labor Party’s influence had dwindled by the 1912 elections. Nome’s gold fields had declined by then, and so had the town’s population. Insurgent49 is hardly Alaska’s first left-wing periodical. The Nome Industrial Worker newspaper was started in 1906 as the official organ of the WFM local 240, and lasted until 1919. In 1912, Socialist Party organizer Lena Morrow Lewis started publishing the semimonthly Alaska Socialist newspaper in Fairbanks, which lasted for about three years. Two other left-wing Fairbanks publications from this period that were shorter-lived were the Tanana Valley Socialist and the Socialist Press. Around the same time, Gustave Sandberg served as secretary of the Alaska Socialist Educational Society, which did such activities as lecturing in mining camps. At least several times, a young writer named Jack London was one of the lecturers. The western half of the country gave the Socialist Party of America disproportionate level of support during its peak period of 1910-1920. Between its founding in 1898 and the beginning of World War I, the Socialist Party had won two seats in Congress, dozens of seats in state legislatures, and the mayoralty of more than 80 cities and towns including Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Butte, and Berkeley. By the 1912 elections, Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs received 916,000 votes, or 6% of the national total. A Lithuanian-born lawyer from Ketchikan, Kazis Krauczunas, ran for territorial delegate to congress on the Socialist Party ticket in 1912. Krauczunas came in third, receiving 1688 votes of a total of 8,204 cast, including 43% of the vote in Ketchikan. By this time, the Socialist Party had at least ten locals across Alaska, including Juneau, Ketchikan, Seldovia, Nome, Valdez, Fairbanks and several Interior mining camps. Rural Alaska mining camps provided the Socialist Party with the bulk of its support. In 1913, Socialist J.E. Moody was elected treasurer of the Fairbanks School Board. In March 1914, a socialist convention was held in Fairbanks which officially formed the Alaska Socialist Party, with territorial headquarters for the party also established in Fairbanks. The Alaska Socialist Party’s 1914 platform preamble read, in part: The
dreams of the lonely prospector are
giving way to the ugly realities of wage slavery and job hunting. The
nightmare of Capitalism already haunts the workers of Alaska. It is
only a matter of time until all the accompanying evils of this system
will be rampant in the Golden North.
Other Alaska Socialist Party planks at the time included union-protection laws, elimination of absentee mine claim-staking, and the federal funding of new railroads and highways. It should be noted that there is no evidence of an Alaska Natives joining the territorial Socialist Party, and there is no record of its stance on the ‘Native question’. Unfortunately, the U.S. Socialist Party at the time had at best a mixed record on fighting racism. In Alaska, any official effort to combat legal discrimination had to wait until the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945. In 1916, the socialist-led Alaska Labor Union (ALU) was formed in Anchorage by 1,200 Alaska Railroad construction workers. In February of 1916, track gangs working for 37½ cents/hour went on strike, demanding wages of 50 cents/hour. The strike turned out to be successful for the union, and was settled in the spring. However, ALU-endorsed candidates did poorly in Alaska’s 1916 elections. For example, Lena Morrow Lewis received only 9 percent of the vote in the election for territorial delegate to Congress. However, an eight-hour day law was passed by 80% of Alaska voters in the same election. The ALU constructed a “Labor Temple” building, the Union Hotel (for ALU members only), and started publishing the Alaska Labor News, which continued until June of 1917. The October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia caused some excitement among a small number of Alaska labor unionists, including a few in Nome who even proposed that a ‘soviet’ (workers council) govern the town. However, the U.S. government started to heavily repress the worker’s movement nationwide in response to such threats. Robert Smith, an IWW member working for the ALU was arrested in Nenana in December 1917, and charged with sedition and treason for attempting to incite a strike during wartime. After 1914, there were sectarian splits in the Fairbanks Socialist Party local that led to its total disintegration by 1915. This was in tune with the fragmentation going on in the Socialist Party nationwide at the time. Disagreements over the breakout of the First World War and the federal government’s “Palmer Raids” were the main reasons for this. Several key Alaskan labor unionists and Socialist Party leaders were tried for sedition around 1920, and the majority of the Alaska Socialist Party leadership had left the territory by 1918. As the railroad construction boom ended by the early 1920s, Anchorage’s population dwindled from 6000 to fewer than 2000 people. The ALU declined as well. Similar declines happened in the mining industries of Nome and Fairbanks. At the end of WWI, the membership of the ALU was very small. The remaining members formed the short-lived Alaska Industrial Union in 1920. In the end, territorial Alaska’s boom-bust economy and highly transient labor force proved too unstable an environment for a worker-based political movement. Alaskans today can learn a lot from this almost-forgotten history of labor-based radical politics in the Great Land. Despite their political failures, the efforts and visions of radical Alaskans from nearly a century ago can serve as an inspiration to today's progressive activists determined to create a better future. Brian Yanity is a graduate student at UAA, where he is president of the Palestine Club and the Sustainable Energy Society. Brian resides in an undisclosed location in Southcentral Alaska. He can be reached at byanity@insurgent49.com. |
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Reserved. in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership. |
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