to the Industrial Workers of the World, which was founded in 1905 and achieved national prominence after its victory in the textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. John Graham Brooks, a progressive, saw the syndicalist movement as an ominous foretaste of the social convulsions that could be expected if the nation failed to provide a better standard of living for the workers and refused to allow them "some voice in management." Founded on a "convulsive and incendiary appeal to the forgotten masses," syndicalism effectively exploited their misery. It was the "child of disillusionment." Its leaders could point to the failure of political reforms as an argument for "direct action." They had no "constructive" program of their own, according to Brooks, but they would continue to win new recruits as long as American society remained indifferent to the workers' reasonable demand for a better life.

Social democrats, more immediately threatened by the IWW, took a harsher stand against violence, sabotage, and "dual unionism" (the attempt to replace craft unions with industrial unions committed to the strategy of direct action). In 1912, the Socialist party voted to expel anyone who rejected political action or advocated "crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence." Party leaders seemed to regard syndicalism as a greater menace to the working-class movement than capitalism itself. Morris Hillquit, speaking for the resolution to expel the IWW, said that neither the "capitalist class" nor the Catholic church could "check or disrupt the Socialist movement," only "injudicious friends from within."

Progressives deplored working-class violence but pointed out that it was often provoked by the violence of employers. When capitalists themselves openly defied the law, they could hardly expect workers to renounce the use of force. Brooks objected to the "moral poltroonery of forcing a standard upon the weak which the strong will not recognize or obey." Such qualifications seldom appeared in the attacks on the IWW launched by social democrats. John Spargo denounced violence as the "weapon of the slum proletariat." It grew out of a "slave morality," according to W. J. Ghent, not a "working-class morality." The "practical policies" of the IWW were "purely anarchistic and anti-socialist," Spargo declared, and a compromise between syndicalism and socialism was unthinkable. In his Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism (1913), Spargo tried to show that syndicalists had merely revived the overheated fantasies of Robert Owen and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, long since discredited by Marx. Their movement was pre-Marxist and prescientific,

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