In reporting the eighth convention of the "Bummery" I. W. W., the _Weekly People_[604] declared that the St. John crowd was in control and that a wooden shoe was made use of in calling the convention in order and attempting to maintain it in order. This meeting continued in session from the 15th to the 29th of September, 1913. There were present thirty-nine delegates and the seven members of the Executive Board. Three national industrial unions were represented: the Textile Workers by two delegates having thirty-one votes; the Forest and Lumber Workers (formerly the Brotherhood of Timber Workers) by one delegate with thirteen votes; and the Marine Transport Workers by one delegate with forty-two votes. The other thirty-five delegates represented eighty-five local unions with one hundred and ninety-two votes.[605]
Attention has been called to the rather tepid discussion of the problem of centralization at the 1912 convention.[606] During the intervening year this question had called forth such bitter factional animosity in the organization that we find it in 1913 divided into two hostile camps and threatened again with disruption. The issue is significantly comparable to the "states' rights" controversy in our political history. The I. W. W. _administration_ and its supporters were, very naturally, "centralists." They favored a strong federal government for the I. W. W. and attacked the "decentralizers'" program for the emasculation of the general administration and the establishment of a loose confederation of sovereign local unions--the states' rights program in industry. The states' rights doctrine failed of acceptance in the I. W. W. as it has failed in American politics. Nevertheless, the decentralization crisis in the I. W. W. deserves more than passing notice. In the first place, the doctrine was not annihilated in 1913; it was merely smothered. The I. W. W. may yet be "unscrambled." In the second place, this issue is perhaps the most fundamental one ever given wide discussion by the I. W. W. membership. It involves directly the whole question of the structure of the organization, the proper distribution of functions and authority among the several parts of the organization and, indirectly, questions of efficiency in carrying on propaganda and organizing work and of the relative merits of authoritarian (state) socialism and so-called "voluntary socialism." As the two groups lined up at Chicago in 1913, we may say that the controversy between the administration's supporters and the defenders of the local unions was, on the whole, a struggle between the western membership, individualistic and tainted with anarchism, and the eastern membership, more schooled to subordination--infected with state socialism.