The effect of the strike on the membership of the I. W. W. in Lawrence was to increase it greatly but only temporarily. Just after the strike the organizers claimed 14,000 members in Lawrence. In October, 1913, there were 700.[581] An investigator for the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations reports that they had over 10,000 members immediately after the strike.[582] The I. W. W. itself claimed 20,000 in Lawrence in June, 1912, as well as 28,000 in Lowell, and boasted that "in nearly every town in the New England states there are locals ranging from 800 to 5,000 in membership."[583] The Federal investigator referred to puts the Lawrence membership of the I. W. W. in 1914 at about 400 and says that local I. W. W. officials attribute this low figure to unemployment, but he himself thinks that other factors entered.[584] The wage increase gained was, he said, offset by the increased speed required on the machines.
This amounted to 50 per cent. Another factor was the forced scattering of I. W. W. leaders after the strike. He found in 1914 only one of eight local I. W. W. leaders who were there at the time of the strike and reports that the employers established a system of espionage in the mills.[585]
Lawrence made the I. W. W. famous, especially in the East. It stirred the country with the alarming slogans of a new kind of revolution. Socialism was respectable--even reactionary--by comparison. The "Wobblies" frankly abjured the rules under which, as they would express it, the capitalist game is played. They said: "If it serves our interests as members of the working class to obey certain accepted canons of conduct, we will obey them because it would be detrimental to our class to disobey them." Lawrence was not an ordinary strike. It was a social revolution _in parvo_. St. John is said to have written to Haywood, "a win in the Lawrence mills means the start that will only end with the downfall of the wage system."[586] This was a class war and the I. W. W. insists that the principle of military necessity justifies it in a policy of _schrecklichkeit_, at least to property, which on the syndicalist hypothesis was stolen anyway, in the beginning. The I. W. W. abjures current ethics and morality as _bourgeois_, and therefore inimical to the exploited proletarian for whom a new and approved system of proletarian morality is set forth. In this proletarian code the sanctions of conduct are founded on the (material) interests of the proletarian, _as such_. The criterion is expediency--effectiveness to one particular end, the overthrow of the wage system and the establishment of--something else--the words _industrial democracy_ or _coöperative commonwealth_ are commonly used in reference to that nebulous future state that all radicals see as in a glass, more or less darkly. This means that staid old New England was confronted with an organization which derided all her fond moralities. The most shocking _défi_ of these I. W. W.s was the _défi_ they hurled at the church. Only less so was the _défi_ they leveled at the flag. The I. W. W. said that the church, obedient to the dictates of big business, preached to the workers a servile obedience now for the sake of a hypothetical heaven of comfort later; "_ergo_," they said, "the church is unethical and we abjure it for a superior proletarian ethics." It considered that the flag was being made the excuse for a jingo patriotism which made the enlargement and conquest of markets and the further exploitation of labor the end and aim of patriotism. In brief, the church and the flag are made to serve commercialism. Commercialism is evil because unjust. Therefore, its servants are, _pro tanto_, evil also and rightly to be repudiated.