Why Portland? Wobblies, Storytellers and the Toilers of the Sea

 When I visit the US this year, I'm not required to spend most of my time nosing around in the IWW archives, as on previous visits. Don't get me wrong, I love archives. I just want to look at some new ones. Though I still feel this is a bit naughty (I'm not over my student hang-ups just yet), I can do whatever research I want. So there. I'm going to visit Portland.

I've been invited to record some lovely significant stories. A Palestinian veteran of the first Intifada, now a resident of the city, has offered to let me record his story. I have been offered a guided tour of co-operative ventures in Oregon from an activists' perspective. How can I, perambulating scrapbook that I am, resist that? It's a sign. Or an excuse. Whatever. There's also the fact, of course, that Portland is famous for having my type of person living in it. That will be fun. Apparently the gentrification process there is a bit out of control too, so I'd love to go see the place now, before it gets too yuppified.

Here's the really fun reason to go Portland.

IWW history. Of course.

For the past few years, I have been immersed, so to speak, in the world of early twentieth century marine transport workers. Particularly those workers who were in the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1910s and 20s, members of the Marine Transport Workers Union, as they called it. That's largely because of Tom Barker, a dedicated and influential Antipodean IWW agitator from this era. My enthusiastic (but short, I promise) description of that research is here.

More generally, I'm interested in the cosmopolitan and syndicalist tendencies that dockworkers and seamen the world over consistently displayed in the twentieth century (and still do, what's left of them). I'm happy to send you a list if you want to read more.

Two historical patterns keep emerging. One is the unusually direct democratic structure of the unions and its effect of keeping the leadership accountable to the rank-and-file . The other is the consistent class solidarity and internationalism of that rank-and-file membership.

Working-class industrial longshoremens' neighbourhoods generally have a mix of open and closed cultural traits such as this book describes, and it's reflected in their unions. To varying degrees, of course.

I found The Portland Longshoremen; a Dispersed Urban Community for sale at the Detroit public library in October 2012, and devoured it over a couple of nights when it was way too cold to go out. It's a good story, as stories about wharfies (that's the Antipodean word for longshoremen) often are. I'm an amateur when it comes to anthropology, but I love reading ethnographic studies. Really good ones are like novels, with the researcher as narrator and participant.

The Portland Longshoremen is particularly participatory. The researcher who conducted the study was a local, born into a Portland longshoring family, and an experienced longshoreman himself. Fortunately, he was doing qualitative research, so this worked out well for him, since his status came from this familiarity with the job, the community and the union, not the fact that he was conducting research for a degree. Workers talked to him because he was an insider.

The Portland longshore workers pop up all the time in IWW history, if you read the primary sources. I think back over all those long hours of scanning microfilm copies of issues of 1919-20 Solidarity (an occupational obligation but hard on the eyes), and the Portland IWW was, well, active. For that matter, the Portland IWW is still active. (I'll be dropping in, for sure).

Pilcher recounts, in this study, the history of the Portland Longshore Union and describes the original influence of IWW longshore workers in its establishment. There is a lot, however, that he doesn't cover (he's doing anthropology, not history, after all), and I have more questions. Research. I love it much more than writing. William does mention “compiling” enormous amounts of historical information. I may be compelled to visit the Stanford repositories.

There's a fashion in labour history theory right now, generally referred to with the prefix “transnational”. It has led, not incidentally, to a scholarly interest in seamen and dockworkers, sailors and radicalism. Very convenient for me. Some of this approach has manifested in the small amount of high quality scholarship that has always been a consistent feature of IWW historical study. Mostly, however, that work tells the story of the wonderful Philadelphia branch of the MTWU, and fair enough. Read Peter Cole's Wobblies on the Waterfront, he has that story covered.

I think the Portland MTWU might be a great case study for my own nefarious purposes. So this year, I'm Portland-bound, seeking stories of the longshore. I want to wallow in the redolences, past and present. Just for fun and peoples history. And, of course, collect the stories I mentioned at the start of this post. Anything else I should do while I'm there?

One more thing. I have found two more books by William Pilcher that are hereby going on my reading pile. Urban anthropology and bibliographies, brilliant.

Pilcher, William W. The Portland Longshoremen; a Dispersed Urban Community. Studies in Cultural Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972.

Cole, Peter. Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.