"This Once Happy Brood..." an IWW Tragedy

 The Sundstedt Family Story

"This once happy little brood is now broken up." EF Moffett.

This little girl with the big eyes is Mae Sundstedt, Junior Wobbly, in 1924. Mae was the eldest child of Fellow Worker Lizzie Sundstedt, an active and well-known member of the San Pedro IWW local.

On June 14th, 1924, 12 year old Mae and her family were at the San Pedro IWW Hall, participating in a benefit for the families of two workers accidentally killed on the job. San Pedro was (and still is) a working port, and for longshore workers, passing round the hat in such circumstances is standard practice and was a frequent occurrence in the early twentieth century.

The Junior Wobblies were putting on a show, so there were several of them at the benefit. Mae was scheduled to perform a dance.

At 8.20pm, a mob of vigilantes, armed with brass knuckles, lead pipes and guns, attacked the Hall. It was a well-planned attack, deliberately organised with violence in mind. Seven of the children present, including Mae and her little sister Lillian, were deliberately pushed into an urn of boiling coffee.

The attackers beat and clubbed men, women and children. Thirty of them were badly injured. Nine of the men were transported past county lines into the desert, and beaten, tarred and feathered, and left there. Many a Wobbly was treated so in the 1910s and 20s, particularly in the south-west of the United States.

Lizzie Sundstedt was herself beaten severely. She might have recovered from those injuries, if she had not had to care for two badly burned children. When she died 6 weeks later, Mae attended the funeral carried on a stretcher.

Background and Sources

Over the previous six months, the IWW Hall on 12th Street, which still stands today, despite everything, saw several raids from the police and right-wing vigilante groups, often working in collusion.

On March 17th, for example, the police raided the hall, arrested four men, and seized books and documents. Outside were 20 cars containing about 100 Ku Klux Klansmen in full regalia. When the cops left, the Klansmen moved in and completely destroyed the interior building and the furniture. Throughout the 1920s IWW Halls all over the United States were continually raided in this fashion.

It is in great part due to those raids that good documentation of IWW history is sparse; and yet, (irony alert), these same raids mean that some of those sources were also preserved in state archives and libraries after they were confiscated. In this case, The University of Washington Library has digitised and made publically accessible this rare primary source collection:

"San Pedro", University of Washington Libraries Digital Collection

The 9 photographs were taken, in the aftermath of the June 14th attack, by Fellow Worker EF Moffett, who knew the Sundstedts well enough to speak at Lizzie's large and well-attended funeral. In an article for Industrial Solidarity, he wrote:

"I found May[sic] Sunstedt on her bed still bleeding and suffering from the effects of the scalds and brutalities done her by the mobsters, who attacked her and several other children in the Industrial Workers of the World hall just fifty days ago. It will be many weeks before this little child will be able to leave her bed. With her were her little sister and brother who were crying, and between sobs they told me that the best friend they had in the world was gone. The undertaker had taken their mother away this morning."

These photographs are a gift for the IWW scholar. They invest this episode with immediacy and individuality. Too often, IWW sources must be considered representative, those fragments we have standing in for all the lost and destroyed records of the raids, beatings, deportations and arrests that the union and its people endured. With the addition of these photographs, we have the "story" element so important to the telling and making of history. The participants become specific individuals, with emotions and experiences, rather than just another member of a crowd, and we can place ourselves and our readers there/then much more effectively with a visual tool.

Lizzie Sundstedt's son would go on to become a founding member of the San Pedro ILWU. All over the West Coast, there are examples of the IWW influence on this significant and persistently radical union. The Sundstedt family still live and work in San Pedro today.

The history of the San Pedro IWW has been neglected even amongst the admittedly select group known as IWW scholars. Hence this telling. Feel free to retell it.

first published February 10, 2016