“The ‘Assassin’ of Wilson”, part one and two of seven
by Louis Adamic, October 1930, American Mercury
I. In the Spring of 1923, working on the docks at San Pedro, in California, I knew a good many IWW’s. The movement was then at its height on the Coast, and they were just starting a new longshoremen’s union in the harbor. Most of the leaders and organizers with whom I came in contact seemed to me to be more or less lopsided fanatics, given to over-dramatizing themselves and their caus.
Perhaps the most level-headed and philosophical of the lot was a tall, gangling fellow, forty-five or so, sharp-featured, with deep-sunken brown eyes and bushy eyebrows, and his left leg stiff in the knee, which in walking made him swing it out sideways in a semi-circle. He was obviously unwell, but still energetic; always coughing slightly, clearing his throat. He had a suggestion of the Indian in his leathery, long face and dark straight hair, which was beginning to gray over the ears; later, when we got acquainted, he told me his was quarter Indian, and a native of Colorado.
One day someone pointed to him in an IWW hangout:Â “That’s Jack Kipps, the guy who assassinated Woodrow Wilson.”
I took this as some sort of wobby joke and thought little of it at the time. The wobblies were full of wild stories. Wilson, in fact, then was still living.
Later I met Kipps, off and on, in the room of a mutual friend, and in the course of a few months he told me, in snatches, probably all there was to know about him.
As a very young man he had been a miner in Colorado. Early in the 1900’s he became a Socialist and developed into an agitator for the radical Western Federation of Miners. He had known Bill Haywood and liked to talk of him. He had had but a few years’ schooling; was self-educated and read, unlike most wobblies, not only radical literature, but everything else that he thought worthwhile and could lay his hands on.
In the so-called Ludlow Massacre in 1913, in which thirty or more working people were killed by employers’ gunmen in a labor dispute, Kipps was shot in his left knee; hence his stiff leg.
During the war he laid low. Having trouble with his chest, he went to the Mojave Desert in Calironia and read Plutarch’s Lives and re-read Dickens and Fielding’s “Tom Jones.”
His health strengthened after the Armistice and he drifted to Seattle, where, in the Spring of 1919, a powerful IWW movement sprang up almost overnight. Ole Hanson was mayor of the city and immediately gained national prominence as a 105% American by his efforts to suppress the wobblies. The country was being swept by the first wave of anti-Red hysteria. There were great strikes along Pugent Sound. The wobblies tied up the port of Seattle, and gangs of American Legion heroes warred upon them.
Kipps soon attained to a sort of leadership among the Seattle IWW’s. He wrote pieces for Solidarity and other wobbly sheets, which often printed his portrait, playing up his part-Indian ancestry to offset the patriots’ charge that the movement was un-American and appealed only to “foreign scum.” He was a leader of the faction that opposed dynamite, arson, gunfire and slugging; he advocated, instead, what he called “non-violent violence” or “the force of numbers.” He published a pamphlet on the subject.
II. One evening, in San Pedro, I remarked to him that I had heard wobblies refer to him as the man who had assassinated Woodrow Wilson; what did they mean by that? I expected him to laugh at my question, but he didn’t, though I knew him to have an active sense of humor. He just sat silent, evidently reluctant to talk about it.
Curious, I urged him to explain to me what the IWW understood by “the assassination of Woodrow Wilson.”
Then he began:
“It happened in Seattle in 1919. As you know, in August of that year, Wilson went on his swing around the country, to appeal to the people for his League of Nations, which the ‘pigmy minds’ in the Senate were determined to kill. He spoke in all the bigger cities and wherever he came the mob cheered him — not quite as wildly as he had been cheered in Europe a few months before, but still.
“According to his schedule, he was due in Seattle on September 13. As you know, the IWW’s were then definitely on the up and up in Seattle, and so about the first of the month we accounced that when Wilson came a delegation of wobblies would call on him and present to him a petition for the release of the political prisoners in the Federal penitentiaries. Of course we didn’t expect him to act on our request, but we figured that presenting the petition would be good propaganda.
“But we no sooner gave out our announcement than the politicians in charge of the preparations let it be known the effective steps would be taken to prevent the wobblies from ‘annoying’ the President. That was the word they used — annoying him. It appeared that we were unworthy of consideration from anybody in authority. We were an ‘outlaw organization’ made up of un-American, low-down foreign scum — an ulcer on the fair and otherwise immaculate body of the Republic.
“Naturally, although scum, we didn’t like this sort of treatment, but we knew that if they wanted to, they could keep our delegation from coming near Wilson. They had their cops and soldiers.
“For two or three days we didn’t know what to do about it. But we couldn’t let Ole Hanson and his gang of petty politicians, and the American Legion, lick us.
“Just then, we were talking a good deal among ourselves about non-violent violence and the force of mere numbers. I was hot for that idea, and still am. So I began to figure how we could get the best of Ole. I hated the little squarehead — not because he was against us, but because he was such a small-time opportunist. I had nothing much against Wilson, and that was true of most wobblies.
“We had numbers. Some of the biggest unions in Seattle were IWW organizations.
“Then I got an idea — an inspiration.
“The idea seemed wonderful to me, and so I got together about a dozen wobs who were sort of active on the agitation end of the movement, and I said to them: ‘When Wilson is driven through the streets in a machine so that the mob can see him and cheer him, why don’t we — thousands of us — line up along certain blocks along the route, all of us dressed in our working clothes, sleeves rolled up, arms folded on our chests? It’ll be Saturday afternoon and all the work will be suspended for the occasion, and some of us aren’t working anyhow. We can get thousands of workers and mass them altogether, occupying, say, five or six blocks. We can get out early so that hoi polloi can’t get those blocks. And when Wilson comes by, we don’t give him a tumble; nobody lets out a sound of cheer and nobody claps his hands. We just stand still, all of us, thousands of us. Just stand still like this, our arms folded — nobody moves and everybody looks straight ahead, not at him, but at nothing at all — just stares past him — everybody still and silent.’