A. S. Embree was an American union organizer, Christian minister, and, leader in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).[1] Embree served as the secretary-treasurer pro-tem of the national IWW for a period of two months after the national office was raided by federal agents.[2][3]
Embree was the editor of the Nome Industrial Worker in Nome, Alaska and chairman of the Bisbee, Arizona IWW strike committee.[4] He was among the union men deported during the Bisbee Deportation, July 12, 1917. He later returned to Bisbee, and was arrested on a charge of inciting a riot. After a change of venue, he was tried in Tucson, and acquitted minutes after testimony was completed.[5][6] Embree then again returned to Bisbee, and was jailed for three months, and threatened with lynching if he did not leave for good.[7]
Embree sought relief from the federal government, arguing that he had the right to live with his wife and children wherever he chose. The federal government informed him that they saw no grounds on which to intervene.[8]
He then worked as an organizer in Butte, Montana, and then traveled to Idaho, where he was arrested for making speeches and distributing literature for the IWW.[9] Embree was convicted of violating Idaho's Criminal Syndicalism Act in Shoshone County in 1921, and spent more than three years in jail.[10] After he was released, he began organizing coal miners in Colorado in March 1926, focusing in particular on Walsenburg, Colorado.[11]
↑ Stephen Martin Kohn, American political prisoners: prosecutions under the espionage and sedition acts, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994, page 170.
1 2 Jonathan Rees, Representation and rebellion: the Rockefeller plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914-1942, University Press of Colorado, 2010
↑ Ben Fogelberg, Western voices: 125 years of Colorado writing, Colorado Historical Society, Fulcrum Publishing, 2004, page 190.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose members are nicknamed "Wobblies", is an international labor union founded in Chicago in 1905. The nickname's origin is uncertain. Its ideology combines general unionism with industrial unionism, as it is a general union, subdivided between the various industries which employ its members. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism", with ties to socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements.
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The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is a union of wage workers which was formed in Chicago in 1905 by militant unionists and their supporters due to anger over the conservatism, philosophy, and craft-based structure of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Throughout the early part of the 20th century, the philosophy and tactics of the IWW were frequently in direct conflict with those of the AFL concerning the best ways to organize workers, and how to best improve the society in which they toiled. The AFL had one guiding principle—"pure and simple trade unionism", often summarized with the slogan "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." The IWW embraced two guiding principles, fighting like the AFL for better wages, hours, and conditions, but also promoting an eventual, permanent solution to the problems of strikes, injunctions, bull pens, and union scabbing.
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The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is a union of wage workers which was formed in Chicago in 1905. The IWW experienced a number of divisions and splits during its early history.
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