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Wobblies, but it was not until nearly three years later that the I. W. W. free-speech epidemic assumed national proportions. Since 1909 the I. W. W.s have attracted quite as much attention by their dramatic free-speech controversies with municipal authorities here and there as they have by the time-honored resort to the strike. During the next few years after the schism of 1908 these free-speech struggles became rather frequent. The Pacific slope is the most fruitful soil for these conflicts. Labor is more mobile there, and when the organizers in any particular town are arrested for preaching revolution a more effective call to
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is possible. On the Pacific slope the
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Wobblies almost literally broke into the jails by hundreds. They came to speak, but with the nearly certain foreknowledge that they would be collared by the police before they said many words. They simply crowded the jails, and in this way, as they intended, clogged the machinery of municipal administration by making themselves the guests of the city in such numbers as to be no inconsiderable burden to their real hosts, the taxpayers. Vincent St. John, then Secretary-Treasurer of the I. W. W., recently told the United States Commission on Industrial Relations that