Socialists, Wobblies and the War Years, 1912 to 1920

The Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World were not the same organization. The Socialists ran candidates and tried to win elections. The Wobblies organized workers into "One Big Union" and used strikes. Idaho had both in the 1910s, and the state treated them differently: the Socialists got votes and the Wobblies got arrested. Keeping that distinction clear is the first job of this lesson.

1912: Debs on the Idaho ballot

Idaho's 1912 presidential ballot had five names. Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, won the state with 33,921 votes (32.08 percent). William Howard Taft, the Republican, received 32,810 (31.02 percent), and Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Progressive ticket, received 25,527 (24.14 percent). Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist, received 11,960 votes, or 11.31 percent of the 105,754 cast. Prohibition candidate Eugene Chafin received 1,536.¹²

Two cautions apply. First, these are votes for a Socialist Party candidate. The American Presidency Project, which publishes the Idaho row, labels them as Socialist Party votes, and the research file behind this module repeats the warning: they must not be counted as Communist Party membership or support.³ The Communist movement did not exist in 1912. It grew out of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the splits in the American Socialist Party after it (lesson 4).

Second, a vote is a single act on a single day. It does not tell us whether the voter was a member of the party, read its newspapers or shared its platform. A voter might choose Debs over two major parties he disliked, or in protest against a particular local employer. The honest statement is the narrow one: 11,960 Idahoans voted for the Socialist candidate for president in 1912.

Where Debs ran strongest

The county table is more revealing than the statewide total. Debs's best Idaho county by share was Bonner County, with 25.64 percent (1,058 votes). Clearwater County gave him 18.05 percent (284 votes) and Shoshone County 16.50 percent (834 votes). His largest vote totals came from Bonner (1,058), Kootenai (1,030), Canyon (848) and Shoshone (834). His weakest showings were in Bear Lake County (1.28 percent, 32 votes), Oneida County (3.69 percent, 145 votes) and Ada County (5.99 percent, 599 votes).¹

The highest shares were in the timber and mining counties of the north, which fits the labor history in lesson 2. But Debs also drew 10 to 15 percent in several farm and Snake River counties (Twin Falls 14.6, Lincoln 12.6, Fremont 10.9 percent), so the pattern is not only a Panhandle one. These are observations about where the votes were, not proof of what the voters believed. A researcher who wants to say why Bonner County voted this way needs local sources: newspapers, union records, county minutes.

The Socialist ticket for governor, 1908 to 1916

Idaho's Socialists did more than vote for Debs. They nominated candidates for governor. Wikipedia's election pages, which draw on the CQ Guide, list four: Ernest Untermann in 1908 (6,155 votes, 6.38 percent), L. A. Coblentz in 1912 (11,094 votes, 10.51 percent) and again in 1914 (7,967 votes, 7.38 percent), and Annie E. Triplow in 1916 (7,321 votes, 5.44 percent). No Socialist nominee is listed for 1918.⁴ Wikipedia also says Untermann ran in 1910; that is unverified here.⁵ These are candidates, not officeholders. In 1912 Coblentz ran a little behind Debs's 11.31 percent. The vote totals are Wikipedia's, not the state canvass, so check them before citing.

What we cannot yet say about Idaho Socialist officeholders

Nationally, the University of Washington's Mapping American Social Movements project reports that more than 1,000 Socialist candidates were elected to office in the early twentieth century, including two members of Congress, dozens of state legislators and more than 130 mayors.⁶ Its interactive map covers 353 cities and towns and can be filtered by state. The text of the page does not list Idaho officeholders, and this module has not verified any. If you want to write that a Socialist was elected to a particular Idaho office, check the map and then a local newspaper, and cite both.

1917: the North Idaho lumber strike

The Wobblies are the story of 1917. The account published by the North Idaho Past Present project reports that the IWW had been organizing lumber camps across North Idaho for about a year. In February 1917, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn spoke to a full Rink Opera House in Sandpoint, and the local IWW even paid rent and groceries for a destitute family until the father found work. In March, the IWW and two other labor groups agreed on a coordinated lumber strike across the Pacific Northwest for July 16.⁷

April 1917: the country goes to war

After the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917 the mood changed. Bonner County registered 1,148 men for the draft, including 254 immigrants intending to seek citizenship, and local newspapers called men who did not register "slackers."⁷ In late April a soldier guarding a railroad bridge near Spokane was shot, soldiers stormed the IWW hall in Spokane and a riot followed.⁷

June to September: the strike

On June 14, 144 men at Humbird Lumber Company's Camp 6 walked off the job. By evening, about 500 striking Wobblies were on Sandpoint's streets, and within a week 2,400 North Idaho loggers had joined. Their demands were an eight-hour day instead of ten, minimum pay of $60 a month including board, bunkhouses for no more than 12 men, bathing facilities and better food. When Pacific Coast workers joined in mid-July, logging across the Northwest essentially stopped. Humbird closed its camps; its sawmills kept running through the summer on logs already in the mill pond.⁷

Governor Moses Alexander spent much of July in Coeur d'Alene and met the IWW for about 90 minutes at its Sandpoint hall. He told them that strikers had the right to strike but that handing out revolutionary literature, picketing and sabotage were illegal. He ordered state health officials to investigate conditions in the logging camps and resisted calls to bring in federal troops, relying instead on recently passed Idaho laws aimed at the IWW.⁷

The local response was sharper. Bonner County Sheriff Remer brought reporters and three American flags to the IWW hall and asked members to hang one outside "so we will know where you are at." A few days after the governor's visit he closed the hall, claiming it violated state law, and the local IWW voted to close only under protest. In late August he arrested John Wright, a former local secretary, and William Deneke, an active member, under Idaho's criminal syndicalism law, and John Currie for picketing. A search of the Wisconsin Hotel turned up IWW literature. Similar arrests across the Panhandle put hundreds of men in jail, and St. Maries built a stockade to hold the overflow awaiting trial.⁷

The settlement

In late August lumbermen meeting in Seattle offered a return to a ten-hour day with a later vote on ten or eight hours, and the strikers rejected it. Unpaid all summer, the strikers voted at Spokane's Finlanders Hall to return to work on September 10. At the Loggers' Club in Spokane, company owners agreed to an eight-hour day only once it became a nationwide industry standard, and they agreed to push Congress for an eight-hour mandate and to standardize camps with lighting, ventilation and showers. Returning loggers denied IWW membership, and the companies accepted the denials. By late September, F.C. Culver of Sandpoint Lumber and Pole Company said the camps were full and the mill was running.⁷

Did the strikers win? Two accounts

An earlier version of this lesson said the strikers won the eight-hour day. The sources do not support that flat statement. Two accounts, read side by side, give different answers.

Source	Type	What it says about the ending
Nancy Foster Renk, North Idaho Past Present, June 12, 2017	Local history article; neutral	Strikers voted to return September 10; owners agreed to an eight-hour day once it was a nationwide industry standard, and to press Congress for a mandate
Idaho Legal History Society newsletter, Winter 2017, "Moses Alexander and His Administration"	Federal court historical society newsletter; neutral	The strike ended about two weeks after Alexander's visit without its demands met; Alexander later urged the companies to adopt eight hours, and some complied gradually8

The two accounts do not conflict on the central point: the strike itself ended without an immediate eight-hour day, and the shorter day arrived later, as an industry standard. They differ on emphasis and on timing (the newsletter's "two weeks" does not match Renk's September 10 return, and the sources here do not reconcile it). The accurate sentence is that the owners later accepted the eight-hour day industry-wide, while the strike ended without immediate gains and the IWW lost the fight over membership.

Martial law pressure and internment

The newsletter adds two details the strike article omits. Acting Governor Ernest Parker was pressed by the state Council of Defense to impose martial law; Alexander told him not to, and later resisted the same push himself.⁸ The newsletter also says about 100 people from Idaho were interned by the federal government as "fractious aliens," with Alexander's support. That figure rests on the newsletter alone and has not been confirmed in a record.⁸

What was the criminal syndicalism law?

Criminal syndicalism laws, passed in many states during and just after World War I, made it a crime to advocate or organize for sabotage or violence to change industrial ownership or political control. Wikipedia's article on the subject says Idaho was the first state to enact such a law, in March 1917 (the bill was introduced February 19, 1917), and that it was amended in 1925.⁹ Law professor Ahmed White gives the exact date as March 14, 1917.¹⁰ Sheriff Remer's North Idaho arrests of August 1917 were made under it.

What the act said and who was convicted

White, writing in the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law (2021), supplies the details this lesson previously lacked. The act is chapter 145 of the 1917 session laws (pages 459 to 460). It passed the House 60 to 0 and the Senate 32 to 3, and the final bill was drafted by a Boise lawyer, Benjamin W. Oppenheim. It made advocacy of the prohibited methods punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $5,000 fine, and it made assembling, and permitting assembly, for that purpose crimes as well.¹⁰

White counts 30 convictions under the act from 1917 to 1923, all of IWW men, all sentenced to the state penitentiary. He names two. J. J. McMurphy was convicted at Wallace on October 23, 1917 and received a year and a $500 fine. A. S. Embree, an IWW organizer, was arrested at Burke in May 1920 and convicted on the testimony of deputies and two former IWW members, with a sentence of 1 to 10 years (Idaho v. Embree, No. 1021, First Judicial District, 1921).¹⁰ White's article is a law review piece critical of these statutes, and the count and citations rest on it alone. The session laws, the court files, and any Idaho Supreme Court appeals have not been read for this lesson; a search for appeals found none.

Across the line in Spokane

Do not confuse the North Idaho events with the Spokane martial law of August 1917. The Spokane Historical project reports that on August 17, 1917 Washington Governor Ernest Lister declared martial law in Spokane, that all three IWW halls were raided, and that 94 members were arrested. It also reports that the 1909 Spokane "Free Speech Fight" had led to more than 500 IWW arrests before a city ban on public speaking was overturned in March 1910.¹¹ Those events are Washington history. The two stories are connected because the Wobblies and their opponents moved across the state line, not because Idaho declared martial law that summer. The sources used here do not report martial law in the North Idaho strike; they describe the governor refusing federal troops and local officials using state law.

In their own words and in the record

The two movements in this lesson wrote a great deal about themselves and about each other, and the officials who dealt with them wrote too. The items below are sorted by who wrote them and labeled by stance and type. Quotations are short and come from the source named. For most items the research only saw a listing or a summary, and each entry says so.

Socialist and labor voices

• Ernest Untermann, "No Compromise with the IWW," St. Louis Labor, January 18, 1913 (self-published by the Socialist press). Untermann, who had been the Socialist nominee for governor of Idaho in 1908, urged the party to stop funding IWW leaders who attacked it. The article, read through a summary, is first-hand evidence that the Socialists and the Wobblies were rivals, not allies.¹² That is the clearest reason the module keeps them apart.
• Eugene V. Debs. His Spokane campaign speech of September 15, 1908 is posted by the Marxists Internet Archive. It was listed and not opened, and it is a Washington event; the research did not confirm that Debs spoke in Idaho. His Espionage Act case, Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (March 10, 1919), is on govinfo; it was not opened.¹³
• The Idaho Labor Herald, later the Gem Worker (Boise, 1913 to 1917). Published by John Alden as the organ of the Idaho State Federation of Labor and the Boise Trades and Labor Council. The research file describes it as an AFL-type voice that favored the eight-hour day and opposed immigration; only the title record at the Library of Congress was read, so that description is unverified. It is the place to look for how mainstream organized labor in Idaho viewed the IWW.¹⁴

Wobbly voices

• William D. Haywood. The Marxists Internet Archive lists his "Timber Workers and Timber Wolves" (August 1912), "The General Strike" (1917), his 1918 cross-examination in the Chicago Espionage Act trial, and a November 1919 piece on the lynching of Wesley Everest at Centralia, Washington. The links were read from the index; the texts were not opened.¹⁵
• Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Her autobiography (1955, published as The Rebel Girl and I Speak My Own Piece) is the first-hand account of the Spokane free speech fight; the Marxists Internet Archive link surfaced but may be a review, not the book, and was not opened. The Spokesman-Review covered her in 1909: a $5,000 bond on November 11 and the headline "Girl At I.W.W. Helm" on November 12 (headlines listed in a University of Idaho reprint index).¹⁶
• The Industrial Worker (Spokane, 1909 to 1913), the IWW's own paper. A March 1910 synopsis of the Spokane free speech fight is reprinted on the Revolution's Newsstand site; only a snippet was seen.¹⁷ HistoryLink puts the 1909 Spokane arrests at about 500.¹⁸
• Oral histories. Solidarity Forever (1985) and the IWW Seattle branch records at the University of Washington are leads; neither was opened.

Officials, employers and the press

• Sheriff Remer, Bonner County. Quoted by Renk asking the Sandpoint IWW to hang a flag outside "so we will know where you are at." He brought reporters and three flags to the hall, and closed it a few days after the governor's visit. The sheriff's first name is not given in the source.
• F. C. Culver, Sandpoint Lumber and Pole Company. Quoted by Renk in late September 1917: "Our camps are filled, our mill is running." That is an employer's statement of the strike's end.
• Local newspapers. Renk cites the Pend d'Oreille Review (Sandpoint) for the August 24, 1917 report of the Wright, Deneke and Currie arrests and the Sandpoint press for calling men who did not register for the draft "slackers." The original issues were not opened. The Wallace Miner, a Republican mining-district weekly, and the Coeur d'Alene Evening Press (1907 to 1929) are on Chronicling America for the Silver Valley view.
• The state's own account. The Idaho Legal History Society newsletter, drawing on Alexander's papers, is the best available official-side narrative of the governor's choices.⁸

Courts and statutes

• The 1917 criminal syndicalism act. Session laws, chapter 145 (per White); not read in the original.
• Idaho v. Embree, No. 1021 (1921). Known only through White. The testimony came from deputies and two former IWW members; White's article does not make the conviction a finding about the IWW as a whole.
• Federal records. Federal internment of "fractious aliens" and Espionage Act cases touching Idaho are not documented in the sources gathered.

Histories written since

• Ahmed White, law-review article, 2021 (critical of the statutes; read through a summary of its Idaho passages).
• Nancy Foster Renk, North Idaho Past Present, 2017 (local history; read in full).
• Idaho Legal History Society newsletter, Winter 2017 (read through a summary).
• Ross Rieder, HistoryLink essay on the IWW (read).
• R. A. J. Perrin, a University of Idaho thesis, "Two decades of turbulence: A study of the great lumber strikes in northern Idaho, 1916-1936." Renk dates it 1961; the University of Idaho bibliography lists 1962. Both years are given here until the thesis itself is checked. It was not opened.¹⁹
• Further reading, not opened: Tyler, Rebels in the Woods (1967); Dubofsky, We Shall Be All (1969).

People and personalities

Arrest is not conviction, and attendance is not membership. Where a person's outcome is unknown, the profile says so.

Gov. Moses Alexander

Won the governorship in 1916 by 572 votes, according to the newsletter. In July 1917 he toured the camps, sent health inspectors, and met the IWW for about 90 minutes at its Sandpoint hall, where he told members they had a right to strike but that revolutionary literature, picketing and sabotage were illegal (Renk). He refused federal troops and resisted martial law; he also supported federal internment of about 100 people as "fractious aliens," on the newsletter's account.

Acting Gov. Ernest Parker

Pressed by the Council of Defense in July 1917 to impose martial law; Alexander told him not to (newsletter).

Sheriff Remer

Bonner County sheriff. He staged the flag demand at the IWW hall in front of reporters, closed the hall within days of the governor's visit, and in late August arrested John Wright and William Deneke under the criminal syndicalism law (Renk).

John Wright, William Deneke and John Currie

Wright, a former local IWW secretary, and Deneke, an active member, were arrested in late August 1917 under the syndicalism law; Currie was arrested for picketing (Renk, citing the Pend d'Oreille Review of August 24, 1917). Their trials and outcomes were not found. Treat them as arrested, not convicted.

J. J. McMurphy and A. S. Embree

McMurphy, convicted at Wallace on October 23, 1917, is the first conviction White cites. Embree, an IWW organizer, was convicted in 1921 after his May 1920 arrest at Burke, on testimony White describes (deputies and two former IWW members).

Benjamin W. Oppenheim

The Boise lawyer who drafted the final syndicalism bill (White).

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

IWW organizer. Spoke to a full Rink Opera House in Sandpoint in February 1917 (Renk, no day given; single-source). In Spokane in 1909, during the free speech fight, she was held on a $5,000 bond, according to a Spokesman-Review headline (above). She later wrote her own account.

William D. Haywood

The same Haywood as lesson 2, now an IWW leader. His 1918 Chicago trial and his flight to Russia in 1921 tie the Idaho mine wars to the 1917 strike and to the Communist movement (lesson 4).

Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist candidates

Debs drew 11,960 Idaho votes in 1912. Ernest Untermann (1908), L. A. Coblentz (1912, 1914) and Annie E. Triplow (1916) ran for governor. No biographies of Coblentz or Triplow were found, and Untermann's Idaho residence is not established.

F. C. Culver and John Alden

Culver was the Sandpoint lumber company voice quoted above. Alden published the Idaho Labor Herald in Boise.

Ida Crouch-Hazlett

A Montana Socialist editor who, according to a Hellraisers Journal snippet, found a Socialist local at Caldwell. Single-source and unverified.

Why Idaho's reaction matters for later lessons

Three themes from 1917 return. First, a sheriff and a governor treated a labor strike as a security problem as soon as the country was at war. Second, the legal weapon was a statute about speech and organizing, not only about violence. Third, the strikers' main demand, the eight-hour day, did not come at once. It came later, as an industry standard, while the companies took back loggers who denied belonging to the IWW. Whether to call that a win is disputed (see "Did the strikers win?" above). A fair account of 1917 has to carry all three.

Still open

• Idaho's 1917 criminal syndicalism statute: Ahmed White gives March 14, 1917, chapter 145 and the vote counts. Confirm the date, the text and the 30-conviction count against the Idaho Session Laws and the Idaho State Archives. No Idaho Supreme Court appeal from these convictions was found; searching CourtListener and the Idaho Reports is the next step.
• Idaho Socialist Party officeholders and county organizations, 1900 to 1920. The nominees for governor are listed above; officeholders are not. Start with the University of Washington map and the Idaho Digital Newspaper Project.
• County-level reasons for the Bonner, Clearwater and Shoshone results in 1912.
• Whether the North Idaho strikers arrested in 1917 (Wright, Deneke, Currie) were tried, convicted or released. The account used here describes the arrests, not the verdicts. An arrest is not a conviction.
• Idaho federal Espionage Act and Sedition Act cases, the Idaho Council of Defense records, and the Nonpartisan League in Idaho: none located in this research round.
• Whether Debs ever spoke in Idaho. His September 15, 1908 Spokane speech is in the Marxists Internet Archive; no Idaho appearance was confirmed.
• The 1961 or 1962 date of Perrin's thesis (see the record section below).

Learn more

• American Presidency Project, 1912: State-by-state returns with the Idaho Socialist vote.
• Socialists elected to office, 1901-1960: The interactive map of Socialist officeholders; filter by state.
• 1917: Wobblies, War, and Walkouts: The best local account of the strike used in this lesson; read it whole.
• Moses Alexander and His Administration (Idaho Legal History Society, Winter 2017): The governor's choices in 1917 and the strike's ending.
• Ahmed White, Law, Labor, and the Hard Edge of Progressivism: The law-review source for the Idaho syndicalism act and its convictions.
• Idaho Digital Newspaper Project: Dated Idaho newspaper issues for checking 1912 and 1917 claims.

Notes

1. "1912 United States presidential election in Idaho," Wikipedia, results table and county notes for Eugene V. Debs. Read it online. ↩
2. The American Presidency Project (UC Santa Barbara), 1912 election statistics, Idaho row: Debs 11,960 votes, 11.3%, total 105,754. Read it online. ↩
3. Jeff A. Pierson, Political Radicalism in Idaho, 1900-1945: Socialist and Communist Evidence Controls, research note, October 17, 2026 (Dropbox research folder 12_Communism_in_Idaho), items ACQ009 and ACQ010. ↩
4. Wikipedia, Idaho gubernatorial election pages for 1908, 1912, 1914, 1916 and 1918, citing the CQ Guide. Verify against the Idaho Secretary of State's canvass. ↩
5. "Ernest Untermann," Wikipedia, on his 1908 candidacy, his national executive committee service and the unverified 1910 run. Read it online. Secondary; his Idaho residence is not established. ↩
6. University of Washington, Mapping American Social Movements Project, "Socialist Party Elected Officials 1901-1960." Read it online. The national totals are from the page text; the Idaho entries are in the interactive map and were not inspected for this lesson. ↩
7. "1917: Wobblies, War, and Walkouts," North Idaho Past Present, June 12, 2017. Read it online. ↩
8. "Moses Alexander and His Administration," Idaho Legal History Society newsletter (Idaho federal court), Winter 2017. Read it online. Read through a summary; the internment figure is single-source. ↩
9. "Criminal syndicalism," Wikipedia, on U.S. state criminal syndicalism laws, including Idaho's 1917 law. Read it online. White gives March 14, 1917; verify the enactment date against the Idaho Session Laws. ↩
10. Ahmed White, "Law, Labor, and the Hard Edge of Progressivism," 42 Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 165 (2021). Read it online. Idaho passages read through a summary; a law-review article critical of criminal syndicalism laws. Check the session-law citation and the conviction count against primary records. ↩
11. "1917: IWW Offices Raided and Martial Law Declared," Spokane Historical. Read it online. ↩
12. Ernest Untermann, "No Compromise with the IWW," St. Louis Labor, no. 624, p. 7, January 18, 1913, reprinted on libcom.org. Read it online. Read through a summary. ↩
13. Debs, Spokane campaign speech, September 15, 1908 (Marxists Internet Archive), and Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919) (govinfo). Neither was opened. ↩
14. Idaho Labor Herald / Gem Worker, Boise, 1913 to 1917, Library of Congress title record. Read it online. Title record read; issues not read. ↩
15. William D. Haywood Archive, Marxists Internet Archive. Read it online. Index read; the texts were not opened. ↩
16. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, autobiography (1955), and Spokesman-Review 1909 headlines as listed in the University of Idaho Transitions reprint index. Read it online. Headlines only; full text not available online. ↩
17. "Synopsis of the Spokane Free Speech Fight," Industrial Worker, March 1910, reprinted at Revolution's Newsstand. Read it online. Snippet only; transcription unchecked. ↩
18. Ross Rieder, "Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)," HistoryLink Essay 2016. Read it online. ↩
19. R. A. J. Perrin, "Two decades of turbulence: A study of the great lumber strikes in northern Idaho, 1916-1936," University of Idaho bibliography entry. Read it online. Bibliographic entry read; thesis not opened. ↩