st fields of the West by inciting the laborers to strikes and
to the destruction of food and material. Popular opinion in the West
inclined to the view of Senator Poindexter of Washington when he said
that "most of the I.W.W. leaders are outlaws or ought to be made outlaws
because of their official utterances, inflammatory literature and acts
of violence." Indeed, scores of communities in 1917 took matters into
their own hands. Over a thousand I.W.W. strikers in the copper mines
of Bisbee, Arizona, were loaded into freight cars and shipped over the
state line. In Billings, Montana, one leader was horsewhipped, and two
others were hanged until they were unconscious. In Tulsa, Oklahoma,
a group of seventeen members were taken from policemen, thoroughly
flogged, tarred, feathered, and driven out of town by vigilantes.

The Federal Government, after an extended inquiry through the secret
service, raided the Detroit headquarters of the I.W.W., where a plot to
tie up lake traffic was brewing. The Chicago offices were raided some
time later; over one hundred and sixty leaders of the organization from
all parts of the country were indicted as a result of the examination
of the wagon-load of papers and documents seized. As a result, 166
indictments were returned. Of these 99 defendants were found guilty
by the trial jury, 16 were dismissed during the trial, and 51 were
dismissed before the trial. In Cleveland, Buffalo, and other lake ports
similar disclosures were made, and everywhere the organization fell
under popular and official suspicion.

In many other portions of the country members of the I.W.W. were tried
for conspiracy under the Federal espionage act. In January, 1919, a
trial jury in Sacramento found 46 defendants guilty. The offense in the
majority of these cases consisted in opposing military service rather
than in overt acts against the Government. But in May and June, 1919,
the country was startled by a series of bomb outrages aimed at the
United States Attorney-General, certain Federal district judges, and
other leading public personages, which were evidently the result of
centralized planning and were executed by members of the I.W.W., aided
very considerably by foreign Bolshevists.

In spite of its spectacular warfare and its monopoly of newspaper
headlines, the I.W.W. has never been numerically strong. The first
convention claimed a membership of 60,000. All told, the organization
has issued over 200,000 car