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William E. Trautmann was born on this day in 1869.
Celebrate by reading this:

Direct Action and Sabotage

By William E. Trautmann

Published in 1912

Awful! An Awful Thing!

A street speaker, once being asked by a bystander, was pressed to answer whether the socialists approved of direct action and sabotage. “Oh no, no, they are opposed to it, they are denouncing it, it is an anarchist doctrine.” Again the persistent bystander put the question. “What then is direct action, what is sabotage? It should be explained if so repulsive as a weapon of the workers in the warfare against the capitalist class.” — “Destruction of human life by dynamite, of property with powder and other explosives, repetitions of McNamara outrages,” was the cocksure reply. The crowd yelled approval, the craft unionists in that crowd nodded their heads as an impressive demonstration that the trades union principals were not to be held responsible for the McNamaras. A labor fakir or two yelled themselves hoarse exclaiming: “Gompers and the American Federation of Labor disapprove such methods as direct action and sabotage, it’s the illegitimate organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, that preaches the use of direct action and sabotage, they ought to be outlawed.” And a lonely member of the Socialist Labor Party added to it: “It’s Haywood and his gang of anarchists who advocate ‘Direct Action,’ and other uncivilized methods, and therefore we of the Detroit Socialist Labor Party have repudiated them.”

And these assurances by the “intellectual” fountain heads of the labor movement are passed unchallenged, and travel all over the country as indisputable facts. They form the basis for discussions and resolutions, and in the official records of many a body of workers these terms of “direct action” and “sabotage” are inscribed as meaning something that must be tabooed.

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“If you believe that between the workers on the one side and their employers on the other there is peace, there is harmony such as exists between brothers, and that consequently whatever strikes and lockouts occur are simply family squabbles; if you believe that a point can be reached whereby the employer can get enough and the worker can get enough, a point of amicable adjustment of industrial warfare and economic distribution, then there is no justification and no explanation of sabotage intelligible to you. Sabotage is one weapon in the arsenal of labor to fight its side of the class struggle.”
  — Elizabeth Gurley Flynn in Sabotage