FOIA Request – September 5, 1917, Raids on I.W.W. Offices

Last week, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Department of Justice. Per the FOIA website, “Since 1967, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has provided the public the right to request access to records from any federal agency. It is often described as the law that keeps citizens in the know about their government.”

The FOIA request was related to my research on I.W.W. “stickerettes” listed in FBI case files from 1917-1918 that I wrote about in my previous post. FBI agents produced the case files in response to the September 5, 1917, government raids on 48 I.W.W. offices and meetings halls across the country, leading to the indictment and arrest of over 100 union leaders and members.

TONS OF MATERIALS SEIZED

In “This week in history: Feds raid IWW offices and union halls,” I.W.W. leader William Haywood describes the extent of the materials seized by government officials:

“Government officials have taken for investigation all the correspondence files, books, and ledgers wherein the financial transactions of the General Office are recorded, and the duplicate membership record of the GRU [Grand Recruiting Union] and many of the Industrial unions, that were kept on file in the General Office. Also there was taken samples of all literature published by the organization, and samples of the dues stamps and various assessment stamps, membership books, report blanks, credentials, and all other supplies pertaining to the work of the organization. From the editorial rooms was taken all the contents of the safe belonging to Solidarity, all the books, records, and mailing list of Solidarity, and also the mailing list of all the language papers, all bound and unbound files and all the papers. From this voluminous mass of papers, literature, and records the government will endeavor to sift whatever evidence (if any) they can find to substantiate their charges against the organization, and will present same to the Federal Grand Jury now sitting in Chicago.”

During the government raids, “…more than five tons of letters, documents, books, papers, pamphlets, leaflets, supplies, equipment, furniture and fixtures” were seized, according to Philip Taft in his essay “The federal trials of the IWW” (Labor History, 3:1, 2008).

In “The Justice Department Campaign Against the IWW, 1917-1920,” Steven Parfitt also writes:

“On September 5, 1917, agents of the Bureau of Investigation, in conjunction with local law enforcement, raided every office of the IWW across the United States within the space of twenty four hours, with possibly the widest-ranging search warrant in US history. They took five tons of material from the national headquarters of the IWW in Chicago alone, and took tons more from 48 local offices and the homes of leading Wobblies (IWW members). Federal agents seized everything from office furniture to paper clips. The District Attorney for Detroit complained to Thomas Gregory, Attorney General from 1914 to 1919, that it ‘became necessary to procure wagons to haul the stuff’ removed from the home of only one Wobbly, Herman Richter. Some government officials claimed that the seized material ‘was sought by the government as evidence tending to connect I.W.W. leaders with the German war office.’ The District Attorney for Philadelphia hinted at other motivations when he described the September raids as done ‘very largely to put the I.W.W. out of business.’ Justice Department officials then used the captured documentation to prosecute more than a hundred IWW leaders at Chicago.”

Here is my FOIA request.

Here is the response I received.

I submitted another request today to ask about the raid on the home of Ralph Chaplin.