Thompson, Fred W.

THOMPSON, FRED W. (1900-1987). Born in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, Fred Thompson joined the Socialist Party of Canada at sixteen. Four years later, a contemporary police report described the strike at the Halifax Shipyards as “in considerable part the work of F.W. Thompson, a boy of not much more than 19 years of age.” In 1920, he joined the One Big Union, and organized among the unemployed in Western Canada. Working in construction on the Pacific coast of the US, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in San Francisco in 1922. The following year, Thompson was arrested in Marysvillle, California and charged with criminal syndicalism. He spent several years in the San Quentin penitentiary. After his release, he struggled to organize miners in Butte and Denver, auto workers in Detroit, and metal workers in Cleveland.

Thompson was elected in 1928 to the General Executive Board of an IWW badly reduced, from many thousand at its peak to only a few thousand followers a decade later. Wartime repression, the emergence of several dynamic mainstream unions that successfully organized industrial workers in large numbers, and the competition of the Communists for young radicals and foreign-born workers all made the Wobblies appear out of date.

A tower of strength in a faltering movement, Thompson was made General Secretary- Treasurer in 1936. Self-educated, he also taught for some years at the Work Peoples College in Duluth, Minnesota, one of the surviving IWW-connected institutions, and in itself a unique experiment in workers education. More important, he served for many years as editor of the Industrial Worker, a lively tabloid whose continuation proved the IWW still existed and offered glimpses of an ideal, better than mainstream unionism. As editor, he wrote a series on the history of the IWW, a series that evolved into an official history.

The IWW: Its First Fifty Years (1955) remains a standard source, published as Thompson held down the Chicago office, doing what he could to keep the small and shifting membership from disappearing. As the caretaker, he was instrumental in arranging for the IWW papers and his own to be sent to Wayne State University in Detroit. During the 1960s, Thompson worked extensively with Joyce Kornbluh to pull together the extensive compendium of IWW strikes, writings, culture, cartoons and songs published as Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology.

Charismatic and kindly, Thompson also made himself a central figure in the modest but real revival of the IWW during the New Left years of the 1960s-1970s. Thanks largely to his influence, young people in the Students for a Democratic Society National office joined the IWW, as others around Roosevelt University established a sort of counter-culture at the Solidarity Bookstore on Armitage Avenue in Chicago. A talented soap box speaker, Thompson took young people to historic Bughouse Square to show them how to organize under the old banner of “Education, Organization, Emancipation!” Such meetings would invariably end with songs by Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim and especially, Ralph Chaplin’s “Solidarity Forever.”

“The most influential Wobbly since the 1930s,” according to Franklin Rosemont, Thompson was also a key figure within the group that rescued the Charles H. Kerr Publishing company in the early 1970s and of which he served as its new president until his death. He was also a member of the Socialist Party, and a charter member of the Illinois Labor History Society that did much to recover the history and importance of Haymarket, the Chicago origin of May Day, and the memories of the martyrs and of their famed survivor, Lucy Parsons.

Kornbluh, Joyce. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology. Berkeley: PM Press, 2012.

Roediger, David, ed. Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1993.

“Franklin and Penelope Rosemont Collection of IWW publications and Ephemera: 1905-2005.” Chicago: The Newberry Library.

Fred W. Thompson Collection. Papers, 1912-1987. Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University.