Since we have been at war certain groups of employers, particularly those in the mining and lumber industries, have still further confused the issue and intensified the popular hostility to the Industrial Workers of the World. They have done this by re-enforcing their earlier _camouflage_ with the charge of disloyalty and anti-patriotism. Wrapping themselves in the flag, they have pointed from its folds to "those disloyal and anarchistic Wobblies" and in this way still further obscured the underlying economic issues. Whatever the facts about patriotism on either side, it appears to be true that the greater part of the I. W. W.'s activities have been ordinary strike activities directed toward the securing of more favorable conditions of employment and some voice in the determination of those conditions. These efforts have been met by charges of disloyalty and by wholesale acts of violence by the employers, that is to say, they have been met by the night-stick and neck-tie party policy--as witness the wholesale deportation of "alleged Wobblies" from Bisbee, Arizona, and the hanging of Frank Little in Butte, Montana. As the President's Mediation Commission reported, "the hold of the I. W. W. is riveted, instead of weakened, by unimaginative opposition on the part of employers to the correction of real grievances."[2] By means of an insidious extension of the I. W. W. bogey idea, either that organization itself or some other labor body or both of them are made the "goat" in disputes in which the I. W. W., as an organization, has no part. If a lumber company, for example, gets into a controversy with the shingle-weavers union of the American Federation of Labor, it has only to raise a _barrage_ and shout through its controlled news columns that "they are 'Wobblies!'" and public opinion is against them. Nor does the misrepresentation stop there. All who openly sympathize with the alleged Wobblies are, forsooth, themselves Wobblies! Naturally the liberals in this country have no sympathy with this night-stick attitude toward I. W. W.'s nor with the night-stick interpretation of I. W. W.-ism. The writer is bound to say, however, that he considers the liberal interpretation entirely inadequate. The liberal attitude is expressed and judgment pronounced when it has been said that the I. W. W. is a social sore caused by, let us say, bad housing. It must be evident (unless we are prepared to take the position that any organization which purposes a rearrangement of the _status quo_--the Single Tax League, for example--is a social sore) that the I. W. W. is much more than that. The improvement of working conditions in the mines and lumber camps would tend to eliminate the cruder and less fundamental I. W. W. activities, but it would not kill I. W. W.-ism.