The primary importance of the Western Federation of Miners in these beginnings cannot be too much emphasized. In a quite real sense the I. W. W. was born out of the Western Federation. It was from this militant miners union that most of the financial bone and sinew came for setting in motion the machinery of the new union. The Federation constituted probably one-third of the membership of the organization which had in its mining department (while it did have it!) by all odds the most vigorously militant of all American unions. The Federation's bitter fights with the mine operators, especially in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho, prepared the ground and spread the sentiment for the extension of revolutionary industrialism beyond the relatively narrow limits of the metalliferous mining industry. It was not a coincidence that the I. W. W. sprang into being so hard on the heels of the strike terrors of Telluride and Cripple Creek. A delegate at the second (1906) convention declared that the Butte Miners Union was the father of the I. W. W.[167] Despite the fact that the I. W. W. did continue to exist, and, periodically, to thrive after the Western Federation broke away, it is safe to say that had it not been for the Federation, with its practical strength and the stimulating example of its history, there would have been no I. W. W. It was Western-Federationism quite as much as DeLeonism that moulded the I. W. W. at its inception. It certainly is not quite true that the first convention was "captured" by the DeLeon element, as so many insinuate. DeLeon was elected to no office and neither of the General Executive Board members elected at large were members of the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance. Debs insists that "DeLeon did not 'capture' the organization and Debs is not 'disgusted' with it."[168] The dominance of DeLeonism was, then, a supremacy of ideas. These ideas may have been "insane delusions" and finally disastrous to the harmony of the movement; but they were presumably defended by their chief sponsor and his followers, in firm conviction that they were essential to the growth of the movement. DeLeon said on the floor of the convention, "When I came to Chicago to this convention, I came absolutely without any private ax to grind or any private grudge to gratify. In fact ... I have had but one foe ... and that foe is the capitalist class."[169] Hermann Richter, now general secretary of the Socialist Labor party wing of the I. W. W., writes in a recent number of their official organ: "During the proceedings of the [first] convention it became apparent that not all delegates understood, or were in free accord with the spirit and intent of the organization."[170] This was very natural considering the composition of the gathering. The sequel proved that this was the least of the troubles in embryo at that first convention.