West; among the homeless, wayfaring men who follow the harvests from Texas across the Canadian border; among the lumberjacks who pack their quilts from camp to distant camp in the fir and pine and spruce forests of the Northwest; and among the metalliferous miners of Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, and Old Mexico. In other words, they are strongest among the men upon whom the nation depends for three of its basic raw materials—materials of fundamental importance at all times; of crucial importance in time of war. According to our best information, approximately four-fifths of these migratory workers are men whose family ties have been broken—"womanless, voteless, and jobless men." Competent authorities estimate that about one-half of them are native Americans, and the other half men who have been uprooted by labor brokers and padrones from their native ethnic and social environments; voluntary or forced immigrants from the agricultural districts of Ireland, from the Welsh and Cornish mines, from the hungry hills of Italy, Serbia, Greece, and Turkish Asia Minor. Bruere wrote of a "pernicious system of sabotage" by railroad corporations and other business interests, creating "hobos, vagabonds, wayfarers—migratory and intermittent workers, outcasts from society and the industrial machine, ripe for the denationalized fellowship of the I. W. W." Typical IWW tactics in the West were soap boxing and, where they found it necessary, the free speech fight. As a direct result of their working class experiences in western states, Western Wobblies developed a bitter hostility toward political parties. The most conspicuous example of these anarchistic sentiments among Western Wobblies was the Overalls Brigade, who were suspicious of all political parties; believed voting and legislating a ritual aimed at deluding workers; were antagonistic toward craft unions, referring to them as coffin societies; and, were generally opposed to leaders of any kind, even within the IWW. In the East, the IWW became the champion of ethnic solidarity and the focus of immigrant discontent, during a strike of women mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. One notable struggle in Paterson, New Jersey involved the production of a pageant in Madison Square Garden, performed by the strikers themselves. Many Eastern IWW members tended to be more supportive of radical state socialist principles of the Socialist Labor Party variety. They did not care for anarchy, and tended to dismiss the Socialist Party's reformist philosophy. According to Paul Brissenden, a labor historian who