of government in the present sense. Beyond the described differences, Hoxie concludes, the theories, methods, and policies of the centralizers and the decentralizers were much the same. But historian Philip S. Foner described the decentralizers as "the most vehement and noisiest of the anti-leadership element." They wanted to remove all officers of the union, and replace them with a stenographer. They also sought to abolish the union's General Executive Board and the annual convention. In 1913 a majority of delegates rejected the goals of the decentralizers, yet they continued their efforts for years afterward. 1924 split In 1924 (three years after Hoxie's analyses were published), as the Detroit IWW languished, the Chicago IWW was once again split by a division between centralizers and decentralizers. Impact of the divisions In 1919 Paul Brissenden wrote that while the departure of Sherman and the Western Federation of Miners in 1906, and the DeLeon faction in 1908, meant the loss of its "most reputable, best financed, and most respectable elements, their loss tended to give sharp definition and emphatic impulse toward a more revolutionary policy." As a result, the IWW became the champion of unskilled and migratory workers, including workers facing frequent unemployment, during the decade that followed. Brissenden commented in 1919 that, [The Wobblies] were able to develop great strength because they had modified their theories to the extent necessary to make some appreciable application of them to the actual conditions of economic life. They were confronted by conditions and met them at the cost of doctrinal consistency. They were unconscious pragmatists and the result is that they have made themselves felt to a much greater extent than the doctrinaires [of the Detroit IWW]. They have been strikingly successful as gadflies—stinging and shocking the bourgeoisie into the initiation of reforms. Yet Brissenden wrote that the question of decentralization was "perhaps the most fundamental [issue] ever given wide discussion by the I.W.W. membership." Brissenden, acknowledging in 1919 that the decentralization forces within the IWW had not dissipated, had a sense of foreboding about the future of that organization. He wrote, "the doctrine was not annihilated in 1913; it was merely smothered. The I.W.W. may yet be 'unscrambled'." In spite of "anti-radical hysteria" during and just after the war years, the IWW continued to grow. The IWW's peak membership probably occurred in 1923. 1924 would see the beginning of a dramatic decline, and the recent