According to Sandburg, 1927, the song was made by a newspaperman who got drunk and landed in Portland Jail; using the first three verses he "learned there." The fourth was added later, "from philosophers at the extreme left in the labor movement and in modernist art in Chicago." Art Thieme changed a few words, but nothing important except he changed a good ol' word of the times in the last verse.
"On Saturday night when I got tight, he trun me in the can,
And now you see he's made of me A honest working man.
The word trun (threw, throwed) was changed to threw.
Some discussion by Thieme in Portland