History Textbook Exercise

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – the Wobblies

Garraty, John A. and Robert A. McCaughey. The American Nation. A History of the United States Since 1865. 7^th Ed. 1991. pp. 645, 704.

In 1905 Debs: William "Big Bill" Haywood, of the Western Federation of Miners: Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, a former organizer for the United Mine Workers: Daniel DeLeon, of the Socialist Labor party: and a few others organized a new union, The Industrial Workers of the World. The preamble to its constitution began: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common."

But the IWW never attracted many ordinary workers. Haywood, its most prominent leader, was usually a general in search of an army. His forte was attracting attention to spontaneous strikes by unorganized workers, not the patient recruiting of workers and the pursuit of practical goals. Shortly, after the founding of the IWW, he was charged with complicity in the murder of an antiunion governor of Colorado after an earlier strike but was acquitted. In 1912 he was closely involved in a bitter and at times a bloody strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which was settled with some benefit to the strikers, and in a strike the following winter and spring by silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, that was a failure.

Organized labor in America had seldom been truly radical. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had made little impression in the most industries. But some labor leaders had been attracted to socialism, and many American failed to distinguish between the common ends sought by communists and socialists and the entirely different methods by which they proposed to achieve those ends.