History Textbook Exercise

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – the Wobblies

Morison, Samuel Eliot and Henry S. Commager. The Growth of the American Republic. 2 vols. 3^rd ed. New York, 1942. p. 91.

The Knights, with their philosophy of industrial unionism, had made uncertain gestures toward these people, but with the decline of the Knights, there was no one to champion them. The void was partially filled by ragged unions that sprang up spontaneously in the mining camps of the West and eventually coalesced into the Industrial Workers of the World. This militant organization, which acted as a catalytic agent in American labor, was born out of the labor warfare in the Coeur d’Alene mines of Idaho in the early ‘nineties. To meet the assaults upon them, the miners organized the Western Federation of Miners, which in turn conducted a long series of strikes through the West. Theirs was from the beginning a fighting existence. Themselves prone to violence, they were met by violence from mine operators, vigilant committees, and government officials. Thus, when the Western Federation of Miners went out on strike at Cripple Creek mines in Colorado in 1903 and 1904, the governor declared martial law and rushed in state troops without even pausing to investigate; the military commander arrested workers without preferring charges against them.