The Wobblies

Richard B. Morris, William Greenleaf and Robert H. Ferrell, America, A History of a People (2 Vols.: Chicago, 1971), II, p. 449.

Another result of the failure of conventional unions and their conventional methods was establishment of a left‑wing protest union movement colored by the tenets of class conflict, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly known as the Wobblies. Founded at Chicago in 1905, the IWW had as its leader William D. (Big Bill) Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, who came from a background of labor violence in the mining camps of Colorado and Idaho. Committed to the idea of a single industrial union under central authority, the IWW had mixed revolutionary overtones of anarchism, syndicalism, and Marxian socialism. Unlike the AFL the Wobblies refused to acknowledge a community of interest between capital and labor. "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common," declared the preamble to the IWW constitution. Seeking to achieve its ends by direct action modeled chiefly after European traditions of syndicalism, the IWW openly advocated sabotage, alienating not only the mass of American workers but even the Debs socialists.

In its first years the IWW suffered from factional disputes between doctrinaire socialists led by Daniel De Leon and westerners led by Haywood, and then attained its peak influence between 1908 and 1915. Small in membership, which never exceeded fifteen thousand, it won a following among migratory workers in the West and unskilled immigrants in eastern mill towns. Most of its members were too individualistic to recognize the need for central direction, and most of the workers it attempted to organize (lid not share its revolutionary ideals. The IWW compensated for these shortcomings by militant activity in trades neglected by the AFL; it led more than a hundred strikes, including the famous textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 which ended in a victory for the workers. The Wobblies found a hero in Joe Hill, a young Swedish immigrant who was a migratory worker and IWW organizer in the West and had a flair for writing labor songs ("And the union makes us strong"). He was arrested in Utah on an allegedly trumped‑up murder charge. Before being put to death in Salt Lake City in 1915, lie said, "Don't mourn for me, organize." Today the IWW, like Joe Hill, is part of labor's folklore.

The Wobblies met defeat in the textile strike of 1913 at Paterson, New Jersey, and a few years later their membership virtually had disappeared. Their rapid decline began after the United States entered the World War in 1917. Regarded as disloyal, the IWW was subjected to harassment and legal prosecution that all but smashed it.