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Popular Culture Review
Schulman describe the Wobblie message as “plain folk running society for their
own benefit” around the world. They conclude,
That way of looking at freedom makes the IWW seem like a
lot more than a labor organization, or bigger than all the other
labor organizations combined. It looks, for instance, like the
grassroots of the ecological/environmental movement. It looks
like the Mexicans and Americans who welcomed the
Zapatistas taking back the land that had been stolen from their
people. It looks like every antiwar movement. It even looks a
little like the world John Lennon summed up in the song
“Imagine,”: no distant god, no country, just us human, all of
us, and our world. ‘
This description of the IWW is a far different one from what young
people in the schools and colleges may find in their textbooks. The IWW is
typically portrayed as a militant, often violent, organization which championed
the rights of unskilled workers before being crushed by the xenophobic
patriotism of World War I and the 1919-1921 Red Scare. The Wobblies are
certainly not perceived as being relevant to the concerns of contemporary
Americans. In Alan Brinkley’s American Histoty: A Sut^ey, for example, the
IWW is acknowledged as having strong roots in the American West,
representing the unskilled, and offering “a home to workers who were otherwise
largely rootless.” The ideology of the union is described as advocating a single
union for all workers and abolition of the “wage slave” system. Asserting that
the Wobblies rejected political solutions in favor of direct action and the general
strike, Brinkley observes, “The Wobblies were widely believed to have been
responsible for the dynamiting of railroad lines and power stations, and other
acts of terror, although the popular image of their use of violence was
undoubtedly exaggerated.” In the political climate of the United States following
the attacks of 9/11 on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the term “terrorist”
is a loaded word which certainly discredits the IWW. Brinkley argues that a
1917 strike by IWW timber workers in Washington and Idaho virtually shut
down production in the industry, bringing the wrath of the federal government
upon the union and its leaders. The passage concludes, “Federal authorities
imprisoned the leaders of the union, and state governments between 1917 and
1919 passed a series of laws that effectively outlawed the IWW. The
organization survived for a time, but never Rilly recovered.”^ This rendering
appears to assume that the IWW has no legacy for today even as the union
continues to organize workers.
The radical and almost un-American nature of the IWW is stressed in
the Prentice Hall text Making a Nation: The United States and Its People,
written by Jeanne Boydston, Nick Cullather, Jan Ellen Lewis, Michael McGerr,
and James Oakes. The authors concluded that when the Wobblies talked about
revolution, “They meant a war, not an election.” Organizing “rugged