Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2007 | Page 66

62 Popular Culture Review terms of hours and effort. The film is a labor of love on the part of the filmmakers, who, in an oral history companion volume to the film, argued for the continuing relevancy of the IWW, proclaiming, “Long regarded as belonging to a social movement whose time has come and gone, the IWW may yet prove to have been ahead of its time, developing and popularizing ideas very relevant to economic and political challenges undreamed of in 1905.”'^ While the viewing audience for the documentary film was limited, Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), a biopic of John Reed based upon historian Robert Rosenstone’s biography of the leftist journalist and author of Ten Days That Shook the World {\9\9), earned critical acclaim, box office receipts, and an Oscar for Beatty as Best Director. While the film captured Reed’s involvement with the IWW in the 1913 Paterson silk workers’ strike, his organizing role in the fonnation of the American Communist Party, and his service to the Russian Revolution, some critics found that the film subverted its politics to the love story between Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). Film viewers may have missed the point that Reed “passionately argued that the industrial unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World was the only viable model for revolutionary action in America.” The film attempted to provide historical context through interviews with witnesses, such as Roger Baldwin, Rebecca West, and Scott Nearing, who provided first-hand accounts of Reed and the First Red Scare. Nevertheless, politics tend to remain peripheral for much of the film, leading Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic to observe, ""Reds is to communism and the Bolshevik Revolution what Hamlet is to Danish foreign policy; the work is inconceivable without the political context, but context is what it remains.”’^ Labor and politics, however, were at the core of independent filmmaker John Sayles’s Matewan (1987), based upon a post World War I labor war in West Virginia’s Mingo County between the United Mine Workers and the Stone Mountain Coal Company and its hired guns from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. Union organizer Joe Kenihan (Chris Cooper) is a former Wobblie who was imprisoned for opposing the First World War. Kenihan attempts to unite Appalachian whites, Italian immigrants, and African American strikebreakers into a cohesive multiracial union. Preaching nonviolence, Kenihan is, nevertheless, unable to prevent the Matewan massacre which takes the organizer’s life and provides the authorities with an excuse to dispatch troops and crush the strike. Labor film historian Tom Zaniello describes Matewan as one of the finest labor films ever made."^^ The most significant connection between the IWW legacy and popular culture, however, lies in music rather than film. In a 2004 piece for the Austin Chronicle, Jim Caligiuri asserts that the activism of musicians such as Bruce Springsteen, Dixie Chicks, and Pearl Jam against the war in Iraq owes a debt of gratitude to Joe Hill “as the originator of protest songs.” Caligiuri writes that as an opponent of militarism. Hill would identify with popular opposition to the Bush administration’s adventure in Iraq. After a brief survey of Hill’s life and