Heroes and Villains: Picturing the IWW

Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman, eds. WOBBLIES! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. London: Verso, 2005. xiii + 306 pp. $25.00.

Like others of my generation who sought an understanding of working-class history in a country that every day denied the existence of classes as more than picturesque cultural detritus, the Industrial Workers of the World played a central role in my discovery of this country's radical tradition. Reading Melvyn Dubofsky's We Shall Be All almost three decades ago was a tutorial in the naturalism of class violence in an Older America.¹ It demonstrated that emphatically working-class leaders like William D. Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn could generate a distinctively American alternative to capitalism based in their own experience—that we too had produced organic intellectuals.² But beyond taking the Wobs seriously as threats to order, as seriously as did state and federal authorities, I was drawn by their picaresque charm, like Tom and Huck setting out for the industrial frontier with dynamite and songs about the One Big Union. If one was looking for an America to believe in, this was a credible version, because the Wobblies seemed utterly American, born out of the mining camps of the Rockies (that "radical West," in Henry Nash Smith's words, that now seems like a chimera), then coming east to hit Northeastern immigrant milltowns like Lawrence and Paterson with tidal force—if only, like the tide, to roll back and seemingly vanish.

Perhaps also like others, however, over time the Wobblies have figured less and less in my teaching about the Progressive Era, relegated to a passing note in lectures and discussions of that period. Like the writers of textbooks and the canonical labor historians upon which those textbooks rely, I have found it difficult to explain the Wobs as more than a romantic sidebar—exemplars of something that was not to be, victims of what was. Their very existence is framed by larger tropes still standard after many decades—the Haymarket Affair at the front end, heralding the triumph of business unionism over the Gilded Age's radical currents, then the Red Scare during and after World War I, which crushed the left as a whole. In this larger context, the IWW appears as just one episode in the larger battles between Labor and Capital (and within Labor), one of the might-have-beens, like the Knights of Labor, the Populists, the German or Italian anarchist sects, Debs's Socialists—take your pick.

Here one runs up against the peculiar American dilemma when seeking a usable, vernacular history for the left. In most other countries, the problem of the radical past is that it's too present, constantly invoked by mainstream political forces that have governed and seek to again in the future. In ways the United States has not seen since the end of "bloody shirt" politics in the 1890s, various historic parties routinely summon their revolutionary legacies for purposes of legitimization. Even at a great remove, the German Social Democratic Party is the party of Karl Marx; the main electoral forces in the Republic of Ireland did originate in different factions of the Irish Republican Army during their Civil War of 1922–23 (even today the ruling Fianna Fail's party emblem reads "The Republican Party" and it is an urgent priority to assert that identity versus the electoral threat of Sinn Fein); the Congress is the party of national liberation in what was British India. Mexico's new elites in the 1920s took this to the highest stage by creating an Institutional Revolutionary Party whose entire rationale was its claimed lineage.

In this country, self-evidently, no major political institution claims a left-wing past—with the signal exception of the African American wing of the Democratic Party. So rather than a parade of state-sanctioned radical and revolutionary heroes and martyrs, we are left with books like Wobblies...