The Wobblies: Inside the IWW's One Big Union

The Industrial Workers of the World set out to do one specific thing: put every worker in an industry into a single union, skilled and unskilled together, instead of splitting them the way the American Federation of Labor did, trade by trade. Delegates founded it in Chicago on June 27, 1905. It went on to run free speech fights that overflowed small-town jails, print a songbook built to outsing the street preachers competing for the same corner, and watch the federal government convict 101 of its own leaders in a single 1918 trial. It never disbanded.

The convention in Chicago, June 1905

A manifesto called the convention five months earlier. On January 4, 1905, twenty-six socialists, radical-union officers, and editors meeting in Chicago signed a call for “one great industrial union embracing all industries,” to convene that June and build it. Big Bill Haywood, secretary-treasurer of the Western Federation of Miners, signed it. So did Mother Jones, already the best-known agitator in American mining country. Eugene Debs’s name does not appear on that first printed manifesto. It shows up in a slightly different version of the document reprinted two months later.

Debs was in the hall regardless. 203 delegates representing 43 organizations gathered at Brand’s Hall on June 27, and Haywood, presiding, opened with the line the union still quotes:

This is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism.

Two days later, on June 29, Debs took the floor and told delegates that “the old form of pure and simple unionism has long since outgrown its usefulness.”

Mother Jones and Lucy Parsons, widow of hanged Haymarket defendant Albert Parsons, were among the few women in the hall, and Parsons took the floor. Her remarks, preserved in the convention minutes at NYU’s Tamiment Library, called women “the slaves of slaves” and put a strike tactic on the record thirty-one years before autoworkers tried it in Flint, Michigan:

My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out an starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.

One card, not forty

The dispute with the AFL was structural, not personal. Craft unionism meant a single railroad yard could carry separate unions for firemen, brakemen, machinists, and switchmen, each running its own contract on its own schedule, so a strike by one trade left the others working. The IWW wrote the opposite premise into its opening line:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.

Where the AFL’s older unions worked under the motto “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” the IWW’s preamble named its actual goal as “abolition of the wage system.” It aimed to organize the workers craft unions mostly did not, unskilled laborers, immigrants, women, and minorities among them, on one card, in one industry, regardless of trade.

Free speech in Spokane

The IWW’s most famous free speech fight is also a story about the men who used to sell jobs for a living. In late 1908 the union ran a “Don’t Buy Jobs” campaign against Spokane’s employment agencies, which charged migratory workers a fee for placements that sometimes lasted a single day, after which the worker paid another agency for the next one. The agencies leaned on the city council, which passed an ordinance banning street meetings outright. The IWW complied for most of a year, watched the council carve out an exemption for the street preachers who competed with Wobbly organizers for the same corners, and on November 2, 1909 declared Free Speech Day, calling on members everywhere to come fill Spokane’s jail.

Police arrested 150 men in a single day. Within twenty days the count reached 400, and the city ran out of cells, stacking overflow prisoners into the Franklin School and Fort Wright. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, nineteen years old, chained herself to a lamppost to slow her own arrest, then used her trial to charge that police were running the jail’s women’s section as a brothel. She was acquitted; her co-defendant was not. The city settled on March 4, 1910: street speaking allowed, prisoners released, and the licenses of 19 employment agencies revoked. Filling the jail had been the plan from the start, and it worked.

Songs to fan the flames

The same Spokane locals who ran the free speech fight also built the union’s most durable piece of propaganda. In 1909 a committee there published the first edition of what the labor movement still calls the Little Red Songbook, titled in full Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops, Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent. Wobbly songwriters set new labor lyrics to the same hymn tunes traveling evangelists used to draw a crowd on those same street corners, on the theory that a soapbox organizer sharing a corner with a competing preacher needed a tune that could carry over his. Joe Hill, the Swedish-born songwriter Utah later executed, added his first contributions starting with the 1911 third edition. Thirty-eight editions came out between 1909 and 2010, small enough to carry in a shirt pocket.

The raids and the trial

The government moved on the union in the middle of a war. On September 5, 1917, Justice Department agents raided every IWW office in the country within a single 24-hour span, 48 local offices plus the national headquarters in Chicago, hauling out five tons of paper from the Chicago office alone. A grand jury indicted 166 IWW leaders; dismissals and unlocated defendants brought the number who actually stood trial in Chicago, starting April 1, 1918, down to 101, Big Bill Haywood among them, before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who became Major League Baseball’s first commissioner in 1920 while continuing to sit as a federal judge until 1922. On August 17, 1918 the jury convicted every one of the 101 defendants after 65 minutes of deliberation. Landis sentenced them on August 31: 15 got the legal maximum of 20 years, 33 got 10 years, 31 got 5, and 18 got less, with fines totaling more than $2 million.

Still chartering members

Membership never came back to its wartime scale. Between 1912 and 1917 total membership had approached 150,000, though only 5,000 to 10,000 workers were ever paid up and active at any one time, since dues lapsed the moment a migratory worker’s job did. The union’s own paper, Solidarity, printed its most reproduced image, a fist built from massed workers’ hands over the words “One Big Union,” on June 30, 1917. Ten weeks later, federal agents were carrying that same paper’s files out the door in boxes.

The IWW never disbanded. It still organizes under the same preamble, one shop at a time, without waiting for an employer’s permission to call itself a union. Nobody claims today’s roster comes close to 1917’s, by any count.