Unpopular Wobblies: the decline of the IWW in the United States, 1905-1924

Abstract

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is a radical labor union that had its heyday in the United States in the early 20th century. Within two decades of its founding, however, the IWW was effectively shattered and severely weakened. This thesis will focus on explaining the numerous factors involved in the union’s decline, both internal and external.I will argue that internal problems like the IWW’s factionalism and administrative weaknesses combined with external factors like government repression and the rise of the Communist movement to create an unsuitable environment for the IWW’s operation. By focusing on these factors and their interplay, I will be expanding upon the ideas laid out by traditional IWW historians like Melvyn Dubofsky or Eric Thomas Chester. At the same time, my focus on the role that the IWW’s relationships with external groups like the Socialist Party or the American Federation of Labor played is also intended to fill a gap in the historiography. This thesis will rely upon a combination of both primary and secondary sources to support my claims. The IWW has been written about by a number of historians and journalists coming from a variety of perspectives that offer important analysis which I will be relying upon. At the same time, IWW members produced countless primary documents in the forms of songs, cartoons, newspaper articles, and pamphlets which I will also be citing routinely. Contemporary scholars and writers also produced many newspaper articles, studies, or polemics which offer a non-IWW or even anti-IWW perspective on the union from the time. All these sources together will allow me to paint a more comprehensive picture of how and why the IWW experienced its fatal decline.