Beset with early legal defeats, the IWW was, for most of the 20th century, a marginal faction of the labor movement. This has made it easy to condemn the Wobblies as utopian or immature, doomed to failure for their lack of pragmatism. But this belies the fact that, as the ACLU’s Baldwin put it, “‘IWW’ was a feared phrase for 10 or 15 years in the United States.”
Even measured by conventional standards, the Wobblies succeeded in many instances, winning higher wages, shorter workdays, and safer conditions for its members. They not only successfully organized major strikes; they posed a fundamental ideological threat to the liberal order. The limits of negotiation is, literally, the first thing out of the organization’s collective mouth: The preamble to the manifesto adopted at the 1905 convention begins with the statement that the “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” This sounds extreme and intransigent because it is. Anyone who has been involved in a unionization drive knows that “the employing class,” as the preamble points out, does everything it can to convince its workers “that the working class have interests in common with their employers.” Instead, the IWW went to great lengths to demonstrate that workers—many of whom were immigrants from several different countries—had much in common with each other.
The organization was extraordinary—and extraordinarily threatening—for many reasons. Primary among them was its dedication to nondiscrimination. No organization can overcome the prejudices of its time or its individual members, but the Wobblies tried. They never chartered a single segregated local. Their pamphlets were translated into 12 languages. People still try to make the argument that socialism never arrived in the United States because of linguistic and ethnic divisions among the working class, but the IWW led several strikes that prove this defeatist, segregationist position is a fabrication. Some of its most celebrated organizers were women. Its newspapers ran articles addressing the harm racism posed to working-class interests and others explaining that prostitution was an economic rather than a moral issue. It took its readers seriously, providing translations of Marx alongside poems, songs, job listings, and news of strikes in France and Italy. Democratic principles did not spring spontaneously from diversity: Strike committees elected to negotiate with employers were purposely organized to include one member from each ethnic group involved in the strike. Historian Peter Cole’s important 2013 book Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia gives a full accounting of the Wobblies’ consciously multiracial character. Local 8, the subject of Cole’s book, was roughly evenly divided between African Americans, Irish and Irish Americans, and immigrants from other European countries. In other words, they were powerful because of their political radicalism, not in spite of it.