Word: iww
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...forcing the mill owners to shorten days and increase wages. A year later, the Wobblies suffered their biggest loss, when the silk manufacturers used police and scabs to maintain their grip. "We didn't include half of what we could have about government attempts to hurt the IWW," producer-director Stewart Bird says. "If we had, people simply would not have believed...
...IWW professed a simple ideology; it hoped the "wage-slave" system would fall to be replaced by industrial democracy. It would be fair to call them "reds" though they were far from dogmatic. And their tactics matched the simplicity of their thought--the Wobblies organized and agitated wherever they went, setting up soapboxes, pasting up posters like the ones you occasionally see in the Square, big cartoons of strong men smashing the state. Pennants carried the One Big Union legend; there were no lapel pins, no sterling silver. Even the leaders were just old organizers; Haywood had learned...
...movie theaters demonstrate the depth of feeling against the Wobblies--in one, a rat (wearing the requisite Bolshevik beard) tries to steal an ear of corn from the stockpile of a virtuous farmer. Fortunately, the farmer's vigilance matches his productivity, and he exterminates the rat (labeled "Bolshevist--IWW") with two quick shovel blows. The music in the production is less authentic and less moving--sung too well, it sounds more studio than picket line...
There are subjects, and this seems to be one, that are almost too romantic to discuss objectively--Bird and Shaffer barely mention the internal splits that divided the IWW into Two Medium-Sized Opposing Camps, and they gloss over the unfulfilled need for an intellectual construct for the union. But what they do focus on is more important. J. Edgar Hoover cut his teeth on the Wobblies; in the face of government's crudest repressions, these immigrant laborers, farm-workers who rode the rails, and confirmed Marxists shone. The film opens with the interrogation of a Wobbly arrested for giving...