Essay --

The International Workers of the World, or the IWW is a leftist federation of unions which made major contributions to the American labor movement in the early twentieth century after its June 1905 founding form the amalgamation of several smaller unions. It has been the subject of historical, inquiries, discussions, and debates; but despite considerable attention, the historical understanding of the unique and radical brand of politics exercised by IWW members, or ‘Wobblies’, remains fluid. Controversies persist from the earliest attempts by scholars to define and understand the IWW agenda and the place it had in the progress of the labor movement. Current historical inquiry fails to examine the early ideological formation of Wobbly thought and how these underpinning influences affected the growth and activities of the union. Modern scholarship relating to the IWW relies overwhelmingly on the aspects of the union as an institution, despite the decentralised nature of th e Wobblies and American labor as a whole, and this stems from the work of earlier historians. While looking more deeply into the aspects of the organisation and what they accomplished, the focus remains upon the institution. The individual members and their sociocultural experiences have been lost and repeatedly overlooked by the emphasis on the structure and effects of the IWW. Scholarship which attempts to analyze and understand the formative days of the IWW and their radical ideology has been largely stymied due to the lack of primary sources available from the Union at its height in the 1917, and before. This dearth of firsthand material was left by the widespread governmental crackdown on ‘subversive’ organisations that came with America's entry into the First... ...hers’ at the beginning of the twentieth century through immigration restrictions the deportation of radicals. Most interestingly, it is argued the government crushed the IWW because of public demand, â€Å"to calm [the public] by fighting crime in whatever form they might imagine it† (192-193.) Similarly, Paul Murphy’s 1979, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States, examined the repression of free speech and assembly during the war as birthing the judicial enforcement of these rights by their decisions. For example the dissenting opinion of Justice Brandeis in Gilbert v Minnesota over the similarly anti world war Non Partisan Leagues actions had become the majority opinion by Gitlow v New York after repeated abuses, particularly aimed at labor and the IWW convinced the Federal Courts that it was their obligation to protect minority groups. (268.)