40 Fun Facts About Industrial Workers of the World

Which federal judge sentenced IWW leaders in 1918 and later became the first commissioner of baseball?

Kenesaw Mountain Landis gave the union's top officers 20 years each after a five-month mass trial. Two years later baseball's owners hired him as commissioner while he was still on the bench.

Which celebrated author, later portrayed in The Miracle Worker, joined the IWW in 1912 and wrote for the union?

Helen Keller explained her choice in a piece titled Why I Became an IWW, linking her activism to her concern about blindness. She wrote for the union between 1916 and 1918.

Which Swedish-born IWW songwriter was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915 after a disputed murder trial?

Joe Hill asked to be cremated, and packets of his ashes were later scattered in every one of the lower 48 states except Utah. President Woodrow Wilson had supported clemency for him.

Which Cork-born organizer, once called the most dangerous woman in America, helped found the IWW in 1905?

Mother Jones earned the label from a West Virginia prosecutor at her 1902 trial for ignoring an injunction against striking miners' meetings. A magazine founded in the 1970s carries her name.

Which one-eyed former miner opened the IWW's founding convention in 1905 and later died an exile in Moscow?

Bill Haywood skipped bail in 1921 while appealing a long prison sentence and fled to Soviet Russia. Half of his ashes were buried in the Kremlin wall and the other half were sent back to America.

What nickname, whose origin is still debated, is used for members of the Industrial Workers of the World?

Wobblies is a name nobody can trace for certain. One often-repeated anecdote credits a Vancouver restaurant owner who gave members credit and could not pronounce the union's initials.

Which IWW founder ran for US president five times as a Socialist, the last time from a prison cell?

Eugene V. Debs helped launch the union but later sided with his party against it, accusing the IWW of representing anarchy. In 1920 he drew 3.4 percent of the vote as a federal prisoner.

In which city, already known for the Haymarket affair and the Pullman strike, was the IWW founded in 1905?

Chicago hosted the founding convention on June 27, 1905, when about 200 socialists, anarchists and radical unionists met to build a rival to the country's craft unions.

Which coffeehouse chain's New York City baristas began organizing with the IWW in 2004?

Starbucks baristas kept the IWW campaign going for years without winning formal recognition. The company's first union had formed in 1985 among Seattle warehouse and roasting plant workers.

Which Massachusetts mill city saw the IWW-led Bread and Roses strike of 1912, uniting dozens of nationalities?

Lawrence strikers sent hundreds of their hungry children to stay with sympathetic families in other states, the walkout's signature move. Many of the mill hands were teenage girls.

Which anarchist speaker, widow of a man hanged after the Haymarket affair, was a founding member of the IWW?

Lucy Parsons became internationally famous on the lecture circuit after her husband Albert was executed in 1887. She was buried in the cemetery where the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument stands.

Which Curaçao-born Socialist Labor Party leader helped found the IWW, then left in 1908 to back a rival Detroit union?

Daniel De Leon wanted the union tied to a political party, and lost when the IWW rewrote its preamble to bar any party affiliation. His followers' breakaway union lasted until 1925.

Which Catholic priest wrote the Preamble to the IWW Constitution, then quit the radical movement under a pseudonym?

Thomas Hagerty reportedly renamed himself Ricardo Moreno and earned his living as a Spanish teacher and oculist. He also drew a wheel-shaped chart of how the union's industries would fit together.

Which IWW organizer in the United States was later executed for helping lead Dublin's 1916 Easter Rising?

James Connolly organized for the union in the United States before returning to Ireland in 1910. Wounded in the Rising, he was carried from Dublin's burning General Post Office on a stretcher.

Which IWW organizer, to whom the song The Rebel Girl was dedicated, later chaired the Communist Party USA?

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also helped found the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. When she died on a visit to the Soviet Union, she was given a state funeral with processions in Red Square.

Which IWW poet wrote the union anthem Solidarity Forever after covering a violent West Virginia coal strike?

Ralph Chaplin began the verses in 1913, inspired by striking families who had spent a year living in tents. He finished the song in 1915.

Which union, hardened by the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903–04, played a key role in founding the IWW in 1905?

Western Federation of Miners members made up about a third of the early IWW, but most of its delegates walked out of the 1906 convention. The union left for good in 1907.

Which rival group led by Samuel Gompers did the IWW's founders accuse of dividing workers into narrow craft unions?

American Federation of Labor unions mostly organized skilled men by craft and left the unskilled outside. The IWW answered with a plan to enroll every wage earner, whatever the job.

Which 1880s workers' order had a creed that the IWW sharpened into its motto about an injury to one?

Knights of Labor members held that an injury to one was the concern of all. The IWW made it blunter: an injury to one is an injury to all.

Which New Zealand-born brewery unionist helped plan the IWW and became its first general secretary-treasurer?

William Trautmann was born to German parents and had been expelled from Germany for radical labor activity. His own brewery union banned him for helping to launch the IWW.

From which Arizona copper town were about 1,300 IWW strikers and bystanders hauled away in cattle cars in 1917?

Bisbee's deportees were held at a baseball park, then railed 200 miles into New Mexico and left there. Mining giant Phelps Dodge had supplied the sheriff with lists of whom to seize.

In which Montana copper city was IWW board member Frank Little seized by masked men and lynched in August 1917?

Butte was already tense after a mine fire killed 168 men in June, and Little had come to support the union drive that followed. No one was ever prosecuted for hanging him from a railroad trestle.

At which Washington mill town did deputies fire on IWW members aboard the steamer Verona in November 1916?

Everett's sheriff and a crowd of deputized businessmen were waiting on the dock when about 300 union members arrived by boat from Seattle to back striking shingle weavers.

Members of which veterans' group clashed with the IWW in Centralia, Washington, during an Armistice Day parade in 1919?

American Legion marchers and union men each blamed the other for starting the fight. That night a jailed IWW member, himself an army veteran, was handed to a mob and lynched.

In which Washington city did the IWW's 1909 free speech fight target crooked employment agencies and fill the jails?

Spokane had restricted street meetings, so more than 400 members got themselves arrested on purpose to clog the courts and cells. The city repealed its ordinance in March 1910.

Which fabric were the mills of Paterson, New Jersey, weaving when the IWW led a months-long strike there in 1913?

Silk had made Paterson's name, but new looms let one weaver tend several machines at once, and the strikers wanted that system abolished. The walkout collapsed that July.

Which journalist, later the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, staged a strikers' pageant for the IWW in 1913?

John Reed and his Greenwich Village friends put the strikers themselves on stage at Madison Square Garden. The show won good reviews, but the strike crumbled soon afterwards.

Under which wartime law were more than 100 IWW leaders tried together in 1918 for hindering the draft?

Espionage Act charges followed raids in September 1917, when federal agents hauled five tons of records out of the union's head office alone. The trial of 101 defendants ran for months.

Which famous defense lawyer won acquittal for an IWW founder accused of plotting to kill Idaho's former governor?

Clarence Darrow tore into the prosecution's star witness, a confessed bomber who had named union officers to save himself. Darrow later defended John Scopes in the 1925 monkey trial.

What name was given to the anti-IWW statutes that Idaho pioneered in 1917 and many other states soon copied?

Criminal syndicalism laws made it a crime to advocate sabotage or violence as a route to industrial or political reform. In California, knowingly joining a group that preached it could bring charges.

Which animal, drawn with bared teeth and claws, became the IWW's symbol for sabotage on the job?

A black cat played on the old superstition about bad luck crossing your path, the idea being to unnerve an employer. Members nicknamed the emblem the sab cat.

What is the popular name of the IWW's collection of labor anthems, first published in 1909 and full of reworded hymns?

Little Red Songbook pages mostly pair old folk tunes and hymns with new pro-union words. Its stated purpose is to fan the flames of discontent.

Which mocking phrase, a jab at members' supposed laziness, was a popular alternative reading of the initials IWW?

I Won't Work was only one of the jokes made at the union's expense. Others read the letters as I Want Whiskey or Irresponsible Wholesale Wreckers.

Which form of address, written before a member's name, do IWW members traditionally use for one another?

Fellow Worker, often shortened to FW, goes in front of a member's name. Some women members have adopted the unofficial variant Sister Worker.

In which city did Ben Fletcher help lead Local 8, the IWW's interracial longshoremen's union founded in 1913?

Philadelphia's Local 8 was about one-third African American, one-third Irish American and one-third other European immigrants, a rare mix for its time. Fletcher was himself born in the city.

Which immigrant community ran the Work People's College near Duluth and published the IWW's only daily newspaper?

Finns formed a sizable part of the union's immigrant membership, perhaps five to ten thousand people. Their Duluth daily, Industrialisti, printed 10,000 copies an issue at its peak.

Which Pacific Northwest fast food chain's workers formed a union with IWW support in 2016 and won votes in 2018?

Burgerville staff won an 18-4 vote at a Portland restaurant in 2018, which forced the company to recognize their union and bargain with it. Five locations went on to hold successful union drives.

Which wartime measure was Australia voting on in 1916 when twelve IWW members were jailed in Sydney for conspiracy?

Conscription split Australia's governing Labor Party, and the IWW's loud opposition to the war made it a target. Prime Minister Billy Hughes then brought in a law to have the union declared unlawful.

Which IWW general secretary, a former Telluride miners' leader, retired in 1915 to a copper claim in New Mexico?

Vincent St. John led the union from 1908 to 1914, yet retirement did not spare him. He was swept up in the 1918 mass trial of IWW officers and sent to Leavenworth.

The IWW anthem Solidarity Forever is sung to the tune of which marching song from the American Civil War?

John Brown's Body lent its melody first to The Battle Hymn of the Republic and then, in 1915, to the union anthem. A hymn of the consumer cooperative movement uses the same tune.