Industrial Workers of the World
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40 free Industrial Workers of the World trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Industrial Workers of the World set out in 1905 to organize everyone the craft unions had left out: the unskilled, immigrants, women and migrant harvest hands. Its founders were miners, socialists, anarchists, a priest and a newspaper editor, and few of them agreed for long. Within a generation the union had led some of the most famous strikes in American history and been all but broken by the government. This quiz starts with the people: who founded the IWW, who led it, and what became of them, from prison cells to exile. It then moves through the mill strikes, the free speech fights, the wartime raids and mass trial, and the union's songs, symbols and slang. It is written for students of labor history, union members and anyone curious about the most radical union America has produced. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01Which federal judge sentenced IWW leaders in 1918 and later became the first commissioner of baseball?
Kenesaw Mountain Landis
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.
Q 02Which celebrated author, later portrayed in The Miracle Worker, joined the IWW in 1912 and wrote for the union?
Helen Keller
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.
Q 03Which Swedish-born IWW songwriter was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1915 after a disputed murder trial?
Joe Hill
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.
Q 04Which Cork-born organizer, once called the most dangerous woman in America, helped found the IWW in 1905?
Mother Jones
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.
Q 05Which one-eyed former miner opened the IWW's founding convention in 1905 and later died an exile in Moscow?
Bill Haywood
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.
Q 06What nickname, whose origin is still debated, is used for members of the Industrial Workers of the World?
Wobblies
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.
Q 07Which IWW founder ran for US president five times as a Socialist, the last time from a prison cell?
Eugene V. Debs
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.
Q 08In which city, already known for the Haymarket affair and the Pullman strike, was the IWW founded in 1905?
Chicago
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.
Q 09Which coffeehouse chain's New York City baristas began organizing with the IWW in 2004?
Starbucks
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.
Q 10Which Massachusetts mill city saw the IWW-led Bread and Roses strike of 1912, uniting dozens of nationalities?
Lawrence
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.
Q 11Which anarchist speaker, widow of a man hanged after the Haymarket affair, was a founding member of the IWW?
Lucy Parsons
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.
Q 12Which Curaçao-born Socialist Labor Party leader helped found the IWW, then left in 1908 to back a rival Detroit union?
Daniel De Leon
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.
Q 13Which Catholic priest wrote the Preamble to the IWW Constitution, then quit the radical movement under a pseudonym?
Q 21From which Arizona copper town were about 1,300 IWW strikers and bystanders hauled away in cattle cars in 1917?
Bisbee
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.
Q 22In which Montana copper city was IWW board member Frank Little seized by masked men and lynched in August 1917?
Butte
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.
Q 23At which Washington mill town did deputies fire on IWW members aboard the steamer Verona in November 1916?
Everett
Thomas Hagerty
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.
Q 14Which IWW organizer in the United States was later executed for helping lead Dublin's 1916 Easter Rising?
James Connolly
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.
Q 15Which IWW organizer, to whom the song The Rebel Girl was dedicated, later chaired the Communist Party USA?
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
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.
Q 16Which IWW poet wrote the union anthem Solidarity Forever after covering a violent West Virginia coal strike?
Ralph Chaplin
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.
Q 17Which union, hardened by the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903–04, played a key role in founding the IWW in 1905?
Western Federation of Miners
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.
Q 18Which rival group led by Samuel Gompers did the IWW's founders accuse of dividing workers into narrow craft unions?
American Federation of Labor
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.
Q 19Which 1880s workers' order had a creed that the IWW sharpened into its motto about an injury to one?
Knights of Labor
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.
Q 20Which New Zealand-born brewery unionist helped plan the IWW and became its first general secretary-treasurer?
William Trautmann
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.
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.
Q 24Members of which veterans' group clashed with the IWW in Centralia, Washington, during an Armistice Day parade in 1919?
American Legion
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.
Q 25In which Washington city did the IWW's 1909 free speech fight target crooked employment agencies and fill the jails?
Spokane
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.
Q 26Which fabric were the mills of Paterson, New Jersey, weaving when the IWW led a months-long strike there in 1913?
Silk
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.
Q 27Which journalist, later the author of Ten Days That Shook the World, staged a strikers' pageant for the IWW in 1913?
John Reed
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.
Q 28Under which wartime law were more than 100 IWW leaders tried together in 1918 for hindering the draft?
Espionage Act
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.
Q 29Which famous defense lawyer won acquittal for an IWW founder accused of plotting to kill Idaho's former governor?
Clarence Darrow
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.
Q 30What name was given to the anti-IWW statutes that Idaho pioneered in 1917 and many other states soon copied?
Criminal syndicalism laws
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.