“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”:
The IWW’s Lost Legacy in
American Popular Culture
The centennial of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 2005
was not on the American media’s radar screen. But if there is ever a time that we
needed the Wobblies it is now: American imperialism rages abroad, social
programs are being cut while the wealthy benefit from large tax reductions, and
the American labor movement is marginalized. In the past, the IWW once posed
a threat to capitalism, however, at the same time, the organization opposed
American entrance into World War I, anfd the patriotic backlash from that war
was used to cmsh such radical alternatives as the anarchism, the Socialist Party,
and the IWW. During the Red Scare of 1919-1921, indigenous radical
alternatives were suppressed, and American radical tradition was largely written
out of the nation’s history and consciousness. History textbooks tend to dismiss
the IWW as a violent and radical manifestation of discontent out of the
mainstream and irrelevant to contemporary America.
There have been, however, some efforts to resurrect the image of the
IWW, and this paper proposes to examine some of these efforts to gain a
foothold within American popular culture. During the turbulent 1960s, as the
post World War II consensus appeared to collapse from its own internal
contradictions, Joan Baez memorialized the great IWW minstrel Joe Hill in her
performance at Woodstock. During the 1970s and 1980s, images of Hill and the
IWW were featured in Hollywood pictures and documentaries, but by the 1990s
the Wobblies had apparently all but disappeared from an increasingly
conservative culture dominated by escapist entertainment and a political
environment in which the Democratic Party abandoned its populist and labor
roots. This paper will examine the history of how the IWW has been portrayed
and all too often ignored in American popular culture, denying the radical
legacy which is part of this nation’s history. Nevertheless, there is, as historian
Howard Zinn suggests, an adversarial culture of struggle in the United States
which continuously challenges the conventional wisdom. This adversarial
culture, especially in the music of protest, keeps the legacy of Joe Hill and the
IWW alive in the United States.
To celebrate the centennial of the IWW, Paul Buhle and Nicole
Schulman edited a graphic history of the union, addressing the IWW’s history
and legacy as well as contemporary organizing campaigns. Buhle and Schulman
acknowledge that the Wobblie heroes such as Joe Hill are similar to other largerthan-life American characters like Johnny Appleseed, John Henry, and Paul
Bunyan, but the difference is the Wobblie political message which transcends
the story of individual heroics. Writing for a younger audience, Buhle and