Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2007 | Page 61

‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Nighf ^ 57 individuals” in the West and unskilled workers, the IWW’s leader William “Big Bill” Haywood “frightened people by calling for sabotage and a general strike.” Describing IWW-led strikes at textile plans in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey, the authors of Making a Nation assert, “Strikers clashed with police and staged parades in which thousands of marchers carried red flags. To sensationalist newspapermen and anxious middle-class readers, these activities looked like signs of approaching class warfare.”^ The text describes, but fails to condemn, the violation of civil liberties that occurred when the Justice Department raided the Chicago offices of the IWW and 96 of the union’s leaders were imprisoned on charges of sedition. Such a tame reading of the 1919-1921 Red Scare does not bode well for the future of American freedom in an era where civil liberties are again under assault by draconian pieces of legislation such as the Patriot Act. The ever-popular American Pageant also perpetuates the image of the IWW as a violent organization. While observing that during World War I “some of the most crippling labor sabotage was engineered by the left-wing IWW members,” the text does recognize that during enforced wartime patriotism, “violence was done to traditional concepts of free speech, as IWWs and other radicals were vigorously persecuted.”*^ This classic text, however, does omit the assaults perpetuated against IWW members and their families in the Ludlow Massacre and Bisbee Deportation. Perhaps one of the most succinct and objective descriptions of the IWW found in this brief survey of textbook literature on the Wobblies is from The Enduring Vision, In this history from Houghton Mifflin, the IWW is portrayed as preaching revolution, but the authors conclude, “The Wobblies had a reputation, much exaggerated, for violence and sabotage, and they faced unremitting harassment through arrests and prosecution by government officials. By 1920 the IWW strength was broken.”^ This passage appears to suggest that the IWW be assigned to the dustbin of history. On the other hand, the IWW and its legacy are celebrated in Howard Zinn’s alternative text, A People's History’ of the United States, which is often employed as a text by progressive historians and teachers. Zinn proclaims that the Wobblies were characterized by a nondiscriminatory approach when it came to race, gender, and skills. He admires the Wobblies for being militant, courageous, and unafraid to fight back when they were attacked. Nevertheless, Zinn downplays the issue of violence, focusing instead upon the Wobblie philosophy of anarcho-syndicalism, in which “the workers would take power, not by seizing the state machinery in an armed rebellion, but by bringing the economic system to a halt in a general strike, then taking it over to use for the good of all.” This proved to be a powerful idea, and, although perhaps only a hundred thousand actually ever joined the union, the IWW exerted an influence far beyond its numbers, terrifying the capitalist establishment of early twentiethcentury America. Zinn writes, “They were attacked with all the weapons the system could put together: the newspapers, the courts, the police, the army, mob