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terms of hours and effort. The film is a labor of love on the part of the
filmmakers, who, in an oral history companion volume to the film, argued for
the continuing relevancy of the IWW, proclaiming, “Long regarded as belonging
to a social movement whose time has come and gone, the IWW may yet prove
to have been ahead of its time, developing and popularizing ideas very relevant
to economic and political challenges undreamed of in 1905.”'^
While the viewing audience for the documentary film was limited,
Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), a biopic of John Reed based upon historian
Robert Rosenstone’s biography of the leftist journalist and author of Ten Days
That Shook the World {\9\9), earned critical acclaim, box office receipts, and an
Oscar for Beatty as Best Director. While the film captured Reed’s involvement
with the IWW in the 1913 Paterson silk workers’ strike, his organizing role in
the fonnation of the American Communist Party, and his service to the Russian
Revolution, some critics found that the film subverted its politics to the love
story between Reed (Warren Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). Film
viewers may have missed the point that Reed “passionately argued that the
industrial unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World was the only viable
model for revolutionary action in America.” The film attempted to provide
historical context through interviews with witnesses, such as Roger Baldwin,
Rebecca West, and Scott Nearing, who provided first-hand accounts of Reed
and the First Red Scare. Nevertheless, politics tend to remain peripheral for
much of the film, leading Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic to observe,
""Reds is to communism and the Bolshevik Revolution what Hamlet is to Danish
foreign policy; the work is inconceivable without the political context, but
context is what it remains.”’^
Labor and politics, however, were at the core of independent filmmaker
John Sayles’s Matewan (1987), based upon a post World War I labor war in
West Virginia’s Mingo County between the United Mine Workers and the Stone
Mountain Coal Company and its hired guns from the Baldwin-Felts Detective
Agency. Union organizer Joe Kenihan (Chris Cooper) is a former Wobblie who
was imprisoned for opposing the First World War. Kenihan attempts to unite
Appalachian whites, Italian immigrants, and African American strikebreakers
into a cohesive multiracial union. Preaching nonviolence, Kenihan is,
nevertheless, unable to prevent the Matewan massacre which takes the
organizer’s life and provides the authorities with an excuse to dispatch troops
and crush the strike. Labor film historian Tom Zaniello describes Matewan as
one of the finest labor films ever made."^^
The most significant connection between the IWW legacy and popular
culture, however, lies in music rather than film. In a 2004 piece for the Austin
Chronicle, Jim Caligiuri asserts that the activism of musicians such as Bruce
Springsteen, Dixie Chicks, and Pearl Jam against the war in Iraq owes a debt of
gratitude to Joe Hill “as the originator of protest songs.” Caligiuri writes that as
an opponent of militarism. Hill would identify with popular opposition to the
Bush administration’s adventure in Iraq. After a brief survey of Hill’s life and