We Shall be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World

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University of Illinois Press, 2000 - Business & Economics - 288 pages
This is the classic history of the Industrial Workers of the World, the influential band of labor militants whose activism mobilized America's poorest and most marginalized workers in the years before World War I.
Originally published in 1969, Melvyn Dubofsky's We Shall Be All has remained the definitive archive-based history of the IWW. While much has been written on aspects of the IWW's history in the past three decades, nothing has duplicated or surpassed this authoritative work. The present volume, an abridged version of this labor history classic, makes the compelling story of the IWW accessible to a new generation of readers.
In its heyday, between 1905 and 1919, the IWW nourished a dream of a better America where poverty--material and spiritual--would be erased and where all people, regardless of nationality or color, would walk free and equal. More than half a century ago the Wobblies tried in their own ways to grapple with issues that still plague the nation in a more sophisticated and properous era. Their example has inspired radicals in America and abroad over the greater part of a century

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Contents

A Setting for Radicalism 18771917
1
The UrbanIndustrial Frontier 18901905
9
The Class War on the Industrial Frontier 18941905
21
From Pure and Simple Unionism to Revolutionary Radicalism
33
The IWW under Attack 19057
50
The IWW in Action 19068
67
The Syndicalism of the IWW
84
The Fight for Free Speech 190912
98
Back to the West 191316
168
Miners Lumberjacks and a Reorganized IWW 1916
185
The Class War at Home and Abroad 191417
200
Employers Strike Back
215
Decision in Washington 191718
228
Courtroom Charades 191819
243
Disorder and Decline 191824
255
The IWW Legacy
267

Steel Southern Lumber and Internal Decay 190912
114
Lawrence 1912
132
Paterson and After
152
Recent Works on the History of the IWW
273
Index
279
Copyright

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About the author (2000)

Melvyn Dubofsky, Distinguished Professor of History at Binghamton University, SUNY, is the author of Hard Work: The Making of Labor History among other books, and coauthor of John L. Lewis: A Biography.Joseph A. McCartin, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University, is the author of Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21.

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