Folly and Vision
O'Neill, William L.
Folly and Vision We Shall Be All. A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, by Melvyn Dubofsky. Quadrangle Books. 557 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill The Industrial Workers of...
...But they never had a historical study worthy of them...
...It is not a cheerful story, nor a consoling one, but there are truths in it that we need to know...
...None but reactionaries can take pleasure in their destruction...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill The Industrial Workers of the World did not lack for bards and poets in their own time...
...Certainly in modern times no group of Americans has given more for less than the Wobblies...
...Perhaps the answer is simply that to get a little you must give a lot...
...More than that, dare one be neutral where so much nobility and passion and tragic grandeur are involved...
...This provides a lesson that certain contemporary radicals have yet to learn...
...The Communist Party, which they fought against as long as strength remained to them, lured away members in the 1920s...
...The wonder is that they endured as long as they did...
...This is not to say that he believes the ends justify the means, rather that their means were appropriate to their ends...
...Readers who are put off by the book's large size and slow start will cheat themselves of a rich chronicle that is not less moving for being so soberly presented...
...The CIO attracted others in the 1930s...
...Some historians have thought that had it not been for governmental repression the Wobblies would have become the means by which industrial unionism was established in America...
...How can one take a disinterested view of such people...
...What they got was hysterical vigilantism and judicial persecutions...
...He also notes the external problems the IWW failed to overcome...
...Many of them concern the IWW's internal weakness, its prodigal waste of leadership, its refusal to sign contracts, and its inability to construct permanent local organizations...
...The Wobblies attributed the vilest motives to the power structure of their day...
...Times have not changed much, as the official reaction to groups like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers demonstrates...
...Other approaches may well be taken to measure and define their exact place in our history...
...Many will find this judgment difficult to accept...
...Dubofsky comes as close to objectivity as decency permits, yet he does not shirk his human obligations in the name of scholarship...
...Yet no one is likely to find retracing Dubofsky's steps worthwhile...
...In the end, of course, they were destroyed...
...It exposes some cherished myths about the Wobblies, but it does not fail to make clear that even at their extravagant worst they were more sinned against than sinners...
...The first impression one takes away from We Shall Be All is a renewed sense of what men (and women too) the Wobblies were...
...But Dubofsky insists convincingly that they were so beset with problems and contradictions within and without that even a more benign official climate would not have saved them...
...For more than twenty years after their organization in 1905 they were beaten, tortured, mutilated, kidnapped, imprisoned, and brutalized in countless ways and places...
...We Shall Be All honors them best by disdaining the easy formulae that offer comfort at the expense of understanding...
...These people led the movement, he tells us, here is what they did, this is what happened to them...
...Recently Joyce Kornbluth's splendid anthology Rebel Voices made their essential documents available to us...
...Joel Hill, Ralph Chaplin, Arturo Giovannitti, to name only a few, insured them a place in our cultural memory, as did the novelists, especially John Dos Passes, who came later...
...Historians will go on debating the questions the Wobblies raised...
...the rest of us must try to find some meaning in their agony...
...Job security and a living wage, eminently desirable things in their own right, are not what they sacrificed their lives for...
...But this evades the issue, and Dubofsky, to his credit, does not press it...
...The Wobblies practiced nonviolence (passive resistance) most of the time despite great provocation...
...The history of movements like the IWW poses special interpretive difficulties...
...We Shall Be All is a true history...
...They extended the area of free speech by their willingness to be arrested in defense of it...
...There is not room here to list all the interesting points and persuasive arguments that Dubofsky makes...
...Their natural allies in the Socialist Party were alienated by the Wobblies' contempt for politics...
...They originated peaceful techniques like the sit-down strike...
...Ideologists will continue to rake over the dead ashes of their doctrinal struggle...
...Their greatest weakness, in this respect, was their propensity toward a kind of verbal overkill, an extreme, self-indulgent rhetoric that terrified the establishment pointlessly, while giving it the means to destroy them...
...Better still, Dubofsky brings out the redeeming virtues that excuse their failings...
...One approach is to say that while the movement was destroyed, its dream lived on to become manifest later in various reforms such as social security or industrial unionism...
...Nonetheless, they expected sensible responses to their activities and justice from the courts...
...They meant to have it all—peace, justice, freedom, dignity, self-determination for everyone—and such benefits as a later generation secured would not have cheered them...
...Brave to the point of folly, they possessed a great vision and suffered terribly for it...
...It is true that the CIO was heir to a fraction of the Wobbly legacy, but few Wobbly leaders would take much pleasure in what the CIO has wrought...
...Now Melvyn Dubofsky, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, has told the Wobbly story in all its tragic amplitude...
Vol. 34 • February 1970 • No. 2
