I've got a big, red, soft spot in my heart for the Industrial Workers of the World (a radical labor union that was especially influential in the Northwest in the early 20th century). It isn't just their contributions to winning the eight-hour workday and outlawing child labor; nor that they accepted all comers, regardless of trade, race, or gender; nor that they eschewed big bureaucracy for small-scale, viral networking and direct action—though all those things are laudable and underappreciated, etc., etc.
No: What I love about the Wobblies is their rough-hewn panache and classical—for lack of a better word—manliness. Forget the puffed-up bravado of a drunken roughneck and the bullying sneer of a pea-brain in his shiny pickup with a "NO FEAR" sticker—I'm talking about nostalgia for the old-school toughs who felled trees, shot and cleaned their dinner, played the musical saw, defended the weak, self-published newspapers, worked hard, and were willing to go to jail for a righteous cause. (I don't care if that's all romanticized myth—it gave us something worth aspiring to.)
The Wobblies is a primer on those days, both in the rugged West and the urban East, with its firetrap factories, stylish hats, and scabrous underclass. The documentary is a collage of contemporary interviews, historical film footage of lumberjacks and city streets, and great old folksongs—the working-class hymns that organizers hoped would woo converts from other hymn-singing organizations. In retrospect, the Wobblies' doomed struggle against the Salvation Army was a bigger loss than its struggle against the capitalists. The latter was a fight over material interests, but the former was a battle for the American soul. While the Salvation Army evangelized for Jesus and against the labor movement, Wobbly poet Joe Hill sang: "You will eat, bye and bye, in that glorious land in the sky; Work and pray, live on hay; You'll have pie in the sky bye and bye. (That's a lie!)" Obviously, the Christians won.
The rise and fall of the I.W.W. is a story every American should hear, but the documentary doesn't offer much beyond the basics—if you don't know about the Everett Massacre (yes, our Everett) or what "an injury to one is an injury to all" means, rent and learn. If you do, you needn't bother—unless you want to see an old man play a saw, hear an old Italian tell funny stories about going to jail, and listen to an old woman rant about how mad she got at being called an "agitator."
The saddest thing about The Wobblies is how old its interview subjects are. The singing, idealistic, lusty Wobbly is a dead creature, whose pale descendents are stuffed with ideals and bereft of ideas. They haunt street corners, hawking copies of the Socialist Worker, desperately trying to distinguish themselves from the LaRouche jackasses.
Children seldom live up to their parents' expectations.
