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The Working Class in American History
We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World
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 would be erased and where all people would walk free and equal. The Wobblies tried in their own ways to grapple with issues that still plague the nation in a more sophisticated and prosperous era. Their example has inspired radicals in America and abroad over the greater part of a century.
557 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
About the author
Melvyn Dubofsky
43 books13 followersA leading scholar of labor history, Melvyn Dubofsky is Bartle Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology emeritus at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 7, 2026
During their heyday they were condemned by business leaders as "anarchists," "traitors," and "undesirable citizens.” America’s most prominent labor leader ridiculed them as "rainbow chasers" who were "spoilers, determined to rule or ruin the labor movement.” Local vigilantes regularly attacked their members and drove them forcibly out of their communities. President William Howard Taft called for using “the strong hand of the United States [government]” to take “decided action” against their employing their free-speech rights on behalf of their cause. And in the midst of the First World War, a United States Senator declared in a speech to his colleagues that the initials of their name stood for “Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors.”
Such invective reflected the horror with which many Americans viewed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Thanks to its members’ revolutionary rhetoric and their opposition to capitalism, the union served as the nation’s great leftist bogeyman in the years between the Gilded Age panic over anarchism and the emergence of the “Red menace” after the First World War. In this comprehensive and well-written account of the organization, Melvyn Dubofsky pushes back against the hysterical denunciations of the IWW’s detractors to offer a history of the union that, while portraying its activities sympathetically, offers a judicious assessment of why it failed to realize the ambitious goals of its members.
Dubofsky starts his account with the IWW’s prehistory on the industrial frontier of the American West. It was there in the mid-1890s that hard rock miners in the Rocky Mountains began a struggle against mine operators to improve their low pay and hazardous working conditions. To that end, several of them formed the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), which was quickly radicalized both by their conditions and by their struggles against owners who refused to treat labor as anything other than a disposable commodity. This radicalization put them at odds with the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), which refused to lend its support for their organizing activities. Whereas the AFL maintained its focus on organizing workers by their craft and allowed their unions to operate autonomously, Western laborers increasingly sought to build “one big union,” in which workers could join regardless of trade and which would form a united front of labor against capital.
This vision took form in a Chicago auditorium in June 1905, when over 200 delegates from a variety of organizations came together to form the IWW. The members represented a number of backgrounds and interests, ranging from veteran union members to socialists of nearly every stripe. From the first, however, the new union was plagued with problems, as it suffered from ideological factionalism and inadequate leadership. Nor did it help that the background of most of the figures at the top was in propagandizing rather than organizing, which was the greater need for a union just starting out. This contributed to its early difficulties in expanding its membership. It was not until the IWW reconstituted itself after resolving its leadership issues at their 1908 convention that it was able to focus more on advancing its cause.
That cause was syndicalism. Dubofsky devotes a chapter of his book to addressing this ideology, which became central to its identity. This was in spite of the fact that, unlike so many other “isms” of the era, there was no clear articulation of its doctrines or an explanation of how it was to be achieved. Instead, it was a sort of hazy utopian goal, a promised land where the industrial union would rule over industry and make governments unnecessary. While this would be achieved through confrontation with the existing capitalist order, Dubofsky stresses that the means involved would be strictly nonviolent, a value they practiced consistently throughout their organizational campaigns.
Such aspirational dreams were irrelevant to the majority of the workers the IWW sought to organize. What they wanted was not the promise of a better tomorrow, but improvements in their conditions today. These the IWW pursued in spite of the obstacles before them. In many places, the effort to organize had to be preceded first by a struggle simply for the right to make their case, which local authorities in places such as Spokane, Fresno, and San Diego sought to restrict. In the South, they faced the additional obstacle of racism, which added to their difficulties in organizing lumber workers in Louisiana and Texas. And in the textile mills in Massachusetts, they coped as best they could with a lack of funds necessary to withstand the opposition of not just the mill owners but the state as well. What few gains were made often unraveled as soon as the organizers moved on.
By 1913, the setbacks in the East led the IWW to withdraw to their base in the West, yet even here a recession and the continuing hostility of business interests threatened their survival. What saved them was the outbreak of war in Europe. With profitable orders flooding in for their products, owners had a powerful incentive to avoid labor strife, even if it meant concessions to their workers. This aided the creation in 1915 of the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO), whose harvest workers provided the IWW with both hope and much-needed dues. With similar gains among lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest and miners in the Rocky Mountain states following, the giddy leadership decided that the conditions were ripe to move from education to taking control of American industry.
What the war gave the IWW, however, the war now took away. The United States’s entry into the conflict in April 1917 changed completely the environment for the “Wobblies” at the very moment they attempted to consolidate their gains. Though more in need of workers than ever, employers could not tolerate the leverage the war gave to labor. In this they had a new ally: the federal government, who, while often hostile towards the IWW up to this point, had only intermittently used its power against the union. Now, however, they were receptive to employers’ claims that work stoppages were a challenge not just to employer control but to the war effort itself. Determined to put the IWW out of business, the federal government banned IWW literature from the mails, their agents broke into the IWW's headquarters in search of evidence, and undercover operatives created justifications to arrest the IWW leadership. The campaign fractured the leadership and tarnished their reputation among the public, with their eclipse on the left by the emergence of communism ensuring their decline after the war.
Despite this the IWW soldiers on today as a pale reflection of the organization that once terrified so many in America. Their irrelevance has made any updating of Dubofsky’s venerable study unnecessary. While the subsequent abridged edition provides a valuable summary of more recently published works, nothing that has come out since has surpassed it. It stands today as a classic of American labor history, and remains by far the best single book about the Wobblies, one generous in its treatment of the subject and conveying with that generosity a sense of what it was about the IWW that inspired so much enduring devotion to it.
Such invective reflected the horror with which many Americans viewed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Thanks to its members’ revolutionary rhetoric and their opposition to capitalism, the union served as the nation’s great leftist bogeyman in the years between the Gilded Age panic over anarchism and the emergence of the “Red menace” after the First World War. In this comprehensive and well-written account of the organization, Melvyn Dubofsky pushes back against the hysterical denunciations of the IWW’s detractors to offer a history of the union that, while portraying its activities sympathetically, offers a judicious assessment of why it failed to realize the ambitious goals of its members.
Dubofsky starts his account with the IWW’s prehistory on the industrial frontier of the American West. It was there in the mid-1890s that hard rock miners in the Rocky Mountains began a struggle against mine operators to improve their low pay and hazardous working conditions. To that end, several of them formed the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), which was quickly radicalized both by their conditions and by their struggles against owners who refused to treat labor as anything other than a disposable commodity. This radicalization put them at odds with the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL), which refused to lend its support for their organizing activities. Whereas the AFL maintained its focus on organizing workers by their craft and allowed their unions to operate autonomously, Western laborers increasingly sought to build “one big union,” in which workers could join regardless of trade and which would form a united front of labor against capital.
This vision took form in a Chicago auditorium in June 1905, when over 200 delegates from a variety of organizations came together to form the IWW. The members represented a number of backgrounds and interests, ranging from veteran union members to socialists of nearly every stripe. From the first, however, the new union was plagued with problems, as it suffered from ideological factionalism and inadequate leadership. Nor did it help that the background of most of the figures at the top was in propagandizing rather than organizing, which was the greater need for a union just starting out. This contributed to its early difficulties in expanding its membership. It was not until the IWW reconstituted itself after resolving its leadership issues at their 1908 convention that it was able to focus more on advancing its cause.
That cause was syndicalism. Dubofsky devotes a chapter of his book to addressing this ideology, which became central to its identity. This was in spite of the fact that, unlike so many other “isms” of the era, there was no clear articulation of its doctrines or an explanation of how it was to be achieved. Instead, it was a sort of hazy utopian goal, a promised land where the industrial union would rule over industry and make governments unnecessary. While this would be achieved through confrontation with the existing capitalist order, Dubofsky stresses that the means involved would be strictly nonviolent, a value they practiced consistently throughout their organizational campaigns.
Such aspirational dreams were irrelevant to the majority of the workers the IWW sought to organize. What they wanted was not the promise of a better tomorrow, but improvements in their conditions today. These the IWW pursued in spite of the obstacles before them. In many places, the effort to organize had to be preceded first by a struggle simply for the right to make their case, which local authorities in places such as Spokane, Fresno, and San Diego sought to restrict. In the South, they faced the additional obstacle of racism, which added to their difficulties in organizing lumber workers in Louisiana and Texas. And in the textile mills in Massachusetts, they coped as best they could with a lack of funds necessary to withstand the opposition of not just the mill owners but the state as well. What few gains were made often unraveled as soon as the organizers moved on.
By 1913, the setbacks in the East led the IWW to withdraw to their base in the West, yet even here a recession and the continuing hostility of business interests threatened their survival. What saved them was the outbreak of war in Europe. With profitable orders flooding in for their products, owners had a powerful incentive to avoid labor strife, even if it meant concessions to their workers. This aided the creation in 1915 of the Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO), whose harvest workers provided the IWW with both hope and much-needed dues. With similar gains among lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest and miners in the Rocky Mountain states following, the giddy leadership decided that the conditions were ripe to move from education to taking control of American industry.
What the war gave the IWW, however, the war now took away. The United States’s entry into the conflict in April 1917 changed completely the environment for the “Wobblies” at the very moment they attempted to consolidate their gains. Though more in need of workers than ever, employers could not tolerate the leverage the war gave to labor. In this they had a new ally: the federal government, who, while often hostile towards the IWW up to this point, had only intermittently used its power against the union. Now, however, they were receptive to employers’ claims that work stoppages were a challenge not just to employer control but to the war effort itself. Determined to put the IWW out of business, the federal government banned IWW literature from the mails, their agents broke into the IWW's headquarters in search of evidence, and undercover operatives created justifications to arrest the IWW leadership. The campaign fractured the leadership and tarnished their reputation among the public, with their eclipse on the left by the emergence of communism ensuring their decline after the war.
Despite this the IWW soldiers on today as a pale reflection of the organization that once terrified so many in America. Their irrelevance has made any updating of Dubofsky’s venerable study unnecessary. While the subsequent abridged edition provides a valuable summary of more recently published works, nothing that has come out since has surpassed it. It stands today as a classic of American labor history, and remains by far the best single book about the Wobblies, one generous in its treatment of the subject and conveying with that generosity a sense of what it was about the IWW that inspired so much enduring devotion to it.
March 11, 2013
In his beautifully written 1969 work We Shall Be All, Dubofsky traces the rise of the Wobblies from their founding convention in 1906 through their years of rapid decline due to government repression in the years during and after World War I. The backbone of Wobblie support was in the West, especially among miners, and Dubofsky situates them as the industrial complements of the Populists. Anticipating in some ways William Cronon’s argument in Nature’s Metropolis, Dubofsky’s West and its radicalism were not the products of an “undeveloped frontier” but rather drawn from the modernity and intensity of its development as a “citadel of American industrialism and capitalism.” The quarrel which the Wobblies perennially picked with the conservative craft-unionist AFL were likewise inherited from earlier radicals in the Knights of Labor, whose inroads against competing unaffiliated unions had prompted the AFL’s formation in 1886. “More and more after 1900, as the AFL under Samuel Gompers leadership grew and prospered,” Dubofsky tells us, “it sought to sell itself to employers and to government officials as the conservative alternative to working-class radicalism. It could do so because its members were . . . satisfied with the status quo, those least alienated . . . So long as wages rose, and they did, hours fell, and they did, security increased, and it appeared to, the AFL could grow fat while neglecting millions of laborers doomed to lives of misery and want.”
The IWW by contrast challenged the wage labor system, disdained “bushwa” demands, and sought to organize laborers, craftsmen and operatives together into a unified system. While membership fluctuated at low levels, between 50,000 and 100,000, the IWW was often successful in organizing workers thought too difficult to bother with such as immigrant women and migrant farm hands. The broad organizing aims of the IWW, and its confrontational tactics ensured that building “a new society within the shell of the old” would be a contentious enterprise. An internal split led the majority of members to distance themselves from the Socialist Party on the grounds that little could be achieved within the political system. The lack of faith seemed justified by a series of battles nationwide in which Wobblies defied local authorities who prohibited street meetings in an attempt to stifle union organizing, and later in strikes harassed by police and state militias.
While the Wobblies enjoyed increased success organizing workers in the years prior to WWI, Dubofsky notes that this was because the “flamboyant agitators, strike leaders, and propagandists of the past had been replaced by less well-known but more effective labor organizers” who addressed “higher wages and shorter workdays . . . improved conditions of life and job security; and . . . said less and less about revolutions to come and utopias to be.” That is, radicalism without the radical ideas that our author insists were such a secondary consideration. Nevertheless, their reputation for radicalism remained in good standing. “So feared were the Wobblies, that probably no group of labor agitators before or since has as suddenly or as disastrously experienced the full wrath of state and national authorities” wrote Dubofsky of the prosecutions, expulsions and raids in the summer of 1917 that fatally crippled the organization.
The IWW by contrast challenged the wage labor system, disdained “bushwa” demands, and sought to organize laborers, craftsmen and operatives together into a unified system. While membership fluctuated at low levels, between 50,000 and 100,000, the IWW was often successful in organizing workers thought too difficult to bother with such as immigrant women and migrant farm hands. The broad organizing aims of the IWW, and its confrontational tactics ensured that building “a new society within the shell of the old” would be a contentious enterprise. An internal split led the majority of members to distance themselves from the Socialist Party on the grounds that little could be achieved within the political system. The lack of faith seemed justified by a series of battles nationwide in which Wobblies defied local authorities who prohibited street meetings in an attempt to stifle union organizing, and later in strikes harassed by police and state militias.
While the Wobblies enjoyed increased success organizing workers in the years prior to WWI, Dubofsky notes that this was because the “flamboyant agitators, strike leaders, and propagandists of the past had been replaced by less well-known but more effective labor organizers” who addressed “higher wages and shorter workdays . . . improved conditions of life and job security; and . . . said less and less about revolutions to come and utopias to be.” That is, radicalism without the radical ideas that our author insists were such a secondary consideration. Nevertheless, their reputation for radicalism remained in good standing. “So feared were the Wobblies, that probably no group of labor agitators before or since has as suddenly or as disastrously experienced the full wrath of state and national authorities” wrote Dubofsky of the prosecutions, expulsions and raids in the summer of 1917 that fatally crippled the organization.
September 30, 2022
This is a very thorough history of the heyday of the Wobblies. Dubofsky is a sympathetic yet critical historian who takes the IWW to task for its vague idealism and often weak leadership. Of course, the real death blow to the One Big Union came during the hysteria of the Great War, though I didn’t realize that the worst of the government repression came before the Palmer raids began. It is a tragic history of revolutionary failure and martyrdom, but Dubofsky gives the Wobblies some credit for helping force the implementation of rudimentary wartime welfare schemes. In that sense they achieved a partial success.
February 27, 2020
3.75 stars
For serious labor history students or Wobbly geeks. Even this abridged version is very full of some dry detail concerning internal politics and organizations. But there are a lot of stirring historical moments, including the Free Speech arrests and involvement in many of the labor actions of the times in Colorado, Arizona, Montana, Minnesota ...
And the concluding chapters detailing the destruction of the I.W.W. using wartime jingoistic fervor and corporate greed to pretty much illegally imprison hundreds of people is sad reading.
For serious labor history students or Wobbly geeks. Even this abridged version is very full of some dry detail concerning internal politics and organizations. But there are a lot of stirring historical moments, including the Free Speech arrests and involvement in many of the labor actions of the times in Colorado, Arizona, Montana, Minnesota ...
And the concluding chapters detailing the destruction of the I.W.W. using wartime jingoistic fervor and corporate greed to pretty much illegally imprison hundreds of people is sad reading.
August 15, 2018
The butler did it.
April 7, 2024
Overall a pretty good book. A good history of the IWW - although there’s quite a lot of criticism of the IWW that seems a little misplaced and not fully explained.
September 24, 2011
This is the definitive history of the IWWW. Depressing on a number of levels: the IWWs inability to understand workers and the society in which they lived; the unending repression by the governments and economic leaders of the American workers; and the shallowness of all of us as humans. The book holds up well for being over 40 years old. If the history of American labor or American radicals has some interest, but not enough for this substantial book, there is a shorter version available.
August 16, 2008
magnificent history of the IWW..
August 16, 2014
Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All; A History of the IWW (1969)
1. The definitive history of the IWW
2. A sympathetic look from 1877-1919
1. The definitive history of the IWW
2. A sympathetic look from 1877-1919
November 24, 2014
It's pretty much the classic study on the IWW. A good starting place for those with an interest in learning more about the IWW from 1905-1924.
December 18, 2016
Much better in the unabridged edition.
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December 8, 2018"As a result of their commitment to ultimate revolution as well as to immediate improvements in the existence of the working class, radicals the world over quickened the emergence of strong labor unions and acted as midwives at the birth of the welfare state. But success, instead of breeding more success, only produced a new working class enthralled with a consumer society and only too willing, even eager, to trade working-class consciousness for a middle-class style of life. The ultimate tragedy, then, for all radicals, the American Wobblies included, has been that the brighter they have helped make life for the masses, the dimmer has grown the prospect for revolution in the advanced societies."
^US labor history in a nutshell
^US labor history in a nutshell
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews