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

The Working Class in American History

by Melvyn Dubofsky, Joseph A. McCartin (Editor)

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
 

Genres: History, Labor, Politics, Nonfiction, United States, American History

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

A 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.

Reviews

[David Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Sam Whitehill · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Homerun2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Chris Nagel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The butler did it.

[Toby Mustill · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[John E · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

magnificent history of the IWW..

[Mark Bowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[River · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Shaun Richman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much better in the unabridged edition.

[N.]

"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