Film Review/Ed Rampell

‘One Big Union’ Returns to the Big Screen

The powerful 1979 documentary “The Wobblies” is being revived, offering a contemporary look at the United States’ most militant union.

The re-release of Deborah Shaffer and Stewart Bird’s documentary “The Wobblies” on May 1 inspired viewers to take to the barricades. A new digitally enhanced restoration of the 1979 documentary is storming theaters nationwide, just in time for International Workers’ Day.

“Wobbly” is a moniker for the Industrial Workers of the World, a militant labor union formed in 1905. The American Federation of Labor, which organized craft unions of skilled workers, and many trade unions—such as the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Shipbuilders, and Helpers of America—had refused to admit Black people. The IWW, in contrast, fought for “One Big Union,” uniting all skilled and unskilled proletarians of all races into a single organization of solidarity.

In his opening speech to the 1905 Chicago conference, the legendary “Big Bill” Haywood called the IWW’s founding convention “the Continental Congress of the working class.” The founders of this multiracial, multicultural union included many of labor’s heavy hitters in the early twentieth century.

Other architects of the IWW included Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party’s 1904 presidential candidate; labor activist Mother Jones; feminist icon and activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; agitator Frank Little, who was later lynched; Lucy Parsons, who was born into slavery in Virginia and organized for decades in Chicago; and newspaper editor and Socialist Labor Party leader Daniel De Leon.

But “The Wobblies” does not focus on the movement’s leaders and notables. Instead, it presents an oral history told by a dozen lesser-known veterans of the IWW, survivors who were located and interviewed by Shaffer and Bird in the 1970s to share their eyewitness accounts on celluloid. The aged rank-and-filers recall their radical youth, including hard fought industrial actions such as the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

By zooming in on lumberjacks, miners, mill workers, and others, The Wobblies slyly emulates the IWW’s anarcho-syndicalist philosophy of a leaderless, self-governed union. The masses — not individuals — are the collective hero of this film.

Many leftist groups are known for their theoretical ruminations, but the IWW’s brand of leftwing activism consisted of very basic, rugged class-war-based politics, pitting the bosses against working stiffs who dared to stand up for their rights. The rudimentary class consciousness of these militant musketeers could be expressed as “all for one, one for all,” cutting across craft, ethnic, gender, and language lines to unite every worker into that aspirational One Big Union.

As The Wobblies details, the federal government eventually cracked down on the union. Once the United States entered World War I, IWW strikes that hampered the war effort and public antiwar speeches were deemed detrimental to national security. Combined with—the looming threat posed by the specter of the Russian Revolution, leading to the United States’ first Red Scare, US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, a young J. Edgar Hoover, and the Espionage Act began cracking down on the Wobblies.

In 1918, 101 IWW members were charged in connection to their antiwar and other activities; all were convicted.

The older ex-Wobblies interviewed in Shaffer and Bird’s documentary retain that spunky spark of defiance. As the Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote in his 1910 poem “The Cloud in Trousers”: “No gray hairs streak my soul.”

With contemporary Starbucks and Amazon employees starting to organize in a country where unionization has been in decline, there may be no better time than today to see this documentary about those fearless fighters for One Big Union, where “an injury to one was an injury to all.”

The Wobblies is being theatrically re-released and will be available for streaming on Kino Lorber in June.

Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at Progressive.org.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2022

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