The Haunted Hall: I.W.W. of Fifty

The Haunted Hall: I.W.W. of Fifty

You don’t remember the Wobblies. You were too young. Or
else not even born yet. There has never beeii anything like
them, before or since. They called themselves materialisteconomists but what they really were was a religion. They were workstiffs and bindlebums like you and me, but they were welded together by a vision we don’t possess.
—From Here to Eternity by James Jones

Bob Willock is a man in an empty room whose windows provide slanting glimpses of Wall Street towers, to the east, and the waterfront, to the west. It is the meeting hall of the Manhattan branch of the Industrial Workers of the World—”the Wobblies”—an organization sustained by a vision that refuses to die in the face of all facts and funeral rites. The IWW is fifty years old now and largely forgotten, but the vision that made it the greatest radical movement in American labor still h...

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