Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers

The romance and tragedy of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) has long captivated leftist historians, and Under the Iron Heel is very much a part of this tradition. Its members “met degradation with a surpassing courage and an astonishing dignity that should long ago have made legends of them all” (6). Briefly surveying the left of today in the conclusion, the author finds that “none of these groups really offers a vision of a workers’ commonwealth of the kind that . . . drove so many real Wobblies to such remarkable levels of sacrifice. And neither does the labor movement itself, or what remains of it” (232). Although the narrative is brief, it still manages to stretch from the organization's founding in 1905 through the late 1920s, tracing a longer-than-usual process of diminishing vitality following the repression of World War I and the Red Scare. As an introduction to the IWW, the only competition to this new work is the abridged version of Melvyn Dubofsky's still definitively comprehensive 1969 history of the group, We Shall Be All, published by Joseph McCartin in 2000. White's work benefits from much new scholarship produced since Dubofsky last updated his book in 1988, and the author made some effective decisions of focus that help manage the extended timeline and make this work the new standard for an easily accessible, yet still scholarly, history of the union.The book does not try to catalog the group's major clashes, its internal divisions, or the origins and evolution of its syndicalist ideology. White is also not really concerned with the IWW of the East, and the author's focus on the West is presented as obvious and largely ignores a long debate about regionalism and the IWW. But White's regional focus does helpfully locate this almost informal group's history where it had the most widespread and persistent support and also repression. It is this latter component, more than the sustaining mutual culture of the organization that enabled its western campaigns and has attracted so much scholarly attention, that drives the author's narrative and helps the book to transcend local and regional variations in IWW organizing.An institutional approach to repression, which we might expect from a legal scholar, is not the direction that White takes, though we do see law and policing evolve and intertwine at the local, state, and federal levels. The author is primarily interested in the human cost of the drive to imprison the rank-and-file membership, much more so than the trials of the leadership. Through these experiences, White wants us to see repression's “vast scale and comprehensive reach, and see how in wrecking lives it also wrecked the union” (7). The book's commitment to storytelling in this vein makes it a visceral, and often moving, human story of the cost of radical resistance to capitalism. There are compelling and insightful stories of undeservedly obscure IWW adherents throughout. Because the IWW functioned more as an adaptable culture of resistance than a cohesive revolutionary organization, these miniature biographies of martyrdom help the reader to understand both the group's radical sensibility and its context. Nicholas Steelink's letters to his wife Fannia from jail in Oakland in 1920 reveal that he cried when he was sentenced, how much he missed her, and that he worried “about her health, about whether she could find work and keep up with living expenses” (197). White asserts that “historians have looked at repression too narrowly . . . without ever reckoning with repression's cumulative effects or giving sufficient attention to the experience of everyday Wobblies,” and after reading a cascade of stories of suffering, the initial implausibility of that claim diminishes (5).Although he argues that historians of the IWW have a “tendency not to adequately consider the more intimate means by which repression accomplished its purposes,” the author unfortunately goes on to assert that “the victims of the kind of repression this book is concerned with were virtually all men” (5, 7). The decision to minimize the effect of repression on women is not dealt with in the text and is awkwardly addressed in an endnote that praises a few of the works on women and the IWW. The book does not focus its story of repression only on imprisonment, and the author acknowledges that some women in or connected to the IWW endured that as well, so there is potential for greater inclusion without losing the effective focus of the book. The full story of repression and its impact at the human level, which this book sets out to recover, would seem to require elevated attention to the experiences of the many women and children connected to these imprisoned men. As Nicholas Steelink's story makes clear, the incarceration of men was also often central to the lives of women.The approach of this book seems fundamentally influenced by the tremendous growth of historical work on the “carceral state,” which now constitutes an entire field in its own right. This body of work could have served as a compelling historiographical justification and scholarly context for White's approach to a new survey of the IWW. Yet among the historiographical claims in the introduction regarding the flaws of prior IWW scholarship in handling the chronology, causality, and nature of repression, the author does not name any specific works in the text. This pattern of disengagement from the historiography in the introduction is consistent through the narrative, and while it increases the book's readability, it obscures both the case for its originality and the author's substantial debt to the large body of work cited in the endnotes and bibliography.It would be a shame if anyone, expert or novice, interested in the IWW was put off by how this work is framed, because it successfully creates a vivid and passionately written story of how the justice system broke the IWW and with much more consistent focus on the human drama of arrests, trials, and imprisonment than we have yet seen. While White's strategy of writing a survey eliminates much, it does convey the core of the diffuse history of the IWW while effectively keeping a lens trained on the rank and file.