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 holds men like Bob Willock, who stared at it once, to the several scattered halls across the country that are so full of memories and empty of men.

The memories are many—riding the rails to Spokane to support fellow workers in the free speech fights of the west, following the harvest with the dreams of better wages and the songs of Joe Hill, striking and picketing the textile mills at Lawrence, Mass., when Joe Ettor raised his voice above the jailings and killings to tell the employers that “You can’t weave cloth with bayonets.” The men are few—but the miracle is that there are any left at all. What sort of men in our practical times have the heart to stay loyal to a vision the world all around them laughs off as obsolete?