Post WWII IWW History 


Mike Ballard suggested I should contact you re IWW history after the second
world war, and under present circumstances I may well be the best person (at
least in the organization) to talk to on this.  But before I put you in touch
with resources (the few that exist) it would help to get a better sense of your
interests.  It seems FW Ballard sent me this some weeks back, but I have
misplaced it if so.
 
There is a study of IWW in Cleveland that focusses on the WWII era (when
Cleveland was the union's last area of significant industrial presence) but
also carries it through the U.S. government's use of the Taft-Hartley law to
bust it.  After that there is no industrial presence, though there is some
activity, until a 1964 blueberry pickers strike in Michigan.  I have in my
files a draft article on IWW from 1945 through 1980 (or perhaps notes for a
draft, I would have to locate it) that I was working up with Franklin
Rosemont (of Charles Kerr publishers in Chicago) and Penny Pixler which was
commissioned for the new edition of Kornbluf's anthology but then vetoed
because we insisted on treating the IWW as a living organization.  There is of
course the quite inadequate treatment in Patrick Murfin's addendum to Fred
Thompson's The IWW: Its First Fifty (70 in the version with the Murfin chapter)
Years.  Sam Dolgoff addresses the era in his memoir, Fragments.  Several IWW
militants speak to the period in oral histories--I have not seen what is
probably the most important of these, recorded by Penelope & Franklin Rosemont
off Fred Thompson (who edited the Industrial Worker, was an IWW organizer,
etc.) a few months before he died.  There is also some material on Work
People's College (run by Finnish IWWs in Duluth MN) into the 1950s,
contemporary accounts in the IWW press and elsewhere of strikes and organizing
campaigns in the 1970s 80s and 90s, an article by Mark Kaufmann on IWW
organizing in Michigan state (the union's industrial stronghold, such as it
was, from late 70s until 1990) in the 1980s in the current issue of Libertarian
Labor Review (#14, Winter 1993).
 
The material is somewhat scanty and scattered, but let me know what you're
interested in and I'll do my best to point you in the right direction.
 
jon bekken               (IWW member since 1978, former IWW Secretary-Treas)
communication studies
suny 234 dowd fine arts
cortland ny 13045
bekkenj@snycorva.bitnet

