A dramatic, deeply researched account of how legal repression and
vigilantism brought down the Wobblies—and how the destruction of
their union haunts us to this day.
In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World was rapidly gaining
strength and members. Within a decade, this radical union was
effectively destroyed, the victim of the most remarkable campaign of
legal repression and vigilantism in American history. Under the
Iron Heel is the first comprehensive account of this campaign.
Founded in 1905, the IWW offered to the millions of workers aggrieved
by industrial capitalism the promise of a better world. But its
growth, coinciding with World War I and the Russian Revolution and
driven by uncompromising militancy, was seen by powerful capitalists
and government officials as an existential threat that had to be
eliminated. In Under the Iron Heel, Ahmed White documents the
torrent of legal persecution and extralegal, sometimes lethal
violence that shattered the IWW. In so doing, he reveals the
remarkable courage of those who faced this campaign, lays bare the
origins of the profoundly unequal and conflicted nation we know
today, and uncovers disturbing truths about the law, political
repression, and the limits of free speech and association in class
society.
