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WOBBLIES
The Western Federation of Miners and 42 other labor
union groups of the 1900's collaborated in
a radical movement in 1905 to form the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in
Chicago. The radicals, known as the Wobblies,
sought to overthrow capitalism in America
and replace it with a revised form of
socialism. The federation's influence
peaked in 1912 but was weakened as World War
I ensued. Following the war, many IWW
leaders were imprisoned for their
anti-capitalist campaigns and their arrests
disrupted the majority of the
organization's political rallies and union
strikes. The union nearly disappeared in the
1920's but many of the ideas and
principles it developed were eventually
incorporated, in modified forms, into modern
industrial unions. The wobblies are now
considered one of America's earliest
examples of a government-recognized labor
union whose radicalism and revolutionary
thinking, despite persecution, persists to
the present.
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