Nov.-Dec. 2005:
Question of A.N.S.W.E.R.
The Story of WRI
Waging Nonviolent Struggle
The Outsider
A Bear’s Life
Deep Commitment
Rearing Resistance
(Un)covering the War
The Lost Boys
Wobblies! A Graphic History
Why They Kill
Letters
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LIVING, BREATHING SPIRIT
OF THE WOBBLIES

By Katie Griffiths and Ryan Nuckel

Wobblies! A Graphic History
Edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman
2005, Verso; 305 pages; $25, paperback

THIS SUMMER, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—proclaimed by its members “the Greatest Thing on Earth”—celebrated its hundredth anniversary. The centerpiece of the celebration is Wobblies!, a graphic history of the movement. It’s also the first in a series of graphic histories—you can look forward to a graphic People’s History of the United States, a biography of Emma Goldman, and a graphic history of Students for a Democratic Society.

Until then, Wobblies! is a uniquely successful example of a history book that draws out the living, breathing spirit of a people’s movement, rather than dredging up dusty ghosts of debates long past. It’s also easily the best recent book on the connection between art and radical politics, not only because of the history it explores, but also by the sheer force of its example.

Co-edited by New York artist Nicole Schulman and Brown University professor Paul Buhle, the book features veterans of World War 3 Illustrated, the pioneering radical comics magazine that grew out of the tumultuous Lower East Side anarchist and art scenes of the 1980s. This school includes Schulman herself along with WW3 co-founders Peter Kuper and Seth Tobocman, Fly, Mac McGill, Ryan Inzana, Sabrina Jones, and Sue Coe. These artists connect the history of the IWW to present-day struggles for peace and economic justice, and their styles—especially Schulman and Tobocman’s haunting scratchboard panels—pay tribute to their artistic forebears. The inclusion of “classic” posters and comics from Carlos Cortez, Ralph Chaplin, and Joe Hill makes the tribute literal.

Unlike most books on the subject, Wobblies! doesn’t end on a tragic note, dissecting the organization’s dramatic collapse. On the contrary, it makes a uniquely convincing case that the IWW lives on—not as a shadow of past greatness, but as a subterranean source of inspiration, a model of joyous, liberatory radicalism.

The book traces the thread of Wobbly sensibility through 1960s comix, surrealism, and the eco-activism of Judi Bari—tying together seemingly disconnected miracles of history:

[Their] way of looking at freedom makes the IWW seem like a lot more than a labor organization, or bigger than all the other labor organizations combined. It looks, for instance, like the grassroots of the ecological/environmental movement. It looks like the Mexicans and Americans who welcomed the Zapatistas taking back the land that had been stolen from their people. It looks like every antiwar movement. It even looks a little like the world John Lennon summed up in the song “Imagine”: no distant god, no country, just us humans, all of us, and our world.

The highlight of Wobblies! is the final essay, “The Art and Music of the IWW”:

The IWW… was no organization of trained artists…. Yet it inspired dozens of talented artists, before 1920 some of the nation’s most experimental and talented, and the IWW generated its own fabulous “school” of cartoonists. Next to songs, cartoons probably brought more workers around that any other expression of Wob creativity…. These rank-and-file artists appear to have received little or no pay for their work, choosing to go ‘on the bum’ with their fellow Wobs, organize where possible, and take odd jobs to stay alive. Some of them signed their art only with the “red card number” on their Wobbly ID, or didn’t sign cartoons at all….

It’s the IWW’s tradition of radical art, along with the incredible talent of the book’s 25 contributing artists that makes the graphic medium of the book so compelling. Wobblies! has also inspired the IWW centennial tour to 16 cities around the country, which will feature film screenings, lectures, and gallery shows.

In a recent interview with online magazine Left Hook, Wobblies! co-editor Paul Buhle explains that the IWW Traveling Show aims to do more than sell books; the goal is to “encourage those people to do their own comics, their own art, their own actions” and spread “a sense that we are entering a new period of unrest and possibility.”

The history of the IWW brought to life in Wobblies! certainly has enough inspiration for everybody—from New York City Starbucks workers organizing under the Wob banner, to today’s radical graphic artists, to grassroots organizers fighting to end the war in Iraq.

Let’s hope it works. If there is a time for taking new opportunities to build on the Wob tradition of broad grassroots solidarity, that time is now. As the war in Iraq grows, our country faces the largest internal refugee crisis since the Dustbowl, and the U.S. labor movement threatens to eat itself alive, it’s a good time to reflect on the moving and unlikely stories of the last American century’s activists who took on fights just as big, and bigger.

Katie Griffiths and Ryan Nuckel are young activists living in Brooklyn, NY.