Explore the IWW: organizing, free speech & prisoner histories →
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), whose members are known as "Wobblies," is a revolutionary industrial union founded in Chicago in 1905 to organize all workers into "One Big Union." Its militant free-speech fights and strikes drew ferocious repression: songwriter Joe Hill was executed in 1915, organizer Frank Little was lynched in 1917, and during World War I the federal government prosecuted more than a hundred IWW leaders — among them Big Bill Haywood — under the Espionage Act in one of the largest mass political trials in U.S. history. Many served long sentences at Leavenworth, and the union remains a touchstone of American labor radicalism. The events below trace the union's rise and the campaign of repression that broke it.
