Landmark Doc on Radical Labor History "The Wobblies" Screens at AMP

Friday, September 18, 5–7pm (doors and bar 5pm, film and talk 5:30pm) | Winsted, CT

American Mural Project screens The Wobblies on September 18, the National Film Registry documentary on the Industrial Workers of the World, followed by discussion with historian Hamish Lutris and author-activist Steve Thornton.

The IWW, founded in Chicago in 1905, organized workers the American Federation of Labor refused to serve, and there were a lot. Immigrants, women, non-white workers, and migrants, were all barred from the AFL's largely white, male, skilled-trade membership. Nicknamed the Wobblies, the union pursued the radical goal of "one big union" that would put the means of production and distribution directly in workers' hands, and became known for cross-ethnic organizing and confrontational, often violent labor battles in the early 20th century's factories, mines, lumber camps, and wheat fields.

Directors Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer built the 1979 film as oral history, interviewing 26 surviving Wobblies then in their 70s, 80s, and 90s and weaving their testimony together with archival footage, period cartoons, and classic Wobbly songs, many written by Joe Hill. Rip Torn and Geraldine Page provided voiceover work reading the words of period figures including IWW leader Bill Haywood. The film was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry and restored and re-released in 2022.

Thornton, a retired organizer with Connecticut's District 1199/SEIU healthcare workers union and the Greater Hartford Labor Council, has spent decades documenting labor history—he's the author of A Shoeleather History of the Wobblies: Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Connecticut and, more recently, Radical Connecticut: People's History in the Constitution State, co-written with Andy Piascik. He runs the Shoeleather History Project, a website chronicling grassroots organizing out of Hartford.

American Mural Project, 90 Whiting Street, Winsted, CT. More at americanmuralproject.org.