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Greg Hall, Harvest Wobblies: The Industrial Workers of the World and Agricultural Laborers in the American West, 1905–1930. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001. 288 pp. $34.95, cloth.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2004

Steven Reich
Affiliation:
James Madison University

Extract

Greg Hall's probing study of migrant agricultural workers in the Far West and Great Plains of the early twentieth century sheds important light on a neglected but important contingent of labor radicals who joined and sustained the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Although we most often associate the IWW with logging and lumbering, mining, and marine transportation, Hall explains how a distinctive work culture united tens of thousands of migrant farm workers from the wheat fields of Kansas to the fruit and vegetable orchards of Washington and California. Despite intense state repression of the IWW during World War One, these harvest wobblies of the Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union (AWIU) led a resurgence of the IWW in the 1920s before internal divisions within the IWW and critical changes in the worklife culture and technology of agriculture led to the ultimate demise of the industrial union among migrant farm workers.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2003 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society

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