Imagine going down to your local brewpub or coffee shop. You meet some friends. The talk turns to the war. You criticize the President and his wealthy supporters. Next thing you know, a couple of husky fellows at the next table grab you, hustle you out the door and down to the local police station. You are arrested on a charge of sedition. Within months you are indicted, tried and convicted. The judge sentences you to 5-10 years in prison — and off you go! Think this could never happen? Well, it happened not that long ago — during World War I — to scores of ordinary people in Montana. They discovered very painfully that their free speech rights had been stripped away by the state legislature.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless farmer and half-Indian mother. Her paternal grandfather, a white settler, farmer, and veterinarian, had been a labor activist and Socialist in Oklahoma with the Industrial Workers of the World in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism.

På et møde i Chicago i USA i 1905 dannede over 200 socialister og fagforeningsfolk organisationen Verdens Industriarbejdere (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW). Et fagforbund baseret på det marxistiske princip om konflikt mellem klasserne og den nordamerikanske filosofi om faglig organisering på industriniveau. Dens medlemmer fik hurtigt øgenavnet Wobblies og de satte nu ind på at rekruttere ufaglærte og udbyttede emigranter, ikke-hvide, kvinder samt de emigrantarbejdere, der var udelukket fra de foreninger af faglærte arbejdere, som den traditionelle og chauvinistiske landsorganisation AFL organiserede.

The rise and fall of the libertarian movement in Chile is a facinating story. There is more to the story than mere historical interest, however. Chile is a country on the brink of development and hence is closer to a European country than to a truly underdeveloped nation. Chile is as urban as any developed country and even in 1900 about 20% of the population lived in cities, around the same percentage as Canada at that time. Population growth is low and vital statistics are at the developed level. Women have a more equal status with men than in any other Latin American country.

El ascenso y decadencia del movimiento libertario en Chile es una historia fascinante. Hay más para la historia que el simple interés histórico, sin embargo. Chile es un país al borde del desarrollo y por lo tanto está más cercano a un país europeo que para una nación verdaderamente subdesarrollada. Chile es tan urbano como cualquier país desarrollado y aun en 1900 cerca del 20 % de la población vivia en ciudades, alrededor del mismo porcentaje que Canadá en aquel entonces. El crecimiento demográfico es bajo y las estadísticas demográficas están en el nivel desarrollado. Las mujeres tienen un más estatus más igual con los hombres que en cualquier otro país Latinoamericano.

Founded in Chicago in 1905 as a radical answer to the American Federation of Labor's acceptance of capitalism and exclusion of unskilled workers from unions, the I.W.W. became notorious as the only labor organization to oppose American participation in World War I. Collection Documents mostly date from the post-war 1920s, when anti-radical sentiment lead to harassment and prosecution of I.W.W. members.

1919 was one of the most eventful and promising years for the local I.W.W. because of the Seattle General Strike. Sixty-five thousand of the city's workers, from hotel maids to garbage collectors, announced they would not work until the federal government and local shipyard owners granted wage increases to workers in the city's shipyards which had boomed during the war. This walkout virtually shut down Seattle from February 4th to February 9th. Although the more conservative American Federation of Labor was mainly responsible for the strike, the Seattle I.W.W. nonetheless participated and saw the strike as an harbinger of more worker solidarity and radicalism to come.

The IWW gave working class rebellion its first soundtrack. Neither the organization's ideology nor tactics were completely new to the labor movement. What was new was the creation of an extensive body of music and poetry, which inspired and united a multicultural, American workforce. Sung at mass meetings, on the picket lines, and in the jails, Wobbly songs kindled a spirit of solidarity and strengthened the will to resist. Most importantly, IWW songs articulated the sentiments and aspirations of the working class in a way that a thousand well-argued pamphlets and manifestos never could.