Fighting for Free Speech with the Hobo Agitators of the Industrial Workers of the World

John Duda     2009     136p     5 x 8

Mass civil disobedience, train-hopping militants, insurrectionist poets, radical marching bands, and a victory for a precarious proletariat—in 1909!

Published for the 100th Anniversary of the Spokane Free Speech Fight, Wanted: Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane! tells the story of one of the first of the Industrial Workers of the World’s famous free speech fights. Through newspaper articles, dispatches from the scene of the fight, and personal recollections, the voices of the workers who filled the prisons of Spokane, Washington in the name of free speech and the One Big Union are brought back into print. A hundred years later, the courage and creativity of these Wobbly free-speech fighters, laughing in the face of law and order to defy an unjust system and even less fair working conditions, could not be more relevant. Includes articles, letters, updates, and essays by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Agnes Thecla Fair, Richard Brazier, J. H. Walsh, and other Fellow Workers.

$3-10