In this important new book, Melvyn Dubofsky traces the relationship between the American labor movement and the federal government from the 1870s until the present. His is the only book to focus specifically on the 'labor question' as a lens through which to view more clearly the basic political, economic, and social forces that have divided citizens throughout the industrial era. Many scholars contend that the state has acted to suppress trade union autonomy and democracy, as well as rank-and-file militancy, in the interest of social stability and conclude that the law has rendered unions the servants of capital and the state. In contrast, Dubofsky argues that the relationship between the state and labor is far more complex and that workers and their unions have gained from positive state intervention at particular junctures in American history. He focuses on six such periods when, in varying combinations, popular politics, administrative policy formation, and union influence on the legislative and executive branches operated to promote stability by furthering the interests of workers and their organizations.

This is the classic history of the Industrial Workers of the World, the influential band of labor militants whose activism mobilized America's poorest and most marginalized workers in the years before World War I. Originally published in 1969, Melvyn Dubofsky's We Shall Be All has remained the definitive archive-based history of the IWW. While much has been written on aspects of the IWW's history in the past three decades, nothing has duplicated or surpassed this authoritative work. The present volume, an abridged version of this labor history classic, makes the compelling story of the IWW accessible to a new generation of readers. In its heyday, between 1905 and 1919, the IWW nourished a dream of a better America where poverty-–material and spiritual–-would be erased and where all people, regardless of nationality or color, would walk free and equal. More than half a century ago the Wobblies tried in their own ways to grapple with issues that still plague the nation in a more sophisticated and properous era. Their example has inspired radicals in America and abroad over the greater part of a century