Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World

I'm not all that fond of graphic novels...though this is more of a collection than a single narrative, with different authors and artists telling different bits of the Wobbly story. The makes it slightly more palatable to me, though I'd just as happily have read a straightforward narrative text.

It's a pretty comprehensive work, and a good introduction for people who no nothing about either the Wobblies or how much effort went into suppressing socialism in the US. I learned lots that I didn't know.

Two things stand out for me: how grim the struggle was, and how limited were the Wobblies' successes - lots more heroic defeats and martydoms than success stories; and how important the divide was between skilled workers, organised in the 'labour aristocracy' unions in the AFL, and unskilled workers, in the IWW and other industrial unions. Perhaps the AFL unions actually did represent the class interests, at least in a narrow sense, of their memberships. Something similar happened in the UK, I think, though the division seems to have blurred in the twentieth century.
And perhaps our current divide, between a 'working class' and a 'middle class' defined in terms of culture is closer to this than we realise.