Break Their Haughty Power: Joe Murphy in the Heyday of the Wobblies - Softcover

Nelson, Eugene

3.89

19 ratings by Goodreads

9780910383318: Break Their Haughty Power: Joe Murphy in the Heyday of the Wobblies

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0910383316 ISBN 13: 9780910383318

Publisher: Ism Pr, 1993

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Joe Murphy, chased out of his Missouri hometown by anti-Catholic bigots, hopped aboard a freight train and headed west for the wheat harvest. Within weeks, the 13-year-old Joe became a labor activist and organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "Wobblies"). Eugene Nelson, a longtime friend of Joe Murphy, describes many labor and free-speech struggles through the eyes of "Kid Murphy." The Wobblies built a dynamic mass movement, and this novel relates Murphy's adventures in the wheat fields, lumber camps, and on the high seas. In contrast to the standard dreary recounting of labor history, Break Their Haughty Power brings you inside labor history as it is being made by passionate human beings with complex personalities.

While portraying Joe Murphy's adventures, Nelson presents a series of dramatic historical events -- including the lynch-mob assault on IWW workers by American Legionnaires in Centralia, Washington in 1919; the nationwide railroad strike of 1922; the Colorado coal miners' strike of 1927, in which IWW activists marched and rallied in the face of company gun thugs; and the 1931 strike by workers building Boulder Dam. Nelson also relates the young Murphy's reflections on meeting Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, and Bill Haywood.

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About the Author:

Eugene Nelson (1929-1999) was born in Modesto, California, and wandered the West as worker and poet. In the 1960's he worked with Cesar Chavez' farm workers' union in Texas. He has written several novels and nonfiction works on the experiences of Mexican migrant workers. "We must have been the same kind of travelers," Jack Kerouac once wrote to Nelson. "You're a natural born writer, a pure storyteller."

Review:

"A classic coming-of-age tale of an American social activist.....reads like a non-stop adventure story reminiscent of Mark Twain's fiction." -- Sara Peyton, The Paper (Santa Rosa, Cal.), Oct. 7-20, 1993

"Nelson has done [a] beautiful job of bringing Joe Murphy's reminiscences into a most readable tome..." -- Carlos Cortez, Industrial Worker, January 1994

"This book...gave me the sense of roots for those of us who continue the many-faceted struggle for justice today." -- Mary Moore, Sonoma County Free Press (California), Oct. 1993

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