On Tuesday 27 June 1905, Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) called the first and founding convention of the IWW to order. He told the 200 delegates and observers assembled in Brand’s Hall, Chicago, that they had come together “to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class”. It was their intention to give the working class “control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters”. They recognised that “there is a continuous struggle between the two classes”, the capitalist class and the working class, and consequently “this organisation will be formed, based and founded on the class struggle, having in view no compromise and no surrender”.

The convention brought delegates from 43 organisations representing some 60,000 workers together with a number of individuals, including Lucy Parsons, the African American anarchist and widow of one of the Haymarket martyrs (four US political prisoners who were hanged in Chicago in November 1887); Mother Jones, the mineworkers’ organiser; and Eugene Debs, the leader of the left wing of the reformist Socialist Party and himself a veteran trade unionist. Also attending the convention was Daniel De Leon, the autocratic leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), a theoretically rigid and sectarian Marxist organisation. They gathered in response to what they saw as a crisis within the US labour movement where the conservative union leaders of the American Federation of Labour (AFL) were failing to defend the working class against the attacks of a rapacious, brutal capitalist class.