The first step in making Joe's pacifism acceptable, maybe even attractive, was to make him seem a familiar rather than exotic character. So I made him a Wobbly. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was a very home-grown, American, populist, working-stiff kind of organization. It had little of the rarefied ideological bent and European influence of the Socialist and Communist parties of the time. Lumberjacks, longshoremen, railroad men, farmworkers—the salt of the earth joined in a kind of global idealism. They struck hard and often, lived constantly on the front lines, advocated noncompliance and sabotage of the World War I effort and were broken as a major force in only a few years by the federal government and their own lack of political infighting skills. But the Wobbly spirit remained alive in fact and fiction, in the Tom Joads and Woody Guthries of the Depression, in the rhetoric of Huey Long and the selling copy of the New Deal. Joe Kenehan is not a slogan-spouting Marxist with a book education, not a little Indian guy in white robes preaching a kind of mystic Eastern acceptance, not a stranger at all but just about the most regular fella you'd want to meet, a railroad worker who's had it up to here with the bosses and their bullshit and has started to do something about it. My hope for Joe Kenehan was that the audience would be halfway down the road with him, identifying with him, rooting for him, before they could stop and realize this sucker doesn't carry a gun. What gives?