Benjamin Hayes Williams (1877-1964) was a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Life Ben Williams was born in 1877 in Monson, Maine and named after president Rutherford B. Hayes.Melvyn Dubofsky. We Shall be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. University of Illinois Press, 2000. In 1888, he moved with his mother to Bertrand, Nebraska and started working as a printing apprentice.
Williams graduated from Tabor College in 1904 with a bachelor's degree.Catalogue of Tabor College. Tabor, Iowa, 1905. While at Tabor, he played on the football team, edited a campus magazine, and was president of the Phi Delta Literary Society.Warren R. Van Tine. Making of the Labor Bureaucrat: Union Leadership in the United States, 1870-1920. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973, pp. 21-22.
He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 and from 1909 to 1917 edited the IWW's publication, Solidarity.
Williams published newspaper articles and authored several works on labor movement.Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology. Edited, with introductions by Joyce L. Kornbluh. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1964.
He died in 1964.
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