Nef, Walter T.

NEF, WALTER T. (1882–c. 1960). Widely regarded by his fellow members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as one of the greatest of all Wobbly organizers, Walter Nef was the original guiding spirit of the IWW’s large agricultural workers’ union. Apart from the fact that he was of German-Swiss background, nothing seems to be known of his pre-IWW life. He took part in the union’s Spokane free-speech fight in 1909–1910 and later organized for the IWW in the lumber industry as well as in construction, mining, and long-shore.

At the IWW Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO) founding convention in Kansas City, Missouri, in April 1915, Nef was elected general secretary-treasurer and immediately spearheaded an aggressive and innovative organizing campaign. Indeed, much of what became recognized as distinctively Wobbly organizing technique was Nef’s creation. Mobile AWO “job delegates” followed the harvest, organizing migratory workers right on the job and taking advantage of the ripening crops to enforce union demands. Starting with nine members, the AWO had signed up some 18,000 by the end of 1916, making it the largest of the IWW’s constituent industrial unions. So great was the IWW’s power and prestige among the migratory “wage-slaves” that, according to the testimony of countless old-timers, it was virtually impossible to ride the freight-trains out West unless one had an IWW “red card.”

The immense and sudden success of Nef’s AWO was a major reason for the US government’s relentless persecution of the IWW during and after the World War I. It is not surprising, therefore, that in 1918, when he was a leader of the large IWW local in Philadelphia, Nef was one of 101 Wobblies convicted and sentenced to Leavenworth Penitentiary for obstructing the war effort.

Released from prison by the end of 1923, Nef did not resume his activity in the IWW. Nothing is known of his life during the next couple of decades, though IWW historian Fred Thompson recalled that Nef, regarding the industrial union structure as inherently revolutionary, tried for a time to organize an industrial union movement without the IWW’s revolutionary rhetoric. In the 1940s Nef discovered Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897) and recognized in them the theoretical basis of the ideas that had animated his whole adult life. He at once commenced publication of his own Bellamyist Equalitarian Bulletin, which he continued to produce, at first in San Francisco and later in Los Angeles, until his death in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The exact date of his death has not been determined, but the reference books that state he died in the 1930s are in error.

McGuckin, Henry E. Memoirs of a Wobbly. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1987.

Nef, Walter T. “Job Control in the Harvest Fields.” International Socialist Review 17 (September 1916).