Founded in a moment of remarkable coalition building in June 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World spent its first eighteen months defining itself and struggling with divisions, expulsions, and defections. The organization's first and only President, Charles O. Sherman, was removed from office at the second convention in 1906, and, not long after that the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) withdrew. Eugene Debs and many members of the Socialist Party also drifted away, leaving the organization with few of the affiliations that had seemed so promising at the founding convention.

The IWW attracted press attention right from the start. The newspapers indexed in the Chronicling America published 349 articles mentioning the IWW in 1905-1906, from which we gleaned the events listed below. They show that organizers were busy in many communities, especially in western states but also in Cleveland, Youngstown, Detroit, Schenectady, and New York City where IWW's new Silk Ribbon Weavers was active. Other reports point to the growing struggle between the IWW and the American Federation of Labor. In some cases, AFL locals defected to the IWW; other articles accused IWW members of scabbing on AFL strikes.

Early in 1906, the IWW launched its first official periodical, the monthly Industrial Worker based in Joliet, Illinois. The journal lasted less than a year, but in 1909, wobblies in Spokane, Washington, began publishing a weekly newspaper bearing the same name.

Two campaigns dominated attention in 1906. One was the effort to win freedom for William Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone, WFM and IWW leaders who had been charged with conspiracy to murder the former governor of Idaho. The other was the great struggle that developed in Goldfield, Nevada, the mining camp that had become the second largest city in that state. A joint effort by the WFM and IWW turned Goldfield into a showcase for industrial unionism by the end of 1906.