by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
This great country furnishes the most valuable object lesson to the working class movement of the universe. Let us hope, let us trust, that the workers everywhere may profit from the tragedies of this land, so that, enlightened by such experiences, they may throw their efforts into one cause and so enable the proletariat to free themselves from the chains of economic slavery and prepare themselves for the historic mission, for the real, final struggle, for their industrial freedom, the only freedom wordi while fighting for.
12
Although this poem frequently appeared in the I.W.W. press over Ralph Chaplins name, in his autobiography, Wobbly (Chicago, 1948), Chap-lin claimed that it was written by a West Virginia miner, Elmer Rumbaugh. He wrote: “The only convert I made for the ‘One Big Union idea was Elmer Rumbaugh, a young, hard bitten miner, blind in one eye as the result of a mine accident…. ‘Rummy afterward joined the I.W.W. and remained true to the faith until his dying day. He was very much interested in writing labor songs. One of these, ‘Paint ‘Er Red,’ in time became a proletarian classic.”
“Paint ‘Er Red” was first published in the Huntington, West Virginia, Socialist and Labor Star (January 24, 1913), while Chaplin was the editor. On November 7, 1914, it was published in Solidarity. The song was used by the prosecution in several federal and state trials of I.W.W. members during World War I period as proof of the organizations revolutionary intent.
PAINT ’ER RED
By RALPH H. CHAPLIN
(Tune: “Marching Through Georgia”)
Come with us, you workingmen, and join the rebel band—
Come, you discontented ones, and give a helping hand,
We march against the parasite to drive him from the land,
With One Big Industrial Union.
Chorus:
Hurrah! hurrah! we’re going to paint ‘er red!
Hurrah! hurrah! the way is clear ahead—
We’re gaining shop democracy and liberty and bread
With One Big Industrial Union.
In factory and field and mine we gather in our might,
We’re on the job and know the way to win our hardest fight,
For the beacon that shall guide us out of darkness into light,
Is One Big Industrial Union!
Come on, you fellows, get in line; we’ll fill the boss with fears;
Red’s the color of our flag, it’s stained with blood and tears—
We’ll flout it in his ugly mug and ring our loudest cheers
For One Big Industrial Union!
“Slaves,” they call us, “working plugs,” inferior by birth,
But when we hit their pocketbooks, we’ll spoil their smiles of mirth—
We’ll stop their dirty dividends and drive them from the earth—
With One Big Industrial Union!
We hate their rotten system more than any mortals do,
Our aim is not to patch it up, but build it all anew,
And what we’ll have for government, when finally we’re through,
Is One Big Industrial Union!
13
“One Big Industrial Union” by George G. Allen appeared in the seventh edition of the I.W.W. songbook.
ONE BIG INDUSTRIAL UNION*
By G. G. ALLEN
(Air: “Marching Through Georgia”)
Bring the good old red book, boys, we’ll sing another song.
Sing it to the wage slave who has not yet joined the throng
Of the revolution that will sweep the world along,
To One Big Industrial Union.
Solidarity, June 30, 1917. The Hand That Will Rule the World—One Big Union.
Chorus
Hooray! Hooray! The truth will make you free.
Hooray! Hooray! When will you workers see?
The only way you’ll gain your economic liberty,
Is One Big Industrial Union.
How the masters holler when they hear the dreadful sound
Of sabotage and direct action spread the world around;
They’s getting ready to vamoose with ears close to the ground,
From One Big Industrial Union.
Now the harvest String Trust they would move to Germany.
The Silk Bosses of Paterson, they also want to flee
From strikes and labor troubles, but they cannot get away
From One Big Industrial Union.
You migratory workers of the common labor clan,
We sing to you to join and be a fighting Union Man;
You must emancipate yourself, you proletarian,
With One Big Industrial Union.
Chorus
Hooray! Hooray! Let’s set the wage slave free.
Hooray! Hooray! With every victory
We’ll hum the workers’ anthem till you finally must be
In One Big Industrial Union.
14
John Brill set these verses to the hymn tune, “Take It to the Lord in Prayer.” It was printed in the ninth edition of the I.W.W. songbook.
DUMP THE BOSSES OFF YOUR BACK*
By JOHN BRILL
(Tune: “Take It to the Lord in Prayer”)
Are you poor, forlorn and hungry?
Are there lots of things you lack?
Is your life made up of misery?
Then dump the bosses off your back.
Are your clothes all patched and tattered?
Are you living in a shack?
Would you have your troubles scattered?
Then dump the bosses off your back.
Are you almost split asunder?
Loaded like a long-eared jack?
Boob—why don’t you buck like thunder
And dump the bosses off your back?
All the agonies you suffer,
You can end with one good whack—
Stiffen up, you orn’ry duffer—
And dump the bosses off your back.
15
“Solidarity Forever” the best-known union song in this country, was composed by Ralph Chaplin (1887–1961), an artist, poet, pamphleteer, and one of the editors of Solidarity, the Industrial Worker, and other I.W.W. publications. Chaplin, a commercial artist, joined the I.W.W. in 1913. In his autobiography he wrote that the idea for “Solidarity Forever” came to him while he was editing a labor paper in West Virginia during the Kanawha Valley coal mining strike. He wrote the stanzas in January, 191$, while lying on his living-room rug in Chicago. In Wobbly, he recalled, “1 wanted a song to be full of revolutionary fervor and to have a chorus that was ringing and defiant.”
“Solidarity Forever” appeared in Solidarity (January 9, 1915)- Since that time it has become, according to Joe Glazer and Edith Fowke (Songs of Work and Freedom, Chicago, i960), “in effect, the anthem of the American labor movement.” Chaplin was one of the most prolific of Wobbly songwriters and poets. Some of his I.W.W. poems are collected in privately printed books: When the Leaves Come Out (1917) and Bars and Shadows (1919).
Ralph Chaplin.
Brown Brothers photo.
SOLIDARITY FOREVER!*
By RALPH CHAPLIN
(Tune: “John Browns Body”)
When the Union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
But the Union makes us strong.
Chorus:
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever!
For the Union makes us strong.
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left for us but to organize and fight?
For the Union makes us strong.
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops; endless miles of rai
lroad laid.
Now we stand, outcast and starving, ‘mid the wonders we have made;
But the Union makes us strong.
All the world that’s owned by idle drones, is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own,
While the Union makes us strong.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn.
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power; gain our freedom when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth the new world from the ashes of the old,
For the Union makes us strong.
16
Ralph Chaplin s song “The Commonwealth of Toil” was printed in the fourteenth edition of the I.W.W. songbook. It was composed to the popular melody, “Nellie Grey.”
THE COMMONWEALTH OF TOIL*
By RALPH CHAPLIN
(Air: “Nellie Grey”)
In the gloom of mighty cities
Mid the roar of whirling wheels,
We are toiling on like chattel slaves of old,
And our masters hope to keep us
Ever thus beneath their heels,
And to coin our very life blood into gold.
Chorus
But we have a glowing dream
Of how fair the world will seem
When each man can live his life secure and free;
When the earth is owned by Labor
And there’s joy and peace for all
In the Commonwealth of Toil that is to be.
They would keep us cowed and beaten
Cringing meekly at their feet.
They would stand between each worker and his bread.
Shall we yield our lives up to them
For the bitter crust we eat?
Shall we only hope for heaven when we’re dead?
They have laid our lives out for us
To the utter end of time.
Shall we stagger on beneath their heavy load?
Shall we let them live forever
In their gilded halls of crime
With our children doomed to toil beneath their goad?
When our cause is all triumphant
And we claim our Mother Earth,
And the nightmare of the present fades away,
We shall live with Love and Laughter,
We, who now are little worth,
And we’ll not regret the price we have to pay.
17
Titled “The Cry of Toil” this poem first appeared in the I.W.W. press in the Industrial Union Bulletin (April 18, 1908). It was credited to Rudyard Kipling. Following that date it was reprinted many times in I.W.W. periodicals, titled “We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years” and either signed “anonymous” or “by an unknown proletarian.” About 1916 the verses were set to music by Rudolph von Liebich of the Chicago General Recruiting Union, and the sheet music was advertised in I.W.W. newspapers. The poem was included in John Mulgans Poems of Freedom (London, 1938), under the title “Labour” and is also printed in Marcus Grahams An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (New York, 1929) with the comment that it is a parody of a poem by Rudyard Kipling.
Sheet music of “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years.”
WE HAVE FED YOU ALL FOR A THOUSAND YEARS*
Poem—By AN UNKNOWN PROLETARIAN
We have fed you all for a thousand years
And you hail us still unfed,
Though there’s never a dollar of all your wealth
But marks the workers’ dead.
We have yielded our best to give you rest
And you lie on crimson wool.
Then if blood be the price of all your wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in full!
There is never a mine blown skyward now
But we’re buried alive for you.
There’s never a wreck drifts shoreward now
But we are its ghastly crew.
Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth
Good God! We have paid it in.
We have fed you all for a thousand years—
For that was our doom, you know,
From the days when you chained us in your fields
To the strike of a week ago.
You have taken our lives, and our babies and wives,
And we’re told it’s your legal share;
But if blood be the price of your lawful wealth
Good God! We have bought it fair.
18
Harry Kirby McClintock (1883–1957), a pioneer radio hillbilly who was known to thousands as “Haywire Mac,” is an important figure in hobo, Wobbly, and hillbilly folk tradition. In an interview with John Greenway reported on in his American Folksongs of Protest (Philadelphia, 1953) McClintock claimed to have been a busker in the I.W.W. band of musicians organized about 1908 by J. H. Walsh in Portland to rival Salvation Army bands in attracting crowds to streetcorner propaganda meetings. During his long and colorful career, McClintock worked as a railroad switchman in South Africa and bummed his way to London to attend the coronation of Edward VII in 1902. He was a civilian mule skinner in the Spanish American War, and had also made his way to China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion.
In 1925 San Francisco radio station KFRC hired him for the “Blue Monday Jamboree.” He then moved to the “Happy Go Lucky Hour” network show, worked for awhile in Hollywood, and returned to San Francisco’s “Breakfast Gang” show on which he played and sang until 1955, two years before his death. He was a member of ASCAP and Local 6 of the Musicians’ Union.
“Hymn of Hate” was printed in Solidarity (January 1, 1916).
HYMN OF HATE
By HARRY MCCLINTOCK
For the sailors that drown when your ill found ships go crashing on the shore,
For the mangled men of your railroads, ten thousand a year or more,
For the roasted men in your steel mills, and the starving men on your roads,
For the miners buried by hundreds when the fire damp explodes,
For our brothers maimed and slaughtered for your profits every day,
While your priests chant the chorus—”God giveth—and God hath taken away.”
For a thousand times that you drove back when we struck for a living wage,
For the dungeons and jails our men have filled because of your devilish rage.
For Homestead and for Chicago, Coeur D’Alene and Telluride,
For your bloody shambles at Ludlow, where the women and babies died,
For our heroes you hanged on the gallows high to fill your slaves with awe,
While your Judges stood in a sable row and croaked, “Thus saith the law.”
For all of the wrongs we have suffered from you, and for each of the wrongs we hate,
Solidarity, August 4, 1917.
With a hate that is black as the deepest pit, that is steadfast and sure as fate.
We hate you with hand, and heart, and head, and body, and mind, and brain.
We hate at the forge, in the mine and mill, in the field of golden grain.
We curse your name in the market place as the workman talks with his mate,
And when you dine in your gay cafe the waiter spits on your plate.
We hate you! Damn you! Hate you! We hate your rotten breed.
We hate your slave religion with submission for its creed.
We hate your judges. We hate your courts. We hate that living lie,
That you call “Justice” and we hate with a hate that shall never die.
We shall keep our hate and cherish our hate and
our hate shall ever grow.
We shall spread our hate and scatter our hate ‘till all of the workers know.
And The Day shall come with a red, red dawn; and you in your gilded halls,
Shall taste the wrath and the vengeance of the men in overalls.
The riches you reaped in your selfish pride we shall snatch with our naked hands,
And the house ye reared to protect you shall fall like a castle of sand.
For ours are the hands that govern in factory, mine and mill,
And we need only to fold our arms, and the whole wide world stands still!
So go ye and study the beehive, and do not quite forget,
That we are the workers of the world and we have not spoken—yet.
19
“Dublin Dan’ Liston who wrote “Dan McGann” and “The Portland Revolution” was the proprietor of the famous “Dublin Dan’s” bar in Butte, Montana, the hangout for many colorful union personalities in that mining town. Liston was a member of the I.W.W. as well as the A.F.L. Bartenders’ Union. On his death in 1942 in San Francisco, an obituary in the Industrial Worker (January 31, 1942) read:
“His song, ‘The Portland Revolution,’ is one of the standbys of the I.W.W. songbook. Perhaps he should be remembered for his gift of popularizing some of the obscure phrases of his Dublin childhood and giving them world-wide currency…. The most apt way of describing the economic level of the worker is the phrase by Dublin Dan, ‘he hasn’t a pot in which to spit or a window to throw it out.’”
“The Portland Revolution” refers to a waterfront strike in 1922 in Portland, Oregon, when the I.W.W. Marine Transport Workers’ Union, organized in 1913, and the A.F.L. International Longshoreman’s Union struck when waterfront employers announced that hiring would be done through a company employment agency rather than through the union list system.