by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
* * *
Thus it was in Uzay that the folk sorely hauled water from Daddio’s well they had dug. And, so it was that when Elmo Groper with his poll went out among the people—passing out free, handy six-ounce size samples of DADDIO’S OLD FASHIONED PURE WATER with added tranquilizers—asking them, “Are the folks getting a fair shake?” Ninety-nine per cent of those polled replied, “Yeah, man, we’re all shook up. Do we get a refund on the bottle?”
21
Carlos Cortez, a frequent contributor to the Industrial Worker, writes from Milwaukee, Wisconsin: “I was born right here in Milwaukee of a Mexican Wobbly father and a German Pacifist Socialist mother. Between them they created another radical. With the exception of various jaunts, I spent most of my life doing such things as common labor, record salesman, book salesman, and various other things. During the last war, I pulled a two-year sentence in a federal correctional for refusing to go into military service. Oh, date of birth, August 13, 1923.” His following two poems appeared in the Industrial Worker (May 2, 1960, and October 11, 1961).
WHERE ARE THE VOICES?
By CARLOS CORTEZ
Where are those loud voices
That rang thru the land in its towns and cities,
In its hop fields and lumber camps,
In its textile mills and steel mills,
In its wheat fields and its waterfronts,
Voices so loud that entire police forces would attend their rallies
To give riot-gun ovations and billy club caresses?
Where is the voice of the young Swedish hobo song writer
Who the mines bosses stood against a prison wall in Utah
And filled his body full of bullets
Like his colleague of two thousand years earlier, the young Jew hobo carpenter
Who the disgruntled money changers impaled on a cross with rusty nails
And two thousand years later are still pounding those nails?
Where are the voices of the young Aztec peon
Shouting Land and Liberty
Who the Hacendado and Standard Oil puppets silenced forever with an ambush
And the young Spanish poet
Who so infuriated that bosom buddy of the State Department
That his cutthroats saw to it those hands would write no more poetry
While across the Tyrrhennean Sea
A sad-eyed Italian suffered a similar fate?
Where are the voices of the two Italian dreamers
Who in Massachusetts were strapped to a chair by the sons of Cotton Mather
And barbecued with high voltage
And the anarchist editor who because he wrote too much
Was found by a bullet on a dark New York street
While the “finest” just shrugged their shoulders
And the passionate Jewess who fleeing one tyranny
Had found only another tyranny and came back broken?
Where are the voices of the half-Indian Wobbly
Who a committee of solid citizens, using tortures no Indian ever dreamed of
Could not get the satisfaction of hearing one cry of pain
Or plea for mercy from his lips
And a fellow worker of his, not quite so stoic,
Castrated and hung by his toes from a railroad trestle
Shouting, “Kill me, you bastards!”
And the burly miner who jumped bail to go to the workers’ paradise
And lushed up his last years in disappointment?
Where are the voices of the stout-hearted Haymarket Germans
Who in Chicago had started a tide
No army of pinkertons and finkertons could hold back
And paid for with their lives to bring
The extra hours of leisure time
That working fools like you and me now enjoy?
Where are those voices?
Have they been buried beneath labor-management contracts,
Buried beneath closed-shop agreements and no-strike clauses,
Buried beneath banquets for pie-cards and their shop owner buddies
With patriotic posters showing labor shaking hands with management
Under the gaze of a beaming Uncle Sam,
Buried ever so deeply beneath overtime paychecks?
Have the voices been drowned out by Technicolor soundtracks,
Radio and television,
Juke boxes and squeaky musaks,
Long voluptuous high-powered automobiles
And bright new vacuum cleaners
All thru the miracle of easy-term time payments
Insipidly singing to us,
“Where else but here could you have it so good?”
Have those voices been outshouted by the voices of the cynic
And the tired radical
And the objective analyzer
Loudly insisting the movement is dead?
The old timers are gone, but their voices they never took with them,
Their lingering voices blending in with an evergrowing symphony,
Bursting out from the Earth’s four corners
From Caribbean jungles and North African deserts
To Arizona reservations and South African slum towns,
From sunny Mediterranean islands and Catalonian alleys
To Kilimanjaro foothills and sunny Southland lunch counters,
Heard above the tanks and guns in Budapest streets
And heard above banana boughten airplanes
Roaring low over Central American rooftops,
Heard in the defiant anthems of Bantu men and women
Falling beneath apartheid clubs and bullets,
Laughing along with walking commuters
Who are
Hitting Jim-Crowed bus lines
Real hard in the pocketbook
And such voices can be heard by all but the very deaf!
From Northern Minnesota’s scrub-timbered wastes
To Southern Arizona’s dry hillsides
And from Puget Sound’s bleak islands
To central Missouri’s padded cells
Still echo the voices of the conscientious young men
Who are proud they did not pay taxes
The year atomic power was brought into this World.
From a sun-drenched Southwestern mesa
A proud people living a life of values so ancient
Yet so new to invading barbarians
Who seek to destroy that which they cannot understand
To a group of would-be mariners
Attempting to sail a ship into nuclear waters
And gaining the love of a people
Whose fishermen die fishing for contaminated sea food.
From missile bases in Nebraska and Wyoming
Where youths picket around the clock and suffer broken legs
To a grimy Southern prison cell
Where languishes a small gentle-faced man
Who dares to dream of freedom for his island;
Down the long broad highways
With a bushy-haired anarchist catholic
Spreading his own gospel of revolution
To a dingy second-floor office
On the dingy street
Of one of the dingiest metropolises
Spreading a badly needed message
And the roll call goes on.
Those are the voices of men and women
Who seek no refuge in gray-flannel-suited anonymity
Or khaki-colored respectability
Or chromium-plated mediocrity.
Those are the voices of the inheritors
Of a million years’ struggle
From primeval quadruped to quixotic biped
And neither Roman arenas
Nor medieval floggings,
Inquisitional torture chambers,
Guillotines,
Firing squads,
Electric chairs
Nor congressional investigations
Can still those voices
For t
hose are the voices only Freedom can silence!
22
DIGGING THE SQUARES AT JACK LONDON SQUARE
By CARLOS CORTEZ
Just a couple of blocks away from the Western Pacific depot where the Weepys tracks run down the middle of the street;
Industrial Worker, December 12, 1955.
Stands the same little old shack that has stood up for many years including those years before the Quake when it stood up straight;
This little shack no longer stands up straight with its underpinnings long shaken loose by the Quake and its bottom slowly sinking in the mud of the Oakland waterfront;
This same little shack that used to be a whaling ship whose boards were torn down to build a bunk house for the workers from the oyster beds in the Bay, then a flop house for sailors, then was changed into a saloon—an arrangement that was agreeable to both sailors, proprietor, oyster workers, and everybody;
Where the sailors used to stop off for one last fling before going out to sea;
And where they whooped it up when they came back;
And they called the place Heinolds First And Last Chance;
And because one of these sailors who between jaunts to the Klondike and between jaunts to the South Seas and between drinks would sit at his special table in the corner of the small barroom to write stories;
Heinolds First And Last Chance is now famous;
Famous because this sailor boy who sat in the corner of the barroom and wrote stories wanted to sell his stories to the big magazines and after many tries and many sailings and many drinks did sell his stories;
And that is how Heinolds First And Last Chance has never been torn down;
As the sailors first and last chance for a drink is now this Bay city’s first and last chance at the tourist buck;
No longer do the old schooners dock there any more, and where the horse drawn paddy wagons used to pull up, the rubberneck buses pull up instead;
With boy scout troops whose scoutmasters make sure those tender young minds are exposed to nothing more potent than his dog stories and no longer need worry that tender young ears will be exposed to the sailors’ rough language tell their young charges about the great rags to riches American dream;
Yes, Jack,
YOU who wrote THE IRON HEEL the boy scouts are looking at your old hangout;
Prim and prissy little nuns with their candid cameras reflecting on that great rags to riches American dream;
Yes, Jack,
YOU who wrote THE WAGE SLAVE, the nuns are taking snaps of your old hangout;
Well-fed rotarian types with their well-fed wives and their expensive movie cameras;
Yes, Jack,
YOU who wrote THE DREAM OF DEBS, the rotarians are taking polychrome movies of your old hangout to show to the club members back in flatsville;
The foreign exchange students looking around in vain and seeing only cocktail bars and seafood grottos asking why there is no Jack London Bookshop;
And the old rail-cat who happens to be standing nearby telling them they would have better luck buying his books back home since all they bother to print in this country now are his dog stories;
Yes, Jack,
Your old hangout is still there but as you would walk into that little old bar that you loved so well, you would find the martini and cocktail crowd a poor substitute for your old whiskey and beer bunch;
Sitting there in their pinafores and aloha shirts and even evening dresses, cameras slung around their necks and guidebooks in their pockets;
OOhing and AHing and really having a ball slumming it up with their empty chatter;
Sitting at the same tables and sitting in the same chairs and sitting at the same bar and sitting on the same barstools;
Where you and your gang of roughnecks used to come and whoop it up.
But, Jack, I want you to know that
I still love the place;
I love the place because it is like
A shrine to me;
You made it a shrine;
Because you’re just one more cat that has
Shown the whole damn World
That art doesn’t need
An ivory tower……….!
23
“Hiroshima,” by Lin Fisher, was published in the Industrial Worker (August 23, 1961).
HIROSHIMA
By LIN FISHER
I, a child knew nothing then
but bonfires in the streets, the smiles
tin triumph of the radio
You were older and perhaps
understood and were ashamed.
I grew to grammar school
the air-raid drills an ugly game
and there beneath my desk with me
the children of Hiroshima.
They grew with me. I read too much
Began to see and understand
The rain of bones and blood and guilt
began to fall around my skull.
The fur of terror touched my neck
Those children screamed at the terrible light.
And blind, they saw and knew in dark
the ways of man the braille of death.
Under the covers at night I heard
the beating of my blood—or heard
the engines of the planes that day
the bombers of Hiroshima
Began to see the children’s hands
as blisters jeweled the gentle flesh
that groped but could not hold their lives.
Now grown, I wake at night to hear
the beating of my bomber-blood
I wonder do they listen too
the children we may someday kill
and wake with sweat to hear the planes
that brightly lift their humming death.
The radar spins across the sky
a mesh of secret hunting planes
Industrial Worker, May 23, 1960.
We’ve let men offer all our lives
for empty words and pride and threats
They tell us that we have the time
to hide our children underground
They will not see the final light
They will not know the way they die.
We sleep between our righteous sheets
and never wake from sheltered dreams
to hear our planes drone overhead
that carry hate and death and Hell
and senseless vengeance round the earth.
“Deterrent” politicians say
and each deters by building death.
What pride to us when we are dead
that others roast and scream and die
that cities melt and earth and flesh?
So threat by threat they train our minds
to slaughter millions for a few
(Is this a heritage for pride?)
for differences that don’t exist
that man have made and can unmake
there is no difference, one and one
each man just loves, creates and dies.
And we who stood aside and saw
the yellow children’s groping death
still watch and let them build again
a thousand new Hiroshimas.
Will death some night illuminate
the guilt we let each nation make
Each man a killer by default
who turns his head, afraid to say
I will not help you murder men
24
This recent statement of I.W.W. ideals was written by J. F. McDaniels and was printed in the Industrial Worker (April 22, 1964). McDaniels writes about himself (letter to J.L. K. June 30, 1964): “Born in a sod shanty on my father’s homestead in Dakota Territory, January 29, 1886. Of peasant-proletarian stock. ‘Graduate’ of fifth grade, Colorado Street School, Butte, Montana. Occupations: peddler, clerk, lumber worker. Entered radical world in 1934, when Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California. Contributed to his weekly newspaper, The Epic News…. No clos
e organizational affiliations now. Just a retired radical philosopher.” A California resident, McDaniels frequently contributes articles to the Industrial Worker.
TODAY’S DREAM, TOMORROW’S REALITY
By J. F. MCDANIELS
We have not yet reached that point in civilization where a person who lacks religious or patriotic convictions is regarded as a good citizen. He may have equal rights before the law, but we find him not fully socially acceptable. If he has no love for his God or his country, we have none for him.
We like our people to be believers, rather than thinkers. Thinkers are not likely to be good conformists. Conformism is an integral part of our social establishment. Thinkers are disturbers of our peace of mind. Those who govern us do not like that. A contented people, a satisfied electorate; of such does the politician dream.
We who hold the radical point of view dream a little sometimes, too. We dream of dissent, discontent, disbelief, and many other matters disturbing to the tory-minded.
We let our thoughts dwell on the gross social inequalities that burden the American poor. We dream of simple social justice for the great masses of common people.
We even have grand dreams of a brotherhood of man, reaching around the world; of ending poverty and war’s destruction in all the lands of Old Earth.
We think great thoughts of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” as the French motto so eloquently expresses it. We would gear the ideals of the noblest minds in history to the building of a civilization inclusive of all the races of mankind.
In these daydreams of ours, we would pluck the rich from their mansions, and put them to work among commoners, and tear down the slums of the poor and build them houses where they can dwell in decency and comfort.
We dream of a new day dawning when there will be an end of luxury and ostentation among the rulers of humanity.
We will harness the forces of nature to the feeding of a vast world population. We will apply the wonders of science to the welfare of people, and not to their destruction.
And so the radicals dream, as the ancient Greeks did, centuries ago. Many of their ideals are now reality, as ours will one day be. They contributed mightily to democracy.
Ralph Chaplin
Notes
Chapter 1
1 Proceedings of the First Convention of the I.W.W. (New York, 1905), pp. 1–2.
2 Ibid., p. 82.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., pp. 575–76.