Rebel Voices
Page 83
Conlin, Joseph R. Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Labor Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse Uiversity Press, 1969.
Debs, E.V. Eugene V. Debs Speaks. Edited by Jean Y. Tussey. New York: Pathfinder, 1972. Includes speech at IWW founding convention, and others on “Industrial Unionism,” “The IWW Bogey,” etc.
Dolgoff, Sam. Fragments. London: Refract Editions, 1986. Distributed in the U.S. by Charles H. Kerr. An autobiography, with much on IWW in New York in the 1930s.
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley. The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography. New York: International, 1973.
Foner, Philip S. The Case of Joe Hill. New York: International, 1965.
Hennacy, Ammon. The Book of Ammon. Salt Lake City: The Author, 1965.
Hill, Joe. The Letters of Joe Hill. Edited by Philip Foner. New York, Oak Publications, 1965.
Jones, Mary Harris. The Autobiography of Mother Jones. Introduction by Fred Thompson. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1981.
Marcy, Mary E. You Have No Country! Workers’ Struggle Against War. Edited & introduced by Franklin Rosemont. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1984. Anti-war writings by the editor of the International Socialist Review.
Marquart, Frank. An Auto Worker’s Journal. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. Includes material on IWW influence on early UAW.
McGuckin, Henry E. Memoirs of a Wobbly. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1987. An old-timer’s reminiscences of IWW organizing in the 1910s, covering hobo and free-speech activities, and including much data unavailable elsewhere.
Mers, Gilbert. Working the Waterfront: The Ups and Downs of a Rebel Longshoreman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. Autobiography of a longtime IWW activist.
Nerman, Ture. Joe Hill: mordare eller martyr? Stockholm: Federativs Forlag, 1951; new edition, Stockholm: Pogo Press, 1979. In Swedish.
Scribner, Tom. Lumberjack, with Appendix on Musical Saw. Published by the Author, no date (circa 1980). Mimeographed.
Shields, Art. My Shaping Up Years. New York: International, 1983.
Smith, Gibbs M. Joe Hill. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1969; reissued by Peregrine-Smith Books, 1984. Well-researched biography of the famous IWW songwriter.
Soderstrom, Ingvar. Joe Hill: Diktare och agitator. Stockholm: Bokforlaget Prisma, 1970.
Thompson, Fred, and Dean Nolan. Joe Hill: IWW Songwriter. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1979.
Young, Henry. Haywire Mac and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Stillhouse Hollow, Texas: Stillhouse Hollow Publishers, 1981. Short biography of Harry K. McClintock.
The IWW in Fiction, Poetry, Theater & Art
The IWW has provided a theme or sub-theme for much literature and art, including novels and/or short stories by Winston Churchill, Floyd Dell, John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, Jack London, Ernest Poole and Upton Sinclair. Only a small sampling of material published since 1963 is listed here. Additional references may be found in the McBrearty bibliography, as noted above.
An opera, Columbine, dealing with the 1927 IWW coal strike in Colorado, with a libretto by Joanna Sampson and a score by Mary Davis, was produced at Boulder, Colorado, in 1973.
Bird, Stewart, and Peter Robilotta. The Wobblies. Introduction by Joyce Kornbluh. New York: Smyrna Press, 1980. A play.
Churchill, Thomas. Centralia Dead March. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1980 (distributed by Charles H. Kerr). Novel about the Centralia Conspiracy of 1919.
Cortez, Carlos, ed. Wobbly: 80 Years of IWW Art. Chicago: Gato Negra Press, 1985. Catalog of an exhibition of IWW cartoons. A different version of the pamphlet appeared in 1987 when the exhibit opened at the Labor Archives & Research Center at San Francisco State University.
—, ed. The World of Joe Troy, Wabbly Artist. Chicago: Gato Negra Press, 1986. Catalog of an exhibit of works by the early IWW cartoonist.
Feied, Frederick. No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos and Jack Kerouac. New York: Citadel, 1964.
Giovannitti, Arturo. The Walker & Other Poems. Edited & introduced by Joseph Jablonski. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1988.
Hall, Covington. Dreams and Dynamite: Selected Poems. Edited & introduced by Dave Roediger. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1985.
Hill, Joe. The Cartoons of Joe Hill. Edited & introduced by Franklin Rosemont. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, forthcoming.
—: Joe Hills Sanger. Stockholm: Prisma, 1969. Songs (with music) in Swedish and English, plus a Joe Hill bibliography.
Houston, Robert. Bisbee ‘17. New York: Pantheon, 1979. Novel focused on the deportation of striking miners.
McDermott, John. Joe Hill. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1976. Based on the Bo Widerberg film.
Patterson, Charles, ed. Paint Creek Miner: Famous Labor Songs from Appalachia. Huntington, WV: Appalachian Movement Press, n.d. (early 1970s). Songs by Ralph Chaplin and Elmer Rumbaugh.
Petrakis, Harry Mark. Days of Vengeance. New York: Double-day, 1983. Novel showing IWW influence among Greek immigrants in the U.S.
Pfaff, Henry. Didactic Verses. Buffalo: The Author, 1984. Satirical lyrics by a longtime Hungarian IWW activist. Riebe, Ernest. Mr. Block: Twenty-Four IWW Cartoons. Introduction by Franklin Rosemont. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1984. Reprint of a 1913 collection of IWW comic strips that inspired Joe Hill’s “Mr. Block” song.
Russell, Bert. Calked Boots and Other Northwest Writings. Harrison, Idaho: Lacon, 1967. Tales of the Idaho wilderness.
Stavis, Barrie. The Man Who Never Died: A Play About Joe Hill. Introduction by Pete Seeger. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1972.
T-Bone Slim. Juice Is Stranger Than Friction: Selected Writings. Edited & introduced by Franklin Rosemont. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr,
Traven, B. The Cotton-Pickers. New York: Hill & Wang, 1969; London: Alison & Busby, 1983. The original German title of this novel was Der Wobbly.
Wayman, Tom, ed. Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job. An Anthology of Contemporary North American Working Poems. Madeira Park, B.C., Canada: Harbour Publishing, 1981.
General Works on Labor History, with Material on the IWW
Adelman, William J. Pilsen and the West Side: A Tour Guide. Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 1983.
Boyer, Richard O. and Herbert M. Morais. Labor’s Untold Story. New York: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1974.
Buhle, Paul, ed. Labor’s Joke Book. St. Louis: WD Pres, 1985. Anthology of labor humor, including some IWW cartoons.
—, and Alan Dawley, eds. Working for Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
Dolgoff, Sam. The American Labor Movement: A New Beginning. Champaign: Resurgence, 1980. An anarchosyndicalist critique.
Foner, Philip S. Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1972. New York: International, 1974.
Foster, James C. American Labor in the Southwest: The First 100 Years. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982.
Fusfeld, Daniel R. The Rise and Repression of Radical Labor in the United States, 1877–1918. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1985.
Guerin, Daniel. 100 Years of Labor in the USA. London: Ink-links, 1979.
Harris, Joe. The Bitter Fight: A Pictorial History of the Australian Labor Movement. University of Queensland Press, 1974.
Johnson, Oakley C. Marxism in the United States Before the Russian Revolution. New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1974.
Lens, Sidney. The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns. New York: Anchor, 1974.
Lynd, Staughton, ed. Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Includes 24 pages on Bill Haywood and the IWW.
McCormack, Andrew Ross. Reformers, Rebels and Revolutionaries: The Western Canada Radical Movement, 1899–1919. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.
O’Connor, Harvey. Revolution in Seattle. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964. Reprinted in 1981 by Left Bank Books, Seattle. On the 1919 Seattle General Strike.
Roediger, Dave, and Franklin Rosemont. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986. Anthology of new and old material on the 1880s Chicago labor movement and its influence, with much on the IWW.
Russell, Bert, ed. Hardships and Happy Times. Harrison, Idaho: Lacon, 1978. Oral histories of old-time Idahoans, including Ern Hanson and other IWWs.
—, ed. Swiftwater People. Harrison, Idaho: Lacon, 1979. Includes an oral history of Swedish immigrant Wobbly Pete Johnson.
Shapiro, Shelby. Unions and Racism. Lancaster, U.K.: IWW British Section, 1980.
Tax, Meredith. The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980.
Thompson, Fred. The Workers Who Built Cleveland. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1987. Published jointly with the Greater Cleveland Labor History Association and the Cleveland Federation of Labor. (Reprinted from the Industrial Worker.)
Wertheimer, Barbara Mayer. We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Chapter 19: “Women in the IWW: The Lawrence Strike, 1912.”
What Is a Sitdown Strike? St. Louis: WD Press, 1987. A pamphlet history of this tactic pioneered by the IWW.
Carlos Cortez: Linoleum-block poster of Joe Hill
”Dust” Wallin (One Big Union Monthly, May 1920)
Nancy Kellerman: Silent Agitator (1980s)
A Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons
by Franklin Rosemont
That the Industrial Workers of the World always was “more than a union’—that its social/economic revolutionary perspectives were broadened and deepened by a no less revolutionary cultural dimension—was plain truth to Wobblies themselves as well as to lucid outsiders in the Union’s heyday, and has been recognized to one degree or another by most later historians. Even before Joyce Kornbluh’s Rebel Ibices appeared in 1964, an extensive critical literature had accrued, for example, on IWW songs.1 One of the many virtues of Kornbluh’s anthology is that it has immeasurably expanded our awareness of the depth and scope of IWW culture. The sheer quantity and quality of this book’s 400-plus pages of Wobbly evidence brings home to all the point that the IWW made history not only on the job and in the jungles, but also in poetry, fiction, theater and the graphic arts.
It is not really surprising that this last remains perhaps the least studied realm of Wobbly culture. Serious scholarship on mainstream comic art scarcely existed before the 1960s, and is still in its beginnings.2 Even today adequate biographies of such outstanding figures as Frederick Burr Opper (Happy Hooligan), George Herriman (Krazy Kat) and Elzie C. Segar (creator of Popeye)—universally regarded as three of the greatest cartoonists of all time—are still to be written. As for the non-mainstream comic art that appeared in labor publications, trade journals, small-town weeklies and the American foreign-language press, it has hardly been studied at all. Few historians of cartooning have been interested in labor, and even fewer labor historians seem to be interested in cartooning. What little has been written on labor cartoons has focused on those artists (Art Young and others) who contributed freely to the labor and radical press while “making a living” by selling very different cartoons to large-circulation commercial magazines and newspapers.3
Readers of Rebel Voices will have noted that each text reprinted in this book is preceded by a short introduction telling something of the biography of the author. Just how little was known about Wobbly cartoonists in 1964 is suggested by the fact that their artwork is reprinted here with only a line indicating the source and date of publication. Nonetheless, by bringing together what is still, nearly a quarter of a century later, the largest collection of Wobbly cartoons ever united in one volume, Rebel Voices laid the foundation for the serious study of this sadly neglected field, and inspired some of us to keep digging in the hope of turning up some valuable information on the elusive creators of these images of humor and rebellion.
Labor cartooning had virtually no traditions behind it when the IWW was founded in 1905, and the Wobblies deserve a large share of the credit for developing the new art. Early on, Wob organizers and editors were aware of the propagandistic power of the cartoonist’s art, and many times over the years they actively solicited cartoons from the artists in their ranks. Under the heading “Worker Needs Cartoons” the Industrial Worker for March 30, 1918 noted that the paper “desires cartoons on industrial union or revolutionary subjects” and that “cartoons in line with the IWW principles and program are acceptable at all times.’’ The note further stressed that “these should be drawn on heavy white paper in India ink where possible,” but allowed that “black crayon work reproduces well where the lines are heavy and clear.”
The technical difficulty of reproducing much of the work submitted by inexperienced artists was evidently a constant editorial aggravation, for in a similar notice “To Aspiring Cartoonists” in the same paper for March 25, 1922, precise drawing instructions were again emphasized. Complaining that the paper had recently received “two very good drawings” that could not be reproduced because they were “done with lead pencil on orange-colored cardboard,” the editor urged that “it would be a good idea for fellow workers with an aptitude for drawing to look up a book on ‘commercial art’ or ‘cartooning’ in a library.”
Raymond Corder (One Big Union Monthly, April 1920)
Judging from the great number of first-rate cartoons published in the IWW press, many fellow workers must have heeded this advice. A few may even have taken one of the several inexpensve correspondence courses in cartooning that even then were advertised in mass-media and “pulp” publications. The resemblance of some IWW cartoons to the work of such then-popular artists as Opper, Rube Goldberg, T. A. Dorgan (“Tad”), Harry Hershfield (Desperate Desmond), George McManus (Bringing Up Father), suggests, too, that Wob cartoonists were careful students of the comics-pages of the big dailies.
What is certain is that Wobbly papers made plenty of room for cartoons—far more than the publications of other unions or of most socialist or other radical groups. The final count is not in, but it seems reasonable to estimate that several thousand cartoons have appeared in the IWW press. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that cartoons have played as large a role as songs in spreading the Wobbly message of workingclass education, organization and emancipation.
We know more today than we did in 1964 about many of these cartoonists, but the gaps in the picture are still enormous, and it is more than likely that some of these gaps will never be filled. Of many Wobbly cartoonists we know nothing beyond their cartoons and their names. Of others we know even less: Many signatures are illegible, many artists signed only their IWW numbers, and some foiled to sign their work at all. With a few notable exceptions, the Union’s cartoonists were self-taught amateurs—eager to help build the new society in the shell of the old, but utterly indifferent to any prospects of a “career” in cartooning (the IWW press has never paid for contributed material). We must keep in mind, too, that not a few of these cartoonists were hoboes, and that anonymity is a built-in feature of hobo life.4
Obscure as most IWW cartoonists have remained, a few of them happen to be well known—as Wobblies, if not as cartoonists. One of the Union’s principal founders, Thomas J. Hagerty—designer of the “wheel of fortune’’ and chief author of the Preamble—did some humorously captioned caricatures for the socialist cultural journal, The Comrade, in 1902.5 In view of the enormous role of humor in the course of its development, the fact that one of the IWW’s cofounders had tried his hand at cartooning seems not only fitting but actually prophetic.
How many people are aware that the most renowned Wobbly of them all, Joe Hill (1879–1915) penned cartoons as well as songs? Although less than a dozen of his cartoons have survived (three are reprinted here on pages 129, 132 and 137), they are all the more precious to us inasmuch as they picture the same raucous class-war humor of such lyrics as “The Preacher and the Slave” and “Casey Jones, the Union Scab”). We know that Hill’s int
erest in pictorial expression began early-one of his youthful paintings is on exhibit at the Joe Hill Museum in his home town of Gavle, Sweden—and remained with him throughout his life.6 While awaiting his judicial murder America’s most celebrated labor martyr declared, “I have lived like an artist and I shall die like an artist.”7
Ralph Chaplin (1887–1961), best-remembered today as the author of the IWW song, “Solidarity Forever,” which long since has become the anthem of the entire American labor movement, was also a cartoonist—indeed, one of the Union’s finest and most prolific.8 Examples of his cartoons can be found on pages 8, 25, 54, 57, 60, 237, 239, 242, 293, 295, 297, 300, 303, 312, 319 and 323. One of the few Wobblies to enjoy the benefits of art school, he worked for many years in the field of commercial art. As staff-artist for Charles H. Kerr’s socialist publishing house in Chicago he illustrated and/or designed covers for many books and pamphlets, including Edward Bellamy’s Parable of the Water Tank and that early radical ecological classic, Germs of Mind in Plants, by Austrian botanist Raoul France. Chaplin contributed lettering and numerous drawings to the Kerr Company’s International Socialist Review, edited by that colorful libertarian socialist (and later Wobbly) agitator, Mary E. Marcy. He also illustrated Marcy’s novel, Out of the Dump, and collaborated with her on a deck of Socialist Playing Cards featuring his drawings and her satirical verses.
At his imaginative best when portraying gleeful “sab-cats” menacing blustering bosses as malignant as they are rotund, Chaplin also did many serious editorial cartoons of great power; his salute to Wobbly martyr Frank Little on page 312 is a prime example. Remarkably versatile, Chaplin also conceived and designed many of the IWW’s famous “silent agitators” or “stickerettes” (see pages, 30, 64,126, 196, 250 and 289), and served as the Union’s principal letterer/calligrapher in the 1910s (his front-page design for the tenth-anniversary issue of Solidarity, reproduced on page 54, and his program-cover for the Joe Hill Memorial on page 152, are good examples of his work in this area). As readers can easily judge for themselves, for he is the best-represented artist in this book, Chaplin the cartoonist produced an impressive and many-sided body of work, for which he deserves greater recognition.