by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Though less celebrated than Hill or Chaplin, Ernest Riebe enjoys considerable prestige among Wobblies as the creator of the Union’s best-loved and most enduring comic strip, “Mr. Block,” which chronicled the misadventures of a blockheaded worker who, in spite of everything, believes the boss is always right.9 The strip debuted in the Spokane Industrial Worker on November 7, 1912, and continued, albeit less frequentiy in later years, through the early 1920s. Several of the strips are reprinted here (pages 5, 171, 231, 234, 254).
Little is known of Riebe’s life beyond the facts that he was born in Germany and lived in Minneapolis during his IWW years. He seems never to have held union office and was not a public speaker. His comic art was his decisive contribution to the Cause. The Union’s earlier cartoons had been mostly of the serious editorial type. What came to be known as characteristically Wobbly humor was largely a creation of the 1910s, and few contributed more to its elaboration than Riebe. It is now established, for example, that Riebe’s strip inspired Joe Hill’s “Mr. Block” song. Hill’s lyrics, which summarize some of the early strips, appeared in the Industrial Worker in January 1913. Later that year a Mr. Block comic book was published, containing twenty-four strips and an introduction by Industrial Worker editor Walker C. Smith. Evidently the first use of the comicbook form as a vehicle of revolutionary propaganda, it was reprinted by Charles H. Kerr in 1984. In 1919 two other Riebe comic booklets appeared in pocket-size format: Mr. Block and the Profiteers and the ironically-titled Crimes of the Bolsheviki which, like all IWW literature of that period, was emphatically pro-Bolshevik in content. Riebe also supplied the IWW press with a poem and a play involving Mr. Block, and some of the early strips were reissued as IWW postcards. Other early Wob cartoonists, including “Dust” Wallin and Ern Hanson, introduced the Mr. Block character into their own cartoons, and the strip has several times been revived in various IWW publications, even in recent years.10
Riebe also drew many single-panel cartoons (one is reproduced here on page 258), including a striking anti-patriotic series, “Under the Stars and Stripes,” that was featured on page one of the Industrial Wbrker from May through June 1913. Later he did several covers for the One Big Union Monthly. But Mr. Block was his major achievement. Vigorously drawn in a breezy style well-suited to its slapstick content, Mr. Block was die Wobblies’ greatest comic in the golden age of Happy Hooligan and the Katzenjammer Kids.
Described by the Charles H. Kerr Company’s International Socialist Review as “one of Chicago’s best known revolutionary artists,” L. Stanford Chumley, two of whose cartoons are reproduced here (on pages 244 and 249) may have been a member of the Socialist Party as well as of the IWW; he also had a hand in organizing the Union’s General Defense Committee, formed to provide legal and other assistance to the many W9b-blies jailed during the World War I anti-radical hysteria. A cover-artist for the Review, Chumley also produced some notable charcoal portraits of prominent Wobblies and Socialists, including Joe Hill, William D. Haywood, Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones. After the “war he edited the New York IWW paper, The Rebel Worker, and wrote the pamphlet, Hotel, Restaurant and Domestic Workers: How They Live and How They Work, published in 1920.11
Another artist who drew covers for the International Socialist Review, Arthur Machia designed the sheet music for Joe Hill’s song, “The Rebel Girl” (see page 117). Two of his cartoons are reproduced on pages 39 and 147.12
Ern Hanson (Tie Vapauteen, March 1925)
Pashtanika (Industrial Pioneer, November 1921)
Raymond Corder (1890–1968) was better known for his poems than for his handful of cartoons.13 One of scores of Wobblies imprisoned for obstructing America’s war-effort in 1918, he did much of his writing and drawing in jail. His one cartoon reproduced in this book, from The Can-Opener, the IWW prisoners’ hand-made in-house organ while they awaited trial in Cook County Jail (see page 266), is not truly representative of his work; most of his published cartoons are exceptionally well drawn. Indeed, notwithstanding his evidently small output, Corder ranks as one of the Union’s more accomplished artists.
Apart from the inferences that he was of Scandinavian origin, lived in the northwest and probably worked as a logger, all we know about I. Swenson is his abundant work as a cartoonist, an example of which may be found on page 266. He contributed numerous excellent single-panel cartoons to the Industrial Worker in the early 1920s, many of them published on page one. Later he drew some splendid though short-lived strips, most notably the hilarious logging-related Mackinaw Mike.
IWW historian Fred Thompson thought that “Dust” Wallin, and possibly James Lynch as well, may have been professional cartoonists who sold work to capitalist papers under other names while donating their services to the One Big Union. If so—and the high caliber as well as the great number of their cartoons lends weight to the possibility—their non-Wobbly work has not yet been identified. The Gustave Dore of the IWW, “Dust” drew in the elaborate, minutely-detailed style of the old-time engravers, and much of his best work featured classical or “Gothic” imagery (see pages 33 and 322). In addition to his many cartoons for IWW newspapers and magazines he also illustrated and designed covers for several pamphlets; one especially elegant example is Abner E. Woodruffs Evolution of American Agriculture, published around 1919. Several of his cartoons also appeared as “silent agitators,” and during the IWW revival in the late 1960s, one was issued as a poster.
James Lynch drew several Mutt-and-Jeff-type strips (see page 356) and many single panels as well as caricatures of well-known labor and political personalities. His fine sense of gags was strengthened by a crisp, smooth line and occasional dramatic use of heavy black/white contrast. A steady contributor of articles as well as cartoons to IWW publications through the 1920s, he is also known to have submitted at least one cartoon to the Proletarian Party press.
Whether Wallin and/or Lynch were indeed professionals further research should reveal. No doubt exists, however, regarding the professional cartoonist who contributed most to the IWW press: Unquestionably it was Art Young (1866–1943). Born in Orangeville, Illinois and raised in rural Wisconsin, Young was inspired to become an artist when he saw Gustave Dore’s illustrations to Dante’s Inferno as a child; later he studied under the reactionary academic painter Bouguereau in Paris.14 One of the best-known cartoonists of his time, he sold cartoons regularly to the leading comic weeklies—Puck and Judge—as well as to such mainstream periodicals as the Saturday Evening Post and even the Hearst papers. Although he had sketched the Haymarket anarchists in Cook County Jail for the Chicago Daily News in 1887, his own radicalism did not emerge until the new century was well on its way. One of the driving forces that made The Masses the liveliest socialist magazine in U.S. history during the 1910s, Young developed an appealing, exuberant style distinctively his own, both in watercolors and in India ink. A Socialist most of his adult life, he aimed his best cartoons at a broad workingclass audience. Since the great majority of his cartoons were free of sectarianism—simply pro-labor and anti-capitalist—they appeared not only in organs of the Socialist Party and the IWW but also in anarchist, Communist and AFL trade union publications.
Scores, maybe hundreds of Art Young cartoons were published in the Industrial Worker and other IWW papers. Three are reproduced here on pages 31,161 and 203; at least the first of these, on the theme of new machinery creating unemployment, was drawn especially for the Union.15 During 1921–23 they appeared almost weekly, sometimes more than one per issue. No doubt many readers, Wobs included, thought Young carried a red card himself. No one has portrayed the devastation, wastefulness and stupidity of capitalism more convincingly than he. His “Poor Fish,” spouting good bourgeois conventional wisdom (“The Poor Fish says that he knows labor produces all the wealth but that the capitalists produce even more’’) was one of Mr. Block’s cousins. His cartoon rallying-calls for workers’ solidarity and united action were such effective propaganda they were reprinted again and again. Part of the end
uring strength of Young’s work lies in the fact that he never took himself too seriously. His ruthless attack on the iniquities of class society was balanced by a playful anticipation of the pleasures of socialism. What he wrote of the early English comic artist Thomas Rowlandson could also be said of Young himself: “He kept his banners for the free life flying: to him the free life was the good life.”16 In most of his finest cartoons, a bright humor sparkles an always youthful, glad defiance.
Very different was Fred Ellis (1886–1941), in whose work humor played almost no role at all. A deadly serious editorial cartoonist, Ellis focused his grease-pencil on the tragedy and gloom of class society; the cover of the General Defense Committee pamphlet on page 345 is typical of his work. Even his occasional “upbeat” cartoons tend to be cold and somber. Never really a part of the Wobbly milieu the way Young was, Ellis was the featured cartoonist of John Fitzpatrick’s radical Chicago Federation of Labor paper, The New Majority, in the early 1920s when the CFL played a leading role in the nationwide movement for a Labor Party. For a time he was associated with the Packinghouse Workers’ union. Later he became staff-artist for the Communist Daily Worker and even spent six months in Moscow in the mid-1930s, cartooning for Pravda.11
In the late teens and early twenties many other professional cartoonists with Left sympathies either offered their services to the IWW or allowed Wobbly editors to reprint cartoons that had originally appeared elsewhere. Many of the leading cartoonists of the day, including Ryan Walker (1870–1932), Maurice Becker (1889–1975), Boardman Robinson (1876–1952), Robert Minor (1884–1952), and William Gropper (1897–1977), had work published in IWW newspapers or magazines. All of them worked for the big commercial press: Robinson for the New York Tribune, for example, and Minor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But their most important cartoons, the ones for which they are remembered today, appeared in socialist or IWW publications.18
Sometimes Wobbly papers reprinted particular cartoons by famous artists not known to have had any Left leanings. In addition to his inimitable Little Nemo and other imaginative strips, the renowned Winsor McCay also did editorial cartoons, and at least one of them, showing a coal-miner’s dream of a better life, was deemed worthy of repeated reprinting in the IWW press.
Photomontage by Sam (One Big Union Monthly, July 1919)
Much stranger is the case of A. D. Condo. Never really well-known in his own day, he was almost completely forgotten until his collection of two-panel strips, The Outbursts of Everett True, was reprinted in 1983 (it was originally published around 1907).19 The exploits of a heavyset and violent-tempered old man who, often at the slightest provocation, inflicts corporal punishment on just about everyone he meets, Everett True would seem to be the work of a misanthrope wholly unsympathetic to socialism. However, another of Con-do’s strips, Osgar und Adolf, ran in the Chicago Daily Socialist in the early 1910s. Curiously, in one of Ernest Riebe’s Mr. Block strips, Osgar und Adolf was singled out for special denunciation because, like many strips in the capitalist press at that time, it made fun of foreigners.20 Even more curiously, in July 1919 a Condo cartoon was published in the One Big Union Monthly. The cartoon shows the hand of an unseen person offering assorted weapons to an astonished capitalist portrayed in classic Wobbly style: enormously fat, with top-hat, diamond stickpin and cigar, and with dollar-signs all over his suit. A balloon has the unseen person saying: “Here, if you’re so keen for intervention in Mexico, take these tools yourself and go to it!!!” One wonders: Did Riebe’s strip help radicalize the cartoonist of Everett Truel
In the late 1930s the Industrial Worker ran a single-panel series titled “The Upper Crust” (see pages 365, 367, 371, 372, 377 and 379). Although they were signed “A. Redfield” they were really the work of well-known New Yorker cartoonist Syd Hof.
Eugene Barnett (One Big Union Monthly, April 1920)
From time to time over the years IWW publications ran cartoons by John Baer, one-time North Dakota congressman—he is said to have been the only cartoonist ever to have held a seat in the House of Representatives—and longtime cartoonist for the Nonpartisan League, and later for the railroad brotherhoods’ paper, Labor?1
In the 1940s Fred Zinn, for many years a contributor to the AFL Lumber and Sawmill Workers’ Union Register and eventually its staff cartoonist, also carried a red card for a while, and drew cartoons for the Industrial Worker. He even designed a new masthead for the paper; introduced in the December 14, 1946 issue, it was used for many years and then revived in 1969 for several more years.22
Now and then the Wobbly press reprinted cartoons from the radical and labor press of other countries. The original One Big Union Monthly used some from the French syndicalist organ, La Vie ouvriere, and in May 1924 the Industrial Pioneer reproduced an example of the work of an imprisoned Spanish anarchosyndicalist cartoonist, Juan Bautista Acher, known as Shum. During and after World War II the Industrial Worker ran several extraordinary antiwar drawings by German-born John Olday (1905–1977), one of the greatest radical cartoonists 23 A lifelong anarchist who took part in the anti-Nazi underground, he escaped the Gestapo in 1938 and fled to London, where he collaborated on the anarchist paper War Commentary and its successor, Freedom, as well as on the surrealist journal, Free Unions. In 1943 Freedom Press published a collection of his bitter, haunting cartoons, The March to Death. Toward the end of his life Olday joined the IWW’s General Defense Committee and contributed cartoons to its Industrial Defense Bulletin.
For every cartoon IWW papers borrowed from abroad, the radical labor press of other lands borrowed dozens from the Wobblies. “From all parts of the world,” Industrial Pioneer editor John A. Gahan noted in 1926, “we are daily receiving labor press exchanges containing reprints of the cartoons and drawings first run in our own IWW press.”24
Of the early IWW cartoonists not represented in the original edition of Rebel Voices, Ernest Henry Hanson (1889–1981?) is probably the most important.25 Born in Iowa, raised on the Pacific Coast and radicalized in Arizona in his early twenties, he joined the IWW in 1914 on his way to the North Dakota harvest, and became a “traveling delegate” three years later. Hobo, logger, trapper and trail cook, he lived most of his adult life in the northwest, especially Montana and Idaho. One of the wildest Wobbly cartoonists, Ern Hanson unleashed a hysterical and hardhitting hobo humor that in many ways was a kind of visual equivalent of the peppery poetry and prose of his great contemporary, T-Bone Slim. (Interestingly, of two known sketches of T-Bone, one is by Hanson.) His sublimely hideous portrayal of Scissor Bill, based on Joe Hill’s song about that abysmal character, is his greatest creation, and appeared in many of his cartoons. Hanson signed his work with various monograms, and sometimes simply E.H.H. (He is, incidentally, almost certainly the author of the short story reprinted here on pages 247–249.) Like thousands of others, he left the Union in the wake of the 1924 split, but his cartoons continued to be reprinted in the IWW press long afterward.
Fred Jerger (One Big Union Monthly, December 1920)
Among the most prolific Wobbly cartoonists was Joe Troy (c. 1873-c. 1953), an artist actively in the service of workingclass revolution for nearly seventy years. According to Carlos Cortez, Troy (born Treu) contributed drawings to the Chicago anarchists’ Arbeiterzeitung before Hay market, when he was only 13.26 Little is known about him otherwise except that he was a lifelong itinerant worker. Fred Thompson recalled meeting him in one of the hobo jungles out west in the late 1920s. More than twenty years later, in the early 1950s, Troy was still sending cartoons to the Industrial Worker. Unlike most of his fellow Wob cartoonists, who preferred a loose, “cartoony” style, he favored a strong, naturalistic yet unpretentious! realism; this did not, however, inhibit his boisterous and often bizarre imagination. A large number of Troy’s original cartoons and drawings have survived, and in 1986 Carlos Cortez organized an exhibition of his work, in Chicago, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the Hay-market Tragedy.
Like several other Wobs
, Eugene Barnett did most of his cartooriing behind bars.27 Born in North Carolina, he went to work in the coal-mines at the age of eight. A member of the United Mine Workers as well as of the IWW, he was one of seven Wobblies framed-up and convicted in the notorious “Centralia Conspiracy” of November 1919, when the IWW hall in Centralia, Washington, was attacked by armed American Legion thugs in the pay of the lumber barons (it was during this attack that the businessmen’s mob murdered Wesley Everest). Paroled in 1931 following a long agitation by the IWW’s General Defense Committee, Barnett took up ranching in Idaho, became an organizer for the CIO’s International Woodworkers Union and supported the short-lived Progressive Party in 1948; he died in 1973. Like the work of Swenson and Hanson, his action-packed cartoons showing obese and bug-eyed bosses calamitously beleagured by Wobs on the job, admirably convey the free-wheeling insolence of the revolutionary-minded hoboes who made up such a large percentage of IWW membership in the Union’s most active days.
Joe Troy (1930s-40s)
Some of the most interesting IWW cartoons happen to have been drawn by artists about whom nothing seems to be known. Most of them were active in that largely unstudied period in the Union’s history, the 1920s. In the late teens and the first years of the new decade a Wob who signed himself Sam drew many cartoons—all unusual, many of them technically or otherwise innovative, and in an astonishing variety of styles.
One of the Union’s most imaginative artists was Fred Jerger (whose cartoons are variously signed Jerger, FJ, Eff Jay and Jay). His “Labor and the Up-to-Date Pest Dispenser” (One Big Union Monthly, December 1920), is markedly similar to a series of “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” cartoons done by Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, for a pesticide company, but Jerger’s predates the latter by three-fourths of a decade.