Rebel Voices
Page 85
In a category all by himself is William Ekman, whose chief contribution to Wobbly art consists of a handful of stick-figure cartoons. Were it not for the fact that his work is provocative and humorous he could easily pass for a precursor of the mordant “I-can’t-draw-and-I-don’t-want-to-learn-how” school that dominates the uninspired pages of today’s “trendy” Left press.
De Moi, OK (or is it CK?—the anagram-signature is not clear), Pashtanika, J. A. Van Dilman and F. Vose are other worthy authors of “cartoons that cannot be excelled for making proletarians think,”28 but who seem to have vanished from the stage of history leaving” no trace beyond a tantalizing trail of humorous drawings.
We know considerably more about many of the later IWW cartoonists, those whose work dates from the 1930s on. Some of these fellow workers are still living; others lived long enough to be interviewed by younger Wobs; still others left some autobiographical record; and a few have been rescued from oblivion by old friends.
A machine-gun instructor in the U.S. Army during World War I, William Henkelman (1894–1986) was among the American Expeditionary Forces who mutinied when sent to Russia at the close of the war in the U.S. government’s attempt to crush the Revolution.29 After his honorable discharge he took up the trade of sign-painting, and in later years lettered many signs and posters for IWW halls and meetings, as he did still later for the Veterans’ Home in Yountsville, California, where he spent the last decades of his life. He started cartooning for the IWW press in the mid-1920s. The drawing on Fred Thompson’s “Bread Lines or Picket Lines” leaflet on page 359 of this book may be an example of his work. A fine draftsman with a rousing comic style, Henkelman was always on the alert for new ways to get the IWW message across. His cleverest efforts in this regard are his humorous Wobbly adaptations of mass-media advertisements, in which famous commercial slogans are made to serve IWW aims. He prepared an IWW calendar to commemorate the Union’s fortieth anniversary in 1945, and he also did the cover for the twenty-eighth edition of the Little Red Song Book. For many years starting in the late 1930s he drew, with a stylus, directly on stencils, cover cartoons for the IWW’s mimeographed Convention Proceedings and internal General Organization Bulletin. A substantial file of his cartoons is housed at the Archives of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University in Detroit.
C. E. Setzer (1905–1970) signed his cartoons X13 (from his IWW card number: X13068) or sometimes CES (see pages 382, 389 and 394).30 He joined the IWW’s Lumber Workers Industrial Union 120 on June 10, 1922 and in later years worked as a harvest hand, in general construction, and finally as a machinist. He served the Union as Branch Secretary, as organizer on the Boulder Dam project in the early 1930s and later on the Los Angeles aqueduct, as a member of the General Executive Board, and as delegate to the twenty-third convention in 1938. His cartoons, however, are his greatest legacy. Although he occasionally drew with pen and ink, his best work was done in linoleum block, a medium he chose simply to save the Industrial Worker the high cost of photoengraving. It was a happy choice: From the start he hit on a thick-lined, often grotesque, completely original style, strangely reminiscent of certain chapbook illustrations from much earlier years of the printers’ art, but unlike anything else in the world of twentieth-century cartooning. Inevitably, some of his work has dated; his use of the theme of species-extinction, for example, in the cartoon on page 389 is—and so much the better for all of us—no longer funny in our ecology-conscious age. But much the larger part of his appreciable output of linoleum-block cartoons remains as implacable and as ferocious as a cornered badger. With the blackest sarcasm and a sadistic clowning worthy of the Three Stooges, X13 fought the good fight against the horrors and hypocrisies of his age and ours.
Taisto Luoma was an American-born Finn who studied at the IWW’s Work People’s College in Duluth, Minnesota, in the early 1930s.31 An active member of Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union 510, he started contributing cartoons to the Wobbly press in the 1930s; some were reproduced on covers of the new series of the One Big Union Monthly. In 1938 he was a delegate to the Union’s twenty-third convention. Old-timers recall that Luoma’s life was a tragic one, afflicted by an unhappy marriage and prolonged illness—perhaps tuberculosis; he evidently died in the 1950s. His personal suffering seems to have affected his work as an artist, for although he did produce a few cartoons on the lighter side, most were done in a sullen, grim style, full of dark foreboding.
During World War II the pages of the Industrial Worker were enlivened by contributions from several young opponents of militarism who, for the duration, were unwilling guests of one or another federal penitentiary. One of those who saw no good reason why the workers of one country should go off and kill the workers of another was Theo “Whitey” Matysik, who spent the war years locked up in Danbury, Connecticut, drawing cartoons.32 Whitey—as he signed his work-was clearly influenced by such popular cartoonists as Gene Ahern, Clare Briggs, H. T. Webster and Gaar Williams, whose syndicated single panels concentrated on the foibles and vicissitudes of everyday life. In 1945 Whitey did the cover illustration for the fourth revised edition of the IWW’s basic programmatic pamphlet, One Big Union.
Fred Jerger (Industrial Pioneer, July 1925)
C. E. Setzer
Another young rebel cartoonist who had no use for capitalism’s war machine, and got thrown in the slammer for his opinion, was Clif Bennett. A sensitive and articulate critic of authoritarian social relations, he contributed penetrating commentary on prison life to the most creative American anarchist journal of the period, Holley Cantine’s Retort. His cartoons for the Industrial Worker, drawn on prison stationery, exude a wry, iconoclastic humor, enhanced by a nervous semi-expressionistic style probably inspired by some of the more maniacal animated films of those years. ‘ As many of his cartoons displayed little respect for the minions of law and order,” Carlos Cortez recalls, Bennett “was usually in hot water with the prison authorities.”33
Cortez (born 1923), himself a war-objector and a two-year resident of the federal pen at Sandstone, Minnesota during World War n, became the Union’s foremost cartoonist in the postwar years, and is probably the only IWW artist whose work has been exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art.34 X13’s able successor in the linocut medium, Cortez acknowledges the inspiration he found as a youngster in the work of the celebrated printmaker of the Mexican Revolution, Jose Guadalupe Posada, and the early German expressionist Kathe Kollwitz—international influences reflecting his own heritage as the son of a Mexican Wobbly father and a German socialist-pacifist mother. When the Industrial Worker converted to offset in the 1960s he continued to use the lino technique in the production of large IWW posters, including an outstanding series of portraits of Joe Hill, Ricardo Flores Magon, Lucy Parsons and Ben Fletcher. Poet, songwriter, General Executive Board member, sometimes editor of the Industrial Worker and its best-known columnist in recent years, Cortez has also done numerous pen-and-ink cartoons for the IWW press. In 1985, to commemorate the Union’s eightieth anniversary, he organized an important exhibition, “Wobbly: 80 Years of Rebel Art,” featuring original works by many of the cartoonists discussed here. As this book goes to press, the exhibit is still touring the continent.
Tor Faegre, a peace activist who played a leading role in the first IWW strike in nearly twenty years—a blueberry-pickers’ strike in Michigan, 1964—belongs to a third generation of Wobbly artists that emerged in the Union’s resurgence in the 1960s and ‘70s.35 Most of his Wobbly art appeared in the free-spirited mimeographed journal of the Chicago IWW Branch, The Rebel Worker, between 1964 and 1967. He also served the Union as signpainter and especially as calligrapher, most notably in his series of beautiful “Revolutionary Calendars” issued under the imprint of the Chicago Wobblies’ Solidarity Bookshop.
Robert Green, another veteran of the ‘64 blueberry strike, did not take up cartooning till several years later. One of many sixties Wobs with links to the so-called “Beat Generation” (one of his f
riends was Neal Cassidy, hero of Kerouac’s On the Road), Green helped found the first surrealist group in the U.S. in 1966, co-organized surrealist exhibitions at Chicago’s legendary Gallery Bugs Bunny, and in recent years has won wide recognition as one of the foremost surrealist sculptors.36 His aggressive, disquieting cartoons have appeared in many labor and radical publications besides the Industrial Worker. A collection of his drawings and poems, Seditious Mandibles, was published by Black Swan Press in 1981.
We have seen that nearly every major industry in which the IWW organized—lumber, agriculture, mining, marine transport, construction and manufacturing—had its Wobbly cartoonists. The conditions in which they lived and worked were the same conditions in which their non-cartoonist fellow workers lived and worked; it is unlikely that any of the Union’s early cartoonists (the commercial artist Chaplin excepted) ever had anything that could be called a studio. We have every reason to believe that many of these cartoons were drawn at cheap diners during lunch-breaks; some, undoubtedly, around the fire in the hobo jungles; others-many others—in the cold grayness of prison. (Has any other social movement in U.S. history created so much behind bars?) It seems to me virtually certain, however—although there is no way to prove it—that the great majority of IWW cartoons were produced in those havens of revolutionary workingclass culture: the IWW halls. Among other enticements, every hall would have been able to provide the sine qua non of the cartoonist’s art: plenty of good black ink and clean white paper.
To what extent Wobbly artists were acquainted with one another, compared notes, or influenced each other we do not know. But acquainted or not, these rebel worker cartoonists made up a remarkable art movement—beyond question the greatest and most influential in the history of American labor. Stylistically as heterogeneous as the so-called “Ashcan School” of painters (most of whom were also cartoonists, incidentally) that emerged around the same time as the IWW, the Wobbly cartoonists developed a vital art of their own, rooted in struggle at the point of production and aimed at hastening the self-emancipation of the working class. Without sacrificing their individuality of expression these artists emphasized the revolutionary values they all shared. There is hardly a cartoon in this book that does not visualize one passage or another of the famous IWW Preamble.
It would be interesting to know something more about the work that influenced these artists, but in this area we can do no more than speculate. The influence of mainstream comic strips and editorial cartoons is clearly paramount, but other influences—especially the work of such popular nineteenth-century illustrators and caricaturists as F. O. C. Darley, A. B. Frost and Dan Beard, who were, in fact, formative influences on the pioneer daily comic-strip artists—are not unlikely. Every IWW hall had a library that might well have included old editions of Dickens illustrated by Darley, or editions of Mark Twain illustrated by Beard. Upton Sinclair’s anthology, The Cry for Justice (1915), a volume no IWW Branch Secretary would have failed to order for the local hall, featured full-page illustrations by many artists of “social protest,” including William Balfour Ker, Theophile Steinlen, Kathe Kollwitz, Gustave Dore, Walter Crane and Will Dyson.
Some notable affinities between the work of IWW cartoonists and the various currents of modern art afford an even wider field of conjecture. Historically, the radical literary/artistic milieu has provided an important meeting-ground for rebellious and creative characters of the most diverse class and cultural backgrounds. Wobblies made no secret of the fact that they wanted ‘ ‘more of the good things of life’’ for the workers of the world, and that among these “good things” were the Fine Arts that the bourgeoisie had appropriated for its own exclusive enjoyment. “In addition to searching for the job,” IWW songwriter and one-time General Executive Board member Richard Brazier pointed out, “we were looking for something to satisfy our emotional desire for grandeur and beauty.”37 Many of the several dozen old-time Wobblies I have known have been authentic workingclass intellectuals—self-taught, independent-minded men and women of considerable culture, frequenters of libraries and art museums, with extensive knowledge of poetry, philosophy and painting. Unfortunately, none of the IWW’s early cartoonists has left us so much as a scrap of testimony on these matters. I, for one, would give a lot to know what Joe Troy thought of Courbet, or whether C. E. Setzer ever dreamed of Van Gogh.
C. E. Setzer
The celebrated 1912 Armory Show in New York (and later in Chicago) which introduced the American public to the work of Europe’s Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Fauvist and Cubist painters, attracted widespread attention in the daily papers and popular magazines, not least of all on the part of cartoonists: F. B. Opper and others spoofed the exhibition, and the new art generally, in countless comics which, in their own way, helped familiarize millions with some essential characteristics of these avant-garde currents. Was it purely by accident that comic artist Gelett Burgess, best known as the author of “The Purple Cow,” happened to write the first important article in the U.S. on those then-shocking convulsionaries of color, the Fauvists?38 In any case, more than a few Wobblies were active participants in America’s far-flung left-wing bohemia in the days of the Armory Show: Would they have missed this epoch-making event in U.S. cultural life?
Or again: We know from the memoirs of Ralph Chaplin, Big Bill Haywood and others that one of the favorite Wobbly hangouts in Chicago in the 1910s and ‘20s was The Radical Bookshop on North Clark Street. According to Kenneth Rexroth, a modernist poet and painter who himself carried a red card in those years, this bookshop imported “the avant-garde poetry of the Twenties from France and Germany and Russia.”39 Were Wobblies reading Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp and Vladimir Mayakovsky?
Although direct influence is impossible to specify, it does not seem implausible to suggest that the anti-academic orientation of these modern movements, their tendency to exalt the artist’s expressiveness over technique, and their overall emphasis on revolt and origi-nality may have been regarded sympathetically by at least some Wobblies, and may even have had a liberating effect on those among them whose urge to draw had perhaps been inhibited by traditional esthetic prejudices.
Far more significant, however, than these vague points of contact, as uncertain as they are tantalizing, are the very real, unmistakable parallels between the methods and achievements of some of the more adventurous IWW cartoonists and those of artists associated with the most extreme modernist currents. At the very moment that the German Dadaists—Hannah Hoch, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Raoul Haussman and others—unleashed their powerful photomontages against the bourgeoisie and its image of the world, an IWW cartoonist known to us only as Sam made effective use of the same medium in the One Big Union Monthly (July 1919). His full-page cartoon captioned “The General Strike” shows an immense arm and fist shattering the walls of America’s jails; the arm and fist are cut out from an aerial photograph of a massive demonstration of workers carrying banners demanding “Down with Autocracy” and “Open the Jails.”
The free use of pre-existing images, mostly newspaper clippings and parts of magazine advertisements, is characteristic of the work of many Cubist, Futurist, Dadaist and Surrealist painters, and has also had many different IWW applications. The One Big Union Monthly for June 1920, for example, published two slightly different versions of the same cartoon. The first, titled “How the Chicago Evening Post Sees the IWW,” is an unretouched reprint of an anti-IWW cartoon from that paper showing a tall, handsome man (representing the solid citizenry of the U.S.) removing his coat to give a sound thrashing to an ugly, knife-wielding killer, labeled “IWW,” who stands menacingly over a bloody corpse. Beneath this cartoon is an altered version captioned “How the IWW sees the Chicago Evening Post and all the rest of the capitalist press.” The man in the foreground is now labeled “IWW” and the murderous plug-ugly about to be knocked around is labeled “Chicago Evening Post.” Here we have a specifically Wobbly variety of what Marcel Duchamp designated a ready
made—slightly “assisted” in this case, and one which, moreover, humorously exposes the platitudinous monotony and superficiality of anti-labor cartoons.
William Henkelman (Industrial Worker, May 18, 1946)
Similarly, one of Ralph Chaplin’s best-known cartoons (reproduced here on page 398) is a close copy of a World War I Liberty Bond poster by the famous Hearst cartoonist Winsor McCay.40 The original shows a husky central figure labeled “America,” standing with sword upraised behind a Liberty Bond shield, warding off a gang of attackers labeled “Devastation,” “Starvation,” “War,” “Pestilence” and “Death.” In Chaplin’s version the central figure represents the working class, the shield is emblazoned with the IWW emblem and the words “One Big Union,” the upraised sword has been changed to a club labeled “Organization,” and the attackers are relabeled “Labor Hatred,” “Hunger,” “Slavery,” “Slander” and “Frame-Ups.” In McCay’s original the figure of War had been a black man raising a sword; in Chaplin’s, significantly, he is white, labeled “Slavery” and wielding a bull whip.
Deceptively simple, such transformations only superficially resemble the common, commercially motivated practice of copying a competitor’s efforts (a standard procedure in the art departments of daily newspapers and advertising agencies). There is much more here than mere plagiarism. It is a question, rather, of a process of ideological demystification, in which workers seize control of oppressive images, undermine their specifically oppressive content and turn them against their class enemies. Analogous if more complex procedures were developed by Dadaists in the late 1910s, and by Surrealists starting in the ‘20s; decades later, the “subversion of images” remains an integral part of the surrealist project, and has proved itself capable of almost infinite elaboration, as evidenced by such recent contributions as J. Karl Bogartte’s photomorphs, the coated collages of Anne Ethuin, and the gommages of Abdul Kader El Janaby.41 A supremely effective means of irritating the mind’s critical faculties, such playful rearrangements seem to be discovered by each revolutionary generation as if for the first time. When a small group of French radical intellectuals who called themselves Situationists took up the technique and dubbed it “detournement” in the 1960s, a legion of critics predictably hailed it as the latest innovation of the avant-garde.