by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
An interesting variant of the same process of radical demystification, Henkelman’s altered advertisements, which he began drawing around 1926, prefigured the recent art of billboard revision, a medium of expression so far outside the academy that it is covered by the penal code.42 A billboard advising youngsters to ‘ ‘Join the Navy and meet interesting people in faraway places” has been dramatically revised simply by adding the words ‘ ‘and kill them.’’ The propaganda effect of thus revealing (and ridiculing) the repressive latent content of modern advertising can hardly be denied, and surely explains the steep fines and jail sentences awarded any practitioners of this art careless enough to be caught at it. I have no doubt that Fellow Worker Henkelman would be proud to be recognized as a forerunner of this new creative method of calling the bosses’ bluff.
The fact that obscure Wobblies co-invented the radical new art-form of photomontage and anticipated other techniques of pictorial subversion still daring enough in our own time to be hailed as something new under the sun, challenges the musty conventions of art history and helps us situate the art of the IWW in the broad panorama of workingclass culture. In its hobo disdain for traditional values, its appeal to the irrational, the bizarre, the fantastic, its frequently excessive and violent humor, and its overriding “bad taste,” the best and most characteristic Wobbly art differs sharply from what became known as “proletarian” art, and especially from the dull, regressive works codified under the unhappy label of “socialist realism.” The delicious irony that flourishes in the cartoons of Riebe, Hanson, Setzer and Henkelman has nothing in common with the shameless glorification of workers as workers so typical of the essentially bourgeois art that usurped the adjectives “proletarian” and “socialist” for purposes of ideological/bureaucratic obfuscation. Mr. Block and Scissor Bill have no equivalent in the art concocted according to the sentimental esthetics of “proletcult” or, for that matter, in the humdrum productions of mainstream business-union cartoonists. Often transcending the didactic limits of their work, the great Wobbly artists reflect the spirit of poetic revolt and Utopian revery that underlies the finest art through the ages. Few IWW cartoons are as unarguably surrealist as the wildly inspired writings of T-Bone Slim, but the free-for-all imagination, untameable, reckless, perhaps a little bit “crazy,” holds its own in the best of them.
Far from being servitors of a domesticated realism, Wobbly artists identified themselves with the shadowy, half-hidden but inexhaustible tradition of the popular imagination—a tradition, or complex of traditions, as old as (and even older than) the working class itself.43 Earlier exemplars of this subterranean current, always so “embarrassing” to the straitlaced wardens of High Culture, include a veritable legion of anonymous balladeers, chroniclers of “tall tales,” itinerant Punch-and-Judy men, authors of “shilling shockers,” architects of ice palaces and carrousels, cabaret singers, and strolling silhouettists on the carnival midway. Among its ancestors it could claim the best of Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the whole of Bosch and Blake. Among its central figures in modern times we could cite Henri Rousseau, an obscure collector of tolls at the gates of Paris before he dramatically altered the course of twentieth-century art by taking up painting at the age of sixty; Ferdinand Cheval who, over a period of thirty years, built his “Ideal Palace” with stones and shells he collected on his daily route as a mailman; the Italian-born anarchist construction-worker Simon Rodia, creator of those marvelous towers in Watts, California; blues-singers such as Memphis Minnie and Peetie Wheatstraw, the “Devil’s Son-in-Law”; silent-film comedians, pulp-writers, radio-scripters and comic-strip artists galore.
Clif Bennett (Industrial Worker, August 3, 1946)
Taisto Luoma (Industrial Worker, January 10, 1948)
In the early decades of this century, when this great popular heritage was increasingly jeopardized by rapid technological change, commercialized and smothered by monopolization of the media, and completely denied or reduced to footnotes by the official critics, Wobblies developed their own fearless, adventurous, iconoclastic art, poetry and song, and recognized them for what they were: inseparable components of a new, revolutionary way of life. Preserving age-old traditions of workingclass culture while class-consciously striving to transform this culture into a coherent and organized negation of the bourgeois order, the IWW dreamed of a universal, truly human culture, free at last of the crippling, stifling influence of an exploitative social system. It is worth emphasizing that, in the movement’s brightest days, artists were never “outsiders” in the One Big Union. Indeed, Wobblies held out the promise that, in the new society, all would be artists. As old-time Wob Sophie Cohen recently put it, the IWW was itself, for its members, an incomparable “means of expression.”44
Revolutionary internationalism—global workingclass solidarity—is implicit in the very name Industrial Workers of the World. In addition to its long and epoch-making history in the U.S., the Union has also flourished, at one time or another, in Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, South Africa and many other countries. Scholarly research into IWW activity abroad is still in its early stages 45 and the study of Wobbly cartoonists around the world remains a task for the future. Judging from what little we have seen of Australian IWW cartoons—the wonderful and elaborate contributions to Direct Action by Syd Nicholls, who went on to become one of Australia’s most famous comic artists 46 and Joe Ryan’s strip, The Amazing Adventures of Mr. Simple (rather like Riebe’s Mr. Block) in the same paper-some pleasant surprises are in store for diggers in this little-known terrain.
Future research into the international dimension of Wobbly culture should also reveal important data on the origins and diffusion of characteristic IWW imagery. It is well known that the Wobblies’ wooden shoe (sabot) as a symbol of sabotage derives from the syndicalist movement in France. Nineteenth-century American cartoonists, notably Thomas Nast, provided the fat capitalist (no “Friend of Labor” was Nast, however, for he also cooked up that notorious comic product of the Haymarket Tragedy, the bomb-toting, longhaired, wild-eyed anarchist, a stock villain even today in the capitalist press), but such stereotypes had numerous antecedents in popular European art and literature 47 To what extent other images are the products of individual invention or of now-forgotten tradition is far from clear. Big Bill Haywood’s oft-vocalized and sometimes-cartooned simile comparing craft-union divisiveness to the separated and therefore weak fingers of a hand, while the One Big Union unites all the fingers into a powerful fist, goes back at least as tar as the Sioux chief Sitting Bull, and probably has folkloric equivalents in other cultures as well.
An interesting example of an American IWW image that originated on the other side of the globe is Ralph Chaplin’s drawing for the General Defense Committee, captioned “Fellow Workers, Remember! We are in here for you; you are out there for us” (see page 323). This forceful sketch has been reproduced countless times in IWW newspapers, magazines and pamphlets as well as on posters, buttons and “silent agitators.” Note, however, that beneath Chaplin’s nom de plume of “Bingo” is the name “Dino,” signifying that Chaplin was only providing the artwork for an idea suggested by another fellow worker. (This was a common practice among Wob cartoonists; another noteworthy example is Riebe’s Mr. Block strip on page 254, in the last panel of which we find that it was 4 ‘suggested by J. Hill.’’) “Dino’’ turns out to have been an Australian IWW artist who, early in 1917, did a crude poster of a Wob behind bars for use in defense agitation “down under.”48 Months later Chaplin, a for better draftsman, turned Dino’s basic idea into a dramatic image that quickly became one of the most famous pieces of IWW art.
Another aspect of IWW history that is just starting to attract serious attention is the impact of the Union’s foreign-language branches, and other minorities, within the U.S.49 Full equality regardless of sex, race or national origin was an IWW principle from day one, and women as well as racial and ethnic minorities have played a large role in the OBU throughout its his
tory. An extensive IWW literature exists in Finnish, Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Bulgarian, Polish, Romanian, Lithuanian, Croatian, Yiddish, French and German; there are even a few things in Chinese and Japanese. None of the existing histories of the Union have drawn more than peripherally on these sources. Most of these foreign-language groups had their own Wobbly songs, and many had their own cartoonists. Frequently their publications also reprinted cartoons from the English-language IWW press, with translated captions. In the 1940s, for example, the lavish Hungarian Bermunkas almanacs reprinted many works by C. E. Setzer.
Many thousands of Black workers have been active in the IWW, especially from the mid-1910s through the big split of ‘24. Among those who attained national renown as organizers and orators were Roscoe T. Sims, Alanzo Richards and especially Ben Fletcher, one of the leading Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union 510 organizers, in Philadelphia and later in Baltimore, and one of the Wobblies sent to Leavenworth for “obstructing” World War I.50 If there were Black IWW cartoonists they have thus far eluded our attention. It cannot be emphasized too strongly, however, that the history of IWW cartooning, like IWW history generally, is a field in which the unknown vastly outweighs the known, and in which new discoveries are constantly being brought to light. Only recently San Francisco Bay Area IWW organizer Dick Ellington made available a letter from the late Guy B. Askew (an old-time Wob also known as Skidroad Slim) that includes a detailed recollection of a heretofore unknown Black Wobbly songwriter and vocalist from the Pacific Northwest, Paul Walker, complete with the lyrics of one of his songs.51
William Henkelman (Industrial Worker, April 27, 1946)
We would also like to know more about the experience of women in the IWW, though here the record is somewhat clearer. We do know that two of the most prominent figures at the founding convention were Mother Jones and Lucy Parsons, and that many of the Union’s best organizers and poets have been women, as one may easily verify by reviewing the texts by and about Matilda Robbins, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Vera Moller and others in these pages. But did any Wobbly women of yesteryear draw cartoons? We do not know.
In the late 1950s and early ‘60s at least one notable woman cartoonist was part of the larger IWW community, if not a dues-paying member. One of the finest cartoon stylists of our time, Trina Robbins is well known as an important forerunner and exemplar of “underground” comics. In 1970 she put together the first all-woman comic book, It Ain’t Me, Babe. By the mid-80s she had produced an impressive quantity of highly original work, including the Misty mini-series for Marvel, The Legend of Wonder Woman for DC, and California Girls for Eclipse; she also found time to coauthor, with Cat Yronwode, an invaluable reference, Women in the Comics. In her teens she was active in a milieu of radical science-fiction enthusiasts who were mostly IWWs. “I always hung around with Wobblies,” she recalls of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area in those years, “but somehow I never actually joined.” Interestingly, her first published cartoons appeared in The Bosses’ Songbook, a compilation of satirical lyrics edited by Wobblies Dick Ellington and Dave Van Ronk in 1958. Her later work includes several labor-related comics, among them a powerful narrative of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.52 Robbins is still active on the Left today, especially in the women’s movement.
Theo Matysik (Industrial Worker, 1943)
The feminist agitation of the early seventies brought women into activist politics in unprecedented numbers, and many, inspired by the Wobbly heritage, took out red cards. In 1976 Kathleen Taylor was elected General Secretary-Treasurer—the first woman to hold the Union’s highest office. Gloria T. Nelson, from Iowa—to the best of our knowledge the IWW’s first woman cartoonist—made her appearance in the pages of the Industrial Worker early in the same decade. Unfortunately, her membership in the Union seems to have been brief, and her cartoons are few in number. Shortly after her arrival on the scene, however, Leslie Fish started drawing for the paper.53
Like most of the new IWW cartoonists of the seventies, Leslie Fish reflected the influence of the “undergrounds” and the “counter-culture” of which these anti-Establishment comics were a part. The Wobblies portrayed in these cartoons are rarely the traditional, well-muscled, male proletarian giants of so much older IWW art, but rather young men and women with long hair and colorful clothes: in a word, hippies who, in fact, made up a large portion of the Union’s membership in those years. While other “Old Left” groups tended to echo the mass-media fear and hatred of the new youth revolt, the IWW alone welcomed this revolt and even embraced it—or rather absorbed it into its own incredibly persistent counterculture.54 Fish’s many well-crafted strips and single panels (some signed with her nom de guerre, Pat Kovalik, and others with a tiny drawing of a fish) are perhaps the best illustrations of this little-known phase of IWW history. Several of her cartoons also focus on specifically women’s issues, a topic touched on—but hardly more than touched on—by a few earlier Wob cartoonists such as Ernest Riebe, “Dust” Wallin and Joe Troy.55 A songwriter/musician as well as a cartoonist, for years Fish has played guitar and sung in an IWW band, The Dehorn Crew, whose albums include the StarTrek-based Wobblies in Space and a 1987 cassette release, It’s Sister Jenny’s Turn to Throw the Bomb.
Underground comics had a lasting impact on the course of cartooning. Paradoxical as it might seem, one of their most important contributions was their defiant anti-professionalism. Thanks to these sometimes crudely drawn but most always energetic and provocative effusions, many thousands of young recalcitrants were encouraged to try cartooning themselves (“Geez, I could draw as good as that”), just as years earlier many wage-earners had been inspired to take up the art by seeing cartoons drawn by their fellow workers in the IWW press. Significantly, more cartoons ap peared in the Industrial Worker during the early 1970s than at any period in IWW history. This may be partly explained by the fact that the editor in those years, Carlos Cortez, was himself a cartoonist, but the sudden proliferation of new Wobbly artists was a crucial factor.
A few well-known “underground” personalities took out red cards, including Skip Williamson (Conspiracy Capers, Bijou Funnies), who drew one cartoon for the July 1970 Industrial Worker before he retired into the pages of Playboy. Bill Crawford was another Wobbly-for-a-couple-of-months-or-so, during which the IWW official organ published several of his Rujus the Radical Reptile strips. Influenced by the underground ferment, but more enduringly committed to Wobbly ideals, were Mike Zaharakis of Oregon and T. J. Simpson of Maine—two of the most prolific IWW cartoonists of the 1970s. Affirming the historical affinity between the underground comics and their illustrious IWW ancestor, both contributed to the ongoing saga of Mr. Block.
The underground cartoonists’ association with labor radicalism reached its peak early in the decade with the formation of a union, largely thanks to the initiative of Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez. One of the relatively few new comic artists who clearly identified with the revolutionary Left, Rodriguez had included a Wobbly sequence in one of his early Trashman comics. The United Cartoon Workers of America (based in the underground comics capital of San Francisco, though it also had informal “locals” in Chicago, Milwaukee and other cities), attracted the best-known figures in the field—Gilbert Shelton, R. Crumb, Trina Robbins, Denis Kitchen, Bill Griffith, Jay Kinney and others—and succeeded, albeit briefly, in raising cartoonists’ pay-rates and effecting other benefits. Loosely structured, with irregular meetings, no officers and no dues, the UCWA reached a membership of somewhere between thirty and seventy-five. It had its own union button-featuring the New Left’s raised fist clutching artists’ pens and brushes—and for a few years its union label appeared on the covers of many comic books. Affiliation with the IWW was seriously considered, and at least once an organizer from the San Francisco IWW General Membership Branch was invited to a UCWA meeting to discuss the possibility. Regrettably, however, affiliation was never decided on, and by 1973 the first and last underground cartoonists�
� union had passed into oblivion.56
Now over eighty years old, the IWW continues to attract rebellious young artists eager to lend a hand, along with their pens and drawingboards, to the struggle against wage-slavery, and to the struggle against the destruction of the Earth that wage-slavery inevitably entails. Denny Mealy of Austin, Minnesota; Ben Trant of Shreveport; Hal Rammel, Debra Taub and Joel Williams of Chicago; Nancy Kellerman of Boston; and Mike Donovan of New York are only a few of the newer artists with red cards in their pockets. Issue for issue, in proportion to its size, the Industrial Worker in recent years has probably published more cartoons than any other labor paper in the U.S. or Canada.
Many recent IWW cartoons, visual parables on the evils of capitalism and the virtues of workingclass solidarity, are basically updated versions of the Union’s earliest art—which is hardly surprising, for the social conditions that brought the IWW into being still exist. The aim of the IWW (“abolition of the wage system”) remains the same, but as the methods and forms of struggle have changed over time, each generation of Wobbly artists has added something of its own. In the ‘30s they had to come to grips with fascism, Stalinism, the New Deal, sitdowns, the CIO, and Revolution in Spain. Truman’s atomic bomb and the Taft-Hartley “slave labor law” posed staggering new problems in the next decade. The ‘50s brought the first workers’ revolution in a modern industrialized country (Hungary), and the movement for civil rights in the U.S. The ‘60s witnessed a worldwide revolt of students and youth, anti-imperialist struggle throughout the Third World, coast-to-coast insurrections in America’s Black ghettoes, and the May ‘68 General Strike in France. In the ‘70s and ‘80s questions of woman’s emancipation and the relation of human society to the natural environment came to the fore. Each of these developments has affected IWW theory and practice, and each has been interpreted in the Union’s cartoons.