by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
Wob cartoonists today tend to be sensitive to the complex manysidedness of the struggle for radical social transformation in the modern world, and many of their cartoons seem to be intended as bridges between the too-often-separated phases of this struggle. Today as yesterday Wobs are active in the workplace, striving to build a labor movement worthy of the name. But just as in the old days the IWW played a leading role in crusades for free speech and woman’s reproductive rights, so the Wobblies of today are likely to be active also in direct-action movements such as Earth First! and Greenpeace, as well as in struggles against nuclear power, apartheid, sex discrimination, the draft, and other abominations. Long before ecology became a household word, Fred Thompson, the most influential IWW theorist of the last fifty years, advanced a new Wobbly slogan for the modern epoch: “Let’s make this planet a good place to live.” The many and varied movements in this direction have received the IWW’s warm support, and their wide-ranging concerns have been echoed and/or expanded in Wobbly cartoons. As has so often happened in the past, labor’s cartoonists are pointing the way forward for the movement as a whole.
Gloria Nelson (Industrial Worker, December 1970)
Tor Faegre: Cover for the first issue of The Rebel Worker, Journal of the Chicago IWW Branch, May 1964
Of course, not all the cartoons in the Industrial Worker today are drawn by card-carrying, dues-paying members of the IWW. Just as the Union published Art Young, Ryan Walker and John Olday in earlier years, so in the 1960s-70s IWW publications ran work by the genial Fred Wright of the United Electrical Workers, and by many others, including artists as different as Lichty, Wolinski and Topor. Following the same non-sectarian policy in the 1980s, the Industrial Worker has featured such outstanding contemporay cartoonists as Gary Huck, Mike Konopacki, Peg Averill, Bulbul, the team of Estelle Carol and Bob Simpson, and (from Britain) Phil Evans, Arthur Moyse and Donald Rooum.
It is well known, at least in labor circles, that the IWW today includes many of the finest labor songsters and musicians of our time. Bruce “Utah” Phillips, Charlie King, Harry and Sharon Muir, J. B. Freeman, Faith Petric, Mark Ross, “Haywire Brack,” Bob Bovee, Mark Soderstrom, Jeff Cahill, Jay Peterson, Larry Penn, Maureen McElderry, Leslie Fish and many other members of IWW Industrial Union 630 have demonstrated that the “singing Wobblies” are not a thing of the past but rather a living, fighting, creative tradition. It is no less true that the IWW press today serves as a forum for the finest and most daring labor and radical cartoonists.
“Wherever you find injustice,” T-Bone Slim once wrote, “the proper form of politeness is attack.” More than ever in our increasingly bureaucratized, militarized, ecocidal, miserabilist society, humor is the secret weapon in the struggle for freedom and real life. In the IWW’s cartoons, as in its songs and its dreams of a better world, Wobbly humor breaks the rules, exceeds limits and goes all the way. In a society of byzantine complexity and cowardly complacency the defiant simplicity and all-or-nothing extremism of these cartoons are not small virtues. In the face of the most massive campaign of ideological mystification in world history these cartoons proclaim that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes after all.
These footloose IWW artists who never made a nickel from their cartoons have left us all a rich legacy. Here as elsewhere, the Wobblies have kept alive that noble ideal: Nothing but the best for the working class.
Franklin Rosemont
Chicago December 1987
1. See, for example, George Milburn, The Hobo’s Hornbook (New York: Washburn, 1930); John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953); Barrie Stavis and Frank Harmon, eds., The Songs of Joe Hill (New York: Oak, 1960); and Archie Green, “John Neuhaus: Wobbly Folklorist,” Journal of American Folklore, 73, 1960, 189–217. 2. A History of the Comic Strip by Pierre Couperie and Maurice Horn (New York: Crown, 1968) was the first major scholarly work on the subject. It was originally published in French the preceding year in conjunction with an international exhibition of comic art at the Louvre. Earlier U.S. books on comics were either anecdotal surveys, such as Martin Sheridan’s Comics and Their Creators (Boston: Hale, 1944), or sociological studies, such as David M. White and Robert H. Abel, eds., The Funnies: An American Idiom (Free Pless of Glencoe, 1963). 3. See, for example, Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1936), 72–74; Oakley C. Johnson, Marxism in U.S. History Before the Russian Revolution (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), 144–149; and Richard Marschall’s superficial and misinformed “Twelve Angry Men,” in Nemo, 24, Feb. 1987, 46–61. Nick Thorkelson, “Cartooning,” (Radical America, March-April 1979) sketches the development of U.S. political cartooning from Nast and Davenport and The Masses artists through Herblock, Mauldin and the “undergrounds,” but the only IWW cartoonist he mentions is Ernest Riebe. For a historical overview of American labor cartooning see Franklin Rosemont, “Labor Cartoons: A Living Legacy of Humor, Struggle and Protest,’” in Bye! American: The Labor Cartoons of Huck & Konopacki (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1987), 110–112; also Paul Buhle, ed., Labor’s Joke Book (St. Louis: WD Press, 1985). 4. Sal Salerno, The Early Labor Radicalism of the IWW, PhD dissertation, Brandeis University, 1986, 13–14. 5. Thomas J. Hagerty, “Some Objections to Socialism,” The Comrade, Sept. 1902, 267. 6. This painting, together with all of Joe Hill’s known cartoons and drawings, and some examples of his lettering, will be reproduced in The Cartoons of Joe Hill, forthcoming from Charles H. Kerr. 7. Joe Hill, letter of Aug. 15, 1915, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Letters of Joe Hill (New York: Oak, 1965), 50. 8. Chaplin discusses his career as an artist in his autobiography, Wobbly: The Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical (University of Chicago Press, 1948). 9. Franklin Rosemont, “Introduction,” to Ernest Riebe, Mr. Block (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1984); Douglas Haller, IWW Cartoonist Ernest Riebe, M.A. Thesis, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1982. 10. Recent revivals of Mr. Block are noted by Carlos Cortez in “Power of the Unspoken Word,” Industrial Worker, Oct. 1982. 11. International Socialist Review, Dec. 1915, inside front cover. 12. In the table of contents of the Review for Oct. 1915 Machia’s first name is given as Arturo. 13. Minnie F. Corder, “Ray Corder” (obit.), Industrial Worker, Jan. 1969, 2. 14. See Art Young’s autobiographies, On My Why (New York: Liveright, 1928), and Art Young: His Life and Times (New York: Sheridan House, 1939), as well as the album, The Best of Art Young, with an Introduction by Heywood Broun (New York: Vanguard Press, 1936). 15. “A Cartoon with a Thought,” Industrial Pioneer, Aug. 1924, 21; Art Young: His Life and Times, op. cit. ,454. 16. Art Young, Thomas Rowlandson (New York: Willey, 1938), 26. 17. See the news story on Ellis in New Majority, Aug. 2, 1919, 5. 18. Oakley C. Johnson, op cit. 19. A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper, The Outbursts of Everett True (Vestal, NY: Vestal Press, 1983). A short biographical sketch of Condo appeared in The Comic Buyer’s Guide, Aug. 5, 1983, 9–10. 20. Riebe, Mr. Block, op cit., 19, “He Was One of the Victims.” 21. “The John Baer Story,” Electrical Workers Journal, 66, Jan. 1967, 53–55; Bill G. Reid, “John M. Baer: Nonpartisan League Cartoonist and Congressman,” North Dakota History, 44, Winter 1977,4–13. 22. See Zinn’s letter to the editor, “Dislikes Articles on Lumber Workers,” Industrial Worker, Feb. 28, 1948, 2. 23. An obituary for Olday appeared in the Industrial Worker for July 1977. A “Tribute to John Olday” was published as a special supplement to the English anarchist paper Freedom, Sept. 3, 1977 (Vol. 38, No. 17). 24. “Show Your Appreciation,” Industrial Pioneer, June 1926, 23. 25. An edited transcript of an “oral history” interview with Era Hanson is included in Bert Russell, ed., Hardships and Happy Times (Harrison: Lacon, 1978), 86–129. 26. Carlos Cortez, Wobbly: 80 Years of Rebel Art (Chicago: Gato Negro Press, 1985), 26. 27. “Eugene Barnett, Cartoonist,” Industrial Pioneer, Feb. 1924, 18; “A Rebel Worker’s Life” serialized in Labor Defender from Jan. 1927 through Jan. 1928; Ralph Chaplin, The Centralia Conspiracy (Chicago: General Defense Committee, 1924), 28–29, passim; Harvey O’Connor, Revolution in Sea
ttle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 193. 28. Editorial note on bottom of page, Industrial Pioneer, Jan. 1925,44. 29. For biographical information on Henkelman I have relied on recollections by Richard Ellington of Oakland, California, and Jenny Velsek of Chicago; see also Cortez, Wobbly: 80 Years of Rebel Art, 18. 30. “Cartoonist X13,” Industrial Worker, June 1971; correspondence with Nicolaas Steelink; Cortez, Wobbly: 80 Years, 32; Guy Louis Rocha, “The IWW and the Boulder Dam Project,” in Joseph Conlin, ed., At the Point of Production: The Local History of the IWW (Westport: Greenwood, 1981), 218–219. 31. Cortez, Wobbly: 80 Years, 22; interview with Jenny Velsek, Chicago, October 1987. 32. Cortez, Wobbly: 80 Years, 38. 33. Ibid., 40; Clif Bennett, “Resistance in Prison,” in Retort, Winter 1949 (more accessible in the special Retort anthology published by The Match! [licson, Arizona, 1987]). 34. Interview with Carlos Cortez, October 1987. The MOMA exhibit, “Committed to Print” (1988), includes one of Cortez’s woodblocks. 35. Tor Faegre, “Organizing Blueberries,” Rebel Worker 2, Summer 1964, 6–9. 36. Permanence du regard surrealiste (Lyon: ELAC, 1981), 61; Edouard Jaguer, preface to Robert Green exhibition, Platypus Gallery, Evanston, 1983; Adam Biro and Rene Passeron, eds.. Die-tionnaire general du surrealisme et de ses environs (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1982), 155. 37. As quoted here in Rebel Voices, 71. 38. Gelett Burgess, “The Wild Men of Paris” {Architectural Record [New York], May 1910, 400–414. 39. Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel (Whey-bridge, Surrey, UK: Whittet Books, 1981), 145. 40. The poster is reproduced in color in John Canemaker, Winsor McCoy: His life and Art (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 176. 41. Penelope Rosemont and Joseph Jablonski, “Miserabilism and Anti-Miserabilism in 1986,” International Surrealist Bulletin, Sept. 1986, 3–6. 42. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood, eds., Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, second edition (Ibcson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987), 231–232. 43. On the popular imagination, see Andre Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings (New York: Monad Press, 1978); Franklin Rosemont, ed., Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices, originally published as a special issue of the journal Cultural Correspondence (Providence, 1979) and reprinted as a book the following year (San Francisco: City Lights, 1980); Raul Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit (London: Eddison, 1975; New York: DaCapo, 1979); Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (San Francisco: City Lights: 1982), and Paul Buhle, ed., Popular Culture in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 44. Quoted in Stewart Bird, Dan Georgakas, Deborah Shaffer, Solidarity Forever: An Oral History of the IWW (Chicago: Lake View, 1985), 68. 45. A useful introduction to the IWW around the world is the postscript to Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), 221–238. 46. Maurice Horn, World Encyclopedia of Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1976), 518–519. Nicholls, incidentally, is the only cartoonist for the IWW included in this 789-page reference; his IWW connection, however, is not mentioned. 47. Franklin Rosemont, “A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired, Wild-Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture,” in Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont, eds., Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), 203–212. 48. The Australian poster (signed DINO) is reproduced in Ian-Turner, Sydney’s Burning (Sydney: Alpha Books, 1969). 49. The importance of the ethnic minorities’ contribution to the IWW, and to American radicalism generally, is stressed in Sal Salerno, The Early Labor Radicalism of the IWW (see note 4, above); and Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to Today (London: Verso, 1987). 50. Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 16194973 (New York: International, 1978), 107–119. 51. Richard Ellington, “Guy B. Askew: A Reminiscence,” unpublished article. 52. Trina Robbins and Cat Yronwode, Women in the Comics (Eclipse Books, 1985). Trina Robbins discusses comic art and her own work in “Interviews with Women Comic Artists,” Cultural Correspondence, 9, Spring 1979, 10–12, and in The Comics Journal, 100, July 1985, 135–139. Her “Triangle Fire” appeared in Pork Roast: 250 Feminist Cartoons, catalog of an exhibition at the UBC Fine Arts Gallery in Vancouver, 1981. 53. According to records at IWW headquarters in Chicago, Gloria Nelson joined the IWW in Sept. 1970; her cartoons are all signed “G. Nelson.” Leslie Fish signed up in June 1971. 54. Roger Lewis, Outlaws of America: The Underground Press and Its Context (Baltimore: Pelican, 1972) noted that “many of the old-timers around the IWW relate to the new youth movement in a very positive way,’’ and’added that “Many underground papers are printed under the IWW union label.” 55. Ann Schofield discusses some early woman-related IWW cartoons in “Rebel Girls and Union Maids: The Woman Question in the Journals of the AFL and IWW, 1905–1920,” Feminist Studies 9:2, summer 1983, 335–358. 56. Details of the history of the UCWA were provided by Denis Kitchen and Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In preparing this paper I have drawn on correspondence and discussions with Minnie F. Corder, Carlos Cortez, Sam and Esther Dolgoff, Richard Ellington, Paul Garon, Archie Green, Robert Green, Denis Kitchen, Mike Konopacki, Joyce Kornbluh, Brian W. Myers, Art Nurse, Lisa Oppenheim, Penny Pixler, Hal Rammel, Trina Robbins, Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, Dave Roediger, Sal Salerno, Erling Sannes, Nicolaas Steelink, Kathleen Taylor, Michael Vandelaar, Jenny Velsek and the late Fred Thompson.
Robert Green (Industrial Worker, January 1986)
Carlos Cortez: Linoleum-block poster of Ben Fletcher, 1987
Index
Acher, Juan Bautista (“Shum”), 430
Ahern, Gene, 433
Akers, William, 87–93
Alderson, William, 133, 156, 267
Allar, John, 301
Allen, Gemge G., 24, 58, 241, 242
Ameringer, Oscar, 14
Anderson, Ed, 270
Anderson, Lee, 236, 237
Anderson, Nels, 66, 68
Applequist, Otto, 127, 128
Appleseed, Johnny, 131
Arp, Hans, 435
Ashleigh, Charles, 79, 105, 106, 107, 325, 335, 352
Askew, Guy B. (Skidroad Slim), 439
Atkins, Tommy, 332
Anerbury, Mary, 369–70
Averill, Peg. 442
B aer, John, 430
Baker, Sec. of War, 253
Baker, Ray Stannard, 158, 160
Baldwin, Roger, 338
Baran, Felix, 110
Barnen, Eugene, 271, 430, 431
Barto, Harold, (Dr.), 267
Beal, Fred, 176–8
Beard, Dan, 435
Beard, Jeff, 110–11
Becker, Ray, 272
Becker, Maurice, 429
Beecher, Henry Ward, 168
Beethoven, Ludwig von, 296
Beffel, John Nicholas, 63
Bell, Dr. Herbert, 256
Bellamy, Edward, 426
Bennen, Clif, 434, 437
Berger, Victor, 50, 162, 167, 170n
Berlin, Irving, 179
Bickford, Dr. Frank, 256
“Bingo”—See Chaplin, Ralph
Binns, Archie, 156
Blake, William, 438
Bland, Bert, 273
Bliss, Philip, 105
Block, Mr. (cartoon) 5, 135–6, 171, 231, 234, 254, 437, 441
Bogame, J. Karl, 437
Bohn, Frank, 7, 52
Borah, Sen. William 4, 255
Boose, Arthur, 87
Bosch, Hieronymus, 438
Botkin, B. A., 87, 156
Bourg, G. J., 345
Bovee, Bob, 442
Boyle, John, 333
Boyd, E. M., 333
Boyd, Federick, 210, 220
Bradley, Joe, 292
Brandeis, Louis, 344
Brazier, Richard, 61, 66, 71, 72, 155, 173–9, 240, 275, 435
Brechler, Frank, 179
Breen, John, 160, 162
Brennan, Pat, 240, 299
Briand, Aristide, 46
Briggs, Clare, 433
Briggs, Walter, 372
Brill, John, 26
Brisbane, Arthur, 370
Brissenden, Paul, 94, 158, 190, 192, 352
Brodeur, Arthur G.,
267
Brooks, J. G., 105
Brown, John, 191
Browne, Waldo, 37
Brueckmann, William, 208
Bruere, Robert, 117, 338
Bryan, William Jennings, 259
Bulbul, 442
Bunyan, Paul, 131, 269, 275
Burgess, Gelett, 435
Burear, Louis. 374
Burns, William, 325
Busick, Judge Charles, 322
Byron, Lord, 162, 184
c. O. G., 155
Cahan, Abe, 226
Cahill, Jeff, 442
Campbell, Thm, 291, 292, 295, 302, 303, 304
Cantine, Holley, 434
Cantwell, Robert, 275
Carey, George, 156, 157
Carlson, Oscar, 111
Carlyle, Thomas, 162
Cassidy, Neal, 434
Caruso, Joseph, 160, 163, 172, 193
Chaplin, Ralph, vii, 8, 12, 24, 25, 26, 27, 54, 57, 58–59, 60, 79, 131, 153, 155, 156, 237, 239, 241, 242, 256, 275, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 300, 303, 312, 317, 319, 323, 324, 325, 328, 329, 340–1, 345, 398, 426–7,