Singing the praises of a colorful union - Wobblies used music and a bit of humor to attract members
Submitted on Thu, 10/05/2006 - 2:29am
By William Mullen - ChicagoTribune staff reporter, October 3, 2006Using humor and music to attract their members, a labor movement known as the Wobblies that was founded in Chicago in 1905 went on to create one of the most important and colorful chapters in American union history.
On Monday, the Newberry Library announced its acquisition of "an outstanding archive" of extremely rare publications and ephemera that record the history of the Wobblies, more formally known as the Industrial Workers of the World.
The collection had taken more than 40 years to amass by a Chicago couple, Penelope and Franklin Rosemont, members of the Illinois Labor History Society.
The IWW, still active with small local chapters in several U.S. cities, has always prided itself as being a little different and perhaps a little ahead of its time from more mainstream labor organizations.
"Wobbly organizers were often very funny people who used humor as a tactic," said Franklin Rosemont, a labor historian and author who has written extensively on the IWW. "They were stand-up improv comedians ahead of their time.
"There was one guy, for instance, who would be at labor gatherings and start shouting desperately, `I'm being robbed! I'm being robbed!' When people rushed to see what was going on, he'd start his pitch by telling them, `I'm being robbed by the capitalist system.'"
A famous Wobbly phrase, "Sit down and watch your pay go up," was used in early attempts in the ultimately successful effort to unionize Detroit auto workers.
IWW print shops in Chicago published hundreds of thousands of copies of the union's "Little Red Song Book," a compendium of labor anthems like "Solidarity Forever," sung by Wobbly musician/organizers who wrote much of the music.
Among the more than 600 items in the collection is an invitation to a 1909 IWW Dance with the song, "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" printed on the back.
There is the 1915 Chicago funeral program for Wobbly martyr Joe Hill, an organizer killed in a Utah jail. There is a photo of the IWW "Work People's College" in Duluth, Minn., a free workers' school that taught immigrants English and skills such as accounting.
Among hundreds of Wobbly books, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers, most of them printed in Chicago, are rare editions of "The Little Red Song Book." The collection also includes IWW membership records, dues stamps, promotional stickpins, buttons and stickers handed out by organizers.
"It is an extraordinarily rich compendium of materials," Newberry curator Martha Briggs said. "It is really fortuitous that it landed at the Newberry, because it relates so well with our existing labor, free speech and Chicago history collections."
In fact, the library, at 60 W. Walton St., sits across the street from Bughouse Bug House Square, the public park that was a center for the oratory and music of early Wobbly organizers and troubadours.
The Newberry neighborhood, now an very upscale area of tony condos and townhouses, for most of the first half of the 20th Century was a rundown slum populated by laborers and hobos. Bughouse Square was a rallying spot where the poor would gather, entertained by a parade of impromptu speakers and performers, most of them bearing a political message.
"We are very pleased to have these archives housed at the Newberry Library," Penelope Rosemont said. "The Wobblies began in Chicago, and now the union's influential past will be preserved and made available to all types of readers here."