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This Day in Labor History: January 15, 1915. Ralph Chaplin writes the classic labor song "Solidarity Forever." On the second day of the LA Teachers Strike, it seems like a great time to talk about this song and the IWW culture that created it. 
If there was one thing the Industrial Workers of the World understood, it was the value of culture as politics.
The early twentieth century was a period of working-class poetry and song. For my book Empire of Timber, about how loggers used their unions to promote their own environmental agenda, I looked at lots of journals that are full of this sort of thing, whether radical or not.
Given the popularity of syndicalism among the Wobblies’ European immigrant base, this was enhanced by these same immigrants also bringing traditions of radicalism through culture with them to the United States.
Ralph Chaplin was a central figure in the IWW. He was born to radicalism, having witnessed a worker shot to death during the Pullman Strike at the age of 7. He later traveled to Mexico in the early days of the Mexican Revolution, becoming an admirer of Emiliano Zapata.
Upon his return from Mexico, Chaplin became involved with the growing IWW, which had by the early 1910s become the most important union alternative to the American Federation of Labor.
Chaplin began writing “Solidarity Forever” while working on a coal strike in West Virginia in 1914. It took him a few months to finish. After watching a demonstration of the hungry in Chicago in 1915, he went back to his hotel room and finished the song.
"Solidarity Forever" of course became the iconic labor song and remains so today. Whether said iconic labor song being 104 years old is a good thing or not is up to you to decide.
Carried from place to place by the IWW, the Little Red Songbook gave workers songs over which they could build solidarity. In our present of demographically divided cultural creation, it’s almost impossible to imagine a single song or style having the ability to unite people.
That might well make for better music, but it’s politically a problem. But to be honest, why shouldn't labor be singing hip hop or Spanish language songs together? Why does it have to be the songs of long dead white workers?
As you can tell, I am pretty ambivalent about the whole thing, in part because like any good ironic Gen Xer, I don't sing in public.
Which is an entirely different point than me defending that position.
Then, the ability to sing together, although not cool in our oh so ironic and detached age, helped workers riding trains between timber camps, in the fields, and in the mines of the American West get through their daily lives of toil and great struggle.
These songs and images created a revolutionary counterculture to the dominant culture of the day that contributed to working-class oppression. Songs and posters were central to building a workers’ revolution.
They also served to push a revolutionary message to a polyglot and often illiterate (especially in English) working-class. Not everyone could read a tract.
But they might learn the lyrics of “Solidarity Forever.” And it didn’t take a working knowledge of the language to see the meaning of a class war prisoner reaching through prison bars or a muscular man standing proud.
Through their songbooks, their newspapers, and their flyers, the IWW created really great culture. The black cat. Mr. Block. “Solidarity Forever.” These are images and songs that stick with us.
As a labor organization, the IWW was often pretty ineffective. Some of that had to do with the conditions of organizing in the early 20th century. But as much had to do with weaknesses within the IWW. Sometimes, the IWW’s commitment to culture actually hindered organizing.
The disastrous Paterson Strike Pageant was a prime example, dividing the workers (those not selected to participate were jealous and the resentments split the strikers) and taking them away from picketing, thus allowing scabs into the factories.
Compared to either the AFL or CIO, the IWW accomplished little. At best, the union’s campaigns caused so many problems in a given industry that it helped force the government to improve the conditions of workers to undermine it, such as with the Northwest timber workers I study.
But both the AFL and CIO were terrible at culture creation. And as bureaucratic organizations, they had little room the kind of individualistic, showy activity that embedded the IWW in public memory.
In fact, they explicitly eschewed this kind of thing as unproductive. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. But the IWW remains in the memory of American radicals today as an alternative to an AFL-CIO seen as unresponsive, boring, and bureaucratic.
It’s had that power since the late 1960s. And the reason for it is largely the powerful cultural creations like “Solidarity Forever.”
Now, there is a gendered analysis of all of this which is important too, which is the IWW and its cultural production could be really misogynistic. Wobbly writings on women and their impact on men are, uh, problematic.
Which, OK, it was 1915 or whatever. But if we are going to lionize IWW culture today, this is worth noting.
Like many Wobbly intellectuals, Chaplin initially expressed hope that the Soviet Union was the beginning a true workers’ revolution but also like many, became quickly disillusioned. Chaplin remained committed to anti-communist leftist thought in the U.S> until World War II.
In 1949, Chaplin became curator for manuscripts at the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma, a position he retained until his death in 1961. I figure this makes him the most famous archivist in American history.
None of this means that I am going to start singing in public, even with other people. Also, we will know the labor movement is on the way back when we have new songs and chants other than "The People United Will Never Be Defeated."
I will now return to my Gen X ironic musical detachment, no doubt personified in the Pavement album I am presently listening to.
Back tomorrow for the 1961 California lettuce worker strike.
