The events started at 10 A.M. with the annual commemoration of the Illinois Labor History Society and the Chicago Federation of Labor on the site of the Haymarket monument at Randolph and Desplaines, which has become one of downtown Chicago’s most popular tourist attractions. Speakers included James Thindwa from Jobs for Justice; Jorge Ramirez, CFL; Tom Balanoff (SEIU District Council), and Katie Jordan. Bucky Halker sang songs.
As the ILHS and CFL speakers concluded their morning May Day messages, many attendees enthusiastically joined the annual Immigrant Rights march.
At 5 o’clock, at Newberry Library, the ILHS held its annual meeting, a prelude to the special Newberry May Day event at 6: “The Wobblies: Memory and Model.” This special Library program opened with a display of selected IWW memorabilia now in the Newberry’s collection—an appreciable addition to such related holdings as the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company collection; the Jack Jones Dil Pickle Club archive; and, more recently, the Henry P. Rosemont Typographical Union collection.
The evening program at Newberry began at 6pm. Larry Spivack, ILHS President, introduced Joe Hill as personified by Joseph Bella. Bella played the guitar and sang Joe Hill songs including the humorous Mr Block not often heard. Spivack presented the Newberry Library with a recent book on George Andreytchine, a Bulgarian Wobbly active in Chicago in the 1910s.
Len Despres, who has just celebrated his 100th birthday, gave a short speech on how the IWW influenced him through Eugene V. Debs and Roger Baldwin. Len, Chicago’s most famous alderman, is loved in Chicago for his work defending the defenseless, his courageous stand on civil rights, open housing, the defense of freedom of speech, and the rights of labor. Len’s book Challenging the Daley Machine is a necessity for all political activists.
David Roediger, Professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana, spoke on the influences of Haymarket and May Day on the IWW. He focused on Albert Parsons and his evolution from Confederate Soldier to Labor activist, anarchist and advocate of the 8-hour day movement. From Waco, Texas where he met Lucy Parsons to Chicago where he was executed. Roediger spoke of the “Chicago Idea” anarchism which he related to the IWW idea of Solidarity and spoke of its importance in achieving the 8-hour day. Roediger’s forthcoming book How Race Survived U.S. History is another milestone in the discussion of this problem that Roediger began with this now classic Wages of Whiteness.
Franklin Rosemont’s talk focused on the IWW, founded in Chicago in 1905 in that very neighborhood within a couple of blocks of the Newberry Library. At that time it was a vibrant area of radical labor activism with Bughouse Square, the Dil Pickle Club and the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company.
Rosemont, the author of Joe Hill, The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, spoke about Hill, labor’s most famous martyr and another frame-up case. When Hill was about to be executed in Utah, he penned the line “Don’t mourn, Organize!” Hill was noted also for the famous line from one of his songs “Pie in the sky.” Rosemont’s book is an exciting view of the IWW milieu at that time. It is being translated into French and due to appear in Paris, France this month. Rosemont emphasized that the IWW was not a trades union but a revolutionary industrial union, its goal to organize one big union of all workers. Chicago was the location of the 1918 IWW trial in which 101 Wobblies were sentenced to the penitentiary for antiwar activity.
Rosemont mentioned Fred Thompson, Jenny Velsek, Jack Sheridan, and Carlos Cortez as the Chicago Wobblies that held the group together in the 1960s. These same people and Len Despres were instrumental in the revival of the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. Rosemont concluded with a hilarious text by T-Bone Slim entitled 49,000,000 Jobs. T-Bone, the IWW’s Mark Twain says, “If I get fired twice perday I’ll be 2,739 years old when the last boss requests my resignation. By that time quite a few bosses will be fired and I can start all over again.”
Penelope Rosemont talked about the IWW’s Solidarity Bookshop which she helped staff in the 1960s. Founded by Franklin Rosemont, Tor Faegre, Robert Green and Bernard Marszalek, Solidarity with its mimeo’d IWW journal Rebel Worker was the center of that Northside neighborhood and became a pole of attraction for young people. The bookshop group was soon joined by African-Americans Joan Smith, Simone Collier, Charlotte Carter and Theon Reynolds. Soon the Lincoln Park neighborhood was full of SDSers, and other young radicals, who came to Solidarity to talk, have events and buy books on the IWW, Surrealism, Situationism, anarchism and scores of radical newspapers including the Black Panther from Oakland and Volonta! from Buenos Aires. Lots of young people joined the IWW but many more committed themselves to the growing movement against racism and the war. All remember Solidarity Bookshop fondly. Penelope Rosemont’s just released book Dreams & Everyday Life covers that period.
There was a short discussion in the spirit of Bughouse Square, Bram Bassford of the Socialist Party sang the Red Flag and Mike Hargis of the IWW reported on the IWW today. Solidarity Forever was sung by the close to 200 people in attendance and that was appropriate since that anthem of the labor movement was written in Chicago by Ralph Chaplin of IWW in 1915.
The program is scheduled to be broadcast on cable TV by CAN-TV and will also be on the radio on WBEZ.