RedCeltic
13th July 2004, 02:32
The following is a list of prominent figures in Wobbly history. Each figure who’s biography is represented here has been, or currently is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. These are all extremely important figures in the history of the anti-capitalist struggle in the United States and the rest of the world.
If there is a figure known by you that was a member (or is) of the Industrial Workers of the World, was (or is) prominent and influential in history but not mentioned here please send me a PM.
Fellow Worker Tom Barker (1887 - 1970)
Tom Barker became the editor of the Australian IWW's Direct Action in 1915 after Tom Glynn was arrested in 1915. He supported industrial unionism because of the failure of Laborism. "I was absolutely convinced after seeing politicians in both New Zealand and Australia that a strong and even ruthless working-class body was necessary to see that people were properly protected and paid." Tom Glynn and Tom Barker brought an infusion of Marxist perspective to the Australian Socialist Party and the IWW Clubs when they joined in 1913.
All governments in modern society, Barker argued, existed for the purpose of protecting private property and the interests of the propertied class; whether the politicians were socialists or conservatives, they could only safegaurd and perpetuate the system of opression. Barker attacked the Second International for being spineless. "Let us get to work, we of the Industrial Workers of the World, we, the countryless, the pariahs, the hobos, the migratory workers. Let us throw off the pusillanimty of political sentimentalists. Economic conditions are bringing us together in spite of ourselves and we, the workers of the world, are dependent upon one another.
Tom Barker Biography (http://http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/TomBarker1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Eugene V Debs (1855-1926)
While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison I am not free!
Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. He became a prominent American labor leader, beginning with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875. In 1893 he organized the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union (ARU). The Union successfully struck the Great Northern Railway in April 1894.
He was jailed during the conterverial Pullman Strike after sucsessfully pulling off a General Strike of Railroad workers. While in prison he read Das Kapital by Karl Marx and converted to socialism. When he got out of Prison he started the Social Democratic Party, Later renamed the Socialist Party of America (now known as the Socialist Party USA). He was their candidate for president in 1900 1904, 1908, 1912, and (from prison)1920
He had been the president of the Indistrual Workers of the World at it’s founding in 1905, and remained active throughout it’s early years.
He had been imprisoned in 1918 for violation of the Espianoge act issued by President Willson which made speaches against the first world war illegal. Eugene V. Debs had been against the European war from the beginning, considering it an imperialist war fought between capitalist nations over collonies for imperialist gains.
He had been sentenced to 10 years in prison yet was pardoned shortly before his death in 1926.
More on Eugene V. Debs (http://http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/EugeneDebs1.shtml)
Debs Foundation (http://http://www.eugenevdebs.com/)
Debs internet archive (http://http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/)
Socialist Party USA (http://www.sp-usa.org)
Fellow Worker Ben Fletcher - A Legacy of Solidarity
At a time when Black Americans were under attack from Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, boss racism, exclusion from the American Federation of Labor, and other forms of institutionalized racism, the "Industrial Workers of the World" welcomed all working people into the union as equals. Incidentally laborers such as Ben Fletcher, that fell outside of the AFL's preference for skilled white anglo saxon males, were able to join forces in the "One Big Union".
Through the recognition of the bosses dependence on workers for profits, and the IWW's willingness to withdraw their labor and efficiency in political battle, the "Wobblies" demanded and won a better standard of living, and respect in the democratic spaces they created on the job.
Fletcher organized the Philadelphia dockworkers' strike in 1913 and was a very accomplished and important IWW leader Fletcher was successful in getting ethnic groups to work together.
The dockworkers' strike was only one example of the labor strife that permeated American society at the beginning of the 20th century. There was widespread unrest between both American-born and immigrant workers and their often abusive employers.
More on Ben Fletcher (http://http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/BenFletcher1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Hubert Harrison 1883 – 1927
The essence of the present situation lies in the fact that the people whom our white masters have "recognized" as our leaders (without taking the trouble to consult us) and those who, by our own selection, has actually attained to leadership among us are being revaluated and, in most cases, rejected. The most striking instance from the latter class is Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of the Crisis. Du Bois's case is the more significant because his former services to his race have been undoubtedly of a high and courageous sort.
Hubert Harrison was born in St. Croix of the Virgin Islands in 1883. At the age of seventeen he travelled to New York where he worked as a bellhop and an elevator operator. He also attended night school and studied sociology, science, psychology, literature, and drama.
Harrison's studies radicalized him and he became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He later joined the Socialist Party where he met other African American radicals such as Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and Claude McKay. He impressed them with his intellect and was given the nickname, the 'Black Socrates'.
Max Eastman, editor of the The Masses, employed him on his journal. Harrison also edited The Voice and contributed to the The Messenger, The Call, The New Republic, the New York Times and the New York World. He also published two important books, The Negro and the Nation (1917) and When Africa Awakes (1920).
Harrison was a strong opponent of United States involvement in the First World War. This caused him to break with William Du Bois who had argued in The Crisis that: "Let, us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks."
Harrison also lectured on socialism and African American civil rights from street corners and in September, 1922, the New York Times reported that he was drawing crowds of over 10,000 people and the New York police had to stop the traffic.
It is claimed that Harrison had a great influence on Marcus Garvey. Harrison, who was now claiming that race was more important than class and after leaving the Socialist Party joined Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Harrison also edited the organizations journal, The Negro World, for four years. He also worked as a staff lecturer for the New York City Board of Education. Hubert Harrison died in 1927.
Fellow Worker Frank Little (A True American Hero) 1880 – 1917
>>>To Frank Little>>> Traitor and demagogue,
Wanton breeder of discontent -
That is what they call you -
Those cowards, who condemn sabotage
But hide themselves
Not only behind masks and cloaks
But behind all the armoured positions
Of property and prejudice and the law.
Staunch friend and comrade,
Soldier of solidarity -
Like some bitter magic
The tale of your tragic death
Has spread throughout the land,
And from a thousand minds
Has torn the last shreds of doubt
Concerning Might and Right.
Young and virile and strong -
Like grim sentinels they stand
Awaiting each opportunity
To break another
Of slavery's chains.
For whatever stroke is needed.
They are preparing.
So shall you be avenged.
Frank Little was born in 1880. Little is known about his family background but he told friends that he had "Indian blood". He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1906 and took part in the free speech campaigns in Missoula, Fresno and Spokane and was involved in organizing lumberjacks, metal miners and oil field workers into trade unions. On one occasion he was sentenced to 30 days imprisonment for reading the Declaration of Independence on a street corner.
In 1910 Little successfully organize unskilled fruit workers in the San Joaquin Valley. This brought him to the attention of the national leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World and by 1916 was a member of the party's General Executive Board.
Little was a strong opponent of the USA becoming involved in the First World War. The leader of the party, William Haywood shared Little's opinions, but this was a minority view in the party. When the USA joined the war in April, 1917, Ralph Chaplin, the editor of the trade union journal, Solidarity, claimed that opposing the draft would destroy the IWW. Little refused to back down on this issue and argued that: "the IWW is opposed to all wars, and we must use all our power to prevent the workers from joining the army."
In the summer of 1917, Little was helping organize workers in the metal mines of Montana. This included leading a strike of miners working for the Anaconda Company. In the early hours of 1st August, 1917, six masked men broke into Little's hotel room. He was beaten up, tied by the rope to a car, and dragged out of town, where he was lynched. A note: "First and last warning" was pinned to his chest. No serious attempt was made by the police to catch Little's murderers. It is not known if he was killed for his anti-war views or his trade union activities.
http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/FrankLittle1.shtml ( More on Frank Little
Fellow Worker Lucy Parsons (1853-1942)
”More Dangerous than a thousand rioters”—Chicago Police Department
"Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully." -Lucy Parsons
By the Women's History Information Project For almost 70 years, Lucy Parsons fought for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised in the face of an increasingly oppressive industrial economic system. Lucy's radical activism challenged the racist and sexist sentiment in a time when even radical Americans believed that a woman's place was in the home.
Her date and place of birth are uncertain and obscured by herself, Lucy Parsons was probably of mixed racial origin with possibly African, which she always denied, Mexican and Indian roots. She was the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket martyrs, and as such first came into prominence. Apart from vindicating his memory by publishing his writings and biography, she published books, pamphlets and newspapers (Freedom 1890-92, The Liberator 1905-06, The Alarm 1915-16) and remained all her life a steadfast rebel.
Was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
[url=http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/LucyParsons1.shtml]More on Lucy Parsons (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/LucyParsons1.shtml)
Lucy Parsons Project (http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/)
Chicago Revolutionary (http://members.tripod.com/~RedRobin2/index-43.html)
Fellow Worker T-Bone Slim
Valentine Huhta, better known as T-Bone Slim, is, with the exception of Joe Hill and possibly Ralph Chaplin, the IWW's best-known song-writer and poet laureate . . . a fixture in the union and its publications for over 20 years. His impact on the culture of the IWW and in the intellectual life of that union's rank and file was as significant as virtually any Fellow Worker in the 98 year history of the OBU.
Yet should you attempt to find information on Huhta, you will be sadly disappointed . . . A search for prominent Wobs on the internet will provide you with pages dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill, Bill Haywood, Gene Debs, Helen Keller, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons . . . the list is huge. But aside from a couple of postings of the lyrics of a few of Huhta's most popular songs, you will find nary a mention of the "Popular Wobbly".
More on T-Bone Slim (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/TBoneSlim1.shtml)
The Lumberjack Prayer (http://www.bloomington.in.us/~mitch/iww/lumber.html)
The Popular Wobbly (http://www.bloomington.in.us/~mitch/iww/wild.html)
I’m too old to be a Scab (http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/tooold.html)
Fellow Worker Judi Bari 1949 – 1997
Judi Bari was a fighter and organizer for many labor, social, and environmental justice causes.
The common denominator was her indignation over injustice, whether in the form of war, racism, sexism, political repression, economic exploitation, or the unnecessary destruction of ecosystems.
Bari was a gifted and inspiring speaker who was widely regarded as the principal leader of the Earth First! movement in Northern California. She led Earth First! in her region to embrace the use of nonviolent direct action and to renounce the use of tree-spiking, or any other tactic that could lead to injuries to timber and mill workers. Coming from a labor organizing background, she was quick to point out that it was not the workers but the giant corporations who should be the target of environmental reformers.
More on Judi Bari (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/BariObit1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Sam Dolgoff 1902 – 1990
spoke from sidewalk soapboxes and in union meeting halls for more than 60 years, and during all that time, what caught everyone's attention was his tough cocky style, half New York, half Joe Hill. Flames of mockery and indignation danced above his head. The man identified with the downtrodden workers, and he shouted "It's a cryin' shame!" And the way those words bellowed from his mouth, the gruff rumble of his laughter, the thrust of his bulldog face and his workman's hands spread in a gesture of sweet reason--every single trait said, in effect: Sam Dolgoff is [not] for the working class. He is the working class. And the rest of you goddamned bastards can say anything you please, but your opinion will not sway him one solitary inch.
More on Sam Dolgoff (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/Dolgoff1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Al Grierson 1948 – 2000
A Poet from Texas who died when he was swept away in a flash flood after his pickup truck stalled in high water a couple miles from home in the rolling, dusty Hill Country.
Around central Texas, Al Grierson, 52, was known as the "Poet Laureate of Luckenbach," a reference to that afterthought of a hamlet made famous by singer-songwriter Waylon Jennings.
But the Canadian-born Grierson's reputation loomed much larger than a fanciful title in a town of 25. He was internationally lauded among folk singers and songwriters, and he was a regular at the world-renowned Kerrville Folk Festival in nearby Kerrville, Texas.
More on Al Grierson (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/AlGrierson1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Gilbert Mers 1908 – 1998
Gilbert Mers was the closest thing to a Texas labor legend since the days of Martin Irons and the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, yet he would be the first to deny this. Born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1908, Gilbert and his family had moved to Bisbee, Arizona by 1918. Maybe something happened to Gilbert in Bisbee. Maybe it was the water. One may recall that in 1917 Bisbee was the site of a mass deportation of 1200 Industrial Workers of the World copper miners from the Phelps-Dodge copper mines. By 1929 Gilbert and his family had moved to Texas where Gilbert worked the docks as a longshoreman. Though his trade was that of a longshoreman, militant unionism was his career.
More on Gilbert Mers (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/GilbertMers1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Queen Silver
To the legendary film producer Cecil B. DeMille, she was "the Godless Girl" in a Hollywood movie (1929) of that title which was modeled on her young life. For a teenager with the unlikely name of Queen Silver, the film was just one more in a continuing series of adventures. Queen had been born at the cusp of a social revolution that ushered in women's equality, world wars, the labor movement, and increased governmental repression of dissent.
Queen was born into radicalism. She attended her first political rally at six days of age. There, her mother, Grace Verne Silver, stood at the podium to denounce the laws and mores that restricted labor -- in particular, the labor of women. Indeed, the fiery Grace had halted an intensive lecture tour only long enough to give birth. Political agitation was a tradition for the Silver women. Grace's mother, Azuba, had lost her health -- and eventually her life -- from working sixteen to eighteen hours a day in cotton mills from the age of eight. Azuba became a vocal opponent of child labor. Queen delighted in introducing herself as "a second generation freethinker [atheist], a third generation feminist, and directly descended from framers of the Constitution."
More on Queen Silver (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/QueenSilver.shtml)
Fellow Worker Harry Bridges (1901-1990)
born July 28, 1901, Kensington, near Melbourne, Vic., Australia
died March 30, 1990, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.
original name Alfred Bryant Renton Bridges Australian-born American labor leader, president of the San Francisco-based International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) from 1937 to 1977.
Bridges left home to become a maritime seaman at the age of 16 and in 1920 legally entered the United States, where he worked as a seaman and dockworker. Was briefly a member of the IWW.
More on Harry Bridges (http://www.ilwu19.com/history/bridges_vs_beck.htm)
Harry Bridges Institute (http://www.harrybridges.com/)
Harry Bridges Project (http://www.theharrybridgesproject.org/)
A Biography (http://www.ilwu19.com/history/biography.htm)
Harry Bridges center for labor studies (http://depts.washington.edu/pcls/)
Fellow Worker James P. Cannon 1890 - 1974
James Patrick Cannon (1890-1974) was an American Communist and then Trotskyist leader. Born in Rosedale, Kansas, he was first a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and then of the Socialist Party of the USA.
He opposed World War I from an internationalist position and rallied to the Russian Revolution in 1917. In 1919, he became a founding member of the Workers (Communist) Party (now known as Communist Party USA) and was part of its leadership from its earliest days serving as Party Chairman from 1919 to 1928 (the position was actually secondary to that of general secretary.
In the factionalised CPUSA in the 1920s Cannon was responsible for the International Labor Defense organisation from which he built a power base. His followers were loosely organised in the so-called Foster-Cannon faction which looked to "native" American workers in the unions.
In 1928, Cannon read a critique of the direction of the Communist International written by Trotsky which the Comintern had mistakenly circulated. He was convinced of the arguments, and attempted to form a Left Opposition within the W©P. This resulted in his expulsion. He then founded the Communist League of America with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, and started publishing The Militant. It declared itself to be an external faction of the W©P.
Following the collapse of the Comintern in the face of Nazism in Germany they concluded with Trotsky that the Comintern could not be reformed and embarked on a struggle to build a new International and new parties.
This led Cannon and the CL to fuse with AJ Muste's American Workers Party and later, with their augmented forces, to join the Socialist Party of America as a faction. This led to an internal struggle with a faction which opposed fusing with the Socialist Party and which went on to form the Revolutionary Workers League, led by Hugo Oehler. In 1937 having recruited large numbers of people from the SPUSA's youth group, the Young People's Socialist League, they left the SPUSA and formed the Socialist Workers Party. Cannon became its first secretary.
Cannon was also a leading figure in the internatinal Trotskyist movement and visited Britain in 1938 with the intention of aiding the unfication of the competing British groups. The result was a patched together unification, the Revolutionary Socialist League, which rapidly disintegrated.
In 1940 Cannon's co-leader of the SWP, Max Shachtman, left with a large part of the membership to form the Workers Party. One of the key questions in this controversy was the political attitude to be adopted with reference to Russia. Contrary to popular legend, however, this was not the question that directly led to the split. Another blow was suffered during World War Two when Cannon was jailed under the Smith Act along with other SWPers. Even in jail however his influence on the SWP was strong and he wrote to change the party line on the Warsaw Rising.
Following the war Cannon resumed leadership of the SWP, but this role declined as he left the post of national secretary in 1953, and retired to California in the mid-1950s. However he was very much involved in the splits which developed in both the SWP and the Fourth International in 1952. He took no part in the various factional disputes that developed between 1963 and 1965, except to decry certain factionalism among his erstwhile supporters in a document entitled Do Not Strangle The Party. He died in 1975 in retirement.
A profuse revolutionary journalist, many of his articles have been collected in a series of books, the best known of which are Notebook of an Agitator and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.
James P. Cannon Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/)
Fellow Worker Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His undergraduate and graduate years were spent at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, "Transformational Analysis." The major theoretical viewpoints of the dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, which was published in 1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published in 1975.
Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.) From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor.
During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others.
Professor Chomsky has received honorary degrees from University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Harvard University, University of Calcutta, and Universidad Nacional De Colombia. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others.
Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. His works include: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Cartesian Linguistics; Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle); Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; At War with Asia; For Reasons of State; Peace in the Middle East?; Reflections on Language; The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. I and II (with E.S. Herman); Rules and Representations; Lectures on Government and Binding; Towards a New Cold War; Radical Priorities; Fateful Triangle; Knowledge of Language; Turning the Tide; Pirates and Emperors; On Power and Ideology; Language and Problems of Knowledge; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Necessary Illusions; Deterring Democracy; Year 501; Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture; Letters from Lexington; World Orders, Old and New; The Minimalist Program; Powers and Prospects; The Common Good; Profit Over People; The New Military Humanism; New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; Rogue States; A New Generation Draws the Line; 9-11; and Understanding Power.
He is currently a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Noam Chomsky archive (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/)
Fellow worker James Connolly 1868–1916
was one of the greatest political thinkers to emerge in the early twentieth century. He was a soldier, labourer, cobbler, journalist, trade union leader and organiser, committed socialist and patriot, intellectual, historian, and military tactician. He was a devoted husband and father to his wife and their six children. With the support of his wife he worked unceasingly in the struggle for national freedom, socialism, and international working-class solidarity, despite the poor circumstances in which he and his family lived in the typical working-class conditions of that time.
Connolly was a man who lived his life according to the dictum of Karl Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” He set about trying to change the world for the betterment of the working class and the peoples enslaved by imperialist power.
Connolly wrote pamphlets, articles, plays, poems, and songs. He was an accomplished public speaker and went on lecture tours in Scotland, England, and the United States, (where he was a member of the IWW) a reflection of the esteem in which he was held in the international labor movement.
He commanded the revolutionary forces in Dublin during the 1916 Rising and was shot by firing squad on 12 May, tied to a chair. This man who played a significant role in changing the course of Irish history in the twentieth century wrote one month before his execution: “The cause of Labor is the cause of Ireland; the cause of Ireland is the cause of Labor. They cannot be dissevered.”
Communist Party of Ireland’s biography on James Connolly (http://www.communistpartyofireland.ie/connolly.html)
Ireland’s Own (http://www.irelandsown.net/jamesconnolly.htm)
James Connolly Society (http://www.wageslave.org/)
James Connolly internet archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/)
Fellow Worker Dorothy Day 1897-1980
"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"
Dorothy Day was born in New York, New York, on November 8, 1897. She studied at the University of Illinois on a scholarship (1914-16). While a student she read widely among socialist authors and soon joined the Socialist Party. In 1916 she returned to New York City and joined the staff of the Call, a socialist newspaper; she also became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1917 she moved to the staff of the Masses, where she remained until the magazine was suppressed by the government a few months later. After a brief period on the successor journal, the Liberator, Day worked as a nurse in Brooklyn (1918-19). For several years thereafter she continued in journalism in Chicago and in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1927, following years of doubt and indecision, she joined the Roman Catholic church, an act that for some time estranged her from her earlier radical associates.
In 1932 Day met Peter Maurin, a French-born Catholic who had developed a program of social reconstruction, which he called "the green revolution," based on communal farming and the establishment of houses of hospitality for the urban poor. The program aimed to unite workers and intellectuals in joint activities ranging from farming to educational discussions. In 1933 Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, a monthly newspaper, to carry the idea to a wider audience. Within three years the paper's circulation had grown to 150,000, and the original St. Joseph's House of Hospitality in New York City had served as the pattern for similar houses in a number of other cities. The Catholic Worker took boldly radical positions on many issues and during World War II was an organ for pacifism and for the support of Catholic conscientious objectors.
A professed anarchist, Day was widely considered in later years one of the great Catholic lay leaders of the time. She protested the Vietnam War and was arrested in 1973 while demonstrating in California in support of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Day died at the House of Hospitality on the Lower East Side of New York City on November 29, 1980. Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was published in 1952.
Catholic Worker Movement (http://www.catholicworker.org/)
Fellow Worker Daniel De Leon
"Industrial Unionism is the socialist republic in the making; and, the goal once reached, the Industrial Union is the socialist republic in operation. Accordingly, the Industrial Union is at once the battering ram with which to pound down the fortress of capitalism, and the successor of the capitalist social structure itself."
Lenin had called Deleon the only American Marxist thinker to have developed his on Marxist Theory. Daniel Deleon was born on an island in the caribean, went to school in Germany and the Netherlands. He settled in New York and studied at Columbia University. In 1890 he joined the Socialist Labor Party and became the editor of it’s newspaper “The People”. He quickly grew in popularity and received 13,000 votes when he ran for New York State Govorner in 1891. He was a Marxist and dedicated to a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. He was highly critical of trade unionism in America of the AFL which he called “seperation of labor.” In the early part of the 20th centery, the SLP was declining in influence with the forming of Eugene V. Debs’ Socialist Party of America. In 1905 Deleon helped found the Industrial Workers of the World, yet left after being disgusted with anarchist influences.
Daniel Deleon is the founder of the only origonal version of Marxism to come out of the United States, called “Marxist-Deleonism” sometimes “Socialist Industrial Unionism” or Socialist Syndicalism”.
Socialist Labor Party (http://www.slp.org/)
Daniel Deleon archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/)
Fellow Worker Dr.Marie Equi 1872-1952
Dr. Equi was a physician and militant supporter of the IWW in the teens and 1920s in Portland Oregon, and perhaps the most openly queer Amerikan radical of her age. A nice essay on her life, with pictures, is available here, from the Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest website (http://home.teleport.com/~glapn/)
More on Dr. Equi (http://home.teleport.com/~glapn/ar04007.html)
Fellow Worker Elizabeth Gurley Flynn “Rebel Girl”
We believe that the class struggle existing in society is expressed in the economic power of the master on the one side and the growing economic power of the workers on the other side meeting in open battle now and again, but meeting in continual daily conflict over which shall have the larger share of labor's product and the ultimate ownership of the means of life.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was born in Concord, New Hampshire on 7th August, 1890. The family moved to New York in 1900 and Flynn was educated at the local public school. Converted by her parents to socialism, she was only 16 when she gave her first speech, What Socialism Will Do for Women, at the Harlem Socialist Club. As a result of her political activities, Flynn was expelled from high school.
In 1907 Flynn became a full-time organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Over the next few years she organised campaigns among garment workers in Pennsylvania, silk weavers in New Jersey, restaurant workers in New York, miners in Minnesota and textile workers in Massachusetts. During this period the writer, Theodore Dreiser, described her as "an East Side Joan of Arc.". Flynn was arrested ten times during this period but was never convicted of any criminal activity.
A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Flynn was active in the campaign against the conviction of Sacco-Vanzetti. Flynn was particularly concerned with women's rights. She supported birth control and women's suffrage. Flynn also criticised the leadership of trade unions for being male dominated and not reflecting the needs of women.
In 1936 Flynn joined the Communist Party and wrote a feminist column for his journal, the Daily Worker. Two years later she was elected to the national committee.
During the Second World War she played an important role in the campaign for equal economic opportunity and pay for women and the establishment of day care centres for mothers working in industry. In 1942 Flynn ran for Congress at large in New York and received 50,000 votes.
In July 1948 12 leaders of the Communist Party were arrested and accused of advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. Flynn launched a campaign for their release, but in June 1951 was arrested in the second wave of arrests and charged with violating the Alien Registration Act.
After a nine-month trial she was found guilty and served two years in the women's penitentiary at Alderson, West Virginia. She later wrote an account of her prison experiences in The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (1955).
After serving five years she was released and soon afterwards became national chairman of the Communist Party in 1961. She made several visits to the Soviet Union and died while there in September, 1964. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was given a state funeral in Red Square. In accordance with her wishes, Flynn's remains were flown to the U.S. for burial in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery, near the graves of Eugene Dennis, Bill Haywood and the Haymarket Martyrs.
Memories of the IWW (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5202/rebelgirl.html)
William Z Foster (1881-1961)
The Life of William Z Forster (http://www.wsws.org/history/1996/feb1996/foster.shtml)
Fellow Worker Joel Hagglund / Joe Hill (1879-1915)
I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning -- organize.
Joe Hill personifies the tradition of political song. Born in Sweden, he migrated to the US and in 1910 joined the Industrial Workers of the World - the "Wobblies". Over the next five years he campaigned for many working class causes. He became a popular song-writer with a gift for capturing the meaning of these causes in song. In 1914, during bitter struggles over free speech in Utah, Joe Hill was framed on a murder charge. Despite appeals from President Wilson and the Swedish government, Joe Hill was executed on November 19th 1915. His body was taken to Chicago where over 30,000 people attended his funeral procession and eulogies were read in nine languages.
State of Utah History archive (http://historytogo.utah.gov/joehilliww.html)
PBS Documentery (http://www.pbs.org/joehill/)
Songs and Tributes (http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/hill.html)
Fellow Worker Big Bill Haywood 1869-1928
For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it.
One of the foremost labor radicals of the American West, "Big Bill" Haywood became a leading figure in labor activities across the United States.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1869, Haywood had a difficult life. He was only three years old when his father died, and at age nine he both lost an eye and for the first time worked in a mine. The economic desperation which led him to work as a child prevented him from ever receiving much formal education.
In 1884, Haywood became an underground miner at the Eagle Canyon mine in Nevada. After a brief stint as a cowboy and a failed homesteading effort, he returned to mining in 1896, this time in Silver City, Idaho. Here he began his labor career as a founding member of a local chapter of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), the industry-wide union that had been founded in 1893 in Butte, Montana. Haywood rose quickly in the union ranks, becoming secretary and president of his local, joining the national union's General Executive Board in 1900, and editing the union's magazine and serving as secretary-treasurer in 1901.
Just as Haywood became one of the leaders of Western unions, labor relations in Colorado exploded into violence. Motivated largely by harsh working conditions, similar to the mines of Butte, Montana, the WFM launched a series of mining strikes in Colorado beginning in 1901. The next several years saw near warfare in Colorado's mining fields. The defeat of the strikes led Haywood to stress the need for "one big union" which could bring broader support to individual labor struggles; accordingly, in 1905 he played a key role in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly referred to as "the Wobblies."
The next year Haywood was charged with plotting the murder of a former Idaho governor. The jury acquitted Haywood, but businessmen and fellow labor leaders would continue to fear and even hate Haywood for his alleged endorsement of violence and sabotage. In 1915, he became the formal head of the IWW and helped to direct strikes from New Jersey to Washington State.
From 1905 to 1920, the IWW organized hundreds of thousands of workers in mines, lumberyards, farms and factories; it never had more than about 150,000 members at any one time, but over 3 million people joined at one time or another. The IWW was strongest in the West, where it organized women and men, African-Americans and whites, recent immigrants and native-born Americans into large industry-wide unions. Wobblies were explicit about their eventual goal of toppling capitalism, and many of their leaders, including Haywood, expressed open admiration for the young Soviet Union. Wobblies quickly became a part of the folklore of the West, celebrated for their staunch egalitarianism and no-holds-barred style.
The domestic repression which World War I brought ultimately crushed both Haywood and the IWW. In 1917, the federal government arrested Haywood and one hundred others and charged them with violating espionage and sedition acts for calling strikes during wartime. All were convicted. When the Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in 1921, Haywood jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928.
haywood in Anarchy Archive (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/haywood/)
The Trial of Bill Haywood (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/haywood/haywood.htm)
Fellow Worker Ammon Hennacy 1893-1970
A brief Biography (http://www.catholicworker.com/ah_bio.htm)
Fellow Worker Marry Harris "Mother" Jones 1837? – 1930
I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.
Born Mary Harris in Ireland, raised in Canada, a teacher in Michigan and a dressmaker in Chicago, she married George Jones in 1861 and they had four children. George Jones and all four children died in a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1867. Mary Harris Jones then moved to Chicago, where she became a dressmaker. She lost her home, shop and belongings in the Chicago Fire.
A gradually growing interest in labor union issues and in radical politics led her to become active by her late 50s as Mother Jones, white-haired radical labor organizer.
Her main work was with the United Mine Workers, where, among other activities, she often organized strikers' wives.
In 1903 she led a children's march from Kensington, Pennsylvania, to New York to protest child labor to President Roosevelt.
In the 1920s, she wrote her Autobiography. She became less active as her health failed, and died in 1930, age 83 (she claimed 100).
Autobiography (http://www.eclipse.net/~basket42/mojones.htm)
Fellow Worker Helen Keller 1880-1968
You dear comrade! I have long loved you because you are an apostle of brotherhood and freedom. For years I have thought of you as a dauntless explorer going towards the dawn and, like a humble adventurer, I have followed in the trail of your footsteps. From time to time the greetings that have come back to me from you have made me very happy, and now I reach out my hand and clasp yours through prison bars. With heartfelt greetings, and with a firm faith that the cause for which you are now martyred shall be all the stronger because of your sacrifice and devotion, I am,
Yours for the revolution--may it come swiftly, like a shaft sundering the dark!
====Helen Keller, in a letter she wrote to Eugene V. Debs who was serving time in prison for speaking against the first world war. April 29, 1919
In many ways, the story of Helen Keller's life has been sanitized for public consumption, confined to images of The Miracle Worker and to passages from her early debut in the Ladies Home Journal. Her story is so remarkable because she went on to become a noted speaker and author, despite her loss of both sight and hearing at the age of two. While we all know that Helen Keller went on to become a public figure and advocate for the blind, less remembered is her radical social vision, her opposition to World War I, her support of workers' and women's rights, her outspoken defense of socialism. The fact that Keller could speak and write at all has somewhat overshadowed the subjects of her speeches and writings, which were largely radical and controversial. She had been a member of the Socialist Party, friend and supporter of Eugene V. Debs, and wrote to him while in prision. She was also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and supported Lenin and the Soviet Union from the moment she heard of them gaining control in Russia, and she worked to get the U.S. to lift an embargo on the Soviet Union.
Helen Keller's life has often been the subject of politically conservative myth-making, an object lesson for overcoming the odds of disability and disadvantage to attain success: the ultimate American dream. In reality, Keller was deeply opposed to the idea that equality could realistically exist in a capitalist society, believing "that the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone", that social inequality, war, and exploitation of human life were all symptomatic of a fundamentally corrupt economic system based on greed and the relentless pursuit of profit. Miss Keller was, quite simply, a red: first in public, later mostly in private, always adamant. In a statement reminiscent of Orwell's socialist hero Gordon Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra Flying), Keller's quote on the back cover defines her vision: "I have entered the fight against the economic system in which we live. It is to be a fight to the finish and I ask no quarter".
Funny, then, that Alabama should have chosen Helen Keller to grace its quarter dollar coin.
American Foundation for the Blind (http://www.afb.org/section.asp?sectionid=1)
Helen Keller Marxist Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/keller-helen/index.htm)
The Story of My Life (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html)
The truth about Helen Keller, (What the Capitalists don’t want you to know! (http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/17_01/Kell171.shtml)
Lorenzo Komboa Ervin
Anarchism and the Black Revolution (http://www.circlealpha.com/library/black_revolution/)
If there is a figure known by you that was a member (or is) of the Industrial Workers of the World, was (or is) prominent and influential in history but not mentioned here please send me a PM.
Fellow Worker Tom Barker (1887 - 1970)
Tom Barker became the editor of the Australian IWW's Direct Action in 1915 after Tom Glynn was arrested in 1915. He supported industrial unionism because of the failure of Laborism. "I was absolutely convinced after seeing politicians in both New Zealand and Australia that a strong and even ruthless working-class body was necessary to see that people were properly protected and paid." Tom Glynn and Tom Barker brought an infusion of Marxist perspective to the Australian Socialist Party and the IWW Clubs when they joined in 1913.
All governments in modern society, Barker argued, existed for the purpose of protecting private property and the interests of the propertied class; whether the politicians were socialists or conservatives, they could only safegaurd and perpetuate the system of opression. Barker attacked the Second International for being spineless. "Let us get to work, we of the Industrial Workers of the World, we, the countryless, the pariahs, the hobos, the migratory workers. Let us throw off the pusillanimty of political sentimentalists. Economic conditions are bringing us together in spite of ourselves and we, the workers of the world, are dependent upon one another.
Tom Barker Biography (http://http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/TomBarker1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Eugene V Debs (1855-1926)
While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison I am not free!
Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. He became a prominent American labor leader, beginning with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1875. In 1893 he organized the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union (ARU). The Union successfully struck the Great Northern Railway in April 1894.
He was jailed during the conterverial Pullman Strike after sucsessfully pulling off a General Strike of Railroad workers. While in prison he read Das Kapital by Karl Marx and converted to socialism. When he got out of Prison he started the Social Democratic Party, Later renamed the Socialist Party of America (now known as the Socialist Party USA). He was their candidate for president in 1900 1904, 1908, 1912, and (from prison)1920
He had been the president of the Indistrual Workers of the World at it’s founding in 1905, and remained active throughout it’s early years.
He had been imprisoned in 1918 for violation of the Espianoge act issued by President Willson which made speaches against the first world war illegal. Eugene V. Debs had been against the European war from the beginning, considering it an imperialist war fought between capitalist nations over collonies for imperialist gains.
He had been sentenced to 10 years in prison yet was pardoned shortly before his death in 1926.
More on Eugene V. Debs (http://http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/EugeneDebs1.shtml)
Debs Foundation (http://http://www.eugenevdebs.com/)
Debs internet archive (http://http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/)
Socialist Party USA (http://www.sp-usa.org)
Fellow Worker Ben Fletcher - A Legacy of Solidarity
At a time when Black Americans were under attack from Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, boss racism, exclusion from the American Federation of Labor, and other forms of institutionalized racism, the "Industrial Workers of the World" welcomed all working people into the union as equals. Incidentally laborers such as Ben Fletcher, that fell outside of the AFL's preference for skilled white anglo saxon males, were able to join forces in the "One Big Union".
Through the recognition of the bosses dependence on workers for profits, and the IWW's willingness to withdraw their labor and efficiency in political battle, the "Wobblies" demanded and won a better standard of living, and respect in the democratic spaces they created on the job.
Fletcher organized the Philadelphia dockworkers' strike in 1913 and was a very accomplished and important IWW leader Fletcher was successful in getting ethnic groups to work together.
The dockworkers' strike was only one example of the labor strife that permeated American society at the beginning of the 20th century. There was widespread unrest between both American-born and immigrant workers and their often abusive employers.
More on Ben Fletcher (http://http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/BenFletcher1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Hubert Harrison 1883 – 1927
The essence of the present situation lies in the fact that the people whom our white masters have "recognized" as our leaders (without taking the trouble to consult us) and those who, by our own selection, has actually attained to leadership among us are being revaluated and, in most cases, rejected. The most striking instance from the latter class is Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of the Crisis. Du Bois's case is the more significant because his former services to his race have been undoubtedly of a high and courageous sort.
Hubert Harrison was born in St. Croix of the Virgin Islands in 1883. At the age of seventeen he travelled to New York where he worked as a bellhop and an elevator operator. He also attended night school and studied sociology, science, psychology, literature, and drama.
Harrison's studies radicalized him and he became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. He later joined the Socialist Party where he met other African American radicals such as Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and Claude McKay. He impressed them with his intellect and was given the nickname, the 'Black Socrates'.
Max Eastman, editor of the The Masses, employed him on his journal. Harrison also edited The Voice and contributed to the The Messenger, The Call, The New Republic, the New York Times and the New York World. He also published two important books, The Negro and the Nation (1917) and When Africa Awakes (1920).
Harrison was a strong opponent of United States involvement in the First World War. This caused him to break with William Du Bois who had argued in The Crisis that: "Let, us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks."
Harrison also lectured on socialism and African American civil rights from street corners and in September, 1922, the New York Times reported that he was drawing crowds of over 10,000 people and the New York police had to stop the traffic.
It is claimed that Harrison had a great influence on Marcus Garvey. Harrison, who was now claiming that race was more important than class and after leaving the Socialist Party joined Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Harrison also edited the organizations journal, The Negro World, for four years. He also worked as a staff lecturer for the New York City Board of Education. Hubert Harrison died in 1927.
Fellow Worker Frank Little (A True American Hero) 1880 – 1917
>>>To Frank Little>>> Traitor and demagogue,
Wanton breeder of discontent -
That is what they call you -
Those cowards, who condemn sabotage
But hide themselves
Not only behind masks and cloaks
But behind all the armoured positions
Of property and prejudice and the law.
Staunch friend and comrade,
Soldier of solidarity -
Like some bitter magic
The tale of your tragic death
Has spread throughout the land,
And from a thousand minds
Has torn the last shreds of doubt
Concerning Might and Right.
Young and virile and strong -
Like grim sentinels they stand
Awaiting each opportunity
To break another
Of slavery's chains.
For whatever stroke is needed.
They are preparing.
So shall you be avenged.
Frank Little was born in 1880. Little is known about his family background but he told friends that he had "Indian blood". He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1906 and took part in the free speech campaigns in Missoula, Fresno and Spokane and was involved in organizing lumberjacks, metal miners and oil field workers into trade unions. On one occasion he was sentenced to 30 days imprisonment for reading the Declaration of Independence on a street corner.
In 1910 Little successfully organize unskilled fruit workers in the San Joaquin Valley. This brought him to the attention of the national leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World and by 1916 was a member of the party's General Executive Board.
Little was a strong opponent of the USA becoming involved in the First World War. The leader of the party, William Haywood shared Little's opinions, but this was a minority view in the party. When the USA joined the war in April, 1917, Ralph Chaplin, the editor of the trade union journal, Solidarity, claimed that opposing the draft would destroy the IWW. Little refused to back down on this issue and argued that: "the IWW is opposed to all wars, and we must use all our power to prevent the workers from joining the army."
In the summer of 1917, Little was helping organize workers in the metal mines of Montana. This included leading a strike of miners working for the Anaconda Company. In the early hours of 1st August, 1917, six masked men broke into Little's hotel room. He was beaten up, tied by the rope to a car, and dragged out of town, where he was lynched. A note: "First and last warning" was pinned to his chest. No serious attempt was made by the police to catch Little's murderers. It is not known if he was killed for his anti-war views or his trade union activities.
http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/FrankLittle1.shtml ( More on Frank Little
Fellow Worker Lucy Parsons (1853-1942)
”More Dangerous than a thousand rioters”—Chicago Police Department
"Anarchism has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, 'Freedom.' Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully." -Lucy Parsons
By the Women's History Information Project For almost 70 years, Lucy Parsons fought for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised in the face of an increasingly oppressive industrial economic system. Lucy's radical activism challenged the racist and sexist sentiment in a time when even radical Americans believed that a woman's place was in the home.
Her date and place of birth are uncertain and obscured by herself, Lucy Parsons was probably of mixed racial origin with possibly African, which she always denied, Mexican and Indian roots. She was the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket martyrs, and as such first came into prominence. Apart from vindicating his memory by publishing his writings and biography, she published books, pamphlets and newspapers (Freedom 1890-92, The Liberator 1905-06, The Alarm 1915-16) and remained all her life a steadfast rebel.
Was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
[url=http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/LucyParsons1.shtml]More on Lucy Parsons (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/LucyParsons1.shtml)
Lucy Parsons Project (http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/)
Chicago Revolutionary (http://members.tripod.com/~RedRobin2/index-43.html)
Fellow Worker T-Bone Slim
Valentine Huhta, better known as T-Bone Slim, is, with the exception of Joe Hill and possibly Ralph Chaplin, the IWW's best-known song-writer and poet laureate . . . a fixture in the union and its publications for over 20 years. His impact on the culture of the IWW and in the intellectual life of that union's rank and file was as significant as virtually any Fellow Worker in the 98 year history of the OBU.
Yet should you attempt to find information on Huhta, you will be sadly disappointed . . . A search for prominent Wobs on the internet will provide you with pages dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill, Bill Haywood, Gene Debs, Helen Keller, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons . . . the list is huge. But aside from a couple of postings of the lyrics of a few of Huhta's most popular songs, you will find nary a mention of the "Popular Wobbly".
More on T-Bone Slim (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/TBoneSlim1.shtml)
The Lumberjack Prayer (http://www.bloomington.in.us/~mitch/iww/lumber.html)
The Popular Wobbly (http://www.bloomington.in.us/~mitch/iww/wild.html)
I’m too old to be a Scab (http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/tooold.html)
Fellow Worker Judi Bari 1949 – 1997
Judi Bari was a fighter and organizer for many labor, social, and environmental justice causes.
The common denominator was her indignation over injustice, whether in the form of war, racism, sexism, political repression, economic exploitation, or the unnecessary destruction of ecosystems.
Bari was a gifted and inspiring speaker who was widely regarded as the principal leader of the Earth First! movement in Northern California. She led Earth First! in her region to embrace the use of nonviolent direct action and to renounce the use of tree-spiking, or any other tactic that could lead to injuries to timber and mill workers. Coming from a labor organizing background, she was quick to point out that it was not the workers but the giant corporations who should be the target of environmental reformers.
More on Judi Bari (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/BariObit1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Sam Dolgoff 1902 – 1990
spoke from sidewalk soapboxes and in union meeting halls for more than 60 years, and during all that time, what caught everyone's attention was his tough cocky style, half New York, half Joe Hill. Flames of mockery and indignation danced above his head. The man identified with the downtrodden workers, and he shouted "It's a cryin' shame!" And the way those words bellowed from his mouth, the gruff rumble of his laughter, the thrust of his bulldog face and his workman's hands spread in a gesture of sweet reason--every single trait said, in effect: Sam Dolgoff is [not] for the working class. He is the working class. And the rest of you goddamned bastards can say anything you please, but your opinion will not sway him one solitary inch.
More on Sam Dolgoff (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/Dolgoff1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Al Grierson 1948 – 2000
A Poet from Texas who died when he was swept away in a flash flood after his pickup truck stalled in high water a couple miles from home in the rolling, dusty Hill Country.
Around central Texas, Al Grierson, 52, was known as the "Poet Laureate of Luckenbach," a reference to that afterthought of a hamlet made famous by singer-songwriter Waylon Jennings.
But the Canadian-born Grierson's reputation loomed much larger than a fanciful title in a town of 25. He was internationally lauded among folk singers and songwriters, and he was a regular at the world-renowned Kerrville Folk Festival in nearby Kerrville, Texas.
More on Al Grierson (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/AlGrierson1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Gilbert Mers 1908 – 1998
Gilbert Mers was the closest thing to a Texas labor legend since the days of Martin Irons and the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, yet he would be the first to deny this. Born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1908, Gilbert and his family had moved to Bisbee, Arizona by 1918. Maybe something happened to Gilbert in Bisbee. Maybe it was the water. One may recall that in 1917 Bisbee was the site of a mass deportation of 1200 Industrial Workers of the World copper miners from the Phelps-Dodge copper mines. By 1929 Gilbert and his family had moved to Texas where Gilbert worked the docks as a longshoreman. Though his trade was that of a longshoreman, militant unionism was his career.
More on Gilbert Mers (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/GilbertMers1.shtml)
Fellow Worker Queen Silver
To the legendary film producer Cecil B. DeMille, she was "the Godless Girl" in a Hollywood movie (1929) of that title which was modeled on her young life. For a teenager with the unlikely name of Queen Silver, the film was just one more in a continuing series of adventures. Queen had been born at the cusp of a social revolution that ushered in women's equality, world wars, the labor movement, and increased governmental repression of dissent.
Queen was born into radicalism. She attended her first political rally at six days of age. There, her mother, Grace Verne Silver, stood at the podium to denounce the laws and mores that restricted labor -- in particular, the labor of women. Indeed, the fiery Grace had halted an intensive lecture tour only long enough to give birth. Political agitation was a tradition for the Silver women. Grace's mother, Azuba, had lost her health -- and eventually her life -- from working sixteen to eighteen hours a day in cotton mills from the age of eight. Azuba became a vocal opponent of child labor. Queen delighted in introducing herself as "a second generation freethinker [atheist], a third generation feminist, and directly descended from framers of the Constitution."
More on Queen Silver (http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/QueenSilver.shtml)
Fellow Worker Harry Bridges (1901-1990)
born July 28, 1901, Kensington, near Melbourne, Vic., Australia
died March 30, 1990, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.
original name Alfred Bryant Renton Bridges Australian-born American labor leader, president of the San Francisco-based International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) from 1937 to 1977.
Bridges left home to become a maritime seaman at the age of 16 and in 1920 legally entered the United States, where he worked as a seaman and dockworker. Was briefly a member of the IWW.
More on Harry Bridges (http://www.ilwu19.com/history/bridges_vs_beck.htm)
Harry Bridges Institute (http://www.harrybridges.com/)
Harry Bridges Project (http://www.theharrybridgesproject.org/)
A Biography (http://www.ilwu19.com/history/biography.htm)
Harry Bridges center for labor studies (http://depts.washington.edu/pcls/)
Fellow Worker James P. Cannon 1890 - 1974
James Patrick Cannon (1890-1974) was an American Communist and then Trotskyist leader. Born in Rosedale, Kansas, he was first a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and then of the Socialist Party of the USA.
He opposed World War I from an internationalist position and rallied to the Russian Revolution in 1917. In 1919, he became a founding member of the Workers (Communist) Party (now known as Communist Party USA) and was part of its leadership from its earliest days serving as Party Chairman from 1919 to 1928 (the position was actually secondary to that of general secretary.
In the factionalised CPUSA in the 1920s Cannon was responsible for the International Labor Defense organisation from which he built a power base. His followers were loosely organised in the so-called Foster-Cannon faction which looked to "native" American workers in the unions.
In 1928, Cannon read a critique of the direction of the Communist International written by Trotsky which the Comintern had mistakenly circulated. He was convinced of the arguments, and attempted to form a Left Opposition within the W©P. This resulted in his expulsion. He then founded the Communist League of America with Max Shachtman and Martin Abern, and started publishing The Militant. It declared itself to be an external faction of the W©P.
Following the collapse of the Comintern in the face of Nazism in Germany they concluded with Trotsky that the Comintern could not be reformed and embarked on a struggle to build a new International and new parties.
This led Cannon and the CL to fuse with AJ Muste's American Workers Party and later, with their augmented forces, to join the Socialist Party of America as a faction. This led to an internal struggle with a faction which opposed fusing with the Socialist Party and which went on to form the Revolutionary Workers League, led by Hugo Oehler. In 1937 having recruited large numbers of people from the SPUSA's youth group, the Young People's Socialist League, they left the SPUSA and formed the Socialist Workers Party. Cannon became its first secretary.
Cannon was also a leading figure in the internatinal Trotskyist movement and visited Britain in 1938 with the intention of aiding the unfication of the competing British groups. The result was a patched together unification, the Revolutionary Socialist League, which rapidly disintegrated.
In 1940 Cannon's co-leader of the SWP, Max Shachtman, left with a large part of the membership to form the Workers Party. One of the key questions in this controversy was the political attitude to be adopted with reference to Russia. Contrary to popular legend, however, this was not the question that directly led to the split. Another blow was suffered during World War Two when Cannon was jailed under the Smith Act along with other SWPers. Even in jail however his influence on the SWP was strong and he wrote to change the party line on the Warsaw Rising.
Following the war Cannon resumed leadership of the SWP, but this role declined as he left the post of national secretary in 1953, and retired to California in the mid-1950s. However he was very much involved in the splits which developed in both the SWP and the Fourth International in 1952. He took no part in the various factional disputes that developed between 1963 and 1965, except to decry certain factionalism among his erstwhile supporters in a document entitled Do Not Strangle The Party. He died in 1975 in retirement.
A profuse revolutionary journalist, many of his articles have been collected in a series of books, the best known of which are Notebook of an Agitator and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.
James P. Cannon Archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/)
Fellow Worker Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His undergraduate and graduate years were spent at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, "Transformational Analysis." The major theoretical viewpoints of the dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, which was published in 1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published in 1975.
Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.) From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor.
During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others.
Professor Chomsky has received honorary degrees from University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Harvard University, University of Calcutta, and Universidad Nacional De Colombia. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others.
Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. His works include: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Cartesian Linguistics; Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle); Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; At War with Asia; For Reasons of State; Peace in the Middle East?; Reflections on Language; The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. I and II (with E.S. Herman); Rules and Representations; Lectures on Government and Binding; Towards a New Cold War; Radical Priorities; Fateful Triangle; Knowledge of Language; Turning the Tide; Pirates and Emperors; On Power and Ideology; Language and Problems of Knowledge; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Necessary Illusions; Deterring Democracy; Year 501; Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture; Letters from Lexington; World Orders, Old and New; The Minimalist Program; Powers and Prospects; The Common Good; Profit Over People; The New Military Humanism; New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; Rogue States; A New Generation Draws the Line; 9-11; and Understanding Power.
He is currently a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Noam Chomsky archive (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/)
Fellow worker James Connolly 1868–1916
was one of the greatest political thinkers to emerge in the early twentieth century. He was a soldier, labourer, cobbler, journalist, trade union leader and organiser, committed socialist and patriot, intellectual, historian, and military tactician. He was a devoted husband and father to his wife and their six children. With the support of his wife he worked unceasingly in the struggle for national freedom, socialism, and international working-class solidarity, despite the poor circumstances in which he and his family lived in the typical working-class conditions of that time.
Connolly was a man who lived his life according to the dictum of Karl Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” He set about trying to change the world for the betterment of the working class and the peoples enslaved by imperialist power.
Connolly wrote pamphlets, articles, plays, poems, and songs. He was an accomplished public speaker and went on lecture tours in Scotland, England, and the United States, (where he was a member of the IWW) a reflection of the esteem in which he was held in the international labor movement.
He commanded the revolutionary forces in Dublin during the 1916 Rising and was shot by firing squad on 12 May, tied to a chair. This man who played a significant role in changing the course of Irish history in the twentieth century wrote one month before his execution: “The cause of Labor is the cause of Ireland; the cause of Ireland is the cause of Labor. They cannot be dissevered.”
Communist Party of Ireland’s biography on James Connolly (http://www.communistpartyofireland.ie/connolly.html)
Ireland’s Own (http://www.irelandsown.net/jamesconnolly.htm)
James Connolly Society (http://www.wageslave.org/)
James Connolly internet archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/)
Fellow Worker Dorothy Day 1897-1980
"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"
Dorothy Day was born in New York, New York, on November 8, 1897. She studied at the University of Illinois on a scholarship (1914-16). While a student she read widely among socialist authors and soon joined the Socialist Party. In 1916 she returned to New York City and joined the staff of the Call, a socialist newspaper; she also became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1917 she moved to the staff of the Masses, where she remained until the magazine was suppressed by the government a few months later. After a brief period on the successor journal, the Liberator, Day worked as a nurse in Brooklyn (1918-19). For several years thereafter she continued in journalism in Chicago and in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1927, following years of doubt and indecision, she joined the Roman Catholic church, an act that for some time estranged her from her earlier radical associates.
In 1932 Day met Peter Maurin, a French-born Catholic who had developed a program of social reconstruction, which he called "the green revolution," based on communal farming and the establishment of houses of hospitality for the urban poor. The program aimed to unite workers and intellectuals in joint activities ranging from farming to educational discussions. In 1933 Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, a monthly newspaper, to carry the idea to a wider audience. Within three years the paper's circulation had grown to 150,000, and the original St. Joseph's House of Hospitality in New York City had served as the pattern for similar houses in a number of other cities. The Catholic Worker took boldly radical positions on many issues and during World War II was an organ for pacifism and for the support of Catholic conscientious objectors.
A professed anarchist, Day was widely considered in later years one of the great Catholic lay leaders of the time. She protested the Vietnam War and was arrested in 1973 while demonstrating in California in support of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Day died at the House of Hospitality on the Lower East Side of New York City on November 29, 1980. Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, was published in 1952.
Catholic Worker Movement (http://www.catholicworker.org/)
Fellow Worker Daniel De Leon
"Industrial Unionism is the socialist republic in the making; and, the goal once reached, the Industrial Union is the socialist republic in operation. Accordingly, the Industrial Union is at once the battering ram with which to pound down the fortress of capitalism, and the successor of the capitalist social structure itself."
Lenin had called Deleon the only American Marxist thinker to have developed his on Marxist Theory. Daniel Deleon was born on an island in the caribean, went to school in Germany and the Netherlands. He settled in New York and studied at Columbia University. In 1890 he joined the Socialist Labor Party and became the editor of it’s newspaper “The People”. He quickly grew in popularity and received 13,000 votes when he ran for New York State Govorner in 1891. He was a Marxist and dedicated to a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. He was highly critical of trade unionism in America of the AFL which he called “seperation of labor.” In the early part of the 20th centery, the SLP was declining in influence with the forming of Eugene V. Debs’ Socialist Party of America. In 1905 Deleon helped found the Industrial Workers of the World, yet left after being disgusted with anarchist influences.
Daniel Deleon is the founder of the only origonal version of Marxism to come out of the United States, called “Marxist-Deleonism” sometimes “Socialist Industrial Unionism” or Socialist Syndicalism”.
Socialist Labor Party (http://www.slp.org/)
Daniel Deleon archive (http://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/)
Fellow Worker Dr.Marie Equi 1872-1952
Dr. Equi was a physician and militant supporter of the IWW in the teens and 1920s in Portland Oregon, and perhaps the most openly queer Amerikan radical of her age. A nice essay on her life, with pictures, is available here, from the Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest website (http://home.teleport.com/~glapn/)
More on Dr. Equi (http://home.teleport.com/~glapn/ar04007.html)
Fellow Worker Elizabeth Gurley Flynn “Rebel Girl”
We believe that the class struggle existing in society is expressed in the economic power of the master on the one side and the growing economic power of the workers on the other side meeting in open battle now and again, but meeting in continual daily conflict over which shall have the larger share of labor's product and the ultimate ownership of the means of life.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was born in Concord, New Hampshire on 7th August, 1890. The family moved to New York in 1900 and Flynn was educated at the local public school. Converted by her parents to socialism, she was only 16 when she gave her first speech, What Socialism Will Do for Women, at the Harlem Socialist Club. As a result of her political activities, Flynn was expelled from high school.
In 1907 Flynn became a full-time organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Over the next few years she organised campaigns among garment workers in Pennsylvania, silk weavers in New Jersey, restaurant workers in New York, miners in Minnesota and textile workers in Massachusetts. During this period the writer, Theodore Dreiser, described her as "an East Side Joan of Arc.". Flynn was arrested ten times during this period but was never convicted of any criminal activity.
A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Flynn was active in the campaign against the conviction of Sacco-Vanzetti. Flynn was particularly concerned with women's rights. She supported birth control and women's suffrage. Flynn also criticised the leadership of trade unions for being male dominated and not reflecting the needs of women.
In 1936 Flynn joined the Communist Party and wrote a feminist column for his journal, the Daily Worker. Two years later she was elected to the national committee.
During the Second World War she played an important role in the campaign for equal economic opportunity and pay for women and the establishment of day care centres for mothers working in industry. In 1942 Flynn ran for Congress at large in New York and received 50,000 votes.
In July 1948 12 leaders of the Communist Party were arrested and accused of advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence. Flynn launched a campaign for their release, but in June 1951 was arrested in the second wave of arrests and charged with violating the Alien Registration Act.
After a nine-month trial she was found guilty and served two years in the women's penitentiary at Alderson, West Virginia. She later wrote an account of her prison experiences in The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (1955).
After serving five years she was released and soon afterwards became national chairman of the Communist Party in 1961. She made several visits to the Soviet Union and died while there in September, 1964. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was given a state funeral in Red Square. In accordance with her wishes, Flynn's remains were flown to the U.S. for burial in Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery, near the graves of Eugene Dennis, Bill Haywood and the Haymarket Martyrs.
Memories of the IWW (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5202/rebelgirl.html)
William Z Foster (1881-1961)
The Life of William Z Forster (http://www.wsws.org/history/1996/feb1996/foster.shtml)
Fellow Worker Joel Hagglund / Joe Hill (1879-1915)
I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning -- organize.
Joe Hill personifies the tradition of political song. Born in Sweden, he migrated to the US and in 1910 joined the Industrial Workers of the World - the "Wobblies". Over the next five years he campaigned for many working class causes. He became a popular song-writer with a gift for capturing the meaning of these causes in song. In 1914, during bitter struggles over free speech in Utah, Joe Hill was framed on a murder charge. Despite appeals from President Wilson and the Swedish government, Joe Hill was executed on November 19th 1915. His body was taken to Chicago where over 30,000 people attended his funeral procession and eulogies were read in nine languages.
State of Utah History archive (http://historytogo.utah.gov/joehilliww.html)
PBS Documentery (http://www.pbs.org/joehill/)
Songs and Tributes (http://www.fortunecity.com/tinpan/parton/2/hill.html)
Fellow Worker Big Bill Haywood 1869-1928
For every dollar the boss has and didn't work for, one of us worked for a dollar and didn't get it.
One of the foremost labor radicals of the American West, "Big Bill" Haywood became a leading figure in labor activities across the United States.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1869, Haywood had a difficult life. He was only three years old when his father died, and at age nine he both lost an eye and for the first time worked in a mine. The economic desperation which led him to work as a child prevented him from ever receiving much formal education.
In 1884, Haywood became an underground miner at the Eagle Canyon mine in Nevada. After a brief stint as a cowboy and a failed homesteading effort, he returned to mining in 1896, this time in Silver City, Idaho. Here he began his labor career as a founding member of a local chapter of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), the industry-wide union that had been founded in 1893 in Butte, Montana. Haywood rose quickly in the union ranks, becoming secretary and president of his local, joining the national union's General Executive Board in 1900, and editing the union's magazine and serving as secretary-treasurer in 1901.
Just as Haywood became one of the leaders of Western unions, labor relations in Colorado exploded into violence. Motivated largely by harsh working conditions, similar to the mines of Butte, Montana, the WFM launched a series of mining strikes in Colorado beginning in 1901. The next several years saw near warfare in Colorado's mining fields. The defeat of the strikes led Haywood to stress the need for "one big union" which could bring broader support to individual labor struggles; accordingly, in 1905 he played a key role in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly referred to as "the Wobblies."
The next year Haywood was charged with plotting the murder of a former Idaho governor. The jury acquitted Haywood, but businessmen and fellow labor leaders would continue to fear and even hate Haywood for his alleged endorsement of violence and sabotage. In 1915, he became the formal head of the IWW and helped to direct strikes from New Jersey to Washington State.
From 1905 to 1920, the IWW organized hundreds of thousands of workers in mines, lumberyards, farms and factories; it never had more than about 150,000 members at any one time, but over 3 million people joined at one time or another. The IWW was strongest in the West, where it organized women and men, African-Americans and whites, recent immigrants and native-born Americans into large industry-wide unions. Wobblies were explicit about their eventual goal of toppling capitalism, and many of their leaders, including Haywood, expressed open admiration for the young Soviet Union. Wobblies quickly became a part of the folklore of the West, celebrated for their staunch egalitarianism and no-holds-barred style.
The domestic repression which World War I brought ultimately crushed both Haywood and the IWW. In 1917, the federal government arrested Haywood and one hundred others and charged them with violating espionage and sedition acts for calling strikes during wartime. All were convicted. When the Supreme Court rejected his final appeal in 1921, Haywood jumped bail and fled to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928.
haywood in Anarchy Archive (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/haywood/)
The Trial of Bill Haywood (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/haywood/haywood.htm)
Fellow Worker Ammon Hennacy 1893-1970
A brief Biography (http://www.catholicworker.com/ah_bio.htm)
Fellow Worker Marry Harris "Mother" Jones 1837? – 1930
I am not afraid of the pen, or the scaffold, or the sword. I will tell the truth wherever I please.
Born Mary Harris in Ireland, raised in Canada, a teacher in Michigan and a dressmaker in Chicago, she married George Jones in 1861 and they had four children. George Jones and all four children died in a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1867. Mary Harris Jones then moved to Chicago, where she became a dressmaker. She lost her home, shop and belongings in the Chicago Fire.
A gradually growing interest in labor union issues and in radical politics led her to become active by her late 50s as Mother Jones, white-haired radical labor organizer.
Her main work was with the United Mine Workers, where, among other activities, she often organized strikers' wives.
In 1903 she led a children's march from Kensington, Pennsylvania, to New York to protest child labor to President Roosevelt.
In the 1920s, she wrote her Autobiography. She became less active as her health failed, and died in 1930, age 83 (she claimed 100).
Autobiography (http://www.eclipse.net/~basket42/mojones.htm)
Fellow Worker Helen Keller 1880-1968
You dear comrade! I have long loved you because you are an apostle of brotherhood and freedom. For years I have thought of you as a dauntless explorer going towards the dawn and, like a humble adventurer, I have followed in the trail of your footsteps. From time to time the greetings that have come back to me from you have made me very happy, and now I reach out my hand and clasp yours through prison bars. With heartfelt greetings, and with a firm faith that the cause for which you are now martyred shall be all the stronger because of your sacrifice and devotion, I am,
Yours for the revolution--may it come swiftly, like a shaft sundering the dark!
====Helen Keller, in a letter she wrote to Eugene V. Debs who was serving time in prison for speaking against the first world war. April 29, 1919
In many ways, the story of Helen Keller's life has been sanitized for public consumption, confined to images of The Miracle Worker and to passages from her early debut in the Ladies Home Journal. Her story is so remarkable because she went on to become a noted speaker and author, despite her loss of both sight and hearing at the age of two. While we all know that Helen Keller went on to become a public figure and advocate for the blind, less remembered is her radical social vision, her opposition to World War I, her support of workers' and women's rights, her outspoken defense of socialism. The fact that Keller could speak and write at all has somewhat overshadowed the subjects of her speeches and writings, which were largely radical and controversial. She had been a member of the Socialist Party, friend and supporter of Eugene V. Debs, and wrote to him while in prision. She was also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and supported Lenin and the Soviet Union from the moment she heard of them gaining control in Russia, and she worked to get the U.S. to lift an embargo on the Soviet Union.
Helen Keller's life has often been the subject of politically conservative myth-making, an object lesson for overcoming the odds of disability and disadvantage to attain success: the ultimate American dream. In reality, Keller was deeply opposed to the idea that equality could realistically exist in a capitalist society, believing "that the power to rise is not within the reach of everyone", that social inequality, war, and exploitation of human life were all symptomatic of a fundamentally corrupt economic system based on greed and the relentless pursuit of profit. Miss Keller was, quite simply, a red: first in public, later mostly in private, always adamant. In a statement reminiscent of Orwell's socialist hero Gordon Comstock (Keep the Aspidistra Flying), Keller's quote on the back cover defines her vision: "I have entered the fight against the economic system in which we live. It is to be a fight to the finish and I ask no quarter".
Funny, then, that Alabama should have chosen Helen Keller to grace its quarter dollar coin.
American Foundation for the Blind (http://www.afb.org/section.asp?sectionid=1)
Helen Keller Marxist Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/keller-helen/index.htm)
The Story of My Life (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/keller/life/life.html)
The truth about Helen Keller, (What the Capitalists don’t want you to know! (http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/17_01/Kell171.shtml)
Lorenzo Komboa Ervin
Anarchism and the Black Revolution (http://www.circlealpha.com/library/black_revolution/)