A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice

by Nicolas Lampert

  13. Lampert, “Public Memories of Haymarket in Chicago,” 7.

  14. Stephen Kinzer, “In Chicago, a Deliberately Ambiguous Memorial to an Attack’s Complex Legacy,” New York Times, September 15, 2004, A14.

  15. The ILHS control of the martyrs’ monument was contentious for a number of reasons. To many anarchists, the monument at Waldheim was embraced because it was initiated by anarchists—the martyrs’ families, including Lucy Parsons (widow of the slain Albert Parsons), under the direction of the Pioneer Aid and Support Association. In this regard, the monument was disconnected from direct government funding and control. After the ILHS took over its deed, they decided in 1997 to register the monument under as a National Historic Landmark. Connecting the martyrs’ monument to the federal government was the last straw for many anarchists, and the National Historic Landmark plaque has been routinely vandalized with anarchist symbols and the commemorative events have been picketed.

  16. Lara Kelland, “Putting Haymarket to Rest?,” Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2, no. 2 (2005): 35.

  17. In 1986, Mayor Harold Washington, the first African American mayor in Chicago’s history, declared the month of May as “Labor History Month in Chicago” to commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of the Haymarket Tragedy. Within his proclamation, Washington stated, “On this day we commemorate the movement towards the eight-hour day, union rights, civil rights, human rights, and by remembering the tragic miscarriage of justice which claimed the lives of four labor activists.” Washington in his speech also highlighted the program organized by the ILHS, the Chicago Federation of Labor and the Haymarket Centennial Committee and urged “all citizens to be cognizant of the events planned during this month and of the historical significance of the Haymarket Centennial.” For a reprint of this statement, see http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas.

  18. Jeff Huebner, “A Monumental Effort Pays Off: After Years of Struggle and Disagreement, a Sculptural Tribute to Haymarket Is Finally in the Works—With Almost Everybody on Board,” Chicago Reader, January 16, 2004.

  19. Tom McNamee, “After 138 Years, Haymarket Memorial to Be Unveiled May Day, At Last, for a Cause,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 7, 2004.

  20. Huebner, “A Monumental Effort.”

  21. Kinzer, “In Chicago, a Deliberately Ambiguous Memorial.”

  22. McNamee, “After 138 years.”

  23. Michael Piazza interviewed by the author, in person, December 9, 2005.

  24. Huebner, “A Monumental Effort.”

  25. To the new monument’s credit, an element of participation, if extremely limited, was built in. The pedestal of the monument has room for additional plaques to be installed connecting recent labor struggles to Haymarket. During the May Day 2005 ceremony at the monument, a delegation of union trade leaders from Colombia presented the first plaque to be added to the pedestal, honoring the 1,300 trade unionists murdered in Colombia between 1991 and 2001. Johnny Meneses, a union activist from Colombia, told the crowd, “You have one monument. But in Colombia, we would need many more than that.” In this case, the new monument served as an important location for solidarity campaigns, helping inform viewers of the troubling situation in Colombia, and making an otherwise static monument more flexible. However, one should note that the pedestal is relatively small, and only a small number of plaques will be able to be installed. Who will select the plaques and which struggles will be deemed important and which ones will be deemed unimportant? See James Green, “The Globalization of a Memory: The Enduring Remembrance of the Haymarket Martyrs around the World,” Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2, no. 4 (2005): 22, 23.

  26. McNamee, “After 138 Years.”

  27. Kinzer, “In Chicago, a Deliberately Ambiguous Memorial.”

  28. Huebner, “A Monumental Effort.”

  29. Donahue has voiced resistance to the proposed renaming of a city park to Lucy Parsons, wife of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons. He also voiced objection to a street in Chicago being renamed after the late Fred Hampton, a Black Panther Party leader who was murdered in 1969 by the police during a raid. Donahue said, “It’s a ‘dark day’ when city officials honor a man who called for harming police officers.” See “Union head blasts plan to name street after Black Panther,” The Associated Press, February 28, 2006.

  30. Diana Berek, interviewed by the author, by e-mail, February 20, 2006.

  31. Ibid.

  Chapter 9: Blurring the Boundaries Between Art and Life

  1. Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology: New and Expanded Edition (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1998), 201.

  2. Ibid., 197.

  3. Irving Abrams, transcript of interview by Frank Ninkovich, 1970, Labor Oral History Project, Roosevelt University, Chicago; Book 17, p. 14. Quoted in Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (Albany: State University of the New York Press, 1989), 26.

  4. “Revolution,” Industrial Worker, June 26, 1913 quoted in Salerno, Red November, Black November 41–42.

  5. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn stressed this point in a speech to the workers where she stated, “I have nothing to lose so I can say whatever I please about the manufacturers as long as I express your sentiments.” See Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 56.

  6. Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 41.

  7. Carlo Tresca, Patrick Quinlan, and Adolf Lessig (a Paterson IWW silk worker) were also key organizers during the strike.

  8. Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 71.

  9. Ibid., 136.

  10. Ibid., 162.

  11. Ibid.

  12. New York Call, May 21, 1913, page 2, quoted in Golin The Fragile Bridge, 163.

  13. Anne Huber Tripp, The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 142.

  14. Ibid., 145.

  15. New York Times, quoted in Current Opinion 55 (July 1913): 32 and Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 168.

  16. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 212.

  17. Ibid., 213.

  18. Text of Flynn’s speech is reprinted in Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 214–26.

  19. Ibid., 221.

  20. Ibid. Golin challenges the idea that jealousy played a significant role. He writes, “There is no evidence to confirm her charge that the Pageant caused jealousy and dissention; all other accounts agreed that immediately after the performance the Paterson strikers seemed more enthusiastic than ever.” See The Fragile Bridge, 173.

  21. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 221.

  22. Golin’s critique of Flynn ignoring so many positive aspects of the pageant (and how Flynn’s critique has influenced how historians frame this event) is detailed in The Fragile Bridge, 170–78. Art historian Linda Nochlin is one of the rare scholars who have argued that the pageant had a positive effect on both strikers and artists alike who were involved in the production. See Linda Nochlin, “The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913,” Art in America 52 (May–June 1974), 67.

  23. Golin argues that the main goal of the pageant was to create publicity, and that the production was staged even though organizers were warned beforehand that it might lose money. He writes, “The working committees finally decided to go ahead, not because they believed money could be made from a single performance—especially not one aimed primarily at working people—but because New York silk strikers who were present at the meeting insisted that the Pageant simply had to be put on and themselves lent money to offset production costs. The New York ribbon weavers knew what most historians have forgotten, that the real purpose of the Pageant was to publicize the dramatic class struggle then taking place in Paterson, in the hope of influencing the outcome.” See The Fragile Bridge, 161.

  24. This point is contentious, for the IWW did carry on throughout the decade (surviving the harsh governmental repression during WWI), and the Wobblies continue to this day. However, Paterson
(following the success at Lawrence) represented a major defeat in the IWW’s ability to organize and win large-scale strikes against manufacturers, a loss that harmed its overall reputation. Paterson also took a tremendous toll on the main IWW organizers. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn never led a major strike again, and Haywood (whose health fell apart during the strike) was sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act. However, while he waited for an appeal, he skipped bail and fled to Russia, where he remained until his death in 1928.

  25. Richard Fitzgerald argues that Greenwich Village artists “never regarded themselves as workers or identified their own interests with those of the working class. They saw industrial working-class struggles as real, but they did not consider them their own. They never regarded themselves simultaneously as both artists as workers. Thus, they saw their career options as open in a way no industrial worker could, and they responded in different ways to the situation which they confronted.” See Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 5.

  26. Golin, The Fragile Bridge, 110. Golin’s book, particularly chapters four through seven, focuses on a critical and historical analysis of the interaction between Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals, IWW organizers, and silk workers during the Paterson strike.

  27. Ibid., 110.

  Chapter 10: The Masses on Trial

  1. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 180.

  2. Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2003) 353.

  3. Eugene E. Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art, and the New Theatre in America, 28.

  4. Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 16.

  5. “Editorial Notice,” The Masses 4 (December 1912), 3, reprinted in Fishbein, in Rebels in Bohemia, 18.

  6. [Editorial: “The magazine is a success . . .”], The Masses 4 (January 1913), 2, reprinted in Fishbein, in Rebels in Bohemia, 18.

  7. Ibid., 18.

  8. The Masses 4 (December 1912), 3, reprinted in Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1973), 27.

  9. Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement, 36.

  10. Paul H. Douglas, “Horrible Example,” The Masses 9 (November 1916), 22, reprinted in Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement, 36.

  11. The Masses’ support for women’s issues and workers issues was commendable, but they failed miserably at race issues. The editors, artists, and writers were overwhelmingly European-American men, and their inability to see and understand racism and form a deeper analysis of sexism is baffling. Eugene L. Leach writes, “At its worst The Masses purveyed racist stereotypes in cartoons and poetry; at its best it sporadically protested the same stereotypes. For the most part the magazine hewed to the myopic line that racism was a by-product of capitalism, so that no special emphasis had to be given to the peculiar oppressions borne by blacks. Like the white leaders of the Socialist party, The Masses shrank back in fear and confusion from confronting this deepest divide in American Society.” See Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement, 42.

  12. For more on the Ludlow Massacre, see, Howard Zinn, “The Colorado Coal Strike, 1913–1914,” in Howard Zinn, Dana Frank, Robin D. G. Kelley, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 7–55.

  13. Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia, 21.

  14. Ibid., 20.

  15. Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator, 50.

  16. Thomas A. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1917–1917): Odyssey of an Era (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 204–05.

  17. This countered other information that they had received. The Masses had sought out the opinion of George Creel, chairman of the Committee on Public Information, who gave his assurance that the August issue had not violated any laws.

  18. Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and its Graphics, 1911–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 60.

  19. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1917–1917), 207.

  20. Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia, 2 4–25.

  21. Ibid., 25.

  22. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1917–1917), 217.

  23. Ibid., 212.

  24. Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 205–06.

  25. Eugene E. Leach writes about Eastman, “When party loyalists abused him for saying kind things about Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Eastman gave them a scolding for their sectarian stiffness: ‘Let us try to use our brains freely, love progress more than a party, allow ourselves the natural emotions of our species, and see if we can get ready to play a human part in the actual complex flow of events.’ ” See Leach, 1915, The Cultural Movement, 38, originally printed in “Sect or Class?,” The Masses 9 (December 1916), 16.

  26. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1917–1917), 217–18.

  27. Ibid., 221.

  Chapter 11: Banners Designed to Break a President

  1. Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 164.

  2. Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Boni and Liveright Publishers, 1920), 21.

  3. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed. One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 1995), 11.

  4. States to ratify in the 1910s included Washington (1910), California (1911), Oregon (1912), Kansas (1912), and Arizona (1912).

  5. NAWSA President Anna Howard Shaw stated, “Do not touch the Negro problem. It will offend the South.” Quoted in David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race: 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 417. Carrie Chapman Catt, who would also serve as NAWSA president argued that democratic rights had been given to “the Negro [men] . . . with possible ill advised haste” and that “perilous conditions in society were the result of introducing into the body politics vast numbers of irresponsible citizens.” Quoted in Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, New Updated Edition (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 1986), 85.

  6. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 82.

  7. Linda J. Lumsden, Rampant Women: Suffragists and the Right of Assembly (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 84.

  8. Linda G. Ford, “Alice Paul and the Triumph of Militancy,” in Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote, 283.

  9. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 124.

  10. Ibid., 59.

  11. Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, 92.

  12. Ibid, 95.

  13. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 167.

  14. Ibid., 171.

  15. Robert Booth Fowler, “Carrie Chapman Catt, Strategist,” in Wheeler, ed. One Woman, One Vote, 310.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid, 286.

  18. Adams and Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign, 216.

  19. Ibid., 222.

  20. Connecticut would also ratify in September.

  21. Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, 339.

  22. Ibid., 251.

  Chapter 12: The Lynching Crisis

  1. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, September 2, 1911, 195, reprinted in Writing in Periodicals: Edited by W.E.B. Du Bois: Selections from The Crisis: Volume 1:1911–1925, Herbert Aptheker, comp. and ed. (Milwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1983), 16.

  2. The Star of Ethiopia celebrated contributions of Africans and African Americans to society and was performed to large crowds in New York City in 1913 and again in 1921, in Wa
shington, DC, in 1915, in Philadelphia in 1916, and in Los Angeles in 1925.

  3. Jim Crow laws existed between 1876 and 1965 and erased the gains that African Americans had made during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. These gains were thwarted when Republican politicians sold out the civil and political rights of African Americans when they agreed to remove federal troops from the South in return for electoral commission votes for the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the disputed Tilden-Hayes election. This became known as the Compromise of 1877, and the equal protection guaranteed by Fourteenth Amendment all but disappeared, ushering in disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws. The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson cemented this disenfranchisement and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that legalized racial segregation. This allowed racism and race terror to flourish, especially in the Deep South.

  4. Interracial working-class organizing sought to change this. In the late 1880s the Southern Farmers’ Alliance led a grassroots campaign to end the economic exploitation of black sharecroppers and impoverished white farmers alike. The Farmers’ Alliance (allied with the Populist Party) developed farmers’ co-ops to challenge the crop lien system in which small-scale farmers mortgaged their crops in return for supplies and household goods from merchants (usually the plantation owners), who charged exorbitant sums.