Alan Calmer on working class literature and those rare and precious recorded hints of what was largely an oral tradition of proletarian poetry in the U.S. of the 19th century.

‘Early American Labor and Literature’ by Alan Calmer from International Literature. No. 1. 1934.

We cannot properly speak of the existence of a body of working-class literature in the United States until the epoch of imperialism. It was not until the first years of the twentieth century that men of letters like Jack London and Upton Sinclair identified themselves with the Socialist Party or that a worker-poet like Joe Hill emerged from the ranks of the I.W.W. Moreover, it is only today, with the development of the Communist movement, that we can begin to talk of an American proletarian revolutionary literature that is attaining maturity.

Nevertheless, it is to be expected that the struggle of the American proletariat during the last half of the nineteenth century, together with the beginning of the Socialist movement chiefly among the German immigrants in this country, would be reflected at least in fugitive writings during this period. Most of the floating literature of this time may never be recovered; while numerous scattered poems, stories, and feuilletons in rare labor newspapers of the time have yet to be collected. In addition to other literary treasures that some day may be discovered, we already know 92f at least two historically important bodies of working-class writings of this period. These are the songs and balladry of the fighting Irish and English hard coal miners of Pennsylvania, and the German-American Socialist literature composed in the U.S. before the beginning of the present century.

The folklore that flourished in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania during the last third of the nineteenth century was of a very striking nature. Although the custom of balladry and minstrelsy had been transplanted from the British Isles, these homespun songs and poems were rooted deep in the life of the coal miners of the state. These ballads were spread by wandering bards and minstrels who were themselves miners. Isolated by the mountainous barriers of this section of the country, the Pennsylvania proletariat created their own oral literature reflecting every aspect of life in and around the hell holes where they were forced to labor. Not only did they sing of tales told around the village green and barroom; almost all of their ballads are full of the serfdom of the miners, of the agony of child labor, of the horror of mine disasters.

But even more important one finds in these ballads the fighting spirit of the workers and the growth of their class-consciousness:

On three days a week, boys, our living we make,
And we work like mules for the bit that we ate;
But now we have a union let them say what they may:
We will strike for more wages than a dollar a day.¹

Supported by the forces of press and pulpit, the coal operators launched a widespread campaign of vilification against the workers’ Union, in order to demolish it. This it reflected in a poem written during the time and printed in a miner’s journal:

What’s that you say? What makes its strike?
Well, now!—you’ve hit a subject which I like
To talk about to strangers, for you’ll understand
A very wrong impression fills the land—
That we are lazy, bloody, reckless men,
Who live beneath the ground, in cave and den,
And come out once a while to get the light—
To burn a breaker, kill a boss, or fight—
That miners ain’t like other folks do be,
All is wrong, which I will let you see.
We’re men like you—though not so finely clad—
Some of us good, and others very bad,
Just as you will find in any other set
Of men who work their daily bread to get.
A pretty independent lot we are likewise,
And will allow no boss to tyrannize,
We hate that, like the Devil hates the water
Blessed by the Priest—and so we ought’er.

He says he is the workman’s great admirer,
While we, in turn, say he’s the great conspirer
Against our price, our liberties, our rights,
And the instigator of one-half our fights.

These miners, who occupy a prominent place in the splendid revolutionary tradition of the American proletariat, fought determinedly against the onslaught of the coal operators and their Pennsylvania Cossacks. This conflict came to a head in the strike of 1875, in which the miners’ strongest union, the old W.B.A., was smashed. One of the finest examples of how literary forms may serve as direct weapons in the class struggle is the ballad, “The Long Strike,” written during the course of the strike in order to cheer the workers. In the midst of this major contest with their class enemy, the miners sung defiantly:

In eighteen hundred and ‘seventy-five, our masters did conspire
To keep men, women and children without either food or fire.
They tho’t to starve us to submit with hunger and with cold,
But the miners did not fear them, but stood out brave and bold.

Now two long months are nearly o’er—that no one can deny,
And for to stand another month we are willing for to try,
Our wages shall not be reduced, tho’ poverty do reign,
We’ll have seventy-four basis, boys, before we’ll work again.

When the miners rose once more at the end of 1887—under the leadership of the Knights of Labor and in support of the railroad workers—John Hory, an Irish miner-poet, composed their battle song:

Here’s to the Knights of Labor,
That brave and gallant band,
That Corbon and old Swigard
Is trying to disband.
But stick and hang brave union men;
We’ll make them rue the day
They thought to break the K. of L.
In free Americay.

When this strike is at an end,
And we have gained the day,
We’ll drink a health to our miner boys,
Both near and far away;
And our brothers on the railroad
In free Americay.

A number of other songs were written about the Knights of Labor, especially in the western section of the country. While many of the ones collected in the pamphlet, Sing, Brothers, Sing! (1886), seem to be written by sympathizers rather than by workers on the picket line, nevertheless they express the militancy of the workers. Most of them are new lyrics set to the tune of popular songs. One of the best known, which was written in California, includes the refrain:

Hurrah! Hurrah! Labor free to all!
Hurrah! Hurrah! hasten to the call!
Shout the joyful tidings, King Capital must fall;
Now we are marching for Labor.

The most famous one of all, Storm the Fort, Ye Knights of Labor!, was sung throughout the West:

Strong entrenched behind their minions,
Sit the money kings;
Slavery grabbers, thieves and traitors
Join them in their rings.
Who will dare to shun the conflict?
Who would be a slave?
Better die within the trenches,
Forward, then ye brave!

Another deals with

Oh, the idle, useless things,
Worshipped as “Industrial Kings,”
Buying legislators, lawyers, courts and all,

while another, The Bondholder and the Soldier—sung to the tune of Susannah—reflects the development of the indigenous revolutionary tradition of America, from the first Civil War to the coming second one:

We met the foe on many fields
And drove them to the sea,
We thought the Union then was saved
And all our people free.
O bondholder! Fear you no wrath divine?
The blows we dealt on Southern heads
Shall surely fall on thine.

Even before the Civil War, the American workers used the weapon of verse in their labor clashes. George E. McNeill, in The Labor Movement, recounts the incident of girl workers in New Hampshire who, as far back as 1837, struck successfully against a wage-cut proposed by the mill superintendent, composed rhymes satirizing him and posted them on the mill-yard fence. “This is but an instance,” stated McNeill, “of a peculiar method which some of the early strikers had of revenging themselves by making verses.”

Another example of revolutionary poetry is given by McNeill in the same volume. The first number of the labor newspaper, Voice of Industry, published on May 29, 1845, contains the story of Mike Walsh, who was arrested for alleged libel against a New York capitalist. While in prison, he penciled the following verse on the wall of his cell:

The wealth which ingrate tyrants wield
To crush and starve us—WE create;
The blood we shed on flood and field,
Give greatness to the MISNAMED great:
But short would reign this favored few,
Were we but to each other true.

McNeill, who was called the “Nestor” of the American labor movement, was himself something of poet. A conscientious labor leader who believed that the capitalist system must be abolished, McNeill worked with Weydemeyer and Sorge during the latter seventies. However, his approach was muddled by a religious humanitarianism which is reflected in his creative efforts. In the poems “On Labor” which appear in his volume of verse, Unfrequented Paths—published when he was an old man—he beseeches the ruling class to surrender its riches to the workers before the masses rise up against their oppressors. In “The Risen Laborer,” he tells them:

O men of wealth and power, the pleading poor
Cry not in vain to God’s Almighty power!
Throw off your burden of excessive wealth,
Or it will beat you down to lowest gulf.

Fail not, “O masters, rulers in all lands,”
Or the dark future reckons hard with you.
Labor’s uprising, peaceful or in terror,
Sure as the day-dawn, certain as the night-time
Cometh with Christ-love or in man’s anger.

He warns them again in “The Poor Man’s Burden”:

Pile on the poor man’s burden—
Your savage wars increase;
Give him his full of famine,
Nor bid his sickness cease.
And when your goal is nearest
Your glory’s dearly bought,
For the poor man in his fury
May bring your pride to naught.

One of his labor poems, “Ode to Truth, reflects the influence of the following stanza from Longfellow:

There is a poor, blind Samson in our land,
Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this commonweal,

which many American labor leaders were fond of quoting.

One of the most curious connections between American labor and literature in the late nineteenth century is indicated by the frequent use which trade union leaders of the time made of poetic texts and quotations. In addition to McNeill, William H. Sylvis—whose premature death destroyed the ties which were being forged between the National Labor Union and the First International at the end of the sixties; Uriah S. Stephens, who formed the Knights of Labor; Parsons and Spies, Haymarket martyrs; and other American labor leaders were men of learning and used literary texts as effective instruments in their speeches and writings. The mark of these literary interests is found even upon labor documents of the period—as witness the verses which head the constitution of the American Miners Association, formed in 1861:

Step by step, the longest march
Can be won, can be won,
Single stones will form an arch,
One by one, one by one.
And by union, what we will
Can be all accomplished still,
Drops of water turn a mill,
Singly none, singly none.

Sylvis’ lengthy addresses are peppered with poetic quotations. His writings, too, occasionally possess a literary touch, as in this opening sentence from his essay, “The Poor Man’s Home”:

“Poets and essayists have sung and written a great deal about the beauty and simplicity of the poor man’s home, and theorists have employed the aid of art to prove that contentment and poverty are inseparable; but ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night,’ ‘The Village Blacksmith,’ ‘The Flat-Boat,’ etc., as illustrations are far more welcome to the rich man’s parlor than be the living realities which they represent.”

Stephens’ speeches contain references to Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, etc. When the Knights of Labor assembly held a memorial service for John Hobson, who died in 1871, Stephens suggested that a poem be written for the occasion. William Fennimore composed the verses, “A Fallen Friend,” which were written into the minutes of the K. of L. meeting. The poem is a stilted imitation of English romantic verse, as mediocre as the elegy, “The Fallen Chieftain,” composed by John James upon the death of Sylvis.

At the funeral of the Haymarket victims, their attorney, Captain Black, read a long poem dedicated to them. According to Black, it had been “handed to me on the train as I came hither, written by I know not whom.” Here was the setting for a masterpiece. The author, however, was obviously not a poet but a crude imitator:

Under the cruel tree,
Planted by tyranny,
Grown in barbarity,
Fostered by wrong;
With stately, soldier pace,
With simple, manly grace,
Each hero took his place,
Steady and strong.

One with a gentle word,
One with a sob unheard
Of warning love; a third
With triumphant cry
Meeting the rope’s embrace—
Of gallows’ old disgraced
Making a holy place;
Thus did they die.

And when in later days,
Bards all sing lofty lays,
In freedom’s makers’ praise,
Their names shall live.

Albert R. Parsons—a native-born labor leader whose ancestors came to America on the Mayflower, who was beloved by the Negro people for his direct work in their behalf during Reconstruction, and who played a prominent part in the great railroad strike of 1877—frequently recited long poems from memory during his last days in prison. His last writings, penned in prison, contain fitting excerpts from the works of English prose masters—a quotation from Macaulay tracing the development of the American masses, a reference from Ruskin to the Paris Commune, etc. While on trial he delivered a nine-hour speech, prefacing his remarks by reciting a poem entitled “Bread is Freedom.”

Man of labor, up. arise!
Know the might that in thee lies,
Wheel and shaft are set at rest
At thy powerful arm’s behest.

Thine oppressor’s hand recoils
When thou, weary of thy toil,
Shun’st thy plow; thy task begun
When thou speak’st:
Enough is done!

Break this two-fold yoke in twain;
Break thy want’s enslaving chain;
Break thy slavery’s want and dread;
Bread is freedom, freedom bread.

“That poem,” said Parsons in the crowded courtroom, “epitomizes the aspirations, the hope, the need of the working-class, not alone of America, but of the civilized world.”

Like Parsons, Spies also turned his courtroom speech into a public forum, exposing the exploitation of labor. He began with a clear-cut statement of the class struggle: “In addressing this court I speak as the representative of one class to the representative of another.” His speech belongs to the literature of labor. In it occurs a slashing reference to the erudition of the prosecuting attorney:

“Grinnell spoke of Victor Hugo. I need not repeat what he said, but will answer him in the language of one of our German philosophers: ‘Our bourgeoisie erects monuments in honor of the memory of the classics. If they had read them they would burn them!’”

A letter by Spies, written from prison, was reprinted in a German-American literary journal. Its editor, Robert Reitzel, refers to the epistle as a-stirring document, ‘which the compares to a monologue from Buchner’s “Danton’s Tod.’”

Robert Reitzel was the most distinguished German man of letters living in America. Born at the time of the German revolution, he came to America early in the seventies. In 1884 he founded Der arme Teufel, the most important German literary magazine in the U.S. Although essentially an individualist, Reitzel believed that the revolutionary spirit of Socialism was a powerful stimulus to literary creation. He understood the oppressive character of capitalism, and became aroused to action by all attacks upon the working-class.

His stand at the time of the Haymarket case was very decisive. He did not content himself with writing letters, as did his American contemporary, William Dean Howells, but agitated at mass meetings and in the pages of his journal for the liberation of the victims of 1886. He warned the working-class that the bourgeoisie were out for the blood of their leaders. He advocated the use of force by the masses as the only way to save the Haymarket prisoners.

The Chicago case left a permanent stamp on the pages of Reitzel’s magazine, as well as upon his own literary work. The Haymarket tragedy appears in his poems and feuilletons published in Der arme Teufel. He believed that the murder of the Haymarket victims would rouse the working-class to action; in 1887 he wrote:

Was frommen bei zertretnen Saaten
Der Sehnsucht friedliche Schalmeien?
Wir wollen statt der Tranen Taten,
Und Blut statt Wein.²

Although German-American literature was an emigré product, transplanted upon foreign shores, yet that section of it to which Reitzel’s later work belonged struck a vigorous note. Until it slowly ebbed away toward the close of the nineteenth century, German-American Socialist literature was the only body of belles-lettres in this country which voiced a strenuous protest against the injustices of American capitalism.

After the revolutionary period of forty-eight, many German journalists and men of letters migrated to this country. Scarcely one of them failed to compose verse reflecting some awareness of the class struggle. This literature extends from didactic writings by worker-poets and political polemicists to distinguished verse by outstanding German men of letters like Reitzel. Among the latter was Heinrich Strodtmann, who published an illustrated comic weekly in Philadelphia during 1853, and whose socialist poems show the influence of his three years’ stay in America; to the former belongs Carl Reuber, a Pittsburgh worker who published a volume of socialist poetry in 1872.³

With the founding of the Communist Club in New York in 1857, and with the development of the First International in America, under the guidance of Sorge, some of these immigrants began to propagate the ideas of Marx and Engels not only by means of lectures and articles but also by poetry, sketches, and fiction.

One of the most talented of them was Adolph Douai. Forced to leave Germany as a result of his activities in the Revolution, he settled in Texas, where he published the San-Antonio Zeitung, an abolitionist paper, in the eighteen-fifties. Driven out of the state by the slaveowners, he moved to Boston, where his atheistic beliefs soon ruined his scholastic career. Arriving in New York in 1866, he drew close to the labor movement, became a Marxist in the early seventies, and was the first popularizer of Marxism in America. Although he was primarily a journalist and educator, Douai wrote many novels and stories. His novel, Fata Morgana, was published in 1859; another one, Die wilde Jagd, was issued ten years later. He was one of the editors of the New Yorker Volkzeitung from 1878 until his death a decade later, and during this period he wrote prolifically.

Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, speaks in glowing terms of another German-American man of letters, Otto Walster. In The Working-class Movement in America written with her husband during their visit to America in the eighties, she declares: “There are two aspects of the poetry of a movement like that of Socialism. The one is furnished by the genuine proletariat, by their sufferings, their awakening, their feeling after hope, their aspiration, their understanding, their victory…But the other aspect of the poetry of the working-class movement is already more definite and distinct in form. It is yielded by the artistic souls that, famishing in the desert of today, are making for the promised land beyond, and mark their way thither by their singing. Of such as these is Walster, poet, dramatist, novelist, an artist to his soul’s core…”

Another Socialist writer, who was a temporary resident of this country, was Leopold Jacoby. At the meeting held in Cooper Institute, New York, on March 19, 1883, to commemorate the death of Marx, Jacoby penned for the occasion a lengthy poem which is printed in the Volkzeitung.

At the same meeting, John Swinton, a prominent American journalist, delivered a brilliant oration on Marx to which even the numerous foreigners in the audience responded thunderously. Born in Scotland, Swinton came to the States at an early age, aiding the Negroes in South Carolina in ante-bellum days. In New York, where he worked as a printer, he became the companion of many leading American men of letters, including Walt Whitman. As managing editor of the New York Times during the Civil War, he became one of the leading journalists in the country.

Growing aware of the character of the “modern Moloch, capitalism” (American democracy he termed a “demonocracy”), he plunged his efforts and finances into the publication of John Swinton’s Paper, which defended the cause of the working-class. Although he did not join any of the labor organizations, Swinton remained a champion of the masses until his death.

In 1880, while in England, he visited Marx, whom he admired as “one of the noblest men and most logical thinkers” of the time. In a small volume, John Swinton’s Travels, he wrote a tiny essay-describing his visit with Marx which is a contribution to American revolutionary literature. Entitled, “The Man of Earthquakes—Karl Marx,” it is an appreciation of the greatness of Marx and the essence of his work that is exceedingly rare for that time:

“Over the thought of the blabblement and rack of the age and the ages, over the talk of the day and the scenes of the evening, arose in my mind one question touching upon the final law of being, for which I would seek answer from this sage. Going down to the depth of language, and rising to the height of emphasis, during an interspace of silence, I interrogated the revolutionist and philosopher in these fateful words:

“’What is?’

“And it seemed as though his mind were inverted for a moment while he looked upon the roaring sea in front and the restless multitude upon the beach.

“’What is?’ I had enquired, to which, in deep and solemn tone, he replied: ‘Struggle!’

“At first is seemed as though I had heard the echo of despair; but, peradventure, it was the law of life.”

The American litterateurs of the time, however, remained largely indifferent to Marxism and, indeed, to the entire labor movement. “Where are the American writers of fiction?” Marx’s daughter asked in 1887. “With a subject, and such a subject, lying ready to their very hands, clamouring at their very doors, not one of them touches it…There are no studies of factory-hands and of dwellers in tenement houses; no pictures of those sunk in the innermost depths of the modern Inferno. Yet these types will be, must be, dealt with, and one of these days the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Capitalism will be written.”

It was not until two decades later that the first attempt at such a novel—Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—was made.

NOTES

1. To an American newspaperman belongs the everlasting honor of having preserved from oblivion this “seam of folklore which once ran through life in the hard coal fields of Pennsylvania.” He gathered them from the last survivors of the generation that composed and sung them. They are collected in his volume, Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miner, by George Korson. The Grafton Press. N.Y. 1927.

2. Quoted in Robert Reitzel, by Adolf E. Zucker. Americana Germanica Press. 1917.

3. Cf. the monograph, Socialism in German-American Literature, by W. F. Kamman, Americana Germanica Press (1917).

Literature of the World Revolution/International Literature was the journal of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1927, that began publishing in the aftermath of 1931’s international conference of revolutionary writers held in Kharkov, Ukraine. Produced in Moscow in Russian, German, English, and French, the name changed to International Literature in 1932. In 1935 and the Popular Front, the Writers for the Defense of Culture became the sponsoring organization. It published until 1945 and hosted the most important Communist writers and critics of the time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/international-literature/1934-n01-IL.pdf