Archie Green, our discipline’s grand mentor and progenitor of the study of labor folklore and workers’ expressive culture, turned ninety in 2007. In the last five years he has issued four new books, each bringing to fruition years of research and fieldwork, thinking and dialog. These late editions hone Archie’s unique approach to the study of labor culture--termed “laborlore”--and demonstrate his continuing passion for and refreshing insight into worlds of organized labor. To be sure, the world of organized labor, or more broadly the world of work, is also fraught with tensions and puzzles, from both political and scholarly points of view. In an article published twenty years ago Archie asked, “Who Treasures Tales of Work?” [1] and it is a question that has recurred in different guises throughout his later writing and public work, seeking ultimately, I think, to valorize the culture of work and locate and enlarge the conscious participation of workers in the history and traditions of the work they do.
The four volumes under consideration here give a sense of Archie’s range. The Big Red Songbook is a kind of treasury of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) songs and songbook lore, while the other volumes collect Archie’s recent expository and analytical writing in search of laborlore’s hidden, esoteric, or lost meanings. Millwrights in Northern California and Harry Lundeberg’s Stetson were written primarily for the trade, carpenters and maritime workers respectively. Millwrights focuses on the history and jurisdictional evolution of one trade, from the construction of ancient windmills and watermills to the modern power plants using metal turbines, compounding trade union affiliation, jurisdiction, and versatility in engineering and mechanical skill. Harry Lundeberg’s Stetson is a series of case studies of waterfront argot and reprints several essays originally written in the 1990s for the newsletter of the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific, West Coast Sailor. Tin Men expands Archie’s scope considerably to grapple with the paradox of figural representation as trade emblem and folk aesthetic in a finely illustrated art history tome. Together, these four somewhat disparate volumes are linked by common preoccupations: the texts and contexts of vernacular expression, the primacy of unions and unionism in the study of work, the premise or ideal of a political culture of democratic pluralism, nostalgia for radical class consciousness and IWW ideology, and admiration and advocacy for direct action, craft skill, and pride in work, whether conservative or radical.
The latest volume, The Big Red Songbook, represents an interest spanning Archie’s entire scholarly career, going back to his forties. One of his first published folklore articles in 1960 established the agenda concluded in The Big Red Songbook. The article detailed the career of Wobbly folklorist John Neuhaus whose collection of pocket-sized IWW songbooks, the so-called Little Red Songbook, served as the basis and inspiration for the present volume. In addition to reprinting this 1960 article on John Neuhaus, The Big Red Songbook includes a preface Archie wrote for this volume and bears traces throughout of his hand as the principal editor, principally in the detailed headnotes to the songs. But the volume also includes several short essays written by others about the songs--introductions by each of the editors, contemporary and historical commentary, and various reflections. Franklin Rosemont, the publisher at Charles Kerr, writes in his introduction about the vast corpus of IWW songs omitted from the little books--the “lost” songs and songs of women and working people of color. A section devoted to writings by some of the songwriters themselves includes reprinted articles by Harry McClintock (aka “Haywire Mac”), Richard Brazier, Jim Connell, and Carlos Cortez. There is a checklist of the songs published up through the thirty-sixth edition (1995), a discography, and a bibliography, bringing all references up to date. The core of the volume are the songs themselves, republished and annotated from the editions of the songbook published between 1909 and 1973, along with several IWW songs “somehow not included” in the little books and contemporary variants and parodies.
The Big Red Songbook has both scholarly and popular appeal, and it is physically big, running to over five hundred pages. Big as it is, it is still somewhat cramped, overflowing and “profusely illustrated” with IWW cartoons, drawings, and Kerr advertisements in the end papers of the paperback edition. Given these constraints, it is hard to want more from this volume, such as tales that were published in the originals. But a tabular checklist indicating songs included and omitted from each edition would have served scholars wanting to historicize the little red songbooks and to know more about the editors’ positions on current events throughout its history. We know from the checklist to this volume when each song entered the little red songbooks but not when certain of them exited or for what precise reason. In fact, Archie himself indicates in a footnote to the Neuhaus article that “a significant folklore study can be made by a consideration of the IWW songs deleted from the twenty-nine editions” (2007: 417). He mentions in this respect, for instance, sabotage songs and pro-Soviet songs deleted from editions issued at sensitive times.
In its one hundred plus years the IWW has become a touchstone of labor or workers’ culture, mainly for its revolutionary idealism and populist persuasion. Several factors explain the enduring appeal and inspiration of the Industrial Workers of the World. For one, the preamble to its 1905 constitution stated uncompromising class opposition between the working class and the employing class, and this class antagonism (“the working class and the employing class have nothing in common”) implied class solidarity (“an injury to one is an injury to all”). Second, the IWW opposed the elitism of craft unionism, welcoming all industrial workers--unskilled, seasonal, temporary workers, and women, minority, and immigrant workers. In this respect, it paved the way for the emergence of the Committee (later Congress) on Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. Third, the IWW gave voice to the rank and file in its traditions of song and verbal art, aided no doubt by the ongoing publication of the little red songbook and the early and widely publicized free-speech fights that promoted several of its members into star soapboxers. Throughout its history, the IWW managed to maintain an ideological purity without having established stable institutions or real institutional clout and remaining marginal to the path of dependence established by AFL-CIO unions.
The IWW is better known and more important for its cultural and political ideals than its contracts or bargaining power. The Big Red Songbook, whatever else it does and whomever it engages, reasserts this tradition precisely, in my view, to counter the institutional forces that sunder culture from labor. Commonly, pragmatism supersedes culture as workers’ interests are viewed in narrow terms of contracts or conditions or matters of social justice. And yet the problem of the consciousness of the culture of work seems somehow overdetermined and as rarified as the consciousness of class. Why does Archie have to ponder, in so many ways, “Who treasures tales of work?” if not to assert that workers have culture, taken for granted perhaps, hidden to the uninitiated, or overshadowed by the flamboyant leaders. And yet the problem of workers’ culture is meliorated whenever Archie discovers or learns of other tradition-conscious workers who recognize something more than popular culture as the culture of workers.
More than a compendium of Wobbly songs and lore, the songs themselves, like any art form, contain a poetics and politics of the IWW, and new generations will plumb their meanings. This big book also contains many of Archie’s lifelong commitments to the expressive culture of work and workers--the song tradition especially--and to a politics of radical vernacular pluralism. The cultural roots entwined in the early IWW’s anarcho-syndicalism animate much of Archie’s political worldview and steadied him through the tumultuous left sectarianism of the last century. His antipathy towards Stalinism, its false ideals and deceitful tactics, is well known, as is his championing of the IWW and the genius he ascribes to the vernacular--culture from the bottom up, rooted in community, imbued with sense of place, what scholars of Greek antiquity would speak of as “autochthonous,” springing from the place where it is found. Less well known, at least to folklorists, might be the story of Harry Lundeberg, the stoic rank-and-file leader of west coast sailors during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, who was de facto (at least to Archie) the voice of anti-Stalinism on the waterfront. “From shipwright days in San Francisco, in 1941, I recall a then-current saying: ‘The waterfront isn’t big enough for the two Harrys’ [Lundeberg and Bridges]. This maxim cloaked personal disagreements, as well as the ongoing war between Communist Party members and friends in the ILWU [International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, headed by Harry Bridges], and an unlikely scattering of Wobblies, Trotskyists, anarcho-syndicalists, and ordinary rank-and-file trade unionists in the SUP” (2006: 12).
Inasmuch as The Big Red Songbook is a culmination to Archie’s career, it would be hasty to make this big book a kind of career bookend. For one thing, Archie still possesses energy and material and desire to continue working. For another, most of Archie’s published writing is a kind of open text, inviting and accommodating further contributions to knowledge, as well as animating the “multiple enactments in all the places we inhabit: on the job, in the union hall, in family circles, across the globe” (2003: 4). His writing, here and elsewhere, displays a remarkably inquisitive intellect, irrepressible in erecting scaffolds for collaborative scholarly inquiry, generating dialog, and posing persistent questions around new and sometimes stubbornly mute subjects.
A dialogic imagination informs this scholarship, enabling us to appreciate the easy link he forges between his own on-the-job excitement with work songs, stories, words, and other expressions heard many years ago and later research and fieldwork for publication. In Harry Lundeberg’s Stetson, Archie recalls an ex-SUP sailor whose name--McDaris or Madeiras--he does not quite remember but whom he remembered quite well enough as “intense and voluble [and who] pursued his beef endlessly by demanding that the union [Local 2116 Dry Dock, Marine Waysmen, Stage Riggers and Helpers] go after the damned salmonbellies” (2006: 24). The little essay on “Salmonbellies,” a term referring both to Pacific coast workers who bribed their bosses and to the bribe itself, the casks of salmon garnered from the summer salmon fishery in Alaska, attempts to track down the history of this term. But what Archie helps us initially to imagine is himself as a young shipyard apprentice somewhat awestruck by this man’s charisma and presence, wondering who he was, what became of him, what this term meant. He concluded, “although his [McDaris/Madeiras] specifics elude me, he planted a new word and contributed to my interest in labor history and culture” (2006: 24).
Suffice it to say, Archie discovered folklore on the job as a carpenter among carpenters, shipwrights, millwrights, and other trade unionists and came to the academic study of folklore mid-career at age 40. His fieldwork style as a folklorist--inquisitive, conversational, detail oriented--seems to have grown directly out of this insider’s curiosity about workers’ culture and expression, and Harry Lundeberg’s Stetson is sprinkled with references to his own experience in these very same work settings on the waterfront. Fieldwork as the stock in trade of folklorists and other ethnographers not only suited his intellectual temperament; it also enabled entrée into a variety of trades, work settings, and workers’ culture broadly, sometimes by proxy. Typically, in addition to his own rigorous inquiry, he involves a network of friends and fellow workers in his enterprise, searching out, identifying, and documenting local examples of the topic at hand and across far-flung reaches. “How would I ever meet tinners scattered from hamlet to metropolis? The best alternative to direct travel seemed to be correspondence with colleagues in workers’ culture” (2002: 64). In Tin Men this reliance on a network of culture workers is most transparent and a model of collaborative scholarship even where Archie has done most of the heavy lifting.
Archie’s unrelenting inquisitiveness is a salient quality of his writing and it takes several forms. We see it expressed as questions inviting the reader of his books to pursue the inquiry beyond what he himself is able to do. In many instances the question quite simply seeks verification or information that someone else may hold. More profoundly, questions seek to enlarge philosophically the reader’s imagination. In Millwrights, for instance, a book addressed to apprentices, he writes quizzically, “Why have some historians found it difficult to move from mechanical to social arenas? Where is the novel in which a millwright joins Captain Ahab or Tom Joad in adventures? Surely the millwright possesses as complex a soul as the tinker, sailor, miner, cowboy, or farm migrant. Union locals from Atlantic to Pacific face a challenge in recovering and interpreting their narratives” (2003:25). Occasionally, his questions carry moral overtones. Again, in Millwrights he poses rhetorical questions of contemporary millwrights at a time of major energy concerns in California: “Do power shortage and Enron troubles translate into moral or political wisdom for millwrights? Local 102 has issued no manifestoes detailing its position on energy matters. Perhaps its members need only to build new stations, not to contemplate the consequences of their work. Perhaps history will provide a marker for the road ahead” (2003: 4).
We also see inquisitiveness expressed as the imaginative interrogation of mute objects themselves such as with many artifacts of fabricated metal figures in Tin Men. In fact, the first chapter of Tin Men establishes the conceit by engaging two different “tin” men (one is actually copper; the other iron) on exhibit at an art installation at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum. One he names “Copper man” and the other “Al” according to its name and function as a trade sign originally advertising Al’s Sheet metal and tinshop in Los Angles: “Conversing with each, I asked, Who fabricated you? When, Where? Why? What brings you into a museum gallery? How do you add to my sense of identity and citizenship? Defying commonsense knowledge that they could not speak, I likened them to balladeers, yarners, and gifted artisans with whom I had talked over the decades” (2002: 2).
In some instances the conceit is near mystical, as when he “imagines midnight conversations” among four museum artifacts at the Museum of International Folk Art, “as they compared notes on the idiosyncrasies of their respective makers and asked how they themselves had come to be in an elegant New Mexico museum” (2002: 107). Similarly, unable to resolve questions—about origins, category, purpose, meanings--he confesses that,
I resume imaginations with various tin men. They whisper knowingly upon sharing secrets and chuckle when joking with me. They reach across the continent to compare notes. Al at Fort Mason proclaims for all, “I transform blueprint into soaring skyscraper; I sketch, cut fold, brake, crimp, beat, braze, heat, solder, weld, rivet, place, and fix.” Local 104’s Copper Man adds, Honor our trade, be patient with time, get it right, keep eye’s peeled for each job’s appearance, watch miters, stick to the union, and guard our traditions (2002: 108).
In a sense this envisioned conversation holds in abeyance the empirical analysis that otherwise explains how the tin men or other forms of expressive culture came into being.
Indeed, Tin Men pursues the painstakingly thorough job of sourcing and contextualizing the examples, of which there are many in this book and many that are nicely illustrated. Tin Men is the first book of its kind and the effort to be exhaustive is impressive if sometimes disappointing in the dearth of meanings that Archie uncovers. In at least one instance, Archie confesses a lack of confidence that enough data about tin men would surface to provide the coherent narrative he encountered in previous studies of ballads and tales (2002: 105). To be sure, the material is rich; the incoherence lies, however, in certain gaps in historical record and meaning that might otherwise “prove direct ancestry” and clarify categories among tin men. Even where genetic connections of the tinner’s craft are incompletely documented, much of the historical survey of tinners, tinkers, and artisans of metallurgy, Kupfferschmidt and Ferblanquier, in this book creates a viable tapestry against which to place contemporary tin workers. The want of ethnographic narrative from contemporary craftsmen and artifacts explains not only the conceit of the “speaking” artifact but also the short chapter tracing the tinsmith’s trade skills back into the hoary past in ancient mythology or illustrations of the craft in medieval woodcuts. The chapter on “Hephaistos and Autolycus,” in addition to the historical survey it provides, quotes several stanzas from the famous passage in Homer’s Iliad about the forging of the shield of Achilles, as if to establish the antiquity and dignity--one might also say pedigree—of trade skills involving the fashioning of metal.
This classical image serves as a counterpoint to the paucity of articulation, both political and aesthetic, around these objects by contemporary tradesmen, artists, collectors, and curators.
Workers often grope for the appropriate words to convey pride or skill. Tinsmiths who have mastered the science of reading blueprints become strangely inarticulate at describing their genius. “He’s a good mechanic” sums up much virtue, and “it just comes naturally” explains the most advanced techniques (2002: 86).
How ultimately do we appreciate these artifacts? In Archie’s terms, “Do we judge a tinsmith’s creativity by norms applied by artists and critics rather than by shop-floor mechanics?” These remain open questions, but Archie has undertaken a worthy task to tease out meaningful categories from the overlapping contexts and trajectories, ranging from craft guilds to trade unions and labor parades to art galleries and private collections, in which we find these artifacts.
In the end Tin Men finds Archie pondering an apolitical or conservative side of workers’ culture as he questions whether or not tin men “contribute to our understanding of work’s meanings” (2002: 150).
Seemingly, tin men have little to do with the larger issues in life…. I am conscious that the figures described in these pages do not trumpet overt ideological causes. Mother Jones, Joe Hill, Eugene Debs, or John L. Lewis never built a tin man nor hid a message in its body. Both marchers and spectators at Labor Day parades view them as mascots, more humorous than serious. Even when tin men become teaching tools in apprenticeship schools and the SMWIA [Sheet Metal Workers International Association] logo, their purpose remains understated and ambiguous. No tin man sings or leads “Solidarity Forever” or “Which Side Are You On?”
The reason we might expect to find any ideological causes in the first place comes out of Archie’s very different and lifelong experience in labor activism. The lack of “overt ideological causes” among tinsmiths is duly noted without judgment, but the prevailing sense in this book is an almost devolutionary premise in which the trade emblem of the tin man--the labor context-- is primary and superior and devolves into stylized, artistic expression and apolitical context. The tin man is caught between very different worlds--radical and conservative, workers and collectors, skilled artisans and self styled folk artists--and Tin Men elucidates these worlds coherently with skill, patience, passion, and open mindedness.
Footnotes
[1] “ At the Hall, in the Stope: Who Treasures Tales of Work?” Western Folklore 46 (July 1987): 153-70.
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[Review length: 3226 words • Review posted on February 6, 2008]