Traveling Wobbly Show
The art of the most courageous, anti-racist, and funniest
of the American labor movements
By Paul Buhle
The
Traveling Wobbly Show greets the centenary of the greatest, most courageous,
most anti-racist but also the funniest of American labor movements. It is
also the labor movement launched in Chicago.
The Show grew out of the creation of a comic-format book for the centenary,
Wobblies, a Graphic History (Verso Books), edited by myself and Nicole Schulman.
Twenty-five artists, including the late Carlos Cortez, contributed work on
various parts of Wobbly history from 1905 through the 1960s, and on a multitude
of Wobbly personalities such as Joe Hill, Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman,
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Frank Little, Primo Tapia, Utah Phillips, Judi Bari,
and many others, including Chicagoans Lucy Parsons and Slim Brundage of the
College of Complexes.
There are additional prints by Dylan Miner on Latino/Wobbly themes, inspired by the work of Carlos Cortez, and a poster by Lawrence Bush on the Wobblies as a transracial movement and class-conscious vision.In experimenting they utilized the woodcut or linoleum cut, ideal for use in artistic prints and therefore already a step away from the singular work created for the rich benefactor or collector, but also useful in more public statements, posters, and political leaflets.
The artists of the Wobbly Show belong largely, although not entirely, to the younger generation of cartoonists around the circle of the annual World War 3 Illustrated. Peter Kuper (artist of Mad’s Spy vs. Spy), Seth Tobocman, Ryan Inzana, Mac McGill, Christopher Cardinale, Chicago’s Josh McPhee, and Milwaukee’s Sue Simensky Bietala, among others, are part of an impulse to reconnect art and radicalism, through a tradition famous for the connections between the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and the “Ash Can School” of New York artists around The Masses magazine during the 1910s. A Modernism close to the spirit of the emerging surrealists (whose 1960s Chicago story is partly told in the book), it marked a revolution in art as well as an artistic devotion to working class life. It was also intensely vernacular, proud of the inspiration that comic strips and other elements of blue collar entertainment could provide the unblinkered artist.
The Wobbly Show is keenly historical in telling the story of the IWW. But it also hails back to the spirit of the self-taught Wobbly cartoonists, who took lessons from the comic strips—with the frequent scene of working class kids throwing snowballs that knock off the top hat of the respectable “gent,” typically a banker, lawyer, or businessman. Plenty of other daily comics also challenged authority, in funny and visually striking ways. But what was most radical was undoubtedly the form of comics. Like movies (“moving pictures”), then just emerging into real theaters, comics allowed artists to experiment with form, learning what its mostly blue collar readership liked best.
The Wobbly show also recalls the more prestigious modernists of the 1910s-30s who wanted to express the essence of the form, and so in experimenting they utilized the woodcut or linoleum cut, ideal for use in artistic prints (and therefore already a step away from the singular work created for the rich benefactor or collector) but also useful in more public statements, posters, and political leaflets. Like young avant-gardists everywhere, these artists were deeply involved with each other, with love and eros as much as politics, and especially daring in their depictions of nudes and of “ugly” men and women, particularly those of the ruling classes. Among the artistic radicals could be counted famed figures like Kathe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, and Frans Masereel, who captured the pathos of the modern scene, among a host of others radicalized by the horrors of the First World War.
Today’s graphic novel and graphic history offer the opportunity for cartoonists, often considered the “lowest” form of popular artists, to make a statement about their world. Bookstores in the U.S. are now selling millions of such books, and although the vast majority of them retain a mediocre if not outright reactionary “superhero” character, the growing interest of young people suggests that a new way of “reading” popular art is now omnipresent. The maturation of comic art in large parts of the world—a maturation promising in the U.S. for a decade from the late 1960s onward, but afterwards disappointed—may finally be taking place. If so, the artists of the Wobbly Show and Wobblies! are in the forefront.
The Wobbly Show, currently at Chicago’s Heartland Cafe has also opened in Providence and in Santa Cruz and will open soon in Santa Barbara, Montreal, Hartford, Baltimore, Barre, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Vancouver, Milwaukee, Madison, Flint, St. Paul, Atlanta, Albuquerque, Boston, among twenty-plus cities in the U.S. and abroad (the Australian centenary of the IWW is to be celebrated in 2007). See www.wobblyshow.org for more information.
Paul Buhle, a graduate of University of Illinois and now Senior Lecturer at Brown University, founded the wobblyesque magazine Radical America for SDS in 1967. He co-edited the Encyclopedia of the American Left and has written many books, including the authorized biography of C.L.R. James. He is now at work, with labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki, on a comic-format adaptation of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the U.S.
Illustration: One of Carlos Cortez’s
legendary
linocuts, on exhibit through June 2005 at the Heartland Cafe in Rogers Park.