ONE BIG UNION:

WALT WHITMAN AND THE WOBBLIES

A Thesis

Presented to the faculty of the Department of English

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

English

(Literature)

by

Elizabeth Ann Ketelle

FALL 2015

© 2015

Elizabeth Ann Ketelle

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ii

ONE BIG UNION:

WALT WHITMAN AND THE WOBBLIES

A Thesis

by

Elizabeth Ann Ketelle

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet

______, Second Reader Susan Wanlass

______Date

iii

Student: Elizabeth Ann Ketelle

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format

manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for

the thesis.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______David Toise Date Department of English

iv Abstract

of

ONE BIG UNION:

WALT WHITMAN AND THE WOBBLIES

by

Elizabeth Ann Ketelle

In a dynamic interplay with the discourses of socialism, anarchism, humanism, and freethought in early twentieth century America, Walt Whitman’s texts helped to shape those forces while the texts themselves were re-shaped in the discourse. Chapter 1 discusses the process by which the British socialists appropriated Whitman’s poetry as their own. Chapter 2 traces the influence of Whitman’s literary executor, Horace Traubel, who shaped Whitman’s legacy as an American socialist. Chapter 3 explores how leaders of the radical left adapted

Whitman’s memes to their own purposes, discussing Robert Ingersoll’s freethinker memes,

Clarence Darrow’s humanist memes, Emma Goldman’s anarchist memes, and Eugene V. Debs’

Christian socialist memes. Chapter 4 offers an extensive analysis of Whitman’s memes in the rhetoric and propaganda of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies). Using cultural criticism and reader response theory, the thesis argues for a new reading of Whitman’s poetry that reflects its appeal to the radical left.

______, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet

______Date

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Nancy Sweet for her kindness, intelligence, and invaluable advice.

And eternal gratitude and love to my husband David for his patience, support, and

encouragement.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………. vi

Chapter

1. THE BRITISH SOCIALISTS… ……………………………………………………….. 1

2. HORACE TRAUBEL AND HIS “HOT LITTLE PROPHETS” ...... 14

3. THE WHITMAN MEMES ...... 27

Robert Ingersoll: The Freethinker Memes………………………………………… 32

Clarence Darrow: The Humanist Memes…………………………………………. 37

Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Memes……………………………………… ….. 42

Eugene V. Debs: The Christian Socialist Memes…………………………………. 48

4. WHITMAN AND THE WOBBLIES ...... 55

5. WHITMAN AND RADICALISM ...... 86

Notes……………… ...... 95

Works Cited ...... 99

vii 1

Chapter 1 The British Socialists The route by which Walt Whitman, celebrant of American democracy, became the enthusiastically proclaimed champion of socialist causes was a circuitous one.

Whitman’s working class background gave him what David Reynolds terms “the heritage of artisan labor and the unified stem family” (Walt 308), a vision that he was loath to betray in the face of industrialism as the American economy changed radically during the nineteenth century. Like others of his time, Whitman was troubled by the changing role of the individual in an increasingly de-personalized, mechanized society.

Over the course of the early nineteenth century, Americans’ faith in the laissez-faire economy and limited government was shaken by government corruption and business abuses of labor. According to The Companion to American Thought, “Industrialism ultimately forced Americans to consider how the institutions, values, and ways of life of an agricultural society could be harmonized” with urbanism (“Industrialism”). All of these questions had implications for the nature of American liberal democracy, defined by Kenneth Cmiel as popular sovereignty checked by the rule of law (208). Cmiel points out that Whitman maintained “a balancing act on the razor’s edge of liberal democracy” (207), espousing a form of republicanism in which artisan labor – a group, according to Bryan Garman, that consisted of “skilled, white workingmen” (Race 8) –

“held their manly independence sacred but recognized that if they were to maintain … a state of equality, they must sometimes subordinate their own interests to those of the community” (Race 19). Thus Whitman was able to define America, as Mila Tupper

Maynard wrote in 1903, as “the embodiment of sacred mass made up of sacred, vital 2 units” (114). For his entire life, Whitman strove to maintain this democratic balance between the necessity of the group and the liberty of the individual.

Reynolds points out Whitman’s mid-nineteenth century devotion “to nature, to the past, to artisan labor, and to the construction of an ideal nation” (Walt 359) – a construct that left little room for a Marxist gloss on economics. Defining the term

“socialism” in 1902, Leonard Abbott states that it “proposes the public ownership and administration of the means of life in the world,” asserting that socialism “is simply the democratic thought carried into the field of industry” (180). Abbott posits, as did socialists generally, that socialism was the product of “industrial evolution” (180) that would end, as M.V. Ball stated in 1898, with “the great army of the dispossessed… assum[ing] ownership” of the means of production and “operat[ing] them for the general good” (161). As American socialist Newton Arvin asserts in his 1938 study of

Whitman, “If in his ‘politics’ he remained for the most part an old-fashioned individualist, in his freer thought – and in his work – he moved well beyond” his old- fashioned paradigm of artisanal republicanism (268). It was in his display of “freer thought” that Whitman had great appeal to the anti-monarchy, socialist sentiment fomenting in Europe during his lifetime.1 American socialist Eugene V. Debs points out in 1908 that socialism is “a continuation of the old fight against monarchy and in favor of democracy, which was begun in 1776 and which has since been growing into an enlarged world-demand” (“Socialist” 1). Historian B.O. Flower, writing in 1914, expresses a common vision with which Whitman was in complete accord – the nineteenth century as a “great revolutionary epoch, culminating in the advent of 3 democracy…[that] seemed to inaugurate an era dominated by freedom, fraternity, and justice” (37). As Michael Robertson points out in Worshipping Walt: The Whitman

Disciples, “Middle class socialists’ eagerness for nonviolent democratic alternatives to the current brutalities of capitalist repression and the potential violence of Marxist revolution” explains why Whitman was so appealing to them (263). Thus, a shared concept of the evolution of a perfect social system blurred the line between Whitman’s democratic vision and the “industrial evolution” of socialism.

In the late nineteenth century, Whitman’s poetry, with its “violently subversive kind of language” (Reynolds, Walt 321), espousal of comradeship across class lines, and advocacy of utopian democracy, caught the attention of the British Ethical

Socialists,2 a movement that Mark Bevir explains “typically defined socialism in terms of an inner spirituality and a sense of brotherhood, more than a set of economic relationships or institutional arrangements,” leading its members to “insist… on the importance of an inner change as a prerequisite for the realisation of socialism” (52).

Ethical Socialists, who believed that “the sense of brotherhood is itself the central feature of socialism” (Bevir 52), would have been especially attracted to the way that, in

Arvin’s assessment, Leaves of Grass “abounds in the imagery of participation, how robust it is in its evocations of common work, common play, of common struggles, of common aspirations” (279). Aware of both Whitman’s celebration of the individual and his “conception of free and wholesome communality” (Arvin 279), British Ethical

Socialists took up his banner. Kirsten Harris shows that as “Whitman’s democratic vision was removed from its American context and reconstructed so that it was 4 applicable to Britain and the socialist cause,” democracy and socialism became synonymous (115).

In his book The Selfish Gene, scientist Richard Dawkins has posited the concept of the “meme” – “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” which

“propagate[s] [itself] in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain” (192).

Geneticist Jacques Monod proposes that like genes, ideas can “fuse, recombine, segregate their content, [and] evolve” (qtd. in Gleick). Writing in Smithsonian

Magazine, James Gleick notes that memes can take the form of ideas, tunes, catchphrases, and images, and that rhyme and rhythm are especially helpful in ingraining memes into human consciousness. Whitman’s poetic interpretation of democracy was so compelling that his memes took on what Gleick calls “staying power,” jumping across class and cultural divides to implant themselves in the fabric of socialism. Whitman’s use of terms like “ensemble,” “en-masse,” “rapport,”

“sympathy,” “comrade,” and “solidarity” in his poetry captured the spirit with which the socialist movement was imbued, establishing memes that took on a life of their own.

Thus, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman became an icon of the British Ethical Socialism movement, which appropriated and mutated his central memes.

Whitman himself never claimed a socialist agenda in Leaves of Grass, and, indeed, his first American readers neither sought nor found a socialist strain in his poetry. In Walt Whitman’s America, Reynolds gives short shrift to any mention of

Whitman’s interest in socialism, writing, 5

Although he shared the concerns and language of the radical agitators of the day, [Whitman] did not go so far as many did in their efforts to overthrow or supplant the American system. He took only a passing interest, for instance, in the utopian socialist movement that swept the nation in the forties. (141-2)

Reynolds further points out that “Throughout his life, [Whitman] resisted the programs of socialists and labor activists” (Walt 142). Biographer Justin Kaplan does not even bother denying Whitman’s possible socialist leanings, preferring to ignore the topic altogether. Robertson notes Whitman’s “indifference to the socialist movement of his time” (Worshipping 226). In Walt Whitman: The Political Poet, Betsy Erkkila states that “although Whitman never questioned the relations of private property and free enterprise at the foundation of the American system” (34), he was troubled by the growing gap between the haves and have-nots that he saw around him. Erkkila’s observation, however, is that “Whitman attributed the problem not to a failure in the system but to an insufficiently radical commitment to Democratic ideology” on the part of Americans (34). His first American readers, as well, seem to have missed any socialist connections in his poetry. Enmeshed as they were in their new democratic project, these readers of Whitman saw predominantly a radical experiment in language and a celebration of the indomitable spirit of what Whitman called in his 1872 Preface

“an aggregated, inseparable, unprecedented, electric Democratic Nationality”

(Whitman, Leaves 651 italics in original). When this democratic meme found its way to

Europe, however, it mutated into a call for social revolution.

The British were the first to read into Whitman’s poetry a compelling socialist argument. By the 1880s Whitman had established a literary reputation in England that 6 equaled his American reputation.3 The second wave of enthusiastic British readers, however, were more inclined to believe that they had discovered through his poetry a new religion based on male comradeship. One of his first British adherents was John

Addington Symonds, a well-known Victorian intellectual. First exposed to Whitman’s poetry in 1865, Symonds became a confirmed Whitmanite whose primary attraction to

Leaves of Grass was his interest in the advocacy for same-sex love apparent in the

Calamus poems. This interest eventually turned into a more encompassing vision of

“human brotherhood” that he articulated in his 1893 book A Study of Walt Whitman.

“[H]e taught me to comprehend,” writes Symonds,

the harmony between the democratic spirit, science, and that larger religion to which the modern world is being led by the conception of human brotherhood…. Through him, I stripped my soul of social prejudices. Through him, I have been able to fraternize in comradeship with men of all classes and several races, irrespective of their caste, creed, occupation, and special training. To him I owe some of the best friends I now claim – sons of the soil, hard workers, natural and nonchalant, ‘powerful uneducated persons. (qtd. in Brown 6-7)

Symonds and other men whom Robertson terms “upper-middle-class members of the

British intelligentsia” (Worshipping 143), including poet and former Church of England minister Edward Carpenter and author Oscar Wilde,4 became the standard bearers who advanced Whitman’s celebration of male comradeship in the direction of a socialist world view. Evoking Whitman’s memes of manly affection and sympathy across social class, Carpenter looks forward to “that great movement which will one day transform the common life by substituting the bond of personal affection and compassion for the monetary, legal, and other external ties which now control and confine society” (qtd. in

Robertson, Worshipping 186). It is a small step from this perspective to socialism. 7

Through the influence of Symonds, Carpenter, and others in their circle, Whitman’s poetry was widely disseminated among the intelligentsia, promoting familiarity with his memes of comradeship and democratic harmony.

A British middle class interest in Whitman existed parallel to the interest of the upper classes, and through the work of J.W. Wallace, this middle-class interest produced a direct link to Ethical Socialism. Under the leadership of Wallace, an architect’s assistant from a working class background, the Eagle Street College was formed in 1887, becoming, as one member wrote in a song lyric, “the tribe of Walt”

(qtd. in Robertson, Worshipping 211) – the nexus of Whitmanism in England. The

Eagle Street College was composed of middle class young men who, like Symonds and

Carpenter, were attracted to Whitman’s affirmation of same-sex comradeship but who went beyond, elevating Whitman to a Christ figure and Whitmanism to the status of a religion. “Since Christ died,” writes Wallace in 1890, “… no greater spiritual force has appeared on earth than is incarnated in Walt Whitman” (qtd. in Robertson, Worshipping

216). In an era when traditional religious belief was being challenged by Darwinism and scientific discoveries, Wallace suggests, “Let us make our little College a church! A church where, without formulas and ritual, with honest freedom of opinion and speech, we may nevertheless meet ‘in His name’” (qtd. in Robertson, Worshipping 216-17).

“His name,” of course, was Walt Whitman. Devastated by Whitman’s death in 1892, the members of the Eagle Street College were anxious that Whitman’s poetry not be forgotten, and they sought ways to continue disseminating his “gospel” (Robertson,

Worshipping 223). 8

In addition to his interest in Whitman, Wallace was deeply involved in the

British Ethical Socialism movement. As Harris points out, British adherents of Ethical

Socialism strove for “a more visionary social ideal” than simple political reform (117).

According to Mark Bevir, Ethical Socialism employed “an ethical tone deriving from a vision of socialism as a new religion requiring a new personal life” (qtd in Harris 117).

This strain of Socialist thinking is similar to the beliefs espoused by Debs in his 1908 journal article “Socialist Ideals”:

While Socialism is a political movement with an industrial purpose . . ., it is really the most idealistic movement of centuries. So idealistic is it in aims that, while having no specific religious tendency or purpose, it partakes somewhat of the nature of a religious movement and awakens something of a religious enthusiasm among its adherents. (1)

This “religious enthusiasm” echoes what Rebecca Edwards posits is Whitman’s goal –

“to help each individual find truth and self-expression while strengthening ties of community and love” (5). What better way to foster the religion of socialism than with the religion of Whitmanism? The link between Socialism and Whitmanism, however, depended on the mutation of Whitman’s democratic ideal into a socialist ideal. This mutation was possible through Whitman’s endorsement of Darwin’s theory of evolution. According to Donald Winters, at the end of the nineteenth century, “liberal religion” embraced Darwinism, “resulting in the three clearly related ideas of ‘the immanence of God, the organic or solidaristic view of society, and the presence of the

Kingdom of Heaven on earth” (4). Whitman’s philosophy, expressing as it does a belief in a divine light in every individual, the value of the individual “en masse,” and a utopian democratic future, was in perfect accord with these ideas, as was the philosophy 9 of the Ethical Socialists. Quoting Whitman, Reginald A. Beckett points out in his 1888 article “Walt Whitman as a Socialist Poet” that “The doctrine of evolution, which is the foundation of Socialism, [Whitman] regards as the ‘last best word up to date upon the old problems of philosophy’” (11). In her 1903 pamphlet “Walt Whitman: The Poet of the Wider Selfhood,” Maynard’s socialist analysis of Whitman’s philosophy endorses the view of the evolutionary progress of democracy:

To combine the freest growth of the individual with the fullest measure of social unity is the problem of human progress. Nature is pledged to each alike. Evolution is bent upon the union of these apparent enemies. It will find means to protect the units while it makes equally complete their union. (127).

As Harris points out, socialists assumed democracy to be an evolutionary step toward a socialist future, and thus they tended to use “democracy” as a synonym for socialism

“or to denote an overarching category which included not only socialism but other movements which worked toward creating a more equal society” (115). Hence, for instance, while Whitman’s references in “Starting From Paumanok” concern his vision of the future of American democracy, socialists would have felt free to interpret his vision as what Debs calls “an extension of the ideal of democracy into the economic field” of socialism (“Socialist” 1):

A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching, A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new contests, New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts. (Whitman, Leaves 24)

Thus for the Ethical Socialists, Whitman’s democratic meme mutated into socialism. 10

The Ethical Socialists’ embrace of Whitman’s poetry was part of a broader socialist impulse to embrace literature in general to further their ends. When Wallace helped to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1892-3, he found the perfect opportunity to weave Whitman into a political philosophy. The British Socialist movement was already amenable to religious rhetoric, as this movement sprang from lower and working-class populations that, as Robertson points out, were steeped in

“non-conformist Protestantism” and that were “comfortable with the evangelical emphasis on personal transformation as the basis of social renewal” (Worshipping 224).

Thus, in an address to the national ILP conference, Wallace found eager listeners when he lectured on Whitman and ended by reading aloud Whitman’s “Pioneers! O

Pioneers!” The audience would have found inspiration in stanzas like this one that show the solidarity of the masses engaged in a mighty, mutual project leading toward a utopian future:

All the past we leave behind, We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers! (Whitman, Leaves 192)

The evangelical fervor of this this poem made it one of Whitman’s most popular works among the Ethical Socialists (Robertson, Worshipping 226). In an 1887 article in the socialist journal To-day Percival Chubb celebrates writers who “quickened and nourished in us a deeper sense of human dignity, a more exacting demand for freedom, a keener susceptibility to beauty and recoil from ugliness a wider sympathy, and more uniting spirit of comradeship” (qtd. in Harris 120). Whitman’s poetry certainly fit this paradigm. Further, in her study of Walt Whitman’s appearance in nineteenth century 11

British socialist journals, Harris develops the argument of textualization – positing that the act of reproducing Whitman’s work in these publications “caused it to acquire socialist connotations” (118) and thus melded Whitman’s identity to the socialist cause.

Prominent socialist John Trevor made his publication The Labour Prophet into a

Whitman organ, claiming that Whitman was “nearer to God than any man on earth” and using Christian rhetoric to depict Whitman as an “alternative messianic figure” (Harris

125). The socialist British Fellowship of New Life journal Seed Time fostered

Whitman’s poetry, as it “promoted a form of socialism that prioritized the development of the individual spirit over state reform” and preached that “individualism was not… antithetical to socialism” (Harris 116). The fervor with which Whitman was embraced by British socialists like Trevor caused blurring of the boundaries between literature and politics. Did socialism exude Whitman’s ideas, or did Whitman exude socialism? As

Harris points out, “For Trevor, it was not so much that Whitman was part of a socialist literary culture, as that socialism was considered to be a part of a Whitmanian spiritual democracy” (Harris 128). In this same tradition of the religion of democracy, in 1938,

Arvin saw Leaves of Grass as an “evangel-poem of humane hopefulness, of positive struggle, of progressive movement and change” (255). Thus Whitman’s poetic memes of individualism tempered with comradeship, and a newer, better world that would evolve from democracy established Whitman as “a visionary spiritual guide for the socialist movement” (Arvin 125).

Through an interlocking system of friendships and shared values, in the late nineteenth century this concept of Whitman’s philosophy crossed the Atlantic Ocean 12 and became firmly entrenched in America, eventually positioning Walt Whitman as the centerpiece of socialism there, as well. Chapter Two discusses this American Whitman phenomenon and the way in which Whitman’s proponents found within his poetry and prose a spirit of democratic equality and revolutionary fervor which meshed with their own political goals. With the encouragement of Whitman’s friend and proponent

Horace Traubel, Whitman Fellowships sprang up around America celebrating the literary, political, and spiritual elements of Whitman’s poetry. The chapter traces the links between this movement and the American Ethical Culture and socialist movements. Chapter Three examines Whitman’s unfavorable attitude towards labor unions, in spite of which, ironically, his memes were circulated throughout the radical left at the turn of the twentieth century. This chapter examines four Whitman proponents who were vital to his association with liberal activism and labor causes: the freethinker Robert Ingersoll; defense lawyer Clarence Darrow; anarchist Emma

Goldman, and socialist Eugene V. Debs. Each of these social activists saw to it that

Whitman’s poetry came to be celebrated throughout the radical left. Chapter Four examines specifically the appearance of Whitman memes in the Industrial Workers of the World (whose members were called “Wobblies”), a union formed in 1905 that welcomed all workers to join in a program of direct action rather than political action to accomplish social revolution. Many of the leaders whose ideas played crucial roles in the I.W.W., including the four people discussed in Chapter Three, were Whitmanites who used Whitman memes in their rhetoric and propaganda efforts. Chapter Four discusses those propaganda efforts, as well as Wobbly activities that reflect a 13 philosophy similar to Whitman’s. Chapter Five argues for a new reading of Whitman, casting the light of cultural and reader response criticism on Whitman and the I.W.W., inviting discussion of the ultimate nature of Walt Whitman’s project of social restructuring and the way his poetry was used by the I.W.W. accomplish its ends. Thus, in a dynamic interplay with the discourses of socialism, anarchism, humanism, and freethought in early twentieth-century America, Whitman’s texts helped to shape those forces while at the same time the texts themselves were re-shaped by their radical disseminators.

14

Chapter 2

Horace Traubel and His “Hot Little Prophets”

The endeavors of American socialist Horace Traubel, variously described as

Whitman’s “own Boswell” (Meyers 213), “literary secretary” (Robertson, Worshipping

235), “errand boy”5 (Karsner 10), and “dutiful son” (“Horace”), further cemented the socialist reading of Walt Whitman’s poetry, a reading that elevated above all other

Whitman themes his notion of the spiritual fulfillment inherent in the comradeship of a dignified and egalitarian working class marching toward a utopian participatory democracy based on unselfish shared interests. In 1873, Traubel was fifteen years old when the fifty-four year old Whitman, recovering from a stroke, moved into his neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey. An “[i]solated and melancholy” (Robertson,

Worshipping 234) Whitman found comfort and distraction in conversations with

Traubel, who, like Whitman, had native intelligence and little formal schooling. When

Whitman moved to Mickle Street in 1883, he took on Traubel as his literary secretary and confidant. As their friendship strengthened, Whitman came to rely on Traubel emotionally. “I feel somehow as if you had consecrated yourself to me,” Whitman told

Traubel. “That entails something on my part: I feel somehow as if I was consecrated to you. Well – we will work out the rest of my life-job together” (qtd. in Robertson,

Worshipping 236). In this spirit, Traubel began recording in writing his conversations with Whitman, a project that eventually manifested itself in the nine volumes of With

Walt Whitman in Camden, the first published in 1906 and the last not published until

1996. Parallel to this devotion to Whitman, Michael Robertson points out that Horace 15

Traubel was engaged, like his Whitmanite counterparts, in a personal struggle “to reconcile premodern religions with post-Darwinian science and democratic political theory” (Robertson, Worshipping 239). Traubel was drawn to the Ethical Culture movement that was established by a reform-minded Jewish rabbi in New York City in the mid-1870s and that strongly echoed the beliefs of the British Ethical Socialists in its liberal, “spiritually tinged ethical humanism” (Robertson, Worshipping 240). Traubel founded his own magazine – The Conservator – in 1890, intending to propagate this new religious movement, as well as his eclectic political beliefs. Like the journals of the British Ethical Socialist movement, The Conservator became a vehicle for the dissemination of Whitman’s poetry and philosophy. Further, just as the men of the

Eagle College found in Walt Whitman’s death the opportunity to spread his message via the British Ethical Socialist movement, Traubel was moved to establish the Walt

Whitman Fellowship: International to perpetuate and celebrate Whitman’s legacy. “I don’t worship the ground you tread on or kiss the hem of your garment,” Traubel told

Whitman, “but I think I know how you are bound to be regarded in the future” (qtd. in

Kaplan 41). Using With Walt Whitman in Camden, The Conservator, and the Whitman

Fellowship movement, Traubel, as William Reichert points out, “spent the rest of his life trying to explain Whitman to America” (317) and shaping the way Whitman was read by the leaders of the radical left in America at the turn of the twentieth century.

His conversations in With Walt Whitman in Camden show Traubel’s project to make Whitman’s democratic impulses cast a socialist shadow as he repeatedly challenged Whitman to recognize socialist memes within his work. Traubel’s close 16 friendship with Whitman evolved in the early 1870s, at a time when Whitman’s poetry was being denounced by the American literary establishment. Although his British adherents visited him and sent him messages of support and friendship, in America,

Whitman, struggling with poor health, was, as David Karsner relates in 1919, “made the target of the most abusive calumny, lies and suspicion ever heaped upon a literary figure” (59). The young Traubel was quickly swept up in the circle of Whitmanites who strove to shield Whitman from all criticism, and for the rest of Whitman’s life,

Traubel became his “proxy, editorial assistant, messenger and companion” (Kaplan 34), eventually, in 1888, taking on the self-imposed task of transcribing their conversations.

In Volume 1 of With Walt Whitman in Camden, published in 1906, Traubel writes in a prefatory note to readers:

Did Whitman know I was keeping such a record? No. Yet he knew I would write of our experiences together. Every now and then he charged me with immortal commissions. He would say: "I want you to speak for me when I am dead." On several occasions I read him my reports. They were very satisfactory. "You do the thing just as I should wish it to be done." He always imposed it upon me to tell the truth about him. The worst truth no less than the best truth. (xiii)

The attitude Traubel expresses here is important because his socialist leanings were a source of repeated discussion and conflict with Whitman. In a 1912 article in The

Conservator, Traubel writes that “Socialism is not a historic tableau projected from petrified backgrounds but a vital, breathing race of people emerging into personality and freedom” (59), and we can sense an echo of Whitman in this statement. As Bryan

Garman points out, “[Whitman] realized that the seemingly unrestrained development of industrial capitalism posed important problems for the Republic, but he defined these 17 problems as moral, not structural or economic” (Race 38). And at the root of Whitman’s moral stance is the quality of the economic relationship that springs organically from the “single solitary person” (Garman, Race 34) and his comrades, all of whom are connected by love and engaged in meaningful work that evinces “their commitment to the community” (Garman, Race 21). Whitman does not understand this system as an economic program that is imposed from above by an impersonal authority. Writing in

1927, Frank Harris, a British editor and journalist who was Traubel’s friend, states, “as a Socialist [Traubel] broke away from Whitman’s traditional and excessive individualism. Traubel was something more than a continuator: he became a sort of St.

Paul, preaching now Whitman’s gospel, now his own” (338). In spite of Traubel’s penchant for minimizing Whitman’s individualist doctrine, Harris identifies in Traubel a “kindred spirit to interpret and give authentic record” to Whitman (336). Thus, while

Whitman balked at labeling his philosophy, stating, “I was never made to live inside a fence” (qtd. in Kaplan 70), Traubel, latching on to what Reynolds calls the “proletarian effect” of Leaves of Grass (Walt 313), seemed always ready to challenge Whitman to re-interpret his democratic principles as support for socialist principles, repeatedly drawing Whitman’s attention from “One’s-Self” as “a simple separate person”

(Whitman, Leaves 3) to the cause of social justice for the masses. William Reichert calls

Traubel “one of the staunchest friends the laboring man has ever had” (317), and as such, he evidently enjoyed educating Whitman about social theory, “convinced that

Whitman was,” Robertson points out, “without knowing it, a proto-socialist”

(Worshipping 252). In one of their conversations, Traubel sought to call Whitman’s 18 attention to anarchism, a political theory that Reichert points out “maintain[s] that political power wielded by government can never be acceptable… as a legitimate mode of social control because it crushes out individual freedom” (4). In that discussion about anarchy, Whitman states, “I don’t see what they are driving at – what the anarchists want.” Evidently recognizing a sympathetic vibration between anarchism and

Whitman’s celebration of individual freedom, Traubel replies, “What do you mean.

Your book is full of anarchism…. Their contention is the same as yours.” He then harangues Whitman: “You ask: what do they want: what do they want? Let me ask you: what do you want?” Thus from Whitman’s initial contention that he does not understand anarchism, Traubel elicits this response:

I want the people: most of all the people: men, women, children: I want them to have what belongs to them: not a part of it, but all of it: I want anything done that will give the people their proper opportunities – their full life: anything, anything: whether by one means or another, I want the people to be given their due. (qtd. in Karsner 73)

“That don’t sound like a plea for millionaires,” responds Traubel, shaping the conversation around his socialist agenda (Karsner 73). Garman points out that early leftists “insisted” that Whitman’s poetry “articulated a collective social vision that opposed the exploitative, iniquitous relations that characterized capitalist society” (Race

3). Actually, Whitman opposed any “exploitative, iniquitous relations,” personal or otherwise, so it was not difficult for Traubel to make him say so. Discussing British socialist Albert Rhys Williams in 1888, Whitman praises him for his effort “to go back and democratize Great Britain.” “Do you have any sympathy for the socialism of these men?” Traubel inquires, to which Whitman responds: 19

In the large sense, whatever the political process, the social end is bound to be achieved: too much is made of property, here, now, in our noisy, bragging civilization—too little of men. As I understand these men they are for putting the crown on man—taking it off things. Ain't we all socialists, after all? (With)

Traubel must have been thrilled by Whitman’s “confession,” as have many socialists since. As Karsner asserts, “Traubel insisted in drawing Whitman out on the labor question… Traubel thought he knew what was wrong with the world. So did Whitman.

But Traubel was convinced of the proper remedy, while Whitman was not and did not much concern himself about it” (72). Traubel must have realized that, as Reichert asserts, Whitman was “a profoundly rebellious individual, refusing to submit himself to the formal rules and regulations of organized society” (318); yet, ironically, in presenting these conversations to the public, Traubel repackages Whitman’s democratic leanings as socialist in nature. “Sometimes… I think,” Whitman muses, “I feel almost sure, Socialism is the next thing coming: I shrink from it in some ways: yet it looks like our only hope” (qtd. in Arvin 248) – not exactly a ringing endorsement of the socialist cause, but good enough to give Trauble permission to market him as a socialist after his death. “Be radical – be radical –“ Whitman tells Traubel, and we can hear the exasperation in his voice as he completes his statement: “…be not too damned radical”

(qtd. in Garman, Race 223). And we can hear the exasperation in Trauble’s voice when he writes of Whitman, “no label will stick to him” (qtd. in Reichert 318). Thus, as “St.

Paul, preaching now Whitman’s gospel, now his own” (Harris 338), Traubel was “the constant and invisible force behind the Whitman propaganda” (Karsner 70).

Traubel continued his crusade in his journal, The Conservator, which he 20 founded in 1894 and for over three decades used as a vehicle for celebrating both his personal political and moral philosophy and the philosophy and poetry of Walt

Whitman. Traubel’s philosophy behind his journal was that, as Karsner points out, “The spiritual aspect of the labor movement is the desire, not for more wages only, but for opportunity in which to reach out in quest for finer possessions and richer truths” and that it was his duty to address “ethical and intellectual discontent” (58). According to

Gary Schmidgall in his introduction to Conserving Walt Whitman’s Fame, Traubel never explained why he chose this name for his journal, but, Schmidgall suggests that we simply need to consult a dictionary, defining a conservator as “one who conserves or preserves from injury [or] violation . . . one who is responsible for the person and property” of someone unable to do so himself (xix). Whitman’s reputation was certainly first on Traubel’s list of things to “preserve from injury.” Calling The

Conservator “a cornucopia” of Whitman material, Schmidgall points out that in the run of 352 issues of the journal, 292 contain Whitman references of some kind (xix). During

Whitman’s lifetime and after his death, Traubel worked tirelessly to keep his poetry and persona alive in American culture. But within this project, Traubel also re-shaped

Whitman in crucial ways, altering his memes within a culture of leftist politics. The

Whitman Archive points out that “[Traubel’s] own books can be read as socialist refigurings of Whitman's work, each of his titles subtly adjusting Whitman's terminology: Chants Communal. . . took the individualistic edge off of Whitman's

"Chants Democratic;" [and] Traubel’s Optimos “redefined Whitman's ‘kosmos’6 as an optimized ‘cheerful whole’” (“Horace”). Thus we see Traubel “preaching now 21

Whitman’s gospel, now his own.”

At the same time that he was ensuring the legacy of Walt Whitman, Traubel was also turning The Conservator into a voice for the Ethical Culture movement and his personal political views (Robertson, Worshipping 246-7). Closely akin to the British

Ethical Socialist movement, the Ethical Culture movement had its roots in Reform

Judaism and Unitarianism, producing a doctrine that proclaimed God to be immanent in every aspect of the world, always unfolding his presence through a gradual, evolutionary process. Such a view blurs the distinction between the sacred and the secular, proclaiming that the earthly and the divine are one and “emphasiz[ing] religious

‘deed not creed’” (Abbott 45). Thus, human society, “embod[ying] the divine spirit,” is one entity and brotherhood a spiritual imperative (Bevir 52). By examining what

Karsner calls “Those ethical verities, those humanitarian impulses, which defer to none but universal ends” (53), Traubel hoped to unite the spiritual and political realms in much the same way that he believed Whitman had. William Thurston Brown, a proponent of Christian Socialism, which was closely related to the Ethical Culture movement, was a Unitarian minister in Salt Lake City, Utah, from 1907-1910 and a firm Whitman adherent. His views of Whitman mirror Traubel’s. “. . . I am convinced,” he writes in Walt Whitman: Poet of the Human Whole, “that for many men of every class in society a knowledge of the verses of Whitman and a sympathetic understanding of his personality has all the exhilaration and stimulus, in a moral way, that a cold bath has in a physical way . . . ‘Come on in – the water’s fine.’” He continues, “No emancipation of the human race or any part of it is possible of which the song of 22

Whitman is not the natural and inevitable music” (Brown, bold original). These concepts appealed to Whitmanites, Ethical Culturists, and socialists, the three groups of readers whom Traubel strove to reach. In 1902 Traubel founded the Society For Ethical

Research, an eclectic group consisting of what Karsner terms “anarchists, theosophists, prohibitionists, single taxers, Adventists, Socialists, and free thinkers” (51), thus creating the opportunity, through The Conservator, to expose an entire free-thinking, left-leaning segment of American culture to the poetry and philosophy of Walt

Whitman.

Gary Schmidgall points out that proof of Trauble’s “socialist-leaning-toward- communist” views can be found in the articles he chose to publish in The Conservator –

“Harry Call’s The Coming Revolution, Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Jack

London’s War of the Classes, Carpenter’s Towards Democracy, John Spargo’s The

Substance of Socialism, Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays . . .” among them (xxxii). In his 1893 Conservator article “The Coming Labor Movement,” W. L.

Sheldon’s asserts that “we may look forward eagerly to the triumph of an eight-hour day over the civilized and the uncivilized world . . . It strikes me that there is need of an organization of the laboring classes, irrespective of race, color, condition, and whatever be their wages” (qtd. in Schmidgall xxxii). Traubel also showed his interest in socialist politics by reviewing many books in the field, including Boycotts and the Labor

Struggle, Out of Work: A Study of Unemployment, Municipal Ownership, Syndicalism,

Industrial Unions and Socialism, and Financing the Wage-earner’s Family (Schmidgall xxxii). Inserting Walt Whitman among these articles, Traubel was implying that, for 23 instance, in his labor-focused poems such as “A Song for Occupations” (a socialist favorite) and “Song of the Broad-Axe,” and in his celebration of the working man and woman in “Song of Myself” Whitman viewed the world through a similar lens.

Other political articles that Traubel published in The Conservator directly concerned Walt Whitman. In presenting these articles about Whitman in a left-wing journal, Traubel, in the tradition of The Labour Prophet, caused Americans to read

Whitman as a socialist. Admitting in 1898 that Whitman “seemed to have no opinion or was unwilling to speculate” on the social program that would produce “the new city of friends” that he wanted to see in America’s future, M.V. Ball finds in his Conservator article “Whitman and Socialism” what so many others found – that “Democracy is inevitable. Universal comradeship, conceived and protected in freedom, must issue from all present conflict” (165). Mustering as an example Whitman’s “Song For

Occupations,” Ball claims that the poem “enforces one of the primary principles of socialism, namely – that the great works of the earth only have come from men and women and men and women enjoy and use them in social union” (163). Thus

Whitman’s project to “find the eternal meanings of” the laborers of America (Whitman,

Leaves 177) is appropriated by the socialist cause. Ball also quotes Whitman’s line from

“A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” that “the working-man and working-woman are to be in my pages from first and last” (160), linking this meme to the socialist cause.

However, unlike so many others who, directly equating democracy and comradeship with socialism, claimed Whitman as their own, Ball ultimately states that “Whitman gave us enough. Let us not squeeze him into an ism” (165). 24

Leonard Abbott’s 1902 article in The Conservator follows in this tradition. In

“The Democracy of Whitman and the Democracy of Socialism,” Abbott posits that “It was Whitman’s concept of the organic unity of the world, of the ultimate unity of society, which gave his democracy its logic and strength” (179), again blurring the line between democracy and socialism. “Our boasted democracy,” he continues, “is after all a good deal of a sham. It is a plutocracy based upon class rule and the degradation of the most useful members of society – the workingmen” (Abbott 179). Drawing

Whitman into his discussion, he quotes “Song of Myself”: “Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing and the chaff of payment receiving/ A few idly owning and they the wheat continually claiming” (Abbott 180). Drawing on the utopian vision of a socialist future,

Abbott rhapsodizes that “Socialism will lift the dead weight from men’s souls and will give the human spirit a chance to soar” (181), linking this sentiment to Whitman’s establishment of “the institution of the dear love of comrades” (qtd. in Abbott 181).

Throughout its thirty year publication run, The Conservator and Horace Traubel produced a constant drumbeat that blurred the line between socialism and Whitman’s democracy. “I believe,” wrote Abbott, “that it is the democracy of socialism that is finally going to make possible the democracy of Walt Whitman” (181), making one impossible without the other and elevating Whitmanist socialism to the apogee of human experience.

Not content with the reach of The Conservator in preserving Whitman’s legacy, in 1894 Traubel was one of the founding members of the Whitman Fellowship:

International, a group of “disciples who worked to assure Whitman's immortality” 25

(“Horace”). The Fellowship had three purposes: “to bring together people interested in

Whitman, to establish Whitman fellowships all over the world, and to publish works relating to Whitman” (Pannapacker 37). One member stated that the meetings were a collection of what member William White identified as “Socialists, anarchists, communists, painters, poets, mechanics, laborers, [and] businessmen” whose common feature was a love of Walt Whitman (qtd. in Pannapacker 37-38). Horace Traubel served as the secretary-treasurer until his dying day and was the organization’s greatest cheerleader, organizing annual dinners and special commemorative celebrations. Alan

Trachtenberg describes dinner meetings of the Fellowship “presided over by the sweet- spirited socialist Horace Traubel and other ‘hot little prophets’ in Bliss Perry’s7 epithet”

(“Walt” 196). Determined that the radical American leaders of the left would have access to the Fellowship, Traubel extended membership to many leftist luminaries:

Helen Keller, Robert Ingersoll (“The Great Agnostic”), Jack London, Eugene V. Debs

(labor leader and Socialist Party candidate for President), Clarence Darrow (defense attorney), Emma Goldman (anarchist leader), Jane Addams (founder of Chicago’s Hull

House), Havelock Ellis (sexologist), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (feminist author).

Many of the members of the Fellowship, according to Robertson, “viewed socialism as a millennial religious movement that would usher in a utopia of comradeship”

(“Reading” 25). During the mid-1890s, the organization thrived, but eventually its meetings were reduced to an annual dinner in celebration of Whitman’s birthday. At these dinners, tributes were read, speeches were given, and Whitmania ran rampant.

Socialist J.W. Wallace, one of the Whitman Fellowship’s original British members, 26 expressed in clear terms the generally-held belief in Whitman’s socialist leanings in his piece in the May, 1919, Whitman Centennial Issue of The Conservator. The current economic system in place in western Europe, he writes, is now in “its final stages of dissolution and disintegration” (Schmidgall 389). He continues:

Based on the idea of private property and monopoly, manifesting itself more and more in the exploitation of the masses by a privileged few, in competitive commerce and business, and in the gigantic growth of modern industrialism and capitalism, it has fostered and developed . . . a selfish and ruthless greed, low aims, and a brutalizing and soulless materialism. (Schmidgall 389)

This old order must be replaced, he avers, by a new order – “the era of true democracy

[of which] Whitman is so far the greatest pioneer and exemplar” (Schmidgall 389).

Striking a blow for socialist Whitmanism, he states that Whitman “is likely to remain the chief influence in its development” (Schmidgall 389). Thus did politics and poetics mesh in the Whitman Fellowship to mold and preserve the legacy of Walt Whitman, as a group of members of the Fellowship drifted toward the radical fringe of the American labor movement and the formation of a new labor union, the Industrial Workers of the

World.

27

Chapter 3

The Whitman Memes

True to his image of himself as a member of an artisanal republic of free, skilled laborers, Walt Whitman’s daguerreotype portrait in the first edition of Leaves of Grass depicts him in the simple, homespun clothing of a working stiff, his hat, as David S.

Reynolds observes, “tilted in cocky defiance” (144). As M. Wynn Thomas points out, in this depiction, “he both signaled his intention to give the mechanics, laborers, and artisans of America” a poetic voice while intending to “proudly proclaim his own social origins in working-class Brooklyn” (344). The economic turmoil of the first part of the nineteenth century, however, threw Whitman’s vision of his worker’s republic into disarray as industrial capitalism led “to the gradual transformation of the skilled artisan class . . . into either unskilled, wage-earning laborers or small entrepreneurs” (Thomas

344). In the early 1830s, Whitman was a Jacksonian Democrat when the Democratic

Party took up the banner of the working class through a movement known as the

Locofocos. As a journalist, Whitman identified with the labor politics of the Jacksonian radicalism of the Locofoco leader William Leggett, whose populism, according to

Reynolds, “was so strong that he viewed the plowman farmer as the highest embodiment of virtue” (Walt 67). Whitman wanted no part in the rise of a system of industrial capitalism that he viewed, as Jason Stacy points out, as seeking “to rob workingmen of their natural dignity” (17) and as inimical to his “idealized world of self-sufficient workers contentedly constituting a harmonious community of spontaneously cooperative labor” (Thomas 344-45), a vision that he explores at length 28 in “A Song for Occupations,” a poem that Thomas calls his “rousing hymn to labor”

(345).

Ironically, as Whitman was increasingly adopted as a socialist standard bearer, his attitude towards the concerns of labor unions became increasingly conflicted.

According to Bryan Garman, Whitman “consistently opposed labor unions, not because they pursued a more equitable wage but because he worried that their members ‘would set on their fellow-workingmen who didn’t belong to their ‘union’ like tigers or beasts of prey’” (Race 20). Steeped as Whitman was in his memories of a friendly, pre- industrial community of small-scale, artisanal craftsmen, as Alan Trachtenberg observes, “The social logic of the wage system escaped him” (“Politics” 131). Further,

Trachtenberg points out, “He does not ask how labor, property, and society might other- wise look, does not imagine the overthrow of the system of occupations or the social relations of labor” (“Politics” 131), preferring instead to celebrate an ideal vision of

America in which, for him, work and art are synonymous. “Throughout his life,” writes

Reynolds, “[Whitman] resisted the programs of socialists and labor activists, saying that as a poet he was a socialist only ‘intrinsically, in my meanings’” (Walt 142), not, evidently, in his practical view of the way he would like society to function. For

Whitman the issue was one of personal freedom, both physical freedom and freedom of expression. Reynolds points out Whitman’s perennial concern with the core conflict between “the centrifugal forces of liberty and individual rights, on the one hand, and the centripetal ones of union and national power” on the other (Walt 146). Whitman, observes Reynolds, “shied away from movements that seemed to upset that delicate 29 balance” of individualism and community by leaning too far in one direction or the other (Reynolds, Walt 146). “I am somehow afraid of agitators,” says Whitman to

Traubel, “though I believe in agitation” (qtd. in Reynolds, Walt 144). Thus, ironically, though lauded by socialists, Stacy tells us that “throughout his life [Whitman] reacted suspiciously toward labor radicalism” (127) as a “socially divisive” force (Thomas

345), producing instead the vision that Thomas sees reflected in “Song of Myself” – “an artisanal dream from the past masquerading as a vision of the present” (345).

How and why, then, did Whitman come to be associated with the left wing labor movement of early twentieth century America? In the 1871 work Democratic Vistas, his critique of the failings of the American democratic experiment that he saw around him,

Whitman addresses the labor question in a footnote to his main text, stating his concern with “The immense problem of the relation, adjustment, conflict, between Labor and its status and pay, on the one side, and the Capital of employers on the other side - looming up over These States like an ominous, limitless, murky cloud, perhaps before long to overshadow us all” (72). He cites “the increasing aggregation of capital in the hands of a few” (72) that has led to innumerable social ills that ultimately “stand as huge impedimenta of America's progress" (72). He offers no solution to this problem, however, except the overall push toward “a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking command, dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from its own interior and vital principles, entirely reconstructing Society” (Democratic 57). Late in his life, Whitman considered these questions once again. In his notes on “The Tramp and Strike Questions” (subtitled “Part of a Lecture proposed, never deliver’d.”) that was 30 published in Specimen Days & Collect in 1883, Whitman again addresses the troubling questions raised by an industrialized society. “Beneath the whole political world,” he writes,

what most presses and perplexes to-day, sending vastest results affecting the future, is not the abstract question of democracy, but of social and economic organization, the treatment of working-people by employers, and all that goes along with it – not only the wages-payment part, but a certain spirit and principle [.] (329)

Classifying the French and American Revolutions as “strikes” (Specimen 330),

Whitman compares present-day America to the “Old World” (330), observing that if

America is currently “grow[ing] vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late years… then our republican experiment… is at heart an unhealthy one” (330). Once again, however, he is unable to offer a solution to these problems. In spite of his ambivalence about the labor question, Whitman certainly had the ability to celebrate the worker in his poetry in a way that resonated with the laboring class. The Whitman Fellowship and Horace

Traubel capitalized on this ability as they spread “the good news” of Whitman’s philosophy by cultivating prominent liberals and leftists such as Robert Ingersoll,

Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, and Eugene V. Debs, all of whom had ties to the labor union movement. All confirmed Whitmanites, these important figures in

American liberalism had access to huge audiences and, thus, the ability to shape public opinion.

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, America found itself grappling with the realities of the Industrial Revolution and the havoc it raised on the 31 ideals of equality and economic prosperity for the masses, ideals that suffered in the face of “the exploitative power of the moneyed few over the productive many” (Wilentz

638). Many in the working class turned to socialism for a solution to the massive inequalities that were becoming too apparent to ignore. As the gap between the

American ideal of individual equality and the reality of deep economic divides grew wider, socialist rhetoric grew more moralistic (as we have seen in Chapter 2), mobilizing the working class to call for what Wilentz terms “the idealistic alternative to undemocratic class rule, the living embodiment of the unselfish cooperative commonwealth” (639). To make this goal palatable to the American public, however, socialists needed to “appeal . . . to the well-springs of American political culture”

(Wilentz 639). As participants in the socialist, freethought, and anarchist movements,

Robert Ingersoll, Clarence Darrow, Eugene V. Debs, and Emma Goldman used Walt

Whitman’s democratic, communitarian language and imagery to link their revolutionary rhetoric to traditional American ideals. As Lois Tyson writes, a “literary text is itself part of the interplay of discourses, a thread in the dynamic web of social meaning”

(291). Thus, history and literature, Tyson points out, “are mutually constitutive: they create each other” (292). When his work was adopted by the radical left, Walt Whitman became a socialist, whether he ever wanted to be one or not. As the radicals transmitted his memes by reinterpreting some of his meanings and ignoring others, all the while honoring his uniquely American democratic urges, these speakers created a new

Whitman while Whitman helped them create a new America. As we shall see in

Chapter Four, the Whitman memes created by these prominent public speakers all came 32 together at the turn of the twentieth century in the construction of One Big Union, the

Industrial Workers of the World.

Robert Ingersoll: The Freethinker Memes

Robert Ingersoll achieved fame in nineteenth-century America as a gifted freethought orator. Though Ingersoll had little direct contact with the labor unions, what

Susan Jacoby calls “the golden age of freethought” (Great 2) in America, from approximately 1875 to 1914, corresponded to the blossoming of socialism in response to the challenges posed by Darwinism and industrialism. Indeed, freethought and socialism shared the same scientific, secular impulses. Jacoby explains:

American freethought derived much of its power from an inclusiveness that encompassed many forms of rationalist belief. Often defined as a total absence of faith in God, freethought can better be understood as a phenomenon running the gamut from the truly anti-religious . . . to those who adhered to a private, unconventional faith . . . at odds with orthodox religious authority. (Freethinkers 4)

At the age of thirty-six, after a successful career as a lawyer, a colonel in the Union army during the Civil War, and a Republican politician, Robert Ingersoll decided to

“pursue his private vision of success” (Anderson, David 31) and took to the lecture circuit, where he quickly became “the most widely influential platform propagandist of the [nineteenth] century” (Robertson, J.M. 389). Paul Kurtz points out that Ingersoll

“was admired as a noble humanitarian, an advocate of human rights, and a defender of unpopular causes – including the rights of the poor, blacks, women, and the dispossessed” (9). To these issues Ingersoll brought his extraordinary oratorical skills.

Andrew Carnegie, David Anderson points out, believed that Ingersoll was “a great

American man of letters” (32) as did Henry Ward Beecher, who stated that he was “the 33 greatest speaker in the English language on earth” (qtd. in Anderson 32). Sporting nicknames like The Great Agnostic, “Matchless Bob, Handsome Bob, [and] Royal

Bob” (Anderson 32), Ingersoll swept the country addressing hundreds of thousands of listeners in the course of what Warren calls his “anti-theological career” (84), a career spent “propagat[ing] . . . the freethought gospel” (Warren 82). Walt Whitman, who considered Ingersoll his friend and greatly respected him, described Ingersoll’s oratorical style as “precious ointment,” and Clarence Darrow “sought to emulate” his speaking style (Anderson 31). Sidney Warren posits that this oratorical ability “was the outstanding gift which Ingersoll bestowed upon freethought in general and agnosticism in particular,” pointing out that “no other freethought leader was able to make his cause known to as many people” (81).

Robert Ingersoll’s “‘holy trinity’ of reason, observation, and experience”

(Persons 62) defined the freethought movement. Much of the freethought philosophy was attractive to Walt Whitman. As Reynolds points out, Ingersoll “both rejected formal religion and espoused a humanistic faith that owed much to modern science” and an appreciation of “the miraculous law underlying the physical universe” (Walt 580).

Whitman followed with interest the dispute between Ingersoll and the British politician

William Gladstone over Gladstone’s argument in support of Christianity. Orvin Larson tells us that when Whitman read Gladstone’s paper, he said with delight, “Bob will . . . crunch him, much as a cat would a mouse til there’s no life left to fool with” (225). In the greater scheme of things, though, Whitman found the dispute to be trivial. “I always feel that to one in the swim – in the swim of modern science, democracy, freedom – ” 34 he told Traubel, “the atonement, the Mosaic records, are not worth the dignity of consideration, of a reply” (qtd. in Larson, Orvin 225). Ultimately, Whitman found

Ingersoll’s entire agnostic project to be equally as trivial. “I know quite well why and whence I must disagree with him,” Whitman told Traubel. “The Colonel and I are not directly at issue even about God and immortality; I do not say yes where he says no; I say yes where he says nothing” (qtd. in Larson, Orvin 237). For his part, Ingersoll stated that “The weakest part of Whitman… was his God belief – that in some way all is good” (qtd. in Larson, Orvin 237-38). According to Stow Persons, Whitman had intended to write a lecture on religion in which he asserted that “each religion . . . was true to its time and place. And that Christianity was truest of all, but it too was fixed in its time, and, by implication, was now to be superseded” by a “religion of humanity”

(107). This impulse resonates with both the freethought and the Ethical Culture movements; as Persons points out, “Whitman’s preoccupation with humanity and indifference to theistic problems typified a large segment of the liberal thought of the day” (107). Whitman, also, according to Arvin, “had early acquired a passionate anti- clericalism, a vehement antagonism to churches and ‘preachers’” that he never lost

(198). This impulse allowed him to position himself among the freethinkers who, like

Ingersoll, recognized that “The word Liberty is not in any [religious] creed in the world” (qtd. in Jacoby, Great 53). Ultimately, though, Whitman’s concession to what

Jacoby terms “some sort of pantheistic deity” (Freethinkers 225) separated him from many proponents of freethought.

This did not stop Robert Ingersoll from reading Walt Whitman through a 35 freethinker’s lens. This is illustrated in his 1890 lecture on Walt Whitman and in his eulogy at Whitman’s funeral, in both of which he establishes freethinker Whitman memes. In his lecture, titled “Liberty in Literature,” he attributes to Leaves of Grass “no drapery of hypocrisy, no pretense, no fear,” saying that in the book “All customs were forgotten or disregarded, all rules broken… in everything a touch of chaos” (Ingersoll).

He says that Whitman was “familiar with labor, a friend of wind and wave . . ., liking the open road . . . neither master nor slave; willing that all should know his thoughts”

(Ingersoll), alluding to Whitman’s poem “Song of the Open Road,” in which Whitman writes of “The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose” (Whitman,

Leaves 126), such leaderless rambling being very appealing to the freethinker. Ingersoll honors Whitman’s concept of the “gospel of the body,” “the sacredness of love, the purity of passion” (Ingersoll) and places Whitman among “the great poets who have been on the side of the oppressed – of the downtrodden” (Ingersoll). “Walt Whitman,” says Ingersoll, “is in the highest sense a believer in democracy. He knows that there is but one excuse for government – the preservation of liberty, to the end that man may be happy.” He then quotes a Whitman line – “I have taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown. I am for those that have never been master’d” – to establish “a declaration of

[Whitman’s] independence” (qtd. in Ingersoll). “Walt Whitman is willing to stand alone,” Ingersoll states. “He is sufficient unto himself.” Evoking Whitman in the spirit of freethought, Ingersoll quotes the poet, saying, “Nothing, not God, is greater than one’s self.” Claiming that “The attitude of Whitman toward religion has not been understood,” Ingersoll praises his “absolute fairness” in spiritual matters, quoting 36

Whitman’s lines:

We consider Bibles and religion divine – I do not say they are not divine, I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still, It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life.

Waxing metaphorical, Ingersoll states, “Whitman keeps open house. He is intellectually hospitable. He extends his hand to a new idea.” Finally, Ingersoll notes that “the questions of origin and destiny are beyond the grasp of the human mind” and that

Whitman “does not imagine that he has reached the limit” of humanity’s journey. Thus, in his speech, Ingersoll plants Whitman firmly in the freethinker sphere, beyond dogma, beyond creeds, beyond the boundaries set up by authority. Ingersoll’s eulogy at

Whitman’s funeral on March 30, 1892, evokes similar freethought memes: “He came to our generation a free, untrammeled spirit, with sympathy for all,” Ingersoll states (qtd. in Jacoby, Great 206-207). Highlighting the freethought “hatred of tyranny” (Warren

82), Ingersoll points out that “He was the poet of that divine democracy which gives equal rights to all the sons and daughters of men . . . No man ever said more for the rights of humanity, more in favor of real democracy, of real justice” (qtd. in Jacoby,

Great 207-208). Again stressing Whitman’s anti-authoritarian strain, Ingersoll states,

“Charitable as the air and generous as Nature, [Whitman] was negligent of all except to do and say what he believed he should do and say” (qtd. in Jacoby, Great 210-211).

“Absolutely true to himself,” says Ingersoll (qtd. in Jacoby, Great 209), Whitman is an inspiration to all because he is unafraid of death, a stance taken by many freethinkers.

Ingersoll, however, ignores Whitman’s inability to completely let go of the notion of an afterlife. “What would this life be without immortality?” Whitman asks Ingersoll after 37 listening to one of The Great Agnostic’s lectures. “What is this world without a further divine purpose in it?” (Reynolds, Walt 581). Only by underplaying Whitman’s uneasiness about agnosticism and atheism and stressing his imperative to puzzle out the meaning of life for one’s self, can Ingersoll wed Whitman’s memes to the freethought project that would have great significance in the underlying philosophy of the Industrial

Workers of the World.

Clarence Darrow: The Humanist Memes

Clarence Darrow was a corporate lawyer working for the Chicago & North

Western Railroad in Chicago when he was jolted from the economic complacency afforded by his well-paid corporate job by the Pullman Strike of 1894. Devastated by a wage cut at the Pullman Palace Car Company, railroad workers appealed to the

American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs (who was later one of the founding member of the I.W.W.), for assistance. Hampered by George Pullman’s “paternalistic policies and refusal to arbitrate” (“Pullman”), the ARU called for a national boycott of

Pullman cars and raised havoc on the railways. When the federal government jailed

Debs for failing to honor an injunction against the boycott, Clarence Darrow volunteered to defend him. For the next twenty years, Darrow defended many cases involving labor unions. Martin Maloney argues that Darrow believed that “The industrial system… through its feature of competition, forced employers to regard labor as a simple commodity: To buy it as cheaply and make it go as far as possible” (116).

The union, Darrow believed, “was the only force that stood between the rights of the individual and the heartless attitude of many employers” (Maloney 116). Because he 38 entered the courtroom as an already prominent lawyer, his presence as someone who

“represent[ed] the interests of labor in its own terms, and… place[d] labor radicalism in its broad social context” (Melish 193), was extraordinarily important to the emerging

American labor union movement. In addition to his defense of Eugene Debs, Darrow’s high-profile labor cases included his successful defense of William Haywood (one of the founders of the I.W.W.) against charges of murder and his controversial defense of the McNamara brothers against murder charges in a bombing of the Los Angeles Times building by the printers’ union.8 Darrow’s exposure to the issues of working people ultimately developed in him what Melish calls a “disgust at the concentration of wealth under monopoly capitalism” (193), a disgust that drove his decisions about what cases to take and established his reputation as a “defender of the downtrodden” (Jensen 6) and the unpopular. Maloney believes that the reason the legend of Darrow as the “defender of the underdog” resonated so powerfully was that “so many people in the United States recognized themselves as underdogs, as outcasts, either real or potential” (qtd. in Jensen

5). Although Darrow’s career spanned decades after he gave up his labor work, according to Melish, “Darrow’s greatest importance may lie in his contribution to the popular formulation and persistent articulation of the ideology of the labor movement at the turn of the century” (191).

Darrow’s exposure to the deep well of human suffering through his courtroom work cultivated in him humanist impulses that folded together the exercise of rationality and compassion, the rejection of the supernatural, and the embrace of science, as well as strong streaks of anarchism and freethought. According to Arthur and Lila Weinberg, 39

“In all his writings there is an antagonism toward prejudice, ignorance, hate, bigotry. He was a skeptic and a dissenter, but always in defense of what he regarded as the positive right of the individual to liberty or speech, thought, and conduct” (qtd. in Jensen 151).

They go on to note that “His writings express a great love for the universal, for the understanding of man and the longing for a ‘better day” (qtd. in Jensen 151). In his

1912 lecture on the topic of industrial conspiracies, Darrow avows strong humanist dogma, stating, “The earth is moving, the universe is working toward justice, toward a better humanity, toward a higher ideal, toward a time when men will be brothers the world over” (29). Is it any wonder that Darrow was attracted to the poetry of Walt

Whitman simply on the basis of these core principles? Writing in 1947, in the introduction to The Wisdom of Clarence Darrow, John W. Gunn states that:

Clarence Darrow could never believe in anything except freedom and kindliness and pity and understanding. He attacked creeds and prejudices because he wanted men to be mentally free, narrow prohibitions and compulsions because he wanted to be physically free . . . [H]e pleaded for understanding, because here is the secret – if secret it is – of all wisdom. (3)

Edward Larson and Jack Marshall note that “few have been more passionate than

[Darrow] in invoking the triumph of the human spirit” (xviii). Darrow, they continue, believed “that every person, given a chance, could accomplish great things” (xviii).

Even given the possibility of hyperbole in these paeans to Darrow, his popularity as a lecturer shows his ability to attract listeners across the social spectrum. In his account of a 1907 Darrow lecture on Walt Whitman in Boise, Idaho, John Farrell notes that opposing sides in a labor conflict all attended, “leaning forward in their seats to catch each word, and a knot of socialist and capitalist scribes mingling ‘the lion and the 40 lamb’… [a]ll agreed that Darrow had made a good talk” (166). “Then,” Farrell goes on, quoting the local newspaper, “the whole bloodthirsty crew poured out of the theater and strolled slowly home under the stars discussing the philosophy of Walt Whitman”

(166).

That Clarence Darrow read Walt Whitman through a humanist lens is amply illustrated in a lecture he delivered in 1924 at a Whitman Fellowship dinner and in an essay on Whitman that was published in 1902. In neither work does he praise

Whitman’s poetry – in the speech he states, “I like him. It’s not for his poetry; I never thought he was a poet, but a man does not need to be a poet” (Darrow, “Walt” 1), and he begins the essay by stating, “No one ever fell in love with Whitman’s work for his literary art, but his work must live or die because of his philosophy of life” (Darrow,

Persian 43). What Darrow does love about Whitman, though, he expresses in the speech as “his broad tolerance” (Darrow, “Walt” 4), regarding Whitman as a man who will “fight for the right of every man to enjoy his convictions no matter how they may differ” (Darrow, “Walt” 4). “When I find a tolerant man or woman,” Darrow says, “one who is really tolerant, I almost universally find that that person has been a student of

Whitman” (Darrow, “Walt” 4). Darrow links this tolerance to an idea that he attributes to Whitman – “that the greatest thing we can find in life . . . is, in effect, over all our cities, great and small, the dear love of comrades” (Darrow, “Walt” 4). Linking

Whitman to his own life’s work, Darrow states, “I like Walt Whitman for what he said about the criminal . . . [T]here is nothing in any human being that is not in every human being . . . we are all alike. Walt Whitman spoke truth better than almost any other man I 41 have even known upon that subject” (Darrow, “Walt” 3). In his essay, Darrow quotes

Whitman, “But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to ensemble” (qtd. in

Darrow, Persian 45), stressing Whitman’s belief in “deep, broad, fundamental democracy that looks at all of nature and feels the unity and kinship that makes the universe a whole” (Darrow, Persian 54). Calling this impulse “wholesome, inclusive democracy” (Darrow, Persian 61), Darrow quotes Whitman: “None but are accepted, none/but shall be dear to me” (qtd. in Darrow, Persian 61). Thus Darrow uses Whitman to establish a family of man, creating socialist memes of comradeship, democracy, and humanitarianism. “I speak the pass-word primeval,” Darrow quotes Whitman, “I give the sign of democracy” (qtd. in Darrow, Persian 91), drawing the conclusion that

“These lines breathe the spirit of true humanity, the spirit that will one day remove all barriers and restrictions, and liberate the high and low alike” (Darrow, Persian 91). He continues creating humanist Whitman memes, stating that Whitman “has no faith in those laws and institutions which the world has ever made to defraud, and enslave, and deny the common brotherhood of all” (Darrow, Persian 54). Envisioning a social revolution predicated on Whitman’s philosophy, Darrow posits a utopian future of anarchy in which “The regenerated world will be built upon the democracy Walt

Whitman taught,” a democracy that “will know neither rich nor poor; neither high nor low; neither good nor bad; neither right nor wrong, but ‘the dear love of comrades’”

(Darrow, Persian 65). Though Darrow endorsed the doctrine of free love that some readers found in Whitman, he never explicitly deals in his speeches and essays with

Whitman’s references to same-sex relationships, though Darrow’s tacit laissez-faire 42 acceptance of this practice can probably be found in his moral code of “true humanity” and his vision of an anarchic future in which all can pursue individual happiness.

Darrow’s position as a hero and defender of the American working class gave him the influence and opportunity to spread these memes, memes that were eagerly absorbed by the labor union movement, especially the Industrial Workers of the World.

Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Memes

Emma Goldman was an immigrant American success story. Born in Lithuania, she immigrated with her sister as a young girl to Rochester, New York, in 1884.

Goldman was radicalized by the 1886 Haymarket riot and the subsequent trial and execution of four anarchists accused of murder when a bomb was thrown into a crowd in Haymarket Square during a labor dispute in Chicago. By 1889 Goldman was living in New York City, where she was tutored in anarchist rhetoric by Johann Most, who was also her lover, a man whom Brid Nicholson calls “the face and the focus on . . . new anarchism in the United States” (52). Nicholson relates that it was Most who taught

Goldman public speaking, harnessing “her aggression, her scorn, ridicule, and sarcasm”

(68) into a rhetorical style that made her famous nationwide. After leaving Most for a new lover, anarchist Alexander Berkman, Goldman was implicated in Berkman’s plan to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, a crime for which she was sentenced to one year in jail.

While in jail she honed her skills in the English language by reading the works of

American socialist and anarchist writers such as Eugene Debs, as well as Emerson,

Whitman, Thoreau, and Hawthorne (Nicholson 97). Jacoby posits that out of this reading “was born a deep love for what [Goldman] would call ‘the other America’ . . . 43 as opposed to the America of nineteenth-century robber barons” (Freethinkers 222). In

1906, Goldman was given money by Paul Orleneff, a Russian actor, to start a new publication that she wanted to name The Open Road, a title borrowed from Walt

Whitman’s poem “Song of the Open Road.” Because an Indiana journal by the name of

The Open Road was already in existence, however, Goldman was compelled her to change the name of her periodical to Mother Earth (Emma 168). In the first edition of the magazine, she quotes Whitman’s poem as her inspiration: “Allon! [sic] Whoever you are come travel with me!” she exhorts her readers. She continues, appealing to her readers as “those who breathe freely only in limitless space” (qtd. in Drinnon 95). In

1908, Goldman entered a relationship with Ben Reitman, an anarchist Chicago medical doctor who cared for “hoboes, prostitutes, and homeless” of that city (Nicholson 118) and who also had close ties to the I.W.W. On the first speaking tour that he organized on her behalf, Goldman became a phenomenon, as she “visited thirty-seven cities in twenty-five states. She gave 120 lectures, sold over ten thousand pieces of literature, and took in over three hundred subscriptions to Mother Earth” (Nicholson 119).

Establishing herself as what Reichert calls the “High Priestess” of American anarchism

(385), Goldman lectured not just on anarchism but on the ways in which drama, literature, and women’s rights interfaced with anarchism, as well. In her belief that art was inherently subversive, Alice Wexler points out, Goldman “used literary and dramatic criticism as vehicles for social critique” as she lectured on Shaw, Ibsen, and

Walt Whitman (100). Popularly known as “Red Emma,” Goldman became known as

“one of the most magnetic and volatile orators in American history” (Marshall 399). 44

Calling Goldman “almost a walking free-speech case,” Wexler points out that she was always “pushing against the borders of the permissible and the proper, extending the realms of free speech for everyone” (100) in what Reichert calls her “refusal to compromise with injustice and ignorance” (387).

Goldman’s brand of anarchism found a sympathetic vibration in Whitman’s philosophical stance on freedom. Timothy Robbins asserts that Goldman and the anarchists “read in Whitman a discontinuous yet always rechargeable spirit of rebellion” (85). Necessary to this rebellion was Goldman’s belief that “Before

‘humanity’ can rebel against the ruling class, individuals must struggle against a ruling idea: that human beings are not fit to govern themselves” (Robbins 85). For Goldman, overturning this “ruling idea” was inextricably linked to what Wexler has called “the transformation of consciousness as a prerequisite to economic and social change” (99).

Goldman believed that this transformation could best be accomplished through the arts.

Hence, Reichert points out, her “tendency to view art not as a remote exercise in beauty and form but as a product of revolutionary progress and development” (387) and as the impetus for that very progress and development. What Reichert calls Goldman’s “hero” is one who will “turn to art in an attempt to lead [the mass of men] to the light above”

(397). Goldman once stated that “life in all its variety and fullness is art, the highest art”

(qtd. in Reichert 397). Mankind must be led to this kind of life, she believed, through the efforts of the hero, who appeals to each individual’s imagination. Goldman saw

Whitman as one of these heroes, a poet who was able to spark in his readers a flame of what Robbins has called “emancipation from hierarchy” (81), an emancipation that 45 would “in turn generat[e] the individual agents who would create a new social order”

(Robbins 81). Whitman’s “art is not only art,” Goldman wrote, “but a cause in the world in itself” (qtd. in Robbins 81). This link between art and freedom was essential to

Goldman because, as Reichert points out, “freedom . . . is the means by which [the anarchist] would bring about the kind of world in which he would like to live” (6).

Thus, “society is nothing more than the sum total of the free acts of the individuals of which it is composed” (Reichert 4). As Goldman stated in her autobiography, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.

Anarchism means that to me” (qtd. in Robbins 80). Laying claim to freedom in every domain, Goldman uses Whitman’s poetry to support her primary causes: “freedom of expression, women’s emancipation, and sexual liberation” (Robbins 92). Applying

Whitman’s idealized same-sex male comradeship to heterosexual relationships,

Goldman argued against the institution of marriage and for free love, believing, as

Reichert tells us, that “all social inequities result from discipline and restraint” (392).

Though Drinnon asserts that Goldman used Whitman’s poetry “propagandistically”

(162), choosing only those pieces that met her needs and ignoring his patriotic impulses, attachment to the middle class, and celebration of masculinity, ultimately, the anarchist belief that “only through freedom can freedom be attained” (Reichert 404) resonates deeply with Whitman’s belief that a satisfactory society can only be built by a group of individuals secure enough in their own personal freedom to cooperate voluntarily in a mutual enterprise. “In fine,” Goldman wrote in an editorial in Mother Earth, “the

Anarchist wants to develop a free society, in which each man will be at liberty to work 46 as an individual or to co-operate with his neighbors in voluntary groups without any employers, bosses, or rulers of any kind” (“Trade” 398), a philosophy remarkably in line with Whitman’s philosophy of labor. This anchor of personal freedom firmly links

Goldman to Whitman.

Emma Goldman’s anarchist reading of Walt Whitman’s poetry can be seen in the undated, unpublished notes for a lecture she delivered on Whitman. In her lecture she writes, “Just as man appears to the great old Walt, so does he appear in anarchism, all equally related to life, all interwoven in society, yet each unto himself a personality”

(Goldman, “Walt”) She quotes lines from Whitman’s “The Great City,” a poem that presents Whitman’s idealized vision of America’s urban possibilities, the great city being one

Where the men and women think lightly of the laws, Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases, Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elective [sic] persons - (qtd. in Goldman, “Walt”)

These lines lead Goldman to comment, “Just ask the democratic president, mayor, judge, or policeman what they think of Walt Whitman’s democracy. Their answer would probably be that it is rank anarchy inciting to riot and disorder” (Goldman,

“Walt”). In the nationless scope of the anarchic world view, Goldman points out that “it is entirely misleading to call Whitman the poet of democracy” because “his wishes and aims were higher” than simply the goals of the United States. She quotes from

Democratic Vistas Whitman’s perception that:

the true nationality of the State, that genuine union . . . is . . . but the fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat 47

and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power. (qtd in Goldman, “Walt”)

From statements like this, Goldman concludes that Whitman’s “art has absolutely nothing to do with the ‘national’ art which reiterates the stale slogan of ‘My Country

‘tis of Thee’ or “The Star Spangled Banner,’” asserting that he is “as unlike the . . . democrat as the anarchist is unlike the typical Bourgeoie [sic].” Her lecture then turns to

“A Woman Waits For Me,” “You Felons on Trial in Courts,” and “To a Common

Prostitute,” which, in their unconventional celebration of sexuality and their empathy with the lower social strata, she presents in their entirety (presumably she intended to read them word for word to her audience) as proof of Whitman’s rebellious, untamed nature. Goldman celebrates the fact that Whitman is defiantly not only giving voice to and humanizing women of the underclass in these poems but also trying to empathize with women in a sexual way, while she ignores the disturbing suggestion of rape in “A

Woman Waits for Me” and Whitman’s attitude that, as D.H. Lawrence once wrote, women are “Muscles and wombs: functional creatures – no more” (qtd. in Reynolds,

Walt 214). Seeing instead an anarchist impulse in Whitman’s unconventional acceptance of sexuality, she states, “Walt was interested,” she writes, “in the whole of man, not merely the bloodless wreckage of Christian and Puritan training. he [sic] sings his human song . . . of the senses, and not the cold song of the living corpse who reflect

[sic] the graveyard in the home, the discipline in the school, the curtailment of law”

(Goldman, “Walt”). “We need Walt Whitman now more than ever,” she ends her speech, “. . . that we may not falter in our efforts to build the new life out of the ruins of 48 the old” (Goldman, “Walt”). This decidedly revolutionary call to action underscores

Goldman’s insistence that Walt Whitman is a fellow anarchist.

Eugene V. Debs: The Christian Socialist Memes

Eugene Victor Debs was “America’s first national working-class hero” (Molloy,

American 88). Between 1897 and 1926, Debs was the most prominent socialist spokesperson in the United States, running for President five times under the aegis of the Socialist Party. Debs began his career as a railroad worker in the Brotherhood of

Locomotive Firemen in 1874. He was elected to a brief stint in state office in Illinois in

1884 but gave up politics for union organizing in the Railroad Brotherhood. Scott

Molloy points out that Debs began his union career with a belief that “there was a social contract in America between employer and employee and that both parties had mutual responsibilities to one another and to society in general” (86). As the 1890s dawned,

Debs began reading Robert Ingersoll and became interested in the poetry of Walt

Whitman (Ginger 80). In 1892, Debs organized a new union that included all railroad workers – The American Railway Union (ARU) – pushing back against the tradition of the trade (or craft) union that was organized around workers in a specific trade within the railway industry. While serving a six-month term in Woodstock Jail in 1894 for violating a federal injunction against the Pullman Strike, Debs read Marx’s Das Capital and was, as Molloy puts it, “transformed almost overnight” into a radical (Molloy 85).

Appalled by what he perceived to be an “entrepreneurial retreat from [the] mutuality” of

“the old conservative order and social contract” (Molloy 87), Debs took up the socialist banner in the belief that the “The monopolies had violated the ‘fundamental manhood’ 49 of the American worker, reducing him to a European serf” (Buhle, Marxism 80). By

1894, the ARU claimed more than 150,000 members (Johnpoll 91), and by 1898, Debs was able to use his influence to help to found the Social Democratic Party. At this point in his career, Eugene Debs became one of the most popular orators in America.

Salvatore calls Debs “a compelling and commanding force” as a speaker (225) as he delivered speeches of over two hours in length to huge audiences. “His appeal,” says

Salvatore, “most frequently described by contemporaries as evangelical, transcended at the moment factional disagreements and led the audience to glimpse a different social order” (225). In 1900, Debs participated in the first of five Presidential campaigns.

According to Molloy, “In a mere dozen years, and against great odds, Debs went from

100,000 votes in his initial run to almost a million in 1912” (88) – those million votes comprising 6% of the total votes cast. In 1905, Debs was one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World, but after a few years of what Bernard Johnpoll calls “intrigue and internal disputes” (96), Debs broke with the I.W.W., “condemning it,” as Johnpoll says, “as an anarchist organization that was not interested in electoral activity” (96). In 1907, Debs became an editor for the socialist newspaper Appeal to

Reason, whose circulation at that time was more than 350,000. Within a few years of

Debs’ arrival, circulation had risen to 500,000 readers (Johnpoll 97). At the outbreak of

World War I, Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for sedition for a speech he gave opposing the war, his reputation as one of the most beloved and respected

American leaders still intact as he sat in his jail cell.

Debs drew many parallels between his socialist ideas and Walt Whitman’s 50 philosophy. In fact, he was probably the most enthusiastic Whitman proponent in left- wing politics, rejecting very few of Whitman’s core principles and embellishing many.

Debs’ socialism was not that of Karl Marx. In fact, according to Robertson, as a spokesman for Christian socialism, Debs frequently “cited as his models Jesus Christ,

Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Whitman” (Worshipping 254). Indeed,

Robertson tells us, “Debs cited Jesus so often that his audiences might well have assumed that Christ had been a member of the Nazareth branch of the Socialist Party”

(“Reading” 24). Debs was a good friend of Horace Traubel, who, according to Garman, used The Conservator to mix Whitman into Debs’ socialist tenets (Race 45). As has been previously discussed, the melding of religious and social millennialism at the turn of the twentieth century yielded a “powerful social critique” (Salvatore 237) that produced a secular co-opting of religious themes. According to Robertson, Debs’ success can be partly attributed to the fact that “he enabled Americans disenchanted with traditional religion to transfer their millennial aspirations from individual salvation to the transformation of society” (Worshipping 254), that transformation taking the form of a socialist revolution. As Melvyn Dubovsky puts it, Debs “Americanized and

Christianized the socialist movement” (63), Debs himself suggesting a Christ figure –

“the simple, humble carpenter who sacrifices himself to redeem a corrupt society”

(Dubovsky 64). Debs viewed Christ as “a real living, vital agitator” (Dubovsky 64) whose mission was to get people to love one another in order to effect social change. In this context, according to Paul and Mari Jo Buhle, it was the “overthrow of economic privilege [that] made possible the realization of the Self” (65). Debs was in perfect 51 accord with this link between economic and personal revolution. John Stauffer and

Benjamin Soskis tell us that:

When [Debs] … shared his vision of working men and women establishing the kingdom of heaven in their own backyards and back alleys, he did so to communicate that his brand of socialism was not some noxious foreign import foisted on unsuspecting Americans but a set of ideas organically emerging out of an abiding faith in the American promise and nourished by the nation’s traditions of democratic individualism. (152)

Linking his beliefs to Whitman’s was another way for Debs to reinforce their uniquely

American provenance. Robertson points out that as a part of this social revolution,

Debs, like Whitman, wanted to “redefine American manhood,” and to that end, “His rhetoric offered an alternative model of masculinity” (Worshipping 255), shifting away from the successful businessman as the exemplar of masculinity, and turning instead to a model “based on love and mutually dependent comradeship” (255). Erkkila points out that in the stories that he wrote in the 1840s, Whitman critiqued, as did Debs in his lifelong career as a labor leader, “capital accumulation, corporate power, the oppression of workers and women, the corruption of businessmen and lawyers, religious institutions, capital punishment, mental asylums, child labor, and child abuse” (29).

While Debs, unlike Whitman, believed that these issues should be ameliorated by society, he was in accord with Whitman in his belief that these issues could also be addressed on a personal level “by invoking the self-regenerating power of the individual and by teaching the values of self-restraint, compassion, and social love” (Erkkila 29).

Like Whitman, Debs believed that, as Garman asserts, “only the intimate bonds of brotherhood could transform the social order and restore the worker’s natural rights” 52

(“Heroic” 107). When he made a pilgrimage to Walt Whitman’s house in 1904, Debs collected five leaves from the front yard that he pressed and kept with him for forty years. Debs biographer Ray Ginger relates that upon visiting Whitman’s grave,

“marveling at Whitman’s vision of American democracy, [Debs] cried without shame as he stood on the ground where his idol lay buried” (232). Such was the emotional power that Walt Whitman exerted upon Eugene Debs.

The Whitman memes that Debs created were interwoven in his own rhetoric, especially in the statements he made to the Whitman Fellowship meetings. Salvatore tells the story that following a 1908 speech, “Debs and some comrades drove to New

Jersey. Along the way Debs gave an extemporaneous speech, ‘fit,’ he said, ‘for Walt

Whitman’” (230). One audience member later stated that the speech was “an apostrophe to democracy, a superlative prose poem” (Salvatore 230). It is clear from this anecdote that rather than refer to Whitman in his speeches, as did the other people discussed in this chapter, Debs chose to absorb the rhetorical power of “Old Walt” (Letters 230) into his own speeches about the ideas to which he was passionately attached. Over and over again Debs associates Whitman with love, joy, and transcendency, creating a sentimental attachment between Whitman and the socialists. In this speech excerpt,

Debs almost seems to be channeling Whitman:

Never mind what others may say, or think, or do. Stand erect in the majesty of your own manhood. Listen for just once to the throbbing of your own heart, and you will hear that it is beating quick-step marches to Camp Freedom . . . Stand up and see how long a shadow you cast in the sunlight! (Debs, “Industrial” 465) 53

Examples of this kind abound in Debs’ speeches and letters. In a 1908 letter to Horace

Traubel declining a Whitman Fellowship dinner invitation, Debs wrote, “Again you will enjoy a brief respite from carking cares and take out your souls and loaf and laugh and love with dear old Walt, whose blessed life has made this old earth right in thought and hope, in love and joy, for all time” (Letters 268). A greeting he sent the Whitman

Fellowship in 1905 displays the same emotional effulgence:

When the . . . Whitman Fellowship assembles, though far away, I shall be there in heart and soul, and share with you in all the delights of the joyous occasion. “The dear love of comrades” will pervade the gathering and make it holy, and the hands of dear old Walt will be raised above in benediction. (Robertson, Worshipping 255).

Robertson points out that this passage “combines all of the central themes of twentieth- century socialism: comradeship, sentiment, and religion” (Worshipping 255), thus tapping into what Erkkila calls Whitman’s “utopian discourse of . . . ‘divine friendship’” (18). In the July 1907, edition of The Conservator, Debs again declines an invitation to a Fellowship meeting, waxing grandiloquent. In spite of his absence, he writes, he will “refresh [him]self at Old Walt’s flowing fountain of inspiration” (Debs,

“Friends” 73). Their fellowship, he tells them, “is the quintessence of human kinship: born of freedom, consecrated to brotherhood, and expressed in love. It is immortal and eternal. Its power is omnipotent” (Debs, “Friends” 73). In a noteworthy speech in

Girard, Kansas in 1908, Debs again references Whitman in this context, stating:

It is when you have done your work honestly, when you have contributed your share to the common fund that you begin to live. Then as Whitman said, you can take out your soul; you can commune with yourself; you can take a comrade by the hand and you can look into his soul, and in that holy communion you live. (Winters 28)

54

Debs’ intense attachment to male comradeship could have had an alienating effect on his constituents, but the discourse of male comradeship was so thoroughly interwoven into the Christian socialist program its possible connection to sexuality was never made an issue. Salvatore quotes journalist Heywood Broun in his 1926 reminiscence about

Eugene Debs:

But the funny part of it is that when Debs says ‘comrade’ it is all right. He means it. The old man with the burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the brotherhood of man. And that’s not the funniest part of it. As long as he’s around I believe it myself. (225)

Although Debs’ association with the I.W.W. was brief, his constant reminders of the

Whitman meme of “the dear love of comrades” and his perpetual drumbeat of “human kinship” help shape the Wobblies.

The freethinker, humanist, anarchist, and labor socialist Whitman memes of these four important American leaders were brought to bear in the formation of the

Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 as they influenced the creation of a uniquely

American response to the pressures of the industrialized world.

55

Chapter 4 Whitman and the Wobblies

The Industrial Workers of the World was formed in 1905 as a reaction to the exclusionary composition of the American Federation of Labor. By 1905, the A.F.L. was a twenty five-year-old craft union whose membership included only skilled craftsmen, rejecting the vast majority of workers who labored in unskilled jobs such as mining, lumber, and agriculture work, whom the A.F.L. felt were “unorganizable”

(Georgakas 107). The A.F.L also discriminated on the basis of race, gender, and immigration and economic status. Thus, as Alan Ruff points out, “the ascendency of large-scale mass production that demanded a cheap, ‘unskilled’ labor pool and eroded skilled positions” (115) left many Americans unrepresented by a union that was interested only in “protecting skilled-craft positions” (Ruff 114). According to Paul

Brissenden in his 1920 history of the I.W.W., the A.F.L. was the I.W.W.’s

“archenemy” and “the embodiment of everything ‘crafty,’” known to the Wobblies as

“the American Separation of Labor” (I.W.W. 83). The founders of the I.W.W. were concerned with harnessing the power of the “millions of men [who] were itinerant laborers who drifted from one job to another, certain only of chronic unemployment”

(Georgakas 106), as well as immigrants, women, people of color, and even children – all of whom were rejected by the A.F.L. The I.W.W. also disagreed with the A.F.L.’s

“assumption of identity of interest between employer and employee” (Brissenden,

I.W.W. 84), explicitly stating in the preamble to its constitution that “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common” (Rebel 2). Spurning the “pure and 56 simple unionism” (Dubovsky 57) of the A.F.L., “Big Bill” Haywood, president of the

Western Federation of Miners, stated at the opening convention of the I.W.W., “There is no man who has an ounce of honesty in his make-up but recognizes the fact that there is a continuous struggle between [the capitalist and the workingman], and this organization will be formed, based, and founded on the class struggle, having in view no compromise and no surrender” (qtd. in Brissenden, I.W.W. 83). At the convention

Eugene Debs also encouraged leaving the A.F.L., stating that the worker should “join the union that proposes on the economic field to represent his class” (qtd. in Brissenden,

I.W.W. 89). In addition, the I.W.W. excoriated the A.F.L. for “its absolute denial of the necessity of united political action on the part of the working class” (Brissenden, I.W.W.

84) and rejected the A.F.L’s concept of “boring from within” (Brissenden, Launching

21) – what the I.W.W. called “political action at the capitalist ballot box” (Rebel 2) – preferring instead the philosophy of direct action in the form of strikes and labor disruption. Though the I.W.W. ultimately split apart on this issue, at its inception the acceptance of direct action over political action was a uniting force. In fact, an I.W.W. proverb was “A wise tailor does not put stitches in rotten cloth” (Dubofsky 168).

Ironically, as we have seen, at one time, Walt Whitman’s idealized artisanal skilled worker’s republic may have matched the A.F.L.’s vision of labor organization.

However, toward the end of his life, Whitman’s views on “the labor question” seemed to be evolving in a direction that pointed toward radicalism. In addition to his thoughts in Democratic Vistas and “The Tramp and Strike Question” that have been previously discussed, Betsy Erkkila points out that “In his later years, Whitman came to share what 57

[socialist reformer] Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1883) described as the

‘wide-spread consciousness among the masses that there is something radically wrong in the present social organization’” (303). As the memes propagated by Whitman’s radical followers inculcated the labor struggles, they became foundational to the

Wobbly fight to bring to fruition what might, indeed, have ultimately become

Whitman’s dream of the ideal America. Whitman’s talk of the comradeship of a unified workers’ republic, his belief in the evolution of a higher form of democratic engagement, his all-encompassing empathy for every form of human experience, his view that art and politics are inseparable, and his revolutionary fervor all became part of

Wobbly DNA, as his poetry gave dignity to their project and proved that the causes of the poor and unorganized were as worthy of note as those of the rich and powerful who traditionally claimed poetry as their own.

The great watchword of the I.W.W. was “Solidarity.” The Wobblies sought to unite “a disparate assemblage of the American left and every type of American worker into one great house of labor” (Hall 7). If the ultimate goal of the I.W.W. was to “effect

[the] final emancipation” of the working class (Brissenden, Launching 40), then the entire working class would have to participate fully and wholeheartedly; thus, the

I.W.W.’s commitment to One Big Union. As an I.W.W. member wrote in a 1919 issue of One Big Union Monthly, a Wobbly publication, “Is it among the working class that we may see the fulfillment of the prediction that there shall be . . . but all one?” (Rebel

104). One Big Union was necessary to the ultimate ends of the Wobblies – a general strike of all industrial workers that would lead to the abolition of the wage system and a 58

“new social order” (Rebel 6) based on what Salvatore Salerno terms “solidarity and free access to social wealth” (41). To accomplish this end, “Big Bill” Haywood said at the founding convention, “We are going down into the gutter to get at the mass of workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living” (qtd. in Rosemont 7). Though the

Wobblies were known for their individualism and creative impulses – in her autobiography, I.W.W. organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn quotes Wobbly George Speed as saying that the first I.W.W. convention was “the greatest conglomeration of freaks that ever met in a convention” (76-77) – Donald Winters points out that theirs was “an individualism reinforced with the sturdier stuff of which solidarity is made,” a

“passionate individualism” that united them in one purpose (31). Thus, Eugene V. Debs was able to say in his speech “Socialist Ideals” that “Spontaneity, enthusiasm, diversity, and solidarity are the essential ingredients of I.W.W. self-organization” (90). This sense of solidarity also gave rise to the motto of the I.W.W. – “An injury to one is an injury to all” (Brissenden, Launching 46)—as masses of migratory workers could and did move from place to place to help their fellow Wobblies fight for social justice, reinforcing empathy for abused workers. The song “Solidarity Forever” by Wobbly Ralph Chaplin was sung at every I.W.W. meeting to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “I wanted,” wrote Chaplin, “a song to be full of revolutionary fervor and to have a chorus that was ringing and defiant” (qtd. in Rebel 26). The song’s first verse and chorus demonstrate its stirring nature:

When the Union’s inspiration through the worker’s blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun. Yet what force on earth is weaker that the feeble strength of one? But the Union makes us strong. 59

Chorus Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever! But the Union makes us strong. (I.W.W. 25)

As John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis point out, this anthem allowed “workers disenchanted with the ‘Battle Hymn,’ which obscures material conditions, to couple their millennial aspirations with social and economic transformation. It fed the civil religion of America’s working class and radicals” (181) and elevated the idea of solidarity to a quasi-religious status among the Wobblies.

Whitman’s humanist memes permeate this discourse on solidarity. Just as the

I.W.W. rejected the “pure and simple” unionism of the A.F.L., Whitman rejects the pure and simple uses of poetry that he sees around him, arguing in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass that poets “are the voice and exposition of liberty,” a

“political liberty” which is “indispensable” (Leaves 627). He begins Leaves of Grass by presenting the reconciliation of the individual and the group, giving them equal importance: “One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word

Democratic, the word En-Masse” (Whitman, Leaves 3). David Reynolds points out that in the very title Leaves of Grass Whitman is dealing with the issue of common human experience. “. . . [G]rass embodies,” Reynolds writes, “simultaneously individualism, each spear a unique phenomenon, and radical democracy, as it is a common vegetation that sprouts everywhere, among all sections and races” (327). “Song of Myself” would probably have been the poem most familiar to the masses at the turn of the century, and, as M. Jimmie Killingsworth points out, this poem “embodies the ideals of personality within the context of political democracy” (28). Whitman’s reference to “the knit of 60 identity” (Leaves 28) in “Song of Myself” refers to his approach throughout the poem of blurring the distinctions between individuals and himself, pulling all together into a common country, a common experience, a common humanity. His terror that the One

Big Union that he loved so much (the United States) would be torn asunder by the Civil

War led him to repeatedly champion the value of collective experience. As Newton

Arvin points out, “If any political feeling was stronger in Whitman than his devotion to political and social freedom, it was his profound devotion to the idea of the Union”

(57). In “Song of Myself” his catalogs of diverse American experience serve this purpose. In “Starting From Paumanok” Whitman addresses “Democracy!” as “Ma femme! For the brood beyond us and of us,/For those who belong here and those to come” (Leaves 21), considering all Americans past, present, and future as one big unified “mass” (Leaves 16). In “A Song For Occupations,” he addresses “Workmen and

Workwomen!” to “find the eternal meanings” (Leaves 177) in the “themes, hints, possibilities” (Leaves 183) of the collective world of work. By creating these images of

Americans at work, Whitman, like the I.W.W., “voiced a collective American identity in a time of disunity” (Work 598). Socialists reading Whitman’s references to the unity of America and the solidarity of the working class could easily extrapolate from these a celebration of the union movement. Erkkila notes that “As the poet of many and one,

Whitman sang of individuality, independence, and freedom, yet also uttered the words comradeship, equality, and solidarity [italics in original]” (321). From these democratic ideals comes Whitman’s statement “Whoever degrades another degrades me” (qtd. in 61

Arvin 263) – a statement virtually identical to the Wobbly motto “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

In addition, Whitman’s anarchist memes can be found in the I.W.W.’s commitment to educating its members so that they would be capable of operating as powerful and purposeful human beings. Whitman repeatedly voiced his support of public education, most notably in his journalism. According to Jason Stacy, Whitman believed that “The press, like the schools, ‘makes the great body of people intelligent, capable, and worthy of performing the duties of republican freeman’” (62). The press and the schools, according to Stacy, “both were places where individuals learned how to be citizens” and “where citizens of different status came together to learn the workings of democracy” (62). “Everywhere,” writes Whitman, “is their influence felt” (qtd. in

Stacy 62). The same impulse drove the Wobblies, who believed, as Rosemont says, that

“the first revolutionary step was to inspire the wage-slaves to think, and to think critically, to expand their moral and mental vision, and thus give them greater self- awareness, which in turn reinforced their confidence in their ability to liberate themselves and to transform the whole society” (320). These ideas are present, as we have seen, in Emma Goldman’s anarchist reading of Walt Whitman which posits that social transformation is only possible if preceded by personal transformation that, as

Rosemont writes, “free[s] the workers’ minds from repressive belief systems” (311). To this end, The I.W.W. established libraries and reading rooms in their union halls.

Socialist John Reed, writing in 1918, stated that “…wherever… there is an I.W.W. local, you will find an intellectual center – a place where men read philosophy, 62 economics, the latest plays, novels; where art and poetry are discussed” (qtd. in

Rosemont 34). Reed calls the I.W.W. hall in his home town “the livest intellectual center in town’” (qtd. in Rosemont 34). This is the very phenomenon for which

Whitman argues in Democratic Vistas when he writes:

I should demand a programme of Culture, drawn out, not for a single class alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms, but with an eye to practical life, the West, the working-men, the facts of farms and jackplanes and engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the middle and working strata . . . I should demand of this programme or theory a scope generous enough to include the widest human area. It must have for its spinal meaning the formation of a typical Personality of character, eligible to the uses of the high average of men - and not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses. (Whitman, Whitman 40)

The very “Personality of character” for which Whitman argues in Democratic Vistas is that sought by the I.W.W., whose goal, according to James Stodder, was to heal “the dichotomy between intellectuals and workers . . . not by intellectuals pretending to be workers, but by the attempts of workers to become intellectuals, that is, independent critical thinkers” (qtd. in Rosemont 33). Whitman’s concern in Democratic Vistas with the “pompous, nauseous, outside shows of vulgar wealth” (72) that were undermining

America’s moral fiber are echoed in Wobbly Floyd Dell’s 1926 observation about the

I.W.W. Hall in New York City: “Where else but in the ‘Wobbly’ halls could [one] hear talk that was not the talk of money and things money will buy?” (qtd. in Rosemont 34).

Rosemont tells us that the Wobblies were “omnivorous multilingual readers, critical thinkers, highly skilled humorists, and often practicing poets” (25) who referred to Karl

Marx as “Old Karl,” echoing Eugene Debs’ habit of referring to Walt Whitman as “Old

Walt.” So entrenched was this educational meme in Wobbly culture that it became the 63 stuff of fiction, as well as fact. In his 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel From Here to

Eternity, James Jones creates Jack Molloy, a Wobbly character who embodies these values and their connection to Walt Whitman. “The Wobblies had taught him to read,”

Jones says of the fictional Molloy (634). “[H]e had always carried his quota of unread books in his bindle or suitcase or seabag . . . The first book he bought for himself, with the first money from the first job, was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass . . ., and since that first copy he had worn out ten others” (635). This archetype of the Wobbly autodidact was firmly entrenched in I.W.W. folklore.

An adjunct to this Wobbly system of education was The People’s College of

Fort Scott, Kansas, which, Eugene Debs pointed out in 1915, “was founded by the working class, is financed by the working class, and controlled by the rank and file of the working class to the minutest particulars” (“School”). The school was dedicated to teaching English to immigrant workers, and to this end, Marian Wharton, head of the college’s Publicity Department, wrote her own textbook called Plain English. Within this textbook are a series of grammar exercises buttressed by the words of socialist and progressive writers, among them Walt Whitman. In one grammar exercise, students are to identify the personal, relative, or interrogative pronouns in two stanzas of Whitman’s poetry, one including the lines, “Camerado, I give you my hand/ I give you my love more precious than money” and the other including the lines “Not one is dis-satisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.” With the prefatory instructions,

“Do not be satisfied with half-way things, or less than that which is worthy of you.

Demand the best for yourself,” students are instructed to “Read aloud this little verse 64 from the Good Gray Poet, Walt Whitman: O, the joy of manly self-hood;/ To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown” (Wharton). When he visited the People’s College, Debs wrote, “I felt that I was breathing the air of pure democracy” (“School”). Thus newly-arrived immigrants who might soon become members of the I.W.W. were nursed on the mother’s milk of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

Of course, an additional Whitman meme is learning through direct experience, not through books. In one of his Camden conversations with Traubel, Whitman comments on his days as a laborer in a print shop, stating, “You get your culture direct: not through borrowed sources – no, a century of college training could not confer such results on anyone” (qtd. in Stacy 15). This statement can apply to many Wobblies, such as I.W.W. leader Vincent St. John, whose “school was his own experience and observation and [whose] creed was action” (James P. Cannon qtd. in Dubofsky 143). In her speech on Whitman, Emma Goldman references Mr. John Bailey, who, she says, tells us that “what made [Whitman] the man and poet he became was no following of any hero or master, but his own peculiar genius which enabled him to observe, absorb, and even love all sorts and conditions of things and people.” In presenting Whitman as rejecting any “hero and master,” Goldman is linking him to the Wobbly propensity to, as John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis point out, “base . . . their understanding of economics on felt experience, not the writings of European philosophers and theorists”

(186). “I’ve never read Marx’s Capital,” “Big Bill” Heywood once said, “but I have the marks of capital all over me” (qtd. in Stauffer 186). Whether through organized education or individual direct experience, the anarchist Whitman memes served the goal 65 shared by Whitman and the Wobblies, as Kenneth McGowan writes, of “the individual awakening of ‘illiterates’ and ‘scum’ to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and rights of their part in it” (qtd. in Rebel 164). This educational program produced union members who, when asked, “Who is your leader?” would reply, “We’re all leaders!” If asked what they wanted, Wobblies would reply,

“We demand everything!” (qtd. in Brown italics in original).

To accomplish this feat of mass education, the Wobblies mobilized the socialist press to produce books for the masses. Whitman himself was interested in the concept of providing his poetry to the people in a format that would appeal to them. Reynolds points out that early in his career as a journalist, “Whitman saw the penny press as a democratizing influence that brought knowledge to the masses” (98) and quotes

Whitman as stating, “Among newspapers, the penny press is the same as common schools among seminaries of education” (98). Whitman once discussed with Traubel his notions for publishing Leaves of Grass, saying, “Why not sometime issue an edition of

L. of G. in small vols, for pocket wear and tear? Song of Myself, Children of Adam,

&c. &c. in separate books? . . . It has long been my ambition to bring out an edition of

Leaves of Grass with margins cut close, paper cover: some book rid of the usual cumbersome features . . .” (qtd. in Price 155). Such a book, thought Whitman, “would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air” (qtd. in Reynolds 352). He wanted “a beautiful book cheap . . . within reach of the average buyer” (qtd. in

Reynolds 352) “for the pocket” (qtd. in Stacy 124). Though Whitman himself never 66 published such volumes, the I.W.W. actually pursued these ideas in their educational program. Believing that their political agenda would be supported by providing high quality reading material for their members, the I.W.W. used the publications of

Haldeman-Julius Press. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius took over editorship of the socialist newspaper Appeal To Reason in 1915, moving into its printing operation in Girard,

Kansas, shortly thereafter to establish the Little Blue Book imprint. These books were printed on cheap pulp paper stapled together in a 3 ½ x 5 inch format. Price tells us that

Haldeman-Julius “was able to democratize literature but only by reducing it to objects that were strictly uniform in all external features . . . [T]his was a book to read rather than to covet” (150). Haldeman-Julius intuited, like Whitman, that “if [a book] were brief enough for work-filled lives, if it fit in a trouser or apron pocket, and if it were inexpensive” (Price 150), people would read good literature. A Little Blue Book version of Walt Whitman’s poems was among the first volumes to be found in the Haldeman-

Julius catalog along with socialist titles and works by authors like birth control advocate

Margaret Sanger, sexologist Havelock Ellis, and Clarence Darrow, many of whom often could not get published in the mainstream press. The I.W.W. actually distributed to workers Little Blue Book editions of Whitman’s poems “small enough to fit in an overall’s pocket” (Erkkila 319). Haldeman-Julius fit himself into the I.W.W. project of public education when he wrote that by reading Little Blue Books, “Many thousands – hundreds of thousands – of Americans… learned to think more largely and carefully.”

“Real contact with great minds,” he continues, “precludes intellectual littleness”

(Haldeman- Julius 33). Not surprisingly, Emma Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth was 67 also published in a 5 x 8 inch format meant to “fit in a worker’s pocket” (Emma 42). In addition, publisher Charles Kerr produced an “endless stream of pamphlets, tracts, and monographs” (Ruff 107), Kerr stating plainly that “The object of the company is to circulate the literature of CLEAR SOCIALISM IN CLEAR ENGLISH” (Ruff 103 capital letters original). Socialist Algie Simons, who helped write the call to establish the I.W.W., was at one time a partner of Charles Kerr, and Kerr himself published a great deal of I.W.W. literature. Needless to say, in 1904, Kerr published the Poems of

Walt Whitman. In 1915, Floyd Dell, co-editor of the socialist magazine The Masses, wrote that “Walt Whitman seems to have been accepted by Socialists as peculiarly their poet . . . In the library of the ordinary ‘local’ he stands on the shelf not far from Karl

Marx” (Garman, “Heroic” 111). Thus Whitman’s desire for mass readership of his poetry came to fruition through the socialist press and the I.W.W.

Out of these educational endeavors flowed a Wobbly culture that actively fostered creativity as a form of “self-emancipation” (Rosemont 20). Roger Baldwin, who was founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and who carried an I.W.W. card signed by “Big Bill” Haywood, “came to understand that many Wobblies were far more spiritual and philosophical than their appearances often suggested” (Solidarity

143). Wobblies were often able to articulate for themselves this yearning for cultural expression, as I.W.W. member Richard Brazier stated in an oral history interview: “In addition to searching for a job, we were also searching for something to satisfy our emotional desire for grandeur and beauty. After all, we have a concept of beauty too, although we were only migratory workers” (qtd. in Rosemont 32). This fact did not 68 escape the notice of the press, as Samuel Putnam’s sneering 1933 comment suggests:

“[P]ractically every Wobbly imagined that he was a heaven-endowed poet” (qtd. in

Rosemont 447). In its project “to question . . . those rhetorical conventions that divide toilers from thinkers” (Green 4), the I.W.W. was in complete accord with Walt

Whitman’s attempts to write poetry for and about the masses. Rosemont tells us that

William Morris, Percy Shelly, Robert Burns, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, and

Walt Whitman were “I.W.W. favorites” and that their works were “readily available in the libraries of Wobbly halls across the continent” (381). Wobbly organizer Elizabeth

Gurley Flynn relates an anecdote about Fred Robinson, the son of a pioneering advocate for birth control access, in her autobiography The Rebel Girl. “Fred,” she tells us, “used to walk me home…He talked about Walt Whitman, Jack London, Emma Goldman, and other people of whom I had never heard” (49). Other iconic I.W.W. personalities also claimed allegiance to the poetry of Whitman. Flynn tells us of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an

I.W.W. martyr,9 that his “social philosophy was a belief in human freedom and the dignity of man . . . He would have been at home with Emerson, Thoreau, or Walt

Whitman” (305). In his autobiography, Wobbly songwriter Ralph Chaplin writes that publisher Charles Kerr “recommended [Leaves of Grass] to me as poetry of the highest order. One Sunday I opened Leaves of Grass at random. It was a revelation . . .

Whitman’s vast affirmation was the entering wedge” (98) and a “religious experience”

(qtd. in Winters 8). B.L. Weber, author of the lyrics for the I.W.W. song “Industrial

Worker,” wrote poetry “in praise of Walt Whitman’s philosophy” (Rebel 16). Buhle asserts that Wobbly poet Arturo Giovannitti10 “like so many others drew upon 69

Whitman’s freedom of form” (“Revolutionary” 166), and Robert D’Attilio relates that

Giovannitti’s poems are “a Whitmanesque mix of lyricism and class struggle” (139).

This infusion of Whitman into the Wobbly culture produced echoes that reverberated throughout its core mission.

Like Whitman, the Wobbly poets were drawn to the use of slang. In Collect and

Other Works, Whitman writes that slang is “the lawless germinal element . . . behind all poetry,” showing that language “has its bases broad and low to the ground” (qtd. in

Reynolds, Walt 121). The appendix in Rebel Voices – “Language of the Migratory

Worker: Including hobo, lumberjack, and mining terms” – clearly shows the Wobbly love of slang terms and of what Salerno calls “occupational folklore” (5). From “angel food” – the term for mission preaching – to “yap” – the term for farmer – the slang dictionary shows a passionate and immediate engagement with language, an engagement that was shared by Walt Whitman. Whitman discusses this immediacy of language in Democratic Vistas when he speaks of an ideal American future in which

“hot from surrounding war and revolution, our speech, though without polished coherence, and a failure by the standard called criticism, comes forth, real at least, as the lightnings” (103). The Wobblies sought this same poetic energy, an energy, as

Erkkila points out about Whitman’s poetry, “[that] was not separate from but actively engaged in the political struggles of the time” (75). Rosemont tells us that, like

Whitman, “Against the classical values of authority, obedience, normality, order, balance, propriety, and maturity, the Wobbly arts resound with their romantic negations: freedom, revolt, passion, wildness, urgency, defiance, and the genius of youth” (452). 70

Through its efforts at mass education and cultural awareness, the I.W.W. propagated the image not of “a mighty and muscular ‘he-man’” (Salerno 296) but of the “poet, artist, humorist, musician, writer, and singer of songs” (Salerno 296), thus creating, like

Whitman, a new archetype of the American male – sensitive, self-aware, compassionate, and singing. By presenting political action as inseparable from art, the

I.W.W. sought to meet Emma Goldman’s and Walt Whitman’s challenge to re-make the individual as a prerequisite to social revolution, and they also changed the discourse of labor organizing in a way that was baffling to many authority figures, who were not used to dealing with politics as “mass entertainment” (Solidarity 23).

A large part of this “entertainment” consisted of singing. Stauffer and Soskis tell us that “It was through their songs that [Wobblies] disseminated their vision of solidarity, hope, revolution, and millennium. Their songbook was their bible” (186).

First published in 1909, the Little Red Songbook went through thirty-five editions, all of which were about the size of a Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Book. Reynolds asserts that

Walt Whitman “regarded music as a prime agent for unity and uplift in a nation whose tendencies to fragmentation and political corruption he saw clearly. Even more than oratory, music offered a meeting place of aesthetics and egalitarianism” (176). The

I.W.W. understood these same principles, seeking, as did Whitman, “music that sprang from native soil and embodied the idioms and concerns of average Americans”

(Reynolds, Walt 179). The fact that Whitman named so many of his poems “songs” indicates the link Reynolds sees between “public entertainment and radical reform”

(Walt 183) in Whitman’s philosophy. For the Wobblies, singing “was not a 71 performance, but a community event in which everyone participated” (Solidarity 21).

Harnessing “the universal language of song” (Solidarity 21), the Wobblies staged

“countless ‘acts of mass singing’ which emboldened workers to unite and fight for industrial democracy” (Stauffer 188). Erkkila quotes an 1884 Whitman letter in which he states that “The final aim of the United States of America . . . is the solidarity of the world. What fails so far, may yet be accomplished by song, radiating, clustering, concentrating from all the lands of the earth” (322), a sentiment with which every

Wobbly would agree. According to Bernard Weisberger the Little Red Songbook was

“what the hymnbook and the Discipline of the Methodist Church had been to the frontier preachers – The sum and touchstone of faith, the pearl of revelation, the coal of fire touching their lips with eloquence” (qtd. in Winters 38). The most famous Wobbly song writer, Joe Hill,11 recognized the power of song when he said in 1914, “a pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once . . . but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over” (Garman, Race 92). As Thomas Marvin points out, “Learned by heart” is a phrase “that suggests a deep, long-lasting impact on both an intellectual and emotional level” (248), placing singing at the top of the list of the most effective propaganda techniques. When 50,000 striking loggers in Everett, Washington, broke into a mass chorus of “Solidarity Forever” (Stauffer 188), the company bosses must have felt that they were experiencing Walt Whitman’s America singing – “the mechanics,” “the carpenter,” the “mason,” “the boatman,” “the shoemaker,” “the wood- cutter” all conspiring, all “Singing with open mouth, their strong melodious songs”

(Leaves 12). Just as Whitman strove to use his poetry to bind Americans together, so, 72 too, did the I.W.W. use the Little Red Songbook to “develop . . . group consciousness and cohesiveness” (Winters 41). This comingling of Whitman’s poetry and the songs of the I.W.W. can best be illustrated by the fate of Joe Hill, by far the most famous and popular Wobbly song writer. Just prior to his execution, Hill requested that no memorial be erected in his memory, preferring instead to have his ashes divided up in small vials and distributed to Wobblies the world over in celebration of the Wobbly lifestyle. Thus, as Marvin says, “Hill is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere” (260). We can only speculate as to whether in his request Hill was drawing on a Whitman meme from section 52 of Leaves of Grass: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, / If you want me again look for me under your boot soles” (77). In any case, Hill’s legacy of song and Whitman’s legacy of poetry, “simultaneously nowhere and everywhere,” lie scattered across America.

Another way in which the Wobblies sought to educate the masses was through soapboxing, an informal means of public lecturing. Marvin tells us that “amid the raucous distractions of skid row street life” (249), soapboxing fostered “revolutionary rhetoric with popular appeal” (Marvin 249). A speaker with something to say would produce a soapbox to serve as a dais on a crowded street. According to Thomas Walker, speaking first in “soft tones to a small cluster of one or two friends” (69), the soapboxer would draw a crowd in to hear his words, growing more and more expansive in his style. “The successful speaker,” according to Walker, “gauged and managed the incipient power of the crowd through strategies of identification with it and endeavored to enlarge the scene ideologically and poetically, often by employing laborlore and 73 other local folk traditions and beliefs to that end” (66-7). Thus, soapboxing offered the

Wobblies a chance to form ad hoc communities for their propaganda, exercising, as

Walker points out, their right of free speech while creating “social legitimacy” (66) for their causes. In forums such as Bughouse Square in Chicago (where Clarence Darrow was known to appear on a soapbox), Pershing Square in Los Angeles, and Union Square in New York City, soapboxers could be found offering “theories of changing the social order” (Rebel 69). The practice led to the famous Wobbly “Free Speech Fights” up and down the west coast as Wobblies came into conflict with local authorities over their intent, as Dubovsky terms it, “to demonstrate that America’s dispossessed could, through direct action, challenge established authority” (173). A Whitman meme floats to the surface here, as Erkkila points out that in his notebooks, Whitman, mulling over a way to “arouse… what he called the ‘divine fire’ of revolutionary sentiment in the mass of common people” (60), considered “ranging up and down the states” delivering

“lessons” to the people (60), his purpose being “to invigorate the physical and spiritual life of the American republic by educating the people in the religion of democracy”

(61). He took up this topic with Traubel, stating, “If I had gone directly to the people, read my poems, faced the crowds, got into immediate touch with Tom, Dick, and Harry instead of waiting to be interpreted, I’d have my audience at once” (Reynolds, Walt

339). Thus the I.W.W. and Whitman show common appreciation for direct action in the service of stoking the “divine fire of revolutionary sentiment in the mass of common people.” 74

The “mass of common people” could not have gotten more common than the tramps and hoboes who were routinely recruited by the I.W.W. A product of the vagaries of the seasonal employment situation in the western United States, these migratory workers formed the foundation of the loosely-built Wobbly structure. As

Wobbly Dick Brazier stated in an interview with folklorist Archie Green, “. . . the West was a wide open country, the open spaces really existed. There was plenty of room to move around in, and there were scenes of great grandeur and beauty, and there were journeys to be made that took you to all kinds of interesting sections of the country.

That’s the feeling we all had” (qtd. in Rebel 71). This is the same feeling of expansiveness that Whitman evokes over and over in his poetry through his catalogs of the American experience and landscape. In “Starting From Paumanok,” for instance, he writes of:

Land of the pastoral plains, the grass-fields of the world! Land of those sweet-air’d interminable plateaus! Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie! Lands where the north-west Columbia winds, and where the southwest Colorado winds! (Leaves 22)

The wandering Wobbly would find a sympathetic vibration in this poetry. In Specimen

Days, Whitman provides “an Undeliver’d Speech” called “The Prairies” in which he sees the American West as the seedbed that will give rise to “a character for your future humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic, and new” (141); the Wobblies gave rise to a similar mythos in their glorification of the West and the men who roamed its parameters. In

1888, socialist Reginald Beckett wrote that Whitman “is at bottom the poet of the virgin 75 soil, the inexhausted territory, the increasing possibilities of the New World” (8). In

“Song of the Open Road,” Whitman writes:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. (Leaves 126)

In this poem he turns “the open road” into a metaphor for the freedom to explore

America physically and philosophically, inquiring of his readers, “will you come travel with me? / Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?” (Leaves 135), once again linking the freedom of solitary endeavor to a community of like-minded individuals.

Thurston Brown wrote in 1913 that Whitman’s life “from the age of 28 to 35… was spent as a sort of hobo, earning his living always, but moving from place to place and becoming acquainted with all sorts of men and women as comrade and fellow.” This footloose, peripatetic lifestyle helped to develop Whitman’s artistic sensibilities in ways that are echoed in the experiences of the western hoboes and tramps. Wobbly organizer

Fred Thompson notes that “[Western workers’] speech was different – much more seasoned, and even their cussing was original and avoided stereotype. I think they shunned stereotype in all things. Their frontier was a psychological fact – a rather deliberate avoidance of certain conventions, a break with the bondage of the past” (qtd. in Dubovsky 25). Rosemont asserts that “Against… conformity and respect for bourgeois ‘norms,’ hoboes not only tolerated ‘difference’ but even welcomed eccentricity” (450). Perhaps Whitman derived these characteristics from his years as a kind of hobo. 76

That Whitman’s bright dream was altered by the Wobblies into a more realistic picture of twentieth-century labor politics only shows its durability. St. John Tucker, former president of the “Hobo College”12 in Chicago, makes a distinction between a hobo, whom he defines as “a migratory worker;” a tramp, who is “a migratory non- worker;” and a bum, who is “a stationary non-worker” (qtd. in Anderson 61). In a passage of redolent of Whitman, he continues:

Upon the labor of the migratory worker all the basic industries depend. He goes forth from the crowded slave markets to hew the forests, build and repair the railroads, tunnel mountains and build ravines. His is the labor that harvests the wheat in the fall and cuts ice in the winter. All of these are hoboes. (qtd. in Anderson 61)

As profiled in a 1914 article in Solidarity, this “nomadic worker of the West,” with his

“cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of bourgeois society, including the most stringent conventions which masquerade under the name of morality” is presented as “an admirable exemplar of the iconoclastic doctrine of revolutionary unionism” (qtd. in Rebel 66). One might think the article was describing Walt Whitman himself. Rosemont comments on hobos as “self-taught geniuses who had been everywhere and seen everything, and who were rightly considered the brainiest characters in the whole U.S. labor movement” (25), celebrating their “sheer groundedness in the reality and diversity of working class life” (Rosemont

25) and calling them “the movement’s most far-sighted visionaries” (Rosemont 25). As a group, he claims, they were “devoted students of such poets as Blake, Burns,

Whitman, and William Morris” (Rosemont 25). Inhabiting box cars and I.W.W. halls as 77

“subversive social spaces” (Rosemont 33), hoboes personified the self-educated, rabble rousing culture of the I.W.W.

In its first years of existence, the I.W.W. increasingly became identified with the hobo culture, a culture composed of men who could be viewed as “the guerillas of the revolution” (qtd. in Rebel 67), and – importantly – men with no wives or families. In the

Christian socialist memes of Eugene Debs, Jesus, the ultimate solitary celibate, was often depicted as “an agitator, a hobo . . . , the prophetic archetype of the rootless rebel” (Winters 32), an iconic figure that hobos could take to heart. Greg Hall points out that the Wobblies came to be identified with a “worklife culture [that] embodied the virtues of manual labor, worker solidarity, [and] masculinity . . .” (109) and that they possessed a “masculine fighting spirit” (110). Winters asserts that the Wobblies sometimes considered wives and families to be one of the “barriers that confine workers to the chains of capitalism” (32). In a 1914 issue of Solidarity, Joe Hill is quoted as stating that the “predominantly male membership of the I.W.W. in the West made it “a kind of one-legged freakish animal of a union . . .” (Solidarity 142). This political organization of male-ness hearkens back to Whitman’s ideal state of male comradeship as the basis of a truly democratic society. Men like “Big Bill” Haywood became the visual icons of the I.W.W. “A massive, stooped-shouldered man [who] had been a cowboy, homesteader, and miner” (Rebel 2), Haywood was “a powerful and aggressive embodiment of the frontier spirit’” (Dulles qtd. in Rebel 2) who certainly would have measured up the standards for masculinity that Whitman sets in “Song of Myself.”

Celebrating the physicality of blacksmiths, for instance, Whitman writes of “The lithe 78 sheer of their waists [that] plays even with their massive arms.” He notes the “polish’d and perfect limbs” of the negro. “I behold the picturesque giant,” Whitman writes

(Leaves 35). Ralph Chaplin heralds the lumberjack or the “timber beast” of the Pacific

Northwest: “As the wage workers go, he is not the common but the uncommon type both as regards physical strength and cleanliness and mental alertness. He is generous to a fault and has all the qualities Lincoln and Whitman loved in men” (“Centralia”). He continues, “[The timber beast’s] job life is a group life. He walks to his daily task with his fellow workers. He is seldom employed for long away from them. At a common table he eats with them, and they all sleep in common bunk houses” (“Centralia”). This way of life echoes the “manly love of comrades” (Leaves 101) for which Whitman so earnestly strove. “I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of

America,” Whitman writes in “For You, O Democracy” (Leaves 101), unwittingly describing the lifestyle of the Wobbly lumberjacks. Garman points out that in the late nineteenth century Horace Traubel and his Whitman Fellowship followers “purged”

Whitman’s poetry of his “homoeroticism” (Race 45) but that the imagery and “language of male desire” persisted (Race 45). Perhaps the migratory, transient, rootless, male

Wobbly culture, homosexual or not, was drawn to this language. Critics have discussed that in Whitman’s lifetime the line between homo- and hetero-sexuality had not yet been drawn. Reynolds writes that “Whitman in his poems typically posed as the extremely ‘masculine’ man. His pose as the turbulent, drinking, fleshy, breeding, working-class rough places him in the realm of . . . sensual males, who sometimes in real life loved both men and women without sacrificing their basic sexual identity” 79

(“‘Affection’” 638). Wobblies may very well have identified with this aspect of his poetry. Frank Higbie quotes a 1978 interview with historian Philip Taft, who was a

Wobbly hobo in his youth. Taft relates that the I.W.W. “had more than the normal number of active male homosexuals” (183). Taft continues, “The older men would protect you in a sort of way, not – you really don’t need protection in those matters, but there were some of them that were very kind” (183). Higbie interprets Taft’s confused diction to his trying to explain that this “protection” did not always “signify a sexual relationship” – rather, in the same sense as Whitman, a mutuality and solidarity of purpose that contributed to a community. As Higbie points out:

Whereas the dominant culture described laboring men, their rough bachelor culture, the spaces they inhabited, and their very bodies as pathological, broken, and beyond the margins of the community, Wobblies refashioned laborers’ bodies, actions, and places into manly sites of rebellion that defined their own community. (193)

The similarity here with Whitman’s project is clear, and his poetry would have been compelling to men living in this context. In any case, Rosemont posits that because the

Wobblies, unlike the socialists, communists, and Troskyites, did not discriminate against “sex-deviates” and because “All wage earners were eligible to join, and that was that” (296), perhaps they were “modest forerunners of the Gay Liberation movement”

(296).

In its pursuit of leisure time for workers, the Wobbly culture was also (often notoriously) associated with relaxation and loafing. The I.W.W.’s drive to shorten the work day to four hours, their defense of “The Right to Be Lazy” (the title of a pamphlet by Karl Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue) (Rosemont 29), and their endorsement of 80 sabotage as a means of direct action in the workplace gave the Wobblies the reputation of being shirkers. T-Bone Slim, a famous itinerant Wobbly, advised his fellow workers,

“Do only such work as you like to do – if you don’t like your job, quit . . . Do not remain standing too long at a stretch – a tired body multiplies weariness. Sit down frequently . . . Do not work too hard . . . Hurry is unnatural – a form of insanity” (qtd. in

Rosemont 20). This attitude sprang from the Wobbly belief that working for wages for the profit of the capitalists was a form of slavery. Indeed, they called the working class

“wage slaves.” Expending too much energy for the benefit of “the Bosses” seemed irrational to a Wobbly. More importantly, however, in its goal of achieving at least an eight hour work day, the I.W.W. advocated “Bread and Roses” as a motto for the working class – that is, both fair wages for fair work and the leisure time in which, as

Kenneth McGown states, to “awake” to “an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and rights of their part in it” (qtd. in Rebel 164). All of these ideas can be traced to Whitman memes. Stacy tells us that the term “loafer” appeared in American English in the early 1830s and “probably had negative connotations as a derivation of the German word for tramp or vagabond” (37), another interesting tie to the hobo culture of the I.W.W. “How I do love a loafer!” Whitman wrote in 1840 (qtd. in Stacy 37), saying that the loafer is “a philosophik [sic] son of indolence” (Stacy 37). Arvin relates Whitman’s words that “When I have been in a dreamy, musing mood, I have sometimes amused myself with picturing out a nation of loafers. Only think of it! An entire loafer kingdom! How sweet it sounds!” (112).

Reynolds points out that Whitman’s love affair with “contemplative loafing” (Walt 64) 81 sprang from his role as a poet and his view of “[t]he activity of poetry [being] largely a matter of relaxation, opening up his sensibilities to the natural and spiritual world”

(Walt 64). But the idea of loaferism was also related to the politics of Whitman’s time.

According to Reynolds, the Whigs in New York City in the 1840s were associated with the “capitalist success ethic” (Walt 601) while the Democrats, with whom Whitman identified, were associated with loaferism. In an essay written in November, 1840,

Whitman shows himself “ready to drop out and become a full-time loafer” (Reynolds,

Walt 64). This attitude, Reynolds tells us, was probably the result of the economic hard times experienced by the young people of the early nineteenth century “who had been impelled by hard times to reject normal capitalist pursuits and find other means of gratification” (Walt 64). This comingling of the world of art, work, and anti-capitalist attitude is picked up by Wobbly Fred Thompson when he calls the I.W.W. “forerunners of a future in which work and leisure are indistinguishable purposeful activities, far from inane, self-directed, freed from all taint of commodity culture because we work for the fun of it and get what we want for free” (qtd. in Rosemont 29). Anticipating the

I.W.W.’s post-capitalist goals, Whitman wrote, “Talk about your commercial countries, and your national industry, indeed! Give us the facilities of loafing, and you are welcome to all the benefits of your tariff system, your manufacturing privileges, and your cotton trade” (qtd. in Arvin 112). His rejection of capitalist values and his delightful notion that “we loafers should organize” (qtd. in Stacy 37) find fulfillment in the Wobbly culture.

Finally, Whitman’s freethinker memes can be found within the I.W.W. On the 82 surface, Wobblies were irreligious at best. Rosemont explains that neither priest, nor minister, nor rabbi was invited to bless the I.W.W.’s 1905 founding convention. “By ignoring this ceremonial detail [standard at A.F.L gatherings], the I.W.W. let it be known that its radical nonconformism was not confined to economics and politics, but extended to the spiritual realm as well” (307). Wobbly leader Walker C. Smith said in

1910:

[T]he casual, the migratory workers’ . . . work shows them the direct relationship between cause and effect, and this destroys their belief in God. They are irreligious. Their words and ethics are not those of the ruling class . . . A hatred for the priest, the soldier, and other forms of authority is ever present. This is the class that masters fear. (qtd. in Winters 32)

According to Henry May, the I.W.W. evinced “a bitter suspicion of religion, a hatred of

‘pie in the sky’’” (qtd. in Winters 10). “Pie in the sky” refers to “The Preacher and the

Slave,” a song by Joe Hill in the Little Red Song Book. Disdainfully referencing “the starvation army” and “Holy Rollers and Jumpers” who only want money, the song is a severe indictment of traditional religion. “Long-haired preachers . . . / Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right,” but when the hungry ask them “bout something to eat,” they answer:

You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. (I.W.W. 36)

Wobbly crowds sang this song with great enthusiasm and humor. Another Joe Hill song, “We Will Sing One Song,” refers to “preachers, fat and sleek” who tell people

“Be generous, be lowly and meek,/ If you don’t you’ll sure get roasted when you die” 83

(I.W.W. 7). When songs like “Workers of the World” refer to workers who have been

“hoodwink’d forever by twaddle and cant” (I.W.W. 14), it is understood that the reference is to the religion as well as the politics of the ruling class. And yet there exists a religious millennialism within the I.W.W. and its vision of the future. The chorus of

Joe Hill’s song “Workers of the World, Awaken!” states, “The end the means is justifying,/ Tis the final stand” (I.W.W. 8). The refrain of the great working class anthem “The Internationale” by Eugene Pottier, a song sung at many Wobbly rallies, states:

Tis the final conflict, Let each stand his place, The Industrial Union Shall be the human race. (I.W.W. 6)

Rosemont asserts that Wobbly “millennialism . . . was always strictly secular, and, indeed, openly atheist” (309). In fact, Winters relates “Big Bill” Haywood’s story of his arrest in 1917: “[S]ome of the boys, when asked about their religion, answered

‘[T]he Industrial Workers of the World.’ When the guards challenged their response, according to Haywood, they replied: ‘Well, that’s the only religion I’ve got’” (qtd. in

Winters 8). Winters, however, sees in the “irreligious” nature of the Wobblies “the very traits which contribute to the creation of a kind of revolutionary religion” (32), what songwriter Ralph Chaplin called “the fantastical Religion of Rebellion at whose shrine

. . . we chanted hymns of hope and hate” (qtd. in Stauffer 187). As has been previously pointed out, Chaplin was a devotee of Walt Whitman and actually spoke at Whitman

Fellowship dinners (Stauffer 194). According to Stauffer and Soskis, Leaves of Grass

“offered [Chaplin] a vision of society defined by the ethos of comradeship, equality, 84 and respect for all people. And it rejuvenated his spiritual faith” (184). Thus Whitman, who was presented by Debs as closely aligned with the Christian socialist movement, became for Chaplin and other Wobblies “a prophet whose poetry embodied their vision of a new age in which the transformation of labor relations was the material manifestation of Christ’s Second Coming” (Stauffer 184). This link between Christian socialist millennialism, Whitman, and the I.W.W. built on what Robertson calls “the progressive optimism among nineteenth century spiritual seekers, the notion that earlier religions had been rough sketches for a fully realized democratic spirituality” that was evolving in modern America (10). Because that “democratic spirituality” was based on the individual, Whitman’s words in “Song of Myself” – “Nothing, not God, is greater than one’s self is” (Leaves 75) – speak to the Wobbly goal of the apotheosis of the individual as the necessary first step towards building the human community. The extent to which the Wobbly goal of solidarity reverberated with the Christian socialist goals of “justice and humanity” and “devotion and self-sacrifice” (Rauschenberg qtd. in

Winters 126) could qualify the I.W.W. as an organization with religious purposes.

Ultimately, the I.W.W. was faced with the same problem that confronted socialists in mid-nineteenth century Europe and America: Where do we park the fervor of the masses when organized religion becomes anathema to them? For the I.W.W. the answer to that question lay in creating a utopian workers’ paradise worthy of a kind of religious veneration. In “Starting From Paumanok,” Whitman offers his vision of “A world primal again . . . / A new race dominating previous ones and grander far with new contests,/ New politics, new literatures and religions, new inventions and arts” (Leaves 85

24). This vision is shared by Eugene Debs in his speech “Industrial Unionism” when he states that:

The workers are the saviours [sic] of society; . . . the redeemers of the race; and when they have fulfilled their great historic mission, men and women can walk the highlands and enjoy the vision of a land without masters and without slaves, a land regenerated and resplendent in the triumph of Freedom and Civilization . . . (466)

This shared millennial fervor cements the connection between the Wobblies and Walt

Whitman.

Writing in his Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman says that

“in the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty is indispensable…The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots” (627). The Wobbly relationship with Walt Whitman was one of mutual satisfaction. In the wage slaves of the I.W.W., Whitman’s poetry finally found the mass audience that he so craved during his lifetime. In appropriating the poetry of an American icon, the Wobblies laid claim to a legitimacy elevation of purpose and values in the context of American life. That the poetry subverted many traditional norms gave it additional éclat in the context of the revolutionary Wobbly project. In short, Walt Whitman fulfilled a propaganda function in the I.W.W. at the same time that the I.W.W. provided living, breathing proof of the truth of Whitman’s poetic imaginings. Thus, in a dynamic interplay with the discourses of socialism, anarchism, humanism, and freethought in early twentieth century America,

Whitman’s texts helped to shape those forces while at the same time the texts were re- shaped by their radical disseminators.

86

Chapter 5

Whitman and Radicalism

Lois Tyson tells us that cultural criticism begins with the perception that

“working class culture has been misunderstood and undervalued” (296). Cultural critics perceive, she continues, that “The dominant class dictates what forms of art are to be considered “high’ (superior),” relegating popular culture to the status of “inferior”

(296). According to Tyson, cultural critics reject this dichotomy, arguing instead that

“all cultural productions can be analyzed to reveal the cultural work they perform – that is, the ways in which they shape our experience by transmitting or transforming ideologies” (296, italics original). In this schema, the distinction between “superior” and

“inferior” (or popular) forms of culture is determined by the social class that holds the power. Though cultural critics view the producers of popular culture as what Tyson terms “oppressed groups” (297), they also see such groups “as capable of resisting or transforming [the] power structure” that is oppressing them (297). Thus cultural criticism “make[s] connections between the literary text, the culture in which it is emerged, and the cultures in which it is interpreted” (Tyson 297).

Interrogating the relationship between Walt Whitman and the Industrial Workers of the World in this light reveals the way in which Whitman was used to form a new

American cultural identity of radicalism in the early twentieth century. The dominant political discourse in opposition to the culture of the robber barons at the turn of the twentieth century was the Progressive movement, whose middle-class adherents, much like the A.F.L, embraced working within the system to effect political and economic 87 reforms. When the I.W.W rejected this approach and thrust itself outside of the mainstream with its adversarial approach of organizing the working class and demanding social change through direct action and sabotage, it alienated itself from the

American power structure, becoming the bête noire of dominant political culture.

Ruthlessly pursued by local and federal law enforcement agencies and the national government throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, the I.W.W. came to be viewed by these agents of the hegemony as a menace to the American way of life.

Its avowal of sabotage as one means of direct action branded it as an agent of mayhem, yet this was a misreading of Wobbly intentions, as sabotage was actually seen as an alternative to direct violent confrontation in most Wobbly dealings. Any violence that was associated with the Wobblies was usually the result of confrontations with law enforcement agents, who frequently provoked a violent response with their own violent actions. Yet newspapers of the times vilified the I.W.W. in editorials. “A whipping post and a cat-o-nine tails well seasoned by being soaked in salt water is none too harsh a treatment for peace-breakers,” writes the Fresno Herald in 1910 (qtd. in Townsend 4).

The St. Louis Republic claimed in 1912 that the I.W.W. “is mere brute ferocity. The tiger which springs on the traveler in the jungle has no philosophy – only a thirst for blood. He cannot be reasoned with – he must be overcome” (qtd. in Townsend 6). That the Wobblies were depicted as such a serious threat to mainstream culture is an indicator of the threat they were perceived to pose to traditional American values. As

Townsend states, “At bottom, the I.W.W. threatened certain individuals’ identity by challenging the way authority was structured in America” (10). The memoirs of 88

Wobblies, as we have seen, do depict a workers’ culture that challenges the structure of authority, but the revolution toward which they were struggling was based not upon violence but upon individual growth and awareness, a plan that took the long view of what would be necessary to sustain a true social revolution.

Walt Whitman endured a similar drubbing by the dominant culture of his time for many of the same reasons. Reynolds tells us that a review of Drum Taps co-written by Whitman and his friend John Burroughs in 1866 perceives Whitman as “almost totally neglected” by the critics and reading public (qtd. in Walt 459). According to

Burroughs, Whitman “has been sneered at and mocked and ridiculed… [H]e has been cursed or caricatured and persecuted” (qtd. in Reynolds, Walt 459). The review labels the 1855 Leaves of Grass “still-born” (qtd. in Reynolds, Walt 459). Reynolds points out that there may have been some histrionics in this review, but that Whitman “never came close to having the kind of popular impact he dreamed of” (Walt 460). Woodress reports the “noisy, often abusive opposition” to Whitman’s poetry (1). Charles Eliot

Norton’s 1855 review of Leaves of Grass calls it “a curious and lawless collection of poems” (qtd. in Woodress 19), associating it with “New York rowdyism” (qtd. in

Woodress 19). Charles A Dana’s 1855 review says that Whitman’s “independence often becomes coarse and defiant” (qtd. In Woodress 18). A Boston Intelligencer reviewer writes in 1856 that Whitman is “below the level of a brute” (qtd. in Woodress 27) and calls Leaves of Grass a “heterogeneous mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense” (qtd. in Woodress 27). A review in the Cincinnati Commercial calls

Whitman “a person of coarse nature and strong, rude passions” (qtd. in Woodress 44). 89

Critic Rufus Griswold, writing in 1860, states that Whitman’s poetry “leaves[s] a foul odor, contaminating the pure, healthful air” (qtd. in Woodson 25), and William Dean

Howells, the leading critic of the establishment of the time, comments on the

“lawlessness” of Whitman’s poetry (qtd. in Woodress 56). Any of these epithets could also have been directed toward the I.W.W. Each of these critics links Whitman’s poetry to the “coarse,” vulgar, and “rude” working classes, effectively ejecting him from the dominant literary establishment, just as I.W.W. members, depicted as dirty bums, were ejected from the dominant political establishment. Little wonder that the Wobblies saw in Whitman a fellow traveler, prophet, and renegade who thumbed his nose at convention and normative values and suffered for it.

Just as the middle class was uneasy with the Wobblies’ approach to social change, preferring the safety of the “pure and simple unionism” of the A.F.L.,

Woodress tells us that by Whitman’s death in 1892, “he had achieved the status of a national landmark; but it must be said that Leaves of Grass was not for many more years a book that respectable middle-class families kept on their living room tables” (1).

Robert Ingersoll, Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, and Eugene Debs were all aware of the controversial elements of his poetry, and all of them celebrated those rebellious aspects, thumbing their noses at dominant middle-class culture in their speeches and lectures as they carried Whitman to a mass audience. Even though Whitman himself struggled with the label of socialist, it is difficult to argue that the entire radical left engaged in a mass misreading of Whitman’s meanings. Reader-response criticism tells us, according to Tyson, that “what a text is cannot be separated from what it does” (170) 90 and that “readers actively make the meaning they find in literature” (170). In social reader-response theory, the meaning is manufactured by the interpretive strategies that are dictated by “the interpretive community to which we belong“(Tyson 185, italics in original). Thus, says Tyson, readers “come to the text already predisposed to interpret it in a certain way based on whatever interpretive strategies are operating for them at the time they read” (185). As critic Stanley Fish points out, “readers do not interpret poems, they create them” (Tyson 185) based on their own experiences and expectations. So when Whitman was presented to the members of the I.W.W. as a socialist poet whose ideas pointed in the same direction as the Wobblies’ doctrine, his poetry came alive for the Wobblies in a way that it never had for the middle class, epitomizing all of their most firmly-held leftist beliefs. The same was true for the way I.W.W. affected

Whitman, as the Wobbly philosophy cast new light on Whitman’s poetry, exposing its political and poetical lineaments in a fresh way.

We end with a discussion of an I.W.W. propaganda image that also reverberates

with Walt Whitman’s vision of a democratic American

future (see fig.1). This illustration appeared in the July 1920

issue of One Big Union Monthly, the I.W.W. magazine

(Rebel 33). It depicts a revitalized mass of workers arising

from the swamp of capitalism and craft unionism labeled

with the descriptors “Unfair struggle for existence/

Fig. 1 misunderstanding/ privation/ want/ grief/ rapine and death.”

The workers are guided to the horizon by an androgynous 91 figure who is labeled “Economic Development” and who holds a science book. The figure gestures toward a future Industrial Democracy whose rising sun is labeled

“Industrial Workers of the World.” The guiding figure represents the I.W.W.’s origins in Marx and Engels’ concept of scientific socialism, which views human history as a progression of stages in an economic evolution that will end in worker control of the means of production. As workers free themselves from the mire of the capitalist system, they will move ecstatically toward the “worker-controlled, cooperative commonwealth”

(Rebel 6) represented by the I.W.W. This “industrial democracy” will be organized around each industry, “administered from the point of production by workers” (Salerno

41), forever eliminating the need for a central government presided over by the

“exploitative and authoritarian” (Salerno 41) ruling class. The rising sun symbolizes the dawn of this new world, a world based on the solidarity of a working class melded together in the true comradeship of mutual interest and, as Eugene Debs says in

“Socialist Ideals,” in “mind and soul. . . free to develop as they never were before.” In his book The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R., Richard Hofstadter posits that the

Progressive Era sought “to bring back a kind of morality and civic purity that was . . . believed to have been lost” in the American experience (5). The I.W.W.’s ultimate vision certainly tapped into this ideological flow.

As “the prophet of spiritual democracy” (Robertson 281), Walt Whitman also tapped into this flow in a way directly parallel to the I.W.W. image. In Democratic

Vistas, his critique of American democracy, Whitman decries the “depravity of the business classes of our country” and accuses the government of being “saturated in 92

corruption, bribery, falsehood, [and] mal-administration” (qtd. in Reynolds 479-80.

These would be the terms in the swamp from which the masses are arising in the

I.W.W. graphic. Arguing against the greed and materialism of American culture,

Whitman looks to the future, arguing for an evolution of democracy that could be

represented by the book labeled Science. According to Whitman, the “First Stage” of

American development was establishment of “the political foundation rights of

immense masses of people - indeed all people - in the organization of . . . governments”

(Whitman, Iowa 55). Relating directly to the book labeled Science, the “Second Stage”

of American development, Whitman tells us, “relates to material prosperity, wealth,

produce, labor-saving machines, iron, cotton, local, State and continental railways, Fig. 2

Fig. 2 intercommunication and trade with all lands," among other benefits of the industrial age

(Whitman, Iowa 56). The “Third Stage” represented by the rising sun, will be “the last

Ideal” (Whitman, Iowa 62), "a sublime and serious Religious Democracy sternly taking

command, dissolving the old, sloughing off surfaces, and from its own interior and vital

principles, entirely reconstructing Society" (Whitman, Iowa 57). This ideal age, labeled

“Industrial Democracy” in the graphic, will be known to Whitman “By the names

Right, Justice, Truth” (Whitman, Iowa 62), terms with which the I.W.W. would be in

complete accord. For Whitman, the androgynous being in the graphic who guides the

masses toward this goal would be what Ed Folsom calls “the poet of democracy” (19),

who, “would change a nation’s reading habits and in so doing would create the

imaginative energy necessary to break down feudalistic assumptions and to construct a

new democratic frame of mind” (19). Thus, agreeing with the I.W.W., Whitman says in 93

Democratic Vistas: “I say the mission of government, henceforth, in civilized lands . . .,

[is] beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves” (22). Kaplan

points out that in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman used several “symbolic

devices in the text as tailpieces” (250). Among these was a “rising sun with nine spokes

of light” (see fig. 2). This image from the Drew University Special Collection of

editions of Leaves of Grass shows a

rising sun quite similar to that in the

Wobbly graphic (“Leaves”). In “For

You O Democracy,” Whitman wrote “I

will make the most splendid race the

sun ever shone upon” (Leaves 100).

Fig. 2 Surely Whitman meant this sun to

symbolize the dawn of a new age for America, a vision of the rising sun identical to that

of the I.W.W.

Fig. 2 Whitman states in the last sentence of his 1855 Preface, “The proof of the poet is

that his country absorbs him as he has absorbed it” (Leaves 636). Has there ever been

another poet besides Whitman whose metaphors have been so completely absorbed into

the blood stream of the American body politic? Pleasantly amenable to the uses to

which his poetry was put during his lifetime, it is tempting to speculate that if Whitman

had lived long enough to witness the passionate way in which the Wobblies embraced

his memes, he would have been thrilled to see his verse come alive in their culture, a

culture that both adapted and reflected his optimistic belief in an industrial future that 94 embodied the closely-knit communal values of the pre-industrial past. For a few decades at the turn of the twentieth century, radical left-wing America needed Whitman as much as Whitman needed America, and their alliance produced an extraordinary melding of politics and poetry. Literary critics who perceive Whitman’s attitude toward industrial labor as, at best, confused or, at worst, indifferent need to examine the inspiration and model he provided for the Industrial Workers of the World.

95

Notes

1. In nineteenth-century Europe, “The idea of a society of orders, where people

were born into a particular class and stayed there, gave way to notions of

mobility, where property, ownership, gender, and education defined a

meritocracy of deserving citizens.” As “the values of paternalism, hierarchy, and

subordination “gave way to an industrial economy, a democratic surge

manifested itself on the part of the working class” (Berger xix).

2. I will capitalize the term socialist when it indicates an official political party. All

other uses of the term will appear in lower case.

3. Robertson attributes Whitman’s initial popularity in England to the efforts of

William Michael Rossetti, who published Whitman’s first English edition, and

Anne Gilchrist, whose “religious devotion” (Robertson 89) to Whitman impelled

her on a lifelong quest to insuring his acceptance by the reading public.

4. In 1882, Wilde paid two personal visits to Whitman. “There is no one in this

great world of America whom I love and honor so much,” he stated (qtd. in

Reynolds 540).

5. Traubel writes in a self-deprecating barb in his own introduction to David

Karsner’s book Horace Traubel: His Life and Work: “At best Traubel is only

known to a handful of people and even with that handful of people he’s only

rated as Walt Whitman’s errand boy” (10).

6. Whitman drew his idea of the kosmos from Alexander von Humboldt’s five-

volume scientific treatise published between 1845 and 1850. Striving to depict 96

the entire universe, Humboldt “described nature not in terms of chaos or conflict

but as a harmoniously ordered system” (Walt 288). Viewing humans “at the

center of creation,” Humboldt “us[ed] science to affirm rather question

humanity’s place in the universe” (288-89). Whitman made reference to

Humboldt in his notes, in his line in “Song of Myself” – “Walt Whitman, a

kosmos, of Manhattan the son” (Whitman, Leaves 45), and in the title of his

poem “Kosmos,” where the term applies to, as Michael Moon states, “an

individual possessing a systematic, inclusive harmony” (Whitman, Leaves n.

330).

7. Bliss Perry was the author of a 1906 biography of Walt Whitman. Perry gave

this “derisive title” (Whitley 69) to the adherents of Whitmanism adjudged by

William James to be “quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman

is of the genuine lineage of the prophets” (qtd. in Whitley 69). These followers

looked upon Whitman as not just a poet but as the genuine prophet of a new

religion.

8. This case nearly proved Darrow’s undoing, as he was accused of jury tampering

with the intent to deadlock the jury after having his clients plead guilty. Darrow

was tried and defended himself, stating in his closing argument, “I am not on

trial for having sought to bribe a man named Lockwood . . . I am on trial

because I have been a lover of the poor, a friend of the oppressed, because I

have stood by labor for all these years, and I have brought down upon my head

the wrath of the criminal interests of the country” (qtd. in Larson Clarence). He 97

was acquitted of the charges, but Edward Larson notes that he was “never again

entrusted with a major union client” (xiii).

9. Bartelomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were Italian immigrants who, after

almost two decades of supporting radical labor causes, were arrested in 1920 for

killing two guards in a payroll robbery. Their case became a cause célèbre

among leftists because the trial was thought to be “a legal lynching” (Boyer

234). The two men were executed in 1927 in the face of worldwide

protestations.

10. Arturo Giovannitti and Joe Ettor were I.W.W. organizers during the 1912

Lawrence textile strike, one of the I.W.W.’s most successful strike efforts. Their

“astounding effectiveness” (D’Attilio 137) as organizers drew the attention of

the Massachusetts authorities, and the two men were arrested for “inciting to

murder” (D’Attilio 138) after one of the strikers was killed in a confrontation

with the state militia. After national and worldwide attention, the two men were

set free. Giovannetti also had a role in the successful Patterson silk mills strike

of 1913. He was invaluable to the I.W.W. in his role as a poet of the revolution

and radical theorist.

11. Joe Hill, an itinerant laborer and I.W.W. song writer, was arrested in Utah in

1914 for the murder of two men during a grocery store robbery. The assailant

was shot during the robbery. Joe Hill sought medical assistance for gunshot

wound on the night of the robbery and was arrested when the doctor reported

him to the police. Hill refused to give himself an alibi, claiming that a woman’s 98

reputation would be ruined if he did. He was tried, convicted, and “transformed

. . . from an obscure Wobbly into a legendary martyr” (Dubovsky 309) when the

I.W.W. began pointing out the injustices to which Hill had been subjected. Hill

was executed by a Utah firing squad in 1914 and quickly, as Dubovsky points

out, “became symbolic of the individual sacrifice that made a revolutionary new

society possible” (313).

12. The Hobo College in Chicago was financed by millionaire James Eads How.

According to Nels Anderson, How’s “favorite dream is to establish in each of

the large cities a hobo college and a cooperative inn for the migrants” (93).

How, according to Anderson, wanted the hobo colleges to “act as feeders to a

grand central hobo university” (93). Because of the Hobo College and the

I.W.W. headquarters, Chicago developed the reputation as a “hobohemian

community” (Rosemont 450). This “hobohemian” culture manifested itself in a

thriving nightclub scene that was exemplified by the Dill Pickle Club, in which,

Steven Carl Tracy tells us, there was “an interest in Whitmanian roots,

exemplified in part by the old timer whose favorite line was ‘I knew Walt

Whitman’ in the face of any criticism of the bard…” (101, italics original). This

“hobohemian” culture resonates strongly with the bohemian culture with which

Whitman associated at Pfaff’s Café in Manhattan. Reynolds describes

Whitman’s bohemians as “disaffected Democrats, footloose rebels with laughter

at their lips and gloom in their hearts” (Walt 377).

99

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