Copies of Mcgovern's Poems Were
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“Copies of McGovern’s poems were circulated among the working men until, blackened and thumbed into tatters, they were unreadable but many memorised the poems and could repeat them as readily as the author himself. There were labor troubles in those days and in such disputes the ironmasters feared one of his poems more than the occasional violence by strike leaders. McGovern’s old friends, men who saw hard hot summer days in the old mills with him, have memories of the tremendous influence his poems had when he washed dirty hands at night and turned to white paper”. 1 MICHAEL J.McGOVERN “The Puddler Poet” Williamstown, Co. Galway Youngstown, Ohio 1847-1933 Steel Mill Labourer Working Man’s Poet Social & Political Campaigner Michael J. McGovern, born in Williamstown, County. Galway, Ireland, became a stirring and powerful poetic voice for working men and women across America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was according to contemporary accounts “the premier working class song-poet of his day” whose campaigning, challenging verses “were once memorised, recited and sung” across the United States. Michael McGovern wrote over 1,000 song-poems during the course of his life. The best known were rallying cries for worker’s rights and union recognition in the steel mills and factories of an America which had just become the world’s greatest industrial power and a nation to which immigrants, desperately seeking a better life, were flooding to from all corners of the Old World. Others espoused the cause of American patriotism and Irish freedom. A small number reflect his unrequited emigrant’s love for his native County. Galway and borrow from or re-work ancient folk tales set in places like Ballymoe, Ballintubber and Williamstown. McGovern was at his most trenchant and influential when a series of violent labour disputes in the 1880s and 1890s pitted recently unionised steel workers against powerful mining companies. One of the most notorious of these occurred in the town of Homestead in Pennsylvania in 1892 when the Carnegie Steel Company took on – and eventually broke - America’s most powerful trade union, The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers Michael McGovern, himself a steel mill worker -a puddler- saw this as a titanic struggle for the rights of workers and their families. The poem he wrote in support of the striking and locked out Homestead workers evinces the mood of that moment and the power of his early verse. LABOR'S CAUSE. (Read at a labor mass-meeting in Youngstown sympathizing with the Homestead strikers) We meet today to sympathize With Homestead men who seek redress; To soothe with hope the widow's cries And aid them in their sore distress…. Send forth the words on spirit wings That wealth no longer shall maintain In this free land, its petty kings. With armed thugs to guard their reign. With justice in this noble fight Wealth's private armies we defy; With votes as weapons wielded right, The cause of labor shall not die. Michael McGovern named himself “The Puddler Poet”; he worked as a “puddler” or steel mill labourer in Yorkshire (England) & Pennsylvania and Ohio (U.S.A.); workers across America were imbued by his verse. 2 A JOURNEY FROM FENIAN IRELAND TO INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND AND A “SMUGGLER’S” SHIP TO AMERICA. The journey, that took Michael McGovern from Ireland to England and ultimately to The United States twenty years before he became the powerful poetic voice of America’s steel mill workers, was filled - it has recently emerged - with intrigue, subversion, militant Irish republicanism in England and a “double life” much of which is still shrouded in mystery. Michael McGovern was born during one of one the darkest years in Irish history, “Black Forty Seven”, the middle year of the Great Famine of 1845-1849. It was a time of hunger, disease, fear and death. His family was living on a 10- acre farm, near the present day village of Williamstown (it didn’t exist in 1847). They survived the famine. Michael was briefly apprenticed to a local shoemaker but sometime about 1865 when he would have been 18 years of age he had a falling out with the cobbler and went to England. In England, he made his way to Sheffield, which was then one of the world’s greatest “Steel Cities”. Sheffield was also, according to contemporary sources, “the main and most militant centre of trade union organisation and agitation in Great Britain”. And it was here that Michael McGovern’s double life began because Sheffield was then one of the most active centres in England of the secret, oath bound Irish revolutionary organisation “The Irish Republican Brotherhood”. Michael joined the I.R.B. in 1867 and became actively involved in its paramilitary campaigns in Yorkshire. The I.R.B. was founded by the old revolutionary James Stephens in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day 1858. It’s sole aim was the overthrow British rule in Ireland by force of arms and the establishment of an Irish Republic. Its counterpart in the United States was organised by John O'Mahony and became known as the Fenian Brotherhood (later Clan na Gael). The members of both wings of the movement are often referred to as "Fenians". We learn of McGovern’s involvement with the IRB in an undated one-page letter he wrote about 1927 when he was 80 years age. The letter was sent to the old Fenian John Devoy who edited the New York weekly Irish newspaper “The Gaelic American”. It survived because it became part of the Devoy papers, which are held in the National Library Dublin, Manuscripts Collection. In it McGovern tells us that he looks back to his days in the I.R.B. “with pride” having joined it as a boy when it was organised after the raid on Chester Castle in England. The abortive Fenian Raid on Chester Castle took place on 11 February 1867. The audacious plan was to seize the huge arsenal of guns and ammunition held in the castle and ship it to Ireland for use by Fenian volunteers but on the night before the operation the plan was betrayed by an informer. McGovern continued to work as an IRB organiser in Yorkshire for the next 12/13 years but eventually as the police and Government agents closed in on him he had to be “smuggled out of England to America by I.R.B. men in Liverpool.” How McGovern was spirited out of England and across the Atlantic, we still don’t know but that derring-do, episode clearly must have had a profound effect on his life, his political thinking and his writing. 3 Michael McGovern, abandoned Ireland, fled from England and escaped to America’s shores where from the shadowed death pangs of an old Irish way of life and the flaring birth pangs of the modern industrial age he created a rich poetic mindscape of 19th century life, labour and love, hewn from his experiences in all three countries. The young McGovern and his family were of a people who owned nothing – not the little house they lived in (the now roofless part) , not the land they worked, not the bog they “saved” their turf on, not even the well they drew water from. But they were possessed of a vigour that had seen 25 generations of their ancestors survive as subject people and yet never lose a sense of their own identity. It was an identity that was sustained as unshakeably by poets, bards and song-makers as it was by men at arms or politicians. The poet WB Yeats wrote of it as an “indomitable Irishness” and the people as “the indomitable Irishry” Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. - Irish poets learn your trade Sing whatever is well made (of those)…beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries. - Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry. Michael McGovern emerges from that shadowland of American history wielding a puddling iron and a pen and writes his own story and the story of his fellow working men warm in empathy, as a blast furnace mill; cold in social commentary, as forged blue steel. Hurrah for the bright redeeming light Which guides the cause of Labor, And union men who, with tongue and pen, Fear not the gun or sabre. These lines are from McGovern’s poem “The Homestead Struggle or “Fort Frick’s Defenders” were written in the immediate aftermath of that violent Carnegie Streel Company strike and lockout in Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1892. This was one of the bloodiest confrontations in U.S labour history. Newly unionised steel workers seized the Carnegie Mill and the entire mill town. They armed themselves with rifles, a 20 pounder cannon and explosives and fought pitched battles with 300 armed Pinkerton agents (hired by the company) and 8,000 state militiamen who were sent in to re-take the steel mills and the town. Some of the fiercest of the fighting took place at flashpoints along barbed wire topped fences erected by Carnegie boss Henry Clay Frick. “The Homestead Struggle” has uncanny resonances in the language of Yeats’s seminal 1913 poem “The Great Day”. Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.