Labor Resistance Poetry of Depression-Era Autoworkers
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses November 2016 Protest Lyrics at Work: Labor Resistance Poetry of Depression-Era Autoworkers Rebecca S. Griffin University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the American Literature Commons, American Popular Culture Commons, Labor History Commons, and the Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Griffin, Rebecca S., "Protest Lyrics at Work: Labor Resistance Poetry of Depression-Era Autoworkers" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 838. https://doi.org/10.7275/8808502.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/838 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PROTEST LYRICS AT WORK: LABOR RESISTANCE POETRY OF DEPRESSION-ERA AUTOWORKERS A Dissertation Presented by REBECCA S. GRIFFIN Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2016 English © Copyright by Rebecca S. Griffin 2016 All Rights Reserved PROTEST LYRICS AT WORK: LABOR RESISTANCE POETRY OF DEPRESSION-ERA AUTOWORKERS A Dissertation Presented by REBECCA S. GRIFFIN Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________ Ruth Jennison, Chair _______________________________________ Nicholas Bromell, Member _______________________________________ Eve Weinbaum, Member ____________________________________ Jenny Spencer, Chair English Department DEDICATION To Mike “Rise Above” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my advisor, Ruth Jennison, for supporting me throughout this process and offering me invaluable suggestions and insight. Thank you as well to my committee members, Nicholas Bromell and Eve Weinbaum. I am also grateful to Marla Miller, John Marsh, and Bruce Laurie for giving me advice early in my research and initial drafting. I also appreciate help and context provided by Ralph J. Marlatt, who is the son of Ralph H. Marlatt, profiled in this dissertation. Ralph J. Marlatt, with the help of his daughter Molly Marlatt Clemmitt, generously provided me with a scan of Ralph H. Marlatt’s fascinating autobiographical manuscript, which has been invaluable for my research. I am indebted, as well, for the assistance I received accessing the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, the Sophia Smith Collection at the Woman’s History Archives at Smith College, and the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs at Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther Library. Thank you, in particular, to Mike Smith at Reuther, who administered the Sam Fishman Travel Grant Program, which allowed me to travel to Detroit to conduct archival research. I am indebted as well to the Fishman family for supporting this opportunity. Thank you to the United Auto Workers, Reuther Library, and Fantagraphics for permission to reprint images. In full disclosure, I am a proud member of Graduate Employee Organization UAW 2322, and I am most grateful to my union, which has represented me as a graduate employee of the University of Massachusetts for the past six years. v I am so fortunate to have patient friends and colleagues who have listened to my ideas and helped me to realize I could take on this project; for this I am especially indebted to my friends Emma Howes, Paige Mitchell, and Giordana Mecagni. I am also so fortunate to have such a supportive family. I want to extend special gratitude to my parents, David and Sandi Griffin; my brother Russ Griffin; my in-laws, Ray and Kathy Fournier; my great aunt and great uncle Shirl and Jack Lewis; and my grandmother Dorothy Griffin, as well as my wonderful network of aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws. Most of all, I want to thank my husband Michael T. Fournier for moving to Western Massachusetts, taking over the grocery shopping, cooking so many delicious meals, organizing our cross-country treks, learning all about unionizing autoworkers in the Great Depression, reading my drafts, and keeping me going with his patience, kindness, and humor. Thank you Mike, for sharing this adventure with me. vi ABSTRACT PROTEST LYRICS AT WORK: LABOR RESISTANCE POETRY OF DEPRESSION-ERA AUTOWORKERS SEPTEMBER 2016 REBECCA S. GRIFFIN, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MAINE Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Ruth Jennison This dissertation argues that scholarly inquiry into American poetry of the Great Depression is incomplete without a critical understanding of poems produced within the labor movement. Through archival research and methodologies drawn from American studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and labor history, this dissertation demonstrates that autoworkers from 1935-1941 developed a rich poetic discourse that championed their cause. Autoworker poets—including autoworker song lyricists—used humor and borrowed extensively from popular, religious, and “folk” cultures to craft their own poetic styles and trope sets. They wrote about a diverse range of topics from their hopes for the unionization movement, to scab conversions, to comic exaggerations of capitalist figures such as Henry Ford and GM’s William S. Knudsen. Their poems and songs also capture aspects of quotidian life on the shop floor, such as the difficulty of assembly line work, gripes about managers and fellow workers, and frustrations with union factionalization. Women autoworkers and union auxiliary members, similarly, fashioned a discourse that spoke to their own particular set of goals, separate from—yet related to— those of unionizing men. This dissertation, further, shows how parodies of songs and vii poems, so often written in the labor movement, were frequently written and rewritten time and time again. Tracing the histories of two parodies, in particular, this study demonstrates 1) how older versions can influence the subtext of newer versions and 2) how mapping geographical appearances of parodies can reveal both evolutions in class consciousness and intersections between aspects of society typically thought to be unrelated. More broadly, discovering the connections between autoworker-authored poems and songs and their wider artistic underpinnings helps us to more deeply understand the array of cultural touchstones that working-class Americans drew upon during a dynamic moment in history. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... vii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... xi INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1. A CRITICAL SYNOPSIS ............................................................................................25 The rise of the UAW ..............................................................................................27 Circulation ..............................................................................................................35 Clayton Fountain and Ralph Marlatt ......................................................................37 A masculine vernacular ..........................................................................................48 “[W]e will tell him where to go” ...........................................................................61 Songs and poems characterizing UAW insiders and outsiders ..............................68 Poems critical of UAW members and organizers ..................................................83 2. POEMS BY WOMEN IN THE UAW’S EARLY FORMATION ...............................87 Women autoworkers in the late Depression ..........................................................90 UAW Women’s Auxiliaries and Emergency Brigades .........................................96 Rallying poems by women autoworkers ..............................................................105 Contemplative poems evoking references to domesticity ...................................113 3. THE TUMULTOUS PARODIC JOURNEY OF “ST. PETER AT THE GATE” .....127 “At the Golden Gate” ...........................................................................................135 The origin of “St. Peter at the Gate” ....................................................................137 St. Peter jokes and their underlying subtext .........................................................139 UAW parodies of “At the Golden Gate” .............................................................142 Ethical foreclosures of “At the Golden Gate” and other parodies .......................147 4. “HINKY DINKY”: FROM DOUGHBOY DITTY TO STRIKERS’ ANTHEM ......153 Origins: the making of a classic war song ...........................................................158 Class-consciousness in Gastonia ..........................................................................166 “The cops are having a helluva time” ..................................................................168