The Singing Went Straight to Their Hearts

My New Year's Resolution for 2012 is to not let a single day pass without doing something, no matter how small, to push back against the plutocracy that has our economy and our nation in a death grip.

This is an old, old fight - older than the nation - and one we've mistakenly thought we'd won more than once. When the Revolution overthrew aristocracy, when the Civil War ended slavery, when TR broke the trusts, and of course when the New Deal and Union Power built the middle class after World War II, we thought the Money Power had been slapped down good and hard.

But it always comes back. More powerful than ever. And overcoming it gets harder every time.

I just started reading the new biography of Joe Hill "The Man Who Never Died." In the introduction, author William M. Adler traces the source of the power of the IWW to rally into one organization workers of both sexes and all races, religions, languages and ethnic backgrounds:

The funeral service on that warm Thanksgiving day in Chicago was testimony to the power of song, a power the IWW had recognized right from its start. "We have been naught," the delegates to the 1905 founding convention sang. "We shall be all."

Wobblies sang in jails, on picket lines, in fields, factories and mines, in train yards and city streets and hobo jungles. The very act of mass singing seemed to embolden and inspire people of varied backgrounds - emigrants from different parts of the world, who spoke different languages, whose skins were of different color - to unite under the IWW flag to the common goal of social and economic justice.

"They had never heard the song before," the novelist B. Traven wrote of a group of strikers, "but with the instinct of the burdened they felt that this was their song, and that it was closely allied to their strike, the first strike of their experience, as a hymn is allied to religion. They didn't know what the IWW was, what a labor organization meant, what class distinctions were. But the singing went straight to their hearts."

The singing went straight to their hearts.

It went to mine. May it go to yours.



I will post one IWW song every day until I can't find any more. Then I'll probably start posting them all over again.

May they inspire us all as they inspired the Wobblies a century ago.