The Little Graphic That Could (and still does)
Lincoln Cushing, DENSE Magazine issue #2, 12/7/2024

“It wasn’t a poster.”

That was the answer when a colleague asked about the powerful graphic of a militant worker produced for the Paterson silk strike cultural production held at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1913. The image by Robert Edmund “Bobby” Jones was the tiny 5 1⁄2 x 7¼” program cover for the Paterson Pageant, perhaps the largest and most ambitious labor culture event ever held in this country. As many as 1,000 silk workers led on strike by the Industrial Workers of the World participated in an evening of radical theater.

The spectacle was described in Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology: “On the afternoon of June 7 several thousand strikers from Paterson arrived in Hoboken by a fourteen-car train. Reaching New York City by ferries, they marched from Christopher Street up Fifth Avenue with red banners flying and an I.W.W. band playing ‘The Marseillaise’ and the ‘Internationale.’ That night, the letters I.W.W. ten feet high in bright red electric lights blazed from the Madison Square tower. Fifteen thousand persons, many who had walked from their homes, crowded the streets.”

The Pageant was the brainchild of young activist-writer John Reed, who’d been jailed after refusing to leave a picket line. He recruited help from his salon-hosting lover Mabel Dodge Luhan as well as realist painter John Sloan and set designer Jones.

The program itself is a remarkable 36-page document. 15,000 were printed at The Success Press in New York, but efforts to sell them were chaotic and most were thrown away. It contained the six demands of the strikers, seven essays, and two photo reproductions: a meeting of 20,000 strikers at Haledon, New Jersey, and another of indicted I.W.W. organizers. History is adapted to the language of the stage: “Scene: Paterson, N.J. Time: A.D. 1913. The Pageant represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the I.W.W., making use of the General Strike as the chief weapon. It is a conflict between two social forces - the force of labor and the force of capital.” The pageant’s cover adapts as well: The inactive smokestacks and tiny windows on the cover are dramatically illustrated, described by the adage: the shut-down factories as well as the absence of activity: The Pageant emphasized the shut-down factories: “Only the return of the workers to the mills can give the dead things life. The mills remain dead throughout the enactment of the following episodes.” thus the absence of stack smoke in the cover graphic.

Previous accounts of the performance focus on its failure to raise money for the strike, which ultimately collapsed. But it was a bold experiment in the intersection between cultural work and social justice. The intensity of the situation succeeded in pulling together people from all walks of life, from dirt-poor immigrant laborers to wealthy socialites to hardened union organizers to Ivy-League college intellectuals.

When Nicolas Lampert examined the Pageant’s legacy in A People’s Art History of the United States he praised it as and concluded that despite the failure of the strike and the complications of artist-worker collaboration, a pivotal moment in drawing isolated artists out of their studios and into the raw power of real-world struggles. Lampert proposes that “the lessons should not be to abandon these types of alliances.”

Lessons have been learned.

As a historian and labor activist, I chart periods of collaboration between labor movements and the arts.  The Paterson figure punctuates these critical junctures. Much like the pageant, the 1930s Great Depression public works programs allowed cultural workers to engage with communities in ways that conventional arts patronage models did not.

During the 1960s, art was an integral part of the successful organizing campaigns by the United Farm Workers Union, when a rich harvest of plays, posters, and songs spread the message of boycotting grapes, lettuce, and wines to the public. New York’s health care workers SEIU Local 1199 started the Bread and Roses cultural project in 1979, commissioning new art and hosting exhibitions. They echoed the Paterson Pageant by producing a musical revue, “Take Care, Take Care,” and in 2000 continued to innovate with “unseenamerica,” an experiment in cultural democracy where hundreds of “ordinary” people were given cameras to photograph their own lives.
 
Other countries take labor culture seriously. In the early 1980s the Australian Council of Trade Unions adopted a policy on Art and Working Life bringing together trade union delegates, community arts representatives, and independent artists with links to the trade union movement. Their Arts and Creative Recreation Committee had full-time paid staff and a budget for projects that included murals, banners, posters, and plays, showcasing cultural work as fundamental to furthering the class struggle just as much as strikes or contract negotiations. Can it be any coincidence that the familiar Paterson figure arose during these periods as a popular silhouette for publication?

By 1915 the I.W.W. printed it as part of their arsenal of subversive “silent agitator” stickerettes. The original image was slightly modified by Ralph H. Chaplin, adding smoke to the redrawn factory stacks. The Pageant experiment was bold and ambitious, but its impact was soon subsumed by the horror of World War I. Only recent scholarship such as Lampert’s has helped revive it as a major step in the ever-evolving class struggle. Jones’ original graphic, centering a rising worker over spirit-killing industrial drudgery, is compact and powerful. Yet the graphic languished. It never attained the feminist iconicity of J. Howard Miller’s World War II “We Can Do It!” poster, now referred to as “Rosie the Riveter.” But by avoiding the radical cliché of the clenched fist, instead showing an open hand ready to grab the future, it stands out as a classic image of resistance.

Jones’s graphic languished until 1985, when American Labor Museum - Botto House National Landmark reproduced it as a poster. It appeared in two 1988 books, Rebel Voices and Art for The Masses (a 1911-1917 Socialist magazine featuring graphics and essays).

The Paterson Pageant graphic, tiny though it was, has endured

But over time the image needed to be refreshed. Even in 1913, a lone light-skinned man did not represent the powerful diversity of the labor movement. In 1992 cartoonist Gary Huck expanded it to three agitators for the United Electrical Workers union, adding a woman and a Black man. The next year muralist Mike Alewitz painted “An Injury to one is an injury to all” (now destroyed) in Los Angeles which was reproduced as an offset poster in 1994, featuring a dark-skinned earring-wearing gender-unclear militant and text in multiple languages. The I.W.W. has revitalized itself as well, recently organizing workers from Peet’s Coffee and Moe’s Books in Berkeley to the Alamo Drafthouse in Texas.

The icon and its lessons haven’t been relinquished to past centuries. Just last year artist Luca Molnar refreshed the graphic with the acrylic and oil painting “Hot Strike Summer.” To Jones’ iconic 1913 image, Molnar adds contemporaneous comrade Mabel Dodge, photos of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre resistance to the KKK and Nazis, and brings it home with the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. She observes: “Set against a patterned background, these images may not be immediately recognizable, yet they eloquently recount a sustained narrative of resistance and underscore the significance of solidarity across racial, gender, and class lines.”

Indeed. Long live the tiny graphic from a massive cultural moment.

Special thanks to Evelyn M. Hershey, Education Director, American Labor Museum - Botto House National Landmark and Catherine Tedford for help with this article.

Images:
1. Cover of the program for the Paterson Pageant, by Robert Edmund Jones, 1913. Image courtesy Tamiment Library, New York University
2. “The I.W.W. is coming!” sticker, circa 1915, revised image by Ralph H. Chaplin. Image courtesy Catherine Tedford. 4 1/8 x 2 ⅜”
3. Graphic for the United Electrical Workers union, by Gary Huck, 1992
4. "An Injury to one is an injury to all,” by Mike Alewitz, mural (now destroyed) 1993, offset poster by Inkworks Press, 1994
5. “Hot Strike Summer,” acrylic and oil on panel, Luca Molnar, 2023

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