You ought to be out raising hell. This is the fighting age. Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
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Saturday January 9, 1915
From Solidarity: New Published Song by Wobbly Poet, Ralph Chaplin
In today's edition of Solidarity we find a new song written to the tune of "John Brown's Body." The lyrics sum up perfectly the philosophy and spirit of the Industrial Workers of the World. We hope the song will soon be adopted as the labor anthem of the entire working class.
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SOURCES
Rebel Voices
An IWW Anthology
-ed. by Joyce L Kornbluh
Charles H Kerr Pub, 1988
When the Leaves Come Out
-by Ralph Chaplin
OH, 1917
http://archive.org/...
IMAGES
Solidarity Forever
http://archive.org/...
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More on Chaplin's Solidarity Forever
Sadly, the IWW website is down as I write this tonight, and so we will have to get to Ralph Chaplin's "Why I Wrote Solidarity Forever" another time. In his autobiography, he remembers writing the song on the same day as the Chicago Hunger Riot of January 17, 1915, which memory, of course conflicts with the fact that the song was first published on January 9th. But this is often the case with autobiographies: that memory is not a perfect source. In any case, this is the description he left us of how he wrote our Labor Anthem:
Elmer Rumbaugh of West Virginia days was at our home for dinner. I was lying on the rug in the living-room that day scribbling stanza after stanza of "Solidarity Forever," an I. W. W. song which I had started in Huntington [WV]. "Rummy" was much interested. I wanted the song to be full of revolutionary fervor and to have a chorus that was ringing and defiant. Walking down Seventy-second Street we tried it out:
Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever
Solidarity forever
For the union makes us strong.
Solidarity
Solidarity of July 31, 1915, Cover by Ralph Chaplin
In his autobiography, Chaplin described living in Cleveland in 1913 and working on
Solidarity:
Solidarity was the official eastern publication of the I. W. W. It had a limited circulation and was printed on an obsolescent flatbed press. Folding, addressing, and mailing were done by a group of fellow-workers willing to donate time after work. they were young, lively, witty, and pugnacious, the same group that formed the nucleus at the Wobbly hall and the open-air meetings. We made press day a gala occasion by singing I. W. W. songs as we folded the papers. By midnight the mailbags would be full, and we would carry them on our backs to the post office. Afterward we stopped at the corner saloon for a sandwich and a glass of beer.
A few years later he would become the editor of
Solidarity.
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SOURCE
Wobbly
The Rough-and-Tumble Story
of an American Radical
-by Ralph Chaplin
IL, 1948
IMAGE
Solidarity Cover
http://spartacus-educational.com/...
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All Six Verses!!
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Sun Jan 11, 2015 at 7:56 AM PT: Added after IWW.org back online:
'Why I Wrote Solidarity Forever"
By Ralph Chaplin - American West, 1968; introduction by Bruce Le Roy
http://www.iww.org/...
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