More about Archie Green


Lore's Labor's Lost: Archie Green's Restoration of Worlds of Labor.
A review essay by Thomas Walker
[Word count: 3304 words]
Tin Men. By Archie Green. 2006. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
244 pages. ISBN: 978-0252073755.
Millwrights in Northern California 1901-2002. 2003. By Archie Green.
Oakland: CA: The Northern California Carpenters Regional Council. 120
pages.
Harry Lundeberg's Stetson & Other Nautical Treasures. 2006. By Archie
Green. Crockett, CA: Carquinez Press. 155 pages. ISBN 0-9744124-3-0
The Big Red Songbook. 2007. Edited by Archie Green, David Roediger,
Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.
538 pages. ISBN 0-88286-277-4.


Archie Green, our discipline's grand mentor and progenitor of the
study of labor folklore and workers' expressive culture, turned
ninety in 2007. In the last five years he has issued four new books,
each bringing to fruition years of research and fieldwork, thinking
and dialog. These late editions hone Archie's unique approach to the
study of labor culture--termed "laborlore"--and demonstrate his
continuing passion for and refreshing insight into worlds of
organized labor. To be sure, the world of organized labor, or more
broadly the world of work, is also fraught with tensions and puzzles,
from both political and scholarly points of view. In an article
published twenty years ago Archie asked, "Who Treasures Tales of
Work?" [1] and it is a question that has recurred in different guises
throughout his later writing and public work, seeking ultimately, I
think, to valorize the culture of work and locate and enlarge the
conscious participation of workers in the history and traditions of
the work they do.

The four volumes under consideration here give a sense of Archie's
range. The Big Red Songbook is a kind of treasury of IWW (Industrial
Workers of the World) songs and songbook lore, while the other
volumes collect Archie's recent expository and analytical writing in
search of laborlore's hidden, esoteric, or lost meanings. Millwrights
in Northern California and Harry Lundeberg's Stetson were written
primarily for the trade, carpenters and maritime workers
respectively. Millwrights focuses on the history and jurisdictional
evolution of one trade, from the construction of ancient windmills
and watermills to the modern power plants using metal turbines,
compounding trade union affiliation, jurisdiction, and versatility in
engineering and mechanical skill. Harry Lundeberg's Stetson is a
series of case studies of waterfront argot and reprints several
essays originally written in the 1990s for the newsletter of the
Sailor's Union of the Pacific, West Coast Sailor. Tin Men expands
Archie's scope considerably to grapple with the paradox of figural
representation as trade emblem and folk aesthetic in a finely
illustrated art history tome. Together, these four somewhat disparate
volumes are linked by common preoccupations: the texts and contexts
of vernacular expression, the primacy of unions and unionism in the
study of work, the premise or ideal of a political culture of
democratic pluralism, nostalgia for radical class consciousness and
IWW ideology, and admiration and advocacy for direct action, craft
skill, and pride in work, whether conservative or radical.

The latest volume, The Big Red Songbook, represents an interest
spanning Archie's entire scholarly career, going back to his forties.
One of his first published folklore articles in 1960 established the
agenda concluded in The Big Red Songbook. The article detailed the
career of Wobbly folklorist John Neuhaus whose collection of
pocket-sized IWW songbooks, the so-called Little Red Songbook, served
as the basis and inspiration for the present volume. In addition to
reprinting this 1960 article on John Neuhaus, The Big Red Songbook
includes a preface Archie wrote for this volume and bears traces
throughout of his hand as the principal editor, principally in the
detailed headnotes to the songs. But the volume also includes several
short essays written by others about the songs--introductions by each
of the editors, contemporary and historical commentary, and various
reflections. Franklin Rosemont, the publisher at Charles Kerr, writes
in his introduction about the vast corpus of IWW songs omitted from
the little books--the "lost" songs and songs of women and working
people of color. A section devoted to writings by some of the
songwriters themselves includes reprinted articles by Harry
McClintock (aka "Haywire Mac"), Richard Brazier, Jim Connell, and
Carlos Cortez. There is a checklist of the songs published up through
the thirty-sixth edition (1995), a discography, and a bibliography,
bringing all references up to date. The core of the volume are the
songs themselves, republished and annotated from the editions of the
songbook published between 1909 and 1973, along with several IWW
songs "somehow not included" in the little books and contemporary
variants and parodies.

The Big Red Songbook has both scholarly and popular appeal, and it is
physically big, running to over five hundred pages. Big as it is, it
is still somewhat cramped, overflowing and "profusely illustrated"
with IWW cartoons, drawings, and Kerr advertisements in the end
papers of the paperback edition. Given these constraints, it is hard
to want more from this volume, such as tales that were published in
the originals. But a tabular checklist indicating songs included and
omitted from each edition would have served scholars wanting to
historicize the little red songbooks and to know more about the
editors' positions on current events throughout its history. We know
from the checklist to this volume when each song entered the little
red songbooks but not when certain of them exited or for what precise
reason. In fact, Archie himself indicates in a footnote to the
Neuhaus article that "a significant folklore study can be made by a
consideration of the IWW songs deleted from the twenty-nine editions"
(2007: 417). He mentions in this respect, for instance, sabotage
songs and pro-Soviet songs deleted from editions issued at sensitive
times.

In its one hundred plus years the IWW has become a touchstone of
labor or workers' culture, mainly for its revolutionary idealism and
populist persuasion. Several factors explain the enduring appeal and
inspiration of the Industrial Workers of the World. For one, the
preamble to its 1905 constitution stated uncompromising class
opposition between the working class and the employing class, and
this class antagonism ("the working class and the employing class
have nothing in common") implied class solidarity ("an injury to one
is an injury to all"). Second, the IWW opposed the elitism of craft
unionism, welcoming all industrial workers--unskilled, seasonal,
temporary workers, and women, minority, and immigrant workers. In
this respect, it paved the way for the emergence of the Committee
(later Congress) on Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s.
Third, the IWW gave voice to the rank and file in its traditions of
song and verbal art, aided no doubt by the ongoing publication of the
little red songbook and the early and widely publicized free-speech
fights that promoted several of its members into star soapboxers.
Throughout its history, the IWW managed to maintain an ideological
purity without having established stable institutions or real
institutional clout and remaining marginal to the path of dependence
established by AFL-CIO unions.

The IWW is better known and more important for its cultural and
political ideals than its contracts or bargaining power. The Big Red
Songbook, whatever else it does and whomever it engages, reasserts
this tradition precisely, in my view, to counter the institutional
forces that sunder culture from labor. Commonly, pragmatism
supersedes culture as workers' interests are viewed in narrow terms
of contracts or conditions or matters of social justice. And yet the
problem of the consciousness of the culture of work seems somehow
overdetermined and as rarified as the consciousness of class. Why
does Archie have to ponder, in so many ways, "Who treasures tales of
work?" if not to assert that workers have culture, taken for granted
perhaps, hidden to the uninitiated, or overshadowed by the flamboyant
leaders. And yet the problem of workers' culture is meliorated
whenever Archie discovers or learns of other tradition-conscious
workers who recognize something more than popular culture as the
culture of workers.

More than a compendium of Wobbly songs and lore, the songs
themselves, like any art form, contain a poetics and politics of the
IWW, and new generations will plumb their meanings. This big book
also contains many of Archie's lifelong commitments to the expressive
culture of work and workers--the song tradition especially--and to a
politics of radical vernacular pluralism. The cultural roots entwined
in the early IWW's anarcho-syndicalism animate much of Archie's
political worldview and steadied him through the tumultuous left
sectarianism of the last century. His antipathy towards Stalinism,
its false ideals and deceitful tactics, is well known, as is his
championing of the IWW and the genius he ascribes to the
vernacular--culture from the bottom up, rooted in community, imbued
with sense of place, what scholars of Greek antiquity would speak of
as "autochthonous," springing from the place where it is found. Less
well known, at least to folklorists, might be the story of Harry
Lundeberg, the stoic rank-and-file leader of west coast sailors
during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, who was de facto (at least to Archie)
the voice of anti-Stalinism on the waterfront. "From shipwright days
in San Francisco, in 1941, I recall a then-current saying: 'The
waterfront isn't big enough for the two Harrys' [Lundeberg and
Bridges]. This maxim cloaked personal disagreements, as well as the
ongoing war between Communist Party members and friends in the ILWU
[International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, headed by
Harry Bridges], and an unlikely scattering of Wobblies, Trotskyists,
anarcho-syndicalists, and ordinary rank-and-file trade unionists in
the SUP" (2006: 12).

Inasmuch as The Big Red Songbook is a culmination to Archie's career,
it would be hasty to make this big book a kind of career bookend. For
one thing, Archie still possesses energy and material and desire to
continue working. For another, most of Archie's published writing is
a kind of open text, inviting and accommodating further contributions
to knowledge, as well as animating the "multiple enactments in all
the places we inhabit: on the job, in the union hall, in family
circles, across the globe" (2003: 4). His writing, here and
elsewhere, displays a remarkably inquisitive intellect, irrepressible
in erecting scaffolds for collaborative scholarly inquiry, generating
dialog, and posing persistent questions around new and sometimes
stubbornly mute subjects.

A dialogic imagination informs this scholarship, enabling us to
appreciate the easy link he forges between his own on-the-job
excitement with work songs, stories, words, and other expressions
heard many years ago and later research and fieldwork for
publication. In Harry Lundeberg's Stetson, Archie recalls an ex-SUP
sailor whose name--McDaris or Madeiras--he does not quite remember
but whom he remembered quite well enough as "intense and voluble [and
who] pursued his beef endlessly by demanding that the union [Local
2116 Dry Dock, Marine Waysmen, Stage Riggers and Helpers] go after
the damned salmonbellies" (2006: 24). The little essay on
"Salmonbellies," a term referring both to Pacific coast workers who
bribed their bosses and to the bribe itself, the casks of salmon
garnered from the summer salmon fishery in Alaska, attempts to track
down the history of this term. But what Archie helps us initially to
imagine is himself as a young shipyard apprentice somewhat awestruck
by this man's charisma and presence, wondering who he was, what
became of him, what this term meant. He concluded, "although his
[McDaris/Madeiras] specifics elude me, he planted a new word and
contributed to my interest in labor history and culture" (2006: 24).

Suffice it to say, Archie discovered folklore on the job as a
carpenter among carpenters, shipwrights, millwrights, and other trade
unionists and came to the academic study of folklore mid-career at
age 40. His fieldwork style as a folklorist--inquisitive,
conversational, detail oriented--seems to have grown directly out of
this insider's curiosity about workers' culture and expression, and
Harry Lundeberg's Stetson is sprinkled with references to his own
experience in these very same work settings on the waterfront.
Fieldwork as the stock in trade of folklorists and other
ethnographers not only suited his intellectual temperament; it also
enabled entrée into a variety of trades, work settings, and workers'
culture broadly, sometimes by proxy. Typically, in addition to his
own rigorous inquiry, he involves a network of friends and fellow
workers in his enterprise, searching out, identifying, and
documenting local examples of the topic at hand and across far-flung
reaches. "How would I ever meet tinners scattered from hamlet to
metropolis? The best alternative to direct travel seemed to be
correspondence with colleagues in workers' culture" (2002: 64). In
Tin Men this reliance on a network of culture workers is most
transparent and a model of collaborative scholarship even where
Archie has done most of the heavy lifting.

Archie's unrelenting inquisitiveness is a salient quality of his
writing and it takes several forms. We see it expressed as questions
inviting the reader of his books to pursue the inquiry beyond what he
himself is able to do. In many instances the question quite simply
seeks verification or information that someone else may hold. More
profoundly, questions seek to enlarge philosophically the reader's
imagination. In Millwrights, for instance, a book addressed to
apprentices, he writes quizzically, "Why have some historians found
it difficult to move from mechanical to social arenas? Where is the
novel in which a millwright joins Captain Ahab or Tom Joad in
adventures? Surely the millwright possesses as complex a soul as the
tinker, sailor, miner, cowboy, or farm migrant. Union locals from
Atlantic to Pacific face a challenge in recovering and interpreting
their narratives" (2003:25). Occasionally, his questions carry moral
overtones. Again, in Millwrights he poses rhetorical questions of
contemporary millwrights at a time of major energy concerns in
California: "Do power shortage and Enron troubles translate into
moral or political wisdom for millwrights? Local 102 has issued no
manifestoes detailing its position on energy matters. Perhaps its
members need only to build new stations, not to contemplate the
consequences of their work. Perhaps history will provide a marker for
the road ahead" (2003: 4).

We also see inquisitiveness expressed as the imaginative
interrogation of mute objects themselves such as with many artifacts
of fabricated metal figures in Tin Men. In fact, the first chapter of
Tin Men establishes the conceit by engaging two different "tin" men
(one is actually copper; the other iron) on exhibit at an art
installation at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum. One he
names "Copper man" and the other "Al" according to its name 
and
function as a trade sign originally advertising Al's Sheet metal and
tinshop in Los Angles: "Conversing with each, I asked, Who fabricated
you? When, Where? Why? What brings you into a museum gallery? How do
you add to my sense of identity and citizenship? Defying commonsense
knowledge that they could not speak, I likened them to balladeers,
yarners, and gifted artisans with whom I had talked over the decades"
(2002: 2).

In some instances the conceit is near mystical, as when he "imagines
midnight conversations" among four museum artifacts at the Museum of
International Folk Art, "as they compared notes on the idiosyncrasies
of their respective makers and asked how they themselves had come to
be in an elegant New Mexico museum" (2002: 107). Similarly, unable to
resolve questions -- about origins, category, purpose, meanings--he
confesses that,

"I resume imaginations with various tin men. They whisper knowingly
upon sharing secrets and chuckle when joking with me. They reach
across the continent to compare notes. Al at Fort Mason proclaims for
all, 'I transform blueprint into soaring skyscraper; I sketch, cut
fold, brake, crimp, beat, braze, heat, solder, weld, rivet, place,
and fix.' Local 104's Copper Man adds, Honor our trade, be patient
with time, get it right, keep eye's peeled for each job's appearance,
watch miters, stick to the union, and guard our traditions" (2002:
108).

In a sense this envisioned conversation holds in abeyance the
empirical analysis that otherwise explains how the tin men or other
forms of expressive culture came into being.

Indeed, Tin Men pursues the painstakingly thorough job of sourcing
and contextualizing the examples, of which there are many in this
book and many that are nicely illustrated. Tin Men is the first book
of its kind and the effort to be exhaustive is impressive if
sometimes disappointing in the dearth of meanings that Archie
uncovers. In at least one instance, Archie confesses a lack of
confidence that enough data about tin men would surface to provide
the coherent narrative he encountered in previous studies of ballads
and tales (2002: 105). To be sure, the material is rich; the
incoherence lies, however, in certain gaps in historical record and
meaning that might otherwise "prove direct ancestry" and clarify
categories among tin men. Even where genetic connections of the
tinner's craft are incompletely documented, much of the historical
survey of tinners, tinkers, and artisans of metallurgy,
Kupfferschmidt and Ferblanquier, in this book creates a viable
tapestry against which to place contemporary tin workers. The want of
ethnographic narrative from contemporary craftsmen and artifacts
explains not only the conceit of the "speaking" artifact but also the
short chapter tracing the tinsmith's trade skills back into the hoary
past in ancient mythology or illustrations of the craft in medieval
woodcuts. The chapter on "Hephaistos and Autolycus," in addition to
the historical survey it provides, quotes several stanzas from the
famous passage in Homer's Iliad about the forging of the shield of
Achilles, as if to establish the antiquity and dignity--one might
also say pedigree -- of trade skills involving the fashioning of
metal.

This classical image serves as a counterpoint to the paucity of
articulation, both political and aesthetic, around these objects by
contemporary tradesmen, artists, collectors, and curators.

Workers often grope for the appropriate words to convey pride or
skill. Tinsmiths who have mastered the science of reading blueprints
become strangely inarticulate at describing their genius. "He's a
good mechanic" sums up much virtue, and "it just comes naturally"
explains the most advanced techniques (2002: 86).

How ultimately do we appreciate these artifacts? In Archie's terms,
"Do we judge a tinsmith's creativity by norms applied by artists and
critics rather than by shop-floor mechanics?" These remain open
questions, but Archie has undertaken a worthy task to tease out
meaningful categories from the overlapping contexts and trajectories,
ranging from craft guilds to trade unions and labor parades to art
galleries and private collections, in which we find these artifacts.

In the end Tin Men finds Archie pondering an apolitical or
conservative side of workers' culture as he questions whether or not
tin men "contribute to our understanding of work's meanings" (2002:
150).

"Seemingly, tin men have little to do with the larger issues in
life. . .. I am conscious that the figures described in these pages
do not trumpet overt ideological causes. Mother Jones, Joe Hill,
Eugene Debs, or John L. Lewis never built a tin man nor hid a message
in its body. Both marchers and spectators at Labor Day parades view
them as mascots, more humorous than serious. Even when tin men become
teaching tools in apprenticeship schools and the SMWIA [Sheet Metal
Workers International Association] logo, their purpose remains
understated and ambiguous. No tin man sings or leads 'Solidarity
Forever' or 'Which Side Are You On?'"

The reason we might expect to find any ideological causes in the
first place comes out of Archie's very different and lifelong
experience in labor activism. The lack of "overt ideological causes"
among tinsmiths is duly noted without judgment, but the prevailing
sense in this book is an almost devolutionary premise in which the
trade emblem of the tin man--the labor context-- is primary and
superior and devolves into stylized, artistic expression and
apolitical context. The tin man is caught between very different
worlds--radical and conservative, workers and collectors, skilled
artisans and self styled folk artists--and Tin Men elucidates these
worlds coherently with skill, patience, passion, and open mindedness.


Footnotes

[1] " At the Hall, in the Stope: Who Treasures Tales of Work?"
Western Folklore 46 (July 1987): 153-70.
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Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from
the Restoration to the New Criticism. By Steve Newman. 2007.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN:
978-0-8122-4009-2 (hard cover). 


Reviewed by David Atkinson, Elphinstone Institute, University of
Aberdeen (david.atkinson@zen.co.uk).

[Word count: 898 words]


For readers of this journal, the title of Steve Newman's book, Ballad
Collection, Lyric, and the Canon, is likely to appear misleading, for
it is not primarily about ballad collecting--that is, the work of
folk song collectors--at all. Rather, it sets out to chart the
literary appropriation of the popular ballad by, among others,
D'Urfey, Gay, Addison, Ramsay, Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth. By
"ballad" is meant something like popular song; Newman has found a
definition from 1728 of a "song commonly sung up and down the
streets" (2)--which is interesting, if not especially helpful--but
annoyingly he cites it from a modern book on ballad opera and does
not give the original source. Historically, of course, it is a
perfectly valid usage; but it is not until the final chapter of this
book that we get to hear (fleetingly) about Francis James Child, and
very few of the standard books in the field of ballad studies make it
into the bibliography.

These are not so much criticisms as caveats: this is a book about the
literary canon. A recurrent motif is the idea that what song
especially brings to the canon is its necessarily collective nature.
"Collection is their [i.e., literary authors'] way of accessing the
ballad's collectivity, a way to take advantage of the ballad's
circulation as a cheap commodity while framing it so that it remains
tied to a common nationality" (3). Yet one never quite feels that
Newman's ballads do actually descend into the street, except perhaps
in Addison's account. This is partly because there is, for instance,
virtually no discussion of such familiar matters as broadside
circulation or, indeed, folk song collecting. The approach is
generally one of close readings of occurrences of popular songs in
literature, in order to illustrate their relations to wider
historical and cultural movements. To take just one example, Allan
Ramsay's songs are incorporated into a broad account of the Scottish
Enlightenment, gender relations, cultural nationalism and "national
schizophrenia," improvement as an engine of social change, and the
rise of the literati. This is all done very well. Songs are seen as
being integrated into the "improvement" of English (and Scottish)
letters. Then with Ritson and Percy, and subsequently Blake and
Wordsworth, ballads and songs, and the mode of lyric generally, are
appropriated to political discourses.

The chapter on Blake and Wordsworth is perhaps the least rewarding,
in part because there is so much more to these poets than their
sporadic use of song. We are told that the aim is "to show how two
important practitioners of Romantic lyric take in the historical and
the social by way of their revision of the Ballad Revival" (183), but
this is not really set out in detail. Wordsworth may have been
reacting to certain excesses of German ballads by the likes of
Bürger, but he could have learned something from English-language
ballads if some of the dismal verses quoted from Peter Bell, for
example, are anything to go by. The section on Blake in particular is
likely to prove difficult to assess for anyone not fully au fait with
current Blake scholarship, since the author is keen to show his
mastery thereof--and this may be part of the problem: he is simply
trying here to do too much.

Indeed, the book in general is somewhat given to academic jargon (for
a book about "the call of the popular," the writing style is
remarkably inaccessible) and contains numerous in-references to
currents in contemporary criticism, especially of the eighteenth
century: "literary loneliness," for example (61); or the "lyric
subject" (187), "a self constructed over time by its experience with
songs," of which, apparently, Scott is a paradigm. It is not that
this is not a useful idea, but the author does have an irritating
habit of repeating such favorite but ultimately rather slight
phrases--Gummere's "cadent feet" is another one (189 ff.)--ad
nauseam. The final chapter traces the ideas of Gummere and the role
of the ballad as a democratizing force in the construction of the
"imagined community" (with reference, of course, to the work of
Benedict Anderson) in American education. Notably, the ballad lent
itself to the educational theory that ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny, in terms both of literary history and students' capacity
for literary appreciation. This paves the way for the treatment of
the ballad in the New Criticism of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth
Brooks. Although the New Criticism approach to poetry is focused on
form and structure "in which the individual reader can learn how to
find his or her proper self" (215)--the "lyric subject," in
fact--Newman manages, just, to square this with Gummere's democratic
project, though (at least from a transatlantic perspective) we have
to take much of this on trust. Indeed, the final few pages shy away a
little from the idea of the necessarily democratizing influence of
the popular.

As an account of the appropriation of popular songs into the literary
canon, this is a first-rate book, especially in the earlier chapters,
which expands our understanding of what was going on in the "long
eighteenth century." Students of the ballad of a strongly literary
persuasion will find it not easy, but largely rewarding reading; and
literature students will learn a lot about their subject, if not much
about the ballad. Others are likely to find its appropriation of the
term "ballad collection" rather annoying.
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http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=558