Читать книгу Left of the Left - Anatole Dolgoff - Страница 16

Maximoff went on to write a number of books and articles, all of them at night and weekends after hard manual work. I think we underestimate how difficult this is. Roger Baldwin, Harvard graduate, briefly a Wobbly, and founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was fond of quoting Clearance Darrow to the effect that “it was a lot easier being a friend of labor than a laborer.” In this, as in many things, Sam was to follow Maximoff’s example, working and writing.

The preface and title page of The Guillotine provide an interesting sub-plot to Maximoff’s book. The title page lists the Alexander Berkman Fund as publisher—in memory of the courageous anarchist who, suffering from depression and incurable cancer, had recently committed suicide. No mainline publisher would touch the book. Who cared to hear what an obscure anarchist had to say about Bolshevik rule? The sycophancy of the Stalin lovers, so influential in publishing circles, bordered on the erotic. Funding of the book came from the meager contributions of thousands of working-class comrades the world over, funneled through their unions and cultural organizations. It was the middle of the Depression. No grants or fellowships for Maximoff, who continued to hang wallpaper.

The address listed on the opening page of the book was in fact the national headquarters of the IWW: 2422 North Halsted Street, Chicago, Illinois. There follows an item listed in the publisher’s preface: “The Berkman Fund acknowledges its special gratitude to Ralph Chaplin, proletarian poet, (and to) Carl Keller, editor of the Industrial Worker, the weekly organ of the IWW.” The Fund does not mention Chaplin was a Wobbly; it was a fact deemed obvious at the time. In other words, the IWW was instrumental in publishing The Guillotine, and thus at an early date exposing the nature of the Soviet state.

I know little of Carl Keller and have no doubt he was a fine, able man. But Sam spoke often and with feeling of Chaplin. His great anthem of labor, “Solidarity Forever,” is sung at union halls, protest meetings, and picket lines around the country, and the world over. Was it coincidence that the Gdansk shipyard workers of the 1980s, who rose up in revolt against Soviet rule, called their movement Solidarity? Yet Chaplin remains one of the unsung heroes of American Labor, if you will grant me the pun. As American to the bone as Maximoff was Russian, the two men were nevertheless brothers under the skin, revolutionists to the core.

Chaplin became a rebel at the age of seven after seeing a worker shot to death during the Pullman strike of 1893. Later, having moved to Mexico he became a supporter of Emiliano Zapata. Back in the U.S. he worked with Mother Jones for two years and served with her during the bloody West Virginia coal mine strikes of 1912–13. It was in the name of the miners that he wrote poems, one of which, set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” became “Solidarity Forever.”

Chaplin then joined the IWW and became a Wobbly through and through. A talented illustrator, he was responsible for the distinctive style of Wobbly art: the heroic figure of a laborer, his sleeves rolled to reveal brawny arms, leaning forward as if rising from the very earth; the strong face peering at you from behind prison bars, his hands gripping the bars, looking much like a self-portrait of Chaplin himself; the arched black cat in the night, hair raised stiff, to this day the anarcho-syndicalist symbol of revolt. The man was also a talented journalist and essayist; for years he was editor of the IWW paper Solidarity, and later the Industrial Worker.

He knew the great Wobblies and socialists close up and personal; indeed he was one of them: Mother Jones, Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Vincent St. John, James P. Thompson, Father Haggerty. And last but certainly not least, there was his closest friend, Frank Little; some would say he was the toughest Wobbly of them all. Born 1879 in the Indian Territory that was to become Oklahoma, the son of a white Quaker father and a Cherokee Indian mother, he was a slight man, had but one eye, and was crippled from beatings incurred during strikes and demonstrations. Yet the man was fearless; his body meant nothing to him. No law, no threat, no person could stop him until his luck ran out in 1917, and he was hanged from a railroad trestle in the dead of night while on a trip to organize the copper miners of Butte, Montana. Chaplin had begged Little not to go there, alone, unprotected, and vulnerable.

Chaplin saw the inside of many a prison, most severely when he was sentenced to twenty years hard labor for violation of the Espionage Act and was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary along with one hundred other Wobblies in the wake of the disgraceful Chicago show trial of 1917. He served four years until he was released. The experience was wrenching, traumatic. What kept him sane, what kept him human was his art and poetry (see Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems).

So we have two men from opposite ends of the earth whose experiences of life were not so different after all. In the vein of the Russian anarchists, Chaplin distrusted the Bolsheviks’ centralized organizational structure from the start. He observed first hand the havoc they caused the Wobblies and the labor movement in general, and he knew them to be unprincipled and dangerous. As an experienced editor, he appreciated the quality of Maximoff’s manuscript—and he admired the man. Chaplin slaved over the book, shaped the translations into readable English, and sent the work on its way in publishable form.

All this I see in the preface and title page, reading between the lines. But one more item in the preface needs attention, a simple footnote: “As our book goes to press, war is raging in Europe and Stalin and Hitler have come to an amicable understanding. Poland has been divided, the territory of Russian terror enlarged, and the plight of the Russian political prisoners have become worse than tragic.”

Maximoff’s book did not see the light of day until 1940. Soon Stalin was to become our temporary friend, never mind his pact with Hitler. Seventy million people were to die. The Guillotine was ignored.