Bars And Shadows The Prison Poems Of Ralph Chaplin
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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(When Ralph Chaplin wrote this pamphlet in 1933, Fascism w...)
When Ralph Chaplin wrote this pamphlet in 1933, Fascism was so the march in Europe and America. He saw the General Strike not just as a broad work stoppage, but rather as the occupation of industry by the workers themselves, it was his belief then that only worker control of industry could combat fascist repression and insure a world peace. This conception of the General Strike influenced the stay - in strikes of the Thirties here and was modified by Japanese workers after World War II when they occupied the industries to make sure that they were kept running in the 1970's workers in Scotland, England, and Italy have militantly taken up the tactic. It remains to be applied on a mass level once and for all to do away with the dangerous foolishness of private of state ownership of production, it is an idea both revolutionary and constructive with a tremendous future. Current IWW literature urges that workers the world over need to reach an understanding among ourselves as to what we make, where we ship it, and how we distribute it in order to make optimal use of our skills and the earth's productive resources without either raping the earth or making slaves of the people.
(The Centralia Conspiracy is presented here in a high qual...)
The Centralia Conspiracy is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Ralph Chaplin is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Ralph Chaplin then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.
Ralph Hosea Chaplin was an American radical editor, poet, songwriter, and commercial artist.
Background
Ralph Hosea Chaplin was born on August 30, 1887 in Ames, Kansas, United States. He was the son of Edgar Chaplin and Clara Bradford. His father operated a prosperous grain and livestock farm until ruined by drought and depression in 1886-1887. Subsequently the family moved to Chicago, where Chaplin's father worked as a railroad employee until the Pullman boycott of 1894.
Education
Chaplin grew up in the slums of the South Side of Chicago and attended a neighborhood elementary school, an experience that indelibly impressed on him the class divisions in American society. The defeat of the American Railway Union in 1894 and his father's blacklisting by the railroads further impressed Chaplin with the intensity of labor-capital conflict. Unable to find work in Chicago during the depression of the 1890's, the elder Chaplin tried farming in 1895-1896 near Panora, Iowa, but failed. A year later the family moved to Dodge City, Kansas, at the invitation of relatives, but there, too, success eluded them. By the end of the 1890's they were back in Chicago. The depression over, Edgar Chaplin found steady work and Ralph attended grammar school through the seventh grade. He worked as an apprentice commercial artist at the American Art School and attended evening classes at the Chicago Art Institute.
Career
He immersed himself in the intellectual and cultural life of Chicago, becoming a regular at the Hull House evening lectures and seminars. Chaplin became an illustrator for the International Socialist Review and a member of the board of directors (1908 - 1913) of the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, for which he illustrated Jack London's Dream of Debs. A restless young man, Chaplin spent a year (about 1909 - 1910) in Mexico City as an artist. There he observed the revolutionary ferment in the country, and met and talked with other radical émigré Americans. Just before Porfirio Díaz fell from power in 1911; the Chaplins returned to Chicago, where their only child, a son, was born. Soon they moved to Huntington, where Chaplin worked as a commercial artist, edited a local labor paper, involved himself in the violent Paint Creek-Cabin Creek coal strikes of 1912-1913, and composed poetry about the miners (published in 1917 as When the Leaves Come Out). By late 1913 he was in Cleveland, where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and contributed regularly to its paper, Solidarity. From Cleveland, Chaplin moved to Montreal in 1914, then back to Chicago in 1915. During his involvement with the IWW in Chicago he became a close friend of William D. ("Big Bill") Haywood, the dominant figure in the organization from 1916 through 1919. At that time Chaplin wrote the words to the most famous of all American labor songs, "Solidarity Forever" (1915). In 1917, Haywood appointed Chaplin editor of Solidarity. As its editor during World War I, Chaplin favored the militant antiwar, anticonscription element among Wobblies and published antiwar propaganda. He was arrested, together with more than 100 other IWW leaders, by the federal government in September 1917, and was convicted in 1918 of conspiracy to violate the wartime espionage and sedition acts. Judge Kenesaw M. Landis sentenced him to twenty years in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. While out on bail pending an appeal, Chaplin made a national lecture tour to raise funds for other convicted Wobblies and wrote The Centralia Conspiracy (1920), a defense of the IWW role in the violence in Centralia, on Armistice Day, 1919. After the Supreme Court rejected his appeal on April 11, 1921, Chaplin began serving his prison term. In prison he continued to write poetry (a collection of his prison poems was published as Bars and Shadows, 1922), and steadily drifted away from the IWW and toward religion. In 1922, a year before President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence, Chaplin informed his father, "I have quit the I. W. W. and quit for good. " Yet after his release from prison, as much from habit as from conviction, he returned to work for the IWW as a writer-editor and rejoined the Communist party. Nevertheless, while he toiled publicly for radicalism, he was becoming increasingly more religious, conservative, and even "bourgeois" in his values. In 1937 he moved to the West Coast to work as a writer for groups in the labor movement opposed to Harry Bridges and the CIO. Unable to defeat Bridges within the International Longshoreman and Warehouseman's Union, Chaplin next served Dave Beck of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in combating alleged communism in the CIO. After a brief return to Chicago late in 1940, Chaplin settled in Tacoma. There he continued as an American Federation of Labor (AFL) editor. He became an ardent advocate of the American role in World War II, though still a bitter critic of the Soviet Union. Together with his wife he joined the First Congregational Church of Tacoma and started to work on an autobiography, Wobbly: The Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical (1948). The book describes exceedingly well the circumstances that made a midwestern American of New England colonial stock into a militant radical, and the subsequent intellectual journey that brought him back to his roots. The book also foreshadowed the anticommunist hysteria that was soon to plague the nation in the era of McCarthyism.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Politics
As a teenager, Chaplin became a socialist and served as a "soldier-salesman" for the Appeal to Reason.
Chaplin joined the newly formed American Communist party in 1919.
In 1928, Chaplin broke with communism. Later, during the New Deal era, he criticized both President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as forerunners of state socialism or communism.
Connections
In the summer of 1905, Chaplin married Edith Medin, also a commercial artist. Working together, both of them were active in socialist circles.