Part Nine: - One Hundred Years of Michigan Work in Art: 1850 to 1950
The Michigan Worker on the Picket Line
A discussion of the art of work in Michigan would be unimaginable without looking at how labor organizing was treated in literature, music, and art.
Today’s heated anti-immigration rhetoric makes polemics like James Millford Merrill’s novel An American Sovereign (1910) feel eerily familiar.[i] The naked racism (or “nativism”) of Muskegon-born writer Merrill (1847-1936) is on full display in his characterizations of union organizers as “greasy-looking” with “crooked teeth” and “hairy hands,” their “small snaky eyes” lurking always under “low brows” and “black hair.” By contrast, he describes the novel’s capitalist hero, (the “true-blue American,”[ii] Foster Mandale) as “fresh” “pushing,” “wholesome,” and “healthy.” To Merrill, the “hellish trades union monsters”[iii] not only lack legitimate grievances[iv], they are a public health risk.[v]
Conflicts between Michigan’s automobile manufacturers and the United Auto Workers Union have generated a significant body of interesting artwork. The union newspaper United Auto Worker published “hundreds of poems” between 1937 and 1941[vi] written by worker poets who expressed their frustration with management and their solidarity with the union cause. Poems such as “King Henry the V-8th” by John Paine lampooned Ford Motor Company’s founder[vii].
For greater profits, Ford surmised,
Production must be organized;
But Henry doesn’t have a yen
To deal with unions of his men.
In “The House that Jack Built” poet Elizabeth England put a little Mother Jones in Mother Goose:
These are the rats:
Millowner—banker—
Landlord—boss
Greedy and ruthless,
Armed with force.
These are the rats,
Fattened on greed,
Who steal the trail
And ravage the forest;
Who waste the ore
And corner the grain;
Who defile the cloth
That fashions the dream
That grows in the house that Jack built.
…
United the Jacks—
rid of the rats—
Can rebuild the house
Make real the dream
Spread the table,
Open the door;
Bring in the light
And give Tomorrow,
To all who work in the house that Jack built.[viii]
In 1937, UAW Local 174 commissioned Michigan artists Walter Speck and Barbara Wilson Speck Benetti to create a mural for their Union Hall. The vibrantly colored nine-by-twenty foot mural includes scenes from “pivotal moments in the union’s history, including the 1936-1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike.”[ix] Two workers, a man and a woman, form the focal point of piece: the woman carries a Congress of Industrial Workers flag, symbolizing cooperation between the UAW and the CIO.
This series will conclude with Part 10, “The Marriage of Michigan Work and Art.”
[i] “In the early twentieth century…nativist furor reached its peak….Eastern Europeans were portrayed as socialists and anarchists, and often blamed for crime and labor conflict….Southern Europeans, like the Slavs, were often reviled because of the perception that they were criminally inclined.” Julia S. Young, “Making America 1920 Again? Nativism and US Immigration, Past and Present,” Journal of Migration and Human Security, Vol 5., No. 1 (2017), 222. The labor agitator in Merrill’s novel is named Captain Multipo (a made-up surname, suggesting Italian origin) and the most violent of the striking workers (described as a “low-browed” and “dark”) is named “Loon Gittig” (a Slavic surname).
[ii] Merrill, 132.
[iii] Merrill, 200.
[iv] “There’s some trouble about hours, I believe, or possibly wages, I’m not sure which.” Merrill, 17.
[v] Young, 222. “Americans across the social and political spectrum frequently blamed immigrants for bringing disease into the United States.”
[vi] John Marsh, ed., You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929-41 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 166.
[vii] Timothy P. Lynch, Strike Songs of the Depression (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 167.
[viii] Lynch, 175.
[ix] Elizabeth Clemens, “Collection Spotlight: UAW Local 174 Mural,” Reuther.Wayne.edu.
Another informative slice of Michigan history. I guess the acorns haven't fallen too far from the oak tree when it comes to the characterization of immigrants and the attitudes some have towards the more recent newcomers to America..