Rosemont, Franklin

ROSEMONT, FRANKLIN (1943-2009). Born in Chicago, Rosemont grew up in the working-class suburb of Maywood. His father, Henry, a printer, and his mother, Sally, a musician, were both important labor and cultural activists. The former played a major role in the historic 1947 to 1949 strike against the Chicago Tribune and hosted a popular labor radio show. The latter, who had played in speakeasies, led the Organized Women Musicians group.

Educated in, but mostly outside of, public schools, Rosemont gained admittance to Roosevelt University without a high school diploma. In that hotbed of Chicago student radicalism, he “majored” in taking the classes of the brilliant Black scholar St. Clair Drake, whose passion for learning about cities, race, Africa, and resistance Rosemont shared. At Roosevelt, Rosemont met his partner in politics, art, and life, Penelope Bartik, later Rosemont. They helped to found the Anti-Poetry Club, a college venture expressing the irreverence, humor, and seriousness that would characterize a lifetime of joint efforts. After joining the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he provided leadership to a 1964 strike of Michigan blueberry pickers. His further activities in 1960s labor and New Left radicalism included participation in the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop, and Students for a Democratic Society, on whose press he produced posters, newspapers, flyers, and broadsheets.

In the winter of 1965 the Rosemonts visited Paris and found André Breton and other remaining members of the Paris Surrealist Group there. It what would be a life-changing experience. They returned home later that year and, with their friend Paul Garon and with support from the French surrealists, founded the first and most enduring US-initiated surrealist group. The Chicago Surrealist Group, in 2020 over a half-century old, typified from the start surrealist emphases on the poetry of artistic imagination, on support for revolutionary politics, and on refusal to separate the two. After Breton’s 1966 death, Franklin Rosemont and Breton’s widow put together the first English-language collection his writings. Generations would learn about surrealism through Rosemont’s massive edited collection, which gathered and brilliantly introduced Breton’s What Is Surrealism? and other writings. Indeed Rosemont, alongside his poetry, painting, sketches and nonfiction, became-- without academic credentialing or salary—perhaps the most important editor of working class and radical history of his generation in the United States. In 1970 his collaborations with the historian Paul Buhle began with a surrealist issue of Radical America. Cooperation on productions of issues of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural Correspondence were to follow. The latter connected radicalism with comics and with popular culture generally, with particularly loving and learned emphasis on Bugs Bunny and Krazy Kat.

From the late 1970s forward the Rosemonts provided leadership and much of the labor to a collective that was revivifying the venerable radical publisher the Charles H. Kerr Company. Franklin’s editorial work and writing preserving and extending the popular memory of the left and labor came to center mostly there. He co-edited the lavish Haymarket Scrapbook and jointly edited The Big Red Songbook, a definitive compendium of IWW songs. New generations learned of the rollicking genius of T-Bone Slim, the intellect and politics of Isadora Duncan, and the popular education and entertainment at Chicago’s Dil Pickle Club through his efforts. Even his monumental biography of Joe Hill originated as a projected edited collection of Hill’s rediscovered cartoons. His writing also included collections of his own poetry, such as Morning of the Machine Gun, Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants, The Apple of the Automatic Zebra’s Eye and Penelope.

Surrealism and the Chicago Surrealist Group remained the centerpiece of Rosemont’s work. The Kerr Company’s surrealist imprint, Black Swan, gathered the works of Benjamin Péret and Jacques Vaché, for example. Stunning and indescribable in terms of genre was his own extended Black Swan book reflecting on the phenomenon of the “wrong number.” In the world of academic publishing Rosemont created and directed the Surrealist Revolution series at the University of Texas Press. That series produced, among much else, works challenging the very notion that surrealism is a male and European movement—in the first instance with the publication of Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Women and in the second with Black, Brown and Beige, coedited by Robin D.G. Kelley and Franklin himself. His own efforts to produce imaginative and beautiful things especially focused on painting and sketching as well as poetry. His art graced surrealist publications in a variety of countries.

Rosemont’s activities as an activist and educator reached quite beyond his surrealist and Kerr company activities. He served the Illinois Labor History Society in various capacities and inspired much of the activity of Chicago-based labor support and anti-fascist organization. An active supporter of the Black Freedom Movement for half a century, he was also a fighter against apartheid and a key figure in attempts to create collaborations between the IWW and Earth First! Rosemont is buried in Waldheim Cemetery, near to the grave of Emma Goldman and facing the monument to the Haymarket Martyrs.

Breton, André. What Is Surrealism: Selected Writings. Edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemont. New York: Monad Press, 1978.

Garon, Paul, Kate Khatib and David Roediger. “The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont.” Counterpunch (April 16, 2009) at https://www.counterpunch.org/2009/04/16/the-surreal-life-of-franklin-rosemont/
Khatib, Kate. “Surrealism’s America: Notes on a Vernacular Epistemology.” Unpublished PhD diss.: Johns Hopkins University, 2013.

Rosemont, Penelope, Dreams & Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker. Sds & the Seven Cities of Cibola. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2008.