Industrial Workers of the World Cartoons

INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD CARTOONS. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is the only North American labor union that produced a distinctive and enduring tradition of cartooning. In the IWW’s heyday, from the early 1910s through the mid-1920s, its cartoons were almost as effective in “fanning the flames of discontent” as the famous Wobbly songs.

The Socialist Party’s cartoonists—those of the Masses, for example (Art Young, John Sloan, Robert Minor, et al.) tended to be professional artists who worked for large commercial dailies and fashionable magazines; their work was slick, stylish, intellectual, subtle, sometimes skipping into preciosity. Wobbly artists, however, tended to be self-taught amateurs, and their art, reflecting the predominance of hoboes in the union’s membership during its most active years, was huskier and brasher, or, as some might say, cruder and more vulgar.

At least one of the IWW’s founding fathers, Thomas J. Hagerty, had tried his hand at cartooning, and the most famous Wobbly of them all, the martyred Joe Hill, was a cartoonist as well as a writer of songs. Another well-known Wobbly bard, Ralph Chaplin, author of “Solidarity Forever,” contributed scores of cartoons to the IWW press over the years.

The following brief accounts of some representative IWW cartoonists should convey something of the range and quality of Wobbly art.

Ernest Riebe, notwithstanding the fact that he was the creator of the best-known and longest-running IWW comic strip, Mr. Block—the slapstick misadventures of a blockheaded worker who believes the boss is always right—little is known of Ernest Riebe other than that he was born in Germany and lived in or near Minneapolis during his IWW years. Mr. Block debuted in the Spokane Industrial Worker, the IWW’s “Official Western Organ,” on 7 November 1912, and continued to appear in that paper, and later in other IWW publications, through the early 1920s.

Before Riebe, IWW cartoons were mostly of the serious editorial type. With Mr. Block Riebe helped create the distinctively aggressive variety of hobo humor for which the IWW became so renowned. His scratchy energetic drawings were well-suited to his raucous gags.

Inspired by Riebe’s work, Joe Hill’s “Mr. Block” song recounted several of the strip’s early episodes; first published in January 1913, it soon became one of the most popular lyrics in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook.

A collection of twenty-four Mr. Block strips was published as a comic book later in 1913 (evidently the first use of the comic-book format for specifically revolutionary propaganda); a few strips also appeared as postcards. A smaller comic booklet, Mr. Block and the Profiteers, was issued in 1919. Riebe also contributed a poem and a play involving Mr. Block to the IWW press. Several other early Wobbly cartoonists, including “Dust” Wallin and Ern Hanson, introduced the Mr. Block character into their own cartoons, and from time to time the strip has been revived in IWW publications, even in recent years.

In addition to Mr. Block, Riebe did numerous single-panel cartoons, among them a remarkable antipatriotic series, “Under the Stars and Stripes,” featured on page one of the Industrial Worker from May through July 1913. Later he drew cover cartoons for the One Big Union Monthly. His ironically titled Crimes of the Bolsheviki, a pocket-size comic booklet published in 1919, was, like all IWW literature at that time, emphatically pro-Bolshevik in content.

Ern Hanson, of Norwegian descent, IWW cartoonist Ernest Henry Hanson was born 2 June 1889 in Forest City, Iowa. At twelve he moved west with his parents, first to California and then to Portland, where he worked at the printing trade. Introduced to labor radicalism in Arizona in 1914, he soon afterward joined the IWW on his way to the North Dakota harvest. In 1917, while “beating the draft by keeping on the move from job to job,” he became an IWW traveling delegate. He took part in the union’s famous May Day, 1919, eight-hour strike, in which the “bindle-stiffs” burned their “lousy blankets” in the public squares of large and small towns and logging camps throughout the Northwest.

Hanson was secretary of the Missoula, Montana, IWW local in 1924 but, like thousands of other Wobblies, left the organization in the wake of the so-called decentralist split. After hoboing much of the first three decades of his life, in his Wobbly days he worked mostly as a logger, and off and on as a trapper and trail cook. In the late 1920s he settled in Idaho as an employee of the U.S. Forest Service, from which position he was fired in 1953, evidently at the demand of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as “a danger to the national interest.” Returning to work as a logger at age sixty-four, he retired on a small pension two years later. He died in 1981 or 1982.

Ern Hanson contributed some of the weirdest and most ornate cartoons ever to appear in the IWW press. Most of these were published in the Industrial Worker, the union’s western organ, which had a large hobo readership. His grotesque portrayal of “Scissor Bill”—the Wobblies’ name for any hopelessly non– class-conscious, boss-loving worker, mercilessly drubbed in one of Joe Hill’s songs—was Hanson’s greatest creation, and figured in many of his cartoons.

C. E. Setzer, one of the greatest Wobbly cartoonists, North Carolina-born C. E. Setzer (1905?– 1970?) joined the IWW’s Lumber Workers Industrial Union 120 in 1922, and from time to time also worked as a harvest hand, construction worker, and machinist. Over the years he served the IWW as branch secretary, general executive board member, and organizer on the Boulder Dam project in the early 1930s, but his abundant and highly original cartoons were his most enduring contribution. Although he did some notable pen-and-ink drawings, his best work was done in linoleum-block, a medium he originally chose simply to save the Industrial Worker the cost of photoengraving. Signed “X13” (from his IWW “red card” number), or with his initials, Setzer’s distinctively thick-lined, grotesque cartoons, bristling with an oftentimes savage humor, are unique in the annals of modern cartooning. Reduced versions of several of his linocuts have appeared as IWW “silent agitator” stickers.

William Henkelman, a machine-gun instructor in the U.S. Army during World War I, William Henkelman was among the American Expeditionary Forces who mutinied when sent to Russia at the close of the war in an effort to crush the revolution. Honorably discharged, he resumed the trade of sign-painter and lined up in the IWW in the early 1920s. Over the years he lettered many signs for IWW halls and meetings, and later for the Veterans Home in Yountsville, California, where he spent the last decades of his life. More important, he became one of the IWW’s most prolific and imaginative cartoonists.

The range and power of Henkelman’s cartoons reveal his constant search for new and unusual ways of expressing the IWW message of working-class self-emancipation. Among his cleverest cartoons are his Wobbly adaptations of well-known advertisements, in which commercial slogans are humorously made to subserve IWW aims. In 1945 he prepared an IWW calendar to commemorate the union’s fortieth anniversary, and he did the cover for that year’s edition of The Little Red Songbook. For many years he drew, with a stylus, directly on stencils, numerous cover illustrations for the IWW’s mimeographed convention proceedings and internal General Organization Bulletin.

Carlos Cortez, foremost of the more recent Wob cartoonists is Carlos Cortez (b. 1923), probably the only IWW artist whose work has been exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Inspired above all by the work of the famous printmaker of the Mexican Revolution, José Guadalupe Posada, and the German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz—international influences that reflect his own heritage as the son of a Mexican Wobbly father and a German socialist-pacifist mother—Cortez is best known for his large linocut poster-portraits of Joe Hill, Ricardo Flores Magón, Lucy Parsons, and Ben Fletcher. In earlier years he contributed many linocuts to the Industrial Worker, but when the paper switched to offset in the 1960s, he began drawing pen-and-ink cartoons. Poet and songwriter as well as artist, Cortez has also served as editor of the Industrial Worker and on the union’s General Executive Board, and is one of the IWW’s most popular public speakers. In 1985, to commemorate the union’s eightieth anniversary, he organized an important exhibition, “Wobbly: Eighty Years of Rebel Art,” featuring original works by many IWW cartoonists of the past and present.

Buhle, Paul. Labor’s Joke Book. Saint Louis: Workers Democracy Press, 1985.

Cortez, Carlos. Wobbly: Eighty Years of Rebel Art. Chicago: Gato Negro Press, 1985.

Reibe, Ernest. Mr. Block. Facsimile edition. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1984.

Rosemont, Franklin. “A Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons.” In Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh. Rev. ed. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1988.

“Historic IWW Cartoons” Industrial Workers of the World. https://www.iww.org/category/image-galleries/iww-cartoons/historic-iww-cartoons