Slim, T-Bone

Owen Clayton

SLIM, T-BONE (1882-1942). Born Matti Valentinpoika Huhta, T-Bone Slim was a second- generation Finnish-American newspaper columnist, musician and poet. A dedicated member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he was a regular columnist for their Industrial Worker and Industrial Solidarity newspapers, though he also wrote for the Communist newspaper Truth during the early 1920s. He was easily the IWW’s greatest writer, and some workers read the wobbly papers only for his column. He wrote several songs, of which a few were published in the Little Red Songbook, including “Mysteries of a Hobo’s Life,” “Harvest Land” and, most famously, “The Popular Wobbly.” He was so well known among hobos that labor journalist Harvey O’Connor dubbed him “the laureate of the logging camps.”

Slim’s writing was characterised by a combination of humor, working-class dialect and absurdist wordplay. His articles were direct and concise while containing a complexity that was akin to the more famous literary modernists. For example, he used neologisms and puns to combine the ideas inherent in two words, such as “Brisbanality,” his word for the writings of the conservative Hearst newspaper columnist Arthur Brisbane, and he SLIMoined the term “headlies” to describe mainstream newspapers. His writing defamiliarized common ideas, making readers think again about concepts and objects they had taken for granted, as when he calls profit “The price ignorance pays greed for the privilege of starving in a world of plenty,” and tear gas “The most effective agent used by employers to persuade their employees that the interests of Capital and Labor are identical.” He also wrote about hunger, which he saw as a defining class experience. Noting that “Labor has a bad habit of getting hungry,” he argued that only revolutionary change would ensure that the working class could continue the “noble custom of eating.” Like Oscar Wilde, Slim wrote in pithy aphorisms, including “Only the poor break laws. The rich evade them.” These sayings were swapped by workers on the job and in hobo jungles, and there are accounts of hobos writing his phrases onto boxcars, which would then circulate around the United States (and beyond). Despite the quality of his writing, however, Slim was forgotten soon after his death in 1942. It would not be until 2019 that the first academic article was published on Slim, though Franklin Rosemont deserves great credit for keeping Slim’s torch alive by publishing what is still the only collection of his writings, Juice is Stranger Than Friction (1992).

There are large gaps in Slim’s biography. Rosemont uncovered several important facts, such as Slim’ marriage to Rosa Huhta, with whom he had four children. For reasons unknown, Slim left Huhta in 1912, and the couple divorced in 1915. Recent research has uncovered more details, such that he was born on Valentine’s Day (Valentinpoika means “Son of Valentine”), and that Slim claimed to have been introduced to anarchism and the IWW as a hobo in 1916. His articles reveal that he worked a variety of jobs, including as a harvest laborer in the Midwest, a camp cook in Oregon (he was a fine cook, which partly explains his interest in food), and a gandydancer on the railways. In later life he settled in New York as a river barge captain, hauling freight in the Manhattan area. He remained poor and often slept at the seaman’s mission on the Lower East Side. When he could not afford that he slept rough, which led him to comment that one morning he “Woke up stiff all over—lumpy bed. I had inadvertently spread two sheets of newspaper in one spot.”

While Rosemont believed that Slim had cut himself off from his family, subsequent research showed that this was not the case. He wrote to and visited relatives, and both borrowed and leant them money. His unpublished writings to his family show a more intimate, personal side: Matti Huhta rather than the persona that was T-Bone Slim. In the letters he muses about old age, pens a loving poem about his niece, and makes a reference to crying about an upcoming court case. Recent investigation also uncovered his arrest for disorderly conduct in 1939 and, in a moment that both mocks the authorities and reveals much about his self-identification, gave them the pseudonym “Joseph Hilger,”a reference to Joe Hill that the police and judiciary apparently did not notice. In what remains another mystery of this hobo’s life and death, Slim’s sixty-year-old body was found floating in New York’s East River on the 15 May 1942. Whether he slipped or whether more nefarious activities were in play is still unknown. He was buried unceremoniously on Hart Island, America’s largest Potter’s Field, stacked in a mass grave three-to-five coffins deep. His body remained unclaimed and it took six months for an obituary to be published.

Such an ending would not have surprised Slim. He believed that, barring a revolution to overthrow the current economic system, he would most likely be forgotten. He commented on this frequently, as when he noted that Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, had been bought for the nation, and asked ironically “Wouldn’t it be a graceful deed if the I. W. W would purchase one of Fegg Bros’ boarding cars (the home of T-Bone Slim)…as a perpetual memorial.” He frequently mocked famous figures like Jefferson, arguing that workers needed to act for themselves rather than expect political leaders to solve their problems. “No great big heroic T-bone Slim or Dill-Pickle Fat,” he wrote, parodying his own name, “is going to prance into an industry and tell the children in the drill-press department, ‘Hear ye, hear ye, I now organize you into the Yearnful Earners of the Universe.’” Since leaders will always betray their followers, he concluded, workers must self-organize to find ways to make political change and improve their condition.

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Slim, T-Bone

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