Mr. Block

MR. BLOCK. The “Backward Worker,” source for a famous Wobbly song, Mr. Block was
invented by IWW artist Ernest Riebe in 1912 for The Industrial Worker, which was published at the time in Spokane. Mr. Block has a solid wooden head and represents the union’s oft-mocked ‘scissorbill’ in despising the Wobblies and believing everything that employers and politicians said. A counterpart to socialist Ryan Walker’s more widely seen character Henry Dubb (whose strip often ended with the sad realization, “I’m the Henry Dubb!”), Mr. Block became a key part of IWW folklore, gaining renown through the song written about him by Wobbly agitator-poet Joe Hill, which began: “Please give me your attention/I'll introduce to you/A man that is a credit to/"Our Red, White and Blue.”/His head is made of lumber,/and solid as a rock;/he is a common worker/and his name is Mr. Block./And Block he thinks he may/Be President some day.”

Almost nothing is known about Ernest Riebe, beyond his birth in Germany late in the nineteenth century, his residence for a period in Minneapolis, and his membership in the IWW from 1912. Original work by Riebe appeared in bursts in the Industrial Worker (1912-13), Solidarity (1913-14), New Solidarity (1919), One Big Union Monthly (1919), Industrial Pioneer (1921) and Industrial Solidarity (1924). Alongside Mr. Block, he produced single-panel cartoons and comic strips lambasting militarism, exploitation and political repression, including a six-part series of detailed illustrations entitled “Under the Stars and Stripes.” Reflecting the peripatetic and fluctuating nature of the union’s membership, the disappearance and sudden reappearance of Riebe’s work elicited no commentary. Given his creativity and technical skill, the artist’s personal obscurity contrasts dramatically with esteemed reputation of Ryan Walker, who succeeded in the commercial press when Left newspapers could not afford to employ him.

The IWW sold Riebe’s work as postcards and, in 1913, as a collection of twenty-four Mr. Block comic strips, representing one of the earliest such anthologies in the United States. Artist Walker C. Smith, the Industrial Worker editor who first ran and championed Riebe’s work, described Mr. Block in the collection’s introduction as the worker who “licks the hand that smarts him and kisses the boot that kicks him.” Showing Riebe’s familiarity with the conditions that much of the IWW’s membership endured, Mr. Block worked as a farmhand, logger, and factory worker and suffered at the hands of bosses, police, charities, employment agents, and other grifters. Despite these setbacks, and the derision of his wife, Mr. Block’s never wavered in his belief in the American Dream.

After a five-year break, Riebe produced new cartoons along with two pamphlets in 1919. Crimes of the Bolsheviki (1919), a satirical volume, has more prose that comic art, but along with similar cartoons produced by Riebe for the Industrial Pioneer marks perhaps the first humorous refutation of the various changes against Bolshevism in the contemporary press (the Bolsheviki had “nationalized” Russian women and so forth). The forty-four-page Mr Block and the Profiteers is also mainly text. Rigorously and wittily critiquing capitalism, it marked the return of Riebe’s popular character. In 1921 Industrial Pioneer published “The Majority: A One Act Play,” an eight-page script featuring Mr. Block. In 1924 Mr. Block was paired in strips with Mr. Bone, an equally dim-witted worker.

If Henry Dubb disappeared with Walker’s last strips of him in the 1920s, Mr. Block enjoyed a lasting presence. Riebe’s work was reprinted in the IWW’s press from the 1920s to the 1970s, and Mr. Block appeared in pieces by other cartoonists. With the rise of radical comics in the 1970s, Riebe became an icon of sorts for the comic artists who worked to change the world rather than to seek fame and fortune. Franklin Rosemont, reviving the Charles H. Kerr company, brought out a reprint of Riebe’s 1913 collection. Visual references to Mr. Block appears in the work of several artists. Wobblies! a Graphic History (2005) commemorates him in a strip by NickThorkelson.

Riebe, Ernest (orig. 1913), Mr. Block: Twenty-Four IWW Cartoons. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1984, with introduction by Franklin Rosemont.

Rosemont, Franklin. “A Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons,” in Joyce L. Kornbluh, ed., Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology. Oakland: PM Press, 2011, third edition.

Index of Cartoons/Mr. Block. IWW Website. https://web.archive.org/web/20110605070551/http://www.iww.org/graphics/cartoons/mrblock/