100 Years Old Today: The Story Behind ‘Solidarity Forever’

[marmar]

from In These Times:


100 Years Old Today: The Story Behind ‘Solidarity Forever’
BY JONATHAN ROSENBLUM


On a windblown, gray Chicago day exactly 100 years ago today, Ralph Chaplin left his home on the city’s South Side for a raucous poor people’s rally at Hull House, the famed settlement house co-founded by Jane Addams. He asked a visiting friend he'd met organizing coal miners with Mother Jones to listen to the lyrics of a new tune he had been working on:

“Solidarity Forever,

Solidarity Forever,

Solidarity Forever,

For the union makes us strong!”

The self-described Chicago “stiff” and “rebel editor” merely wanted to write a song that could be for workers what “John Brown's Body” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” were for abolitionists. In fact, he borrowed the very melody.

One hundred years later, despite the rise and precipitous fall of workers’ movements in the U.S., Chaplin's song is a classic still widely sung with fists raised and demands for justice submitted. It's an international and national anthem, still regularly belted out by “Occupy” and sung every weekday by crowds from 20 to 100 protesters at the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda.

.....(snip).....

As the IWW's radical antiwar and pro-wildcat strike tactics got the union increasingly on government enemy lists, Chaplin ended up in Chicago’s Cook County jail and then Leavenworth on a conspiracy rap while his song slowly made its way into the labor canon.

With the workers' success at winning better terms and the powerful growth of unions, “Solidarity Forever” spread in an arc that would take it across the United States, adopted as the official anthem of the United Auto Workers, and into Canada, France, Latin America and even Australia (one of the early IWW leaders fled there while under suspicion of communist activities; Australian Labor Party leader and former Prime minister Bob Hawke was known to sing it from memory). The French sing it as “Solidarite mes freres et mes soeurs.” A Spanish version can be found in the renowned manual of American community singalongs, “Rise Up Singing.” ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17542/solidarity_forever