Wobbly; The Rough-and-Tumble Story of an American Radical
Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1948. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. vi, 435, [11--including illustrations]. Index. No dust jacket present. Cover has some wear and soiling. Bookplate on fep. Bookseller's stamp on rep. Minor damp staining at bottom of some back pages. Ralph Hosea Chaplin (1887–1961) was an American writer, artist and labor activist. He began work in various union positions. For two years Chaplin worked in the strike committee with Mother Jones for the bloody Kanawha County, West Virginia strike of coal miners in 1912–13. These influences led him to write a number of labor oriented poems, one of which became the words for the oft-sung union anthem, "Solidarity Forever". Chaplin became active in the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or "Wobblies") and became editor of its eastern U.S. publication Solidarity. In 1917 Chaplin and some 100 other Wobblies were rounded up, convicted, and jailed under the Espionage Act of 1917 for conspiring to hinder the draft and encourage desertion. He wrote Bars And Shadows: The Prison Poems while serving four years of a 20-year sentence. Chaplin was very disillusioned by the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the evolution of the Soviet state and international communism, as he details in his autobiography, Wobbly. Chaplin maintained his involvement with the IWW, serving in Chicago as editor of its newspaper, the Industrial Worker, from 1932 to 1936. Eventually Chaplin settled in Tacoma, Washington, where he edited the local labor publication. From 1949 until his death, he was curator of manuscripts for the Washington State Historical Society. More