FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

₁  It is impossible to fully appreciate this fascinating volume of laconic humor without contemplating its visual mate: Mr Block: The Subversive Comics and Writings of Ernest Riebe, ed. Graphic History Collective with Paul Buhle and Iain McIntyre (Oakland: PM Press, 2023). Readers who wish to delve into the Wobbly genius more deeply will find their way to Riebe.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) produced not only labor heroes and heroines, some of the greatest in US history, but also a generous handful of artists and writers, proletarians all, with a shared perspective. Joe Hill, unquestionably the most famous, who along with John Brown is among the great martyred heroes of the Left, returned to public attention with “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” a ballad written in a leftwing children’s camp and intoned to Popular Front audiences by Paul Robeson. T-Bone Slim, by contrast, has remained obscure, known mostly to IWW devotees. Until now, that is.

Without the efforts of the late Franklin Rosemont to recover the disappearing legacy of the Industrial Workers of the World, the fascinating and enigmatic labor whimsy of “T-Bone Slim” – the Finnish-American Matti Huhta – might have been lost entirely. That it could be recovered at all, as the IWW passed through eras of partial recovery followed by near-total collapse, remains remarkable. That the editors of this volume have found so much rich material and treated it with great care is surely a prime example of unknown labor-culture treasures made newly available. Billy Bragg called this volume “lost wisdom,” and Tom Morello described T-Bone as having “skewered injustice and uplifted the working class.”

If Slim had written nothing but “The Popular Wobbly,” a hilarious commentary of lower working class life adapted from a 1917 music hall hit, his status in labor folklore of the homeless traveling worker would surely endure somewhere and somehow.

They go wild, simply wild over me.
I’m referring to the bed bug and the flea.
They disturb my slumber deep
And I mummer in my sleep
They go wild, simply wild over me. (p.6)

The editors of this volume have determinedly recovered Slim’s real life, or the most that will likely ever be recovered. Raised in Ashtabula, Ohio, evidently rejecting the strict moral and religious training of the Lutheran church, Huhta was a rebel but also a bright boy. Reading widely, in both poetry and prose, and likely also influenced by the rhythmic lines of the poetic Finnish saga Kalevala, Slim took work on the docks as the family moved to Erie, Pennsylvania. His mother ran a little boarding house and his father drowned himself in Lake Erie, perhaps of a broken marriage and broken heart. By that time, as a young man, Slim had already married a Finnish immigrant and set up his own household.

Slim was, however, a poor excuse for a husband and irresponsible father of four. He hit the road in 1912, and his wife later sued for divorce. He would remain on the road, a transient worker for most of the rest of his life until becoming a tugboat captain in his last years. A writer by instinct, he published only after he joined the IWW, probably around 1916. The form of his writing, poetry and prose, remains both unique and deeply rooted in Wobbly traditions.

The IWW had already, by that time of his joining, seen its best days. The short-time, high prestige recruitment of Western miners had ended with the disaffiliation of the Western Federation of Miners in 1907. The recession of that year practically finished off the dues-paying membership. A stunning return to the spotlight, organizing among East Coast factory workers in the famous Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey textile and silk strikes during 1912–1913, ended with no breakthroughs in the East after all.

And yet, as a legendary vehicle of class solidarity and hope, not to mention disdain for capitalism and all it represented, the IWW held on. It continued to be seen as a savior of the itinerants, mostly if not only in parts of the West and also as the vision of what unionism might be, could be. In “free speech” fights, on street corners, in the occasional urban lecture hall but definitely in the distant halls of lumber workers, it had a message. The message, better delivered in songs, jokes, and punchy prose than in theory, found many genius moments.

Who read the IWW newspapers that Huhta/T-Bone wrote for? It’s hard to say. The IWW maintained a magazine through the 1920s, but after 1930, only the tabloid Industrial Worker, at first weekly, then less frequently. A split in 1924, so senseless that it could have been provoked by the authorities, nearly destroyed the organization. Older Wobs meanwhile faded away and younger radicals became Communists who, after a time, took up the familiar stick-to-local-conditions strategy that the most effective IWW organizers had adopted earlier. Ideology had more value for the agitator, the source of his or her dedication, than for the ordinary workers to be organized. The “demand” strikes of the early 1930s, as labor historian David Montgomery named them, had little hopes of forming recognized unions but demonstrated urgency and militancy, led locally across the country by communist regulars, Trotskyist groups, De Leonist grouplets split off from the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), or others. The IWW got little credit.

And yet. Wherever radical papers circulated, at least through the 1930s, the Industrial Worker was to be found. And treasured, in many places and by many people, as a voice of a different kind. There was even a Finnish-language counterpart in Minnesota! And there, also, a Work Peoples’ College, so called. In other words, working class self-education, faded since the coming of radio, continued in a variety of ways, in a variety of places including Chicago, IWW headquarters, where the Industrial Worker endured. It purveyed and falteringly propagandized for a vision of labor self-emancipation that has not yet died.

Back now to Slim. His earliest poem, recovered here through ardent research, sets the tone. He imagines himself as a mouse trod underfoot by a human, and compared it to the status of a prisoner – evidently himself, in the clink for trespassing (a.k.a homelessness). “With one faint squeal, beneath a heel / Its tiny light went out” (p.5), and what better fate to expect from a jail cell of an arrested vagrant, that is, himself?

Followed, in a few years, by the famous “Lumberjack’s Prayer,” including these lines, “I pray dear lord for Jesus’ sake, / Give us this day a T-Bone Steak / Hallowed be thy holy name / But don’t forget to send the same” (p.23). Still more years later, he is picking peaches  and lamenting, “It seems the peach crop must be destroyed as to keep the prices from spoiling in cans—couldn’t they give them to the paupers in the country poor farms to go with that yearly egg” (p.226).

The obvious weaknesses of the IWW had also been its strength since its earliest years. Its self-sacrificing heroes were footloose. They mistrusted union contracts on principle – a strategy sure to be defeated in the end, but appealing to militancy. They seem always to have been rather more legendary than real, and yet they were real. The affiliation of the Italian-American Socialist Federation, the FSI, with the IWW rather than the Socialist Party, also speaks to this quality: the Italian immigrant activists inclined toward syndicalism and direct action, but they had an intellectual base in the urban coffee houses where radical newspapers upon racks offered a basis for discussion and debate. The IWW, of course, had the enthusiastic support of the Masses magazine, favorite of Bohemians around the US until its suppression in 1917.

Slim was whimsical and usually rhyme-centered. No blank verse for him. Even his prose had a poetic character. And so he continued, almost always on the move in casual labor, living badly, until his untimely death in 1942.

Today, a foundation grant has made it possible for the editors to delve into the archives, especially of the Newberry Library in Chicago. The Finnish scholar, Ville-Juhani Sutinen, has remarked that “Matt Huhta is so unreal that we have to imagine him” (p.351). Precisely so. Let your imagination run wild while perusing the pages of this book.¹

Discovering T-Bone and reading his work, a young Franklin Rosemont summed it all up best in the first issue of The Rebel Worker. It is worth quoting him at length.

Because he escaped the academies, and didn’t listen too closely to the limits imposed by authoritative grammarians, T-Bone gives us something else (and something infinitely better) than the esteemed but useless literature of our ruling class. His spontaneous notations riddled with explosive humor and his savage plays on words transcend all bounds of bourgeois propriety. He’ll never make it in the college textbooks. Neither could he be comfortably included in an anthology of “socialist realism,” that reactionary middle-class genre which naively thinks that factory-workers, after putting in an eight-hour day or longer, want to read long, drawn-out tales of other factory-workers putting in eight-hour days or longer. As if work itself wasn’t tiring and alienating enough!