Picture This!

Twenty-five years ago I walked into the Austin, Minnesota Labor Center for a rally to support Hormel meatpacking workers who were resisting their employer's demands for deep wage- and work-rule concessions. A display of union buttons on the lobby wall caught my eye. At first glance they appeared to be from that early twentieth-century radical labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, best known as "the Wobblies." They were emblazoned with that iconic globe, crisscrossed with longitude and latitude lines. But where the Wobbly buttons were—and are—typically red, these buttons were in all sorts of colors. Indeed, no two were even the same color. I drew closer and discovered that the buttons read "IUofAW" rather than "IWW," and that each included the name of a month in 1934. A grizzled meatpacker explained to me that these were monthly-dues buttons from the "Independent Union of All Workers," a predecessor of both the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). They were color-coded so that, in the days of shop floor dues collection, and workers could easily ascertain whether their fellow workers had paid their monthly dues. Born in a sit-down strike at the Austin Hormel plant in the fall of 1933, the IUAW had stretched to thirteen communities in the Midwest by 1935, reaching beyond the industrial boundaries of meatpacking to organize iron molders, founders, machinists, truckers and warehouse workers, and service, retail, and municipal employees in Iowa, Wisconsin, and North and South Dakota, as well as Minnesota, before carving itself up into separate organizations—some AFL and some CIO—in the late 1930s. The iconography of the dues buttons, of course, was intended to evoke and invoke the legacy of the IWW, an organization which had imprinted itself on the labor souls of Austin activists like Frank Ellis, Svend Godfredson, and Casper Winkels.

Little did I realize in that moment the degree to which the 1985-1986 Hormel strike, waged by the members of UFCW Local P-9, would be haunted by the spirits of both the IWW and the IUAW. Local P-9 members and supporters would virtually recreate, in their late twentieth-century battle, the structure, the strategy, and the culture of the IWW and the IUAW. On motorcycles, packing tents, they solicited solidarity in some of the same communities that had been interwoven half a century earlier. On soap boxes and street corners, they revived public speaking, creative singing, and veritable guerrilla theater skits. And at the plant gates and in the streets, they sat down, challenged the police, and sought to block production. Only in the aftermath of this struggle was I able to connect these dots and map these connections between two pasts—that of the 1910s and that of the 1930s—and the present of the 1980s.

That display of IUAW dues buttons on the wall of the Austin Labor Center had, day in and day out, in plain sight, signified these connections. That's what art can do. Of course, we have to know how to read that art to become aware of such connections. And, too often, we don't know how.

For their effort to teach us, we owe a substantial expression of gratitude to Lincoln Cushing and Timothy Drescher—and to the folks at Cornell University Press, who have produced a gorgeous book at a reasonable price. Cushing and Drescher have collected for their readers a stunning collection of American labor posters, and they have organized them in thematic chapters that help us to make sense out of them. They have also provided us with close readings and back stories for many of the images. They have taken historically significant images out of the shadows, literally out of file drawers and closets, and put them in our sights. We can now choose whether to be informed and inspired by our past, or haunted by it. Thank you, thank you, thank you...