“Blazing Signals of a World in Birth”: Lyrical Expression and International Solidarity from the Literary Left to the Popular Front

Abstract

John Dos Passos’s monumental U.S.A. trilogy illustrates how poetry and song lyrics figured prominently in the labor activism of the 1910s. In the course of the three novels, “Solidarity Forever”—a song written by Ralph Chaplin (1887–1961) in 1915 as a union anthem for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—makes repeated appearances. In one of the chapters, the song is used to initiate one of the novel’s many protagonists into the protest culture and politics of the IWW (115). Dos Passos (1896–1970) also presents a comprehensive biographical sketch dedicated to Joe Hill (1879–1915), the quintessential union songwriter, whose lyrics were sung by protesters across the nation: “Along the coast in cookshacks flophouses jungles wobblies hoboes bindlestiffs singing Joe Hill’s songs […] forming the structure of the new society within the jails of the old” (717). The song lyrics and poems emerging in the context of the IWW were intended to create a sense of solidarity among the working class. In addition to the appeal these songs and poems had for working-class people, they were also instrumental in recruiting a large number of middle-class intellectuals such as Dos Passos. Accordingly, in one of the autobiographical Camera Eye-sections (one of the narrative modes used in U.S.A.), Dos Passos relates how, from the window of his Harvard dormitory, he witnessed “millworkers marching with a red brass band through the streets of Lawrence Massachusetts” (263).