John Neuhaus: Wobbly Folklorist

Abstract

N O more tradition's chains shall bind us, sang the delegates to the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago, June 1905.1 The miners and machinists, socialists and syndicalists, trade unionists and revolutionists who banded together to organize all workers, regardless of craft, origin, or status into One Big Union * were soon to be labeled I.W.W.'s, * Wobs, * and Wobblies.* 2 There is no evidence that the pioneer Wobblies in their formative years were aware of the turn-of-the-century stirrings in ballad scholarship, folklore, and cultural anthropology. The I.W.W. organizers knew only from their personal experience as workers and as dreamers of a new society* the weight and strength of traditions' chains. President William R. Bascom, at the American Folklore Society's 1953 meeting, stated, . folklore is an important mechanism for maintaining the stability of culture. He went on to say that among its plural functions folklore is used to provide members of society with ... a from 'the hardships, the inequalities, the injustices' of everyday life. 3The Industrial Workers of the World scorned all the mechanisms and artifacts of compensatory escape used by workers. But in spite of their mockery and vituperation, they developed, in time, their own body of traditional lore-song, tale, custom, aphorism-and within the enclave of the dominant society they abhorred, they used this folklore to transmit their own cultural values. Notwithstanding their post-World War I decline as an effective force in the labor movement, they lived to see in the late 1930's many of their own traditions conveyed by the folk process outside their isolated group to the giant industrial unions of the New Deal period. Much of the history of American folklore study is the enlargement of scope and probing in depth as the scholar casts his net to include new groups-spatial, occupational, linguistic, religious, or racial. 4 Strangely, no folklorist has come to grips with either the labor or radical movement in the United States. George Korson knows trade unionism more intimately than any folklore scholar, yet in his excellent studies5 he has avoided general union songs not specifically connected with coal mine minstrelsy. John Greenway 6 surveyed such labor songs as met his thematic criterionprotest; however, his basic interest was not whether labor unionism as an institution or movement was sufficiently stable and isolated to permit its members to develop a body of traditional material. The reason for these lacunae is complex and, properly, the subject for separate research.7 There died in San Francisco, California, on 29 June 1958, an unsung folklorist, John Neuhaus, who made his life's work the study of Wobbly tradition. It was my fortune to know him well. I have set my memorial to him in the form of an essay on his scholarship in this challenging area of folklore study. A trait John Neuhaus held in common with his fellow workers * was a constant and ingrained use of special slang characteristic of the labor movement. In a very real