Mr. Block and Franklin Rosemont
Author, activist and surrealist Franklin Rosemont speaking at a Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) conference in Chicago in 2007. Photo: Thomas Good / Next Left Notes. CC BY-SA 4.0
Please give me your attention, I’ll introduce to you
A man that is a credit to “Our Red, White, and Blue;”
His head is made of lumber, and solid as a rock;
He is a common worker and his name is Mr. Block.
And Block he thinks he may
Be President some day.
[And so it came to pass
Block changed his name to Trump
And he wasn’t even asked,
Becoming a complete and total ass.]Oh, Mr. Block, you were born by mistake,
You take the cake,
You make me ache.
Tie a rock to your block and then jump in the lake,
Kindly to that for Liberty’s sake.
There’s a whole lot of false consciousness running around. How to battle against it? It’s a matter of public health. It’s as bad as the measles. The Wobblies, or members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) thought that song was essential, and their greatest songster was Joe Hill, and Joe Hill’s best song against false consciousness was Mr. Bloch who also became the main figure in the cartoons of Ernest Riebe. Mr. Block thinks that doctors and nurses belong to different economic classes. Same with professors and students; he thinks they’re not in the same boat. Yet, we’ll all sink or swim together. Joe Hill was executed in 1915 by the state of Utah (“murdered by the capitalist class,” says the monument in Salt Lake City). His songs remain a painless vaccination to what ails us.
Why we need song and history just now. Everyone’s talking about “story” like what story do we tell each other? History or herstory? Dig where you stand, the starting point of history from below. How deep shall we dig? Here in the Great Lakes, thanks to David Graeber, it’s easy to go back to Kondiaronk. Or now, to go back to Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009) because he knew we had to dig deep. He wrote the great biography of Joe Hill. We need a Joe Hill to write more verses, Mr Block Goes to Palestine, Mr. Block Goes to the Border, &c. Otherwise, it’s the measles.
Franklin wrote about tons of other things as well, all just as curious, interesting, funny, and needed. He didn’t like misery at all and, he loved the marvellous. We have such a book of Franklin Rosemont’s writing, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture, edited by Abigail Susik and Paul Buhle (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2025). It’s totally splendid like a jewellery box of pearls, rubies, saphires, and diamonds. Some for special occasions, ceremonial, intimate, beautiful, and some world-changing providing a great clearing of the air letting us see clearly or a thaw of the ice a releasing forgotten tales from the campfires or kitchen tables. It has thirty-five chapters divided in seven parts, namely, Americana and Chicagoana, Comics and Animation, Music and Dance, Labor History, Play and Humor, Ecology, and Reminiscence. Its playful original prose is infectious.
Abigail Susik writes a fine introduction telling how Franklin along with Paul Buhle “sought fresh possibilities for discovery within everyday life.” She refers to his “highly idiosyncratic confidence in the persistence of moments of vernacular authenticity.” C.L.R. James and Herbert Marcuse were their mentors, gurus, accompaniers.
Folkloric, homespun, regional, and lowbrow, his blue collar upbringing, teenage encounters with the Beat generation in San Francisco, prepared him for the possibilities of détournement both de-railing and re-routing. In the Fifties he read Mad magazine. After dropping out of high school and hitch-hiking to San Francisco, he returned to study for a time at Roosevelt University in Chicago where he studied with St. Clair Drake. He joined the Wobs in 1962 taking out his red card, and running over to Michigan to help with the blueberry pickers strike.
This book is essential reading for May Day 2025. The Haymarket riot of 1886, the subsequent hangings, the round-up of organizers and rebels, led to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward of the following year and later his book Equality. Rosemont has a wonderful appreciation of both demanding nothing less than a complete transformation of the human condition to full equality. The story of American socialism influenced Mark Twain, Frank Baum, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Morris, Eugene Debs, and Mme. Blavatsky. They’re only the beginning of the afterlives of that first May Day of industrial capitalism.
After Haymarket, Franklin explains the terrorist in an essay “A Bomb-Toting, Long-Haired, Wiled-Eyed Fiend: The Image of the Anarchist in Popular Culture.” When once again this figure, the terrorist, becomes of bogey-man of Mr Block, a lunatic, a communist, dark-skinned villain. Also a figure of laughter in Buster Keaton, the cartoons, and the comics. Franklin sought out the old timers. He enjoyed himself. He lived life and loved well. He went to Bugs Bunny, Thelonious Monk, André Breton, Paul Garon, and Penelope Rosemont. He was a people’s scholar.
With David Roediger he edited The Haymarket Scrapbook (1986, 2012) which Meridel LeSueur called “a magnificent work of research, memory, and love,” as it is indeed. As a resource for the annual May Day celebration it should be in easy reach of every student, worker, and immigrant. In 1983 with his life-long partner and comrade, Penelope, he took over the long-standing Chicago publisher, Charles Kerr. They continued to synthesize radical political agitation and counter-cultural revolt of the 1960s.
His was the Chicago world of Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel. His father was a leading typographer and unionist in Chicago, a leader of 1949 newspaper strike, and historian of American labor’s first strike, the Philadelphia typographical strike of 1786. He named his son, Franklin, after Philadelphia’s most famous printer. He knew the IWW old-timers, thorough study of IWW documentation. Thus part of his patrimony included the birth of the republic, and though Franklin would never describe himself in any sense as a republican or as a “citizen” in that bourgeois sense, he drew his authority from the working-class history intrinsic to his surroundings.
He edited a book of the writings and speeches of Isadora Duncan. He praised Marth Graham. He wrote another on the Dill Pickle club of Chicago. His oddest book is surely An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers (2003). Its “News from Other Nowheres” as he described it referred to that “no place” called from the Greek “utopia.” Its title points to the central importance that the telephone had in the life of the day. Instead of an introduction he writes, “’History’ tells us the Black Hawk War ended in 1832. Why, then, do I see it, hear it, and feel it raging on all sides?” Why indeed!
Briefly told, the Black Hawk War ended native resistance in the old Northwest. Black Hawk led the Sauk and Fox indigenous people who had been forced from their homelands back to them in Illinois. Settlers had to flee to Chicago. Black Hawk and his allies were defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe. It is significant for the American history of divide and conquer that fighting for the USA against the native people were both Jefferson Davis, future leader of the confederacy, and Abraham Lincoln, future leader of the Union. That’s why the Black Hawk War had such a ghostly presence to Franklin Rosemont.
Franklin loved to quote Robin D.G. Kelley, “Now is the time to think like poets, to envision and to make visible a new society, peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imaginations.” That’s the problem, namely, how to de-colonize our imaginations? That’s why writes about Bugs Bunny, the Wobblies, the Blues, and Surrealism. Painting, song, and music, these have to be the numbers we dial to get an answer from Mr Block. At first he may say, “wrong number,” but he’ll learn if there are enough of us and we are laughing! Laughter, that’s the ticket.
“What’s Up, Doc?” asks the ever-friendly Bugs Bunny. He fights the pink-faced pudge named, Elmer Fudd, who plays a greedy gold-digger, greedy for money. Elmer Fudd’s esemblance to Elon Musk is inescapable if accidental. His main activity is the defense of private property especially his carrot patch. Bugs is a street-wise city kid, a Brooklyn trickster, never at a loss for a flippant remark or legitimate question in an illogical situation. Bugs Bunny helped form the sardonic attitude of the GIs who went off to fight Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, knowing that they had to watch their backs. Hence, double V. Victory over fascists abroad, and racists at home. Not only did Bugs Bunny out-trick Elmer Fudd in all his capitalist guises, he did so munching a carrot. This fellow was going to enjoy life even in the midst of disasters. Rosemont calls him the “veritable symbol of irreducible recalcitrance.”
The brilliant versatility of Mel Blanc’s voice spoke to millions during cartoons on Saturday afternoons at the movies. The supreme grace of Krazy Kat helped Franklin introduce his “The Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons” which was as thorough, brilliant, and very much as comical as the hard-hitting wobbly songs. They anticipate photomontage; they’re the beginning of the stickerette. Some said IWW stood for I Won’t Work, and in truth Franklin thought all would become artists in the new society.
Why music? It is closest to the heart; straight, no chaser. Africa, its rhythms, its instruments. In blues lyrics he finds materialism, eroticism, humor, atheism, passion for freedom, sense of adventure, and alertness to the Marvellous. Blues is black, blues is popular, blues is song, blues is collective, blues is muscular. The blues people are alchemists of the word incanting against “the shabby confines of detestable reality.” He takes the words for this music – blues, jazz, swing, bebop, and reggae – as expressing the full measure of African glory: looking ahead to a non-repressive civilization, harking back to Yoruba trickster tales, to the secret lore of slaves, to the underground railroad or the freedom ship (as Marcus Rediker is teaching us to see), to the loa of Haitian voodoo.
Franklin’s teacher at Roosevelt was St. Clair Drake whose father was from Barbados. Drake became the friend of Padmore and Nkrumah. He studied black seamen in Cardiff, Wales, in 1947 and 1948. It was a coal and steel town like Chicago. He helped make Franklin cosmopolitan and pan African. He was a significant mentor, and himself a student radical at Hampton Institute in the 1920s. Franklin, like Langston Hughes, knows rivers, and the rivers (as we know from Aldo Leopold) flow into the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean from Chicago, via the Great Lakes or the Mississippi.
The Atlantic problem or how the modes of doing things (culture, production, ethnology, reproduction) differs and mixes among the people and creatures of the four continents that form the four corners of that ocean. Black skin and blue blood, white skin and ocher skin, people the color of the earth: Africa, Europe, Latin America, Turtle Island: together they form ‘the Atlantic problem.’ Small wonder that Chicago is one of its centers where solutions are sought.
Abigail Susik introduces the collection with a helpful essay on surrealism with its emergence in Chicago in 1966 with links to Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. To find the surreal in nonsurrealist phenomenon, to be able to wander (dérive), to be open to what arrives by chance (disponsibilité). Drawing on the irrationality of dreams, Franklin propounded the oneiric life.
He learned early to do his own thinking, avoiding the “police-like aspects of literary criticism” and the mature result is original, a marvel, by re-writing it “in service of desire.” He formed his own judgements. Melville makes the cut, thundering “No!” in the land of the dollar.
Franklin loved word-play, puns and palindromes. The palindrome turns the world of letters forward to back or back to front and the real world upside down or topsy turvy.
Rail at a liar.
Name no one man.
No lemons, no melon.
Rats live on No Evil Star.
Wonders in Italy: Latin is “red’ now.
Deer flee freedom in Oregon? No, Geronimo, deer feel freed.
If there was one poet who Franklin put up top (well, after Joe Hill of course) that would be T-Bone Slim. He was a tug-boat captain skilled at tenderly nudging huge ocean liners to their berth. He does the same with language finding that a shout, a slogan, a koan, or a haiku could nudge continents together. T-Bone Slim understood the latent content of the age.
“Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.” “A stiff without a brother is a ship without a rudder.” “Half a loaf is better than no loafing at all.” “Juice is stranger than friction.” “Civilinsanity.”
Rosemont finds him at the junction between the phonetic cabala and the surrealist image. T-Bone Slim’s grammar opens up between the lines. Franklin admires his pamphlets, Power of These Two Hands (1922) or Starving Amidst Too Much (1923). He was at home on skid row or in the hobo jungle. Malcontents, dreamers, eccentrics, those ‘touched in the head.’ It is a phrase reminding one of an old attribute of sovereignty, ‘the King’s touch.’ Their disdain for “leaders.” Their love of nick-names. Their presence in the harvest drives.
Like Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim was Scandinavian (but Finnish not Swedish) from Ashtabula, Ohio. His writing radiates slapstick poetic goofiness, vernacular surrealism. He was a philosopher of the Wobblies, “bringing the sublime and the ridiculous into a compromising proximity.” “Let us not lose sight of the fact that we are at grips with ‘the noble white man’ that made agony both ingenious and scientific, and relegated life’s possibilities to the select few and life’s ‘garbage’ to the many.” If his writing seemed scrambled he replied, “so is the capitalist system. Us great writers must conform with prevailing aggravations.” “Living in what he termed ‘hoarse and bogey days,’ his confidence in what could be remained boundless: ‘We haven’t seen anything yet.’”
I have thought that experience as a tug-boat captain explains his powerful and gentle way with words. On second thoughts I think his earliest formation came from his mother, a washerwoman, who took him with her on her rounds, making him used to moving about as well as gaining knowledge of dirty laundry and how folks dress themselves, princes and pauper alike.
In 1966 he went to Paris and met the surrealist, André Breton, hanging out with other surrealists at the café Promenade de Vénus. “Surrealism” means beyond the real. “What’s real now once was only imagined,” as Blake said. “Sur” also means on, as in on top of, or superior to. “Authentic art goes hand in hand with revolutionary social activity,” the surrealists believed.
He wrote another biography of the French soldier and surrealist Jacques Vaché, Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism (2008). He loved their doodles, cartoons, drawings, and stickerettes. Their original, demotic thinking, street-wise, owing something to Studs Terkel as well as Nelson Algren. He had hitch-hiked from Chicago to San Francisco in 1960 homing in on City Lights book store. One thinks of Franklin at the tail-end of the Beatniks and the beginnings of the radical hippies.
Franklin’s roots were in the press room. I think of him with Johannes Gutenberg or Marshal McLuhan because their work on print and page understood the medium preceding the digital era. He liked to draw. And what a scholar he was! Really in the tradition of François Villon, independent of institutions of learning, yet foraging among them, wondering and wandering.
He made an exegesis of Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks that brought the Iroquois League quite out of the distant past such that “it glows brightly with the colors of the future.” Once the Iroquois provided help to the settler colonists at the Albany Congress of 1754 in offering their experience with federalism as a way that several may govern as one – federalism. Now again more than a hundred years later the Iroquois offered a notion of matriarchy, common property, and the long house.
He did this in the midst of the settlement of Marx into American academia. Not as political economy but as revolutionary imagination. He was helped by Raya Dunayevskaya and Thelonius Monk. Originally published in an occasional journal he edited called Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion. He generously welcomed E.P. Thompson’s huge screed, Poverty of Theory, to this task of recovering the life-long humanism of Karl Marx.
He was a man of the Movement. Adept at the cut-and-thrust of sectarian in-fighting he avoided the unfeeling but shiny scars that could result. He learned some of his Marxism from long-time Fred Thompson who in the midst of sectarian bickering would sing out the classic, “Oh, Karl Marx’s whiskers were eighteen inches long,” which could pretty much calm things down. Rosemont found that “strange birds continue to build their nests in Karl Marx’s beard” and we could easily, in this same spirit, imagine the birds braiding the whiskers into dreads!
He could be as direct as a nail to the noggin of Mr. Block. Is there a question about what he stood for? Here is his credo as concise and comprehensive a definition of woke as you could possibly find outside your sleeping bag. Faites attention, Mr. Block.
“In poetry as in life I am for freedom and against slavery: for the Indians against the European invaders and the American explorers; for the black insurrections against the white-power structure; for guerrillas against colonial administrators and imperialist armies; for youth against cops, curfews, school, and conscription; for wildcat strikers against bosses and union bureaucrats; for poetry against literature, philosophy, and religion; for mad love against civilized repression and bourgeois marriage; and for the surrealist revolution against complacency, hypocrisy, cowardice, stupidity, exploitation, and oppression.”
With that we join Franklin Rosemont in saying, “Goodbye, Mr. Block,” and hello to May Day Earth Day combined.
