Page:Hold the Fort! (Scheips 1971) low resolution.pdf/43

NUMBER 9, who was named after Kennesaw Mountain where his father, a Union surgeon, had lost a leg in June 1864 in the fighting that preceded the fall of Atlanta. Although individuals were before the bar, the trial was really a trial of the IWW, or, as Patrick Renshaw says, of "a philosophy." The 101 Wobblies tried in Chicago were all convicted and sentenced to prison, some for twenty years. One of them was Ralph Hosea Chaplin (the editor of Solidarity, the official Wobbly paper), whose sentence was commuted in 1923. Among the others were the Englishman George Hardy; Harrison George, another writer; and William D. (Big Bill) Haywood, the secretary-treasurer of the IWW. Haywood subsequently jumped bail after unsuccessful appeals of the sentences and headed for Moscow, where he died in 1928. In addition to the prison sentences, the court imposed fines totaling over $2.5 million. The great trial of 1918 and the unsympathetic post-World War I years brought about the rapid decline of the IWW, which is barely alive today. In the 1930s, and afterward, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) would succeed in industrial unionism where the I W W had failed.

Of the Wobblies who went to prison following the trial of 1918, Ralph Chaplin was especially remarkable. An artist and a poet of no little ability, while in prison he wrote a number of poems which he published in 1922 as Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin. Subsequently he differed with Harrison George and the Wobblies who pursued Communism, and afterward, in World War II, he edited the Labor Advocate, published by the Central Labor Council of Tacoma, Washington. With a grant from the Newberry Library in Chicago he later wrote—and in 1948 the University of Chicago Press published—his fascinating autobiography, Wobbly, the Rough and Tumble Story of an American Radical.

These two young Wobblies, Ralph Chaplin and Harrison George, added a brief chapter to the history of "Hold the Fort," finding Bliss's militant tune useful as they broke into troubled song in the days of their arrest and imprisonment. In October 1917, while in the Cook County jail pending trial and conviction, George wrote "Remember," which was sung to the tune of "Hold the Fort." The first and fourth verses and the chorus of this song evoke memories of an old radicalism: