Ralph Hosea Chaplin | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1887 |
| Died | 1961 |
| Occupation(s) | Labor activist, songwriter, illustrator |
Ralph Hosea Chaplin (1887–1961) was an American writer, artist and labor activist.
Chaplin was born in 1887.[citation needed] At the age of seven, he saw a worker shot dead during the Pullman Strike in Chicago, Illinois. He had moved with his family from Ames, Kansas to Chicago in 1893.
During a time in Mexico he was influenced by hearing of the execution squads established by Porfirio Díaz,[citation needed] and became a supporter of Emiliano Zapata.[1]
On his return, he began work in various union positions, most of which were poorly paid. Some of Chaplin's early artwork was done for the International Socialist Review and other Charles H. Kerr publications.
For two years Chaplin worked in the strike committee with Mother Jones for the bloody Kanawha County, West Virginia strike of coal miners in 1912–13. These influences led him to write a number of labor oriented poems,[citation needed] one of which became the words for the oft-sung union anthem, "Solidarity Forever".
Chaplin then became active in the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or "Wobblies") and became editor of its eastern U.S. publication Solidarity. In 1917 Chaplin and some 100 other Wobblies were rounded up, convicted, and jailed under the Espionage Act of 1917 for conspiring to hinder the draft and encourage desertion. He wrote Bars And Shadows: The Prison Poems while serving four years of a 20-year sentence.
Although he continued to work for labor rights after his release from prison, Chaplin was very disillusioned by the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the evolution of the Soviet state and international communism, particularly its involvement in American politics and unions in 1920–1948, as he details in his autobiography, Wobbly.[page needed]
Chaplin maintained his involvement with the IWW, serving in Chicago as editor of its newspaper, the Industrial Worker, from 1932 to 1936. Chaplin left the IWW in 1936.[1]
Eventually Chaplin settled in Tacoma, Washington, where he edited the American Federation of Labor's local labor publication. He converted to Roman Catholicism and published his autobiography Wobbly.[1] From 1949 until his death, he was curator of manuscripts for the Washington State Historical Society.
Chaplin died in 1961.[1]
According to the IWW, Chaplin likely designed the now widely used anarcho-syndicalist image, the black cat.[2] In 2022, law professor Ahmed White mentioned him in his book on the IWW called Under the Iron Heel.[3]
There are ten entries for Chaplin's works in the Library of Congress online catalog.
