Northwest labor press., August 18, 2017, Page 29, Image 29

NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | August 18, 2017 | PAGE 29
ON LABOR DAY
Solidarity — Now, and Forever
In Tacoma, Ralph Chaplin’s body may
be ‘mouldering in the grave’ but his
spirit is marching on.
By Don McIntosh
This Labor Day — like every Labor
Day the last 18 years — a crowd will
gather beside a gravestone in
Tacoma to honor the man who wrote
the words to “Solidarity Forever.”
Solidarity Forever — sung to the
tune of the Battle Hymn of the Re-
public — is the most famous anthem
of the American labor movement.
Ralph Hosea Chaplin wrote it in
1915 after witnessing the bloody
struggles of striking coal miners in
West Virginia. At the time, Chaplin
was a poet, writer and cartoonist for
the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW) a radical anarchist-influ-
enced union of miners and loggers.
Where the Battle Hymn says “his
truth is marching on,” Solidarity
Forever ends its refrain with “the
Union makes us strong.” Today it’s
sung at union meetings, rallies, and
on picket lines in the United States
and other English-speaking coun-
tries.
Chaplin was one of the IWW’s
Ralph Chaplin
leading lights, and was one of about
100 IWW members who went to
prison under the Espionage Act of
1917 for opposing U.S. involvement
in World War One. He was released
after serving four years of a 20-year
sentence, and went right back to la-
bor activism.
Chaplin lived in Tacoma for the
last decade of his life. There he
worked as an archivist for the Wash-
ington State Historical Society and
served as editor to the newspaper of
the Pierce County Labor Council.
He died in 1961 and was buried be-
side his wife at Calvary Cemetery in
Tacoma.
The annual graveside observance
began nearly 40 years later, in 1999.
It started with a pledge a local labor
leader made to a dying member. Phil
Lelli, the longtime leader of Interna-
tional Longshore and Warehouse
Union (ILWU) Local 23, promised
Local 23 member T. A. “Tiny” Tron-
son he wouldn’t let Chaplin’s place
in labor history be forgotten. That
year and every year since then, the
Pierce County Labor Council has
sponsored the memorial. It features
songs, stories, and the display of an
artifact — a tin cup Chaplin
scratched his name on when he was
in jail on the Espionage Act charges.
“Foremost in our mind,” says La-
bor Council secretary-treasurer
Patty Rose, “is that he always stood
up for workers in their struggle.”
REMEMBERING RALPH CHAPLIN
■ Time: 10:30 a.m., Monday, Sept. 4
■ Place: 5212 70th St W, Tacoma, Washington
(Entrance across from Meadow Park Golf
Course on Lakewood Drive West)
Solidarity Forever
When the union’s inspiration
through the workers’ blood shall run,
there can be no power greater
anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker
than the feeble strength of one?
But the union makes us strong.
CHORUS:
Solidarity forever. Solidarity forever.
Solidarity forever.
For the union makes us strong!
They have taken untold millions
that they never toiled to earn,
but without our brain and muscle
not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power,
gain our freedom when we learn
that the union makes us strong.
[Chorus]]
In our hands is placed a power
greater than their hoarded gold,
greater than the might of armies,
magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old.
For the union makes us strong.
[Chorus]
— Ralph Chaplin, January 17, 1915