Book Review
Agitate! Educate! Organize!: American Labor Posters
By Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher
------------------
It is a difficult thing to review a book written by a friend. The only other event that comes close is the moment when someone you love holds up their newborn child for your inspection. Even if the child looks like a wad of chewed gum (as most of them do) you are obligated for the sake of the relationship, past and future, to proclaim otherwise.
Fortunately this friend of mine, Lincoln Cushing, has produced a baby that is not at all like a piece of chewed gum. His new book on American labor posters is excellent—a really fine piece of work that should become a standard reference and which certainly deserves a place on public and university library shelves.
Cushing works here with co-author Timothy Drescher to present more than a century’s worth of labor imagery. Leafing through these pages the reader gets a dose of history from the perspective of labor organizations and also from the viewpoint of individual workers and the very small groups that often fall beneath the radar. The AFL-CIO’s refined product is here but also the work of amateurs and fringe elements whose cries seem to come from the soil itself. Many of these posters seem to have been drawn in blood.
The culture of labor is based in the protest of unfairness; its graphic arts take the form of demands, complaints and often enough, pure rage: these posters shout: “Coal operators get rich while miners die;” construction workers proclaim “The Vietnamese never froze my wages.”
And then there is the utopian impulse, the dream of the golden mountains that animated the working class in the years before unions were legal or socially acceptable. We see the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen’s fanciful depiction of an ideal world of organized labor with the overarching claim “Blessed are the horny hands of toil.” Cushing and Drescher wisely include two posters by International Publishers and the famous hands of Nedeljkovich, Brashich and Kuharich, one of which is the I.W.W.’s “Pyramid of the Capitalist System” and the other “The Last Strike.” [I only wish they could have included the wonderful but rarely encountered “Tree of Evil” by the same artists and firm, but of course there is only so much room in any book.]
This book should definitely find a place in labor studies courses—I only wish we’d had something like this back when I was parsing labor history. And I hope that Lincoln Cushing and Timothy Drescher have a second edition in planning, if not already in the works.
For something about Mr. Cushing, see: http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/Library/CL_Cushing.html
Michael McGrorty
