Document Type
Article
Abstract
During the 1930s, and as part of the effort to organize the new unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations or to revitalize the old unions of the American Federation of Labor, hundreds of workers and labor organizers would write and publish poems in their union newspapers. In this essay, I focus on the poetry of a single union, the United Auto Workers, from its origins in the Flint-sit down strike of 1936-1937 to the campaign to organize Ford workers in the years that followed. During that period, the United Auto Worker published around 110 poems and these poems, I argue, offer a window into the living and working conditions of autoworkers during the latter half of the Depression decade. Specifically, these poems articulate the protest autoworkers made against the assembly line, automaker's "fascistic" anti-union practices, and a burgeoning capitalist economy and culture that invited workers to think of themselves as consumers rather than workers. More generally, I argue that these poems detail how solidarity among workers emerged - that is, in response to the actions of employers, the state, and popular culture - and the role that poetry played in its formation. Moreover, and taken as a whole, these poems suggest the wealth of recovery and rediscovery projects that remain for scholars of the left, especially when we look beyond the conventional sites of publication and beyond the conventional expectations of who constitutes an author.
Repository Citation
Marsh, John. "United Auto Writers: Poetry from the United Auto Worker, 1937-1939." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–28. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/8