Posters Show the Labor Movement At its Best

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=6924

by Randy Shaw‚ May. 14‚ 2009
Review it on NewsTrust

When I receive a book for review, I quickly skim through it before putting it aside for future reading. But when I got Lincoln Cushing & Timothy W. Drescher’s, Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters, I became so engrossed in its collection of historic labor posters that I could not put it down. Many readers will have this problem; the work includes so many visually striking and powerful images that one cannot stop searching through the pages for the next poster. But the book offers more than the best collection of labor posters yet produced. It forces readers to think about the values that inspired these posters, and that produced the movements from which these art works emerged. One could understandably wonder why the causes and unions trumpeted in the posters were not more successful, and why the integration of cultural work and labor unions -- so prominent in the Industrial Workers of the World, the United Auto Workers, SEIU Local 1199 and the United Farmworkers of America (UFW) -- remains the exception and not the rule.



I’ve read my share of books of social movement posters, but Cushing & Drescher’s, Agitate! Educate! Organize!, is in a class by itself. Its over 250 posters even includes such rarities as Big Bill Haywood and the Western Federation of Miners’ 1906 poster that used an American flag to protest the U.S. government’s massive violation of union rights in Colorado -- a sorry chapter in the nation’s history that became the subject of J. Anthony Lukas’ classic book, The Big Trouble.

The authors were able to produce such finds because Lincoln Cushing received a grant in 2003 to build a database of American labor artwork. He then surveyed libraries, unions and archives and anywhere else posters might be found to come up with a database of nearly 1000 digitized and catalogued images. Readers now get the benefit of his best pickings.

While a few of the posters have been widely seen -- such as Ester Hernandez’s iconic “Sun Mad Raisins” takeoff on the Sun Maid Raisin Girl, Ricardo Levins-Morales’ “The labor movement! The folks that brought you…,” and various Images of Labor created by Jacob Lawrence and Milton Glaser -- the vast majority are likely new even for veteran activists.

FULL story at link.

Lincoln Cushing and Timothy W. Drescher will hold their San Francisco book release premiere for Agitate! Educate! Organize! American Labor Posters on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 7:00 PM at Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia St., San Francisco.

Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron. He discusses the power of UFW cultural works in his book Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century (University of California Press)