Poems By and For Workers

Walt Whitman, Bud L. McKillips, Thomas Hood, Dana Burnot, Carl Sandburg, Miriam Tano, Frieda Kaiser, Edward Markham, Borton Braley, Archibald MacLeish, W.H. Davies, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Cloghorn, Ogden Nash, Harold L. Ickos, Ralph Chaplin, Vachel Lindsay, Mildred Scholl, James Rusell Lowell, William Morris.

New York: International Ladies’ Garment Workers' Union, 1941. Mimeograph. Side-stapled in wraps. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in. 25 pp, printed on rectos only.

This exceedingly rare 1941 poetry anthology published by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers' Union gathers work by famous authors as well as union members, and includes two otherwise unpublished poems by the labor activist, social worker, educator, and poet Hilda Worthington Smith.

One of these poems, “Frontiers of Freedom,” was sent by Smith to Eleanor Roosevelt shortly after it was written on New Years Day 1940, and is mentioned and quoted in Roosevelt’s January 6, 1940 diary entry.

Poems By and For Workers also reproduces the well-known poetry of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and others, including Ralph Chaplin. Chaplin notably designed the black cat image used by the Industrial Workers of the World and other syndicalists, and is the author of the oft-sung protest song, “Solidarity Forever.” The booklet was published in August 1941, just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ subsequent entry into World War II, which would reshape the landscape of American industrial production, driving ever more women into the workforce.

Mild chipping, and cracking at spine and wear to wraps, though binding remains strong; otherwise very good. Faint ownership stamp on cover indicating this copy belonged to the Educational Department of the I.L.G.W.U. Locals 76 and 261 in Chicago. Only 2 copies on OCLC as of July 2021.

A rare document of labor poetry and women’s literature from an integral moment in American history and a turning point in the gendered makeup of the American workforce.