IWW Mourns Franklin Rosemont

By Joe Grim Feinberg
Industrial Worker, June 2009

Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12, in Chicago. He was 65 years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong friend Paul Garon, he cofounded the Chicago Surrealist Group, an enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make the city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades, Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories and other interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous.

Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of the area's more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood schools after his third year of high school (and instead spending countless hours in the Art Institute of Chicago’s library learning about surrealism), he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in 1962. Already radicalized through family tradition and his own investigation of political comics, the Freedom Rides, and the Cuban Revolution, Franklin was immediately drawn into the stormy student movement at Roosevelt.

Looking back on those days, Franklin would tell anyone who asked that he had “majored in St. Clair Drake” at Roosevelt. Under the mentorship of the great African American scholar, he began to explore much wider worlds of the urban experience, of racial politics and of historical scholarship—all concerns that would remain central for him throughout the rest of his life. He also continued his investigations into surrealism, and soon, with Penelope, he traveled to Paris in the winter of 1965 where he found André Breton and the remaining members of the Paris Surrealist Group. The Parisians were just as taken with the young Americans as Franklin and Penelope were with them, as it turned out, and their encounter that summer was a turning point in the lives of both Rosemonts. With the support of the Paris group, they returned to the United States later that year and founded America's first and most enduring indigenous surrealist group, characterized by close study and passionate activity and dedicated equally to artistic production and political organizing. When Breton died in 1966, Franklin worked with his wife, Elisa, to put together the first collections of Andre's writings in English.

Active in the 1960s with the IWW, the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Franklin helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964 and put his considerable talents as a propagandist and pamphleteer to work producing post $#&.%e-$#&.%7$I&'+'$#&%+70%8#"+0&9$$2&% on the SDS printing press. A long and fruitful collaboration with Paul Buhle began in 1970 with a special surrealist issue of Radical America. Lavish, funny and barbed issues of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural Correspondence were to follow.

The smashing success of the 1968 World Surrealist Exhibition at Gallery Bugs Bunny in Chicago announced the ability of the American group to make a huge cultural impact without ceasing to be critics of the frozen mainstreams of art and politics. The Rosemonts soon became leading figures in the re-organization of the nation’s oldest labor press, Charles H. Kerr Company. Under the mantle of the Kerr Company and its surrealist imprint Black Swan Editions, Franklin edited and printed the work of some of the most important figures in the development of the political left: C.L.R. James, Marty Glaberman, Benjamin Péret and Jacques Vaché, TBone Slim, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and, in a new book released just days before Franklin’s death, Carl Sandburg. In later years, he created and edited the Surrealist Histories series at the University of Texas Press, in addition to continuing his work with Kerr Co. and Black Swan.

A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low, the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington, and the historians Paul Buhle, David Roediger, John Bracey, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Rosemont’s own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in inspirations and results.

Without ever holding a university post, he wrote or edited more than a score of books while acting as a great resource for a host of other writers.

He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States. His spectacular study, “Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture,” began as a slim projected volume of that revolutionary martyr’s rediscovered cartoons and grew to a giant volume providing our best guide to what the early twentieth century radical movement was like and what radical history might do. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past. Indispensable compendiums like “The Big Red Songbook,” “What is Surrealism?,” “Menagerie in Revolt,” and the forthcoming “Black Surrealism” are there to ensure that the legacy of the movements that inspired him continue to inspire young radicals for generations to come. In none of this did Rosemont separate scholarship from art, or art from revolt. His books of poetry include “Morning of the Machine Gun,” “Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants,” “The Apple of the Automatic Zebra’s Eye” and “Penelope." His marvelous fierce, whimsical and funny artwork—to which he contributed a new piece every day—graced countless surrealist publications and exhibitions.

Indeed, between the history he himself helped create and the history he helped uncover, Franklin was never without a story to tell or a book to write—about the IWW, SDS, Hobohemia in Chicago, the Rebel Worker, about the past 100 years or so of radical publishing in the U.S., or about the international network of Surrealists who seemed to always be passing through the Rosemonts’ Rogers Park home. As engaged with and excited by new surrealist and radical endeavors as he was with historical ones, Franklin was always at work responding to queries from a new generation of radicals and surrealists, and was a generous and rigorous interlocutor. In every new project, every revolt against misery, with which he came into contact, Franklin recognized the glimmers of the free and unfettered imagination, and lent his own boundless creativity to each and every struggle around him, inspiring, sustaining, and teaching the next generation of surrealists worldwide.

and in a true show of

and in a true show of character, refuses to support marie mason as well..

Yeah they've been oddly

Yeah they've been oddly silent on her case whereas Fifth Estate and the EF! Journal have had an article in her support in most of the issues since her arrest.

Obviously you don't read

Obviously you don't read Industrial Worker or the IWWs website, because they've been asking for support since her case broke. Don't just make shit up based on your narrow, ideological identity. Critiquing unions is all well and fine, just don't lie about it.

I seem to recall them

I seem to recall them removing support a while back saying that ELF actions ineffective or something along those lines.

Obviously you don't read

Obviously you don't read Industrial Worker or the IWWs website, because they've been asking for support since her case broke. Don't just make shit up based on your narrow, ideological identity. Critiquing unions is all well and fine, just don't lie about it.

"Obviously you don't read

"Obviously you don't read Industrial Worker or the IWWs website, because they've been asking for support since her case broke. Don't just make shit up based on your narrow, ideological identity. Critiquing unions is all well and fine, just don't lie about it."

actually, they recently withdrew support for marie mason. perhaps you should read your favored industrial worker more. furthermore, just because i criticized them for withdrawing support doesn't mean that i have some narrow, ideological identity, but of course, i can see how you could see that from a comment that short that says nothing about my personal thoughts on anything other than them withdrawing support for marie mason.

Obviously you don't read

Obviously you don't read Industrial Worker or the IWWs website, because they've been asking for support since her case broke. Don't just make shit up based on your narrow, ideological identity. Critiquing unions is all well and fine, just don't lie about it.

I'm not the poster this was

I'm not the poster this was a response to, but to hopefully clear a bit up:

The General Executive Board issued an editorial in the Industrial Worker last spring condemning the Earth Liberation Front and explaining that they were not supporting FW Mason because the IWW draws a distinction between the type of direct action they engage in and that of the ELF. The General Defense Committee however was allowed to issue a stamp whose funds would go to Marie's defense. I think that is how it played out, anyway, I got rid of my old issues of the Industrial Worker when I stopped paying dues. I looked at iww.org and found no mention on the GDC section of FW Mason. I did a search for "marie mason and found three items, the most recent being an anouncement dated October 18, 2008 posted by tomkat (the Secretary-Treasurer of the GDC) regarding a video screening hosted by the Ohio Valley IWW in collaboration with the October 22nd Coalition which was a benefit for her.

The IWW has officially kept FW Mason at arms length so far as has been apparent to someone who was paying dues up until the end of last year, but it should be said that the General Defense Committee has seemingly done as much as they were able to support her.

--ingrate

ELEPHANTS ARE CONTAGIOUS <3

ELEPHANTS ARE CONTAGIOUS
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
r.i.p. franklin rosemont

the memorial service is on 11 july 09.

Nice SS,the quintessential

Nice SS,the quintessential avant-garde destroyer of icons and other spectacles,and the respect,possibly covered in sandpaper,like guy d's ,

Where and what time?

Where and what time?

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.