I recently heard someone say his college-bound nephew asked him, “What’s a union?” Whether you love unions, loathe them, or remain indifferent, the fact that an ostensibly educated young person might have such a significant gap in their knowledge should cause concern. A historic labor conflict, after all, provided the occasion for Ronald Reagan to prove his bona fides to the new conservative movement that swept him into power. His crushing of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) in 1981 set the tone for the ensuing 30 years or so of economic policy, with the labor movement fighting an uphill battle all the way. Prior to that defining event, unions held sway over politics local and national, and had consolidated power blocks in the American political landscape through decades of struggle against oppressive and dehumanizing working conditions.
In practical terms, unions have stood in the way of capital’s unceasing search for cheap labor and new consumer markets; in social and cultural terms, the politics of labor have represented a formidable ideological challenge to conservatives as well, by way of a vibrant assemblage of anarchists, civil libertarians, anti-colonialists, communists, environmentalists, pacifists, feminists, socialists, etc. A host of radical isms flourished among organized workers especially in the decades between the 1870s and the 1970s, finding their voice in newsletters, magazines, pamphlets, leaflets, and posters—fragile mediums that do not often weather well the ravages of time. Thus the advent of digital archives has been a boon for students and historians of workers’ movements and other populist political groundswells. One such archive, the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library, has recently announced the digitization of over 2,200 posters from their collection, a database that spans the globe and the spectrum of leftist political speech and iconography.
We have cleverly-designed visual puns like the Chicago Industrial Workers of the World poster just above, titled “What is what in the world of labor?” Promoting itself as “One Big Union of All Labor,” the IWW made some of the most ambitious propaganda, like the 1912 poster (middle) in which an “Industrial Co-Operative Commonwealth” replaces the tyranny of the capitalist, who is told by his “trust manager” peer, “Our rule is ended, dismount and go to work.” In this post-revolutionary fantasy, the IWW promises that “A few hours of useful work insure all a luxurious living,” though it only hints at the details of this utopian arrangement. Up top, we have an ornate May Day poster from 1895 by Walter Crane, hoping for a “Merrie England” with “No Child Toilers,” “Production for Use Not For Profit,” and “The Land For the People,” among other, more nationalist, sentiments like “England Should Feed Her Own People.”
“While all of the posters were scanned at high resolution,” writes Hyperallergic, “they appear online as thumbnails with navigation to zoom.” You can download the images, but only the smaller, thumbnail size in most cases. These hundreds of posters represent “just a portion of the material in the Labadie Collection”—named for a “Detroit-area labor organizer, anarchist, and author” who “had the idea for the social protest archive at the university in 1911.” You can view other political artifacts in the UMich library’s digital collections here, including anarchist pamphlets, political buttons, and a digital photo collection. The collection as a whole gives us a potentially inspiring, or infuriating, mosaic of political thought at its boldest and most graphically assertive from a time before online petitions and hashtag campaigns took over as the primary circulators of popular radical thought.
via Hyperallergic (where you can find some other big, visually striking posters)
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Where can I click to scroll through the posters?
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lbc2ic?sort=lbc2ic_id;type=boolean;view=reslist;rgn1=ic_all;q1=lbc2ic
See end of 2nd paragraph > http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lbc2ic?cc=lbc2ic;page=index;c=lbc2ic
It really bothers me too… Internet 101: your readers probably (certainly) came here looking for what you promised in your title.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lbc2ic?auth=world;size=20;sort=lbc2ic_id;start=1;type=boolean;view=reslist;rgn1=ic_all;q1=lbc2ic
“B” The link is in the Article. I did not see it at first as well. I copied it out here. You may have to copy and paste from this comment area to get there.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lbc2ic?cc=lbc2ic;page=index;c=lbc2ic
There is a link, but you have to look carefully for it:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lbc2ic?cc=lbc2ic;page=index;c=lbc2ic
I think this is it:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lbc2ic?auth=world;sort=lbc2ic_id;type=boolean;view=thumbnail;rgn1=ic_all;q1=lbc2ic
Is there any way to download the images in a non-thumbnail-size format?
Writes of being ‘ostensibly educated’ and, before the paragraph is out, incorrectly writes ‘blocks’ instead of ‘blocs’. Clearly all rather relative, this being educated business.
An archive of these posters would be incredible.
I really like the way Open Culture handles these collection posts. It is easy to get in their rhythm and looking for the right link becomes easy enough.
Rarely is good stuff spoon-fed.
Leftist political posters are about free and open communication. Hence it’s ironic that these images can only be viewed in thumbnail form, a manner that does no justice to the original works. While this approach may still prove helpful for the occasional scholar, it is NOT the same as releasing these images to the public.
I love hows theres a lot of IWW posters up uncredited, and we cant actually see them properly.
I also doubt any of these actually have _any_ form of copyright on them either.
Any chance of purchasing prints of these wonderful pieces at full size? Thank you -
Why They don’t upload them in full size? These posters belongs to everybody!