Solidarity Forever

The story

Ralph Chaplin began writing "Solidarity Forever" in 1913, while he was reporting on the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in Kanawha County, West Virginia. He was moved by the resolve and high spirits of the striking miners and their families, who had lived in tents for a year through a violent strike in which about 50 people were killed on both sides. He finished the song in Chicago on 15 January 1915, the day of a hunger demonstration. Chaplin was a committed member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the "Wobblies", and wrote for Solidarity, the union's paper in the eastern United States, and drew its cartoons. He set his words to the tune of "John Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic".

The song puts into verse the IWW's "Preamble", printed inside the front cover of every Little Red Songbook, which opens: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common." The Preamble called for workers to organise as a class, take possession of the means of production and abolish the wage system; it held that trade unions, by negotiating contracts, misled workers into thinking they shared interests with employers, and it rejected participation in electoral politics, and spoke of "forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old". Chaplin's six stanzas follow that analysis: two classes with nothing in common, the workers as the makers of the world's wealth and its rightful owners, union solidarity as their strength, and a new world brought to birth "from the ashes of the old".

The song spread far beyond the IWW. Other unions, among them the AFL–CIO, adopted it, and it is still sung at union meetings, protests and rallies in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and at conferences of the Australian Labor Party and Canada's New Democratic Party. It has been translated into French, German, Polish, Spanish, Swahili and Yiddish. Chaplin was not pleased. Late in life, by then an opponent of the Communists in the labour movement, he wrote "Why I Wrote Solidarity Forever", in which he complained that a song "uniquely our own" had become "a singing commercial" for the industrial unionism that followed the Wagner Act, and that "when the labor movement ceases to be a Cause and becomes a business, the end product can hardly be called progress." The IWW's songbook even carried a satire, "Aristocracy Forever", mocking the AFL–CIO's use of the song.

Singers have shaped it to their own times. Many leave out the second and fourth stanzas, the most radical. Pete Seeger's version drops them and rewrites the last; since the 1970s women union members have added verses about women's work and wages, a Canadian set adds verses against racism, and the centennial edition of the Little Red Songbook includes two new verses by Steve Suffet. Utah Phillips, Pete Seeger and John Darnielle are among those who have performed it, and it is sung in the 2014 film Pride, about the London group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners in the 1984–1985 UK miners' strike.

What it says

A rallying song of industrial unionism: the workers who built the world's wealth are told that alone they are weak, that against the owners they have nothing in common, and that only the union, held together, makes them strong. The mood is defiant and confident, ending in the hope of a new world built from the ruins of the old.

The words