INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT:

THREE DEATHS IN THE ANARCHIST FAMILY:

The last few days have seen the passing of three tireless anarchist fighters from an heroic generation.

ABEL PAZ:

Abel Paz was a life long anarchist and anti-fascist, as well as an historian of the movement. Here is the tribute to his passing from the LibCom site, basically a rework of his entry in the Wikipedia.

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Abel Paz, the author of Durruti, the People Armed, died in hospital in Barcelona tonight:
From wikipedia:
Abel Paz (born August 12, 1921. - Died April 13, 2009) is a Spanish anarchist, former combatant and historian.

Abel Paz is the pen name of Diego Camacho. He was born in Almería in 1921, and moved with his family to Barcelona in 1929. In 1935 he started work in the textile industry and joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT).

In July 1936, with the start of the Spanish Civil War and Spanish revolution he joined the anarchist Durruti Column. As well as fighting on the Aragon front, he fought in the Barcelona May Events of 1937.

After the fall of Catalonia in January 1939, he went into exile in France, where he was interned. During the 1940s he fought both in the French resistance to Hitler and the Spanish Anarchist resistance to Franco.

He is the author of numerous works on anarchist history, the most important being his biography of Buenaventura Durruti which has appeared in several editions, and numerous languages.

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Here, also from the post on LibCom is the references (in Spanish) that a commentator added.

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links in Spanish:
alasbarricadas thread

http://www.alasbarricadas.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=41025
Interview with Abel Paz from 2005

http://www.alasbarricadas.org/noticias/?q=node/1633
Videos on the Memoria Libertaria site

http://www.memorialibertaria.org/spip.php?article1167
Los que quisieron matar a Franco

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm2cJnSyHrw&feature=related

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Finally, also from the Wikipedia entry on Paz is a list of his works in print.

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Works:
*Durruti en la Revolución Española. Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 1996.
*Durruti in the Spanish Revolution. AK Press, 2006. ISBN 978-1-904859-50-5. Translated by Chuck W. Morse.
*Durruti: the people armed. Black Rose, 1976. ISBN 978-0-919618-74-9 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-919618-73-2 (hbk.)
*The Iron Column. Kate Sharpley Library, 2006. ISBN 1-873605-04-8
*The Spanish civil war. Hazan, 1997. ISBN 978-2-85025-532-8
*La Barcelona Rebelde: Guía De Una Ciudad Silenciada Octaedro, 2003. ISBN 978-8-480636-28-5

FRANKLIN ROSEMONT:

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Another recently deceased comrade is Franklin Rosemont, surrealist, poet and long standing member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), for whom he edited both 'The Little Red Songbook' and the IWW's paper 'The Industrial Worker'. Here is a brief announcement of his death from Facebook.

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Announcement: Franklin Rosemont R.I.P.‏ :
Steve Ongerth posted an announcement to the cause Industrial Workers of the World.
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Everyone:

I regret to announce that Fellow Worker Franklin Rosemont, one time editor of the /Industrial Worker/ and member of the Charles Kerr Publishing Company, editor and writer of many fine books on IWW cultural history died on April 12, 2009.

Rosemont was the editor of the /Industrial Worker/ in 1988 and was largely responsible for the issue--published that May--where Earth First! and the IWW were "introduced" to each other (I can email folks a copy of that as excerpted in my upcoming book).

It was that issue that helped bring about the IWW - EF! coalition that played a major role in Redwood Summer and facilitated the work done by Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney, and countless others.

FW Rosemont's decision to publish an issue of the IWW's newletter of record focusing on Earth First! was by no means free of controversy, but it was a key turning point in the history of both Earth First! and the IWW.

Franklin is survived by his wife (and co Kerr Publishing Company member) Penelope. Further details will be forthcoming.

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Here is a further and more detailed tribute from AK Press' Blog Revolution By The Book.

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Franklin Rosemont, surrealist & historian: 1943-2009:
By kate April 14, 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 co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group in 1966, 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 André’s wife, Elisa, to put together the first collection of Breton’s writings in English.

Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a Democratic Society, 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 posters, flyers, newspapers, and broadsheets 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 reorganization 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, T-Bone 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 I.W.W. and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, began as a slim projected volume of that revolutionary martyr’s rediscovered cartoons and grew to 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 a 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 US, 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.
ARCHIE GREEN:

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Yet another old comrade, Archie Green, coeditor with Rosemont of 'The Little Red Songbook' has also recently passed on to that great sit down strike in the sky. Here's an obit from the website of the Australian IWW that eulogizes all three comrades.

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Vale Franklin Rosemont, Archie Green & Abel Paz:

Submitted by Viola Wilkins on Wed, 15/04/2009 - 08:50
Kate Khatib writes: Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65 years old. Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a Democratic Society, 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 posters, flyers, newspapers, and broadsheets on the SDS printing press.

He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States. His spectacular study, Joe Hill: The I.W.W. 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 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 with Archie Green. http://info.interactivist.net/node/12524

He edited and wrote an introduction for What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings of Andre Breton, and edited Rebel Worker, Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, The Rise & Fall of the DIL Pickle: Jazz-Age Chicago's Wildest & Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot and Juice Is Stranger Than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim. With Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon he edited The Forecast is Hot!. His work has been deeply concerned with both the history of surrealism (writing a forward for Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth) and of the radical labor movement in America, for instance, writing a biography of Joe Hill & Dancin' in the Streets! Anarchists, Iwws, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Rosemont
more:

http://libcom.org/news/franklin-rosemont-1943-2009-14042009 http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1832
http://www.surrealistmovement-usa.org/pages/black.htm l
Archie Green, 91, union activist, folklorist, and editor of “The Big Red Songbook dies. Submitted by REB on Mon, 03/30/2009 - 2:02pm. From the March 28, 2009; New York Times story. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/books/29green.html?_r=2

In 2007, Mr. Green completed a project nearly 50 years in the making, The Big Red Songbook, which he helped to edit. It included the lyrics to more than 250 songs in the various editions of the Little Red Songbooks published from 1909 to 1973 by the Industrial Workers of the World, best known as the Wobblies. They were gathered by John Neuhaus, an I.W.W. machinist, who left his collection to Mr. Green when he died in 1958. Thanks to LaborStart for the heads-up.
http://www.iww.org/en/node/4657
Abel Paz (born August 12, 1921. - Died April 13, 2009) is a Spanish anarchist, former combatant and historian.
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/369055/index.php
Abel Paz is the pen name of Diego Camacho. He was born in Almería in 1921, and moved with his family to Barcelona in 1929. In 1935 he started work in the textile industry and joined the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). In July 1936, with the start of the Spanish Civil War and Spanish revolution he joined the anarchist Durruti Column. As well as fighting on the Aragon front, he fought in the Barcelona May Events of 1937.

After the fall of Catalonia in January 1939, he went into exile in France, where he was interned. During the 1940s he fought both in the French resistance to Hitler and the Spanish Anarchist resistance to Franco. He is the author of numerous works on anarchist history, the most important being his biography of Buenaventura Durruti "Durrutti, The People Armed" (Originally published by Free Life Editions, NY which has appeared in several editions, and numerous languages.

Also read The Iron Column: Militant Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War 200+ pages. Translated by Paul Sharkey. First published (in Catalan) as Crónica de la Columna de Ferro Barcelona http://akpress.org/2006/items/durrutiinthespanishrevolution
links in Spanish:

*alasbarricadas thread http://www.alasbarricadas.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=41025
*Interview with Abel Paz from 2005 http://www.alasbarricadas.org/noticias/?q=node/1633
*Videos on the Memoria Libertaria site http://www.memorialibertaria.org/spip.php?article1167
*Los que quisieron matar a Franco http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm2cJnSyHrw&feature=related

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Here's another, longer tribute to Archie Green, published at the University of North Carolina Press blog.

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In memoriam, Archie Green (1917-2009)

I wrote briefly last week (in rather vague terms) about some of Archie Green’s accomplishments. Over the weekend, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times both published lengthy obituaries. I wanted to offer a more personal glimpse of him here from a longtime friend and colleague of Green’s, Robert Cantwell. In 2001 UNC Press published Green’s collection Torching the Fink Books and Other Essays on Vernacular Culture. For that book, Bob wrote a foreword that incorporated some of Green’s biography, acknowledging that Green’s life and work were inseparable. In the following essay, Bob writes about Green’s politics and personality, his innovations, and his legacy. [Archie Green photo from the work of Hazen Robert Walker.] — ellen

Since so much of the conversation in which Archie engaged with his many friends and protégés over the years was ideologically nuanced, and often about the nuances of ideology, it became a kind of parlor game to try to locate him somewhere on the ideological spectrum. Was he an anarcho-syndicalist, as he sometimes claimed, like Emma Goldman? Or a cultural pluralist, like Horace Kallen, whom he often cited? Or a “left libertarian,” a term he seemed to favor later in life? Or was he simply an unreconstructed New Dealer? To a superficial observer, Archie might look like one of the underfed revolutionaries gesticulating through the pages of Dos Passos’s USA trilogy — but on that point there was no ambiguity. Archie was a radical, but not, finally, an ideologue; and if he was a revolutionary, it was a revolution more of minds and hearts than of posters and parties.

One of the most surprising and bewildering themes of his conversation was his unrelenting criticism of certain heroes of the folk revival such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie (whom many of Archie’s friends and followers had at one time loved and revered, and maybe did still) or his skepticism about folk revivalists generally in favor of combative movement-songsters like Aunt Molly Jackson, or a genial cowboy singer like Glenn Ohrlin, or a coalfield balladeer like Hazel Dickens — singers whose working-class credentials could not be doubted.

What was all that all about, one wondered — could it be only that Seeger had been perhaps a little slow in repudiating Joseph Stalin?

This always seemed to me a family quarrel exacerbated by the narrowness of the political niche that people like Seeger and Lomax and Guthrie and Green each had tried over their careers to occupy, especially during those difficult postwar years when the embattled Left had retreated, culturally speaking, to an underground of schools, universities, and summer camps. Archie knew where he stood. And he expected those around him to know, or at least to think carefully about, where they stood — for where social change and effective action are concerned, nothing will come of nothing.

Achieving complexity without confusion, subtlety without obfuscation, nuance without equivocation, Archie was all of the above: suspicious of concentrated power at any level, like the anarchists; dedicated, like the syndicalists, to self-governing, voluntary communities as the cultural ground upon which political consciousness may flourish; “left,” certainly, because dedicated to social democracy; but “libertarian,” too, because for him democracy by definition came from the ground up. No plan, program, or scheme, however clever or visionary, might produce it.

We sometimes associate libertarianism with that simon-pure individualism that thinks of democracy mainly as a regime for enriching oneself. Archie’s was a distinctively social kind of ethical libertarianism, with definite Jewish roots, that demands we discover in ourselves the resources of being, in relation to others, conscientiously and energetically human. For all of his bluster about scoundrels Right and Left, Archie was profoundly kindhearted. Oh, and a New Dealer, too, in his idealism, his sense of solidarity with all who shared his convictions, a believer in good government, and, like Roosevelt, one who threw in his lot with working people as the prime movers of American prosperity. And, yes, an Obama supporter.

Archie did not like to be patronized. And he did not like patronizing political philosophies whose basic argument was that people mostly don’t know what’s good for them, that they needed elite panels of lieutenants or authoritarian leaders to maneuver them in the right direction. The doctrine of “false consciousness” was anathema to him. People were not so misled as they appeared to be. They were not dupes, but, like the rest of us, thought, spoke, and voted from within the world as they saw it. Were we sufficiently imaginative, he seemed to demand, we might get into the shoes of people with whom we disagreed, and see the error of supposing that only graduates of the Yale and Harvard law schools were fit to take up the reins of history.
An intellectually gifted, bookish, and politically inclined smallish Jewish-American boy — his father was a harnessmaker from the Ukraine, multilingual, who ran from the Cossacks after leading a small-scale shtetl revolt — Archie looked for a model of manhood to the skilled, stouthearted, self-respecting Scots shipwrights among whom he worked in his early days on the waterfront, as Jewish boys of later generations might look to the cowboy, the mountain banjo player, or the bluesman. He called himself a shipwright. But he was not a poseur. He had learned the trade, and practiced it.

At the same time, like his mentor, Mission District linguist Peter Tamony, he had had a keen eye for the vernacular, not only in language, story, tale, and legend, but in the crafts and the arts with which skilled workers rear and beautify our built environment. Read one of his books — one of his most recent, for instance, Tin Men, on the effigies that sheet metal workers construct to advertise and celebrate their craft, and suddenly you see “tin men” everywhere. The same was true of all the marvels of crafts and art to which Archie awakened us: not only odd words like “fink,” “linthead,” or “pilebutt,” or songs of mysterious origin such as “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” but also the Italian stone-carvings overhead in the entrance hall of the Library of Congress and the brick walkways underfoot on the UNC campus, laid from the early days to the present by local African-American masons.

Archie was not, as sometimes supposed, an auto-didact, like the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, to whom he was sometimes compared, but a widely read, deeply learned man versed in all manner of subjects, including literature (especially American literature), history (especially the history of the Left in Europe and America), anthropology and folklore, and politics (he was the most astute political observer I’ve ever known). He had taken a degree in Anthropology under Alfred Kroeber at Berkeley in 1939 before joining the Civilian Conservation Corps on the Klamath River. Later in life, after following the carpentry work from the declining postwar San Francisco waterfront to the city’s growing uptown, he reentered the academy, first as a library science student at Champaign-Urbana and finally, in the 1960s, as a graduate student in folklore at Penn. After taking his degree Archie entered the professoriate at Illinois and the University of Texas, but left the academic world after a few years in order to lobby in Washington for the passage of the American Folklife Act and the creation of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. After ten years, he succeeded.

In politically dark times, of which we have had so much in recent decades, Archie used to advise that we cultivate our own garden. He did not mean retreat from the political process. He meant that we should exercise our citizenship in ways in which we could do some immediate, palpable good in some cause about which we cared, whether it was to save the spotted owl, create a country music discography, or raise funds for a scholarship in labor studies. Simply to express one’s opinions, to discuss and remonstrate, to make consideration of the political a part of everyday social intercourse, even if only among friends and family — that too, for Archie, was a way of being “involved.” “Involved?” he might have said, along with Jim Stark, “We are all involved!” For many otherwise committed and well-intended people, breaking out of the private life on behalf of the common good is often a kind of personal crisis. For Archie there was no anxiety on this score. Though he was certainly an “activist” for vernacular lore in all its forms, the common good, for him, flowed over his doorstep and into all of his personal relations; the public sphere was his personal life.

Archie was not bourgeois. He never drove a car. There were no fashionable clothes, no gourmet foods, no fine furniture. The house at the top of Caselli Street in San Francisco’s upper Castro remains pretty much as he found it in the 1950s, when he bought and refurbished it. Archie entertained his many visitors by the window in his front room, which was also, as it happened, his workroom, where the couches and the chairs and the desktop were piled high with file-stuffed cardboard boxes, papers, magazines, journals and books. There was scarcely a place to sit. But sit one did, and listened. Always the focus was not on “I,” or “you,” but “we” — what will we do to advance the cause, to enhance the visibility of labor culture, to improve this or that academic program in folklore, to mount the conference, publish the book, edit the record album, commemorate the site of an epochal strike or save the labor landmark like Copra Crane down on Islais Creek? He was a fountainhead of ideas, which he readily gave away to younger scholars in the hopes they might carry them through. The intellectual proprietorship that is the unwritten law of academic advancement was unknown to him. Were one to undertake a genealogy of the scholarly publications in labor history and folklore over the last thirty years, to track the lines of connection that placed such-and-such a person in a certain influential academic or editorial or executive position in the field, to track the ideas circulating in the discourse of folklorists whether in Archie’s beloved “public sector” or the academy itself, one would discover a vast web of relations he himself had spun and of which he was the vigilant center. He rarely if ever spoke of himself, except when asked — which, in later years, many did, with tape recorders at the ready — and then typically in historical and political terms, using his own story as a window on the politics, the personalities, and the issues of the periods that shaped him.

I like to call Archie, as a kind of shorthand for people who don’t know him or much about him, the last of the Wobblies. The IWW was the “one big union;” their creed, like Lincoln’s, was “to every man the fruits of his labor.” Their martyr was Joe Hill. They were working class intellectuals with strong backs and strong arms and inquiring minds who, when they were not hauling logs or singing protest songs or riding the rails, loved to roll up their sleeves and dispute a point. That was Archie: knit cap on his head, cuffs folded back to his elbows, gesturing with his sinewy forearm, his speech exiting his face with a kind of twist as if his nose itched, and sometimes through one side of his mouth like a street tough, mulling it over, hashing it out, holding forth — “Socrates in a T-shirt,” as Stephen Wade says. That captures it.

For years Archie spoke of opening a dialogue between scholars and working people. I thought he was dreaming — especially during the Bush years when it seemed the estrangement between Right and Left had become permanent and irreconcilable. Meanwhile, ten years or so ago he had gathered a little cohort of his old union friends in the Bay Area to establish what he called the Fund for Labor Culture which, among other projects, would sponsor a day-long conference he called a “Laborlore Conversation.” The first of these took place in the piledivers’ union local in Oakland in 2004. Here the sons and daughters (yes, daughters) of men who built the Golden Gate and the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridges (and who are at this moment sinking the piles upon which the new Bay Bridge will rise), workers and union officers and old veterans of the labor movement met with historians, folklorists, filmmakers, editors, preservationists, journalists, environmentalists, and students to see if together they might at least spade up the ground in Archie’s dream garden.

Since then — the sixth meeting will be in Chicago in May — the conversation has ranged over everything from Al Zampa’s fall from the unfinished decking of the Golden Gate Bridge (he survived) to intrepid women tugboat captains, Lumbee Indian sheetrockers, mountaintop removal and undocumented workers. New friendships have formed: between a man who has groped about in the cloudy waters of San Francisco Bay in a diving suit and a woman who writes and edits a blog on rural culture; between an ironworker and an oral historian; between a retired merchant seaman and an English professor.

It is inspiring, this opening of the ark of the democracy to which Archie dedicated his long and energetic life. We fall so easily into the habit of despising one another it’s easy to forget how much there is to admire and to learn, on the other side of the debate, the ballot, the income bracket. At close range and within close quarters, ideas like “class” can come to seem a little less real, and “culture” a little more so. That’s what we learned, I think, from “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” “pilebutt,” or tin men, when Archie unpacked them. He taught us that as card-carrying members of “one big union” which is the human race, we are all, as he was himself, the fruits of our own labor, each of us entitled to the enjoyment of them as any other.
Bob Cantwell

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill