FAREWELL, FELLOW WORKER: Franklin Rosemont-Wobbly, Surrealist, poet, historian, and publisher
Penelope and Franklin Rosemont with Paul Buhle at the Heartland Café in Rogers Park, a popular radical gathering place.
Franklin Rosemont died the other day at the too young age of only 65. I am sure it came as a surprise and disappointment to him. He had every intention of following the example of his IWW and Chicago radical mentors like Fred W. Thompson, Slim Brundage, and Burt Rosen in living to a ripe old age organizing, educating, agitating, and subverting cultural expectations. But he wasted no time. Old pal and former SDS leader and editor Mike Klonsky noted on his blog SmallTalk that Franklin and his wife Penny were on hand a day earlier for an event at the Heartland Cafe.
I first met Fellow Worker Rosemont shortly after coming into contact with the Wobblies during the protests at the Democratic National Convention of 1968. By that time he was not as active in the Chicago Branch as he had been earlier in the decade when he helped organize one of the IWW’s few job actions of the period, the 1964 strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan and helped create the Rebel Worker. As often in his tempestuous life, there had been clashes with older Wobblies who did not understand the emerging counter culture and even with his friends and allies at Solidarity Book Store, the legendary center of Wobbly/anarcho-syndicalist/Surrealist activity in the city. Sadly those kinds of personality clashes were not uncommon at the time.
Rosemont was instead dedicating most of his time to the Surrealist Movement and to mentoring the emerging SDS, particularly its anti-authoritarian wing. But he was still part of the Wobbly and radical social community in which I was soon immersed.
I remember my first visit to Gallery Bugs Bunny in Old Town where Franklin was introducing Surrealism to dumbfounded Americans in 1968. Needless to say it was like nothing a young and naïve bumpkin in a cowboy hat had ever seen. The significance to the emerging counter culture in Chicago of that event cannot be underestimated. It deeply influenced the Chiago Seed, the underground newspaper whose collective I joined in 1972. The Seed’s surrealist sensibilities made it unlike any of its contemporary publications on either coast or university towns. And that was only one manifestation of Rosemont’s influence.
Despite a wide ranging career as an artist, poet, and activist, Rosemont’s deepest and most lasting contribution will be as a vital link in the unbroken chain of Chicago radical culture that stretches from the Haymarket Matryrs and Lucy Parsons to today’s young anti-corporate globalism street guerillas. As a historian-and most importantly as the keeper of the flame at Charles H. Kerr Publish Company, Rosemont preserved, protected, and expanded a tradition that he handed to a new generation.
Fittingly, I last saw Franklin Rosemont at Carlos Cortez’s wake. I tried to pitch him a collection of my more “political” poems which had been rejected by horrified editors at my previous publisher Skinner House Books. Well, they may have been daring by Unitiarian Universalist standards, but Rosemont wasn’t fooled. They broke no new ground, exploded no conventions. They didn’t deserve to be put out under the Kerr, let alone the Black Swan (explicitly Surrealist) imprimatur. He was right, of course.
The following is an obituary sent out by the New World Recourse Center
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, 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 collection of André’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 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 co-edited 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 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.
A memorial will be announced at a later date.