Songs Of Our Fathers

The Power of Song: A young Bob Dylan joins voices with veteran protest singer, Pete Seeger. "There is no life without song,’" said the Czech resistance fighter, Julius Fuchik, "as there is no life without the sun."

On Wednesday, 28 July 2010 I delivered the following speech to approximately 120 workers and students attending the "Fightback" rally organised by Unite on Campus (Auckland) in Basement Lecture Theatre B28 of the University of Auckland Library. Other speakers included The EPMU’s Bill Newson, the NDU’s Karl Andersen, Former Green Party MP, Sue Bradford and Unite General Secretary, Matt McCarten. The rally was chaired by Unite organiser, Joe Carolan.

WHEN JOE INVITED me to address this "Unite on Campus" protest rally last week, I must confess to feeling a pang or two of trepidation. It’s been many years since I stood in front of a room full of workers and students with clear rhetorical intent.

What could I possibly tell you about trade unionism or student activism that is even remotely relevant to your situation? The world has changed dramatically since I was last a trade unionist – let alone a student activist!

You don’t need me to tell you that back in the 1970s and 80s, when I was in my early 20s, it was so much easier to be both.

But the organisers of tonight’s rally have reassured me that a backward glance or two might actually be helpful in the battle to halt this Government’s attack on workers’ rights. And, as an historian, I can hardly disagree.

So I’ve asked myself: "What’s the easiest way to convey the sentiments of Activists Past to Activists Present?"

My answer is – their songs.

Protest songs were the You-Tube clips of their day: cheap to produce, easy to access, and if they were any good they could be passed on to tens of thousands of people in an astonishingly short period of time.

So I hauled out my copy of Kiwi Youth Sings – a songbook put together in 1951 by the Student Labour Federation and the Progressive Youth League. The songbook’s editors, Conrad Bollinger and Neil Grange, were in no doubt concerning the importance of political song.

"Locked in the dungeons of the Gestapo the Czech resistance fighter Julius Fuchik could not be stopped from singing", they told their youthful readers. ‘"There is no life without song,’" said Fuchik, "as there is no life without the sun."

The first song in "Kiwi Youth Sings" is, very appropriately, "The Internationale". Just listen to the anger and red-hot determination of its opening lines:

Arise ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation,
A better world is now in birth.
No more tradition’s chains shall bind us!
Arise ye slaves no more in thrall!
The earth shall stand on new foundations,
We have been nought – we shall be all!

Stirring stuff!

But not all the songs rely on the rhythms and language of the Bible.

"It’s My Union", an Australian ditty, is much more colloquial:

They can call me agitator,
They can even call me traitor,
They can tell me that my brain is off the track.
But I’m smart enough to see
What the union’s done for me
So, I’m rolling up my sleeves and fighting back.

From England came the poignant "People’s Anthem" – the most popular song of that first great mobilisation of working-class people, the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 40s.

Rather than ask God to save the Queen, the song’s author, Ebenezer Elliot, implores the Almighty to save the people.

Shall crime bring crime forever,
Strength aiding still the strong?
Is it thy will, O Father,
That Man should toil for wrong?
No! say thy mountains, No! thy skies:
Man’s clouded sun shall brightly rise,
And songs be heard instead of sighs.
God save the People!

And, of course, we could not walk among England’s poor without acknowledging William Blake’s mysterious incantation of a poem "Jerusalem":

And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon these clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Nor could we leave them without at least quoting the chorus of what Bollinger and Grange called "the great hymn of the British Labour Movement:

Then raise the scarlet standard high!
Within its shade we’ll live or die!
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer
We’ll keep the red flag flying here!

Years later, I’m reliably informed, Conrad Bollinger penned a wicked parody of "The People’s Flag":

O Labour’s flag is deep magenta
It flies on high – just right of centre!

Interestingly, on the night of 5 July 1945, when it became clear that the British Labour Party had won the General Election, the vast crowd of working-class Londoners which had gathered outside Transport House to welcome in the Red Dawn didn’t celebrate their victory by singing "The People’s Flag". The song they sang that night, to usher in Britain’s new welfare state was much older. It was William Blake’s "Jerusalem".

I shall not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Til we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land

But nowhere, in the English-speaking world has the battle for workers’ rights been harder – or bloodier – than in the United States.

Small wonder, then, that it is from the USA that we have inherited what is, perhaps, the greatest union anthem of all – "Solidarity Forever!".

Just listen to the enormous confidence that rings out in the song’s verses: the absolute conviction that workers’ power can not only defeat the bosses, but transform the world:

They have hoarded untold millions
That they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle
Not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power,
Win our freedom when we learn -
That the union makes us strong

In our hands we hold a power
Greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the strength of armies
Multiplied a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world
From the ashes of the old -
When the union makes us strong!

The author of "Solidarity Forever!", Ralph Chaplin, was writing in the optimistic early years of the 20th Century – when it seemed that the long-awaited "Commonwealth of Toil" could not be long-delayed.

But the First World War, and coming of the Great Depression drove iron into the soul of the American Labour Movement.

Listen to the bare language and stark choices laid down by Florence Reece, who battled alongside her husband for miner’s rights in the Kentucky coal-fields during the 1930s. She wrote down these words on the back of a calendar after a gang of strike-breakers crashed into her home and attacked her family.

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?

And that’s a sentiment, Comrades, that never changes. To every human-being, be they old or young, black or white, man or woman, rich or poor, a moment always comes when the choice that changes lives must be made, and an answer given.

Which side are you on?