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history of labor day review of union comics

Labor Day, celebrated in the United States on the first Monday of September probably has its roots in Canadian labor tradition. On 15 April 1872 the first workingman's demonstration of significance in North America was held in Toronto Canada for the purpose of freeing 26 members of the Toronto Typographical Union imprisoned for striking for a 9 hour work day. 10,000 workers participated in this demonstration called for by the Toronto Trades Assembly.






In 1894 workers in the company town of Pullman, Illinois went on strike. Pullman was a classic company town everyone worked for the Pullman Railway Car Company. The town was segregated according to jobs, the workers living in row houses, the managers in modest victorians and George Pullman lived in the opulent hotel where his business contacts stayed while in town. There were town stores and a town bank. Rents were automatically deducted from paychecks.



Americans were outraged at the president's response. There were anti Cleveland demonstrations, and congress quickly and unanimously passed and act declaring the first Monday in September to be a holiday for American workers in celebration of their productivity and contributions to society and the economy. This act was on the president's desk within six days of the strike's end, and was quickly signed into law. 1894 was an election year, but this gesture to the electorate didn't help Cleveland win reelection.




A strike by members of the Writers Guild of America was expected to halt television production in the Spring of 2001, but was resolved at the last minute, and many younger fans may have forgotten that it was a TV writers' strike of a decade ago that rearranged American TV schedules from a single season beginning in the Fall and ending in the Spring with a Summer season of reruns, to our new schedule of shorter seasons punctuated by reruns, seasons beginning in the Summer, etc.



Meanwhile, a Radio Writers Guild had been formed and they joined the Author's League, but in 1950 the Screen Writers Guild organized radio writers, and the Author's Guild, Dramatists Guild, Radio Writers Guild, Television Writers Guild all became part of the Screen Writers Guild.


Most animation artists are represented by Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Local 839, but there's a long history of competing attempts to unionize the animation industry.


Fleischer Studios was struck in 1936 by the Commercial Artists and Designers Union. After a five month strike, Paramount, Fleischers' financial backer and distributor forced him to sign with the Union. The shop was moved to Florida, a strong anti-union state, but Fleischer then had to pay a premium for top animators to move to Florida. The studio went bankrupt, and was taken over by Paramount and moved back to New York.



On 5 October 1945 3000 film workers fought Burbank police in front of the Warner Brothers Studio. The Guild itself didn't strike, but offered assistance. CSU had destroyed itself in a series of futile strikes, but the Guild continued as an independent union until joining the Teamsters in 1971




In his History of the Comics, Jim Steranko writes In the early 1940s the American Communist movement made an effort to infiltrate and organize the comic industry into a union, just as they had done with the theatre and film guilds. (Jack) Cole heard about it, and with the help of artist George Brenner, attended the first meeting and successfully broke it up. (1) This is the only reference I have for this story, and no other information is available.

Joe Kubert recalls another attempt to create a comic workers' union in the late 1940s. He recalls being at the first meeting and believes it may have been instigated by writers who were unhapy with page rates and wanted greater benefits. Josef Rubinstein recalls AC Hollingsworth telling him he found it hard to get comics work due to his union support. Kubert does not recall the above mentioned incident with Jack Cole, nor does he remember his high school buddy AC Hollingsworth at the meeting he attended, so there may have been another organizing effort. The whole problem with the union idea, according to Kubert was that the artists who were getting work didn't need a union and wouldn't want to jeopardise their working relationships with editors, and the guys not getting enough work wouldn't be helped by a union.


From their inception, newspaper strips, comicbooks and animated cartoons have been connected with the uneducated, delinquent and immigrant classes. Possibly the first regularly published comicbooks of new material were the pornographic 1920s 8 page Tiajuana Bibles. A scan of the New York Times' index for the turn of the last century shows the same concerns expressed in Seduction of the Innocent half a century later.



There are some exceptions, however, and they offer some nice material for collectors. Unfortunately, one is unknown to me. Labor is a Partner was published by the Catechetical Guild in 1949. It can be assumed from the title and the content of the better known Guild comic Is This Tomorrow' that this is a tract encouraging labor to reject communist affiliations.



CLIFF MERRITT by Al Williamson and Angelo Torres.

Do comic books get any prettier than this ?


Cliff Merritt Sets the Record Straight is the first book. Cliff, a Robert Young looking gentleman is about to retire from the railroad, and he's given a dinner which he uses as an occasion to make a quick speech about progress in economics and safety through union activity. Cliff lives with his son and his family and he learns that his grand daughter has had a tiff with her boyfriend over the legitimacy of union activities. He calls the youngsters together and gives them a slideshow detailing union history and demonstrating the need for a union to ensure workers' rights and safety. The young lovers make up and head off to the malt shop for a soda. The reprint of this book has a hand colored cover by Alden McWilliams

Cliff Merritt and the Very Candid Candidate finds Cliff trying to get away for a fishing trip, but it seems his nephew, Billy Merritt has been speaking out against union leadership because he believes they're not acting quickly enough about a member's grievance. Billy eventually runs for president against Cliff's best friend. It's a nice little soap opera story about the conflicts between impatient youth and entrenched power, with a moralistic sub plot about getting caught gossiping. The older men in power come to ask if they're too complacent, and the young men come to respect their elders' maturity.

In addition to the comics, there was a coloring book, The Men Who Move the Nation, which has fine, realistic art by Alden McWilliams, and a ' politically correct' reprint with 'corrections' by a less skilled artist, turning some of the predominantly white male figures into women and black men. This reprint is retitled People Who Move the Nation.

There was also a newspaper strip called Cliff Merritt's Scrapbook of Men on the Move. This is a single panel with 3 or 4 unframed, unrelated transportation and labor facts, like Believe it or Not. There were at least 135 of these panels produced, and they were distributed through a newspaper distribution syndicate. Part of the material was printed in a digest sized collection called Cliff Merritt's Scrapbook People on the Move, published by the union, possibly in 1984. A fuller version, possibly the whole, was published in a regular mass market paperback size by Popular Library in 1973 as Cliff Merritt's Man on the Move.






This is a remarkable book. It is three times the size of most commercial jobs. The story is well written and complicated, heavy on fact and history and it makes its propagandistic points well. There are several KKK sequences and scenes of racial lynching. It's support of civil rights was early, and certainly controversial. From fifty years after it 's publication we can look back and see that the post war call for civil rights was indeed, the next step towards freedom that workers would demand, and that foresight shows the body of the Joe Worker text to be both radical and relevant to us today.

This is a rare book. It is not listed in Overstreet or Gerber, and there is no record of it in the files of Commercial Comics or in the files of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, who commissioned it. Only it's inclusion in an early promotional brochure for Commercial Comics allows me to definitely attribute it to that company. The book was published between 1948 and 1950. By 1950 typical print runs for Commercial comics ' educational titles were 1,000,000.

Joe Worker and the Story of Labor is a full sized full color comic weighing in at a healthy 48 pages with paper covers. The story is attributed to Nat Schacnner, and the art to Jack Alderman.

Malcom Ater, who ran Commercial Comics stated in interviews that he wrote all the titles himself, and his son, who worked in the company, believes this to be true. I have been unable to to find any living person in the United States with the name Schacnner, nor can the name be found in Social Security Death Indexes. Because of this and similarities in the writing style of Joe Worker compared to other Commercial titles I believe it was a pseudonym for Mr Ater.



With the abolition of monopoly capitalism, company towns and child labor it may be easy to forget that unions addressed a variety of legitimate social and economic ills and that all workers have benefitted from the struggles of an earlier day. America was founded with a radical sense of liberty and personal freedom. Our rights of free speech, free assembly and free press guarantee our right to organize, and it's been a cultural truism since Ben Franklin stated in revolutionary times that ' we must hang together or we will hang separately', and yes, it's nice to end the Summer with a three day weekend.


1) Steranko History of Comics Volume Two, Pg 88

2)Robin Snyder's The Comics, Volume 8, # 9 Pg 72, letter from Jerry DeFuccio


Labor Day History





Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists


Writers Guild


All text copyright tom christopher

Cliff Merritt copyright United Transportation Union

Joe Worker, Naked Force and Freedom or Compulsion copyright Malcolm Ater Commercial comics

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