Solidarity Forever: The Song, the Word, and Why Labor Still Sings It

Solidarity forever Solidarity forever Solidarity forever But the Union makes us strong.

Ralph Chaplin, a cartoonist and editor for the Industrial Workers of the World, wrote those four lines in Chicago in January 1915, setting them to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” He did not invent the idea behind them. The Knights of Labor had been saying some version of it since 1869, and 65 years after Chaplin’s song, a shipyard union in Poland took the English word for its own name and organized roughly ten million people under it. Solidarity, as a word and a labor tactic, is bigger than the song that made it famous, and older than most people singing it realize.

Where the song came from

Chaplin had been writing and drawing for the IWW’s eastern paper, Solidarity, for a few years when he covered West Virginia’s Paint Creek-Cabin Creek coal strike in 1912 and 1913, a fight that killed around fifty people on both sides and left striking families living a year in tents. Watching them hold out, he started drafting new words for the old abolitionist marching tune “John Brown’s Body,” the same melody carried into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He finished the song back in Chicago, though his own two tellings of the story do not agree on the day. His 1948 memoir, Wobbly, puts it on January 15, 1915. A 1968 magazine essay, retold since as marking the song’s centennial, sets it two days later, on the 17th. Both versions agree it was the day of a hunger demonstration in the city.

He printed the song in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook, and within a couple of years it had traveled to Pacific Northwest logging camps, where the union’s eight-hour-day fights were turning violent. “Fifty thousand striking Puget Sound loggers bellered it out to a world that didn’t care a hoot about the problems of vote-less and cruelly exploited ‘timber beasts,’” Chaplin wrote, remembering the spread without much sentiment.

What the verses actually argue

The politics are not subtle. Chaplin’s third verse names who built the country’s wealth and who was left out of it:

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade. Dug the mines and built the workshops; endless miles of railroad laid. Now we stand, outcast and starving, ‘mid the wonders we have made; For the Union makes us strong.

That is the argument. The chorus is the instruction: stop work together, or lose separately. Solidarity, in this song, names a specific tactic rather than a mood.

The word is older than the song

Chaplin was drawing on IWW language, and the IWW was drawing on somebody else’s motto. The Knights of Labor, the country’s first mass labor federation, was founded in Philadelphia on December 28, 1869 by Uriah Stephens and a group of fellow tailors, and its members held that the best government was one in which an injury to one is the concern of all. When the Industrial Workers of the World founded itself in Chicago in 1905, it sharpened the wording for its own Preamble, ending its call to organize every industry with the line “thus making an injury to one an injury to all.” Bill Haywood’s own autobiography credits a man named David C. Coates with suggesting that clause as the slogan form still printed on IWW literature.

The English word itself is older than either organization. “Solidarity” entered the language in 1829, borrowed from the French solidarite, a term the Encyclopedie had coined in 1765 from solidaire, meaning interdependent, whole. The Latin root underneath, solidus, just means whole, undivided. Swap concern for injury in the two mottos above and the demand changes shape: concern is a feeling one worker is supposed to have about another’s trouble, and injury is a fact, one that belongs, by the IWW’s arithmetic, to everybody who carries the same card.

Chaplin did not care for what happened next

Chaplin was swept up in the 1917-18 Espionage Act prosecution of the IWW himself, one of about a hundred members convicted, and served four years of a twenty-year sentence for opposing the draft, the same law that put Eugene Debs in an Atlanta cell for a speech. He is also usually credited with drawing the IWW’s black cat emblem from those same years. What he was not comfortable with, later in life, was watching mainstream industrial unions adopt his best-known song as their official hymn. Writing in American West in January 1968, he said what the Wobblies who lived through the union’s roughest years actually thought about it: “there is no one who does not look with a rather jaundiced eye upon the ‘success’ of ‘Solidarity Forever.’” He went further: “All of us deeply resent seeing a song that was uniquely our own used as a singing commercial for the soft-boiled type of post-Wagner Act industrial unionism…” The man who wrote American labor’s most sung anthem spent his last years arguing that the labor movement it was written for had mostly stopped acting like one. He died in 1961.

A shipyard took the word for a country’s name

On August 14, 1980, workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland walked out under an electrician named Lech Walesa. Poland’s government signed the Gdansk Agreement on August 31, 1980, granting Polish workers the right to organize unions independent of the Communist Party, and that September the new nationwide union took the English loanword as its own name: Solidarnosc. By 1981 it counted roughly ten million members, close to 80 percent of the country’s wage-earning workforce, according to the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk, the institution built to document the movement. The government hit back: martial law, declared December 13, 1981, put Walesa and thousands of activists under arrest, and the union was formally outlawed the following October. It did not stay banned, and within a decade a communist government that had spent a year jailing the word’s members was gone.

What it costs on an actual picket line

None of this settles what solidarity costs a worker standing outside an actual struck business. In the United States, Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, codified at 29 U.S.C. section 157, protects the choice to refuse to cross a lawfully established picket line, whether the dispute belongs to that worker’s own union or somebody else’s. Refusing counts legally as a sympathy strike. A sympathy striker can be permanently replaced but not fired, and goes on a preferential recall list until a job opens. The protection can be lost when the primary strike is unlawful, when a contract’s own no-strike clause bars honoring another union’s line, or when a refusal at a neutral employer disrupts its business enough to outweigh the worker’s Section 7 right.

The protection has a wall built into it. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act added Section 8(b)(4) to federal labor law, barring a union from pressuring a neutral employer, one with no part in the actual dispute, into cutting off business with the company that does. A worker can still decline to cross a line at the struck employer’s own gate. A union cannot legally organize that same refusal against the grocery store two blocks away just because it stocks the struck company’s product. Congress wrote the limit on solidarity into the same law that still governs every picket line in the country, and the word keeps meaning exactly what it costs to act on: your fight is my fight, up to the point where the law says otherwise.