May 25, 2020
#321

Thank you, Barbara Schock, for sharing your extraordinary gift of these vignettes of Galesburg & 19th century American history.

"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" From Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag c1927, p.184-5.

In 1907 Carl Sandburg became an organizer for the Social Democratic Party in the Lake Shore and Fox River District of Wisconsin. Since the middle of the nineteenth century German socialists had been emigrating to the state. They were usually skilled craftsmen and had strong ideas about the power of the people. They believed municipalities should own public utilities, there should be national ownership of mines, child labor should be abolished, there should be state standards for working conditions, there should be income and inheritance taxes, there should be old age pensions and there should be insurance against sickness.
 
Sandburg’s socialism included individuals as well as society as a whole. His life experiences up to that time had convinced him there were great inequities in the economy. He used his experiences while growing up in a poor family as examples of the unfairness of life and the national economy.
 
He became adept at speaking on street corners to draw a crowd of listeners and in public meeting places. He wrote articles for various newspapers in the area as well as a pamphlet entitled “You and Your Job.” In it he described the effects of his father being paid so poorly as a blacksmith helper at the railroad.
 
He also learned how to be persuasive in his speeches and to dramatize the conditions under which many people worked. These skills would later serve him on his lecture tours across the continent.
 
In fact, Sandburg worked so hard as an organizer that he ceased writing poetry, neglected his health and spent a great deal of time away from Paula Steichen, the young woman he had married in 1908. His earnings amounted to the coins which his listeners contributed.
 
By 1904 the Social Democratic Party had elected five candidates to the state assembly and ten to the Milwaukee city council. A real breakthrough occurred in 1910 when Emil Seidel was elected mayor of Milwaukee. Sandburg became his secretary and continued his political writing.
 
The progressive movement at the turn of the century was a dynamic political alternative and created an opening for a variety of social and economic changes in this country. Other organizations focused on organizing unions to protect workers.
 
One of those was the International Workers or the World (IWW) founded in 1905 in Chicago. The Wobblies, as they were nicknamed, used music to call attention to themselves. Henry McClintock was a song leader for the organization in Seattle. In 1902 he wrote new humorous and sarcastic lyrics to a Presbyterian hymn, “Revive Us Again.” John J. Husband composed the music in 1815.
 
These are the words of the song as published in Sandburg’s The American Songbag:
 
I went to a house,
And I knocked on the door,
A lady came out, says,
“You been here before.”
 
I went to a house
and asked for a piece of bread,
A lady came out, says,
“The baker is dead.”
 
Chorus: Hallaluyah, I’m a bum
              Hallaluyah, bum again
              Hallaluyah, give a handout
              To revive us again.

_______________________

Audio: "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!" · Utah Phillips ℗ 1983 

Score & Lyrics: "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!" - Sandburg's The American Songbag (1927), p.184-5.