Chaplin, Ralph, 1887-1961

Poet, writer, labor editor.

Labor leader, poet, and songwriter; joined I.W.W. in 1913 and became chief publicist and agitator; divided his time between commercial art and editing labor papers, working in various cities in the U.S., Canada, and Latin America; spent time in Leavenworth Prison (Kan.) for his anti-World War I activities; spent last years in Tacoma, Wash., where worked with Washington State Historical Society to gather I.W.W. literature and history; strong Socialist; b. Ralph Hosea Chaplin in Ames County, Kan.

Labor activist, poet, artist, and editor of various publications, including the I.W.W.'s Solidarity (1917), Industrial Worker (1932-36), Voice of the Federation (1937), and Labor Advocate (1941-45).

Ralph Chaplin (1887-1961) was a labor activist and agitator in the Industrial Workers of the World (the I.W.W. or "Wobblies"), becoming editor of its eastern U.S. publication Solidarity . Chaplin was jailed in 1917, with a number of other Wobblies, under the Espionage Act for conspiring to hinder the draft and encourage desertion, serving four years of a 20-year sentence. His works include: Bars and Shadows: the Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin (1923) and Wobbly: The Rough-and-Tumble Story of an American Radical . His strongly Socialist views later moderated and he began advocating instead for good labor and management relations. Chaplin wrote about this change in a two part article "Confessions of a Radical," published in the Empire Magazine of The Denver Post (Feb. 17, 1957): 12-13; (Feb. 24, 1957): 10-11. He was also an internationally recognized poet and essayist, corresponding with Carl Sandburg, Witter Bynner, and others in the literary world.

Henry Pettit was Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was named Honorary Curator of Rare Books in Norlin Library in the early 1950's, managing the collections and encouraging the acquisition of such materials as eighteenth-century English literature and examples of early printing. Pettit was a scholar of the English poet Edward Young (1683-1765), compiling A Bibliography of Young's Night Thoughts (1954) and editing The Correspondence of Edward Young (1971).