[MUSIC] This is a picture of the Los Angeles Times building, which once stood in the northeast corner of First and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. This is a picture of the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910 after someone detonated 16 sticks of dynamite left in a suitcase in an alley outside the building. 21 people died in the explosion and subsequent fire. Suspicion for the bombing immediately fell on a union, the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers. For the past few years, employers across the country, including the newly formed US Steel, had tried to break the union and mostly succeeded. The Bridge and Iron Worker's Union had responded by dynamiting non-union construction sites and iron works across the country. The publisher of the Los Angeles Times, General Harrison Gray Otis, had himself recently led an open shop campaign in the city putting him and his newspaper, as it were, in the crosshairs. Sure enough, in April 1911, two brothers, James and McManigal McNamara, officers of the Association of Bridge and Iron Workers, were arrested and eventually confessed to the Times Bombing. Less than a year later, in January 1912, some 25,000 workers led by the radical union, the Industrial Workers of the World, Struck the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In the course of that strike, city authorities declared martial law and state militia patrolled the streets. Local police turned fire hoses on picketing workers. A Lawrence undertaker, allegedly in the employ of one of the mill owners, planted dynamite as part of a plot to discredit the strike. Two of the strike leaders, Joseph Ettor and the poet, Arturo Giovanitti, were inexplicably charged with murder when the local police shot and killed a striking woman. And if all that were not bad enough, when the Industrial Workers of the World arranged to have the children of striking workers sent to supporters in New York, police and militia arrived at the train station and began clubbing children and parents alike. As Lawrence in the LA Times building bombing suggest, by 1912, the US suffered from a plague of labor violence and no one knew for sure when it would stop or how bad it would get. In August of that year, Congress created a commission on industrial relations in order to discover the underlying causes of dissatisfaction in the industrial situation and report its conclusions thereon. The chairman of that commission eventually found, as he put it, the basic cause of industrial dissatisfaction to be low wages. In other words, workers were dissatisfied because they did not earn enough money to support their families, and could see no way to lodge their protest at these conditions, except through strikes and violence. In October 1912, a few months after Congress created the Commission on Industrial Relations, the poet and critic Harriet Monroe brought out the inaugural issue of Poetry, the journal, more than any other, which would both publish and cultivate modern poetry in the United States. Over the next several decades, Monroe would publish most of the poets who would go on to constitute the canon of modern American poetry. On the surface, these overlapping events in the years 1911 and 1912, the early days of Poetry and the coming to crisis of what people at the time called the labor problem, these can seem like an accident of history, merely coincidental. Today, I would like to suggest that these events had more in common then it might otherwise appear. In particular I will show you that modern American poetry looks the way it does, and emerges when it does, because poets began to write about the violent strikes, the wide spread poverty, and the other labor problems that roiled America in the first decades of the 20th century. Most of the poets we think of when we think of modern American poetry experimented with writing poems about the poor and working class. In what follows, I will walk you through three of the most frequently anthologized poems in the modern American cannon. William Carlos Williams's The Red Wheelbarrow, TS Elliott's Preludes, the Robert Frost's The Death of the Hired Man. Together, these poems can suggest the role that the labor problem and those who lived it, that is the poor and working class, played in the formation of modern American poetry. [MUSIC]
