The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim

The Popular Wobbly: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim

Edited by Owen Clayton and Iain McIntyre

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2025)

When the world is too strange, a straightforward narrative is inadequate.  Satire, humor, or venturing deep into the mind is perhaps the only outlet.  Labor radical T-Bone Slim is a ready guide to the U.S. economy’s underside.

T-Bone Slim carried an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) red union card in his pocket.  The IWW members were known as Wobblies. Working itinerantly, Slim earned his pay in Northwestern U.S. timber camps, railroad track gangs, loading docks, construction, and wherever there was easy and ready work.  

In 1883, “T-Bone Slim,” was christened Matti Valentinpoika Huhta by his Finnish immigrant parents in Erie, Pennsylvania. At various times, he went by Matt Arlund, Matt Arnold, Matt Houghton, and Joseph Hilger.  Slim’s father mysteriously drowned from the Erie docks where he worked, and in 1942, Slim’s body was found floating in New York City’s East River. 

Slim was a hobo, an itinerant worker, possibly exiting a 1902 marriage to a Finnish immigrant, Rosa Kotila.  Perhaps low wages or alcohol spoiled their home life, and in 1910, she had Slim arrested for nonsupport of her and their four children.  A rolling boxcar was his male escape route, abandoning his family.  In 1915, Rosa filed for divorce, citing drunkenness, absence, and gross neglect. Beginning in 1919-1920, he began regularly sending his pithy dispatches to the IWW’s newspaper, The Industrial Worker.  

Like the IWW, Slim was an anti-capitalist agitator.  In 1905 Chicago the IWW was founded, its preamble opening with “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”  The union organized all workers, no matter their age, race, or gender.  The union flourished after its first five years, organizing immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, as well as Midwestern itinerant harvest workers, timber workers, and dock workers, and wherever those without a specific craft came together. Although the IWW won better conditions for workers, its refusal to recognize capitalism meant it refused to sign contracts, which limited its long-term effectiveness.  The IWW filled jail cells in the 1910-1912 period with its “Free Speech” fights, as members stood on street corners delivering their radical message and were quickly imprisoned.  A typical Wobbly tactic was to shout, “I’ve been robbed!”  As a concerned crowd gathered, the unionist would break into his speech. “I’ve been robbed by the capitalist class.”  The AFL unions disdained the IWW, and during World War I, heavy-handed U.S. government repression almost broke the organization.

The nickname “T-Bone” grew from Slim’s attachment to a decent meal, particularly when working at isolated timber or railroad camps, victimized by questionable company bunk house fare.  Perhaps his most famous poem is 1922’s The Lumberjack’s Prayer.

With Alum bread and Pressed-Beef butts,

Dear Lord you damn near ruin’d my guts,

Your white-wash milk and Oleorine,

I wish to Christ I’ve never seen.

Oh, hear me Lord, I am praying still,

But if you won’t our union will,

Put pork chops on the bill of fare,

And starve no workers anywhere.

In 1923, during federal anti-alcohol Prohibition, Slim contrasted those who blamed workers’ poverty on alcohol with the upper crust’s drinking habits.  “But drink doesn’t seem to faze the Gold Coast any.  Inebriated Captains of Industry and pickled Colonels of Commerce are still good for a four-bit tip.”

Wordplay and definitions are central to Slim’s writing, like his play on “executive.”  He wrote in 1925, “We are pleased to call men who superintend, oversee, propose (accept or reject) ‘Executives.’  How come?  They tell me what to do, and I execute the necessary moves, and they are executives.  Truly, how come? Who am I?  Am I an executor, executionist or an execustiff?”

Since Slim’s writings are rooted in current events from the 1920s to the 1940s, the editors include extensive footnotes that explain the circumstances or working-class slang of the times.  There was a great debate in the 1920s about whether the IWW should align with the new U.S. Communist Party.  Slim supported the union’s independence and wrote accordingly. Regularly his writings end with a union message, encouraging workers to organize.

David Roediger shares an introductory essay on surrealism and its lingering influences in some labor writing, particularly his attachments to Chicago’s Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company.

The book’s editors recommend digesting Slim in bite-sized pieces. This is not a cover-to-cover read; it’s best taken in small, few-page doses.  There is no central narrative, besides Slim’s wanderings, so contemplate and think twice about Slim’s musings.  The Industrial Worker readership probably looked forward to Slim’s missives or perhaps missed the humor.  Surrealism is an apt description, so plunge carefully into jaundiced diatribes on capitalist excess – it may still resound with the reader today.

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Reviewed by Mike Matejka, President of the Illinois Labor History Society