[4 items] Franklin Rosemont 1943 - 2009
http://antiauthoritarian.net/NLN/?p=582 By Mike Klonsky April 14, 2009 CHICAGO, Ill. I ran into old friends Franklin and Penelope Rosemont Saturday at the Heartland Cafe where I was doing the Live From the Heartland Radio Show. The two of them had come to hear a young community activist who followed me on the program, to talk about Franklin's book, The Rise and Fall of The Dill Pickle, the legendary Chicago jazz club and cultural/political hangout of the Jazz Age. Franklin and Penelope both seemed in great spirits seeing their work being taken up by the current generation. Yesterday I was stunned to hear the sad news that Franklin had died the next day after a long battle with illness. Franklin, 65, came from a working class family. He was a surrealist/poet/artist/revolutionary and a big part of the '60s Chicago cultural and political scene. I first met both of them in Chicago in '68 where they were SDS activists. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Franklin had hitchhiked 20,000 miles around the USA and Mexico and wound up in San Francisco in 1960, the heyday of the beat generation poetry renaissance. Franklin and Penelope went on to create the Chicago Surrealist Group in 1966 after traveling to Paris in 1965 to meet André Breton and attend meetings of the Paris Surrealist Group. The group played a major role in organizing the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, and has published socially active newspapers and materials through the years. Franklin and Penelope also took over the old Kerr Publishing House and brought it back to life, reviving many classic works of labor history. Many of their experiences together are documented in Penelope's wonderful book, Dreams & Everyday Life: Andre Breton, Surrealism, the IWW, Rebel Worker, Students for a Democratic Society and the Seven Cities of Cibola in Chicago, Paris & London. For more on Franklin Rosemont: Encyclopedia of Road Culture, http://www.digihitch.com/road-culture/beat-generation/454 Bibliography http://www.allbookstores.com/author/Franklin_Rosemont.html -- Mike Klonsky is an educator, writer and school reform activist who lives in Chicago. Like many of us here at The Rag Blog, he has roots in Sixties activism and had a decades-long friendship and working relationship with Franklin Rosemont and his partner Penelope. Mike blogs at SmallTalk. http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/ -------- Franklin Rosemont, 1943-2009 http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/franklin-rosemont-surrealist-author.html 14 April 2009 A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low, the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington and the historians Paul Buhle and John Bracey, Rosemont's own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in inspiration and result. [The following biographical sketch of Franklin Rosemont was prepared for The Rag Blog by Penelope Rosemont with David Roediger and Paul Garon.] Franklin Rosemont met André Breton in 1966 and this became a turning point in his life. He became a celebrated, poet, artist, historian, editor, street speaker and surrealist activist. He died on Sunday April 12, 2009, at age 65. With his partner and comrade of more than four decades, Penelope Rosemont, he cofounded in 1966 an enduring and adventuresome Chicago Surrealist Group, making the city a center in the reemergences worldwide of that movement of artistic and political revolt. He has been editing a series on Surrealism for the University of Texas series on surrealism. Most recent in that series is Morning Star by french intellectual Michael Löwy. Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943, to two of the area's more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood schools, he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in 1962. There he, already radicalized through family traditions, experiences with miseries inflicted by the educational system and through the reading of momentous political works and comics, entered the stormy left culture of Roosevelt. The mentorship of the African American scholar St. Clair Drake and his relationship with Penelope led him to much wider worlds. He "hitchhiked 20,000 miles" even as he discovered surrealist texts and art. Soon, with Penelope, he found the surrealist thinker André Breton in Paris. Close study and passionate activity characterized the Rosemonts' embrace of surrealism as well as their practice in art and organizing. Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Rosemont helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964 and began a long and fruitful association with Paul Buhle in publishing a special surrealist issue of Radical America in 1970. Lavish, funny and barbed issues of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural Correspondence were to follow. The smashing success of the 1968 world surrealist exhibition at Gallery Bugs Bunny in Chicago announced an ability of the Chicago surrealists to have huge cultural impact without ceasing to be critics of the frozen mainstreams of art and politics. The Rosemonts soon became leading figures in the reorganization of the nation's oldest radical publisher, the Charles H. Kerr Company. In that role, and in providing coordination for the surrealist Black Swan Press, Rosemont helped to make Chicago a center of nonsectarian revolutionary creativity. In Chicago in 1976 he and Robert Green organized the Largest surrealist exhibition entitled the Marvelous freedom -- World Surrealist Exhibition. A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low, the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington and the historians Paul Buhle and John Bracey, Rosemont's own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in inspiration and result. Without ever holding a university post, he wrote or edited more than a score of books while acting as a great resource for a host of other writers. Rosemont's book, Joe Hill, the IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, has recently been translated into French and published in Paris. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past. In none of this did Rosemont separate scholarship from art, or art from revolt. His books of poetry include Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants, The Apple of the Automatic Zebra's Eye and Penelope. His marvelous fierce, whimsical and funny art work graced countless surrealist publications and exhibitions. His activity with the Wobblies at Solidarity Bookshop was illustrated in cartoon format in a book by Harvey Pekar edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman. The SDS activity of Franklin and Penelope was illustrated in another catoon format book by Pekar and Paul Buhle called Students for a Democratic Society, A Graphic History. Franklin Rosemont and African-American scholar Robin D.G. Kelley have a forthcoming book, Black Brown & Beige, Surrealist Writings from Africa and its Diaspora from University of Texas Press. -------- Artist, historian and rebel http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/17/artist-historian-and-rebel Alan Maass honors a revolutionary who helped keep the history of our movement alive. April 17, 2009 FRANKLIN ROSEMONT, a historian, poet, artist and lifelong revolutionary, died suddenly April 12 at the age of 65. He was a part of movements for justice that spanned half a century, and as a writer and artist, he helped keep alive the traditions and history of the struggle for a better world. Franklin was born in Chicago in 1943. His father Henry was a union printer who played a leading role in the nearly two-year-long Chicago newspaper strike of 1947-1949, editing the strike newspaper and writing scripts for a daily radio show, "Meet the Union Printers," broadcast on the Chicago Federation of Labor's station WCFL. His mother Sally was a jazz musician who became president of a union local for women musicians. Not surprisingly, Franklin was drawn to the left early on--he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at age 7. Tiring of high school, he dropped out to hitchhike across the U.S. and Mexico, logging more than 20,000 miles by his count. One regular stop was San Francisco's North Beach, the heart of beat culture, where he met Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the other poets at City Lights bookstore. Franklin was also drawn toward surrealist literature and art--first encountered, he said, in a high school anthology, where he came across the surrealist proverb "Elephants are contagious." With U.S. society still in the grips of Cold War conservatism, the appeal of the beats and the surrealists was as a cry of defiance against the conformity of American culture. But Franklin always connected cultural rebellion to a political one, viewing surrealism not only as a form of artistic expression, but as a political philosophy. By the early 1960s, the civil rights movement was shaking U.S. politics, and a new left was emerging. Back in Chicago, Franklin went to Roosevelt University, then a center of radical activity, and one of the few schools committed to hiring African American faculty--it was known as the "little red schoolhouse." In the mid-1960s, he and his wife Penelope, a fellow artist, visited Paris, where they met Andre Breton, the main figure of European surrealism. Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, written in the 1920s, insisted on the connection of politics and art. Breton later visited Mexico to meet Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky--together, they wrote the manifesto Toward a Free Revolutionary Art. Breton found kindred spirits in the Rosemonts. Franklin and Penelope came back to the U.S. and formed the Chicago Surrealist Group. Its members could be found at Solidarity Bookstore or Gallery Bugs Bunny--both places served as meeting space during organizing around the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. For the Rosemonts, exhibitions of their art went hand in hand with producing leaflets and posters for the struggle. Franklin worked with the IWW and Students for a Democratic Society. He also spearheaded the newspaper Surrealist Insurrection, which was singled out as an inspiration by radical students during the Prague Spring rebellion in Czechoslovakia in 1968. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - FRANKLIN WAS a tireless writer. After Breton's death in 1966, he edited an English language collection of Breton's writings, among many other works by surrealists. He published numerous books of his own poetry. He also used his encyclopedic knowledge of American labor and the left to become a prolific historian--all without, as one tribute to him put it, "ever holding a university post." Recently, he published his biography Joe Hill, the IWW and the Making of a Working-Class Counterculture. He also edited and wrote introductions for numerous books collecting the writings of a virtual Who's Who of American radicals. Many of these books were connected to what became a central project of Franklin's life--the Charles H. Kerr Company, the oldest socialist publisher in the country. Founded in 1886, the Kerr Company was a stronghold of the Socialist Party left and IWW during the first decades of the 20th century--known for a vast list of radical books, its series of short pamphlets wrapped in red cellophane called "The Pocket Library of Socialism," and its monthly magazine, the widely read International Socialist Review. By the time Franklin connected with the Kerr Company in the late 1970s, it had fallen on hard times. A small number of older socialists who remembered the Kerr Company in its heyday had recently joined the board of directors, thinking that the company deserved "a proper burial," and that at least its stock of old books could be saved from the dumpster. But one thing led to another, and the Kerr Company was reborn, with a steady trickle--and then a healthy stream--of reprints and new titles. Franklin threw himself into the work with all his infectious energy, giving new life to Kerr classics by the likes of Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs, Mother Jones and many more. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I MET Franklin when I was first coming around left-wing politics in the early 1980s. With the right-wing Reagan era taking hold, Franklin's knowledge and experience were a treasured resource. He was a bridge to the struggles of the past that we knew about mainly through reading--not only those he was a part of in the 1960s and '70s, but ones that came before him. Through Franklin, I met the Kerr Company's movement veterans--like Fred Thompson, whose days as an agitator dated back to the pre-Depression Wobblies. Or Joe Giganti, formerly head of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, not to mention opera critic for the Communist Party's Italian-language paper Il Lavoratore. I knew about the 1930s Chicago union activist Vicki Starr (who went by the name Stella Nowicki) from the wonderful documentary Union Maids. But of course, Franklin and his Kerr Company co-conspirator David Roediger knew where she lived, and got her to an International Women's Day event where she could be questioned in person. I should also say that I was never prouder to call Chicago my hometown than when I was talking to Franklin. He was an inexhaustible storehouse of information about the other Chicago they don't make tourism commercials about--or mention in their bids to host the Olympics. It was enough to say you'd moved to a new place in such and such neighborhood, and you'd soon learn that you were down the block from a factory once owned by the German émigré who financed the English-language translation of Marx's Capital, or that there was a forgotten monument to Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons' widow Lucy Parsons in a park nearby, or that the 1968 convention protesters had taken refuge on that street over there where they're building the fancy townhouses. The book of Franklin's that I always thought was perfectly suited to him was the Haymarket Scrapbook, which he edited with David Roediger--and if you see a copy for sale anywhere, don't hesitate, grab it fast. The Scrapbook is what a coffee-table book should be--hugely oversized, and stuffed with essays, excerpts, quotes, poems, drawings, photos, reproductions of leaflets and anything else remotely pertaining to the 1886 demonstration in Chicago's Haymarket Square and the execution of the Haymarket Martyrs after that. The book tells the story of the Martyrs and the movement for the eight-hour day that they led. But it also sets out the backdrop and associated political developments, and it traces Haymarket's reverberations through the years in shaping all kinds of people and all kinds of struggles. This is the history of our movement that's kept hidden from us. Franklin was devoted to keeping that history alive so that it could be a part of shaping the struggles of the future. And for that, we owe him many thanks--and our commitment to keep up the fight. -------- Poet, Historian, Surrealist Activist The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont http://www.counterpunch.org/rosemont04162009.html By PAUL GARON, DAVID ROEDIGER and KATE KHATIB April 16, 2009 Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65 years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong friend Paul Garon, he co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, an enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make the city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades, Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous. Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of the area's more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood schools after his third year of high school (and instead spending countless hours in the Art Institute of Chicago's library learning about surrealism), he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in 1962. Already radicalized through family tradition, and his own investigation of political comics, the Freedom Rides, and the Cuban Revolution, Franklin was immediately drawn into the stormy student movement at Roosevelt. Looking back on those days, Franklin would tell anyone who asked that he had "majored in St. Clair Drake" at Roosevelt. Under the mentorship of the great African American scholar, he began to explore much wider worlds of the urban experience, of racial politics, and of historical scholarshipall concerns that would remain central for him throughout the rest of his life. He also continued his investigations into surrealism, and soon, with Penelope, he traveled to Paris in the winter of 1965 where he found André Breton and the remaining members of the Paris Surrealist Group. The Parisians were just as taken with the young Americans as Franklin and Penelope were with them, as it turned out, and their encounter that summer was a turning point in the lives of both Rosemonts. With the support of the Paris group, they returned to the United States later that year and founded America's first and most enduring indigenous surrealist group, characterized by close study and passionate activity and dedicated equally to artistic production and political organizing. When Breton died in 1966, Franklin worked with his wife, Elisa, to put together the first collection of André's writings in English. Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a Democratic Society, Franklin helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964, and put his considerable talents as a propagandist and pamphleteer to work producing posters, flyers, newspapers, and broadsheets on the SDS printing press. A long and fruitful collaboration with Paul Buhle began in 1970 with a special surrealist issue of Radical America. Lavish, funny, and barbed issues of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural Correspondence were to follow. The smashing success of the 1968 World Surrealist Exhibition at Gallery Bugs Bunny in Chicago announced the ability of the American group to make a huge cultural impact without ceasing to be critics of the frozen mainstreams of art and politics. The Rosemonts soon became leading figures in the reorganization of the nation's oldest labor press, Charles H. Kerr Company. Under the mantle of the Kerr Company and its surrealist imprint Black Swan Editions, Franklin edited and printed the work of some of the most important figures in the development of the political left: C.L.R. James, Marty Glaberman, Benjamin Péret and Jacques Vaché, T-Bone Slim, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and, in a new book released just days before Franklin's death, Carl Sandburg. In later years, he created and edited the Surrealist Histories series at the University of Texas Press, in addition to continuing his work with Kerr Co. and Black Swan. A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low, the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington, and the historians Paul Buhle, David Roediger, John Bracey, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Rosemont's own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in inspirations and results. Without ever holding a university post, he wrote or edited more than a score of books while acting as a great resource for a host of other writers. He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States. His spectacular study, Joe Hill: The I.W.W. and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, began as a slim projected volume of that revolutionary martyr's rediscovered cartoons and grew to giant volume providing our best guide to what the early twentieth century radical movement was like and what radical history might do. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past. Indispensable compendiums like The Big Red Songbook, What is Surrealism?, Menagerie in Revolt, and the forthcoming Black Surrealism are there to ensure that the legacy of the movements that inspired him continue to inspire young radicals for generations to come. In none of this did Rosemont separate scholarship from art, or art from revolt. His books of poetry include Morning of the Machine Gun, Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants, The Apple of the Automatic Zebra's Eye and Penelope. His marvelous fierce, whimsical and funny artworkto which he contributed a new piece every daygraced countless surrealist publications and exhibitions. Indeed, between the history he himself helped create and the history he helped uncover, Franklin was never without a story to tell or a book to writeabout the IWW, SDS, Hobohemia in Chicago, the Rebel Worker, about the past 100 years or so of radical publishing in the US, or about the international network of Surrealists who seemed to always be passing through the Rosemonts' Rogers Park home. As engaged with and excited by new surrealist and radical endeavors as he was with historical ones, Franklin was always at work responding to queries from a new generation of radicals and surrealists, and was a generous and rigorous interlocutor. In every new project, every revolt against misery, with which he came into contact, Franklin recognized the glimmers of the free and unfettered imagination, and lent his own boundless creativity to each and every struggle around him, inspiring, sustaining, and teaching the next generation of surrealists worldwide. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
