Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin

MP3 Audio CD. The Prison Poems include: Mourn Not The Dead; Taps; Night In The Cell House; Prison Shadows; Prison Reveille; Prison Nocturne; The Warrior Wind; To Freedom; The Vision Maker; Distances; Phantoms; Seven Little Sparrows; Salaam!; The West Is Dead; Up From Your Knees!; The Eunuch; I W. W. Prison Song; To France; Vlllanelle; Wesley Everest; The Industrial Heretics; Blood And Wine; The Red Guard; The Red Feast; The Girls Who Sang For Us; To Edith; Song Of Separation; To My Little Son; Escaped!; and Retrospect.

Ralph Hosea Chaplin was a US author, artist and labor activist. When he was 7 years old, he saw an employee killed through the Pullman Strike in Chicago, Illinois. He had settled with his family from Ames, Kansasto Chicago in 1893. At an instance in Mexico he was predisposed by hearing of the death squads formed by Porfirio Díaz, and became a promoter of Emiliano Zapata. When he came back, he started working in varying union positions, many of which were inadequately paid. A little of Chaplin's early art pieces were created for the International Socialist Review and other Charles H. Kerr books.

Chaplin worked in the strike committee with Mother Jones for about 2 years for the gory Kanawha County, West Virginia strike of coalminers in 1912-1913. These impacts brought him to pen several labor-themed verses, some of which were the words for the a-little-of-the-topic union anthem, Solidarity Forever.

Chaplin thereafter became active in the Industrial Workers of the World or the IWW, or Wobblies and was an editor of its eastern U.S. publication Solidarity. In 1917, Chaplin and a few 100 other Wobblies were turned up, condemned, and imprisoned under the Espionage Act of 1917 for conspiring to obstruct the draft and motivate desertion. He wrote Bars And Shadows: The Prison Poems while in prison for four years of a 20-year sentence.