Organized Labor

By Mike Munoz & Jim McNamee

Archie Green, author, folklorist, shipwright, teacher and icon for the San Francisco labor movement, has died at the age of 91.

Born Aaron Green in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he moved with his parents to Los Angeles in 1922. He grew up in Southern California, began college at UCLA, and transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1939.

He was indentured into Shipwrights Local 2116 on February 28, 1941 working in the San Francisco shipyards and served in the U.S. Navy during Work War II in China. He was a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America Local 2236 for over 67 years and was a Journeyman Shipwright. He was elected Recording Secretary and delegate to the Bay Counties District Council of Carpenters.

His pro-labor orientation owed much to his father, a socialist who supported Eugene Debs, the campaign of Upton Sinclair for governor of California in 1934, and became a supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Describing himself as an “anarcho-syndicalist with strong libertarian leanings,” or a “left-libertarian,” Green combined a sensitivity for working people, an abiding concern for democratic processes, and a pragmatic willingness to lobby for reforms.

Archie was a union shipwright, a trade unionist, folklorist and musicologist. He was a scholar of “laborlore,” a term he coined and is defined as the special folklore of workers. Devoted to understanding vernacular culture, he gathered and commented upon the speech, stories, songs, emblems, rituals, art, artifacts, memorials, and landmarks which constitute laborlore. He is credited with winning Congressional support for passage of the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-201), which established the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress.

After years of work as a journeyman shipwright Green enrolled in graduate school in 1958, earning an M.L.S. degree from the University of Illinois in 1960 and a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. He combined his support for labor and love of country music in the research that became his first book, Only a Miner.

Green joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1960, where he held a joint appointment in the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations and the English Department until 1972. Working as a senior staff associate at the AFL-CIO Labor Studies Center in the early 1970s, he initiated programs presenting workers’ traditions at the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall, and from 1969 to 1976 led the successful legislative campaign to enact the American Folklife Preservation Act.

He became known for his work on occupational folklore and on early hillbilly music recordings. In 1975 he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. He was awarded the Bingham Humanities Professorship at the University of Louisville in 1977, and was a Woodrow Wilson Center fellow in Washington, DC, in 1978. His articles have appeared in Appalachian Journal, Journal of American Folklore, Labor’s Heritage, Musical Quarterly, and other periodicals and anthologies. He retired from the University of Texas at Austin in June 1982, and established an archive for his collected materials in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In retirement from teaching, Green continued to write and publish the results of years of research. He acted as a mentor to many trade unionists that showed an interest in labor history. His love for the Pile Drivers Local 34 and his own Carpenters Local 2236 was evident whenever he spoke of examples of unions who took pride in telling the stories of their unions.

In 1982 while doing research on his book Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes, Ed Kelly put him in touch with Mike Munoz, who was collecting and filing local 34’s historical materials. Archie decided that Mike would write a book on Local 34 which resulted in “PileButt a collection of stories on Pile Driving.” In 2002, Archie and the Fund For Labor Culture supported the production of the award winning video, PileButt – Working Under the Hammer by Maria Brooks.

When asked why he was so interested in Local 34 he stated that he had always been amazed by the unity and strength exhibited by PileDrivers Local 34 during his days working on the San Francisco Waterfront.
He completed books on tinsmiths’ art using examples from Northern California (Tin Men, 2002); a monograph on millwrights in Northern California over the twentieth century (2003), and a collection of essays on the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific (2006). Most notable has been the 2007 publication of The Big Red Songbook, featuring the lyrics to the 190 songs included in the various editions of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbooks from 1909 to 1973.

Green inherited the project from John Neuhaus, a machinist and Wobbly who devoted years to collecting a nearly complete set of the IWW songbooks and determining what music the songs had been set to. When Neuhaus died of cancer in 1958, he gave his unique collection of songbooks, sheet music and other materials to Green, who vowed to carry on Neuhaus’s vision of a complete edition of IWW songs. Green deposited Neuhaus’s original materials in the folklife archive at the University of North Carolina.

At home in San Francisco, Green served as secretary of the nonprofit Fund for Labor Culture & History. Founded in July 2000, the Fund has worked with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to identify labor landmarks in San Francisco and install commemorative plaques, supported the publication of books on roots music, labor songs and historic labor landmarks, prepared guides to films on skilled union craftsmen, and helped the United Mine Workers restore the Ludlow Monument in Colorado.

In 1995 he received the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for outstanding achievement in public folklore from the American Folklore Society.

In August 2007 he received the Living Legend award from the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

Archie successfully melded labor unions and their members into working cohesively with labor academics to tell the stories of working people and their unions. He was a dear friend of Pile Drivers Local 34 and the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council, he will surely be missed.