again in turn-of-the-century poetry protesting the slaughter by American troops of the
people of the Philippines, poems contemporary with Markham’s. But the appeal of such power
relationships leads us repeatedly to reenact them. In Markham’s case, ironically, the
implicit reaffirmation of such hierarchies helped give the poem remarkable cultural
warrant.
Given the poem’s huge and instant success it is not surprising that the Examiner
should want to commemorate its pride in being the first place to publish it. So that same
year (1899) the San Francisco paper reinvented the poem as an elaborately illustrated
supplement to its Sunday edition. It is by far the most memorable reprinting of "The
Man With the Hoe." Already oddly positioned within William Randolph Hearst’s
sometimes melodramatic newspaper, the poem has its inner tensions further exacerbated by
the Examiner’s richly contradictory fin-de-si?cle presentation. Notoriously
imperialist, the paper was also by turns sensationalist and antagonistic toward the barons
of monopoly capitalism. Markham, wholly in sympathy with the plight of exploited workers,
was nonetheless uneasy with organized labor and its aggressive and collective agency from
below. All this, curiously, is enhanced by the poem’s new incarnation.
The poem is printed on a large sheet of heavy paper about twenty-two inches wide. This
broadside in turn had a series of images printed on its reverse side before it was folded
in half so as to make the poem into a folder with a front and back cover. Unashamed of
stylistic contradiction or cheerfully eclectic, the accompanying images mix elements of a
Victorian scrap book with art nouveau and Edwardian book illustration. An oval portrait of
Markham, framed in laurel leaves, shares the cover with an engraving after the central
figure in Millet’s painting [Fig. 1]. On the back cover a skeletal grim reaper rides a
horse of the apocalypse down a road past poplar trees straining against the wind [Fig. 2].
Ringing the blade of his scythe is a crown that once perhaps sat on a head of state. Above
the image two lines heralding a future of radical change and retribution are quoted from
Markham: "When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? How will it be with Kingdoms
and with Kings."
Inside, the poem is presented in two floral frames on opposite sides of the sheet [Fig.
3]. On the lower left, a bat-winged figure, part satyr and part serpent, lies vanquished,
his ill-gotten crown beside him on the ground. To his left another snake, this one itself
satanically crowned, coils itself around the tripod of science and a book of the law,
showing us how culture can be allied with the forces of repression but also potentially
evoking a populist anti-intellectualism and values Hearst held in contempt. Above all
this, hovering in mid-air, is the agent of their undoing: a goddess of liberty wielding a
flaming sword and a wreath of laurel. On her shoulders an adoring eagle is perched to
serve as her wings. Below her the river of life, above her the clouds, sweep in harmonious
brush strokes toward a redeemed destiny.
Nowhere in the illustration are there factory owners or workers to be seen. The
illustration interprets the poem as a symbolic confrontation between abstract,
mythological forces. Human agency is imaged out of it. If this presentation underlines the
poem’s high cultural ambitions, then, it also underwrites its relevance to eternal values
rather than immediate (and potentially threatening) historical contexts. It is a version
of the poem, needless to say, that the English profession would find more suitable, a
properly transcendentalizing interpretation of the poem’s idealizations. In a way, it is
the version of the poem that generations of high school teachers have found fittingly
literary. Contemporary struggles, inequities at arm’s distance, are not the concern of
this sort of literariness, which awaits a paradise to be regained in the fullness of time
but accessible now in unsullied aestheticism.
The poem itself of course had other cultural effects. Despite its problematic
curtailment of workers’ agency, its condemnation of exploitation made it possible to
articulate it to labor reform movements. It was open to multiple interpretations, only one
of which is built into this illustrated version. Meanwhile, worker poets themselves would
have to write poems suggesting they take matters into their own hands.
Note: see Revolutionary Memory for the full set of illustrations.
Reprinted from Cary Nelson, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the
American Left. Copyright 2001 by Routledge.