dotofficial: Happy birthday, Utah Phillips! (May 15, 1935)An anarchist, trade unionist, folk singer,
dotofficial: Happy birthday, Utah Phillips! (May 15, 1935)An anarchist, trade unionist, folk singer, and storyteller of immense wit and wisdom, Bruce “Utah” Phillips was born to a family of trade unionists and vaudeville entertainers, which influenced the activism he would pursue his entire life. Serving in the Army during the Korean War, Phillips was disturbed and affected by the devastation he witnessed being wrought in Korea, and returned to the United States a confused, angry, and violent young man. Hoboing on the rails and writing songs about the country, he eventually arrived at the Catholic Workers’ Joe Hill House of Hospitality in Salt Lake City, where he met the Christian anarchist Ammon Hennacy, who was to become his mentor. Hennacy taught Phillips the meaning of anarchism and pacifism, and Phillips devoted himself to these ideals, as well as to syndicalist revolution, becoming an active member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Phillips played a crucial role in collecting and preserving the songs and stories of the IWW at a time where the union was at its nadir, and though his audience was always small, he could always find one wherever he went. A lifelong drifter, in the last years of his life Phillips settled in Nevada City, California, where he turned his efforts towards improving the lives of the local homeless and establishing his own House of Hospitality. Suffering from heart disease in the last years of his life, Phillips died of heart complications in 2008. Like the Wobbly bards on which he modeled himself, however, he lives on in the songs and stories he spent his life championing, and in the indelible impression he made on anyone fortunate enough to meet him.“These kids don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don’t have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that.” -- source link