John Lepley:
"Be Hammers-Not Anvils": Clinton Jencks and Miners' poetry

A devout Christian in his youth, and a participant in tense labor and legal battles as an adult, Jencks knew the power of the arts to inspire and nurture souls in struggle. Today, Salt of the Earth is a part of the labor movement’s cultural heritage, not unlike Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?”, Herbert Boyer’s and Richard Morais’s Labor’s Untold Story, and John Sayles’s Matewan; Jencks himself was aware of the canonical status of Salt of the Earth and did much to cultivate it. Be Hammers—Not Anvils, an anthology of poetry that he compiled and edited reflects his later pursuit of the sublime.[2] Collected from issues of the Miners’ Magazine, the journal of the Western Federation of Miners, the poems, as Lorence notes, are a testament to “workers’ deepest thoughts concerning their lives and work.”[3]

Figure 1. A picture of Jencks and other members of Mine Mill; Jencks is second from left.

The title that Jencks chose for the collection is a nod to the George Herbert poem “Jacula Prudentum” which counsels "When you are an anvil, hold you still/When you are a hammer, strike your fill." Such logic must have resonated with the miners that Jencks came to work, live, and struggle alongside. According to the United Mine Workers reformer Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, the line was also a favorite of John L. Lewis.[4] The table of contents for Be Hammers—Not Anvils organizes the poems into thirteen sections. As Jencks writes in his introduction, he initially read the poems “just for fun” when he began research for a project on unions in the Rocky Mountains. However:​

“As I read on, month after month, year after year, I began to look more and more eagerly for the poems of the miners that put the warm flesh and blood of real people on the skeletal framework of news stories, editorials and local union reports. I became more and more excited because I could not escape the feeling that these miners were speaking across the years to me about my feelings, my problems."

Figure 2. The first page of Jencks's introduction to Be Hammers--Not Anvils.

The titles of the sections suggest Jencks’s moral imagination and how he understood the world: “human dignity,” “economic systems,” “political comment,” “working and living conditions,” “strikes,” “women,” “love,” “trials and frame-ups,” “religion,” “scabs,” “unionism,” “war,” and “just musing.” Gender and sex influence Jencks’s three-page introduction. “Miners themselves talk about the underground as a thing alive, as a woman angry because they have raped that virgin seam,” he writes. Once an organizer, though, always an organizer; the introduction to these poems are from the perspective of someone who wants to build connections between people. “From the soul’s nakedness springs a cry that must find an echo, an affirmation, an answer in another human being somewhere, sometime,” Jencks concludes.

Organized in Butte, Montana in 1893, the Western Federation of Miners led a dramatic existence in the southwest and Rocky Mountains. The WFM and IUMMSW published the Miners Magazine from 1900 to 1921. Poetry was a regular feature in the journal, some of which was contributed by miners. For example, “N.J.B. Bailey” of Superior, Wisconsin wrote three poems that Jencks includes in the “economic systems” category: “Sons of Toil, Awake! Arise!,” “Rouse, Ye Slaves,” and “Industrial Hymn.” Information on Bailey is sparse; however, the proceedings for the 1908 WFM Convention include a letter from Bailey who claimed employers blacklisted him because of his union activities and which he signed “Your Fellow Slave in Danger.” In “Human Dignity” Jencks includes three poems by a supporter of WFM, J.G. Schwalm, of Sterling, Colorado. A member of the Carpenters Union and a staunch freethinker and socialist, Schwalm published the pamphlet “Uncle Sam’s Religion, or, Why We Don’t Want the Bible in Public Schools” as well as similar-themed articles in other journals.[5] The November 1, 1906 issue of the Miners’ Magazine includes his poem “Reason”:

“Reason, thou art supreme, Thou art our God; Without thy holy pow’r We’re dust and sod— Thou art the fount of truth and right; Without thee there is night.”

“Reason” evokes the profound shifts that affected spiritual and religious thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here, though, the question is why Jencks chose this poem for inclusion in Be Hammers—Not Anvils? Perhaps he saw it as representative of the period? Or maybe the poem connected with him on a personal level? As Lorence explains, Jencks underwent a period of introspection in his later years, including his faith. His involvement with Jewish and Unitarian organizations in San Diego “demonstrated the breadth of his ecumenism as he moved beyond the Protestant Christianity of his youth to a more comprehensive humanism.”[6]

The Miners’ Magazine published poems by women, too. Jencks featured pieces by Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Agnes Thecla Fair throughout Be Hammers—Not Anvils. The section “Working and Living Conditions” features “The Miner” and “Goldfields” by Fair. Ironically, though, it is unclear if the section about “women” includes any female writers.[7] Why Jencks includes a section on women only leads to speculation. As an organizer, and later as a scholar, he understood that women were anything but passive bystanders in working class life and organization. During the Empire Zinc strike, he championed their emergence into the pivotal roles that Salt of the Earth dramatizes onscreen. “None of these women were working actually on the job…their whole lives were involved, but who thinks about the women that are in the home?” Jencks noted.[8] Still, his troubled marriages to Virginia Derr and Florence Bird (the former an accomplished activist in her own right), tested the limits of his enlightened position to women.

Of course, the publication of these poems in the Miners’ Magazine is, in and of itself, a reflection of the journal’s longtime editor, John M. O’Neill, but they suggest the breadth of verse that Jencks had to select from in compiling Be Hammers—Not Anvils. Unfortunately, Jencks died before he could turn the draft into a polished manuscript and elaborate on what these poems meant to him.

Jencks poses the above question at the end of his introduction. Art has always played a key role in social movements, whether it is music, poetry, dance, murals, film, or some other medium. It sustains, drives, and fires radical imaginations and hopes. With Be Hammers—Not Anvils Jencks mined the Miners’ Magazine to show that poetry has a place in contemporary struggles for economic, political, and social justice. Art is not incidental to these struggles, it is central to them.