There's lots of talk here in the US and around the world about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. This is a good article about how Sandburg stuck up for the little man.

It's behind a paywall.

If you scroll down, there's a "no thanks" button which gets you into the paper.

Unfortunately, when I looked there is no article on this subject, probably because the page has updated to other matters.

Am I the only one who finds something amusing about an article about "rich vs poor" being behind a paywall?

Yes, Bob. That is funny!

Sorry it's behind a paywall. I found it through Google, so I guess I can never link to the Tribune. Here's the article:


By Kevin Stein
April 25, 2014

Poet Carl Sandburg ought to be trending on Twitter. He should be cited on CNN, declaimed under the Capitol dome and quoted as ear candy in the State of the Union address. Poetic justice would find him enjoying a sudden back-to-the-future moment in all its digitized whoosh and bang.

After all, his rough-hewn poems kindled the bonfires of Populist complaint long before our current fascination with "income inequality." A century following the 1913 publication of his landmark "Chicago Poems," Sandburg stands as one American writer who arguably got right his poetics and his economics.

What's more, his discomfort with the economic divide rifting early 1900s industrial culture has proved to be prescient indeed.

One needn't look further than the recent news that a mere 85 human beings now control as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion among us.

Fittingly, Sandburg's work itself shovels such a chasm between readers who on one side revere his fervent populism and on the other bristle at his anti-capitalist jibes. Reading Sandburg, though, one rarely suffers the aftertaste of someone out for himself. He seems rather the sort who innately understands poetry is not a form of personal ambition.

A product of hardscrabble life both at home and on the itinerant road, Sandburg sticks up for the little guy in a culture obsessed with grandiose landscapes of wealth. His work maps our nation's economic Grand Canyon separating a cohort of haves from legions of have-nots. Sandburg does so largely by focusing not on his private grievance but rather on the culture's odd man out, fixing his poem's topography on a lone character contemplating opulent niceties that ever elude him.

While "Chicago Poems" is chock-full with apposite specimens, his "Child of the Romans" proffers a fine example of this poetic odd-man-out framework.

The dago shovelman sits by the railroad track

Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.

A train whirls by, and men and women at tables

Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,

Eat steaks running with brown gravy,

Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.

The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,

Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,

And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day's work

Keeping the road-bed so the roses and the jonquils

Shake hardly at all in the cut glass vases

Standing slender on the tables in the dining cars.

Favoring filmic strategies, Sandburg displays a director's penchant for postmodern quick-cut juxtaposition. His poem's camera eye frames a "dago shovelman" breaking for a peasant lunch alongside the railroad his backbreaking labor maintains in finest order. Note how Sandburg's scene contrasts the worker's "dry bread and bologna" with the gravy-swimming steaks served to the dining car's well-heeled denizens. Note, too, how theatrical understatement sweetly offers up strawberries and cream to further sour the comparison.

Even Sandburg's then-common, if now incendiary, use of the racial slur accentuates his character's outlier status. This shovel man, descendant of prodigious road builders, serves a role much like that of the ancient legionnaires. Those men built and maintained a vast circuit of roadways undergirding both the Empire's military power and a luxuriously decadent lifestyle for the select few. As with our own working class, they built the Empire's pathways to war, fought its bloody clashes and maintained its means to haul homeward battle's spoils.

What's curious, thus apt, is how the efforts as well as the person of Sandburg's odd man out go unnoticed by the "men and women at tables / Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils." Invisible, both the man and his 10-hour shift would likely be noted only if his labors were substandard — only if, say, the tabled flower vases wobbled wildly enough to pitch water into the laps of those in the proverbial lap of luxury.

It's worth noting Sandburg avoids any mention of American industrial power and achievement, railroad safety or even the societal benefits of such modern conveniences — precisely the things that capitalism and this worker's efforts make possible. Doing so, Sandburg implies that the hands shaping these things into being receive decidedly less reward for their contributions than do our lauded captains of industry.

The challenge — and often the failure — of political poetry is the risk of putting off one's audience by fumingly preaching to them. Few readers welcome brickbats of self-hate cudgeled to their ears. Sandburg, at his clumsy worst, is capable of just that.

Here, Sandburg never says outright whom we should regard as good and bad guys. He doesn't harangue the capitalist venture. Instead, he merely counterposes the man's pride in workmanship with the extravagance of the pampered. His elemental odd man out appears therefore resolute as he shovels privilege for the wealthy while —simultaneously, Sandburg winks — digging his own grave.

Kevin Stein is Illinois' poet laureate

Sandburg would be in a load of trouble today for using "dago".

One dictionary called it an "extremely offensive word for a person from Italy, Spain, Portugal or South America." Does anyone know the history of that offensiveness?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

One dictionary called it an "extremely offensive word for a person from Italy, Spain, Portugal or South America. Does anyone know the history of that offensiveness?

Probably from the Spanish proper name Diego 'James'. It's been offensive at least for the past 100 years.

Extremely, z? As bad as kike or nigger, for example?

Extremely, z? As bad as kike or nigger, for example?

I don't know. I've been addressed as the latter once or twice by African-Americans, but in the context it made sense. As for the former I've been been called that, although on occasion I have been mistakenly identified as Jewish.

Being of Italian descent, I've probably had wop hurled at me and dago occasionally. I cannot ever remember being called a guinea, which to my ear always sounded a bit East coast to me. I say those three are more offensive than the (regionalism?) EYEtalian. I do remember being teased and called names in grade school, but I've never really been discriminated against because of my ethnic origin, so the occasional slur was not taken too seriously (Jerry used to tease me with some of the sort of old fashioned sounding terms and I would return the favor and ask him not to refer to me that way which he ignored.)

I remember being astonished when I found out that dago could be applied (mainly by the British)to non-Italians.

I'd say all of these slurs can be extremely offensive or not depending as with a lot of language on the context and intent. There is a difference between being told a joke that uses these slurs and being told that you did not get a job ...

When I lived in Bend, Oregon, I hung around with a man whose family name was DiMeo, who referred to himself as a dago. Annnnd, just to prove his Italian ancestry, he owned a Bellanca airplane, designed by Giuseppe Bellanca.

Speaking of airplanes, here's a "dago" who gets lots of respect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dago_Red

As z said, it's context and circumstances.

Geoff the limey/paddy mongrel

I've always hated the word because it was part of my bigoted grandfather's 4-word-compound for the scum of the earth (it was 'dagos, wops, kikes and niggers'. He himself was a kraut-mick mongrel.

Growing up in the east, wop always sounded a lot worse than guinea, which seemed old-fashioned. Dago was often applied equally to Puerto-Ricans.

I'm descended from a long line of Viking worriers. One ancestor was contemporary with Eric the Red and was called Oscar the Yellow. Official records say he was regarded as a coward but we prefer to picture him as overly-cautious with a propensity for fainting spells. While other Vikings wore red to hide blood from serious wounds, Oscar wore brown pants. While other Vikings traveled the oceans in long boats, Oscar was forced to paddle his fjord on a raft, providing excursions for the ladies. How the other Vikings envied him.

I have considered wop an extreme slur, but I always saw dago as a more friendly reference. I'd better be more careful.

quote:

...part of my bigoted grandfather's 4-word-compound for the scum of the earth...

Bethree, do you think maybe he didn't know any better or for sure did you know him to be bigoted? I believe I've mentioned my sweet grandmother here. She saw nothing wrong in calling African Americans "coons." I know; it was disgusting. However, I honestly don't think she was bigoted - just ignorant.

My mother was slightly deaf, just how deaf was a matter of conjecture, but I remember how upset she was when a Harry Belafonte song was a big hit in the '50s. She couldn't understand how singing "Dago, dago" was acceptable. We finally convinced her it was "dayo", and tis calmed her down.

Harry Belafante learned that song singing in a church choir. I'm sure you've all heard it: Glo-oooo-ooo-o-ria, in excelsis Day-O!