Stitching Together Family and Activism in a Graphic History
Comic artist and teacher Ben Katchor has been saying to me for years: Comics are the new “art book” of the twenty-first century, and even the “coffee table art book,” presuming people still have coffee tables. Frances Jetter’s The Amalgam: An Immigrant, His Labor Union, and His American Family in Brooklyn is the proof absolute, although it incorporates so many multimedia elements that it defies a straightforward “comics” label.
The Amalgam is a worker-oriented, socialistic Jewish “family book,” sharing some of the same political and cultural insights that can be read in the pages of the new Jewish Currents. The importance of family, craft, and organizing carry the reader through this family history.
The Amalgam: An Immigrant, His Labor Union, and His American Family in Brooklyn
By Frances Jetter
Fantagraphics Underground, 160 pages
Release date: October 8, 2024
The book establishes its focus on craftsmanship within the first two pages. It begins with a series of artistically-designed door hardware from 1920, or perhaps far earlier, and the next two pages are images of thread on bobbins. More thread follows, and finally hands working on thread appear. Then come five beautifully drawn sketches of Poland as a moving geography from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Then, Jetter’s grandfather faces conscription into the Russian army and flees across the Atlantic. Here a different book begins.
Jeter’s grandfather finds his cause and calling in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). This prompts some explanation of the movements of the time. The ACWA’s precursor, the United Garment Workers (UGW), had sought only skilled craft workers since its beginning in the 1890s, excluding most people who worked in the rapidly expanding menswear industry, especially women. ACWA Founder Sidney Hillman, his wife Bessie Abramowich, and a large handful of organizers successfully confronted their employers, as well as the UGW and the American Federation of Labor, whose conservative leaders regarded the ACWA as dangerously radical.
The organization was indeed dangerously radical during World War I, in one specific way: The union believed that production in the hands of workers themselves would increase efficiency and provide better working conditions. By 1917, when wartime orders for military uniforms inundated the garment industry, former activists in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, found a place for themselves in the ACWA which was more sympathetic to anarchism than other unions. This came in no small part because the Woodrow Wilson Administration was arresting and ferociously persecuting Wobblies, and other opponents of World War I, around the country.
What we find on page after page of The Amalgam are prints of a highly imaginative character. They depict the work and workers, they celebrate the victories for shorter hours, and they ponder the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924 that halted the wave of Jews escaping Eastern Europe. They reflect on children growing up in a Brooklyn Jewish family with books for playthings. The family story presses onward—in stunningly beautiful print after print—through the family’s generations as the beloved grandfather grows older. It closes with a note of the continuing struggle for unionization and the observation that the cross street near her grandfather’s house, which is still standing, is now called Marcus Garvey Boulevard for another radical activist, indicating how the makeup of the neighborhood has changed, but the tradition of radical organizing continues on.
The intimacy of the images in the book can be set alongside Jetter’s own career trajectory. Jetter, an unabashed progressive, has been teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York City since 1979. Her linocut prints have been published in a handful of prestigious newspapers including The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Norman Rockwell Museum exhibited sixty-five of her prints in 2019.
This book is an important contribution to help newer generations understand that craft is a part of both family life and working class culture.