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Aaron Archie Green June 29, 1917 - March 22, 2009  Aaron Archie Green, June 29, 1917 - March 22, 2009 Indentured into Shipwrights Local 2116 in 1941, Green became a journeyman shipwright in the San Francisco shipyards, and later served in the US Navy. He was also elected Recording Secretary and delegate to the Bay Counties District Council of Carpenters. Born Aaron Green in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he moved with his parents to Los Angeles in 1922. He began college at UCLA, and transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1939. Green credited his pro-labor orientation to his father, a socialist who supported Eugene Debs and President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Describing himself as an "anarcho-syndicalist with strong libertarian leanings" or a "left-libertarian", Green combined a sensitivity for working people, an abiding concern for democratic processes, and a pragmatic willingness to lobby for reforms. Besides being a union shipwright and dedicated trade unionist, Green was a folklorist and musicologist. In particular, he studied "laborlore", a term he coined for the special folklore of workers-speech, stories, songs, emblems, rituals, art, artifacts, memorials and landmarks. Green is credited with winning Congressional support for the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-201), which established the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress. After years as a shipwright, Green enrolled in graduate school in 1958, earning an M.L.S. degree from the University of Illinois in 1960 and a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. He combined his support for labor and love of country music in his first book, Only a Miner. Green joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1960, with an appointment in the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations and the English Department, He stayed in Illinois until 1972. Working at the AFL-CIO Labor Studies Center in the early 1970s, he initiated programs presenting workers’ traditions at the Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife on the National Mall. In 1975, Green joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. He was awarded the Bingham Humanities Professorship at the University of Louisville in 1977, and was a Woodrow Wilson Center fellow in Washington, DC, in 1978. His articles appeared in Appalachian Journal, Journal of American Folklore, Labor’s Heritage, Musical Quarterly, and other periodicals and anthologies. He retired from the University of Texas in 1982. In retirement in San Francisco, Green continued to write and publish, including, in 2007, The Big Red Songbook, featuring the lyrics to the 190 songs included in the Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbooks. Green also acted as a mentor to many trade unionists with an interest in labor history. His love for the Pile Drivers Local 34 and his own Carpenters Local 2236 was evident whenever he spoke of examples of unions who took pride in telling their own stories. When asked why he was so interested in Pile Drivers Local 34, Green said he had always been amazed by the unity and strength of that local during his days on the San Francisco waterfront. In 1982, while Green was researching his book, Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes, Ed Kelly put him in touch with Mike Munoz, who was collecting and filing Local 34’s historical materials. Green decided that Munoz should write a book on Local 34, which resulted in PileButt: A Collection of Stories on Pile Driving. In 2002, Green and the Fund for Labor Culture supported the production of the award-winning video, PileButt-Working Under the Hammer, by Maria Brooks. In 1995, Green received the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for outstanding achievement in public folklore from the American Folklore Society. In 2007, the Library of Congress named Green as a "Living Legend," a distinction he shares with Dolly Parton, Muhammad Ali, Madeleine Albright and Johnny Cash-to name a few. Archie Green successfully bridged the world of labor unions and their members and labor academics to tell the stories of working people and their unions. He was a dear friend of Pile Drivers Local 34 and the Northern California Carpenters Regional Council. Archie, we’ll miss you. |
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