"Bread or Revolution" (1914), an I.W.W. hat card in Union Square

A Bain News Service photograph dated 11 April 1914 shows a man at an Industrial Workers of the World rally for the unemployed in Union Square, New York, wearing a hat card that reads "Bread or revolution." Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The photograph

This is a news photograph, not a poster. A Bain News Service photographer caught a man at an I.W.W. rally for the unemployed in Union Square, New York. On his hat is a card with three words.

BREAD OR

REVOLUTION

The catalog title, "I.W.W. Hat Card," comes from a handwritten caption on the glass negative. The archive notes that the caption and the negative number are Bain's annotations, not words on the card, and it does not transcribe them as part of the object.

Two choices

The archive files the slogan as a fear appeal. It offers the audience two outcomes and no middle course: give relief, or face upheaval. As rhetoric it is a threat wrapped in a demand.

It is also worth reading the other way. A man at a rally for the unemployed wore a sign in a public square, and a news agency photographed it. Nothing in the record says he was arrested for it. The card is crude, but it is speech, made in the open. The case for a free country is that it lets that card be worn and answers it with argument, relief, or a better economy, not with a round-up.

Where it leads

Four years later, a newspaper cartoon took a different line. W. A. Rogers's 1918 cartoon Now for a Round-Up shows Uncle Sam leaving a Capitol bannered "Sedition law passed," dragging small figures tagged Spy, Traitor, I.W.W., and others. The site's case study on labor organizing and anti-union campaigns covers I.W.W. print and the cartoons drawn against it, and the wartime censorship case study covers the laws that came later. The hat card dates from April 1914, three years before the Espionage Act of 15 June 1917 that the censorship case study describes.