Mr. Block

Twenty-Four I.W.W. Cartoons

by Ernest Riebe

edited by Franklin Rosemont

Publication date: October 1984
Paperback: $12.00

Mr. Block is a United States comic strip character commemorated in a song written by Joe Hill.

Mr. Block, who has no first name, was born 7 November 1912 to Ernest Riebe, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Block appeared that day in the Spokane newspaper Industrial Worker, smoking a cigar and wearing a checkered suit with top hat. Subsequently, Mr. Block lost the fancy clothes but always kept a hat, ten sizes too small, perched on one corner of his wooden blockhead.

"Mr. Block is legion," wrote Walker C. Smith in 1913. "He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw .. [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him ... the personification of all that a worker should not be."