About Us

“Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.”

At the peak of the first Gilded Age and the dawn of the Progressive Era, Edwin Markham wrote what was deemed then "the battle-cry of the next thousand years.”

His poem, The Man with the Hoe — a tribute to a Jean-François Millet painting from which Markham took its name and inspiration — was the catalyst for a national discourse in newspapers across the country on socialism, labor rights, and the rampant wealth inequality emblematic of his time.

Bowed Press follows in the tradition of Edwin Markham, and Jean-François Millet before him, from this Second Gilded Age. We cover the fights that characterize our time: Labor, the Climate Collapse, and the politics of working people.

In the final words of the poem, Markham poses a question to the working class of the Future:

"O masters, lords and rulers in all lands
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings —
With those who shaped him to the thing he is —
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world.
After the silence of the centuries?”

We are the working people of Markham’s Future. Join us while we answer the “silence of the centuries.”