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Resisting Our Hitlers, Exposing Our Holocausts

December 22, 2023 — Lew Rosenbaum

[I wrote this essay at the end of the year 2000.  With the current events in Palestine, the Masha Gessen affair, and the role of the United States in creating and maintaining the Zionist project, I decided to revisit it. With the rise of our own fascist movements, how we respond to our own Hitlers is a matter of some currency. Gessen, of course, was vilified for comparing the Israeli state to the Nazis. I made some modifications in the original, but the essay is substantially the same as when I wrote it.  I refrained from making direct comparisons with the Republican and the Democrat fascists: but they should be fairly obvious. At the time I wrote it, I emailed it to my sister, Greta, to get her reaction.  She took great exception to the concept of the “holocaust industry,” but I am convinced that with the 23 years experience in between then and now and in light of Masha Gessen’s New Yorker article, if she were alive today, she would agree with these conclusions.]

I have been reading three books about Germany, but I cannot stop thinking about missiles and mortars in Palestine.  As the year 2000 ends, I finally finished Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum.  I had promised myself a year ago to reread Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and I have finally gotten to it. And then by chance I this winter I came upon the story of Mildred Fish, one-time student at the University of Wisconsin, who winds up in the German resistance, Resisting Hitler.

600 Israeli soldiers are detained for refusing compulsory armed service.  Their reason is the increasing severity of the Israel Defense Force atrocities against the Palestinians, who are engaged in what we are calling an intifada.  One woman in the IDF, whose job it is to search the Palestinian women, complains about the indignities with which she is forced to treat Palestinian prisoners.  At times, she says, she feels like a Nazi.  A Jewish academic, appalled at the behavior of the IDF, compares them to Hitler’s Nazis.  As this is broadcast to a progressive internet discussion group, objections fly across the screen: how is it possible to compare these two situations that are totally different. Germany’s Nazis were the real Nazis.  YOU can’t have MY holocaust.

Surely this simplifies a very complex subject. But when presumably rational people react so strongly to the feeling of one human being for another; when a rabbi insults the woman who is merely expressing her disgust for the position she finds herself in, one questions what personal stake does this rabbi and other ordinary human beings have in maintaining that destruction of the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe was unique in history?

Let’s not even consider this as a continuation of the thesis that the Jews must justify their existence as chosen people through examples like the holocaust.  For, in the manner of thought I am posing, there are no examples LIKE the European holocaust.  To suggest that the decimation  (taken literally) of the indigenous peoples of the Americas was a holocaust; that the millions who died in the middle passage from Africa to the Western hemisphere was a holocaust; that the calculated and calculating systematic working to death of millions of slaves (whose average working life when “sold down the river” was 7 years) was a holocaust evokes cries of protest.  Eastern Europe was unique, you see.

Well, I suppose it was.  And so was the Triangular Trade in human chattel. And it seems to me only reasonable to grant this uniqueness to seize upon their commonality as well.  If one cannot understand the consciousness of Israeli Jews without understanding the Nazi era, one cannot understand the consciousness of North Americans without understanding the legacy of slavery, one certainly can’t understand the consciousness of Palestinians without understanding the occupation and all that means.

But no.  When victim becomes oppressor, the situation becomes complicated. The oppressor must maintain some aspect of being victim. The Israeli government portrays itself as the object of terrorism. In the U.S. the government defends itself against “reverse racism.”

Of course to grant that the feeling of oppression conforms even in some general way to fascism undermines the ideals and dreams of many who still believe that the Israeli state could achieve the egalitarian goals it once professed.  Israeli leaders in particular cannot grant the possibility, that the government in power is acting very like the state(s)  from which Jews fled in the thirties and forties.  “My power,” these leaders might say if they were candid, “depends upon my convincing the people of my country that they have more in common with me than with the common people whose land we have taken and who work, eat and even bathe at our pleasure.”  The Nazi era is something that Israeli leaders have packaged as a commodity. These leaders trade the “holocaust card” on the market.  It is the bargaining chip that they have in world politics because it keeps the majority of citizens of Israel in their hip pocket and in the Israel Defense Force.

Although I started this article with “I cannot stop thinking about missiles and mortars in Palestine,” I really can’t stop thinking about what the Nazi era and what contemporary Palestine has to teach us about ourselves.

II

The biography of Mildred Fish-Harnack begins with its outcome. Hitler overturned the sentence of his own court and ordered her guillotined. That is, on Hitler’s direct orders she was the only American woman to have been executed.  Born and raised in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Fish returned to Wisconsin to college. While a student at University of Wisconsin, she met Arvid Harnack, who was studying for his doctorate (one of two he took). It was the 1920’s, they got married, and they settled in Germany.  Harnack was a member of a leading academic family, a family which mingled among a social circle including Nobel prize winners, men of the clergy, lawyers and statesmen.  They expressed their patriotism in their love for German culture.  For them, Germany was synonymous with Goethe and Beethoven.  For them, the rise of Hitler was anathema, signaled the death of that culture.  In the meticulously researched pages of Resisting Hitler, you will not find any indication that the Harnacks considered joining the Nazis.

BERJAYA

After 1933 the Harnacks began to develop discussion groups and study circles and social circles out of which they built a small anti-fascist network.   Arvid was highly schooled in economic theory and visited the Soviet Union to study their planned economic formations.  Mildred, who was taking her doctorate in American Studies, was doing work on the transcendentalists in literature and philosophy.  Her lectures on Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson were highly regarded.  She was engaged in translating work from English to German, when the censors allowed such books to be published. The two were close to the American Ambassador to Germany, but especially to his daughter, Martha Dodd.  Resisting Hitler is filled with interviews and insights from some of the people who knew them well in this period. And from some of these interviews emerges the picture of people turning toward Marxism and the political-economic formation that was developing in the East, in the Soviet Union.

Of course many anti-fascists turned east. That was where someone was listening. They would have been as happy to find a receptive ear with Uncle Sam as with Uncle Joe.  But Sam wasn’t listening at all, and even Martha Dodd offered her services to the Soviets.  In addition, the author makes a good case for Arvid and his friends being as influenced by a promise of the future– central planning and egalitarianism — as much as by revulsion for the present.

Harnack fed information to both the US and the USSR.  For months, the network in Germany reported on the expected attack to the East.  When the attack finally came, network members were astonished as Hitler’s forces moved rapidly to the East.  It appeared that the Reich was invincible.  But when the tide turned with the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, German papers did not report the change.  A radio broadcast from the network to their Soviet contact was intercepted.  In a matter of a few days the 17 key members of what Hitler branded the Red Orchestra were imprisoned. Their trial, in mid December, lasted only 5 days. Harnack and the inner circle of this conspiracy were executed in a few days later. The Court sentenced Mildred to six years in prison, but Hitler was furious. He demanded a retrial. Mildred, too, was killed.  Hitler was determined that they would die without knowing of the prospect of success of the Russian counteroffensive.

III

Bernhard Schlink’s writing is very elegant in its simplicity.  I cannot think of The Reader without thinking of Hesse, not so much for content as for style.  The Reader has no “hero” in the usual sense.  It’s two main characters are quite flawed.  It’s a postwar tale narrated by a lawyer (Schlink himself is a lawyer) who, as a boy, a pubescent teenager, comes to know a woman who was a camp guard during the war.  Comes to know first in a physical, sexual, sensual way.  This rather odd couple, a woman and boy who could easily be mother and son, carries on an intense, curious romance. But know each other they do not. One day she disappears from his town, his life, under mysterious circumstances.  And it is only later in the novel, after the young man becomes a lawyer, that he meets her again and finds out about her position as a camp guard.  But does he even know her then? And what does he know of what she did?

BERJAYA

As a young man he reads to her: he finds out that she cannot read herself.  She never learned.  He is such a good reader.  And he makes her so happy by his reading.  But does he really understand what he reads as much as she understands his reading, and even later, in what she requests from him while she is in prison?   In the end, we readers are compelled to question which of the two is the reader of the title.  It is perhaps this ambiguity, which makes this novel so provocative; while it’s resolution in the final separation and search for truth, which makes it so frustrating.

Much of German post-war writing is filled with concentration camp angst.  It’s a genre like Westerns in the US.  Except that in our Westerns the Indians are either noble savages or just plain savage.  We don’t seem to have much angst over our concentration camps.  And probably, looking at Germany from the safe distance of middle America, I can sit here and say “enough already.”  The resolution of The Reader was frustrating because it was so indecisive.  I don’t know who bears the guilt. ‘

It may not be clear who are the friends of the resistance, but there is no doubt in Resisting Hitler who is the enemy. And it’s important to put this novel in the context of the fate that befell the Harnacks once they were dead.

Within the German military, a patriotic group developed a conspiracy to kill Hitler.  It was a high placed, anti-fascist formation that did not succeed.  After the war they were given high honors, They were treated as heroes. In contrast, the Red Orchestra became the object of vilification.  They were traitors, not heroes; they sold secrets to the enemy. They were Reds.  I am tempted to say smugly, “The Germans are like that you know.”  Chalk it up to the authoritarian personality and genetic fascism.

But the state of Wisconsin did the same thing.  A proposal to celebrate Mildred Harnack day in the public schools was killed when a University of Wisconsin alumnus, an editor of an Oklahoma newspaper, argued that it was a damned shame his daughter would observe a holiday from school in honor of a damned Communist when she couldn’t even say prayers to her God in the schools.

After Germany reunified, the authorities found that a school in the east had been named to honor Mildred.  Western authorities promptly changed the name to some cipher instead. The outcry from those “totalitarian East Germans” forced the government to concede on the question of the school name: It reverted back to Mildred’s school.

So maybe The Reader isn’t as superficial as I think it is.  And just maybe I’m displacing my anger about America onto this book.  But The Reader is not “about” middle America. It IS about Germany.

IV

In the 1800’s, two North American white women were appalled at the treatment of Blacks and Indigenous Americans. They wrote two novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ramona; they used the limited quality of 19th century moral force to cast a literary searchlight into the dark places of the national psyche.  A century later the literary moment has degenerated to reflect the acceptability of ethnic boundaries of creativity.  Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie and Diane Glancy write very well; but they are expected (are allowed?) to write only about the debacle and survival of the Native American.  A whole generation of African Americans write about the experience of black America (are they  allowed to write about anything else?). And when they do, they are criticized for not writing about universal human experience. August Wilson was chastised by the New York Times drama critic Robert Brustein for only writing about Blacks! In the same column, Brustein asked Wilson to write about universal themes, like Chekhov did.  Mind you, he did not chastise Chekhov for only writing about Russians. Doesn’t Philip Roth write about Jews?  In this country of 275 million people, are not more than a dozen white novelists writing about OUR holocausts, our ugly Americans, our Americans grappling with the blood history of our country? I am reminded of the incredible debate (who can debate this any more?) going on about whether Jefferson had children with slave mistress Sally Heming. 

The philosophical approach of the “ethnic agenda” requires that each writer must write about his or her community.  Then, by definition, the writing from that category is not universal and hence not of the same quality as . . .  But wait a minute.  What is “my community” and how does it relate to the whole?  Doesn’t a truly American literature spring from the multi-faceted American experience?  Isn’t the blues the quintessential American experience, in this most class-divided of all countries?

While the ethnic agenda frames questions in terms of color, it’s not so much a black and white issue any more. Increasingly the question to writers is: who will finally take up the cause of the least of us all.

V

The ethnic political agenda is part of a cultural assault that has Balkanized American literature.  When David, my (at that time) 17 year-old step-son read To Kill A Mockingbird, it made such a huge impact on him. David’s father is African-American.  The author: a white southerner attempting to come to grips with the American holocaust, but from the perspective of the white southerner. I emphasize that, because the examples of this are few and far between. And yes, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is flawed. But the impact on a 17 year old African American man was undeniable.

Who will take up the cause of the marginalized?  Who will clarify that the experience of American survivors of the uniquely American holocausts merges with the universal? Denise Giardina, in her novels about the Appalachian miners, examines this relationship.  Richard Price’s hard-bitten city dwellers connect to this reality. Russell Banks’ vivid portrait of the abolitionist family of John Brown in Cloudsplitter. Even John Grisham, in A Time To Kill, examines the brutality of Southern law from the viewpoint of a civil rights lawyer. But by and large, the angst over the American holocaust is left to the survivors to write about. There is an acquiescence that white Americans are not survivors also. I want to read someone who expresses the complexity of this relationship, it’s ambiguity and it’s decisiveness.

We are back to where we began.  America must own up to its own holocausts.  It must own up to its own fascist practices.  We must recognize the reality that Germans drew up their proscriptions against Jews after reading about the American post Civil War black codes. America relies on certain ideas and institutions to guarantee that the holocausts remain the property of demagogues.

Literature can break this stranglehold.  Literature arises on the foundation of experience.  Forty and fifty years ago, this experience was segregated, balkanized and exemplified politically by liberation movements and civil rights movements. Those movements have gone as far as they could have: they have achieved integration of segments of those communities into the leading circles of the country.  The leaders of those movements of yesteryear today are more representatives of the Democratic Party and all it represents than of the grassroots movements from which they evolved. The experience of today is a different experience. It is the experience of the fragmentation of those movements and the emergence of a class movement.  Such a movement is calling forth its writers, its musicians, its artists.  Only this kind of a movement can confront the past in all its ambiguity with unambiguous honesty.

V.

Many years ago I interrupted the peaceful ending of a family seder, after all the questions had been asked and answered, and after everyone had a warm feeling of democracy that the story of liberation from pharaoh always brings. I asked how we could end this celebration without at least commenting on the suppression of the Palestinians and questioning how this contradicts the notion of liberation in Israel.  I was not a very popular person.  Since then I have come to be encouraged by the number of people who share these opinions.  I was encouraged in 2000 by the number of Israeli soldiers refusing to fight (just as their German anti-fascist forbears tried to undermine the Third Reich). I am encouraged today by the US Jewish Voice for Peace and its clear opposition to the Zionist state of Israel.  And I find the broad social activity for housing, health care, abolition of the carceral state and other fundamental needs – movements to end our ongoing holocausts — very encouraging. These movements need a literary voice. It’s time for a class movement in literature, drawing on the unique and emerging 21st century experience of a newly forming class of disenfranchised:  A class whose historic role is abolition of all previously existing conditions of exploitation and oppression. 

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Why A Third Party? The Case For A New Abolitionism

May 11, 2022 — Lew Rosenbaum

With more than 800,000 dead from COVID in the US alone, the questions are urgent: Who will represent us, who will provide for us, who will make sure our political representatives don’t destroy our ability to live on earth? Do we need to rely on the bumbling dunderheads who run the Democrats and the open fascists who control the Republicans?

Political parties are not inherent in the DNA of the United States. In fact, the leading writers of the Constitution wanted a government in which the “most capable” (meaning the wealthiest, white men as individuals) ran the country.  Madison and Hamilton, writing in The Federalist Papers, abhorred “factions.” The faction they abhorred the most, and feared would organize under a political party, was the poor.  This was one reason why neither the President nor the Senate was elected directly. Within the first few years, however, life asserted itself and ousted the ideological purity intended by the founders.

In the very first administration debates arose around the major themes that would plague the country throughout its existence.  What is the relation between the Federal government and the states (“states rights”); the power of the cities versus the rural areas; land-owning agriculture and industry and the power of the banks. Soon political representatives emerged to fight for these interests.  Under the Washington administration, Alexander Hamilton articulated a plan to support the fledgling industry of the North, open a national bank, raise a standing army.  Thomas Jefferson led the opposition faction, with position that the dependence of wage-labor on the employer was inherently inferior to the yeoman farmer.  The Hamilton faction won this round, conceding to the Jefferson faction that the capital would be moved from New York to the District of Columbia. Thus the Jeffersonian (Democratic) Republican Party consolidated around the Southern slavery-based agricultural ruling class, and the Federalist Party formed around the emerging manufacturing sector of the North.

From 1788 to 1836, the Southern states had a firm grip on the Presidency.  In those 48 years, four of the six presidents were Southerners – called “Republicans” — who controlled the White House for 40 of the 48 years.  Congressional battles were fought over whether the Federal government should fund such projects as the Erie Canal, called “internal improvements.”  Southerners opposed paying for the economic improvement of Northern states, arguing that if the states needed such investment, they should raise the money themselves.  There is no reason, they argued, that South Carolina taxes should be used for the exclusive benefit of New York. Implicit in this argument was the recognition that the expansion of Northern manufacturing and the route westward would amplify the political power of the North.  Increasing Northern population would improve its proportion of delegates to the House of Representatives. These dull battles over dollars and cents veiled the contradiction, dubbed the irrepressible conflict, between free and slave labor.

This conflict broke into the open in 1819 with the Congressional debates on admission of Missouri to the Union.  Political leaders understood that should more states be admitted as free states, the balance of political power in the Senate would shift away from the South. This debate, which was settled by the “Missouri Compromise,” allowed Maine in as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.  It also established a line of latitude, Missouri’s Southern boundary, that separated slave and free states, extending west into the Louisiana Purchase territory.  The most significant thing about this Compromise, for this discussion, is that it established a system of two parties that depended on each other to maintain the status quo.  Nominally, the Federalist Party disintegrated after 1819 and the Republicans split into Northern and Southern factions.  The Federalists of the Northeast as well as Republicans of the North united into the Whig Party; while Republicans North and South came together under the banner of the Democratic Party. Henry Clay, an architect of the Missouri Compromise, joined John Quincy Adams as founders of the Whigs. New Yorker Martin Van Buren engineered the foundation of the Democratic Party along with Andrew Jackson. In this gentleman’s agreement, both parties agreed to kick the can down the road.  Both parties recognized that this compromise would accept the slave power ruling in the South. This paradigm, where two sections of capital made a political agreement to preserve some form of the status quo relation between owners of private property, ruled the country for the next 40 years.  

Other battles took place between 1819 and 1850 to test and adjust the bonds of the agreements between the slave power and the growing manufacturing/industrial North.  Following the 1837 “Texas Revolt” and the declaration of the “Republic of Texas,” Southern expansionists argued for the annexation of Texas and conquest of Mexico, turning the territory conquered into slave states.  In the war with Mexico, the US stole one third of the Mexican territory, including California.  Southern politicians brought to Congress demands to annex Texas and turn it into five slave states. As Texas was beyond the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, once again the slavery question came before Congress. In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman Daniel Wilmot proposed that slavery be prohibited in all territory acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House, where the more populous northerners (Democrats and Whigs) supported it. It failed in the Senate where there was equal representation, North and South. 

In response to the crisis presented by Texas admission, opponents of the expansion of slavery organized a new Party, the Free Soil Party, and ran former President Martin Van Buren in the 1848 election.  Senator William Seward of New York recognized this achievement: With free soil on a national, presidential platform,  “Antislavery is at length a respectable element in politics.” The appeal of the Free Soil movement was not a pure support of the cause of abolition; it was supported by people who saw their economic betterment only coming by homesteading what had been Native American land and what was now likely to become slaveholder plantations.  Some saw this as insulating themselves from having to compete with an inferior race.  It demonstrates the way in which the objective needs of social motion proceeds along a sometimes indirect path, a path that was nevertheless anathema to the South.

The Whigs won the 1848 election and the long delayed efforts to expand slavery to the lands stolen from Mexico came to the fore. California applied for admission as a free state, the South opposed it, and once again, in 1850, Henry Clay negotiated a compromise. Whig and Democrat again stabilized the slavery question.  The main elements of the compromise allowed California to enter as a free state, but all other territories were allowed to determine their status by the popular vote of white men. The Democrat and Whig political factions, had one main goal: keeping the union together, under the status quo of the increasingly tenuous control of the slave power. As if they had discovered democracy, the Congress called this new formula “popular sovereignty.”  

In 1854 Stephen A Douglas, Senator from Illinois, proposed that Kansas and Nebraska be admitted to the union.  Because these were part of the Louisiana Purchase, their status was governed by the Missouri Compromise, north of the Compromise line and hence necessarily part of free territory.  When the South opposed this, Douglas introduced legislation that would allow people in those states to choose their status – extending popular sovereignty to the Missouri Compromise area.  The Kansas Nebraska Act passed, but the debates on this subject shattered the party alignment that had been containing the slavery debate.

The Whig Party, unable to respond, collapsed, joining with Northern Democrats, who opposed the nullification of the Missouri Compromise, and Free Soilers to form the Republican Party.  Republicans were not abolitionists; they wanted to contain slavery in the territory it already occupied. The South became solidly Democratic. Another party emerged to play a role, the Know Nothings, whose basic outlook was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic, but also anti-Kansas-Nebraska Act.  The 1856 election, resultd in a Democrat James Buchanan winning the presidency, capturing all but one of the Southern states and five Northern ones.  Nevertheless the Republican Party’s John Freemont won 11 Northern states and captured one-third of the popular vote. The Know Nothings ran Millard Fillmore, who won in Maryland alone.

In the short period from 1854 to 1856 the Republican party was born, solidified their position in the North, and grew into a legitimate contender in national elections.  The Supreme Court threw a gauntlet at the political system in 1857, deciding, in the Dred Scott case, that slavery was legal in all states. The Know Nothings fell apart, the anti slavery members joining the Republicans.  John Brown’s attempt to seize the armory and Harper’s Ferry and begin an insurrection against the slave power failed, but his execution in 1859 and the cause he represented galvanized the nation. The battle was on. Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the Presidency in 1860 with a platform stopping the expansion of slavery. Republicans won 18 Northern and Western states.  Southern Democrat John Breckinridge won the Southern 11 states.  Two other parties won the other four states. The South was convinced that they had lost the political battle.  The only way left, the Southerners understood, was the military subjugation of the North.

While there is a line of abolitionism that runs through this entire period, it should be understood that never, in the period leading up to the Civil War, was abolitionism the majority opinion.  At the time of the Missouri Compromise, only a small number of people carried on that propaganda war.  At the opening of the Civil War, many abolitionists refused to take part in the Republican Party debates, seeing the ‘free soil” party program as too bound by compromise.  Nevertheless, it was the Republican Party, in all its contradictory messiness, that shepherded the government through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.  Unconscious of the necessity of abolition as late as 1861, practical reality forced them to that conclusion and to the conclusion that the Southern planter oligarchy would have to be subjugated. Militarily, the Northern armies and freed slaves broke the back of the slave-owners political control of South as well as North at Appomattox in 1865.  Politically, the Civil War continued in the period we call Reconstruction, until the election of 1876 and the Hayes Tilden Agreement of 1877. Once ready to swear allegiance to their Wall Street masters, the slaveocracy was restored to political power and the freedmen driven back into peonage.

Since the Civil War the two party system has maintained the status quo very well.  And what is that status quo? At the end of Reconstruction, the Northern financial-industrial capitalists had established their supremacy. This victory unleashed the “robber barons” of steel, the railroads, oil, and Wall Street itself. The wars of extermination against Native Americans accelerated, in some cases using the same troops that had been stationed in the South to guarantee the civil rights of the freed slaves. Troops from the South were redeployed to suppress labor insurgency across the country. By the beginning of the 20th century, the system organized itself around the maintenance of political control by the corporate masters of private property. 

Opposing wings of private property have used the party system to fight each other, often with significant differences. Sometimes those differences were so severe as to call into question their common interests. But at no time were their conflicts so severe as to make the parties abandon the rule of private property.  Now, 145 years after the end of reconstruction we are approaching a severe political crisis that makes us look carefully at what is at stake.

A new form of abolitionism is in the air.  For as long as people have looked to the Communist Manifesto as a beacon of future emancipation, we have talked about the abolition of private property. Marx explained the strategy of the working class in this way: “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” [Value, Price and Profit]. In 1865 that was an ideological current in the movement.  Changes in the movement have forced this abolition question to the forefront. Various stages in the development of mechanical automation have produced predictions about the end of work and the distribution of the abundance that automation can produce according to need. The introduction of the microchip, the development of robotics, and the expansion of AI have brought something qualitatively new to the equation. We are actually witnessing the beginning of the end of labor power as a commodity, and hence the end of value.  We are beginning to see the capacity to organize society around production for use, not for exchange. And none too soon, as the rapacious advance of technological change under the dominance private property threatens to end nature’s basis of providing abundance for all. 

Unlike previous periods, when political battles were waged around the dominance of one form of private property or another, today we are beginning to see battles over whether or not private property should dominate at all.  This is the meaning of demands for housing and health care as rights independent of the market.  The abolition of the rule of private property is now the practical answer to the fight for basic needs.

One important way that abolitionism has been introduced into the contemporary conversation is the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. Similar to the earlier abolitionists, today’s fighters started as a small group ideologically and morally convinced of their cause.  In the wake of the George Floyd murder, this abolition has entered the mainstream debate. Some of the leading theorists of this abolition talk about it in terms of ending the domination of private property over the conditions of life that make prisons the answer to the practical problems people face in the community.  For so many years we have talked about abolition as a good idea to win people over to.  No longer. Today abolition is being proposed as the only practical way to achieve what are the basic needs of the people.

Similarly, when Jeremy Rifkin wrote his book, The End Of Work, not many people paid attention to his prediction.  That’s not the case any more.  Guy Standing’s advance of the term “precariat” has been followed by Andrew Yang running for president on the political position of the end of work.  In a way, Yang is the Martin Van Buren of our time (of course Yang was never president, but he is the first to elevate the qualitative importance of robotics to a presidential campaign).

How will this abolition thing come about?

The historical framework we come from is that the contending forces battle it out through the political arena, at first in the electoral arena through representative political parties.  It is a truism that capital has two political parties.  It is becoming better and better understood, and our history leading up to the Civil War confirms, that the system of party politics is keeping us enthralled, that neither party represents us. At the advent of the Civil War, the agreement between two sections of capital no longer could hold, because one section of capital was holding back the revolutionary development of the other.  The great “democrat,” Thomas Jefferson, became (along with Madison and Monroe and Jackson), the leader of the agricultural section of capital that depended on slavery.  The great aristocrat, Alexander Hamilton, at the outset of the country became the political leader of the fight for industry and banking (and hence for wage-labor).  The development of machinery and modern industry created the possibility for abolishing private property in human beings.  It did not make that abolition inevitable, but it established the possibility, and a war was fought to bring that into reality. Because the contending political parties still represented two wings of capital, another form of private property emerged triumphant, championed by its political party, the Republicans.

So how do we get a party to represent us?

A similar but different dynamic is happening around us. What’s different is that no section of capital can be relied on to advance the revolution, as the Republican Party could by representing industrial capital and free labor. What is similar?  Today’s Republicans represent the rural areas and Southern states. Defections from the Republicans show just how reactionary they have become.  In advance of the November election, a number of former members of the current administration declared that they cannot vote for Trump.  Some even pledged to vote for a Democrat.  On the other hand, John Bolton said that he will write in a “conservative Republican,” whom he will name later.  The Lincoln Project also aimed at a section of the conservative Republicans to win them away from Trump.

Today’s Democrats are splitting as well. The Democratic National Committee has a difficult time controlling who gets elected to Congress.  In the 2018 Congressional elections, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Boston’s Ayanna Pressley defeated powerful, long time Democratic “liberals.” Jamal Bowman challenged and defeated the DNC backed candidate Elliott Engel in New York in the 2020 election primary, and joined the “squad” in his general election victory. Charles Booker barely lost to Amy McGrath in the fight to challenge Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell. In the Chicago suburbs in 2018, Loren Underwood ousted a long term Republican while campaigning on a program of expanded health care; and in 2020 Marie Newman ousted conservative incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski in the primary, on a program including Medicare for All.  Over the past 10 years, the composition of the Chicago City Council has changed to reflect some of these changes as well. 

As with the Whigs and Democrats of 150 years ago, where one party could not contain pro- and anti-slavery positions, there is not room in one party for the advocates of expanding public property (like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal) and those wanting to maintain the status quo. This reflects the fact that there is no room any more for capital to grant the demands for basic needs that the 40 million newly unemployed are adding to those being made by the already dispossessed. The most recent example of this is the passage in House and Senate of an infrastructure bill and a defense bill that provide plenty of grist for the corporate profit mill.  Meanwhile a bill, dubbed “Build Back Better” has been cut in quarters, and the quarter left languishes in the Senate and won’t be passed unless it is further gutted.

What seems clear is that the Republicans are turning into the equivalent of the Democrats of 1860, a party based in the South and dedicated to the utmost reaction. The Democrats are looking like the Whigs of 1848. While Biden won the presidency in November, 2020, Democrats arrived in Washington in January ready to do battle on how to control or respond to the demands of the people.  Just as the Whigs of 1848 splintered over the question of slavery and its abolition, Democrats today are splitting. No one will say it out loud.  It’s not even necessarily conscious.  The issue today is abolition as well, and the subject is public or private property.  Will we have a public health system or one subjected to private corporate greed?  Will housing be a human right, or will we watch increasing numbers of people in tent cities while real estate speculation runs rampant?  Will the public take control of “policing” in America, or will we be further murdered and subjugated by private militias and militarized police forces? Will what happens to the earth be decided by the people, or will corporate/technological profiteers be allowed to place bets on how quickly the arctic ice sheets will melt?

It’s impossible to say how long it will take for this to mature.  The Working Family’s Party can provide sort of a thermometer of how far along this process has gone, as it tries to balance its “fusion” politics with its stated declaration of the need for a third party.  In different parts of the country, grass roots leaders are vying for political office;  in most cases they estimate that they cannot win without the label of a major party (even when that party does not back them).  Paula Swearingen, who tried to unseat Joe Manchin in the West Virginia Democratic primary, has declared her independence.

Of course there are various other political parties running candidates with varying degrees of success at this time, the Green Party and the Justice Democrats being perhaps the most prominent.  As did smaller political parties in the political motion in advance of the Civil War, these parties will play a role. It is likely that a bourgeois third party will emerge first, then a workers’ party. Ultimately a political expression that represents the new, dispossessed class, an abolitionist class, created by the new means of production will emerge. And because it will represent people who cannot survive except by distribution according to need, it will be a practical communist party representing a practical communist class. It’s not likely to be as clean as that; but the process is well underway, and is likely to proceed from the splintering of the major parties and the accumulation of independent forces not affiliated with parties today.

Posted in economics, Elections/Electoral, History, Labor, Labor History, My Essays. Tags: , , . Leave a Comment »

Poetry for April 10: Zapata/Huerta

April 9, 2019 — Lew Rosenbaum

Poems for April 10:  Assassination of Zapata and Birth of Huerta

One hundred years ago today, April 10, 1919, government assassins murdered Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.  Here is what Eduardo Galeano wrote about this in his epic Century of the Wind (the third volume of his Memory of Fire trilogy).  Read a review of Century of the Wind here:

1919 Cuautla

This Man Taught Them That Life Is Not Only

Fear of Suffering and Hope of Death

It had to be done by treachery.  Shamming friendship, a government officer leads emiliano-zapata-claudio-osoriohim into the trap. A thousand soldiers are waiting, a thousand rifles tumble him from his horse.

Afterward they haul him to Cuautla and exhibit him face up.

Campesinos from everywhere flock there for the silent march-past, which lasts several days. Approaching the body, they remove their sombreros, look attentively, and shake their heads.  No one believes it.  There’s a wart missing, a scar too many;  that suit isn’t his; this face swollen by so many bullets could be anybody’s.

The campesinos talk in slow whispers, peeling off words like grains of corn:

“They say he went with a compadre to Arabia.”

“Hell, Zapata doesn’t chicken out.”

  He’s been seen on Quilamula heights.”

“I know he’s sleeping in a cave in Cerro Prieto.”

“Last night his horse was drinking in the river.”

The Morelos campesinos don’t now believe, nor will they ever believe, that Emiliano Zapata could have committed the infamy of dying and leaving them all alone.

Ballad of the Death of Zapata

Little star in the night

that rides the sky like a witch,9781568584461

where is our chief Zapata

who was the scourge of the rich?

 

Little flower of the fields

and valley of Morelos,

if they ask for Zapata,

say he’s gone to try on halos.

 

Little bubbling brook,

what did that carnation say to you?

It says that our chief didn’t die.

that Zapata’s on his way to you.

(from Vicente Mendoza, El Corrido Mexicano, Mexico City, FCE, 1976]

 

***************************

Born April 10, 1930:  Dolores Huerta, a “Civil Rights icon,” a living legend and labor activist, this interview was conducted with her in 2017.

Here are the lyrics of the “Corrido de Dolores Huerta” and here is the version with Los Lobos.

En Dawson, Nuevo Mexico
El diez de abril
Nació Dolores HuertaBUSD-Teach-In-with-Dolores-Huerta-0241
Nadie se lo imaginaba
Que ella iría encabezar
Parte del gran movimiento

En Stockton, California
Donde ella se crió
Empezo a ver la injusticia
Que el campesino ha sufrido
Sin la representación
Que una unión le daría

Me acuerdo que allá en Delano
El sesenta y dos
Se asoció con César Chávez
Y entre él y la Dolores
Formularon una unión
Que llegó a cambiar las leyes
Su sentir de mujer
Dirigió por buen camino
Del mejor porvenir
Al humilde campesino
Su sentir de mujer
Le prestó a la unión la fuerza
Te has ganado la flor
De la paz, Dolores Huerta

Después que organizaron
La gente en la unión
Imponieron una huelga
Para hablar de los contratos
También para nagociar
Apuntaron a la Huerta

César Chávez les decía
“Vamos a ganar
Esta huelga sin violencia
La revolución social
Hay que ganarla con la paz
Derramar sangre no es ciencia”https---images.genius.com-ca0eb33dffb6f8ce0110898e1d2158e6.500x500x1

Y un día en Arizona
La gente decía
“Ay Dolores, no se puede!”
La Dolores les contesta
“Esto será nuestro grito
Sí se puede! Sí se puede!”
Su sentir de mujer
Dirigió por buen camino
Del mejor porvenir
Al humilde campesino
Su sentir de mujer
Le prestó a la unión la fuerza
Te has ganado la flor
De la paz, Dolores Huerta

Posted in History, Labor, Labor History, Music, Poetry. Leave a Comment »

Remember Antietam! A Civil War battle contains lessons for today

September 24, 2018 — Lew Rosenbaum

Remember Antietam!

A Civil War battle contains lessons for today

BY CHRIS MAHIN

It was the bloodiest single day of fighting ever to take place in North America. On that day, more than 2,000 men gave their lives to halt a slaveholders’ army. Within days of their sacrifice, the first step was taken to abolish slavery in the United States. The Civil

Gardner_Confederate_Dead_Antietam

Confederate soldiers lie dead on the battlefield.  “The whole landscape turned slightly red.”  Over 2,000 Union solders were killed

War’s Battle of Antietam deserves to be commemorated by all those fighting to transform society today.

In a sense, the process of abolishing unjust property relations in this country began on September 17, 1862 on a battlefield near Antietam Creek in western Maryland. Twelve hours of hard fighting by brave soldiers that day gave the Union Army a victory of sorts. That gave Abraham Lincoln the political protection he needed to begin steps that would transform the Civil War from a defensive war to save the Union into a revolutionary war to abolish slavery.

Five days after Antietam, Lincoln convened his Cabinet and announced that, if the Confederate states were still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, he would free all their slaves. Lincoln was true to his word and, on New Year’s Day in 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This executive order freed only the slaves in those states or parts of states that were in rebellion. It did not abolish slavery throughout the United States. However, it transformed the nature of the war, and unleashed a process that led inexorably to the

fullsizeoutput_382d

Abraham Lincoln recognized that Antietam gave him the rationale for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. This portrait of Lincoln was drawn by Charles White.

Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which did abolish slavery throughout the United States.

By the time of the Civil War, slavery in the United States was dominated by wealthy capitalists, most of whom owned thousands of slaves. This tiny elite represented about one percent of the population of the United States. They sold their cotton and other commodities on the world market and were an important part of the world capitalist system. Since the average price of a slave was $1,000 and there were 4 million slaves in the United States, emancipation removed $4 billion in value from the hands of capitalists.

At its time, the abolition of slavery in the United States was the greatest blow to a form of capitalist private property which had ever taken place in history. (That remained true until the Soviet Revolution of 1917.)

So, in a sense, the process of abolishing unjust property relations in this country began on the Antietam battlefield. The stage for the battle was set in early September 1862. Emboldened by several recent victories, General Robert E. Lee moved the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia into Maryland, a slave state that had remained in the Union. A major Confederate victory inside Union territory would strengthen pro-Confederate sentiment in the North right before the fall 1862 Congressional elections. It might also convince some European powers to intervene in the war on the side of the Confederacy.

Lee believed that the commander of the Union’s Army of the Potomac – General George B. McClellan – was cautious to the point of cowardice. Lee also thought that McClellan’s army would be demoralized from recent defeats. As historian Stephen W. Sears has pointed out, these assessments were “only half right.”

McClellan was a supporter of slavery who constantly made excuses for why he would not

McClellan

General George McClellan: his conduct fully justified Lee’s contempt for him.

fight the Confederate Army. At the Battle of Antietam, McClellan’s conduct fully justified Lee’s contempt for him. McClellan had learned Lee’s plans and had more troops at his disposal than Lee did. Still, he refused to move decisively against Lee, and allowed Lee’s army to escape after the battle.

But if McClellan violated all the principles of warfare at Antietam, the same cannot be said for his soldiers. Forced to attack in “driblets” (as one Union general put it), the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac fought bravely.

The courage of the Union troops was vividly demonstrated in the struggle to take “The Sunken Road” – a small depression at the edge of a farm. After several attacks against this strategic position failed, the task of capturing it fell to one of the Union Army’s most celebrated units – the Irish Brigade. This unit was known for marching into combat behind emerald green battle flags bearing gold shamrocks and harps. Shouting its battle cry (“Clear the way!”) in Irish, the Irish Brigade advanced across an open field. Intense enemy cannon and rifle fire “cut lanes” into its ranks. Within minutes, hundreds of its soldiers were killed or wounded. Ever since, the Sunken Road has been known as the “Bloody Lane.”

In all, 2,108 Union soldiers were killed at Antietam; 9,549 were wounded; and 753 ended up missing. The carnage that day was so terrible that – as one Union soldier put it – “the whole landscape for an instant turned slightly red.” This sacrifice saved the day for the Union; Lee was forced to retreat back into Virginia.

There are moments in history when the future of humanity rests on what a relatively

Antietam_Overview

The battlefield at Antietam

few people are willing to endure. September 17, 1862 was such a moment. The bravery of the Union soldiers that day did not end the Civil War. Lee’s army would invade Union territory again, and the war would drag on for two more long years.

The Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, the fruit of Antietam, did not guarantee equality for African Americans or a just society. Eventually, the post-Civil War Reconstruction governments would be overthrown and the South plunged into a reign of terror which rivaled slavery. But acknowledging those grim facts should not blind us to the reality that, in a sense, the fight for a new America began at Antietam. The Union victory there transformed the Civil War into a revolutionary war to abolish one specific form of capitalist private property: chattel slavery.

The finest tribute we can pay to those who died at Antietam is to finish their work. At Antietam, every soldier knew he risked his life if he drew enemy fire upon himself by picking up a flag dropped by a slain flag bearer. But battle flags in motion were absolutely necessary to signal the motion of troops, and so, time after time, a Union soldier picked up the fallen standard and raised it high again. In the Irish Brigade’s attempt to take the “Bloody Lane,” 16 of its flag bearers were shot dead, one after another. Today, “picking up the flag” means fighting to end the rule of all capitalists, just as those who served in the Union Army helped end the rule of one kind of capitalist, the slave-owning capitalist. When we fight that good fight, we pay our best homage to those who bled for freedom’s cause years ago beside a winding creek, on a day when the very landscape itself seemed to turn red.

                              

This article originally appeared in the September 1999 edition of the People’s Tribune. For more information about the People’s Tribune, go to: www.peoplestribune.org

____________________________________________________________________________

Posted in African American/Black Studies, History, Labor History, military/war, Politics. Leave a Comment »

Chris Mahin Writes: April 4, 1968 Dr. King Is Killed

April 4, 2018 — Lew Rosenbaum

[I’m glad to be able to reprint Chris Mahin’s essay, written for a labor union periodical some years ago, on this the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  For one thing, it celebrates the struggles for which he gave his life as a struggle of a class for its emancipation.  For another, how can we see the demand of the Black sanitation workers (“I Am A Man”) and not think of the contemporary “Black Lives Matter.” — LR]

50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King

April 4, 1968: Dr. King is killed defending labor’s rights

 BY CHRIS MAHIN

April 4 is one of the saddest days of the year. On that day in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While many events are held each year to honor Dr. King’s memory, too often people forget – or have never learned — why he was in Memphis that spring. Dr. King went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers – and paid for his stand with his life. That makes April 4 an important anniversary not only in African American history (and in U.S. history in general), but in the history of the labor movement as well.

On February 12, 1968, hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers went on strike. At the time, they were making less than $1 an hour and were eligible for welfare. They decided that they had had enough of poor wages, terrible working conditions, and a viciously anti-union mayor.

The workers were members of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The strike was the culmination of years of mistreatment. The workers worked 12 hours a day carrying garbage with busted, leaking pails. Some of the pails were infested with flies and maggots, and the workers had no place to wash up in the yard when they had to leave the trucks. Some of the workers had no running water when they returned home after work. The workers had no real benefits of any kind.

This dire situation came to a crisis point on Feb. 1, 1968, when the accidental activation of a packer blade in the back of a garbage truck fatally crushed workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker.

Almost 1,400 sanitation workers joined the strike. They shut the city down.

The workers and their supporters marched daily to pressure the mayor and the city Soldiers at Civil Rights Protestcouncil to recognize the sanitation unit under AFSCME Local 1733. The men wore signs which read “I AM a Man,” a slogan that was eventually recognized around the world.

Tension grew in the city as Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb called the strike illegal and threatened to hire new workers unless the strikers returned to work. On February 14, the mayor issued a back-to-work ultimatum for 7 a.m. on Feb. 15. The police escorted the few garbage trucks in operation. Negotiations broke off. The newspapers began to report that more than 10,000 tons of garbage was piling up.

It was in that tense environment that AFSCME organizers appealed to Dr. King to come to Memphis to speak to the workers. Initially, King was reluctant. He was immersed in work preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was a huge undertaking, an effort to bring poor people of all ethnicities to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 to protest poverty. But when AFSCME organizer Jesse Epps pointed out that the fight of the sanitation workers in Memphis was part of the same struggle as the Poor People’s Campaign, King agreed.

Once in Memphis, King immediately grasped the importance of what was unfolding there. On his first visit to the city, March 18, he spoke to a crowd of 17,000 people, and called for a citywide march.

On Thursday, March 28, King led a march from the Clayborn Temple, the strike’s 1522808459_maxresdefaultheadquarters. The march was interrupted by window breaking at the back of the demonstration. The police moved into the crowd, using nightsticks, Mace, tear gas – and guns. A 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was shot dead. The police arrested 280 people, and reported about 60 injuries. The state legislature authorized a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen moved in.

On Friday, March 29, some 300 sanitation workers and ministers marched peacefully and silently from Clayborn Temple to City Hall – escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three huge military trucks, and dozens of National Guardsmen with their bayonets fixed.

In the last days of March, King cancelled a planned trip to Africa and made preparations to lead a peaceful march in Memphis. Organizers working on preparations for the Poor People’s Campaign in other cities were directed to leave those cities and come to Memphis, for it was clear that the Poor People’s Campaign could not be won without winning the fight in Memphis.

On April 3, 1968, Dr. King returned to Memphis. That evening, he gave an extraordinary speech to hundreds of people at Mason Temple. The speech has gone down in history as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Anyone who reads it today will notice that it is an eloquent statement of support for the sanitation workers. (That night, King called ows_15228096861200them “thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering.”) But it is also a farewell speech, the oration of a man who knew he might not have long to live, and who was searching his soul to make sense of his life, and his place in history.

In the speech, King emphatically rejected the calls not to march again because of an injunction:

“[S]omewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right!”

At the end of his remarks he referred indirectly to the underhanded attempts by racists, the FBI, and other forces to sabotage his leadership and destroy the movement, declaring:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like everybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

martin-luther-king-jr.-moment-of-assassination-e1522619185956

The assassination at the Lorraine Motel balcony, April 4 1968

Less than 24 hours after uttering those words, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Urban rebellions broke out in more than 60 cities. In response to pressure from all over the country, the federal government sent Labor Department officials to Memphis to mediate a settlement to the strike.

 

On Tuesday, April 16, AFSCME leaders announced that an agreement had been reached.  The agreement included union recognition, better pay, and benefits. The strikers voted to accept the agreement.

It was a bittersweet end to a long battle. The strike ended in victory, but at a terrible cost, the death of one of the foremost symbols of the fight for justice in that (or any) era. AFSCME’s victory in Memphis inspired other workers in Memphis to join unions, and other employees throughout the South to join AFSCME. The Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King had been working on when he went to Memphis did take place later in the tumultuous year 1968. As King had hoped, it brought together poor people of all ethnicities to demonstrate in Washington, D.C. – African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites.

Given Dr. King’s role in the Memphis sanitation strike and the tremendous community support that the strikers received, perhaps the month of April ought to be a time to remember that not all labor leaders have an official position with a union — and that labor comes in all colors, and includes both employed and unemployed people. If we hold on to those lessons, we will honor what was won with such great sacrifice in Memphis in April 1968.

 

                                                            # # #

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in African American/Black Studies, economics, History, Labor, Labor History. Leave a Comment »

Chris Mahin writes: The Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the origins of International Women’s Day  

March 8, 2018 — Lew Rosenbaum

The Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the origins of International Women’s Day  

BY CHRIS MAHIN

 There were no fire extinguishers. Flammable materials were stored throughout the factory. The building was illuminated by open gas lighting. The ninth floor of the 10-story building had only two doors leading out. By the time the seamstresses there realized the building was on fire, one stairwell was already filling with smoke and flames. The other door had been locked, supposedly to prevent workers from stealing materials or taking breaks. The single fire escape collapsed under the weight of the many desperate people trying to use it. The elevator stopped working.

 Realizing that there was no other way to escape, some of the women broke out windows and jumped to the ground nine stories below.  Others pried open the elevator doors and tumbled down the elevator shaft. (Few survived.) The rest waited until smoke and fire defeated their desperate efforts to save themselves.

 The fire department arrived quickly, but the firefighters were unable to stop the flames. (There were no ladders available that could extend beyond the sixth floor.) The tragedy claimed 146 lives; 91 people died in the fire itself, and 54 died in the falls.

 Most of the dead were young. The average age of the victims was 21. Workers as young as 14 perished that day. Most of the victims were Jewish and Italian immigrant women.

 Every executive of the company got out alive.

 The deaths at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City on the afternoon of March 25, 1911 stunned people across the United States. The fire played an important role in changing the public’s perception of union workers and union organizers. The Women’s Trade Union League and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union led many of the protests against this tragedy, including the silent funeral march which brought together over 100,000 people.

 The tragedy also intensified the effort – which had begun before the fire – to observe March 8 each year as International Women’s Day.

 For decades before the Triangle fire, rallies, marches, and protests by women workers had taken place in early spring, often in March.

 6963695829_b33ed9e0cc_bOn March 8, 1857, the New York City police attacked and dispersed a demonstration of women garment workers protesting terrible working conditions and low wages. Two years later, again in March, those women garment workers formed their first trade union to protect themselves on the job.

 On March 8, 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City to demand shorter hours, better pay, an end to child labor – and the right to vote for women.

 In 1910, an international conference of socialist organizations was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. There, Clara Zetkin, a distinguished member of the German Socialist Party, proposed that an International Women’s Day be recognized by all the organizations present at that conference as a way to mark the strike of the garment workers in the United States. Zetkin’s proposal was greeted with unanimous approval by the conference of more than 100 women from 17 countries (including the first three women elected to the parliament of Finland.)

 The decision of the Socialist International’s meeting had an effect. One year later — in 1911 – International Women’s Day was commemorated for the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland. Over a million women and men took part in rallies. These events took place on March 19, 1911. Less than a week later, the flames poured out of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York.

 The Triangle fire spurred on those who were determined to expose the conditions facing535443654-newrose1 women workers, and gave tremendous impetus to International Women’s Day events. In speeches, newspaper articles, books, and publicity material promoting International Women’s Day events, the terrible conditions which led to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire would be cited again and again as vivid examples of the horrors women workers have to endure in an unjust economic order.

 After many decades in which people around the world commemorated March 8 as International Women’s Day, in 1978, school officials in northern California began an effort to observe Women’s History Week. This caught on. By 1987, the governors of 14 states in the United States had declared March to be Women’s History Month. That same year, the federal government also declared March to be National Women’s History Month.

 This year’s commemorations of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month are especially important because the issues which the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire brought into public view – such as the existence of sweatshops and the exploitation of immigrant workers – still exist. In fact, globalization under the control of a few billionaires has made these problems even worse for the majority of the world’s workers than they were for the workers of New York City in 1911.

 There is much we can learn from the attitude conveyed by Rose Schneiderman, a  prominent socialist and union activist, who spoke to a memorial meeting for the Triangle fire’s victims, held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911. Here are her words, directed to an audience made up largely of well-to-do members of the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization that had provided moral and financial support for some of the first protests at the Triangle factory:

schneiderman_rally “I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

 “This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

 “We have tried you, citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers, and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable, the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

 “Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

 “I can’t talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”

 Indeed, too much blood has been spilt. Today, as in 1911, it is up to our class to save itself.

Posted in Labor, Labor History, Women. Leave a Comment »

The Battle of Lawrence, 1912: Lessons for Today by Chris Mahin

January 11, 2018 — Lew Rosenbaum

The Battle of Lawrence, 1912:

Textile workers’ victory contains lessons for today

BY CHRIS MAHIN

“We want bread – and roses!”

“Bayonets cannot weave cloth!”

“Better to starve fighting than to starve working!”

More than a century ago, thousands of men, women, and children shouted those slogans – in many different languages – in the bitter cold of a Massachusetts winter.

On January 12, 1912, thousands of workers walked out of the textile mills of Lawrence, HT_020_004_min_wage_hb_160411_4x3_992Massachusetts and began a strike which lasted until March 24, 1912. At its height, the strike involved 23,000 workers.

Located in the Merrimack River Valley, about 30 miles north of Boston, Lawrence was a city of 86,000 people in 1912, and a great textile center. It outranked all other cities in the production of woolen and worsted goods. The woolen and cotton mills of the city employed over 40,000 workers – about one-half of Lawrence’s population over the age of 14.

Most of the Lawrence textile workers were unskilled. Within a one-mile radius of the mill district, there lived 25 different nationalities, speaking 50 languages. By 1912, Italians, Poles, Russians, Syrians, and Lithuanians had replaced native-born Americans and western Europeans as the predominant groups in the mills. The largest single ethnic group in the city was Italian.

At the time of the strike, 44.6 percent of the textile workers in Lawrence were women. More than 10 percent of the mill workers were under the age of 18.

Despite a heavy tariff protecting the woolen industry, the wages and living standards of textile workers had declined steadily since 1905. The introduction of a two-loom system in the woolen industry and a corresponding speed-up in the cotton industry led to lay-offs, unemployment, and wage reductions. A federal government report showed that for a week in late November 1911, some 22,000 textile employees, including foremen, supervisors, and office workers, averaged about $8.76 for a full week’s work. This wage was totally inadequate, despite the fact that the average work week was 56 hours, and 21.6 percent of the workers worked more hours than that.

To make things worse, the cost of living was higher in Lawrence than in the rest of New Lawrence-kids-1912England. The city was also one of the most congested in the United States, with many workers crowded into foul tenements.

The daily diet of most of the mill workers consisted of bread, molasses, and beans. Serving meat with a meal was very rare, often reserved for holidays. The inevitable result of all this was an unhealthy work force. Dr. Elizabeth Shapleigh, a Lawrence physician, wrote: “A considerable number of the boys and girls die within the first two or three years after beginning work. … [T]hirty-six out of every 100 of all the men and women who work in the mill die before or by the time they are 25.”

The immediate cause of the strike was a cut in pay for all workers which took place after a new state law went into effect on January 1, 1912. The law reduced the number of hours that women and children could work from 56 to 54. The mill owners simply sped up the machines to guarantee they would get the same amount of production as before, and then cut the workers’ hours and wages.

On Thursday, January 11, 1912, some 1,750 weavers left their looms in the Everett Cotton Mill when they learned that they had received less money. They were joined by 100 spinners from the Arlington Mills. When the Italian workers of the Washington Mill left their jobs on the morning of Friday, January 12, the Battle of Lawrence was in full swing. By Saturday night, January 13, some 20,000 textile workers had left their machines. By Monday night, January 15, Lawrence had been transformed into an armed camp, with the police and militia guarding the mills through the night.

The Lawrence strike began as a spontaneous outburst, but the strikers quickly realized that they needed to organize themselves. At a mass meeting held on the afternoon of the strike’s first day, they voted to send a telegram to Joe Ettor, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, asking him to come to Lawrence to aid the strike. Ettor arrived in 1912_Lawrence_Textile_Strike_2Lawrence the very next day, accompanied by his friend Arturo Giovannitti, the editor of “Il Proletario” and secretary of the Italian Socialist Federation.

Although only 27 years old, Joseph J. (“Smiling Joe”) Ettor was an experienced, militant leader of the IWW. He had worked with Western miners and migrant workers, and with the immigrant workers of the Eastern steel mills and shoe factories. Ettor could speak English, Italian, and Polish fluently, and could understand Hungarian and Yiddish.

Under Ettor’s leadership, the strikers set up a highly structured but democratic form of organization in which every nationality of worker involved in the strike was represented. This structure played a decisive role in guaranteeing the strike’s outcome. A general strike committee was organized and a network of soup kitchens and food distribution stations were set up. The strikers voted to demand a 15 percent increase in wages, a 54-hour week, double time for overtime, and the abolition of the premium and bonus systems.

Despite the fact that the city and state authorities imposed a virtual state of martial law on Lawrence, the strikers remained undaunted. They pioneered innovative tactics, such as moving picket lines (in which thousands of workers marched through the mill district in an endless chain with signs or armbands reading “Don’t be a scab!”); mass marches on sidewalks; and sending thousands of people to browse in stores without buying anything. They organized numerous parades to keep their own spirits up and keep their cause in the public eye.

The agents of the mill owners struck back. When the police and militia tried to halt a parade of about 1,000 strikers on January 29, a bystander, Annie LoPezzo, was shot dead. Ettor_and_G_postcard_001
Despite the fact that neither Ettor nor Giovannitti had been present at the demonstration, they were both arrested the next day. They were charged with being accessories before the fact to the murder because they had supposedly incited the “riot” which led to the shooting. That same day, an 18-year-old Syrian striker, John Ramy, was killed by a bayonet thrust into his back as he attempted to flee from advancing soldiers.

In early February, the strikers began sending their children out of the city to live temporarily with strike supporters. The city authorities vowed to stop this practice, and on February 24, a group of mothers and their children were clubbed and beaten at the train station by cops. This act horrified the country, and swung the general public over to the side of the strikers.

Concerned that the growing outrage over the conditions in Lawrence might lead to public support for lowering the woolen tariff, the mill owners began to look for a way to end the strike. First the largest employer, the American Woolen Company, came to an agreement. Then the others followed. The workers won most of their demands. By March 24, the strike was officially declared over and the general strike committee disbanded. It was a tremendous victory – but not the end of the battle.

On September 30, 1912, the murder trial of Ettor and Giovannitti began. It lasted 58 days. The defendants were kept in metal cages in the courtroom while the trial was in session. The prosecution accused Ettor and Giovannitti of inciting the strikers to violence and murder. Witnesses proved that the two were speaking to a meeting of workers several miles from the place where Annie LoPezzo was shot. Across the United States and the world, concerned people expressed outrage at the prosecution’s attempt to punish two leaders for their ideas.

Before the end of the trial, Ettor and Giovannitti asked for permission to address the court. Ettor challenged the jurors, declaring that if they were going to sentence Giovannitti and himself to death, the verdict should find them guilty of their real offense – their beliefs.

He said:

“What are my social views? I may be wrong but I contend that all the wealth in this country is the product of labor and that it belongs to labor. My views are the same as Giovannitti’s. We will give all that there is in us that the workers may organize and in due time emancipate themselves, that the mills and workshops may become their property and for their benefit. If we are set at liberty these shall be our views. If you believe that we should not go out, and that view will place the responsibility full upon us, I ask you one favor, that Ettor and Giovannitti because of their ideas became murderers, and that in your verdict you will say plainly, we shall die for it. … I neither offer apology nor ask for a favor. I ask for justice.”

Giovannitti made an impassioned speech to the jury, the first time he had ever spoken publicly in English. His eloquence drew tears from the most jaded reporters present.

On November 25, the jury found the defendants not guilty. Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom.

There is something especially poignant about the Battle of Lawrence – and something especially important about learning its lessons. The Lawrence textile strike took place at a time when the mill owners lacked maneuvering room because they had to maintain public support for a high tariff on woolens. That was certainly a factor in the workers’ victory. So was the fact that the textile workers comprised such a large percentage of the population of Lawrence. But those factors do not change the reality that the victory at Lawrence was won by the bravery and intelligence of the workers themselves.

The victory at Lawrence disproved the vicious lie being circulated at the time by the leaders of the American Federation of Labor that immigrant workers could not be organized. It showed that immigrant workers and women workers would not only support strikes – if given the chance, they would gladly lead them, and lead them well. The strikers in Lawrence won their demands because they never let themselves be divided on ethnic or gender lines, because they were militant (and creative) in their tactics, and because they found a way to appeal to the conscience of the general public.

One other feature of the Battle of Lawrence made it especially significant. It’s summed up in the famous slogan of the strike – “We want bread – and roses!” The textile workers who braved the Massachusetts winter in 1912 wanted more than a wage increase. They were inspired by a vision of a new society, one where the workers themselves ruled. In this society, every human being would have “bread” – a decent standard of living. They would also have “roses” – the chance to learn, to have access to art, music, and culture; a society which would allow the flowering of everyone’s talents, the full development of every human being.

On this anniversary of the Lawrence textile strike, we should take courage from the bravery of the strikers, learn from their clever tactics, and dare to think as far ahead as they did. The Lawrence strikers believed deeply in the idea expressed so well in one of the verses in the labor song “Solidarity Forever.” That verse confidently proclaims, “We can build a new world from the ashes of the old.” Despite all the misery we see in the present, a new world is possible. The cynics of today are as wrong to deny the possibility of qualitative change as the AFL leaders in 1912 were to deny the possibility of organizing immigrant workers. If all of us act with as much foresight and courage as did those who fought so well in Lawrence in 1912, the vision of those strikers can become reality, and we can win a world with both bread and roses for everyone.

 

 

 

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The First National Hunger March confronts the U.S. Congress by Chris Mahin

December 1, 2017 — Lew Rosenbaum

 

The First National Hunger March confronts the U.S. Congress

In 1931, the unemployed sang “The Internationale”  on the steps of the U.S. Capitol

 

BY CHRIS MAHIN

They traveled in automobiles so dilapidated they were nicknamed “tin lizzies.” They had only gunny sacks and blankets to protect them from the extreme cold. There were 1,670 of them, but each was a delegate representing many others. They had come to confront

Hunger March Tin-Lizzy

Tin Lizzy

the U.S. Congress, to insist that it give aid, not charity, to the unemployed.

December marks the anniversary of the First National Hunger March, which arrived in Washington, D.C. on December 6, 1931, and marched to the U.S. Capitol and the White House the next day.

When the Great Depression began, there was no such thing as unemployment compensation or welfare. What little help the poor received, they obtained from private charities, mainly religious ones. Employers took advantage of workers’ desperation to slash wages – sometimes as much as 10-20 percent. A wave of evictions took place.

The call for the march demanded: (1) unemployment insurance; (2) the seven-hour workday with no cut in pay; (3) a federal work program paying union wages; (4) an end to racial discrimination, and an end to deportations of immigrant workers; (5) support
for the demands of the veterans and poor farmers; and (6) that all funds being built up for making war be used instead to help the unemployed – and be administered by the Unemployed Councils.

Hunger March Detroit

1923 Ford Hunger March Detroit

The National Hunger March was carefully organized. The first step was a series of actions at the state level. In April 1931, five columns of unemployed marchers started out from different points in Ohio. They met in Columbus. Despite a heavy rain, 3,000 people came out to greet them. During the last week in May, four columns of marchers started out from different parts of Michigan. As they marched, large gatherings of workers greeted the contingents in Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Pontiac, Wayland, and Detroit. Some 15,000 people were present when the columns met in Lansing, the state capital. These protests were followed by hunger marches in at least 40 other cities.

While the state-level marches were meticulously organized, the national march to Washington was planned with military precision. The caravan was not a mass procession of the jobless; it was strictly limited in size.

Here is how historian Franklin Folsom described the huge logistical challenge facing the march’s organizers:

“Plans called for the formation of four separate columns, all of which would meet in Hunger March National ManifestoWashington on December 6 to be on hand for the opening of Congress the next day. On December 1, Column 1 was to leave Boston and Column 2 would leave Buffalo. On November 30, Column 3 would leave Chicago and Column 4 would leave St. Louis. Delegates from the West Coast would leave cities there on November 23 and would join columns in either Chicago or St. Louis. …

“It was no simple matter to get 1,670 delegates transported, fed, clothed, and sheltered – all on a strict schedule. Each delegate wore an armband reading, ‘National Hunger March, December 7, 1931.’ Each truck, which typically carried ten delegates, elected a captain, and each column of trucks elected a guiding committee and a leader. In every truck there was a map telling exactly the route to be followed, and with each column went a scout car, sometimes pushing ahead to look for difficulties and sometimes following behind to watch for breakdowns. Each column also had a medical aid squad and a mechanic.”

En route, the National Hunger March had to deal with local authorities who were often very hostile, and had to respond to a media campaign designed to discredit the march. In Hammond, Indiana, the police tried to stop a rally called to support the march, but the crowd was so large and militant that the police gave up. The New York Times claimed that the marchers would be “furnished with rifles.” This was completely untrue, and even the Secret Service felt compelled to dispute the claim.

Hunger march in picturesWhen the marchers entered Washington, there were as many cops lining the streets as there were marchers. Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley had ordered all soldiers at nearby Fort Myer to be ready for active service. Two companies of Marines had been called up. Nearly 1,000 additional Marines were brought from Virginia to the Marine barracks in Washington. Four hundred police officers were also brought in from Eastern cities to bolster the Washington, D.C. police force.

On the morning of December 7, the marchers met at John Marshall Place. On their picket signs were slogans such as: “We demand unemployment insurance equal to full wages”; “Down with charity slop; we demand cash relief”; “Milk for our children”; “We American workers refuse to starve”; “Not a cent for war — All funds for the unemployed.”

At John Marshall Place, Washington’s commissioner of police, Pelham Glassford, sped around on a bicycle, dressed in civilian clothes and smoking a long-stemmed pipe. He had deliberately laid out the longest routes for the marchers to march, to tire them out.

Two rows of policemen — about 1,000 officers in all — stood along the line of march. More than 400 additional police officers were stationed at the Capitol. There, the marchers were forced to move into a roped-off area where they were a wide distance from the thousands of people who had come to watch them. Machine guns were pointed at the marchers. The police officers present were armed with sawed-off shotguns and tear-gas guns. (One journalist reported that there were also hand grenade launchers.) An ambulance stood by.

Vice President Charles Curtis had decreed that the marchers could not enter the Capitol grounds with signs that criticized the president or Congress or that were offensive. But since the authorities had not issued any regulations about music, the marchers’ band struck up the battle song of the world’s working class, “The Internationale.” On the steps of the U.S. Capitol, the anthem’s words rang out:

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

Arise, ye wretched of the earth,

For justice thunders condemnation,

A better world’s in birth. 

The march’s organizers had wanted to send committees of delegates on to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate to present their demands, but marchers were not admitted to either the Republican-controlled Senate or the Democratic House. (In fact, on the Senate side of the Capitol, the delegates had to present their demands to the sergeant at arms while they were standing at a basement door.)

From the Capitol, the demonstrators proceeded to the White House. The White House grounds were swarming with police officers. Ambulances and patrol wagons were stationed nearby. President Hoover was inside the White House when the delegates from the Hunger March called, but he refused to see the marchers.

Unable to secure meetings with members of Congress, the hunger marchers headed home. At each place along the return route that the caravan stopped, mass meetings were held, with marchers reporting on what had happened when they tried to speak to the president and the members of Congress. While some newspapers sneeringly described the marchers’ return to their original assembly points as a “retreat,” that term was not accurate; the marchers proceeded back to their starting points exactly as planned.

Determined, militant, and impressively organized, the National Hunger March of December 1931 re-asserted the right of the American people to go en masse to the capital city to petition for change. It showed unemployed workers that they could organize themselves. It forced Depression-era America to admit that the hunger stalking the land could not be ended simply with charity. It compelled the federal authorities to face the fact that to end the massive poverty in the country, the economy was going to have to be restructured in some way.

Within a year, another Hunger March had taken place. This time, the vice president and the speaker of the House of Representatives had no choice but to meet with marchers. Later, the first Unemployment Insurance Bill was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Congressman Ernest Lundeen from Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party. Ultimately, the first system of federal Social Security, including a national unemployment compensation law, was enacted early in the New Deal administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The National Hunger March (and the preparatory marches which took place before the

Hunger Marach England

Hunger marches were an international phenomenon

main march to Washington occurred) had far-reaching effects. They helped spur on the fight not only of unemployed workers, but of employed workers as well. A state-level hunger march that took place in Pennsylvania before the national march helped inspire 40,000 miners in Pennsylvania to go on strike. Local hunger marches in Ohio stimulated efforts to organize steel workers into a union.

The Hunger March of 1931 helped pave the way for the establishment of a social contract in the United States. Today, that social contract has been torn to pieces by developments in the economy. But even as different as the world is today from what it was in 1931, there is still much to learn from the First Hunger March. The delegates and captains of that protest understood that nothing would change until people spoke up. They understood that pressure had to be put on Congress (even the part of it controlled by the Democrats). They deliberately timed their protest to coincide with the opening of a session of Congress.

The more news that comes out about Congress, the more timely the demands of the Hunger March of 1931 seem to be. That’s especially true of the demand to stop all deportations of immigrant workers, and the demand that all the money being set aside for war preparations be used instead to help the unemployed. Clearly, our predecessors in the fight against hunger were on to something!

 

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November 7 in American History — Two Articles by Chris Mahin

November 7, 2017 — Lew Rosenbaum

The legacy of Elijah Lovejoy:  Let truth ring out!

BY CHRIS MAHIN

The event shocked the conscience of American and led directly to the Civil War. Although it is barely mentioned in most schoolbooks, the murder of editor Elijah Lovejoy on November 7, 1837 is one of the most significant events in U.S. history. The life of this courageous opponent of slavery should be celebrated by all those who love freedom.

lovejoy_grangerpressElijah Lovejoy might have led an uneventful life if he had been born in a peaceful time, but his era was anything but peaceful. He lived in a moment of history marked by intense conflict between the legislative representatives of the slave states and free states. This battle for control of the Union was particularly bitter in the Midwest. In 1828, Lovejoy began to feel the effects of this “irrepressible conflict” when he moved from his native Maine, a free state, to St. Louis (located in the slave state of Missouri).

Lovejoy, the son of a minister, became a partner in a St. Louis newspaper. His early articles dealt with subjects like the evils of tobacco, whiskey, and breaking the Sabbath. However, Lovejoy’s priorities changed after he went to study for the ministry at Princeton University. There, he came under the influence of America’s leading opponent of slavery, the impassioned Boston minister William Lloyd Garrison.

Lovejoy returned to St. Louis in 1833 and became editor of the St. Louis Observer. His position was uncompromising: Slavery is a sin and should be abolished. When the newspaper’s office was destroyed by a mob, he was forced to flee across the Mississippi River to Alton, in the free state of Illinois.

When Lovejoy’s printing press arrived in Alton, the crate was tossed into the Mississippi elijah-lovejoyRiver by a mob. Although some of Lovejoy’s friends begged him to refrain from discussing slavery, he continued his agitation. Twice more, presses used to print his newspaper were destroyed. Then, on the evening of November 7, 1837, a drunken mob of 200 people attacked the office of the Alton Observer. Five slugs from a double-barreled shotgun killed Elijah Lovejoy as he tried to protect his printing press. Lovejoy’s assassins were freed by the local authorities.

The death of this 35-year-old editor and minister set off a chain of events which transformed America. Former President John Quincy Adams called Lovejoy America’s first martyr to freedom of the press. Lovejoy’s murder convinced John Brown that slavery would never be abolished by peaceful means; Brown began planning how to counter the violence of slavery with violence.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy was the kind of person who emerges when a society is in crisis. At such moments in history, individuals step forward who are capable of seeing further than the average person can. Fired with a sense of mission, these leaders are the first to feel deeply about the moral choices facing society. They sense the answer to a problem and fight to make others grasp it. They search for ways to shake the mass of people out of their complacency.

Such leaders have always seized the weapons of the printed page and the speaker’s platform and used them to win people to new ideas. Sometimes, these leaders pay a terrible price for their devotion, falling in the struggle as Elijah Lovejoy did. But their victory lies in the minds which ultimately get opened as a result of their relentless agitation. Lovejoy’s heroic death helped people understand that slavery was wrong and that it endangered the freedom not only of the slave, but also of the people of the North and West as well.

a996884e1b785944997737bc3292f9caThe abolitionists of the 19th century felt an obligation to protest the most horrific wrong of their generation. They understood that economic, social, and political issues ultimately express themselves as moral choices.

Today, this country once again finds itself in the midst of economic dislocation and social strife. Just as in the pre-Civil War era, these issues come down to moral choices.

In Lovejoy’s time, the 10,000 families that controlled the largest Southern plantations (and owned most of the slaves in the United States) completely dominated the political life of the country. That handful of people, a tiny percent of the 30 million human beings then residing in the United States, were prepared to do anything necessary to maintain their political control. (They certainly showed that by killing Lovejoy.)

Today, 1 percent of the population of the United States controls 42 percent of the wealth – and 445 billionaires own 45 percent of the world’s wealth. In the country where chattel slaves once picked cotton, welfare recipients in the “workfare” slave-labor program now pick up filthy debris from the city parks with their bare hands. As in Lovejoy’s time, the crying need of the present is for those who see further and feel deeper to step forward. Once again, it is time to shake people out of their complacency. It is time for words as uncompromising as those of Elijah Lovejoy and William Lloyd Garrison to ring out again from the speaker’s platform and leap off the pages of the revolutionary press.

History will never forget Lovejoy, the man who dared to challenge the political domination of the United States by 10,000 slaveholders. If we honor him for courageously speaking the truth that “slavery is sin” even in the slave state of Missouri, don’t we have an obligation to speak truth to power today, to challenge the political control of this society by a small class of millionaires?

This article originally appeared in the November 1997 edition of the People’s Tribune. For more information about the People’s Tribune, go to: http://www.peoplestribune.org 

 

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Deported past the Statue of Liberty:  The Palmer Raids

BY CHRIS MAHIN

We were led to a cabin. … Then came a violent lurch; we were on our way. I looked at my watch. It was 4:20 a.m. …

On the deck above us I could hear the men tramping up and down in the wintry blast. I felt dizzy, visioning a transport of politicals doomed to Siberia. … Russia of the past rose before me and I saw the revolutionary martyrs being driven into exile. But no, it was New York, it was America, the land of liberty! Through the port-hole I could see the great city receding into the distance, its sky-line of buildings traceable by their rearing heads. It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America , indeed America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up — the Statute of Liberty!

— Emma Goldman, Living My Life

It had been a year of upheavals — and of strikes.

Early in the year, a one-week general strike had swept Seattle, ignited by a strike of 35,000 shipbuilders who had begun a fight for higher wages, an 8-hour day, and a 44-hour week. That same month, in Patterson, New Jersey, 28,000 workers in the silk mills went on strike. In the fall, the police of Boston struck. In late September, 365,000 steelworkers walked off their jobs, a strike which began simultaneously in dozens of cities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and other states.

It was the year 1919 — and the rulers of this country were worried.

World War I had ended on November 11, 1918 and the result was turmoil across much of the globe. Large sections of western Europe lay in ashes. In the East, the Russian Revolution had taken place.

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A Mitchell Palmer

In 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson appointed a new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer was a Pennsylvania attorney with liberal credentials — including past support for workers’ rights and women’s suffrage — but he soon reversed his views. Alarmed at the militancy of workers around the world, Palmer came to believe that communism was “eating its way into the homes of the American workman.”

Palmer’s 24-year-old assistant J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of a new division of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the General Intelligence Division. By October 1919, Hoover’s department had collected 150,000 names in rapidly growing files.

On June 2, 1919, bombs went off in eight cities, including Washington, D.C. (where Palmer’s house was partially damaged). Responsibility for these attacks was never established, although it was alleged by some that anarchists were behind them.

palmer-raids-1918-1921-nThe bombings gave Palmer the excuse he needed. Palmer and Hoover orchestrated a series of showy and well-publicized raids against alleged radicals, using the provisions of the Espionage Act of 1919 and the Sedition Act of 1918.

Beginning on November 7, 1919, Palmer’s men smashed into union offices and the headquarters of radical organizations. In December, Palmer’s agents seized 248 resident aliens and forced them on board the Buford, a ship bound for the Soviet Union. The deportees included Emma Goldman — the union organizer, feminist, and anarchist. Among the exiled were young boys. One of them was on crutches. Another, suffering from an ulcerated stomach, had been carried from his bed in the immigration station hospital to the assembly point to board the Buford.

Later, in January 1920, Palmer and Hoover organized the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, rounding up as many as 10,000 suspected troublemakers.

It has now been 98 years since immigrant workers were forcibly ejected from the United States, imprisoned on a ship which literally sailed past the Statue of Liberty with its inscription “Give me your tired, your poor, your restless masses yearning to breathe free.” Much has changed in the years since the events which are now known as “The Palmer Raids,” but there are some eerie parallels between the “Red Scare” of 1919 and today.

In both 1919 and our time, acts of terrorism have been followed by grotesque violations of civil liberties and attacks on immigrant workers.

It’s important to remember, too, that the deportation of the passengers on the Buford buford_cartoontook place right in the midst of what was then the largest and most sustained effort to unionize the steel industry in American history — the Great Steel Strike of 1919. In 1919, half the steelworkers in the United States were immigrants — and organizing steel was the key to unionizing all of basic industry. The anti-immigrant and anti-radical campaign waged by the Wilson administration and the arrest of key union organizers by Palmer and Hoover’s flunkies were not the only reason for the failure of the 1919 steel strike — but they certainly contributed to its defeat. That loss meant that this country had to wait until the 1930s to see a successful attempt to unionize steel and organize viable industrial unions.

Given this, can anyone doubt that creating hysteria about “Reds,” “terrorists,” and immigrants hurts all of labor?

November 7, 2017 marks the 98th anniversary of the beginning of the Palmer Raids. Attached and below is an article that I wrote several years ago about the raids, updated slightly. (The article was written for a union website.) — Chris Mahin

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Chris Mahin writes: The First Labor Day Parade: “Let Labor Unite”

September 1, 2017 — Lew Rosenbaum

[In the following essay, written for a union newspaper a few years ago, Chris Mahin points out that the labor movement has always championed immigrants’ rights and has been led by immigrants.  Some among the labor movement have even challenged the wage-labor system itself]

 

SEPTEMBER 5, 1882
The First Labor Day parade: “Let Labor Unite”
By Chris Mahin |

The huge procession began with 400 members of Bricklayers Union No. 6, all dressed in white aprons. They were followed by a band and then the members of the Manufacturing Jewelers union. The jewelers marched four abreast, wearing derby hats and dark suits with buttonhole bouquets. They all carried canes resting on their shoulders (similar to the way infantry officers carry swords when on parade.)

Labor_Day_Parade_New_York_1909_Float_Womens_Auxilliary_Typographical_Union-1EXLG

1909 Labor Day Parade

As the day went on, the parade included contingents from the Manufacturing Shoemakers Union No. 1 (wearing blue badges), and an especially well-received contingent from the Big 6 – Typographical Union No. 6 – whose 700-strong delegation marched with military precision (they had practiced beforehand.) The Friendly Society of Operative Masons marched with their band. They were followed by 250 members of the Clothing Cutters Benevolent and Protective Union, the Dress and Cloak Makers Union, the Decorative Masons, and the Bureau of United Carpenters (who marched with a decorated wagon).
The parade was filled with banners: “Labor Built the Republic – Labor Shall Rule It”; “To the Workers Should Belong the Wealth”; “Down with the Competitive System”; “Down with Convict Contract Labor”; “Down with the Railroad Monopoly”; and “Children in School and Not in Factories,” among others. The members of the Socialist Singing Society carried a red flag with a yellow lyre in its center. The banner which perhaps summed up the entire procession best was carried by members of the American Machinists, Engineers, and Blacksmiths Union (who wore heavy leather aprons and working clothes). It read simply: “Let Labor Unite.”

 

first-labor-day-parade-union-square-nyc-1882

First Labor Day Parade 1882

It was the first Labor Day parade – and it took place on a Tuesday.
Labor Day became official in this country when the U.S. Congress passed a law in 1894 making the first Monday in September a legal holiday. But this holiday was not simply given to the workers of the United States by the government as some act of charity. The tradition of publicly honoring labor’s contribution to society is a custom established by the workers themselves.
The first Labor Day parade in the United States was held in New York City on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882. More than 10,000 workers marched. It was organized by the Central Labor Union, a body representing 60 unions and over 80,000 people. The CLU was a secret lodge of the Knights of Labor, the major national union of the time.
To really appreciate the September 1882 labor parade, it’s important to keep in mind the profound changes that this country had gone through in the 17 years before it took place. After the Civil War ended in 1865, the capitalists of the North emerged triumphant. They went on the offensive, bitterly opposing labor’s demands. By the time the depression of 1873 took place, any lingering unity between the different forces which had united in opposition to slavery had been torn apart.
On Saturday, July 21, 1877, 17 workers involved in a nationwide railroad strike were shot dead in Pittsburgh. The next day, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a New York Protestant minister who had been one of the most eloquent orators against slavery, preached these words:

“God had intended the great to be great and the little to be little…The trade unions, originated under the European system, destroy liberty…I do not say that a dollar a day is enough to support a man and five children if he insists on smoking and drinking beer…[b]ut the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live.”

The 1882 labor parade was the culmination of more than ten years of agitating and organizing by dedicated labor activists in New York. These activists were deeply committed to the fight for the eight-hour day and against the repressive tactics of the employers. They also worked closely with the leaders of what were at that time New York’s largest immigrant communities to assist the fight for justice in three countries: Ireland, France and Germany.
The 1882 parade took place in a city which had seen militiamen open fire on Irish-American Catholic demonstrators in 1871; where thousands demonstrated for the eight-hour day in 1872; and where three demonstrations had already taken place in 1882 to demand justice for Ireland in its fight against British rule. (All three demonstrations had been jointly sponsored by labor organizations and organizations fighting for Irish freedom.)
Because the 1882 labor parade was held on a work day, most of the participants had to give up a day’s pay in order to march. (The CLU even levied a fine on non-participants.) In all, the workers involved forfeited about $75,000 in lost wages.
The parade was scheduled to coincide with a national conference of the Knights of Labor being held in New York. This explains why almost the entire national leadership of the Knights of Labor was present on the parade’s reviewing stand in Union Square.

However, the affiliation of these leaders with the Knights of Labor was discreetly hidden from the press that day. (At the time, the Knights of Labor was still a semi-secret society.) For instance, the top leader of the Knights of Labor – “Grand Master Workman” Terence

225px-Terence_v_powderly1

Terence Powderly was Grand Master Workman of the Knights of Labor — but also Mayor of Scranton, PA

Powderly – was introduced only as the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania (which he was).
The vibrant character of the labor movement of that time can be seen by looking at three extraordinary people present on the reviewing stand at the 1882 parade:

Patrick Ford was the publisher and editor of the Irish World, a newspaper which strongly supported labor and the fight for Irish freedom. He had been brought to Boston from Ireland in 1842 at the age of seven. Ford had served his printing apprenticeship with newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison, America’s leading opponent of slavery, before the Civil War. In 1870, Ford founded the Irish World, a newspaper which was regularly suppressed when it was shipped to Ireland.
John Swinton was the chief editorial writer of the New York Sun. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, he had moved to New York in 1850 and worked as a printer and became an abolitionist. Swinton had been with John Brown when he made his famous raid on Osawatomie, Kansas in 1857. Swinton would go on to start his own pro-labor newspaper in 1883.
Carl Daniel Adolf Douai was the publisher and editor of the New Yorker Volkszeitung, a socialist German-language daily. Douai was a German immigrant who had been threatened with lynching when he spoke out against slavery while publishing in Texas. In 1860, he moved to New York where he became active in socialist, abolitionist, and Republican Party activities.

The presence of these three men on the reviewing stand – and the presence of Irish, French, and German flags (in addition to the U.S. flag) at the picnic which closed the day – illustrates the wide scope of labor’s concerns at that time. These leaders’ involvement with the parade (and the militant banners carried by the marchers) show that from its very beginning, the U.S. labor movement has been about more than just getting its members a few cents more an hour in wages. From its inception, the labor movement in this country has included both native and foreign-born leaders and immigrant workers have always played an important role in the labor movement. From the very beginning, the U.S. labor movement has included elements who have not been afraid to challenge the legitimacy of the wages system itself.
That’s definitely worth remembering this Labor Day.

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