“There was a time in the history of France when the poor found themselves oppressed to such an extent that forbearance ceased to be a virtue, and hundreds of heads tumbled into the basket. That time may have arrived with us.”
A cooper said this to a crowd of 10,000 workers in St. Louis, Missouri in July, 1877. He was referring to the Paris Commune, which happened just six years prior. Like the Parisian workers, the Saint Louis strikers openly called for the use of arms, not only to defend themselves against the violence of the militias and police who were sent to crush their strike, but for outright revolutionary aims.
The Great Upheaval was the first major worker uprising in the United States. It began in the fourth year of the Long Depression which, in many ways, was worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It lasted twenty-three years and included four separate financial panics. In 1873, over 5,000 business failed. Over one million Americans lost their jobs. In the following two years, another 13,000 businesses failed. Railroad workers’ wages dropped 40-50%. And one thousand infants were dying each week in New York City.
By 1877, workers had suffered four years of wage cuts and layoffs. In July, the B&O Railroad slashed wages by 10%, their second wage cut in eight months. On July 16, 1877, the trainmen of Martinsburg, West Virginia, refused to work. They occupied the rail yards and drove out the police. Local townspeople backed the strikers and came to their defense. The militia tried to run the trains, but the strikers derailed them and guarded the switches with guns. They halted all freight movement, but continued moving mail and passengers, to successfully maintain public support.
Today in Labor History March 30, 1856: The Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Crimean War, between Russia and the victorious Ottoman Empire (allied with the UK, France and Sardinia-Piedmont). The flashpoint was a conflict over the rights of Christian minorities in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, and control of its holy sites.
The Crimean War was one of the first to utilize modern armaments, like explosive shells, railways and telegraphs. Much of these armaments came from Alfred Nobel’s family armament factory. It was also a particularly deadly war. Around 670,000 soldiers died in only four years, the majority from preventable infectious diseases (e.g., typhus, typhoid, cholera, and dysentery), not from battle wounds. Mortality rates for soldiers were 23-31%, compared with U.S. troop mortality rates of only 2% during the Vietnam War.
In the aftermath of the Crimean War, Russia sold Alaska to the U.S. out of fear that the UK would simply take it from them in their weakened military state. The last living veteran of the Crimean war was a Greek tortoise, named Timothy, who had served as a ship’s mascot during the war. He died in 2004, nearly 150 years after the war ended. Despite their victory, the Ottomans gained no new territory, and the war nearly bankrupted them, contributing to their decline as a super power. The Crimean War also helped forge the alliances and grievances that would lead to the First World War, and quite likely to the conditions leading up to Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea and its current fight with Ukraine.
Florence Nightengale became famous as a nurse during this war. Tolstoy fought in the 11-month Siege of Sevastopol. His experiences in this war contributed to his pacifism and anarchism. After witnessing a public execution in France, one year after the Crimean War ended, he wrote, “The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.” The war also influenced his novel, “War and Peace.”
Today in Labor History March 29, 1935: French illegalist anarchist Clément Duval died. He was a major influence on other illegalist anarchists of the era, including members of the Bonnot Gang. In 1886, Duval robbed the mansion of a Parisian socialite. He was condemned to death, but his sentence was later commuted to hard labor on Devil's Island, French Guiana, setting for the novel Papillon. According to Paul Albert, "The story of Clement Duval was lifted and, shorn of all politics, turned into the bestseller Papillon." In a letter printed in the November 1886 issue of the anarchist paper Le Révolté, Duval famously declared: "Theft is but restitution carried out by an individual to his own benefit, being conscious of another's undue monopolization of collectively produced wealth."
Today in Labor History March 29, 1797: William Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin was an English journalist, philosopher and novelist. And one of the first modern proponents of anarchism. His most famous books are “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice” and “Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams,” a mystery novel that attacks aristocratic privilege. Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights, and is regarded by many as one of the founding feminist philosophers. Her most famous book was “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792). She died 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
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If you're a curious human, please consider buying a copy of my book, Sticky. It's the best thing I've ever written! 🦎
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The toughest audience isn't necessarily a drunk crowd at a comedy club or your boss when you ask for a raise. Writer and podcaster Mark Cecil reckons your kids when you're reading them a bedtime story can be absolutely merciless. "They’re just sitting right in front of you, all yours to entertain… or not. They don’t know how to pretend to like something, either. If they’re not pleased, you will know." He writes for LitHub about everything he learned about storytelling at the Bedtime University MFA, from how to construct a plot, to the two great engines of human drama.
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Today In Labor History March 26, 1850: Edward Bellamy was born. Bellamy was an American author and socialist political activist, most well-known for his utopian novel, “Looking Backward,” one of the most commercially successful books published in the 19th century. It particularly appealed to the intellectuals who were alienated by the Gilded Age greed, corruption and violence. His book inspired many to form so-called “nationalist clubs” to implement his ideas of a society free of private property, social classes, war, poverty, crime, lawyers, politicians, prostitution, merchants, soldiers, and taxes. Plus, everyone could retire by the age of 45. He died at the age of 48 from tuberculosis.
Today In Labor History March 26, 2000: British anarchist Alex Comfort died. Comfort was a scientist and a writer. His most well-known work was the nonfiction sex manual, “The Joy of Sex.”
Today In Labor History March 26, 1918: American anarchist Philip Grosser wrote about being tortured in the prison on Alcatraz Island, while serving time there for refusing to serve in World War I. By 1920, he was the only draft resistor still serving time at Alcatraz. Alexander Berkman referred to him as "one of [my] finest comrades."
Today in Labor History March 25, 1931: The authorities arrested the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama and charged them with rape. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American youths, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused of raping two white women. A lynch mob tried to murder them before they had even been indicted. All-white juries convicted each of them. Several judges gave death sentences, a common practice in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women. The Communist Party and the NAACP fought to get the cases appealed and retried. Finally, after numerous retrials and years in harsh prisons, four of the Scottsboro Boys were acquitted and released. The other five were got sentences ranging from 75 years to death. All were released or escaped by 1946. Poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote it in his work Scottsboro Limited. And Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son was influenced by the case.
Today in Labor History March 25, 1811: Oxford University expelled Percy Bysshe Shelley for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley was an English Romantic poet, radical in both his art and his politics. His poem "The Mask of Anarchy," which he wrote in 1819 after the Peterloo Massacre, is one of the first modern descriptions of nonviolent resistance. His admirers included Karl Marx, Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw. He was married to Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein.”
I like to keep my stories grounded in real life….for the most part. My books can be considered “plausible reality.” The stories are certainly fiction, but I hope you as a reader can go “hmph, yea I could see that happening.” #writingcommunity#writinglife#author#authorsofmastodon@bookstodon#amwriting
Today in Labor History March 22, 1886: Mark Twain, who was a lifelong member of the International Typographical Union, gave a speech entitled, “Knights of Labor: The New Dynasty.” In the speech, he commended the Knights’ commitment to fair treatment of all workers, regardless of race or gender. “When all the bricklayers, and all the machinists, and all the miners, and blacksmiths, and printers, and stevedores, and housepainters, and brakemen, and engineers . . . and factory hands, and all the shop girls, and all the sewing machine women, and all the telegraph operators, in a word, all the myriads of toilers in whom is slumbering the reality of that thing which you call Power, ...when these rise, call the vast spectacle by any deluding name that will please your ear, but the fact remains that a Nation has risen.”
Lately I’m finding myself creating 1 or 2 great chapters in my outline for my next book. It’s those other chapters bringing everything together that I’m still working on. At the same time I’m also finding myself adding more details to the great chapters. I guess my overthinking is why it takes so long for me to release books. #writingcommunity#authorsofmastodon#author#amwriting@bookstodon
Today in Labor History March 19, 1742: Tupac Amaru was born. Tupac Amaru II had led a large Andean uprising against the Spanish. As a result, he became a mythical figure in the Peruvian struggle for independence and in the indigenous rights movement. The Tupamaros revolutionary movement in Uruguay (1960s-1970s) took their name from him. As did the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary guerrilla group, in Peru, and the Venezuelan Marxist political party Tupamaro. American rapper, Tupac Amaru Shakur, was also named after him. Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, wrote a poem called “Tupac Amaru (1781).” And Clive Cussler’s book, “Inca Gold,” has a villain who claims to be descended from the revolutionary leader.
Today in Labor History March 18, 1918: U.S. authorities arrested Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón under the Espionage Act. They charged him with hindering the American war effort and imprisoned him at Leavenworth, where he died under highly suspicious circumstances. The authorities claimed he died of a "heart attack," but Chicano inmates rioted after his death and killed the prison guard who they believed executed him. Magon published the periodical “Regeneracion” with his brother Jesus, and with Licenciado Antonio Horcasitas. The Magonostas later led a revolution in Baja California during the Mexican Revolution. Many American members of the IWW participated. During the uprising, they conquered and held Tijuana for several days. Lowell Blaisdell writes about it in his now hard to find book, “The Desert Revolution,” (1962). Dos Passos references in his “USA Trilogy.”