Today In Labor History June 29, 1906: US Congress renewed the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act, which amended previous immigration law by adding four new inadmissible classes: anarchists, people with epilepsy, beggars, and importers of prostitutes.
Today In Labor History June 29, 1941: Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998), founder of the U.S. civil rights group the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was a key figure in the Black Power movement, becoming honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party and, later, as the leader of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. The FBI attempted to destroy him through COINTELLPRO, and succeeded in convincing Huey Newton that he was a CIA agent. This, and the Panthers’ embracing of white activists into their movement, led him to distance himself from the Panthers. In 1968, he married the famous South African singer Miriam Makeba and moved to Africa, changing his name to Kwame Ture and campaigning internationally for revolutionary socialist pan-Africanism.
Today In Labor History June 29, 1936: Jesus Pallares, founder of the 8,000-member coal miners’ union, La Liga Obrera de Habla Espanola, was deported from the U.S. as an "undesirable alien." During the 1934 La Liga strike against the Gallup American Copper Company, in New Mexico, the governor declared martial law & used the National Guard to close off the town for 5 months. White supremacists and proto-fascist groups led the fight to halt economic relief to the striking Mexican miners. When a union organizer was arrested for leading an anti-eviction action, someone shot at the courthouse, killing the sheriff. This led to the arrest and deportation of 100 Mexican miners.
Today in Labor History June 28, 1956: 100,000 workers struck in Poznañ, Poland, shouting "Bread & Freedom.” The protests were violently suppressed, with at least 67 workers killed. The government sent in tanks and 10,000 soldiers. The next day, another 70 would be killed, 700 would be arrested, and hundreds more would be wounded. Several months later, anti-government protests would break out in Hungary, during its Revolution. The Soviets sent in tanks to suppress that uprising, killing thousands. And from these events came the term “tankie” to refer to hardline communists who continued to support (or not criticize) these authoritarian governments and their repressive actions against their workers.
Today in Labor History June 28, 1969: The Stonewall Uprising began after an early morning police raid of the Stonewall Inn, in New York. Initially led by trans women, lesbians and gay street kids, the riot grew into several days of street battles with the cops with thousands of LGBTQ people participating. At one point, when the riot squad tried to clear the streets, the crowd formed kick lines and sang: We are the Stonewall girls/We wear our hair in curls/We don't wear underwear/We show our pubic hair. In the days that followed, residents of Greenwich Village and members of the LGBTQ community began demanding the right to live openly, regardless of their sexual orientation, and without fear of being arrested. The next year, to commemorate the uprising, the first Pride Parades were held in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Today in Labor History June 27, 1905: The mutiny on the Russian battleship Potemkin began. Tensions were already high because of recent loses in the Russo-Japanese war and the presence. Furthermore, the crew was made up of recent recruits and the officers were relatively inexperienced. The mutiny began when sailors refused to eat the borscht that was served to them because of the meat was crawling with maggots. The ship’s 2nd in command threatened to shoot the men if they didn’t eat it. When he did shoot one of the mutineers, the crew attacked him and other officers, promptly killing nearly half the officers on board. They then decided to sail to Odessa to join the General Strike that was going on there. After that, they escaped to Romania where they obtained political asylum. The mutiny is considered an important step toward the Russian Revolution. It was depicted in Serge Eisenstein’s classic film, “The Battleship Potemkin.”
Today in Labor History June 27, 1905: The Industrial Workers of the World (AKA IWW or the Wobblies) was founded at Brand's Hall, in Chicago, Illinois. The IWW was a radical syndicalist labor union, that advocated industrial unionism, with all workers in a particular industry organized in the same union, as opposed by the trade unions typical today. Founding members included Big Bill Haywood, James Connolly, Eugene V. Debs, Lucy Parsons, and Mother Jones. The IWW was and is a revolutionary union that sought not only better working conditions in the here and now, but the complete abolition of capitalism. The preamble to their constitution states: The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. It also states: Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
They advocate the General Strike and sabotage as two of many means to these ends. However, sabotage to the Wobblies does not necessarily mean bombs and destruction. According to Big Bill Haywood, sabotage is any action that gums up the works, slowing down profits for the bosses. Thus, working to rule and sit-down strikes are forms of sabotage. The IWW is the first union known to have utilized the sit-down strike. They were one of the first and only unions of the early 20th century to organize all workers, regardless of ethnicity, gender, nationality, language or type of work (e.g., they organized both skilled and unskilled workers). They also were subjected to extreme persecution by the state and by vigilantes working for the corporations. Hundreds were imprisoned or deported. Dozens were assassinated or executed, including Joe Hill, Frank Little, Wessley Everest and Carlo Tresca. And scores were slaughtered in massacres, like in McKees Rock railway strike, PA (1909); Lawrence Textile Strike, MA (1912); San Diego Free Speech Fight, CA (1912); Grabow, LA Lumber Strike (1912); New Orleans, LA banana strike (1913); Patterson, NJ textile strike (1913); Mesabi Range Strike, MN (1916); Everett, WA massacre (1916); Centralia, WA Armistice Day riot (1919) and the Columbine, CO massacre (1921). There was also the Hopland, CA riot (1913), in which the police killed each other, accidentally, and framed Wobblies for it.
There are lots of great books about the IWW artwork and music. The Little Red Songbook. The IWW, Its First 50 Years, by Fred Thompson. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology, by Joyce Kornbluth. But there are also tons of fictional accounts of the Wobblies, too. Lots of references in Dos Passos’, USA Trilogy. Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, was influenced by his experience working as a Pinkerton infiltrator of the Wobblies. The recent novel, The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter, has a wonderful portrayal of Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, during the Spokane free speech fight. And tons of classic folk and protest music composed by Wobbly Bards, like Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin, Haywire Mac and T-Bone Slim.
Today in Labor History June 27, 1880: Helen Keller was born (1880-1968) in Tuscumbia, Alabama. In addition to being an early advocate for disability rights, she was also a radical socialist for women’s suffrage and birth control, the rights of workers and world peace. She supported the NAACP and was a founding member of the ACLU. She also joined the IWW and wrote for them from 1916-1918. In 1933, the Nazi Youth burned her book, “How I Became Socialist.” However, like many people of her era, from both the right and the left, she supported the eugenics movement and once claimed that the lives of infants with severe cognitive impairments were not worth saving. She published 12 books. Her most famous was her autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” (1903).
Today in Labor History June 27, 1869: Anarchist, feminist and labor activist Emma Goldman was born in Lithuania. She helped plot the assassination of steel magnate, Henry Clay Frick, with her lover and comrade Alexander Berkman. Frick was fiercely anti-union and hired hundreds of Pinkertons to suppress the Homestead steel strike in 1892. In a gun battle, the Pinkertons killed nine strikers. Seven Pinkertons died, as well. Later that year, Berkman carried out the assassination attempt, but failed, and spent many years in prison. It was supposed to be an attentat, or propaganda by the deed. Like many anarchists of that era, they believed that their violent action would inspire working people around the world to rise up against capitalism and its leaders, like Frick. After that, Goldman publicly spoke out against attentats, because they weren’t inspiring the masses into action, but they were increasing state repression against their movement.
The state did imprison Goldman numerous times for other offenses, like “inciting to riot,” war resistance, and illegally distributing information about birth control. They even arrested her in 1901, in connection with the assassination of President McKinley, though she had nothing to do with it. They eventually released her and executed a mentally ill, registered Republican named Leon Czolgosz for the crime. In December, 1919, they deported her and Berkman to Russia. She had initially been supportive of the Bolshevik revolution and was excited to be there to witness its fruits, but denounced them after the massacre of more than a thousand sailors during the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. Soon after, she and Berkman left Russia, completely disillusioned. However, in Germany and England, leftists were offended by her denunciations of the Soviet Union. Berkman died in 1936. That same year, she travelled to Spain to support the anarchists during the Civil War. She died a few years later in Toronto, at the age of 70.
Today in Labor History June 26, 1975: Two FBI agents and one member of the American Indian Movement (AIM) were killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Undercover FBI agents framed AIM activist Leonard Peltier for the two FBI deaths. During the trial, some of the government’s own witnesses testified that Peltier wasn’t even present at the scene of the killings. Nevertheless, a judge him to two consecutive life terms. Peltier is still in prison and his health has been deteriorating. Peltier admitted to participating in the shoot-out in his memoir, “Prison Writings, My Life in the Sundance.” However, he denied killing the FBI agents. He became eligible for parole in 1993. Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama, all campaigned for his clemency. President Obama denied his request for clemency in 2017.
Today in Labor History June 26, 1894: The American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene Debs, called a nationwide boycott in solidarity with their striking members at Pullman, Illinois. The Pullman Railroad Strike began as a wildcat strike in Chicago, when 4,000 railway workers walked off the job. It quickly escalated into the largest industrial strike the U.S. had ever seen, with 260,000 workers participating. Most of the workers lived in the company town of Pullman, just south of Chicago. When George Pullman slashed wages and jobs, he didn’t lower rents. Consequently, the workers called a strike. In addition to fighting for increased wages and union representation, they also wanted democracy in the autocratic company town. When the strike started, the Pullman workers were not yet organized in a union. However, Eugene Debs, who created the ARU in 1893, came in to organize the men and they quickly signed up. He called a boycott which halted much of the rail transport west of the Mississippi. Worker sabotage caused $80 million in damages. The government sent in federal troops to suppress the strike, killing at least 30 strikers. They also arrested Debs for conspiracy to block U.S. mail. Clarence Darrow defended him. However, he still got six months in prison. Debs would go on to cofound the IWW, in 1905, along with Lucy Parsons, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, James Connolly, and others.
Today in Labor History June 25, 1893: The Haymarket Martyrs Monument was dedicated at Forest Home Cemetery, Chicago, to honor the anarchists who were framed and executed for the bombing at Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886. More than 8,000 people attended. Unions from around the world sent flowers to be laid at the base of the monument, where there is a plaque containing the last words of Haymarket martyr August Spies: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” The Haymarket anarchists had been organizing for the Eight Hour Day. The monument was erected by the Pioneer Aid & Support Association, an organization created by African-American anarchist and IWW cofounder Lucy Parsons, widow of Albert Parsons, another of the Haymarket martyrs. In 1997, the monument was designated a National Historic Landmark—a hypocritical whitewashing considering that the U.S. is one of only 2 countries in the world that does not recognize May 1 as International Workers’ Day, in honor of the Haymarket martyrs, and that it created Labor Day in an attempt to suppress the more radical May 1 commemorations.
Today in Labor History June 25, 1878: Despite mass protests, Ezra Heywood was sentenced to two years hard labor for advocating free love and sexual emancipation as part of women's rights. President Hayes pardoned him after 6 months because of mass protests. He was arrested 4 more times and died of tuberculosis soon after his final release from prison. Heywood was an individualist anarchist, feminist and abolitionist who was hounded and harassed by the moralist vigilante Anthony Comstock. His wife, Angela, was considered by many to be even more radical than he was. Together, they published the Word, in which they regularly wrote about socialism, labor reform, free love, sexuality, birth control, and women’s rights.
Today in Writing History June 24, 1842: Ambrose Bierce, American short story writer, essayist, and journalist was born. The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration named his book, “The Devil’s Dictionary,” one of the top 100 masterpieces of American literature. Many consider his horror writing on par with Poe and Lovecraft. As a satirist, he has been compared with Voltaire and Swift. His war stories influenced Hemingway. In 1913, at age 71, he traveled to Mexico to cover the revolution. He joined Pancho Villa’s army and witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca. He never returned from Mexico. No one knows what happened to him and his body was never found. However, a priest named James Lienert, claimed that Bierce was executed by firing squad in the town cemetery there.
Today in Labor History June 24, 1943: Otto Rühle (1874-1943), German Left communist of the Spartacist League, died in Mexico. Early in his life, Rühle trained and worked a school teacher. He created a socialist Sunday school and criticized traditional school in "Work and Education" (1904), "The Enlightenment of Children About Sexual Matters", (1907), and, "The Proletarian Child" (1911). In 1912, he was elected to the Reichstag as a Social Democrat.
However, he is much more well known for his role as a leader of the Council Communist movement, along with Anton Pannekoek. They opposed the state communism of the Soviet Union and advocated for Workers Councils and Council Democracy. Lenin attacked them in his pamphlet, “Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.” Rühle was also a comrade of Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Franz Mehring and very active in the German Revolution. He opposed both World Wars and fascism.
Today in Labor History June 24, 1904: Troops arrested 22 workers in Telluride, Colorado. They accused them of being strike leaders and deported them out of the Telluride district. This was a repeat of events in March, in which they deported 60 union miners. And all of it was part of the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903-1904. The strikes were led by the Western Federation of Labor (WFM) and heavily suppressed by Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts detectives, local cops and militias. Some scholars have claimed said that "There is no episode in American labor history in which violence was as systematically used by employers as in the Colorado labor war of 1903 and 1904."
One of the strike leaders was Big Bill Haywood, who would go on to cofound the even more radical IWW in 1905. Pinkerton agent James McParland tried (and failed) to frame Haywood for the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905. The Pinkerton agency in Colorado at this time was run by James McParland, who had served as an agent provocateur and the sole witness against the 20 innocent Irish coalminers who were executed as Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in the 1870s. (That story is depicted in my novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill.”) McParlan placed numerous spies and agents provocateur within the WFM to sabotage and undermine their organizing.
Today in Labor History June 24, 1525: The Church reconquered the Anabaptist free state of Munster. The Anabaptists had created a sectarian, communal government in Munster, Germany, during the Reformation. They controlled the city from February until June 24, 1525. They were heavily persecuted for their beliefs, which included opposition to participation in the military and civil government. They saw themselves as citizens of the Kingdom of God, and not citizens of any political state. Their beliefs helped radicalize people during Germany’s Peasant War, a revolt against feudalism and for material equality among all people. Some of the early Anabaptists practiced polygamy and polyamory, as well as the collective ownership of property. The more conservative decedents of the Anabaptists include the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites.
The Munster rebellion has been portrayed in several works of fiction. My all-time favorite is “Q,” (1999) by the autonomist-Marxist Italian writing collective known as Luther Blissett. They currently write under the pen name Wu Ming. Giacomo Meyerbeer wrote an opera about it 1849, Le prophète.
Today in Labor History June 23, 1611: Henry Hudson’s crew mutinied and set him adrift in the Hudson Bay. He was never seen or heard from again. He was trying to find the fabled Northwest Passage through the arctic circle to China. Conditions were terrible. It was freezing. They were running out of food and supplies. The crew wanted to return home. Hudson wanted to keep going, seeking something no one was sure actually existed. It was a classic example of workers, fed up with being treated poorly & risking their lives for a demanding boss, rising up against him. They saved their lives in the process, but were arrested upon their return to England.
Today in Labor History June 23, 1848: Workers rose up in Paris. The rebellion lasted until the 26th. They were rebelling against plans to close the National Workshops created by the Second Republic to provide work and income for the unemployed. The National Guard killed up to 10,000 people. They deported another 4,000 to Algeria. This was after the Revolution of February, 1848, which overthrew King Louis Philippe and established the Second Republic.
Today in Labor History June 23, 1972: Title IX of the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to prohibit sexual discrimination to any educational program receiving federal funds. As a result, there has been a huge increase in girls’ athletic programs in high schools and colleges and, consequently, professional women athletes. It is probably one of the reasons why the U.S. has been able to produce so many top-level women soccer players and dominate women’s soccer for the past 20 years. In 2022, after filing a claim for equal pay, the U.S. women’s national soccer team won equal pay to the men. The World Surf League has been providing equal pay to athletes, regardless of gender, for five years now. Title IX also prohibits banning transgender athletes from competing in school sports, although this has been repeatedly violated in many states, with support of the courts.
Today in Labor History June 23, 1947: The anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act was passed, overriding President Harry Truman’s veto. It came on the heels of the largest strike wave in U.S. history. When World War Two ended, inflation soared and veterans flooded the labor market. As a result, frustrated workers began a series of wildcat strikes. Many grew into national, union-supported strikes. In November 1945, 225,000 UAW members went on strike. In January 1946, 174,000 electric workers struck. That same month, 750,000 steel workers joined them. Then, in April, a national coal strike began. 250,000 railroad workers struck in May. In total, 4.3 million workers went on strike. It was the closest the U.S. came to a national General Strike in the 20th century. And in December 1946, Oakland, California did have a General Strike, led by women retail workers. It was the last in U.S. history, and the action the most prompted Congress to take action on behalf of their corporate bosses.
Taft-Hartley rolled back many of the labor protections created by the 1935 Wagner Act. It weakened unions in numerous ways, including the banning of the General Strike, and all forms of protest in support of workers at other companies, effectively prohibiting solidarity actions. It also allowed states to exempt themselves from union requirements. Twenty states immediately enacted anti-union open shop laws. There hasn’t been a General Strike in the U.S. since then.
Today in Labor History June 22, 1922: After guards shot and killed 3 striking miners at the Southern Illinois Coal Company, hundreds of union miners laid siege to the mine, using hammers, shovels and dynamite to wreck equipment and keep the strikebreakers pinned down inside coal cars and behind barricades. After the scabs, guards and superintendent surrendered, the strikers marched them into Herrin, five miles away. Along the way, they encountered a mob of angry miners. One of them shouted, "The only way to free the county of strikebreakers is to kill them all off and stop the breed!" Another said, “We must show the world this ain’t West Virginia,” referring to the Battle of Blair Mountain, nine months prior, in which up to 100 miners were killed in the largest armed domestic conflict since the Civil War. Then the mob grew angrier, striking the scabs with rifle butts, eventually telling them to run for their lives, shooting them as they ran. In total, they killed 19 scabs and the superintendent. Several strikers were eventually arrested and held in the Williamson County jail, which is now a historical museum focusing on the conflict. At the initial inquest, the coroner concluded that the deaths were “due to the acts direct and indirect of the officials of the Southern Illinois Coal Company." Those who were tried for the murders were all acquitted. None of the miners were ever convicted.
Today in Labor History June 22, 1914: Anarchists, intending to bomb the Rockefeller Mansion, accidentally blew up the Ferrer Center for anarchist education, killing three anarchists and putting a temporary end to the Modern School. They had been seeking revenge against Rockefeller’s Standard Oil for the Ludlow Massacre (4/20/1914), in which Colorado National Guards and private cops, hired by Rockefeller, attacked a tent colony of 1,200 miners and their families, killing 21, including women and children. The private cops were from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, same ones involved in the Matewan Massacre in West Virginia. From September 1913 through end of May, 1914, up to 200 people had died in the Colorado Coalfield War, including 37 cops, soldiers and private detectives fighting for the coal companies, making it one of the deadliest strikes in U.S. history.
Today in Labor History June 21, 1982: John Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the attempted assassination of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1981. A Few years later (1990), Reagan was found not guilty by reason of dementia, when he said “I don’t recall,” 88 times during the Iran-Contra hearings, a rate of more than 10 per hour. (In 1994, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s). Hinkley said he tried to assassinate Reagan to impress actress Jody Foster, who had played Iris, a twelve-year-old prostitute in the film Taxi Driver. In that film, Robert DeNiro’s character, Travis Bickle, tries to assassinate the president. And from all this came one of the more amusing band names from the classic era of Hardcore Punk, JFA, or Jody Foster’s Army.
Today in Labor History June 21, 1964: Civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan, who beat them to death with clubs and chains. Their mangled bodies were later found by federal agents.