“Most times when people in Scotland – or in other working class communities outwith the south east – see their lives, they’re gross caricatures supposed to represent a sort of ultra-realism. Being made to feel like an exhibit is never good.”
Graeme Armstrong discusses his award-winning debut novel THE YOUNG TEAM, & the language & lived experience behind its narrative
Today in Labor History November 7, 1918: Kurt Eisner led an uprising that overthrew the Wittelsbach dynasty in Bavaria, during the German Revolution. After the Kiel Mutiny a few days prior, uprising broke out throughout Germany. Within months, the Independent Social Democrats, who were heading the provisional government, were overthrown by the Bavarian Raterepublik, composed of Workers', Soldiers', and Farmers' Councils. Those fighting the socialists included anarchists and anti-authoritarian communists like Erich Mühsam, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Toller and Ret Marut (who became known as the novelist B. Traven after fleeing the counterrevolution and living in exile in Mexico).
Today in Labor History November 7, 1912: Ernest Riebe's "Mr. Block," IWW labor comic strip first appeared in print. Mr. Block was one of the best-loved features in the Wobbly press. Joe Hill wrote a song about "Mr. Block," who was a boss-loving, American Dream-believing, self-sabotaging knucklehead. Some call Riebe the first "underground" comic book artist.
Mr. Block (by Joe Hill)
Please give me your attention, I'll introduce to you
A man who is a credit to the ["Our] old Red White and Blue["]
His head is made of lumber and solid as a rock
He is a common worker and his name is Mr. Block
And Block [he] thinks he may be premier [President] some day
Chorus
Oh Mr. Block, you were born by mistake
You take the cake, you make me ache
[Go] tie a rock on your block and then jump in the lake
Kindly do that for Liberty's sake!
Yes, Mr. Block is lucky - he got a job, by gee!
The shark got seven dollars for job and fare and fee
They shipped him to a desert and dumped him with his truck
But when he tried to find his job he sure was out of luck
He shouted, "That's too raw! I'll fix them with the law!"
Block hiked back to the city but wasn't doing well
He said "I'll join the union, the great AF of L".
He got a job that morning, got fired by the night
He said, "I'll see Sam Gompers and he'll fix that foreman right!"
Sam Gompers said, "You see, you've got our sympathy."
Election day he shouted, "A Socialist for Mayor!"
The comrade got elected [and] he happy was for fair
But after the election he got an awful shock
[When] a great big socialistic bull did rap him on the block
And Comrade Block did sob, "I helped him get his job!"
Poor Block he died one evening, I'm very glad to state
He climbed the golden ladder up to the pearly gate
He said, "Oh Mister Peter, one thing I'd like to tell
I'd like to meet the Astorbilts and John D Rockerfell!"
Old Pete said, "Is that so? You'll meet them down below!"
Tune: It Looks to me Like a Big Time Tonight. from Al Grierson,
by Joe Hill, in 13th ed. of the Little Red Songbook
Today in Labor History November 5, 1916: The Everett Massacre occurred in Everett, Washington. 300 IWW members arrived by boat in Everett to help support the shingle workers’ strike that had been going on for the past 5 months. Prior attempts to support the strikers were met with vigilante beatings with axe handles. As the boat pulled in, Sheriff McRae called out, “Who’s your leader?” The Wobblies answered, “We’re all leaders!” The sheriff pulled his gun and said, “You can’t land.” A Wobbly yelled back, “Like hell we can’t.” Gunfire erupted, most of it from the 200 vigilantes on the dock. When the smoke cleared, two of the sheriff’s deputies were dead, shot in the back by their own men, along with 5-12 Wobblies on the boat. Dozens more were wounded. The authorities arrested 74 Wobblies. After a trial, all charges were dropped against the IWW members. The event was mentioned in John Dos Passos’s “USA Trilogy.”
Today in Labor History November 4, 1839: The Newport Rising began. It was the last large-scale armed rebellion against authority in mainland Britain. It began when approximately 4,000 Chartists, led by John Frost, marched on the town of Newport. When several were arrested, other Chartists, including coal miners, many armed with homemade weapons, marched on the Westgate Hotel (where they were held) to liberate them. Up to 24 were killed when soldiers were ordered to open fire on them. The Chartists were fighting for the adoption of the People’s Charter, which called for universal suffrage, the secret ballot, and the right of regular working people to serve in the House of Commons. Three leaders of the uprising were sentenced to death, but popular protests got their sentences commuted to Transportation for Life, probably to Australia or Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania). America’s first cop, Allan Pinkerton, supposedly participated in this rebellion. He was a known Chartist in those days, a physical force man who loved to battle cops and Tory thugs. Because of his history of street violence and vandalism, he had to flee Britain in the dark of the night, ultimately settling in Illinois, where he eventually set up the private detective agency that would go on to murder numerous union organizers, and set up hundreds more for long prison stints through the use of agents provocateur and perjured testimonies.
The riots were depicted in the following novels: “Sir Cosmo Digby,” by James Augustus St John (1843), “Rape of the Fair Country,” by Alexander Cordell (1959) and “Children of Rebecca,” by Vivien Annis Bailey (1995).
Today in Labor History November 3, 1793: French playwright, journalist and feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists. Her writings on women's rights and abolitionism reached a large audience in many different countries. She was also an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality.
“Michael Dunn has created the characters that bring the 19th Century's Mine Wars to life for today's readers. Anywhere but Schuylkill will remind readers of John Sayles and Tillie Olsen and the best in the long tradition of labor literature.”
—James Tracy, co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power: Interracial Solidarity in 1960s-70s New Left Organizing
Today in Labor History October 26, 1892: Ida B. Wells published “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” which led to threats against her life, and the burning down of her newspaper’s headquarters in Memphis. Wells, who was born into slavery, was a journalist, educator, feminist, and early Civil Rights leader who helped found the NAACP.
This is a great labor novel, as good as any I have read. Given the current revival of pro-union sentiments, from Starbucks to Amazon to General Motors, I hope it will be widely read.
“In the tradition of Upton Sinclair and Jack London, Michael Dunn gives us a gritty portrait of working-class life and activism during one of the most violent eras in U.S. labor history. Anywhere but Schuylkill is a social novel built out of passion and the textures of historical research. It is both a tale of 1870s labor unrest and a tale for the inequalities and injustices of the twenty-first century.”
—Russ Castronovo, author of Beautiful Democracy and Propaganda 1776.
Today in Labor History October 21, 1981: Kuwasi Balagoon was finally captured following a Brinks robbery. Balagoon had been a member of the Black Panther Party. While in prison, he became disillusioned with the Panthers, became an anarchist and joined the more militant Black Liberation Army. He escaped from prison twice. In 1979, while on the lam from his second prison escape, he helped to free political prisoner Assata Shakur, who fled to Cuba and lives there to this day. In 1986, he died in prison from AIDS. In 2019, PM Press released a collection of writings by and about Balagoon called, “Kuwasi Balagoon: A Soldier's Story.” And the prison abolitionist group, Black and Pink, which supports LGBTQ and HIV-positive prisoners, has, since 2020, run a "Kuwasi Balagoon award" for those living with HIV/AIDS.
Today in Labor History October 20, 1895: Anarcho-syndicalist writer Gaston Leval, active in the Spanish Civil War, was born in France. He was the son of a French Communard. He escaped to Spain in 1915 to avoid conscription during WWI. Then left for Argentina during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera where he lived from 1923 to 1936. He returned to Spain and became a militant fighter, and where he documented the revolution and the urban and rural anarchist collectives.
Today in Labor History October18, 1927: The trial of Sholom Schwartzbard began for killing Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petliura, for slaughtering15 members of his family in Pogroms. Schwartzbard was a Russian-born French Yiddish poet and an anarchist. He served in the French and Soviet militaries.
The new blogpost on the poetics of my book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia to be released on 16 Jan 2024 by Manchester University Press.
It explains with examples how to integrate poetry in academic non-fiction.
Today in Labor History October 15, 2005: A planned Nazi march in Toledo, Ohio sparked a 4-hour riot by counter-protesters, including anarchists, the International Socialist Organization, and Anti-Racist Action. Aggression was directed against the police, who initially protected the Nazis, but then later escorted them out of town. However, in December, 700 police, with armored personnel carriers and rooftop snipers, protected Nazis, allowing them to complete a rally, despite massive opposition.
For more on the history of Anti-Racist Action, and other anti-fascist movements of the 70s-90s, read “We Go Where They Go,” by Shannon Clay, Lady, Kristin Schwartz, and Michael Staudenmaier, and “No Fascist USA!” by Hilary Moore and James Tracy.
Today in Labor History October 9, 1936: A lettuce strike had recently ended in Salinas, California. However, when red flags went up throughout town, the authorities feared communist agitators had returned and removed the red flags, only to find out later that they were part of a traffic check being done by the state highway division.
The first effective organizing in the Salinas Valley began in 1933, with the mostly female lettuce trimmers demanding equal pay to the men. The Filipino field workers supported the women’s demands. In 1934, members of the Filipino Labor Union (FLU) struck the lettuce farms. So, the farmers brought in Mexican and Anglo scabs. They used vigilante mobs and the cops to violently attack the strikers and arrested their leaders. When the Filipino Labor Union and the Mexican Labor Union joined forces, a mob of vigilantes burned their labor camp down and drove 800 Filipinos out of the Salinas Valley at gunpoint. The 1934 strike ended soon after, with the growers recognizing the FLU and offering a small raise. This violence inspired John Steinbeck to write “In Dubious Battle” and “Grapes of Wrath,” for which he won both Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes.
Today in Labor History October 9, 1874: Mary Heaton Vorse was born. Vorse was a labor journalist who participated in and wrote eyewitness accounts of many of the significant labor battles of her day. In the 1910s, she was the founding editor of the “Masses,” as well as an activist in the suffrage and women’s peace movements. In 1912, she participated in and wrote about the Lawrence textile strike. She helped organize the Wobblies’ unemployment protest in New York, 1914, and was good friends with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In 1916, she reported on the IWW Mesabi Range strike. And in 1919, she worked as a publicist for the Great Steel Strike. She also wrote the novel, "Strike!" about the 1929 textile mill strike, in Gastonia, North Carolina, which was made into a film in 2007.
Today in Labor History October 6, 1900: English anarchist author Ethel Mannin was born in London. Her memoir of the 1920s, Confessions and Impressions was one of the first Penguin paperbacks. Her 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has been described as "an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive industrial organization of society." Mannin protested imperialism in Africa during the 1930s. She was also very active in anti-fascist movements, including the Women's World Committee Against War and Fascism, and she supported the military actions of the Spanish Republic.
Today in Labor History October 5, 1923: Swedish anarcho-syndicalist playwright & novelist Stig Dagerman was born. Over the course of 5 years, 1945–49, he wrote four successful novels, a collection of short stories, a book about postwar Germany, five plays, hundreds of poems and satirical verses, several essays and a large amount of journalism. He wrote the essay “Anarchism and Me” about his views on anarchism, and society, in post-World War 2 Europe. He killed himself in 1954, by running his car with the garage closed.
Today in Labor History October 4, 1884: Japanese writer Jun Tsuji was born. He was a Dadaist, nihilist, Epicurean and shakuhachi musician. Early in his life, he was influenced by the works of Tolstoy, Kōtoku Shūsui's socialist anarchism, and the literature of Oscar Wilde and Voltaire. Later, he became a follower of Stirner’s individualist anarchism. His works were censored by the authorities and he was harassed by the police. His former wife, anarcho-feminist Itō Noe, was murdered by the military police in the Amakasu Incident in 1923, when the military police murdered her and lover, Ōsugi Sakae, an informal leader of the Japanese anarchist movement, along with Ōsugi's six-year-old nephew. During the weeks that followed the great Kantō earthquake, authorities and vigilantes arrested, beat, tortured thousands of dissidents, and murdered an estimated 6,000.
Today in Labor History October 3, 1957: The California State Superior Court ruled that the book Howl and Other Poems, by Allen Ginsberg, was not obscene. The poem was based, in part, on a horrifying peyote hallucination he had of the glitzy Sir Frances Drake hotel, in San Francisco, morphing into a child-eating demon. The poem’s references to drug use and to homosexuality are what provoked the obscenity trial. City Lights bookstore own and publisher of Howl, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and bookstore manager, Shig Murao, were arrested on obscenity charges for selling the book.
Today in Labor History October 2, 1968: The Tlatelolco Massacre occurred in Mexico City. 15,000 students were demonstrating at the Plaza of Three Cultures against the army’s occupation of the University. The army, with 5,000 soldiers and 200 tanks, ambushed the students, opened fire, and killed nearly 300. They also arrested thousands. This occurred ten days before the opening of the Olympics, the same Olympics where Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved-fists in a Black Power salute. The U.S. contributed to the massacre by providing the Mexican military with radios, weapons, ammunition and riot control training. Furthermore, the CIA provided the Mexican military with daily reports on student activities in the weeks leading up to the massacre.
Chilean film maker Alejandro Jodorosky portrayed the massacre in his film “The Holy Mountain” (1973). Chilean author Roberto Bolano referenced it in his 1999 novel, “The Savage Detectives.”
Today in Labor History October 2, 1937: Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of Haitians living in the border region of the Dominican Republic, resulting in the genocidal Parsley massacre of up to 35,000 Haitians. Trujillo was obsessed with race. He’d use pancake make-up to lighten his skin color and hide his Haitian roots. And even so, the wealthy Dominicans still snubbed him for his working-class family origins. One week prior to the massacre, he publicly accepted a gift of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, whose racial theories he clearly embraced. He used racism to distract Dominicans from their poverty, which had been exacerbated by the Great Depression, and by Trujillo’s corrupt rule.
Edwidge Danticat’s historical fiction, “The Farming of Bones,” takes place during the time of the massacre.
Today in Labor History September 30, 1912: The Lawrence, Massachusetts “Bread and Roses” textile strike was in full swing. On this date, 12,000 textile workers walked out of mills to protest the arrests of two leaders of the strike. Police clubbed strikers and arrested many, while the bosses fired 1,500. IWW co-founder Big Bill Haywood threatened another general strike to get the workers reinstated. Strike leaders Arturo Giovannitti and Joe Ettor were eventually acquitted 58 days later. During the strike, IWW organizers Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn came up with the plan of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to live with sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, a move that drew widespread sympathy for the strikers. Nearly 300 workers were arrested during the strike; three were killed. After the strike was over, IWW co-founder and socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs, said "The Victory at Lawrence was the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized labor."
Several novels have been written against the backdrop of this famous strike: The Cry of the Street (1913), by Mabel Farnum; Fighting for Bread and Roses (2005), by Lynn A. Coleman; Bread and Roses, Too (2006), by Katherine Paterson
Today in Labor History September 27, 1962: Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was published, ushering in the modern environmental movement and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.