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MikeDunnAuthor

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Working Class Historical Fiction from the not so gilded age. Labor History. Social justice. An injury to one is an injury to all!

https://michaeldunnauthor.com
https://www.thehistoricalfictioncompany.com/michael-dunn

Pronouns: He/him

#Solidarity #Sabotage #GeneralStrike
#HistoricalFiction #WorkingClass #LaborHistory
#WomensRights #antifascism #AntiImperialism #LGBTQIA+ #EndAbleism #TransRightsAreHumanRights #SelfDetermination #ClimateChange

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Today in Labor History December 19, 1900: French parliament gave to amnesty everyone who participated in the scandalous army treason trial known as the Dreyfus affair. The scandal began in 1894 when the state convicted Captain Alfred Dreyfus of treason. He was a 35-year-old French artillery officer of Jewish descent, falsely convicted for espionage and imprisoned in Devil's Island in French Guiana. Émile Zola's open letter “J'Accuse” helped build a movement of support for Dreyfus, putting pressure on the government to reopen the case. In 1899, Dreyfus was returned to France, retried and convicted again, but was pardoned and released. They eventually reinstated him as a major and he served during the World War I. Roman Polanski made a film about the affair called “J’Accuse,” after the Zola letter. However, much of Europe and the U.S. banned screenings of the film due to Polanski’s U.S. rape conviction.

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Today in Labor History December 17, 1760: Deborah Sampson was born on this date in Massachusetts. Sampson disguised herself as a man in order to fight with the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. She called herself Robert Shirtliff (as in don’t lift my shirt) and stood 5’9”, taller than the average man in those days. She fought in several skirmishes with British forces before being wounded and discovered and then honorably discharged from the army. She later petitioned the government to be repaid the wages that had been denied her because she was a woman. Her friend Paul Revere advocated for her full compensation. Finally, in 1816, Congress granted her request. There are several other women known to have secretly fought in this war. Sampson’s story has been portrayed in several plays and works of fiction, including “Portrait of Deborah: A Drama in Three Acts” (1959) by Charles Emery, “I'm Deborah Sampson: A Soldier of the Revolution” (1977) by Patricia Clapp and Revolutionary (2014), by Alex Myers, one of her descendants. Whoopi Goldberg played her in an episode of “Liberty Kids.”

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #Revolution #deborahsampson #women #sexism #drag #books #fiction #play #author #writer @bookstadon

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Today in Labor History December 15, 1973: The American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from its official list of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In the 1950s and 1960s, some therapists used aversion therapy to "cure" male homosexuality. Like in Anthony Burgess’s, “A Clockwork Orange,” they would show patients pictures of naked men while giving them electric shocks or drugs to make them puke. In the 1973 vote, 5,854 members voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, while 3,810 voted to retain it. In a compromise, they agreed to remove homosexuality from the DSM, but replaced it with "sexual orientation disturbance" for people "in conflict with" their sexual orientation. They did not completely remove homosexuality from the DSM until 1987.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #lgbtg #homophobia #transphobia #conversiontherapy #dsm #therapy #mentalhealth #torture #psychiatry #clockworkorange #books #authors #writers #fiction @bookstadon

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Today in Writing History December 15, 1905: The Pushkin House was established in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to preserve the cultural heritage of Alexander Pushkin, (6/6/1799–2/10/1837). Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era. He was influenced by Enlightenment writers and thinkers, like Diderot and Voltaire. He spoke out in support of social reform, and wrote poems, like “Ode to Liberty,” leading to the government exiling him from the capital. In 1920 the Pushkin House was renamed the Institute of New Russian Literature, with the main objective of preparing authoritative "academic" editions of works by Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and others.

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Today in Labor History December 10, 1861: Nguyễn Trung Trực, along with his militia, sunk the French lorcha L'Esperance. Nguyễn Trung Trực was a fisherman who organized and led a guerilla rebellion against French colonial forces in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam in the 1860s. They used snipers to assassinate isolated French soldiers and chased French soldiers around the countryside, attacking military installations that were left undefended. Their intimate knowledge of the territory and their skill in hit-and-run tactics allowed them to inflict substantial casualties on the European troops.

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Today in Labor History December 10, 1896: Alfred Jarry's play, Ubu Roi, premiered in Paris. At the end of the performance, a riot broke out. Many in the audience were confused and outraged by the obscenity and disrespect they felt in the performance. Others, like W. B. Yeats, thought it was revolutionary. Jarry’s work was a precursor to Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. Ubu Roi is a parody of Shakespeare's Macbeth and parts of Hamlet and King Lear. However, having recently reread the play, I found an uncanny resemblance between Pere Ubu and Donald Trump.

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Today in Labor History December 9, 1935: Walter Liggett, American newspaper editor and muckraker, was murdered in a drive-by shooting with a Thompson submachine gun, as he stepped out of his car, groceries in his hand. His wife and daughter were in the car and witnessed his death. Liggett was a card-carrying member of the American Socialist Party, but he was more of a Mid-Western Populist-Socialist than a Marxist. In the 1920's he participated in efforts to free Sacco and Vanzetti and Thomas Mooney. In a series of articles, he accused Farmer-Labor politicians of collusion with the organized crime family of Isadore Blumenfield. He accused Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson of corruption and said that he should be impeached and prosecuted. In response, Blumenfield tried to bribe him to stop his exposés, but Liggett refused. Blumenfield and his gang savagely beat Liggett up. Liggett escalated his attacks and began printing a list of reasons for Olson's impeachment on the front page of the Midwest-American. Soon after, he was murdered.

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Today in Labor History December 7, 1905: A General Strike of 150,000 workers began in Moscow, at the climax of the 1905 Russia Revolution. The strike escalated into a general uprising, with thousands of workers taking up arms against the imperial government. At least 400 workers died. The revolt was based in the apartment of writer, Maxim Gorky. Militants made bombs in his study and ate in his kitchen. On December 10, socialist revolutionaries bombed the headquarters of the Moscow Okhrana (secret police). By December 12, the rebels held six of the seven railway stations and many neighborhoods. On December 15, they assassinated the head of the Okhrana. However, the Imperial Guard brought in reinforcements on the 15th. They shelled the proletarian district of Presnia, home to 150,000 textile workers, and ultimately quashed the rebellion.

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Today in Labor History December 6, 1889: The trial of the Chicago Haymarket anarchists began amidst national and international outrage and protest. None of the men on trial had even been at Haymarket Square when the bomb was set off. They were on trial because of their anarchist political affiliations and their labor organizing for the 8-hour work-day. 4 were ultimately executed, including Alber Parsons, husband of future IWW founding member Lucy Parsons. One, Louis Ling, cheated the hangman by committing suicide in his cell. The Haymarket Affairs is considered the origin of International Workers Day, May 1st, celebrated in virtually every country in the world, except for the U.S., where the atrocity occurred. Historically, it was also considered the culmination of the Great Upheaval, which a series of strike waves and labor unrest that began in Martinsburg, West Virginia, 1877, and spread throughout the U.S., including the Saint Louis Commune, when communists took over and controlled the city for several days. Over 100 workers were killed across the U.S. in the weeks of strikes and protests. Communists and anarchists also organized strikes in Chicago, where police killed 20 men and boys. Albert and Lucy Parsons participated and were influenced by these events. I write about this historical period in my Great Upheaval Trilogy. The first book in this series, Anywhere But Schuylkill, came out in September, 2023, from Historium Press. Check it out here: https://www.thehistoricalfictioncompany.com/it/michael-dunn and https://michaeldunnauthor.com/

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Today in Labor History December 5, 1928: The Colombian military slaughtered up to 2,000 people in the Banana Massacre. Workers had been on strike against United Fruit Company since November 12. They were participating in a peaceful demonstration, with their wives and children. The Columbian troops set up machine guns on the rooftops near the demonstration and closed off the access streets so no one could escape. The soldiers threw the dead into mass graves or dumped them in the sea. U.S. officials in Colombia had portrayed the workers as communists and subversives and even threatened to invade if the Colombian government didn’t protect United Fruit’s interests. Gabriel García Márquez depicted the massacre in his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” as did Álvaro Cepeda Samudio in his “La Casa Grande.”

United Fruit, which is now called Chiquita, controlled vast quantities of territory in Central America, and the Caribbean, maintained a near monopoly in many of the banana republics in which it operated (e.g., Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica). By 1930, it was the largest employer in Central America and the largest land owner. In 1952, the government of Jacobo Arbenz, in Guatemala, began giving away unused land, owned by United Fruit, to landless peasants. In 1954, the CIA deposed the Arbenz government, leading to decades of brutal dictatorship and genocide of Guatemala’s indigenous population. The head of the CIA at that time was former board member of United Fruit, Allen Dulles, who also oversaw the over throw of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the MK Ultra LSD mind control experiments.

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@NoraGottlieb @bookstadon yes, it is. And dole isn't any better.

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@NoraGottlieb @bookstadon
Btw, coincidentally, the scientist who led the MK Ultra mind control experiments for the CIA, as well as developing poisons to assassinate Castro and Lumumba, was named Gotlieb.

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There was a drug store in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania that plays prominently in my novel, ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL. It was run by a Polish immigrant known as Doc Luks. He was sympathetic to the miners and would often provide medicine and treatment for free during strikes, when the workers had no money to pay him.

His son, George Luks, became a successful artist, of the Ashcan School, a politically rebellious art movement that was influenced by Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and which portrayed the everyday lives of working class people and immigrants. Luks’s art, in particular, was influenced by the poverty and oppression suffered by the miners he grew up with.

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ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL
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Today in Labor History December 3, 1984: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed over 3,800 people and injured up to 600,000 more. Up to 16,000 people died, in total, over the years following the disaster. The Government of Madhya Pradesh has paid compensation to family members of 3,787 of the victims killed. Numerous local activist groups emerged to support the victims of the disaster, like Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla, who won the Goldman Prize in 2004. Many of the activists were subjected to violent repression by the police and government. Larger international groups, like Greenpeace and Pesticide Action Network also got involved. The disaster has played a role in numerous works of fiction, including Arundhati Roy’s “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” (2017) and Indra Sinha’s “Animal’s People” (2007). It has also been referenced in music by the Revolting Cocks “Union Carbide” and the Dog Faced Hermans ”Bhopal.”

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Today in Labor History December 2, 1867: British author Charles Dickens gave his first public reading in the United States at Tremont Temple in Boston. He described his impressions of the U.S. in a travelogue, “American Notes for General Circulation.” In Notes, he condemned slavery and correlated the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad. Despite his abolitionist sentiments, some modern commentators have criticized him for not condemning Britain’s harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica. During his American visit, he also spent a month in New York, giving lectures, and arguing for international copyright laws and against the pirating of his work in America. The press ridiculed him, saying he should be grateful for his popularity here.

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Today in Labor History December 2, 1859: The authorities hanged abolitionist John Brown in Charleston, Virginia for his leadership of a plot to incite a slave rebellion. Victor Hugo, who was living in exile on Guernsey, tried to obtain a pardon for him. His open letter was published by the press on both sides of the Atlantic. His plea failed, of course. On the day of his execution, John Brown rode in a furniture wagon, on top of his own coffin, through a crowd of 2,000 soldiers, to the gallows. The soldiers included future Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth. Walt Whitman described the execution in his poem “Year of Meteors.”

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Today in Labor History December 1, 1912: The rustling card system was put into place by the Anaconda Mining and Smelter Company. Rustling cards verified employees’ identities and employment status. The company used spies to identify union agitators and refused them rustling cards and jobs. In 1920, the IWW called a strike at the mines around Butte. They demanded the end of the rustling cards system, and the implementation of the 8-hour day and higher wages. On 4/21/1920, guards opened fire on unarmed picketers, killing one and injuring sixteen. Dashiell Hammett depicted the strike in his first novel, “Red Harvest.”

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Today in Labor History November 26, 1911: Paul Lafargue, Cuban-French revolutionary and son-in-law of Karl Marx, died. Lafargue wrote “The Right to Be Lazy” in 1893 while in prison. Lafargue had Jewish, French, Indian, Creole and African ancestry. When IWW cofounder Daniel De Leon asked him about his origins, he replied that he was proudest of his “negro” ancestry. In his youth, Lefargue participated in the International Students Congress in 1865. Consequently, the government banned him from all French universities. So, he moved to London, where he became a frequent visitor to Marx’s house, ultimately marrying his daughter, Laura. Lafargue was a member of the General Council of the First International. He also participated in the Paris Commune.

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Today in Labor History November 23, 1644: At the height of the English Civil War, John Milton published an anti-censorship pamphlet, “Areopagitica.” He had been censored several times, particularly in his attempts to defend divorce, a radical idea in those days. He anonymously published “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce” (1643), which was condemned by the Puritan clergy as heretical and supportive of sexual libertinism.

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Today in Labor History November 20, 1896: Rose Pesotta, anarchist labor activist and the only woman on the General Executive Board of the International Ladies' Garment Workers (ILGWU), from 1933-1944, was born on this date, in Ukraine, to a Jewish family. She learned about anarchism by reading books by Bakunin in her father’s library. Her parents set up an arranged marriage for her, which she did not approve. So, she emigrated to the U.S. in 1913, joining the ILGWU the next year. Her local, , was filled with militant women veterans of the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike. She wrote regularly for the New York Anarchist press, in both English and in Yiddish. She was friends with Italian-American anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In 1933, she organized immigrant Mexican garment workers, leading to the Los Angeles Garment Workers Strike. She also organized workers in Canada and Puerto Rico. Later in life, she worked briefly for the B’nai B’rith. She also wrote two memoirs, Bread Upon the Waters (1944),[6] and Days of Our Lives (1958).

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Today in Labor History November 20, 1820: An 80-ton sperm whale attacked and sunk the Essex, a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts. The tragedy occurred off the western coast of South America. 7 members of the 20-man crew died at sea, as they attempted to make land in the lifeboats. Survivors ate their dead comrades to stay alive. The story inspired Herman Melville to write his 1851 novel Moby-Dick. And it inspired modern day orcas to organize and fight back to reclaim the seas from humans.

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Today in Labor History November 17, 1942: Ben Reitman, hobo organizer, anarchist and one-time lover of Emma Goldman, died. Reitman served as a doctor for hobos, prostitutes and the downtrodden. He participated in numerous free speech fights and anarchist causes, getting beaten, tarred and feathered, jailed, and run out of town for his troubles, most notably during the San Diego free speech fight. He also wrote the book, “Boxcar Bertha.”

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Today in Labor History November 17, 1947: Revolutionary and author Victor Serge died. Serge lived in Paris in the early 20th century, where he was loosely associated with the Bonnot gang of anarchist bank robbers, and where he collaborated with Raymond Callemin on the newspaper L’anarchie. He was in Barcelona during their anarchist uprising and contributed to the CNT’s newspaper, “Tierra y Libertad.” He went to Russia in 1918, initially in support of the communists. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the repressive, autocratic rule, criticized the party and was imprisoned. He wrote numerous books, including the classic “Birth of Our Power” and his autobiographical “Memoirs of a Revolutionist.”

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Today in Labor History November 16, 1849: Russian authorities gave a death sentence to author Fyodor Dostoevsky for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group called the Petrashevsky Circle. He and his colleagues were lined up before the firing squad when, at the last minute, a cart arrived with a letter from the Tsar, commuting their sentence. He still had to serve 4 years hard labor in Siberia. Dostoevsky alludes to his experience before the firing squad in his 1868-1869 novel, “The Idiot.”

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #radical #FiringSquad #DeathPenalty #executuion #russia #dostoevsky #writer #author #fiction #novel #books @bookstadon

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Today in Labor History November 10, 1995: The Nigerian government executed playwright and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop). Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent movement protesting the despoiling of Ogoniland by Royal Dutch Shell. Beverly Naidoo’s 2000 novel, “The Other Side of Truth,” is based on Saro-Wiwa’s execution, as is Richard North Patterson’s 2009 novel, “Eclipse.”

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #KenSaroWiwa #ogoni #shell #BigOil #nigeria #repression #DeathPenalty #nonviolence #activism #environmentalism #protest #playwright #books #writer #BlackMastadon @bookstadon

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#imperialism #AntiImperialism #SocialJustice #FreeSpeech
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Today in Labor History November 9, 1851: Kentucky marshals abducted abolitionist minister Calvin Fairbank from Jeffersonville, Indiana, under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. They took him to Kentucky to stand trial for helping a slave escape. Fairbank was an activist on the Underground Railroad. He spent over 17 years in prison and was lashed 35,000 times. He was pardoned in 1864. He was believed to have helped at least 47 people escape slavery. Fairbank wrote a memoir in 1890 called “Rev. Calvin Fairbank During Slavery Times: How He "Fought the Good Fight" to Prepare "the Way." He died in near-poverty, in Angelica, New York, in 1898, at the age of 81.

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#FreePalestine #EndTheSiege #EndTheOccupation #zionism #StandWithGaza #FreeSpeech #books #novels #writers @bookstadon

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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).

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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!

  1. 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!"

  2. 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."

  3. 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!"

  4. 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

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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.”

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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).

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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.

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“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

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #fiction #HistoricalFiction #novel #mining #union #strike #ChildLabor #immigration #racism @bookstadon

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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.

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ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL

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.

-reviewed by William P. Meyers, iii Publishing

Available now from Historium Press https://www.thehistoricalfictioncompany.com/michael-dunn

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Author Arundhatu Roy faces sedition charges.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/10/author-arundhati-roy-may-face-prosecution-india-speech

#FreeSpeech #india #kashmir #author #Writer #fiction #solidarity #arundhatiroy #modi @bookstadon

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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