#Workingclass Americans have become more #progressive over time, but the major parties don't offer a way to support majoritarian progressive policies,
Center for Working-Class Politics, "Working-Class Social and #Economic Attitudes: An Analysis," https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/20091032/CWCP-Jacobin-report-20250721.pdf
Today in Labor History July 28, 1932: General Douglas MacArthur, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower and their troops, on orders by President Herbert Hoover, burned down a shantytown by unemployed veterans near the U.S. Capitol. They also shot and killed two veterans. 20,000 ex-servicemen had been camped out in the capital demanding a veterans’ bonus the government had promised but never given. Consequently, they called themselves the Bonus Army. Cavalry troops and tanks fired tear gas at veterans and their families and then set the buildings on fire. MacArthur and President Herbert Hoover declared that they had saved the nation from revolution. The shootings are depicted in Barbara Kingsolver's novel “The Lacuna.”
#workingclass #LaborHistory #bonusarmy #verterans #wwi #washington #military #Revolution #writer #author #books #fiction #novel #historicalfiction @bookstadon
Today in Labor History July 28, 1917: The Silent Parade took place in New York City, in protest against murders, lynchings, and other violence directed towards African Americans. Organizers set up the parade to protest the East Saint Louis race riots (May-July 1917), when whites murdered up to 200 African Americans, and caused 6,000 black residents to become homeless. While Woodrow Wilson was entering World War I to “make the world safe for democracy,” black Americans were asking when he’d do the same for them.
The Silent March was organized by a coalition of groups, led by the new NAACP. Up to 15,000 participated. Organizers wanted president Wilson to enact anti-lynching legislation. He refused. Wilson appointed numerous racists to his cabinet and was an outspoken defender of segregation on “scientific” grounds. He was also fond of telling racist jokes. As an academic, prior to his political career, he was an apologist for slavery. And he used his authority to actively prevent admitting African Americans into Princeton as students or faculty. Ironically, one of the primary organizers of the Silent March, W.E.B. DuBois, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Woodrow Wilson presidential candidacy, calling him a “liberal Southerner,” who would deal fairly with Negros.
The East Saint Louis racist pogrom occurred during one of the largest migrations of black workers from the South to the North. Between 1910 and 1920, half a million African Americans migrated north to Chicago, Saint Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other cities. In 1919, there were 38 different racist riots in the U.S., all directed against the black community. The massacre in East Saint Louis began in response to a strike by white employees of the Aluminum Ore Company, after the bosses hired black replacement workers, a common practice of the bosses to divide the working class and weaken unions. Additionally, many of the unions were overtly racist and excluded black workers, including the Aluminum Ore union. To make matters worse, employment agents were going to the South and recruiting African Americans under false pretenses, offering them stable jobs and housing when, in reality, they were being recruited to work as scabs. So, it is likely that many, if not most, of the workers didn’t even know they were being hired as scabs. Regardless, they wouldn’t have been allowed to join the union, either.
Racism by unions and white workers was not inevitable in those days, and it was certainly counterproductive to the aims of working people of all backgrounds and identities. Consider that in 1920, in rural Mingo County, West Virginia, when the coal bosses brought in African American workers as scabs, the UMWA encouraged them to join the union and the strike, and achieved solidarity between white, native-born workers, African Americans from the South, and Italian immigrants. This is portrayed in John Sayles film, Matewan. And by 1916, thanks largely to the superb organizing of Ben Fletcher, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW, uniting a workforce that was 33% Irish, 33% Polish & Lithuanian, and 33% African American. Fletcher also traveled up and down the east coast organizing dockers across race. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American.
Read my biography of Fletcher here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/05/13/ben-fletcher-and-the-iww-dockers/
Today in Labor History July 28, 1915: 330 U.S. marines landed in Port-au-Prince, marking the beginning of a 19-year occupation of Haiti. The occupation took place after President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was assassinated by insurgents. Haitians rose up against the Americans in two major rebellions during the occupation. U.S. forces slaughtered up to 15,000 Haitians in protests and uprisings, plus another 5,500 died in their forced labor camps. The U.S. was guilty of numerous human rights violations, including summary executions, censorship, concentration camps and torture.
Today in Labor History July 28, 1794: The authorities guillotined Robespierre, radical Jacobin and architect of the French Reign of Terror, when they slaughtered over 45,000 clergy, members of the nobility, and “enemies of the republic.” Prior to the French Revolution, he had advocated for universal suffrage, and abolition of the death penalty and the Atlantic slave trade. There are too many historical novels set during the French Revolution to name them all. However, here are some of the most famous ones. “The Scarlet Pimpernel” (1905) by Baroness Orczy. “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859) by Charles Dickens. “Ninety-Three” (Quatrevingt-treize) by Victor Hugo. It was published in 1874, three years after the bloody upheaval of the Paris Commune.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #robespierre #french #Revolution #paris #commune #deathpenalty #guillotine #slavery #writer #books #author #fiction #novel #victorhugo #charlesdickens @bookstadon
RIP Richard Mock (1944-7/28/2006), illustrator and satirist extraordinaire.
Today in Labor History July 28, 2006: Illustrator Richard Mock died. He was best known for his illustrations in The New York Times from 1980 through 1996. His art also frequently appeared on the covers of the magazines Fifth Estate, Alternative Press Review & Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
RIP Richard Mock (1944-7/28/2006), illustrator and satirist extraordinaire.
Today in Labor History July 27, 1838: 70,000 people attended a Chartist rally in New Castle. Soldiers surrounded the marchers and attempted to intimidate them with their bayonets. Many feared things would escalate into another massacre, reminiscent of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in 1819.
The Chartist movement was a working-class reform movement in the UK that was most active in the late 1830s and ‘40s. It took its name from the People's Charter of 1838. The movement was violently opposed by the authorities. The Charter called for six basic reforms: (1) universal suffrage for all men 21 years and older; (2) secret ballot; (3) No property qualification for parliament; (4) payment for service in parliament; (5) equal representation per capita, preventing less populous regions from having greater weight; (6) annual parliamentary elections as a check against bribery and corruption.
Interestingly, Allan Pinkerton, America’s most famous cop, the union-busting, murderous bulldog of the plutocrats, had not only been a Chartist in Scotland prior to emigrating to the U.S. He was a member of the Physical Force faction of the Chartists, demonstrating in the streets for temperance and against slavery, for universal suffrage, and the rights of man, committing vandalism and arson for the cause. He detested the propertied class, politicians, the cops, and Tory thugs, whom he loved to battle in the streets. And when things became too hot for him, he fled to America with his 15-year-old wife.
Here is Chumbawamba performing the Chartist Anthem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waRwJZFoJmw&list=RDwaRwJZFoJmw&start_radio=1
You can read my two bios of Allan Pinkerton here: https://marshalllawwriter.com/the-eye-that-never-sleeps/
https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/04/union-busting-by-the-pinkertons/
Today in Labor History July 27, 1919: Riots erupted in Chicago when a black youth on a raft crossed an unseen "color line" at the 29th Street Beach. He was drowned by rock-throwing whites. Tensions escalated quickly when a white police officer prevented a black cop from arresting the perpetrator. 38 people eventually died in the riots that followed, and which continued until August 3. Up to 2,000 lost their homes. White gangs attacked black neighbors and workers trying to get to and from work. Black civilians organized to resist and protect each other, while the Chicago Police turned a blind eye to white on black violence. The riots were ended by the deployment of 6,000 national guards. This was just one of over 36 white supremacist pogroms against black communities that broke out across the U.S. in the year after World War I. The deadliest of these pogroms occurred in Elaine, Arkansas, where up to 240 African Americans were massacred by racists.
In the years leading up to WWI, hundreds of thousands of southern African Americans moved north to get away from segregation, lynchings, political disenfranchisement, and for better economic opportunities. Between 1916 and 1919, the African American population of Chicago increased 148% from 44,000 to 109,000. Another 20,000 poor, southern whites also moved to Chicago at this time. Most of these newcomers (black and white) moved to the Southside, which had been inhabited by poor whites, predominantly Irish. And this led to competition for housing and jobs. Irish gangs were major instigators of the violence. They even tried to provoke Eastern European communities into join them by donning black face and burning down Lithuanian and Polish homes in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.
While these same racial tensions continued for decades, there was a significant period of activist solidarity and organizing between poor whites and poor blacks in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Young Patriots worked together with the Black Panthers and Young Lords. @jamestracy and @AmySonnie write brilliantly of this history in their book, “Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times” (2011).
Today in Labor History July 27, 1918: Miner and union organizer Ginger Goodwin was shot by a hired private cop outside Cumberland, British Columbia sparking Canada's first General Strike. He was a labor activist and a member of the Socialist Party of Canada. Additionally, he was an antiwar activist who said that workers of one country should not be employed to kill workers of another country because of capitalist conflict. “War is simply part of the process of Capitalism,” he said. “Big financial interests will reap the victory, no matter how the war ends.” However, in spite of his protests, he was still drafted to fight in the First World War. In order to avoid conscription, he fled into the mountains, where he was murdered by a cop in 1918. Canada’s first General Strike began in response.
The Ballad Of Ginger Goodwin
Ginger Goodwin is a name you don't often hear or see.
They don't say a word about him in our country's history.
He was a labour leader and he wouldn't go to war.
"While the army breaks our strikes at home, its strikers I'll fight for."
In Trail back in the summer of 1917.
Ginger fought against conscription even though he was class D.
But when he led a miners' strike to spread the eight hour day
Conscription checked him out again and found he was class A.
Ginger hid from cops and soldiers in the hills near Cumberland.
Miners brought him food and sheltered him, they knew he was their friend.
So the bosses hired special cops when their power was at stake.
Dan Campbell murdered Goodwin at the head of Comox Lake.
The whole damn town of Cumberland turned out for the funeral hike.
Vancouver's workers shut her down for a one day general strike.
Soldiers back from foreign wars then attacked the labour hall.
Both the bosses and the workers knew who caused the Czar's downfall.
You can still see Ginger's grave along the road to Cumberland.
He didn't win no medals and no one understands.
Don't tell me that a hero has to die in foreign lands.
We lost heroes here in labour's wars and they all had dirty hands.
Here is a selection of photographs by Gerda Taro:
1. Photo from Barcelona at the outbreak of the war, 1936, that shows two little boys in caps above a crumbling wall that has been reinforced with a sandbag.
2. Refugees from Malaga in Almeria, 1937: an old man with bandaged head and beret; a woman standing; several children on a folded up mattress; an old woman
3. Crowd at the morgue gates following a bombing in Valencia, 1937
4. A 1937 photograph by Taro of 2 Republican soldiers at the Navacerrada Pass in Spain carrying a wounded soldier by stretcher.
Today in Labor History July 26, 1937: Photojournalist and antifascist Gerda Taro was killed while covering the Spanish Civil War. She was 26. Thousands attended her funeral. Tara was a German Jew, who had to flee Germany after being imprisoned for her anti-Nazi activism. While living in exile, in France, she met another Jewish exile and photojournalist, Endre Ernő Friedmann. Together they published their work under the pseudonym Robert Capa. Scholar Hanno Hardt described their work as such: "Taro and Capa helped invent the genre of modern war photography while fueling the vicarious experience of the spectator by offering an approximation of life in the conflict zone."[
After Taro’s death, Friedmann would retain the name Robert Capa and go on to become recognized as one of the greatest photojournalists ever. In 1947, he cofounded the great Magnum photojournalism cooperative, which included other great photographers, like Maria Eisner, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and William and Rita Vandivert.
Madrid and Paris both named streets for Taro, Calle Gerda Taro and Rue Gerda Taro, respectively.
Helena Janeczek portrayed Taro in her historical novel, The Girl With the Leica (1917).
#workingclass #LaborHistory #fascism #nazis #antifascism #jewish #antisemitism #hitler #franco #gerdataro #robertcapa #journalism #photography #photojournalism #spain #civilwar #fiction #historicalfiction #novel #books #author #writer @bookstadon
Today in Labor History July 26, 1944: The Red Army liberated Lviv, Ukraine, from the Nazis. Only 300 Jews survived the Nazi occupation out of 160,000 who were living there before the Nazi invasion. The occupation is depicted in several books, including Robert Marshall’s “The Sewers of Lvov” (1991) and Krsytyna Chiger’s memoir “The Girl in the Green Sweater” (2007). Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s film “In Darkness,” which was nominated for an Oscar, is based on these two books.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #nazis #fascism #holocaust #redarmy #russia #soviet #ussr #ukraine #books #fiction #historicalfiction #author #writer #film @bookstadon
Today in Labor History July 26, 1894: President Grover Cleveland created a Strike Committee to investigate the causes of the Pullman strike and the subsequent walkout by the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs. After four months, the commission absolved the strikers and placed the blame entirely on Pullman and the railroads for the conflict. Roughly 250,000 workers participated in the strike. And an estimated 70 workers died, mostly at the hands of cops and soldiers. To appease workers, the government came up with a new holiday, Labor Day, to commemorate the end of the Pullman Strike. However, President Cleveland had other interests in creating the new holiday. Rather than rewarding workers, his goal was to bury the history of the Haymarket Affair and the radical anarchist and socialist history of the labor movement by choosing any day other than May 1 as the new national labor holiday.
On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers went on strike across the U.S. to demand the eight-hour workday. It was the world’s first May Day/International Workers’ Day demonstration—an event that has been celebrated ever since, by nearly every country in the world, except for the U.S. Two days later, Chicago Police and Pinkertons attacked protesters, killing at least one person. On May 4, anarchists organized a demonstration at Haymarket Square to protest that police violence. Somebody threw a bomb, which killed at least one cop. The police opened fire, killing another seven workers. Six police also died, likely from “friendly fire” by other cops.
The authorities went on a witch hunt, rounding up most of the city’s leading anarchists and radical labor leaders. They ultimately convicted seven anarchists, even though none of them were present at Haymarket Square when the bomb was thrown, and executed four of them in 1887, including Albert Parsons. After her husband’s execution, Lucy Parsons continued her radical organizing, writing, and speeches. In 1905, Lucy cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), along with Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, James Connolly, and others.
You can read my complete article about the Great Upheaval here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/31/the-great-upheaval/
You can read my biography of Lucy Parsons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/24/lucy-parsons/
Today in Labor History July 26, 1877: Federal troops killed up to 30 workers at the "Battle of the Viaduct," Chicago, during the Great Upheaval (AKA Great Train Strike). This came after the Workingmen’s Party (affiliated with the First International), organized a rally of six thousand people. At this gathering, a former Confederate Army Officer from Waco, Texas, named Albert Parsons, gave a fiery speech. The events of the Great Upheaval radicalized Parsons and his wife Lucy. In the years following it, they became some of the nation’s leading anarchist organizers. The state executed him in 1887 as one of the Haymarket Martyrs who had been fighting for the eight-hour workday. His widow, Lucy, an African American woman, went on to cofound the radical Industrial Workers of the World, in 1905, along with Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, and others.
The day after Parsons’ speech, protests erupted. Police fired into the crowd, killing three men. The next day, an armed demonstration of 5,000 workers fought the police and soldiers in the Battle of the Viaduct, when they killed as many as 30 more workers and injured over one hundred. One journalist wrote, “The sound of clubs falling on skulls was sickening for the first minute, until one grew accustomed to it. A rioter dropped at every whack, it seemed, for the ground was covered with them.” A judge later found the police guilty of preventing the workers from exercising their right to freedom of speech and assembly
The Great Upheaval was a national strike wave involving major uprisings in Martinsburg, WV, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Saint Louis, San Francisco, Boston, Reading, PA, New York and many other cities. I write about it in my historical “Great Upheaval Trilogy.” My first book, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” takes place in the years immediately preceding the Great Upheaval. Book II, “Red Hot Summer in the Smoky City,” my current WIP, takes place in Pittsburgh, at the height of the Great Upheaval.
You can read my complete article about the Great Upheaval here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/31/the-great-upheaval/
You can read my biography of Lucy Parsons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/03/24/lucy-parsons/
And you can get my book ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL from these indie book sellers:
https://www.keplers.com/
https://www.greenapplebooks.com/
Or send me $25 via Venmo (@Michael-Dunn-565) and your mailing address, and I will send you a signed copy!
#workingclass #LaborHistory #chicago #massacre #railroad #GeneralStrike #wildcat #strikewave #IWW #socialism #haymarket #anarchism #lucyparsons #policebrutality #policemurder #fiction #novel #historicalfiction #writer #author #books @bookstadon
Great news! ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia’ will be released in paperback in January 2026 
This means that the book will soon be available at a more affordable price and I’m glad it will reach more readers. In the new blogpost, I respond to some of the critical reflections from reviewers. Read Part 1 here 
https://alexandrinavanke.com/2025/07/25/paperback-release-incoming-what-critics-think-about-my-book-and-why-it-matters-for-the-class-debate-part-1/
#rotterdam, my former home, is getting ready for war with #russia.
#GifsArtidote: dutch ppl will pay for their own deaths, because the fascists in power say so. they were bombed then, & will be now
https://www.ft.com/content/0c42af06-2139-4848-a980-b90494794c98
#workingclass #imperialism #rotterdam #russia #nato #nazis #war #nuclear #press #news #media #BreakingNews
https://bsky.app/profile/gifsartidote.life/post/3lut6d4z5o22i
4-Day work week, 32 hours/week, no reduction in pay caused no loss in productivity for businesses. Indeed, companies' profits increased 1.4%. In other words, they CAN pay us more, while letting put in fewer hours, and still make a huge profit.
How?
They cut out the useless, time-wasting shit like boring meetings and busy work. But it also gave workers more free time to be with friends and family, pursue hobbies, rest, recover from the pressures of work. And the work, itself, felt less stressful. There was less burn-out. Workers took fewer sick and personal days. Resignations dropped in half.
Today in History July 25, 1965: Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, accompanied by Mike Bloomfield and Barry Goldberg, from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. It was the first time he had performed with electric instruments and signaled a major change in folk and rock music. Many purists in the audience booed. Pete Seeger said he wanted to take an axe to the cables because it was so loud and distorted. He later claimed that the sound quality was poor and he merely wanted audience members to hear Dylan’s voice. Dylan claimed that Seeger’s response was like a dagger in his heart. In 2013, Dylan’s Newport guitar sold for $965,000.
Today in Labor History July 25, 2010: WikiLeaks published classified documents about the War in Afghanistan, one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history. The leak included 91,000 Afghan War documents, covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009. Prior to the release, WikiLeaks made the logs available to “The Guardian,” “The New York Times” and “Der Spiegel.” The Times said the leak "offers an unvarnished and grim picture of the Afghan war." The Guardian called it "one of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history ... a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency." The documents also revealed that U.S. military contractors had hired local male child prostitutes.
As a result of the leaks, the U.S. government launched a criminal investigation into Wikileaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, who spent years under British custody. And the U.S. fought aggressively to get him extradited to the U.S., where he would face multiple life sentences for espionage.
Watch the original leaked footage here: https://youtu.be/5rXPrfnU3G0?t=2
