Haymarket Riot and Conspiracy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Messer-Kruse
Keyword(s):  
Labor Unions ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Life Imprisonment ◽  
Death Sentences ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cell Suicide ◽  
First Red Scare ◽  
American Left

The Haymarket Riot and Conspiracy of 1886 is a landmark in American social and political history. On May 4, 1886, during an open-air meeting near Haymarket Square in Chicago, someone threw a dynamite bomb into a squad of police, sparking a riot that resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four rioters. Eight anarchists were brought to trial. Though the bomb-thrower was never apprehended, the eight radical leaders were charged as accessories before the fact for conspiring to murder the police. After the longest criminal trial in Illinois history up to that time, seven men were convicted and condemned to death and one to a long prison term. After all appeals were exhausted, four were executed, one cheated the hangman with a jail cell suicide, and the death sentences of two others were commuted to life imprisonment (all three incarcerated men were later pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1892). The Haymarket bombing and trial marked a pivotal moment in the history of American social movements. It sparked the nation’s first red scare whose fury disrupted even moderately leftist movements for a generation. It drove the nation’s labor unions onto a more conservative path than they had been heading before the bombing. The worldwide labor campaign for clemency for the convicted men became the foundation for the institution of International Workers’ Day on May 1, a holiday ironically observed in most countries except for the United States. It also began a tradition within the American left of memorializing the Haymarket defendants as the first martyrs to their cause.

The Adversity and Empathy of Emma Goldman

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-136
Author(s):  
Nolan Bennett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Structural Injustice ◽  
Attempted Murder ◽  
The People ◽  
The Family ◽  
William Mckinley ◽  
Emma Goldman ◽  
First Red Scare

Chapter 4 examines how Emma Goldman wrote her 1931 Living My Life to challenge the state authority that had deported her during the first Red Scare, turning inward before a global audience to analyze experiences in the family, factory, anarchist circles, prison, and in nursing. Through autobiography Goldman theorized two approaches to antiauthoritarian politics. Whereas an adversarial approach aimed to emancipate the people through targeting and removing agents of oppression, empathy would raise awareness of the people that suffer structural injustice. The chapter traces this shift in anarchist politics across Goldman’s descriptions of her assistance with the attempted murder of Henry Clay Frick and her response to the assassination of President William McKinley. Recognizing Goldman’s claim of experience elevates Living My Life among her anarcha-feminist essays and speeches, and it explains why she revealed her previously secret involvement with the attack on Frick though it made difficult her return to the United States.

The History of Mitigation in Death Penalty Cases

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
Russell Stetler
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Death Sentences ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
Mitigating Factors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Effective Representation ◽  
The U.S

This chapter discusses how the theory and practice of mitigation have evolved over more than four decades, thereby helping to define the modern death penalty era in the United States. Prior to 1976, juries generally made death penalty decisions in a unitary proceeding. Juries then had unfettered discretion to impose death sentences, and the results were so arbitrary that in 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all the existing death penalty statutes. In 1976, the Court approved new statutes that guided jurors’ discretion. The Court required individualized sentencing in which jurors could consider mitigating factors based on the diverse frailties of humankind. This broad definition of what might inspire juries to reject death was elaborated in succeeding decades in a series of decisions relying on the Eighth Amendment. Social workers and other nonlawyers became critical members of multidisciplinary capital defense teams providing effective representation under the Sixth Amendment.

The Claims of Experience

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nolan Bennett
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Industrial Change ◽  
Life Narrative ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Conservatism ◽  
New Community ◽  
Emma Goldman

Why have so many figures throughout American history proclaimed their life stories when confronted by great political problems? The Claims of Experience provides a new theory for what makes autobiography political throughout the history of the United States and today. Across five chapters, the book examines the democratic crises that encouraged a diverse cast of figures to tell their stories: Benjamin Franklin amid the revolutionary era and its aftermath, Frederick Douglass in the antebellum South and in abolitionist movements, Henry Adams in the Gilded Age and its anxieties of industrial change, Emma Goldman among the first Red Scare and state opposition to radical speech, and Whittaker Chambers amid the second Red Scare that initiated the anticommunist turn of modern conservatism. These authors made a “claim of experience”: a life narrative that offers its audience new community by restoring to readers and author alike from prevailing political authorities the power to remake and make meaning of their lives. Whereas political theorists and activists have often seen autobiography as too individualist or a mere documentary source of evidence, this theory reveals the democratic power that life narratives, both written and spoken, have offered both those on the margins and in the mainstream. When successful, claims of experience redistribute popular authority from unsettled institutions and identities to new democratic visions. This book offers both a method for understanding the politics of life narrative and a call to anticipate claims of experience as they appear today.

scholarly journals Chronicling subversion: The Cronaca Sovversiva as both seditious rag and community paper

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Quinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Italian Immigrants ◽  
First Red Scare ◽  
Over Time

The Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) was an anarchist newspaper, known today for the views of editor Luigi Galleani, whose ideas are associated with multiple bombings carried out in the United States throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the First Red Scare and the executed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. A broad reading of the Cronaca Sovversiva , which focusses on more than its connections to controversy, violence and repression, reveals how a periodical produced by a wide range of artists, writers and activists became central to how many Italian immigrants understood and engaged with industrial capitalism. This paper argues that the Cronaca Sovversiva built an audience over time by incorporating a wide range of perspectives, addressing local and global issues and linking readers with other forms of literature as well as community events and projects. Diverse works of radical literature, art and announcements in the periodical, set within the predictable, repetitious framework of a weekly community paper, allowed a germinating militant movement to develop throughout and outside the Cronaca Sovversiva ’s pages.

MOVE

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Kent Evans
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Police Department ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
States Government ◽  
Tear Gas ◽  
History Of ◽  
Improvised Explosives

This book is a religious history of MOVE, a small, mostly African American religious group devoted to the religious teachings of John Africa that emerged in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. MOVE is perhaps best known for the MOVE Bombing. In 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department—working in concert with federal and state law enforcement—attacked a home that MOVE people shared in West Philadelphia, involving hundreds of police officers and firefighters and using tear gas, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, and improvised explosives. Most infamously, a police officer dropped a bomb containing C-4 explosives, which he had acquired from the FBI, from a helicopter onto the roof of the MOVE house. The bomb started a fire, which officials allowed to spread in hopes of burning MOVE people out of the house. Police officers fired upon MOVE people who tried to escape the flames. Eleven MOVE people died in the attack, including John Africa. Five of those who died were children. Based on never-before-seen law enforcement records and extensive archival and ethnographic research, MOVE: An American Religion reinterprets the history of MOVE from its origins in the late 1960s, its growth in the early 1970s, its conflicts with the United States government from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and its presence today. It is the first full-length academic study of MOVE since 1994 and is the first book to consider MOVE as a religion.

Revolution and Repression

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenyon Zimmer
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First Red Scare ◽  
First World

This chapter examines how the First World War and its aftermath fundamentally altered global politics. Empires crumbled, socialist and nationalist revolutions erupted, and millions perished. Meanwhile, in the United States, rising patriotic fervor and wartime demands for “100 percent Americanism” marked immigrant anarchists as doubly dangerous, and Russia's October Revolution amplified antiradical fears. America was distressed by widespread racial violence, its first Red Scare, and a colossal postwar strike wave. In this context, the federal government proved willing to suppress radical speech and deport politically undesirable immigrants, efforts that were met with an unprecedented upsurge in anarchist violence, itself both a result and a cause of increasing repression.

The Bracero Program, 1942–1964

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan R. García
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bracero Program ◽  
Bilateral Agreements ◽  
Agricultural Laborers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Government Interference ◽  
Favorable Conditions ◽  
Contract Labor

The Bracero Program began in 1942 as a temporary wartime measure but was extended repeatedly until 1964. During that time, more than 4.5 million braceros received contracts to work in the United States, primarily as agricultural laborers. Before the program ended, braceros worked in thirty-eight states in the United States, with the majority contracted by eight states. With the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941 and the subsequent sinking of two Mexican vessels by German submarines, Mexico and the United States entered into a bilateral agreement. In actuality, there were two bilateral agreements, the first extending from 1942 to 1949, and the second, enacted as Public Law 78, starting in 1951 and culminating in 1964. Throughout the program’s existence Mexico strove to ensure favorable conditions under which braceros were to be contracted, especially in light of the strong opposition to the program among a number of sectors in Mexico and the long history of discrimination against people of Mexican descent in the United States. Like Mexico, the United States faced opposition to the contract labor program from both employers and labor unions. Employers were wary of too much government interference in their ability to secure a plentiful and cheap labor supply, while labor unions viewed the program as a threat to organizing efforts and as an obstacle to achieving better working conditions and pay for agricultural workers in the United States. The Bracero Program also deeply affected the braceros themselves in both positive and negative ways. And it had a profound impact on the families of the braceros who left to work in the United States. The program was plagued by a number of issues and problems, primarily resulting from a lack of enforcement and widespread contract violations. Despite the problems associated with the program, both countries touted its benefits, not only to their economy, but to the braceros themselves. The braceros did not passively accept their fate and challenged their treatment in a variety of ways. Although the Bracero Program ended in 1964, its legacy continues to affect US–Mexican relations to this day. Furthermore, former braceros and their descendants have undertaken a movement to demand reimbursement for wages promised them under the requirements of the Bracero Program.

Venceremos Means “We Will Win”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teishan A. Latner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Construction Projects ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Left

Chapter One illuminates Cuba’s influence on the American Left at the height of the sixties era by examining the history of the Venceremos Brigade, an anti-imperialist Cuba solidarity organization formed in the United States in 1969. Initiated by New Left antiwar and civil rights activists from Students for a Democratic Society and incorporating a broad spectrum of social movements, including women’s liberation, veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and elements of Puerto Rican, Chicana/o, and Asian American movements, the Venceremos Brigade sent several thousand U.S. leftwing activists to Cuba during the next decade as volunteer laborers. Working in agricultural and construction projects on the island to support Cuban socialism and publicizing the nation’s achievements in universal education and healthcare, the Venceremos Brigade built a grassroots counterpoint to the Washington consensus of antagonism toward the Cuba.

Reflections on the History of the French and American Labor Movements

1957 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Val R. Lorwin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jules Michelet ◽  
American Labor

Jules Michelet remarked that the forms of association “must differ … among the different countries, according to the diversity of national genius.” and Denis W. Brogan once said (he is surely one who does not merit the reproach): “Because we have studied only France, we have not understood even France.” The second remark might apply to the United States, too. There has been talk of the value of comparative study of labor movements, but comparatively little application of comparative methods to labor history. A comparison of the history of association in labor unions in France and the United States may therefore throw a little more light on the “national genius” of each country as well as on die behavior of each labor movement.

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