Portside

Colonialism Is Hard to Kill

70 YEARS AGO, on May 7, 1954, after more than seven years of war, Vietnamese forces put an end to French colonial rule in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by defeating the French Army at Dien Bien Phu in northern Vietnam. The Vietnamese victory was to a lesser extent a defeat for the U.S., which had been supplying French fighters with large numbers of tanks and military aircraft. Under the peace treaty that was signed after the war, the Vietnamese people were scheduled to hold an election to determine the composition of the government of a unified Vietnam. But the election never took place, because the anti-communist caretaker government that was installed by France and the U.S. in the southern part of the country refused to allow it. The result was a divided Vietnam that was only united after more than 15 years of additional bloodletting. https://web.archive.org/web/20071216092215/http://www.historynet.com/ma…

“It Was the Right Thing to Do”

95 YEARS AGO, on May 8, 1929, Albert Kahn Associates, one of the largest architecture firms in the U.S., which had pioneered the use of reinforced concrete for the construction of industrial buildings, signed a contract to design what would be the first tractor factory in the Soviet Union. 

The Kahn firm had designed many buildings for construction in Europe and in South America, but the deal with the Soviets was a first for the Detroit-based firm. It was particularly unusual because the U.S. did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, which meant that doing business with the USSR involved an unusual amount of risk. 

Kahn Associates was renowned for having designed major factories for virtually every U.S. auto manufacturer, including Ford, Chevrolet, Cadillac and Chrysler. Under the contract with the Soviets, Kahn agreed to not only design the tractor factory, but to set up an office in Moscow, where the staff would train Soviet architects in the firm’s advanced methods. 

Eight months after the initiation of the first contract, Kahn signed a second, much larger, deal to be consulting architect for all industrial construction in the USSR. Over the next five years, Kahn’s staff in Moscow  helped to design more than 500 Soviet industrial plants and trained more than four thousand Soviet architects. Kahn, who did not profess to be a leftist, said that he believed – and I quote – “the Russian people – regardless of their form of government – were entitled to help after all their generations of suffering under the czars. It was the right thing to do.” https://www.jstor.org/stable/41933723

“Join, Or Die”

270 YEARS AGO on May 9, 1754, The Pennsylvania Gazette, which was owned and edited by Benjamin Franklin, published the first U.S. political cartoon, an image of snake that was cut into pieces, each piece representing one of the North American colonies, under the heading “Join, or Die.” The image and the accompanying text delivered the message that the colonies faced a dire military threat from France, and that they needed to act in unison in order to avoid fatal consequences. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/revoluti…

Apartheid’s End 

30 YEARS AGO, on May 10, 1994, Nelson Mandela, the South African revolutionary who had spent most of his adult life in prison, was inaugurated as South Africa’s first president to have been elected in a truly democratic election. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/4/27/thirty-years-of-freedom-fa…

Class War in the Midwest

130 YEARS AGO, on May 11, 1894, most of the hundreds of workers at the Pullman Car Company factory in Chicago began a spontaneous strike to demand that the company rescind a large wage cut imposed by management. Many of the strikers were members of the American Railway Union, which had not planned the strike, but once the strike began, the union decided to support it. Soon the ARU called on its tens of thousands of members, who were employed at most of the railroads in the U.S., to refuse to operate trains that included any Pullman-built car. The result was that ARU members blockaded trains that included Pullman-built cars. The strike spread slowly at first, but by the end of June more than 125,000 ARU members at 29 railroads were boycotting trains that included a Pullman car. On July 2 the federal government obtained a federal court’s  injunction against the strike because it was interfering with the shipment of U.S. mail. When the strikers refused to obey the injunction, U.S. President Grover Cleveland dispatched thousands of soldiers and deputy U.S. marshals to Chicago to enforce it. The strikers refused to yield, and the soldiers and lawmen fired on them, killing 30 and wounding many more. ARU President Eugene Debs was arrested and served six months in jail for his role in defying the injunction. The strike failed to attain its objectives, but its size and the brutality of its suppression were never forgotten. https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/organizations/labor/jane-addams-a…

Unsafe at Any Speed 

55 YEARS AGO, on May 12, 1969, General Motors Corporation announced that Chevrolet had built its last Corvair. From the very beginning in 1960, Corvairs were obviously unusual. Not only did they have air-cooled, rear-mounted engines, like Volkswagen sedans, but they looked nothing like any existing U.S.-made car.  They immediately became a best-seller, but before long their drivers began to experience unexpected steering problems. A young and largely unknown Ralph Nader published a book-length critique of the Corvair’s design titled “Unsafe At Any Speed,” and Corvair sales plummeted. Nader’s criticism inspired Congress to create the first government agency focused on automobile safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Even though the Corvair’s lack of safety was never totally clear, its sales never recovered, and Chevrolet stopped building them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed:_The_Designed-In_Dang…

“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night”

75 YEARS AGO, on May 13, 1949, the progressive activist, singer and actor Paul Robeson, who was being sharply attacked by some for his political activities, made a performing tour of Europe, during which he was filmed making an impromptu rendition of “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” to a meeting of Scottish coal miners. https://youtu.be/B0bezsMVU7c?si=0P8NYTXGREfM6mSJ