Portside

There’s Big Money in Exporting Death

90 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 4, 1934, the U.S. Senate began a 2-year process of exposing many ugly truths about often unethical and always profitable behavior of the country’s armaments and banking industries before and during World War 1. 

The Senate's Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry used its power to subpoena documents and compel testimony to expose how the industry had used political influence to scuttle every attempt of a skeptical public to keep the U.S. from joining in the war.

As the Senate committee’s chairman said, “The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself.”

The shocking and headline-grabbing testimony received by the committee was enough to persuade a majority of both houses of Congress to repeatedly pass laws that, from 1936 until 1941, prevented the U.S. armaments industry from selling weapons to nations that were at war. https://systemicjustice.org/article/the-weapons-industry-kills-how-u-s-…

The Die Is Cast

250 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress – elected representatives of all but one of the 13 British colonies in North America – convened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s, Carpenters’ Hall. For the next seven weeks the Congress debated what was to be done about the increasingly authoritarian policies of Britain’s royal government toward the colonies. They composed a declaration of grievances addressed to King George III, and recommended that each of the colonies defy British law and establish a local militia. It was a decisive step toward the shooting war that would begin less than eight months later. https://jacobin.com/2014/11/americas-founding-myths

The Shot Not Heard Around the World

250 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 6, 1774, the verbal defiance of the British government being expressed in Philadelphia (see above) was underlined by a more dramatic challenge to royal authority in Worcester, Massachusetts, which was about 10 day’s journey on horseback to the northeast.

On this day a county court of justice, where the officers were appointees of the British crown, was scheduled to begin a session.  Before the court could meet, the town was occupied by more than four thousand members of both the militia from Worcester and from communities for miles around. The citizen-soldiers, who were lined up on both sides of Main Street when the court officers arrived, prevented the officers from entering the courthouse and ordered them into a nearby tavern. After a conference of the militia’s leaders, the court officers were ordered to sign papers disavowing their appointments to office by George III and paraded down Main Street, hat in hand, loudly recanting their oaths of office. Without having fired a single shot, the militia had permanently closed Worcester’s colonial Court of Justice. https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/02/the-true-start-of-the-american-rev…

Yankee Doodle Disses Native Americans 

241 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 7, 1783, representatives of 35 Native American Nations, including Wyandot, Lenape, Shawnee, Cherokee, Ojibwa, Odawa, Mingo, Miami, Potawatomi, Wabash Confederacy and Haudenosaunee gathered near Lake Erie in what is now Fremont, Ohio, to discuss the formation of what eventually was known as United Indian Nations or the Northwestern Confederacy.

In the treaty that brought the Revolutionary War to an official conclusion, the British had ceded all the land they had once claimed south of the Great Lakes to the victorious rebels, making no provision for the many Native American nations that had fought on the British side. The new U.S. government was pushing west as fast as it could, using force to take over as much Native American land as possible, and negotiating treaties with individual groups of Native Americans when necessary.

The Native Americans that met on this day understood the importance of presenting the U.S. with a unified political and military front, so they agreed to establish the United Indian Nations. For the next 12 years, the Native Americans’ agreement to act in unity was constantly challenged by U.S. political and military assaults. The United Indian Nations inflicted at least two huge defeats on the U.S. Army, but the attacks continued until in August 1795, when what remained of unified Native American resistance in the region came to an end, for a time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwestern_Confederacy

Jim Crow Gets the Boot, but ‘Voluntarily’

70 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 8, 1954, public schools in both Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, were racially integrated for the first time. Sixteen weeks earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the school segregation was unconstitutional, but the court had not actually ordered any schools to end segregation by a particular day, so in September 1954 no school that had been segregated was under any legal compulsion to integrate.

In fact, many school districts in the Deep South refused to desegregate for years even after the Supreme Court and lower federal courts had ordered them to do so. Both school systems could be said to have ended their long histories of segregation “voluntarily.” Here are two detailed accounts of the desegregation of the two cities’ schools. https://boundarystones.weta.org/2021/03/03/after-bolling-school-desegregation-dc https://www.mdhistory.org/a-thorny-path-school-desegregation-in-baltimore/

Boston Police Strike Out

105 YEARS AGO, on September 9, 1919, nearly three-quarters of the Boston, Massachusetts, police force went on strike, demanding higher wages, shorter hours, improved working conditions, and the right to join a union. The strike, which was one of the first-ever police strikes on the U.S., was regarded as a huge threat, both by the Governor of Massachusetts (who happened to be future-president Calvin Coolidge) and by President Wilson.

Coolidge and Wilson felt threatened (like almost every fat cat) because they were hostile to organized labor but also because an unprecedented strikes wave was taking place all over North America and Europe.  Many of the strikers were frank admirers of the recently successful Russian revolutionaries, who were not only literally smashing the old regime but were also trouncing the British and U.S. armies’ attempts to smash the Red Army. 

The writers of North American headlines and editorials were almost unanimous in identifying the Boston police as apostles of Bolshevism. As the daily Boston Transcript reported, the strike’s defeat was guaranteed because "behind Boston in this skirmish with Bolshevism stands Massachusetts, and behind Massachusetts stands America."

As it turned out, the newspapers saw the near future clearly. Before the strike was 12 hours old, Gov. Coolidge sent five thousand National Guard troops to Boston, where they killed eight Boston citizens in less than a week. Boston’s Police Commissioner fired every striker and did everything in his power to make sure they never ever worked for any U.S. police department. The Commissioner also hired strikebreakers at a rate of pay that was almost exactly equal to the wage that the strikers had wanted.

Crushing the Boston police union had no effect on the ongoing strike wave, but it did help to ensure that nearly 50 years would pass before the next U.S. police strike. It also helped Coolidge get elected vice-president and take the White House over when President Harding died in office in1923. https://blogs.umb.edu/bpstrike1919/about-this-project/

Give Us Liberty or Death!

285 YEARS AGO, Sept. 10, 1739, was the second day of the week-long Stono Rebellion, the largest insurrection of enslaved people ever to occur in British North America. Approximately two dozen enslaved people took over a store near Charleston, South Carolina, where they seized guns and ammunition, after which they marched south, shouting “Liberty!”  After a week, all the rebels had been captured or killed. Most of those captured were executed and the remainder were sold to plantations in the West Indies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stono_Rebellion

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This Week in People’s History did not appear last week due to illness.