This Week in People’s History, August 15 – 21
August 15, 1843 (180 years ago). In Buffalo, N.Y., some 70 delegates from 12 states (there were 26 states at the time, 12 of which were slave states) convene for the 5-day National Convention of Colored Citizens. The delegates include Black abolitionist luminaries Frederick Douglass, Samuel H. David, William Wells Brown, Charles B. Ray, Charles L. Remond, Henry Highland Garnet and others. The meeting tries to unite around a policy for the elimination of slavery throughout the United States. Almost exactly half of those attending are advocates of helping to organize an armed rebellion in the slave states, to be forcefully assisted by the armed forces of the 14 states that had already abolished slavery (or had begun to do so by mandating slavery's gradual abolition). They might have been called the If-Not-Now-When? faction. The other half of the delegates believe that such a slave rebellion, even with the strongest possible intervention by the non-slave states, would be suicidal and unsuccessful. Of that the This-Is-Not-the-Moment faction felt certain, but they did not unite around a strategic vision to compel the slave states to abolish slavery. One of the Convention's highlights is a speech by Henry Highland Garnet, pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., including this: "Bretheren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been -- your cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. Remember that you are FOUR MILLIONS!" Garnet's call for rebellion failed by one vote of being adopted as the sentiments of the convention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1843_National_Convention_of_Colored_Citiz…;
August 16, 1983 (40 years ago). In early August 1983, almost everyone in the world who paid the slightest attention to the news was familiar with the name Klaus Barbie. He was infamous as a high Gestapo official known as "the Butcher of Lyon," who had escaped arrest after World War II and lived comfortably under an assumed name for more than 30 years. Most people who cared about him knew that Barbie had been arrested and extradited to France, where he was awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. But on August 16, 1983, the world learned something completely new and shocking about him. On that day the U.S. Department of Justice released a 241-page report saying that immediately after World War II, Barbie had been hired by the United States government to work for it as a spy. While Barbie was on the U.S. payroll, the U.S. concealed him from French authorities who were searching for him. Then the U.S. helped to smuggle Barbie to Bolivia, where they set him up with a phony identity. But despite the U.S.-orchestrated coverup, Barbie had been arrested and was about to stand trial for his role in the Holocaust. The revelation that the U.S. had hired Barbie, had concealed him from French police, and had smuggled him out of Europe after giving him a new identity, cast a very unflattering light on the United States' professed antagonism to fascism and to practitioners of genocide. In 1983 the U.S. finally came clean because everything the U.S. had done to help Barbie escape justice was about to become public information at Barbie's upcoming trial. Of course, the belated U.S. confession implicated many U.S. officials in a 35-year-long conspiracy to obstruct justice, but no charges were ever brought against any of those who had helped Barbie evade prosecution for so long. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/trial-of-nazi-criminal-klaus-barbie
On August 17, 1913 (110 years ago), Mark Felt was born in Twin Falls, Idaho. Felt joined the FBI in 1942 and rose to the position of second-in-command after 32 years. During all that time, Felt had never rocked the FBI boat, but then the Watergate burglars were caught in the act. Soon after the failed burglary, the Nixon White House began putting heavy pressure on the FBI to play dumb. Loyal FBI employee that he was, Felt didn't want to play dumb, neither did he want to publically blow the whistle. So he became Deep Throat, secretly giving the Washington Post enough information to prevent the White House from successfully burying the truth about the burglary and covering up one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history. No one will ever know for certain whether Nixon would have been forced to resign had it not been for the truthful leaks from Mark Felt, but it seems very likely that his disclosures were essential to preventing the success of another Nixon dirty trick. I, for one, believe he acted heroically, despite his feet of clay, when the republic was in great peril. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/lawmans-unwavering-compass-led-…
August 18, 1962. Peter, Paul & Mary release their first hit "If I Had a Hammer," which later wins 2 Grammys: Best Folk Recording and Best Performance by a Vocal Group https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGMOB2K78iM
August 19, 1953 (70 years ago). The Iranian government led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh is overthrown by a coup that was secretly organized and bankrolled by the U.S. and the U.K. Mossaddegh was immensely popular, which is why he had been appointed prime minister by the Shah of Iran, and he was only a radical to the extent that he knew a sovereign nation had the right to control its natural resources. Iran was one of the world's major crude oil producers. Mosaddegh had done what every patriotic Iranian wanted him to do, nationalize Iran's oil producing companies, most of which were owned by capitalists in the U.K. In the eyes of the Eisenhower administration, Mosaddegh's non-communist nationalism was unacceptable, so the CIA and MI6 collaborated on removing him from power and cancelling the oil nationalization. Under the thumb of the U.S. and the U.K., Iran had a series of authoritarian, anti-democratic governments until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which is why the revolutionaries considered the U.S. to be the Great Satan when they came to power. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-de…
August 20, 1964. President Lyndon Johnson signs the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the keystone legislation in the War on Poverty. Despite decades of propaganda to the contrary, the War on Poverty was a great success until Republicans in Congress and the White House deemed it, falsely, to have been a failure and called it off. In fact, the War on Poverty was largely responsible for reducing the number of impoverished people in the U.S. by 46 percent over ten years, a completely unprecedented shift in the distribution of income in the U.S. After the War on Poverty was called off in the early 1970s, the poverty rate began to climb, and then it stabilized at around 15 percent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty
[This item has been updated with additional information.]
On August 21, 1963 (60 years ago), South Vietnam is governed by a pro-U.S. clique that is almost totally alienated from the country's population. All high government officials are Catholic and educated in the U.S. or Europe while 80 percent of the population is Buddhist and had never been outside Vietnam.
The government is wholly dependent on hundreds of millions of dollars it received annually from the U.S. Treasury and on more than fourteen thousand U.S. military personnel tasked with training and equipping South Vietnam's army and police.
The South Vietnamese government is besieged on two fronts. It faces an enormously popular and widespread non-violent civil disobedience campaign supported by the country's Buddhist majority, as well as a growing guerrilla war supported by members of the country's large and well-organized communist party, which had the material and political support of North Vietnam's government and communist party.
The official antagonism to the South Vietnamese populace comes to a head on August 21, when hundreds of South Vietnamese soldiers and police used their U.S.-supplied equipment and training to stage coordinated night-time raids on Buddhist pagodas throughout the country, beating and arresting thousands and killing hundreds (no reliable tally of the deadly violence exists). The troops loot and vandalize the temples, many of which are ancient and most of which are repositories of priceless artifacts.
The coordinated attack on the Buddhist temples was conceived and directed by South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother, who is head of the police and the special forces. U.S. officials in South Vietnam claimed later to have been surprised by the attack, even though the U.S. had made it possible by arming and training the attackers.
After the brutal attacks, the State Department decided that the South Vietnamese government had proven shown itself to be too corrupt and antagonistic to the majority of the population to have the slightest chance of helping to lead the effort to suppress the ongoing rebellion by Buddhists and anti-imperialists.
As a result, three days after the events of August 21, President John Kennedy appointed a new ambassador to South Vietnam -- Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. -- and authorized the CIA in Saigon to arrange for the removal of Vietnamese president Diệm (and his brother), to be replaced with South Vietnamese who were not so far removed from the population. When the U.S.-approved coup was carried out by the South Vietnamese Army on November 2, the coup-makers executed both the president and his brother. Lodge and other U.S. officials said they had not called for the execution of the Diệm brothers, but a wink and a nod would have been quite sufficient.
In what was almost certainly a coincidence, President Kennedy, who had authorized the coup, was assassinated in Dallas less than three weeks later. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/vietnam/2020-11-01/new-light-da…