This Week in People’s History, Jan 9 – 15
Fighting the Good Fight
115 YEARS AGO, on January 9, 1909, the first issue of La Follette's Weekly Magazine, founded by U.S. Senator Robert La Follette was published in Madison, Wisconsin. It billed itself as a "publication that will not mince words or suppress facts, when public welfare demands plain talk, about public men, legislative measures, or social and industrial wrongs." The Senator wrote this in the first issue: "In the course of every attempt to establish or develop free government, a struggle between Special Privilege and Equal Rights is inevitable. Our great industrial organizations [are] in control of politics, government, and natural resources. They manage conventions, make platforms, [and] dictate legislation. They rule through the very men elected to represent them. The battle is just on. It is young yet. It will be the longest and hardest [battle] ever fought for Democracy. In other lands, the people have lost. Here we shall win. It is a glorious privilege to live in this time, and have a free hand in this fight for government by the people." Twenty years after it began publication, it changed its name to The Progressive, which carries on with the effort to build "government by the people." https://portside.org/2014-04-02/progressive-magazine-and-center-media-a…
Teach Literacy and Go to Jail
170 YEARS AGO, on January 10, 1854, a judge in Norfolk, Virginia, sentenced a white seamstress, Margaret Douglass, to a month in jail for the crime of teaching free African-American children to read.
There is a historical marker in downtown Norfolk bearing a photograph of Margaret Douglass and this inscription: "I told the judge to do his duty and put me in prison at once, if he chose, for I would ask no favors at the hands of any man."
The inscription continues, "Margaret Douglass, a white woman from Charleston, South Carolina, moved to Norfolk with her daughter Rosa in 1845 and lived near here on the former Barraud Court. She was a vest maker by occupation. In June 1852 she and her daughter opened a school in the second story back room of her house to teach 25 free black children, both boys and girls, how to read and write.
"Tuition was three dollars a quarter. After she was seen walking in the funeral procession of one of her deceased students, her school was raided, and she was arrested. She argued her own case in court, pointing out that the wives and daughters of several court officials taught black children weekly in Sunday School classes at Christ Church from the same books she used. After being found guilty, she served a month in jail. Later she moved to Philadelphia with her daughter and gained considerable notoriety based on her booklet about her experience in Norfolk that was published in 1854. "
The Zinn Education Project has a more detailed discussion of Margaret Douglass' victimization here: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/woman-jailed-teaching-black-chi…
Cigarettes: Deadly, But Very, Very Popular
60 YEARS AGO, on January 11, 1964, the Surgeon General of the United States made big news by releasing "Smoking and Health". The next day it was the top story in most Sunday newspapers; the Washington Post gave it a 4-column wide, 3-line headline: "Cigarette Smoking Cited as Main Cause of Deadly Lung Cancer." But the tobacco industry response, "More Research Needed, Says Industry," also received page-1 treatment. The report came out on Saturday because the White House wanted to minimize its impact on the stock market. As it turned out, the stock market hardly noticed; on Monday, the first trading day, most of the major tobacco stocks fell very slightly and Reynolds Tobacco stock even went up. The report's impact on smokers was not as substantial as public health advocates hoped. When it was published, 46 percent of U.S. adults smoked cigarettes; the percentage of smokers has slowly but steadily declined until it now stands at 30%. But, thanks to the growth of the population, the absolute number of smoking adults in the U.S. is higher than it ever was. Smoking is now responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the U.S., including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from exposure to second-hand smoke. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/dise…
Talk Is Cheap, But It Wins Elections
40 YEARS AGO, on January 12, 1984, the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, which had been appointed by President Reagan with a mandate to "drain the swamp" of bureaucracy, published a 47-volume report, containing 2478 cost-cutting recommendations. According to the report, its recommendations had the potential to save more than $424 billion over three years. Claiming to have a plan to cut costs in an election year is great politics, but would it work? According to an analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, even if all the recommendations had been implemented, that savings would be $98 billion over three years, or less than a quarter of what the report claimed. Most of the recommendations were never put into effect. Despite the effort's lack of discernible effect on the so-called swamp, it did no harm to Reagan's re-election campaign. https://portside.org/2021-07-07/how-reagan-revolution-collapsed-america…
An Orgy of Police Brutality
150 YEARS AGO, on January 13, 1874, hundreds of thousands of people had recently lost their jobs as a result of what was then the largest U.S. depression ever, which had begun four months earlier. This was at a time before the invention of unemployment insurance, when the only social safety net was charity. With whole families thrown out of work, some 90 thousand newly evicted New Yorkers were homeless and many of them were literally starving. Unemployed workers organized themselves to demand government assistance at a massive January 13 demonstration in Tompkins Square, on New York City's Lower East Side. Hundreds of the demonstrators were hurt when they were attacked by club-wielding mounted policemen. Samuel Gompers, who was at the time a 24-year-old cigar maker, described the event this way: "mounted police charged the crowd on Eighth Street, riding them down and attacking men, women, and children without discrimination. It was an orgy of brutality." Not surprisingly, the unemployed workers' demands were not met. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1874_Tompkins_Square_Park_riot
McCarthyism's Dramatic Downfall
60 YEARS AGO, on January 14, 1964, "Point of Order!", a documentary film about the Senate hearings that helped to disgrace anti-communist witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy, was released. The film, by Emile de Antonio, Daniel Talbot and Robert Duncan, was innovative because it did not use any narration (except for a 60-second voice-over introduction), nor did it include any footage that had been created for the documentary. The Senate hearings it depicted had been recorded for broadcast by CBS, and every second of the 97-minute film was taken directly from 188 hours of CBS recordings. Similarly, the soundtrack consisted of nothing but what had been created for broadcast. The bare-bones film was a surprise hit. When it was first released the film did not have a distributor, but within weeks of its playing to packed houses in New York City, a major distribution company bought the distribution rights for $100,000 plus a percentage of box office receipts. You can watch "Point of Order!" here: https://youtu.be/4DgYXx3r304?si=YUel6XCv9Cj8kK8L
Hitler's Wealthy Friends in the House of Lords
90 YEARS AGO, on January 15, 1934, one of Britain's biggest newspapers, the Daily Mail, published a major article under the headline "Hurrah for the Black Shirts!," which meant, to the 1,500,000 regular readers of The Daily Mail, "Hurrah for the Fascist Movement in Britain." The article exhorted the paper's readers, "Britain's survival as a great power will depend on the existence of a well-organized part of the Right, ready to take over the responsibility of national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method as Mussolini and Hitler have displayed."
There was nothing surprising about the article to anyone who was familiar with the Daily Mail. The paper's editorial stance was determined by its rich owner, Harold Harmsworth, also known as Viscount Rothermere, who was famous for his warm friendship with both Hitler and Mussolini.
With the Daily Mail's support, the British Union of Fascists was a significant presence on the far right. Five days after January 15, the Black Shirts held a rally in Birmingham that was attended by some 10 thousand supporters, who cheered their leader's calls for a "modern dictatorship" that would be "armed with powers to overcome the problems that people want overcome." Less than five months later, a standing-room-only crowd of 15 thousand packed a London arena to cheer their leader say that "only fascism and its Black Shirts can preserve British free speech and our other liberties."
But a large number of those present were there specifically to jeer the fascist speakers, with the result that the event was punctuated by many fights resulting in serious injuries. As a result of that night's violence, the Daily Mail ceased to cheer for the British Union of Fascists, but continued to praise Hitler and the Nazi takeover of central Europe right up until the UK declared war on Germany in September 1939. https://jacobin.com/2022/09/right-wing-media-wwii-newspapers-olmsted