This Week in People’s History, June 4–10
Editor's note: When this column was first posted early on 6/4, the links at the ends of several items were no good. All those bad links have now been fixed.
Voyage of the Doomed
85 YEARS AGO, on June 4, 1939, a refugee tragedy reached its sad climax when the St. Louis, a German passenger liner with more than 900 Jewish would-be refugees aboard was denied permission to land at Florida by the U.S. government. After being turned away by Canada, the ship returned to Europe. After much negotiation, the ship’s captain succeeded in landing 288 passengers in the United Kingdom and 619 in Antwerp. Of those who disembarked at Antwerp, 224 were sent to France, 214 to Belgium and 181 remained in the Netherlands. The ship returned to Hamburg, Germany, with no passengers aboard. Historians estimate that 392 of the 619 who reached the mainland of Europe survived the Holocaust, while 227 perished in concentration camps. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/voyage-of-the-st-louis
Two Roads, Two Endings
35 YEARS AGO, on June 5, 1989, multifaceted dissatisfaction with authoritarian regimes in two almost unimaginably different nations – Poland and China – came to a head with astoundingly different results.
In Poland, after more than 11 years of rising tension between an unresponsive bureaucratic government and a very widely supported pro-democracy movement, a peaceful transition of power took a major step forward when citizens used their first opportunity in 44 years to express their feelings at the ballot box and voted overwhelmingly in favor of non-communist candidates.
On the same day, in China, a 7-week-long demonstration in Beijing against an entrenched regime by thousands of dissatisfied students and workers was brought to a sudden end by an army attack that resulted in a bloodbath. The number of demonstrators killed remains a Chinese state secret; the officially confirmed death toll is 241, but credible sources say the true number is ten times greater.
Of course, the situations in Poland and China were very different, so it is difficult to confidently draw any conclusions from comparing them, but their having occurred on the same day is food for thought. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/from-china-to-polan…
A Big Step Toward Ending a Long War
55 YEARS AGO, on June 6, 1969, after developments in the U.S. War Against Vietnam made it clear that the U.S. had no alternative to reaching a negotiated settlement in order to bring the war to a close, liberation forces in South Vietnam set up the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam in order to have a seat at the negotiating table. The PRG was recognized as the government of South Vietnam by 38 countries and was accepted by the foreign ministers of the Non-aligned countries as a full member of the Non-aligned group. It was also recognized during the negotiations leading to the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement as an equal party to the U.S.-supported Thieu administration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Revolutionary_Government_of_t…
Plain English, or Else!
70 YEARS AGO, on June 7, 1954, Maury Maverick, a progressive New Deal politician from Texas who served two terms in Congress from 1935 to 1939 and was later appointed head of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, a federal agency that provided loans and grants to companies with fewer than 500 employees.
As head of the Smaller War Plants Corporation he coined the term “gobbledegook” as part of a campaign against bureaucratic language. He wrote to his staff: “Memoranda should be as short as clearness will allow... Put the subject matter – the point – and even the conclusion in the opening paragraph and the whole story on one page... Stay off the gobbledegook language. It only fouls people up… Let’s stop ‘pointing up’ programs and ‘finalizing’ contracts. . . . Anyone using the words ‘activation’ or ‘implementation’ will be shot.” https://www.timesenterprise.com/opinion/columns/government-grounds-for-…
Pity the Poor War Criminal
50 YEARS AGO, on June 8, 1974, Harvard University announced it had accepted a $2 million gift from the Alfred Krupp Foundation and would use the funds to create an endowed European Studies professorship. Many observers were shocked by the news.
Alfred Krupp, who set the foundation up, made many millions of dollars before and during World War II manufacturing guns, ammunition, planes and ships for the Third Reich. One of his factories exploited the slave labor of tens of thousands of Auschwitz inmates. In 1943 the Third Reich appointed Krupp to be Reichsminister für Rüstung und Kriegsproduktion. He was arrested in 1945 and later charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The indictment charged that before and during the war, Krupp had employed “hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war in the iron and steel and in the mining industries alone [including] foreign civilian workers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates.”
In 1948 Krupp was convicted on all charges and sentenced to 12 years in prison. As an additional punishment, all his property was confiscated by the allied occupation forces in Germany. But not, as it turned out, for long.
Less than three years later, Krupp’s sentence was commuted to time served and all his confiscated property was returned to him in “an act of clemency.” The Krupp companies, of which Krupp was the sole owner, had never stopped manufacturing armaments. Before Alfred Krupp died in 1967, he turned his entire fortune, including control of the businesses he owned, over the Krupp Foundation, in order to keep his armaments empire out of the hands of his son, who Krupp considered to be “irresponsible.” https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/12/opinions/harvard-university-israel-antis…
Protecting Freedom of Speech
55 YEARS AGO, on June 9, 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court put some teeth in the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech when it ruled that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
In other words, it is not illegal to declare that the U.S. government ought to be overthrown or to be a member of an organization that says the same thing unless the government can prove that someone has done something making lawless action likely.
The court ruled that Ohio’s criminal syndicalism statute was unconstitutional and overturned several cases that had resulted in people going to prison for merely advocating overthrow of the government (including the 1948 prosecution, under the Smith Act, of the leadership of the U.S. Communist Party). (See last week’s This Week in People’s History item for June 3, 1949). Of course most of the people who had been imprisoned for their subversive speech were no longer alive by the time of the court’s ruling. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/brandenburg-v-ohio/
Nothing Illegal About Just Hanging Out
25 YEARS AGO, on June 10, 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a 7-year-old Chicago anti-loitering law, which had been enacted in an attempt to give the police the authority to prevent gang activity, was unconstitutional because the law’s prohibition on remaining “in any one place with no apparent purpose" was too vague for a member of the public to know what conduct was prohibited. The Supreme Court ruling in Chicago v. Morales was hailed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had filed the case. “We are grateful that the Justices of the Supreme Court understand what escaped the political leaders of Chicago: namely, that it is not a criminal activity simply to be a young man of color gathered with friends on the streets of Chicago,” remarked the Illinois ACLU’s legal director. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-hails-supreme-court-decision-s…