This Week in People’s History, Jun 4–10, 2025
Farmworkers’ Unions Win a Big One
JUNE 4 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the enactment of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first U.S. law to establish the collective bargaining rights of farmworkers.
California’s 1975 law to give farmworkers’ unions legal status came more than four decades after passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which specifically denied its protections to agricultural workers and to domestic workers.
Perhaps not everyone knows that the NLRA’s exclusion of agricultural workers and domestic workers was solely due to racist prejudice. In 1935 Congress was not ready to give two majority-black groups of workers any rights they could assert against their employers, most of whom were white.
Every effort to correct that result of racist prejudice during the Civil Rights Movement’s legislative heyday came to nothing.
In 50 years since California acted, 13 more states have given legal status to agricultural workers’ unions. They are Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin. It is interesting (but hardly surprising) that Louisiana is the only former Confederate state that has legalized farm-workers’ unions. https://portside.org/2025-04-14/how-fight-trumps-attacks-farmworkers
The Nixon Gang Gets Down to Business
JUNE 5 IS THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY of one of the decisive moments on the road to the Watergate scandal, the secret first meeting of the so called Interagency Committee on Intelligence, the members of which were President Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA Director Richard Helms, National Security Agency Director Admiral Noel Gaynor, Defense Intelligence Agency Director General Donald Bennett, White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, and White House aide Tom Charles Huston.
The seven men agreed that the nation was in a crisis that could only be resolved by a coordinated attack on the antiwar movement, the counter-cultural movement and the political left. They agreed that the federal government needed to systematically ignore the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on illegal searches and wiretaps and to establish concentration camps to imprison dissidents, leftists and anti-war activists. They put White House aide Huston in charge of producing a written plan for implementing that program. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2020-06-25/spying-americans-new-release-infamous-huston-plan
A Deportation that Backfired
JUNE 6 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of a moment that echoes loudly in the current Age of Xenophobic Authoritarianism, when the U.S. government took the first step in the shameful process of deporting an immigrant worker for no good reason.
On June 6, 1950, the U.S. Army revoked the security clearance of one of its own officers, Col. Qian Xuesen, who had been a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the U.S. Air Force.
At the time of the Army’s action, Qian, who had studied and worked in the U.S. for 15 years, was Professor of Jet Propulsion at Caltech and the director of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Center. In addition to his being a leader in the fields of aerospace engineering and cybernetics, he had also originated the field of engineering cybernetics.
Qian, who was never charged with a crime, lost his security clearance when he refused to testify in the loyalty-related trial of friend and colleague Sidney Weinbaum. Soon after that, Qian was arrested on suspicion he was involved in espionage. He was released after an FBI investigation found no evidence Qian had ever broken the law. The simple fact of his arrest led to the order that he be deported to China.
When he arrived in China, Qian, who was by far the most experienced rocket scientist in that country, quickly became director of the country’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons development, a position he held until he retired in 1991. https://jacobin.com/2018/02/deportation-united-states-immigrants-activists
Popular Justice Is No Crime
JUNE 7 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of a successful protest demonstration in Bristol, England, in support of the mushrooming protests concerning the murder of George Floyd.
Located on England’s west coast, Bristol had been a major hub for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As a result it continues to be the home of many buildings that were once part of the slave trade’s infrastructure and contains numerous monuments to major slave traders.
One of those monuments was a larger-than-life bronze statue of slave trader Edward Colston standing atop a 10-foot limestone base in the center of Bristol. On June 7, 2020, demonstrators pulled the statue off its base and dumped it into Bristol Harbor.
Three men and a woman were arrested and charged with criminal vandalism. At their trial they did not deny having toppled the statute but did deny that doing so was a crime. All of them were acquitted and released. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-59892211
Whitewashing the CIA Isn’t Easy
JUNE 10 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the release of the final report of the President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States.
The President’s Commission had been created at the same time both the Senate and the House of Representatives began full-scale investigations of extensive disclosures that the CIA had for years been heavily involved in spying on dissident individuals and organizations inside the U.S., despite the legal prohibition on domestic CIA operations.
As expected, the White House-led investigation in 1975 painted a much prettier picture of illegal CIA activities than did either of the Congressional efforts. The presidential study could not even bring itself to characterize the CIA’s domestic spying as illegal, preferring to describe it as having “exceeded statutory authority.”
More than 35 years after the release of the Presidential Commission’s report, it was disclosed that it had been heavily edited by Dick Cheney, who was then the White House Chief of Staff and had no official role in the report’s drafting. Among Cheney’s edits was the complete omission of an 86-page section entitled “CIA Assassination Plots.” https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2016-02-29/gerald-ford-white-house-altered-rockefeller-commission-report
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