A hundred years ago, radical Finnish immigrants founded a cooperatively-owned park to escape political repression on Minnesota’s Iron Range. It’s still “a workingman’s paradise.”
Georgia’s sweeping, political application of conspiracy law echoes tactics that shattered the left a hundred years ago, when the government targeted socialist parties and militant unions with laws against criminal syndicalism, espionage, and sedition
During the 20th century’s two red scares in US and Canada, Wobblies and Communist-aligned unions faced fierce repression from employers and government. They were targeted because they were seen as posing a real threat to the capitalist social order.
Poet Langston Hughes was invited to speak at Occidental College on this day in 1948, then uninvited when red-baiters released a report calling him a “subversive.” His story shows how the postwar Red Scare targeted radicals, particularly black leftists.
Reader Comments: Bank Failures, Deregulation and Fed-Raising Interest Rates; Illegal Invasion of Iraq; Slash Pentagon Budget; Jim Crow South; New Day for UAW; Light Communication; Letters From Langston; US Policy and Taiwan; How Workers Win
Being a leftist — or worse, a child of leftists — in the mid-20th century meant constant harassment from the FBI. From my childhood in the 1940s and ’50s through the upheavals of the ’60s, I only told them one thing: take a hike.
Reader Comments: Ukraine War; Peace Movement; Starbucks; Supreme Court and Gerrymandering; Huge Union Win at MIT; Red Scare; Anti-Corporate Radio is Everywhere; Labor Against War in Ukraine; Walden Bello; Announcements; more...
In the 1970s, Robeson’s admirers — boosted by the upsurge of black studies and black cultural projects, the waning of the Cold War — began to rehabilitate his reputation with various tributes, documentary films, books, concerts, exhibits, and a play
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