Labor Fest 2024 is coming to the SF Bay Area this July.
If you're in the Bay Area, July 21, 5-8 pm, please come hear me read from my working-class historical novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill. Signed copies will be available.
Make an evening of it. Or a weekend.
Lots of wonderful speakers and musical and theatrical performances!
And report-backs on organizing efforts among low-wage workers of color.
Today in Labor History June 24, 1525: The Church reconquered the Anabaptist free state of Munster. The Anabaptists had created a sectarian, communal government in Munster, Germany, during the Reformation. They controlled the city from February until June 24, 1525. They were heavily persecuted for their beliefs, which included opposition to participation in the military and civil government. They saw themselves as citizens of the Kingdom of God, and not citizens of any political state. Their beliefs helped radicalize people during Germany’s Peasant War, a revolt against feudalism and for material equality among all people. Some of the early Anabaptists practiced polygamy and polyamory, as well as the collective ownership of property. The more conservative decedents of the Anabaptists include the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites.
The Munster rebellion has been portrayed in several works of fiction. My all-time favorite is “Q,” (1999) by the autonomist-Marxist Italian writing collective known as Luther Blissett. They currently write under the pen name Wu Ming. Giacomo Meyerbeer wrote an opera about it 1849, Le prophète.
An enchanting telling of the complex and fascinating life of real-life Luisa Abrego of Seville, who forges a new life after freedom from slavery in colonial Mexico and gets caught in the far-reaching Spanish Inquisition.
AN EXTRAVAGANT, SPRAWLING PICARESQUE set in Zaire in the last years of the Mobutu regime is a symphony of voices from every walk of life, from tough street kids to the secret police to high society. Vivid and fascinating. B PLUS
Based on the true story of one ordinary woman who risked everything to reunite Jewish children with the true names they hadn't even realized they'd lost.
The Forgotten Names reminds the world of the impact that one person can have in the face of overwhelming odds.
THE WORLD OF 1950s BOMBAY comes alive in this story of twin sisters trying to follow their own dreams and meet the expectations of their very proper Punjabi family, still unsettled by the violence of Partition. Lovely, rich saga. A MINUS
Today in Labor History June 7, 1929: Striking textile workers battled police in Gastonia, North Carolina, during the Loray Mill Strike. Police Chief O.F. Aderholt was accidentally killed by one of his own officers during a protest march by striking workers. Nevertheless, the authorities arrested six strike leaders. They were all convicted of “conspiracy to murder.”
The strike lasted from April 1 to September 14. It started in response to the “stretch-out” system, where bosses doubled the spinners’ and weavers’ work, while simultaneously lowering their wages. When the women went on strike, the bosses evicted them from their company homes. Masked vigilantes destroyed the union’s headquarters. The NTWU set up a tent city for the workers, with armed guards to protect them from the vigilantes.
One of the main organizers was a poor white woman named Ella May Wiggans. She was a single mother, with nine kids. Rather than living in the tent city, she chose to live in the African American hamlet known as Stumptown. She was instrumental in creating solidarity between black and white workers and rallying them with her music. Some of her songs from the strike were “Mill Mother’s Lament,” and “Big Fat Boss and the Workers.” Her music was later covered by Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie, who called her the “pioneer of the protest ballad.” During the strike, vigilantes shot her in the chest. She survived, but later died of whooping cough due to poverty and inadequate medical care.
For really wonderful fictionalized accounts of this strike, read “The Last Ballad,” by Wiley Cash (2017) and “Strike!” by Mary Heaton Vorse (1930).
Today in Labor History June 1 is the day that U.S. labor law officially allows children under the age of 16 to work up to 8 hours per day between the hours of 7:00 am and 9:00 pm. Time is ticking away, Bosses. Have you signed up sufficient numbers of low-wage tykes to maintain production rates with your downsized adult staffs?
The reality is that child labor laws have always been violated regularly by employers and these violations have been on the rise recently. Additionally, many lawmakers are seeking to weaken existing, poorly enforced laws to make it even easier to exploit children. Over the past year, the number of children employed in violation of labor laws rose by 37%, while lawmakers in at least 10 states passed, or introduced, new laws to roll back the existing rules. Violations include hiring kids to work overnight shifts in meatpacking factories, cleaning razor-sharp blades and using dangerous chemical cleaners on the kills floors for companies like Tyson and Cargill. Particularly vulnerable are migrant youth who have crossed the southern U.S. border from Central America, unaccompanied by parents. https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attack/
Of course, what is happening in the U.S. is small potatoes compared with many other countries, where exploitation of child labor is routine, and often legal. At least 20% of all children in low-income countries are engaged in labor, mostly in agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa it is 25%. Kids are almost always paid far less than adults, increasing the bosses’ profits. They are often more compliant than adults and less likely to form unions and resist workplace abuses and safety violations. Bosses can get them to do dangerous tasks that adults can’t, or won’t, do, like unclogging the gears and belts of machinery. This was also the norm in the U.S., well into the 20th century. In my soon novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” the protagonist, Mike Doyle, works as a coal cleaner in the breaker (coal crushing facility) of a coal mine at the age or 13. Many kids began work in the collieries before they were 10. They often were missing limbs and died young from lung disease. However, when the breaker bosses abused them, they would sometimes collectively chuck rocks and coal at them, or walk out, en masse, in wildcat strikes. And when their fathers, who worked in the pits, as laborers and miners, went on strike, they would almost always walk out with them, in solidarity.
Today in Labor History May 20, 1776: The Mohawks, under the leadership Joseph Brandt (Thayendanegea), defeated the American Revolutionaries at the Battle of the Cedars (on the St. Lawrence River). A day earlier, Benedict Arnold, commanding the American military garrison at Montreal, surrendered to a combined force of British and Indigenous troops. Brant was born into the Wolf Clan of the matrilineal society, where power was divided between male chiefs and clan mothers, with decisions made by consensus between them. Much of this history is portrayed in the wonderful novel Manituana, by Wu Ming (2007), an Italian writing collective formerly associated with the Luther Blissett Project.
I find I can't stomach most fiction anymore, especially anything written since about 1990. But Vanessa Chan's "The Storm We Made" is a powerful exception. Minutely and lovingly observed and the emotional punches it delivers are all earned and deserved.
It's set in #Malaysia in the 1930s during the British colonial period (when it was still called "Malaya") and the #Japanese wartime occupation of the 1940s, and its principal characters are Malay and Japanese. So right away that sets it apart from anything I've ever read before.
What's more, most of the principal characters from whose points of view we see the story are women and girls.
It is so rare, in #English language fiction, to have a glimpse into the dynamics of #Colonization when it's not practiced by a Western state.
The #Audiobook is beautifully narrated by Samantha Tan, a woman of #Asian ancestry.
Would love to hear #TootSEA thoughts on this book.
Kate Sheridan leaves Ireland for London seeking freedom and work. But war looms and danger lurks. She meets Charlie Butler, a dashing pilot who charms her, but can she trust him? Will their love survive their families' objections and the trials of war?
On July 22, 1916, someone set off a bomb during the pro-war “Preparedness Day” parade in San Francisco. As a result, 10 people died and 40 were injured. A jury convicted two labor leaders, Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings, based on the false testimony of Martin Swanson, a detective with a long history of interfering in San Francisco strikes. Not surprisingly, only anarchists were suspected in the bombing. Swanson maintained constant surveillance and harassment of Mooney and Warren Billings, as well as Alexander Berkman & Emma Goldman. A few days after the bombing, they searched and seized materials from the offices of “The Blast,” Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman’s local paper. They also threatened to arrest Berkman. Billings and Mooney ultimately served 23 years in prison for a crime they had not committed. Governor Edmund G. Brown pardoned them in 1961.
Billings and Mooney were both anarchists, and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). As a young man in San Francisco, Tom Mooney published The Revolt, a socialist newspaper. He was tried and acquitted three times for transporting explosives during the Pacific Gas & Electric strike in 1913. Consequently, the cops already believed he was a bomber, prior to the Preparedness Day parade.
In 1937, Mooney filed a writ of habeas corpus, providing evidence that his conviction was based on perjured testimony and evidence tampering. Among this evidence was a photograph of him in front of a large, ornate clock, on Market Street, clearly showing the time of the bombing and that he could not have been at the bombing site when it occurred. He was finally released in 1939. Upon his release, he marched in a huge parade down Market Street. Cops and leaders of the mainstream unions were all forbidden from participating. An honor guard of longshoremen accompanied him carrying their hooks. His case helped establish that convictions based on false evidence violate people’s right to due process.
The Alibi Clock was later moved to downtown Vallejo, twenty-five miles to the northeast of San Francisco. A bookstore in Vallejo is named after this clock. On May 11, 2024, I did a reading there from my working-class historical novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill, during the Book Release Party for Roberta Tracy’s, Zig Zag Woman, which takes place at the time of the Los Angeles Times bombing, in 1910, when two other labor leaders, the McNamara brothers, were framed.
In 1931, while Mooney and Billings were still in prison, I. J. Golden persuaded the Provincetown Theater to produce his play, “Precedent,” about the Mooney and Billings case. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote, “By sparing the heroics and confining himself chiefly to a temperate exposition of his case [Golden] has made “Precedent” the most engrossing political drama since the Sacco-Vanzetti play entitled Gods of the Lightening… Friends of Tom Mooney will rejoice to have his case told so crisply and vividly.”
During the Spanish war against fascism (AKA the Spanish Civil War), many Americans volunteered to join the antifascist cause as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. One of the battalions was named the Tom Mooney Machine-Gun Company. It was led by Oliver Law, a communist, and the first black man known to have commanded white U.S. troops.
A DELICATELY HAUNTING THAI novel unfolds like a late-night story from its protagonist, a monk in his 90s telling tales of his youth in the remote jungles of the late 19th century, where tigers and crocodiles lurked in the darkness. Stunning. A MINUS
'Google search interest for “historical fiction books” increased 34% in the last 3 years to 33,000 searches/month. The K-lytics Historical Fiction Report 2024 incorporates two Top-100 Market Snapshots: one for the Historical Fiction bestseller list and another for Historical Mystery. See trending authors, publishers, book descriptions, keywords, pricing analysis, cover art, Kindle Unlimited vs. Non-KU, and more.' https://k-lytics.com/dap/a/?a=16040&p=k-lytics.com/historical-fiction/@bookstodon#books#publishing#mystery#Historicalfiction