Neil Burns Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 Yahoo Article Interesting article from Yahoo. This ties into the general hysteria often discussed on the forum in the US circa 1917-18. Why exactly Montana feared it would be a hotbed of German intrigue and sedition is beyond me. Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeppoSapone Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 Neil How strong was the IWW in Montana in 1917? Also, were local mines producing anything essential to the war effort? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andigger Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 Neil - I don't know, but it might not be that they feared attack but rather that there was a large German immigrant population (and therefore suspect) there. Just conjecture on my part. Andy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Burns Posted 10 January , 2006 Author Share Posted 10 January , 2006 Good points, gentlemen, hadn't really considered either! Tony, the Wobblies were pretty strong in the Northwest although the folks highlighted in the article don't appear to be Wobblies. One Big Union! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul guthrie Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 When John Adams was president in 1798 the US passed the infamous ALien & Sedition acts, one newspaperman served time for saying if president he would quarrel with France, claim natioal crisis etc. and cover it all with a claim of piety - sound familiar? -. Several others were convicted, Jefferson pardoned them all, a dark day in US history. Something similar happened in Kentucky, will try to find it, during WW1 I mean. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul guthrie Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 OK, in 1918 Congress passed Espionage Act, it allowed prison for up to 20for statements intended to create insubordination disloyalty etc. A Sedition Act peohibited language that brought government flag etc into disrepute. Phone eavesdroping became common w/o a warrant - sound familiar? In Covington Kentucky there were many Germansm teaching it in school wsa banned. A shoemaker named Schoberg and Kruse, an officer of Bavarian Brewing - fine building, still there -were arrested for various treasons after eavesdroping with a bug in his shop, statements such as the war was for money they sang in a language not English too! They were convicted with others, sent to prison, 6th Circuit affirmed, Supreme COurt refused to hear an appeal, finally after 6 months sentences were commuted they go out. These comments were in private conversations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Burns Posted 10 January , 2006 Author Share Posted 10 January , 2006 It was under the above Federal Law that Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned for his anti-war speeches in June of 1918. Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul guthrie Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 True about Debs, a socialist, but my example is even worse cause they were private conversations bugged w/o a warrant. The courts of course were open and operating, Judges were available to give govt a warrant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andigger Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 What petition would be presented to the court? Was suspicion of sedition required to be proven before tapping could be used? FISA didn't come into effect until 1978. Andy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeppoSapone Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 Neil What I had in mind was what happened to the Miners of Bisbee. Never, even in her wildest dreams, would Thatcher have been able to get away with what happened in Arizona in July 1917. http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/index.html "When US involvement in WW1 began, IWW copper strikes [butte, MT; Globe, AZ; and Bisbee, AZ] were branded acts of "German agents" by the likes of NY Times." IIRC the label "IWW" was used as a stick to beat organised Labour as a whole. "Around 2,000 vigilantes (Bisbee Loyalty League; Businessmen's Protective League) herded 1,386 strikers onto 23 railroad boxcars, shipped them to the Mexican border to die (but they lived). Only 426 strikers were IWW, but the largest percentage of any IWW nationality was Mexican. According to Felix Frankfurter (who 'mediated') half of the workers were foreign-born." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Burns Posted 10 January , 2006 Author Share Posted 10 January , 2006 Hi Tony, Nothing new I know of (or could google!), I half-expected something to come to light after the fall of the Soviet Union I figured if Fascist Italy was involved it would have come to light by now. American Labor Museum You may find this interesting as it involved the large Italian immigrant population in Paterson, now don't panic, all their descendants are good solid conservative folk with no Anarcho-syndicalist leanings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeppoSapone Posted 10 January , 2006 Share Posted 10 January , 2006 You may find this interesting as it involved the large Italian immigrant population in Paterson, now don't panic, all their descendants are good solid conservative folk with no Anarcho-syndicalist leanings. Neil Oh well, you can't have everything! Actually, of course they are. Ordinary people just want to live their lives in peace, and do their best for their kids. IMHO whenever there is a big strike etc it is the fault of either the employers or the government. Re: Carlo Tresca. I have read a lot of claims that say he was killed by organised crime. Of course, people can say anything at all on the internet. I don't know how much proof they actually have. Here is an account of his death that blames the Bonanno Crime Family. Somewhere else I read that this murder was done a an "act of good faith" because these people were negotiating with the US government. They were prepared to help future military landings in Sicily. I believe that they did so, and wonder what they got in return. Well, thats the net for you! http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters2/bonanno/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Burns Posted 11 January , 2006 Author Share Posted 11 January , 2006 Hi Tony, I used to have abook called Anarchist Portraits, that I thought connected the murder with Stalinists, but after reading this article the mob connection does sound familiar. Unfortunately I think my copy of the book was Syndicalized a few years back! Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Simon Bull Posted 11 January , 2006 Share Posted 11 January , 2006 Pardon my ignorance but what does IWW stand for? Is the Wobblies a nickname for the IWW? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Burns Posted 11 January , 2006 Author Share Posted 11 January , 2006 The Industrial Workers of the World are a union with an anarcho-syndicalist agenda. They were known as the Wobblies and were very involved in the 1912 Paterson Silk Mills strike which is where the poster comes from. The pageant itself was a pretty big flop from what I've read. They are still around today. Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Simon Bull Posted 11 January , 2006 Share Posted 11 January , 2006 OK, in 1918 Congress passed Espionage Act, it allowed prison for up to 20for statements intended to create insubordination disloyalty etc. A Sedition Act peohibited language that brought government flag etc into disrepute. Phone eavesdroping became common w/o a warrant - sound familiar? In Covington Kentucky there were many Germansm teaching it in school wsa banned. A shoemaker named Schoberg and Kruse, an officer of Bavarian Brewing - fine building, still there -were arrested for various treasons after eavesdroping with a bug in his shop, statements such as the war was for money they sang in a language not English too! They were convicted with others, sent to prison, 6th Circuit affirmed, Supreme COurt refused to hear an appeal, finally after 6 months sentences were commuted they go out. These comments were in private conversations. Paul - does the fact that the 6th Circuit found against these Defendants and the Supreme Court refused leave to appeal mean that there is a legal precedent for Bush intercepting communications without a court order and that anyone challenging what he is doing will have to overturn this case? Obviously, I am acting on limited information, but that would seem to be the effect of the decision under English rules of precedent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhill Posted 12 January , 2006 Share Posted 12 January , 2006 A quick search through my bookshelf reminds me that Montana was a main centre of hysteria due to its copper mines, of which of big names were Phelps-Dodge and Anaconda, as well as the presence of the Wobblies. As a matter of fact, we had the Wobblies up here as well. The winter of 1913-1914 saw a lot of unemployed men coming into the towns when the lumber camps closed for the winter. A recession had set in and there was no work. IWW organizers had come up from the States, and the unemployed demanded food, shelter, and work from the City, sometimes under threats of violence. Hereabouts, at least, the men had some poplular sympathy and the City actually provded some food and shelter and attempted to hire some men for make-work projects. However, the IWW was so extreme in its demands that no agreement was possible. The IWW people seemed to have drifted back south when many of the men broke ranks and accepted the City's offers. Our American friends were much more direct about the matter and in 1917-1918 put down the IWW with considerable violence; some considerable blood being shed. However, it is not hard to see why the Wobblies could be seen to be seditious. Their language was always extreme, and they publically preached violence and sabotage. Nobody at the time could have known that their bark was worse than their bite. Or so it seems to me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lassuy Posted 12 January , 2006 Share Posted 12 January , 2006 There is an excellent article on the subject by Clemens P. Work in the most recent--Winter 2005--issue of Montana, The Magazine of Western History. The mag is published by the Montana Historical Society. Living just 6 miles from the North Dakota/Montana border, I've always been struck by the difference between the two states when the US entered the war. Montana quickly devolved into riots and lynchings of suspected German sympathizers, while North Dakota--itself a hotbed for the IWW and the Non-Partisan League--stayed relatively calm. I suspect it has something to do with the numbers of German immigrant residents. Montana had relatively few, and many of those were Hutterites, a pacifist religious sect, which made them doubly suspicious. North Dakota, on the other hand, had (and has) a large German population. It would have been somewhat difficult to lynch a German in our state capitol of Bismarck (named after the Iron Chancellor himself), or for that matter the towns of Munich, Berlin, Strasburg, etc. In numbers there is strength (an old IWW slogan!) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Burns Posted 12 January , 2006 Author Share Posted 12 January , 2006 Hi James, That was the trouble with the IWW they did the same thing with the Paterson Silk strikes moving the negotiations from worker's immediate concerns to total social upheaval! Thank you for the insight into the local population, lassuy. It's not often discussed how a number of US veterans organizations (like the American Legion) were formed to combat European 'isms' (Anarchism, Communism etc.) from becoming too popular. Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeppoSapone Posted 12 January , 2006 Share Posted 12 January , 2006 Hi James, That was the trouble with the IWW they did the same thing with the Paterson Silk strikes moving the negotiations from worker's immediate concerns to total social upheaval! Thank you for the insight into the local population, lassuy. It's not often discussed how a number of US veterans organizations (like the American Legion) were formed to combat European 'isms' (Anarchism, Communism etc.) from becoming too popular. Neil Neil Literally to combat the 'ism' in the case of the IWW. From one site on the Centralia, Washington, massacre we read: "It's an interesting experience to go to Lewis County and see the big memorial with a doughboy from the 1914-18 war, only to walk closer and see that the inscription marks the deaths of four local members of the American Legion in 1919." See here: http://skellywright.blogspot.com/2005/11/c...w-massacre.html More on what happened in Centalia: http://content.lib.washington.edu/iwwweb/read.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul guthrie Posted 12 January , 2006 Share Posted 12 January , 2006 Also in 1965 in a birth control case the Supreme COurt 1st recognized a constitutional right to privace, that remains controversial but it's the law nowl. 1n 1968 Omnibus Crime Control & Safe Streets law was passed prohibiting use of evidence gathered this way w/o court approval and the Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Act of 1979 also requires court approval albeit from a secret court. THis is the law that has recently and repatedly been disobeyed. There is zero in these cases that's good precedent today but great question Simon. This post did not come out as typed, 1st sentence is The Sedition and Espionage Acts of 1917 & 1918 are no longer law. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil Burns Posted 12 January , 2006 Author Share Posted 12 January , 2006 Hi Tony, Alleged Wobblie leanings were even suspicious enough to get poet Gary Snyder fired from a US Forestry Service job in Washington state in the 1950's. ( I figure if you've got a Phil Ochs song in your signature, I don't need to tell you who Gary Snyder is ) I was unaware of the Centralia American Legion monument, interesting. Neil Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeppoSapone Posted 12 January , 2006 Share Posted 12 January , 2006 Hi Tony, Alleged Wobblie leanings were even suspicious enough to get poet Gary Snyder fired from a US Forestry Service job in Washington state in the 1950's. ( I figure if you've got a Phil Ochs song in your signature, I don't need to tell you who Gary Snyder is ) I was unaware of the Centralia American Legion monument, interesting. Neil Gary Snyder, now that is a 'blast from the past'. Last I heard he was working as an academic in California. Despite being nicknamed "I Wont Work" and "Imperial Wilhelms Warriors" I believe that a fair number of members of the IWW did serve in WW1. In Centralia one man who was lynched by the "patriots" had been in the army in France. Somehow I doubt that Wesley Everest is one of the four names on that memorial! See here for a pic of him in uniform: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAeverest.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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