August 23

Eighty years ago today, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed at Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts for the murder of two shoe factory employees seven years before. The murders took place in the midst of the post-World War I “red scare,” and the arrest of two Italian anarchists -- a class considered by many Americans as the gravest threat to the nation -- surprised no one. Although physical evidence connecting the men to the crime was either ambiguous or nonexistent, a circumstantial case persuaded a jury of their guilt; Judge Webster Thayer, who presided over the original trial, had set the tone for the proceedings by equating jury duty with military service.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts called upon you to render a most important service. Although you knew that such service would be arduous, painful and tiresome, yet you, like the true soldier, responded to that call in the spirit of supreme American loyalty. There is no better word in the English language than “loyalty.”

Thayer, who once berated a jury for acquitting an Italian anarchist, could not have been more clear about what might qualify as a “loyal” verdict.

Over the next six years, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti drew the world’s attention. As the execution date neared, workers in the United States and Europe protested vigorously. On August 7, 1927 hundreds of thousands of American workers threw down their tools and walked off their jobs. Appeals for clemency and motions for new trials had come to naught. The governor of Massachusetts appointed a commission to assess the fairness of the trial, though its conclusions were all but preordained. The United States Supreme Court declined to intervene.

As for the condemned themselves, they spent the last months of their lives writing letters to family, friends and supporters. In one of the most memorable of these, Nicola Sacco wrote to his daughter Ines:

I would like that you should understand what I am going to say to you, and I wish I could write you so plain, for I long so much to have you hear all the heart-beat, eagemess of your father, for I love you so much as you are the dearest little beloved one.

It is quite hard indeed to make you understand in your young age, but I am going to try from the bottom of my heart to make you understand how dear you are to your father's soul. If I cannot succeed in doing that, I know that you will save this letter and read it over in future years to come and you will see and feel the same heart-beat [of] affection as your father feels in writing it to you.

August 16

On this date in 1819, five dozen saber-bearing cavalrymen -- many of them loaded with drink -- charged a crowd of demonstrators in Manchester, initiating one of the most notorious acts of political suppression in English history. Out of a crowd of 50-80,000, hundreds of people were injured and between eleven and eighteen killed.

The “Peterloo Massacre,” as it came to be known, occurred at St. Peter’s Field during a mass meeting organized by the Manchester Patriotic Union Society. The Manchester radicals were among the many groups calling for such innovations as universal suffrage and a repeal of the corn laws, which -- by taxing imported corn and encouraging the expansion of domestic wheat farming -- had driven the price of bread skyward. Working people, -- crushed by the escalating cost of food and denied corresponding wage increases -- were infuriated, and after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, unrest rippled throughout the country.

The Manchester Patriotic Union Society, formed in March 1819, invited a group of notable English radicals to speak on August 16. Among them were Richard Carlile, a newspaper publisher, and Henry “Orator” Hunt, a gentleman-turned-radical whose nickname attested to his forensic skills. Local magistrates, wary of the gathering, enlisted hundreds of young men from the local yeoman cavalry along with “special constables” and infantrymen. Their official task was to guard against the outbreak of violence, imagined as always to emanate from the ranks of the lower sorts; their unofficial role, of course, was to ensure that the meeting did not establish a precedent by ending successfully.

In the early afternoon -- just as Hunt was preparing to speak -- the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry were ordered to disperse the crowd and arrest its leaders. Samuel Bamford, a weaver and political radical, was among those arrested at St. Peter’s field. He served a year in Ilchester Gaol, after which he wrote one of the most important eyewitness accounts of the massacre. As Bamford explained,

the cavalry were in confusion: they evidently could not, with all the weight of man and horse, penetrate that compact mass of human beings and their sabres were plied to hew a way through naked held-up hands and defenceless heads; and then chopped limbs and wound-gaping skulls were seen; and groans and cries were mingled with the din of that horrid confusion . . . .

In ten minutes from the commencement of the havoc the field was an open and almost deserted space. The sun looked down througha sultry and motionless air. The curtains and blinds of the windows within view were all closed. A gentleman or two might occasionally be seen looking out from one of the new houses before mentioned, near the door of which a group of persons (special constables) were collected, and apparently in conversation; others were assisting the wounded or carrying off the dead. The hustings remained, with a few broken and hewed flag-staves erect, and a torn and gashed banner or two dropping; whilst over the whole field were strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes, and other parts of male and female dress, trampled, torn, and bloody.

In the aftermath of the massacre at St. Peter’s Field, the English Parliament issued the so-called Six Acts, which suppressed public meetings, enhanced penalties for “blasphemous and seditious libel,” and restricted press freedoms by placing heavier taxes on newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals.

July 28

The Great Depression descended into state-sponsored violence on this date in 1932, as President Herbert Hoover oversaw the eviction of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (popularly known as the "Bonus Army") from its shantytown on the swampy flats of the Anacostia River, just southeast of the federal core in Washington, DC. The marchers, consisting of 15-20,000 Great War veterans and their families, had come to the nation's capital in June to ask for early payment of certificates worth roughly $1.00 for each day served during the war. The certificates were set to mature in 1945, but the Bonus marchers asked Congress to release the funds more than a decade early, when the veterans needed them most. Although the House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill to grant the veterans their wishes, the Senate defeated a similar measure by an overwhelming margin of 62-18. (The whole legislative drama was irrelevant, as Hoover most certainly would have vetoed any bill that made its way through Congress.) By this point, the BEF had set up a temporary camp on the Capitol grounds, and a number of demonstrators had occupied federal buildings that had been vacated for the hottest part of the summer.

On July 28, Herbert Hoover ordered his attorney general to remove all demonstrators from federal property. Although Hoover evidently did not want the Anacostia Flats encampment to be cleared, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, believed that communists were responsible for the demonstrations and that "the [bonus] movement was actually far deeper and more dangerous than an effort to secure funds from a nearly depleted federal treasury." Pursuing the war veterans across the river, MacArthur's infantry and cavalry units (including six tanks) trashed the Bonus encampment, scattering the marchers with fixed bayonets and tear gas, asphyxiating two infants. Hundreds of others were injured, and two veterants were shot.

Time magazine reported on one of the deaths:

When war came in 1917 William Hushka, 22-year-old Lithuanian, sold his St. Louis butcher shop, gave the proceeds to his wife, joined the Army... Last week William Hushka's Bonus for $528 suddenly became payable in full when a police bullet drilled him dead in the worst public disorder the capital has known in years.

This is a re-post of last year's entry

July 12

On this date in 1917, in one of the more remarkable vigilante actions in the history of the American labor movement, more than a thousand “deputies” wearing white armbands rounded up nearly 1200 residents of Bisbee, Arizona and deported them by train to a remote town in New Mexico. Their crime, so to speak, was to have struck against the copper mines that enriched the shareholders and executives of companies like Phelps Dodge.

The western mine fields had been an especially fierce battleground for decades, as workers chafed against the grip of companies that paid them poorly, recklessly endangered their lives, and pitted them against each other on the basis of race and national origin. These companies likewise owned the houses where workers lived, the stores where they shopped, and the newspapers that lectured them regularly on their obligations to the company. The mainstream labor movement, best represented by the American Federation of Labor, generally ignored miners, who found support instead from more politically radical unions like the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World.

As the Great War churned onward and the price of copper tripled, Arizona’s mine workers -- backed by the IWW -- escalated their demands for better pay, improved working conditions and anti-discrimination measures intended to reduce ethnic and racial rivalries. When those demands were refused, half the workforce of Bisbee walked off the job. Over the next two weeks, rumors circulated that the strikers and the IWW had been infiltrated by German saboteurs and spies. On July 12, sheriff Harry Wheeler announced that he had summoned more than 1000 “loyal Americans” from Bisbee and Douglas

for the purpose of arresting, on charges of vagrancy, treason and of being disturbers of the peace of Cochise County, all those strange men who have congregated here from other parts and sections for the purpose of harassing and intimidating all men who desire to pursue their daily toil. I am continually told of threats and insults heaped upon the working men of this district by so-called strikers, who are strange to these parts, yet who presume to dictate the manner of life of the people of this district.

Armed members of the hastily assembled Citizen’s Alliance rousted striking workers -- and anyone else they could get their hands on -- and marched them from town, after which they were loaded into manure-filled boxcars and hauled away to the desert of southern New Mexico.

Until the mass evacuation of Japanese Americans from their communities during World War II, the “Bisbee deportation” represented the greatest violation of civil liberties in the history of the American West.