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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, JUNE 4–10
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_ Voyage of the Doomed (1939), Two Roads, Two Endings (1989), A Big
Step Toward Ending a Long War (1969), Plain English, or Else! (1954),
Pity the Poor War Criminal (1974), Protecting Freedom of Speech
(1969), No Law Against Just Hanging Out (1999) _
Waiting in vain, Courtesy of National Archives and Records
Administration
_VOYAGE OF THE DOOMED_
85 YEARS AGO, on June 4, 1939, a refugee tragedy reached its sad
climax when the St. Louis, a German passenger liner with more than 900
Jewish would-be refugees aboard was denied permission to land at
Florida by the U.S. government. After being turned away by Canada, the
ship returned to Europe. After much negotiation, the ship’s captain
succeeded in landing 288 passengers in the United Kingdom and 619 in
Antwerp. Of those who disembarked at Antwerp, 224 were sent to
France, 214 to Belgium and 181 remained in the Netherlands. The ship
returned to Hamburg, Germany, with no passengers aboard. Historians
estimate that 392 of the 619 who reached the mainland of Europe
survived the Holocaust, while 227 perished in concentration camps.
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_TWO ROADS, TWO ENDINGS_
35 YEARS AGO, on June 5, 1989, multifaceted dissatisfaction with
authoritarian regimes in two almost unimaginably different nations –
Poland and China – came to a head with astoundingly different
results.
In Poland, after more than 11 years of rising tension between an
unresponsive bureaucratic government and a very widely supported
pro-democracy movement, a peaceful transition of power took a major
step forward when citizens used their first opportunity in 44 years to
express their feelings at the ballot box and voted overwhelmingly in
favor of non-communist candidates.
On the same day, in China, a 7-week-long demonstration in Beijing
against an entrenched regime by thousands of dissatisfied students and
workers was brought to a sudden end by an army attack that resulted in
a bloodbath. The number of demonstrators killed remains a Chinese
state secret; the officially confirmed death toll is 241, but credible
sources say the true number is ten times greater.
Of course, the situations in Poland and China were very different, so
it is difficult to confidently draw any conclusions from comparing
them, but their having occurred on the same day is food for thought.
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_A BIG STEP TOWARD ENDING A LONG WAR _
55 YEARS AGO, on June 6, 1969, after developments in the U.S. War
Against Vietnam made it clear that the U.S. had no alternative to
reaching a negotiated settlement in order to bring the war to a close,
liberation forces in South Vietnam set up the Provisional
Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam in order to
have a seat at the negotiating table. The PRG was recognized as the
government of South Vietnam by 38 countries and was accepted by the
foreign ministers of the Non-aligned countries as a full member of the
Non-aligned group. It was also recognized during the negotiations
leading to the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement as an equal party to the
U.S.-supported Thieu administration.
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_PLAIN ENGLISH, OR ELSE!_
70 YEARS AGO, on June 7, 1954, Maury Maverick, a progressive New Deal
politician from Texas who served two terms in Congress from 1935 to
1939 and was later appointed head of the Smaller War Plants
Corporation, a federal agency that provided loans and grants to
companies with fewer than 500 employees.
As head of the Smaller War Plants Corporation he coined the term
“gobbledegook” as part of a campaign against bureaucratic
language. He wrote to his staff: “Memoranda should be as short as
clearness will allow... Put the subject matter – the point – and
even the conclusion in the opening paragraph and the whole story on
one page... Stay off the gobbledegook language. It only fouls people
up… Let’s stop ‘pointing up’ programs and ‘finalizing’
contracts. . . . Anyone using the words ‘activation’ or
‘implementation’ will be shot.”
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_PITY THE POOR WAR CRIMINAL_
50 YEARS AGO, on June 8, 1974, Harvard University announced it had
accepted a $2 million gift from the Alfred Krupp Foundation and would
use the funds to create an endowed European Studies professorship.
Many observers were shocked by the news.
Alfred Krupp, who set the foundation up, made many millions of dollars
before and during World War II manufacturing guns, ammunition, planes
and ships for the Third Reich. One of his factories exploited the
slave labor of tens of thousands of Auschwitz inmates. In 1943 the
Third Reich appointed Krupp to be Reichsminister für Rüstung und
Kriegsproduktion. He was arrested in 1945 and later charged with war
crimes and crimes against humanity. The indictment charged that before
and during the war, Krupp had employed “hundreds of thousands of
civilians and prisoners of war in the iron and steel and in the mining
industries alone [including] foreign civilian workers, prisoners of
war and concentration camp inmates.”
In 1948 Krupp was convicted on all charges and sentenced to 12 years
in prison. As an additional punishment, all his property was
confiscated by the allied occupation forces in Germany. But not, as it
turned out, for long.
Less than three years later, Krupp’s sentence was commuted to time
served and all his confiscated property was returned to him in “an
act of clemency.” The Krupp companies, of which Krupp was the sole
owner, had never stopped manufacturing armaments. Before Alfred Krupp
died in 1967, he turned his entire fortune, including control of the
businesses he owned, over the Krupp Foundation, in order to keep his
armaments empire out of the hands of his son, who Krupp considered to
be “irresponsible.”
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_PROTECTING FREEDOM OF SPEECH_
55 YEARS AGO, on June 9, 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court put some teeth
in the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech when it
ruled that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless
that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless
action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
In other words, it is not illegal to declare that the U.S. government
ought to be overthrown or to be a member of an organization that says
the same thing unless the government can prove that someone has done
something making lawless action likely.
The court ruled that Ohio’s criminal syndicalism statute was
unconstitutional and overturned several cases that had resulted in
people going to prison for merely advocating overthrow of the
government (including the 1948 prosecution, under the Smith Act, of
the leadership of the U.S. Communist Party). (See last week’s This
Week in People’s History item for June 3, 1949). Of course most of
the people who had been imprisoned for their subversive speech were no
longer alive by the time of the court’s ruling.
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_NOTHING ILLEGAL ABOUT JUST HANGING OUT_
25 YEARS AGO, on June 10, 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a
7-year-old Chicago anti-loitering law, which had been enacted in an
attempt to give the police the authority to prevent gang activity, was
unconstitutional because the law’s prohibition on remaining “in
any one place with no apparent purpose" was too vague for a member of
the public to know what conduct was prohibited. The Supreme Court
ruling in Chicago v. Morales was hailed by the American Civil
Liberties Union, which had filed the case. “We are grateful that the
Justices of the Supreme Court understand what escaped the political
leaders of Chicago: namely, that it is not a criminal activity simply
to be a young man of color gathered with friends on the streets of
Chicago,” remarked the Illinois ACLU’s legal director.
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