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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, SEPT 4–10  
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_ Death for Export (1934), The Die Is Cast (1774), The Shot Not Heard
Around the World (1774), Yankee Doodle Shafts Native Americans (1783),
Jim Crow Must Go, but ‘Voluntarily’ (1954), Boston Police Strike
Out (1919), Give Us Liberty or Death! (1739) _

By Art Young, New Masses, 1934,

 

_THERE’S BIG MONEY IN EXPORTING DEATH_

90 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 4, 1934, the U.S. Senate began a 2-year process
of exposing many ugly truths about often unethical and always
profitable behavior of the country’s armaments and banking
industries before and during World War 1. 

The Senate's Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions
Industry used its power to subpoena documents and compel testimony to
expose how the industry had used political influence to scuttle every
attempt of a skeptical public to keep the U.S. from joining in the
war.

The shocking and headline-grabbing testimony received by the committee
was enough to persuade a majority of both houses of Congress to
repeatedly pass laws that, from 1936 until 1941, prevented the U.S.
armaments industry from selling weapons to nations that were at war.
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_THE DIE IS CAST_

250 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress –
elected representatives of all but one of the 13 British colonies in
North America – convened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s,
Carpenters’ Hall. For the next seven weeks the Congress debated what
was to be done about the increasingly authoritarian policies of
Britain’s royal government toward the colonies. They composed a
declaration of grievances addressed to King George III, and
recommended that each of the colonies defy British law and establish a
local militia. It was a decisive step toward the shooting war that
would begin less than eight months later.
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_THE SHOT NOT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD_

250 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 6, 1774, the verbal defiance of the British
government being expressed in Philadelphia (see above) was underlined
by a more dramatic challenge to royal authority in Worcester,
Massachusetts, which was about 10 day’s journey on horseback to the
northeast.

On this day a county court of justice, where the officers were
appointees of the British crown, was scheduled to begin a session. 
Before the court could meet, the town was occupied by more than four
thousand members of both the militia from Worcester and from
communities for miles around. The citizen-soldiers, who were lined up
on both sides of Main Street when the court officers arrived,
prevented the officers from entering the courthouse and ordered them
into a nearby tavern. After a conference of the militia’s leaders,
the court officers were ordered to sign papers disavowing their
appointments to office by George III and paraded down Main Street, hat
in hand, loudly recanting their oaths of office. Without having fired
a single shot, the militia had permanently closed Worcester’s
colonial Court of Justice.
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_YANKEE DOODLE DISSES NATIVE AMERICANS_ 

241 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 7, 1783, representatives of 35 Native American
Nations, including Wyandot, Lenape, Shawnee, Cherokee, Ojibwa, Odawa,
Mingo, Miami, Potawatomi, Wabash Confederacy and Haudenosaunee
gathered near Lake Erie in what is now Fremont, Ohio, to discuss the
formation of what eventually was known as United Indian Nations or the
Northwestern Confederacy.

In the treaty that brought the Revolutionary War to an official
conclusion, the British had ceded all the land they had once claimed
south of the Great Lakes to the victorious rebels, making no provision
for the many Native American nations that had fought on the British
side. The new U.S. government was pushing west as fast as it could,
using force to take over as much Native American land as possible, and
negotiating treaties with individual groups of Native Americans when
necessary.

The Native Americans that met on this day understood the importance of
presenting the U.S. with a unified political and military front, so
they agreed to establish the United Indian Nations. For the next 12
years, the Native Americans’ agreement to act in unity was
constantly challenged by U.S. political and military assaults. The
United Indian Nations inflicted at least two huge defeats on the U.S.
Army, but the attacks continued until in August 1795, when what
remained of unified Native American resistance in the region came to
an end, for a time.
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_JIM CROW GETS THE BOOT, BUT ‘VOLUNTARILY’_

70 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 8, 1954, public schools in both Washington,
D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, were racially integrated for the first
time. Sixteen weeks earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the
school segregation was unconstitutional, but the court had not
actually ordered any schools to end segregation by a particular day,
so in September 1954 no school that had been segregated was under any
legal compulsion to integrate.

In fact, many school districts in the Deep South refused to
desegregate for years even after the Supreme Court and lower federal
courts had ordered them to do so. Both school systems could be said to
have ended their long histories of segregation “voluntarily.” Here
are two detailed accounts of the desegregation of the two cities’
schools.
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_BOSTON POLICE STRIKE OUT_

105 YEARS AGO, on September 9, 1919, nearly three-quarters of the
Boston, Massachusetts, police force went on strike, demanding higher
wages, shorter hours, improved working conditions, and the right to
join a union. The strike, which was one of the first-ever police
strikes on the U.S., was regarded as a huge threat, both by the
Governor of Massachusetts (who happened to be future-president Calvin
Coolidge) and by President Wilson.

Coolidge and Wilson felt threatened (like almost every fat cat)
because they were hostile to organized labor but also because an
unprecedented strikes wave was taking place all over North America and
Europe.  Many of the strikers were frank admirers of the recently
successful Russian revolutionaries, who were not only literally
smashing the old regime but were also trouncing the British and U.S.
armies’ attempts to smash the Red Army. 

The writers of North American headlines and editorials were almost
unanimous in identifying the Boston police as apostles of Bolshevism.
As the daily Boston Transcript reported, the strike’s defeat was
guaranteed because "behind Boston in this skirmish with Bolshevism
stands Massachusetts, and behind Massachusetts stands America."

As it turned out, the newspapers saw the near future clearly. Before
the strike was 12 hours old, Gov. Coolidge sent five thousand National
Guard troops to Boston, where they killed eight Boston citizens in
less than a week. Boston’s Police Commissioner fired every striker
and did everything in his power to make sure they never ever worked
for any U.S. police department. The Commissioner also hired
strikebreakers at a rate of pay that was almost exactly equal to the
wage that the strikers had wanted.

Crushing the Boston police union had no effect on the ongoing strike
wave, but it did help to ensure that nearly 50 years would pass before
the next U.S. police strike. It also helped Coolidge get elected
vice-president and take the White House over when President Harding
died in office in1923.
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_GIVE US LIBERTY OR DEATH!_

285 YEARS AGO, Sept. 10, 1739, was the second day of the week-long
Stono Rebellion, the largest insurrection of enslaved people ever to
occur in British North America. Approximately two dozen enslaved
people took over a store near Charleston, South Carolina, where they
seized guns and ammunition, after which they marched south, shouting
“Liberty!”  After a week, all the rebels had been captured or
killed. Most of those captured were executed and the remainder were
sold to plantations in the West Indies.
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This Week in People’s History did not appear last week due to
illness.

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