Dear Progressive Reader,
“Who will remember?” asked Charlie King in his beautiful 1977 song “Two Good Arms,” written for the fiftieth anniversary of the August 23, 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. This week, we remembered these two men and their wrongful conviction during a time of anti-alien hysteria nearly a century ago. We covered the trial and its aftermath extensively in the 1920s, including publishing excerpts of several letters written by both men while in jail. Journalist and human rights activist Elizabeth Glendower Evans wrote for our magazine (then called La Follette’s) that she “became convinced that the men were being scapegoated because they were immigrants and labor activists. She explained that ‘all this took place in the months when the anti-alien hysteria which had been gathering head since the war, came to a climax.’”
Our editor Bill Lueders recently found out that he had been termed “super far left” by Fox News during a primetime talkshow. “I accept the label, so long as I can define it,” Lueders wrote to the host in a letter published on our website. He went on to explain to the Fox host that “The Progressive, now 110 years old, has an absolute commitment to nonviolence and a fundamental aversion to militarism and war. We support full equality under the law for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. We are concerned about the urgent but largely unaddressed crisis of climate change, and the vast ignorance that allows some, including the President, to deny its very now-obvious existence. We want all Americans to receive quality health care, which must involve turning away from a system whose main purpose is to make money. We call for easing the crushing burden of student debt and making a college education affordable to all. We stand for reproductive rights and want to ban assault weapons.” We’ll see if they invite him on to discuss these ideas.
Speaking of discussion and debate, the Democratic National Committee met this week and decided not to hold a candidates’ debate on the issue of the climate crisis. But they will have another debate, this one in Houston, scheduled for September 12-13. It is not yet certain which candidates will be included. Meanwhile, as Jud Lounsbury writes, U.S. Representative Steve King of Iowa again showed his lack of understanding of history when he told a constituent during a one-person town hall that African Americans should be indebted to Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. “[I]t’s much better for us to be grateful for both sides,” he told her in a remark that sounded a lot like Donald Trump after the August 2017 violent march in Charlottesville, Virginia. And, Quashon Avent explains why the Republican National Convention may well feel right at home in Charlotte, North Carolina next year. “If anyone was surprised by the xenophobia on display in North Carolina, they shouldn’t have been,” he writes after a recent Trump rally in Greeneville. “It’s the kind of thing that happens in North Carolina all the time.”
As fires continue to burn in Brazil’s Amazon, and European leaders and activists discuss ways address them, Basav Sen of the Climate Policy Project notes that “The emergence of dangerous authoritarian governments—here and in Brazil, as well as in countries like India and the Philippines—is one of the gravest threats facing the world today. Not only because of the threats they pose to human rights and democracy, but because their political agendas deepens the climate crisis.”
By the way, if you are reading this in the Madison area (or plan to be here in the next few weeks), The Progressive has some great events coming up. On September 6 we will kick off our annual Fighting Bob Fest at the Barrymore Theatre at 7pm, and the following weekend we are hosting a panel at the Capital Times Idea Fest to remember the fortieth anniversary of our historic free speech court battle with the U.S. Government over the printing of a story on nuclear secrecy.
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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