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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, AUGUST 19–25, 2026  
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_ Big Strike Wins Big (1966), Radical Idea No Longer (1866), Haiti
Gives Slavery the Boot (1791), Jury’s Verdict: Freedom! (1781),
Greenhouse Effect? Forget About It! (1856), Ugly Moment, Uglier War
(1636), Workers Lose Big on Blair Mountain (1921) _

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_BIG 6-WEEK AIRLINE STRIKE WINS A MAJOR PAY HIKE (1966)_

SIXTY YEARS AGO, ON AUGUST 19, 1966, the International Association of
Machinists won a hard-fought strike that had shut down more than sixty
percent of the U.S. airline industry for six weeks during what
otherwise would have been the airlines’ most profitable season.

The strike pitted 35,000 workers against some of the country’s
biggest and most profitable airlines – Eastern, Northwest, National,
TWA and United – four of which have since disappeared as a result of
mergers.

The union was not only fighting the employers, they were also up
against the U.S. government, which was trying to control inflation
with a “voluntary” wage-increase cap of 3.2 percent a year. The
airlines, which were enjoying unprecedented profits, took the
government’s lead and offered the union only 3.2 percent, claiming
it was their patriotic duty to abide by the voluntary guideline.

The union and its members insisted on substantially more, both because
their frozen wages were then below the pay of many machinists in other
industries and because the airlines were posting unprecedented
profits.

The airlines refused, so on July 8, 1966, picketlines went up at 230
airports. Roughly 150,000 people with tickets to fly that day had to
make alternative travel arrangements or stay home. Seats on planes
flown by other airlines were almost non-existent because in 1966
airline schedules were tightly regulated, so the carriers that were
still flying didn’t have the legal option to add flights to their
existing schedules. Over the next six weeks, some 6 million would-be
air travelers were diverted to buses, trains, or automobiles.

The White House did what it could by hosting contract negotiations,
which managed to reach a tentative agreement calling for an annual 4.5
percent wage increase. But union members rejected the deal by a 3-1
margin.

Finally, when the strike was nearly six weeks old, the airlines
offered the machinists pretty much what they asked for before the
strike began, an annual six-percent wage increase with a
cost-of-living adjustment. The membership approved the deal by a 2-1
margin and the U.S. airline industry’s most disruptive strike was
history. [link removed]

 

_WHEN THE 8-HOUR WORKDAY WAS A RADICAL IDEA (1866)_

ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY YEARS AGO, ON AUGUST 20, 1866, the first
session of the 5-day National Labor Convention began in Baltimore.
Before the convention was over, the delegates agreed to form the first
U.S. labor federation, known as the National Labor Union.

The convention issued the historically significant call to establish
the 8-hour day and put an end to the era’s standard practice of 10-
or 12-hour days. Calling for an 8-hour day in 1866 was considered a
very radical position. When the brand-new National Labor Union did so,
they beat Karl Marx’s brainchild. the First International Working
Man’s Association, to the punch by two weeks.

In 1868 the National Labor Union played a central role in getting the
U.S. Congress to mandate the 8-hour day for all U.S. government
workers.  When President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 8-hour law,
Congress overrode the veto, putting the law into effect without the
President’s
signature.  [link removed]

   

_HAITI GIVES SLAVERY AND COLONIALISM THE BOOT (1791)_

TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, ON AUGUST 21, 1791, hundreds of
enslaved people in northern Haiti began a planned uprising to reclaim
their freedom and destroy the society that held them in bondage  The
insurrectionists were inspired not only by the hatred of slavery, but
by the 2-year-old French Revolution’s endorsement of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Haiti soon became the world’s
first Black
republic.  [link removed]
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_A JURY’S VERDICT MAKES FREEDOM A REALITY (1781)_

TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, ON AUGUST 22, 1781, a court in
Massachusetts ruled that Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman could not legally be
another person’s property under the terms of the state’s
10-month-old Constitution, therefore the man who claimed to own her
had no right to do so and she was, in fact, no longer enslaved. When
the court ruled that the 37-year-old Freeman was free, she had been
enslaved since she was born.

The Massachusetts Constitution said nothing about slavery and did not
expressly outlaw it. But the Constitution’s first sentence reads
“All men are born free and equal and have certain natural,
essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the
right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of
acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of
seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

When Freeman overheard the man who claimed to own her discussing the
new constitution with dinner guests, she realized that she, and
thousands of other Bay State residents who were being treated as
property, could not be enslaved in the eyes of the law,  She, and a
fellow worker who was being treated as property by the same man, found
a lawyer, Theodore Sedgewick, who filed a suit on their behalf,
pointing out that the claim the two were enslaved had no legal basis.
Three months later, a County Court of Common Pleas jury ruled that
Freeman and her fellow worker were, in fact, free. In addition to
their freedom, the court granted each plaintiff 30 shillings, the
approximate equivalent $150 today. 

The jury’s verdict only applied to the two plaintiffs, but two years
later the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that under the
Constitution’s Declaration of Rights no Bay Stater had a legal basis
to claim ownership of another person.

Freeman had this to say about her experience: “Any time, any time
while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me,
and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have
taken it—just to stand one minute on God's airth a free woman—I
would.”
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_THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT? FORGET ABOUT IT! (1856)_

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY YEARS AGO, ON AUGUST 23, 1856, Eunice Newton
Foote presented her study _Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the
Sun's Rays _at the annual meeting of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.  Foote had discovered and demonstrated that
sunlight heated carbon dioxide more than the other gases making up the
atmosphere. Hence, the higher the atmosphere’s concentration of
carbon dioxide, the hotter the atmosphere.

For reasons not known for certain, but reasonably ascribed to sexism,
Foote’s discovery was forgotten for nearly a century.
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_AN UGLY MOMENT IN AN UGLIER WAR (1636)_

THREE HUNDRED AND 90 YEARS AGO, ON AUGUST 24, 1636, one of
America’s “founding fathers,” Massachusetts Bay Colony leader
John Endecott, departed Boston at the head of 90-man war party,
setting a course for Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island.

It was the beginning of the Pequot War. Endecott’s orders were to
kill all Native American men on the island and make prisoners of all
women and children. When the punitive expedition reached Block Island,
some 40 Native Americans attempted to prevent them from coming ashore,
but were forced to retreat by Endecott’s guns.

Once ashore, the colonists encountered no more Native Americans. 
They spent two days on the 10-square-mile island, during which "they
burned sixty native wigwams in the two villages they found and
destroyed seven canoes and close to two hundred acres of native
corn." 
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_WORKERS LOSE A BIG FIGHT ON BLAIR MOUNTAIN (1921)_

ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE YEARS AGO, ON AUGUST 25, 1921, the 9-day Battle
of Blair Mountain, in southwestern West Virginia, started. It was one
of the largest episodes of deadly violence ever to occur in the U.S.,
yet it is unknown to the vast majority of the U.S. population.

It is likely that the bloody battle is so obscure today because it is
a perfect example of class warfare in action, pitting a racially mixed
army of more than ten thousand union members and and supporters of the
United Mine Workers of America against a smaller, but much better
armed, force of anti-union cops, most of them employees of open-shop
coal companies.

The dominant ideology of the U.S. pretends class warfare doesn’t
exist, so a clear example of workers taking up arms in the name of
their class is consigned to the memory hole.

The shooting ended – thanks to the intervention of the U.S. Army –
in the defeat of the union supporters, almost all of whom gave up when
the troops arrived, rather than fight against U.S. soldiers doing
their legal duty. Many if not most of the union supporters had been
members of the Army less than five years before during World War 1,
and they would not fire on men wearing the uniform that had been
theirs so recently.

Before the battle, small-scale, but deadly, class war had been raging
in West Virginia coalfields for more than a year, during which dozens
of union activists had been killed, one or two at a time, by
anti-union thugs. The mobilization of more than ten thousand armed
workers had been sparked when company thugs murdered two well-known
pro-union law-enforcement officials in broad-daylight, to prevent them
from testifying in a case about anti-union violence.

After the killing of the officials, pro-union coal miners began an
attempt to overrun the nearby non-union stronghold of Mingo County,
where they hoped to oust the local anti-union government that was
behind much of the violence. Their attempted invasion of Mingo was
prevented by the much better-armed anti-union force, which used well
fortified positions on the slopes of Blair Mountain to block the
workers’ advance.

Even though many tens of thousands of shots were fired during the
fighting, most of the gunfire took place at very long range, so the
number of people killed was probably less than twenty. The exact
number is not known.

The victory of the coal barons and their thugs with the help of the
U.S. Army proved to be a demonstration that anti-union violence could
be committed with relative impunity, particularly in places where
organized labor was not already powerful. The legal clout of
anti-union bosses kept most unions and many of the members on the
defensive until 1933, when the union-friendly National Industrial
Recovery Act became law.
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