Dear Progressive Reader,
December 24, 1914 in the trenches of World War I, a silence fell across the battlefield. According to The New York Times, roughly 100,000 British and German troops were involved in the informal cessations of hostility along the Western Front on that Thursday and Friday. The story is poignantly told by musician John McCutcheon in his 1984 song Christmas in the Trenches (now also available as a book). McCutcheon performed this song for our 2021 Armistice Day event, co-sponsored with the Madison chapter of Veterans for Peace.
While the grassroots cessation of hostilities was initially celebrated in the British press, the military leadership quickly sought to tamp down this enthusiasm for peace. The image above is from The Illustrated London News of January 9, 1915. It is captioned: "British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches"
In the Manchester Guardian of the same day, the story was first reported after word came home to friends and relatives. “Since Christmas, there has come over in the soldiers’ letters home from the trenches in Flanders the news of all those spontaneous little groups of truces which on Christmas Day and its Eve sprang up at intervals all the way down those trenches,” the paper noted. “It was a thing more hopeful . . . . It was the simple and unexamined impulse of human minds, drawn together in the face of a common and desperate plight. In the nature of its evil, war is now as inhuman as a great pestilence or earthquake.”
This was a lesson that the generals did not want their troops to learn! The immediate response was to rotate those “spoiled” troops out of the field and replace them with new ones, who would not know of these peaceful exchanges. The following week, the paper reported, “Early in the morning of Boxing Day [another unit] whose trenches lay somewhat to the rear of the trenches to which the Germans had paid a visit, were ordered to replace the English troops in the front trenches. The explanation was that Headquarters did not consider it advisable for such happenings to take place.” But the memory of that day—of everyday people choosing peace in spite of their leaders’ passion for war—has lived on, for, as the author of the first article noted, these men had seen “how very much saner and wiser [people can be] than the human intelligence which first devises such engines [of war, but] has failed to prevent their being used.”
This week on our website, award-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore shares his song about “Manchin the Evil Coal Man” as Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia blocks the Build Back Better agenda that attempts to make the country (including his own state), well, better. And playwright Joe Godfrey takes a humorous ornithological look at the “birds of Washington.”
Mike Ervin chronicles his brief time in a local “neighborhood watch group” before he “read “Fearing Your Neighbors,” Michael Kuhlenbeck’s article on neighborhood watch groups in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of The Progressive, [where he] learned about how these groups are created in cooperation with law enforcement, in ways intended to increase law enforcement's reach.” Sarah Lahm describes the celebration of Myon Burrell’s first year out after spending half of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit. And Kathy Wilkes writes about workers forced to work in dangerous conditions, following the tragic deaths in the recent tornadoes in Illinois and Kentucky.
Finally, Michael Makowski reports on recent wins by socialist candidates in a variety of states, hearkening back to Milwaukee’s early twentieth century “Sewer Socialists.” And sociology professor Colleen Wynn pens an op-ed for our Progressive Perspectives project, noting that “History shows that sustained social movements made up of both small and large actions over time do yield change.” Let that be our guide in the coming year!!
Please 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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