Daily Bleed October 17: Ba Jin, José Sabater Llopart, José Sabate, Edmond Marpaux, A.S. Neill, Maurice Halle, Armando Borghi, Errico Malatesta, Durruti Column, Louis Berthomieu, Emma Goldman, Francisco Ferrer, Thierry Maricourt, Louise Michel; anarchist, anarquista, anarchiste, What Happened on this day, in recovered history October 17

she becomes what they ask her     they put their pens deep in & she sucks them dry — Lyn Lifshin, "Madonna of the Interview" "Uzzano" Number Four. Winter, 1977.

OCTOBER 17

NIKOLAI CHERNYSHEVSKY
Premier 19th-century revolutionary theorist, social critic.

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Japan: KANNAME-SAI HARVEST FESTIVAL

BLACK POETRY DAY.

Isle of Ely, England: ST. AUDREY'S (origin of "Tawdry") FAIR.

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1586 -- Philip Sidney dies at 32 of an infected thigh wound after giving his leg armor to a soldier who had forgotten his own. Wrote "Arcadia"; "Defence of Poesie."


1711 -- Jupiter Hammon, America's first published black poet, lives.



1727 -- Political maverick John Wilkes ("Essay on Women") lives. Apocryphal interchange with Lord Sandwich, when the latter sputters: "Wilkes, you will die of a pox or on the gallows," to which he replies:

"That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your lordship's mistress or your lordship's principles."



1760 -- France: Henri Saint-Simon, libertarian socialist utopian theorist, lives.

Excellent work on Utopias, see Marie Louise Berneri's Journey through Utopia (Beacon Press)

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/contemp/pamsetc/socfrombel/sfb_2.htm

1781 -- US: Last major battle of the Revolutionary War concludes with the defeat of the British by Colonial & French armies at Yorktown, Virginia. Another two years before a peace treaty is signed.


1796 -- Canada passes Antislavery Act.


1806 -- Haiti: Jean Jacques Dessalines, revolutionist & emperor, assassinated.


1813 -- Author Georg Büchner lives.


1827 -- Thomas Carlyle, marries the Jenny of Leigh Hunt's "Say I'm growing old, but add, / Jenny kissed me." Samuel Butler, of their tempestuous marriage:

"It was good of God to let Carlyle & Mrs. Carlyle marry one another & so make only two people miserable instead of four."

1860 -- First pro golf tournament held (Scotland). Willie Park wins.
http://www.scottishgolf.com/



1866 -- France: Edmond Marpaux lives. Member of the "Ligue des Antipatriotes." Convicted to life in prison for killing a policeman despite his denials of doing it. Marpaux was killed during a prison uprising.

In September 1894, a prison supervisor kills the anarchist convict François Briens. October 21, 1894, the supervisor is killed in revenge & a prison revolt occurs & is promptly suppressed. The next day 11 convicts are killed, including the anarchists Jules Leauthier, Pierre Meyrveis, Benoit Chevenet.

They had taken refuge in a tree, which was cut down as they shouted "Anarchy Lives!"

Marpaux was killed the morning of the 23rd.

http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/b8gv6t

1871 -- US: It Is So Writ? Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Grant suspends writ of habeas corpus.


1877 -- US: Snake Oil? John D. Rockefeller makes a contract with the Pennsylvania Railroad, giving his Standard Oil Company a rebate on all freight carried by the line. The arrangement provided him the key to monopolizing virtually all production & transportation of oil in the US.

One little noise of life remained — I heard
The train pause in the distance, then rush by,
Brawling & hushing, like some busy fly
That murmurs & then settles; nothing stirred
Beside.

— Charles Turner, "On the Eclipse of the Moon of October 1865"

1877 -- US: Samuel Ringgold Ward lives, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Considered one of the finest abolitionist orators.


1878 -- Divide & Conquer?: Thomas Edison succeeds in subdividing electrical current, adapting it to household use; when announced, gas stocks tumbled on the New York Stock Exchange. Sub-urbs soon invented as a result.


1883 -- England: Anti-authoritarian educator A.S. Neill lives. Establishes his school, Summerhill, with Lyme Regis. Proponent of children sharing in running schools, Neill told of this anarchist experiment in numerous books.

"We decided, my wife & I, to have a school where we would grant to the pupils the freedom of expression. For that it was necessary for us to give up any discipline, any direction, any suggestion, any preconceived morals, any religious instruction whatsoever."

The A.S. Neill Summerhill School maintains a site at
http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/pages/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.S._Neill


1889 -- Russia: Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Russian radical critic, dies. He helped lay the basis for revolutionary populism.

Wrote What is to be Done?, a political novel that influenced two generations of Russian intelligentsia, including many anarchists such as Emma Goldman. It served as the manifesto of the 19th Century Russian Nihilists.

It served the same purpose to them that On the Road did for the Beatniks, or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test did for the Hippies, in later times. It was a unifying literary statement serving to define a secular subculture, consisting in each case of self-consciously revolutionary youth.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSchernyshevsky.htm

1892 -- David Edelstadt (1866-1892), American Yiddish anarchist & poet, dies.

Marmor, Kalmon. David Edelstadt. New York, YKUF Farlag, 1950. Octavo, orange-red cloth, 410 pp., chronological bibliography, index, b/w illustrations.

1894 -- US: Ohio national guard kills three lynchers while rescuing a black man.


1896 -- Anton Chekhov, after today's disastrous premiere of "The Seagull" in St. Petersburg, vows (vainly) never to write for the stage again.
http://www.innereye.net/performance/chekhov.htm
http://www.eldritchpress.org/ac/yr/Anton_Chekhov.html


1900 -- Poet Yvor Winter lives.

1900 -- France: Louise Michel

17 octobre 1900: Elle revient à Paris.
[Source: Michel Chronologie]

1902 -- US: Tried & found guilty of obscenity earlier this month, where the judge said her sex education pamphlet "The Wedding Night" was too obscene to show to the jury, Ida Craddock slashes her wrists & turns on the gas, killing herself rather than returning to court for sentencing.



1903 -- Nathanael West lives, New York City. American writer who satirized the American Dream, & who first attracted attention in France after World War II.

Nathanael West Notes

As a struggling writer working as hotel manager in NY, he often put his writer pals up for free — Dashiell Hammett, James T. Farrell, & Erskine Caldwell were among them.

West was killed in an automobile accident near El Centro, California, with his wife Eileen McKenney during their honeymoon when hit by a train.

... show details

West ended up in Hollywood writing screenplays; others doing the same in the 1930s & 1940s included James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, John Fante, Daniel Fuchs, Horace McCoy, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Dorothy Parker, John Don Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

West became an artist & satirist in compensation for his inability to conform & succeed along conventional paths.

— Jay Martin, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life

Eileen McKenney was main subject of novelist Ruth McKenney's book My Sister Eileen (1938).

West completed four novels:

• The Dream Life of Balso Snell, 1931
  
• Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933
  
• A Cool Million, 1934
  
• The Day of the Locust, 1939
  

With the rise of consumerism & commodity fetishism the distinction between image & reality is critically blurred. West was one of the first writers to see this situation developing. The Day of the Locust ...depicts the consequences of the blurring of the line between substance & image.

The wooden horse, Balso realized as he walked on, was inhabited solely by writers in search of an audience, & he was determined not to be tricked into listening to another story. If one had to be told, he would tell it.

— from The Dream Life of Balso Snell

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/nwest.htm
http://web.archive.org/...pip.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/amlitchron_20th.html

1905 -- Russia: A frightened Czar Nicholas II, faced with rising peasant disturbances, the General Strike in the cities & the appearance of a workers' council at the head of the Petersburg strike movement, signs the Manifesto of 17 October guaranteeing civil liberties. The peasants & workers continue to riot.


1908 -- US: Emma Goldman begins national lecture tour while the country is immersed in presidential campaigning; hopes to wind up her tour on the West Coast & depart for Australia in the new year.
[Details / context]



1909 -- US: Emma Goldman is the chief speaker at a NY City mass meeting called to protest the Oct. 13 execution of Francisco Ferrer, founder of the Modern School movement in Spain. On the 23rd Emma also marches in a parade of 600 anarchists & socialists in New York City to protest Ferrer's execution. She is still, during this period, engaged in a free-speech battle in Philadelphia where police refused to let her speak in September.

1915 -- Playwright Arthur Miller lives (1915-2005). Combined social awareness with searching concern for a character's inner life. Wrote "The Misfits" for one-time wife Marilyn Monroe. He was attacked by HUAC during the 50s witchhunts but refused to name names.

The apple cannot be stuck back on The Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed & challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/amiller.htm

The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a mattress.

Another victim of HUAC: Miller was denied a passport to attend the Brussels premiere of his play THE CRUCIBLE (1953). In 1956 he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Refusing to name others, who had associated with leftist or suspected Communist groups, he was cited for contempt of Congress; Ayn Rand, falling all over herself to testify & curb free speech, is no doubt displeased when the ruling was reversed by the courts in 1958.

http://www.levity.com:80/corduroy/millera.htm

1918 -- S.S. Lucia beccomes the last boat to be sunk by a U-boat in World War I.

1920 -- Russia: John Reed, American radical journalist, dies in Moscow at age 32. Chronicled Mexican & Soviet revolutions. Wrote Ten Days That Shook the World.

Daily Bleed Patron Saint, 1998
Greenwich Village commie & bohemian, chronicler of revolutions in México & Russia.

Buried in the Kremlin Wall. Large red banner bears the collective inscription:

"The leaders die, but the cause lives on."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jreed.htm


Insurgent Mexico:

"At noon we roped a steer, & cut his throat. & because there was no time to build a fire, we ripped the meat from the carcass & ate it raw.

"Oiga, meester," shouted Jose, "Do the United States soldiers eat raw meat?"

I said I didn't think they did.

"It is good for the hombres. In the campaign we have no time for anything but carne crudo. It makes us brave..."

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/reed/
http://struggle.ws/ws/ws50_factory.html
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jreed.htm

1920 -- Italy: The Unione Anarchica offices in Bologna are raided. Carlo Frigerio & Errico Malatesta, anarchist militant/writer, are arrested (& upwards of 80 others), held responsible, along with Armando Borghi & Corrado Quaglino, the local editor of Umanita Nova, & Virgilia d'Andrea, for the worker occupations of the factories in Milan during the summer & especially during September.

Since the arrest of Armando Borghi on October 13, shortly after his return of Russia & the searching on October 15 of the newspaper Umanita Nova, all the principal leaders of the U.A.I. & the U.S.I. are detained because of the factory occupations.

Their demand for provisional liberation is refused early in January, & the manufacture of a "criminal" plot fiction leads their lawyer, Merlino, to tear to shreds in the "Scintilla," the accusing documents.

When Errico Malatesta returned to Italy in October [actually Dec. 24 — ed.] 1919, after being smuggled out of England on a coal boat by the head of the Italian Seamen's Federation, all the ships in the port of Genoa saluted his arrival, the city stopped work & turned out to greet him.

— Hippolyte Havel

1922 -- Scotland: Unemployed workers leave Glasgow on a hunger march to London.


1924 -- US: Four Will Get You Ate? NY City boarding house keepers band together because of the high cost of living & vote to serve tenants just four prunes apiece at breakfast.

Prune Juice! —

You Make My Bowels Move!

— to the tune of "Wild Thing"...

1929 -- Vladimiro Gortan, one of a number of antifascist Slavs who participated in "al pebiscito indetto dal fascismo" (March 24th), is condemned to death by a special tribunal & shot near Pola.
Source: [Crimini e Misfatti]



1930 --

All the women in the coal camps are sitting with bowed down heads,
Ragged & bare-footed, & the children cryin' for bread.

No food, no clothes for our children, I'm sure this head don't lie;
If we can't get more for our labor we'll starve to death & die!

Don't go under the mountain, with a slate hangin' o'er your head;
And work for just coal oil & carbide, & your children cryin' for bread.


This mining town I live in is a sad & lonely place
Where pity & starvation is pictured on every face!

Some coal operators might tell you the hungry blues are not there.
They're the worst kind of blues this poor woman ever had.

— Aunt Molly Jackson, mother, miner's wife, songster, "Ragged Hungry Blues"

She later talked about the latter song for the Library of Congress, reprinted in Greenway's 'American Folksongs of Protest':

"On the seventh day of May, 19 & 30, during the strike, the miners built a soup kitchen out of slabs... By the middle of October we were desperate; we did not see how we were going to live. For two or three days we did not have anything to make soup out.

On the 17th morning in October my sister's little girl waked me up early. She had 15 little ragged children & she was taking them around to the soup kitchen to try & get them a bowl of soup. She told me some of them children had not eat anything in two days. It was a cold rainy morning; the little children was all bare-footed, & the blood was running out of the tops of their little feet & dripping down between their little toes & running onto the ground.

You could track them to the soup kitchen by the blood.

After they had passed by I just set down to the table & began to wonder what to try to do next. Then I began to sing out my blues to express my feeling. This song comes from the heart & not just from the point of a pen."

RONALD D. COHEN & DAVE SAMUELSON, Songs For Political Action (accompanying book), Bear Family Records, 1996, pp. 56-57

http://www.folkarchive.de/ragged.html

1930 -- Germany: Thomas Mann gives his speech "An Appeal to Reason" — Nazis disrupt it.


1931 -- US: Gangster Al Capone gets 11 years for forgetting to pay taxes.



1933 -- US: Albert Einstein arrives, a refugee from Nazi Germany.

"To the Village Square we must carry the facts of Atomic Energy.
From there must come America's Voice."

— Albert Einstein

1933 -- Norway: First Labor government forms.



1936 -- Spain: In Perdiguera (Aragon), the International Group of the
Durruti Column, composed of 250 anarquistas, engage in a battle against the fascists.

Many friends & partners are killed...

[Details]

1937 -- Bertolt Brecht play "Senora Carrar's Rifles" premiers, Paris.
http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/adorno18-brecht5.html



1938 -- Eat Your Heart Out, Foucault?: Deconstructionist Daredevil Evel Knievel lives.
Discovers the true philosophical meaning & purpose of motorcycles.
http://evelknievel.com/

1939 -- Warren Billings, labor activist, released from Folsom Prison.


1940 -- ¶ Author Jack Kerouac breaks his leg during a football game this month (I don't have exact day); he had just begun attending Columbia University in September on a football scholarship.


1941 -- High Seas: A German submarine torpedoes the US destroyer Kearney 350 miles southwest of Iceland; kills 11 crew members, seriously wounding two. The Kearney, the first destroyer attacked by a German submarine, sustains heavy damage but manages to stay afloat.


1941 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Rep. Martin Dies (D-TX) sends the attorney general a list of 1,121 "subversive" US employees; after investigation two are dismissed. Government is justa crawlin' with commies.


1942 -- US: Army private James Rowe is hanged for murdering a fellow soldier, the first of 142 American servicemen executed during World War II, Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Trying to determine who committed the first lynching is like trying to determine who built the first fire.

— George Burrows

1943 -- US: Better (F)red Than Red?: In the face of mounting opposition to communism & the Soviet Union in American society, the Young Communist League (YCL) dissolves itself at a convention, NY City. In an about turn of face, the 400 delegates organize American Youth for Democracy, which only offers membership to non-Communists.


1943 -- France: André Respaut (1898-1973) arrested & tortured before being sent to Buchenwald, where he was known for his courage & generosity — saving several deportees from death.

From 1939 to 1943, he was active in the resistance & the group "Combat." A lifelong anarchiste, he worked with an association of deportees, & wrote the books Buchenwald terre maudite (1946), Sociologie fédéraliste libertaire (1961).

André was released on April 11, 1945 by the Americans.

1945 -- Argentina: Juan Peron's popularity increased after he introduced liberal workplace policies to the point where he was considered a threat by the Junta. In early 1945 he was arrested & detained.

Public discontent was great & the main trade union federation, the Confederacion General de Trabajo (CGT), organized the first major public action for democracy on October 17, 1945. Its call for Juan Peron to be freed was supported by the Union Sindical Argentina (USA), but not the anarchist union, the Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA). Eva Peron played a large part in this demonstration.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/15323

1949 -- Spain: Six antifascist guerrillero, militants of the CNT, including José Sabater Llopart, are trapped & killed in Barcelona.

... show details

José Sabaté was the former head of the Barcelona Dyers Union, turned guérilla along with his two brothers, Francisco ("Quico") & Manuel (aka Manolo).

José teamed up with his brother "Quico," & the two became the nightmare of the forces of repression in Catalonia. Manuel joined another action group headed by Ramón Capdevila &, captured a few months from now, was executed in February 1950.

El Quico carries on the struggle against the Franco regime until his death in action in 1960.

See Sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary & The Anarchist Resistance to Franco - Biographical Notes, both by Antonio Tellez.

http://libcom.org/history/articles/1910-1949-jose-sabate-llopart
http://libcom.org/history/llopart-manuel-sabate-1927-1950
http://www.struggle.ws/spain/after_afa.html
http://geocities.ws/paisajes_guerrilla/catalonia.html

1950 -- US: "Salt of the Earth" strike begins in Silver City, New Mexico; strikers' wives "man" & walk picket lines for seven months during 14-month strike.


1952 -- George Bernard Shaw play "The Millionairess" opens, Broadway (83).


1954 -- Composer/anarchist John Cage's "34' 46.776" premiers, Donaueschingen.
http://www.classical-composers.org/comp/cage
http://www.gradnet.de/papers/pomo2.papers/rigaud00.htm



1957 -- French-Algerian author Albert Camus is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Camus wrote for many years for the anarchiste & left wing press in France.

Camus' biographer Herbert Lottman comments on his association with numerous anarchists... [Details]

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1960 -- Thierry Maricourt lives. Poet, novelist, anarchiste, with numerous reference works to his credit: Histoire de la littérature libertaire en France, Dictionnaire des auteurs prolétariens de langue française, de la Révolution à nos jour & the antifascist Les nouvelles passerelles de l'extrême droite. Poetry/novels include Adèle au-delà de l'ombre, Plaidoyer pour Ravachol (1997).

"Un mur en trompe l'oeil invente l'interdit
un homme en uniforme informe les passants:
"Ici commence l'ordre avec ses tragédies
avec ses rires jaunes, ces crimes indécents" (...)

— excerpt, Délit de Vie.

https://www.monde-libertaire.fr/antimilitarisme/14742-thierry-maricourt-de-la-cellule-204-c

1961 -- England: Sit-in at Soviet Embassy in London in protest against planned nuclear testing by USSR. Wow! Nice digs.

1961 -- France: Police massacre over 200 (possibly 300) Algerians protesting against police oppression & the curfew imposed against their community in Paris.

Police search Algerian ghettos for FLN members, indiscriminately killing innocent Algerians before turning their guns on a large group of protesters gathered near the Seine River. The next day police release an official death toll of three dead & 67 wounded, a figure disputed by witnesses who observe bodies littering the area & floating in the Seine...

[Details / context]

1963 -- UN General Assembly bans weapons of mass destruction from space.



1966 -- US: Anarchist collective, "The Diggers," holds its first free street feed in Frisco, California.
We are all Emmett Grogan !


1967 -- US: Seems just like yesterday: Joan Baez + 122 arrested Oakland Induction Center. 14th, 16th, 17th, 1966, 1967.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Baez


1968 -- Jose Feliciano, the blind Latino singer-guitarist, issues his controversial, bluesy rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" on RCA Records. He first performed it at a 1968 World Series game between the Tigers & Cardinals. Baseball fans booed.


1977 -- Italy: Nationwide wildcat hospital strikes all over Italy, against settlement signed by the unions. Workers put forth their own demands & fight police. The army is called in to serve the patients in Rome, elsewhere ("Serve the People"?).


1978 -- US: Turn in Your Green Card?: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Jimbo Carter signs a bill restoring Jefferson Davis' citizenship.


1979 -- S. J. Perelman dies in New York. American humorist, master of wordplay — in books, movies, plays, & essays. His magazine pieces are collected in numerous books, including Strictly from Hunger (1937), Westward Ha!: or, Around the World in Eight Clichés (1948), & The Road to Miltown; or, Under the Spreading Atrophy (1957).

His style is one they used to call "deadpan," but is better defined as elaborately droll. He used to write for the Marx Brothers, & there is an element of Perelman in those fried speeches of Groucho...

http://www.ralphmag.org/perelman.html

1979 -- Mother's Day?: Mother Teresa awarded Nobel Peace Prize.



1985 -- Legendary jazz & blues singer Alberta Hunter dies, NY City. Achieved fame in Chicago jazz clubs in the 1920's, toured Europe in the 1930's &, after over 20 years anonymity as a nurse, returned to performing in 1977.
http://www.redhotjazz.com/hunter.html



1985 -- Claude Simon of France wins the Nobel Literature Prize.


1987 -- England: As the biggest storms in a century wreak havoc across southern England, a mob takes advantage of the chaos to loot in Oxford Street.
Source: [Calendar Riots]


1988 -- "Rockin' Robin" beats "Sensational" Sherri Martel for WWF woman's title.


1988 -- US: About 600 arrested at Pentagon in a blockade protesting US war in Central America.


1989 -- "It felt like a 600 pound gopher going underneath my feet at 40 miles an hour."

— San Francisco Giants pitcher Mike Krukow's description
of how it felt at Candlestick when the World Series earthquake hit


1990 -- Fellowship of Reconciliation sends 20 people on a peace mission to Iraq & Jordan.



1991 -- US: News anchor Bree Walker Lampley files an FCC complaint that LA radio KFI-AM personally attacked her by discussing her having a deformed baby.


1991 -- Tennessee Ernie Ford, country singer (16 Tons), dies at 72.



2005 -- Ba Jin (aka Pa Chin [pseud. of Li Feigan]) (1904-2005) dies. Chinese novelist, discovered anarchism with the reading of Peter Kropotkin & Emma Goldman & created his pseudonym Ba (from Bakunin ) & Jin (from Kropotkin). Cruelly persecuted, but finally, in the decade of Deng Xiao-ping's reforms, he was elected honorary chairman of Chinese Writers' Association & also a contender for the 2001 Nobel Prize.

Ba Jin was constantly harassed by the Communists, & in 1949, was forced by them to rewrite his stories, removing or replacing all anarchist references with Communist ones.

In 1966 he was again in disgrace, branded,

"A great poisonous weed"

& his writings condemned as seditious.

[Details / context]

2009 -- US: First Seattle anarchist Bookfair.
http://seattleanarchist.org/
http://recollectionbooks.com/SeattleRadicalTimeLine.htm


2010 -- Vatican: The official Vatican newspaper declares beer-swilling, doughnut-loving Homer Simpson & son Bart are Catholics — & says parents should not be afraid to let their children watch "the adventures of the little guys in yellow."

Crusty, however, remains an unrepentant Jew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_Father,_Like_Clown
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/8069472/Homer-Simpson-is-a-true-Catholic.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/18/us-simpsons-idUSTRE69H54K20101018


3000 --

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"We have oftener than once endeavored to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."

— Voltaire

3500 --