We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
— George Bernard Shaw
China: MOON'S BIRTHDAY. Offerings of fruit are left on rooftops & in open courtyards, with lanterns burning all night on houses, pagodas, ships & river boats. Children get special candies & moon cakes. Flowers & seeds fall from the moon.
http://www.selia.com/lyrics/MoonAndMe.html
1128 -- Hugh de Payens, Master of the Templars, receives the "Relief des St. Omer' from the father of Geoffrey de St. Omer. To receive the "Relief des St. Omer" one must "monica" the father of Geoffrey de St. Omer.
1394 -- France: Charles VI, Beloved & Respected Comrade King , expels the Jews.
1555 -- Germany: Religious Peace of Augsburg.
1597 -- Cervantes thrown into Seville jail, where he gets idea for "Don Q." Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, a tax collector in the province of Grenada, is imprisoned in the Carcel Real, the royal prison in Seville, Spain. Apparently a subordinate had deposited funds with an untrustworthy banker. While in prison he starts plotting, but probably not actually writing, "El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha." http://www.malaspina.org/cervantesm.htm
1613 -- François La Rochefoucauld lives. French classical author best known for his maximes, epigrams expressing a harsh or paradoxical truth in the briefest manner possible. His insights have influenced among others Lord Chesterfield, Thomas Hardy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stendhal, & André Gide.
1620 -- England: Mayflower departs from Plymouth with 102 pilgrims.
1776 -- US: British forces under General William Howe crossed the East River into New York City in boats provided by, & under artillery cover from, the Royal Navy under Admiral Richard Howe, the general's brother. General Washington & his Continentals skedaddled to Harlem Heights. All but 500 of the 22,000 residents abandoned the city.
1782 -- US: Congress adopts a Masonic emblem as the Great Seal of the US.
1789 -- American novelist James Fenimore Cooper lives.
1809 -- John Gay play "The Beggar's Opera" (revival) opens in London.
1821 -- With Spanish influence failing due to wars in Europe, a council of Guatemalan leaders adopt the Plan of Iguala which created an independent country ruled by Mexico's Emperor Iturbide. What is now Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, & Nicaragua dissolved into the current nations in July 1823.
1830 -- England: Railing? William Huskisson, a popular member of the British Parliament, became the first person to be run over by a railroad train. He was to speak at the opening of the Manchester & Liverpool Railway when he failed to look both ways before crossing.
There isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going.
— Edna St Vincent Millay
The 'Railway Age' is inaugurated when, at the grand opening of the first line built for both passengers & goods (Liverpool to Manchester), head of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson, is killed by the Rocket while attempting to shake hands with the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington.
When the train finally crawls into Manchester, the gathered mechanics & artisans boo & revile the occupants of the Duke's carriage.
1845 -- US: Female cotton workers strike for the 10-hour day.
The first mass strike of women workers for the 10-hour day took place when 5,000 women in the textile mills of Allegheny City & Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania walked off their jobs. The strike was unsuccessful.
1846 -- Russia: Warlaam Tcherkesoff lives (1846-1925) (or Tcherkezov). Georgian Prince, anarchist militant & collaborator with that other Prince, Peter Kropotkin. "Ambassador of Georgian patriots."
[Details / context]spelled also as Cerkezov, Cerkesov, Cherkesov, Cherkezov; first name also as Varlaam, Warlam
1853 -- US: The first American librarians' convention meets, in NYC.
1867 -- Author Petr Bezruc (Vladimir Vasek) lives.
1872 -- Congress of Saint-Imier convenes, September 15-16 1872, at the initiative of the Jura Federation.
The antiauthoritarians refuse to recognise the decisions ram-rodded through by the Marxists & authoritarian socialists at The Hague Congress. Federations of the Latin countries secede & convene the St. Imier Congress, where they adopt a federal & free pact. All forms of political power, i.e. political/administrative & economically broadly defined, are denounced.
The anarchist international met several times during the following years. The anarchist section of the International continued until 1878, by which time the increasing reaction in the Latin Countries made it difficult for open mass movements to continue.
The Marxist rump, split by dissensions in its new home in America, had already expired in 1874, killed by its leader’s megalomaniac desire for complete domination of the working class movement.
1889 -- Quote: "The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him."
— Robert Benchley, My Ten Years in a Quandary
Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
Humorist Robert Benchley lives, Worcester, Massachusetts. Father of Nathaniel (Sail a Crooked Ship), grandfather of Peter (Jaws).
His quiet, whimsical humor mainly depicted the struggles of an ordinary little man — himself — who was completely befuddled by the world; his humor often ascended by hardly noticeable steps into pure nonsense. Drama critic for "The New Yorker," for which he also wrote "The Wayward Press" column under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes.
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by then I was too famous.
1890 -- Poet Claude McKay lives, Sunnyville, Jamaica. Emigrates to the US in 1912. Winner of the 1928 Harmon Gold Medal Award for Literature. Author of the influential poetry collection Harlem Shadows, & famous for the poems "The Lynching," "White Houses," & "If We Must Die," (used by Winston Churchill as a rallying cry during World War II).
THE WHITE CITY
I will not toy with it nor bend an inch.
Deep in the secret chambers of my heart
I muse my life-long hate, & without flinch
I bear it nobly as I live my part.
My being would be a skeleton, a shell,
If this dark Passion that fills my every mood,
And makes my heaven in the white world's hell,
Did not forever feed me vital blood.
I see the mighty city through a mist-
The strident trains that speed the goaded mass,
The poles & spires & towers vapor-kissed,
The fortressed port through which the great ships pass,
The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate,
Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate.
1891 -- Agatha Christie lives, Torquay, Devon. Wrote hundreds of books, some under the pseudonym Mary Westmancott. Creator of Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective, & Miss Jane Marple.
1894 -- Japan defeats China in Battle of Ping Yang.
1895 -- Mark Twain arrives in Australia for a 3-month lecture tour.
1896 -- Kansas, Missouri, Texas Railroad stages a head-on train wreck as a publicity stunt.
Two freshly painted 40-year-old locomotives crashed head on in front of 40,000 paying spectators near Waco,
Texass. William Crush, passenger agent for the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railroad — The Katy — staged the event & charged $2 to see it, with a special charter fare of $3.50 roundtrip from Houston. The crowds ignored the sheriff's deputies & were within ten yards of the crash, two died & dozens were injured. Scott Joplin was in the crowd & later wrote "The Great Crush Collision."
Drivin' that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones you better
watch your speed
Trouble ahead
Trouble behind
& you know that notion
just crossed my mind
Trouble with you is
The trouble with me
Got two good eyes
but we still don't see
Come round the bend
You know it's the end
The fireman screams &
The engine just gleams
1897 -- US: Emma Goldman delivers the first of four lectures in Philadelphia before several English-speaking organizations, including the Ladies' Liberal League & the Single Tax Society. Her lectures include "Free Love." Before the largest free-thought organization of Philadelphia, the Friendship Liberal League, the anarchist feminist critiques the freethinkers' "partial application of the principles of freedom."
1901 -- US: Citizens of Norman, Oklahoma demand resignation of Police Judge A. Overstreet because he is reported to have said that it was a shame to arrest Emma Goldman & that it would have been better for the poor people if Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President McKinley had been killed long ago.
[Details / context]
1906 -- México: (September 15-October 1) Fin de la segunda época de "Regeneración" [anarquista publication]. Represión general ala Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal, con motivo de las insurrecciones frustradas de 1906 Insurrecciones del Partido Liberal Mexicano en Jiménez, Coahuila; Acayucan, Veracruz y Camargo, Tamaulipas. Lucha de los obreros textiles. // End of the second publishing period of "Regeneración," with the repression of the anarchist Partido Liberal following failed uprisings.
[Context / details]
1914 -- Author (John) Robert McCloskey lives. Wrote Make Way for the Ducklings.
1916 -- Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu lives. Romanian-born French writer, who gained at early age fame with his poems. During World War II he was imprisoned in a concentration camp.
1916 -- France: First tank used in war, "Little Willies" at Battle of Flors.
1919 -- US: Coolidge breaks Boston police labor strike.
1924 -- England: Date on the Zinoviev Letter (a forgery designed to bring down the labour government), allegedly from the Comintern to British Communists. Several MI5 & MI6 were officers involved in the plot & apparently include Sidney Reilly, Arthur Maundy Gregory, Joseph Ball, & Stewart Menzies (future head of MI6). http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUzinoviev.htm
1924 -- Uruguay: Fernando O’Neill Cuestas, nicknamed Zapicán, lives (d. 2005). Direct action illegalist, revolutionary & historian of anarchism in Uruguay.
“Finito” (Little Thin Man)
Member of Libertarian Youth in Montevideo, did much time in prison & as an exile eluding various dictatorships. Involved with the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) & the Tupamaros.
O'Neill Cuestas, Fernando [Zapicán] (1924-2005), revolutionary & historian of anarchism in Uruguay, was born on 15 September 1924 in Mercedes, capital of the Department of Soriano, Uruguay, the eldest son of Fernando O’Neill Parada (1890-1976) & his wife, Aurora Cuestas Acosta (1897-1977). O’Neill’s first known ancestor in Uruguay on his father’s side is his grandfather, Daniel O’Neill. Daniel O’Neill, an Irish immigrant & non-practising Catholic, settled in the countryside of the Department of Flores around 1870. There he married a Spanish-Uruguayan, Rosa Parada, & the couple had eleven children. The second youngest, Fernando O’Neill Parada, worked as an estancia foreman before becoming a landowner & attaining a comfortable economic position in Soriano. Fernando O’Neill Parada married a woman from Mercedes, Aurora Cuestas Acosta, with whom he had four children: Fernando (1924-2005), Amanda (1927-2003), Jorge (1929-1999), & finally, Teresa (b.1934), a piano teacher living in the city of Paysandú.
Fernando O’Neill Cuestas, nicknamed Zapicán since his early years, attended primary school in the Salesian College of San Miguel de Mercedes & received a Catholic education, which he later renounced. Of a rebellious character, he did not complete his secondary education as he was expelled from school for bad behaviour. Many of O’Neill’s relations were involved in violent incidents; an uncle on his mother’s side was stabbed to death in a dispute with a neighbour, two uncles on his father’s side committed murder & a third was killed in the battle of Tupambaé (24 June 1904) during the last Uruguayan civil war. Before reaching the age of twenty, O’Neill was involved in many knife fights in Mercedes, earning him fame as a man of arms from a young age. In the course of various confrontations & in defence of what he considered family honour, O’Neill killed one person & gravely injured two. Convicted of murder & grievous harm, he was incarcerated in Miguelete Prison, & subsequently in Punta Carretas Penitenciary.
O’Neill acknowledged that before serving time in Miguelete Prison, he had had little interest in political activism & that his life 'was that of a middle-class boy who felt a deep rejection of, or indifference to, the moral values of his class: economic success, attainment of a respected position in society & a university profession' (O’Neill 1993: 57). In Miguelete Prison, the Catalonian anarchist Pedro Boadas Rivas developed a friendship with O’Neill. Boadas, together with other active anarchists, served a sentence for various attacks, murders & armed robberies, among them that of Cambio Messina in 1928 in Montevideo. This group was recaptured subsequent to undertaking a bold escape in 1931, led by Argentine anarchist Miguel Arcángel Roscigno (or Roscigna) & Italian anarchist Gino Gatti. The group had escaped through a tunnel leading to Carbonería El Buen Trato, a coalyard situated opposite the penitenciary. On foot of conversations with these anarchists & reading the books with which they provided him, O’Neill adopted a libertarian ideology & supported direct action as a method of political agitation. This was despite the fact that during that era in Uruguay, anarcho-syndicalism — a movement pursuing industrial actions, especially the General Strike — predominated over active anarchism.
Released in 1952, O’Neill joined the ranks of Libertarian Youth in Montevideo. That same year he published a 48-page pamphlet entitled Un ex penado habla (An ex-prisoner speaks) in which he denounced the terrible treatment meted out to prisoners in Uruguayan prisons. He further accused the police & political authorities of committing acts of corruption. The pamphlet, which was widely distributed, provoked a debate in the press. O’Neill’s accusations landed him with a lawsuit for defamation & slander.
During those years, O’Neill went to live with his family, who in 1951 had settled on rented land about fifteen kilometres from the city of Paysandú. There he cultivated sugar beet & established contacts with a group of independent leftist intellectuals, whose principal reference was Carlos Quijano (1900-1984), lawyer & founder-director of the Uruguayan weekly paper "Marcha".
Returning to Montevideo in 1956, O’Neill participated in ten days of debate culminating in the foundation of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU). Catalan anarchist refugees from the Spanish revolution (1936-1939) & some Argentine active anarchists had a particular impact on this organisation. The Uruguayan anarchists who had founded the Community of the South in 1955 did not join the FAU. They set up a printing press & moved to the outskirts of Montevideo, where they dedicated themselves to working the land on a communal basis. Others, dubbed orthodox or pure anarchists, similarly refused to join the FAU as they opposed an organisation which required obedience to leaders. O’Neill, despite voicing his dissatisfaction with the lack of clear & concrete political projects on the part of the FAU, remained within its organic structure until 1968.
Because of his methodical character & his passion for books, between 1965 & 1967 the FAU entrusted O’Neill with sorting & categorising the International Anarchist Library Archive with headquarters in Montevideo. This undertaking had been commenced by the Romanian Eugen Relgis (1895-1987), an anarchist & pacifist intellectual taking refuge in Uruguay. At the same time, O’Neill worked in a union with an anarcho-syndicalist slant, centred around the workers of FUNSA, a Uruguayan tyre factory. During this period, he established close relations with some of the most prominent libertarian activists of the era: brothers Gerardo & Mauricio Gatti, Carlos Mechoso & Ruben Barcos, among others.
The triumph of the Cuban revolution & the subsequent ideological & political declarations of its leaders provoked divisions in the Uruguayan anarchist movement, despite the fact that all of those involved supported some of the political measures adopted by the Cubans, such as agrarian reform. In 1968 O’Neill found it contradictory to consider himself an anarchist & at the same time to support the Cuban revolution. The revolution was defined as Marxist-Leninist & had embarked upon a process to consolidate a State sought to combat all forms of opposition.
The anarchist doctrine negates the existence of the State whether it be capitalist or socialist & the FAU proclaimed that 'its fundamental political aim is the destruction of the State in the form of institutional political domination, as well as the suppression of governmental forms of power' (FAU 1986: 18). For this reason, & because the anarchists’ aims seemed to him confused, O’Neill decided to distance himself from the FAU. In 1968 he approached the Tupamaros National Liberation Front (MNL), an urban guerrilla organisation founded in 1966. The organisation was initially intended as a form of resistance to the repressive excesses of political power & to the threat of a coup d’état.
The Tupamaros, a revolutionary leftist organisation, predominantly comprised middle-class activists with university education. O’Neill felt comfortable within this organisation in spite of the fact that distancing himself from his old comrades in the FAU had produced a conflict of loyalties that plagued him throughout his life. O’Neill participated in Tupamaro activism such as bank robberies, & worked for the information service of that organisation. Despite being detained by the police in 1969 & confined to a barracks, his connections with the Tupamaros could not be proven & he was released after a few months.
In 1972, faced with a military offensive against the Tupamaros, O’Neill decided to move to Chile, carrying a letter of recommendation from the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano addressed to the then socialist president Salvador Allende. When general Augusto Pinochet staged a military coup on 11 September 1973 & overthrew Allende, O’Neill managed to obtain refuge in the Argentine embassy & was moved to that country in January 1974. O’Neill settled in Buenos Aires but did not participate in Argentine guerrilla movements. His intention was to enter Uruguayan territory via the north coast, but he desisted when he learned that his name was included in the list of people persecuted by the Argentine-Uruguayan paramilitary commandos which operated in that city. When a number of his companions were kidnapped & 'disappeared', O’Neill took refuge in the Swedish embassy in November 1974. In December of that year he arrived in Sweden as a political exile & settled in Stockholm.
From Europe, O’Neill repeatedly planned to return to Uruguay in secret to join the resistance movement against the dictatorship in power in Uruguay since the coup d’état of 27 June 1973. Nevertheless, his attempts to return failed because of practical impediments & the defection of some of the exiles who accompanied him. O’Neill then concentrated on becoming active in campaigning for the release of Uruguayan political prisoners & denouncing his conditions in prison. In 1982 he moved to Spain. In Madrid O’Neill sold toys, & later in Málaga he sold refreshments on the beach. There he contacted anarcho-syndicalist elements & initiated & collaborated enthusiastically in the first stage of the publication of the Rojo y Negro newspaper. 'O’Neill was a person much loved by the CNT activists of those years in the city of Málaga, where he left his mark & was exemplary for his honesty' (Peña 2005). In 1984 O’Neill travelled to Portugal. In Lisbon he made the acquaintance of Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, one of the leaders of the Claveles Rojos’ revolution of 1974, & engaged in activities for this movement.
In 1985 Uruguay recovered its democratic institutions & in mid-1986, O’Neill returned to his native country, settling in the Montevideo district of Cerro. There he re-established relations with members of the Tupamaro movement & FAU activists, organisations which had been legalised by the government chosen in the national elections of November 1984. In Cerro, O’Neill organised a residents’ civil defence movement to combat delinquency in the district, for which he was questioned by his anarchist companions. Distanced from them, in 1997, he settled in Paysandú, where he gradually abandoned political activism, but supported the leftist coalition of Frente Amplio, which triumphed in the 2004 elections.
He wrote & published Un ex penado habla (Montevideo: author's edition, 1952), Anarquistas de acción en Montevideo 1927-1937 (Montevideo: Recortes, 1993); El caso Pardeiro: un ajusticiamiento anarquista (Montevideo: Testimonio, 2001) & Búsqueda y captura del comandante Doblas (Montevideo: Fin de Siglo, 2004).
O’Neill was a particularly slim man & his friends gave him the nickname “Finito” (Little Thin Man). He was a kind & formal person, methodical in the extreme & possessing incisive reasoning. O’Neill was a compulsive reader, an autodidact who searched tirelessly & in vain for responses to the ambiguity of the human condition. During the closing years of his life, O’Neill concluded that humanity was still not mature enough to generate just & peaceful societies & he disavowed totalitarian world views.
In his last testament Fernando O’Neill stipulated that religious symbols should not be used during his wake, that any feelings of sadness should be avoided & that those attending should take their leave of him simply as a departing friend.
Carlos Caillabet.
1925 -- Breadgivers published in 1925 (exact date unknown), an autobiographical novel by Anzia Yezierska, is about a turn of the century Orthodox Jewish Eastern European immigrant family on the lower East Side of New York City. A daughter breaks away from family to achieve her own American Dream; her father curses her, & lives to regret it as he becomes dependent on her for his own survival.
Anzia Yezierska had a romantic relationship with philosopher John Dewey. Worked for the Works Progress Administration's Writers Project. In the last decades of her life, she documented the plight of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York. She died in obscurity in 1970.
"When Gorter became a Socialist he issued a book of poems, which no longer had nature for the theme, but class struggle. As he says in one of his poems, he "had found something much greater than Nature."
— H.Canne Meijer, from Pioneers of Anti-Parliamentarism, by the anarchist Guy Aldred.
With his friend, Anton Pannekoek, another much neglected famous Dutch marxist, Gorter opposed Lenin & the Bolshevik Party's capitulation to capitalism.
Gorter argued Lenin's tactics would destroy the Russian Revolution, turning it into a powerful ally of world Capitalism, allied to other capitalist states, in enmity to the working class struggle.
1928 -- Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovers, by accident, the antibiotic effects of the penicillin mold.
1928 -- Julian Edwin Adderly lives, Tampa, Fla. Best known as "Cannonball" Adderly, a jazz saxophonist who played with Miles Davis as well as lead his own band with brother Nat Adderly & musicians such as Yusef Lateef & George Duke.
1928 -- Edgar Rice Burroughs novel Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle is published.
1928 -- Henry Armitage & friends destroy the Dunwich Horror (H.P. Lovecraft).
1931 -- Scotland: Sailors at Invergordon mutiny over pay reductions, as part of the generalised refusal of the government's economic austerity measures which began with the riots on 10 June.
Source: [Calendar Riots]
1934 -- Tomie de Paola, illustrator, lives.
1935 -- Germany: During the National Socialist congress in Nuremberg, the Reichstag adopts the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws.
The laws legitimize anti-Semitism & the so-called "purity of German blood." They also forbid marriage & sexual relations between Germans & Jews. Jews will no longer enjoy any protection from the state. Eventually they lose access to law & the courts — & are completely at the mercy of the secret police & concentration camps.
1936 -- US: She's A Red! Lucille Ball, unbeknownst to her, is appointed to the state central committee of the Communist Party of California. Good for laugh until the commie witchhunter's come a callin'...
1938 -- Thomas Wolfe dies in Baltimore of multiple tuberculosis of the brain, less than a month before his 38th birthday. Lines from his own work are carved on his gravestone:
The last voyage, the longest, the best.
— Look Homeward, Angel
1938 -- Spain: Many leading anarchists express to Emma Goldman, who is here for the next six weeks, their strong opposition to the policies of the CNT's National Committee & its conciliation of the Negrin government. They are especially critical of Vázquez, who now acknowledges the destructive actions of the Communists but still wants them treated gently.
The FAI by contrast is anxious to begin a campaign abroad exposing the activities of the Communists in Spain.
Emma is shocked by the number of anarchists & other leftists held in prison...
1938 -- Edgar Rice Burroughs novel Tarzan & the Forbidden City is published.
1938 -- France: "Immediate Peace!" manifesto — drafted & signed by Nicolas Faucier & Louis Lecoin — published in "Le Libertaire." Arrested the morning of October 8, 1939 ("inciting servicemen to disobedience for the purposes of anarchiste propaganda"), Faucier ended up in prison during the war, toward the end avoiding deportation to the Nazi camps only by a timely escape.
1941 -- Lithuania: 800 Jewish women of Shkudvil are executed by the Nazis.
1943 -- US: Paul Robeson gives 296th performance of Othello in New York City.
1943 -- Italy: Gino Lucetti (1900-1943) dies. Tossed a bomb at Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader 'Il Duce' Mussolini in 1926. Today he cheated on his 30-years prison sentence. WWII antifascist partisans took group names, & two in Carrara area were ‘G. Lucetti’ (60-80 guerrillas) & ‘Lucetti bis’ (58 strong).
[Details / context]
1947 -- US: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established (or the 14th?); CIA colluded with Nazis.
It's predecessor, the OSS, was instrumental, along with the Vatican, in helping Nazi war criminals flee to North & South America & also instrumental in creating a new German spy agency run by former Nazis. To "protect US interests" around the world.
"In U.S. intelligence, there was no prohibition of hiring anyone in the Gestapo & SS," said historian Timothy Naftali. "This was a 'don't ask, don't tell' culture."
1958 -- US: 40 die as a train unsuccessfully attempts to cross an open drawbridge near Bayonne, New Jersey.
I'll be locked here in this cell
Till my body's just a shell
An' my hair turns whiter than snow.
I'll never see that gal of mine.
Lord, I'm in Georgia doin' time.
I heard that lonesome whistle blow.
1959 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Soviet Premier Nick Khruschev denied entry into Disneyland.
Cold War continues for another 40 years as a result of this Mickey Mouse insult.
1962 -- Brian Epstein brings the Beatles to the offices of the "London Daily Mirror" for an interview with Peter Jones, who concludes they are "a nothing group."
1963 -- US: Four children killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama is bombed with 15 sticks of dynamite. Prime suspects are the KKK & Nacirema (white supremacist organizations. Nacirema derived from American spelled backwards). This is the church of the Birmingham High School scholarship recipient who is presently studying in Paris, Angela Davis.
J. Edgar Hoover stopped prosecution in 1965, Robert Edward "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss was convicted of his part in the bombing in 1977, another bomber admitted his part on his death bed in 1988, the last two suspects surrendered in May 2000.
Come round by my side & I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
& the choirs kept singing of Freedom....
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
& I asked them right with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come & the Sunday has gone.
& I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
& the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
— Richard Farina, "Birmingham Sunday" (1964); Tune: "I Loved a Lass"/"The False Bride" (trad.), excerpt.
Only months earlier, the church had been the rallying point for the marches against Bull Connor's police dogs & fire hoses. Today a group of young girls had just finished a Sunday school lesson & were in the basement changing into their choir robes.
A few blocks away, but within sight of the church, a white man stood waiting on the sidewalk. He was Birmingham truck driver & one-time city employee Robert Edward Chambliss — the man whom friends in the Eastview 13 Klavern of the Alabama Klan called Dynamite Bob.
At 10:19 A.M., 15 sticks of explosive blew apart the church basement & the children in the changing room. The four dead: Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, & Cynthia Wesley, all 14; & Denise McNair, 11. Some 20 others were injured.
1969 -- According to today's issue of the "Library Journal," poet/anarchist Diane di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik "provides a stark & vivid characterization of her young life in New York City."
Diane Di Prima(1934 - )
loss of temper no problem
arrogance no problem
boxes of empty beer cans &
wine bottles no problem
thousands of styrofoam cups
no problem
Gregory Corso no problem
Allen Ginsberg no problem
Diane di Prima no problem
Anne Waldman's veins no
problem
— "No Problem Party Poem"
Diane di Prima is an American poet whose work has been identified with the Beat Generation. In addition to writing poetry, she has held numerous editorial positions: co-editor with Le Roi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka) of Floating Bear (1961-1963) & sole editor from 1963-1969; contributing editor to Kulchur (1960-1961); associate editor of Signal Magazine (1963-1965); publisher/editor of The Poets Press, New York (1964-1969); editor/publisher of Eidolon Editions, Point Reyes, California (1972-1976). She has also been associated with Wingbow Press, Berkeley, California & an instructor at the Naropa Institute & the New College of California. Di Prima is also a co-founder of the American Theatre for Poets.
1970 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Vice-President Spiro "Who?" Agnew says the youth of America are being "brainwashed into a drug culture" by rock music, movies, books & underground newspapers.
A man of strong convictions; confirmed when he is later convicted on criminal charges & loses his vice office.
1970 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Tricky Dick Nixon orders the CIA to prevent the inauguration of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile (they can't). The Trickster further authorizes $250,000 to bribe Chilean congressmen. Later, the CIA is instrumental in Allende's murder. http://www.iisg.nl/collections/chile/ http://recollectionbooks.com/cs/index.htm#chile
1970 -- US: Using a US-funded tank, Louisiana police storm the Black Panther HQ.
1972 -- Israel: Massive retaliatory raid launched in southern Lebanon to root out PLO guerrillas.
1972 -- US: McCord, Barker, Sturgis, Gonzalez, Martinez, Liddy & Hunt are indicted for the Watergate break-in; meanwhile Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Tricky Dick Nixon orders an FBI investigation of House Speaker Carl Albert.
1973 -- Chile: Songster Victor Jara murdered four days after the US-sponsored overthrow of Salvador Allende. (see 11 September).
Rounded up & held with 5,000 other "subversives" in Estadio Chile, Jara was recognized & shot by military officers.
His body was found in a Santiago morgue in a heap of bodies.
"Allende's biggest mistake was not giving us weapons. A lot of people, even women, would have fought."
— Chilean housewife, quoted in "The New York Times", September 24, 1973
Daily Bleed Saint 2006-2008
Chilean song-writer, activist, martyr.
1974 -- Russia: Police bust up an outdoor modern art show, bulldozed by authorities in Moscow.
1974 -- Uriah Heep bassist Gary Thain is nearly electrocuted onstage during a show in Dallas. He survives but quits the group soon after. Said he didn't want to end up in a heep.
1981 -- US: Blockade starts at nuclear power plant construction site, Diablo Canyon, California. Over two weeks, 1,901 are arrested in the largest occupation of a nuclear power site in US history. http://www.downtheyellowcakeroad.org/
1982 -- Quickly ridiculed as "McPaper" or "News McNuggets," the colorful, satellite-transmitted "USA Today" goes on sale.
"Until 1923, Celso, who came from Bazzano (Bologna) had been very active in the anarchist movement & in the USI (Italian Syndicalist Union). Armando Borghi was the head of the USI in Bologna at the time. He was also active in other places around the province. Among his associates, those whom I met & can recall now, were Luigi Fabbri, Gino Balestri, Primo Proni (my grandfather), Emilio Predieri (an uncle of mine), Castagnoli & there were others whose names I cannot call to mind. There was an uprising in Bazano (I cannot recall the exact year) in which my father was an active participant, holding rallies in several towns around the province & in Bologna."
1988 -- US: Asked about the holocaust during a rare news conference, Dan Quayle calls it "an obscene period in our nation's history."
Reminded that the Holocaust did not take place in America, he explains that "in this century's history" is what he meant to say. "We all lived in this century," he says, adding cryptically, "I didn't live in this century."
1995 -- US: Lakota tribal elders protest making of a film based (apparently quite loosely) on the life of Crazy Horse. Rapid City, South Dakota.
[Details / context]
1996 -- US: 6,000 rally & 1,033 are arrested near the Headwaters Grove in rural Carlotta, Calif., in a protest against the logging of one of the last large unlogged redwood stands in the world.
1997 -- US: A fired assembly-line worker kills 4 at an Aiken, South Carolina parts plant.
1998 -- Steven King novel Bag of Bones hits bookstores, US.
2005 -- US: "100th anniversary of the founding of the IWW" is a conference in Kansas City from (September 15-17). Includes a labor history tour of Kansas City on the 16th.
http://www.iww.org/
3000 --
I come because tyrants imagine
That mankind is only their throne
I come because peace has been nourished
By bullets & cannon alone
I come because one world is two
& we face one another with rage
I come because guards have been posted
To keep out the hope of the age
Text of a poem by Joseph Bovshover, from American Labor Songs of the 19th Century. Music by Dick Gaughan for the (East) Berlin 1982 Festival of Political Song.
anti-CopyRite 1997-3000, more or less Subscribe to daily email excerpts/updates (include 'subscribe bleed' in subject field), or send questions, suggestions, additions, corrections to: BleedMeister David Brown
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anarchist, labor, & radical used booksSee also: Anarchist Encyclopedia http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/gallery/galleryindex.htm Stan Iverson Memorial Library http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/ Anarchist Time Line / Chronology http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/indexTimeline.htm
John Gay play "The Beggar's Opera" (revival) opens in London.
[Details / context]
US: Emma Goldman delivers the first of four lectures in Philadelphia before several English-speaking organizations, including the Ladies' Liberal League & the Single Tax Society. Her lectures include "Free Love." Before the largest free-thought organization of Philadelphia, the Friendship Liberal League, the anarchist feminist critiques the freethinkers' "partial application of the principles of freedom."
Italy: Constitution adopted by the Federazione Anarchica Italiana (F.A.I.) at during the founding congress (15-19th). The Carrarese have a long tradition of independence best described as anarchism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw5-vifVM3E
