Today in Labor History February 28, 1933: Erich Mühsam, was arrested and blamed for the Reichstag fire. The fire was actually set by Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist.
Mühsam was sent to the Oranienberg concentration camp, where he was tortured and murdered. Mühsam was an anarchist, poet and playwright who condemned Nazism and satirized Hitler. In the wake of the fire, President von Hindenburg issued the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties, and launching a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists, making the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany. They went on a witch hunt, mass-arresting Communists, including members of Parliament, crippling their participation in the March 5th special elections, which allowed the Nazi party to expand their plurality in parliament. Hitler had called in hopes of moving the Nazi party from a plurality to a majority through quasi-legal means. Sound familiar?

#workingclass #LaborHistory #nazis #hitler #germany #communism #anarchism #concentrationcamp #reichstag #Poet #playwright #fascism #antifascism #antifa @bookstadon

Today in Labor History February 7, 1917: A court wrongly convicted labor organizer Tom Mooney for the San Francisco Preparedness Day bombing in July 1916. The governor finally granted him an unconditional pardon after 22.5 years of incarceration. 10 people died in the bombing and 40 were injured. A jury convicted two labor leaders, Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings, based on false testimony. Both were pardoned in 1939. Not surprisingly, only anarchists were suspected in the bombing. A few days after the bombing, they searched and seized materials from the offices of “The Blast,” Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman’s local paper. They also threatened to arrest Berkman.
In 1931, while they were still in prison, I. J. Golden persuaded the Provincetown Theater to produce his play, “Precedent,” about the Mooney and Billings case. Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times wrote, “By sparing the heroics and confining himself chiefly to a temperate exposition of his case [Golden] has made “Precedent” the most engrossing political drama since the Sacco-Vanzetti play entitled Gods of the Lightening… Friends of Tom Mooney will rejoice to have his case told so crisply and vividly.”

You can read my full bio of Tom Mooney here: michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/05/…

#LaborHistory #workingclass #bombing #sanfrancisco #TomMooney #anarchism #prison #wrongfulconviction #EmmaGoldman #play #playwright #books @bookstadon

Today in Labor History January 31, 1912: A General Strike began in Brisbane, Australia. It lasted until March 6. The strike was a response to the suspension of tramway workers for wearing union badges. Within a few days, the strike committee became the de facto government of Brisbane. No work could be done in the city without the committee’s permission. They created their own independent police force and provided ambulance service for the city. They issued strike coupons, redeemable at stores that were in solidarity with the strikers. People wore red ribbons to show their support and even put them on their dogs and dray horses. On the second day of the strike, 25,000 people marched, with another 50,000 supporters watching. On Black Friday, February 2, the cops attacked a women’s march with batons. Emma Miller, a trade unionist and suffragist who was in her 70s and weighed less than 80 pounds, pulled out a hat pin and stabbed the rump of the police commissioner’s horse. The horse reared and threw the commissioner. As a result of his injury, he limped for the rest of his life. The courts ultimately ruled in favor of the unionists, and their right to wear union badges while on the job. Errol O’Neill wrote a play about the strike, “Faces in the Street.”

#workingclass #LaborHistory #Brisbane #australia #generalstrike #policebrutality #union #eugeneoneal #solidarity #playwright @bookstadon

Today in Labor History January 2, 1921: Karel Čapek’s science fiction play “R.U.R.” premiered. "R.U.R." stands for “Rossum's Universal Robots.” The play introduced the word “robot” to the English language and to the world of science fiction. He derived the word “Robot” from the Czech word for forced labor by Serfs, a derivation he attributed to his brother, Joseph. The play is an archetype for many of the science fiction stories and films that followed, like Bladerunner, West World and Terminator, and others about robots, replicants and hosts that rebel against humans. However, “R.U.R.,” like Čapek’s 1936 novel “War with the Newts,” is also a satirical critique of totalitarianism, which was already on the rise in Europe at the time he wrote the play.

Čapek was opposed to all forms of totalitarianism, including both communism and fascism. As a young man, he worked as a journalist, in Prague, where he wrote on topics such as nationalism, totalitarianism and consumerism. As a teen, he was expelled from his high school for participating in an unauthorized student club, which he later described as a "very non-murderous anarchist society." In 1938, he had the chance to leave for the UK, but refused to leave Czechoslovakia, where the Nazi Gestapo had named him "public enemy number two." He died later that year from pneumonia.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #karelcapek #sciencefiction #scifi #robot #serf #slavery #totalitarianism #satire #play #playwright #theater #film #bladerunner #rebellion @bookstadon