Two Fulcrum Anniversaries —The Bomb and a Boon

 

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima August 6, 1945.

Two incredibly significant anniversaries are being observed today.  They couldn’t be more different, but each event shaped and changed forever the world in which we live.  Eighty-one years ago on August 6, 1945 the Atomic Bomb was first used as a weapon of war, exploding with unprecedented devastation over Hiroshima, Japan and ushering in decades of fear known as the Nuclear Age.  Twenty years later President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ushering in an era of increased Black political participation and power particularly in the states of the old Confederacy.

Despite the anniversary, the defining world historical event of the 20th Century attention to Hiroshima seems, at least to me, to be more muted than during previous years.  Perhaps it has to do with the rapid fading of the World War II generation itself.  Perhaps because a generation or more has come of age since the demise of the old Soviet Union and with it the Sword of Damocles threat of global incineration that Baby Boomers like me grew up with.  Despite rising tensions with Russia under Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine few expect that not-so-veiled threats to seriously threaten the United States or its European allies with nukes.  China, the emerging polar power vs. the U.S. has not been unclearly aggressive. 

There have been periodic scares from the Third World—largely fantastic attempts to whip up hysteria over supposed suite case bombs in the hands of terrorists, the so called Islamic bomb in Pakistan which was preemptively squashed by India, periodic bluster and chest beating threats from North Korea, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s persistent attempts to drum up a war between the U.S. and Iran over as yet undeveloped possible nuclear arms.  With Donald Trump as his imbecilic dupe, he finally stirred up a war with the Islamic Republic.  You may have heard that is not going well.

Despite all this most Americans no longer live with the dread of the world coming to an end tomorrow.  

 

The Doomsday clock is set closer than ever to Midnight

We may be too nonchalant.   In 2023 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which keeps close track on such things re-set their famous Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to Midnight, the most alarming re-set ever which reflected North Korean efforts, the collapse of agreements by Iran to suspend weapon development, and the general instability of the world largely due to Donald Trump’s feckless policies, and population pressures from accelerating climate change.  The Clock has been re-set again to 85 seconds to Midnight.

The devastation in Hiroshima.

The U.S. Army Air Corps B-29 bomber Enola Gay piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped a bomb on Hiroshima at 8:15 local time as residents were beginning their work and school days.  To do justice to the occasion today, I would have to dwell in detail on what it was like in the city that morning when “the face of the sun seemed to kiss the earth.”  And frankly I am not up to that ever-wrenching experience.  Call me a coward.  Instead, for just a taste of the horror and destruction I invite you to view Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs.

Voting rights demonstrations across the South, often brutally suppressed, like the first attempt of a march from Selma Alabama where young John Lewis had his skull fractured and the deaths of White civil rights workers pressured Lyndon Johnson to act and ultimately gave him the leverage to get an act through Congress.

The anniversary of the Voting Rights Act continues to generate more interest than usual because voting rights are under such relentless attack and because of the deaths of voting rights champions Congressman John Lewis and Rev. C.T. Vivian.  Progressive forces are now rallying to preserve them and to recoup what has been lost since 2013 when the Supreme Court overturned a key provision to combat racial discrimination in voting.

Under Section 5 of the landmark civil rights law, jurisdictions with a history of discrimination needed to seek pre-approval of changes in voting rules that could affect minorities.  It blocked discrimination before it occurred. In Shelby County V. Holder the Court invalidated Section 4—which laid out criteria for identifying states and localities covered by Section 5—claiming that current conditions require a new coverage formula.  That left Section 5 intact but unenforceable.  The conservative majority on the Court claimed that Congress could easily adopt a new formula and restore enforcement, knowing full well that with the House of Representatives in the iron grip of reactionary Republican majorities that no remedy would be enacted.

Since then, attacks on voting rights have intensified across the country—and not just in the old Deep South.  Republican Legislatures and Governors have enacted waves of legislation aimed at curbing or discouraging voting by minorities and any groups of voters suspected of possible Democratic tendencies.  In the name of fighting a virtually nonexistent form of voter fraud—registration and voting by non-citizens misrepresenting their status—burdensome proof of identity legislation, including very limited numbers of approved identification documents and fees and charges for attaining those documents.  Places where applicants can obtain documents have been reduced requiring burdensome travel and their hours of operation restricted.  Students have been barred from registering where they attend college, even if they live there year around.  Early voting periods have been reduced and restricted.  Polling places have been eliminated and consolidated in minority areas to guarantee long and discouraging lines.  It seems like new and creative ways to curb registration or discourage voting are introduced every year, churned out as model legislation by some right wing think tank and spreading from red state to red state like a virus.

The Rev. William Barber in the red stole became a leading voice for the "Civil Rights Movement for our times" and demands to end the GOP rampage of voter suppression laws.  Seen here before his arrest with other faith leaders in Washington.

Many, maybe even most, of these restrictions eventually get struck down in the courts, but not before having their desired effect for an election cycle or two.  With Section 4 in place, many of these changes would have been stopped by Federal review before they were even put in place. 

Meanwhile there was a growing rank-and-file movement to reclaim voting rights in the same way as they were first won at bitter cost to begin with—with street protests and civil disobedience.  The NAACP’s Moral Monday movement in South Carolina was a model for a new activism and a movement that has been called the Selma of the 21st Century.

Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Among the witnesses are Senate Co-Sponsor and Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. , Benjamin Hooks and Rosa Parks.

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark National Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a ceremony at the White House attended by leaders of both parties in Congress and Civil Rights leaders including the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Benjamin Hooks. 

My generation, which grew up protesting the War in Vietnam, grew to regard Johnson as “the enemy.”  Yet his record on domestic issues was unmatched by any President except Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  His Great Society programs, though far from perfect, were the last great systematic assault on poverty in our history.  And this Texas wheeler-dealer accomplished what Northern liberals like John F. Kennedy never could—a comprehensive legislative attack on discrimination and the subjugation of Black citizens. 

Perhaps we expected that subsequent Democratic Presidents would take up where Johnson left off without the stain of a fruitless war.  The fact is that whatever their intentions, none of them did.  The previous year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened doors of public accommodations in response to ongoing campaigns by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), branches of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), and others. 

But the historic pattern of restricting voting by Blacks through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright intimidation that was the hallmark of the Jim Crow era after Southern Whites dismantled the reforms of post-Civil War Reconstruction, remained untouched.  With new militancy the SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) turned to campaigns to register voters. 

That campaign took a bloody, violent turn in Selma, Alabama earlier that year. Marchers attempting to reach the local Court House to register were attacked and many severely beaten. Black demonstrator, Jimmy Lee Johnson, was killed during a march in near-by Marion City.  Then James Reeb, a White Unitarian Universalist Minister who had responded to a call by Dr. King for support, was beaten to death shortly after arriving in the city. 

Johnson instinctively knew that the death of the White minister would galvanize public sentiment and support in the way no number of Black deaths could. A few days later a massive Selma to Montgomery March was turned back with violence at the Edmund Pettis Bridge—Bloody Sunday.   

On March 15, Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to call for the Voting Rights Act. It was introduced in the Senate on March 18 by Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois.  

A second March to Montgomery, this time under the protection of Federal Authorities, got underway on March 21 and arrived at the Alabama capital for a massive rally on March 25 with the renewed purpose of supporting the Voting Rights Act.  After the rally a White Unitarian Universalist volunteer from Michigan, Viola Liuzzo, was shot and killed while driving a Black demonstrator back to Selma.  

The deaths of a white minister and a white woman volunteer during the Selma Campaign spurred Congress to action on the Voting Rights act in a way the vastly more numerous murders of Black activists like Jimmy Lee Jackson had ever done.  White privilege thus leveraged the landmark act.  At least the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) recognized the sacrifice of Jackson alongside UUs Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo in the memorial plaque that hangs in the Boston headquarters.

That only stepped up pressure on Congress, where despite a fierce last line of resistance by Southern Democrats, a filibuster was broken and the measure passed the upper chamber on May 26.   The vote was 77-19 with 47 Democrats in favor, 17 opposed and 30 Republicans—who still were proud to be the party of Lincoln—in favor and 2 opposed. 

Delaying tactics and attempts at gutting the measure by amendment slowed action in the House of Representatives but it passed with minor amendments on a vote of 333-85 when Congress reconvened from the Independence Day recess on July 9.  A Conference Committee reconciliation of the two versions cleared the House on August 3 and the Senate the next day. 

Johnson wasted no time including King and Rosa Parks to attend. 

 

Mr. Lincoln’s Hand in the Pocket—First U.S. Income Tax Funded the Civil War

 

Lincoln's Income Tax proposal was bitterly opposed by Democrats and mocked in the press.  Here he is not only depicted as a court fool, but his exaggerated nose is meant to suggest that he was a "greedy Jew."

Nobody, and I mean nobody—not even progressives—likes paying taxes.  Especially income taxes.  We are aware of the need to fund the essential work of government, and may even support wider spending for public benefit, but when the tax bite falls on us personally, it hurts. 

On August 5, 1861 President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the first American income tax.  It was a provision of the Revenue Act of 1861.  The new tax was 3% on all income above $800 to be “…levied, collected, and paid, upon the annual income of every person residing in the United States, whether such income is derived from any kind of property, or from any profession, trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere, or from any other source whatever…”  The same act hiked the tax to 5% on all citizens living outside the country.  It was essentially a flat rate tax. 

Needless to say, it was unpopular.  But the President had few alternatives.  He had raised a massive Army, outfitted, and armed it with money that the government didn’t have.  And despite the hopes for a quick victory, Lincoln knew that the War to Preserve the Union, as he called it, was apt to take a while. 

Since the foundation of the Republic the Federal government had been on a strict revenue diet for both philosophic and practical reasons.  The realm of Federal activity was strictly limited by the Constitution as it was interpreted at the time.  Most governmental functions fell to the individual states and local governments. 

Federal revenues were limited.  Most came either from the Tariff or from the sale of government land.  But because of anti-tariff feeling in the agricultural South, where the plantation elites relied on the importation of cheap manufactured goods from Europe and resented protectionist levies that benefited Northern manufacturers, import levies had been slashed in 1841 and lowered again in 1856.  Land sales were also in the decline as most Federal land east of the Mississippi was settled and western sales were slowed by the continuing border wars in Kansas and Indian peril elsewhere.   Then, of course, the secession of the Southern states cut Tariff revenue from important ports like Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans.  

                              

                                         Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase conceived the Income Tax plan.

Lincoln was caught in a bind between soaring costs and plummeting income.  He turned to his Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase for advice.  Chase, like other members of Lincoln’s Cabinet, notably Secretary of State William H. Steward, had been Lincoln’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.  Unlike Steward, who entered the job thinking he could be a prime minister to weak President but soon came to respect and admire Lincoln, Chase always looked down on the President and frequently was engaged in political sniping and backstabbing.  None-the-less, Lincoln had to rely on his judgment and the support he had in financial circles. 

Chase discounted the possibility of any kind of new Federal Tax on property as un-Constitutional.  Instead, he proposed borrowing most war funds by issuing bonds, the model of Albert Gallatin during the War of 1812.  He engaged Jay Cooke, a Philadelphia financier to handle the bonds.  Cooke performed spectacularly with special patriotic appeals that sold bonds not just to wealthy investors but to many middle class citizens.  Eventually nearly one quarter of all Northern families purchased war bonds.  But those bonds would eventually have to be repaid.  To reassure investors that there would be a revenue stream capable of repaying the bonds, Chase reluctantly advised the income tax. 

Surprisingly, given the fact that there was little ability for the government to assess actual income, voluntary compliance was relatively high, particularly in the industrial and commercial New England and Eastern states where both incomes and support of Lincoln’s war aims was highest.  The starting base for payment, $800, is estimated to be about the equivalent of $18,750 today.  When most Americans were still farmers and many city workers, even skilled craftsmen, earned far less, the tax fell on only a fraction of families.  Even with subsequent hikes and adjustments over the war 10% of families nationally and 15% in the northeast had paid some income tax by war’s end.  

New Yorkers line up to pay the first Income Tax in 1862.

The Revenue Act of 1862, which also created the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue, moved from a flat rate to a modified “progressive” system that exempted the first $600, imposed a 3 percent rate on incomes between $600 and $10,000, and a 5 percent rate on those over $10,000. The first withholding taxes were imposed on Federal employees and on dividends paid by corporations.  In addition, the Act also imposed a raft of new or greatly hiked excises taxes—many of them sin taxes—and fees.  

Now freed from pesky southern Democrats, Congress also imposed a high new protective tariff, which would continue to be a hallmark of Republican policy for the next hundred years.  Even these measures were insufficient to the need. 

Key to financing the war was the Legal Tender Act of 1862 which authorized the Treasury to issue notes—Greenbacks—that were required to be recognized for the payment of all debts except redemption of bonds and payment of Tariffs.  This departure from traditional hard currency was inherently inflationary but combined with other measures kept inflation in the North well below the out-of-control Confederate rates and well below inflation during future American wars. 

A bonus was that shrewd investors could purchase war bonds with inflated Greenbacks and be repaid later in specie, which spurred more bond sales.  By war’s end, with costs running to an astonishing $2 million per day, income tax rates had been raised twice more.  In the end the income tax proved to be a reliable and flexible revenue stream.  But although tolerated as a war time necessity, there was no public support to continue the tax. 

This wealthy taxpayer paid a whopping $889 in Income Tax in 1884 and all he got was this lousy receipt.

After reductions in 1868, it was allowed to expire in 1872.  Efforts by Populists and other reformers in the late 19th Century to resurrect the tax were resisted.  An income tax adopted in 1898 was struck down by the Supreme Court because the tax was not levied proportionally among the states. 

It took the 1913 16th Amendment to the Constitution to make the income tax a permanent fixture in the U.S. tax system.

Reminder to DJT--John Peter Zenger, Freedom of the Press, and the Precious Right to be Obnoxious

 

Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton making his dramatic appeal to the jurors in the John Peter Zenger Libel Trial.

August 4 is often considered the birthday of Freedom of the Press in the United States.  On this day in 1736 the original Philadelphia lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, successfully persuaded a New York jury to acquit John Peter Zenger of a charge of seditious libel for printing criticisms of Royal Governor William Cosby.  It was no easy feat. 

Cosby stacked the deck against the German-born printer by hand picking loyal toadies to sit on the special two-judge court that conducted the trial and then caused both of Zenger’s original lawyers to be disbarred for objecting to the irregularity.  

                        

                                New York Royal Governor William Crosby's armor did not protect his thin skin from the sting of criticism.

Zenger was a master printer who was hired by the owners of the New-York Weekly Journal to produce the paper.  He was listed as printer and editor, but the editorial content of the publication was controlled by political opponents of the Governor including James Alexander, a leading lawyer, former Attorney General for both New York and New Jersey and a member of the powerful Governor’s Council for both colonies.  Alexander anonymously wrote scathing denunciations of Governor Crosby printed each Monday. 

The unpopular Governor was infuriated.  He was turned down by the Provincial Assembly when he asked for permission to conduct a public burning of copies of the Weekly Journal.  Instead, he ordered Zenger arrested and jailed, although it is unclear whether the printer even shared the views of his employers.  In short, Zenger was a fall guy for Alexander and his fellow Whig opponents of the governor.  

German born printer John Peter Zenger was the fall guy for the real authors of articles castigating the Governor in the New York Weekly Journal.

But Zenger was up for the game.  He dictated an account of his arrest through a hole in the door of his jail cell to his wife and his apprentices set up and distributed it in an edition of the Weekly Journal.  Alexander and another prominent lawyer, William Smith, agreed to represent Zenger.  When they objected to Cosby’s stacked court, they were disbarred.  Naturally, no other local members of the bar were eager to take their place.  

The newspaper and the criticism that got its printer into trouble.

The case came to the attention of another printer, Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia.  Franklin had a natural interest in freedom of the press and as Postmaster General of the Colonies he was in an unusually good position to be kept on top of developments far and wide.  He was also the acknowledged leader of the Philadelphia business and professional community.  Franklin recruited Hamilton, the leading member of the Pennsylvania Bar to accept Zenger’s case on a pro bono basis. 

Hamilton, like Alexander, was Scottish emigrant with a Jacobean past.  In court, he took a daring approach.  The presiding judges already warned jurors to disregard Hamilton’s “slanders” and render a verdict of guilty based on his charge of printing false, scandalous, and malicious articles about the Governor.  

                        

Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton for the defense.

Hamilton readily admitted to the facts.  Zenger had indeed printed and distributed the articles as charged and under the law, he acknowledged, that was sufficient for conviction of libel.  In defense, he argued that the articles if libelous, were none-the-less true.  His offer to produce evidence of their truth was squelched by the Judge. 

But in a magnificent summation he called upon the jurors to recognize the truth of the charges on the basis of their own experience of affairs in the colony.  “The question before the court and you, gentlemen of the jury, is not of small nor private concern,” Hamilton pleaded. “...No! It may in its consequences affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America. It is the best cause of liberty...” 

Then he shocked the jury—he called upon them to vote for acquittal because the prosecution was a manifest injustice whatever the letter of the law read.  And the jury bought it.  They brought in a unanimous verdict for acquittal.  It was the first instance of jury nullification in North American history.  

The verdict was popular in New York and across the Colonies and Hamilton became widely celebrated.  The Common Council of New York City awarded him the freedom of city, and a group of prominent residents contributed to the production of a 5½-ounce gold box that was presented to him as a lasting mark of their gratitude.  The box remained a family heirloom, but replicas are still given out by the Philadelphia Bar Association to their out-going Chancellor, a position once held by Hamilton.  

                                       

                                                        The title page of the first London edition of Zngler's account of his trial including transcripts.

Zenger published a verbatim account of the trial as A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger and then quietly returned to his trade and continued printing the Weekly Journal.  He died in 1746 at the age of 49. 

Governor Cosby did not last so long.  He died of tuberculosis in Albany in March 1736. 

George Clarke was elevated to acting Royal Governor until a permanent replacement, George Clinton, took office in 1743.  Clarke restored Alexander and Smith to the Bar and reappointed Alexander to his Council. 

Alexander resumed his career becoming leading Whig in provincial politics of both New York and New Jersey.  In 1743 he became a co-founder with Franklin of the American Philosophical Society and in 1751 helped establish King’s College (now Columbia University.)  He died full of honors in 1756. 

Writing after the American Revolution, Gouverneur Morris observed that the “trial of Zenger in 1735 was the germ of American freedom, the morning star of that liberty which subsequently revolutionized America.”

In 1492 Columbus and the Jews of Spain Were the Ships Passing in the Night

 

Columbus kissing the ring of his patroness Queen Isabella of Spain while her co-monarch King Ferdinand and a Catholic Bishop look on as he prepares to depart the port of Palos in an illustration supporting the discovery myth.  Omitted were the ships carrying exiled Jews leaving the same port that day.

On August 3, 1492, two events of world changing significance brushed up against each other in Spain.  Italian-born mariner Christopher Columbus set out from the Atlantic port of Palos on his voyage to discover new trade routes to the Indies.  As his little three ship flotilla left port it passed several vessels laden with Jews. 

Just weeks after Columbus’s patrons Their Most Catholic Majesties Queen Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, joint monarchs of newly united Spain, finally expelled the last of the Moors from Iberia by capturing the fabled city of Grenada earlier that year and they issued the Edict of Alhambra.  Isabella, Columbus’s main sponsor, was fanatically Catholic and under the influence of the Inquisition. 

Jews lived and thrived as a significant minority in both Islamic and Christian areas of the Iberian Peninsula for hundreds of years and going back to Roman times.  But over the previous 200 years, they came under increasing pressure in Catholic areas.  In more tolerant Moorish regions, Jews thrived as philosophers, scientists, physicians, statesmen, and money lenders—a profession that was forbidden to Muslims and Christians alike. 

The Inquisition successfully petitioned the Joint Monarchs for the expulsion of the Jews of Spain, which they ordered in the Edict of Alhambra. 

The new decree ordered that the remaining Jews in the realm to either convert to Catholicism or leave Spain with four months.  Many Jews did choose baptism, but they and their decedents, called Marranos, remained under suspicion of secretly practicing Judaism and eventually themselves fell under the yoke of the Inquisition. 

Jews who would not convert were promised the protection of the monarchs while they disposed of their assets and were to be to be allowed to depart unmolested carrying with them their personal belongings, but no gold or silver.  Forced to sell assets under these conditions, most Jews received only a fraction of their worth.  Others had property seized by Christians while authorities looked the other way, and many more had to simply abandon everything.  

Expelled from their homes and carrying with them what they could salvage, Spanish Jews begin the trek to ports like Palos to sail into exile.

Many voluntarily sailed before the deadline, mostly to North Africa where tolerant Moors welcomed them.  They and their descendants eventually spread over the Muslim world and became known as the Sephardic Jews. 

Jews unable to arrange their own transportation by the deadline were rounded up and placed on ships that scattered them across Europe to uncertain fates.  Some were given refuge in Portugal on promise of protection.   Prince Henry instead robbed and enslaved them.  Many arrived in Italian city states where some found a begrudging welcome and others were later massacred.  In all an estimated 250,000 Jews were expelled.  

The native Arawak people were among the Carib tribes tortured and annihilated by Columbus in his ruthless reign as Viceroy of the New World.

Columbus, himself a devout Catholic, saw nothing wrong with any of this.  On his voyage he stumbled on the islands of the Caribbean without realizing where he was and returned to Spain declaring that he had claimed the Indies for the monarchy.  He was rewarded with the position of Viceroy over the new lands and the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea. 

Columbus made more voyages in increasingly desperate attempts to prove that he had actually found the Orient.  He also became a despotic ruler.  He was so cruel to the native Carib people—nations he essentially wiped from the face of the Earth in a decade—that even the Church was appalled.  He was eventually hauled back to Spain in chains and stripped of his titles and fortune. 

He spent the last few bitter years of his life trying to regain what he had lost and defending the increasingly dubious claim that he had reached Asia. 

As for Isabella and Ferdinand, they grew wealthy on the gold and silver of the dispersed Jews.  The Spanish Empire grew fat on gold looted from the Aztecs and Incas and from new mines of silver and gold worked by Native slaves. 

The losers were the displaced Jews and the conquered native peoples of the New World.

Ginger Goodwin,A Murder, a Mob of Soldiers, and Canada's First General Strike

 

A mob of recently discharged soldiers armed and organized by local employers and authorities raid the Vancouver Labour Temple injuring the Labour Council Secretary, a female employee, and a longshoreman.  Other labor leaders were hunted down and arrested and/or simply kidnapped.  The rank and file of the striking unions, however, continued to conduct the one-day General Strike as planned.

On August 2, 1918 Canada saw its first general strike, a well-planned and highly effective one day protest in Vancouver, British Columbia over the suspected murder of labor activist and draft opponent Albert “Ginger” Goodwin.  It came during a war year punctuated by several strikes and labor unrest in the key industries in western Canada including lumbering and milling, coal mining, and on the docks.  Instead of letting the one-day action come and go, authorities and industrial barons colluded to violently suppress it using hundreds of recently de-mobilized soldiers.

Patriotic fervor was running high in Canada, particularly in British Columbia, considered the stronghold of the Dominion’s English-speaking Empire Loyalists.  Canadian troops had been fighting in France for three years and had taken heavy casualties in some of the worst of the trench warfare carnage of the Western Front. 

On the other hand, decades of pent-up labor frustration were coming to a head.  Many workers bitterly opposed the draft which they saw as “sending poor men’s sons to fight a rich man’s war.”  Socialism had taken deeper hold on Canadian workers than their American counter parts south of the border.  Many still took to heart the socialist international idealism of the pre-war period which had laid hopes on preventing war by refusing to allow workers of one country to be used to kill workers of another.  Unfortunately, despite that high minded rhetoric, one by one the western Social Democratic Parties had fallen in line behind their national governments.  Many western workers bitterly objected to that and remained opposed to the Great War.  Workers also recognized a strategic opportunity to use a pressing need to ramp up war production coupled by a labor shortage created by the draft and general mobilization, to press for significant gains in wages and working conditions.  The wave of strikes, large and small was a natural outgrowth of these circumstances.

The immediate precipitating cause of the General Strike was the death under highly suspicious circumstances of Goodwin, a popular union leader and militant. 

Albert "Ginger" Goodwin.

Goodwin was born in Treeton, England on May 10, 1887.  He immigrated to Canada in the early 20th Century and was working as a coal miner at Cumberland on Vancouver Island by late 1910.  In 1912 he joined the epic strike of the Cumberland mines that dragged on through the beginning of World War I.  The long, bitter strikes confirmed his working class militancy and lead him to taking a greater leading role as a radical and socialist in the trade union movement.  He also entered electoral politics running as an anti-war Socialist Party of Canada candidate in the 1916 provincial elections. 

Goodwin’s rise to union leadership was even more impressive.  In December 1916 he was elected secretary of the Trailmen and Smelters Union local on Vancouver Island, a part of the historically radical Western Federation of Miners and the next year he was elected Vice President of the British Columbia Federation of Labour.  After the WFM changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelt Workers (MMSW) he became President of District 6 and also of the Trail Trades and Labor Council which united the industrial union MMSW with craft unions in the mines and mills.  

He achieved all of this despite his well-known anti-war views and encouragement of draft resistance.  At first he did not, however, personally resist the draft in order to continue his labor work.  He duly registered and was granted a medical deferment on the basis of black lung disease from years in the coal mines and rotting teeth.  After he led a major strike of Trail Smeltermen in 1917 Goodwin found his deferment suddenly canceled and he was called up for active duty.  True to his principles, he fled, living for months in the bush supported by his fellow workers.

On July 27 while camping in the hills above Cumberland, Goodwin was discovered by Dominion Police Special Constable Dan Campbell who shot him dead.  Campbell claimed self-defense although Goodwin’s gun was not fired or found near his body.

When word reached Vancouver the labor movement there was outraged and assumed that Goodwin had been systematically hunted down and murdered.  That was probably a good assumption given that no investigation of the circumstances of the death was undertaken.  The Vancouver Trades and Labour Council (VTLC), not a notoriously radical body which included several relatively conservative craft unions, voted 171-1 in favor of calling a one-day General Strike in protest.  There was also a feeling that an effective General Strike would demonstrate the power and solidarity of Vancouver labor, strengthening the hands of member unions in their upcoming confrontations with employers over wage and hour issues.

The strike call included the whole of British Columbia but with just a few days to organize, participation outside of Vancouver was spotty. But in the city with the full support of virtually all of the city’s unions, the strike was paralyzing, but peaceful.

Employers and local authorities—and perhaps the provincial and national governments had enough advance notice of the strike based on the widely publicized call to do some organizing of their own.  Someone with excellent connections arranged to rally by large numbers of recently discharged soldiers to protest disruptive strikes in key industries during a period of national emergency.  Labor was portrayed as “stabbing the troops in the back” and as German agents and/or Bolsheviks.  Not only were the men worked up into a frenzy, but they were also provided with automobiles and armed with clubs and pistols.  A detailed plan for a surprise attack on strike headquarters at the Labour Temple at 411 Dunsmuire Street was drawn up and key mob leaders were provided with detailed layouts of the building.

                    Labor militant and well-known Suffragist Helena Gutteridge's eyewitness account of the raid on the Labour Temple stoked public outrage.  

The supposedly spontaneous mob attacked the building on the day of the strike.  At least 300 men ransacked the offices of the VTLC.  Twice attempts were made to throw VTLC Secretary Victor Midgely from the office window.  A female employee was badly roughed up and injured when she intervened to prevent it.  Midgely and a Longshoreman found in the office—probably acting as an unofficial security guard—were beaten and forced to kiss the Union Jack.  Prominent labor activist and suffragette Helena Gutteridge was also at the scene but was unharmed.  Her account of the attack was widely circulated afterwards.

The ex-soldiers searched the city for union leaders, arresting or kidnapping several.  But the strike was well enough organized that rank and file members kept it in force in good order with a minimum of violence, though there were several street scuffles between strike flying squads and the soldiers and local police. 

The strike ended as scheduled and most workers returned to work the next day.  Union officers, and strike leaders, however, were sacked and blackballed.

Ginger Goodwin's funeral procession in Cumberland, British Columbia, the mining town where he rose to prominence in the labor movement. 

To show the public that the strike had deep support of membership of the participating unions and was not foisted on them by a cabal of devious Bolsheviks, the officers of the VTLC and many member unions resigned en masse then stood for re-election.  The vast majority overwhelmingly re-elected.

The Vancouver General Strike helped set the table for the much larger and open-ended Winnipeg General Strike in June of 1919.  Vancouver would launch to most substantial sympathy strikes in support of Winnipeg that year.

In September of 1919 many leading members and unions of the VTLC bolted the Canadian Trades Council to help form the new One Big Union of Canada, an avowedly revolutionary union inspired by the Industrial Workers of the World in the States.  Like the IWW, it adopted industrial unionism rather than craft divisions, although in practice many old craft locals that joined the OBU continued to function without much change except for better co-ordination with other crafts in their industries. 

                                        A One Big Union of Canada flyer from 1919 refuting a well-orchestrated red baiting campaign.

The OBU was supported by the Socialist Party of Canada and by revolutionary syndicalists.  It flourished in western Canada well into the 1920’s but was beset by red busting harassment from authorities and employers and sapped by poor internal organization.  Member unions began drifting back to the established unions.  Eventually it shrank to a few thousand members, most in the Winnipeg Transit Workers and merged with the Canadian Labor Congress in 1956.