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.

Maria Mitchell Broke Taboos When She Reached for the Stars

                 

                                   Astronomer Maria Mitchell from an 1851 portrait by H. Dassell. 

Today is the birthday of the woman who many consider the first professional female scientist in the world. Maria Mitchell was born on August 1, 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. All of you with dirty minds can compose your own limerick now.

She was raised as one of 10 children in a Quaker family and was a distant cousin of Benjamin Franklin. Her father William was an amateur astronomer who believed that observation of natural phenomena revealed the glory of God’s plan. Alone among her siblings young Maria was captivated by her father’s enthusiasm. At an early age she began reading his books and recording his observations. Her father was her best teacher.

Maria got what formal education was then available to young women at Unitarian minister Cyrus Peirce’s School for Young Ladies, where she impressed the schoolmaster with her diligence so much that he kept her on as an assistant after she completed her course work. In 1835-38 she operated her own school.

The following year she was hired by the Nantucket Atheneum as a librarian. She pursued a self-directed program of education from the volumes in her charge. She worked there for 18 years. Meanwhile, she continued to assist her father. Together they made observations of stars for use in celestial navigation and surveyed the coastline of Nantucket Island, both of which were very useful for local mariners.

                   

                               Mitchell as a young woman.

Shortly after beginning her career at the Atheneum, Mitchell was expelled from her local Friends Society for expressing doubts and misgivings. She had little use for religious dispute. Like her father, she found her God in nature. She shifted her attendance to the Unitarian congregation but did not become a member.

The Atheneum provided intellectual and even spiritual nourishment itself.  It hosted lectures by the leading lights of the day, including key figures in Transcendentalism, anti-slavery, and early feminist causes such as Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, William Agassiz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lucy Stone, William Ellery Channing, Horace Greeley, and Theodore Parker. Many were guests in the Mitchell home and Emerson, among others, was invited to view the heavens through Maria’s telescope.

Mitchell’s life changed in the autumn of 1847. One night she observed an unusual blurry object in the night sky through her telescope. She noted its precise location. The following night she discovered it had moved, confirming her suspicion that the object was a comet. The discovery of Comet Mitchell (C1847 VI), or Miss Mitchell’s Comet, as it came to be popularly known, made her an instant celebrity. She was awarded a gold medal by King Fredrick VII of Denmark for being the first person ever to discover a comet that could not be observed with the naked eye.

                      

                              Mitchell's certificate of election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She also received honors at home. In 1848 Mitchell was elected as the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1850 to the new American Association for the Advancement of Science. The latter organization’s leading figure, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory, helped her secure a commission from the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office calculating tables of positions of Venus.

Mitchell also used her fame to lend support to the causes of women and abolitionism. She was a friend and supporter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. Later in life, in 1873 she was a founder and early president of the American Association for the Advancement of Women. To show that she would not support slavery, she refused to wear any cotton garments tainted by the misery of enslaved persons.

In 1857 Mitchell gave up her position at the Atheneum. She accepted the invitation of Chicago banker General H. K. Swift to become a traveling companion to his daughter Prudence. It was Mitchell’s first real chance to travel beyond Massachusetts. She first toured the American West and South, where firsthand exposure to slavery encouraged her increasing abolitionist fervor. 

                                 

                                                Mitchell in middle age.

Then she accompanied Prudence and author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family on the Grand Tour of Europe. She found herself a greater celebrity on the continent than at home. She was introduced to many of the leading scientists and given personal tours of observatories in Greenwich and Cambridge. After some difficulty she was even given admittance to the Vatican Observatory. She latter commented, “I did not know that my heretic feet must not enter the sanctuary, that my woman’s robe must not brush the seats of learning.”

Upon her return to the States Matthew Vassar asked her to join the faculty of his new college, the first to offer women “the same education, with the same standards, as that offered in men's colleges.” Despite the founder’s support the Board of Trustees resisted the appointment of women to the faculty for several years. Mitchell finally became the first female professor in 1865. She remained on the faculty until 1888.

For the most part, her association with Vassar College for Women was a happy one. She oversaw the construction of a modern observatory of which she was named Director so that she could continue her own observations and research in addition to her teaching duties. But there were challenges. When she discovered that she was being paid less than new male instructors just beginning their careers, she demanded equal pay. After a struggle she got it. Baptist members of the Board of Trustees also tried to have her dismissed for being “a rank Theodore Parker Unitarian.” She beat back that challenge, too.

Meanwhile Mitchell continued to reap honors. In 1869 she became one of the first three women elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society, founded by her cousin Ben Franklin. In 1887 Columbia College in New York City awarded her an honorary Doctorate in Science and Philosophy.

Mitchell retired from Vassar after the 1888 school year. The following June she died in Lynn, Massachusetts at the age of 70. She was buried next to her father on her beloved Nantucket.

An early souvenir post card of the Maria Mitchell Memorial and Observatory on Nantucket Island.

In 1908 the Maria Mitchell Society opened the then state of the art Maria Mitchell Observatory on the island. The institution continues to keep her legacy alive and provides science education opportunities to generations of young people, many of the young women.

Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for July 31 2026

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.  

                                                            Walking the Walk 

The National March into Maquette Park Saturday, August 1, 9am-1pm at Chicago's Marquett Park. "In 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Chicago Freedom Movement marched into Marquette Park to confront entrenched segregation, redlining, and organized racial violence. Sixty years later, communities across the country face renewed attacks on voting rights and access to the ballot, expanding systems of criminalization and detention, and deepening economic inequality.

This national gathering connects the unfinished work of 1966 to the defining moral challenges of this moment. Faith leaders, civic leaders, organizers, artists, young people, and communities from across the country will march for free and fair elections, freedom for immigrant and marginalized communities, and a future rooted in dignity, justice, and shared humanity."

Led locally by IMAN in partnership with 60+ community-rooted organizations, including the Rainbow Push Coalition, The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), Side With Love, and the Unitarian Universalist Advocacy Network of Illinois (UUANI), and Sponsored nationally by Powered By Faith,  The National March into Marquette Park

Planet Palooza is an outdoor event aimed at ways to “Make our planet a better place to live” now in its 4th year on Woodstock Square on Sunday, August 16 from 11 am to 3 pm. It will highlight and showcase McHenry County Non-Profit Groups and Organizations that address environmental issues, groups that advocate for diversity and equality, veterans, groups that combat hunger, homelessness, domestic violence, addiction, human trafficking, suicide, gun violence, as well as those groups who provide other essential services to our growing and diverse communities will all be exhibiting. Featuring information and outreach booths and table, entertainment, family activities, and food trucks. Hosted by Together We Stand McHenry County and the McHenry County College Sustainability Center. Visit the website at https://togetherwestandmchenrycounty.org/Planet-Palooza/

Compassion for Campers

Our distributions are usually held on the first and third Fridays of the month from 10 am to 2 pm at the new McHenry County Resource Center (MCHC) at the McHenry County Mental Health Board offices, 620 Dakota Street in Crystal Lake.    Due to a Mental Health Board event the MCHC will be closed on August 7.  The following C4C distribution will be Friday, August 21.  If and only if C4C receives enough urgent monetary support, we may be able to schedule a special distribution during that long gap between service.

With at least a temporary home base, C4C can resume accepting donations of supplies including clean used sleeping bags and tents in their bags or cases, tarps and other basic camping gear, rain gear, and especially mosquito and tick repellents and sunscreen.  Contact Sue Rekenthaler at tomatos@mc.net or Patrick Murfin at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net for more information.

Financial support is critical to fulfilling our mission. The best thing you can do is offer your critically needed financial support. Money donations are always welcome at     https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe.   Look for updates here.  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org .

U.S. Patent No. 1 Answered a Humdrum Need

Samuel Hopkin's patent with the original signatures.  The date and number in the top right of the page were added after the Patent Act of 1836.

On July 31, 1790 President George Washington affixed his signature to a document granting the first United States Patent.  It was the culmination of a process that began when Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, himself an inventor with more than a passing interest in innovation, carefully reviewed the application.  When he concluded that the submission was both original and useful he signed the document and passed it on to Secretary of War Henry Knox who also approved it and then sent it to Attorney General Edmund Randolph.  Only when the last was finished with it did it land on Washington’s desk.

It was a cumbersome procedure entailing most of the Executive Branch of the still new Federal Government.  It was an improvisation by Jefferson who for some reason left out his rival for Washington’s favor, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton despite the New Yorker’s avowed interest in encouraging American industry.  Chances are very good that the snub was not accidental.

President George Washington and his Cabinet--Secretary of War Henry Knox, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Attorney General Edmund Randolph.  All but Hamilton were involved in the review of the first patent.

Jefferson had to ad lib a review process because when Congress authorized the government to issue patents it neglected to say how it should be done.  The act simply authorized the government to carry out the powers described in Article 1. Section 8 of the Constitution:

Congress shall have the power...to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

The first person to take advantage of the new law was Samuel Hopkins, a Philadelphia inventor who petitioned for a patent on an improvement “in the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process.”  As inventions go, it was pretty mundane, but potash, which was derived from the ash residue of vegetable matter, usually wood, and was used in the making of soap and candles.   Both of those necessities had usually been made at home in the Colonial Era.  Hopkins hoped his process would encourage their manufacture in small scale craft shops for local sale.  So, it perfectly fit Jefferson’s key criterion—usefulness.

Samuel Hopkins was granted the first Patent for his new process of making potash. 

Hopkins was so excited about the prospects for his process that the very next year he was also granted the first patent from the Parliament of Lower Canada in 1791, and issued by the Governor General in Council Angus MacDonnel at Quebec City.

The approval process was repeated two more times that year for a new candle-making process and Oliver Evans’s flour-milling machinery.  The following year the trickle of applications became a rushing steam as innovative and ambitious dreamers submitted their ideas for a $4 fee—a cost that although not insignificant, could be raised by most.   Whatever his own interest in examining the models and drawings, the workload was overwhelming the Cabinet and the President’s attention.

Jefferson substantially streamlined the process.  He handed over initial review to a State Department Clerk who would make a recommendation which he would approve and send on to the President for a final signature.  In practice the final two steps began to simply rubber stamp the Clerk’s determination.

This process continued into Jefferson’s own Presidency.   At his urging Congress created Patent Office with its own staff of clerks.  More than 10,000 patents were issued before 1836 when a fire destroyed all of the records.  That fire spurred Congress to enact the Patent Act of 1836 which authorized the hiring of professional patent examiners in addition to the clerks.  It also authorized new patent documents to be issued in all cases where the patent could be confirmed by other records such as copies held by the recipient.  2,845 patents were restored and issued a number beginning with an X.  That included Hopkins’ first patent.  The rest of the missing patents were voided.

A number of well-known personages worked as political appointees in the Patent Office including Civil War nurse Clara Barton.

To date there are more than six million patents that have been issued to Americans and other nationals by the U.S. Patent system.  Since 1975 patents have been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, a part of the Department of Commerce.

By the way, a copy of Hopkins’ patent with the original signatures still exists and is held by the Chicago Historical Society.