Anniversaries

Year ten, and still counting: this from Dalia Lithwick, on the of sight/out of mind legal limbo to which we've relegated "enemy combatants."

In Digby's post on the newest "bad apples" video to get out, some suggested context to that January 11 Guantanamo anniversary—

We are a nation of prisons. I just don't think most Americans find it all that remarkable that a particular group of prisoners are caught in some kind of legal limbo. It happens every day to one extent or another...

Just as those marines are so used to killing that they can't see they've lost their humanity, the American public is so used to innocent people in prison that they can't get worked up about a bunch of innocent foreigners caught in a Catch-22.

January 11 also marked a 100th anniversary: the start of the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike in the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile mills. On January 1 of that year a new state law went into effect, reducing the maxiumum weekly work hours for women and children from 56 to 54. From the centennial site's history—

On January 11, workers discovered their employers had reduced their weekly pay to match the reduction in their hours. That difference in wages amounted to several loaves of bread a week.

Bruce Watson in Bread and Roses quotes a mill overseer who stated "the strike began like a spark of electricity." On January 11, Polish women weavers at Everett Cotton Mills realized that their employer had reduced their pay by 32¢ and stopped their looms and left the mill, shouting "short pay, short pay!" (Watson, Bread and Roses, p. 11). Workers from other mills joined the next day; within a week 25,000 workers were on strike.

Robert Forrant on Majority Report, about the strike and its resonance today, in the context of ongoing Occupy actions.

Among the issues Forrant notes: the dire conditions that led workers to strike, and the role of women, many of them immigrants from diverse cultures who nonetheless recognized their common interest. There was the IWW's organizing workers disdained by the AFL. The National Guard called against strikers drew heavily from the classrooms of Harvard—an institution benefiting from the wealth of mill-owning donors. To complicate class issues further, many of the Harvard men had sisters actively involved in supporting the strikers.

New York City, 1912: parade of Lawrence children sent to foster families during the strike

More history and photos at the Bread and Roses Centennial Exhibit.

One hundred years ago, the Lawrence strikers won—briefly. Employers would later fire union organizers, hire spies, and chip away at the workers' gains.

Decades later, after New Deal legal protections and post-World War II recovery, large numbers of workers would begin approaching middle-class status, for a brief window of time.

The protections are essentially gone, and in a climate of "shut up and be grateful if you have a job," the Occupy/99% movement is the first thing in a long, long time that's reminiscent of those young women with the vision to demand bread, without forgetting the need for "roses."

Today would have been the 83rd birthday Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the holiday named for him comes only once a year it's still a potential reminder of how much of King's pro-economic justice and anti-war record is airbrushed from the usual commemorations.

We may be even farther now than in Dr. King's lifetime from the ideal of turning military spending abroad toward social justice at home. And with the military now our only jobs (and benefits) program, more "apples" can be expected to turn out "bad," in a society dehumanized in ways that Dr. King feared.

Another January 15—with renewed threats to the basic voting rights that people fought and died for—here's Charles Pierce: On Our National Holiday, America's Everlasting War.