Daily Bleed Radical Literary History for July 16th

Among the leaves & the rolls of moonlight, The moon, which weaves lace on the road-white Among the winds, & among the flowers, Our blithe feet wander — life is ours! — Voltairine de Cleyre, excerpt, "Love's Ghost"

JULY 16

IDA B WELLS
Anti-lynching crusader, advocate for racial justice.

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US: ATOMIC BLAST DAY.

FESTIVAL OF CONVIVIAL TOOLS.

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-622 -- 'Hegira' — Islamic chronological time considered to have begun, being based on the first day of Prophet Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina [622CE].
Source: [Calendar Riots]


463 -- Here's a Laffer?: Start of Lunar Cycle of Hilarius.


1099 -- Crusaders herd the Jews of Jerusalem into a synagogue & set it afire. Love that neighbor.



1439 -- England: Kissing banned, in an attempt to stop the spread of pestilence & disease. The prohibitions fail as people only pay them lip service. In the end a compromise: No tongues. (So to speak.)


1482 -- The first world atlas is printed.



1546 -- England: Awry? Anne Askew burnt for denying doctrine of transubstantiation. Tram substations hadna been invented just yet.


1548 -- "The Paz that refreshes"?: La Paz, Bolivia is founded.


1730 -- Elijah Fenton dies, Easthampstead, Berkshire. Wrote Poems on Several Occasions (1717).


1757 -- England: The first private press in the UK, Horace Walpole's, publishes its first book, Thomas Gray'sOdes.


1769 -- New World: San Diego mission established; first mission founded in Mexican California. We oppose them, preferring other principled positions.


1782 -- de Sade completes "Dialogue Between a Priest & a Dying Man," in prison.


1782 -- France: de Sade escapes during a transfer between French prisons, Valence.


1787 -- US: "Connecticut Compromise," providing for a bicameral US Legislature, adopted by the Constitutional Convention. The House of Representatives it creates would be elected on the basis of population, with blacks, who could not vote, counting as three-fifths of a person each.


1821 -- US: Mary Baker Eddy, lives, Bow, New Hampshire; founder of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, also known as the Christian Scientists.


1827 -- England: King For A Day? To relieve boredom, the prisoners at King's Bench Prison, London, attempt to hold elections for a prisoner to represent them as a Member of Parliament; the game proves so much fun, the governor attempts to suppress it & a riot ensues.
Source: [Calendar Riots]


1829 -- A poem in tribute to the late Philadelphia caterer Robert Bogle is published. Bogle is the first known professional African-American caterer. Among his descendants is Robert W. Bugle, publisher of the Philadelphia Tribune, & Donald Bogle, noted film critic & author of Black Americans in Film & Television.


1835 -- US: 2,400 Cherokee shipped out of Montgomery, Alabama, for the Arkansas River, as part of the forced relocation of all Indians in US to territories west of the Mississippi River. Basic consolidation of over a century of the theft of all Indian lands to the east, primarily through bribery, theft, murder, cheating, looting & an unending string of broken legal treaties, & preparation for more of the same to come to the west in the coming decades.


1855 -- US: Salish tribe cedes all lands in Montana & Idaho in Treaty of Hell's Gate.

1860 -- US: Decree from Emperor Norton I,
America's greatest ruler ever,
proves himself so:
he dissolves the United States of America.

(Damn anarchists.)

http://www.zpub.com/sf/history/nort.html
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/norton.html

1862 -- US: Ida B Wells lives, Holly Springs, Mississippi. Launches her nation-wide anti-lynching campaign after the murder of three black businessmen in Memphis, Tennessee.

In 1896 Mary Church Terrell , Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Margaret Murray Washington, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, & former slave Harriet Tubman meet in Washington, D.C., to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).

http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/barnett.htm

1862 -- US: David Farragut becomes first rear admiral in US Navy. Stroked his way to the top, in a manly manner.


1863 -- High Seas: US battles the Japanese in the Straits of Shimonoseki.


1868 -- Wilkie Collins novel The Moonstone first published in book form.


1872 -- Norway: Roald Amundsen, Polar explorer / author of Northwest Passage, lives, Borge.


1877 -- US: Start of The Great Upheaval — the first American mass strike wave, viewed at the time as a violent rebellion against the railroads.

The Great Railway Strike of 1877 began with a wildcat strike of 30 railroad firemen in Martinsburg, West Virginia, protesting wage cutbacks, & escalates into two weeks of national worker rebellion against the railroad industry & federal government.

Riots killed dozens in the Midwest & East Coast, & strikers briefly seized the city governments of Pittsburgh & St. Louis. Workers, without unions to tame & control them, successfully stopped trains for 3-4 days to as much as a week, destroyed or seized property & even "managed" it as if it were their own.

See Strike! by Jeremy Brecher, 1972

http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/haymarket/schneirov_nights_of_labor.html
http://en.internationalism.org/inter/110_history.htm
http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/teacherguides/strike/background.htm

1878 -- Emil Heinich Maximilian Hoedel, a 21-year-old worker, his last words being "Vive la commune," is executed. Hoedel shot King Guillaume to protest & publicize the misery of the workers.

A month after Hoëdel fails to kill Guillaume, Karl Nobiling, a Doctor of Philosophy & also an anarchist, takes his turn, & also failing, turns his gun upon himself.

Paul Brousse (see the Daily Bleed, Jan 23, 1844) coins the phrase "propaganda by the deed" to describe Nobiling's attempt, which quickly enters the anarchist lexicon. These acts often serve to strengthen the state, & Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader German Chancellor Bismarck benefits by adopting repressive laws to destroy any opposition movements.

1886 -- American author of hundreds of dime novels, E.Z.C. Judson, dies. Books included The Mysteries & Miseries of New York (1848), Ned Buntline's Life Yarn (1848), Stella Delorme; or, The Comanche's Dream(1860), & Buffalo Bill's Trail; or, Will Cody, the Pony Express Rider.


1888 -- "Shoeless Joe" Jackson lives (1888-1952), Pickens County, South Carolina.

Baseball player banned from the sport, one of its most fabled characters whose haunting quality of his life infuses W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe as well as the Kevin Kostner film based on the book, Field of Dreams. Illiterate & terrified of the big cities, he reluctantly went to the major league, & in 13 years hit .356 before his banishment. His favorite bat, "Black Betsy," was given to him in 1908 by a cab driver, & still exists today (recently put up for auction on Ebay with a minimum $500,000 bid).

1889 -- Lauri Pohjanpää lives (1889-1962), Helsinki. Finnish poet, theologian, best known for his fable poems.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lpohjanp.htm


1893 -- Australia: William Lane leaves to set up a socialist utopia in Paraguay.


1894 -- US: Many Negro mine workers in Alabama killed by striking white miners.



1898 -- US: Photographer Berenice Abbott lives, Springfield, Ohio.(1898-1991). Best known for her documentary photographs of New York City.

Abbott got her start as a assistant to the anarchist / surrealist photographer Man Ray & is credited with teaching him to dance & also with rediscovering French photographer Eugene Atget.

She played bit parts in Eugene O’Neill plays & was adopted as "the daughter" of the legendary anarchist Hippolyte Havel.

1929-1939, Berenice Abbott spent 10 years photographing New York City as it changed. She received funding from the WPA from 1935 to 1939 & selected 305 photos for the New Deal project. The complete work was compiled by Bonnie Yochelson & published in 1997: Berenice Abbott: Changing New York.

http://www.commercegraphics.com/ba.html
http://www.ovguide.com/berenice-abbott-9202a8c04000641f800000000027e09a
http://nothing-is-new.com/2008/11/02/berenice-abbott/

1898 -- France: Pierre Desgranges (aka Granges) (1865-1898) dies. Anarchiste militant, like his father, & brother Victor.

Moved to Lyons in 1890. Here he is active in numerous groups: "Jeunesse antipatriote," "Les Ennemis de toute candidature,""Ni dieu ni maître" (which earn him several police searches). Particpates in the 1896 conferences ofSebastien Faure & tries to create a new revue, "Jeuness" (producing only 2 or 3 numbers). Seriously ill, Desgranges dies at age 33.
http://www.ephemanar.net/juillet16.html

1900 -- US: The tunnel being dug for Alexander Berkman's prison escape is discovered. Although prison officials cannot verify who is responsible or the tunnel for, Berkman is placed in solitary confinement. The tunnel rat, Eric Morton, sick from the physical hardship of digging the tunnel, soon sails to France & is nursed back to health by Emma Goldman.
[Details / context]



1903 -- Italy: Premier issue of "Il Libertario", an anarchist weekly magazine directed by Pasquale Binazzi & Petroni Carlotta Zelmira, in Spezia.

"Il Libertario" is a vital part of the Italian trade union movement & agitation at the beginning of the century, in the debates over WWI & during the upheavals of 1919-1921.

Over the years "Il Libertario" survives numerous repressive efforts by authorities until finally destroyed by the fascists. Number 886 appeared on October 26, 1922; on the 27/28th La Spezia is occupied militarily & on the 29th the government is handed over to Mussolini.

• See Raccolta periodici, http://www.municipio.re.it/manifestazioni/berneri/periodici.htm


• See "Umanità Nova",
  http://isole.ecn.org/uenne/archivio/archivio1999/un13/art488.html


• http://www.ephemanar.net/mars05.html#binazzi

1912 -- US: Her lecture circuit completed, Emma Goldman stops at the Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago to visit the grave of Voltairine de Cleyre. (Emma too will eventually be buried here, in 1940.)
http://graveyards.com/IL/Cook/foresthome/ne-goldman.html
http://graveyards.com/IL/Cook/foresthome/
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/cleyre/presley.html

The poetry of Voltairine de Cleyre, see
http://recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/index.html#Cleyre


1914 -- Belgium: Socialist conference in Bruxelles (Kautsky, Trotsky & Rosa Luxemburg).
http://www.reocities.com/~Johngray/barrotk.htm


1915 -- Henry James becomes a British citizen to dramatize his commitment to England & the Allied cause:

"I have testified to my long attachment here in the only way I could — though I certainly shouldn't have doneit . . . if the U.S.A. had done a little more for me."

http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/

1916 -- US: During strike of 30,000 iron-ore mine workers of the Mesabi range in northern Minnesota, Carlo Tresca& other IWW strike leaders are arrested on charge of inciting the murder of a deputy.
[On or about this day; exact date not given.]


1917 -- Russia: Lenin & other Bolsheviks fail to seize power in Petrograd (-July 18).


1918 -- Russia: Czar Nicholas & family killed, by Czar wanna-bes, in a be-czar manner. The family doctor, their servants & their pet dog were shot by the Bolsheviks, who had held them captive for 2 months in the basement of a house in Ekaterinberg.


1918 -- Russia: Maxim Gorky’s "Novaia Zhizn," the last opposition paper, banned.

Good background on the Russian Revolution & its failings, see Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks & Workers Control 1917 - 1921: The State & Counter-revolution:

http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/russia/sp001861/bolintro.html


1927 -- Nicaragua: First collective aerial bombing in history, by US over Ocotal. Meanwhile Augusto Sandino begins a protracted war against US occupation of the country.


1928 -- Novelist / art historian Anita Brookner, lives, London. Author of Hotel Du Lac.
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth19&state=


1932 -- Mari Evans, author of the poetry collections I Am a Black Woman & Nightstar: 1973-1978, lives, Toledo, Ohio.



1934 -- US: Beginning of the San Francisco General Strike. 127,000 workers participate. A longshoreman's strike spreads to become a two-day general strike paralyzing the area, & leading to a successful settlement.

See The Big Strike: A Pictorial History of the 1934 SF General Strike with narrative by Warren Hinkle.

Screenprint: San Francisco '34 Waterfront Strike,
between 1940 & 1948. Anton Refregier, 1905-1979



1935 -- Arnold Adoff lives, New York. Poet & anthologist, especially of titles that celebrate African-American heritage. Although not African-American himself, he dedicated himself to providing books & stories which provided his own children, Jamie & Leigh, with poetry with which they could find themselves. Married to novelist, Virginia Hamilton.
http://www.arnoldadoff.com/



1936 -- Spain: In Barcelona the anarcho-trade unionists of the powerful C.N.T (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) urge, without success, Luis Companys, president of the "Generalitat" (governing Catalonia), distributing weapons to the workers, to counter the imminent threat of a rightwing military coup d'etat.

"We had the clear impression that if the politicians feared Fascism, they feared even more the people armed."

http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/history/spain/

1937 -- Germany: Concentration camp erected, Buchenwald.


1937 -- Cuban novelist novelist Reinaldo Arenas lives, Oriente Province. Joined the revolution of Castro but, like many Cuban homosexuals, was branded a "social misfit" & imprisoned for several years during the 1970s. He immigrated to NY, where, dying of AIDS, he committed suicide, at age 47. He wrote Hallucinations (1969), The Doorman (1991), & Singing from the Well (1967).
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/dolgoff/cubanrevolution/toc.html


1941 -- US: 100^ø F (38^ø C) highest temperature ever recorded in Seattle, Washington. If it's not raining this is not Seattle.
http://www.washington.edu/cambots/



1945 -- US: First atomic bomb exploded, Trinity Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico. Detonation was not made public for three weeks, when two others like it devastated the Japanese civilian cities of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Powered by a sphere of plutonium the size of an orange, it produced a fireball that rose 8,000 feet in a fraction of a second, pushing a mushroom cloud 41,000 feet high. The Manhattan Project was top secret in 1945, & nearby residents were told an ammunition dump had exploded.

A brigadier general who had observed the test from a bunker 10,000 yards south of the explosion later wrote, "The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the mid-day sun ... Thirty seconds after the explosion came, the air blast pressing hard against people & things, to be followed almost immediately by a strong sustained awesome roar which warned of doomsday & made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty."

"I am become death, shatterer of worlds."

— Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavadgita, after witnessing the explosion)

The only journalist allowed to witness the Alamogordo atomic bomb test, two months later, after A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, wrote about the Alamogordo event in glowing (sic) terms in The New York Times:

"The hills said ‘yes' & the mountains chimed in ‘yes,'" the newsman waxed poetic.

"It was as if the earth had spoken & the suddenly iridescent clouds & sky had joined in one mighty affirmative answer. Atomic energy — yes."

http://www.atomictourist.com/
Alternative Press Review: Nukes in Space
http://www.nukefix.org/weapon.html

1946 -- US: Notices are tacked on the doors of Negro churches in Georgia, reading "The first nigger who votes in Georgia will be a dead nigger." Southern hospitality & tacky notes in one fell swoop...


1948 -- Netherlands: Founding of the Dutch Experimental Group by artists Karel Appel, Guillaume Corneille, & Constant & Jan Niewenhuys, Amsterdam. In September they issue their magazine"Reflex #1".


1949 -- Ivanov Vyacheslav Ivanovich dies, Rome, Italy. Leading poet of the Russian Symbolist movement, philosopher, classical scholar. Left Russia in 1924 to become a convert to the Roman Catholic church. His most important poetical work is Cor Ardens (1911); also published translations of Sappho & Aeschylus.


1950 -- Uruguay defeats Brazil (2-1) in the first post-war World Cup (of soccer, obviously).


1951 -- J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is published. Remains a very popular book today. Amazon.com lists over 200 customer reviews of the book.
http://204.232.203.158/letters/index.php


1953 -- Author Hilaire Belloc, 83, dies of burns sustained after falling into his fireplace.
http://www.reocities.com/Paris/7990/


1960 -- Italy: After three years of negotiations, agreement is signed between CGIL & Confindustria (Management) providing equal pay for equal work for women in Italian industry.


1962 -- ¶ During this month Beatster Jack Kerouac travels to New York, Old Orchard Beach in Maine & Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Returns to Florida, where this summer Lois Sorrell visits& Kerouac reads Nabokov's Lolita.

1967 -- On the last day of the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, 20 year old Arlo Guthrie performs his new song, a 20 minute ditty called "Alice's Restaurant," to rave reviews. Also appearing is Leonard Cohen.

You can get anything you want... at Alice's Restaurant, exceptin' Alice
You can get anything you want... at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in it's around the back
Just a half-a-mile from the railroad track
Oh... You can get anything you want
At Alice's restaurant.

http://www.arlo.net/
http://sims.net/massacre/why-alice.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_7C0QGkiVo

1968 -- Big Brother & the Holding Company, & Sly & the Family Stone open the new Fillmore West, the former Carousel & El Patio ballroom, San Francisco.


1969 -- Apollo 11, first manned lunar mission, leaves town, country, planet, to confirm the moon is made of cheese.



1973 -- US: Senate Armed Services Committee begins probe into allegations that the US Air Force had made 3,500 secret B-52 raids into Cambodia in 1969 & 1970.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Cambodia_KH.html

1973 -- US: During Watergate hearings, aide Al Butterfield reveals existence of tape recordings of the Master bugger man bugging himself. The beginning of the end for the Trickster.

It is, Peter Dale Scott wrote, "no coincidence" that most of Watergate's shadow players dwell in the same "conspiratorial world" that led to the Bay of Pigs, the Castro assassination plots involving CIA-mob teamwork, the gun-&-drug running syndicates formed in pre-revolutionary Cuba (later transplanted to Miami) & the Kennedy assassination cover-up.

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/ArchiveMirror/Parascope/nixon.htm

1973 -- Not Too Twisted? Roger English finished 102 hours & 28 minutes of doing "The Twist."


1975 -- Germany: The Radicals Decree, designed to remove "extremists" from the civil service where they could have an important influence. Consequently, a large number are banned. Strangely enough, many more "left extremists" have Berufsverbote than right extremists. A count made by the magazine"pad.-extra" this month reveals a total of 553 Berufsverbote for the left-oriented & but five for the right.
http://www.geschichte.nrw.de/artikel.php?artikel[id]=455&lkz=en
http://books.google.com/books...Radicals+Decree...


1979 -- Canada: Proof Marijuana Kills? Pothead whales beach themselves at Point au Gaul, Newfoundland; all die.


1981 -- Folk-pop singer/songwriter Harry Chapin, 39, dies in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway in Jericho, NY on the way to a benefit concert. A champion for the hungry & homeless who organized a massive effort to provide food for the needy.


1981 -- Shukuni Sasaki spins 72 plates simultaneously. Please don't do this techtonic trick at home unless you have 72 plates.



1983 -- England: In an anti-nuclear protest 10,000 form human chain linking US & Soviet embassies, London.
http://www.protest.net/


1985 -- Heinrich Böll dies near Bonn. German writer of ironic novels of travails of life during & after World War II, won the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature. His books includes Und sagte kein einziges Wort (1953, Acquainted with the Night) & Gruppenbild mit Dame (1971, Group Portrait with Lady).

Boll's works reflected his central concern with the abject failure of State, Church & Home.

"The continual need to defend the individual & the family fired both Boll's creative energy & his trenchant criticism of politicians & journalists who seemed to care for neither. His solidarity with the young & the disadvantaged, his refusal to indulge in cold-war politics & his more recent presence at mass demonstrations in the Federal Republic against nuclear weapons brought him much public ridicule & detestation.

The award of the Nobel Prize in 1972 was greeted in some quarters with undisguised dismay, & as recently as 1983 Boll was invited by the Kulturminister of Baden-Wurttemberg to consider emigration."

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/boll-brief-bio.html

1987 -- Nicaragua: In their first major action since Oliver North's efforts to make them folk heroes ('Ollie's Folly'), the Contras kill three children & a pregnant woman.

Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Ronald Reagan illegally & surreptitiously financed these Contras, & urged American citizens to aid them, bizarrely comparing them to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the 1930's (American volunteers — often Communists, some anarchists & Wobblies — who fought against Franco & his fascist thugs). These are the same Contras who ran a drug ring to finance their attempt to overthrow the government. In North America we call this the "War on Drugs."

http://gnn.tv/videos/1/Crack_The_CIA
http://www.notbored.org/rushdie.html
http://www.costaverde.net/facilities.htm

1988 -- Carl Lewis runs a wind-assisted 100 m in 9.78 sec. The International governing body immediately gives meeting, to consider a ban on beans.


1989 -- Dinosaur attacks a girl on a Costa Rican beach (beginning of Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park).


1991 -- US: PBS's "P.O.V." schedules "Tongues Untied" (about black homosexuals) on this date - 60% of member stations refuse to air it.


1995 -- Bosnian Serbs execute hundreds of Muslim civilian prisoners.


1996 -- Singer Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries accepts an undisclosed settlement after a London newspaper reported she appeared on stage without panties.

1996 -- US: H.W. Sternberg patents a drinking glass with burping sound effects.



1998 -- The Marijuana Liberation Front issues froth it's 1998 manifesto:

"Freedom Demands the Right to be Wrong."

http://hempfest.org/

1998 -- US: Hate group ad runs against gays.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_ads.htm



1999 -- The Marijuana Liberation Front issues it's 1999 manifesto:

Civil disobedience . . . with a smile!

http://www.hempfest.org/
http://www.isomedia.com/homes/harpo/gallery/9600/_mlfposter.html



2002 -- Ireland: The IRA apologizes for killing noncombatants in the last 30 years. Yep-a-doodle.

3000 --

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a vision of corrected history with breakfast
by Al Hellus

the days' casting call
includes newsbites on the radio
that could have happened
anywhere between the last fifty years
& breakfast, which is
a plate of poached headlines
& a cup of printer's ink.

surely the second coming is at hand.

I stare out the window where, suddenly,
the Watergate hearings are once
again in session — a bearded Richard Nixon
is seating on the stand admitting,
finally, that he always was a crook, &

Joe McCarthy breaks down on television,
blubbers to the packed Senate chamber
about his obsession with
young communist boys
who spurned him in his youth.

on a warm Tuesday in Vienna, Hitler
is accepted into the academy of art.
He becomes a mediocre painter
most noted for having dropped dead
at the Cedars Tavern next to Jackson Pollack
who kept right on talking to the
poor old bastard for half an hour.

his last painting,
a nude self-portrait
sells for thousands of dollars
who claims to really like it.

Al Hellus is an arts activist living in Saginaw, Michigan. a vision of corrected history with breakfast is his first book of poems.

4000 --

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