On June 21, 1877, the authorities hanged ten Irish miners in a single day in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Known as Black Thursday, or Day of the Rope, it was the second largest mass execution in U.S. history. (The largest was in 1862, when the U.S. government executed 38 Dakota warriors). They convicted the Irishmen of murder, and accused them of being terrorists from a secret organization called the Molly Maguires. They executed ten more over the next two years, and imprisoned another twenty suspected Molly Maguires. Most of the convicted men were union activists. Some even held public office, as sheriffs and school board members.
However, there is no evidence that an organization called the Molly Maguires ever existed in the U.S. The only serious evidence against the men was presented by a spy, James McParland, working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who provided the plans and weapons the men purportedly used in their crimes. The entire legal process was a travesty: a private corporation (the Reading Railroad) set up the investigation through a private police force (the Pinkerton Detective Agency) and prosecuted them with their own company attorneys. No jurors were Irish, though several were recent German immigrants who had trouble understanding the proceedings.
Nearly everything people “know” today about the Molly Maguires comes from Allan Pinkerton’s own work of fiction, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives (1877), which he marketed as nonfiction. His heavily biased book was the primary source for dozens of academic works, and for several pieces of fiction, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes novel, Valley of Fear (1915), and the 1970 Sean Connery film, Molly Maguires.
My novel, Anywhere But Schuylkill, tells a truer story of these union miners and their persecution by the Pinkertons.
#CarbonMajors is a database of historic production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal, and cement producers.
• Investor-owned companies account for 31% of emissions, with Chevron, ExxonMobil, and BP the three largest contributors.
• State-owned companies are linked to 33%, with Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, and the National Iranian Oil Company being the largest contributors.
• Nation-states account for the remaining 36%.
“The #CarbonMajors database makes it dramatically easier to document, calculate, and visually demonstrate the growing chasm between the urgent demands of climate reality and the continued reckless and intentional growth of oil and gas production,” said Carroll Muffet, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law #CIEL.
Today in Labor History April 2, 1840: Émile Zola, French novelist, playwright, journalist was born. He was also a liberal activist, playing a significant role in the political liberalization of France, and in the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely convicted and imprisoned on trumped up, antisemitic charges of espionage. He was also a significant influence on mid-20th century journalist-authors, like Thom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion. Wolfe said that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Steinbeck, Dickens, and Zola.
Zola wrote dozens of novels, but his most famous, Germinal, about a violently repressed coalminers’ strike, is one of the greatest books ever written about working class rebellion. It had a huge influence on future radicals, especially anarchists. Some anarchists named their children Germinal. Rudolf Rocker had a Yiddish-language anarchist journal in London called Germinal, in the 1910s. There were also anarchist papers called Germinal in Mexico and Brazil in the 1910s.
The one that does not care about it's most #vulnerable citizens? The one that #squeezes everytime those same poorest citizens?
The one ruled by an #elite for the #elites?
The one giving more and more power to those elites?
The one lying about stopping the #GlobalWarming? The one doing #greenwashing of highly contaminating companies? The one still using and extending the use of #coal, #gas and #petrol?
The whole European Commission should be dismantled and put in #jail for all those crimes. 😡😡😡
With #ClimateChange threatening the North Pole Workshop, Santa will phase out #coal use in naughty stockings. Instead, a volunteer brigade of ChristMoose will fill those stockings with a greener alternative fuel.
This one showed up in my neighbourhood on #Christmas morning. Santa’s got my number…
Whatever #winter#holidays you celebrate, be kind to the Earth and each other (or the #moose will fertilise your #trees )!
"In one of the largest mass arrests of recent years, police in #NewSouthWales (NSW) detained some 109 protesters on Sunday evening. They had participated in a 30-hour maritime demonstration of 34 kayaks, surfboards and pontoons at the port of Newcastle, aimed at blocking coal shipments and the broader promotion of fossil fuels. The protest had been given police permission until 4 p.m., at which point the arrests suddenly started.
"The arrests point to a deepening crackdown on the #RightToProtest. Significantly, this is being spearheaded by Labor governments, now in office federally and at the state and territory levels across mainland #Australia. The detentions indicate official fears over growing social opposition, related not only to climate change, but to Israel’s genocidal assault on #Gaza, a broader eruption of #militarism and the soaring cost-of-living.
"The action, organised by the #RisingTide organisation, saw dozens and at times more than a hundred people take to the water in small vessels to prevent #coal loads from exiting the port. The activists said they succeeded in delaying multiple shipments, but noted that this is only a fraction of the coal that passes through the port each year.
"In comments at the protest and since, representatives of Rising Tide pointed to the increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate change. In Australia, this included one of the worst #bushfire seasons in 2019-20, and massive #floods in northern NSW and parts of #Queensland last year that displaced thousands.
"Along with their abandonment of the flood victims and others impacted by climate change, the Labor governments are doing nothing to address the underlying crisis.
"The federal Labor administration cynically appealed to discontent over the issue in the May 2022 election. Its policy is a 43 percent emissions reduction by 2030 and net-zero by 2050. Scientists have warned that both are woefully inadequate, compared with the scale of the crisis. But even these targets are entirely meaningless, with Labor approving dozens of new coal and #gas projects across the country.
"The protest was not a snap action or an unauthorised event. It had received prior approval from police. Demonstrators were addressed by prominent political figures, including federal Greens leader Adam Bandt and one of his predecessors, #Bob Brown. The Greens, their references to the environmental crisis notwithstanding, seek to collaborate with Labor, as it greenlights #FossilFuel projects and defends the whole profit system that is responsible for climate change.
"Given the establishment character of the speakers and the police authorisation, the subsequent crackdown was particularly striking.
"Police have claimed that approval was only until 4 p.m. on Sunday afternoon and that participants then refused to leave the port’s waters. By 5:30 p.m., the port was cleared, and its operations were resumed.
"The speed of the police crackdown indicates extensive prior planning. Footage on social media shows at least one police vessel approaching the activists and moving to detain them.
"The police arrests were indiscriminate. Among the 109 arrested was #AlanStuart, a 97-year-old clergyman. Five children were detained.
"In a statement on X/Twitter, Legal Observers NSW said five of its representatives were arrested. 'Observers were present to document the actions of police and connect any protesters arrested with legal representation,' it stated.
"Despite being marked out with coloured vests and having repeatedly spoken to police during the event, the observers were nevertheless hauled in. They noted that this was an attack on 'the right to document and monitor protest as media and independent observers,' which 'is an internationally protected right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.'
"Three of the legal observers were charged, joining more than 100 others. Even the children who participated have reportedly been referred to relevant authorities under the Young Offenders Act.
"The blanket charge applied to the adult protesters of unreasonable interference by use of a vessel under section 13 of the state’s Marine Safety Act carries a maximum penalty of a $5,500 fine. While most protesters were released on bail after being booked, two organisers, including one with impaired vision, were detained overnight in a police watchhouse. They received hundreds of dollars in fines, with a judge declining to impose the maximum fine because of their lack of a criminal history. The remaining protesters face court next year.
"The arrests and charges were clearly intended to send a message that further disruptions will not be tolerated. If that were not the case, the protesters could simply have been moved on without the mass detention or subsequent charges."
The ASTOUNDING huge big news out of COP28 "so far" is Biden's comitment to not just build NO MORE, not one, coal plant ever again, but to Cycle Down and Replace ALL COAL PLANTS NOW, all gone within 12 years.
US TO REPLACE COAL PLANTS
Coal is 20% of the US power system. That is construction of massive size. Terawats of renewable construction. Funding for remediation for energy industry jobs, protecting former coal communities.
There was a drug store in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania that plays prominently in my novel, ANYWHERE BUT SCHUYLKILL. It was run by a Polish immigrant known as Doc Luks. He was sympathetic to the miners and would often provide medicine and treatment for free during strikes, when the workers had no money to pay him.
His son, George Luks, became a successful artist, of the Ashcan School, a politically rebellious art movement that was influenced by Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” and which portrayed the everyday lives of working class people and immigrants. Luks’s art, in particular, was influenced by the poverty and oppression suffered by the miners he grew up with.
West Virginians Could Get Stuck Cleaning Up the #Coal Industry’s Messes
The state’s program for reclaiming abandoned coal mines has long been plagued with problems, but state and federal officials have done little to prepare for this reckoning.
Impressive research, using detailed Medicare death records, though, of course, this study will surely be misused e.g. to argue for how clean coal is now, and for continued coal-to-gas switch, despite cleaner, cheaper techs. https://gwagner.com/ccs-delay #pollution#climate#coal
Volunteer Jordan Bestwick has been improving conditions in the fossil collection at the Nottingham Natural History Museum, reorganising and packing specimen trays with acid-free foam or paper.
Here he is working on some drawers of Carboniferous Coal Measures fossils.
Today in Labor History September 10, 1897: A sheriff and deputies killed 19 striking miners and wounded 40 others in Lattimer mine, near Hazelton, Pennsylvania during a peaceful mining protest. Many of those killed were originally brought in as strikebreakers, but then later organized and joined the strike. The miners were mostly Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak and German. The massacre was a turning point for the UMW. Working and safety conditions were terrible. 32,000 miners had died from 1870-1897, just in the northeastern coalfields of Pennsylvania. Wages had dropped 17% since the mid-1890s.
The strike began in mid-August, when teenage mule drivers walked off the job to protest the consolidation of stables, which had forced them to walk much further just to get to work. After a scuffle between drivers and supervisors, two thousand men walked out, as well. Soon, all the mines in the region had joined the strike. Most of the men who weren’t already members of the UMW quickly joined the union. Up to 10,000 miners were now on strike. The mine owners’ private police, known as the Coal & Iron Police (miners called them Cossacks, for their brutality), was too small to quash the strike, so they called on the sheriff to intervene. He mustered a posse of 100 Irish and English immigrants, who confronted the miners as they marched toward Latimer, on Sep 10. Along the way, they joked about how many miners they were going to kill.
The massacre provoked a near uprising. The sheriff called for the deployment of the National Guard, which sent 2,500 troops to quell the unrest. 10 days later, a group of Slavic women, armed with fire pokers and rolling pins, led 150 men and boys to shut down the McAdoo coal works, but were stopped by the National Guards. The sheriff, and 73 deputized vigilantes, were put on trial. However, despite evidence clearly showing that most of the miners had been shot in the back, and none had been armed, they were all acquitted.
“In the tradition of Upton Sinclair and Jack London, Michael Dunn gives us a gritty portrait of working-class life and activism during one of the most violent eras in U.S. labor history. Anywhere but Schuylkill is a social novel built out of passion and the textures of historical research. It is both a tale of 1870s labor unrest and a tale for the inequalities and injustices of the twenty-first century.”
-Russ Castronovo, author of Beautiful Democracy and Propaganda 1776.
Available on Sep 19, 2023, from all the usual online distributors, or direct from my publisher: http://wix.to/M9gMx11
Today in Labor History September 6, 1869: The Avondale fire killed 110 miners, including several juveniles under the age of 10. It led to the first mine safety law in Pennsylvania. Avondale is near Plymouth, Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna River flows nearby. The mine had only one entrance, in violation of safety recommendations at the time. In the wake of the fire, thousands of miners joined the new Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, one of the nation’s first large industrial unions (and precursor to the United Mineworkers). My book, “Anywhere But Schuylkill,” opens with this fire. My main character, Mike Doyle, joins the bucket brigade trying to put out the flames shooting out of the mineshaft.
"Anywhere but Schuylkill" by Michael Dunn - coming soon from Historium Press! Check it out!! http://wix.to/M9gMx11
“The Banshees of Inisherin and 1917 are two of the best historical films I’ve seen in recent years, particularly the cinematography. Yet the visuals Michael Dunn creates in Anywhere But Schuylkill, are richer, more vivid, more imaginative, and more haunting and indelible than what I recall in those brilliant films. It’s like the author transports himself to each scene and brings to life each physical detail, each expression, each emotion, and each word of dialogue with the care of a Renaissance painter.”
—David Aretha, award-winning author of Malala Yousafzai and the Girls of Pakistan and Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1963 March on Washington.
The U.S. state of Wyoming could gain the most from federal climate funding, but obstacles are many.
Inside Climate News reports: "Ambitious climate action could reap rewards for the No. 1 coal state ... But the state economy remains tied to fossil fuels."
Today in Labor History August 25, 1819: Allan Pinkerton was born. He founded the Pinkerton private police force, whose strike breaking detectives (Pinkertons, or 'Pinks') slaughtered dozens of workers in various labor struggles. Ironically, Pinkerton was a violent, radical leftist as a youth. He fought cops in the streets as a member of the Chartist Movement. He had to flee the UK in order to not be imprisoned and executed. Yet in America, he became the nation’s first super cop. He created the secret service. He foiled an assassination attempt against Lincoln. He fine-tuned the art of spying on activists and planting agents provocateur in their ranks. His agents played a major role in destroying the miners’ union in the 1870s, as portrayed in my novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill.” Later, they assassinated numerous organizers with the IWW and came within inches of successfully getting Big Bill Hayward convicted on trumped up murder charges.