Wednesday July 5, 2006, 6pm
at The National
Archives, 900 Market Street,
The entrance is on Chestnut between 9th & 10th streets.
215-606-0103
The Industrial Revolution changed the nature of revolutionary struggle so that the second century of America became a quest for economic equality as a pre-requisite for political equality. Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto; the struggle for the eight hour day died in Chicago at the Haymarket on May 4, 1886, creating May 1 as the International Labor Day. This era witnessed the growth of the Socialist and Communist Parties and U.S. government anti-communist activity, culminating in the Palmer Raids after the First World War and the Smith Act after the Second World War. Locally, Penn professor Scott Nearing wrote the first expose of child labor and was fired because of it, leading to the formation of the American Association of University Professors and the doctrine of Academic Freedom. The Philadelphia waterfront was organized by the Industrial Workers of the World during the 1920s and Philadelphia was home to a Smith Act trial in 1954. To explore this exciting time, our speakers will be:
* David Garrett Izzo, editor of Advocates and Activists, 1919-1941: Men and Women Who Shaped the Period Between the Wars and author of the article in it on Scott Nearing. Izzo is associate professor of English at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, has his Ph.D. from Temple University and is author and editor of more then ten books: novels, plays, literary criticism, literary philosophy, literary biography and literary history; as well as numerous articles. Although he is primarily a scholar of modern British and American literature his interest in W.H. Auden led him to become an expert on many aspects of the years between the wars.
* Sherman Labovitz, author of Being Red in Philadelphia, left the Communist Party in 1957, became a college professor and established a program in social work at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Labovitz recounts his mid-1950s arrest, trial, and conviction as a member of a group of nine Philadelphia Communists (including the poet Walter Lowenfels) indicted for "conspiring to advocate an overthrow" of the government--a violation of the Smith Act. What made this case more than simply a historical footnote to the McCarthy era was that, in an age before public defenders and pro bono lawyers, the Philadelphia Bar Association stepped in to ensure legal counsel. Furthermore, unlike earlier Smith Act trials, the defense focused on freedom of speech rather than Communist policy and in so doing discredited the government's use of paid informants as trial witnesses. Their convictions were overturned on an appeal based on a later ruling of the Warren Court. He is able to give an engrossing look at the clashes and intersections of left-wing politics, constitutionality, and cold war ideology in the middle of the twentieth century.
* Alexis Buss was elected the international general secretary of the Industrial Workers of the World three consecutive times. She currently is the chief organizer of the IWW bookstore at 4530 Baltimore Ave. The IWW organized the Philadelphia Water Front in the 1920's and they continue to organize Philadelphia area workers at places like StarBucks. From the IWW preamble, written in 1905: "It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall be overthrown".