BETTY FRIEDAN
Pioneer American feminist writer, critic, agitator.

"It flows through old hushed Egypt & its sands, / Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, / & times & things, as in that vision, seem / Keeping along it their eternal stands..."


1819 -- US: Monarchy for the People!

Emperor Norton I, true ruler of these United States, lives...& well he lives!
He ate without paying at whatever restaurant, lunchroom, or saloon took his fancy.
Created his own money, which was honored all over Frisco Bay.

First Emperor of the US & Protector of All Mexico, left an estate comprising a two-&-a-half dollar gold piece, three dollars in silver, a franc piece of 1828, & 1,098,235 shares of stock in a worthless gold mine & a large — if supine — army:

We are but the Emperor's Imperial Guard!

His principle philosophical clarion call, "Principia" is gospel & therefore unquestionable truth.

See Herbert Asbury's The Barbary Coast.

The Emperor called for a world of leisure & creativity, a country of the mind without borders, in which all were engaged in their most creative work. Waiters & busboys presented lectures & philosophers cleaned tables.

("I could argue all day about the significance of facing east in religious rituals, but a clean table is a clean table.")

Scientists & engineers conferred & drew up plans for great civic projects, mile-high buildings, gigantic ocean-going balloons propelled by bicyclists, a network of tubes beneath the city to speed postal deliveries. The plans themselves were considered to be great works of art, & exhibitions drew great throngs.

He had two dogs, Lazarus & Bummer. Probable source of the word 'bummer' adopted in the 60s & still in usage today...as in:

1822 -- Emancipated US Blacks settle in Liberia, West Africa.


1826 -- James Fenimore Cooper novel The Last of the Mohicans is published.


1842 -- Georg Brandes (1842-1927) lives. Danish critic & scholar, who had great influence on the Scandinavian literature from 1870s through the turn of the century.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/brandes.htm


1856 -- Paul Napoleon Roinard lives, Maritime Seine. Wrongfully ignored French anarchist poet.

Roinard broke with his family & went to Paris where he met artists such as Auguste Rodin. He published his first poems, Nos plaies (Our wounds, 1886), lampooning bourgeois society. He formed the group "La butte," with friends, which had some influence on libertarian literature. In 1891, with Zo d' Axa, he started the individualist journal "L'en Dehors" & collaborated on "La Plume" & "La Phalange", & directed the review "Septentrionale." Kicked around with poets & artists of the time, such as Stephen Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, & Laurent Tailhade.

Roinard's principal works are La mort du Rêve; La légende Rouge; Le donneur d'illusions; Les miroirs.

Un peuple a-t-il jamais profité d'une guerre?
Drapeaux...
S'ils changent leur couleur, elle ne change guère,
Tous sont rouges du sang qu'on a versé pour eux.
Guerre à la guerre!

— from "Les patries"

1857 -- Russia: During this month Mikhail Bakunin, in various prisons since his part in the Dresden uprising in 1849, currently imprisoned in Schlusselberg, has his sentence commuted to Siberian exile.



1861 -- US: Delegates from six southern states meet in Montgomery, Alabama to form the Confederate States of America.

1869 -- US: Wobbly "Big Bill" Haywood lives, in Salt Lake City, Utah — where all good Mormons try to emulate him. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) honcho.

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Daily Bleed Saint 2006
Wobbly tough guy. Labor leader with an attitude. Always advocated violence against oppression. Convicted of sedition in 1917, sentenced to 20 years hard labor, he jumped bail to Moscow, the so-called workers' paradise, where he died penniless & alone.

"Got a minor quarrel with this one...To say Haywood "always advocated violence" is a gross exaggeration. He was certainly no Martin Luther King, but he actually practiced & advocated mass non-violent direct action. When the classic period Wobbly organizing team — Big Bill, Tresca, Saint John & the rest — would arrive in town, strike violence by the workers tended to drop abruptly. They used terms like, "strike with your arms folded." It tended to be AFL or UMW strikes that were bloody affairs with workers' militias fighting pitched battles with the cops & bombings."       Anyway, keep up the good work.       Solidarity,                — David, Feb 5, 1999

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See Melvin Dubofsky's Big Bill Haywood (Vol 1) or Haywood's own autobiography.

Butte, Montana still remembers Big Bill,
http://newdeal.feri.org/nation/na35514.htm

Poet Carl Sandburg wrote a piece for the "International Socialist Review" casting IWW leader William "Big Bill" Haywood, imprisoned along with the rest of the IWW leadership on wartime sedition charges, as a kind of 20th-century John Brown, & another piece on Haywood for the "Chicago Daily News,"
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sandburg/journalism.htm

For background on the IWW, see Howard Zinn excerpt,
http://colfa.utsa.edu/users/jreynolds/Textbooks/Wooblies/IWWWebPage.htm

http://www.kued.org/productions/fire/%20bill_haywood/
http://www.kued.org/joehill/faces/bill_haywood.html
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/haywood/haywood.htm

1876 -- US: One of John Muir's earliest printed appeals to save Yosemite.


1894 -- Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, dies in poverty.

This bent metal serpent/ holy horn with lids like beer mug/ with phallic tail why did they invent you before Coleman Hawkins was born ? This curved shiney tune gut/ hanging lynched like/ J shaped initial of jazz/ wordless without a reed when Coleman Hawkins first fondled it/kissed it with Black sound did COngo blood sucking Belges frown ? This tenor/alto/bass/baritone/soprano/moan/cry & shout-a-phone ! sex-oh-phone/tell-it-like-damn- sho-isa-phone !What tremors ran through Adolphe Saxe the day Bean grabbed his ax ? This golden mine of a million marvelous sounds/black notes with myriad shadows/or empty crooked tube of technical white poor-formance/calculated keys that never unlock soul doors/white man made machine saved from zero by Coleman Hawkins ! This saxophone salvation/modern gri gri hanging from jazzmen's necks placed there by Coleman Hawkins a full body & soul sorcerer whose spirit dwells eternally in every saxophone NOW & all those sound-a-phones to be 'The Sax Bit' by Ted Joans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Sax

1899 -- Philippines: A US sentry shoots Filipino soldiers, sparking the revolt against the non-imperialist benevolent US occupation. The Islands became a US colony following the Spanish-American War (ostensibly fought to "free" Cuba from foreign control (sic)) when the US reneged on promises to free the country. Explained the Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader president of the Philippine Commission:

"We propose to stay there indefinitely
in working out this good
that we propose to do them."

This "good" would be called terrorism by any decent people.

Filipino historians like Agoncillo & Constantino estimate more than 300,000 Filipinos, mostly civilians, perished as a result of the American genocide benevolence.

The most barbaric forms of torture & interrogation as well as scorched earth military tactics & the brutal "reconcentration" of civilians were used.

"In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:

'The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners & captives, active insurgents & suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...."

4,165 US troops, 10,000-20,000 guerrillas & 200,000 civilians are killed in the next four years.

See A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.

http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/sctexts/simbulan980704.html
http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/Philippinevictims.html
http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/ChronologyofTerror.html

1900 -- Jacques Prévert, (1900-1977) lives. Poet, surrealist, libertarian. Worshiped freedom & glorified the spirit of rebellion & revolt. Participated with the surrealists, but refused to join the Communist Party with Andre Breton, whom he made fun of in "Mort d'un monsieur." Also a talented screen writer, whose credits include The Children of Paradise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Pr%C3%A9vert
http://monde-libertaire.info/citation/prevert.gif
http://ytak.club.fr/avril2.html#11

1900 -- Labor strikes in mining areas lead to riots, Belgium & Germany.
'Calendar Riots'


1904 -- MacKinlay Kantor, novelist (Andersonville) lives, Webster City, Iowa.

A little tidbit: Mackinlay Kantor also wrote the novel-in-verse Glory for Me, the basis for the movie The Best Years of Our Lives.

Bleedster Michael Ceraolo, Feb. 2005

1913 -- US: "Front of the Bus" Rosa Parks civil rights activist lives, Tuskegee, Alabama.

In 1943, Parks became one of the NAACP's first women members. She also joined the Montgomery Voters League to encourage black registration. In her most famous act of resistance, on December 1st, 1955, Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger in a city bus, sparking the successful Montgomery bus boycott. Her activism made it impossible for her to find work in Montgomery. She moved to Detroit & continued the struggle.

1913 -- First removable automobile wheel is used.


1914 -- Scotland: Suffragettes burn two mansions.
'Calendar Riots'


1917 -- US: In Cleveland, Emma Goldman speaks on "The Message of Anarchism" before a full assembly of the North Congregational Church. Tomorrow she addresses a free-speech meeting & is dismayed that other speakers have refused to attend the event if birth control is included among the issues addressed.



1919 -- US: The "Seattle Union Record" publishes Anna Louise Strong's General Strike editorial.
See Harvey O'Connor's Revolution in Seattle (Monthly Review Press, 1964; reprinted by Left Bank Books, 1980?, with new introduction by David Brown [yours truly, Auntie Dave]).


1921 -- Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963) lives, Peoria, Illinois. Founder of National Organization for Women (NOW).


1921 -- Chile: Massacre at San Gregorio leaves 565 nitrate miners dead. Hot on the heels of the 1920 post-war depression the employers are on the offensive & from 1921 to 1923 are successful in beating back the unions.

Overall 1920 was a year of brutal repression for the workers movement — many locals were burnt down, many agitators murdered, workers sent to prison, etc. The IWW led a three month long strike protesting the export of grain during a food shortage. The government repressed both the IWW & anarchists, going so far as to frame the Wobblies with a planted bomb. & the following year witnessed the almost forgotten San Gregorio Massacre where hundreds of miners were killed mercilessly.

http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/world/la/chile/

1922 -- US: Capablanca plays 103 simultaneous chess games, Cleveland (102-0-1).


1924 -- British release Mahatma Gandhi early, after two years in prison, due to ill health.


1926 -- England: The London Evening News publishes a story entitled "Winnie-the-Pooh", which will eventually become the first chapter of the book Winnie-the-Pooh. Illustrations for this story are created by J.H. Dowd.


1929 -- John Giola dances the Charleston for 22 hours, 30 minutes in New York City. Apparently thought he was in Virginia.


1930 -- First tieless, soundless, shockless streetcar tracks, New Orleans. You can hear a pin drop.


1933 -- England: Emma Goldman's vacation in Bristol (February 4-16) at the home of English friends Thomas & Nell Lavers includes informal meetings with local anarchists.

During this month & next Emma also tries to interest London publishers in Alexander Berkman's proposed translations of German & Russian books.

'Emma Goldman Papers'

1933 -- Germany: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Hitler orders police to confiscate literature "endangering public security".


1939 -- Spain: Spanish Loyalist capital of Gerona falls to Franco's fascists.


1940 -- Kurt Weill cantata "The Ballad of Magna Carta" premiers over NYC radio. Text is by Maxwell Anderson.


1943 -- Bertolt Brecht play "The Good Woman of Szechuan" premiers, Zurich.


1944 -- US: Right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals is formed by Sam Wood, King Vidor & Walt Disney, Hollywood.


1949 -- Iran: A leftist assassination attempt on the Shah fails. The Shah is uninjured, but three bullets air-condition his hat.


1950 -- US: 12 prominent US scientists protest any future use of the hydrogen bomb.


1954 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Senator "Tail Bummer" Joseph McCarthy begins a cross-country speaking tour denouncing the Democratic Party's "20 years of treason".


1956 -- US: White student riot at University of Alabama against court-ordered admission of first Negro student.


1957 -- Writer, painter, book illustrator, Miguel Covarrubias dies.

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/current/2004/covarrubias/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Covarrubias
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/covarrubias_miguel.html

1957 -- Hey, You Maroons!

Joseph Hardaway, creator of Bugs Bunny, dies at 66.

That's All, Folks!



1957 -- First electric portable typewriter goes on sale.


1957 --

L'Art brut Talks by Ralph Rumney (L'Art brut de vivre [The Outsider Art of Living]) & Asger Jorn (Industrie et beaux-arts, extrêmes de l'unité situationniste [Industry & Fine Art: The Two Extremes of Situationist Unity]), Taptoe Gallery, Brussels (a "monosonorous talk" is presented by Yves Klein two days later). http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]

1961 -- Filming starts on Luis Bunuel movie "Viridiana," Mexico.


1962 -- Russia: Take Me Out to the Gulag? Newspaper "Izvestia" reports baseball is an old Russian game.


1963 -- Canada: Defence Minister George Harkness resigns over Canada's refusal to accept US nuclear warheads for Bomarc missiles.


1964 -- China: Communist government charges Khrushchev is seeking world domination through collaboration with the US.


1966 -- Bill Graham's first non-benefit show. Graham presents The Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium, 1805 Geary Street, in Frisco, California. Also, author Ken Kesey disappears (to Mexico).
http://wild-bohemian.com/kesey.htm


1967 -- Ousmane Sembene movie "La Noire de..." premiers, Dakar, Senegal.

who poverty & tatters & hollow-eyed & high sat up
smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats
floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz ...

— aLLEN gINSBERG

October 27 Daily Bleed Saint

NEAL CASSADY
American Beatnik poet, cultural renegade, your ultimate school bus driver.

http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/page.jsp?what=NealCassady
http://www.intrepidtrips.com/pranksters/neal/index.html
http://ezone.org/ez/e2/articles/digaman.html

"The bus came by & I got on, that's when it all began

There was Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to Nevereverland"

— 'The Other One', The Grateful Dead

http://www.litkicks.com/People/NealCassady.html