http://youtu.be/GaWpdgCowxk
Please watch this video and look out for my upcoming posts on the truth of all people. Again, this is not a Pro-Black blog or post. I didn't even WANT to be black all my life, and didn't even like ADMITTING IT! I would lie and say I was black and I was proud! I just admitted it a few days ago that if I had anything to do with it, I would have been white. I grew up with all white people, I assimilated (or actually if you grow up with them you don't assimilate you just grow) and hated every bit of my blackness. But I didn't know better. The media portrays us as shiftless, lazy, savage, whores, scoundrels, worthless. Our history of slavery and civil rights and lack of knowledge in our heritage has always been a source of discomfort and shame in my life. But today I can say that I have openly cried for my people and for ALL people that we could be so deceived.
Please seek the truth for yourself. Click the link and watch all the parts in this series of videos!
Peace be unto you my brothers and sisters!
Showing posts with label african. Show all posts
Showing posts with label african. Show all posts
Thursday, May 19, 2011
1877 Insurrection: Excerpt from THE AGE OF BETRAYAL: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900
1877 Insurrection: Excerpt from THE AGE OF BETRAYAL: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900
http://yinsurgent.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/1877-insurrection-excerpt-from-the-age-of-betrayal-the-triumph-of-money-in-america-1865-1900/
The Post Gazette Editors were kind enough to publish this bit from Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 by Jack Beatty.
It’s worth checking out for the pictures, alone.
I wished I’d have copied this rather than the version on the ‘about this picture‘ page.
Maybe this’ll get the Yinsurrectionary Times its first ‘cease and desist’ order? Maybe including a link to but the book offers some protection?
WORKERS MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN FIGHTING OR EATING
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, “the largest strike anywhere in the world in the 19th century,” according to one historian, was the social earthquake of the Gilded Age, bursting post-Civil War illusions of American immunity to European-style class conflict. To keep afloat during the long depression of the 1870s, the railroads first engaged in wasting rate wars; then, to recoup their losses, colluded to cut wages to $1 a day, beginning July 1, 1877. The Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that $1 a day represented “absolute poverty.”The strike reached Pittsburgh on the morning of Thursday, July 19, when an announcement from Pennsylvania Railroad Superintendent Robert Pitcairn was posted that said all eastbound trains would “henceforth” be doubleheaders. That is, the length of the trains would be doubled without increasing the size of the crew, costing jobs and endangering train crews.
Augustus Harris, a flagman, refused to go out on the first doubleheader. A brakeman joined him. Yardmen joined them. When a brakeman, following his supervisor’s orders, started to couple a car to an engine, the strikers threw coupling pins, injuring him and making him run for his life. Engineers were warned: Stay away from the trains.
“Hice, you have a perfect right to refuse to go out,” trainmaster David Garrett told Andrew Hice and a score of strikers, “but you have no right to interfere with others.”
“It is a question of blood or bread,” Mr. Hice came back, “and if I can go to the penitentiary I can get bread and water, and that is about all I can get now.”
After a crowd blocked the eastbound switch at the 28th Street crossing in what is now the Strip District, all traffic stopped. Superintendent Pitcairn departed for Philadelphia, leaving his chief clerk, David Watt, in charge. Mr. Watt applied to Mayor William McCarthy for help, but Mr. McCarthy had no will for that. Squeezing Pittsburgh for decades, the Pennsylvania Railroad had incurred the city’s enmity.
“From the first commencement of the strike,” the Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots found, “the strikers had the active sympathy of a large portion of the people of Pittsburgh.”
The mayor could spare no men; budget cuts had winnowed his day police force to 11 men. Mr. Watt could ask for volunteers among the laid-off policemen milling in City Hall awaiting their last paychecks. Ten came forward. Mr. Watt led them up Liberty Street toward the switch at the crossing.
Wading into the crowd he declared, “I’ll turn that switch,” and strode toward it. A striker stepped in front of him. Mr. Watt took the man by the coat, at which a fist “shot out” and struck Mr. Watt in the eye. The police pursued the puncher, the crowd neither resisting nor cooperating. Boys threw stones. Dispatcher Joseph McCabe turned the switch. A freight train pulled out of the yard, the last for three weeks.
THE PHILADELPHIANS INVADE PITTSBURGH
In charge at the Philadelphia headquarters of the Pennsylvania Railroad on July 19 was third vice president Alexander Cassatt, a well-born Philadelphian and older brother of the painter Mary Cassatt. Reports of the trainmen’s walkout reached Mr. Cassatt late in the afternoon. After telegraphing the Pittsburgh office to replace the strikers with “extra conductors and engineers,” he left for Cheswold, the neo-Gothic mansion on the Main Line in Haverford he had commissioned in 1872.When most Americans used an outdoor privy during the day and a chamber pot at night and five out of six city dwellers still bathed with pail and sponge, Cheswold boasted seven bathrooms. Mr. Cassatt was having dinner with his wife and three children when the station master at Haverford arrived with news that a rough had blacked David Watt’s eye and strikers had stopped all traffic.
When the Trainmen’s Union representatives passed their list of demands to Superintendent Pitcairn in Philadelphia on Friday morning, he handed it to Mr. Cassatt, now in charge. Mr. Cassatt read it — the union mainly wanted the wage cut rescinded and the double-headers cancelled — and handed the list back. “Have no further talk with them,” he instructed Mr. Pitcairn. “They’ve asked for things we can’t grant them at all.” Knowing that Gov. John B. Hartranft, vacationing in Wyoming in a luxurious private car supplied by Mr. Cassatt’s railroad, had called out the National Guard, he felt no need to bargain.
By late afternoon, Gen. Alfred L. Pearson, the commander of the Pittsburgh-based 6th Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard, had mustered only 130 men, a force too small, he told Mr. Cassatt, to disperse the crowd. A cannonade would do it — he had two artillery pieces — but at an unacceptable cost in lives. Mr. Cassatt said he was prepared to pay the price.
Gen. Pearson, a Medal of Honor winner in the Civil War, doubted that his regiment would fire on “their fellow townsmen.” Mr. Cassatt suggested that Gov. Hartranft’s Adj. Gen. James W. Latta “had a good regiment under arms” in Philadelphia; a special train could bring them to Pittsburgh overnight. They would shoot, if they had to. Gen. Pearson wired Gen. Latta that “to avert bloodshed, we should have not less than two thousand troops.”
In a decision a Pittsburgh paper branded “insane,” Gen. Latta called out the 1st Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard under Maj. Gen. Robert M. Brinton. Bad blood between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia extended back decades, to the founding of the Pennsylvania Railroad by “Philadelphia capitalists” and their campaign to keep competitors out of Pittsburgh. How Pittsburghers would react to Philadelphia militia marching through their streets to break a broadly supported strike against the hated Pennsylvania Railroad was foreseeable but not foreseen.
That evening the Philadelphia depot thronged with soldiers and their families. Of 1,200 troops in the division, Brinton’s summons had reached a little over 600. In cars bearing the marks of stonings by strikers in Harrisburg, Johnstown and Altoona, the Philadelphia militia pulled past 28th Street in Pittsburgh early Saturday afternoon, their long polished Springfield rifles sticking out the broken windows.
PITTSBURGH FIGHTS BACK AS BLOOD RUNS IN THE STREETS
The Philadelphians were “spoiling for a fight,” the Army Times later reported, boasting en route they would “clean up Pittsburgh.” They marched up the tracks toward the 28th Street crossing, two Gatling guns pulled bumpily along behind. From a parallel street “wild and famished looking women” hissed at them. Bobbing along the tops of the cars on the adjacent track, Alexander Cassatt’s tall white hat was visible.As they gained the crossing, the Philadelphians saw they were marching into a tight spot. A steep hill ran up from the tracks on one side. Four coal cars wedged them in on the other, with “spectators” covering the coal. Spread out on the hill were lawyers and businessmen there out of curiosity, families with small children, trainmen, millmen, miners and the remnants of the Pittsburgh militia.
Ordered to occupy the crossing during the night, by midday some of the Pittsburgh militiamen had melted into the crowd; others stacked their arms and sat on the hill with their friends or families. The crowd blocking the tracks numbered “seven to eight thousand.” The Philadelphians, having split their force to guard facilities closer to the depot, were three hundred.
They deployed in a hollow square, facing the Gatlings at the thickest knot of people a few paces down the tracks. A detachment of the “Dark Blues” lowered their rifles and charged the crowd with their bayonets. Men grabbed at the bayonets and tried to pull the rifles away from the soldiers. One “retained his piece by using his bayonet, and my impression is he run the man through,” a militiaman recalled.
From the hill boys threw stones. From the coal cars came a barrage of coal. Mr. Pitcairn, in the center of the square, said coal “clouded the horizon.” A soldier “had the whole side of his face taken off by a brick.” Others collapsed from sunstroke. “Shoot, you sons of bitches, won’t you shoot!,” a voice taunted.
The crowd surged around the Dark Blues. At least three pistol shots, one from a boy on the hill, rang out. No one gave the order, but up and down the square the militiamen opened fire, at first in all directions, then at the hillside. A reporter for the Pittsburgh Post described the scene on the hill: “Women and children rushed frantically about, some seeking safety, others calling for friends and relatives. Strong men halted with fear, and trembling with excitement, rushed madly to and fro, tramping upon the killed and wounded as well as those who had dropped to Mother Earth to escape injury and death.”
Five minutes of shooting, two or three shots a second, had left 17 dead and 60 or 70 wounded. The casualties included at least one woman, a Pittsburgh militiaman, an old man and a four-year-old girl pulled from the line of fire by a lawyer who tourniqueted her shattered knee with his handkerchief. That night the doctors amputated her leg in vain.
THE CITY IS DEVASTATED AND THE BILL COMES DUE
“FIRST BLOOD: Seventeen Citizens Shot in Cold Blood by the Roughs of Philadelphia; The Lexington of the Labor Conflict at Hand” read the headline in the Sunday Pittsburgh Gazette.Rather than stay in the crossing and be overrun by a crowd that swelled as the news of what they had done spread, the Philadelphians took refuge in the 26th Street roundhouse. They were fired on throughout the night by rifles and shotguns their attackers had stolen from a local gun shop. Toward morning rioters ran a burning coke car topped with petroleum into the buildings adjacent to the roundhouse. Its roof caught fire. At the thought of the Philadelphians burning alive the mob let out a “savage, prolonged yell of exultation.”
Soon men began gagging on the smoke. Before the roof fell in, Gen. Brinton ordered them to evacuate. These factory workers and clerks far from their Philadelphia homes then formed up, one Gatling gun in front, another in the rear, and at a little past 8 marched out of the yards.
The sight of the Gatlings panicked the crowd, which rushed for the alleys running off Liberty Street. As the troops passed, “pistols blazed at them out of doorways and windows, from behind corners, projecting signs, crates and boxes, from cellars and other places,” and even from a police station. Caring people took the wounded into their homes, and lied for them when gunmen, looking for soldiers to kill, rapped on the door. When their pursuers switched to rifles, the Philadelphians fired back, wounding a nonstriking railroad mechanic returning from work and a plasterer and killing a saloonkeeper standing in his own door.
Approaching the Allegheny Arsenal, a major arms depot for the U. S. Army, the Philadelphians were turned away. Afraid that if he harbored Gen. Brinton’s men the crowd would storm the arsenal and make off with its 36,000 rifles and muskets, its cannon and powder magazine, the commander accepted only the wounded. With his troops low on ammunition and without food or water for 24 hours, Gen. Brinton decided not to fight his way to the depot but to march the Philadelphians out of Pittsburgh via the high bridge over the Allegheny River to Sharpsburg, camping on the grounds of the local workhouse.
The crowd now ruled the city. “Vengeance means retaliation,” Barrington Moore, Jr. observed. “It also means a reassertion of human dignity or worth, after injury or damage.”
Saturday night and Sunday, a few outraged Pittsburghers reasserted their dignity against the Pennsylvania Railroad, burning 1,200 freight cars, 104 engines, 46 passenger cars and all 39 company buildings in Pittsburgh, including the Union Depot and hotel. According to Carroll Wright, the first U.S. commissioner of labor, “a great many old freight cars which must soon be replaced by new, were pushed into the fires by agents of the railroad company … and of course the loss was included in claims on the county of Allegheny.”
The tax-paying rioters would have to pay for the damage. The committee investigating the riot found that “the actual destruction was participated in by only 30 to 50 men.” Photographs of the train yards reveal a wilderness of twisted metal and fallen brick extending two miles, not so much resembling Lexington as Berlin circa 1945.
“No parallel in the history of the world upon the strength of what we saw,” Adj. Gen. Latta wired Gov. Hartranft. “A crowd setting fire to something feels irresistible; so long as the fire spreads, everyone will join in and everything hostile will be destroyed,” Elias Canetti wrote in “Crowds and Power.”
And so it was in Pittsburgh. “The strike is over,” a New York Times correspondent wrote on Sunday night, “for there is nothing here to strike against so far as the Pennsylvania Railroad is concerned.”
(Excerpted from “THE AGE OF BETRAYAL: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900.” By Jack Beatty. Copyright (C) 2007 by Jack Beatty. Recently published by Alfred A. Knopf.)
More on the Great Betrayal of 1877
Politics and Public Service
In the months following the Election of 1876, but prior to the inauguration in March 1877, Republican and Democratic leaders secretly hammered out a compromise to resolve the election impasse and address other outstanding issues.
Under the terms of this agreement, the Democrats agreed to accept the Republican presidential electors (thus assuring that Rutherford B. Hayes would become the next president), provided the Republicans would agree to the following:
- To withdraw federal soldiers from their remaining positions in the South
- To enact federal legislation that would spur industrialization in the South
- To appoint Democrats to patronage positions in the South
- To appoint a Democrat to the president’s cabinet.
Why did the Democrats so easily give up the presidency that they had probably legitimately won? In the end it was a matter of practicality. Despite months of inflammatory talk, few responsible people could contemplate going to war. A compromise was mandatory and the one achieved in 1877, if it had been honored, would have given the Democrats what they wanted. There was no guarantee that with Samuel J. Tilden as president the Democrats would have fared as well.
To the four million former slaves in the South, the Compromise of 1877 was the “Great Betrayal." Republican efforts to assure civil rights for the blacks were totally abandoned. The white population of the country was anxious to get on with making money. No serious move to restore the rights of black citizens would surface again until the 1950s.
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h396.html
Timeline of 1877 Presidential Election:
Timeline of 1877 Presidential Election:
http://millercenter.org/president/keyevents/hayes
http://millercenter.org/president/keyevents/hayes
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Key Events in the Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes
1877
March 5, 1877
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, previously a Union soldier, as well as a representative and governor of Ohio, is publicly sworn in as the nineteenth President of the United States. He takes the oath privately on March 3rd. In the race against Democrat Samuel Tilden, Hayes secures only 48 percent of the popular vote and 164 electoral votes to Tilden's 184. However, voter fraud and unclear results are reported in several states. A controversial decision of a special electoral commission ultimately proclaims Hayes President, with some Democrats referring to Hayes as "Rutherfraud." In return for the presidency, the Republicans make various concessions, including the removal of federal troops from the South. These actions are labeled the "Compromise of 1877"; African-Americans refer to it as "The Great Betrayal."
March 20, 1877
At a cabinet meeting, Hayes agrees to send a commission to Louisiana to report on the conditions in the southern state. In reality, he plans to use the action to sanction his decision to allow Democrat Francis T. Nicholls to take over the states by removing federal aid from federally appointed governor Stephen B. Packard. Meanwhile, Hayes's cabinet includes staunch liberal Republican William Evarts as secretary of state and a former Confederate as postmaster general; the nomination of the latter appeases Southern Democrats as part of the Compromise of 1877.
April 10, 1877
Troops depart the statehouse in South Carolina following a meeting at the White House with Daniel H. Chamberlain and Wade Hampton; without support, Chamberlain gives in, and Hampton becomes governor.
April 24, 1877
As in South Carolina, Hayes officially withdraws soldiers from Louisiana. Governor Packard has no choice but to submit, declaring, "One by one, the Republican state governments of the South have been forced to succumb to force, fraud or policy." Hayes's withdrawal of troops from the South marks the end of Reconstruction. At the same time, Hayes will also oversee the appropriation of federal funds for internal improvements in the South.
June 1, 1877
With Mexican-Texas border incursions continuing, Hayes sends troops to patrol the nearly lawless Mexican border and cross it if necessary to pursue bandits. Mexican president Diaz protests and sends troops to the border as well. Ultimately, economic concerns motivate both parties to work towards a settlement.
June 22, 1877
Following John Jay's investigation of the New York Customhouse, Hayes issues an Executive Order that forbids the involvement of federal employees in political activities. The President takes such action in the hope that it will curtail corruption; the Executive Order stipulates that those in office can no longer be dismissed for political reasons. Congress rejects additional proposals. These events testify to Hayes's interest in civil service reform.
July 16, 1877
Following pay cuts, the first major interstate strike -- the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 -- begins on the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) line at Camden Junction, Maryland; additional strikes will follow, lasting a month. Lacking organization, the strikes frequently degenerate into mob activity. Hayes sends federal troops to protect mail and quell the riots that take place in numerous cities, angering many workers. The strike will lead to anti-Chinese attacks in San Francisco during the fall.
September 6, 1877
Hayes challenges the political power of New York Senator Roscoe Conkling when the President announces he will replace Collector of the Port of New York Chester A. Arthur, as well as naval officer Alonzo Cornell, during the reorganization of the New York Customhouse. Although Arthur has overseen improvement in the Customhouse, he also uses it to further Conkling's political interests. Incensed by Hayes's decision, Conkling, Hayes's opponent for the Republican presidential ticket in 1876, blocks Hayes's nomination of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., for the position.
September, 1877
Hayes goes on a tour of the South, pledging reconciliation and solidarity through a policy of pacification.
1878
January 1, 1878
Founded in 1869 by Uriah S. Stephens, a tailor in Philadelphia, the Knights of Labor is established as a national organization. It is the first labor union to attempt to organize all workers and hopes to establish a worker-owned factory system. With rapid growth in the 1880s, the Knight membership peaks in 1886 and then goes into rapid decline.
January 17, 1878
A U.S.-Samoan treaty is signed in Washington which gives the United States the right to establish a naval and coaling station at the port of Pago Pago; it also pledges American assistance to Samoa if a third country interferes with Samoan chiefs. The Senate ratifies the treaty on January 30.
February 28, 1878
Hayes vetoes the Bland-Allison Act, advocated by farmers and debtors, but Congress passes the measure over his veto. The act calls for the resumption of silver coinage at a rate between $2 and $4 million per month.
March 1, 1878
Hayes vetoes a bill which bans incoming vessels from carrying more than fifteen Chinese passengers. Hayes then works to negotiate changes to the Burlingame Treaty with China in order to set limits on Chinese immigration.
March 23, 1878
America recognizes the Diaz regime in Mexico in an effort to avoid greater conflict.
May, 1878
House Democrats begin an investigation of the controversial presidential election of 1876, much to the chagrin of Hayes, who fears that the investigation may be an attempt to replace him with Tilden.
November, 1878
Following congressional midterm elections, the Democratic Party controls both houses of Congress for the first time since the Civil War. Consequently, Hayes will have little sway in Congress.
1879
January 1, 1879
Hayes allows the resumption of gold payments for Civil War greenbacks, paper money not backed by specie, silver, or gold. This is a continuation of the Specie Act begun under President Grant. During the Hayes administration, as the government's gold supply grows and the issuance of silver coins increases, the economy begins to recover. By the spring of 1879, the government has retired all Civil War bonds.
February 3, 1879
After a political struggle between Hayes and Senator Conkling, the Senate approves Hayes's appointments for the New York Customhouse. Although these fail to end inefficiency in the civil service system, the country largely supports Hayes's commitment to reform.
April 29, 1879
Congress passes the Army Appropriations Bill. The law includes a "rider" which forbids the use of federal troops at polls, which many regard as an attempt to nullify black voting rights. Hayes vetoes the bill, but the House sustains the veto. Hayes again vetoes the rebuffed version, and many Republicans feel the veto secures the election of 1880.
May 29, 1879
Hayes vetoes a version of the appropriations bill for the third time; a later bill excludes "certain judicial expenses" forbidding the army to "police the polls"; Hayes will agree to this language.
June, 1879
The appropriations designated by Democrats exclude implementation of election law funds; Hayes vetoes the bill.
1880
March 8, 1880
In a speech to Congress, Hayes continues to support a Central American canal to unite the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Following the trip to America by French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps -- the builder of the Suez Canal in Egypt -- Hayes states that "the policy of this country is a canal under American control." A canal running through Panama will be completed in 1914.
June 7, 1880
The Republican National Convention meets in Chicago. Hayes had already pledged, in 1876, not to run for a second term; by the time the convention begins, the party has split into two factions: James G. Blaine's "Half-breeds" and Roscoe Conkling's "Stalwarts." The Stalwarts nominate Ulysses S. Grant against the nominations of Blaine and John Sherman. After 36 ballots, Blaine unexpectedly lends his support to James A. Garfield, the Speaker of the House, giving Garfield the presidential nomination. In order to maintain party unity, Chester A. Arthur, a Stalwart, is nominated for vice president.
June 24, 1880
The Democratic National Convention meets in Ohio and nominates Winfield S. Hancock, a Union commander, for President and William H. English for vice president.
November 2, 1880
James A. Garfield is elected President by a narrow popular margin (with only 48.5 percent) but with a comfortable majority of electoral votes, 214-155.
November 17, 1880
The United States and China sign a treaty which repeals a section of the 1868 Burlingame treaty. The move gives the United States the power to "regulate, limit or suspend" but not completely prohibit Chinese immigration. The treaty also includes a clause banning the opium trade. In return, the United States grants China trading privileges.
1881
March 4, 1881
Republican James A. Garfield is sworn in as the twentieth President of the United States.
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