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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Everything You Need to Know
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
From the Suffragettes to Stonewall, from the Prague Spring to the Arab Spring, from the Jarrow Marchers to the Poll Tax Riots, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, we have witnessed a century and more of highly significant protests in which ordinary people have made their views known to those in power and sometimes changed the world. We have seen remarkable changes and popular protest has played a critical role in making ours a better and more democratic world. This book chooses a few key protests to show what we can accomplish if we try.
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ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PROTEST:
Everything You Need to Know
CHRISTOPHER CATHERWOOD
To the loving memory of my father Frederick Catherwood 1925–2014
And to his daughter-in-law, my wife Paulette
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
What do we want? A Student Union!
When do we want it? Now!
What are we wearing? Dirty jerseys!
The chants of hundreds of thousands of students down the ages are very similar to the first four lines of the above extract. The final lines are rather unusual, however, and possibly unique. It never occurred to people in Oxford back in the autumn of 1973 that Oxford university students would ever demonstrate or chant about anything. Yes, students in Paris might riot (as they did so spectacularly in 1968), but in Britain – and at Oxford? The thought was inconceivable to many observers, who could not quite believe their eyes when they saw large numbers of Oxford students with placards walking down the High Street and ‘the Broad’, all vociferously demanding the same kind of university-wide student union as existed at virtually every other British university – except, of course, at Cambridge …
They could not be Oxford students, opined the great Lady Alexandra Trevor-Roper, wife of Regius Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper and herself the daughter of Field Marshal the Earl Haig, commander of British forces in the First World War. And how did she know this? The demonstrators were wearing dirty jerseys! They could not possibly be Oxford!
So from then on it became de rigeur among certain of the Oxford university student political classes not merely to shave the night before (so as to have a day’s growth of beard, as intellectuals seemed to have in France), or to have hair slightly below the collar, but also to wear a dirty jersey. This was done not out of absent-mindedness, though there was plenty of that as always among students, but as a mark of honour, a dirty-jersey-wearing Oxford student.
The student union never came. The monopoly enjoyed by college bars continues – and probably does so to this day. Several very talented students were ‘sent down’ or expelled, one of whom is now a nationally revered journalist who went on to great things after leaving Oxford. Those of us of a more nervous disposition visited the illegally occupied building chosen by the protesters just once, always slightly apprehensive that the authorities would strike while we were in the building. Some of us actually remembered that we were at university to work, knuckled down to some serious study, and passed our prelim exams.
The building occupied by dozens of eager protesters is now a Faculty library, filled with students far more anxious to get a good degree and a well-paid job on graduation than to waste time protesting about things that can never happen.
But in 1973 the whiff of revolution still hovered over Balliol College Oxford, with the presence of ‘The Hitch’, otherwise known as the writer Christopher Hitchens, still there in spirit though no longer in person. Balliol students were so outraged at the military coup in Chile in 1973 that they unanimously passed a resolution asking General Pinochet to step down to let the revolution continue. The mind boggled – did a military dictator really cower in fright when a bunch of Oxford students asked him to resign? Pinochet Terrified by Oxford Student Demand – Flees the Country! None of us ever read that headline over our baked beans for breakfast. Yet absurd and ludicrous though it all now looks over forty years later, they were in one sense exciting times. People in those days actually believed in something, they cared … How true is that today? Has a strong dose of realism – often caused by the spectre of unemployment in these financially uncertain times – brought with it a sense of selfishness, of being out just for oneself and one’s own future, of lack of concern for other people and especially those less fortunate than oneself? One wonders …
Perspective brings a degree of wisdom and now we live in an age where the terrors are very different from those of my student days. We no longer fear nuclear war, the threat of Armageddon with Soviet missiles obliterating one half of the earth and American missiles the other. But we have terrorism, which brings its own fears, and possibly another kind of annihilation, if the environmental activists are right about the dangers of global warming. There are still many issues about which to protest and against which to demonstrate, even if the targets have changed since the student demonstrations of a long time ago.
This book is about the past century or so of protest movements. It would have been possible to take it further back, to look at the Peasant’s Revolt of the fourteenth century, the Boston Tea Party and the French Revolution, the heroic movements to free the slaves in Britain and the USA, and many more besides. Unfortunately the book would then have been impossibly long, so the publishers wisely decided to start the clock at 1900 and take it from there.
Even so, many protests have to be omitted. And many of them were small but highly significant. For example, the women portrayed in the film Made in Dagenham may not be world famous, but they struck a solid blow for equal pay for female as well as male workers that has proved significant. Local protests might not achieve much in and of themselves, but cumulatively they can create a momentum that truly changes the world. Communism in Romania seemed immoveable in 1989, and many reckoned that while other Soviet-bloc regimes would fall, in Bucharest it would remain. But demonstrations against the mistreatment of a single individual in a provincial town eventually set a light that in the end caused the overthrow of even the Ceauşescu regime, an event that the wisest commentators thought impossible. And the whole Arab Spring, as we shall see, began when an obscure street vendor in Tunisia committed suicide.
So this book is inevitably a selection of protest movements, rather than being a much longer definitive account. Unfortunately, so much written about what are called ‘social movements’ by the academics are in impenetrable sociological prose, readable only by those who have spent time at university learning to master the jargon and arcane terminology. Online media sources can be very helpful, but can also often be put together by enthusiasts, and so are not always as objective as one would wish.
Perspective is also always vital in looking at protest movements. That is why our book looks at two protest movements in two countries that in the short term looked like failures but in the long term were successes: Czechoslovakia in 1968 and then in 1989, and Poland in both 1980 and also in 1989. The Prague Spring of 1968 was crushed with Soviet tanks and over twenty years of brutal Communist oppression. But then in 1989 came the Velvet Revolution and the astonishingly bloodless overthrow of the hitherto seemingly invincible Communist Party. It was similar in Poland. In 1980 Solidarity, the free Trade Union, flourished briefly, only in its turn to be suppressed, this time by its own army as opposed to a Soviet-led invasion. But in 1989 the heroes of 1980 found themselves in power, in another extraordinarily peaceful and bloodless transition of power.
This is why our book has chosen Czechoslovakia and Poland, as opposed to the better-known and iconic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Events in Berlin symbolised the overthrow of Communism to many in the West – and your author has his own piece of the Berlin Wall, hacked off personally, to prove it. But 1989 was a single event in Germany, with the only major protest movements having been suppressed a long time before. What made the Czechs and Poles special was the turning upside down of previous repression, of political prisoners becoming the new national leaders, of democracy triumphing over dictatorship. And historically that makes their two cases more interesting.
The easiest way to present the entries in this book is chronologically. The significant starting point of each entry arranges the chapters. However a thematic look at the subjects is also possible:
Political protests
Non-violent protests
Boycotts
Strikes
Rock throwing, burning and violent protests
Marches and demonstrations
Pickets
Sit-ins and occupations
Civil disobedience
Many of these overlap, of course. Someone such as Gandhi used many types of protest. He was non-violent, but endorsed civil disobedience against the British. He was thoroughly political – agitating for Indian independence – and he organised a march to the sea to collect salt, while at the same time organising a boycott of British-made cotton.
But many protests come in single categories. And also this book has preferred items that recur. For example, the demonstrations in East Germany in 1989 led, as we shall see, to the fall of the iconic Berlin Wall. But our book looks at that in the context of the protests in Czechoslovakia, since what happened there in 1989, as well as being as important in its own way as the collapse of Communism in East Germany, was also a reversal of the attempt to introduce peaceful Communism – with a ‘human face’ – in 1968. The entry for Czechoslovakia looks at the events in both those years, and how what looked like a failure in 1968 turned unexpectedly to success and freedom in 1989.
So there are many recurrent themes in this book, with many entries embodying several of them at once.
Our book deals with so many contentious issues that we have to ask if there can ever be such a thing as true objectivity. Take genetically modified or GM crops – are they Frankenstein foods or science’s answer to feeding millions of the starving in the Global South? There are equally zealous activists on both sides, each group utterly convinced of the entire correctness of their own particular cause. Anyone writing on such contemporary hot-button issues faces a real challenge! So your author hopes that this book has been as neutral as is possible, and one that enables readers to make their own minds up rather than telling them what they ought to be thinking.
Your author’s two previous books in this series are about past conflicts: the battles of both the First World War and its successor the Second World War. The consequences of both conflicts are very much still with us – the Ukraine, the chaos in Syria, to name just two – but they are in the past. Many of the issues in this book are also historical. Women now have the same voting rights as men in Britain and the USA, trade unions are legal and India is not only an independent country but also one of the leading nations of the world.
But as a glance at those issues shows, much still has to be won. While women are enfranchised in Western democracies, for instance, there are other countries where they have no vote or any kind of rights at all. In some nations trade unions that exist independently of the government remain illegal, and workers have no genuine protection against those who exploit them. And while many parts of India are First World, part of the globally interconnected twenty-first century, other regions within that country have scarcely changed since the Middle Ages.
Some of the victories that have been won, and about which we read in this book, are in reality only partial, and that is something that those of us raised in the West need to remember. And events in the USA that occurred while this book was being written remind us – Martin Luther King achieved much, but are all African-Americans truly equal citizens of the USA? Again, there is much to ponder.
The two World Wars are thankfully over. They are truly history. But some of the issues raised here are profoundly contemporary. We do not yet know the ending. This is important. History written up until 1989–91 was composed during the Cold War, and as some of the entries in our book argue, those who predicted that conflict’s demise were very few and far between. Therefore anything written in, say, 1979, would presuppose the continuation of the bipolar superpower conflict between the USA and USSR. The extraordinary events of 1989 in Poland and Czechoslovakia (at which we look) were unforeseeable in 1979, though in retrospect it is now easy to see where history was heading. Similarly, few in 2000 would have predicted that much of the beginning of the twenty-first century would be taken up with Islamic terrorism or wide-scale bloodshed across the Middle East. With several of the issues in our book we are therefore still in 1979 and the Cold War or 2000 and the Middle East, rather than looking back on something that is now over, such as World War II ending in 1945. We still do not have the perspective that history gives us.
So this book is a discussion starter, giving the outlines of some of the key protest movements of the past hundred or so years. Some of the movements we look at succeeded, others failed, yet others are still active. But many of them show that ordinary individuals, acting either alone or collectively, can move mountains. We may not be like idealistic young Oxford students in the 1970s, wearing dirty jerseys and asking a dictator to resign. But we can still try to make our world a better place. Hopefully this book can show us how to begin our journey.
SUFFRAGETTES AND VOTES FOR WOMEN
(1903–1920 and Beyond)
On December 5th 1908 the fiery Welsh radical David Lloyd George addressed a packed meeting, mainly female, in London’s great Royal Albert Hall. The venue was full, since Lloyd George was also the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man in charge of the budget, and one of the most important politicians in Britain.
Many of his audience were suffragists, women who passionately supported the right of women to vote, but who rejected completely the campaign of the suffragettes to use violence and civil protest to bring attention to the cause. One of the suffragists in the audience was an intelligent Welsh schoolteacher, whose husband was Lloyd George’s eye doctor. Also present and fearing trouble was their ten-year-old daughter, dreaming one day of becoming a medical student.
The child’s worst fears were realised. Along with the suffragists who wanted to use argument and reason to further the goal of votes for women were numerous suffragettes who were looking for trouble. One of the latter, a woman named Helen Ogston, had come prepared. Over 70 suffragettes started to heckle David Lloyd George, and when the stewards tried to expel them, she brandished a whip! Eventually all the hecklers were removed and the Chancellor of the Exchequer – who supported votes for women – was able to finish his speech. But it turned out to be a very memorable and symbolic evening, one that the ten-year-old girl, who fulfilled her dream of being a doctor, could recall vividly for the remaining eighty-three years of her life. She was my grandmother, and as we shall see, it would take her another twenty years before she and my great-grandmother achieved the longed-for right to vote.
Slow but steady progress or the sudden use of violence to force the pace – this is always the dilemma of any protest movement. There is a division between those who favour a gradualist approach and those who want instant action by whatever means necessary, whether legal or not. This is a common thread through many of the protests we shall examine in this book, and the supporters of votes for women – the suffrage, to use the political term for voting rights – were no exception.
In our study we are looking at the past century or so, but the women’s suffrage movement was the beneficiary of over a hundred previous years and more of the slow emancipation of the female half of the human species. In 1908, for instance, women in New Zealand had already enjoyed equal voting rights with men since 1893. However, in Switzerland it took decades more for women to be able to vote in federal elections. Not until 1971, in the lifetime of many of us today, did Swiss women get equal suffrage with men. By this time countries such as India, Israel and Sri Lanka had already had women serve as prime minister.
It is not just, therefore, in strongly patriarchal societies, such as in much of the Arab world, that women are still waiting. Indeed one should say that in many Muslim countries women have had the vote for decades, with female prime ministers or presidents in the world’s largest Muslim nations such as Indonesia and Pakistan. In many regions the struggle for equal political rights is not history but an ongoing struggle against centuries of oppression and ill-treatment.
In the nineteenth century women in Britain had steadily accumulated a number of equal rights. A woman’s property no longer automatically became her husband’s upon marriage. Clever girls could go to university, and where my female ancestors attended, University College London, women not only received equal degrees to men (at Cambridge it was not until the 1940s that women became full graduates), but could study alongside them in subjects such as medicine. Women were slowly gaining the intellectual respect hitherto reserved for men. It was against this background, none of it associated with violence, that the suffragists began the campaign to get the vote for women. And one should remember that not all men could vote in, say, 1908 – many poor and socially disadvantaged working-class men did not possess the franchise either.
So when we think of the protest movements for female suffrage we must remember that there were two distinctive strands, each with a strategy of their own. And in addition, many men supported the suffragists, such as the future Labour Cabinet minister, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, and indeed many members of the Liberal Cabinet, in power in Britain since December 1905.
The great Victorian intellectual John Stuart Mill, whose 1859 book On Liberty was one of the most significant works on that subject during that century, was a keen supporter of votes for women, advocating it as early as 1865–66. But it was not for another thirty years, until 1897, that the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) was formed. The leader of this was Millicent Fawcett, one of the founders of Newnham College in Cambridge (one of the first for women) and the sister of the distinguished medical pioneer Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The NUWSS contained many women like this – intellectual, educated, middle class and with excellent social connections to the London political elite, not least to the Liberal Party, which won an electoral landslide over the Conservatives in the 1906 General Election.
However, this gradualist approach did not appeal to everyone, and in 1903 a Manchester widow called Emmeline Pankhurst founded her own group, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Her late husband Richard Pankhurst had long been a supporter of votes for women, and Pankhurst herself had close links with the then infant Labour Party and its founder, Keir Hardie. It was to this new group, the WSPU, that the Daily Mail gave the nickname that would stick: the ‘suffragettes’.
These campaigners spurned gradualism, and decided on the direct approach. As early as 1905 suffragettes were using militant tactics, smashing windows, demonstrating in public, setting fire to Royal Mailboxes and the like. In 1905 Christabel Pankhurst, Emmeline’s daughter, was imprisoned for such offences, and altogether well over a thousand women spent some time in jail for their militancy.
This was to cause no end of a problem to the Liberal government, some of whom supported the overall cause, but with plenty that did not. Psephologically, women in Britain have tended more to vote Conservative than Liberal and then Labour, so Liberals fearing votes for women were doing so on electoral grounds as well as out of misogyny.
Firstly, women wanted political prisoner status, which the government refused to grant them. Second, from 1909 onwards many started going on hunger strikes, a tactic that would increasingly be used in twentieth-century protests, from the peaceful Gandhi in India to the more violent IRA activists in Northern Ireland. Then, as now, those in power were reluctant to create martyrs, so one of the first suffragette hunger strikers, Marion Wallace Dunlop, was duly released after 91 days by a nervous government.
However, both sides realised that if women were automatically released, simply going on hunger strike would be an easy way for those imprisoned always to escape sentence. So in 1913 Reginald McKenna (Winston Churchill’s successor as Home Secretary) introduced the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, popularly called the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. Once a hunger striker became dangerously emaciated and ill, she would be released, but re-imprisoned the moment her health restored itself on the outside. Already in 1909 violent force-feeding with tubes was often brought in, which sometimes caused much injury to those so treated.
Emmeline Pankhurst was a heroine for some women for her leadership of the struggle. For others she was a tyrant, since within WSPU circles her word was law. Some of her own family rebelled, notably Sylvia Pankhurst, one of the daughters. She became active in social work amidst the downtrodden and exploited of the East End of London, whether men or women. She enjoyed the family’s ties with the growing Labour Party, which she saw as one of the best means of implementing a much wider social change than simply the issue of female suffrage. Christabel, by contrast, concentrated on the WSPU and the vote, spending some of her time beyond the reach of English law in Paris.
The anniversary of World War I has reminded us that in 1914 Britain was in a dangerously volatile political environment. Civil war was a real possibility in Ireland, with the Conservative Opposition at Westminster hideously close to a treasonous alliance with the Irish anti-independence Protestants. Labour relations were also bad, and the strife caused by suffragette militancy created much civil discord. But for the advent of war the situation could have become even more febrile, with catastrophic results for national stability.
As we know, the war brought its own disasters, with nearly a million slaughtered in the trenches of Flanders and elsewhere during 1914–1918.
Christabel Pankhurst became one of the war’s most enthusiastic supporters, and many suffragettes decided to suspend the cause for the sake of patriotism and national unity.
And this brings us on to a natural question, posed by many historians ever since – such as by Trevor Lloyd in his book, SuffragettesInternational. Did all the militancy help? Was violence worthwhile? Or did the aggressive tactics of the WSPU help indirectly? This issue is important, as it will apply elsewhere to many of the protests that are the subject of our book, as the same discussion comes up again and again.
In theory, women over thirty gained the vote in 1918 because of their splendid service to the nation during the war. Countless well-born women – such as, for example, the writer Vera Brittain – gave up their privileged lifestyle at home to serve as nurses at the Front. Countless poorer women became factory workers, especially in munitions, taking the place of men who had been sent to fight overseas.
But since the vote was for women over thirty, and with property qualifications, this meant in effect that the majority of women who had engaged in war service on the Home Front remained excluded from the vote. Either they were deemed too young (under thirty) or were of a lower social class (factory workers without property). Not until 1928 did women gain full electoral equality – the so-called ‘flapper vote’ – with all women over twenty-one being eligible to vote. And significantly, that right was given by the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister and cousin of Rudyard Kipling.
So did the slow tactics of the NUWSS or the violence of the WSPU carry the day? Or was it simply the case that by 1918 politicians of all stripes finally realised that women deserved the vote? It is hard to say.
In concentrating, as many books and articles do, on the United Kingdom, we forget that similar struggles were taking place elsewhere, such as in the USA.
The notion of votes for women in the United States was debated back in the 1870s, and in 1869 the frontier state of Wyoming granted them the right to vote. As in Britain, women differed on how best to gain the suffrage, with the NAWSA (the National American Women’s Suffrage Association) taking the more moderate stand. In contrast, the National Women’s Party (NWP) advocated more militant tactics, with riots and picketing. One interesting observation is that one of the key NWP supporters and funders was Louisine Havemeyer, the widow of the rich sugar baron H. O. Havemeyer, and now herself one of the wealthiest women in the country. She is principally best known for the purchases that she and her husband made of Impressionist art, with a collection now mainly in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. But she was also an active suffragette, addressing the multitudes in Carnegie Hall and burning an effigy of the president, Woodrow Wilson. So while the names of Susan B. Anthony and of Sojourner Truth are those linked most strongly to the cause of women in the USA, it is interesting to reflect how wide their support was, from the very poor to the fabulously wealthy.
The Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on August 18th 1920, when the support reached the necessary thirty-six states for the Amendment to become law. Significantly its wording, reflecting the federal nature of the USA, did not grant women the vote directly but rather proclaimed that no state should have a law that forbade them so to do. Certain states held out their ratification for some while after 1920, but in essence that vote enabled the majority of American women to exercise their franchise freely.
As we saw with the Swiss example, it took a while for other democracies to catch up. Nonetheless, the right to vote now became the democratic norm. However, many nations still hold out, and in much of the world women remain second-class citizens. The struggle is not yet over.
THE WOBBLIES AND EUGENE DEBS
(1894 and Beyond)
One of the many mysteries of American politics to outsiders is that there is no major equivalent of the Socialist or Labour parties of Europe and Britain and its Commonwealth, with political parties directly affiliated to the trade union movement. Democrats might have union links, but not in the same way as, say, Britain or France (where some unions used to have Communist ties instead).
However, historically this has not been the case. In the past there were Socialist candidates for the presidency, and trade unions that had overtly political links far further to the left than the Democratic Party.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or ‘Wobblies’, to use their nickname, were founded in the industrial unrest that existed in the American Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century, in 1905. In most of the Western world both then and today we had what are known as ‘craft unions’, which specialised according to the particular skill of the workers involved – the National Union of Miners, the Transport and General Workers Union, the Confederation of Health Service Employees etc. But what the Wobblies preferred was ‘One Big Union’ that represented all workers, regardless of speciality or trade. They preferred this arrangement for ideological reasons, in that the IWW existed to represent the working class as a social group, and the eventual overthrow of the capitalist system. It existed therefore not merely to represent workers in relation to management, but as an overtly political activist group.
As the mission statement document put it:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common … Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth … Instead of the Conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,’ we must inscribe upon our banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wage system …’
This was therefore more than normal trade union collective bargaining, it was a call to abolish the entire economic and political system upon which the USA and other capitalist countries were based. Needless to say, employers who might just about be able to tolerate wage bargaining by established unions found the Wobblies far beyond the acceptable pale.
The IWW approach was thus more similar in many ways to the anarchists and allied groups in countries such as Spain. Strikes and protests were the way in which to gain progress, and soon the Wobblies were active in many disputes. One of the early actions was a major industrial disruption in 1909 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in McKees Rock, at a railway car manufacturing plant. What began as a simple wage dispute soon developed into a massive confrontation between workers on the one hand, and police and private security guards on the other. Numbers are disputed, but between twelve and twenty-six were killed and many injured. The tactics of the managers, sending in strong-armed strike-breakers, were far more brutal than anything seen in Britain in, for example, strikes in coal mines in South Wales, at the same time.
By 1912 the Wobblies had over 25,000 members, and were involved in more than 150 strikes. It should be remembered, though, that mainstream organised labour in the USA was far bigger than this, and although the IWW stirred up much hostility and fear, they were still a minority overall. Many of their members were recent migrants to the United States, workers originating in Europe where conditions had often been harsher. Famously, many Wobblies were agricultural workers, formerly peasants in the more oppressive parts of the Old World. The Wheatland Hop Riot in 1913, in Yuba County California, was a similar incident of a pay dispute that escalated into violence, with four people killed and the IWW local leaders imprisoned unjustly for second-degree murder.
One of its dilemmas was how far the IWW should be affiliated to a political party, in this case the little-known and oft-forgotten Socialist Party in the USA. One of this party’s key founders was the American socialist and thinker, Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926). Debs stood five times for the presidency of the USA, in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912 and finally in 1920. Although he never came remotely near success, he is unique not just for the number of attempts but also from the fact that his final bid was from inside a prison cell.
