Almost fifteen years ago The Nation published a list of the fifty most influential progressives of theTwentieth Century:
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/fifty-most-influential-progressives-twentieth-century/
Their introduction proudly points out “… The radical ideas of one generation are often the common sense of the next. When that happens, give credit to the activists and movements that fought to take those ideas from the margins to the mainstream. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of radicals and reformers who challenged the status quo of their day…
…Progressive change happens from the bottom up, as Zinn argued. But movements need leaders as well as rank-and-file activists. Movement leaders make strategic choices that help win victories. These choices involve mobilizing people, picking and framing issues, training new leaders, identifying opportunities, conducting research, recruiting allies, using the media, negotiating with opponents and deciding when to engage in protest and civil disobedience, lobbying, voting and other strategies…
Progressive change happens from the bottom up? So they say but I don’t think so and here’s one big reason why: https://www.bucksafa11.org/2022/03/02/smell-the-sulfur/
A Crack In the Dam Heads Up?
Yesterday, Daniel Greenfield took the subject to a place where few people have dared to go at
https://www.frontpagemag.com/arrest-californias-leaders-and-the-riots-will-stop/
where he mentions …
not just George Soros or the Ford Foundation (which got into funding the radicalization of Latinos back when George was still grifting his way across Manhattan) or a handful of groups here and there…
So he gets props from me for mentioning the level above his targeted California’s entire Democratic political leadership.
But the socialist claptrap from the Nation deserves a more serious wakeup call even if it is fifteen years past due. The Nation’s vacuous and obviously pliable subscribers are not the type to question any part of the comfort zone delivered to them by the Nation and tomorrow, after more than a century of delivering their bent Progressive message to it’s low IQ highbrow audience The Nation expects to witness a massive nationwide turnout to damn the man who’s return to office was made possible by an overwhelming embrace from a populace worn down and sickened by the Democrats and RINO’s controlled by the KINGS of their choice born of their Queen:
This has been a tedious and time consuming effort so imagine my surprise when I see this news this morning:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4322746/posts and I’m getting some serious joy from that news so I am going to post this almost half completed research effort this morning in the hope it will add some depth to the understanding to be gained as the facts are rolled out by President Trump’s team that many may find difficult to believe. God bless America!
Since there is a counter-point to everything this effort is made with the children in mind especially those who were educated in the fifty states and started graduating from high school around our Bicentennial year.
As their increasing numbers warmed to the change their educators introduced those who took advantage of their charges impressionable minds still in the formative process; manipulating that process along the way, a manipulation that appears to have also dialed back maturation by about twenty years.
In an effort to recover those children and get them on a truer track, a general review of the overall characteristics of the Socialist ordained Fifty is included as it is clear that those selected for such questionable esteem, character was measured only against the amount of planned lasting damage done to our Constitutional Republic. A debased society was what was important to each esteemed socialist involved in the deception so we’ll start each profile at Wikipedia for family basics.
Taking it from the top…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nation
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/01/saving-the-nation/377038/
Peter Dreier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dreier
Howard Zinn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn
https://www.zinnedproject.org/about/faq/
Eric Foner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Foner
On with the show…
Eugene V. Debs
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs
…The Cooperative Commonwealth of [Laurence] Gronlund also impressed me, but the writings of [Karl] Kautsky were so clear and conclusive that I readily grasped, not merely his argument, but also caught the spirit of his socialist utterance – and I thank him and all who helped me out of darkness into light.[21]
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/eam/spa/socialistparty.html
The Social Democracy in America was founded by Eugene V. Debs from the remnants of the American Railway Union and the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth (associated with the newspaper The Coming Nation) on June 15, 1897. The Social Democracy of America was initially oriented towards a policy of colonization, naming a 3 member “Colonization Committee” on Aug. 1, 1897, consisting of Richard J. Hinton (Washington, DC), Wilfred P. Borland (Bay City, MI), and Cyrus Field Willard (Chicago, IL). This trio explored the possibility of establishing a colony to seed the future “Cooperative Commonwealth” in the Cumberland plateau of Tennessee. As an associated side-project seems to have made a concrete proposal to the city of Nashville to construct 75 miles of railroad for the city—a project which would put to work the blacklisted and unemployed former members of the ARU/Social Democracy iin America to work and helped build the notion of social ownership of productive capital in a single moment, it was hoped.
https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people/eugene-debs success proved illusory
But the socialist ideal lived on, inspiring a new generation of social reformers in the 1930s who, under the banner of the New Deal, enacted most of the programs and policies called for in the Socialist Party platform of 1912. It was not the socialist commonwealth, but it was a genuine achievement—one for which Debs and his followers legitimately could claim some credit.
“The little that I am, the little that I am hoping to be, lowe to the Socialist movement. It has given me my ideas and ideals; my principles and convictions, and I would not exchange one of them for all of Rockefeller’s bloodstained dollars. It has taught me how to serve-a lesson to me of priceless value. It has taught me the ecstasy in the handclasp of a comrade. It has enabled me to hold high communion with you, and made it possible for me to take my place, side by side with you, in the great struggle for the better day; to multiply myself over and over again, to thrill with a fresh born manhood; to feel life truly worthwhile; to open new avenues of vision; to spread out glorious vistas; to know that I am kin to all that throbs; to be class conscious, and to realize that, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color or sex, every man, every woman who toils, who renders useful service, every member of the working class without exception, is my comrade, my brother and sister-and that to serve them and their cause is the highest duty of my life.”
https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Debs-Critical-Essay.pdf
The stylistic effect of repeating “had I not known,” “had I not seen,” “had I not found,” allowed Debs to use his own experience of joblessness to represent the structural role of surplus labor in the capitalist system, but in an easily-accessible and emotive form.
Socialism juxtaposed the work that people did in traditional societies with the capitalist industrialization of work that alienated the workers from the products of their labor. Debs linked this socialist precept to common American values by using Abraham Lincoln as an example:
Your grandfather could help himself anywhere. All he needed was some cheap, simple, primitive tools and he could then apply his labor to the resources of Nature with his individual tools and produce what he needed. That era in our history produced our greatest men. Lincoln himself sprang from this primitive state of society… Yes, but Lincoln had for his comrades great: green-plumed forest monarchs. He was in partnership with nature… Had Lincoln been born in a sweatshop he would never have been heard of (14-15).
Another theme of socialism is the inevitability of technological advance. Industrialization allowed the capitalist system to make workers interchangeable, like cogs in a machine. But this technology, because it amplified the labor of workers, also had the potential for liberating workers from toil—if they owned the means of production and could benefit from the surplus it produced instead of having it turned into profit for a few owners. Debs introduced this topic in paragraphs 20 through 28, pointing out that the “primitive tools” of fifty years ago had been replaced by mammoth machines, and that this was the law of evolution in modern economies. He then presented the socialist vision:
Your material interest and mine in the society of the future will be the same. Instead of having to fight each other like animals, as we do today, and seeking to glorify the brute struggle for existence—of which every civilized human being ought to be ashamed— instead of this, our material interests are going to be mutual. We are going to jointly own these mammoth machines, and we are going to operate them as joint partners and we are going to divide the products among ourselves (28).
Looking back over more than a hundred years, well into the age of Technological advances, a cognizant person might recognize the emergence of Socialism as a tool of those controlling our lives rather than one of Deb’s vision. Is there even a scent of mutuality of ownership emanating from the technocratic’s think tanks? All I sense is the screws of destruction being turned once again in their favor.
Jane Addams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Addams
…Addams spent her childhood playing outdoors, reading indoors, and attending Sunday school. When she was four she contracted tuberculosis of the spine, known as Potts’s disease, which caused a curvature in her spine and lifelong health problems. This made it complicated as a child to function with the other children, considering she had a limp and could not run as well.[23]
…Addams gathered inspiration from what she read. Fascinated by the early Christians and Tolstoy’s book My Religion, she was baptized a Christian in the Cedarville Presbyterian Church in the summer of 1886.[36] Reading Giuseppe Mazzini‘s Duties of Man, she began to be inspired by the idea of democracy as a social ideal. Yet she felt confused about her role as a woman. John Stuart Mill‘s The Subjection of Women made her question the social pressures on a woman to marry and devote her life to family.[37]
https://www.neh.gov/article/jane-addams-hero-our-time
Not always serious and priggish, Jane could also be irreverent, even naughty. In her autobiography, she confesses that she and some classmates at the seminary read Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey and even went so far as to imitate the author…
…Discovered disoriented by a young teacher, the girls had their books and white powders confiscated, were administered emetics, and sequestered in their rooms…
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1931/addams/biographical/
…At the age of twenty-seven, during a second tour to Europe with her friend Ellen G. Starr, she visited a settlement house, Toynbee Hall, in London’s East End. This visit helped to finalize the idea then current in her mind, that of opening a similar house in an underprivileged area of Chicago. In 1889 she and Miss Starr leased a large home built by Charles Hull at the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets. The two friends moved in, their purpose, as expressed later, being «to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago1…
…In her own area of Chicago she led investigations on midwifery, narcotics consumption, milk supplies, and sanitary conditions, even going so far as to accept the official post of garbage inspector of the Nineteenth Ward, at an annual salary of a thousand dollars. In 1910 she received the first honorary degree ever awarded to a woman by Yale University.
https://www.hullhousemuseum.org/about-jane-addams
…The residents of Hull-House formed an impressive group, including Jane Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, Florence Kelley, Dr. Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and Grace and Edith Abbott. From their experiences in the Hull-House neighborhood, the Hull-House residents and their supporters forged a powerful reform movement. Among the projects that they helped launch were the Immigrants’ Protective League, the Juvenile Protective Association, the first juvenile court in the nation, and a Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic (later called the Institute for Juvenile Research). Through their efforts, the Illinois Legislature enacted protective legislation for women and children in 1893. With the creation of the Federal Children’s Bureau in 1912 and the passage of a federal child labor law in 1916, the Hull-House reformers saw their efforts expanded to the national level.
…A founder of the Chicago Federation of Settlements in 1894, she also helped to establish the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers in 1911. She was a leader in the Consumers League and served as the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (later the National Conference of Social Work). She was chair of the Labor Committee of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, vice-president of the Campfire Girls, and a member of the executive boards of the National Playground Association and the National Child Labor Committee. In addition, she actively supported the campaign for woman suffrage and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920).
In the early years of the twentieth century Jane Addams became involved in the peace movement. During the First World War, she and other women from belligerent and neutral nations met at the International Congress of Women at the Hague in 1915, attempting to stop the war. She maintained her pacifist stance after the United States entered the war in 1917, working to found the Women’s Peace Party (WILPF), which became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919. She was the WILPF’s first president. As a result of her work, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/addams-jane/ Is more of a thorough review of Addams than most others who commented on her life. Tolstoy, who Addams admired, was a critic:
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was another type of hero to Addams. Unlike Carlyle, Tolstoy did not valorize individuals standing out from the crowd as exemplary moral paragons who wield socially ordained positions of power. Instead, he valued solidarity with the common laborer. Addams’ vast intellectual curiosity made such extremes in influences possible. Addams read Tolstoy’s works from the time she graduated from college until the last years of her life, and she often praised his writing in articles and book reviews. Tolstoy’s emphasis on working for and with the oppressed while writing novels and essays that influenced a wider audience resonated with Addams’ work and writings. However, Tolstoy was a moral idealist. He left everything behind to take up the plow and work as a typical farm laborer. Addams was moved by Tolstoy’s account, and—typical of her self-critical, thoughtful approach–she questioned her leadership role in the social settlement, but only for a short time.
Motivated by Tolstoy’s troubling moral challenge to work in solidarity with the common laborer, Addams sought him out while she was on vacation (and recovering from typhoid) in Europe in 1896. The meeting made a lasting impression on Addams (TYH 191–195). Tolstoy came in from working the fields to be introduced to Addams and her partner Mary Rozet Smith. The meeting began with Tolstoy questioning Addams’ fashion choice because the sleeves of her arms, consistent with the style of the time, had “enough stuff on one arm to make a frock for the girl” (TYH 192). Tolstoy was concerned that the trappings of material wealth alienated Addams from those she was working with. This criticism continued when Tolstoy learned that part of Hull House’s funding came from Addams’ estate, which included a working farm: “So you are an absentee landlord? Do you think you will help the people more by adding yourself to the crowded city than you would by tilling your own soil?” (TYH 192) The remarks humbled Addams, and, on her return to Hull House, she was determined to take up more direct labor by working in the new Hull House bakery. However, reality demonstrated how Tolstoy’s idealism was incompatible with her work in social settlements: “The half dozen people invariably waiting to see me after breakfast, the piles of letters to be opened and answered, the demand of actual and pressing human wants—were these all to be pushed aside and asked to wait while I saved my soul by two hours’ work at baking bread?” (TYH 197)
No time for progressives to consider the safety of a soul; not even their own.
…Working amidst one of the most significant influxes of immigrants the United States has ever known, Hull House got off to a slow start as neighbors did not know what to make of the residents and their intentions. However, Addams and Starr built trust, and in a short time, Hull House became an incubator for new social programs and a magnet for progressives wanting to make society a better place. Without formal ideological or political constraints, the settlement workers responded to the neighborhood’s needs by starting project after project…
…The reputation of the settlement rapidly grew, and women, primarily college-educated, came from all over the country to live and work at Hull House…
Given the drastic shifts in sexual mores in the twentieth century, the contemporary understanding of what it means to be lesbian cannot straightforwardly be mapped onto the late and post-Victorian eras. Still, it can be argued that Hull House was a lesbian-friendly space. Addams set the tone for this identification with her own long-term intimate relationships with women, first with Starr and then with Mary Rozet Smith (Brown, 2004).
https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1948-1.pdf page 245
Louis Brandeis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Brandeis
…His parents, Adolph Brandeis and Frederika Dembitz immigrated to the United States from their childhood homes in Prague, Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire, and now part of the Czech Republic). They emigrated as part of their extended families for both economic and political reasons. His extended family included Dante scholar Irma Brandeis, whose father was Brandeis’ second cousin.[8][9] The Revolutions of 1848 had produced a series of political upheavals and the families, though politically liberal and sympathetic to the rebels, were shocked by the antisemitic riots that erupted in Prague while the rebels controlled it.[10]: 55 In addition, the Habsburg Empire had imposed business taxes on Jews. Family elders sent Adolph Brandeis to America to observe and prepare for his family’s possible emigration. He spent a few months in the Midwest and was impressed by the nation’s institutions and by the tolerance among the people he met. He wrote home to his wife, “America’s progress is the triumph of the rights of man.”[10]: 56
According to biographer Melvin Urofsky, Brandeis was influenced greatly by his uncle Lewis Naphtali Dembitz. Unlike other members of the extended Brandeis family, Dembitz regularly practiced Judaism and was actively involved in Zionist activities. Brandeis later changed his middle name from David to Dembitz in honor of his uncle, and through his uncle’s model of social activism, became an active member of the Zionist movement later in his life.[13]: 18 …
…In a letter while at Harvard, he wrote of his “desperate longing for more law” and of the “almost ridiculous pleasure which the discovery or invention of a legal theory gives me.” He referred to the law as his “mistress,” holding a grip on him that he could not break.[15]…
…Brandeis became a leader of the Progressive movement, and he used the law as the instrument for social change. From 1897 to 1916, he was heavily involved with multiple reform crusades…
… He supported the conservation movement; in 1910, he emerged as the chief figure in the Pinchot–Ballinger investigation, saying:[27] “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”[28]
From a Twenty-first Century point of view, Progressive’s record of running in place appears to have gotten We the People nowhere.
https://www.brandeis.edu/about/louis-brandeis.html
The university was established seven years after the death of our namesake, Justice Louis Brandeis. In founding Brandeis University, the American Jewish community sought to build an institution that put into practice the universal values and principles Justice Brandeis embodied: open and robust inquiry, a reverence for learning and knowledge, and service to others.
I held the belief that the U.S. Constitution was the foundation that attracted the attention of the rest of the world then I read this:“If we would guide by the light of reason we must let our minds be bold.” — Louis D. Brandeis
That made me wonder if Brandeis believed in God
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Weir_(activist) Alison Weir (Not the British author) https://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/history.html and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Weiss Philip Weiss https://mondoweiss.net/2017/01/immaculate-conception-brandeis/
I am confounded this is the first time I’ve heard of them. We share the same sentiments towards people I have no respect for and anti-semitism has nothing to do with it.
Florence Molthrop Kelley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Kelley
Kelley was a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, an activist for women’s suffrage and African-American civil rights. She was a follower of Karl Marx and a friend of Friedrich Engels. Her 1885 translation of the latter’s The Condition of the Working Class in England into English was published with Engels’ approval in 1887, under her married name “Mrs. F. Kelley Wischnewetzky,” and is still used today.
https://www.nndb.com/people/460/000204845/ Florence Kelly’s profile
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/florence-kelley
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/father-daughter-duo-reformed-america-180981016/
https://www.greatschools.org/pennsylvania/philadelphia/1943-Kelley-William-D-School/
Compare to
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/issues/one-means-preventing-pauperism-2/
John Dewey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey
https://www.stlawrenceinstitute.org/vol13brk.html
In 1882, Dewey entered Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to study philosophy. Unlike most American university philosophy programs, the one at Johns Hopkins emphasized new German scientific research methods rather than religion as the best way to arrive at the truth. Dewey also embraced the “new psychology,” then being practiced in Europe, which focused on observing human behavior and scientific experimentation.
After he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1884, Dewey began his career teaching philosophy at the University of Michigan. His students welcomed his new emphasis on science and psychology. Dewey became increasingly convinced that to be a philosopher one also had to be an experimental psychologist.
In 1886, Dewey married Harriet Alice Chipman, whom he called Alice. A former teacher, she was majoring in philosophy at the University of Michigan. She was a freethinking feminist who fought for women’s rights all her adult life. She also turned Dewey’s thinking around to use philosophy to help solve real social problems.
Dewey became increasingly interested in the philosophy of education and in 1899 published School and Society. To test out his educational theories, Dewey and his wife started an experimental school in Chicago. The school was closed after Dewey became involved in a dispute with the university president, William Rainey Harper. Dewey now moved to Columbia University.
https://biographs.org/steven-clark-rockefeller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Clark_Rockefeller
In 1976, Rockefeller began an intensive study of Zen Buddhism, making frequent week-long visits to the Rochester Zen Center, where he was a trustee.He coordinated the drafting of the Earth Charter for the Earth Charter Commission and Earth Council. In 2005, he moderated the international launch of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) (2005–14) in its headquarters in New York, launched by UNESCO and attended by Nane Annan, the wife of Secretary General Kofi Annan.[6] He is Co-Chair of Earth Charter International Council and has written numerous essays on the Earth Charter, available at the Earth Charter website.[7]
He coordinated the drafting of the Earth Charter for the Earth Charter Commission and Earth Council. In 2005, he moderated the international launch of the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) (2005–14) in its headquarters in New York, launched by UNESCO and attended by Nane Annan, the wife of Secretary General Kofi Annan.[6] He is Co-Chair of Earth Charter International Council and has written numerous essays on the Earth Charter, available at the Earth Charter website.[7]
Lincoln Steffens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Steffens
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lincoln-Steffens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Workers%27_School
https://cooperative-individualism.org/steffens-lincoln_enemies-of-the-republic-1904.htm
https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/terror/terror.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/lincoln-steffens-muckrakers-progress.html#
https://spartacus-educational.com/Jsteffens.htm
W.E.B. DuBois
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Bois
https://www.bluefieldwv.gov/community/page/dr-web-du-bois opposed Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise,”
https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/
…in 1909, Du Bois co-founded the NAACP
https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/booker-t-washington-and-atlanta-compromise
Upton Sinclair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair agnostic; family nouveau poor post civil war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/were-all-social-democrats-now/
…Throughout the two-century history of socialism, at least the untyrannical kind, most of its adherents have tried to balance their dream of a humane and fully egalitarian order with the need to fight for changes in the only world they would ever know …
…Rather than base our politics on a utopian ideal, it would be better to keep persuading our fellow Americans to nudge the country and the world closer to a point where an ethic of solidarity would have greater sway than the inhumane, individualist alternative…
Second, we should make it a priority to work for reforms that will help improve the lives of a majority of the population and can win their approval.
Third, we should commit ourselves to work inside the Democratic Party—to run for office at all levels, canvass for and donate to its candidates, and encourage everyone we know to get out the vote.
Fourth, we have to discipline ourselves to use a political language that non-leftists understand and will be comfortable using. You can talk of “Latinx” and “BIPOC” and “birthing people” among your comrades, but realize that such terms will confuse more people we want to reach than they will comfort—and thus risk setting back the causes of racial equality, reproductive justice, and transgender rights they were coined to advance. They also make it easy for Tucker Carlson and his many fans to ridicule us as enemies of ordinary people. As the journalist Sam Adler-Bell wrote recently, the language of “‘wokeness’ . . . is hostile to the basic logic of leftist organizing. Solidarity requires an invitation, a warm and friendly offer to collude in a risky proposition. It doesn’t work as a sanctimonious entreaty to identify with an existing set of self-evident values.”
Fifth, be optimistic…
The fear that our influence will grow drives much of the anxious fervor on the contemporary right, which wants desperately to “make America great again” with no clear notion of what it might mean to accomplish that impossible task…
Margaret Sanger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Sanger
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/margaret-higgins-sanger-1879-1966
https://sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/articles/sanger-hitler_equation/
https://www.rbf.org/about/our-history/timeline/planned-parenthood
…In 1942, when Sanger’s Birth Control Federation of America joined the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the R[ockefeller] B[rother’s] F[und] began its own support for the organization…
…RBF support for the organization continued through 1975…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Perkins_Gilman
https://www.neh.gov/article/charlotte-perkins-gilman-did-more-write-one-classic-short-story
https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/directory/charlotte-perkins-gilman/
https://www.cwhf.org/inductees/charlotte-perkins-gilman
https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5657/ Socialist and Suffragette
https://www.humanitiestexas.org/education/online-resources/ela/charlotte-perkins-gilman
Roger Baldwin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Nash_Baldwin
https://digitalcommons.rockefeller.edu/jem-the-beginnings/25/
https://www.aclu.org/about/about-aclu
The ACLU is frequently asked to explain its defense of certain people or groups — particularly controversial and unpopular entities such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islam, and the National Socialist Party of America. We do not defend them because we agree with them. Rather we defend their right to free expression and free assembly.
Frances Perkins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Perkins
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/frances-perkins
https://www.naswfoundation.org/Our-Work/NASW-Social-Work-Pioneers/NASW-Social-Workers-Pioneers-Bio-Index/id/315 are social workers who have explored new territories and built outposts for human services on many frontiers.
https://www.ssa.gov/history/fperkins.html
https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people/frances-perkins …
Perkins also… learned from friends such as labor leader Rose Schneiderman the one-word solution to poverty: organize. Perkins never stopped believing that legislation was the best way to “right industrial wrongs,” but unlike many women of her class, Perkins came to accept the value of working-class organization. Perkins also joined the Socialist Party but quickly concluded that practical remedies—rather than the more visionary doctrines of the socialists—held out the best chance for improving the lot of workers. In the election of 1912, she voted for Woodrow Wilson for president, not Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate.
https://www.nps.gov/people/frances-perkins.htm In 1913, Frances married Paul Caldwell Wilson. She chose to keep her maiden name, and defended her choice in court. Their daughter, Susanna, was born in December 1916. Shortly after Susanna’s birth, Paul began showing signs of mental illness, and would be in and out of institutions for the rest of their marriage. Frances would often live with other women in DC, including Mary Rumsey (founder of the Junior League) and Representative Carolyn O’Day. Her husband remained in New York City.
https://www.eriegaynews.com/news/article.php?recordid=201510francesperkins
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/events/triangle-waist-company-factory-fire/
https://www.nps.gov/places/frances-perkins-house.htm
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/perkins-frances-she-boldly-went-where-no-woman-had-gone-before/ …The lessons in becoming a skilled politician were piling up. In the past she had looked down on politicians but now concluded, “…that venal politicians can sometimes be more useful than upstanding reformers (Downey, 2009,p. 39).” Understanding and accepting the value of working within the political order was one of the secrets of her success.
Her experiences in these activities taught her another valuable lesson. A politician told her that men trusted women who were motherly and not seductive sirens. Downey says, “She began to see her gender, a liability in many ways, could actually be an asset. To accentuate this opportunity to gain influence she began to dress and comport herself in a way that reminded men of their mothers…
In 1913 Perkins married Paul Caldell Wilson. He was handsome, rich and a progressive. She defied convention and kept her maiden name. After several attempts at conceiving a daughter was born. Life did not treat Frances well. Both husband and daughter were depressed and institutionalized for long periods.
When Al Smith campaigned for governor she helped by making contacts. To her surprise, shortly after he was sworn in Smith appointed her to the Industrial Commission which oversaw factory conditions. One of her important victories there was to outlaw child labor. This job paid $8000 and was considered a plum. No woman had ever served on the commission and there was a lot of protest over the appointment. Frances had some doubts about accepting and consulted Kelley. Smith told them, “If you girls are going to get what you want through legislation, there better not be any separation between social workers and government (Downey, 2009, p. 77).”
John L. Lewis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Lewis
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1096&context=classracecorporatepower
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Typical CIO contracts contained two key provisions: a “management prerogative clause” that allowed the employer to close and move production facilities at its discretion, and a “no-strike clause” that prevented the workers from doing anything effective about such decisions. Finally, while radical organizers and militant tactics were used to obtain the position of exclusive representative, once the new unions were recognized by management, those organizers were fired.
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And during the next five years, 1937 to roughly 1942, since they had not entered into a typical CIO contract that required them to give up the right to strike during the duration of the bargaining agreement, Inland Steel workers could and they did back up their demands with successful direct action…
…The testimony by a third Inland steelworker, Joe Gyurko, is cited by Kim Scipes (2003: 156) to the same effect. Gyurko recalls that in the 1936-42 pre-contract period, departmental strikes were common. When foremen or supervisors refused to deal with pressing issues affecting work conditions, the men thought nothing of stopping work and letting gondolas full of molten steel hang in mid-air. In these situations, the rapidly approaching danger that production would be interrupted in order to clean out the gondola and reheat the steel acted as a time clock, forcing the company to bargain with the workers (Scipes, 2003: 156, citing Nyden, 1984: 24).
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Accordingly we are left with a “road not taken” that would make possible not only a consistently bottom-up recasting of modern American labor history, but a joyful convergence with historians of Polish Solidarity, with narrators of what didn’t happen in France in 1968, and above all, with George Orwell and Noam Chomsky in offering homage to the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Catalonia during the Spanish civil war (see Chomsky, 2005). 5
…One of Alinsky’s books, a biography of John L. Lewis, was a breathless paean of praise to its subject. It happens that for about three years, I was one of the original faculty of Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute. I remember Alinsky commenting with wonder that for periods of time in the mid-1930s, there was more mention of Lewis by the media than of President Franklin Roosevelt. Alinsky is the link between Lewis and both the conventional misstatement of how the NLRA and CIO came into being and liberal adulation of Chavez as a supposed alternative to Lewis’ top-down organizing style. In a chapter entitled “The Alchemist,” Bardacke spells out Saul Alinsky’s influence on Cesar Chavez.
Alinskyite community organizing, Bardacke writes, has become “a codified discipline, with core theoretical propositions, recognized heresies, disciples, neophytes, and splits. It is a political theory….” (Bardacke, 2011: 68)…
Our operating assumptions were that you didn’t ask basic questions about the economy because that would label you a “pinko,” an ideologue, and worse. If you raised these kinds of questions, the climate of the time would shut you down, so you had to be pragmatic. . . . We had no ongoing, fundamental analysis of the economy, no long-term diagnosis. No one was asking about alternatives to all the companies moving to the South, Latin America, Asia. We didn’t have any alternative except, just keeping building organizations (Schutz and Miller, eds., 2015: 208-209).
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Dick Harmon also commented that there was no consideration within the Alinskyan community that “Corporate capitalism is One system, a Whole, assaulting both human beings and the rest of the natural world” (Schutz and Miller, 2015, eds.: 212-213).
Every one of these criticisms could be made of the CIO organizing inspired by John L. Lewis, mentor of his admiring acolyte, Saul Alinsky, who in turn employed and influenced Chavez.
The transmission of John L. Lewis-style organizing strategy from Lewis to Chavez was by way of a man named Fred Ross, “one of the first people on Akinsky’s payroll, and an early practitioner of Alinsky-style community organizing.”
According to Bardacke, Chavez watched Ross work and was watched by him, he filed weekly and sometimes daily reports to Ross and Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). He studied [Alinsky’s] Reveille for Radicals. He read and reread Alinsky’s 1949 biography of John L. Lewis . . . . During Alinsky’s regular visits to California, which often lasted several weeks, Chavez worked alongside the master in formal trainings, conferences, and fundraising events (Bardacke, 2011: 68).
…Chavez was also “vigorously anti-Communist, no matter what kind of Communist you happened to be” (Schultz and Miller, eds.: 108-109, 111). And in his zeal to protect the jobs of Hispanics already in the United States, Chavez did not hesitate to inform agencies of the federal government about the identities and whereabouts of undocumented new arrivals from Latin America.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Following her husband’s death in 1945, Roosevelt pressed the United States to join and support the United Nations and became its first delegate to the committee on Human Rights. She served as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights and oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
After Maude divorced her first husband, the champion polo player Lawrence Waterbury, in 1912, she married the playwright and novelist David Gray in 1914 in a small ceremony attended only by Eleanor and the Roosevelt family lawyer, John M. Hackett.[58] The couple maintained a close relationship with Eleanor and Franklin. The couple maintained a close relationship with Eleanor and Franklin, and Eleanor was instrumental in successfully advocating for Gray’s appointment as United States minister to Ireland, a post he held from 1940 to 1947.[57
From https://www.jstor.org/stable/1899749 The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change
In In 1915, on hearing of the Rockefeller Foundation’s desire to set up a medical school in Peking, Paul Reinsch, theUnited States minister to China, remarked approvingly that the foundation’s plans were “in full accordance with the traditions of our past relations with China, where the activities of our people have been religious, cultural and educational in a far greater measure than they have been commercial.”
Norman Thomas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Thomas
https://spartacus-educational.com/USAthomas.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Theological_Seminary
https://kaiserreich.fandom.com/wiki/Norman_Thomas
https://www.bu.edu/sth-history/norman-thomas-1968/
https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/tam_423/
https://www.bu.edu/sth-history/prophets/
A.J. Muste
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Muste
https://resource.rockarch.org/the-atomic-bomb-development-rockefeller-foundation-role/
https://www.christiancentury.org/features/aj-muste-s-christian-nonviolence
Sidney Hillman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Hillman
https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people/sidney-hillman X
https://www.hillmanfoundation.org/sidney-hillman-foundation/about-sidney-hillman
https://erpapers.columbian.gwu.edu/sidney-hillman-1887-1946
https://jwa.org/teach/livingthelegacy/biographies/hillman-sidney
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstreams/a46a9bf5-1c27-4486-af15-f35da192bef1/download
Henry A Wallace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace
https://www.conservapedia.com/Henry_A._Wallace
https://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1947/04/wallace.htm
https://www.issuelab.org/resources/27913/27913.pdf not a clarifier; use as broad source
119. Foundation, Rockefeller, Annual report for 1959, New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1960, p. 242.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
The genesis of the Green Revolution was a lengthy visit in 1940 by U.S. Vice President-elect Henry A. Wallace, who had served as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture during President Franklin Roosevelt’s first two terms, and before government service, had founded a company, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, that had revolutionized the hybridization of seed corn to greatly increase crop yields. He became appalled at the meager corn yields in Mexico, where 80 percent of the people lived off the land, and a Mexican farmer had to work as much as 500 hours to produce a single bushel of corn, about 50 times longer than the typical Iowa farmer planting hybrid seed.[20] Wallace persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to fund an agricultural station in Mexico to hybridize corn and wheat for arid climates, and to lead it, he hired a young Iowa agronomist named Norman Borlaug.[21]
A. Philip Randolph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Philip_Randolph
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/randolph-philip
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/messenger/index.htm
https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5125/ socialist beliefs
https://www.dsausa.org/blog/hero_of_the_democratic_left_a_philip_randolph/ democrat party
Walter Reuther
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Reuther
https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-people/walter-reuther
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/walter-p-reuther
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/reuther-walter-philip
September 1, 1907 to May 10, 1970
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Martin Luther King wrote a letter to union president Walter Reuther, congratulating him and observing: “More than anyone else in America, you stand out as the shining symbol of democratic trade unionism” (King, 17 May 1961). King had a stalwart ally in Reuther, who gave critical backing to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was a supporter of King’s civil rights tactics.
Progressives preach about confronting evil even as political passions blind them to their own unbalanced life of rage, refusing to acknowledge the evil they’ve unleashed on our world as they hide behind their embraced godless humanist morality born of death in the Void.
Of interest https://tarantula.ruk.cuni.cz/AKTUALITY-2015-version1-ds10_dennis_smith_the_chicago_.pdf
https://books.rupress.org/sites/books.rupress.org/files/ebooks/9780874700329.pdf History of RockInstitute
https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/Research/GEHN/GEHNWP19.pdf China trade
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/11/how-opium-imperialism-boosted-chinese-art-trade/
https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/279679/jewish/Capitalist-or-Communist.htm