Saturday, April 21, 2018

Helen Keller, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, IWW, Upton Sinclair

WHO led?

"A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920, Flynn played a leading role in the campaign against the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti.

] Flynn was particularly concerned with women's rights, supporting birth control and women's suffrage. Flynn also criticized the leadership of trade unions for being male-dominated and not reflecting the needs of women."


https://www.aclu.org/

"“So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we’ll be called a democracy.” — ACLU founder Roger Baldwin

When a roomful of civil liberties activists — led by Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, and Albert DeSilver — formed the ACLU in 1920, the Supreme Court had yet to uphold a single free speech claim. Activists languished in jail for distributing anti-war literature. State-sanctioned violence against African-Americans was routine. Women won the right to vote only in August of that year."
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"The ACLU was founded in 1920 by Helen Keller, Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, Walter Nelles, Morris Ernst, Albert DeSilver, Arthur Garfield Hays, Jane Addams, Felix Frankfurter, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and its focus was on freedom of speech, primarily for anti-war protesters.

 During the 1920s, the ACLU expanded its scope to include protecting the free speech rights of artists and striking workers, and working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to decrease racism and discrimination. During the 1930s, the ACLU started to engage in work combating police misconduct and supporting Native American rights. Many of the ACLU's cases involved the defense of Communist party members and Jehovah's Witnesses.

 In 1940, the ACLU leadership voted to exclude Communists from its leadership positions, a decision rescinded in 1968. During World War II, the ACLU defended Japanese-American citizens, unsuccessfully trying to prevent their forcible relocation to internment camps. During the Cold War, the ACLU headquarters was dominated by anti-Communists, but many local affiliates defended members of the Communist Party.
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 In one typical instance in 1923, author Upton Sinclair was arrested for trying to read the First Amendment during an Industrial Workers of the World rally


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An Injury to One is an Injury to All

IWW
NATO
ILWU

"Upton Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

 In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muck-raking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.

 Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence"

 Writing during the Progressive Era, Sinclair describes the world of industrialized America from both the working man's and the industrialist's points of view. Novels such as King Coal (1917), The Coal War (published posthumously), Oil! (1927), and The Flivver King (1937) describe the working conditions of the coal, oil, and auto industries at the time.

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