Adonis Diaries

Led by women: US Labor movements (1840-1860)

David Montgomery in “Citizen worker: The experience of workers in the US with democracy and the free market during the 19th century” demonstrated that modern America was born of movements of workers’ protestations and demonstrations.

The workers’ press flourished from the beginning of the 19th century to 1930.  It was then suffocated by the private barons of industries after the scare tactics propaganda of the Red monster revolution in Russia.

Women were mostly the editors of workers’ presses and lambasted the new set of values of the barons of industries that reduced common people to experiencing degradation in their values, loss of dignity and independence, deprivation of self-esteem, decline of the status of workers as individuals, and the stepping back of culture.

For example, the “factory girls” of Lowell revolted when the owner cancelled the custom of workers assigning someone to read to them at loud voice when working. The women wrote:

“who sells his work loses his liberty and becomes at the pay of enterprises controlled by rich aristocrats, ever ready to crush any minor protest to his right to serfdom. The alternative is that you sell the product of your work and save your individuality.  Workers must own the factories and regain their health, morale, intelligence, and their civil rights.”

The workers’ press denounced the “betrayal of clerks” in media, universities, and institutions concerned of legitimizing the tyranny of the “new spirit of the time” and disseminating degrading values of slaving for the job market. The US workers’ press and magazines preceded Karl Mark’ “Capital” by two decades.

Norman Ware’s book “The industrial Workers, 1840-1860:  The reaction of American industrial society to the advance of the industrial revolution” opened the way for further social studies that feel very current and most appropriate.

It is interesting to note that, during the social upheaval in France of 1848 (to deposing the monarch Louis-Philippe), women were the most vocal and active in march protests and denouncement.  The new breed of “psychologists” got in arm analyzing the activist women as ripe for asylum.  The club of psychologists and physicians claimed that women are not endowed with enough emotional strength to supporting “political excitements”.

Consequently, women activists tend to go overboard in zeal and relentless actions.  For example, women activists horrified the mental experts by wearing men’s cloth.  The experts would give samples of sober women, taking good care of husband, children, and home and then, suddenly dropping every social responsibilities to joining wholeheartedly the uprising.

The term “democratic sickness” was first introduced by Hamilton, just after the US independence, in order to siding with the aristocratic classes for governance.  “Democratic sickness” was taken up later on by the aristocrats and conservatives “thinkers” as a form of lunacy such as monomania, idiots, and demagogues.

Those passionate French women activists were haranguing the masses: “No more misery.  No more exploitation of man by man.  No more rich people.  No more police force.”  The same opinions on women activists were repeated after the Paris Commune in 1870.

Physicians strongly suggested that such women should be held in straight jackets because they are dangerous elements with ideas going contrary to nature in values relevant to family, properties, liberty, and constitution.

The German and English physicians worried that French “democratic sickness” could be physically contagious and they made sure to close borders to such trespassers for the duration of the upheaval.  The German physician Carl Starck warned of the “smaller brain size of French women that is organized in a peculiar manner, and fraught with pathological characteristics of autism and leading to physical degeneracy.”

The prime enemies to Capitalist America are well-adjusted and well-fed minority and working class kids.

Parents in the US are witnessing a reduction of 40% of their quality time to caring for their kids.  Kids return home alone, eat frozen food, watch TV, play video games, and isolated from their environment. Parents have to work twice harder for longer duration for less than what they earned three decades ago. Even national health care coverage for the downtrodden has barely passed Congress with drastic restrictions.

Kids are getting hooked to alcohol and drugs and are seeking gang-type protection against their loneliness and disorientation.  Fact is, most States considered satellites to the USA lack national health coverage and the schooling system is mostly privatized.