Thai Jones "More Powerful Than Dynamite" on WHVW this morning, 6:30 Inquiring Mind!

[Joel Tyner]

Hi all...

One more reason here to tune into our show on WHVW 950 AM this morning 8 am to 10 am-- Thai Jones will be our guest at 9 am!...

[click here for recent Liz Benjamin interview with Thai on "Capital Tonight"

http://www.capitaltonight.com/2012/04/author-thai-jones-discusses-new-book-on-1914-anarchy/

We'll be joining Thai and his dad Jeff (former Communications Director for Environmental Advocates of New York, Director of Apollo Alliance of NYS (long-time friend of mine since the mid-90's during my runs for state legislature; for more re: Apollo Alliance see:

http://www.wdiny.org/programs/GreenCorner/apollo.aspx ).......later today for 6:30 pm author event(!):

http://inquiringmindbookstore.webs.com/apps/calendar/showEvent?calID=3553017&eventID=178082866&next=%2FshowAgenda%3FcalID%3D3553017%26pageNum%3D1

Inquiring Mind Bookstore & Cafe

AUTHOR EVENT: THAI JONES @ 6:30PM

Saturday May 19, 2012 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM

65 Partition Street, Saugerties, NY 12477

Author of, More Powerful than Dynamite, Thai Jones will be giving a reading and book signing on Saturday, May 19th @ 6:30pm. Join us!

[feel free to join in the mix on the air this morning as you wish-- call in to studio line at 471-9500!]

Pass it on...

Joel

845-750-4392/444-0599

http://www.JoelforCongress.org

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Joel (260+ now on board online)

http://www.DutchessDemocracy.blogspot.com

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/17/lillian-hellman-clarence-birdseye-and-thai-jones-must-read-nonfiction.html

Thai Jones: Must Read Nonfiction

May 17, 2012 7:19 PM EDT

More Powerful than Dynamite
By Thai Jones

In his effort to capture the spirit of the times, Thai Jones seems to have read every column inch of newspapers published in New York City in 1914. His industriousness turned up some beauties, like the Jan. 1 New York Times piece that foretold a year "of obedience to law's commands, the hooting down of the agitator."

As Jones demonstrates in his fascinating new book, More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York's Year of Anarchy, the paper's prediction was as wrong as wrong gets.

Though global events-namely, World War I-would soon eclipse the local tumult, New York City, in 1914, was a hub of radical politics. The city started the year with a new mayor, 34-year-old John Purroy Mitchel, a reform-minded upstart who swept to victory by a big margin, clobbering the famously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. For the city's far-left, however, a group of self-proclaimed anarchists that included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the ascension of the "Boy Mayor" meant nothing.
Berkman, the editor of Goldman's strident magazine Mother Earth, sought nothing less than a political reformation-a working-class uprising-and he had spent more than a decade in prison for trying to incite one by shooting Henry Clay Frick, a Carnegie Steel executive, in 1892. "An interrupted revolutionary, he somehow had to regain what he'd lost," Jones writes. "He needed more than a cause to dedicate himself to; the robber system of capitalism provided an endless litany of causes. He required an enemy, a villain."

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., would do just fine. Though he had largely withdrawn from the day-to-day workings of his family's vast business empire, Rockefeller remained a corporate figurehead. In April, 1914, a clash between National Guardsmen and striking workers at the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company resulted in the deaths of about two dozen miners and members of their families. Berkman had found his adversary.

In the spring and summer of 1914, Berkman denounced Rockefeller and other industrialists, as thousands of residents and visitors assembled for a series of protests and public hearings across the city. They were united in their disgust at economic inequalities, corporate rapaciousness, and subhuman working conditions. Regrettably, some of Berkman's likeminded warriors intended to take things much further. On July 4, an explosion in an East Harlem apartment building killed four, including three men who had accumulated a cache of explosives that they apparently planned to use in an attack on Rockefeller's Westchester home.

Though Jones is chiefly concerned with the anarchist movement and other political events of 1914, his book is also packed with fascinating asides about various social and cultural goings-on in early 20th-century New York City. With vigor and the authority that comes from exhaustive amounts of research, he writes about movies (patrons flocked to voyeuristic films about the flesh trade while ignoring an early documentary about American battlefield deaths); the contentious history of curfews for city nightclubs and restaurants; and the ups and downs of various public intellectuals, like The Jungle author Upton Sinclair. ("Nor had he helped his own good name with a quest for perfect health that had embraced prolonged fasting, frequent sanitarium stays, and a brief experiment with the 'monkey and squirrel diet.'")

A century after protesters took to the streets in and around Manhattan's Union Square, the Occupy movement began doing the same. There are some parallels between the 1910s and the 2010s, but Jones draws a more apt comparison with March 6, 1970. On that day, three people involved in the antiwar movement died when a bomb they were building for an attack on a nearby Army base brought down a Greenwich Village townhouse. They were members of the Weather Underground, the activist group that used means both legal and otherwise to voice their opposition to the fighting in Vietnam and a host of other issues. (Jones's parents were also members, and much of this is covered in his 2004 book A Radical Line.)

"Whether it was the Vietnam War or the daily horrors of industrial violence, both the anarchists and the Weathermen had been prepared to kill to combat them," writes Jones. "And in these two instances-separated by ninety-two blocks and fifty-six years-it was they who died in the attempt."

-Kevin Canfield