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"
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:
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
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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