The smallest New Left group is the New England Party of Labor which publishes Hammer and Steel, a memeographed sheet that some people believe expresses “pure Maoist views.”  The man behind the organization is Homer Chase from New Hampshire.  He wants to have a hammer and sickle carved on his father’s headstone and has been fighting the town fathers for years on this issue.  “The headstone seems more important to Homer than anything else,” says critic Communist Gus Hall.  “but he gets written up by the press as a big factor in the Sino-Soviet split.”  For once perhaps Gus Hall is right.

— George Thayer, The Farther Shores of Politics, 1968

Hm.  This is an entirely different interpretation of the group than what we see on wikipedia.  That Gus Hall quote seems relevant to place into the wikipedia article on said organization — see “Ray O Light Group“, which has all the appearances of having been pieced together by members of the organization.

Originally called Hammer & Steel (H&S) or, more infrequently, New England Party of Labor, they split from the CPUSA following Krushchev‘s Secret Speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU. After several name changes (Youth for Stalin in 1968 and Stalinist Workers Group for African-American Liberation & a New Communist International from 1969-1976) which reflect shifts in both composition and political line, they became the present Ray O. Light Group. Many of its members were Northern Communists who came to the South to organize. Hammer & Steel was a small editorial board which grew out of the struggle against what it saw as revisionism in the CPUSA. It criticized the CPUSA for liquidating the revolutionary line on the African American national question, and for returning to a position of “American Exceptionalism” (by supporting the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy) which had previously been upheld by Earl Browder. Though it was a small group, H&S was the only group to be attacked by name by Krushchev in his polemics against the Communist Party of China (CPC) for siding with the CPC and Party of Labor of Albania (PLA) in the Sino-Soviet Split. H&S was the only revolutionary group in the US to have a representative at the 5th Congress of the PLA in 1966. Hammer & Steel argued that there was a focal contradiction (see, contradiction) around the oppressed peoples fighting for national liberation. This was reflected in the United States in the African American struggle for self-determination.

Why, they were a big factor in the “Sino-Soviet Split”!  According to their literature, backed up by Kruschev himself.  Take that, Gus Hall, you old Communist you!  Must have been the jack-boot from the Soviet propaganda he was spurring forth, minimalizing their role in the Soviet — Sino split.

 Louis Adamic October 1930 American Mercury

VI.  “Well, anyhow, from Seattle Wilson went down to Portland, and from there on to California.

“In a couple of days the wobblies in Seattle began to discuss the newspaper reports and rumors which were to the effect that Wilson wasn’t well, that he was ‘fatigued,’ and so on.

“Of course, he was sick before he started West, but when two weeks after leaving Seattle he finally broke down altogether, and had to abandon his tour, the IWW’s around Pugent Sound developed the idea that our demonstration on September 13 was behind it all.

“We five men who had called on Wilson, of course, told about our visit.  I tried to be accurate, but the other four, I think exaggerated things a little.  By and by the story of our visit, as it went from mouth to mouth among the wobblies, was to the effect that Wilson had collapsed while talking with us.

“Very few IWW’s were willing to remember that Wilson was a sick man before coming to Seattle.  Almost everybody seemed to be convinced that we — the thousandas of wobblies who had lined the streets when he rode through Seattle — had ‘assassinated’ him.  That was the word they used.  And since I was the one who originated the idea, I was given the credit for the ‘assassination.’

“The idea persists to this day, and I don’t believe there is any way of killing it.  The wobblies argue that I finished Wilson a goddamn sight more thoroughly than if someone had shot him dead or blown him up with dynomite.  Had he been assassinated physically, they say, he would now be a rival for Lincoln as a national hero.  In 1919 he was going through the biggest crisis in his career.  A shot from an assassin’s gun would have saved him historically, whether his League of Nations went over or not, because such a death would have been dramatic and tragic.  Instead, on September 13, he shrvilled up before our numbers, and in the next two weeks he degenerated into complete ineffectiveness.  He has been of no consequence ever since.  Now he is a futile old man — dead, although still unburied.  That’s the wobbly idea about in on the Coast.”

I asked Kipps what he himself thought about it.

“Well,” he said, “I know that Wilson was sick before he came West in August, 1919.  To say that our demonstration assassinated him, of course, is an exaggeration, but there is no doubt in my mind that it hastened his breakdown.  It was, perhaps, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“I’m called ‘the guy who assassinated Wilson.’  I guess I’ll be known as such the rest of my life, though in the last two years I’ve heard of two or three other men who claim to have suggested the demonstration on September 13.  But I don’t care.  They can have the credit.  As a matter of fact, I often wish I hadn’t had anything to do with it, though I know that as an IWW I oughtn’t feel that way.

“There is no doubt, however, that the demonstration had a powerful effect on Wilson.  Only the other day I picked up the latest Atlantic Monthly at the library and there was a little article by him called ‘Away From the Revolution!’ in which he appeals to the responsible capitalists of the country to lessen their resistance to the proletariat’s efforts to improve its lot.  The article is almost hysterical in tone; the hysteria of a senile old man just awakened from a nightmare.  Read and you’ll see.

“Wilson may live a few years longer and write a few more articles, but you can’t convince the wobblies on the Coast that hasn’t been dead ever since that Saturday afternoon in Seattle in 1919.”
……………………………………………………….

VII.  As I have mentioned, Jack Kpps told me this story some time in 1923.  Shortly afterward the IWW longshoremen’s union in San Pedro called a strike, tying up the harbor for two weeks, at the end of which time the strike was broken and then several of the leaders and agitators, including Kipps, were charged with criminal syndicalism, tried and sent to San Quentin.

Kipps was released late in 1927, and I ran into him one Sunday afternoon in Pershing Park in Los Angeles.  He had spent over three years in the prison jute mill.

I scarcely recognized him.  He looked definitely ill.  He was all skin and bone, and all his hair, what there was left of it, had turned gray.  Coughing dryly, he told me with a shrug of his shoulders that now he had T.B. for fair.  He grinned and said:  “I’m a short-timer.”

Woodrow Wilsonhad been dead then over two years.

Kipps was unwilling to discuss the Seattle incident any further.  We talked of other things.  He mentioned an article of mine that he had read in a magazine.  I asked would he mind if some day I wrote up the Seattle demonstration.  He thought a while, then he said:

“I’d prefer if you don’t.  I’m not exactly stuck up over the fact that the idea behind the affair was mine.  I never had any bad feelings toward Wilson.  He probably was all right in some ways.  He was prt of the System, helpless to do anything for the workers even if he wanted to.  He meant well.  The workers must help themselves; nobody else will or cal help them; and whether they can or not remains to be seen.  That stunt in Seattle was aimed more at Ole Hanson and that bunch of coyotes there than at Wilson.

“If you wrote a piece about me, I probably couldn’t resist looking it up:  and I don’t want to see it.  I can’t get the affair out of my mind as it is.  In San Quentin, when I couldn’t sleep nights, I thought about it for hours.  I haven’t a bad conscience about it, or anything like that; but everywhere I go they say I’m the guy who assassinated Wilson.  They called me that in San Quentin.  Lately I’ve started to deny having had any connection with the matter whatever.  I don’t like it.  Wilson is dead now, so why gloat over it?  After all, he was President of the United States.  I can’t help feeling that way, although, perhaps as a radical I oughtn’t to.”

He paused a minute, coughing.

“But of course,” he said then, “I don’t care what you do” — coughing — “afterward.  I mean in a year or two.  I probably won’t last that long.”

Soon after this someone induced a wealthy woman radical in Pasadena, a parlor pink, to send Kipps to a sanitarium at Sierra Madre.  He was there two years, a hopeless case, sitting in the sun, reading.

Last Spring he died.

Louis Adamic October 1930 American Mercury

“That evening a messenger came to the IWW headquarters with a request from the President for our delegation to call on him at ten-thirty the next morning and, if we desired, to present our petition.

“Of course we informed the messenger that we’d be there.  Then we quickly made up a delegation of five men, including two ex-soldiers and myself.  The ex-service men wore overseas caps and others parts of the uniform; one had a wound stripe on his sleeve, and we made him Number One of the delegation.  He was to present the petition.  He name was Harry Link.  Each one of us was supposed to make a little speech, and we rehearsed half the night.

“At ten-twenty-five the next morning — Sunday — the five of us went to the swell hotel where Wilson was staying.  The place was all in flags.  A couple of sentries stood at the entrance of the lobby.

“A young Army officer in a snappy uniform — boots, spurs, Sam Brown belt and saber — met us in the doorway.  I guess he was waiting for us.  He gave us the once-over, especially the ex-soldiers.

“‘You are –?’ he began to ask.

“‘We are a delegation of the Industrial Workers of the World.’ said Harry Link.  ‘We have an appointment with the President.’

“Then newspaper men began to crowd around us, and the officer quickly ordered us to follow him.  We went up an elevator, and then through a corridor, which was banked with flowers, with a couple of soldiers hanging around.

“We entered a small room and the officer asked us to sit down.  His neat military appearance was in sharp contrast with our own.  He kept on eyeing us.

“We were in the presidential suite.  We sat there about ten or fifteen minutes.  Nobody said a word.  Somewhere we could hear the clicking of a typewriter.

“Then a door opened and a civilian secretary or Secret Service man advanced to us briskly.  He looked us over and took our names.  Then he said: ‘Come this way, please,’ in a crisp official tone of voice.  He looked like a floorwalker.

“He led us into a great big room.  Right near the door was a tremendous basket of flowers, and the rest of the delegation sort of crowded me against it.  The top of a fern leaf tickled me under the nose.

“‘Step this way please,’ said the floorwalker, and we all moved toward the center of the room.

“Wilson stood by a long heavy table, his left hand holding the edge of the table top.  I had a funny feeling that I can’t quite describe to you.  I was sort of mixed up, maybe because the fern had tickeled my nose and I had almost overturned the flower basket.

“Wilson looked small.  I had an idea he was taller.  His face was long and his head seemed to be heavy on his neck.  And he looked old — just old.

“Now he sort of took a step toward us and said: ‘Good morning.’  One of the delegation insisted afterward that he said:  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ but I think he said merely ‘Good morning.’

“He shook hands with us.  His hands felt dry and shaky in mine, like nothing much.  His voice sort of shook.  He evidentally was under a great strain.  He could scarcely look the two ex-soldiers in the face.  I believe he thought that I was an ex-soldier, too, because of my lame leg; he hardly looked at me either.

“After shaking our hands, he stepped back to the table and leaned on it with his left hand.

“I was sort of sorry for him.  I wondered if he was still under the effects of our demonstration on him the day before.  I almost wished we hadn’t pulled it.

“Well, we stood there before Wilson, the five of us, all of us, I guess, feeling pretty nervous.  Harry Link held the petition in his hand and shifted the wight of his body from one foot to the other.  He was a great big six-footer and built like an ox; had been wounded in the war.

“Wilson then nodded to the floorwalker, who stood to one side, and the floorwalker withdrew.

“I guess Wilson waited for us to speak, and there was a long and awkward silence.  Harry Link cleared his throat and was going to speak, but couldn’t.  Instead, he just handed Wilson the petition.  Wilson took it.  His hand shook pretty badly.  Harry cleared his throat again, but couldn’t get a word out.  It was awful.  I felt the blood rushing to my face.

“Wilson didn’t look at any of us, only at Harry Link for a second.  Then, when Harry said nothing, Wilson placed the petition on the table and said something to the effect that he would read it immediately.  I don’t remember his exact words.  I watched his face, which looked very bad — long and gray.  His long narrow jaw moved up and down, and his voice, while fairly clear, was sort of unnatural, or so it seemed to me.  Perhaps the acoustics of the big room made it sound the way.  I can’t quite describe it.  I remember it vaguely.  The whole experience was a little fantastic, unreal.

“According to the rehersals the night beore, each of us was supposed to make a speech, but I was the only one who managed to say anything.  There was another long silence, and then I said:  “Mr. President, attached to the petition are the signatures of over one thousand of our fellow workers, all of them citizens of the United States.  We could have secured ten thousand signatures, but until last night we thought we would not be allowed to present the petition to you.’

“Wilson looked at me for a moment.  Then he said that he was sorry that obstacles had been placed in our way when we had first planned to call on him.  He added that he had been displeased upon hearing of the local reception committee’s decision to bar us from him.  His voice shook.  His right hand shook, too, until he finally gripped the lapel of his coat.

“I almost wished I hadn’t come along with the delegation.  Man, but I felt lousy!  My own voice, when I spoke, sounded strange in that big room.  I was pretty well balled up, standing under that high ceiling, the thick, soft rug under my feet, feeling sorry for Wilson.  I barely heard what he said; later I had to check on his words with the other four men.  They were all mixed up too.

“I was supposed to have said: ‘. . . all of them citizens of the United States, and, Sir, many of them ex-soldiers and ex-sailors who have served in the war to make the world safe for democracy.’  But I forgot to say that last part.  I’m glad I did; there was no use rubbing it in about making the world safe for democracy, though, of course, at the time I wasn’t thinking of that.  I had spoken at hundreds of workers’ meetings, but now I was all mixed up.

“Wilson looked pretty bad, but perhaps he was the leasst flustered man in the room — that is, outwardly.  Inwardly, I’m sure he was worse off then all five of us put together.  I think it took all his self-control to keep his chin up.

“A couple of times during the interview he closed his eyes for a few moments and there was a little muscular movement on his face.  With his eyes closed he looked even worse than when he had them open.

“I don’t believe we were in there more than four or five minutes, and I was glad when it was over.  Towards the last I felt sort of weak all over and dizzy in my head.  It was the goddamnedest experience I ever had.

“Finally, the door opened and in came the floorwalker and stopped at the door, near the flower basket.

“Then Wilson again shook hands with us.  He said, “Thank you,’ and we went out.  I saw him take a few steps after us, then he stopped in the middle of the big carpet and bowed a little.  He looked like a ghost.

“The floorwalker and the Army officer got us out into the corridor, which was full of newspaper men.  They wanted to know our names.  What? … why? … when?  They fired questions at us.  But I said the other four not to talk; to hell with them.

“We got out in the street and jumped in a street car.  I almost missed it because, with my leg, I couldn’t walk as fast as the others.

“‘Christ almight!’ said Harry Link.  He was sweating, although it wasn’t hot at all.

“We couldn’t talk about it for an hour or more.  We had been before the President of the United States– and what a mess he was!  A pale old man standing in the middle of a big room, under a high ceiling, with a bowed head.

“Everything was a mess.  The whole country.  I thought to myself that Wilson, in his fine cutaway coat and striped pants, and we, in our working clothes, were just the opposite poles of the same mess.  Here in that luxurious hotel-room, we suddenly met for a few minutes and — well, I don’t know.  It was pretty queer, the whole thing, believe me.  I had no feeling against him.  I only thought what a mess he was.  A goddamn tragedy — the President of the United States, the most powerful ruler on earth, but unable to do anything for us — the workers — although I don’t doubt now that in his heart he was for us.  He couldn’t do anything about the biggest problem in the country, in the world — the problem of the distribution of wealth.  Helpless — the President of the United States.  Nobody could do anything.

“I felt like two cents for pulling that demonstration on him the day before.  I was my idea.  It was as unfair to him to pull a thing like that on him as it was for the capitalists to exploit us.

by Louis Adamic, October 1930, American Mercury

“Well, by and by the bands began to play — there were several of them along the route — and Wilson was driven through the city.  The mob cheered him till you couldn’t hear the music.

“He was all dolled up as a great statesman should be and he waved his plug hat and bowed a little now and then, acknowledging the ovation of the people.  The President of the United States!  It was a great event in Seattle.

“Secret Service men moved along the crowd just a little ahead of the presidential car, which was surrounded by cops on motorcycles.  And behind it were other machines, carrying other great men — rolling slowly to give the mob a chance to cheer them a long time.  There were ten or twenty blocks of cheering maniacs.

“Then, all of a sudden, Wilson came to a block where everything was quiet.  Hundreds of grimy working men, interspersed with women, stood still and silent on both sides of the street.  Not a cheer, not a sound, not a move.  Most of the men didn’t even look at him; some of them, of course, couldn’t resist giving him the once-over, but everybody was instructed to look past him.  Only a couple of kids were pushing and yelling here and there, which made the wobblies’ silence and immobility even more terrible.

“I naturally had a personal interest in the thing.  I stood on the edge of the sidewalk, between two ex-soldiers in overseas caps, on the left-hand side of the street in the first wobbly block.  A policeman was planted right in front of me, but I could see Wilson over the cop’s shoulder.

“He stood in the machine.  He smiled as he came to our block.  Then the smile went off his face — like that,” snapping his fingers.  “He knew that we were IWW’s, I guess, but he didn’t know what to make of it.  He looked flabbergasted.  Back there the mob had cheered him till you couldn’t hear the music; here these dirty bums didn’t even move, but stood like statues, and among them were dozens of ex-soldiers.

“He continued to stand in the car, but it was obvious that he wanted to sit down.  He looked stern.  His frame looked sort of limp and hunched up.  The hand holding his tall hat hung by his side.  His face looked old and saggy.

“The music behind him now sounded clear and awful.  A second before it couldn’t be heard for the mob’s noise, now you heard nothing but music and the roar of the cops’ motorcycles.

“The car moved on — slowly.  Then there was another block of still, silent wobblies in denim overalls, their arms crossed on their chests, printed hatbands on their hats and caps, most of them not looking at Wilson, but straight ahead, past him.  Thousands of them.  Block after block — five blocks.

“It was dramatic as hell — believe me.

“At the third block Wilson sat down besid his wife.  I guess he had to because he couldn’t stand up any longer.  Those who saw him there said that he seemed to be crumpling up.  He put on his tall hat, a little to one side.  He had been told that the wobblies were out, but I guess he didn’t expect anything like this.  He was white as a sheet and hunched over.

“Beyond the wobby blocks there were more cheering people, but Wilson didn’t stand up again.  He merely waved his hand and smiled sort of weakly to the mob.

“Afterward we heard that the newspaper men who accompanied the presidential party were asked not to play up the demonstration too much; it might only fan the anti-Red hysteria; and most of them reported it with great restraint or ignored it altogether.  The New York Times man, for instance, saw fit to print only that the IWW had been ‘undemonstrative,’ which gave the reception a ‘sinster note.’  I happened to see the write-up and have the clipping somewhere.

by Louis Adamic, October 1930, American Mercury

“The idea caught on right away.  Everybody thought it was a great stunt.  It spread around in no time and all the wobblies in Seattle got excited about it, and they also heard about in in Tacoma, Spokane, Centralia, Walla Walla and as far down as Portland and Eureka.  They even heard about in the woods hundreds of miles inland.

“We only had about a week to organize the stunt, and it had to be done more or less in secret so that it would hit them as a surprise.  You see, we still weren’t thinking of playing a trick on Wilson, but merely of getting with Ole Hanson and his bunch.

“Days passed.  Monday or Tuesday somebody else, I don’t know who, improved on my idea by suggesting that we pring thousands of hatbands inscribed ‘Release Political Prisoners!’, which we did.  We would thus present our petition to Wilson anyhow; he could read it while he drove past us.

“Thursday and Friday nights we held special meetings all over town to instruct the wobbly mob where to assemble and how to act when Wilson came by.

“On those two nights I couldn’t sleep a wink.  As I have said, it was my idea.  I was as excited as hell about it.  I began to see now that this wouldn’t be merely getting even with Ole, but that we were pulling a stunt on the President of the United States.  I knew how susceptible Wilson was to public response.  How would our lack of response affect him?  And would it work?  You can imagine how a thing like this can flop at the last minute.  Would the public interfere when they saw us assemble?

“But it looked great.  All day Friday and on Saturday in the afternoon wobblies poured into Seattle from Tacoma, Spokane, Centralia and elsewhere, including the lumber camps in the woods — hundreds of them, from everywhere.

“Then Saturday afternoon came.  Wilson was in town.  He had been cheered in Tacoma; in fact, he had been cheered, more or less, wherever he had stopped and given the people a chance to see him.

“In Seattle everything was closed and tens of thousands turned out to see him and hail him.  The streets he was to pass along were jammed.

“The reception was scheduled for two o’clock, but we had our mob out long before one.  We occupied five long blocks near the end of the route, on both sides of the street.  There must have been five thousands of us; some say ten thousand, but that’s exaggerated; and we packed the sidewalks from the walls of the buildings to the curb.  The great unwashed; all of us wearing grimy working clothes, blue-denim over-alls and blue working shirts with sleeves rolled — outcasts, the scum — some of them six feet and a half, great big fellows, Bohunks and squareheads, with powerful arms and necks, chests like barrels.

“We had the five blocks that we had packed out all to ourselves.  The respectable mob naturally steered clear of us.  We were pariahs, the ugly big boil that Dr. Ole Hanson was trying to cut open and cure.

“At first the cops were sort of excited as we began to mass together, but they didn’t know what to do about it.  There were too many of us, and more were coming.  Thousands of us.  And some of the lumberjacks and dockwallopers looked as if they could eat five cops apiece for breakfast.  Beside, how would it look if they tried to chase off the streets when, so far as they knew at the moment, all we wanted was to see the President?

“The chief of police was all flustered.  He rode by us in his machine several times with a worried face, but finally — perhaps after a consultation with Ole — it was decided to let us alone.  I guess they figured it was for the best.  They didn’t want to have a riot in the city while the President was there.  Also, by being all together we would not contaminate the good people of the town further up the street.

“Most of us wore the hatbands: ‘Release Political Prisoners!’  We had many ex-soldiers in the movement; they wore their overseas caps and we put them out in front so that Wilson could see them.

by Louis Adamic, October 1930, American Mercury

I.  In the Spring of 1923, working on the docks at San Pedro, in California, I knew a good many IWW’s.  The movement was then at its height on the Coast, and they were just starting a new longshoremen’s union in the harbor.  Most of the leaders and organizers with whom I came in contact seemed to me to be more or less lopsided fanatics, given to over-dramatizing themselves and their caus.

Perhaps the most level-headed and philosophical of the lot was a tall, gangling fellow, forty-five or so, sharp-featured, with deep-sunken brown eyes and bushy eyebrows, and his left leg stiff in the knee, which in walking made him swing it out sideways in a semi-circle.  He was obviously unwell, but still energetic; always coughing slightly, clearing his throat.  He had a suggestion of the Indian in his leathery, long face and dark straight hair, which was beginning to gray over the ears; later, when we got acquainted, he told me his was quarter Indian, and a native of Colorado.

One day someone pointed to him in an IWW hangout:  “That’s Jack Kipps, the guy who assassinated Woodrow Wilson.”

I took this as some sort of wobby joke and thought little of it at the time.  The wobblies were full of wild stories.  Wilson, in fact, then was still living.

Later I met Kipps, off and on, in the room of a mutual friend, and in the course of a few months he told me, in snatches, probably all there was to know about him.

As a very young man he had been a miner in Colorado.  Early in the 1900’s he became a Socialist and developed into an agitator for the radical Western Federation of Miners.  He had known Bill Haywood and liked to talk of him.  He had had but a few years’ schooling; was self-educated and read, unlike most wobblies, not only radical literature, but everything else that he thought worthwhile and could lay his hands on.

In the so-called Ludlow Massacre in 1913, in which thirty or more working people were killed by employers’ gunmen in a labor dispute, Kipps was shot in his left knee; hence his stiff leg.

During the war he laid low.  Having trouble with his chest, he went to the Mojave Desert in Calironia and read Plutarch’s Lives and re-read Dickens and Fielding’s “Tom Jones.”

His health strengthened after the Armistice and he drifted to Seattle, where, in the Spring of 1919, a powerful IWW movement sprang up almost overnight.  Ole Hanson was mayor of the city and immediately gained national prominence as a 105% American by his efforts to suppress the wobblies.  The country was being swept by the first wave of anti-Red hysteria.  There were great strikes along Pugent Sound.  The wobblies tied up the port of Seattle, and gangs of American Legion heroes warred upon them.

Kipps soon attained to a sort of leadership among the Seattle IWW’s.  He wrote pieces for Solidarity and other wobbly sheets, which often printed his portrait, playing up his part-Indian ancestry to offset the patriots’ charge that the movement was un-American and appealed only to “foreign scum.”  He was a leader of the faction that opposed dynamite, arson, gunfire and slugging; he advocated, instead, what he called “non-violent violence” or “the force of numbers.”  He published a pamphlet on the subject.

II.  One evening, in San Pedro, I remarked to him that I had heard wobblies refer to him as the man who had assassinated Woodrow Wilson; what did they mean by that?  I expected him to laugh at my question, but he didn’t, though I knew him to have an active sense of humor.  He just sat silent, evidently reluctant to talk about it.

Curious, I urged him to explain to me what the IWW understood by “the assassination of Woodrow Wilson.”

Then he began:

“It happened in Seattle in 1919.  As you know, in August of that year, Wilson went on his swing around the country, to appeal to the people for his League of Nations, which the ‘pigmy minds’ in the Senate were determined to kill.  He spoke in all the bigger cities and wherever he came the mob cheered him — not quite as wildly as he had been cheered in Europe a few months before, but still.

“According to his schedule, he was due in Seattle on September 13.  As you know, the IWW’s were then definitely on the up and up in Seattle, and so about the first of the month we accounced that when Wilson came a delegation of wobblies would call on him and present to him a petition for the release of the political prisoners in the Federal penitentiaries.  Of course we didn’t expect him to act on our request, but we figured that presenting the petition would be good propaganda.

“But we no sooner gave out our announcement than the politicians in charge of the preparations let it be known the effective steps would be taken to prevent the wobblies from ‘annoying’ the President.  That was the word they used — annoying him.  It appeared that we were unworthy of consideration from anybody in authority.  We were an ‘outlaw organization’ made up of un-American, low-down foreign scum — an ulcer on the fair and otherwise immaculate body of the Republic.

“Naturally, although scum, we didn’t like this sort of treatment, but we knew that if they wanted to, they could keep our delegation from coming near Wilson.  They had their cops and soldiers.

“For two or three days we didn’t know what to do about it.  But we couldn’t let Ole Hanson and his gang of petty politicians, and the American Legion, lick us.

“Just then, we were talking a good deal among ourselves about non-violent violence and the force of mere numbers.  I was hot for that idea, and still am.  So I began to figure how we could get the best of Ole.  I hated the little squarehead — not because he was against us, but because he was such a small-time opportunist.  I had nothing much against Wilson, and that was true of most wobblies.

“We had numbers.  Some of the biggest unions in Seattle were IWW organizations.

“Then I got an idea — an inspiration.

“The idea seemed wonderful to me, and so I got together about a dozen wobs who were sort of active on the agitation end of the movement, and I said to them: ‘When Wilson is driven through the streets in a machine so that the mob can see him and cheer him, why don’t we — thousands of us — line up along certain blocks along the route, all of us dressed in our working clothes, sleeves rolled up, arms folded on our chests?  It’ll be Saturday afternoon and all the work will be suspended for the occasion, and some of us aren’t working anyhow.  We can get thousands of workers and mass them altogether, occupying, say, five or six blocks.  We can get out early so that hoi polloi can’t get those blocks.  And when Wilson comes by, we don’t give him a tumble; nobody lets out a sound of cheer and nobody claps his hands.  We just stand still, all of us, thousands of us.  Just stand still like this, our arms folded — nobody moves and everybody looks straight ahead, not at him, but at nothing at all — just stares past him — everybody still and silent.’

Previous to his coronation in Jerusalem, Tomlinson and the Theocratic Party merged their political efforts with a new political entity on the scene called The National Hamiltonian Party.  Exactly what form this merger took is unclear, for the Hamiltonians bear scant similarity to the Theocrats.The National Hamiltonian Party was founded in December 1965 by what appears to be a group of bluebloods.  Its candidate for President in 1968 is Eric Sebastian, a descendant of Alexander Hamilton and a graduate of Harvard and Oxford.  At one time he worked in the Dewey, Eisenhower, Rockefeller, and Nixon campaigns but gave up in disgust in 1960.  He noted with sadness “the degradation of blintz – eating politics that was forced on a truly aristocratic man” such as Rockefeller.

Other leaders in the Party are Adrian Tilt, like Sebastian a stockbroker by trade; Lindsay Williams and Maxwell Byrnes, both bankers; J. Thomas Aldrich, who complained that he had to run against “an unbelievable assortment of ambitious politicians” in Maryland’s Sixth Congressional District; and Mannings Claiborne Case, who claims relationship to a number of well-known Louisianans of the past and who is described as a writer, a political and philosophical commentator, a philanthropist, and a plantation owner.  Case unsuccessfully contested the Senate seat now held by Allen Ellender.

Eric Sebestian, in opening his campaign for the 1968 race, said on 4 July 1966:  “We, of the National Hamiltonian Party stand proudly together, united and determined to return America to the hands of the aristocracy.  We are now calling for a return to the this form of government as set forth in the Constitution:  Rule by the Aristocrats!”  Hamiltonain literature notes that Sebastian has entered the 1968 race with several disadvantages:  “… he is educated, he is intelligent, and he is disdainful of stupidity.  As we know, stupidity is the one quality that has been identified [with] the average American voter.”

Hamiltonians have a five-plank platform: the return to the election of Senators by state legislatures; the return to the election of the president by independent electors, not by the popular vote; a reorganization of the tax system in order to “encourage success”; the abolition of Constitutional Amendments Thirteen through Twenty-Two; and the restriction of voting rights “to educated land-owning leaders.”  The Party’s slogan is a quote from Alexander Hamilton:  “Your People, Sir, Are A Great Beast.”

Sebastian promises not to bow and scrape for votes.  Nor will he accept support from any group that he considers to be beneath the dignity of the office.  President Johnson and vice-president Humphrey he refers to as “peasants” who have squandered the respect of the free world by such actions as riding on a merry-go-round and showing off an abdominal scar.

How the Hamiltonians and the Theocrats will work together may prove to be one of the more fascinating demonstrations of political skill of the twentieth century.  Neither has much in common except considerable idealism and patriotism.  Tomlinson, for one, is unconcerned with the details.  [… [“God will work them out.”] ]

The Farther Shores of Politics:  The American Political Fringe Today, George Thayer, 1968

While the liberals celebrated, the Republicans meditated, and their conclusions made them just so many floats in the triumphal parade for Fair Dealer Harry Truman.  “Does the Republican Party Have a Future?” asked the grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge, and his answer was affirmative only if the party established a “liberal record.”  The Saturday Evening Post, of all magazines, stripped away the main argument Deweyites had been using to console themselves; a heavier vote, the Post’s analyst argued, would have meant only a more resounding victory for the Democrats.  Nobody, it seemed, was a conservative any more.  Ex-Speaker Joe Martin discovered that the GOP was too full of “plutocrats.”  Senator Taft lectured a Republican caucus on the wisdom of backing “welfare measures”, and Senator Wherry let it be known that “fundamentalist” rather than “conservative” was the proper adjective for his philosophy.  Thomas Dewey used the occasion of his first major statement after the election to tongue-lash Republicans who “try to go back to the 19th century, or even to the 1920s.”  They “ought to … try to get elected in a typical American community and see what happens to them,” said Dewey, who spoke with considerable authority on the subject.

—- Eric F Goldman Rendezvous With Destiny
A History of Modern American Reform, 1952

Just a passing thought word alterations in the “liberal” / “progressive” dichotemy (words have just been dropped on us interchangable, aren’t they?  Latter adopted after the former lost favor.  Actually it is that reason that I tend to cringe whenever I hear or read the word “progressive”, unless referring to something from the first two decades of the last century.)
Of course, the conservatives in 1948 quickly caught sight of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and they were all set.

Going inito the archives of The New York Times with the phrase “first negro president”, and pushing past “first” for various institutions to the heart of “first” for The United States, I am a bit surprised at how late any reference to the hypothetical comes up.  Maybe I have the parlance wrong — was it “negroe” at some point until they dropped the “e”, was there a negroid in the last part of the nineteenth century? — “First colored president” doesn’t throw me anywhere until 1976 — at the end maybe I ought to just drop the “first” and I’d pull something there?

But here are the names of the first two “First Negro Presidents”, at least as recorded in the anals of the New York Times, the “Paper of Record”.

6-25-1962… Comic Turns Quips Into Tuition … by Paul Gardner

The Gaslight Cafe, a subterranean coffeehouse in Greenwich Village, is featuring a young Negro comic who is working his way through college by hurling verbal spears at the relations between Whites and Negroes.

He is Bill Cosby, a 24 year old physical education major at Temple University, here for the summer to polish his style, collect new material, and save money for the fall Semester. […]

Mr. Cosby may startle them with a bit of unorthodox poetry, such as “Roses are red, violets are blue, grass is green — and dirt is brown.”

Occasionally he may threaten an unsmiling patron with the cryptic order:  “You better laugh.  I’ve got a club that’s the opposite of the Ku Klux Klan.”

In a skit in which he impersonates the first Negro President in the White House, Mr. Cosby says to an imaginary friend, “Yeh, baby, everything’s fine, except a lot of ‘for sale’ signs are going up on this block.”

The article went on to say that Bill Cosby felt he was having trouble finding a distinctive delivery.  Also he may just get tired of show business anyway.

Continuing, in May of 1965 the Irving Wallace book The Man, which “concerned itself with the first Negro President of the U.S.”, topped the best-seller’s list.  This might be a good curiosity seeker’s read at the moment, something along the lines of looking over to youtube to grab ahold of Robert Kennedy on “Voice of America” saying that race relations were moving so fast that the US may find itself with the first Black President… well, eight years ago, but never mind that.

The novel was made into a tv movie, as shown in the 7-9-1971 headline “Jones Plays Black President for TV Film”.  Here we find the Second “first negro president.”  Skip forward in the article to a name:

He is James Earl Jones, who starred in “The Great White Hope” and other films and plays.  He is now making a two-hour movie about the first Negro to become the president.

So, for the record, the First First Black President was Bill Cosby, and the Second First Black President was James Earl Jones.  Barack Obama will just have to be content standing on their shoulders as the First Black President in Actuality.

I doubt that the search for the “first negro vice-president” would gent any sooner, as it is a less scintilizing prospect.  I know that columnists for the New York Times and other elite opinion-meisters speculated on it for the 1972 presidential campaign, dove-tailing with a Nixon dirty trick strategy with CREEP plotting to rouse up the rabble in “those neighborhoods” of the inner-city so they would DEMAND a black vice presidential candidate from the early presumptive Democratic nominee, Edmund Muskie.  A sure defeat for the Democrats would have followed, a landslide defeat and electoral stain that would have taken the Democrats a generation to overcome.

Anyway…

3rd Century BCE:  In order to stop inflation, Roman Emperor Diocletian fixed prices on consumer goods and declared that anyone who charged extra would be put to death.  This led people to hoard commodities.  In response, Diocletian banned hoarding under punishment of death, at which time terrified citizens began shutting down their businesses altogether.  Naturally, the Emperor decreed they had to stay open.  The punishment?  Death of course.

This comes from the latest issue of Mental Floss, on the sidebar to “4 Other Times the US Economy Tanked”, a list of 3 good examples and one that shouldn’t belong, and a sidebar on World Historic Economic Tankings.  Cynics amongst us can tell us if the principals of Diocletian aren’t basically replicated in a softer, fuzzier version.

As for the rest of Mental Floss — if you’re not interested in this, maybe you’d be more interested in the article listing examples of Famous Feral Children?

And, incidentally, the magazine got his year wrong by a suffix — AD, not BCE.