Today in Labor History January 18, 1788: The First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay, Australia, with 736 convicts from Great Britain. It took over 250 days to reach its destination. The penal colony became the first European settlement in Australia. Mary Bryant, with her husband, children and 6 other convicts escaped the colony and eventually returned to England. Many believe the British deliberately brought people carrying smallpox on the voyage in order to decimate the indigenous population.
1920s
Today in Labor History January 18, 1920: N.Y. ruled that schools could fire teachers for Communist Party membership.
1940s
Today in Labor History January 18, 1943: The first uprising of Jews began in the Warsaw Ghetto, marking the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In the summer of 1942, the Nazis deported over a quarter million Jews from the ghetto to Treblinka and murdered them. In response, the remaining Jews began building bunkers and smuggling weapons and explosives into the ghetto.
On January 18, 1943, when the Nazis began their second deportation of the Jews, the armed insurgency began. They fought with whatever they could smuggle into the ghetto: handguns, gasoline bottles and a few other weapons. They inflicted enough casualties on the Nazis that they halted deportation within a few days. Consequently, the Nazis deported only 5,000 Jews, instead of the 8,000 planned.
The Jews knew from the start that the uprising was doomed. Most of the Jewish fighters did not expect to survive. Rather, they saw their resistance as a battle for their honor and a protest against the world’s silence. Marek Edelman, one of the few survivors, said their inspiration to fight was “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths.”
Today in Labor History January 18,1943: Mary Kenney O’Sullivan died on this date. She was the first American Federation of Labor (AFL) woman organizer. She also organized the Woman’s Bookbinder Union in 1880. And she was a founder of the National Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1903.
1970s-1980s
Today in Labor History January 18, 1978: Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” hit the top of the Billboard music charts.
Today in Labor History January 18, 1983: The International Olympic Committee restored Jim Thorpe‘s Olympic medals to his family. Jim Thorpe (Wa-Tho-Huk) was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation and an Indigenous American athlete and Olympic gold medalist. He is considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, winning two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics (one in classic pentathlon and the other in decathlon). He also played professional football and baseball. They stripped him of his Olympic titles when they discovered he played two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, violating the amateurs-only rule of the era.