1800s
Today in Labor History January 20, 1872: Filipino soldiers staged a bloody revolt against Spanish rule known as the Cavite Mutiny. Around 200 locally recruited colonial troops and laborers rose up hoping that it would escalate into a national uprising. However, government forces quickly put down the mutiny. They executed many of the participants and cracked down on the independence movement. Nevertheless, it marked the beginning of a movement that would eventually lead to the Philippine Revolution of 1896
Today in Labor History January 20, 1888: American blues musician and songwriter, Lead Belly, was born. Lead Belly usually played a twelve-string guitar, but he also played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin and windjammer. He served several prison terms between 1915 and 1939. Folklorists John Lomax, and his son Alan Lomax, recorded him in prison in 1933 and 1934 for the Library of Congress. Lead Belly recorded numerous songs about work, poverty, prison, racism and discrimination, such as “Bourgeois Blues,” “The Gallis Pole,” “Take This Hammer,” “John Henry,” and “The Red Cross Store Blues.”
1920s-1940s
Today in Labor History January 20, 1925: Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan priest, poet, and politician was born. Cardinal was a liberation theologian. He also founded the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived from 1965–1977. When the Sandinistas (FSLN) took power, they chose him to be minister of culture from 1979-1987. He quit the FSLN in 1994, protesting the autocratic rule of Daniel Ortega. Cardinal called it “a dictatorship not a revolutionary movement.”
Today in Labor History January 20, 1946: 750,000 US steel workers went on strike as part of a post-war strike wave that encompassed well over a million workers.
1980s
Today in Labor History January 20, 1986: Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” topped the music charts on this date. The song, a eulogy for dying industrial cities, includes the lines: “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores / Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more / They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks / Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to your hometown / Your hometown / Your hometown / Your hometown . . .”