Today in Labor History September 7: 1850s-1860s
Today in Labor History September 7, 1857: Mormon settlers slaughtered most of the members of a peaceful, emigrant wagon train in the Mountain Meadows massacre. The Mormons dressed as Piutes. They also hired actual Piutes to help in the attack, so the authorities would blame Indians instead of Mormons. In 1877, the authorities indicted nine of the perpetrators. However, they only executed one.
Today in Labor History September 7: 1910s
September 7, 1860: Giuseppe Garibaldi & his troops entered Naples, helping to consolidate the different states of the Italian Peninsula into a single state, the Kingdom of Italy. The rebellions of the 1820s and 1830s, and the revolutions of 1848, inspired Garibaldi’s revolutionary fervor. Garibaldi was a native of Nice (then part of Piedmont). He participated in the Piedmont uprising of 1834. As a result, the authorities sentenced him to death. However, he escaped to South America and spent fourteen years in exile. While there, he took part in several wars, and learned the art of guerrilla warfare before his return to Italy.
September 7, 1911: The French authorities arrested poet Guillaume Apollinaire for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre Museum. They released him after a week. The crime had been committed by his former secretary. Apollinaire was one of the foremost poets of the early 20th century, as well as one of the most impassioned defenders of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism. Apollinaire wrote one of the first Surrealist literary works, the play “The Breasts of Tiresias” (1917). Many of the young surrealist writers admired him during his lifetime (Breton, Aragon, Soupault). Apollinaire died during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
Today in Labor History September 7: 1970s-1980s
Today in Labor History September 7, 1977: Workers in Ghaziabad, India, burned a factory and lynched two finks, with 40,000 going on strike in solidarity with insurgents.
September 7, 1992: Troops opened fire on thousands of nonviolent African National Congress demonstrators, in the Ciskei “homeland” South Africa, murdering 28.
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