The Struggle for California’s “White Gold”: The Making of LA’s Modern Metropolis

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Environmental, Natural Environment, Popular Culture, Regional History


In 1900 the population of Los Angeles was 102,479, the 36th largest city in the USAⓐ. A couple of years into the new century the name Hollywood resonated only as a hotel, Hollywood’s legendary preeminence as the epicentre of the world’s film industry was still over a decade away. Nonetheless the city’s growing numbers were already putting pressure on the water supplies. LA’s location on a water-poor, semi-arid plane magnified those pressures. A lack of rainfall and groundwater and droughts was making the situation worse (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Owens and Mono Lakes’ (MONO Case), Case No 379, (TED Case Studies), www.web.archive.org).

Mulholland in the valley (Photo: LA Times)

A couple of ambitious engineers in the city’s water company (later the LA Board of Water and Power)—Fred Eaton (also the LA mayor) and William Mulholland—cast their eyes round for a more reliable source of water to accommodate Los Angeles’ continued growth and development. The solution lay to the northeast, in the Owens River Valley which backs on to the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. If Los Angeles owned the land here the water could be diverted to the city. The obstacle was that this was farming land with hundreds and hundreds of farmers legally ensconced on small plot-holders. The farmers’ land-holdings also gave them water rights and they had their own agenda regarding the Owens valley, they were backing a national valley reclamation project to irrigate the valley farmlands.

Mulholland (pointing), with members of his syndicate (Photo credit: www.latimes.com)

It was former mayor Eaton who started the ball rolling, at the same time setting the ethical standard for Mulholland, by securing options on riparian lands under the pretense of establishing cattle ranches (Marian L Ryan, ‘Los Angeles Newspapers Fight the Water War, 1924-1927’, Southern California Quarterly, 50(2) (June 1968)). Soon Mulholland was driving the scheme and the Los Angeles water authority set about buying up as much of the land around the Owens River as they could. Mulholland, Eaton and other local business notables including Harrison Gray Otis and Henry Huntingdon formed a business cabal which became known as the San Fernando Syndicate. The syndicate allegedly used inside knowledge (the plan to build a aqueduct connecting the valley to the city) to buy up land that would become highly profitable (‘William Mulholland’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

Cottonwood Creek diversion conduct and Owens Lake in background (wwww.owensvalleyhistory.com)

Mulholland’s vision for LA’s prosperity was dependent on the monopolisation of the valley’s water, but he was completely unscrupulous in the way he went about it, “employ(ing) chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies” to secure the water LA needed (‘Reading Los Angeles.: Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert’, (Christopher Hawthorne), LA Times, 29-Jun-2011,  www.latimesblogs.latimes.com). The cagey, Belfast-born Mulholland deceived Owens Valley farmers and also misled the Angelenos as well by grossly understating the quantity of water that would be taken for LA.

Route of the LA aqueduct (Image: www.owensvalleyhistory.com)

The syndicate, from 1905 on, bought up strategic parcels of land piecemeal in the valley (by 1928 90% of the water rights were in Mulholland’s hands). The City of Los Angeles meanwhile built a 375km-long aqueduct (completed in 1913) to siphon off the water from the Owens River. Some of the water was diverted to irrigate the San Fernando Valley but most went via the aquifer to service the needs of the LA metropolis. (‘The Water Fight That Inspired “Chinatown”’, Felicity Barringer, 25-Apr-2012, (Green),  www.green.blogs.nytimes.com).

The problem with the proposed Owens Valley Reclamation Project, which had it gone ahead would have stymied Mulholland’s plans, was already taken care of. Mulholland through his political connexions in Washington lobbied the US president, Theodore Roosevelt, who squashed the project (‘The Los Angeles Aqueduct’). This was viewed by the farm settlers as a public act of betrayal (‘The Valley of Broken Hearts’, C.E. Kunze, The San Francisco Call (1924), in ‘Owens Valley’s – Los Angeles Aqueduct’, (Owens Valley), www.owensvalleyhistory.com). In time the Owens Valley farmers amd ranchers realised the enormity of the threat to them…by 1926 Owens Lake was completely dry. Frustrated, angered and rebellious, they attempted to retaliate through acts of sabotage, in 1924 blowing up the aqueduct. Mulholland responded by calling in armed guards, conflicts occurred and tensions ran high over water access. A second flashpoint occurred when Owens Valley activists aided by a local scofflaw element commandeered the Alabama Gates section of the aqueduct resulting in a four-day standoff. Afterwards Mulholland hired Pinkerton private detectives to track the ‘culprits’ and ‘ringleaders’. Other incidents escalated the conflict including more dynamiting of the infrastructure in 1927ⓑ (‘The Water War that Polarized 1920s California’, (Gary Krist), Literary Hub, 17-May-2018,  www.lithub.com ; ‘New Perspectives on the West’, ‘William Mulholland (1855-1935)’, www.pbs.org).

Detectives investigating the scene (Photo: LA Times)

Mulholland eventually came out on top in the ‘war’ due to a combination of factors, “determination and deceit” on his part, but also because the Inyo County Bank folded , taking with it most of the ranchers and farmers’ savings. Personally for Mulholland though, he had just a modicum of time to savour his victory. In 1928 the collapse of St Francis Dam cost nearly 500 lives and caused widespread devastation of property and crops. As he had been project engineer, Mulholland was blamed for the disaster and forced to resign in disgrace (‘New Perspectives’, PBS). By 1930 the handful of remaining farm-owners, with unviable land having lost their irrigating water—the “white gold” as they called it—and confronted with droughts, their only one recourse was ultimately enforced migration (Kunze, ‘Owens Valley’).

Mono Basin, Cal.

The Los Angeles Water Department (even after Mulholland’s esclipse) continued the search for new sources of water, one scheme sought to extend the LA aqueduct to the Mono Basin. Local farmers after eventually realising that Mono Lake was staring down the same fate as Owens Lake, took action to save it from destruction (‘Mono Lake’)ⓒ.

The Los Angeles water authority’s and Mulholland’s diverting of the Owens River and the incorporation of the San Fernando Valley into LA’s municipal boundaries, paved the way for LA’s eventual growth into a mega-sized city by any standardsⓓ (Hawthorne). But this achievement was at devastating and irreparable cost to the Owens Valley environment which became no longer viable as a farming community… the Owens River was reduced to a trickle and the Owens Lake ecosystem destroyed (Barringer).

Endnote: Chinatown backdrop

The story of the LA water wars and the Californian “water czar” William Mulholland’s machinations inspired the 1974 cult neo-noir mystery film Chinatown. Polanski’s film uses the historic 1920s conflicts as backdrop for a fictional detective story in which the persona of the larger-than-life Mulholland is represented by two characters: the visionary and straight dealing Hollis Mulwray, and the Machiavellian über-schemer Noah Cross (Barringer).

ᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽᴽ

ⓐ ‘Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1900’. United States Census Bureau, June 15, 1998
ⓑ prompting LA newspaper of the day The Gridiron to report that “Civil War Threatened” as “L.A. Faces Water Famine”, (11-Jun-1927)
ⓒ Mulholland and Los Angeles also looked at tapping into the Colorado River to replenish the city’s water supplies but this proved logistically too difficult even for Mulholland
ⓓ 9,000,000 people by 1994

The Emperors of Vice and Crime of Shànghâi‘s Yesteryear

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

This piece in the China Daily Show caught my eye recently…”the first season of CSI’s much-anticipated ‘Shanghai’ spin-off has been cancelled, after scriptwriters failed to take into account the East Coast city’s complete absence of crime”. It goes on to say, “plotlines involving corruption, sexual harassment and high-end ergotou[𝕒] were shelved after quality-control cadres for the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) cited an ’insufficient suspension of disbelief’ for viewers”[𝕓].

🔺 The formula: the standard Shànghâi period crime series

This amused me, less for the satirical tone inherent in the piece (CSI detectives investigating “high level wok theft”), but because every time I switch on the television in China and flick through the drama offerings on China’s subscription network,  a more than healthy proportion of the fare seems to be fixated on 1930s Shànghâi noir and underground crime gangs.

Chinese television entertainment csars of course trade on the viewing public’s nostalgia for a past time where Shànghâi pulsated to a rhythm of decadence, glamorous nightspots and ostentatious ritzy opulence, counterposed against an underbelly of sin, gangland warfare and corrupt police. While these television series, such as the popular Meng’s Palace and New Bund, are pure and typically exaggerated fictions, the sources of their invention were very real.

If the Shànghâi of the 1920s and ‘30s that we visited in the preceding blog deserves it’s glowing epithet, “the Paris of the South”, then it’s other sobriquet, “the whore of Asia”, to describe the seedy and violent underbelly of the same city, is every bit as applicable. The “freebooting capitalism” of Shànghâi in the interwar years[𝕔] and it’s rewards, spawned a wave of criminal activity with underworld bosses vying for a bigger piece of the city’s stupendous economic pie. Like the legitimate commercial powerhouses on the Bund, the gangland “Mr Big’s” were very much part of Shànghâi’s “movers and shakers”.

The Big Three?
The conventional view of Shànghâi‘s criminal underworld in the Twenties and Thirties is that there were three main gang chiefs who ran most of the show. This triumvirate of crime was made up of Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin, …of the three gang bosses (san daheng), Zhang was of lesser significance, confined to playing a secondary role to Du. The older Huang was first to attain prominence, entering the French Concession police force and rising through the ranks to become police chief. From this advantageous post the corrupt Huang could play both sides and garner a cut of the criminal profits [𝕕].

Huang—Lin—Du
Huang was eventually dismissed from the FP constabulary which led to him going full-time as a criminal overlord. The sacked cop made his fortune with a scheme involving the stealing of incoming opium from the docks, which his gang then transported into Huang’s residence by a back entrance. Huang had the opium—which cost him zilch!—distributed throughout China through his Sanxin Company [‘Murder, Mayhem and Money’, (Ni Dandan), Global Times, 12-Mar-2013, www.globaltimes.cn]. It was the pockmarked Huang’s first wife (Lin Guisheng), an influential behind-the-scene figure in Shànghâi power circles, who provided the boost to the career of the third of the crime triumvirate. Madame Huang took on the young Du Yuesheng as a partner in a French Concession operation, the start of a business empire for Du which ultimately eclipsed that of her husband’s. Du’s power base and muscle was the much feared Green Gang, which numbered as many as 20,000 members at it’s zenith [‘Shanghai in the 1930s’, World History, http://world history.us].

Du and the Green Gang
“Big-eared” Du was a complex and fascinating figure in the Shànghâi underworld scene. As zongshi (grandmaster) of the local crime operation, he was ruthless in business and intimidating in method (he would despatch coffins to the houses of gangland rivals who had earned its displeasure as a grim warning). Yet he forbid members of his Qing Bang gang to violate women, the wealthy Du was generous and wrote off many debts owed him by friends. Du’s business scope was panoramic … opium dens, gambling shacks, prostitution rings strung out across the city, kidnapping, protection rackets, labour contracting, heroin and morphine labs, as well as more ‘legit’ activities. He also founded a boys’ school in the French Connection and was president of the Chinese Red Cross during the Sino-Japanese War. And, in a perverse twist, Du, having made a ‘motza’ from his cur of the proceeds of the opium monopoly, was ultimately made president of the “National Board of Opium Suppression Bureau”! [Derks, Hans. History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East, Ca. 1600-1950. Vol. 105, Brill, 2012. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbhdf. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020].

Du’s political ties to the Chinese republic’s political elite
Du sided with Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists in the conflict against Mao’s communists, playing a role in the 1927 Shànghâi purge. After the Japanese invasion in 1937 Du fled to Hong Kong, a move which lost him goodwill in Shànghâi. After the war Du wanted to return to the city but was not welcomed back and died in Hong Kong exile [‘The three tycoons of gangsters’ Shanghai’, Timeout, 22-Mar-2016, www.timeoutshanghai.com].

It didn’t end in a happy story for the other two ‘tycoons’ either. When the Japanese army invaded, Xiaolin switched sides and aided the Japanese efforts to root out subversive (ie, anti-Japanese) elements in Shànghâi, making him a wanted man by the Nationalists. In 1940 he was executed by one of his own bodyguards. As for Huang, his ultimate downfall was the communists’ takeover in 1949. Stripped of his great wealth, Huang was forced to submit to “self-criticism” and take up lowly work as a street sweeper (‘The three tycoons’).

1932 Hochi map of Shànghâi🔺

A Mexican ‘godfather’ of Shanghai crime?
Another name—juxtaposed against that of Du—occupied a similar senior role in the gangland power structure in Shànghâi. Carlos Garcia, a Mexican who migrated to the fabled city of the east, carved out a lucrative (illicit) business shipping Mexican tequila via Shànghâi back to prohibition-hit California. He has been depicted as the closest thing the Shànghâi underworld of the day had to a “capo di tutti capi”[𝕖]…gang boss Garcia proved indispensable in his ability to adjudicate disputes and ensure that they didn’t develop into internecine gang warfare [‘The Canidrone Tower Gang’, Paul French, (‘That’s Shanghai’), 23-Sep-2019, www.thats,mag.com].

During the 1920s and 1930s it is estimated that there was some 100,000 gangsters in Shànghâi (around three percent of the city’s population at the time) [Brian G Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937, (1996)]. The vice empires of Du and his ilk were built on control over the city’s prostitution, gambling and drug trade, especially opium.

The law-enforcers’ role
The city’s police, tempted by tangible graft and corruption all around, were inherently weak, explaining why Shànghâi fell prone to unchecked lawlessness and gangsterhood. Irredeemable “bad apples” like the discredited Huang thrived in the tainted civil police agencies of 1920s and ’30s Shànghâi. The individual carve-up of the city constabulary into three distinct and unrelated entities, added to the police’s overall inefficiency. Law enforcement suffered hugely as a result of the absence of a single, paramount city police force, making it very difficult for the police to operate strategically and cohesively to rein in the city’s countless ’villains’ [‘The Shanghai Settlements’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Endnote: Gangs of old Shànghâi
Carlos Garcia’s key role in the city’s crime business is a reminder of the importance of the non-Chinese element in the Shànghâi underworld.  As well as Garcia, there were other “blow-ins”, characters like ’Lucky’ Jack Riley. Riley, an escaped convict from the US, “lucked-in” in a big way on settling in the inter-war East Asian crime capital. Riley succeeded in cornering the Shànghâi slot machine market (patronised heavily by the foreign military personnel in residence), and with a Jewish criminal associate, he ran from a business from Shànghâi servicing prohibition-era America’s habit for heroin. Roaming the mean streets of 1930s Shànghâi were a host of multicultural gangs—Portuguese gangs, Spanish gangs, Mexican gangs, Jewish gangs, etc—giving the cosmopolitan edge of Shànghâi another dimension [‘Those Rogue Foreigners Ruled the Streets of 1930s Shanghai’, (Seth Ferrenti), Vice Media, 22-Jun-2018, www.vice.com].

﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏﹏

[𝕒] a white-coloured liquor (a type of baijiu) popular in China; literally ”second pot head”
[𝕓] “’CSI: Shanghai’ cancelled due to lack of crime”, (Ping’an Jiedao), China Daily Show, 20-Feb-2020, www.chinadailyshow.com
[𝕔] Ferranti: 2018
[𝕕]  of the several territorial police forces in Shànghâi, the French was the most corrupt – according to Bernard Wassermann, Secret War in Shanghai: Treachery, Subversion and Collaboration in the Second World War (2017, 2nd Ed.)
[𝕖] ”boss of bosses”

 


The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Economic history, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?

We’ve all heard the term bandied round—anyone who is reluctant to embrace new technology or the world of computers is labelled a Luddite. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a person who is opposed to the introduction of new working methods, especially new machines”. Many of us would also have an inkling of the term’s origins, deriving from the group of English workers in the early 19th century whose method of resisting new work technologies in Georgian factories and mills took on a very “hands-on”, destructive manner. Beginning with weavers in the textile industry in Nottinghamshire taking to the new machines with sledgehammers in protest, the movement soon spread to other parts of the Midlands and the North of England.

¤ ¤ ¤

Rampage against the machine provokes a repressive reaction
The British government wasted little time in sending in an army of soldiers(𝓪 ) in defence of capital. Their assignment was to protect the factories and quell the workers’ revolts. Parliament enacted laws making the workers’ trail of destruction against the machines a capital offence, and many of the offenders were summarily and violently dealt with (shootings, hangings, transportation to New Holland for 14 years). Consequently, the Luddite movement lost energy and cohesion and petered out within a few years [‘The Original Luddites Raged Against the Machine of the Industrial Revolution’, (Christopher Klein), History, 04-Jan-2019, www.history.com].

¤ ¤ ¤

Class loyalty
The ruling elite of the day viewed the actions of the workers in attacking the private property of employers as merely bloody-minded vandalism, a perspective that still held an attraction for some modern conservative historians in the 20th century… eminent historian JH Plumb for instance dismissed the Luddites’ revolts as nothing more than “pointless, frenzied industrial jacquerie”. But was that all there was to it, nihilism, the mindless, purposeless, random savagery of working class vandals? 

In a ground-breaking article in the early Fifties radical historian EJ Hobsbawn took issue with the conventional “nihilistic sabotage” view of historians like Plumb. Hobsbawn places the rebellious workers’ actions in their proper context, that of the Industrial Revolution and the economic vicissitudes of the period. The machine-breaking by the weavers and other workers was a direct action form of industrial strategy initiated by labour, Hobsbawn calls it “collective bargaining by riot” [EJ Hobsbawn, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present, No 1, (Feb., 1952), pp.57-70]. EP Thompson describes Luddism as “a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism” [E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (1966)](𝓫).

¤ ¤ ¤

The threat accompanying automation
Workers such as the weavers in Nottinghamshire around 1811/12 foresaw the dire implications for them of the introduction of new inventions like the mechanical loom. The economic downturn Britain experienced during the drawn-out Napoleonic Wars resulted in loss of profits for the merchants who owned the mills and factories. But it harmed working families even more…unemployment was widespread, food became scarce and therefore more expensive. Magnifying the problem, trades like the stocking knitters and the lace workers were in decline. By using the new technology, employers could increase production allowing them to engage untrained workers at lower wages. This directly and adversely affected the weavers and other artisans who had spent years learning and honing the skills of their craft. Now the new machines were being taken over by untrained workers who produced inferior work. The job security of textile craftsmen were thus imperilled, by the use of the (new) machinery in (as they saw it) “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to circumvent standard labour practices(𝓬). The danger identified, the textile workers found themselves limited in the forms of protest available to them—they could not legally form trade unions and they could not strike(𝓭 ). Smashing knitting frames and other machines was conceivably the only effective way to protest the inevitable erosion of their economic livelihood [George Binfield, quoted in Klein; ‘What is a Luddite?’, wiseGEEK, www.wisegeek.com].

¤ ¤ ¤

Not technophobes of the Industrial Revolution
Hobsbawn is at pains to stress that the protesting mill and factory workers bore no hostility to the machines per se(𝓮). Notwithstanding that the concept of trade unionism was inchoate and still barely nascent at this time, Hobsbawn describes the “wrecking (as) simply a technique of trade unions in the period before (and during) the early Industrial Revolution“. A more contemporary historian George Binfield concurs with Hobsbawn’s central thesis, stating that the derisory ‘technophobe’ tag is a mischaracterisation of the movement—the textile artisans were not against the new technology of the Industrial Revolution, but against the use of it to produce shoddy clothing and depress the wages of skilled workers (Binfield in Klein)(𝓯). Actually, far from being inept, many of the Luddites in the textile industry were highly skilled machine operators [‘What the Luddites Really Fought Against’, (Richard Conniff), Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com].

Poster notice offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the frame-breakers who attacked George Ball’s Notts. workshop in 1812 🔻

¤ ¤ ¤

Antecedents and successors of the Luddites
Luddism, as Donald MacKenzie put it, “was neither mindless, nor completely irrational, nor completely unsuccessful” [DA MacKenzie, ‘Marx and the Machine’, Technology and Culture, Vol 25, No 3, July 1984, pp.473-503]. Hobsbawn scuttles any suggestion that the Luddites’ movement was a one-off phenomena. Arguing that it’s antecedents can be traced back as far as the 17th century, he details instances of other English workers utilising the same industrial tactic as the Luddites—West of England clothing industry , 1710s-1720s; weavers in Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Devon, 1726/27(𝓰); rioting of textile workers in Melksham (Wilts), 1738; and not confined to the textiles business – coal miners employed the same wrecking tactic in the Northumberland coal-field in the 1740s (𝓱). Hobsbawn notes that the Luddites’ tactic of destroying the tools of production in a calculated fashion did not end with the movement’s swift demise. He cites the riots in Bedlington (Durham) in 1831 in which strikers wilfully wrecked the capitalists’ winding-gear.

¤ ¤ ¤

No unmitigated failure; the preventative measures tactic
Although the Luddites’ revolt ended in suppression and broken dreams, Hobsbawn makes the case that there were successes in the workers’ efforts in other episodes of machine-breaking. In some instances, the mere threat from disgruntled craftsmen to wreak havoc on factories and mills was sufficient to dissuade some employers from introducing the machinery as planned, eg, this was the case earlier with weavers in Norwich and shearmen in Wiltshire. Hobsbawn concludes that “invariably, the employer, faced with such hazards” decided to delay or not implement the new technology, cognisant of the latent threat to his property and even his own life. In several of the cases cited by the historian, the threats were a successful bargaining tool to stop employers from cuttingworkers‘ wages, and in the instance of the Northumberland coal miners, their provocative action in burning the mine’s pit-head machinery actually won themselves “a sizeable pay rise”.

🔺‘Ned Ludd’ (sometimes transcribed as Ned Lud) (Image: Granger Collection, NY)

¤ ¤ ¤

Footnote: The eponymous ‘leader’ of the movement
The Luddites’ leader was supposed to be one “Ned Ludd”, sometimes referred to as ‘General‘, ‘Captain’ or even ‘King’ Ludd. Purportedly he was an apprentice in the late 1770s who was either beaten or berated by his master and took revenge by damaging the factory’s stocking frame. It seems that in all probability Ned is apocryphal in the fashion of Robin Hood, the English personification of the mythical figure invoking social justice. Ned can be viewed as a symbolic leader for the wrongly-treated to rally round in pursuit of righting (in this instance) the workplace injustices foisted upon skilled industrial craftsmen (Ludd was even said to reside in Sherwood Forest, another nod to the inspiration of the Robin Hood legend in his invention).

(𝓪) some 12,000 troops in total were despatched, more than the number under the command of Wellington in the concurrent Peninsula War, a classic, heavy-handed overkill by the British authorities 

(𝓫) one writer applies the term “labor strategists” to the Luddites as a de facto vocational appellation, [Brian Merchant, ‘You’ve Got Luddites All Wrong’, (Tech By Vice), 03-Sep-2014, www.vice.com]

(𝓬) being prevented from forming trade unions left industrial workers already behind the eight-ball when IR mechanisation came along—they were unable to establish a minimum wage, establish workers’ pensions and set standard working conditions

(𝓭) the technology the Luddites railed against did not necessarily need to be new, the stocking frame for instance had been invented 200 years earlier (Conniff)

(𝓮) nor were they “heroic defenders of a pre-technological way of life” – as romantically portrayed later in some quarters (Conniff)

(𝓯) as Binfield contends, the Luddites were in fact willing to adapt to mechanisation…it was the direction that enhanced productivity was heading—enriching the merchant owners, not the workers—that was their beef. Their objective was a share of those profits, or at the very least, a decent wage

(𝓰) their attack on the property and materials of masters and blacklegs had the positive outcome of gaining them a “collective contract” of sorts

(𝓱) workers in the East Midlands hosiery trade also resorted to frame-breaking as part of the riots in 1778 to protest wage erosion…Hobsbawn calls these hose-makers “the ancestors of Ludditism”

The Red Underground’s War on Bourgeois Capitalist Europe: Euro-terrorism in the 1970s, West Germany and Italy

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Comparative politics, Political History, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

From the end of the Sixties the militant Weathermen in the US rode a global wave of youth and student rebellion against “the establishment” (see blog, 17-Jan-2020). Their emergence was in part a direct consequence of the student protests and violent clashes with the police and security forces that shook the leading cities of Europe and elsewhere in 1968 (the “Generation of 1968”). That same wave that gave impetus to the first stirrings of violent resistance by the Weathermen also ushered in other paramilitary organisations in Western Europe around the same time. The two of these that gained the most publicity/notoriety are discussed below.

⫸ West Germany: Red Army Faction (Ger: Rote Armee Fraktion) AKA Baader-Meinhof Gang❉

Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, anti-Zionist

The radical student critique: The West German “fascist state”

West German youth by the late 1960s were experiencing a sense of alienation from the Federal Republic (BDR). The source of this disquiet lay in the nature of West German society and politics. The BDR that they had grown up in was now prosperous, but it was moving away from the direction of liberalisation and reform toward a polity that was increasingly authoritarian under the veneer of democracy. The postwar West German government, allying itself to the US and to NATO, and with Berlin on the front line of the Cold War, was charting an increasingly illiberal course, as the country’s politicised youth saw it—the West German Communist Party had been banned in 1956; the police had violently over-reacted to student protests killing one unarmed student activist; the Brandt government had introduced the Radikalenerlass (German for “Radical decree”) law in 1972 barring radicals (as defined by the state) and those with a ‘questionable’ political persuasion from holding public sector jobs. Many in the student left railed against what they saw as hypocrisy from Bonn—assuming the guise of an advanced liberal democracy while at the same time hosting visits from ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran, not to mention it’s other politically uncomfortable associations [‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki), http://military.wiki.org].

The Wirtschftswunder (the West German “economic miracle”) and its creator, economics minister Erhard 🔻

Students and those on the left generally viewed the postwar denazification of West Germany with justifiable suspicion, it’s outcomes were ineffective and at best incomplete. The policy was breached repeatedly, eg, Chancellor Adenauer’s appointment of a former Nazi-sympathiser to high political office; even more alarmingly, Kurt Kiesinger, a former Nazi Party member, rose to the republic’s top political post, Bundesrepublikkanzler, in 1966; and many ex-Nazis were still able to walk into government positions at the local level up. Many on the left in the BDR were convinced that the republic’s conservative media, controlled by Axel Springer, was biased in favour of the establishment, while the more liberal press in BDR was heavily censored by the government. At the same time radicals looked on aghast when the two major parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, formed themselves into a “Grand Coalition” (‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki).

As the succeeding generation, many students were left with a feeling of war-guilt as inheritors of the nation’s Nazi past. Added to this was the disillusion many Germans felt at their country being associated with a blatantly imperialist war in Vietnam. All of these dilemmas coalesced into a conviction for many on the left that the BDR government lacked legitimacy and was tantamount to a “fascist state”. Hence the collective call of West German youth for radical social change. The radicalisation of many in the republic’s student movement was partly fuelled by healthy doses of Marxist economic theory (it should be remembered that in 1966 the BDR economy had gone into recession—for the first time in 15 years) [‘German students campaign for democracy, 1966-68’, (Global Nonviolent Action Network), http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu].

BMG – terrorising the BDR

Student disaffection and that of other activists in the West German New Left was rife, many protested their disapproval, some turned to more violent and direct ways of voicing their opposition. Into this turbulent milieu came, among others, the first incarnation of the Red Army Faction, better known courtesy of the media’s tag, the Baader-Meinhof Gang (BMG), at the end of the Sixties. Its founders and main leaders were Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Horst Mahler.

BMG started by engaging in arson as a protest against the Vietnam War and graduated to bomb attacks on US military facilities, German police stations and media outlets controlled by the Springer press. To bankroll their terrorist activities the gang robbed banks and kidnapped VIP hostages for ransom✫ [‘The Red Army Faction and the Stasi’, TELOSscope, 24-Oct-2016, (Review of Elliot Neaman’s Free Radicals), www.telospress.com; ‘Red Army Faction’, (Military Wiki)]. Among BMG’s victims were symbols of the BDR regime (individuals from the political and economic elites), US military personnel, as well as a number of unfortunate bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite killing some 34 people during its urban guerrilla ‘career’, RAF managed to elicit a measure of support from within West German society. For scores of disillusioned young West Germans at the time, there was support for or at least acceptance of RAF’s actions…(as Siegel put it), owing to the (still recent) Nazi legacy many “guilt-ridden liberals saw (RAF’s) panache as a countercultural critique of West Germany’s boring bourgeois life”. There is evidence also that there was collusion between BMG and East Germany and specifically the DDR’s Stasi (secret police) (Neaman). BMG also underwent some guerrilla training from the Palestinian al-Fatah in Jordan – which didn’t go exactly to plan. Andreas Baader, the group’s leader, deliberately cultivated an outlaw image, likening himself to Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde criminal infamy) [‘The Romance of Evil’, by Fred Siegel, City Journal, 18-Sep-2009]§. Baader, Meinhof and their close associates were arrested in 1972 and the leaders died in custody within a few years—apparently by their own hands (though some are skeptical that these were in fact suicides).

Eponymous leaders of BMG 🔻

With the founding members in prison, a “second generation” of RAF cadres emerged, sympathetic to the group’s cause, picking up the terrorist-guerrilla baton where the incarcerated pioneers left off. This “RAF 2.0” was proactive between 1975 and 1979, especially during what became known as the “German Autumn” of 1977. They held personnel hostage at the West German embassy in Stockholm, perpetrated hits on public prosecutors and bankers, kidnapped industrialists, etc. ). In the 1980s and 1990s a” third generation” of RAF materialised and was intermittently active for some years, but since 1998 RAF has been considered to be moribund.

∝∾∾∾∾∾∝∝∾∾∾∾∾∝

⫸ Italy: Red Brigades (It: Brigate Rosse)

Ideology: anti-fascist, communist revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist

As with their West German counterpart, the Red Brigades (BR) had its antecedents in the massive-scale student protests of 1968 against the state, and the workers’ struggles in Italy in 1968-69 to bring about social and political change. The militant organisation was formed from a leftist student group at the University of Trento in Italy’s north set up by Renato Curcio and Margherita Cagol. BR claimed a membership of up to 1,000 strong at its peak (others have put it at about 400 to 500 full-time members) plus an indeterminate number of supporters [“Years of Lead” — Domestic Terrorism and Italy’s Ref Brigades’, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, www.adst.org ; Sundquist, Major Victor H. “Political Terrorism: An Historical Case Study of the Italian Red Brigades.” Journal of Strategic Security 3, no. 3 (2010) : 53-68. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.3.3.5. Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol3/iss3/5].

CDP-PCI’s “compromiso storico”

In Italy BR was able to tap into the prevailing student and worker discontent with the government (at first through it’s grass-root activism in northern industrial cities like Milan and Turin). Many radicalised sections of Italian workforce were disillusioned by the ‘historic’ coalition formed between the conservative Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and a belief lingered that PCI’s deal with the main bourgeois party would not ultimately represent the interests of the country’s working class (Sundquist) (cf. the CDU/SDP coalition in West Germany).

Red Brigades in “the Years of Lead”

From the early to the late 1970s BR unleashed a series of terror strikes, a chapter in what became known in Italy as “the Years of Lead” (It: Anni di piombo), which was a longer period of postwar social and political turmoil in Italy characterised by terrorist attacks from both right- and left-wing paramilitary groups. Material help for BR was forthcoming from the USSR and Czechoslovakia (weaponry). After the arrest of Curcio and Cagol in 1974, a “second generation” of radicals took up the ‘war’ against the Italian authorities. The act most associated with the BR Mach II (now led by Mario Moretti) and earning it its greatest opprobrium was the kidnapping and eventual murder of former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro in 1978. BR’s murder of the highly popular Moro lost it much public support, including that of some sections of the left.

The assassination of Moro galvanised the national government, the Italian security forces and the Carabinieri into launching an all-out war against the leftist terrorist organisation☌. With a more concerted counter-terrorist strategy including intelligence from paid informers, the authorities were ultimately successful in capturing the leaders and a large chunk of BR cadres, effectively eliminating the threat to the country during the 1980s◎. [‘The Red Brigades’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org ; ‘Years of Lead (Italy)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Sundquist]. Despite its eventual failure and demise, BR was lethally effective in its methods – between 1973 and 1994 the terrorist group killed 223 people in its assaults (Global Terrorism Database, University of Maryland). One academic calls it “the most menacing radical group in Italy‘s post-WWII history”, [‘Learning from the Past: Case of the Red Brigades in Italy’, Daniela Irrera, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses. Vol. 6, No 6 (JULY 2014]. International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26351263].

Methods of the “Red Euro-terrorists”

Both RAF and BR used similar tactics and strategies – primarily sabotage, arson, bank robberies, kidnappings and assassinations. The human targets were generally politicians (almost all right-wing), senior police, judges, industrialists and bankers, though BR also went after trade union officials in Italy which eventually helped undermine its support. Initially, BR refrained from lethal violence, often inflicting the punishment of aginocchiare (kneecapping) on its selected targets. But, as the Seventies rolled on, they were taking a more direct and extreme retribution on the capitalist state expanding the scope of terror to murder.

RAF ‘wanted’ poster (source: www.vukutu.com)

These two far-left European terrorist groups according to their pronouncements shared roughly the same broad, radical objectives as the Weather Underground – to destabilise the state and bring down the country’s capitalist regime◘. The two, also like the Weathermen, took great inspiration and more than a few tips from the Tupamaros urban guerrilla group of Uruguay. The Weather, BR and RAF all pursued a avowedly violent strategy against the authorities, but the Weathermen, when compared to BR and RAF, were “terrorism-lite”. Whereas the Weather targeted material damage only, meticulously avoiding the endangering of human life, the two European terrorist groups had no such compunctions or qualms.

Endnote: RAF and BR – red militants in a crowded field of left-wing Euro-terrorists

Neither RAF in Germany or BR in Italy were sole traders in the leftist-terrorism game in their respective countries, such is the splintering nature of ultra-left, extremist groups. There were a string of other terrorist groups operating at the same time, the most consequential of these were Prima Linea (Italian for “First Line”) in Italy and the Revolutionary Cells (Ger: Revolutionäre Zellen – RZ) in West Germany—the latter having a lower profile than RAF but actually perpetrating more bomb and arson attacks on the state than it (Military Wiki).

◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘◙◘ ◙◘ ◙◘

❉ sometimes also called Baader-Meinhof Group. Red Army Faction was its official organisational name

✫ BR went one better in fund-raising it’s revolutionary mission, getting involved in drugs and arms trafficking which included doing business with the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra (‘Red Brigades’, Wiki)

§ a trait shared by the Weathermen

◘ BR also had another, more specific objective of wanting to force Italy to leave NATO

☌ this did not stop BR Mach II from making one more high-profile kidnapping, that of American deputy chief of staff of NATO (General Dozier) in 1981. Italian police managed to rescue the general unharmed and Italian and NATO security forces executed successful retaliatory action again BR (Sundquist)

◎ BR though didn’t entirely disappear…after it split into two separate groups in the early 1980s, the more hardline splinter group continued into the 2000s (amounting to a third organisation claiming to represent BR)