Johnston Dissent

8/11/2019 Johnston Dissent

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Dissent and Democracy inU.S. History, 18801930

Newberry Digital Collect ions for the Classroom


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Dissent and Democracy in U.S. History,18801930Newber ry Digi ta l Col le ct ion s fo r Clas sr oom Use

Introduction

What is dissent? What role has dissent played in the development of American democracy? The Oxford English

Dictionaryhelps us begin to answer the first question. The OED defines dissentas difference of opinion or

sentiment; disagreement and the opposite of consent. This document collection encourages teachers and

students to elaborate that definition and to develop answers to the second question by examining four case

studies in dissent from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These case studies represent four

very different forms of dissent: the mass demonstrations and violence of Haymarket, the parades and

petitions of the womens suffrage and anti-suffrage movements, the pamphlets and clinics of Margaret

Sangers birth control crusade, and the free-speech forums and masquerade balls of the Dill Pickle Club.

These case studies, in their variety, allow us to consider the different forms that dissent might take, and the

different paths that these movements could follow within national history.

U.S. historians and political scientists often classify dissident movements along a spectrum from left to right,

with the left side encompassing Communists, socialists, and others committed to greater economic and

political equality, often achieved through government intervention, and the right side including those who

embrace capitalist economics with little or no state regulation. However, these categories become more

difficult to define in the area of civil liberties, which both the left and the right claim to embrace. For

example, today, the civil rights and reproductive rights movements are both identified with the left, while the

gun rights and pro-life movements are both identified with the right. In regard to these movements, neither

the left nor the right can be characterized as simply for or against government intervention.

InAmerican Dreamers: How the Left Changed America, Michael Kazin identifies two axes through which to

interpret the history of leftist dissent in the United States. One axis concerns the relationshipsand

differencesbetween the political left and the cultural left. Bypolitical left, Kazin refers to movements and

individuals, which advocate significant changes to national laws and, even, to the structure of government.

Examples from this document collection include the Workingmens Party platform and the suffragists efforts

to change voting laws. By cultural left, Kazin means the more amorphous, and often more widely accepted, set

of artistic and literary practices that express dissent from prevailing cultural norms. Examples from this

collection include the Dill Pickle Club records of bohemian life. As Kazin notes, there are plenty of

moments when political and cultural activity intersect, however there are also many moments when they

diverge and, as historians, it is useful to be able to distinguish between them. The second axis that Kazin

identifies describes a tension within the goals of leftist movements, whether they are primarily political orcultural. That tension lies between, on the one hand, the desire to extend or protect individual liberties and,

on the other hand, the desire to achieve social equality and justice. There are times when achieving collective

good seems to require the sacrifice of individual freedoms and vice versa. Although Kazin writes specifically

of the left, his terms provide a useful framework for many of the documents presented here and can help us

formulate terms and questions for right-wing as well as left-wing movements.


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Please consider the following questions as you review the documents

Develop a definition of dissentbased on your reading of these documents. What do the documents

have in common? How does the concept of dissent allow us to bring together documents that are, in

many ways, quite different?

What forms has dissent taken in U.S. history? What are the objectives of the writers and

organizations represented in these documents? In what ways do they dissent from the political andsocial conditions of their times? What are their methods for advocating change? What are their

relationships to mainstream American politics and culture?

What is the role of dissent in a representative democracy such as the United States? Why have groups

of Americans chosen to go outside of official channels (e.g., elections) in order to try to reform

government and society? How have traditions of dissent changed the ways that Americans practice

democracy?

In what ways does the pursuit of individual liberty conflict with the quest for social equality and

justice? In what ways are these goals compatible?


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Documents 1, 2, 3, and 4

Attention Workingmen! Great Mass Meeting Tonight at 7:30 Oclock at the

Haymarket. 1886.

Newberry Call No. VAULT Ruggles 12

C. Bunnell. After the Riot: The Shadow of Death and Police Charging the

Murderous Rioters. Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper.May 15, 1886.

Newberry Call No. A 5 .34

Michael J. Schaack.Anarchy and Anarchists.A History of the Red Terror and

the Social Revolution in America and Europe. 1889. Title page and

frontispiece, 5052, and 578.

Newberry Call No. J 29 .795

Nineteenth-century employers often expected workers to spend 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week on the

job. In the 1880s, anarchists, unionists, socialists, and reformers organized a national effort to demand an

eight-hour workday. During the first week of May 1886, 35,000 Chicago workers walked off of their jobs in

massive strikes to protest their lengthy work weeks. Some of these strikes involved violent skirmishes with

the police. At least two strikers were killed on May 3. In response, the next evening, roughly 1,500 people

gathered at the West Randolph Street Haymarket, a market on the edge of the city where people bought hay

for their horses. Although the May 4 rally featured fiery speeches from the citys leading anarchists and labor

leaders, it was a peaceful gathering. As the rally drew to a close, hundreds of policemen moved in to disperse

the crowd. Someone threw a bomb at the police brigade, killing one officer instantly. The police responded

with a barrage of bullets. An unknown number of demonstrators were killed or wounded. Sixty police officerswere injured and eight eventually died. Politicians and the press blamed anarchists for the violence. Although

there was no evidence linking specific people to the bomb, eight men were convicted of murder on the basis

of their political writings and speeches. Four men were executed; one committed suicide. The trial was later

considered grossly unjust and, in 1893, the Illinois governor granted absolute pardon to the three, remaining

imprisoned defendants. The labor organizations, however, were severely damaged and the anarchist

movement never recovered from the trial. The documents that follow include representations of the

Haymarket events in a New York newspaper and passages from a history written by Captain Michael Schaak.

Schaak commanded a Chicago Avenue police station in 1886 and played a large role in the arrests and

prosecutions of anarchists following the Haymarket violence. Schaak included in his book the published

principles and constitutions of several radical parties, such as the Workingmens Party of the United States,

excerpted below. He also reproduced Judge Joseph E. Garys instructions to the jury, or guidelines onreaching a verdict.


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Questions to Consider

1. Examine the broadside advertising the Haymarket rally. What can you learn about the rallys

audience and purpose from this broadside?

2. Examine the illustrations of the Haymarket events from Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper.

How did this newspaper portray the events to a national audience? Do the illustrations

encourage readers to sympathize with the police or the demonstrators? On what grounds?

3.

What are the principles and goals of the Workingmens Party, as outlined in this document?

Which, if any, of their goals do you consider reasonable? Which, if any, do you consider

unreasonable?

4. How does the judge instruct the jury to consider the constitutional right to freedom of speech?

What are the limitations on this right, according to the judge? How does he define accessory? To

what extent does he consider accessories culpable for a crime?

5. Does Schaaks position as police chief appear to affect his presentation of the issues and events?


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Documents 5, 6, 7, and 8

Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women.

Womans Protest Against Woman Suffrage. 1909.

Newberry Call No. J 325 .64

Letter from Margery Currey to Eunice Tietjens, August 8, 1912.

Newberry Call No. Midwest MS TietjensBox 4, Folder 237.

John T. McCutcheon. There Ought to be Schools for the Instruction of

Women Voters. June 16, 1913.

Newberry Call No. John T. McCutcheon Papers, Box 7, Folder 188.

Alice Duer Miller. Introduction, Representation, and Why We Oppose

Votes for Men. InAre Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times.

1915. pp. 2021 and 50.

Newberry Call No. 4A 17680

In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted the right to vote to women throughout the

United States. The amendment represented the culmination of a long and uneven campaign to achieve

womens suffrage. Women had not possessed the right to vote (or, for the most part, to own property) under

British colonial rule and, following the American Revolution, federal and state governments kept those

restrictions in place. (The one exception was New Jersey, which allowed women to vote until 1807, when an

amended voting law barred them.) A persistent, if small, minority advocated for womens suffrage throughoutthe first half of the nineteenth century and gained prominence with the 1848 Seneca Falls convention on

womens rights. However, the suffrage movement stalled during the Civil War and, afterwards, split over

support of the Fifteenth Amendment, which extended suffrage to African American men, but not to any

women. The movement overcame its divisions in the late 1880s and moved forward through the following

decades by pursuing both state and federal reform. Residents of Illinois saw the results of this incremental

approach: in 1891, the Illinois state legislature granted women the right to vote in school elections and, in

1913, it extended this right to presidential and local elections.

The documents that follow represent both pro- and anti-suffrage positions. Chicago novelist Caroline F.

Corbin led the fight against suffrage in Illinois. She established the Illinois Association Opposed to the

Extension of Suffrage to Women (IAOESW) in 1897 and, in this 1909 letter to state legislators, makes the

case against suffrage. On the other side of the debate, Margery Currey writes to her friend Eunice Tietjens

about marching in a suffrage parade during the Progressive Party convention in August 1912. (Former U.S.

president Theodore Roosevelt had formed the Progressive Party that summer after losing his bid for the

Republican Party presidential nomination. Roosevelt agreed, with some reluctance, to support womens

suffrage in his campaign. But in any case, he lost the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.) The cartoon by

John T. McCutcheon appeared in the Chicago Tribunefive days after the Illinois House of Representatives

approved womens suffrage in Illinois. Finally, Alice Duer Millers book of poetryAre Women People?featured

work that she had published the previous year in theNew York Tribune. Miller skewered the self-proclaimed

populism of President Wilson and others who professed a commitment to representative democracy yet

opposed womens enfranchisement.


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1. What reasons do the anti-suffrage petitioners give for opposing womens suffrage? What do they fear

will be the consequences of extending the vote to women?

2. Describe Curreys account of marching in the suffrage parade. What is her tone? What made the

experience so significant and, in her words, splendid?

3. Examine McCutcheons cartoon. What makes the cartoon funny? What arguments does the cartoon

implicitly present?

4. How does Miller make the case for womens suffrage in her poems? What is her tone?

5. Compare the different forms of political dissent represented by these documents. Which do you find

most effective? Why are they effective?


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1. Why does Sanger believe that it is important for women to have accurate information on

reproduction, birth control, and venereal disease? What relationships does she perceive between birth

control and womens freedom?

2. Why does Sanger believe that working women should not have more than two children? How is

economic class relevant to the issue of birth control?


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Selected Sources

Mary Chapman. Are Women People?: Alice Duer Millers Poetry and Politics.American Literary History

18:1 (Spring 2006).

James R. Green. Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement, and the Bombing That Divided

Gilded Age America. 2006.

Newberry Call No. HD8085.C53 G74 2006

Michael Kazin.American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. 2011.

Jill Lepore. Birthright: Whats Next for Planned Parenthood?New Yorker. Nov. 14, 2011.

Margaret Sanger. MMWR Weekly. Dec. 3, 1999.

www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4847bx.htm.

Outspoken: Chicagos Free Speech Tradition. 2004. publications.newberry.org/outspoken/index.html.

PBS.American Experience: The Pill. www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/pill/index.html.

Janice L. Reiff, Ann Durkin Keating, James R. Grossman, eds. The Encyclopedia of Chicago. 2004.

www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org.


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ument 1:

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1886.


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wspaper.


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15, 1886.

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ging the Murderous Rioters. Frank Leslies Illustrated ewspaper.


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, August 8, 1912.


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Document 6:Letter from Margery Currey to Eunice Tietjens, August 8, 1912. Transcript.

Newberry Call No. Midwest MS Tietjens Box 4, Folder 237.

Have you read Chicago news? Do you realize that we have had the first suffrage parade in Chicago! To be sure, it was really an

escort for the women delegates to the Progressive Convention, and was brought together on 24 hours notice, but we

marched, and we carried yellow banners, and we heard a woman second the nomination for president, and we heard Roosevelt

and other convention speakers come out roundly for a definite program of labor legislation such as has never been done

before; and Votes for Women goes into the platform! I was never so busy and so exuberant in my life as during this

convention week. These have been memorable daysand nights, toofull of wonderful constructive work. It will all be over

Saturday night, after Mrs. Robins gives a dinner at the City Club for her sister, Mary Dries, who is a delegate to the National

Progressive Convention How those words have become charmed. You never felt such a spirit as that which pervaded the

convention. Well, you see I am a maniacbut it was splendid! My work has been to me a well of mineral water, and a band of

music, and a ride on an aeroplane.

The friend you speak of came into the officeattended the salonand Floyd administered aid and comfort. He liked her all

right.

Sincerely yours,

Margery Dell

August Eighth


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16, 1913.

berry Call N

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8.

Instruction of Women Voters.


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Tim

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ument 8: A

es. 1915.

berry Call N

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iller. Intro

duction. InAre Women People? A Book of hymes for Suffrage


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es. 1915. pp

berry Call N

ice Duer

. 2021.

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iller. Repr

esentation. InAre W men Peop e? A Book f Rhymes or Suffrage


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mes for Su

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iller. Why

. 1915. p. 5

We Oppos

.

Votes for en. InAre Women eople? A ook of


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very Girl hould Kno . 1922 [ori inally published 1912 913].


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argaret Sa

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nger. Fami

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y Limitation. 1914. p. 3.


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ument 11:

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ill Pickle

o. Midwest

lub entran

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le, Box 2, f

ph. n.d.

lder 32.


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ument 12:

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A Night in

o. Midwest

Bohemia:

S, Dill Pic

he Dill Pic

le, Box 2, f

kle Maske

lder 188.

Ball. 1916.


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Anti- ar

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ance. [192

S, Dill Pic

9 or 1935].

le, Box 1, f lder 33.


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ument 14:

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Is Free Lo

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e Possible?

S, Dill Pic

[1930].

le, Box 2, f lder 152.

Johnston Dissent

Documents

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