In which I recommend a women’s history newsletter
I had planned to tell you another story from the Weimar Republic in today’s post, but quite frankly the post is at the Hot Mess stage*, a regular part of my process for writing articles and books but one I usually manage to avoid in blog posts. I’ve been working at it for the better part of a week. And I’ll keep poking at it.
In the meantime, I’d like to share a women’s history newsletter that I’ve been enjoying for several months now, Julia Carpenter’s A Woman to Know. It comes out more or less daily** and it’s one of the few newsletters that I read as soon as I see it in my inbox. In each issue, Carpenter shares the story of a relatively unknown woman from history. (At best I’m familiar with one in ten.) And she includes a list of references in case you want to know more. (This is actually a problem as it contributes to my To-Be-Read list/pile/shelf, which is spiraling out of control. )
With any luck, my next post will be the story of the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin. In the meantime, enjoy a few stories about kickass women you probably haven’t heard of.
* Several years ago I accepted that the Hot Mess Draft is an official part of my process. It is the stage after the initial research and just before the Shitty First Draft that Anne Lamott describes so vividly in Bird By Bird. (Essential reading for anyone who wants to write.) I pour everything I know about the subject–and everything I don’t know but need to find out–onto the page. (Or more accurately, the screen.) I highlight things in yellow and ask questions in ALL CAPS. I try to clump similar ideas into a rough structure that may or may not bear a resemblance to the final shape of the piece. I repeat myself. Worse, I contradict myself.
**How does she do it???
A Great Book About American Immigration Law
I have often complained that one of the failures of American history class as I experienced it in high school* was that everything after the civil war was taught as a series of legislation punctuated by two world wars. The world wars were taught as story, and subsequently stuck with me . But the history of legislation was essentially a list: a name, a date, a paragraph about what the law in question accomplished. Here’s what stuck: anti-trust legislation, labor rights legislation, and, inexplicably, the Taft-Harley Act (the name, not the content).**
It turns out that the history of legislation can be pretty thrilling in the right hands.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965 began as an attempt by journalist and second-generation American Jia Lynn Yang to understand the law that allowed her parents to come to the United States, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The result is a gripping account of forty years of Congressional wrangling over immigration law in the United States.
Yang successfully argues that the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is a relatively new one—and demonstrates that laws controlling immigration are even more recent. The book centers on the passage of three major immigration laws—in 1924, 1952 and 1965—and the competing ideas about ethnicity, race and the nature of the United States as an entity that shaped those laws.
Yang never loses sight of the fact that laws are passed by people. She introduces us to the often colorful and sometimes awful politicians and activists who lobbied for and against changes in immigration policy, clearly evoking each man’s character as well as describing his political career. She outlines ugly relationships between immigration laws and the eugenics movement, isolationism, anti-Communist rhetoric, McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, and calls to keep the United States true to its “Northern European roots.”
Yang ends where she began, with the impact of the 1965 bill, which opened the door to non-white immigration, closed the border with Mexico for the first time and changed the United States in ways that its promoters had never anticipated.
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is an important and sometimes surprising history of American immigration policy and the people who made it.
*I realize that this is not a universal experience. It wasn’t even my universal experience. My world history teacher did an excellent job of capturing my imagination despite the challenges inherent in the concept. Fabulous high school history teachers exist. My hats off to you all.
**I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up: formally known as the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, it restricted the power and actions of labor unions. The 80th Congress passed it over President Truman’s veto.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic, Pt 3: May Day, 1929
If I had more self-discipline, I would wait and tell this story in chronological order, after several other stories from the Weimar Republic that already have a place in my blog post editorial calendar.* But I found this story absolutely amazing when I read it over the course of several days’ articles in the Chicago Tribune of 1929. Sometimes I’ve just got to share the story NOW. Pull up a seat.
* * *
One of the recurring themes in Weimar Germany, as it appears in Sigrid Schultz’s Tribune articles, is street fighting between different political factions and police intervention in the battles. The combinations involved vary from day to day, but the pattern is clear: one group has something to celebrate, a second or sometimes third group objects, fisticuffs (or gun shots) ensue, the police come in. The article always includes the numbers dead, wounded, and arrested.
What was later described as the battle of May Day in 1929 didn’t follow that pattern.
Anticipating trouble, the Berlin police revoked the right to march on May Day that labor unions and the socialist and communist parties had won under the former kaiser’s regime.** (This is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
Violent demonstrations broke out in several neighborhoods on the days leading up to May 1, which confirmed the wisdom of the order as far as the police were concerned. The socialist party accepted the police mandate and rented large halls in which to hold their May Day meetings—though I assume they grumbled about it. The communists were going to march, dang it.
On April 30, communist party members went from house to house, asking people to turn out for the parade and telling them not to carry weapons because this was going to be a peaceful demonstration. Meanwhile, the police mobilized all their reserves and armed them with machine guns, tear gas bombs, and armored cars. (You can see where this is going, right?)
On May 1, an estimated 80,000 communists and their allies turned out for a parade and open air meetings. After some fights with the police, the communists built a barricade using sewer piping that was stacked by the side of the road. The police stormed the barricades with machine guns and armored cars. The communists retaliated by throwing stones.
Despite the inequality of weapaons, the battle continued for four days, with a rising number of dead and wounded on both sides. On the last day, some of the policemen had had enough. To quote Miss Schultz: “The riot-swept district of Wedding was the scene of the first open outbreak of the policemen’s dissatisfaction at the way they have been driven by Junker officers in the last few days. Defying their superior officers’ orders, the men took off their steel helmets, laid aside their hand grenades and entire equipment, and proceeded to fraternize with the crowd by singing popular songs.” (Sound familiar?)
It’s a nice image, but the impact of the May Day battle didn’t end when the fighting stopped. Blutmai (Bloody May) is considered one of the events that contributed to the political instability of the Weimar Republic.
*A rather grand description of something that is basically a list of documents in a Scrivener file.
**I don’t know about you, but I grew up learning about May Day as a time when you made a basket,*** filled it with flowers, and gave it someone in the morning. (Usually your mother.) It was a nice craft project for an elementary school classroom or a Bluebird troop. No one mentioned a word about May Day as an international celebration of the labor movement.
***Often woven out of strips of construction paper. Though the crafty websites these days seem to be going with the much simpler paper cone.