Throughout these many years of painting I have practiced starting my work from reality stating the facts before me. Then I paint without the object for a certain length of time, combining reality and imagination.
I have often obtained in painting directly from the object that which appears to be real results at the very first shot, but when that does happen, I purposely destroy what I have accomplished and re-do it over and over again. In other words that which comes easily I distrust. When I have condensed and simplified sufficiently I know that I have achieved more than reality.
Q: How do you achieve such richness of color in your pastel-on-sandpaper paintings?
A: This results from the several months of studio time and many layers of soft pastel that go into creating each painting. In a sense my technique is analogous to glazing done by the Old Masters. They slowly built up layers of thin paint to achieve a high degree of finish. Colors were not mixed physically, but optically. I gradually build up layers of soft pastel, as many as 30, to create a pastel painting. After a color is applied, I blend it with my fingers and push it into the sandpaper's tooth. It mixes with the color beneath to create a new color, continually adding richness, saturation, and intensity to the overall painting.
Most significant growth in my life has been the direct result of errors, mistakes, accidents, faulty assumptions and wrong moves. I have generally learned more from my mistakes and my so-called failures than any successes or instances of "being right." I would venture to propose that this equation is also true in the world at large. Error is a powerful animating ingredient in political, scientific and historical evolution as well as in art and mythology. Error is a necessity. The question I had to ask myself was: how can I cultivate a tolerance and an appetite for being wrong, for error?
In the face of an exceedingly complicated world, there are too many people who are invested in "being right." These people are dangerous. Their authority is based on their sense of certainty. But innovation and invention do not only happen with smart people who have all of the answers. Innovation results from trial and error. The task is to make good mistakes, good errors, in the right direction.
That a photograph is unlikely to be a laboratory record is evident when we think about how it is made. Most photographers are people of immense enthusiasms whose work involves many choices – to brake the car, grab the yellow instead of the green filter, wait out the cloud, and at the second everything looks inexplicably right, to release the shutter. Behind these decisions stands the photographer's individual framework of recollections and meditations about the way he perceived that place or places like it before. Without such a background there would be no knowing whether the scene on the ground glass was characteristic of the geography and of his experience of it and intuition of it – in short, whether it was true.
Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive. Only the artist's presence in the work can convince us that its affirmation resulted from and has been tested by human experience. Without the photographer in the photograph the view is no more compelling than the product of some annoying record camera, a machine perhaps capable of happy accident but not response to form.
To create demands a certain undergoing: surrender to a subconscious process that can yield surprising results. And yet, despite the intuitive nature of the artistic process, it is of utmost importance to be aware of the reason you create. Be conscious about what you are attempting or tempting. Know why you are doing it. Understand what you expect in return.
The intentions that motivate an act are contained within the action itself. You will never escape this. Even though the "why" of any work can be disguised or hidden, it is always present in its essential DNA. The creation ultimately always betrays the intentions of the artist. James Joyce called this invisible motivation behind a work of art "the secret cause." This cause secretly informs the process and then becomes integral to the outcome. This secret cause determines the distance that you will journey in the process and finally, the quality of what is wrought in the heat of the making.
Certainly the most compelling thing in both personal life and art is to be yourself. When we engage attentively and honestly, pay attention to the insights that come to us, see our denial and faulty thinking, and engage in uncovering the obstacles and blocks to our expression, we realize that art is a wonderful medium for personal growth.
If we realize all this, we do ourselves justice when we claim to be an artist. We really mean it, and we own it. Today, as we start working on whatever it is we're doing, let's claim our role as artists, being attentive to process as much as finished results.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision.
We most certainly need to test ourselves against the most extreme possibilities, just as we are probably obligated not to express, share, and impart the most extreme possibility before it has entered the work of art. As something unique that no other person would and should understand, as one's personal madness, so to speak, it has to enter into the work to attain its validity and to reveal there an internal law, like primary patterns that become visible only in the transparency of artistic creation. There exist nonetheless two freedoms to express oneself that seem to me the ultimate possibilities: one in the presence of the created object, and the other within one's actual daily life where one can show another person what one has become through work, and where one may in this way mutually support and help and (here understood humbly) admire one another. In either case, however, it is necessary to show results, and it is neither lack of confidence nor lack of intimacy nor a gesture of exclusion if on does not reveal the tools of one's personal becoming that are marked by so many confusing and tortuous traits, which are valid only for one's own use.


All online retailers will want to increase their turnover as much as possible during the next twelve months. That is how you will raise enough profit to expand and take your operation to the next level. The issue is that people without experience in this process often make the wrong moves. They spend lots of time and money on things that aren't going to create the desired results. With that in mind, I've included some excellent advice on this page that could help you strive ahead. If you put these tips and tricks into action, I'm confident your turnover will reach new heights this year.
You need to make sure the checkout process on your website is as straightforward as possible. That will help to ensure customers don't have enough time to change their minds before clicking the order button. Also, it means they won't have to work hard to purchase from your company. There are lots of different ecommerce checkout solutions you could use. However, you'll always get better results if you create something new. So, now is the time to get in touch with your web developers and explain your requirements. They will design a system that meets all your expectations for little expense.
The way in which your website appears could play a significant role in the number of sales you achieve. Considering that, you should spend some time looking at the most popular ecommerce websites in the world. Amazon is the largest online seller at the moment, and their domain is incredibly simple. You need to follow suit if you want to dominate the industry. Make sure that even a child could work out how to find the products they need on their site. Add a search tool, and ensure your categories are refined as much as possible.
If you sell expensive items via your website, many of your customers might have to look elsewhere for financing deals. That is a major issue for you because that could take them a lot of time. So, you should use technology to your advantage and ensure they never leave your checkout page. There are platforms out there you can use to remove all the hassle and offer financing deals to your customers. You should help them to see the best solutions available in a matter of seconds. In most instances, they'll just need to enter information about their earnings. The software will then make recommendations.
Put those tips into practice as you move through this year, and I'm confident you'll increase turnover beyond any expectations. The basic rule of thumb is that you just need to make life easy for your customers. Don't expect them to work hard to give you their money because that isn't going to happen. You're the one who has to make all the effort if you want to encourage more sales. With a bit of luck, you now have all the knowledge you require.
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Thunderstorms in Corsica and parts of Italy leave seven dead Extreme weather
Violent thunderstorms with winds of up to 139mph (224km/h) have struck the Mediterranean island of Corsica and parts of Italy, killing seven people and leaving at least a dozen more injured.
On Corsica, a 13-year-old girl died after a tree fell on a campsite where she was staying in the south, while a 46-year-old man was killed when a tree fell on a campsite bungalow in the northern town of Calvi . A 72-year-old died when the roof of a beach hut was blown off and hit her car.
Two people were killed in separate incidents in Tuscany when trees were ripped up by storms on Thursday – one near the city of Lucca and another near Carrara. Another four people were injured by falling trees at a campsite near Carrara.
In Venice, hurricane-force winds ripped away shards of brick from St Mark's bell tower.
The Meteo France weather service issued another severe weather alert for Corsica, but said it "expected wind gusts with storms overnight to Friday will be much less violent than those on Thursday morning".
The storms struck after three days of intense rain in the region, which has endured a summer of extreme heat, drought and raging forest fires that scientists have linked to human-caused climate change.
Officials ordered the evacuation of all campsites on Corsica and rescue operations were launched along the island's western coast in response to SOS calls from grounded and wrecked ships. Dozens of other vessels sent out signals requesting emergency help.
Rescue crews found the bodies of a 62-year-old fisherman and an unidentified kayaker off Corsica's west and east coasts, according to the French maritime authority for the Mediterranean. It said both died as a result of the sudden storm and that more than 100 grounded, wrecked or stranded ships in the area had called for emergency help.
On Corsica about 45,000 homes were left without electricity on Thursday and at least 12 people were injured and taken to hospital, one in a critical condition, the island authorities said.
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The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he had called an emergency government meeting by video conference on Thursday evening to respond to the crisis.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, traveled to the island on Thursday and visited the worst-affected areas including the campsites where people died. He said that at one point about 350 people had been reported missing as pleasure boats had capsized or been thrown adrift, but that they had now all been found alive and well.
The president of the executive council of Corsica, Gilles Simeoni, described a brief but "extremely violent and entirely unpredictable" weather event that lasted "dozens of minutes".
In Venice, high winds detached pieces of brick from St Mark's bell tower, which stands in front of the famous cathedral. Tourists were evacuated from the structure, which was cordoned off. The storm upended chairs and tables in St Mark's Square and elsewhere, and swept away beach chairs on the nearby Lido.
Winds rose suddenly and were calmed within five minutes, said Carlo Alberto Tesserin, the caretaker of the basilica and bell tower. "These were not usual winds for us," Tesserin told the Associated Press.
Cedric Boell, the manager of restaurant Les Gones Corses in northern Corsica, said: "We have never seen such huge storms as this, you would think it was a tropical storm."
Yolhan Niveau, 24, a wildlife photographer staying at a Corsican campsite near San-Nicolao in the north-east, said the storm had torn through the site, uprooting trees and damaging mobile homes. "There was no warning. … I don't feel scared just stupefaction. No one expected this."
Meteo France had not given advance warning and said the exact location of storms was difficult to predict. It issued an alert with "immediate effect" as strong winds began to hit the island.
In northern Italy, an overnight storm forced the closure of a rail line south-east of Genoa after high winds carried beach structures onto the tracks, damaging the electrical circuitry.
The storm struck during Italy's busiest beach vacation week. The mayor of Sestri Levante, Valentina Ghio, warned that whirlwinds were possible and appealed to visitors to stay away from beaches until the severe weather had passed.
Hailstones the size of walnuts pounded Italy's Liguria region with enough force to break windows and damage orchards and gardens.
While northern Italy has suffered its worst drought in decades this year, heavy rains in recent days that brought scattered hailstorms, whirlwinds and flooding have damaged or destroyed entire crops of fruits and vegetables along with vineyards and olive orchards, according to the Italian agricultural lobby Coldiretti .
On Wednesday, sudden thunderstorms caused flash floods in Paris subway stations and the Old Port of Marseille. The previous day winds of more than 60mph (100km/h) were recorded at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
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Amazon rolled out a dozen new Alexa-controlled Echo products in September 2018 that included an updated smart display, microwave, and even a subwoofer. However, one of the most surprising new products was the simplest in operation and function: a wall clock. The idea was to add a visual interface in the form of an analog clock face with LED indicators at every minute mark that would complement the voice-only interface of smart speakers. Echo Wall Clock wasn't the most obvious new product but did align well with tracking your timers which is one of the top five most common smart speaker use cases.
The $29.99 device began selling on Amazon.com in mid-December with shipments arriving shortly before Christmas. It was popular enough among Alexa enthusiasts to rack up over 450 reviews and a modest 3.3 average rating. However, the Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern discovered that it is not currently shipping due to concerns that arose around unreliable wireless connectivity.
We're aware that a small number of customers have had issues with connectivity. We're working hard to address this and plan to make Echo Wall Clock available again in the coming weeks.
Given that Amazon launched so many new Alexa products at once in September, it was inevitable that at least one would face issues. And, it appears not all customers are having issues. The product has 36% 5-star ratings on Amazon.com. The irony here is that the Echo Wall Clock is the simplest device that was debuted and users are experiencing the age-old issue of wireless connectivity. This won't have any impact on overall Alexa adoption but does show that even when you get the hard stuff like voice interaction right, other issues can derail your product success.


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1919: The Year the World Was on Fire
Steve Fraser
One hundred years ago was a time of revolution. Emma Goldman, John Reed, and Bill Haywood were at the center of it all.
Industrial Workers of the World parading ahead of the "Paterson Pageant" at New York City's Madison Square Garden. The pageant, a recreation of the events of the Patterson, New Jersey, silk workers strike, was the brainchild of John Reed, Bill Haywood, and Emma Goldman.
"The world is on fire," Woodrow Wilson told his personal physician attending to him in Versailles as he attempted to negotiate a treaty to end World War I. Across the Irish sea, William Butler Yeats was composing lines that still resonate: "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned/ The best lose all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
Emma Goldman, the world's most celebrated anarcho-feminist, was in jail in New York, charged with sedition. Big Bill Haywood, the super-hero of American labor syndicalism, was in and out of jail in Chicago on multiple counts of criminal syndicalism, espionage, and sedition. John Reed, the adventuring radical writer whose Ten Days That Shook the World about the Bolshevik Revolution thrilled millions (Goldman among them) was in transit between Finland and the just-born Soviet Union, certain to be jailed should he return to the United States.
All three would soon find themselves in Petrograd, where the fire that so worried President Wilson had first ignited.
The year was 1919. 1919 marks the end of the long nineteenth century. The social and cultural foundations of modern Europe and the United States, in place since the days of the French revolution, seemed on the verge of collapse. The whole intricate web of international relations responsible for a century of uneasy peace in Europe had unraveled in the war, virtually guaranteeing a brutish struggle for supremacy afterward.
Domestic politics in practically every country were in a constant uproar. The leading capitalist economies of Europe were in shambles, physically devastated, mired in debt, spiritually demoralized. Normal social and political life seemed impossible.
Instead, the chaotic rhythms of the street took over: the politics of resentment and revenge, of scapegoating and conspiracy-mongering, of the putsch and the revolutionary insurrection. That axiomatic faith in progress, reason, private property, and liberal democracy, which had once seemed so unassailable, was profoundly shaken.
At least since the days of the Paris Commune, a specter had haunted the western world. In 1919, the specter became flesh and blood. For some it was a nightmarish creature, a harbinger of a social pandemonium that would obliterate civilized life.
But for others — prominent among them Goldman, Haywood, and Reed — it was an augury of a new world bearing an emancipatory promise, an end to poverty and industrial squalor, self-destructive competition, racial and religious hatreds, patriarchy and psychic repression, war and imperial domination, the exploitation of man by man.
Everything held sacred by bourgeois society – the nuclear family, Christianity, the free market, parliamentary democracy, individualism – was imperiled, shadowed by hypocrisy and losing traction. A new society of fraternal cooperation and solidarity, gestating first in Petrograd, would, it seemed, nourish a new kind of human being, one no longer infected with the self-seeking possessiveness, envy, and the will to domination that seemed inherent in capitalist civilization.
Great forebodings and great expectations, exactly a century old, seem far older than that now; exaggerated, hallucinatory, quaint, dead. But they were not for those living with them in that extraordinary year.
Kicking Off Everywhere
While the victors met in Versailles and tried to put back together again a world undone by war, whole empires (the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian) were going out of existence. The Bolshevik Revolution not only controlled Russia but threatened to overrun Europe. The Russians soon formed the Communist (or Third) International determined to seize the moment and prompt Bolshevik risings everywhere.
Indeed, early in the year a workers' rising in Berlin was mercilessly crushed (its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated, Liebknecht shot in the back, Luxemburg's body found floating in the Landwehr canal weeks later). The Weimar socialist government which had dealt so mercilessly with Luxemburg and her comrades then had to fend off an attempted right-wing military coup (the Kapp putsch).
Events in Berlin were followed by more successful, if brief, revolutions in Bavaria and Bremen, with the former declaring its independence. Then Bela Kun, an inconspicuous radical Hungarian journalist, overthrew the Magyar land magnate and polo-playing Count Karolyi, and established a soviet government in Budapest that lasted four months. Romanian and other armies sponsored by the Allies finally exterminated the revolution.
Factory seizures swept through Italy and France.
The governments of Austria and Italy nearly went under. Barcelona was paralyzed by a revolutionary strike. General strikes erupted in Paris, Lyons, Brussels, Glasgow, and Argentina. The president of Portugal was murdered. Uprisings broke out in Norway, Holland, Sweden, and the newly born Czechoslovakia. Great Britain trembled at the prospect of proletarian intransigence, while the Irish republicans prepared for civil war with their English overlords when they tried to suppress the Sinn Fein.
Even the normally placid Canadians were in an uproar as general strikes erupted in Winnipeg and Edmonton in the west, and Toronto and Nova Scotia in the east. In Winnipeg, the strike's central committee replaced the elected government until the Royal Mounted Police put an end to that.
While the Red and White armies ranged back and forth across the plains of Poland, the great powers at Versailles, including the US, sent aid and arms in the hope of isolating and killing off the Bolshevik contagion. But French sailors ferried to the Black Sea mutinied rather than attack. Longshoremen in Seattle and San Francisco refused to load armaments destined for counter-revolutionary Admiral Kolchak in Vladivostok.
Movements of national liberation rocked the colonial world. The British army massacred home-rule demonstrators in Amritsar, India; in Turkey, Kamal Ataturk mobilized on behalf of Turkish independence against the imperial designs of the British and French. In Egypt, an insurrection threatened when the British deported the head of the nationalist movement.
Amidst this chaos and mayhem, Benito Mussolini formed the fascist party. Adolph Hitler joined what would become the Nazi movement. From a military hospital, he penned his first piece of anti-Semitic propaganda.
America, where people had for generations taken comfort from their continent's apparent immunity to the upheavals of the Old World, was shocked to find its precious isolation at an end. Even American participation in the World War had failed to shatter the national equanimity; the experience had been so brief, so triumphant. The US emerged from the war as the world's pre-eminent economic power. But in 1919 great expectations were shadowed by great forebodings.
Sixty thousand Seattle workers began the year with a general strike early in February, an all but unheard-of phenomenon in American history. Mayor Ole Hanson (elected with labor's support) denounced the strikers as Bolsheviks and called out the marines. The unions, led by the metal workers and longshoremen, set up a kind of provisional government (over which the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, exerted real influence) to assure the carrying out of vital municipal services. A Soldiers, Sailors, and Workingmen's Council (modeled on the Russian soviets) made a brief appearance (although it was honeycombed with spies).
The Seattle Central Labor Council endorsed the Bolshevik Revolution; its rallies against American intervention a month before the general strike had been assaulted by the city's police. Although the strike was quashed in five days, people around the country were astonished that matters could reach such a pitch of civil rancor.
All through the rest of the year, strikes broke out virtually everywhere, 3,600 in total involving four million people: In the coal mines (where there was talk of nationalization), on the railroads, in the lumber camps, on construction sites, among telephone operators, down in the subways, on the killing floors of the stockyards, even Broadway, became sites of class conflict. Thousands of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, shut down the industry. In Butte, Montana, copper miners established a workers, soldiers, and sailors council to direct their struggle. A soviet popped up in Portland, Oregon.
Each and every disturbance seemed to harbor, at least for some Americans, the frightening prospect of social and political mayhem, or, on the contrary, the inspiring vision of general human emancipation. Neither vision was warranted by the actual confrontations.
And that is precisely the point. The times were out of joint. No one could take the real measure of the events swirling around them. Hyperbole was the norm.
Red Terror
After Seattle, two strikes in particular dominated the landscape of social and psychic derangement. In September, Boston police walked off the job. Although these supposed guardians of civil order — God-fearing Irish Catholics all of them — only wanted to join the sober-minded American Federation of Labor, every public official and every newspaper from Boston to San Francisco denounced them as "agents of Lenin," compared Commonwealth Avenue to Nevsky Prospect in Petrograd, and described a "Bolshevik nightmare" of terror in the streets, even though the actual amount of looting and disorder remained remarkably limited.
The otherwise timorous governor of Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, joined the rhetorical overkill, refused to negotiate, summoned the army and a volunteer militia of Harvard students, and as the "savior" of Boston, ignited an otherwise somnolent political career that eventually landed him in the White House.
Not long after Boston subsided, the nation's single most important industry, steel, became an inferno of vigilante terror as the steel companies and their political allies responded ferociously to a strike by their vast (nearly 300,000) and largely immigrant workforce. In obscure industrial hamlets all across western Pennsylvania and Ohio men, women, and children were beaten and jailed and cowed into submission. The strike raged on through to the end of year.
The air filled up with what had become by this point in 1919 an obligatory rhetoric of "red terror. What made this oddly incongruous, poignant in fact, is that these allegedly Bolshevik steel workers were in fact rural proletarians recently recruited from the steppes of eastern and southern Europe and the cotton fields of Alabama. They knew next to nothing about socialism or revolution; instead, they were preoccupied with surviving the purgatory of the steel furnaces, a work life so bestial and dangerous and degrading it is virtually unimaginable to us today. No matter: the hysteria about "aliens" as carriers of a bolshevism gone viral could not be stilled.
In 1919, the epithet "un-American" tainted multitudes, since, as Clinton Stoddard Burr wrote a few years later, "most of the hordes of immigrants who have been pouring into the United States from the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe, from lands inhabited by races impregnated with radicalism, Bolshevism, and anarchy belong for the most part to the lower strata of humanity."
Since it was practically axiomatic that African Americans were "alien," the same stigma attached to unruly black steel workers; indeed, the dozens of race riots that coursed through American cities and towns that year persuaded people like President Wilson that "the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America." Wilson no doubt took note that during and after the nation's largest and most fatal race war in Chicago 250,00 workers were on strike in that city.
But all this talk of radical infestation was not pure fantasy. During the war years, various sub-species of anti-capitalist insurgents — socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, Wobblies, and eventually communists — were active and hunted down by the government.
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (a one-time progressive-minded Democrat who had favored women's suffrage and trade unionism) initiated a series of raids against radical organizations throughout the country. Palmer deliberately began them on November 7, 1919, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.
In a first wave, federal, state, and local authorities arrested a thousand; then later another 4,000 in 33 cities. If the imprisoned were immigrants, they were denied any semblance of due process. And the raids rolled on through the steel and coal mine and railroad uprisings. Palmer's list of sixty-eight prominent persons allegedly holding "dangerous, destructive, and anarchist sentiments" included social workers Jane Addams and Lillian Wald and historian Charles Beard.
Headquarters were pillaged and wrecked, posse-style justice meted out, and hundreds of radical-minded immigrants were deported (including Emma Goldman, who, as she sailed out of New York on the US Buford — dubbed the "Soviet Ark" — with 249 fellow deportees gazed shoreward and noted in melancholic irony: "It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America indeed, indeed America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up – the Statue of Liberty!"). By the time they were done, Palmer's raiders had discovered three pistols and no explosives.
"Big Bill" Haywood, the larger-than-life hero of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), idolized by working stiffs and Greenwich Village bohemians alike, fled the bail bondsman and the prospect of twenty years in prison. Shipping out on a false passport, he went off to Stockholm and then to his final destination in the Soviet Union. Like Goldman, he had his own intimate moment with Lady Liberty: "Goodbye. You've had your back turned on me for too long. I am going to the land of freedom."
Before all that, however, when the IWW remained a force to be reckoned with, Wobbly organizer Wesley Everest, a lumberjack who had served in France, was cornered in the backwoods of Centralia, Washington, where he was castrated and hung by an enraged mob of businessmen, American Legionnaires, and local thugs. The leader of the steel strike, William Z. Foster, was a well-known syndicalist. This made him an ideal target for those who wanted to believe that the "bohunks" had walked away from their furnaces not because they were dropping dead from exhaustion at the end of twelve-hour days of stupefying heat, but rather because they were being ministered to by satanic intriguers.
Mother Jones rallied the strikers noting that, "Our Kaisers have stomachs of steel and hearts of steel and tears of steel for the 'poor Belgians." She declared them to be "czars" relying on the help of mercenary "cossacks" to save their "slave" empire.
Anarcho-terrorists mailed off thirty-eight bombs hoping to incinerate the high and mighty, including John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Secretary of Labor Wilson, among others. An Italian suicide bomber blew himself up outside Palmer's Washington home, presumably the event that unleashed the Attorney General's own reign of terror against dissent tout court. A house servant for Senator Thomas R. Hardwick lost his hand opening an exploding package at the senator's house in Atlanta.
Bomb scares continued through the year and into the next, when a great explosion in front of the Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street wreaked havoc, killing more than thirty, wounding scores more.
The Politics of Fear and Paranoia
A great fear hovered over the country. People talked and behaved strangely.
A Connecticut clothing salesman went to jail for six months for saying Lenin was smart. In Chicago, a sailor shot a man for not rising during the national anthem. In Indiana, a jury took two minutes to acquit a man for killing an alien who had shouted, "To hell with the United States."
General Leonard Wood suggested deporting radicals in "ships of stone with sails of lead." A senator from Tennessee proposed shipping native-born radicals to a special penal colony in Guam.
Every mystery had the same solution. A huge storage tank in Boston harbor filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses exploded. Like a slow motion tidal wave, fifteen meters high and twenty-five meters wide, the molasses rolled irresistibly through the city's streets, burying carriages, cars, houses, and warehouses, drowning people and animals. It took two months for heavy hydraulic pumps to rid the city of the molasses. Horses stuck in the goo were put out of their misery. Naturally, anarchists were blamed, but there was no proof.
Attorney General Palmer declaimed that "the whole purpose of communism appears to be the mass formations of the criminals of the world to overthrow the decencies of private life…to disrupt the present order of life regardless of health, sex, or religious rights." He went on to denounce the "hysterical neurasthenic women who abound in communism." He worried about revolutionary heat "licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes to replace marriage vows with libertine laws."
Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding lamented, "I really think we are facing a desperate situation. It looks to me as if we are coming to a crisis in the conflict between the radical labor leader and the capitalistic system under which we have developed the republic." Evangelist Billy Sunday thought it might be a good idea to "stand radicals up before a firing squad and save space on our ships."
From the other shore, John Reed painted a prose portrait of Judge Landis – a jurist of transparent prejudices who had sent dozens of anti-war radicals off to long jail terms on the flimsiest of legal pretexts — and gave him "the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead."
Although these remarks are in some sense ravings, no one should think that their underlying concerns were merely the rabid hallucinations of extremists, of a fringe of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. The President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had this to say when he cabled Congress from Versailles: "The question which stands at the front of all other questions amidst the present great awakening is the question of labor."
Wilson echoed a universal presentiment that fateful fundamentals were at stake. The president's days as an active force in public life were numbered as he suffered a disabling stroke and heart attack in September. But his sense that America, along with the rest of the world, had arrived at a kind of judgment day had a long history stretching back to the Gilded Age.
It echoed the fatal Haymarket bombing of 1886, the slaughter at Carnegie's Homestead Steel works in 1892, the terrible Ludlow massacre of women and children in 1914 at Rockefeller's Colorado coal mines, and dozens of local confrontations that had accumulated until they reached critical mass and detonated in 1919.
As Wilson's remarks and the bloody atmosphere into which he deposited them suggest, the "labor question," just as in Europe, was the ne plus ultra of this extraordinary moment. Why? To our "post-industrial" ears, especially in the United States, there is something strange about this fact. If we think about the "labor question" at all today, what comes to mind are pedestrian conflicts over wages and hours and life on the job.
There was a time, however — and 1919 was that time's climactic moment — when the "labor question" interrogated the fabric of American life. Many of the most memorable events of 1919, both here and abroad, pitted massed proletarians against all the institutions of political and industrial authority.
More than that, they alarmed or inspired people, because their outcome, many believed, would decide a whole range of matters: whether the traditional nuclear family would survive or give way to something more open-ended and communal; whether relations between men and women would remain patriarchal or become more egalitarian; whether existing systems of racial subordination would endure or die; whether bourgeois decorum, sexual restraint, and respect for material acquisition would succumb to more bohemian and openly erotic sensibilities; whether God was truly dead or not; whether the nation-state would give way to some form of global government, or perhaps more extremely, lose its distinctive tribal definition.
Utopia and dystopia collided head on. For generations, men and women devoted to the Enlightenment faith in progress and reason, but estranged from industrial capitalism, had dreamt of a proletarian emancipation which would simultaneously liberate all of humanity. The crack-up of the old order, first in war and then in revolution abroad, gave license to prophesy the arrival of that glorious day when the whole of repressive bourgeois life would join the exploitation of labor in the museum of humanity's pre-history.
Homeland of the Revolutionary Dream
Goldman, Haywood, and Reed were all prophets of that emancipated tomorrow. Whether voluntarily or driven there by circumstances, all three ended up in Petrograd.
Reed died there, and his ashes are buried beneath the Kremlin's walls. Haywood also died there, and half his ashes lie near Reed's (the other half in Waldheim cemetery in Chicago, where the anarchists executed for the Haymarket bombing are entombed). Goldman after a time, left utterly disillusioned with what Bolshevism had become. But while she was there, and despite her anarchist reservations about what she considered Marxism's dangerous attachment to the state, she defended the revolution with all the fervor and resoluteness which had earned her high regard and intense loathing almost from the moment she arrived in the United States in the late 1880s.
John Reed first came to Petrograd in September 1917, just after the combined might of the workers, peasants, and soldiers' soviets had repelled the attempted counter-revolutionary putsch of the czarist general Alexander Kornilov. It was love at first sight, a passion that inflamed his classic account of the days leading up to the Bolshevik triumph.
In those perilous times no one knew if the Revolution could survive, but for Reed, "whether it survive or perish…it will have shown that dreams can come true." It would stand as "a pillar of fire for mankind forever."
Ten Days That Shook the World combined that poetry, pageantry, heroism, and romance which had distinguished Reed' s journalism for years. Returning to the United States, he braved the suffocating atmosphere of state repression to address gatherings of thousands: "My people weep with joy to know that there is something like dreams come true in Russia."
During the few short years left to him, Reed remained a committed Bolshevik, a founder of the American Communist Party, and the American delegate to the Third International. He died in 1920 due in part to a typhus infection he'd contracted on a mission to Baku at a Congress of Eastern Races Lenin asked him to attend.
As Reed lay dying back in Petrograd, he was nursed by Emma Goldman. She had spent a good part of her working life as a nurse. She and Reed of course had known each other for years; they addressed the same rallies, marched on the same picket lines, spent evenings together at gatherings of radical artists, writers, and intellectuals in Greenwich Village and Provincetown. To the last, she loved his youthful exuberance and was devastated by his death. When Goldman arrived in the Soviet Union, Reed was one of the first people she sought out at the Hotel Astoria in Petrograd, where they celebrated their reunion.
Goldman already was harboring reservations about the role of the Soviet secret police (the Cheka), but Reed reassured her: "You are a little confused by the Revolution in action because you have dealt with it only in theory." Reed convinced her, if only temporarily, that whatever its shortcomings, the revolution had to be defended against the armies of counter-revolution surrounding it on all sides and undermining it from within.
In the end, those reassurances proved hollow. Goldman grew increasingly suspicious not only of the Cheka and its terror, but of the more general Bolshevik disregard of democratic protocols, the wholesale quashing of opposition parties, the emasculation of the soviets, the privileges accorded the upper echelons of the Bolshevik party amidst the severe privations most Russians faced during the period of "war communism," the rampant corruption infesting state bureaucracies, and so on.
Given all that, however, and mindful of her lifelong, profound theoretical differences with the socialist (not just Bolshevik) commitment to state intervention, it is even more remarkable how passionately she defended the revolution — and for how long she kept silent about its transgressions.
Like Reed, she believed in its promise: "The October Revolution was the culmination of passionate dreams and urgings." Even earlier, at the outbreak of the revolution in February, Goldman and her lifetime comrade Alexander Berkman considered returning to their homeland — something they had often mused about doing for years — and were urged to do so by Leon Trotsky, who was about to leave New York himself, and who, like Goldman, considered Kerensky's provisional government then ruling Russia to be rotten to the core.
Dark days in wartime America were lightened for her by news of October, which carried "the message of fulfillment of the supreme promise of the Revolution." At first, Goldman depicted the Bolsheviks as brilliant, demonstrating the courage of martyrs. She condemned those among the liberal and even radical intelligentsia who joined in the anti-Bolshevik hysteria then gripping America. Reed's famous book (which she read while incarcerated in a Missouri penitentiary) transported her back to her homeland for "ten glorious days."
Goldman spent two years in a federal penitentiary, then was deported aboard the Buford (trailed by a British man-of-war for fear the Bolshevik-minded deportees might revolt on board). She and her fellow exiles traveled in a locked train from the port of Hango in Finland to the Soviet border. Nearly there, her "heart trembled with anticipation and fervent hope." There at last:
Sacred Russia! Sacred Ground! Magic People! You have come to symbolized humanity's hope, you alone are destined to redeem mankind. I have come to serve you, beloved matushka. Take me to your bosom, let me pour myself into you, mingle my blood with yours, find my place in your heroic struggle.
Big Bill Haywood had already achieved super-hero status among legions of embattled workers and disaffected intellectuals. He was as well the primal anti-hero of the country's establishment; the New York Times considered him "the most hated and feared figure in America."
Haywood, Goldman, and Reed had shared many battlefronts. And Haywood too saw in the Bolshevik revolution the living embodiment of an emancipation he'd devoted much of his rough life to achieving. Incarcerated in Chicago, he was ecastatic to hear news of October and the prospect of global insurrection: "We have lived to see the breaking of the glorious Red Dawn." Only his forced isolation from history in the making depressed him.
Haywood and the IWW he had helped create were first and last committed to action, not theory. The Bolsheviks had acted when others drew back so that Big Bill could see in the Revolution a Russian facsimile of what the Wobblies were all about; October was "the greatest event of our lives… the dawn of freedom and democracy."
When he disembarked in Riga in 1921, he was immediately honored by the Bolsheviks and offered his services with enthusiasm. Lenin suggested he help develop an industrial colony in western Siberia along the Ural Mountains the "Autonomous Industrial Colony of Kuzbas"). He was expected to recruit thousands of American engineers and skilled workers to open coal mines, build steel plants, and pioneer modern farming. He tried but failed; he harbored feelings that he had been manipulated by party hierarchs.
Haywood returned to Moscow, diabetic and in generally poor health, drinking heavily, with few friends except for occasional visits from American comrades. He died there in 1928 and was given an elaborate state funeral.
A ruin of what he had once been, deeply longing to return to the fray in America or at least to the rugged landscape of the Rocky Mountain west that had nurtured him, alienated from the theoretical disputations that preoccupied the communist world, Haywood nonetheless remained a Bolshevik loyalist to the end, grateful not only for the revolution's hospitality but for its historic accomplishments.
Exiled No More
"Exile" is not quite the best word to describe the condition of these three revolutionists. True, they weren't welcome in the United States (Haywood would almost certainly have spent the rest of his life behind bars; Reed would most likely have done jail time as well; Goldman was simply outlawed from returning). And it's true too that had they been able to come back, they would have, to carry on the struggle.
But when they set sail for Petrograd, they were consciously heading to their spiritual homeland — in exile no more.
The magnetism of October, however briefly it lasted, was so great for these three, as it was for millions around the world, that it is hard to calculate today. 1919, an exceptional, nearly apocalyptic year, began in 1917. For these three exiles, it was the summa of their loftiest aspirations, the justification for all they had endured. It was the righteousness of History with a capital "H." They shared that faith.
Yet how utterly different they were. Not their doctrinal affiliations. Haywood was a syndicalist, Goldman an anarchist, Reed a free-floating radical writer until his conversion to communism. Those were distinctions that under ripe conditions could generate a lot of heat and bitter polemic.
But instead what is most striking is the vast distance separating their social origins. So too, the worlds in which they first established their bona fides as anti-capitalist heroes had little if anything to do with each other — or so it seemed.
The road that nonetheless led them all to Petrograd illuminates sub-surface tectonics characteristic of industrial and finance capitalism's formative phase.
Emma Goldman hailed from a modestly middle-class Jewish family in Russia, not rich certainly but with enough to afford household servants. It was a tightly-knit and rather oppressive patriarchy, a religious but not a devout home. She was a diligent student, an avid reader and music lover.
Instinctively rebellious, Goldman, even as a teenager, was drawn from afar to the revolutionary, anti-czarist, pre-Bolshevik Narodnik movement, admired its heroes, including its czarist assassins, and the prominent role played by its female activists. She virtually committed to memory What is To Be Done?, the novel by Nikolai Chernyshevksy which effectively served as the Narodnik bible.
It was a demanding gospel. In Goldman's case it instilled a sense of high moral purpose and self-sacrificing devotion to the cause even unto death which lodged in the marrow of her character for the rest of her life.
In the New World, she found her home away from home in the urban barrios and industrial ghettoes of the immigrant working classes. To be sure, her appeal eventually reached deep into the ranks of middle class reformers, most especially among feminists and defenders of the right of free speech. Her anarchism, however, was first of all a socialist-inflected anarchism, for which she tirelessly proselytized among German, Italian, Polish, Russian, and of course Jewish workers (with whom she periodically worked as a seamstress).
If her anarchism had a natural seedbed, it was among the dispossessed streaming to America from the desiccated provinces of southern Italy, from the evacuated steppes of eastern Europe, and from the impoverished shtetls of the Pale of Settlement. They constituted a first-generation industrial proletariat, barely removed from their former lives as peasants and small villagers. Stark encounters with the miseries and autocratic regimes of the medieval sweatshop and modern factory and with the brutal apparatus of corporate and state repression would make them combustible human material. That was Goldman's conviction.
Anarchism in America never amounted to much as an organized movement. But those who advocated in its name, none more so than Emma Goldman, found enthusiastic listeners in the thousands.
Some were middle-class reformers and radicals who recognized in its precepts, especially in its uncompromising belief in individual freedom, a philosophical kinship with the teachings of people like Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Wendell Phillips.
Goldman herself was alert to that connection; it echoed her earliest infatuation with the Narodniks. But she was really an anarcho-communist for whom emancipation was a social act that would do away with capitalism and the propertied individualism it fostered.
And she was a woman of the world, a cosmopolitan, open to the disruptive currents of modern life, whether in the realm of marriage and sexual relations or the modernist breakthroughs in art and literature. However, sexual freedom, gender and racial equality, artistic experimentation, freedom of thought and speech were for Goldman integral features of a more fundamental liberation of the immigrant working classes among whom she had lived and worked.
Rejecting the whole of bourgeois life – its materialism, mammon worship, moral hypocrisy, and imaginative sterility – was the revolution's mission. She might have agreed with the New York Times' verdict about the Armory Show in 1913, that its contributors were "cousins to the anarchists in politics."
A Roughneck Through and Through
Big Bill Haywood held to the same set of convictions. But he came of age in very different circumstances. Poor from the start. His father was a one-time pony express rider who died when Bill was three; by the age of nine he was working in the mines.
Haywood was a roughneck and proud of it. He was tutored by life and did most of his book learning when he was behind bars.
Later in life, when the government was hunting him down, intent on obliterating the IWW, Haywood made one thing clear: "They can't stop us. No matter what they do we will go on until we — the roughnecks of the world — will take control of production and work when we please and how much we please. The man who makes the wagon will ride in it himself."
Haywood's world was full of roughnecks: cowboys; gold, silver, and metal miners; migrants harvesting corn and wheat; stevedores; itinerant prospectors; lumberjacks, mostly born and raised in the mountains and plains of the American West. As a boy and young man, Haywood did most of those jobs; he mined and tried prospecting, did a stint as a cowboy, tried homesteading and went bust. He lived in the country's industrial outback; the land of extractive capitalism.
Here, labor was outdoors, often in isolated desert or mountain locales, and dangerous. Mines caved in or exploded or filled lungs with toxic fumes. Steers impaled cowhands, rustlers threatened them. Blizzards and droughts, floods and insect invasions made farming hellish. Tall trees crushed the incautious lumberman.
Employment was casual, which means it came and went with the fickle fortunes of far-away markets or simply because a mother lode of ore played out sooner than expected. Boom towns turned into ghost towns practically overnight.
This was the "precariat," if there ever was one. A rootless proletariat, some still harboring dreams of escape — maybe through a lucky strike prospecting, maybe by running a small herd of one's own — comprised a roaming army tramping the roads and riding the boxcars in search of survival. Transitory and violent, populated mainly by single males, the social universe created by extractive enterprise, small and big, bred a kind of insouciance and an impromptu sense of fraternity that Haywood made his own.
Twelve-hour days bent over a sewing machine in a garment sweatshop in New York or tending to the white-hot blast furnaces of Pittsburgh could be just as exhausting, injury ridden, and spendthrift when it came to human life. The same drive to accumulate capital operated in the small, pre-mechanized mines of Utah and Nevada where Haywood first worked as drove primitive tenement workshops in Philadelphia and St. Louis familiar to Goldman. The same compulsion to accumulate on penalty of commercial failure made the engines hum in the Mellon family's high-tech, hard-rock mines out West as it did at Carnegie's modern steel works in Homestead, Pennsylvania.
Otherwise, however, Haywood and Goldman were nurtured and matured in radically different environments: urban or rural, migratory or in settled ethnic enclaves, among immigrants or the native-born, among uprooted peasants and stigmatized minorities or among indigenous vagabonds, among people attached to Old World mores and faiths or those cut adrift, speaking two dozen languages or an American vernacular.
The social ecologies that characterized the extractive capitalism of the Rocky Mountain West and the industrial capitalism further east were genetically linked. They were kin but not identical twins. Those who lived and worked in these separate spheres carried with them distinctly different histories and outlooks on life; their motivations and desires, their social as well as their work experiences set them apart, if not at odds with one another.
Still, the IWW was always committed to building "One Big Union" to include all of laboring humanity. Immigrants who had lost their homesteads in Scandinavia and worked the Mesabi iron range became Wobbly militants. And the IWW enjoyed moments of high drama among the immigrant working classes of the East.
The strike in 1912 by thousands of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts — women and men whose birthplaces would have blanketed a map of Europe and the near East — was led by the Wobblies and was a victory. A year later, a mass strike by the polyglot silk workers of Patterson, New Jersey, was also a Wobbly-inspired uprising. It ended in defeat.
Goldman and Haywood featured prominently in both. Indeed the "Patterson Pageant," a staged re-enactment of the strike in Madison Square Garden, designed to marshal public sympathy and support, was the brainchild of Goldman, Haywood, and especially John Reed, a brilliant tour de force dreamed up at a Greenwich Village salon they all three regularly attended.
These East Coast uprisings were spectacular. Haywood and the Wobblies scared the readers of the New York Times. But whether in victory or defeat, they left little behind in the way of enduring organization. Rather, the Wobbly brand of syndicalism found its most loyal adherents back where it began.
At its peak during World War I (but before the United States entered the conflict which initiated the inexorable government-led destruction of the movement), the IWW had a membership of at least 100,000 (and probably a good bit more than that). Most worked the mines, forests, shipyards, ranches and farms of the Great Plains, the ranges of the Rocky Mountains, and the vast treed wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, and the turpentine plantations of the southern pine barrens. This was heartland territory for the Wobblies and for Haywood.
Goldman and Haywood (and Reed too) became international celebrities, traveling the world. Haywood was a hero not only among European radicals and labor activists as was Goldman, but even in such far-off places as Australia and New Zealand where syndicalism had laid down roots.
But Goldman, not Haywood, was the true cosmopolitan: learned, literary, at ease crossing class lines, at home on both sides of the Atlantic. Haywood, for all his global notoriety remained the untutored provincial, a rootless roughneck at home on the road.
The Patrician Revolutionary
John Reed uprooted himself. His origins were light years away from either Goldman's or Haywood's. Born into inherited wealth, his grandfather had been a merchant connected to the Astor fur trading empire in the days when Portland, Oregon, was still a frontier town. His father managed the estate, which also included holdings in public utilities, served the city of Portland as a Teddy Roosevelt progressive reformer, and instilled in his son a proper bourgeois work ethic, the family's treasure notwithstanding.
Reed grew up with liveried servants, in a compound surrounded by formal gardens and greenhouses, riding the family's horses, socializing at the city's poshest country club, living the life of a carefree beau ideal while absorbing the finest education at prep school and eventually Harvard.
He gave all of that up to become a troubadour of the revolution, years before it erupted in Petrograd. The phenomenon is a familiar one; the offspring of aristocrats or the landed gentry or merchant princes or the haute bourgeoisie rejecting a life of privilege and siding with the underclasses.
This was the case, for example, for the Decembrist plotters against Czar Alexander early in the nineteenth century, for the Narodniks Goldman idolized, for Russian anarchists like Prince Peter Kropotkin, and even for a few Bolsheviks.
The same social inversion is detectable in Western Europe beginning with the French Revolution and emerging again and again in the socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century and beyond. It is a telltale sign that ruling elites are finding it difficult to reproduce themselves culturally, and that the legitimacy of the existing order of things is in question.
Family ruptures of this sort could be emotionally violent and irreparable. Reed, however, remained a devoted son even as he moved further away from his native bourgeois turf, its ways of life and cherished values. Beginning with his time at Harvard, Reed increasingly thought of himself as a knight errant for social justice. His spear was his pen, wielded mainly as a journalist but also as a poet and would-be novelist.
Reed wrote with fervor as well as with acute observation and insight, about the lives of Lower East Side poor. He went to Mexico to write about and even team up with Pancho Villa and his peasant army. A revolutionary, a general, an uneducated peasant, a democrat, and a highwayman, Villa was irresistible to someone of Reed's temperament and political inclinations. He penned informative, vivid reports.
Along with them came an underlying fascination with the down and out, with tales combining masculine toughness and rough justice showing up in the barely visible warrens of the urban working class or in the deserts and mountains of rural Mexico. The subterranean worlds of sailors, prostitutes, cowboys, and hoboes were Reed's oyster.
This wasn't just a kind of romantic slumming. Reed immersed himself in a fellowship of writers, artists, and intellectuals who felt similarly disaffected from the norms of bourgeois life, in search of social, moral, and even aesthetic alternatives.
That began at Harvard where, while still living the life of the bon vivant, he also gravitated toward the university's Socialist Club, at which other young men of privilege like Walter Lippman criticized the abhorrent features of Gilded Age capitalism. From Harvard he went to live in Paris, on the Left Bank, and then returned to "settle" (though Reed's peripatetic life was hardly ever settled) in its bohemian American cousin, Greenwich Village.
There were a critical mass of people, more or less of his social background, migrating to New York from all over the country with a shared antipathy for capitalism,. They who quarreled fiercely over monogamy, terrorism, the role of government, sexual freedom, socialism, outré styles of painting and theater, the rise and fall of the nuclear family, war, pacifisim and much more.
This Village milieu, and on its outer fringes a much broader spectrum of middle-class people disturbed by the inequalities and corruptions of public life — if not quite as radical in their political inclinations — formed a kind of culture of resistance. And with great intensity and imaginative energy, this culture of resistance searched for ways out.
Revolutionary Outlaws
A Russian-Jewish anarchist, a roughneck from the mountains, and a man in self-imposed exile from bourgeois privilege could find common ground. All were uprooted and ready to link their fates to the uprooted everywhere.
The decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century bore the indelible marks of this all-sided social and cultural upheaval. Anarchism, syndicalism, and communism had small, committed followings. Socialism attracted larger numbers, but only for a short while.
But these movements were embedded in much broader and deeper antipathies. Capitalism by its nature is disruptive, penetrating and exploiting and subduing alien life forms. Naturally, it invited opposition, never more adamant than when it first appeared, so strange and ruthless. More than that, it inspired visions, whether concrete or vague, of some future cooperative commonwealth rather than the savagely competitive and destructive one that had descended on the country.
During those formative years, stretching from the antebellum period and with increasing intensity into the first decades of the new century, capitalism's enemies appeared everywhere.
Workingmen's parties, Greenback-Labor parties, the Northern and Southern farmers alliances, the Anti-Monopoly movement, the Eight-Hour Day crusade, the Populist Party, the Knights of Labor, the nationalist clubs of spawned by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, the Single-Tax movement — these were not sectarian gatherings but mass insurgencies. Novelists and poets, muckraking journalists and rebellious clerics and rogue intellectuals, aligned themselves with these upheavals, and mounted a multi-dimensional cultural moral, political, and ethical interrogation and indictment of the new order.
Considerable social distances separated Goldman, Reed, and Haywood. Their institutional affiliations and specific political perspectives differed. But each, in her or his own way, articulated a common language not merely of protest or criticism, but one that depicted a future without capitalism.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, that future world was more often than not described as a cooperative commonwealth; by 1919, socialism.
Haywood and Goldman both pointed to Haymarket and the executions that followed as turning points in their lives.
Haywood learned about the Knights of Labor as a young miner. During the depression of the 1890s he briefly joined "General Charlie Kelly's Army" of the unemployed in Reno, one of several such "armies" tramping through America of which the more famous was the brigade led by Jacob Coxey. A first draft of the IWW's founding document envisioned its purpose as the establishment of a "Cooperative Commonwealth."
Goldman often alluded to the cooperative alternative. The founder of the Masses magazine, Peter Vlag, was a long-time proponent of the cooperative movement. Reed's enduring admiration of his father honored his commitment to progressive reform in a town of complacent Babbits.
All three became famous and infamous figures in public life because they drew on a deep grammar of defiance that had grown lush over decades of use by rebels before them. The October Revolution, for a moment, seemed to embody all that energy and hope; all roads led to Petrograd.
Revolution breaks all the rules. Goldman, Haywood, and Reed were all law-breakers; or at least indicted for doing that. There are features of American capitalism in its youth, of the resistance movements it spawned, and of the experiences of these three rebel celebrities which reflect the unsettled state of this new way of life.
"Wage slavery" was a common phrase during the Gilded Age (virtually unthinkable to use today). It suggests how startling the appearance of an American proletariat seemed. It lived on the borders of the national imagination, visible but in shadow, unknown, inarticulate, ominous.
A sliver of the American working class — the most highly skilled, native American or west European craftsmen — escaped this social oblivion; they got educated, acquired modest homes, earned a certain social esteem, participated in conventional civic and political life, and joined American Federation of Labor affiliated unions. Radicals tried to win them over. And the AFL did for years include a small socialist presence. But the proletariat that Goldman, Reed, and Haywood found more hospitable was far more marginal to the American mainstream.
Marginal is an odd word to describe such an immense population. Yet it is apt for a country in which the industrial capitalism that was producing and reproducing this new social species was itself so recently born. Marginality, moreover, is one way of capturing salient traits and behaviors that made the era so fraught and lent the lives of these three exiles such cachet.
They were outlaws according to various local, state and national police and judicial authorities and they embraced the stigma. They were unruly, insubordinate, and proud of it. One might call them the intellectuals of the outlaw classes.
Goldman was not merely an anarchist. She identified with that wing of the movement which believed in "propaganda of the deed," the politically purposed act of terrorism which she characterized as an act of sublime heroism. She was the accomplice of lifelong comrade Alexander Berkman in his failed attempt to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the coke mining baron who, as the acting manager of Carnegie's steel works oversaw the slaughter of the company's striking workers at Homestead (with Carnegie's full knowledge and consent).
She went so far as to try her hand at sex work to get money to arm Berkman for the assault. When the anarchist Leo Czolgosz assassinated President McKinley in 1901, there was a national cry to jail Goldman as his inspiration and collaborator. There was no collaboration, and Goldman had only the most fleeting encounter with Czolgosz.
But in the days leading up to his swift execution and for years afterwards, she defended him in principle, explaining to all who would listen and in the face of repeated efforts to shut her up, how the barbarism of the powerful drove the powerless to retaliate.
Recognizing the horror associated with this kind of political violence, and that Czolgosz was a "soul in pain" afflicted with "too sensitive a social consciousness," she nonetheless "bowed in reverenced silence" before his "strength to stand and die alone." In Goldman's view, "Anarchism claims the right of Defense against the Invasion and Aggression of every shape and form and no one who has his eyes open will and can deny that those in Power are the Invaders." Czolgosz counted as one of "the Exploited and Disinherited Millions who lead a life of darkness… one of the victims of the McKinley regime." In some fundamental sense, anarchism was antithetical to the law as inherently repressive.
Syndicalists might or might not enter the political arena, but their respect for bourgeois law was minimal. This was emphatically the case for Haywood, the Wobblies, and for the whole frontier world of extractive capitalism out of which they emerged.
Haywood didn't mince words: "I despise the law and I am not a law-abiding citizen." At a rally at Cooper Union College in 1911, he proclaimed, "It is our purpose to overthrow the capitalist system by forcible means if necessary."
The enemy could be equally cavalier about the law. When martial law was declared during the Colorado mine wars, a militia officer was blunt: "To hell with the Constitution. We are not going with the constitution."
The Western Federation of Miners, out of which the IWW originated — took up arms to defend itself against the heavily weaponized mine owners, with the rallying cry "No Compromise, No Surrender." The IWW was notorious for the disdain with which it viewed the labor contract; as a way of legitimating the exploitation of labor by capital, it was made to be broken. And there were many ways to break it, including not only spontaneous walkouts, but through acts of collective soldiering and sabotage at work.
Haywood could be circumspect about this. During the war, the IWW conducted many strikes and the government tried painting them as unpatriotic acts deserving of punishment under the sedition and espionage and criminal syndicalism laws just recently passed. And unlike the AFL, which had pledged not to strike while the war lasted, the IWW refused to knuckle under. Haywood made clear that, "It was better to be a traitor to your country than a traitor to you class."
But Haywood always insisted that the strikes were strictly economic affairs. Moreover, although his organization opposed the wartime draft, IWW leaders steered clear of urging members to defy it (many Wobblies were indeed drafted and served). Still, Haywood was a "roughneck" who was never shy about expressing his underlying contempt for the law and order of capitalist society.
Similar instincts led Reed to ride with Pancho Villa and to gravitate to Bolsheviks because they were willing to break through to the other side when others hemmed and hawed. Reed's journey to that existential position was unnatural, at odds with how he started out than was the case for either Goldman or Haywood. His father had been a reformer but one who worked strictly within the law; a steadfast opponent of those who abused the law, but not one to question whether prevailing law was in some sense unlawful, an affront to human rights and dignity. Yet even while attending prep school and enjoying the delights of the family compound, Reed found himself drawn to Portland's urban underworld, hanging around with the sailors and longshoremen at the docks or with loggers on their way to and from their forest workplaces, fascinated by its gamblers, hoboes, and petty criminals.
For the Bohemian sensibility, the prevailing order of things, from the most mundane to the most sacred, was vulnerable to root-and-branch criticism, and it could and should be overthrown.
Bohemia was Reed's home away from home. Some "Villagers" broke the law or were broken by the law; Margaret Sanger, for example, in crusading for birth control; Emma Goldman for simply saying the impolitic about sex or terrorism or the "sacred right" of the hungry unemployed to take bread when it was denied them, speech acts which earned her jail time and made her a widely admired champion of free speech; Max Eastman for publishing the Masses and the unapologetically anti-war and anti-capitalist cartoons of Art Young.
Whether operating outside the law or on its elusive margins, whether choreographing the "Patterson Pageant" or mounting the Armory Show, the Village that housed Reed empathetically embraced the workers incinerated at Rockefeller's coal mining complex in Ludlow, Colorado; the young immigrant women immolated in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire; that whole vast, barely visible, embattled working underclass which, like these cultural insurrectionists, stood at odds, by choice and circumstance, from the law and order of the way things were.
Outlaws have often exerted a subterranean allure, even among those most enmeshed in conventional routine — sometimes especially in those circles. Social bandits stealing from the rich to give to the poor – whether in fact or legend – drew cheers long before capitalism took root; there have been many Robin Hoods pursued by the King's men. What is distinctly curious about the world of Village and proletarian "outlaws" is that they were not for the most part outlaws, nor did they did fit the profile of the social bandit. And rather than comprising a tiny band of merry men, they filled up a very large region of the country's demographic landscape.
Yet these populations, the movements they formed, and the people that led them were frequently treated as if they existed in some gulag of the bourgeois imagination, in a hinterland of the despised and dangerous cultural "offal." This may have been the case because American capitalism as a social system and political structure was itself immature, only half-formed, half civilized.
Capitalism and democracy have long lived uneasily together. The free market is, in some sense, a zone of freedom. All, in theory, can enter; all live there, in theory, as equals. Democracy should, in theory, thrive there.
However, capital is a political category before it is an economic one. It accrues commanding power over life to those who possess it, placing everyone who has had it denied or stolen from them in an inherently subordinate position.
The movement for democracy wages a seemingly interminable struggle against that imbalance. In Gilded Age, turn of the century America, that battle was conducted with great violence.
The potentates of the new industrial order were ill-educated parvenus, socially insecure, so recently risen they hardly formed a coherent, self-conscious class. They lacked, as well, much in the way of political know-how, and were not much drawn to the arts and crafts of governing. Preoccupied with accumulating the family patrimony, they relied on machine politicians, pliable judges, and the law to take care of business — their own and the country's. Accustomed to unquestioning obedience as entrepreneurial empire-builders, they expected that to translate into the public arena, unobstructed by democratic protocols. Consequently, when class relations became heated, resort to the blunt instrument of violence was quick to follow.
Labor conflict in America was for decades the most violent anywhere in the capitalist world, by far. This is well known. Apart from direct class confrontations, the country has been and remains to this day extraordinarily violent in its everyday life, whether in its race relations, inside the family, or on the streets. Something more particular, however, is germane in the case of these three exiles and the movements and milieu in which they were embedded. Their outlaw status and the coercive means used against them was a function of this underdeveloped, immature nature of an American capitalist political order, still bloody in tooth and claw.
Later generations would condemn the violations of civil liberties that often accompanied the state terror that descended on these circles, the Palmer raids most infamously. But however censorious these later accounts might be, they would eschew Goldman's point, that underlying motive that made Haywood and Reed ready to court extreme measures. The whole system had to go.
Drinking the Cup to the Last Drop
Why? What had preceded Berkman's attack on Frick, or the way for Leo Czologz's assassination of President McKinley, was the repeated resort to violence by the private armies of the country's leading industrial enterprises, and the official violence authorized by public authorities at every level of government. This pattern of coercion, this mockery of democratic law, not only heavily discounted stated bourgeois dedication to law and order, but also provided the ethical justification needed to engage in what many of the marginal considered acts of self-defense.
That's why it was not uncommon for armed worker militias to march in the streets of major metropolises to signal that if they were attacked, they would strike back. Who were the lawbreakers? Who did the law protect? In the overwhelming number of cases of industrial violence, the initiators were today what might call the 1 percent and their political enablers.
Before there was a "deep state" overseeing the country's foreign relations, guarding its "national security" while far removed from democratic oversight and given wide-ranging freedom to exercise violence abroad, there was what a similar parallel state supposedly securing domestic tranquility. It too was immunized against democratic supervision, also empowered to act with the tools of extreme coercion.
That state wreaked havoc when Goldman, Haywood, and Reed were active; it operated in broad daylight, a tacit acknowledgment that for the wealthy and their political backers, when the stakes got high enough, capitalism and democracy couldn't coexist.
What was to be done, as Goldman's Narodnik heroes had pondered? Go the people. One way or another, that was the mission — the promise of emancipation would be fulfilled by The People. The People, in the eyes of our three exiles and their compatriots, were largely made up of workers; their labor and the relations of command and obedience in which it took place was the soil in which rebellion would grow.
Still, it was a category containing multitudes. The People could disappoint. Emma Goldman, whose faith in The People was virtually bottomless, also had this to say: "The People! [Berkman] had also done something for the people; and our brave Chicago martyrs and others in every land and time. But the people are asleep; they remain indifferent. They forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters and crucify their Christs."
Finally, in Petrograd in 1917, and the world over in 1919, The People had risen. Or so it seemed. If these premonitions so soon seemed premature, if desires so quickly and tragically turned into ash, Emma Goldman's reflections on her own life might work as a fitting epitaph for an age: "My life – I had lived in its heights and depths, in bitter sorrow and ecstatic joy, in black despair and fervent hope. I had drunk the cup to the last drop."
Steve Fraser is the author most recently of Class Matters: The Strange Career of an America Delusion and a forthcoming book of essays from Verso on capitalism and class in American history.
"The world is on fire," Woodrow Wilson told his personal physician attending to him in Versailles as he attempted to negotiate a treaty to end World War I. Across the Irish sea, William Butler Yeats was composing lines that still resonate: "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ […]
Bolshevism, Real and Imagined
Jason Schulman
A Century After "Ten Days"
Andrew Hartman
From the Finland Station


Come for the food. Savor the views. Create memories.
Located in the heart of historic Rockport, Massachusetts, My Place by the Sea features award-winning New American cuisine highlighted by fresh local seafood and an unrivaled romantic setting overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Award-winning Chef Kathy Milbury and co-owner Barbara Stavropoulos created a one-of-a-kind dining experience when they took the reins of this elegant waterfront eatery in 2000. Kathy's passion for local and sustainable cuisine and Barbara's eye for design have perfectly captured Rockport's rich history as a local seaport and an artist colony.
My Place by the Sea is the perfect place for a late lunch or early dinner before catching a show at the Shalin Liu, gather with friends after a stroll down Bearskin Neck, or have an elegant date night with that special someone. If you're looking for some midweek fun, be sure to check out our Wednesday dance event, Hump Day, featuring a bar and DJ with all your favorite summer time hits!


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Andhra Prabha is een Telugu-dagblad in India.

De krant, een broadsheet-dagblad, werd in 1938 in Chennai opgericht door Ramnath Goenka om de strijd aan te gaan met de toen toonaangevende Telugu-krant Andhra Patrika. Een belangrijke hoofdredacteur was Narla Venkateswara Rao, onder wiens leiding de krant een paar maanden niet verscheen om te protesteren tegen pogingen van de Britse regering Indiase kranten te censureren.

Tot 1959 werd het blad alleen uitgegeven vanuit Chennai. In 1960 volgde een editie in Vijayawada, kort daarop gevolgd door een editie in Chittoor (vanaf 1966 Bangalore). In 1977 volgde Haiderabad en in 1985 Visakhapatnam.

Externe link
 Website Andhra Prabha

Indiase krant
Andhra Pradesh

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


After having a few days off from cooking, I have renewed inspiration for menu planning and cooking dinner.
Monday - Meatball sandwiches and sweet potato fries (the Hubs cooked up a big ol' pot of meatballs and sauce yesterday).
Tuesday - Escarole and white bean soup, side salad, crusty bread for dipping.
Friday - Take out (Emma has a 5th grade swimming party at 7). I'll grab pizza or Chinese food prior to her party.
Sunday - GAME DAY! Menu to follow in a separate post, but it looks like chili will be the main event!
For more meal time inspiration, visit I'm an Organizing Junkie's Meal Plan Monday. To see all of my menu plan posts, click here.


Who hasn't heard of the Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich!?
Our chefs take it up a notch by adding Knorr Gravy to the cheese sauce. The result? A meatier, intense flavour that you ought to try out for yourself!
Sirloin Steak; cook, rest, and slice thinly.
Mix water and Knorr Demi-Glace powder together; bring to boil and mix with cheese sauce and simmer for few seconds.
Add steak back to pan and warm through.
Fill buns with steak and sauce, top with pickled jalapenos, extra sauce and extra grated cheese.


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MAFES researcher tackles plastic in cotton
Harvesting cotton at the MAFES R. R. Foil Plant Science Research Center. (Photo by David Ammon)
COTTON IS ONE OF MISSISSIPPI'S top agricultural commodities. With 780 farms and 1,600,000 bales produced in 2019, it is clear why Mississippi ranks third in the nation for cotton production. Cotton's role extends well beyond the state line, however, as it is found in clothing, fabrics, and even cosmetics across the globe.
With a role so large, the quality of cotton is vital. Dr. Filip To, MAFES researcher and agricultural and biological engineering professor, is collaborating with the USDA-ARS to detect contaminants in cotton before the final stages in the ginning process.
"We are trying to find the solution that will remove the plastic before it gets to the gin," To said. "We want to address the issue of plastic contaminants in the cotton being ginned, and we want to get a more contaminant-free cotton."
Plastic contamination of cotton is a grueling yet common issue in today's process of cotton ginning. Most often, plastic can be found in cotton from trash that has been blown into the fields and picked up by machinery or even the plastic wrap used to secure bales or modules of cotton. Inside the gin are hundreds of rotary saws that rotate at a high speed to separate the seed from the fiber. When plastic is present, however, it also gets cut into smaller pieces, which become embedded into the fiber. To said the presence of plastic in cotton can significantly decrease the value of the product.
"When a bale of cotton from an area is discovered to have contaminants, they say it comes from that particular region, which can affect the reputation of all cotton from that area," To explained. "As a consequence, the product from that locale becomes less desirable as fewer buyers want it. From the farmer's point of view, they need to be sensitive to make sure their cotton is contaminant-free as their reputation, and the reputation of their neighbors, depend on it."
The team is also examining the issue of moisture content in cotton gins. Moisture content of the cotton correlates with the productivity of the gin and the quality of the cotton. In order to aid in the separation of fibers, seeds, and sticks, the moisture content of seed cotton must be perfect at the level necessary to promote adequate cleaning, yet not so low as to cause permanent damage to the fibers. Imprecise moisture content allows for weakening of the fiber, thus causing it to break, resulting in fiber length reduction. Final bale moisture content outside the range of four to seven percent may lead to production and storage issues further along in the production chain.
The three-year project is being carried out in three phases, beginning at Mississippi State before moving to the USDA-ARS Cotton Ginning Research Unit in Stoneville, Mississippi. The plan is to create a machine vision system that would be used in the gin to detect the plastic in the cotton, remove the contaminant, and discard it.
Contaminated cotton infographic.
The second year of research is underway. The current stage observes whether the machine can recognize the plastic contaminants in the cotton. The machine is tested for accurately detecting the contaminant and characterizing its performance. Phase two will look at moving cotton and scale-up issues. The team will take a sample of cotton, feed it through a conveyor, and examine whether the machine detects, removes, and discards the contaminated part. The final phase moves the research and cotton to the gin, putting it all together.
The impetus of the project stems from the volume of plastic contamination that has increased over the years.
"Plastic contaminants have increased over the years, and so far, there is not a good solution to handle it," To said. "This is a global problem and there are currently limited solutions to curb the volume."
The current method for removing plastic contamination relies heavily on presorting the modules of cotton by hand before being fed into the gin. Some automatic detection technology is also used inside the gin including many cameras and high-performance electronics or computers. Both methods are currently unsustainable and they have many issues. To and his team are interested in shifting to a method that uses very little human involvement by automating the detection and separation process.
Farmers are hit heavily by the results of contaminated cotton, but consumers face implications, too. To said consumers see an increase in prices when contaminated cotton is present.
"In clothing, a contaminant degrades the quality of the clothing. When textile industries see bales of cotton with contaminants, they penalize the grower and deduct much of the costs," To said. "This then affects the price of the clothing you buy. Fabric with contaminated cotton is deemed flawed, making the clean material rare and, as a result, more expensive."
Plastic contamination is by far the most challenging issue facing the U.S. cotton industry, at least that we have seen in many years. U.S. cotton no longer enjoys the non-contaminated premiums that it once had.
Joe Thomas, research leader at the USDA-ARS Cotton Ginning Research Unit in Stoneville, Mississippi, added that contaminated cotton has a very difficult time competing in the market.
"We can all agree that we like the feel of wearing cotton, but it is not the least expensive of fibers," Thomas said. "As a result, it has a tough time competing in the marketplace. When you throw plastic contamination into the mix, it requires additional processing, and it increases yarn and fabric prices. You have a high price fiber that's desirable, but you're adding costs to that fiber, putting it at an even worse competitive position."
Thomas believes eliminating plastic contamination will be beneficial for all involved in the industry.
"Plastic contamination is a major industry concern. If somebody can create a method or process to mitigate the impact of this contamination, or better yet eliminate it all together, it would be a tremendous benefit to the cotton producers, the ginners, the merchants, just about everybody in the value chain," Thomas said.
Plastic contamination has been an industry-wide issue for some time now, and research conducted by the ARS and institutions such as MSU are vital to diminishing the problem.
"Plastic contamination is by far the most challenging issue facing the U.S. cotton industry, at least that we have seen in many years. U.S. cotton no longer enjoys the non-contaminated premiums that it once had," Thomas added. "The implications are huge—loss of market share to countries like Australia and Brazil, price discounts, loss of income to producers, the increased cost of ginning—it's a pretty long list, and it's an industry-wide problem. That's why you see groups like the ARS and universities like MSU collaborating on projects, and the contamination project, in particular, is being addressed by multiple agencies industry-wide."
The newly appointed research leader is excited about potential developments to follow the research, as well as the journey it will take him on.
"The potential for technological breakthrough in either contamination detection or moisture control excites me," Thomas said. "I've been in the industry for over 45 years, but I'm new at being the research leader, so that adds to the excitement. It gives me the opportunity to share my years of experience with younger engineers and scientists coming into our industry."
This research is a non-assistance cooperative agreement between the USDA-ARS and Mississippi State University. This research is funded by the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station.
Filip To
Education: B.S., M.S., Electrical Engineering, Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University
Focus: Sensors, instrumentation, automation, robotics
Passion At Work: I work to solve problems to make people's lives simpler. I make things work automatically to solve issues of human error, fatigue, efficiency, productivity, and cost. I share my passions with students.


Helani Galpaya was invited as an expert speaker to the Intergovernmental Group of Experts (IGE) on e-Commerce and Digital Economy meeting which took place during UNCTAD's e-Commerce week.
Helani's presentation focused on the state of connectivity, use of mobile payment and level of e-Commerce use in the Global South, as revealed by the AfterAccess survey LIRNEasia, RIA and DIRSI have just completed. She was also an invited speaker at the first IGE in 2017.
Populations living in urban or rural areas with greater coverage does not necessarily get populations online.
Peru and Paraguay show the highest urban rural gaps in social media use in Latin America.
About 13% of Bangladeshi's use the Internet.
Latin America uses apps for transport, trading and ecommerce the most out of the global South.
India and Pakistan use transport and taxis the most in Asia, while only India uses trading or e-Commerce the most.


The picture above is one part of deko ideen frhling schale, entitled tablett dekorieren im fr hling 22 h bsche arrangements. You can make a comparison with the fr hlingshafte gr e im winter sch n bei dir by depot, or even compare it with the tischdeko fr hling 100 bezaubernde ideen zum selber machen.
Gunmetal are dominant on this tablett dekorieren im fr hling 22 h bsche arrangements due to table below. Then white & light grey color scheme is make it perfect. Combination beetween dark olive, charcoal, camo green, very light pink and charcoal grey are wraping around the room.


In this updated article we will follow up our view on Japanese Yen outlook in 2019.
We wrote an article in late December last year titled "Will Yen Continue to Outperform in 2019?" In the article, we said that the Japanese Yen can continue to strengthen against other major currency pairs in 2019. In that article, we presented two daily technical charts below to back up our thesis: GBPJPY and CADJPY.
Little did we expect that these two pairs will reach our daily target in just a few days after our article. The Yen pairs had a flash crash last Wednesday at 22.40 PM GMT. In just 8 minutes, the Yen appreciated more than 3% against the dollar. Not only against the dollar, the Yen also appreciated in similar magnitude and speed against other major and emerging market currencies.
Some financial media speculate a couple of possible reasons for the Yen flash crash. One possible reason was due to the thin liquidity during witching hour (5 - 6 pm EST). This is the time when New York traders leave the office and Tokyo traders arrive. Further exacerbating the thin liquidity, last Wednesday was also a public holiday in Tokyo. Another possible reason was due to Apple's sales warning after the US stock market closed on Wednesday. However, the profit warning news came 1 hour before the Yen flash crash, casting some doubt how important Apple's warning was.
At EWF, we don't try to speculate or guess about fundamental reasons behind the move in the market. After all, usually this is an after-the-fact exercise to find the "reasons." We believe that technical charts can and often speak very loudly about the expected path. After last week's flash crash, we have seen Yen pairs recovering nicely. As we reach our downside target in just the first week in 2019, the question is what's in store for Yen for the remainder of 2019? We will update our view and argue from the three technical charts below that last week was only the beginning of the Yen's strength and we will see further strength in Yen in 2019.


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Often asked: When Did Saint Valentine Die?
1 Who did St Valentine Fall in Love?
2 How many St Valentines are there?
3 Why did they kill St Valentine?
4 What is the true history of Valentine's Day?
5 Is Valentine a Catholic saint?
6 What Valentine means?
7 What the Bible says about Valentine's Day?
8 Why is it called Valentine's Day?
9 Who is the patron saint for love?
10 Why is Valentine's Day bad?
11 What six countries celebrate Valentine's Day?
12 What miracles did St Valentine?
Who did St Valentine Fall in Love?
Either way, as time went on, more romantic connotations came to be associated with the saint. One legend has Valentine befriending (or falling in love with ) the blind daughter of a judge (or his jailer — again, it depends).
How many St Valentines are there?
First of all, there was more than one Saint Valentine. There were three. All three men lived during the 3rd century A.D. Two lived in Italy—Saint Valentine of Rome and Saint Valentine of Terni—while the third resided in a Roman province in North Africa.
Why did they kill St Valentine?
The very brief vita of St Valentine states that he was executed for refusing to deny Christ by the order of the "Emperor Claudius" in the year 269. He was arrested and imprisoned upon being caught marrying Christian couples and otherwise aiding Christians who were at the time being persecuted by Claudius in Rome.
What is the true history of Valentine's Day?
The ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine's Day.
You might be interested: Who Wrote The Poem A Visit From Saint Nicholas?
Is Valentine a Catholic saint?
Although the Roman Catholic Church continues to recognize St. Valentine as a saint of the church, he was removed from the General Roman Calendar in 1969 because of the lack of reliable information about him. He is the patron saint of lovers, epileptics, and beekeepers. By some accounts, St.
What Valentine means?
1: a sweetheart chosen or complimented on Valentine's Day. 2a: a gift or greeting sent or given especially to a sweetheart on Valentine's Day especially: a greeting card sent on this day. b: something (such as a movie or piece of writing) expressing uncritical praise or affection: tribute.
What the Bible says about Valentine's Day?
1 John 4:7-12. Dear friends: let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
Why is it called Valentine's Day?
Valentine's Day is named after Saint Valentine, a Catholic priest who lived in Rome in the 3rd Century. There are many stories about St Valentine and over time these stories grew into the legend we know today.
Who is the patron saint for love?
St. Dwynwen is the patron saint of lovers. Her feast day is January 25, Dydd Santes Dwynwen.
Why is Valentine's Day bad?
That's a lot of pressure for two people on just one day of the year. All that pressure on relationships during Valentine's Day can actually harm relationships, even leading to breakups. A study tracking Facebook breakup statuses found that couples tend to break up more often after Valentine's Day.
You might be interested: Readers ask: What Did Elizabeth Ann Seton Do To Become A Saint?
What six countries celebrate Valentine's Day?
Valentines Day Around the World
United States. In the United States and Canada, Valentine's Day is an extremely popular festival.
Britain. In Britain, St Valentine's Day is celebrated with great fanfare and gaiety.
Italy. In Italy, Valentine's Day was once celebrated as a Spring Festival.
Korea.
What miracles did St Valentine?
Valentine worked miracles. The most famous miracle attributed to St. Valentine occurred through a letter he is said to have written to a young blind girl before his martyrdom. The girl miraculously gained her sight to read the note.
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Founded by Lucy Mitchell-Innes and David Nash, who previously headed the worldwide Contemporary and Impressionist & Modern Art divisions of Sotheby's, Mitchell-Innes & Nash places exemplary contemporary artists within a historical context, revealing a continuity of ideas and aesthetic virtuosity from the Modern era through the present day. Lucy Mitchell-Innes is also a member of the selection committee of Art Basel and a former president of the Art Dealers Association of America.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash's renowned exhibition program fosters excellence within artistic practice, while forging an informed dialogue between emerging and established internationally recognized artists. From acclaimed surveys of 20th century masters, such as Jean Arp, Anthony Caro, Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Leon Kossoff, Kenneth Noland, Roy Lichtenstein, and Nicolas de Stael, to solo exhibitions of Sarah Braman, Keltie Ferris, Daniel Lefcourt, Pope.L, Martha Rosler, and Jessica Stockholder, Mitchell-Innes & Nash has proven expertise in both advancing the careers of emerging artists and maintaining the superior standard set by established artists.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash is not currently accepting artists' submissions.