William Benbow Quotes
Grand National Holiday
In 1840 Benbow traveled the countryside promoting his one month general strike. He was arrested and imprisoned a few days before the strike was scheduled to begin. This did intimidate all the other strike leaders and the strike was called off. Benbow died in prison the following year.
William Benbow, 1784-1841, English Protestant minister, reformer, pamphleteer and publisher, Euphemism for a Chartist and Working Class General Strike, ~1832
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
See {616053}. The strike was broken by jailing one of the main leaders.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising.
This was a great victory for the Victor Berger wing of the party. They purged the violence advocates and communists from the party. Despite this, a few right wingers call any socialist a communist and a revolutionary.
At the time, Sir Charles was the commander of British Military forces of the North of England and rode to Kersal Moor to keep his eye on a huge Chartist demonstration. See {616055}. He reached this conclusion.
The demonstration actually had 300,000 people including 20 different bands, humongous for the day.
There were massive strikes in Italy. These strikes began in the engineering factories and soon spread to railways, road transport, and other industries. The strikers, however, did more than just occupy their workplaces, they seized them for themselves. Soon 500,000 strikers were at work, producing for themselves. The question was what next. Malatesta and others recommended that they go on and take over the government and not just try and have better labor conditions and factory operations. See {616350}. He warned that the capitalists and middle class bourgeoisie had been so frightened by the successful national strike that they would even ally with the Fascists who they did not like either. That is how Mussolini and his Fascists came to power.
This is the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday. The reason that this is important is when there were many legal battles of public schools and municipalities celebrating Christmas and exhibiting crèches and Christmas trees, several of the proponents argued the doctrine of originalism—namely that we should not declare unconstitutional anything that was common and accepted at the time of the Constitution’s writing, debating, and ratification. They argued that the First Amendment was not intended to cover celebrations of Christmas as the founding fathers would not have made unconstitutional that which was common. While the principle of originalism has advocates and critics, the originalism theory does not hold regarding Christmas because Christmas was not commonly celebrated in early America. See {629845} and {629843} for more evidence on this point.
In 17th century England the Puritans were major opponents of the Celebration of Christmas which at the time had been celebrated mostly by Roman Catholics.
July 4 is celebrated today, but the exact day has varied.
William Benbow (1787 – 1864) was a nonconformist preacher, pamphleteer, pornographer and publisher, and a prominent figure of the Reform Movement in Manchester and London. He worked with William Cobbett on the radical newspaper Political Register, and spent time in prison as a consequence of his writing, publishing and campaigning activities. He has been credited with formulating and popularising the idea of a general strike for the purpose of political reform.
