Adrienne Rich Quotes
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W. W. Norton & Company, 1976, p. 52.
The then Vice President was accosted on the train by southerners who believed that he was on his way to his home state of Tennessee to persuade the legislature not to secede from the union. Amid cries to hang him and after he was punched by one of the mob, ex-Senator Wigfall—the man who had received the surrender sword at Sumter, who was also on the train, persuaded the crowd to hear Johnson out. Johnson thus began his speech which was potentially for his life, but never wavered from his view that secession was a mistake. Most of the crowd calmed down and as the train pulled out, they let him go though there were still a few shouts for “hanging.” There was no secret service protection for the President or vice President at the outbreak of the Civil War. Pinkerton had organized some informal protection for the President and thwarted some plots, but it was the Vice President who was attacked first. And there was not sufficient protection to prevent Lincoln’s assassination.
In 1892 President Harrison and the Republicans were trying to win a second term and were embarrassed by a bloody strike and riot at the Homestead steel works. Frick, the Homestead General Manager, was visited by a Republican emissary suggesting that Frick recognize the union and reduce the public embarrassment.. The Republicans lost to Grover Cleveland and the Democrats.
This quotation was reprinted and widely distributed by the CIO in its 1936 organizing drive of the Ford Motor Company
It was fairly common at the time for the management of a company undergoing a strike to hire goons and gunmen to beat up and even murdering strikers to intimidate the strikers. But some state and locall governments supporting private companies began to do that as well. Sometimes they even used the police and the state national guard.
Mitchell had warned that the strike was coming (see {607760}). The strike lasted 29 days and ended when the miners received a 10% wage increase. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the dispute.
The strike went on. See Mitchell’s later statement: {607757}.
Defense Secretary Les Aspin was testifying for hours before the House Armed Service Committee a week after he had received an operation to install a pacemaker.
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse." Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum," which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
