Two news reports I recently stumbled upon while reading through the Fort William Times Journal. Both of these articles fell in June 1913.
The first is about anti-socialist police in Breslau, then a part of German Silesia, now Wroclaw in Poland, and in 1913 the German Empire’s sixth or seventh largest city, a major industrial centre, especially for linen and cotton manufacturing, and capital of a region dominated by coal mining. The police, as part of a government campaign against trade unionists, would actually attack and accost funerals for workers identified as members of the Socialist Party or at least members of a local trade union. The red ribbons and flag were a dead give away. As many funerals would become large processions, often rancorous, proud and politically charged, especially if the deceased was a member of the labour or socialist movement considered to have died unjustly, the police may have felt it posed a threat to ‘public order’; but clearly, the lengths they went to represent, according both to the article and a little sense, an attack upon organized labour far beyond ‘keeping the peace’.
The police, according to this Fort William Times Journal report, would charge and break up large funeral processions; smaller ones they would accost, either way with clubs a swinging. Then, having disrupted the march, the police would tear off the ribbons from the casket, and even reach inside to pull the red ribbon pinned to a lapel. In some cases, according again to this cable from Breslau, they would actually attack the physical burial and reach into the grave to remove any red tokens. Seems a little over the top, doesn’t it? It certainly might be a biased report, especially given the tensions between Germany and Britain at the time (the Fort William Times Journal would often carry headlines about German officialdom and its belligerency). Certainly the Fort William Times Journal was not a pro-labour paper, given its attitude towards strikes and organising. So, there must be some truth to this. There is something almost ‘tribal’ or ‘ancient’ in it as well, assaulting and demeaning an opponents death ceremonies, but clearly we are dealing with something much more interesting and pertinent to today: a state using its armed guards to assault both mentally and materially any opposition to its sway, and to the rights of capital.
I found a more amusing story a week later in the paper. It concerns a German official, unnamed but apparently well connected to the Chancellery, and speaking in the name of some branch of the German Government, calling President Wilson of the United States an “Agitator for Socialists.” “Lecturing Socialist, it has dubbed him” the article goes on to say. “A bigger disturbor of peace than the Balkans War” according to the Germans. For anyone who knows anything about Woodrow Wilson, this is ridiculous, and the Fort Williams Times Journal says as much, at least in its tone of bemused amazement. For anyone who knows anything about Woodrow Wilson, his personal beliefs, his racism, attitude towards Progressivism and socialism, and the labour movement in general, and towards business and monopoly, then calling him a socialist would be like calling him an idolater: crude and insulting, the opposite of what he really was, and what forces in the United States he represented. Hell, Teddy Roosevelt was more socialist than Woodrow Wilson, or was at least someone like Jack London could quote him approvingly.
