Catching on! The Musical!

HISTORICAL MEMORY & THE BOYS ON THE BLACKLIST
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Here's an issue for discussion at the newly formed
Greater Manchester Radical History Group:

Meeting to be held on Saturday 31st, March 2012:
Starting at 11am at the Town Hall Tavern,
on Tibb Lane off Cross Street
near Albert Square,
Manchester.
Entrance Free. Everyone welcome.
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WHY was Steve Acheson from Denton in Tameside and a handful of Manchester contracting electricians left standing on lonely pickets around the city's building sites fighting the blacklist in the building trade and almost ignored by the British left and the trade unions for so long? Why do some things become documented and celebrated, and others disappear from the historical memory?

In 1899,a strike took place in New York that forced the press barons, Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst, into a compromise. This month, Dan Barry in his theatre column of the International Herald Tribune, wrote: 'There really was a newsboy's strike in 1899 that unsettled the empires of Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst' and 'there really were thousands of children using muscle and wit to thwart delivery of Pulitzer's Evening World and Hearst's Evening Journal...' The sheer embarrassment of these gaffers, Pulitzer and Hearst, being portrayed as heartless scoundrels by thousands of young ragamuffins demanding the right to 'sale or return' on the newspapers they sold on the streets of New York was remarkable, and perhaps more remarkable was that they had some success. Yet, afterwards the New York newsboy's strike, which spread to other cities, disappeared off the historical radar and almost a century would pass, writes Dan Barry, 'before the Newsboy's Strike of 1899 received its due...' It has now been remembered because the historian, David Nasaw, spotted a footnote and wrote 'Children of the City' about the 1899 Newsboy's Strike in a book in 1985, and this month Disney has put on a Broadway musical 'Newsies the Musical' which began previews on the 15th, March: the actor and playwright, Harvey Fierstein who wrote the play says 'facts are not what drama is'. Mr. Fierstein said he wanted to plumb the historical event for art, entertainment and essential truths, as when these striving children come to a liberating realisation: 'That they matter.'

Why was the New York newsboy's strike forgotten about for almost a century? Why did it disappear from the historical memory for so long and now it is being remembered in a musical on Broadway by Disney? Surely not because of some conspiracy by an historical hierarchy? Some things like the consequencies and sufferings of the parties in the Spanish Civil War were clearly shelved and hidden in a great forgetfulness by 'el Pacto de Olvido':
'Pact of Forgetting (in Spanish: el pacto de olvido) is the Spanish political decision (by both the leftist and rightist parties) of avoiding having Spain deal with the legacy of Francoism after the 1975 death of Gen. Francisco Franco, who remained in power since the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1939.'*

The Spanish case was a very special instance of taking an event off the political/ historical record, but it is unlikely that the New York newsboys fell into such a deliberate act of exclusion or that the Manchester electricians were deliberately overlooked by the media during the early years of their campaign against the blacklist; much more likely it was down to a failure of madia management on the part of the workers in the early days. But does this apply to Captain Swing and the Luddites in the 19th century as some radical historians are now suggesting? Was it bad media management or something else that has led to them being overlooked by many main stream and left-wing historians?

This coming Saturday this will be discussed at
Greater Manchester Radical History Group Meeting
to be held on Saturday 31st, March 2012:
Starting at 11am at the Town Hall Tavern,
on Tibb Lane off Cross Street
near Albert Square,
Manchester.


*This pact underpinned the transition to democracy of the 1970s and meant that difficult questions about the recent past were suppressed for fear of endangering 'national reconciliation' and the restoration of liberal-democratic freedoms. Further, responsibility for the Spanish civil war, and for the repression that followed, was not to be placed upon any particular social or political group. 'In practice , this presupposed suppressing painful memories derived from the dictatorship's division of the population into "victors" and "vanquished".'
This pact has since been challenged with the arrival of a socialist government in 2004 under the prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose grandfather, himself a republican officer, was condemned to death and shot by Franco's Nationalist troops in the Spanish Civil War.