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.

Ought Northern Voices to follow in the steps of the Encyclopedia Britannica?

ON the Church Street Market bookstall a poster declares 'KILL KINDLE & SAVE THE BOOK'. Last week, it was reported that the Encyclopedia Britannica ceased to be a printed publication as it embraced the Web and in a letter in the International Herald Tribune (IHT) a Mr. Fred D. White writes: 'It isn't just Encyclopedia Britannica that is being "reduced to a click", but all books seem to be headed in that direction, as e-book readers proliferate.' The same day a letter arrived at Northern Voices from someone called 'Danny' from Newry in County Down, who having picked up a copy of Northern Voices (NV) five years ago while studying at Huddersfield University, now decides to write: 'I'm not really an anarchist but I find such ideas highly interesting', and he requests a copy of NV.

Meanwhile, Fred White in the IHT writes: 'This digitization of print may be inevitable but we are losing something precious in our culture.' He argues: '...the Internet and its resources can never replace physical books, no more than a photograph of a Rembrandt can replace the actual painting. The very physicality of books plays a basic role in the learning experience. Physical books slow us down - we need to slow down - and foster deeper thinking. And yes, books are beautiful, inside as well as out.'

The forthcoming Summer issue of Northern Voices No.13 has an interview with ex-amateur boxer turn Manchester bookseller, Eddy Hopkinson, about the future of the book and the threat of the e-book. Eddy has been 42-years in the trade and is now the oldest second-hand bookseller in central Manchester. This local interview takes place at the same time as the University of Amsterdam Exhibition on 'The Printed Book: A Visual History'. Of this exhibition in the Herald Tribune Alice Rawsthorn wrote: 'The exhibition comes at a propitious time, when smart publishers are responding to the onslaught from e-books by adopting a more adventurous approach to design.' She, like Eddy Hopkinson in Northern Voices, thinks '... the printed book faces an uncertain future.' Ms. Rawsthorn reminds us that there have been technological threats before to the book trade, but thinks 'that it will probably become a niche product with high design values, and is likelier to be an artist's monograph or special edition of a literary novel, rather than a textbook or pulp fiction.'

It is anticipated that the bibliophile and Northern Voices' affictionado, Chris Draper, will address this topic when he addresses the Manchester Radical History Group meeting at the Town Hall Tavern on Tibb Lane near Albert Square, in central Manchester on Saturday 31st, March at 11am. If so he will have his critics from some of the modernists on the Northern Voices editorial panel. This meeting is a public meeting and the details are as follows:

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.

The physical printed version of NORTHERN VOICES 13 may be obtained as follows:
Postal subscription: £5 for two issues (post included)
Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' at
c/o 52, Todmorden Road,
Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH.
Tel.: 0161 793 5122.
email: northernvoices@hotmail.com

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.

Aims:
1) To found a Northern Radical History Network.
2) To decide on the nature of our first research publication:
the Luddite anniversary.

11am to 12.30:
Chris Draper on the Practicalities & Purpose of Radical Publishing:
Production, Content, Style, Form, Accessibility & Distribution.
Examining some previously published examples for consideration:
'Chomsky & his Critics' issued in 2001 (first published by sociologists at the Manchester Universities and some northern anarchists); the Northern Voices' series of journals 2003-2012 ( published by Northern Voices' Editorial Panel); Spanish Civil War booklet (first published by Tameside Trade Union Council in 2006 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the Greater Manchester County Association of TUCs' program for that year), 'The Workers' Next Step' (2009).

a) What kind of outcome do we want from our project & publication?

b) What kind of booklet do we want?

c) Where will it be distributed and to whom?

d) What should be the relationship of these publications to the Blog?

e) What kind of methodology ought we to be using?

Lunch Break: 12.30 to 1.30pm.

1.30pm to 2.30pm:

Richard Holland on the Luddites & Peterloo-
Why do some events get neglected and others get embraced by the popular culture and the establishment left?

2.30pm to 4pm:

Roger Ball on the History, Practical Experiences & Endeavours of the Bristol Radical History Group, giving everyday parochial examples from his knowledge of the South West of England, and showing how he views a similar venture might relate to the general public in our Northern towns and cities.
What is the knack of opening up the public conciousness to our own history and form of life, away from the stale ghettos of establishment thinking and politics?