by Fred Glass and Jos Sances
These illustrations for the award-winning thirty-minute documentary video We Mean to Make Things Over (Fred Glass, 2022) were created by Jos Sances using scratchboard technique. This takes place on a black board incised to expose the white clay underneath, much like the way a block print is created. The images were scanned and colored within Photoshop. Part One debuted last week.
9. A symbol of America's welcome to immigrants from all over the world, the Statue of Liberty was received from France in the same year, 1886, that the authorities unleashed an anti-immigrant backlash following the events of Haymarket Square and repression of the movement for an eight-hour day. This contradiction and pendulum swinging between welcome and scapegoating has often characterized the country's attitude toward immigrants.
10. The Second or Socialist International was founded in Paris in 1889, and one of its first orders of business was to proclaim that workers in each country should demonstrate, up to and including general strikes, to commemorate the Chicago martyrs' sacrifice and push for a universal eight-hour day, on May 1 each year. Karl Marx's comrade in arms, Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895), is depicted here.
11. After Albert Parsons, one of the Haymarket martyrs, was executed, his widow, Lucy Parsons, tirelessly worked for his and the other Haymarket martyrs’ exoneration. For decades afterward she was a fixture at May Day events and in union organizing drives. Chicago police described her as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”.
12. President Grover Cleveland signed the proclamation for a Labor Day holiday in 1894 after the brutal suppression of railroad workers striking across the nation in solidarity with workers in the Pullman Car factory near Chicago. Labor Day was seen as a less radical and dangerous concession to workers than May Day, with the latter's association with socialism. Labor Day is still celebrated today on the first Monday in September, at events where workers are often addressed by politicians sympathetic to the labor movement.
13. The bloody but successful San Francisco General Strike arose from a coast wide maritime strike, which became a shutdown of all San Francisco industry after two strikers, longshoreman Howard Sperry and marine cook Nick Bordoise, were gunned down by police on July 5, 1934.
14. In 2006 millions of immigrant workers and their supporters took to the streets of the nation's cities, large and small, to demand fair treatment, in some of the largest marches and demonstrations in U.S. history. Once again immigrants had been unfairly scapegoated following the September 11 attacks in New York, and the backlash created a movement, including undocumented immigrants, who came out of the shadows to protest.
15. The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 popularized the economic idea of the 1% and the 99%, and in Oakland thousands of people came out on November 2 for a "Day of Action". Not quite a general strike, it nonetheless brought downtown Oakland to a halt, shuttered many businesses, and shut down the port on behalf of the interests of "the 99%" in the wake of the Wall Street crash and Great Recession. Since then May Day has been once more growing in popularity, with unions, socialist groups and other community organizations demonstrating on behalf of social justice across the country, despite the holiday’s continuing unofficial status.
Jos Sances is an East Bay artist and muralist and retired co-founder of Alliance Graphics. His work can be found at www.josart.net. Fred Glass is a filmmaker, author and retired City College of San Francisco Labor and Community Studies faculty member. For more information and to watch the 30-minute documentary video, We Mean to Make Things Over: A History of May Day, go to thefredletter.com.