#Port Arthur

[coutureboard]

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

UGK released their debut album Too Hard To Swallow November 10, 1992

[evilenterprise]

[humanoidhistory]

Turnip Rock, Port Austin, Michigan.

(Detroit Public Library)

[unteriors]

13th Street, Port Arthur, Texas.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"It was the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World or Wobblies] and the Finns that initially took the lead in supporting the Russian Revolution, which had profoundly influenced political developments in Finland.

...

According to A.T. Hill, local Wobblies “hailed the Russian Bolshevic [sic] revolution as something that had followed the IWW economic blueprint.” Mass meetings to protest the continued involvement of Canadian armed forces in Russia were organized. A “Friends of Russia” committee, composed of workers representing a number of organizations and trade unions in Port Arthur and Fort William, was also established. And, as Hill remembered, within the columns of the newly created Vapaus newspaper, members of the Finnish community could engage with recent events in Russia and forge closer bonds with fellow Finns working in other lumber camps. Many Wobblies viewed the Russian Revolution in much the same way as other socialist organizations in North America. Its success was seen as an indication that the end of capitalism was at hand and that workers in North America should take heart from the events in Russia. Despite becoming largely inactive in the region during the second half of the First World War, the IWW remained vigorous across the border in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Most notably, the Superior District Lumber Workers Industrial Union No. 500 continued to agitate and to lead strikes. It was among the lumber workers in Wisconsin and Minnesota and in classes taken at the Work People’s College in Duluth, Minnesota, that Hill spent much of the war.

Drawn to the growing unrest at the Lakehead, Hill moved to Port Arthur in 1917 and dedicated himself to the activities of local Finnish socialists. On behalf of the IWW LWIU [Lumber Workers International Union], Hill and those he recruited toured much of Northwestern Ontario in an attempt to organize workers and drum up subscriptions for Vapaus. Much of the IWW’s attention was focused on the Russell and Newaygo Timber Company and its operations within the district of Thunder Bay. Despite high hopes, in the end Hill was fired (both for his agitation and for conflicts with Lutheran Finnish workers). There now existed within the camps [thanks to the Russian Revolution] a rift between non-socialists and socialists, and debates over the various interpretations of Marxism.

The IWW appealed greatly to immigrant workers in Northwestern Ontario. As Holmer Borg, a Swedish lumber worker and IWW organizer, recalled in 1972:

The IWW organized through its members. Every member was expected to organize, not necessarily by having well organized meetings, [but] simply by talking among workers.

The IWW also tended to focus on the immediate issues that faced workers where they organized. In addition, many recent immigrants were drawn to unions whose organizers actually spoke their language. Most of the other established trade unions tended to send English-speaking organizers who had little or no actual experience in the regions they were visiting or with the workers they were trying to organize.

...

One report by the Dominion Police referred to the Finns in Port Arthur as “anarchists pure and simple.”"

- Michel S. Beaulieu, Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. p. 53-55.

[postcard-from-the-past]

Tsarevich and Amur battleships by Port Arthur, modern-day Lüshunkou, Dalian, China

Russian vintage postcard

[platypusesforarms]

Port Arthur | Tony Robinson Explores Australia: The People Are Revolting

Port Arthur today is a major tourist attraction in Tasmania, and it's difficult to imagine it was once one of the most terrifying places on Earth. Location was always part of its appeal, but not for the picturesque surroundings. Port Arthur is a natural fortress; accessible only via a narrow strip of land known as Eaglehawk Neck.

[lonestarbattleship]

USS CONSTITUTION in Port Arthur, Texas. She was newly refurbished and embarked on a thank-you tour, stopping at Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports from July 1931 to May 1932.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department: TXPWD_1997-22-145

Date: March 1932

[coutureboard]

[todayinhiphophistory]

Today in Hip Hop History:

UGK released their second album Super Tight August 30, 1994

[magstorrn]

port arthur, lutruwita/tasmania - 20 march 2024

[dontsweatthefresh]

Teezo Touchdown - Third Coast (Official Video)

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Another well-received speaker during the early months of 1925 was A.E. Smith. His presentations as head of the Ontario section of the Canadian Labour Party (CLP) at the Wobbly-controlled Port Arthur Labour Temple, the Orpheum theatre in Fort William, and the Fort William Auditorium focused on unemployment associations and the progress made “in forming educational classes in the East.” They were well attended. Once again, Fred Moore chaired the Fort William meetings. He used them to convince those in attendance that “the radical labour movements were converging towards ‘the day’ when a social revolution would bring about a complete change in system.” The main duty of a labour representative in Parliament, he contended, “should be to weaken, hamper and embarrass the bourgeois parliament.” The process of social revolution, described as a “grim business,” was but a “natural evolution.”

...

The activities of organizers from both the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] and the CPC [Communist Party of Canada] caught the attention of regional politicians and traditional labour leaders, who began to voice their opposition to immigration and the flood of radical workers into the country. Not all of the attention was negative. The recent success of the Communists, for example, caught the attention of Peter Heenan, the Kenora Labour member of the provincial parliament (MPP) who had been elected in 1919 and again in 1923. Sensing a shift in provincial politics, he sought to tap into the CPC’s growing support despite having recently accepted nomination from the Liberal party. He was refused a meeting. Sensing an opportunity of its own, the CPC parachuted party stalwart A.E. Smith into Port Arthur to run in the riding of Port Arthur-Thunder Bay during the 1925 federal election. Smith and the CPC’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) chose the riding because both felt that the support from the Finnish lumber workers might well carry the day. His candidacy also received the support of the local Canadian Labour Party (no surprise, as Smith was president of the Ontario section) and from Alex Gibson and the Port Arthur Trades and Labour Council. Once more, Smith’s candidacy would reveal the mileage that the Lakehead left could get by attempting to occupy at least some of the political space normally occupied by the centrists.

Much of Smith’s platform reiterated the speeches he had given in the region earlier in the year. Local newspapers described him as eloquent, with even normally skeptical journalists suggesting that “oratory like his had not flown from the tongue of any speaker on the platform in Port Arthur.” Moreover, his politics were clearly enunciated. At the Port Arthur Armoury, for example, he addressed the crowd of 2,000 directly as a “deliberative assembly, a parliament of the people, who are the first factor … in political power.” Smith did well, garnering 1,363 of a total 9,068 votes in perhaps the best showing of any federal Communist candidate in the 1920s. Even the Port Arthur News-Chronicle described the election as the “Most Vigorously Contested in the History of Port Arthur.”

The CPC considered Smith’s showing a clear indication of its growing stature in the region. As Anthony Rasporich’s work reveals, “near majorities were in fact recorded over the Conservative, Liberal, and independent candidates in the south end polls dominated by the Slavs and Finns, and in radical rural pockets of Finns to the north and west of Port Arthur.” It is revealing, however, that he won only three rural polls by narrow margins, and that the Finnish vote was split almost equally among all candidates."

- Michel S. Beaulieu, Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. p. 113, 114-115.

[postcard-from-the-past]

View of Port Arthur, modern-day Lüshunkou, China

Russian vintage postcard