Crossword No.1 Answers
Across: 9. Non-racial 10. Negro 11. Gramsci 12. Toilers 13. Tart 14, 17 down, 26. Workers of the world unite 16. Old beer 17. Taranto
19. Libertine 22. Lull 24. Bridges 25. Overrun 26. See 14 27 Calamanco.
Down: 1. Knights of Labour 2. Unpaired 3. Marsh 4. Civil war 5. Elater 6. Engineers 7. Egress 8. Sons of Toil Union 15. Red ragger 17. See 14 18. Neutrino 20. Bailie 21. Insect 23 Fermi.
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Did You Know?
The following snippets relate to some of the clues and answers to the cryptic crossword.
10. Negro – the first black union in the United States to win major concessions from a corporate giant was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Their struggle is the subject of a film, The Union, made in 2001. The legacy of courage and solidarity of the Pullman porters helped trigger the civil rights movement of the 1960's.
1. Knights of Labour – this was a secret society founded in the USA in 1869; its main aim was to bring both skilled and unskilled workers into one organisation, “to establish co-operative institutions, such as would tend to supersede the wage system by the co-operative industrial system”.
In November 1888 the American journal, Knights of Labour, announced the dispatch of an organizer to Australia who probably arrived and worked first in Sydney and established a group there. The American was William E Lyght, who, with the assistance of Larry Petrie (later killed in Paraguay) called a mass meeting in Yarra Park, Melbourne, to lay the aims and objects of the Society before the public. “Roll up and hear us on 9th October, 1890. Come and join us. Unionism for ever!” a branch of the Knights of Labour was founded in the rooms of one of the leaders of the movement, Dr William Moloney; the spiritual leader of the Australian Knights was J R Davies.
They were refused admission to the founding convention of the Progressive Political League of Victoria in 1891, on the grounds that secret societies were unsuitable for political work. But they were represented in the Melbourne May Day march in 1893 and attended for many years after that. Assemblies were also established at Footscray, Mitcham, and Yarraville, as well as Melbourne.
The society never really flourished in Australia – it seemed pointless to have a secret society in the labour movement under Australian conditions. But at times it had some very prominent members, including W G Spence, W A Holman, George Beeby, Arthur Rae, George Black, Francis Cotton, William Lane, Ernie Lane, Henry Lawson, Conrad von Hagen, L A Petrie, Fred Flowers, and many others who were leaders of important sections of the labour movement. There was an attempt by the Freedom Assembly to appoint delegates to the 1893 Labor League Conference in New South Wales, but apparently the move was not acted upon.
The Freedom Assembly was established in Balmain in 1892, and there were branches in Wagga Wagga, Brisbane, and Maryborough. The Society had only a marginal effect on the labour movement in Australia.
3. Vance Marshall – an Australian author who participated in the red flag riots in the later stages of the First World War. A ban on the use of the red flag, except to signal danger, was introduced under the War Precautions Act in September 1918. The red flag, even though it was a traditional emblem of labour, was accused of being a sign of disloyalty, a sign for support for Bolshevism and all that it was said to stand for, nationalization of women and all!
The labour movement, weary of the war restrictions, set out to oppose the War Precautions Act and indicated its opposition by flaunting one of its provisions, the ban on the use of the red flag. In Sydney, returned soldiers attacked a socialist meeting in the Domain being addressed by Vance Marshall, who became a well known writer. Oddly enough, Marshall went to jail, not those who attacked the meeting.
8. Sons of Toil Union – a little-known union involved in rail construction works at Camerunga at the time of the Hunter River Colliers’ Strike in 1892.
(Information for the three Australian items above were taken from the book The Bitter Struggle: a pictorial history of the Australian labor movement, by Joe Harris, University of Queensland Press, 1970.)
24. Harry Bridges – the co-founder and long-time President of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, one of the most-progressive and democratic of the US trade unions. For the ILWU, Bridges and Goldblatt (leader of the warehousemen) drafted a union constitution that's exceptional in the control it grants members. Many union constitutions give members very little beyond the right of paying dues in exchange for the services provided them by the union's securely entrenched bureaucrats. But the ILWU constitution guarantees that nothing of importance can be done without direct vote of the rank-and-file.
No one can take ILWU office except through a vote of the entire membership; no agreement with employers can be approved except by a vote of all members; the union cannot take a position on anything without membership approval.
Thanks in large part to Bridges, the ILWU also was one of the first unions to be thoroughly integrated racially. The union has always been probably the country's most socially conscious union. As the ILWU's official history records accurately, it is "the most outspoken among trade unions on civil rights, civil liberties, general welfare, and international amity, disarmament and peace."
The ILWU was an outspoken foe of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, even at a time when most other unions enthusiastically supported involvement. The union has been equally outspoken against the invasion and occupation of Iraq and against the government attacks on civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism. And members have opposed oppressive regimes abroad by refusing to handle cargo bound for or coming from their countries.
Closer to home, the ILWU used its pension funds to finance construction of low-rent apartments in San Francisco's St. Francis Square, an extremely rare example of what the union calls "cooperative, affordable, integrated working-class housing."
Harry Bridges led the way to that and much more which benefited many, insisting always that the credit should go not to him, but to the union's rank-and-file, they who "did the fighting, the organizing, the striking."
As a newspaper that once reviled Bridges as a dangerous radical said on his death, "He sought the best of all possible worlds. This one is much better due to his efforts."
(Taken form The Remarkable Harry Bridges, 27 July 2005, by Dick Meister, published on the MUA web site at http://mua.org.au/news/general/harryo.html )