Free Republic

Noted author Paul Kengor has unearthed declassified letters and other documents in the Soviet Comintern archives linking early leaders of the ACLU with the Communist Party.Kengor found a May 23, 1931 letter in the archives signed by ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, written on ACLU stationery, to then American Communist Party Chairman William Z. Foster asking him to help ACLU Chairman Harry Ward with his then-upcoming trip to Stalin’s Russia.The letter suggests Ward intended to visit the Soviet Union to find “evidence from Soviet Russia” that would undermine the capitalist profit motive.Baldwin wrote the letter at a time when Stalin was...

In addition to the record-breaking year for migrant apprehensions along the southwest border, the Biden Administration can notch another historical claim in 2021 with 11 Border Patrol agents dying in the line of duty. This number eclipses all records dating back to 1919, when the Department of Labor was responsible for immigration matters.

On this date in 1923, a German paramilitary was shot by a French firing squad near Dusseldorf for his anti-occupation sabotage efforts. Albert Leo Schlageter, a World War I veteran and conservative Catholic who signed up with the right-wing Freikorps and tangled with communists after the war, joined the fledging Nazi party when it absorbed his Freikorps unit in 1922. The next year, France occupied the Ruhr to secure war reparations payments then crippling Germany, which would do much to speed the rise of the Nazis in the years ahead. Schlageter was nabbed sabotaging railroad lines in resistance, and Berlin’s...

The raids constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes. Friday, January 3, 2020 Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en) Lawrence W. Reed Lawrence W. Reed Politics History Woodrow Wilson First Amendment Communism World War I Police State Exactly a hundred years ago this morning—on January 3, 1920—Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished Bill of Rights. During the night, some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were rounded up and jailed for what amounted, in...

"The road, trees, houses and even ourselves were bathed in a blinding phosphorescent-like glow which had its center in a bright streak in the sky above us," highway construction superintendent Leroy Milhan of Centerville, Michigan, would recall in a paper published the following year. "It passed over us toward the west. Immediately came a muffled report or jar that shook houses and the very earth like an earthquake." The following day, the Washington Times reported that "telegraph and telephone communications and electric lighting plants in several cities in southern Michigan and northern Indiana are out of commission" as a result...

Every mouth I meet opens to complain, “Things’ve changed . . . Nothing’s the same . . . Not like we were . . . The country isn’t what it was . . .” So I checked back — exactly 100 years — to see the America of 1919. World War I over. The USA needed security. Instead, cities experienced “Red Scare” bombings, race riots, workers striking, vets competing for jobs, May Day demonstrations, armed resistance movements and the deportations of 149 people, including Emma Goldman, to Russia. Historians rate 1919 “America’s worst year.” Dial telephones, pop-up toasters and shortwave radios made their entrance. Despite that pardon-the-expression “car”...

As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken on a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. It’s a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Roosevelt’s 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he proclaimed that “we have room for...

On January 15, 1919, a tank containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses weighing an estimated 26 million pounds burst open, unleashing a sticky flood onto Boston's North End. The 25-foot high wave of goo oozed over the streets at 35 miles per hour, crushing buildings in its wake and killing 21 people. The wave broke steel girders of the Boston Elevated Railway, almost swept a train off its tracks, knocked buildings off their foundations, and toppled electrical poles, the wires hissing and sparking as they fell into the brown flood. The Boston Globe reported that people 'were picked up and...

Yesterday was the 92nd anniversary of one of the strangest tragedies ever to take place on American soil. It's the stuff of Weekly World News or The Onion. Yet it was a very real, deadly, (and delicious) disaster. To this day on hot summer days in an old Boston neighborhood, residents swear that they can smell a vague odor of molasses. It's a sweet-smelling reminder of a day when some 150 people were injured; 21 people and several horses were killed by a sudden flood of molasses... Purity Distilling Company was doing big business. A large quantity of stored molasses...

Yes there really was a flood of molasses in Boston in the early 18th century, and as improbable as it seems, the reality is horrifying. And yes, sometimes a woman is so dumb she's married to a killer and doesn't know it. Reviews of "Dark Tide" and "Mafia Wife"…both older books but worth a new look. HERE FOR REVIEWS

The removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored, says Tom Gross It is not surprising, given the sheer scale of the Holocaust and its sadism, that it has dominated contemporary discourse among Jews and others. But, while the extermination of European Jews has rightfully (though belatedly) generated a great deal of study and research, the removal of the Jews from the Arab world has been all but ignored. This ignorance extends to policy-makers at the highest level. Some journalists and politicians I have spoken to have expressed surprise when I even mentioned that Jews...

“A dull muffled roar gave but an instant’s warning before the top of the tank was blown into the air,” The New York Times wrote in 1919. “Two million gallons of molasses rushed over the streets and converted into a sticky mass the wreckage of several small buildings which had been smashed by the force of the explosion.”

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-100-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power...

Both critics and supporters of US President George W. Bush's post-September 11 vision of a new, freedom-loving Middle East have noted the strong similarities between the president and his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. In 1917, the 28th president brought US forces into World War I with the promise that an allied victory against Germany and its allies would make the world "safe for democracy." Wilson's vision of a postwar world was a bit out of place in the war being fought on the killing fields of Belgium and France. Neither the Allies nor the Central Powers were fighting the war for...

Disillusionment with Woodrow Wilson changed the American Left forever. In 1916, German saboteurs destroyed Black Tom Island in New York Harbor.Click for Bettmann/Corbis pic. Today’s state-oriented liberalism, we are often told, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of progressivism. The progressives, led by President Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in reason and the better nature of the American people. Expanded government would serve as an engine of popular goodwill to soften the harsh rigors of industrial capitalism. Describing the condition of his fellow intellectuals prior to World War I, Lewis Mumford exclaimed that “there was scarcely...

Recent months have seen a flurry of books about the highly controversial 1919 World Series and the so-called “Black Sox.” The most notable are Red Legs and Black Sox by Dr. Susan Dellinger; and Burying the Black Sox by Gene Carney. Both are highly informative books that were a joy to read and have renewed my interest in “all things Black Sox.” I recently reread the Melvin Durslag Sporting News interview of Chick Gandil from 1956. Gandil was often cast as a ringleader of the plot to throw the 1919 World Series. Thirty seven years later, at age 69, he...

During the 2004 campaign our Executive Director contacted the candidates running for Congress from the 5th and 8th Districts to ask about their support for passenger rail. When he reached an aide to the Republican candidate for the 5th District seat, he received the answer, "We support passenger rail only if it pays for itself." Our Executive Director works with political figures day in and day out, so he's something of a diplomat. Had I been on the phone, I would have shot back, "When did I-90 ever pay for itself?" Hanging around conservative Republicans like I do, time and...