Wisconsin election update: Blog post from 1956 documents bullying union tactics
May 21st, 2012 - 12:09 pm
Full-page scans
Below you will find full-page scans of the entirety of In Freedom’s Cause: The Menace of UAW-CIO Coercion. Click on each image to see it in high resolution.
And don’t forget to vote on June 5!
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What a treasure.
Organized communist Mob activity, supported by government officials.
Mafia government, aided the the silence of the Lambs for DECADES!!
Yes I blame the Pretend Opposition.
Now Republicans can ‘save’ us from their terrible friends across the aisle, right?
Oh how interesting it’s 1956 only two years after The Bildeberg Group by lefty Rockefeller to destroy us,all. Yes the GOP will save us from this Communosocialist scim millions doed fighting against and keeps trying to slaughter the Jews now using their Islamos to do his,dirty,works against,Jews,and,Whites. Your whistling past our graveyards and,especially all young punksoon off to war in the hot,desert sands in their new and ”stylish” Chem/Bio Suits in the next two,months. ,Soros is part of this sick Group that bankrupts countries and stole over $10T as a fact! Yes,I woll take any GOP as Obama and hos ”reverends” of hate say it so loud yet constantly dismissed as just ”talking big”. Just ask Tony the ”flotilla” Italian that stayed behind in Gaza so he could ”help them out”! Oops sorry you can’t talk to Tony cos they brutally beat and tortured him for Real torture and then sawed his head alive. These are the ”Social” Democrat ”party” that can’t figure out it ”socialist names. So don’t try to diminish by saying ”all politicians are the same”. Yes we can do a real,debate cos you don’t,know Sen. Robert Byrd as the open KKK Member and proud of it. Yes these ”Democrats/liberals” were formed cos lincoln freed the slaves and they didn’t want former slaves owning guns! No the GOP does not kill over,300+++ innocent Mexicans for their,sick gun,cntrol scams! The GOP is not any fan of BLT so stop the noise cos it’s no Kosher sandwich and filled with his black ”reverends” of hate as the,MLK frauds they truly are. Yes the,Gop is the true party of the people by the people and,not a bunch of amoral spoiled punks still playing their ”victim/racist/bigot” scams cos the,NAACP is ONLY about persecuting white on black cases alone so lets be,clear The Gop and True independents don’t bash ”Romney the Mormon” while totally ignoring the older Harry Reid and Mormon they all deny.
No, the independent thinkers have had enough of their cheap Theaters of The Aburd like giving the black panthers a pass for voter intimidation as clearly done. No the GOP would put Sharpton and his Black panthers in jail for their ”contract to kill Zimmerman that Obama refuses just like his Occupy Brown Shirts that will never be ”heard” as Obama is the biggest danger to America and tovthe Jews. Ues they are godless amoral punks that are just Useful Idiots off to fight for Democracy and the,Jews,they hate.
My great uncle lived in Kohler, Wisconsin, beginning in the early fifties. I was but a mere toddler when these “hijinks” began, but I still have some recollection of the “tension” in the town. Kohler was, and is, a VERY small town.
I remember SEEING this pamphlet in a drawer in my uncle’s living room. He used to send me to “The Club” (The America Club”) to get him a pail of draft beer.
Yes, in those halcyon days, and in such a small town America, that was Okay. My uncle would call them to say I was coming and they’d hand me a pail of beer to take back on my bicycle.
That little vignette may explain why I seem to be so “bitter” these days.
Great to have an eyewitness account from the era! Thx.
Your story reminds me of my of parts of my own childhood in the 70s, before the nanny statists protected us from….ourselves? My Bavarian immigrant grandparents would send me to the local pony keg with a one gallon glass jug to fetch the day’s draft beer for them. I feel I saw the last gasp of “the old ways”, and the post-war America which is now gone. Perhaps the taming of the old west might have engendered similar resentments, but I share your bitterness at what we have lost.
And kudos to Zombie for another fine article. Love your work.
Well if you didn’t cling to that beer uncle would have never been so pissed! ha
Was the union thug who killed a man by breaking his neck ever brought to justice?
The activist thug escaped to Michigan where the then Governor Williams refused to extradite him to Wisconsin for murder for at least the next four years. The dead worker, one William Bersch, the alleged neck-breaker, one John Genaca of the UAW-CIO.
Does anyone know?
Zombie:
Is it appropriate for you to publish someone else’s work here? Certainly I hope that this is not copyrighted because this deserved the widest possible dissemination. Would you be able to put the scans here in a PDF for download? I would love to keep a copy of this.
Thanks
I sincerely doubt this is copyrighted anymore. Probably long since passed into public domain. Besides which, the whole purpose of the pamphlet, which was given away for free at the time, was to disseminate the info as far and wide as possible. If Herbert Kohler’s estate ever found out that anyone went to the effort of posting his speech online, they’d almost certainly be quite pleased!
So, feel free to download the jpegs. You can download all 15 hi-res jpegs and put them together into a PDF yourself, if you so desire.
Besides which, unless something major happens to the internet, this will be online forever.
Also, I should point out, that there is no copyright notice anywhere in the pamphlet (as the scans show), so it was free to reproduce even when it was first published.
The pamphlet would have been within its first 28-year copyright term under the 1909 copyright law at the time that the current copyright law took effect in 1978. Under the law in effect when the pamphlet was printed, its first copyright term would have expired in 1984: 1956 + 28yrs = 1984.
However, the new copyright act, which took effect in 1978, did away with the renewal term provisions of the old law. The pamphlet’s copyright protection would have been extended another 67 years, for a total term of 95 years…BUT because the pamphlet was published without a copyright notice, under the terms of the old law it went directly into the public domain, and is therefore free to all comers.
Please note that under the current law, lack of copyright notice does not mean that the work is in the public domain. Copyright vests directly in the work at the moment it is created, and notice has been optional since the US joined the Berne Convention in 1989. This means that everything created since 1989 is under copyright whether it carries notice or not; whether that copyright is enforceable, likely to be enforced, or worth enforcing, is another matter.
Thanks for supplying the expert’s assessment!
The part I liked best was “because the pamphlet was published without a copyright notice, under the terms of the old law it went directly into the public domain, and is therefore free to all comers.”
I will not speculate on why you liked that particular part of my explication the best, Zombie; I can think of several reasons, some of which I would agree with and some with which I’d disagree. A discussion for another time, perhaps.
WOW! I need to start flipping through “ephemera” more closely…great find. Thank you for sharing!
“Was the union thug who killed a man by breaking his neck ever brought to justice?”
You’re kidding, right?
ISTR there’s a Supreme Court ruling that unions are “entitled” to whatever actions they deem necessary for “organizing” or strike activities. Including violence.
Nice. It is interesting how well the unions controlled the story, even on the right there are many who fail to grasp what unions were about in the old days.
So it’s not just the government employee unions. I knew it.
Unions are just street gangs with tools.
Zombie wrote, “But its contents were so modern-seeming and so relevant to the recall election of Scott Walker happening right now in Wisconsin that it seemed as if it was a blog post written yesterday. The issues, tactics and warring sides are almost exactly the same today as they were 56 years ago.”
I had a very strong feeling like this when I read Orwell’s essay, “Notes on Nationalism”. After changing a few names and dates, his description of “negative nationalism” in the left of his day reads like it could have been written yesterday.
For example: “The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany.
“He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind.
“I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/nationalism.html
Hey Zombie,
Great find. I used your scans to make a PDF. It’s acceptable for reading but I was also hoping to use OCR to extract the text.
“In Freedom’s Cause” [PDF]
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B7w9In9khv39M1VDc0l4N1ZFYjQ
If you can make higher-resolution images available, I’ll turn those into a better-quality PDF.
I checked Google Books and they list this pamphlet but have no preview.
http://books.google.com/books?id=RWecHAAACAAJ
Apparently, Herbert V. Kohler also wrote these pamphlets, likely based on the same information.
“Are Unions Above the Law?”
http://books.google.com/books?id=H7wYGQAACAAJ
“Can a Free Economy Tolerate Union Violence?: The Menace of UAW-CIO Coercion”
http://books.google.com/books?id=X0bZHAAACAAJ
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Zombie, have you been in touch with the Scott Walker people? have you advised them of this find?
Congratulations Zombie, this is one of your best yet. Loved the writing you’re using to frame the argument, and the investigative skills you’ve honed.
http://www.nrtwc.org/multimedia/the-scepter-of-violence/
If you haven’t you need to watch this.
Of particular note at 20 minutes in “The Hobbs Act which makes it a Federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion does not apply to the use of force to achieve legitimate labor ends.”
That is how bad it has been since the 70′s. Imagine what will happen if we get four more years of big labor approved Supreme Court justices and executive actions. It was one executive action by JFK that granted government workers the right to unionize.
When I was a kid, the State workers union that took care of the kids at the Northern Center went on strike. They left those kids, all retarded, special needs, whatever, to fend for themselves. A large number of women, my mom included, went out and crossed the lines to make sure those kids were taken care of. The vile hate spewed by those goons forever made me a despiser of Unions. Public at first, but then, as a professional driver, I had to deal with teamster docks. That led to my despising of all unions. I know I shouldn’t lump them all together, but I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with them. Now, this crap in my home State of Wisconsin.
I’m in Wisconsin, and it’s shameful how our civil public discourse has degenerated into hateful sound bites. I’d like to print out this article to discuss with my teens. The invasion of union thugs for last summer’s takeover of our beautiful Capitol, complete with unhappy “flee-bagging” lawmakers hiding out in ündisclosed locations” was frightful.
Voter fraud will likely again be an issue in the recall elections of Scott Walker, with the usual characters denying that it occurs. For goodness’ sake, we have to show government I.D. to do so many mundane things, why not to vote?
BTW One of my kids’ teachers, Mr. Levenhagen, showed his real WEAC teacher’s union colors. YouTube him under “teacher” “rant” “Madison” “Fox” He continues teaching, organizing, and was even lauded by other public union folks!
Is your child actually taught by Looney Levenhagen? Can’t you remove them from the class to another teacher?
Good work, Zombie. Let’s hope this goes viral.
Simply outstanding, Zombie.
My grandfather started a successful plumbing business in the 1940′s. As a teenager in the ’60′s I worked for him, filing invoices. By far the vast majority of those invoices were from the Kohler Company. He sold very little from other manufacturers.
Now I know why.
I suspect is is because of people like my grandfather that the Kohler Company survived. Unions underestimate the power of the businessmen’s network
From now on I will only buy Kohler products! I see the same thing here in Texas with the teachers unions…. I am a member of a local IBEW from Houston. They refuse to police their own. Thank you for the story and history lesson. Wish it was a public stock I could invest in but will invest in its products and tell my circle of friends why Kohler are the best products to buy and why that is a simple fact.
You have an old piece of right wing, shithead propaganda (redundancy intended). You clowns have always sucked. POWER TO THE PEOPLE – STOP THE PIGS
Your parents must be so proud.
Zombie: anyone here forward this to the good folks of North Carolina?
They could use this as a great tool to disseminate far and wide just prior to the DNC brouh-ha-ha….called a ah con-ven-chun???
One big difference:
Then: industrial private sector unions.
Now: anti-industrial public-sector unions.
Aside from that, the more things change…
One thing to note: they didn’t have latex paint back then. The oil paint that was used then was a lot more difficult to get off. That paint bombing business was a lot more serious than it would be today. It wasn’t just a cute prank.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19581203&id=ST4aAAAAIBAJ&sjid=8CUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4958,968124
Looks like Mr Gunaca was actually extradited to Wisconsin. I especially like Gov Williams’ purported fear of a biased trail and unjust conviction of his Michigan resident farmed out to Wisconsin by Detroit union thugs to instill fear and suborn compliance…
Just found it in the Jun 15, 1959 “Sheboygan Journal”: Gunaca plead “No Contest” to two counts of felonious assault.
From the Jun 16, 1959 “The News Palladium”: The prosecuting DA recommended 3yrs probation and a fine, but the presiding judge ruled the plea equivalent to guilty, and gave him the maximum penalty of 3yrs prison for each offense, to serve concurrently.
The more things change the more they stay the same……..
BTW I would give anything to work for an employer like that now a days, few and far between now.
Zombie:
My father was a domestic Cold Warrior here in So. Cal. When he passed in 2002 the famous anti communist democrat Roy Brewer attended his funeral. I was not introduced to him otherwise I would have talked his ear off, I just thought he was a kindly older gentleman in a wheelchair. He said my father never got the acknowlegement for all he’d done. That said I inherated my fathers anti commie library and am going through it to seperate the religous from the literary from the anti comminist stuff. The Nixon Library has agreed to accept the anti commie stuff, Pop chilled down in the late 30′s with a young attorney when he moved to Whittier. My point, I might have some copies of this pamphlet in the pile, I do have many and thought they might be of interest to you or the folks at PJ. Dad was big on the Dan Smoot report and I have a copy of Little Cesar by Ralph De Toledano which has some real interesting stuff on Mr. Chavez and truley makes me wonder why we have a US Navy ship named for him, is the USS Che on the ways? Anyway as I am PJ subscriber you can track me down that way. I would be happy to see my fathers life work go to some good use, and NO you can not have his copy of Elizabeth Bentley’s Out of Bondage but I have a few reprint copies of William Z. Foster’s Toward a Soviet America. Ya know weve been warned about what is going on today for over 50 years, when will we listen?
What I recommend is that you blog about the interesting material in the library. It would be much more interesting coming from someone who had a personal connection to the material.
Of particular interest would be stuff that has some relevance to current events (like this Wisconsin pamphlet did). People would be more likely to read a post about that rather than simply a post about an old book with not much relevance to the modern world.
Donating the collection tot he Nixon library is a great idea, and is probably the best use for it. I myself am so overwhelmed with other projects that I could never do it justice.
But thanks for the offer and the story — fascinating!
Ron Radosh might be interested in some of it.
If by “Old Book” you were refering to Foster’s “Tword A Soviet America” old as it may be, published in 1932, it is amazing just how much they actually have accomplished. The chapter on education is very scary as he told how through a “National Department of Education they would revolutionize the studies, being clensed of Religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materilism, internationalism and the general ethics of the new Socialist society.” Again that has come to pass so I consider it very relative to today but yes the Bently story is just an old commie comming in from the cold but it does give credit to the anticommunists of the day and that would be my feeling of why it is pertanent today as it was planned so long ago. But thanks for your reply, I really enjoy your work!
Luddites go back to the early 19th century.
With very few exceptions throughout history, unions have been synonymous with thuggery.
Plus ca change ! For an interesting treatment of a small part of organized and subsidized union violence, see the Herb Sorrell portions of Peter Schweizer’s “Reagan’s War”. “The Venona Papers” details some of the organizational and money laundering systems used. “The Forgotten Man” discusses the “parallel track” public and hidden foreign funded organizations which in several cases succeeded in taking over labor groups and unions in the US. Great to hear someone remembers Smoot ! Have there been any solid publications on the subject of how Robert Caro’s Pedernales prevaricator used the weight of the government to crush conservative advertising for radio opinion / comment shows such as Smoot’s after 1964 ? Obama’s party’s policies are the Auschwitz of hope. Any betting pools up yet for which week the O will drop the ” ‘Daisy’ commercial ” bomb this year ? NObama in o twelve ! GBUSA
Grup:
Thanks for the Smoot acknowlegment. Pop kept stacks of the Dan Smoot report all over the house and I have more than a few around here. My next project IS to organize the lot but I was tempted to toss all the pamphlets but this Zombie column gave me second thoughts, I’ll let the Nixon Library sort it out. Do you remember the Aussie Dr. Schwarz? I got drug off to many of his lecturers as a kid. I guess if I really wanted to rebell back in the late 60′s I could have joined the CPUSA
Thank you so much for this, Zombie! Fascinating and useful.
Viva la New Journalism! Great job, Zombie. You are a treasure.
Why doesn’t anyone in industry speak like Mr. Kohler anymore?