Even in the Medieval Era serfs burned the Lords records to end the struggle of oppression. Even the era you studied in 7th grade was very oppressive to the lower classes. [see more http://www.historytoday.com/sean-mcglynn/violence-and-law-medieval-england.] Further in the 20th Century workers changed the way in which students/children were used as a resource to the system of industrialization. As societies grew more workers asked the questions like making devices that kill humanity. Jacques Jares believed that workers of the world should unite for global peace. If we refused to make and produce items weapons of mass destruction and oppression that destroy the world, then, those in power will not be able to use such things of the natural world. Jares was ultimately assassinated in trying to stop the "war to end all wars." Again we are all in this experiment of Democracy together. To be able to identify and fix the problems we face for our future, we all need to follow the social contract, and see positive solutions for the problems. Then to act to leave the earth better than when we were asked to be stewards of it during our lifetime.
Further the freedom of thought is one of the most important ideas we have tried to foster in the United States of America. In 1943 it was ruled by the United States Supreme Court that the pledge of allegiance was unconstitutional and that we are not able to forces school students to salute the flag, if they deem it to be against their own conscience. We will study this basic premise when we see Anne Hutchinson take on the Puritans. She will contest the ideas that her own thoughts about her god are her own, and no institution can tell her different. Her philosophy is still with us today. Further this idea she had will become the basis of the American Revolution's fervor and the eventually ending of slavery. In God in America, the professional theologians explain that the religious conscience becomes the full force to end tyranny and rid the American Colonies of a King, ruling over the people. So again the people are the sovereigns and make the strength of our federal constitution and American workplace. Long live the American worker who fights for the struggle to make all our lives better.
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"For Mother Jones protecting children was extremely important. Excerpt form internet: In 1901, workers in Pennsylvania's silk mills went on strike. Many of them were young female workers demanding to be paid adult wages.[18] The 1900 census had revealed that one sixth of American children under the age of sixteen were employed. John Mitchell, the president of the UMWA, brought Mother Jones to north-east Pennsylvania in the months of February and September to encourage unity among striking workers. To do so, she encouraged the wives of the workers to organize into a group that would wield brooms, beat on tin pans, and shout "join the union!" She felt that wives had an important role to play as the nurturers and motivators of the striking men, but not as fellow workers. She claimed that the young girls working in the mills were being robbed and demoralized.[18] The rich were denying these children the right to go to school in order to be able to pay for their own children's college tuitions.
To enforce worker solidarity, she travelled to the silk mills in New Jersey and returned to Pennsylvania to report that the conditions she observed were much better. She stated that "the child labor law is better enforced for one thing and there are more men at work than seen in the mills here." In response to the strike, mill owners also divulged their side of the story. They claimed that if the workers still insisted on a wage scale, they would not be able to do business while paying adult wages and would be forced to close.[19] Even Jones herself encouraged the workers to accept a settlement. Although she agreed to a settlement that sent the young girls back to the mills, she continued to fight child labor for the rest of her life.[19]
In 1903, Jones organized children who were working in mills and mines to participate in a "Children's Crusade", a march from Kensington, Philadelphia to Oyster Bay, New York, the hometown of President Theodore Roosevelt with banners demanding "We want to go to school and not the mines!"[20][21][22]
As Mother Jones noted, many of the children at union headquarters were missing fingers and had other disabilities, and she attempted to get newspaper publicity for the bad conditions experienced by children working in Pennsylvania. However, the mill owners held stock in essentially all of the newspapers. When the newspaper men informed her that they could not publish the facts about child labor because of this, she remarked "Well, I've got stock in these little children and I'll arrange a little publicity."[23] Permission to see President Roosevelt was denied by his secretary, and it was suggested that Jones address a letter to the president requesting a visit with him. Even though Mother Jones wrote a letter asking for a meeting, she never received an answer.[24] Though the president refused to meet with the marchers, the incident brought the issue of child labor to the forefront of the public agenda. The 2003 non-fiction book Kids on Strike! described Jones's Children's Crusade in detail
Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She was a suffragette, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical socialist and a birth control supporter. In 1915 she and George Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition. In 1920, she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller traveled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Keller met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. Keller and Twain were both considered radicals at the beginning of the 20th century, and as a consequence, their political views have been forgotten or glossed-over in the popular mind.[29]
Helen Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency. Before reading Progress and Poverty, Helen Keller was already a socialist who believed that Georgism was a good step in the right direction.[30] She later wrote of finding "in Henry George’s philosophy a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature."[31]
Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development." Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew of her political views:
At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him. ... Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.[32]
Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, known as the Wobblies) in 1912,[29] saying that parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political bog". She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In Why I Became an IWW,[33] Keller explained that her motivation for activism came in part from her concern about blindness and other disabilities:
I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness.
The last sentence refers to prostitution and syphilis, the former a frequent cause of the latter, and the latter a leading cause of blindness. In the same interview, Keller also cited the 1912 strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts for instigating her support of socialism."
- Bonnie Stepenoff, "Keeping it in the Family: Mother Jones and the Pennsylvania Silk Strike of 1900–1901”, Labor History 38, no. 4 (1997): 446
- ^ Jump up to: a b Bonnie Stepenoff, "Keeping it in the Family: Mother Jones and the Pennsylvania Silk Strike of 1900–1901”, Labor History 38, no. 4 (1997): 448
- Jump up ^ "Mother Jones leading a protest, circa 1903". Explore PA History. Retrieved 30 November 2015.
- ^ Jump up to: a b "Today in labor history: Mother Jones leads march of miners' children". People's World. 21 September 2012. Retrieved 30 November 2015.
- Jump up ^ Jones, Mother (1925). "Chapter Ten: The March of the Mill Children". In Parton, Mary Field. The Autobiography of Mother Jones. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company. Retrieved 30 November 2015.
- Russell E. Smith, "March of the Mill Children", The Social Service Review 41, no. 3 (1967): 300
- Loewen, James W. (1996) [1995]. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Touchstone ed.). New York, NY: Touchstone Books. pp. 20–22. ISBN 978-0-684-81886-3.
Jump up ^ "Wonder Woman at Massey Hall". Toronto Star Weekly. January 1914. Retrieved October 31, 2014.
Jump up ^ George, Henry (1998). Progress & Poverty. Robert Schalkenbach Foundation. ISBN 978-0911312102.
Jump up ^ Keller, Helen (November 3, 1912). "How I Became a Socialist". The New York Call. Helen Keller Reference Archive. Retrieved March 15, 2016.
Jump up ^ "Why I Became an IWW" in Helen Keller Reference Archive from An interview written by Barbara Bindley[who?], published in the New York Tribune, January 16, 1916 - West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
319 U.S. 624
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (No. 591)
Argued: March 11, 1943
Decided: June 14, 1943
47 F.Supp. 251, affirmed.
Syllabus
Opinion, Jackson
Concurrence, Black
Concurrence, Murphy
Dissent, Frankfurter
Syllabus
1. State action against which the Fourteenth Amendment protects includes action by a state board of education. P. 637.
2. The action of a State in making it compulsory for children in the public schools to salute the flag and pledge allegiance -- by extending the right arm, palm upward, and declaring, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" -- violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. P. 642.
So held as applied to children who were expelled for refusal to comply, and whose absence thereby became "unlawful," subjecting them and their parents or guardians to punishment.
3. That those who refused compliance did so on religious grounds does not control the decision of this question, and it is unnecessary to inquire into the sincerity of their views. P. 634.
4. Under the Federal Constitution, compulsion as here employed is not a permissible means of achieving "national unity." P. 640. [p625]
5. Minersville School Dist. v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, overruled; Hamilton v. Regents, 293 U.S. 245, distinguished. Pp. 642, 632.
APPEAL from a decree of a District Court of three judges enjoining the enforcement of a regulation of the West Virginia State Board of Education requiring children in the public schools to salute the American flag.