Fintan O'Toole and Piper French on Los Angeles
| In early June, as demonstrations sprouted up around Los Angeles in protest of the hundreds of people being rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, President Trump declared the largely peaceable assemblies to be “a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” and deployed seven hundred marines and 1,700 National Guard soldiers to the city. In the Review’s July 24 issue, Fintan O’Toole writes about Trump’s “desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military”: So long as Trump has political opponents, their dissent alone makes the danger of rebellion timeless and ubiquitous. What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time.
And today on the NYR Online, Piper French writes about the network of worker centers—which “organize mostly low-wage immigrant laborers”— and labor unions that has been leading the protests, and asks whether this moment of solidarity might have a lasting effect on the organized labor movement. Below, alongside O’Toole’s and French’s essays, are five articles from our archive about protest, labor, and the domestic use of state violence. What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time. Will the shocking displays of state power on display in LA cause unions to close ranks, or deepen their solidarity with immigrant workers? “[In It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair] Lewis rips through a genealogy of American proto-fascist tendencies, including anti-Semitism, political corruption, war hysteria, conspiracy theories, and evangelical Christianity, before ending on the ‘Kentucky night-riders,’ the ‘trainloads of people [who] have to gone to enjoy lynchings.’ ‘Not happen here?… Where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!’” —June 22, 2020 “This is a public, surveys have suggested, that believes crime to be the number-one domestic political issue, want strong law enforcement, and would not and often did not make much of a fuss about police brutality as long as it was kept out of sight, out of mind.” —October 10, 1991 Families lucky enough to hold jobs during the Depression joined unions in droves, especially in California, and contributed mightily to the strikes in the cities and on the big farms and mines throughout the West in the mid-1930s. But they lost out too—the unions retreated or were busted, the strikes were broken, and the leaders of “Mexican race,” whether or not they were US citizens, were deported.
—August 31, 1972 “‘A significant cause of the deaths and injuries at Jackson State College,’ said the Scranton Commission report on the killings there, ‘is the confidence of white officers that if they fire weapons during a black campus disturbance they will face neither stern departmental discipline nor criminal prosecution or conviction.’... After the report on the Kent State killings by the Ohio special Portage County grand jury, law officers may feel as free to shoot white students as they do black.” —December 3, 1970 Elizabeth Hardwick
Chicago“Wednesday night, during the siege of the Hilton, when the police mercilessly beat young men before the eyes of everyone, you could hear the timid but determined voices of ‘concerned’ women calling out, ‘What are the charges against that young man?’ Or, ‘Stop, please, Sir, you are killing him!’ The mention of the instruments of law and order sent the police into a wild rage and for a moment they stopped beating demonstrators and turned to threaten the frightened suburbans.” —September 26, 1968 Special Offer
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