Revolutionary Greetings Quotes

The only glaring weakness in McGovern’s sweep was his failure to break Humphrey’s grip on the black wards in Milwaukee—where The Hube had campaigned avidly, greeting all comers with the Revolutionary Drug Brothers handshake. It was

A few weeks later, in the middle of a cold December night, the pair, along with 247 other radicals, were herded onto a freighter and shipped off to Soviet Russia, a government the United States didn’t even recognize. Greeted as heroes upon their arrival, Goldman and Berkman believed they had landed in a country where their politics would find a home. But once again, a promised land disappointed. Instead, they found workers in conditions of servitude, corruption among their managers, and no tolerance of free speech. In a remarkable moment, Goldman and Berkman complained to the leader of the revolution himself, Vladimir Lenin. Unlike muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and other American fellow travelers, Berkman and Goldman courageously criticized the Russian Revolution. Lenin dismissed the complaints and said that there was no room for free speech in the revolutionary period.

Tried together, they were dubbed the Ohio 7, although legal battles took some of them from Ohio to New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. These legal battles weren’t the only troubles greeting these revolutionaries: except for Williams, whose wife and children did not accompany him underground, the other six were couples who lived and raised their families underground. After the arrest, the government attempted to use the nine children, most of them under ten and all of them minors, as bargaining chips against their parents. The state offered the Levasseurs’ eight-year-old daughter $20 and some pizza to cooperate with the government against her family. The Mannings’ children were held incommunicado for two months after the parents were first arrested; they had to go on hunger strike to force the government to disclose the whereabouts of their children.

This familiarity of revolutionary violence in the French imaginaire, together with sepia-tinted memories of the old Franco-Russian alliance, pre-disposed intellectuals in France to greet Communist apologetics for Soviet brutality with a distinctly sympathetic ear.