Emanuel’s policies stifle freedoms

Near the beginning of the 20th century, the labor group Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as the “Wobblies,” was smeared and vilified in the press by the movers and shakers of the day. The IWW was demanding the eight-hour day and the end of wage slavery. Wobblies had led major strikes in Massachusetts and New Jersey by organizing low-paid immigrants and young women in the mills. The employer class was outraged and frightened.

When the Wobblies tried to organize itinerant workers in the West into the One Big Union by holding street-corner rallies, they were met by the enforcement of hastily passed, restrictive city ordinances against public speaking. The IWW response to this repression was to call for all hobos to ride the rails and flock westward to fill the jails of Spokane, Fresno and San Diego. The Wobblies won a historic victory for free-speech in the United States that still rings down the decades as part of what’s best in the American tradition.

Today, Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel stands with those eminently respectable, forgotten and disgraced movers and shakers of an earlier day. He calls for ordinances to stifle dissent against the NATO and G8 meetings next May. He wants draconian measures to make arrests too costly for demonstrators and wants to restrict park admittance in order to harass and discourage ordinary citizens from demonstrating. Let us remind Mayor Emmanuel now and next May that he, like his predecessors in Spokane and Fresno, is on the wrong side of history. When we do, we will be participating in a long, proud, and spirited tradition of which the mayor of Chicago knows little and for which he shows even less respect.

Roger Fraser

Rolling Meadows