Vol. 81/No. 41      November 6, 2017

 

25, 50 and 75 Years Ago

 
November 6, 1992
DES MOINES, Iowa — In the wake of the largest immigration raid and deportation at a U.S. plant in recent time, Monfort packinghouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, announced that it had completed redocumentation of its work force. It has forced the more than 1,300 meatpackers who were left working there after the September 22 raid to produce papers proving their citizenship or permission to work in the United States.

Of the 307 Mexican and other Latin American immigrants arrested in the raid, 285 “chose voluntary deportation.” The alternative was to spend two months in a U.S. jail waiting for a hearing.

Many workers who were deported have made their way back to Grand Island to rejoin their families. Workers said the effort to organize a union in the plant continues.

November 6, 1967
The deepening intensity of anti-war sentiment is evidenced by the wave of militant student actions that have swept the country. Protests aimed at campus recruiting by the armed forces and Dow Chemical Company have now hit the hallowed halls of Harvard and a half dozen other widely separated universities.

A Navy recruiter was held in his car for four hours at Oberlin College in Ohio on Oct. 26. Students surrounding the car were dispersed by police who used tear gas and fire hoses to break up the demonstration. The college canceled all classes Oct. 30 after 2,000 of the school’s 2,500 students boycotted classes to attend a “think-in” against the war. Students demanded an end to on-campus recruiting by the military and a campus referendum on the war.

November 7, 1942
On November 7, 1917 the power of the hateful Czarist autocracy — the tyranny of noblemen, landlords, capitalists and exploiters — over the territory and peoples of Russia was overthrown. Under the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin and Trotsky, the millions of workers and soldiers became the rulers of Russia, transformed into the Soviet Union.

From the very first day the party and the men who led the revolution taught the workers and peasants of Russia that their uprising was only the first step in the world struggle for socialism. While bending all their energies to help the world revolution, the Bolshevik leaders warned the Russian people that the workers state would face a grave and ever-present peril if it remained surrounded by a hostile capitalist world.  
 
 
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