ABSTRACT
If somebody had come to Port Huron when we young student activists were meeting and told us to pay attention to detailed accounts of events that had occurred in 1912 (50 years before), we would certainly have turned a cold shoulder. For 1912 was an ancient time, before two world wars, the Soviet revolution, and a massive depression. Automobiles and movies were just coming in. It was the year that the Titanic sank, when Woodrow Wilson was elected president, and the Republic of China was proclaimed. We may have been interested in the fact that it was a year that witnessed landmark events in the history of people’s movements: it was the year of the great Lawrence Textile Strike, in which thousands of young female textile workers of many ethnicities united to prevent their wages from being cut; that year Eugene Debs ran for president as a Socialist and got nearly a million votes; that year the African National Congress was founded in South Africa. But it would have seemed unlikely that an aged veteran of those days could provide important lessons for us to draw on.
