1810s-1870s
Today in Labor History May 27, 1819: Poet, author and activist Julia Ward Howe was born. She composed the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. She also wrote the pacifist Mother’s Day Proclamation, which led to the creation of Mother’s Day.
Today in Labor History May 27, 1871: Today was the end of the Paris Commune and the Bloody Week that destroyed it. Communards were lined up and shot against the wall, now known as “mur des fédérés,” to honor their memory.
1880s
Today in Writing History May 27, 1884: Writer Max Brod was born. He is most famous as Franz Kafka’s friend and biographer. Kafka had asked him to burn his unpublished manuscripts. Instead, he famously published them. However, Brod was also an accomplished writer himself, well-known in Germany. He also mentored other writers. His endorsement of Juroslav Hasek’s hilarious anti-war satire, The Good Soldier Svejk, was crucial to its success. He was also a Zionist disciple of Martin Buber. And in 1939, he and his wife fled to Palestine to escape the Nazis, who burned his books in the book burning of 1933.
Dashiell Hammett
Today in Writing History May 27, 1894: Author Dashiell Hammett was born. Hammett’s writing was influenced by his experience working as a Pinkerton detective. He even worked undercover as a strikebreaker during the Anaconda miners’ strike. However, when the Pinkertons enlisted him to assassinate IWW member Frank Little, he refused, and quit the agency. His most famous books were The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934). Both were later made into films. Though he worked for Pinkerton’s capitalist thugs as a young man, he later supported the Anti-Nazi League and the Western Writers Congress and donated to the Republican cause in Spain. He also served as president of the Communist-sponsored Civil Rights Congress of New York. As a result, he was subpoenaed by McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt. He was also convicted in absentia in 1932 of battery and attempted rape. He died in 1961 from lung cancer.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Today in Writing History May 27, 1894: Writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine (the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Detouches) was born. Celine was one of the greatest, yet most controversial, French writers of 20th century. On the one hand, he was a rabid anti-Semite and a convicted Nazi collaborator. Indeed, his anti-Semitism was so over-the-top that some Nazis worried his polemics would be counterproductive to their cause. On the other hand, he wrote beautiful prose in an entirely unique and lyrical style. His classics, Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936), were criticized for being gloomy and pessimistic. And they were. Yet, they also laid bare the stupidity and horror of war, and the greed and oppressiveness of the wealthy and powerful. His writing style influenced Sartre and Camus, as well as Gunter Grass, Henry Miller, William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut.
1900s-1910s
May 27, 1907: Biologist and environmental activist Rachel Carson was born. Her book, Silent Spring, helped launch the modern environmental movement.
May 27, 1916: 3000 members of the Marine Transport Workers of the IWW marched along the Philadelphia waterfront, leading to strikes at three non-union docks. Black and white Wobblies fought together against scabs and police.
Today in Labor History May 27, 1919: workers in Lima declared a general strike, which paralyzed economic activity in the area, against the high cost of living. The government eventually crushed the strike by killing at least 100 and wounding and jailing hundreds more. Find out more in this account of Peruvian anarcho-syndicalism
1940s
May 27, 1944: a general strike broke out in Marseille, Vichy France. Metalworkers, public servants and transport workers joined a stoppage of shipyard workers the previous day, demonstrating in front of the City Hall demanding “bread!”. The strikers held fast, until the Gestapo arrested 15,000 workers. The allies liberated Marseille soon after.
Today in Labor History May 27, 1947: The U.S. Fishermen and Allied Workers union merged with Harry Bridges’ ILWU.
1950s
May 27, 1958: Ernest Green became the first African-American to graduate from Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas.
Today in Labor History May 27, 1959: The CIO-affiliated Insurance Workers of America merges with its AFL counterpart, the Insurance Agents International Union to form the Insurance Workers International Union. The union later became part of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
1960s
May 27, 1962: The Centralia mine fire probably started on this day, though some people believe it started earlier. No one knows for sure what started the fire, but it has been burning nonstop for nearly 60 years. It forced the evacuation and abandonment of Centralia, Pennsylvania. And there’s enough fuel to keep it burning for another 250 years. The inside of the mine is as hot as Mercury and as toxic as Saturn. It spews vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate crisis without providing any usable energy.
May 27, 1968: A grand jury indicted the “L.A. 13” for conspiracy to disturb the peace for their role in the Chicano school walkouts: Sal Castro, Eliezar Risco, Patricio Sanchez, Moctezuma Esparza, David Sánchez, Carlos Montes, Ralph Ramirez, Fred Lopes, Richard Vigil, Gilberto Olmeda, Joe Razo, Henry Gomez, & Carlos Muñoz, Jr.
Today in Labor History May 27, 1968: University and high school students went on strike in Dakar, Senegal.
1970s-1980s
May 27, 1971: Pakistani forces slaughtered over 200 Bengali civilians in the Bagbati Massacre.
May 27, 1980: The South Korean military slaughtered 3,000 unarmed civilians during the Kwangju Uprising, which lasted from May 18 through May 27. The victims had been protesting military rule and demanding democracy.
2020s
Today in LGBTQ May 27, 2020: Author and LGBTQ rights activist, Larry Kramer, died. He wrote the screenplay for the film Women in Love, (1969) and a novel called Faggots (1978). Many members of the gay community denounced the latter for its portrayal of shallow, promiscuous sex in the 1970s. However, he is probably most remembered for founding the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (1980), which became the world’s largest private organization assisting people with AIDS. And then cofounding the AIDS activist organization ACT UP (1987).