Today in Labor History October 3, 1860, 10,000 men and boys marched in a three-mile procession through Chicago. Many were immigrants from Europe, veterans of the Revolutions of 1848. They wore capes and military-style hats, and carried six-foot long torches. Some marched with guns. Others held signs with the image of a large eyeball. They were the Wide Awakes, a Radical Republican abolitionist militia, active in the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War.
Their name, Wide Awakes, like today’s use of the word “woke,” was meant to convey that they were awake or alert to racial and other social injustices. However, the Wide Awakes were also on the lookout for successionists, racists, and others who wanted to keep African Americans enslaved and oppressed, and they were ready and willing to battle them in the streets, which they did on several occasions.
One of the Wide Awakes leaders in St. Louis was Henry Boernstein, a German who had participated in the 1848 Paris Revolution. Prior to that, he had published the radical journal Vorwärts! in Paris, with Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Ludwig Bernays, the poet Heinrich Heine, and others. Boernstein idolized Bernays, who helped radicalize him. At the same time, Bernays simultaneously had affairs with both Boernstein’s wife and daughter. Marx joked that Bernays was a prisoner of love, being kept by a cabal of calculating Boernstein women.
Read my complete article “The Wide Awakes and the Antebellum Roots of Wokeness” here:
Michael Dunn
The Wide Awakes and the Antebellum Roots of Wokeness - Michael Dunn
The Wide Awakes and the Antebellum Roots of Wokeness
#LaborHistory #workingclass #woke #racism #slavery #abolition #civilwar #Revolution #marx #republican
