The IATSE Local 99 Office will be closed in observation the July 4th holiday.
The 4th day of July, as a national holiday, commemorates an event which ought to be very dear to American workingmen opposed to oppression, robbery, and degradation, because it was a day on which the people — at least a large majority of them — decided to strike against the laws, the authority, the government of England.
Prior to July 4th, 1776, the colonies were full of agitators. They defied courts and their injunctions. They flung defiance into the very teeth of the British king, his generals, and his soldiers. There was riot and bloodshed, battles, defeats, and victories. Washington and his compatriots were denounced as anarchists, nihilists, rebels, and traitors. Upon the heads of Hancock, Adams, Washington, and others a price was set, and if they had been caught they would have been unceremoniously shot to death or hanged. The Declaration of Independence recited the cause of the great strike for liberty. The authors of the strike knew there would be great inconvenience to the people of the colonies, that trade and commerce would be crippled; that untold sacrifices and sufferings would result, but the leaders did not heed such ravings. There was a principle involved, and they struck for a principle, and, moreover, these patriotic strikers started out early to enlist sympathy for their righteous cause. They wanted money, they wanted troops, they wanted ships of war, and France sympathized with the heroic, patriotic strikers, gave money, men, fleets, munitions of war, and by virtue of such sympathy and aid Washington eventually won the strike. At that time there were thousands of Tories in the colonies, despicable creatures who denounced the strike for liberty and independence, they denounced France for her sympathy and aid, and the colonists, who fought and suffered and bled and died were denounced as anarchists, traitors, enemies of their country and their countrymen. It was the greatest strike on record, and as a result of the strike conditions were greatly improved, a new nation was born, and England learned and the world learned that the strikers were not anarchists; that they were simply opposed to bad laws but were in favor of good laws, of good government, of being sovereign citizens instead of subjects and slaves, that they were opposed to degradation, and that their shibboleth was, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
The strike of which we write began 118 years ago and continued about eight years, or until 1784, and from that day to the present, the American people have kept alive and vital the spirit of independence. They love liberty and hate tyrants. It does not matter to them who the tyrants are or what methods are employed to crush them, they will not yield their rights, their liberties, their independence and go down to degradation without a struggle. It is as Grant said, “the American way.”
—Eugene V. Debs