Today in Labor History March 25, 1811: Oxford University expelled Percy Bysshe Shelley for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley was an English Romantic poet, radical in both his art and his politics. His poem "The Mask of Anarchy," which he wrote in 1819 after the Peterloo Massacre, is one of the first modern descriptions of nonviolent resistance. His admirers included Karl Marx, Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw. He was married to Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein.”
Today in Labor History September 9, 1828: Leo Tolstoy, Russian author and playwright was born. He is most famous for novels like Anna Karina, and War and Peace. He chose the name for the latter after reading French anarchist Proudhon’s publication called War and Peace. Tolstoy also wrote many short stories, an autobiography and many works of nonfiction. After witnessing a public execution in 1857, he wrote: "The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere." In the 1870s, he experienced a profound spiritual awakening, which led him to become a Christian anarchist and pacifist, and which he wrote about in his non-fiction work Confession (1882). He also wrote about nonviolent resistance in The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), which influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Wittgenstein. He was repeatedly nominated for Nobel prizes in both literature and peace.
Today in Labor History August 14, 1846: The authorities jailed Henry David Thoreau for refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican War. Aside from this early act of American civil disobedience and war resistance, Thoreau also wrote, “Walden.” His essay, “Civil Disobedience,” influenced generations of activists and writers, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Tolstoy, Yeats, Proust, Hemingway, Upton Sinclair and Martin Buber.