1914 Society (2)

Society

1914. Swedish-American IWW leader Joe Hill is arrested January 13 on charges of having been one of two masked men who gunned down Salt Lake City grocer John Morrison and his son the night of January 10. While no motive can be shown for Hill to have committed the crime, when he is brought to trial, he is nevertheless convicted. He has written essays, letters, and songs for the Wobbly newspapers Industrial Worker and Solidarity, his songs have included "The Preacher and the Slave" which contained the phrase" pie in the sky," and he has had a major influence in furthering the IWW cause.

1914. Suffragettes march on the Capitol at Washington June 28 to demand voting rights for U.S. women.

1914. Mohandas Gandhi returns to India at age 45 after 21 years of practicing law in South Africa where he organized a campaign of "passive resistance" to protest his mistreatment by whites for his defense of Asian immigrants. Gandhi has read Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" and attracts wide attention in India by conducting a fast--the first of 14 that he will stage as political demonstrations and that will inaugurate the idea of the political fast.

1914. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act voted by Congress October 15 toughens the federal government's power against combinations in restraint of trade as outlawed by the Sherman Act of 1890. Exempts labor unions.