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We're resuming our admirably thorough subtextual mapping of Pynchon's Shadow Ticket, and no expense is being spared as we embark on a discursive, brief history of class warfare; the development of the false flag, one of the capitalist class's favored strikebreaking counterinsurgent stratagems; and the erection of the anticommunist surveillance apparatus, systemized forms of domestic political control that bedded in during the 19th century and which serve as historical backdrop to the dialoguing narratives of ST and AtD.

Please subscribe to one of the PPM Patreon paid tiers to support our ongoing, interwoven deep political and Pynchonian analysis efforts. Join the Cork Board Cadre today!

I will update the liner notes a little later, so this is relatively brief for expediency's sake, but file under:

Molly Maguires, Allan Pinkerton, Pinkerton Detective Agency, James McParland, the Baltimore Plot, Philadelphia and Reading Railroad magnate Franklin B. Gowen, social banditry, the widow Molly Maguire, Anti-Landlord Agitators, landlord beatdowns, Anthracite region of PA, the Maguires expulsion from colonized Ireland, Workingmen's Benevolent Association, the first big American anticommunist false flag, Ancient Order of Hibernians, Eugene Debs, Gilded Age, Pinkerton's Masonic meeting w/ Edward Rucker, the Abe assassination dress rehearsal, lady Pinkerton spies Kate Warne and Hattie Lawton, Baltimore secessionists Jerome Bonaparte and Thomas DeKay Winans, Bonaparte's son's overseeing of the BOI's formation, Robert Pinkerton's lobbying for the FBI's creation, Emma Goldman, rhyming McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt assassinations (one successful and one thwarted in Milwaukee), Pinkerton's Secret Service spymaster replacement Lafayette Baker, Edwin Stanton's hand in Lincoln clipping, Knights of Labor, Uriah Stephens, Terrence Powderly, Commonwealth v. Hunt, unions legalized and the slow death of conspiracy charges for collective bargaining, the Great Upheaval, a railroad company insurance scheme / boxcar torching false flag in Pittsburgh, armories installed in industrial cities, early riot control War Department white papers, Propaganda of the Deed, Johann Most, Pisacane, Bakunin, Ravachol, Galleanisti, dynamites arrival, PropDeed and vigilantism psyop parallels today (Mangione, Elias Rodriguez, Boelter), Errico Malatesta, Paris Commune, Nechayev, Narodnaya Volya aka People's Will, Lenin's brother Aleksander Ulyanov's PropDeed, assassinations galore, Tsar Alexander II, French President in '94, Spanish PM in '97, Empress of Austria in '98, King of Italy in 1900, McKinley in 1901... The Milwaukee Station House Bombing of 1917. PropDeed in Against the Day... And lastly, a relatively deep unpacking of false flag whispers, rumors of capitalist paid riot-inciters, at the infamous Haymarket Affair. This is a far-from-exhaustive index, but I think I've hit most of the primary episode beats.

Additional sources incorporated into our rabbit hole excavation:

Louis Adamic - Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America

Eric Hobsbawm - Bandits

Nick Fisher - Spider Web: The Birth of American Anti-Communism

Beau Riffenburgh - Pinkerton's Great Detective: The Amazing Life and Times of James McParland

The Return of the Repressed - "Bonus Episode 13" on Molly Maguires and Pinkertons

Thomas Pynchon - Against the Day

(among others)