Mastodawn

Today in Labor History October 7, 1977: Environmentalist activist Eric McDavid was born. He is green anarchist, convicted of conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage corporate and government property, as a member of the Earth Liberation Front. The FBI had used Zoe Elizabeth Voss, a paid FBI informant, to infiltrate the group and act as an agent provocateur. She provided the activists with bomb-making plans, the money to buy the materials, transportation and a cabin to work in. She exploited McDavid’s attraction to her to build trust and provoke increasingly radical and provocative actions. She taught the group how to make the bombs. After spending nearly 9 years in prison, McDavid was released in 2015, after the prosecution admitted that the FBI had withheld thousands of pages of potentially exculpatory evidence, including love letters between McDavid and Voss and proof that she had been exempted from an FBI polygraph test.

These same tactics have been used by the FBI and police in the U.S. since at least as far back as the 1870s, when the Pinkertons used them to disrupt and destroy the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association and the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania, a history that I write about in my novel, “Anywhere But Schuylkill.”

You can read my article about the Pinkertons here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/04/union-busting-by-the-pinkertons/

You can read my article about the Molly Maguires here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2024/04/13/the-myth-of-the-molly-maguires/

You can purchase my novel here:
https://www.keplers.com/
https://www.greenapplebooks.com/
https://christophersbooks.com/
https://boundtogether.org//
https://www.thehistoricalfictioncompany.com/product-page/anywhere-but-schuylkill-by-michael-dunn
https://www.amazon.com/Anywhere-but-Schuylkill-Michael-Dunn-ebook/dp/B0CJVW1BP2