John Turner | |
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_001.jpg) Turner ca. 1900 | |
| Born | 24 August 1864 |
| Died | 9 August 1934 (aged 68) |
| Movement | Anarchist movement, labour movement |
| Part of a series on |
| Anarchism |
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John Turner (24 August 1864 – 9 August 1934)[1] was an English-born anarcho-communist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent."[2]
Turner was the first person to be ordered deported from the United States for violation of the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act.
Turner was a member of the Socialist League but left to become a member of the Freedom Group (UK) and later on became general secretary of the Shop Assistants' Union, which he had founded.[3] At one point, the union attempted to nominate Turner for Parliament, but he declined since he preferred not to "waste his time in parliamentary debates".[4]
Turner worked on several publications in addition to Freedom. He was a member of the collective that put out Commonweal[5] and was also the editor of Freedom's syndicalist journal The Voice of Labour, which denounced the "blight of respectability" of mainstream labour unions. The paper began as a weekly in 1907 and advocated direct action and the general strike.[6]
The same year, Turner, along with Guy Aldred and others, formed the Industrial Union of Direct Action. Turner was also elected in absentia to the International Bureau of the Anarchist International, which wad formed at the International Anarchist Congress of Amsterdam. Throughout the many changes in the history of Freedom, Turner was its publisher from when it was renamed Freedom: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Work and Literature in 1930 to his death in 1934.[7]
After the Russian Revolution, Turner traveled to Russia as part of the British Labour Delegation, and attempted to help Aron Baron acquire reprieve from a death sentence. Baron was subsequently charged with having "aroused public sentiment abroad against his imprisonment in the Solovietzki and having induced revolutionists visiting Russia to seek his release". Baron was then sent to a prison in Siberia.[8]
Turner had spent seven months of 1896 (during which time he met Voltairine de Cleyre) lecturing throughout the US.[9] He returned to the country in October 1903, just seven months after enactment of the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which barred anyone from entering the country who held anarchist views. He was arrested on October 23 after he gave a lecture at the Murray Hill Lyceum. When he was searched, immigration officials found a copy of Johann Most's Free Society and Turner's speaking schedule, which included a memorial to the Haymarket Martyrs.[10] That was enough to order his deportation. Turner was held in detention at Ellis Island for three months awaiting appeal of his case to the US Supreme Court. Before the final ruling, Turner was released on US$5,000 bail. He then gave some lectures around the country, wrongly speculated that the Supreme Court would declare the law unconstitutional[11] and returned to England before the judgment could come down against him.[12]
