The Daily Worker Newspaper, March 13, 1926, Page 6

Page Six j THE DAILY WORKER THE DAILY WORKER Published by the DAILY WORKER PUBLISHING CO. 12118 W. Washington Bivd., Chicago, I, Phone Monroe 4713 SUBSCRIPTION RATES By mail (in Chicago only): By mall (eutelde of Chicago): $68.00 per year $4.50 six monthe | $6.00 per year $3.50 six moaths $2.50 three months $2.00 three months Address all mail and make out checks to THE DAILY WORKER, 1118 W. Washington Bivd,, Chicago, Illinole SSC SAS J, LOUIS ENGDAHL ,. —rceennerecee BItOPS WILLIAM F. DUNNE MORITZ J. LOEB. sevvevanns sore Business Manager Batered as second-class mat] September 21, 1923, at the post-office at Chi- cago, Il, under the act of March 3, 1879. | By JACK JOHNSTONE, bf Lage betrayal of the anthracite coal miners by the Lewis administra- tion cannot be judged by itself as an isolated act committed by leaders who had misjudged a situation. To get the proper perspective, so as to under- stand correctly the magnitude of the crime perpetrated upon the miners, particularly, but against the working- class as a whole, we must look back over the few years that Lewis has been president of the United Mine | Workers of America, <> 200 Advertising rates on application. LS The Priesthood in Mexico Just as the bourgeoisie of Europe in its revolution was forced to suppress the power of the church which was one of the main bulwarks of feudalism, so the Mexican revolution had,to meet the same problem and solve it in a similar fashion. | Feudalism and peonage is the most fruitful soil for the super- stition of Romanism. The sinister, scheming, depraved vultures of the church thrive in such an environment, It is their special m sion to utilize their power acquired thru fraud. and violence to prevent the light of intelligence piercing the-feudal night. The ten thousand years’ dark ages in Europe were recapitulated in a few hundred years in Mexico. The Mexican constitution stipulates: that the member of holy parasites be limited to a certain degree according to the popula- tion; that the church property be nationalized and that the church only use it so long as it obeys the law; that the state and church be separated completely and that no priest engage in political ac- tivity but confine himself solely to the business of “cloud pushing” and rainbow chasing (if people want to pay for that sort of thing that is their affair); parochial schools are forbidden. Under feudalism in Europe the church owned two-thirds of all the land; in Mexico they owned three-fourths and were the chief feudal exploiters. The Mexican church laws are essential if all rem- nants of the feudal system are to be destroyed. With the feudal system falling before the national bourgeois revolution the “ne changing” church looks around for some other power to serve for pelf. From agents of the feudal barons they. become agents and spies for Wall Street. Added to the priestly crew are protestant missionaries of American finance capital. The Mexican laws’prehibit foreign religionists preying upon the Mexican people. That is their privilege and when ‘tle plunderbund of the United States grows indignant over the legislation against the am- bassadors of ignorance it is interfering in a situation that is none of its business. Intelligent people will refuse to join in the Wall Street in- spired clamor against Mexico because it chooses to enforce its own | laws against a horde of vicious parasites. And we Communists, as the vanguard of the working class, will support to the best of our | ability the efforts of Mexico to be free to enforce its decrees against | the priests and preachers who are in.Mexico to help place the yoke of imperialism upon the workers of that nation. We hope to see the day that the Mexican people drive gut eyery agent of Wall Street, whether he wears the garb of the;priest or the soldier, and ex-! terminate root and branch the institutions they represent, thereby continuing the bourgeois revolution until the proletarian revolu- tion is realized—in other words, for Mexico, the permanent revo- lution in the Marxian-Leninist sense, A Titled Socialist. Lady Cynthia Mosley and her husband, Oswald, while visiting this country to aid in settling certain capitalist court claims in- volving her grandfather’s estate, so that she may continue to live off the exploitation of labor, spent part of their time visiting the few remaining headquarters of the branches of the defunct socialist party and posing for their pictures before the cameramen of the press. Neither of them have the slightest conception of socialism and being dilletante bourgeois neurotics they react to the struggles of the workers in the most superficial, romantic, poetic fashion. They visited coal mines and got a thrill out of having their pictures taken, washing the coal dust off their aristocratic fingers while posing before the inevitable camera. Their utterances contained nothing more than the most ‘insipid banalities. After seeing the misery of the working class they have nothing better to offer them than the spurious socialism of the fabians which completely ignores the class struggle. In New York their grand limelight tour was climaxed with a meeting under the auspices of the socialist party at Cooper Union, which was attended by but 400 of the remnants of that discredited yellow outfit. So dead is the socialist party that not even titled “socialists” press agented by the whole capitalist press can evoke asign of life. It is to be hoped that the. lord and lady get a proper trimming by real working class randidates in the regions in which they “stand” for parliament, so that they will be relegated tosthe ranks of the royal rubbish where they belong, instead of trying to befuddle the working class with their sloppy sentimentalism. eS Arthur Brisbane assures the readers of the Hearst press that big Dusiness must ngt fear the higher wages won by the building trades Worker® in New York City, because “capital will find all the money coming back to its coffers.” Brisbane says: sous, plasterers, brieklayers, carpenters, spend what they get.” They spend what, they get because they must in order to provide themselves with the necessities of life. Capital holds the gun, the high cost of living, that forces the workers to return to capital every- thing they earn in wag Get the Paris Commune Edition! Be sure to Fey your PARIS COMMUNE EDITION of The DAILY WORKER next Saturday, March 13. The NEW SATURDAY MAGAZINE SUPPLEMENT of that issue will contain the famous article of Lenin, “THE PARIS COM- MUNE AND THE PROBLEMS OF THE DEMOCRATIC DICTATORSHIP”—published for the first time, we be- lieve, in the English language. Written in, July, 1905, in the midst of the stirring revolutionary events of that year, the article shows the master hand of Lenin who, more ably than any other except Marx himself, could draw the lessons from the great event of Paris ant ly them in the real life of his own time. Don't fail to’ get the next edition of the Daily Worker Saturday Magaaine. When we trace the misdoings of | John L. Lewis since he became presi- |dent, we see that this latest act was |the. climax of a series of betrayals |that Nave demoralized the fighting | miners’ organization and gradually re- |duced it to @ mere appendage of | Wall Street, IRST, what was the situation in the anthracite, did the situation | warrant a retreat from the original |demands put forward by the tri-dis- | trict convention, and if so, were the |miners in such a defeated frame of mind, that it was necessary to accept |such an outrageous agreement. Let | us,analyze the entire situation, There is no question that after nearly six months of bitter struggle the miners’ conditions were very bad, but the morale of the strikers was excellent, they were in a fighting mood, Out of 158,000 strikers not one had deserted the ranks, nor was there a single thought expressed about going back to work. Coupled with this strong fighting spirit of the strikers, the labor move- ment was rallying to their support. True the support was only moral and financial, but this was the immediate need of the strikers. At the time Lewis was signing the agreement, |machinery was being set up that would have. fed, clothed and housed the miners for an indefinite period. It can be said, that in spite of the privations suffered by the strikers, the day on which this black agree- |ment was signed, they were |Stronger, more militant and willing to |fight, more united in purpose than in jany other period during the strike. | Not only that, but the persistent ef- forts of the progressive miners were | bearing fruit, the miners, slowly but |surely, were becoming conscious of |the.class nature of the struggle. The three district grievance com- mittees had consolidated their forces, jthey gave official expression to ‘the jfeeling’ of the rank and ‘file. They had sounded the note of warning to the Lewis machine that the miners | would not stand for a settlement less than’ the demands of the tri-district convention, they were just beginning to establish themselves, &s the lead- ing strike committee. Then came the betrayal. This was the strategic mo- ment for Lewis to commit his vile a month, it could not have been ac- complished, at least not so quietly. i hd uninitiated will say, if it was the purpose of the Lewis admini- stration to serve the coal operators why did they not sign the agreement without going thru such a heartbreak- ing strike. In the first place a strike could not have been avoided, the miners in convention made demands and. these could not be aW&ndoned without at least pretending to strug- gle for them. Second, the anthracite miners had some confidence in the leadership of Lewis, this was his only stronghold in the entire coal mining field. (It is no longer.) Third, this is an old maneuver of Lewis, call the miners on strike, starve them into submission or maneuver in such a 54-HOUR AIR SERVICE BERLIN TO VLADIVOSTOK WILL OPEN DURING YEAR WASHINGTON, D. C., March 11. A 54-hour airplane service be- tween Berlin and Vladivostok, the Principal Soviet port on the Pacific, will be opened this year, according to advices received from Moscow by the Russian Information Bureau. Regular service will be maintained on the route of nearly 5,000 miles, the planes flying day and night. At present the running time by rail between Berlin and Vladivostok via the Paris-Viadivostok exprese is 13 days, 4 hours, The new air line is being organ- ized by the German-Ru: in Naviga- tion company (“Deruluft”) in con- Junction with the German company” Aero-Lioyd. From Viadivostok a Spe- cial connecting airplane line will go to Tokio, Regular airplane service between Berlin and Moscow has been con- ,dueted for the past two years, Last year 1741 p, ngers were carried and 395,000 pounds of goods, includ- ing mail. Demand U. S. Senator Pay $10,000,000 Tax WASHINGTON, March 11 — The treasury department has taken an- other step in its fight to collect $10,- 000,000 in additional taxes from Sen- ator Couzens (R.) of Michigan, The sum which is due as. taxes for the year 1919 is in dispute. Treas- ury officials estimate the value of the Ford Motor Company stack which Couzens sold Edsel Ford at this figure over the returns which he made a oe the government. deed; if he had waited two weeks or} way during the strike so that a situa- tion will arrive that will,enable him to sign the union up with an agree- ment suitable to. the coal operators. Fourth, there were millions of tons of stock coal on hand. This assured the coal operators the retention of the market at an inflated price. This is a damaging statement to make. To substantiate it, let me present the evidence submitted by Lewis’ first lieutenant, Frank Far- rington presented at a time when the ambitious Frank flirted with the pro- gressives in the hopes that he might supplant John Lewis as international president of the United Mine Workers of America, In a series of letters between Far- rington and Lewis from November 2, 1922 until November 22 of the same year, the corrupt inner jworkings of the Lewis administration were ex- posed in all its crude nakedness, The Miners’ Union Must Fight for” labor leader a traitor. A strike of such magnitude as the anthracite is very difficult. to handle, officials *in these trying times will make mis- takes, especially will these mistakes be disastrous if the leaders are hot class conscious, Mistakes, however, should not be confused and labeled as betrayals. There is the question, however, but what the settlement of the anthracite strike was a deliberate and organized betrayal. The record of John L. Lewis is by far the blackest in the American lahqy movement. This is a serious charge to make and accusations of these kind should not be made lightly. In sub- stantiation of this charge, I place briefly before the readers of The DAILY WORKER the“high. spots in the career of this man and you can be your own judge. First of all Lewis was never elected by the mem- ‘The Betrayal Conference at Philadelphia jent, ~as Frank Hays, then became (presid and ‘inimediately appointed Lewi international vice-president, Hays, a weakling, ‘sodn’” me putty ‘in the hands of the cunning Lewis. In 1919 Hays resigned and for so doing received a year’s salary in advance and Lewis. stepped: into: the -| position he now holds, without ever having been elected to a. single office in the miners’ union, This in itself is remarkable and more than stspi- cious, but it is what Lewis has done since becoming prestdent that stamps him as’ the most dangerous influence in the American labor movement. Briefly’ it is: When he stepped in as president, the miners’ union was the, most. militant and best organized section of the labor movement, no ‘sooner stepped, into offiée deliberately and methodically | egan, to: stamp out all militaney and’ bring the ‘entire organization’ under h {Scotia miners. remembers, or should remember, the betrayal of the Fayette county non- union miners who had come out to a man at the call of Lewis, the signing of separate agreements for the anthra- cite and bituminous fields, This gave the coal operators a breathing spell which they have taken advantage of. The Jacksonville agree- ment further demoralized the miners and gave the coal operators the time necessary to move the big bulk of their mining operations from the union to the non-union fields, a process which is still taking place and when the Jacksonville agreement expires, they will be able to close down the union mines almost completely and complete the demoralization of the union in the central competitive fields. Following the 1922 betrayal, Lewis and his lieutenants carried om a ter- rific reign of terror against, all opposi- tion forces in,the union. MacLachlan was removed as President of Nova Tom Myerscough, Duncan McDonald, Freeman Thomp- son, John Watt, Tom. Parry, are only a few of the many that have been re- Above are pictured representatives of the miners’ union and of the operators ‘at the actual signing of the five- year plan by which the; betrayed miners were forced to return to their posts. Sitting, left.to right are: Thomas Thomas, general manager of the Lehigh Valley Coal Co.; John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers; Alvan Markle; W. W. Inglis, president of the Glen Alden Coal company; James A, Gorman, secretary of the an- thracite board of conciliation, and U. B. Warriner. Standing, left to right are: A, M. Fine; C. J. Golden, George B. Hadesty, Philip Mucray, Andrew Mattey, E. H. Suender, Thomas Kennedy and Rinaldo Cappellini, qe ——— ee i Naive letters have been, made public, they were read proceedings of the 30th consecutiveand fifth bien- | nial convention of the United Mine Workers of America, DtStrict 12, held May 13 to May 27 at Peéoria, Ilinois. So they are official, authentic and in their own and not my language. The letters are too long to reprint. The main points of @xposure were, that Lewis in a board .meeting ac- cused Farrington of entering an agree- ment to allow the strip mine in Herrin, Illinois toy rate duringy the strike. This m@de Farrington throw all caution to lig’ wind and in a letter of nearly words to Lewis, dated Novem! 22, 1922 he accused him of the ft ing: 1.—That Lewis had recetVed a large sum of money from the Kansas coal operators to get rid of Alex Howat; as president of the Kansas miners. 2.—That Lewis and other officers had collected $100,000 from the coal operators in Kentucky for permission to run their mines during the strike. 3.—That instead of borrowing $100,- 000 from the Harriman Bank of New York, Lewis received $750,000 and that three members of the Harriman Bank directorate are rating non- union coal mines in Py isylvania and that the $650,000 the public never heard of, was; Mept by Lewis and his associates the under- of the union the striking coal fields standing that the supp would be withdrawn workers in the non- of Pennsylvania, S Farrington completely exposes the strike maneuvers of Lewis. On this ‘uestion we will quote that entire sec: } .ion of his letter, becatge of its direct ; bearing upon the anthracite strike. I list it here as number four, it is numbered as the second indictment of Lewis in the Farrington letter: 4, “Second: An irffluential oper- ator, with whom I Wappen to know you had dinner duringythe month of December, told me that: you told him during the month ofsDecemder that you Delieved the mines workers of the country were going tobe. obliged to take a reduction of wages after the first of April and that you implied that in order to enable you to escape responsibility for the reduction a strike was to be called on the first of April and that it would continue until the government intervened and settled the strike or until the mem- bers of our union themselves, were punished so that they demanded a Settlement of the strike,even on the basis of a reduction of wages, and considering the fact that you were continuing parleying with government authorities during the strike, I have just as much right to believe his state- ment as tPue as youshave to believe the story about mepconcerning the Lester mines,” As This policy pursued by Lewis dur- ing the 1922 strike" fs exactly the bership to his present position of president. His rise in the miners’ union was thru the back door. It was common knowledge in 1916 that Al Hamilton, a scab coal operator, boast- ed that he was going to make John L, Lewis the president of the miners’ union. Just how much truth there was to this statement I do not know, except that it was realized in a very suspicious way. OR years Lewis tried to induce the Illinois miners to elect him to official position. Each time he was defeated. Three times he was defeat- ed for secretary of the Illinois miners. Failing in this manner to become a leadgr, Gompers appointed him as Américan Federation of Labor organ- izer. In 1916 he appeared as a na- tional figure in the capacity of trying to force down the throats. of the Pitts- burgh miners an abnoxious agree- ment, It was at this time that Hamil- ton was supposed to make his boast that he would make Lewis the next president of the United Mine Workers of America, In 1917 Lewis was appointed statis- tician by President John P. White, later he was appointed manager of the Miners’ Journal. In 1918 John P. White resigned to take the position of “advisor” to the fuel commission. Pmoved from office and expelled from the union, Pat Toohey, Joe. Angelo and others have been suspended and | the skids are prepared for them, Phe record of the Lewis-Farrington jmachine is so black that it is almost impossible to point out the blackest spot. The police, the courts, the K. K. K, the state, the coal operators, gunimen'‘and sluggers have all been used by these leeches against the jin- terests of the miners. This was brot out in broad relief in the Zeigler trials, where Henry Corbishley, the fighting progressive president of Lo- cal 922 and his equally militant col- leagues are being railroaded to the penitentiary for, from ofe to ten years, on a framed-up charge of con- spiracy to murder: This was accom- Plished thru a united front between the officials of the United Mine Work- ers of America, the K. K. K., the coal operators and the state. HESE are but a few of the mis- deeds committed by~the Lewis- Farrington administration. The pur- pose of signing a 5 years’ agreement in the anthracite is to tie the hahds of the miners leaving the coal oper- ators free for five years to weed out the progressives and carry on a guerilla warfare, demoralize and if possible, destroy the miners’ union. This is a black picture, but it is the situation that must be faced. How can it be met, what must the miners do to retrieve their lost position and bring back the union to a militant organ of struggle. This is indeed a hard but not a hopeless task, it is one bound dictatorship. In the struggle that followed, he took away the auto- nomy Of Districts 15, 17, 19, 20, 26, 29 and‘ 20.) Some of these districts/are completely out of business and.others are a mere skeleton of their former selves. , He expelied Howat from the union while he was in jail fighting the Kansas industrial court law. Placing this: district under a provisional gov- ernment the membership declining from 11,000 to 700. Under his’ mis-leadership, the fight- ing Nova Scotia and Alberta miners were deserted, the influence of’ the Lewis administration being thrown towards the coal operators instead of the miners, with the result that these two districts are running on an open shop basis, IS first great betrayal, however, was the 1922 coal strike. The manner in which this strike was set- tled has been the basis since of all the sufferings endured’ by the miners and their families, Here we saw for the first time the hard and soft coal miners,. union and the / non-union, standing shoulder to shoulder in a great struggle, As a fighting unit, they were unbeatable. Only thru treachery was their hard fought vic- tory turned into defeat, Everyone Back in the Anthracite Slave Pens same followed by him in the anthra- cite strike and can ,be seen much more clearly now in 1922, It is very easy to stand and call 4 Here the varnomeny sigh back at. work in the old Bellevue. mine at ween. Production is again that will test the coufage of the miners. 'T is easy for progressives to fight wheh winning the battle, the real test of the class conscious worker is made at just such black periods in the development of the labor move- ment as confronts the miners today. There must be no retreat. Pessimism must not be allowed to enter. The graves that surround the coal mines of this country are a mute testimony of the grim struggle that took place to establish the United Mine Workers of America. The punishment meted out to the Howats, Thompsons, etc., thé long term of imprisonment given to the Zeigler miners, are living test- imonies of the struggle that is taking / Place to make the miners’ union @ fighting organization. The progressive miners must rally their forces. In the name of those unknown heroes who died for the cause, in the name of those who have been specially picked out for punishment by ithe Lewis- Farrington machine, in the name of the betrayed miners and their fam- ilies, the struggle must go on until the control of the union has been taken out of the hands of these men and the union made to function as it was intended as a working class or- ganization, fighting in the interest of the miners, —