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ee Ns LD ee EES SEE SA } _EPUADE PE MeS aes. moaonmm o> a —— a | 7 w | o oak THE DAILY WORK E LY WORKER DAILY WORKER PUBLISHING CO, Phone Monroe 4712 by the 1113 W, Wasl s By mail (in Chicago only): $8.00 per year $4.50 six months $2.50 three months | By mail (outside of Chicago): $6.00 per year $3.50 six months $2.00 three months Address all mail and make out checks to THE DAILY WORKER, 1113 W. Washington Blvd., Chicago, III, J. LOT WIL BERT \ weoEDditors Business Manager MILLER ..., Entered as second-c mail September 21, 1923, at the post-office at Chb =-=9, IlL, under the act of March 8, 1879, Advertising rates on application, The Slimy Path to the Senate A number of questions which, like the Gilbert and Sullivan flowers that bloom in the spring, have nothing to do with the case of the seating of Frank L, Smith, Samuel Insull’s favorite senator from Illinois, are being raised. The right of the senate to pass on the qualifications of its own membership, the right of states to be represented by any citizen they elect or select, the question of whether the accept- ance of money from public utility corporations by an officeholder supposed to be regulating them, constitutes “moral turpitude” —all these various angles to the situation are being debated with | that nicety of detail and wealth of language which makes one pause in wonderment until one recalls that one of the functions of the senate is to pretend to ponder solemnly issues which have already been decided. This is not to say that the seating or the refusal to seat the choice of the Illinois traction interests as a representative of the people of Illinois will show any prearrangement. But it does mean that no one will arise in the senate and state that the methods by which Smith was « scted differ in degree only, and not in kind from the general process by which all the senators and congressmen finally arrive in Washington. The whole mechanism of elections in the United States is a gigantic hoax—a fraud perpetrated year after year in the name | of democracy. The proof of this statement is in the fact that in neither the house of representatives or in the senate is there a single spokesman of the American working class. American democracy does not seep down to the masses who do the work of the country. It is in the name of “the people” that senators and congress- | men are supposed to speak. But what problems of the American working class are ever dealt with by them except from the stand- point of the bankers, bosses and businessmen? “People” is such a delightfully general . rm. The verbal struggles which take place in Washington center around divergencies of interest among these three groups. Only indirectly do the mass of workers and farmers ever get their day | in court. Thousands of workers and farmers in Illinois voted for Smith, the candidate of a great financial combination which ex- ploits them, and thereby proved that the corruption of American eapitalist democracy has infected whole layers of the American masses. Corruption is inseparable from capitalism. It is only one of its many manifestations of disease. The working class, if it re- mains tied to the parties of American capitalism, will become like the parasitic populace of ancient Rome—utterly debauched and dependent entirely on the whims of powerful industrial and financial lords. A labor party, rallying the workers around their immediate interests as a CLASS, will mean a re-birth for the American -workers and farmers. When they have built such a party, as they must and will, they will look back in wonderment and dis- gust to the time when a sneering and contemptuous ruling class was able to point with complacency to the fact that the same masses who were victimized by their industrial and state ma- ehinery licked gratefully the hands which had beat them down and kept them down. Only the working class can end capitalist corruption, and it is only wo $s parties whose candidates are not eased into public office down a chute smoothed with the gangrenous slime of a rotting system, This is the process by which not only Frank L. Smith, but all other senators and congressmen, with negligible exceptions, ob- tained their places in the state machinery of capitalism, Dear to the Heart of the Bosses Is the Watson-Parker Bill Speaking of the wage demands made by the trainmen and conductors on southern railroads, the New York Times says: The possibility of a strike . . is considered so slight by railroad men as to be unworthy of consideration... . The provisions of the Watson-Parker act ARE AN EFFECTIVE PROTECTION AGAINST A SUDDEN WALKOUT. Even if the workers should be dissatisfied after all the various bodies possible of creation under this law had failed to make peace, THEY WOULD HAVE TO GIVE THIRTY DAYS’ NOTICE before dropping their duties. (Emphasis ours.) The Watson-Parker bill is filled with expedients for delay- ing action by workers. This is the main reason why it was enacted. “All the various bodies possible of creation under this law” are for the purpose of delaying action while the agents of the railroads, in and out of the unions, systematically undermine ihe morale of the union membership. Once the capitalists are fairly certain that a strike can be prevented entirely or delayed until it becomes ineffective, they ean contemplate complacently, as they do the southern railway wage demands, all disputes with the trade unions, Hspecially is this true when, as is the case in the American labor movement, the trade union officials are just as enthusiastic about the mech- anism which delays strike action as are the capitalists, There was no such complacency evident in the capitalist press when the railway workers forced the Adamson eight-hour Jaw thru by the threat of strike action, The Waison-Parker law is a law in the interests of the rail- roads and not in the interests of raiiroad workers, ste ree Somme They Know What They Want The Enemy in the Coal Industry. R ;the foremen, and im ‘the background DJOINING the Botany Worsted jthe great belching cliimney of the Bot- Mills in Passaic ig a block known |any mills. All this*packed into one as Mattimore street. On one side of | block. e¢ OMPANY-OWNED® houses, pamp- ered foremen, poorly-paid workers iking for the right to have their own union, “scabs” who have gone back to work or who refused to leave their jobs at all—thé$e things too are found in the one blétk of Mattimore street. se Recently a fresh “wave of excite- ment rippled down Mattimore street. |There have been many such ripples jsince the strike began. The latest one Started with the appearance of a num- ber of notices to mové, served on resi- the evening groups of people gather|dents on the striké#s’ side of the on the steps and porches in front of |Street. They were signed by Arthur the houses on both sides of Maiti-| Hughes, agent for the Botany Worsted more street. They too stare acr Mills. The first one to-receive these the street contemptuously. Occasion- tices were those behind in their rent ally a few jeering words fly thru the | Payments. air, Tenants Blacklisted. TPHIS block of houses and tenements| Then a rental agent appeared with on both sides of the street is own-|% list of names covering two pages ed by the Botany Worsted Mills. Word went out that the whole street Huge and formidable, the mills can|WaS to be cleared on the strikers’ be seen standing just in back of the |Side, whether rent was paid or not. A neat brick cottages of the foremen. |amily from out of town moved into To the right of the strikers’ side of One of the houses across from the the street and in back of the mills !0remen’s homes, and went to’ work runs a canal, To the left and in front |i the Botgny mills, Other families of the mills is Dayton avenue, | were to be imported from out of town the street is a row of neat little brick } cottages with fenced-in lawns, screen- d-in porches and flower gardens. On the other side of the street stretches an- irregular line of ugly, run-down, drab-colored houses and tenements. Broken steps lead to the sidewalk. The roofs sag and the porches, where there are any, look on the verge of collapsing. Stark Hostility. These two rows of houses stand and stare hostilely at each other across the street which divides them. ,In Mattimore Street in Passaic, N. J. Just One Block, Mattimore street is only one block long, yet in this one block are con- centrated many of the important ele- ments of the textile strike now in its thirty-eighth week. These same ele- ments can be found in almost any av- erage strike ever hetd in this coun- try, for that matter, That narrow, one-block street pre- sents a dramatic picture fit for the stage in its compression, On one side the dingy, ruined homes and tene- ments of the striking workers, On the jby the management of the mills, and |the street was to be swept clean of rikers and strike sympathizers to make room for the “stabs.” This was | the explanation the strikers living on the street gave for the blacklist of the rental agent. of T number seven Mattimore street is a butcher shop. On the Bot- any agent's list thé name of the butcher appeared. The agent showed it to him. “What is the matter?” he asked, “What is i name doing on this list?” other the spruce, red-brick cottages of! “Search me,” ae the butcher. Three Soldier-Correspondents Three widely known and popular soldier-correspondents In the Soviet Union who are frequent contributors to the workers’ newspapers there, From | The American Worker Correspondent left to right, they are} Deviatov, Sapojnitov, Kozlov, respondents from the 95th sharpshooters’ division of the Red Army, | GET YOUR UNION TO TELEGRAPH CONGRESS TODAY! Resolutions Have Already Been Adopted by the Chicago Federation of Labor and ¥ ae A They are soldier-corm ‘You know I always pay my rent yromptly in advance.” He Knew. But the butcher did have some idea »’ why his name was on the list. He old it to an agent of the union. “My orother-in-law lives tpstanrs,” he said, ‘In the evening he and his family and maybe some striker friends sit out in ‘ront of my shop and the foreman .cross the street sees it. Thcy’re the mes who are back of this list, of course. Certainly I’m for the strik- rs, I belonged to the miners’ union or 28 years myself. It was the strike in Pennsylvania that brought me into his town several years ago. I was put out of a company-owned house in Pennsylvania during the strike, just like they’re trying to put out these people on this street. It was a little different there, because we had leases saying we had to get out when we stopped working for the coal com- pany. But it comes to the same thing here with these people.” All up and down the street, notices have been served on the strikers, or- ering them to moye in three days. None of them have gone yet, and they assert they don’t intend to, without putting up a fight first. After eight months and more of successful strike, hey are not so easily cowed, HE strikers who live on the street say that there are only about 15 “scabs” scattered up and down the street, among the several hundred res- idents on the strikers’ side. The fore- men’s side, of course, they consider entirely “scab.” A few of these fif- teen have moved into the neighbor- hood recently. Some of the others have dribbled back to the mills grad ually. The rest never went out on strike at all, The Reason, “This strike has been on since Janu- ary, 1926. Why is it that the Botany Mills have waited nearly nine months before trying any drastic means to realize at last that the strikers intend to stick it out to the end. The Botany mills management is not anxious to drive these strikers living across the street out of the mill-owned houses, They are skilled workers and needed in the mills. So they were allowed to stay on month after month, on the continual expectation that each month would see them back. But now the ninth month is well started and thére is no sign of weakening yet. And so as part of a renewed campaign of violence, comes the eviction notices of Matti- more street, Passaic, Subscribe to the 1113 W. Washington Bivd., Chicago, Ill. WITHDRAW ALL U.S. WARSHIPS FROM NICARAGUA! NO INTERVENTION IN MEXICO! HANDS OFF CHINA! the Denver Trades and Labor Assembly. (Copyright, 1926, by Upton Sinclair.) Thus led on, Rachel said that she would be interested to understand dhe ideas of Comrade Watkins. (Whonever a Socialist wanted to be very polite to a Bolshevik, she call- ed him by the old term, which had applied before the family row broke out.) How could a mass uprising succeed in America, with the em- ploying class in possession of all the arms and means of communica- tion? They had poison gas now, and would wipe out thousands of the rebel workers at a time. The one possible outcome would be re- action—as in Italy, where the work- ers had seized the factories, and then had had to give them up be- cause they couldn’t run them. Comrade Watkins replied that Italy had no coal, but was depen- dent on Britain and America, which thus had the power to strangle the Italian workers. As a matter of fact the Fascist reaction in Italy had been made by American bank- ers—Mussolini and his ruffians had not dared to move a finger till they had made certain of American cred- its. We had played the same role there as in Hungary and Bavaria; all over the world, American gold was buttressing reaction. Paul had seen it with his own eyes in Si- beria, and he said, with his quiet decisiveness, that nobody could un- derstand what it meant unless he had been there. Paul didn’t blame Comrade Menzies for feeling as she did; that was natural for one who hd been brought up under peace conditions; but Paul had been to war; he had seen the class struggle in action, “Yes, Comrade Watkins,” said Ra- chel, “but if you try and fail, things will be so much worse.” “If we never try,” said Paul, “we can never succeed; and even if we fail, the class consciousness of the workers will be sharpened, and the end will be nearer than if we do nothing. We have to keep the rev- olutionary goal before the mass- es, and not let them be lured into compromise. That is my criticism of the Socialist movement; it fails to realize the intellectual and moral forces locked up in the working class that can be called out by the right appeal.” “Ah,” said Rachel, “but that is the question—what is the right appeal? I want to appeal to peace rather than to violence, That seems to Me more moral.” Paul answered, that to make peace appeals to a tiger might seem moral to some, but to him it seemed futile. The determining fact in the world was what the capitalist class had done during the past nine years. They had destroyed thirty million human’ Hives, and three hundred bil- lions of wealth, everything a whole generation of labor had created. So Paul did not enter into discussions of morality with them; they were a set of murderous maniacs, and the job was to sweep them out of pow- er. Any means that would succeed were mora] means, because nothing could be so immoral as capitalism. When Bunny went out with Ra- chel, she said that Paul was an ex- traordinary man, and certainly a ig iy ‘ DON'T DELAY! What Are You Doing? dangerous one to the capitalist class. He was a case of shell-shock from the war, and those who had made the war would have to deal with him. Then Bunny asked about Ruth, and Rachel] said she was a nice girl, but a little colorless, didn’t comrade think? Bunny tried to ex- plain that Ruth was deep, her feel- ings were intense, but she seldom expressed them. Rachel said Ruth ought to think for herself, because she would have a lot of suffering it she followed Paul thru his Bolshe- vik career. Bunny suggested that Rachel might help to educate her, but Rachel smiled and said that Comrade Ross was too naive; surely Paul would not like to have a So- cialist come in and steal his sister’s sympathy from him. In spite of all Bunny could do, his women friends would not be friends. Then later on Bunny saw Paul, and got Paul's reaction to Rachel. A nice girl, well-meaning and intelli- gent, but she wouldn’t keep her pro- letarian attitude very long. The so- cial revolution in America was not going to be made by young lady col- lege graduates doing charity work for the capitalist class. What she was doing among the “Ypsels” was mostly wasted effort, according to Paul, because these Socialist organ- zations spent their efforts fighting Communism. The capitalists ought to be glad to hire her to do such work, But somehow it wasn’t that way, Bunny found; the capitalists were narrow minded, and lacking in vi- sion. A few days later Bunny learn- ed that Rachel was facing a serious dilemma. She had ‘taken her four years’ course at the university with the idea of making a career as a so- cial worker; but now @ woman friend, upon whose advice she was acting, had warned her that she was throwing away her chances by her activity With these “Ypsels.” It was hard enough for a Jewish girl, and one from the working classes, to have a professional career, without taking on the added handicap of So- cialism. Rachel should at least wait till she had got a position, and got herself established. So there were more troubles. What was Rachel going to do? The answer was that she was not going to desert her beloved young Social- ists. It was all very well to say wait, but that was the way all com- promising began; once you started, you never knew where to stop. No, Rachel would take her chances of the “Ypsels” being raided by the po- lice, or placarded in the newspapers ‘as a conspiracy to undermining the morals of youth. If it turned out that her friend was right, and the bourgeoisie wouldn’t have her as a dispenser of their charities, she would find some sort of job in the labor movement. And Bunny went off to keep an engagement to a din- ner party with Vee Tracy, having a sober face and a troubled con- .Seience, neither of which she was clever enough to hide. (To be continued.) GET A SUB. We wilt send sarapte coples of The DAILY WORKER to your friends~ *