The Daily Worker Newspaper, March 19, 1927, Page 8

In Gay Scotland TS labor movement in Scotland is no dry-as- dust thing despite the fact that there are as many classes, if not more, studying Marxism in Scotland as in any other country—with the excep- tion of Russia. The leaders early realized that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and set about with right good will to make these notor- ious Bolshie engineers of the Cylde, who are demons on economics, a body of men such as would cheer the heart of Robert Morris, if he were alive today. The greatest success has been achieved in the fos- tering of choirs, In this, they have beaten, in com- petition those choral unions which the bosses have encouraged in order to show that they are inter- ested in the workers’ welfare if not in a rise in wages. Membership is not confined to members of socialist organizations even if the conductor is. But not only have Glasgow’s labor thoirs beaten everything in that town, but one of them, The Or- pheus Choir, is champion of Great Britain, and has an international reputation. Roberton, the leader. toured the States a short time ago with those of the choir that managed to get leave of absence from work. Because of the inability of the members to get away from their labors, an invitation to appear in Berlin had to be refused, Some time ago, the patriotic London Scots brought them down to perform in the Albert Hall there, and while delighted with the performance, they were incensed at Roberton for refusing to finish up with “God Save The King.” His plea, on another oc- casion, for not rendering the national anthem was that “God Save The King” is bad music and worse sentiment. ; Under the leadership of Roberton, who, by the way, represents labor on the edugational board in Glas- gow, the Scottish workers have wrested the laurel crown from Wales, which country, up till a few years ago, was supposed to be unapproachable in choral singing. Other labor choirs more than hold their own with the boss outfits. Every year, in Glasgow, an art exhibition is held where only the workers’ exhibits are shown. All the radical organizations combine to make it a success, and their efforts are rewarded by the artistic paint« ings sent in by the hardy sons of toil. Tapestries and other things are also shown. Needless to say, the exhibitions are becoming more popular every year, and are paying their way. The co-operati-~ *-~ a band, which takes part with other ones in supplying musie to the workers in the summer nights in the public parks. And then different labor organizations have their fife bands. In the opinion of the writer, the bagpipes will play no small part, when the time comes, in raily-. ing the working class of Scotland. Many a time and oft have the capitalists of Britain used them to some tune in their imperialist wars; but the time is not far distant when instead of being gladdened by the skirl of the pipes,, they will shudder in their shoes to hear “The Campbells Are Coming, Hur- rah! Hurrah!’ Yes, once again, they will hear the wild McGregor’s slogan: “Gather! gather! gather! If they rob us of name and pursue us with beagles, ‘ Give their house to the flames and their flesh to the eagles, Not only ave the Campbells coming, but the other clans as well are coming with the object of rais- ing the red standard. It matters not that there is one black sheep .in the MacDonald clan, the others will settle his hash. One gets a hint of what is to come, each May Day, when the workers in each distriet march to the central meeting place with red flag flying and the pipes skirling out defiance: “For a’ that, and a’ that, Its comin’ yet for a’ that, When man tae man, the world o'er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.” “A Night With Burns,” is a-favorite theme with labor men anxious to get workers interested in. poetry. But that is not the only reason for select- ing Burns, even though, his music rivals that of Orpheus: Did you ever ask yourself why Scotsmen have such a mania for putting statues up to the beloved bard; why the unsophisticated worker thinks Burns the greatest poet that ever lived? The reason is not far to seek. He sang the sweetest songs; was born of the workers, and was class con- scious. In the hills where the propagandists haven’t penetrated with Marxism, the peasants know their Burns. And knowing him, they are then fit sub- jects to know the scientifie side expounded by Marx and Lenin. Do you object to such simple preparation as this: “We labour soon, we labour late To feed a titled knave man, And a’ the comfort we’re to get Is that beyond the grave man.” Or this tit bit from “The Jolly Beggars”: “A fig for those by law protected, Liberty’s a glorious feast; Courts for cowards were erected, Churches huilt to please the priest.” The Scotch worker will tell you that “God Save The King” is not Scotland’s national anthem but “Scots Wha Hae.” And who would blame them for swearing by one of the finest ever written, from which I quote: “By oppressions, woes and pains, By your sons in servile chains, We will drain our dearest veins, . But they shall be free! Lay the proud usurper low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberties at every blow! Let us do or dee!” Color is lent to the lectures on Burns by pictures on the screen depicting the scenes, where “gorse, and grass, and heather, where his footsteps* pass the brighter seen.” Burns said, on his deathbed, that people would think more of him a hundred years after. So we will Bobbie, so we will! Yours will be about the only statue the workers will leave standing in George Square, Glasgow. The Fall of a Young Man HE is a young man of 25. A little late in ac- quiring his laurels. Through no fault of his own. Not being born with a golden spoon in his mouth, he had to interrupt his studies by earning his own living, selling stocks and bonds. But he was not blocked thereby. He put his pennies to- gether and fought his way to a “summa cum laude,” graduating with the highest honors. This intermission in business gave him a touch of reality that brought him to his collegiate tasks with a questioning attitude. It emboldened him to challenge some of the orthodox tenets handed out dogmatically by the best of professors. Which caused him a great deal of trouble and stress, some- times raising the entire issue of the possibility of ; losing his diploma. courageous, fearless, Natively endowed with a brilliant mind, he cul- tivated it the more by those subtleties of thinking found to hand im the intricacies of mathematics, physics and the exact sciences generally. There was something about their problems and solutions that magically enticed his dialectic attention. He came to love ideas as others love sport, dancing or women. It was, some said, “a means of escape.” Not so, for when it came to the senior subjects, for example, those of economics, politics and history; his class- mates found an unexpected militant against the myths and superstitions of the regulation orthodox, here too. For example, in the study of the Civil War, he drove his professor, back of slavery, back of Lin- coln, back of the north, back of the abolitionists, until he found himself advancing the “economic in- terpretation” of history. Out of his own mind. Un- eoached by the rising new school of American his- torians who were flirting with Marxism, unaware of the drastic revolutionary implications. Sander- son was a scientific explorer, and hence probed truth to its ultimates, following whither it led him. Thus, he was brought, willy-nilly, to the whole school of Marxist literature, through the problems raised by Still he persisted: tenacious, the inadequacy of the bourgeois scholarship.as com- ing from the lips of the best of university teachers. Socially alert, Sanderson began to frequent the meetings and gatherings of the socialists, liberals, anarchists, radicals — as invited or taken to by some of his classmates, male and female. He heard the arguments pro and con, eagerly read the refer- ences, followed anxiously the free personalities of the men and women who were the protagonists. Armed with these newer truths he came back to the classroom with an arsenal of facts that he had hard time to restrain for sheer fullness of speech. He was ready to bombard and explode. Why not? Not caring particularly for the limelight (he was simply not built that way), it took a long while for the Dean to spot him. For the administrative de- tails of the Dean kept this erstwhile teacher of his- tory too absorbed to feel this new angle of Sander- son to whom he was really attached as senior to junior scholar. Furthermore, there was already rumor of making Sanderson a Fellow, upon gradua- tion. A logical step, for there were very few to surpass Sanderson in all-around scholarship. Dean Mason was not your dry-as-dust academi- cian. He was fully alert to the trend of the times. He had a business sense as well as a devotion to scholarly theory. It was even said, in a whisper, that he had been a revolutionist abroad. Some said a German socialist. So that, Mason knew his man. Sanderson was no phenomenon to him. For all his . routine, Dean Mason had been f tion of our scholastie friend, now ti radicalism, ‘ This issue came to a climax with the Phi Betta Kappa selections. The Dean’s was the deciding bal- lot. He had already had his mind made up in favor of Sanderson, despite all the expectant hostility of his colleagues, But for obverse reasons. The ma- jority was in favor of dismissing the issue by the simple act of refusal. to those in power. There were. decades of prece- pcb Tape the evolu- towards That were a simple matter By FRANK GALLACHER We won't forget that you sent four little cannons te France during the revolution, “to help to shoot the aristocrats.” We won’t forget your daring at a big dinner, when asked to toast Mr. Pitt, how you said, “I toast a better man, I toast George Washington.” We won’t forget how you swore an oath, “My lips are sealed forever on those cursed politics,” and couldn’t keep it. And our hearts will ° bleed when we think of you at the finish, your body .sick unto death, and the factor dinning you for five pounds, saying: “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair; How can ye chant ye little birds, And I sae weary fu’ o’ care.” © Space forbids any more quotations from that great rebel and artist Robert Burns. As regards sport, the labor representation in most town councils is so strong that tennis, the sport of the elite, has become a proletarian game. It is a common sight to see the lads and lassies issuing from tenements, liko those which infest the east side of New York, with tennis racquets under their arms, going to have a game on the courts in the public parks, for two or three pennies an hour. : Labor forced the public swimming ponds and baths to be given free to the unemployed two or three. times a week. It is possible to get a day’s golf for fifty cents over courses, whose beauty and surroundings distract attention from the game. The Plebian Harriers Club has made quite a name for itself on the racing track, and the young workers are now being catered for in the labor movement so far as football is concerned. You must not think that with all this pleasant- ness that the important thing is neglected. Just as the women there can sew, read, attend to the dinner, cooking and rock the baby in the cradle at one and the same time, so can the workers in the movement find time to play and make themselves fit to propagate the glad tidings. Like “Father O’F lynn,” they “have a wonderful way wid them.” Mr. Churchill found this out, to his ¢ost in Dun- dee, where he met his Waterloo. He found the jute mill workers were no mere village statemen among whom “news much older than the ale went round,” but very wide awake individuals, well up to all the moves in politics. He never got such a heckling in all his life, and since then cannot bear to hear the notes of the song, “Up Wi’ The Bonnets 0’ Bonnie Dundee.” The Scotsman dearly loves to heckle a speaker, and often I have been in fits of laughter listening to an Economic League (supposed by tories to be a more palatable name for the workers than Con- - servative Party) speaker being put through the mill. They have a keen sense of humor, which has been fostered for generations by all sorts of orators, from the Communists, Socialists, Atheists, Anarchists, Salvationists and quacks, on soap boxes at every second street corner. You will see that, in a certain sense, there is freedom of speech. By A. HENRY SCHNEER dent. Any one of Sanderson’s essays in History would do the trick. But no! Dean Mason brought them around to a point of strategy hitherto un- known to the Alma Mater. : “Vote ‘Yes’,” argued the wily craftsman. “For only thus shall we have him within our midst for the next three years, when we can influence him away from these dangerous doctrines.” And then he sallied forth with all the intensive scholarship he was capable of, going back to the proud days and works of the great masters; quoting Marx and Engels and Bohm-Bauerck and Plechanov—of course, with 4 wilful distortion that would shame the spirit of Truth herself. Waxing hot over the pollution of the modern young mind on the part of propagandist plays, pulpits, press, publications, meetings, societies, pernicious disloyal professors, happily ousted. There was a Freudian hate akin to flagellation—to heated sadism in the Dean’s castiga- tion of his “former” gods, his youthful “ideals.” Sanderson was the Jacobean sacrifice to the gods Mammon and Moloch. He won his point. Sanderson was awarded Phi Beta Kappa. Sanderson was made Fellow in His- tory. rson was rapidly advanced to Associate Professor. Sanderson was given the freedom of the university; the choice ef the best hours, classes, fellow-instructors, appointments. . There was nothing his heart wanted he did not get. The Dean had won. The Dean had been the powerful pragmatist, Success was his. For hadn’t Alma Mater taken — back unto its bosom this lion in embryo and weaned him away from radicalism only to become another lamb, whilom a more servile one, having been nur- tured upon the milk of human kindliness and care! And who that knows American culture, American forces, American life will dare to assert that, within the next generation of college men and women, the Sandersons of today will not be emasculated into the Deans Mason of tomorrow? How shall we pre- vent history from deflecting itself thus, by inert repetition? y