The Daily Worker Newspaper, March 25, 1927, Page 6

THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, FRIDAY, MARCH 25, 1927 The Blood of the People| Is on the Heads of Those’ Who Defend the ( Old Order | By J. LOUIS ENGDAHL, olution as a result euse tc of an inc ing of Nanking and Chunki Nanking, especially the center of inte stead the anghai, as the cd news se ort t American and Briti ng down a ic bombardment of Nanking h explosive shel port must be t ers are with h i n in connection with the news thru yesterda » Associated Press, under Shanghai, March stated: “Nanking fell without fighting. All the and the United States consulate are safe. disorders within the city occurred. “THE CITY OF CHINKIANG ALSO FELL BLOOD- LESSLY AND THE AMERICANS THERE ARE SAFE.” Americans | Only minor * * * | If there is any trouble, therefore, at Nanking, or at} Chinkiang, it is certain that it was instigated by the im- perialist invaders. The People’s Army has nothing to gain by the incidental killing of a few profit parasites. Ever since the People’s Armies began moving down the Yangtze Kian River toward Shanghai, the military machine of the alien profiteers, including warships from | a dozen nations, have been itching to begin their business | of murder. The robber imperialists have viewed with agony the development of the Chinese revolution. They have seen great sections of China go over peacefully and without bloodshed to the People’s Standards. * . . This is March, “The Month of Revolutions.” It was fm this month, ten years ago, that czarism was over- thrown in Russia. This was accomplished practically without bloodshed. The same was true when the masses, in the cities and on the land, went over to the Bolshevik position in the following month of Novem- ber. This is the month of the anniversary of the Paris Commune. Fifty-six years ago the working class of | Paris successfully held aloft the banners of revolution- | ary until their class enemies in both France and Ger-| many joined forces, a combined power that was too! strong for them. Then the massacre began—the slaugh-) ter of the 30,000 workers of Paris—at the hands of} the butchers whose descendants today have their mur-} der ships in battle array before the great cities of} China where labor is today successfully assuming power. | The Hungarian Soviet Republic was established prac- tically without bloodshed. The same was true of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. But these were heroic ef- forts to win western Europe for labor. But the slaugh- ter came, the terror reign ensued when the old order in Europe, ably assisted with American gold, success-| fully overcame, in a bath of blood, the will of the many. . . * The Paris Commune was unsuccessful but it proved i tion and a lesson to labor in the years that! have followed. The workers of Hungary and Bavaria were unable to repeat the victory of the Russian work-/| ers and peasants. The Chinese masses are proving more successful, but they have great struggles ahead. World labor cannot permit the Chinese revolution to) face the fate of the Paris Commune. There are many} indications that such will not be the ¢ase. The Chinese | revolution’ has a powerful party—the Kuomintang—as | its leader. It is defended by a well disciplined and care-/| fully trained army, the Kuominchun. The unity of the | city workers with the peasants is being developed. Na-/| tional solidarity grows. | * * * But the capitalist order will not give up China with-| out a struggle, no more than it has given up hope of| conquering the Union of Soviet Republics even to this} day. But the blood is on the heads of the supporters} of the dying social system. It is on the heads of those} responsible for the fascist states that have been erected in Europe, at the cost of tens of thousands of workers’ lives, especially in Italy, Spain, Poland, the Balkan} countries, the bloodiest being Roumania and Jugo- Slavia, and the Baltic provinces of the Paris peace ban- dits, nests of terror, most crimson with labor’s blood being Finland and Lithuania. The scene changes to Nanking, China, city of 380,900 population, the center of many struggles since the Man- chus were deposed and the Chinese republic came into existence in 1911. Chinkiang is about 45 miles down) the Yangtse, at the juncture with the Grand Canal,)| with extensive imports. | The winning of these two cities is important alike for the Chinese revolution and for world imperialism. * * * | | “Socony Hill,” the stronghold of the Standard Oil Com-| y in Nanking, becomes the news center of the day. 't is charged that “Americans” have been compelled to seek Socony Hill as a sanctuary, to protect themselves against the Chinese. The first news dispatches said that the “Americans” had to take flight before the depredations of “North- erners,” the retreating catspaws of the foreign profiteers. If there were any disorders this is no doubt the correct explanation. If there are any American dead in China today, at Nanking or elsewhere, missionaries, Standard Oil agents, or the marines, bluejackets or other Hessians of the international bankers, they have doubtlessly been slain by their own hirelings. In explanation of this situation, one of the paragraphs in the manifesto issued by General Psi Tsung Hsi, in command of the People’s Army at Shanghai, is very enlightening. He says: ‘“For eighty years the imperialists, under protection of unequal treaties, have reduced China to a state of vassalage. “AFTER THE REVOLUTION OF 1911, THE FOR- EIGN IMPERIALISTS CONTINUALLY SUPPLIED CHINESE IMPERIALISTS WITT RIT AND GUNS, WITH WHICH THEY HAVE WAGED WAR FOR THE LAST FIFTEEN YEARS. “On the one hand the foreign imperialists have checked the development of Chinese edu and industries, and on the other have secured for themselves special privileges. “But the Chinese now have awakened and Shanghai, the greatest commercial center in the Far Kast, will kecome not only a strong base for Chinese nationalism, but for a world revolution.” * * * The paragraph referred to is set in bold faced capi- tal letters. But the paragraph that stirred the im-| perialists of the world and their press+was the last} paragraph, the declaration of solidarity of the workers | and peasants of China with the oppressed of all lands. The shelling of Nanking by United States and British ‘warships was the answer. For Chinese labor to doclere its solidarity with the working class of other countries ui is a crime in‘ the eyes of the imperialist wor. perialism seeks to punish that crime in the only man. ner that it knows how, 7 American labor cannot remain idle as this struggle grows. y | | death. ~ HENRY FORD libel suit for Mr. Sapiro. JAMES A. REED PRINCIPALS IN FORD-SAPIRO SUIT SNAPPED AT TRIAL AARON SAPIRO | Here are the principals in the $1,000,000 libel suit brought against Henry Ford and the Dearborn Independent by Aaron Sapiro, |Chicago attorney and organizer of farmers co-operative societies, snapped at the trial in federal court at Detroit, Mich. They are, \left to right, Henry Ford; Senator James A. Reed, of Missouri, chief defense attorney; Aaron Sapiro, who is suing the auto magnate and the magazine for articles appearing in the Independent; and William Henry Gallagher, Detroit attorney, who is prosecuting the WILLIAM GALLAGHER, THESE JURORS TO DECIDE WHETHER FORD WILL PAY MILLION Closeups of the six men and six women jurors in the Sapiro-Ford libel trial at Detroit, QUART DALY The Citizens’ Military Training Camps’ By NAT KAPLAN. (One-time member of the Recruiting Publicity Bureau, U. S. A.) To the American youth who thinks of war as an adventure, a series of triumphal marches and parades, no book will be more revealing than that written by the marine corps captain, Laurence Stallings—“Plumes,” which we had the pleasure of rereading re- cently. Stallings knows war, but, more to the point, his experiences in the “war for democracy,” “the war to end war,” taught him the hitter lesson of his betrayal, along with that of thous- ands, by the Judas-kiss of the pay- triot politicians, bankers and clerics who today, as then, form the sideline chorus for the clicking typewriter music of the C. M. T. C. recruiters. eee * a The marine captain fell with many wounds during an attack on Belleau Wood. He endured all of the agonies of battle and surgery and returned to the United States with a wrecked body and a mind sickened by useless, pur- poseless butchery. Despite heroic at- ‘tempts by plastic surgeons, Captain | Stallings was forced to have a leg amputated. All of this, for what? * * * “Richard Plume had life stolen from him. Stolen by all those scoun- drels who were not there with him. The scoundrelly . . . . orators were not there. . . The same orators are playing the marionetta, now dangling from strings that center at Wall Street, extend to Washington and, from there, are put into operation by the Recruiting Publicity Bureau at Gov- ernors Island, New York. Most not- able will be the air-thumping gestic- ulations, the flag-waving gestures, the fervid mouthings of these strum- pet puppets, these kept-clergymen, these Wall Street yes-men, while they plead for the “mental, moral, and physical development” of Amer- ican youth and respect for duly con- stituted authority. Leaders and authority of what sort? To return to Stallings, marine cap- tain. : “War is directed by ghastly men. a brutal and vicious dance, It was the tragedy of our lives that we had to be mutilated at the hands of dolis and fools. I was seduced into it by men like Taft, who went about speak- ing for on’s participation in the war. Until I went to France a long succession of baptist preachers had threatened me with the horror of I've lost that interest, and T can walk I'm not afraid to die. ‘into a chureh and laugh in the prea- cher’s face. What does he know about death?” este tee hoe These same holy men are helping to sell the military training idea with the usual line of tripe, treacle and hokum, “Physical training,” “mental, moral and physical develop- ment,” “citizen’s training camps,” “free vacation,’—and so forth, with a skillful avoidance of things and terms military. But glance at a copy of “The Mil- itary Instructors Manual.” “Success in battle is the ultimate object of all military training.” “The scheme is to make the stu- dent a good shot, singly and collect- of war.” “The functions of bayonet train- ing are (1) to teach the correct use of the bayonet until it becomes in- stinctive; (2) t» develop the fighting spirit; (3) to develop speed, accur- acy and coordination.” “The most vulnerable points of the body are: the neck, small of the back (on either side of the spine), chest and thighs. Bony parts of the trunk must be avoided by accurate aim.” “After every butt blow a thrust must immediately follow, since no butt blow of itself, is apt to be fa- tal.” * * * Coupled with these contributions to the “mental, moral and physical development” of the American youth, courses in “history” and “citizen- ship” are given, but in the interest of saving your laughter for a perusal of the comic magazines, none will be given—except the all-pervading “axiom” that all opposition to the military and paytriot creed has its or- igin in Moscow, that all opponents are either castrati, nervous women or reds. * * * This is the sort of teaching that is masked by the “free summer camp” garb of the Citizens’ Military Training Camps, ballyhooed by the type of advertising and “news” stor- ies that would have sent Diogenes scurrying for another lantern. Citizens’ Mili.. Train. Camps .Gal 2 The proof of the essential failure of these camps is that few (accord- ing to lieutenant-colonel, then major, Fleet, second corps area, ©. M. T. C. recruiting officer last year) come back for a second year. Once stung }and misled it is hard for even the |consumate genius of the Recruiting | Publicity Bureau to resell the idea to a disappointed customer. | A newspaper review of “What Price Glory?” says “It deals with , the should-be forgotten side of the ' struggle in France.” In the same at- \titude, a kept press seeks to either ignore or endorse the C, M. T. C. campaigning of the American fascisti | paytriots. Instead of the black shirts | worn by the Italian terrorists, they seek to employ th. O. D. of the C, M. T. ©. They bristle with Hun |psychology, their “school” grounds |are within the bounds of army posts, notorious for their moral laxity, reek- jing with obscenity, vulgarity and filth, and they prate a never-ending line of “mental, moral and physical development.” * * * | A solid, massed front of public opinion, meeting the lies of the re- cruiters and apologists with truth, will defeat the hidden purposes of the Citizens’ Military Training Camps. BUY THE DAILY WORKER AT THE NEWSSTANDS J ively, in time of peace and in time | Lower abdomen, base of | The Daily Symposium Conducted by EGDAMLAT. THE QUESTION. | Are you pleased with Judge Seeger’s decision in the | “Peaches” Browning case? THE PLACE. | 145th street and Broadway. : THE ANSWERS. . Mrs. Rhudd, McCombs Place, housewife: “Yes. Even tho I’m a woman myself, I do not sympathize with Peaches. She wasn’t fair to Mr. Browning. She didn’t live up to her side of the bargain. Judge Seeger was right in denying her alimony.” * * * Sam Keller, Newark, salesman: “No. I regret that Browning won. The judge was to merciful to that fool. He knew what he was going in for and he ought to pay now.” | * * * Mrs. Winston, West 142nd street, housewife: “Yes. Peaches should have been more appreciative. She wanted | too much and now she has nothing. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if they reconcile.” * * * M. Gutnick, 281 West 29th street, manufacturer: “No. I believe there might be some truth to Mrs. Browning’s charges. At any rate, Mr. Browning is rich enough and should pay for his ‘youthful folly.’ I, too, think that they will reunite.” * * * Mrs. J. Rodgers, West 149th street, housewife: “Yes. I sympathize with Mr. Browning. I feel he was tricked into this marriage. Personally, I believe Mrs. Heenan is more to blame for it than Peaches.” rs Letters From Our Readers Made World Better Place. Editor, Daily Worker:—Under date of March 14, 1927, I notice that the government is dismissing its case vs. C. E. Ruthenberg. This reminds me of the war prosecu- tion which hounded Ruthenberg into prison. I admire his courage and his manhood, for he was a man. He helped to make this world a better place in which to live. Sincerely yours, Ernest Lundeen. * * * Follows Nearing’s Advice. Editor, Daily Worker:—One of the best methods to in- crease the circulation of The DAILY WORKER was sug- gested by Comrade Scott Nearing at the Lenin Memorial meeting. He advised that regular readers and friends of The DAILY WORKER buy copies of the paper while on the way to work, leave them in the subways, | might never have come to pass. and repeat the process while going home. I have been buying regularly 3, 4, and 6 copies of The DAILY WORKER each day, and always leave them in trains and street cars. I have noticed that on many occasions the papers are picked up by passengers and read with great interest. 1 urge all those who want to see the Greens, the Wolls, and the Sigmans driven from the labor movement and a@ new class-conscious fighting spirit injected into it, to help spread with all their means the only English labor organ, The DAILY WORKER. : z —Henry Walters, SEND IN YOUR LETTERS The DAILY WORKER is anxious to receive letters from its readers stating their views on the issues con- vay © the labor movement. It is our hope to de- a “Letter Box” department will be of wide terest to all members of The DAILY WORKER family. Send in your letter today to “The Letter Box,” The DAILY WORKER, 38 First street, New York City. Read The Daily Worker Every Day id i SACCO, VANZETTI, AND “THE RESPECTABLES.” By Felix Frankfurter. Little, Brown and! The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Company. $1.00. To anyone familiar with the case at close range, attendance at a Sacco- Vanzetti protest meeting is rather a disturbing experience. You fidget as speakers rummage helplessly in the heaped-up mass of evidence and legal phrases, facts and near-facts. You wonder why speaker after speaker some- how picks some special'y harsk bit of misinformation as the’cue for a burst of eloquencc, Each speaker has his own version of the ecase—not exactly crreneous, just truths torn out of their context and badly assembled. But gradually the disturbance passes. You are caught up by the spirit { of such a meeting. You realize that however wrong in detail, the speakers are right on the whole. They cut through the legal ramifications and evasions to the grim heart of the matter: two radical workers being tortured to death by the master class. They make vivid what the workers all over the world have sensed—the Sacco-Vanzetti case as a flaming symbol of the class| struggle. Y 1 Felix Frankfurter’s book takes no cognizance of this symbol, except! where he does so by implication and almost unconsciously. His book is me- ticulously correct on detail—and horribly wrong on the whole. : Let it be understood to begin with that he has made a masterful sum- mary of the purely legal aspects of the case. The physical facts are pre- sented in concise, organized form. The book should be read and re-read by labor speakers and writers and by workers generally who want their indigna- tions a little more concrete. There was no reason why Prof. Frankfurter should consider the deeper meaning of the case, the development of the inter- national agitation, etc. All that was outside the scope of his intention. In the limits which he set for himself he did exceedingly well, and despite the remarks which follow, this review is intended as an endorsement. * * * At several points, however, he betrays his feeling about the larger aspects |of the case. That feeling is as much determined by his liberal cast of mind as was Judge Thayer's reaction to the case as a whole. The liberal mind shrinks from the unpleasant reality under the surface; it gets the hibby- jibbies in the full view of a loud rough international agitation; it prefers to narrow all issues to some polite and respectable formula. Thus Frankfurter —after himself showing how all the social, financial, political and legal forces joined in an orgy of persecution—meekly apologizes for having questioned | the infallibility of the courts. The efforts to revise the work of the courts, he pleads, “in no wise imply an attempt to undermine the necessary safe- guards of society against crime.” “Rather do they reveal confidence in our institutions and their capacity to rectify errors. They also serve to warn against too marked an assumption that, because ordinarily the criminal ma- chinery affords ample safeguards against perversions of justice, a situation may not arise where extraordinary circumstances have deflected the operation of normal procedure.” *. * * That’s where he stopped. Those are the last words in the book. Beyond | that point the finicky liberal, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot go. The road becomes too rough for him. If they cared and dared to go on he might discover that the sad exception by a curious chance generally affects the life of a leader of the workers; that the safeguards collapse just as soon as class issues are involved. * * * I want to single out two passages in the book, not because they are im- portant in themselves but because they revegl an attitude typical of a large body of liberal opinion. Unfortunately many of our friends have yielded to the same attitude; and even the Italians in the Sacco-Vanzetti committee are lending themselves naively to the leadership of well-meaning American liber- als (some of them call themselves “socialists’”). (1) Referring to William G. Thompson’s entry in the case on October 1, 1928, Frankfurter says: “The espousal of the Sacco-Vanzetti cause by a man of Mr. Thompson’s professional prestige at once gave the case a new com- plexion and has been its mainstay ever since.” In other words, the case was suddenly made nice and respectable, fit to be touched without gloves. The facts were no more damning of the Massachusetts court the day after Oc- | sities = than the day before. Yet, he says, the complexion of the case was |) changed. Well, in the first place, the forces operating in this case, on both sides, { are so large that a Thompson or two dozen Thompsons do not affect it. The radical attorney, it is true, got a rough deal from the courts. But how the eminently respectable Thompson fared? He argued the appeals before the Supreme Court—and that court stood squarely by Thayer. He presented new testimony—and Thayer brushed it aside in irritation! He dared to question Thayer’s fairness—and he was called crazy in an official opinion. In a word, his experience was precisely the same as his predecessor’s, Fred H. Moore’s. It is only in Frankfurter’s mind, and minds like his, that any change has taken place. The complexion of the case is still what it was—a class per- secution. Not all the optimism of Thompsons.and Frankfurters can make the Massachusetts courts kosher. (2) The same absurdity crops out earlier in the book in a reference to Moore, whom he describes as “a Westerner, himself a radical and a pro- fessional defender of radicals . . . an outsider . . . unfamiliar with the tra- ditions of the Massachusetts bench . . . a factor of irritation. . . .” In effect this is an attack upon Moore because he gave Sacco and Vanzetti a class- conscious defense. Naturally only a radical could give them such a defense. Had there not been this effort on Moore’s part to meet a class persecution frankly as such, without persiflage and make-shift, the international agitation Of course that agitation is an unsavory business for the respectables in Massachusetts and they will never forgive Moore. But without it there would be no Savco-Vanzetti case. There would be only two corpses. sat * * * Frankfurter himself shows that the first conviction of Vanzetti was even more farcical than the second. There was no Moore to antagonize the court, no agitation whose complexion needed a beauty doctor. Yet there was not a ripple of protest. By the time the second trial came the radicals and Moore’s bold tactics had aroused attention. But even then the protest came from radical and working class sources only. The respectable opinion which is now the “mainstay” of the case was extremely dumb. It remained quite dumb year after year although the facts were as clear then as now. The very quotations made by Frankfurter were in hundreds of labor papers—there was no excuse for the respectables not knowing. There was no excuse for the Atlantic Monthly waiting till 1927 to print the thing. It received and rejected articles to the same purport in 1922. The workers’ agitation—which would have been impossible without Moore’s deliberate exposure of the class con- spiracy—was then as now the mainstay of the case. Without it the Sacco- Vanzetti case would have been extremely dead by now. It was not Fred H. Moore’s supposed lack of familiarity with Massa- chusetts courts that “irritated” Judge Thayer, but the fact that at every point he was merciless in exposing class bias and prejudice by judge and prosecutor. Moore had ample opportunity to learn about Massachusetts law when he suc- cessfully defended Ettore, Giovannitti and Caruso in a murder frame-up after the Lawrence strike. His great popularity with the hard-boiled New England newspapermen who covered the trial is proof that Thayer’s rather than Moore’s personal characteristics were to blame for the irritation between them. Anyone else who would have tried to show up the farce would have been equally irritating and infinitely less effective. Thompson is irritating to Thayer now. Thayer was equally annoyed with non-Westerners like Eliza- beth Glendower Evans and Anna Davis. These slurs at a brilliant and courageous labor attorney, and the silly, assumption that the case has miraculously become respectable in the ey: if | | 1 i | the Boston Herald et al, are just laughable—unless the workers take up seriously. That is why these remarks had to be made. Whatever out- come the credit belongs to the radicals, attorneys and others, who up justice and made a case whose complexion offends certain f: tastes. * * * * Bearing this in mind, by all means read Frankfurter’s book. Buy it for permanent reference. Give it to somebody else to read. —EUGENE LYONS. The Negro in Industry —The total Negro population in continental” United States in 1920 was 10,463,131, an increase over the\ 9,827,763 of 1910. Of this number 4,824,151 aged 10 years and over wei in —_ in stam in im. a bere cued ie Ge! in 1910. cen’ legro population ga occu) considerably that of the white population. wars _Per- 11,000 Millionaires.—“It is computed that a person who receives a income of $50,000 or more must have a total of $1,000,000, upon this basis, there were probably about the States. This number increased to about 6,600 in 1916, to about 11,800 in 1017, the ) at any one time—due Pp to are probably about 1: Ame