The Daily Worker Newspaper, June 15, 1927, Page 6

Ps Page Six Moishe Nadir _ FROM PLAY-BOY TO REVOLUTIONIST | By A. B. MAGIL, When Moishe Nadir stood up in Central Opera House the other night to receive the ovation of the many ad-| mirers that had come to welcome him, he was already tired. Tired of his travels, of the excitement of coming back, of meeting people, shaking hands, answering ques- tions. Tired, But most of all there was that festive tiredness of a person who has passed through a deep emotional experience which has left him a little con- fused, a little uncertain of his waking and dreaming. * * * More than a year ago Moishe Nadir stood up to re-| ceive a similar ovation in Carnegie Hall. He was going away on a European trip, most of which would be spent in Soviet Russia. Moishe Nadir, the skeptic, the scoffer at all deep ardors and positive ths, was going to the! land where ardor and faith and knowledge were creating tangible miracles. In search of what? Perhaps he didn’t himself know. But at Central Opera House the other night there stood up a worshipper, one who had parti ted in some- thing intimate and joyc nd in whose blood all that he had seen and ex ed during the last year had risen to a great tide anding About ten tributor to a c phia. At that ists, grindir @ little cheaply » > Nadir was a regular con- h newspaper ‘in Phil of § humor- me wrote it didn’t mat- ter much. . But beh the name Moishe Nadir something of the man Isaac Re ss, the Galician Jew, who had Wanted to be nd had been compelled to Become mere! the professional humorist. hat Moishe Perhaps he only di humorist, would b 2 a ir, th Reiss could ever have been. After Philadelphia there was Greenwich Village. Joe Kling, editor of “ an ephemeral literary maga- sine, began printing t of Nadir’s experimen- composed for the initiate and only “Villager” among Village, like Philadelphia, was tal verse, mome’ only. Nadir was Yiddish writers. only an episode. Slowly Moishe Nadir was emerging into a position unique among Yiddish writers. He was becoming a storm center. He was discussed, anatomized, quarreled about. No Yiddish writer has been the subject of so much controversy. There are those who worship him and those who hate him—his enemies have always been many. When Noah Steinberg, a young Yiddish writer, recently issued an extensive study of Moishe Nadir, he was attacked on all sides, Nadir doesn’t deserve such/ he f But the Maurice Becks, THE MENACE IN THE SCHOOLROOM sy, MILITARISM . ‘Tne doar patriots have extended flag day to flag week so they can have .agre tit. to prepare the workers’ children in the schoolrooms for cannon fodder in future wars to defend the imperialist investments of Wall Street. Smash the beast now by refusing to permit your children to be regimented in the schoolroom preparatory to being systematically slaughtered on the battlefields in behalf of the capitalist plunderers. All workers should try to safeguar arives d their children against this murderous policy. serious treatment, the pedants shouted; he’s a poseur, a trifler, he writes unintelligibly, scorns all correct and dignified expression. Nadir’s numerous personal and lit- erary idiosyncrasies have made him peculiarly suscepti- ble to these petty attacks. Some of these criticisms have no doubt been justified, A vivid, mercurial personality, he had exploited his ex- traordinary talents until he had become something of a! professional esthete. He jeered at philistinism, at banal- | ity and soggy sentimentalism, but also at all strivings| toward great goals, the struggles of the oppressed, all} passionate living. The name itself: Moishe Nadir. In Yiddish there is something impudent in the sound, some- ad engender thing vagrant and unabashed. Nadir was the eternal | tat the abilily of the individual nose-thumber. * * * jmembers to carry on shop Ppropa-| Yet something was gnawing at Moishe Nadir, and the |@nda and shop activities in their sterility of such attitudes was creating a great need,|Place of work be fully utilized. It is ft was all very well to laugh at bourgeois smugness. | important that they be given all pos-| “*3ut it was laughter in vacuo. And it created a smug-|sible training and that reports of} ness of its own, that contemptuous smugness that made|shop conditions and shop activities | itself felt in regard to “the mob,” that is, the toiling! be made and discussed in the street masses. . Bi | nuclei. | Something was gnawing at Moishe Nadir and he joined! Where several members work to- the staff of the “Freiheit.” The esthete, the darling of | gether in one shop, too few to form the “literary” cafes, became a contributor to a Commu- |, shop unit, they should if at all pos-/| nist newspaper. This was in the early days of the Paper | sible belong to the same street nuc-| when its existence was precarious and salaries were even | leus, keep in close touch with one more uncertain than they are now. thei: eke She shesek dacledh da 6 Nadir began conducting his daily column, “From Yes-| 20ne*, ang the ib ss ee a terday Till Tomorrow.” This was a personal vehicle, in | Whole becomes SOREN eee, een which he wrote anything that happened to pop into his ther developing and Or sensing. the mind—and the mind of Moishe Nadir is amazingly, | activities with a view to building a} breathlessly fertile. It quickly became one of the most | Shop unit in their place of work. popular features of the “Freiheit.” There is nothing! In addition, street nuclei should comparable to it in the bourgeois American press. Nadir|give all necessary assistance to shop is easily the most brilliant columnist in America: F. P.| nuclei in or nearest to their territory A. and Heywood Broun are tyros in comparison. He is/both financially as well as by way of never perfunctory, never wistfully weary. Nadir always| distribution of literature and shop writes as if he were discovering language for the first! bulletins at factory gates and organ-| time. His words are mocking yet tender, warm, light, | ization of street and factory meet-| flexible, always unpredictable. And most remarkable firs of all is his apparent spontaneity, his endless and ef- 208 fortless ingenui Of course, Nadir frequently outrages the academicians. He takes too many liberties with the | brow, Ms | language that they have taken such pains to teach cor-, This field offers our Party some | rect behavior. * * * | of its greatest opportunities to es-| Yet even on the “Freiheit” Nadir remained very much | tablish contact with working masses. the dilettante, the incorrigible child babbling inspired| The main object is to bring these precocitics. But the discontent in him was growing| masses into motion against their sae | more clamorous, urging him to go away. As a revolu-| enemies, to consolidate the influence tionary artist he sympathized with any attack on the|Sained by the Party and give it or-| old order, though he himself remained a bystander, not | %4nized expression. By pursuing the/ @ participant. And he found himself drawn to the land | correct policies and tactics the Party where the old, decaying order was being destroyed and|can gain the deciding influence of| in which something vital and strong was struggling into | these movements. The method of} being. | work of necessity takes different To Soviet Russia he brought with him his skepticism, | forms within the different mass or- his disillusion and discontent, his capricious mockery. | £anizations. As an example we enu-| And Moishe Nadir, the humorist and poet, who had gone | merate the following: “| from Galicia to the United States, to Philadelphia, Green-| 1. Permanent mass organizations,| wich Village, the Second Avenue cafes, found at length | such as trade unions, labor parties that home that he had always been seeking. At the age and workers’ fraternal organizations. of forty-two Mcishe Nadir fell in love with a strange, 2. Mass organizations which have country and a strange people, | been created for specific permanent * * * Me oat such as International Labor | ,. The love songs of Moishe Nadir, the love songs that} Defense and the International Work- | he wrote during the past year to Soviet Russia, are | ers’ Aid. | among the greatest in the Yiddish language. They ap-| 8. Temporary united-front organi- peared at intervals in the “Freiheit,” written ostensibly | zations set up around single issues, | in prose. He embraced the country, its people, its lan-|such as strike relief, pr-otection of guage and its way of life with the passion that all his | foreign-born, anti-injunction, defense | life he had denied. And he wanted everybody to take|of certain workers’ cases, tenarits’ | part in this love of his: he spoke constantly of “our coun- | leagues, ete. | try,” “our government.” ; Our trade union work is by far | There are those who continue to scoff at this new| the most important of these various fervor. But it remains real and profound. For when | categories here mentioned since that Moishe Nadir, a sympathizer with the Revolution, re-| is the basis for success in practically turned as Comrade Moishe Nadir, « participant in that| all other activities. The trade unions Revolution, he returned as a man reborn, | are elementary class organizations “9 if bs | of the workers and the tasks of the| His first published work since his return to the United | Communist Party within them have | States appeared in the “Freiheit” the other day, It is| been formulated by Comrade Lenin| a rather lengthy poem called “The Jazz Song of Stoker | as follows:—‘The engine is the Par- Jim.” Judged by esthetic standards, it is perhaps not ajty, its cogs grip the cogs of the very good poem, but as an expression of Moishe Nadir it | trade union wheel and bring them is an amazing testament. He speaks throughout the | into motion, The trade unions in turn poem of “Brother Jim,” “Comrade Jim,” and towards | set into motion the greater masses.” the end says: | The instrument through which the “Sickle and hammer are the sign Party works within the trade unions, Of the day that is coming for Jim.” is the trade union fraction, The lim- The esthete stoop to propaganda? Call it what you | ited influence of our Party upon the Organization CHAPTER FIVE—Continued ; Shop Activities by Street Nuclei. | While street nuclei cannot concen- |trate their work within one shop, it lis nevertheless of great importance | CHAPTER VI. Work in Mass Organizations. will, But one should remember that the esthete is dead. | trade unions in general makes one Not the artist, however, nor the human being. of our main problems, that of e} * * * tablishing much broader contacts on Moishe Nadir has returned to America, But he is|the basis of the issues prevailing. only visiting this ‘country now. Shortly Comrade Moishe|In each instance the issues are de- Nadir goes back home—home to Soviet Russia, where he| termined by the conditions of the intends to live and to work. | industry and the degree of develop- } By ARNE SWABECK. |; with trade union tactics. al Problems ment of the unions: The immediate task of the fraction is to build the! left wing (whether it be the T. U. E. L. or have another name.) But the fractions must also build a broader | movement of the opposition elements around the issues made concrete, bringing it constantly closer toward complete support of the left wing. The fraction then becomes the instru- ment with which to direct these movements in the struggle for the needs of the unions. It is not our purpose here to deal However, the following few points should be mentioned. The issues naturally vary according to the degree of develop- ment of the unions and their posi- tions within a give industry. The methods also vary on the same basis. As an illustration we select three} industries, coal mining, the steel in- industry ard the ho? “dust (To be continued) a eeteenickianennatiess To Pierce Sky Plans for the proposed 110- atory Larkin Tower, on West Forty-Second Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, New York City, have been approved hy the city’s building depart- ment. Cost is estimated at $25,- 000,000 and completion is antici- pated before the end of 1928. Plans call for it to rise 1,200 fect above street level, 267 feet higher than the Eiffel Tower, Paris. Drawing of it is pic- tured here in ‘comparison with the Eiffel ‘Tower, Paris,:. Professional Patriots (Continued from last issue) What do professional patrioteers mean by the word “patriotism”? Devotion to business priv- |tlege and to the open shop; the idea that law, | private violence and officials should put down what under this definition is “unpatriotic”; that the only approach to social problems is suppres- sion of one side of the argument. | “Professional Patriots” is edited by Norman | Hapgood from material assembled by Sidney Howard and John Hearley. ~ * * . “Your business is being injured. You are losing money every day on accoynt of the willful, malicious lies that have been told about West Virginia. You know this is true. The prosperity of this State has been re- tarded many years on account of these misrepresenta- tions.” The American Citizen, a periodical published by the Association, carried the usual warnings of “World Rev- | olution,” quotations from Lenin, headline summaries of “Bolsheviki Doctrines,” and the familiar closing appeal ‘to “Mr. Loyal American.” But the most extensive variety of literature has come from the National Civic Federation, with its three | departments specializing in propaganda for its con- ception of patriotism. Mr. Easley publishes one leaflet | that is unique, entitled “Questions for Every Good | American to Answer.” It purports to be a letter from | an indignant father to the Civic Federation, asking the | Federation to take the lead in curbing the spread of radicalism so that it may not infect his children. Parts | of it read: | “For the last two years my wife and I have been | reading and studying Socialism and Bolshevism. We have visited the Rand School and read much of its liter- ature. We have listened to socialists in their halls and at the street corners; we have heard them in church cireles, social clubs and educational meetings. Among the speakers were clergymen of prominence, professors from important universities and principals and teachers from the public schools with now and then an editor. From all that we have heard and seen, we have come to detest the very word ‘Socialism’. ... We regard the doctrines of economic determinism as an abomination, leading straight to atheism and the destruction of the family. We regard their theory of internationalism, with its contempt for lave of country, as one leading to disloyalty to our government and the destruction of nationality.” And so on through a couple of galleys, the father of a family of three sons and daughters tells how the churches, the schools and the charity organizations are being captured by the advocates of radicalism, ending with the suggestion that, the parents and patriotie mem- bers of churches, and college alumni should organize and “join hands” to “beat down the impudent pretensions of the comparatively few.” And finally it asks, “Will not your Department on the Study of Revolutionary Move- ments take the initiative in this matter?” And of course Easely and his department will, Another of Mr. Easley’s best leaflets is entitled “The War Against Patriotism.” In the space of two pages it lays low as unpatriotic, the World Peace Fel- lowship, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the Rev. A.:Maude Royden, of London, “numerous church and missionary bodies,” the National Council for the Reduction of Armaments, the Foreign Policy Association, the National Student Forum, and The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in Amer- ica, (To be continued.) ‘SEND IN YOUR LETTERS The DAILY WORKER is anxious to receive letters from its readers stating their views on the issues con- |fronting the labor movement, It is our hope to de- | velop a “Letter Box” department that will be of wide interest to all members of The DAILY WORKER family. Send in your letter today to “The Letter Box,” The DAILY WORKER, 33 First street, New York City. Read The Daily Worker Every Day “A PICTURE OF CIVILIZATION IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA” OIL! by Upton Sinclair. Albert & Chas, Boni. $2.50, Most of those who read this review are already prejudiced about “Oil!” They are prejudiced in its favor because it has been suppressed in Boston, and against it because it ran serially in The DAILY WORKER. “Oil!” should never be taken serially—it should be gulped, Sinclair doesn’t write neat works of art. He is, not a novelist, in the academic sense of the word. His style bears the same relation to literature that the skyscraper does to architecture. Its proper effect is achieved only in the mass. There is nothing satisfactory about a piece of it.» * Sinclair gets his results by piling up the evidence, and his “novels” have little enough of ,plot, nothing of that closely-knit running narrative that sustains interest from one installment to another. The story of “Oil!” is pretty slim. There is young “Bunny,” the’ son of a rising independent oil-well promoter, whose father gets into the big game, and grows rapidly rich, partly because of the great world war. Young Bunny is a decent’ lad, Sinclair’s own type, presumably, and he wonders and worries about the rights and wrongs of things, meanwhile rather ineffectively dodging the matchmaking mamas, and the “red hot mamas” of his own class, In the end he becomes reconciled to Bolshevism, convinced it isn’t just a Ger- man intrigue, tho still unconvinced that it is the way out of the mess which he recognizes the world to be in. He starts to spend his inherited wealth on new Brookwood schools, and solves his flapper problem by marrying a men- shevik Jewess. Somehow, Sinclair contrives to make this last seem like a desperate adventure. * * * This is the way with all of Sinclair’s theses, those frankly polemical like “The Brass Check” and those disguised as fiction, like “Oil!” He crushes the present system under an avalanche of facts; he builds up a hanging case | against the bourgeoisie, and then he sentences them to social service, a new | liberal newspaper, or something else equally piffling. * * * It was obviously not for titis that the book was suppressed in Boston. Nor did that half page of quotations from the “Song of Songs, Which Is Solomon’s,” make any more than a pretext. The thing that riled the bankers of Back Bay is not an exposure of the impurities of the Bible, for nowhere else in the world are they such popular literature as in the home of the | Puritans. What caused the trouble in Boston was that some of the impur- | ities of the Republican saints were dragged out and flaunted in a “socialist” book. The real thing in “Oil!” is the history of graft and corruption, of the warping of every decent instinct, of the loosing of every form of degeneration and decadence which is involved in the dictatorship of the capitalist class. This class is mercilessly flayed. It is represented, at the best, in the person of men like Bunny’s father, as a group of rulers rising thru definitely anti- social abilities, the power of clever swindling, and suppressing in its career those real abilities, of constructiveness which these men would otherwise exhibit. It is a ruling clique so lacking in philosophy that it falls for every sort of charlatan and spiritualist. Somé of the most entertaining sections are those which deal with the creation of a new religion, “The Four Square Gospel”—a man preacher who gets lost in the sea, this time, and those who profited from this fakery themselves were swindled by others as crude. * * 7 Interspersed among the descriptions of waste and revelry, undeniably the true picture of social life of the rich in Southern California, come little sketches of the life of the poor, who make the dissipations of oil men and their movie queens possible. Into Bunny’s own oil well falls a worker. (We quote a little tho, for reasons already stated, it is hardly fair to Sinclair.) “How long has he been down?”, says Bunny’s father. “We've been fishing half an hour,” says the foreman. “Well, then, he’s drowned in the mud. . .” The foreman has been trying to get him out with @ hook, because the “three pronged grab” will tear him so. But “Dad” says, “Go ahead and get it over with, and let’s hope it’ll teach the rest of you something.” It is chiefly for plain speaking about the man who invented “normalcy” that “Oil” is suppressed. For instance, after telling how the oil barons and other big interests bought and built a tremendous propaganda machine, by means of which 16,140,585 Americans were “suceessfully bamboozled” into voting Harding into office, Sinclair sums up: “President Harding had brought with him a swarm of camp followers, his political bodyguard at home; the newspaper men knew them as ‘the Ohio gang’, and they were looting everything in sight. Barney Brockway had given one of his henchmen wu desk in the secret service department; this was the ‘fixer’, x if you wanted anything, he would tell you the price, The Wilson administration had grown fat by exploiting the prop- erties seized from enemy aliens; and now the Harding administration was gro‘ving fat out of turning them back. Five percent was the regular ‘split’; if you wanted to recover a ten million dollar property you turned over half a million in liberty bonds to the ‘fixer’, Bootlegging privileges were sold for millions, and deals were made right in the lobbies of the Capitol. Dan heard from insiders that more than three hundred millions had already been stolen from the funds appropriated for relief of war veterans—the head of that bureau was another of the ‘Ohio gang’.” Then, of course, Teapot Dome. * * * We have to praise Sinclair’s restraint, He has been often accused of hysteria, of exaggeration. I believe that the human imagination is not cap- able of exaggerating the culpability of the present ruling class in America; certainly Sinclair did not try. The material lay thickly. at his command, he had to choose, rather than to invent. As an example of his moderation, take this description of the patriots’ raid on the I. W. W. hall at San Pedro: “Tables were overset, and dishes and crockery trampled, and the metal urn or container in which the coffee had been boiling had been overset, and its steaming contents running here and there. But first they had hurled three children into it, one after another, as their frantic parents dragged them out. The flesh had been cooked off their legs and they would be crippled for life; one was a ten years old girl known as ‘the wobbly song- bird’; she had a sweet treble voice and sang sentimental ballads and rebel songsyand the mob leader had jerked her from the platform, saying, ‘We'll shut your damned mouth!’ ” The actual fact is that not only is all of this true, but also what Sinclair does not say: the mob was not content with boiling the children in the hot coffee, its members had not been sure there would be coffee there, and they had brought boiling grease, with which they basted some of the children; one little boy, so badly burned, with grease that he could not walk, crawled several blocks to get away from his tormenters; and the mother of some of the children was so shocked by their torture that she died. Such are the deeds of patrioteers. Sinclair’s description of Bolshevism is not so good. He realizes it as a terrific force; he sees it as an inevitable development, but he always treats it as a faith, not a science, Bolshevists are heroes, they are wise, they are successful leaders of the working class, but it would be so much nicer, in Sinclair’s opinion, if we did not have to have them around. You will find out more about Communism in one page of the “A.B.C.” than in all tho there is hardly a chapter in which it is not mentioned. j —VERN SMITH.! { THE WAR FOR OIL. rie THE POLITICS OF OIL, by R. Page Arnot, Labour Pub. Co., London. $.35. Another book on oil,—this time a good one: short, concrete, enlightened. The author covers the same field as Delaisi and De la Tramerye. / Unfor- tunately Arnot’s book appeared before Louis Fischer’s Oil Impérialism. Much of the data in Fischer’s book would have strenbthened Arwot’s con- tention. f : This is, in brief, that oil is a get-rich-quick commodity, which h4s yielded immense returns to those business interests that have participa in its development. Since oil is a source of vast economic power it impliés a cor- responding danger. Arnot shows very clearly that the rivalry of the great oil trusts, particularly the British Royal Dutch and the American Standard, involves the same type of economic conflict which brought on the World War. * * * Arnot makes another point regarding the oil industry which is not usu- ally emphasized in books on oil. He writes of “the lot of the workers.” In America he calls attention to the man-handling methods employed by the oil interests of the Southwest. Royal Dutch, he shows, is much more subtle in its handling of the labor problem. Coolies are used on its properties. “Oil Engineering” describes its labor policy in a paragraph. “These coolies are imported from Java, China, the Straits, and India in roughly equal propor- tions. It is found that this mixture renders the company immune from strikes and other industrial struggles, one nationality neutralizing the others.” * * Redters who wish to keep their eyes on the oil conflict should read this Ae Pera Mi ied it is hoop ‘and aca) furthermore, it carri ite lesson worl econc ies a Y “ne sat leterminisms of “Oil!”,, Ae RE TREC IS