The Daily Worker Newspaper, June 28, 1927, Page 6

- ‘ By I. JEROM The Proletarian Spirit. ¥ this miracle hundred workers massed in a » cloak ¢ from The front Hyman has the floor. Gen- | Manager of the Joint Bo ® Words are few a re ). ion, fellow only ill pay I have for et my f the pro- His vusky ney tc st ‘Fo i The black- malgamated The Civie ives money lederation ¢ ind we. W ? The ne e judg oney nave we got to help are against us. us. The boss- The police are A. F. of L. is against are knocked-out by wainst us. Th is. Our worker: the long Our pickets asap leaders are jailed. Who’s going to help our cause if not we ourselves? Workers, comrades, do your utmost. Dig deep into your pockets. Into your flesh if you have i By RT MILLER. “fOOLIDG ys flag of America means best job on earth” de- clares the New York Tim The uttered ny of the Green, Woll, Lewis out- w at the head of the American Federation of Labor. This theory of \ the exalted position of labor in the Un tes as compared with other s, the theory of the im- nity of the United States from the phrase might well have beer b wi “Phe class struggle elsewhere, has become the basis for a complete cla: collaboration philosophy, which has been carefully nourished and djs- Seminated by r ary labor lead- ers and employers alike. It on made the b: for the theory that the trade unions are not fighting or- ganizations of the workers but rather in the of Green, “agencies through wh cooperation between unions and manag: can be re- alized.” The conservative wing of the American labor officialdom has literally swamped the labor move- ment with this propaganda for the last few yea nd it has found its concrete e in arbitration schemes, the B. and O. plan for in- creasing the prod of Jabor and various forms of labor banking and insurance. One cannot doubt but that the materia! perity in which itions of pros- rica found itself during this per an impetus to this propaganda, and that it seri ously affected and dulled the mi taney and fighting spirit of certain Sections of the American working ¢lass. Even in our own ranks it gave rise to certain exp ms of scepti- cism and pessimism from those who based their views on “temporary and superficial phenomen * * * IECENT developments tend to indi- cate that the “honeymoon” period ig over, and that the campaign @gainst class collaboration, carried on by the left wing, fundamen- tally correct. As far back as Jan ary, 1926, Joseph Wild of the Daily News Record let the cat out of the bag when he said, “Inquiry shows that cooperation and profit sharing * succeed in good times to some extent hut wither under adverse winds.” Mr. Wild then quotes W. G. Haber, “The first zero breeze of rigorous "times will freeze 90 per cent of these ‘) labor idiosyncrasies.” ' American capitalists encouraged the Golden Rule twaddle for a time a very definite and useful pur- », During the period of expanding nd developing prosperity, labor had to be drugged against launching an #fensive, against demanding its an capitalists were reaping. "certain key sections of the American Working class and by cultivating A few crumbs to the railroad workers, the building trades and other highly skilled categories, a few sumptuous‘ love feasts with Woll, Hoover, Jewell,” Willard, Hillman, Nash, ete, as the guests and the ‘trick was done, As a result there been during the last few years | almost no serious struggle for in-| ‘ereased demands by any section of bi the American labor movement except that Jed by the left wing. ard, | comrades. al.{to make in my hour| “Here to Sigman.|} Labor Faces a Turn in th govern the development | settled and are highly charged with |broad militant left wing, which will |hold a real promise for a rennais- ;sance of the entire American labor rein the unusual harvest which | r ng.|face the ; could be done only by bribing | v |labor’s standards which will follow. Sedulously the policy of class cooper- | ation. | between those who are ready to desert the labor movement and those | who are ready to fight for its ex- {to!” A girl comes Daily The collection begins forward—pale, oval-faced, a Worker folded under her arm, “I give one hundred doll Her voice is low, but firm with conviction, Another girl—two ‘men—three— step forward. There is a rush to the front. he chairman pleads for pa- tience. “Your money will be taken, | Please give us a chance| the entries.” One worker, a bearde: brings to the table fifty you let me bring another fifty »w? I think my wife can raise announces that one n five hundred dol-| annot be made pub- a member of a right and he fears reprisals. » pledge to bring money the owing day, two days later, at the | club together and bring | Who knows how much 3 ns to them. And one brings over his watch: pawn this.” an hour has passed. The an rises to announce the re- A light of joy is in his eye. The workers wait for the announce- ment. The room holds its breath. “Over ten thousand dollars!” “Tm-poss-ible!” The wonderment is whispered thru the room. Over ten thousand dollars! The workers look at one another. Is it a dream? Joy floods to their eyes, If they were not ashamed, if they could but be little children they would ery. Their glances embrace each other. Is it possible? We?—we gave it? For the first time they behold their seedy clothes, their pinched faces, their poverty. Is it possible? And in my corner I ask. these be conquered? sults. Shall the Road “zero breezes” approaching. While the development of American capi- | talism is still distinctly on the up-| grade, there are signs of a turn in the road. Recent reports indicate serious declines in the automobile, textile and building industries, which are key factors in the maintenance of the present period of American pros- perity. Conditions in Europe, in which American capitalism has be- come deeply involved are most un- ial electricity. Under these changing conditions, it is becoming increasingly evident that the American capitalist class has de- cided to change its tactics, to drop its honeyed phrases, and come down to} business. The following recent events bear out this conclusion: (1) The offensive against the miners’ union. (2) The refusal by the Fed- eral Board of Mediation of an in- crease in wages to conductors and trainmen on fifty-five western rail- roads. (3) The renewal of the use of injunctions on a broad scale against labor (stone cutters, carmen, needle trades). (4) The proposed at- tack upon the building’ trades, now being discussed by the employers in this industry. (5) The dropping of insurance and welfare schemes by a number of employers (American Woolen Co., Morris Packing Co.). (6) The ferocity of the attack against the most militant section of | the American labor movement in the needle trades. (7) The pressure be- ing brought to bear upon the Broth- erhood of Locomotive Engineers Bank by the Mitten interests. These examples, which can be amplified by others in every section of the coun- try, make it evident that an offen- sive against the trade unions of this country on a broad and formidable seale, is slowly but surely gathering headway. * * * i ier prospect holds the possibility of deep-going changes in the American labor movement in the not distant future. Labor is facing more and more the question of the | ~~ defense of its most fundamental and | elementary rights to organize, to strike and to picket. In this struggle | the honest trade union elements in| the American Federation, those who | refuse to surrender their basic rights, | must either step forward, consolidate | their forces, draw in from the ranks of the unorganized new and coura- geous fighting elements, and build a movement, and a period of great de- velopment and growth, or they must impending danger of the complete wiping-out of the trade unions and the inevitable crushing of The lines are erystallizing sharply istence, Boy On Trial For Murder. HACKENSACK, June 27.—James Hoey, 19, of Dumont, N, J., is ex- pected to go on trial here soon for the murder of his friend, Elisha times are changing. The econ- | Smith, 19, at the home of Evelyn Sil- omic weather man predicts: some} veria, 14, on March 12, NEW YORK JUSTICE—THE GOD WITH TWO FACES SLUGGERS GO FREE!” “STRIKERS TO JAIL! Drawing by Jan Matulka in the New Masses. Ryan of the Catholic University of America. In particu- lar, he attacked Frederick J. Libby, executive secretary. “He declared, according to the affidavits, that Mr. Libby was educated for the promotion of Communism in Russia or by Russians; that after returning from Russia he taught Communism in Pennsylvania; that he is a Communist; and that he and an associate take turns visiting Russia to get instructions from the Soviet gov- ernment; that the Council is the tool of the Soviets and its constructive measures are a cloak to hide its sinister designs; that the Council and Mr. Libby want to over- | throw our government by violence. “Immediately there was a hue of indignation. Gen- eral Bowley wag asked for proofs. He promised them. Not one so far has he supplied. His very associates have admitted that he went too far, drawing inferences not justifiable from the evidence. Fred R. Marvin, editor | of the Searchlight column in the New York Commercial, one of those to whom General Bowley went pleading for help in his predicament, was unable to say more than that ‘It is impossible that in his (General Bowley’s) address in Columbus he used expressions which, if liter- ally construed, he could not prove; but as to his real purpose no honest citizen can question him,’” The activities of other army. professional propagan- dists is told by Mr. Cline in a subsequent article (New Republic, July 9, 1924), as follows: “There is, for instance, the activity of Lieutenant- Colonel H. H. Sheets. We have at hand a copy of a let- tions.” ter sent by Colonel Sheets to Dr. John A. Ryan of the One of the earlier army officer mix-ups with the | Catholic University of America, who is on the executive peace societies is described by Leonard Cline in “The | board of the National Council for Prevention of War. War on the Peace Seekers” (New Republic, July 2, | Dr, Ryan had’ delivered an address before the conven- 1924): tion of the Women’s International League for Peace “So we arrive at the episode of Brigadier-General | 2d Freedom, Colonel Skeets demanded answers to a Albert J. Bowley. Speaking always with the agreement | list of questions which imputed to the League and to Dr. that his utterances shall not be given to the press, Gen- | Ryan as well a program of violent communistic doc- eral Bowley has declared that activities of the Soviet | trines. fe Reds have been reflected in such organizations as the | the letter, which concluded, ‘Are you willing to be Y.W.C.A. (cheers from the business men), that our col- | branded as a self-appointed destroyer of the mation?’ leges are teaching our young people pacifism and Com- | Copies of this letter were sent to the press. munism; that Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams “And there is the incessant propagandizing of such are ‘the reddest of the reds.’ We have no time, however, | journals as the Army and Navy Register. An article in to consider more than his speech before the Chamber of | the November 10, 1923, issue of this organ declared that Commerce at Columbus, Ohio, on March 7. | $3,000,000 in gold had been sent into the United States “As usual, General Bowley exacted the promise that | by the “Communistic International.’ On the return from there should be no newspaper account of his talk. But | Europe of Frederick J. Libby of the National Council when it was over five of his auditors, outraged, swore | for Prevention of War, a campaign to wipe out our to affidavits recounting what he said, He attacked the | army and navy would begin, the article declared, ‘so National Council for Prevention of War, among whose | that when the red uprising comes the country will be at officers are such persons as Mrs. Catt, Miss Addams, | its mercy.’” President Hibben of Princeton, President Lowell of Har- What has been done to counteract these absurd state- vard, Maude Wood Park, Julia G. Lathrop, William | ments from military sources? Mr. Cline reports: Allen White, Mrs. Louis D. Brandeis, Dr. John A. (To Be Continued) “THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW” Professional Patriots | (Continued from yesterday) The close relationship of Fred R. Marvin of the New York Commercial and the American Defense Society to all these army officers may be gathered from Mr. Marvin’s series of articles which ran in the Army and | Navy Journal in the spring of 1926 (see page 92). Sev- eral of them attack the advocates of peace and interna- tional good will. All the War Department men use the Marvin material and other rehashed items from the notorious Lusk Report. A typical verbal assault on progressive movements by big army advocates was made in 1925 on the League for Industrial Democracy in the pages of the Bulletin of the 88rd Division of the U. S. Army and in the Quartermaster Review. Other army officers took up the false charges which consisted of “treason” and references to the circulation of a so-called “slacker’s oath.” When these charges were investigated they were found to have originated with Mr. Marvin who is sys- tematic in his slanderous attacks on the L. I. D, When Mr. Marvin was asked to produce evidence to prove his lying charges he failed as usual to reply. Mr. Norman Thomas, a director of the League, refers to Marvin’s statements as “childish and malicious misrepresenta- => Otho he British bloc against the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics has failed, at least temporarily, war o& invasion is postponed for just a little, The vigilance of the Soviet Union is one main reason, assassiqs hired by England have been caught, { f Religious prejudice was brought out boldly in| | | RED POETS AND BOURGEOIS INTELLECTUALS. | | In his review of Lola Ridge’s Red Flag Lebarbe seems to me to have | misunderstood almost every aspect of Miss Ridge’s work in an astonishing (manner. He announces with loud and belligerent fanfare that Lola Ridge is a proletarian poet. This original discovery will probably surprise no one ;more than Miss Ridge herself, who may be delighted to learn that her intel- | lectual, highly stylized, imagistic poetry is full of the heartbeat of the American worker. But in that case, what kind of creature is the American worker? * * * The fact that Miss Ridge has often drawn her inspiration from the masses and from workingclass history (such as the Russian Revolution) doesn’t make her a proletarian poet. In her diction and in the subtleties of her emotional approach she is thoroughly alien to the proletariat. This is not intended as criticism of Miss Ridge. Since poetry in this country is still produced largely by bourgeois intellectuals (exploited workers never | get a chance to indulge in such leisure pursuits), it is inevitable that the i | | | | wai READ \a hysterical defense of Miss Ridge against imagiriary foes. stamp of a bourgeois psyche should remain more or léss intact, no matter how completely individual intellectuals may be in sympathy with the inter- ests of the workingclass. Lola Ridge is a bourgeois intellectual. So is Joe Freeman, who is a thoroughgoing Communist. - So is Lebarbe himself, (He showed it in his recent sonnet in The DAILY WORKER.) So am I and | several other persons I could mention who are members of the Workers (Communist) Party. Figure it out for yourself why Carl Sandburg, who is not a Communist, is a better proletarian than Joe Freeman who is; why | Theodore Dreiser, who has no real quarrels with the capitalistic system, is a more proletarian novelist than Floyd Dell, who has given some of his best energy to the revolutionary movement. * * * And Lebarbe’s choice for proletarian laurels is strangely awry. For of living American poets Lola Ridge would be one of the most difficult for an American worker to understand. The blue-blooded aristocrat, Amy Lowell, is simple in comparison. And Lebarbe’s quotation from “Red flag” proves it. Miss Ridge is one of the most persistent and most intricate of the imagists, |and with this she combines an obscure, mystical intensity that places her decidedly among the “difficult” poets. Lebarbe, carried away by the subject matter of some of her poetry and her obvious sympathies, disregards every- thing else. And for some reason he also seems to feel it necessary to make He actually is sore at the fact that critics have praised “Red Flag”! * * * Lebarbe’s review also contains a number of curious irrelevancies. The fact that “ ‘Annunciation’ speaks of violets and the word ‘yclept’ is found in ‘After the Recital’ ” is doubtless very interesting and literary antiquarians of the future may thank him for the information. He might also have men- tioned that “Obliteration” speaks of the sea, that the word “appulse” is used as the title of one of the poems, etc., etc, * * * The poem “Phyllis” is emphatically not reminiscent of T. S. Eliot (an- other proletarian?). Let Lebarbe read or reread “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Sweeney among the Nightingales” and “The Waste Land.” * * * The poetry of Lola Ridge has certain very distinguished qualities. But they seem to have escaped Lebarbe in his frantic desire to make a “proleta- rian” of her at any cost. If Lebarbe thinks I’m all wrong, let him follow his own adviee and place “Red Flag” in the hands of a worker of working class origin. And if he wishes, he can choose somebody who happens to be especially sensitive to poetry. Then let him note the reactions, if any. —A. B. MAGIL. THE SHYLOCK OF THE WORLD. AMERICA, THE WORLD’S BANKER, by Dr. Max Winkler. Published by the Research Department, Foreign Policy Association, N. Y. » $.50, Dr. Winkler is the ‘Vice-President of Bertron, Griscom & Co., and was formerly the head of the Foreign Bond department of Moody’s Investor’s Service. While, therefore, we cannot look to him for anything in the way of a social interpretation of the phenomena of financial imperialism, he is ~ nevertheless a first class statistician and has collected a very valuable body of data from which Marxian students can draw deductions of their own. This pamphlet is the best current study of the manner in which the spiral of American finance is continuing to soar skywards. Exclusive of the ten billion dollars of political or war debts advanced by the American Govern- ment to foreign Governments, private American investors, according to the figures compiled by Dr. Winkler, had invested approximately thirteen billion dollars abroad by the end of 1926. This figure is about a billion dollars greater than the estimates of the U. S. Departrnent of Commerce. * * * The suddenness with which Uncle Sam has entered upon the role of the world’s Uncle Shylock stands out above everything else in the book. Prior to 1915 foreign borrowings floated in the United States were of relatively no moment. By the end of 1926, foreign private financial investments in this eountry reached $12,855,000,000, geographically distributed as follows: Region Amount Europe ... . .$3,596,700,000 Canada . 8,557,600,000 Cuba 1,508,700,000 Mexico + 1,074,600,000 Central America 205,200,000 South America ... 1,978,300,000 China, Japan and Philippines . 718,500,000 MitmmNaNGONS oc eo chic edeseds 225,000,000 Hence, to whatever corner of the earth we may turn we find that Amer- ican dollars have penetrated it and that foreign workers must sweat out in- terest and dividends with which to line the golden coffers of American im- perialism. “America has loaned money to the Dutch East Indies, Australia, Central America, Cuba, the West Indies; in South, America to the govern- ments of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru and to the provinces and states, departments, cities and municipalities within these countries. * . * “Today American dollars finance Chilean nitrate producers, Venezuelan oil companies, Sao Paulo coffee growers, Colombian tobacco raisers and Ceara cotton planters. Funds are obtained in the United States for Peruvian sanitation projects and for Brazilian, Chilean and Colombian railroad con- struction. America supplies capital for Danish banks, Swedish industrial concerns, Norwegian hydro-electric projects, Finnish financial institutions, Czechoslovak equipment and glass companies, Jugoslav railways, Italian pub- lic utilities, Spanish telephone enterprises and even Russian mining projects (Harriman manganese concession and Lena goldfields concession).” The conclusions to be drawn from these facts are quite simple and should be very obvious, The adage is as true as it is ancient that in capitalist so- ciety “he who holds the purse strings calls the tune.” But of the manner in , which American imperialism directs the course of practically all of the / western world and of even the major powers Dr. Winkler drops not even a word. This we must conjecture for ourselves or secure from other sources. Secondly, how long can the mad dance keep up? On this question Dr. Winkler and the Foreign Policy Association throw just a hint. Already the world is finding it difficult to meet the interest and amortization charges which such huge loans involve although, for the time being, “the over-abundance of (American) capital will make it possible for such debtors, as may be in difficulties temporarily, to create new debts to take eare of existing obligations (p. 74).” In other words, foreign nations are beginning to borrow from us to pay interest—a situation, as a result of which, “some of the recent offerings do not perhaps constitute high grade investment is: ” It goes without saying that the venerable Doctor of Philosophy neglects to add that sections of the Communist International are on the job in all of the countries getting ready to take over and direct the works when the crash occurs, t —JACK HARDY. ( THE DAILY WORKER EVERY DAY { «