The Daily Worker Newspaper, October 24, 1927, Page 6

umbacesers Page Six THE DAILY WORKER ("em wat Published by the DAILY WORKER PUBLISHING CO. Daily, Except Sunday 83 First Street, New York, N. Y. Cable Address SUBSCRIPTI By Mail (in New York only): $8.00 per year $4.50 six months $2.50 three months Phone, Orchard 1680 ATES By Mail (outside of New York): $6.00 per years $3.50 six months 00 three months ‘Address and mail and make cut checks to THE DAILY WORKER, 33 First Street, New York, N.Y. J. LOUIS ENGDAHL )} ie | WILLIAM F, DUNNE § BERT MILLER. 20 “ntered as second-class m: the p the act of Business Manager at New York, N. ¥., 79. The Buffoonery of Chicago’s Mayor Let no one imagine the bombastic antics of Mayor William | Hale Thompson of Chicago are the result of mere individual! lunacy. His flamboyant attacks upon King George of Britain, his | billingsgate adorned with such elegance of diction as “I will make King George keep his snoot out of Chicago or I will punch it,”) arouses loud huzzahs from considerable sections of the population. | To thousands upon thousands his appointment of theater man-/ eger hearing the descriptive cognomen of “Sport’”” Hermann, to pass upon text books in the schools and histories that adorn the shelves of the public library, does not seem ludicrous. Were it not for the fact that they belong to the opposition party the names of “Hinky Dink” and “Bath House John” would adorn the list of | censors. | That textbooks held by Thompson to unduly praise England | are to be revised by as rare a selection of ignoramuses as could| be found in Chicago is not particularly amazing. Probably they | will do as good a job as the original authors, in spite of their | grotesque language. | As far as Thompson, individually, is concerned, his perform- | ance is a carefully calculated political stunt, appealing to the large | anti-British elements among the German and Irish voters of | Chicago. It will be recalled that his clownish stunts were con-| sidered laughable when he tried to use them to remain in office in 1928, and he was in almost total eclipse until a year or so ago. | Let no worker get excited about the danger of King George | coming over to rule us. The real enemy is to be found in Wall) Street and at Washington. We should no more fight to defend | the interests of our ruling class than the British workers should | fight to defend “their” king and the workers of both countries should fight against the master classes because it is the only fight worth the shedding of a single drop: of working class blood. | Political Assassination Is Not Revolutionary | Whatever may have been the motives that impelled Samuel | Schwartzbard, now on trial in Paris, to kill General Simon Petlura, | it is certain that his act was in no sense revolutionary in spite of its being a gesture of self-sacrifice. There is no valid reason to doubt the young man’s story that he was driveneto! homicidal frenzy by the remembrance of the savage ferocity with} which Petlura and his underlings wrought death and destruction to thousands upon thousands of Jewish men, women and children. Particularly ridiculous is the attempt of the prosecution to introduce evidence trying to connect the Soviet Union with the action of Schwartzbard in killing the white guard butcher. The testimony of a spy that the young:man who thought himself the avenger of his people was a member of a “secret committee or- ganized in Paris by the Soviets to kill Petlura in order to prevent his possible return to power in the Ukraine,” is plain perjury. This should be obvious to anyone with even the slightest knowl- adge of Communist tactics. Assassination never has been and never will be a part of the revolutionary program. That tactic is confined exclusively to the reactionaries, or the victims of capital- ist illusions who imagine that the acts of individuals determine the course of history. Political assassination is today one of the principal weapons of the paid hirelings of the imperialists and is directed almost exclusively against representatives of the Soviet Union, many of whom have been murdered by hirelings of cap- italism. As for Petlura, as an individual, he had long since ceased to} a be regarded as a dangerous enemy of the Soviet power. The in- dignation of those who have lived under his terror, the mass power of the workers and the invincible red army had blasted his hopes of ever becoming the ruler of the Ukraine. The injection of the anti-Soviet note into the famous trial is only one more attempt of the enemies of the workers’ and peas- ants’ government of Russia to align the reactionary forces of the world for a new war, but this particular attempt will fail of its purpose because of its palpable absurdity. A Futile Purpose Over their soup at the New York Civic Club a few days ago a group of liberals announced their intention to organize a na- tion-wide movement with the object of “establishing the -inno- cence” of labor’s martyrs, Sacco and Vanzetti, a fact that is al-|; ready established to the complete satisfaction of the working class of the world and to sympathizers with the labor movement in general. The workers are already convinced that the execution of those two radicals was the culmination of one of the most brazen frame-ups ever conceived and executed in the history of the class struggle in the United States. The workers are not interested in trying to “convince” the capitalists of the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. But they do want to take such steps as will make difficult, and then im- possible for similar crimes to be perpetrated on revolutionary working class leaders in the future. And the best means towards this end is to build a labor defense movement that will mobilize the mass power of the workers against future attempts to crucify workers who loyally stand with and fight for the interests of their class. Editor, DAILY WORKER: iearefully—-not superficially and| Permit me to attract the attention | hastily—the health hazards in indus- of your readers to the Industrial|try and their remedies. At this oc- Health Exhibit now open at the N. Y.|casion it should be mentioned that a Academy of Medicine, 108rd St. and| permanent Museum of Safet inly Fifth Avenue., admission free to all.|in industry has been open for years Tt is a small exhibition, but very in-jat 120 E 28th St., N. Y. ©. o Let the structive to factory and shop workers | Workers know what may be done to THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, MONDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1927 “This Imperialist White-Man Baggage Doesn’t Belong Here” MONEY WRITES if Fishes and Pike ¥ HAT is the most important single fact about American civilization? The answer is: economic inequality. There has been inequality in other times and places; the poor have been equally poor, but never in history have the rich been so rich, or so se- es paar any attention to the cops at all— meres Bee ey fue go right through the traffic ae nals,” I never had any money, so to me Now the world ha So the formula must be altered: and “Mammonart.” eure in their riches, built so elaborate a machine for flaunting their riches before the eyes | “Well? waid my. wife, swith aalld of the poor. In this statement we'ipony, “you should report them. Such put our finger upon the solar plexus things ought not to be tolerated.” of America: the land of a million | “Oh, no,” replied the boy, “I’m not rich engaged in devising new ways | worrying. When I grow up, I’m go- of exhibiting wealth, and of a hun-jing to be rich, and I can do it too.” dred ‘and twenty million poor, €N-} Do not suppose that this was an gaged in marvelling at the achieve-/ accident, the peculiarity of an indi- ments of the wealth exhibitors. |vidual youth. It is what had been There haye been great empires! taught to that youth in grammar prior to capitalist America; the num-. School, in high school, in church, in ber of them is buried under the sands the newspapers, the movies, and the of the ages. But we may safely make Political campaigns; the ethical code s assertion, that never in all his-|of civilization, the propaganda tory, or pre-history, has there been , Whereby ten million youths are kept empire in which the victims of ex-| Contented with their lot. Educators ploitation were kept so continuously and moralists, editorial writers and face to face with the evidences of Fourth of July statesmen do not put their loss. Now, as ever, the poor it So crudely, of course: what they are huddled in slums, far from the Say is that America is the land of palaces of the rich; but now, for the opportunity, and every ‘child born in first time, the rich have been vain , it has a chance to become president. enough—future times will say in-| The Italian educator, Pestalozzi, sane enough—to devise “Sunday sup- tells how the little fishes complained plements,” “tabloids,” and. “home | of the voracity of the pike, and the editions,” to enable the poor to share | pike held a conference, and adjudged imaginatively in the lives of the rich.| the complaint to be justified, and or- The factory slave, having hung for dained that every year thereafter two an hour to a strap in a crowded little fishes should be permitted to street car, and eaten his tasteless become pike. That most charming supper of denatured foods, props his fable tells me all I need to know stockinged feet upon a chair, lights , about the moral code of my country. his rancid pipe, and spreads before; For a million little fishes to be his eye a magic document—the| preyed upon by a hundred great pike twenty-four hour record of all the is all right, because every little fish rders, adulteries, briberies, be-|has an equal chance to become a pike is, drinking, gambling and mane at) he needs is to grow sharp eral licentiousness of the exploiters|enough teeth, and eat enough of the of the world. It is all made as real other little fishes. Any little fish as life to him—the palaces and shin-| that disputes the fairness of such an ing motor-cars the soft-skinned “dar-| arrangement is a “sorehead,” and lings of luxury” in their ermines, andj his “grouch” is simply the expression also in their lingerie; their elegantly|of his conscious dental inferiority groomed escorts in opera costume,| g ene and also in underdrawers—no inti- arent) oa understand the mate details are spared. ropisms” which dominate American soul. ave takes his wife and children to|hecause they represent the aggre- a moving picture palace, where they|gated terror of millions of little n na year. Old time fairy tales| alt with far-off things, but the! modern movies deal with the instant’ hour, and why they do not lead instant revolution is a problem thr* would puzzle a man from Mars. Th« xplanation is the conviction, deep! rooted in the hearts of ninety-nine if of every hundred persons in th: e audience, that he or she i: ined to clumb out upon the face the other ninety-nine, and have o e to spend money like those s of luxury upon the sereen It happened not so Jong ago that m: wife was employing a high school boy of the working class, at the tasks burying the family garbage and scrubbing the kitchen floor. who are interested in industrial|prevent sickness and accidents in "hygiene and who are willing ( study working places—B. Liber. , c ez their cars in this city is a crime,” re- “The way the rich people | marked this youth, “They Sb pay All my childhood and youth I heard a formula: “Money talks!” moved on, and talking is out of date. by means of the printed word that the modern world is controlled. the formula meant: “Shut up!” It is “Money rites!” This is a study of American literature from the economic point of view. It takes our living writers, and turns their socks inside out, asking, “Where did you get it?” and “What did you do for it?” It is not a polite book, but it is an honest book, and it is needed. It coneludes a series, begun ten years ago, including “The Profits of Religion,” “The Brass Cheek,” “The Goose-step,” “The Goslings,” each snapping at the next one’s tail, as a means of evolving into pike- hood. Each one suffers agonies of pain and fear, but has no time to feel sorry for himself, because he has been taught to believe that this is the proper and necessary mental condi- tion for little fishes. “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” he says; and is firmly persuaded of his destiny for pikehood, and rapt by the vision of the glory that awaits him. So you have the explanation of those hun- dred and three sea-urchins, swimming in the black waters in front of my home. Cold and exhaustion, rheuma- tism, drowning, broken heart valves, sharks and the giant barracuda—all these “negative suggestions” each sea-urchin pushes away, and concen- trates upon the faith that he or she will be a bit swifter or luckier than the others, and get first to the shore. IL. Being Somebody p° not understand that it is merely the money; you will be crude and ee people spend upon a supper-party | fishes, fleeing from the bigs pike, each ; thousands, than a working class family! jamming the others out of the way, this glory will cling to him, he will vulgar if you think that. It is what the money will buy—in other words, what the contrivers of mass-tropisms have created to give money its mean- ing and its grip. Two days have passed, and you can see the process in action with my sea-urchins, The race has been won by a seventeen-year old lad, a “bell-hop” from Canada; and behold him lifted up into a golden cloud! His picture is in every edi- tion of every newspaper in the land, and a hundred million people clamor his name; erowds besiege him, he is carried upon shoulders; contracts are spread before him, he has only to “sign on the dotted line,” and he may the| travel about in private cars, and have They are mass-im-|Managers and secretaries and press nd then once a week the wage! pulses, having the intensity of frenzy,,agents, and a glass tank, in which several times each day he swims in eville houses before the eyes of All the rest of his life NEW FLIER WITH SEVEN MOTORS Mode! of new flier to be constructed this year, it is said, It will be a huge ship, with seyen motors, to keep it aloft in long yoyages when aecidents happen to one or more of the engines, | tional event, in a language - By Upton Sinclair '@e “somebody”; the very town where he was born shares in his reflected glory, he has “put it on the map.” One of the celebrities who ruled the world during my boyhood, the late John L. Sullivan, was introduced to Grover Cleveland, and wanted to put the latter at his ease. “A great man is a great man,” said John L. “It don’t matter if he’s a prize-fighter or a president.” And so every year America widens the categories of greatness, and takes new heroes into her Hall of Fame. The youth who swims the Catalina channel, the girl who swims the English channel, the man who walks across the continent in forty-seven days, the man who drives a motor car two hundred and seven miles an hour, the man who flies over the north pole, the man who eats a gallon of beans in eleven min- utes, the girl who slays her rival with a hammer, the scientist who discovers a cosmic ray, the movie star who marries her seventeenth husband, the preacher who reads the bible two hundred times—each one has his day, or perhaps his week or month, upon} the front pages of the papers, each has his moving picture contract and his vaudeville “time,” each his en- velope in the “morgue” of the news- papers, where the clippings about him are indexed, and will be looked up whenever he comes to town, or does anything else that has “news value.” Strangers marvel at this clamor and lack of restraint, and think there must be some especial -depravity in the American soul; but this is be- cause our thinking about human so- ciety is still unscientific. “Vice and virtue are products like vinegar,” said Voltaire; and every social mani- festation has its cause. The cause of America’s frenzy is simply the ex- tremes of social contrast, greater than any to which human nature has hitherto been exposed. In order to understand the sea-urchins who swim channels, or the “human flies” who climb the outside of forty-story build- jings, or the “walking stomachs” who eat twelve dozen oysters and forty- nine pancakes at a meal, it is neces- sary to have sympathy, and realize what it means to be.a “nobody” in capitalist society—an obscure atom in a miserable mass, travelling in a crowded street car to a monotonous job, railed at by a nagging boss, wearing frayed clothing, eating dirty food, sleeping in a hall bedroom with the rent overdue, The victim of such conditions, driven to desperation, makes some hitherto unheard of ef- fort, develops some hitherto un- imaginable ‘talent—and behold him suddenly transported into fairyland, jriding in a limousine, carrying wads of greenbacks in every pocket, waited ‘von, flattered, caressed, loved, stared at, cheered, photographed, talked ‘bout. Does anybody wonder that merica is the land of unlimited pos- ‘bilities and that Japanese, Chinese, indoos, Turks, Jews, Greeks Ital- ans, Poles, Papuans and Patagonians lveam of emigrating to that movie- and where every farm house kitchen ‘s a baronial hall and every drawing- room a cathedral? All the way up and down the social scale, wherever you study these mob- »xcitements, you find the same arti- ficially created tropism, the impulse to move in el ditectle of gold. The reporters who ite up the sensa- which | “fourteen points” on which this coun- | dividual by the name of Chamorro, | gua. | from our point of view. {not entitled to better treatment. j freedom provided they do not get crosswise with the wishes of the United States that is good for them government. This is the latest in- terpretation of one of the famous try marched to war to make the world safe for democracy in 1917. An in- choose to run for president of Nicara- Ite is not much of a candidate But this is not the question. Our rulers believe in democracy and that’s self-explana- tory. So Mr. Kellogg informed all and sundry that he would not be <e- sponsible for Mr. Chamoro’s expeses and treated ‘that person as one who had left his bed and board and was * {bate big story behind this is to the effect that Wall Street already has a good and faithful cervant in the presidential chair in Nicaragua. There is no sense in dumping a good man, even if the fellow who hankers for his job is just as good. Diaz has done the right thing by Wall Street’s Nell, so why bother with Chamorro. Open elections openly arrived at, are the order of the day in Nicaragua but candidates that are not satisfactory to Wall Street had better save their’ money. * bd - HE war against king George of England still rages on the Lake Michigan front. General Thompson is leading the hardy colonists in per- son, and it now looks as if victory would perch on his banners, The Trish-democratic vote which was wavering for political reasons, has decided to avenge a long-standing in- |sult and will spring to arms at the call of the general. The only doubt- |ful elements are the Chicago school teachers. While Thompson is slay- ing the British lion his school board is saving money for the wealthy tax dodgers of the Windy City by slash- ing the teachers’ salaries. But then, patriotism is a costly luxury. * * * |JFRELAND is making long strides morally and ‘socially according to eumas MacManus, story teller and patriot who has managed to eke out an existence by writing about the land of his birth. If MacManus had confined himself to telling stories about barefooted peasants he might have escaped the dishonor of being mentioned in this column, since his stories are poor. But when he dabbles tin polities he might as well make up his mind that he needs defensive armor. And when he Says that Ire- land is striding forward, morally and socially under the Free State government he should expect that some of his fellow country-men will take issue with him. Irishmen are supposed to quarrel on slight pro- vocation. This is not so, but what of it? What is believed i§ a collection of fables that don’t hurt anybody if taken in the proper spirit. We may return to this issue again and we jmay not. * - * r would amaze you to learn the number of letters I receive daily asking me to sponsor some worthy cause. I have long since ceased corre- sponding with secretaries of move- ments whose membership is almost entirely confined to a letterhead. But some secretaries have a sense of humor or else they are plump crazy. So they cannot be ignored. One of them seized on the bright idea of interesting me in his pet cause by writing to a friend of mine and sug- gesting that he bring the matter to my attention. He was organizing a league to free Ireland and of course I was his meat, . * KNOWING, from previous experience that I do not take kindly to one- man organizations, he did not dare make frontal attack. He tried @ flank movement. He wrote to James P. Cannon, and got Jim so excited about the woes of his ancestral home that I was importuned to do some- thing about it. The main thing was to acquaint me with the matter, and’ that being accomplished the rest wes expected to be easy. But it wasn’, I have a decided aversion to flank if movements and hereby advise all who may be harboring designs on my emotions that I am impervious to flattery. And as far as Ireland {a concerned I positively refuse to risk life or limb in the service of that country until there is an organization composed of at least two persons that aims to do something other than proving that all Irishmen are virtu- ous and have a sense of humor, ll parts ever farther from English— each one is hoping to attract the at tention of. the “desk,” and to rise upon the wings of this story to the permanence of “feature writing.” The “desk” is hoping, by masterful handling of each new opportunity, to replace the managing editor in the affections of the publisher. The man- aging editor is hoping to avoid being replaced by a dozen too eager sub-| ordinates. The publisher is hoping) to prove to some big banker that a) newspaper is capable of affording its “eighty per cent safety,” just the> same as if it were chain grocery stores, or the diversion of industrial de- see alcohol. From top to bottom the same “erysotropism,” the deadly’ oressure of competitive greed. 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