The Daily Worker Newspaper, October 29, 1927, Page 8

Page Eight THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1927 THE DAILY WORK “Published by the DAILY WORKER PUBLISHING CO. Daily, Except Sunday 83 First Street, New York, N. Y Cable Ad ds SUBSCRIPTION RATES f ; By Mail (in New York only): By Mail (outside of New York): $8,00 per year $4.50 six months $6.00 per years $3.50 six months .50 three months 2.00 three months ci -————"faaress and mail and make out checks to THE DAILY WORKER, 33 First Street, New York, N. ¥. “EDITOR... ee ‘ROBERT MINOR ASSISTANT EDITOR WM. F. DUNNE Phone, Orchard 1680 *Daiwork” 2 Entered as second- York, mail at the post-o' March %, 18 The Mafalda—The Rotten Symbol of a Rotten Government ist state which sped it} and peasants hud-| A rotten hulk, symbolic of the fe out on the Atlantic v dled in its hold, the Mafalda sent to their death, almost in sight of their goal, the immigrants who believed a new and better life was about to open for them. Nineteen years in service, a former troop ship, racked and strained by war service, the Mafalda, by one of the strangest ac- cidents in the annals of the sea, opened her propeller shaft tun- nel to the Atlantic and sank. Such things happen only to a ship that should be sold for old iron. The secrecy with which the fascist authorities have sur- rounded the disaster is testimony to their guilt. They are aided | and abetted by the Brazilian authorities who fear that if the truth becomes known immigration will suffer a setback. | That there is brazen official lying relative to the number of | passengers lost is now clear. The statements of ship captains who} went to the rescue, estimate the dead at from 200 to 600. The survivors are prisoners. They are being held while Mus- | solini’s agents concoct a plausible story. Squarely upon the fascist government of Italy the responsi- | bility for the disaster falls. Fascism selects the immigrants, | fascism owned the ship, fascism knew of her unseaworthiness. | Every Italian worker in this country should demand thru his | union or fraternal society, or both, the strictest investigation and} punishment for those guilty of what is worse than murder. Protest should be made’ to the Brazilian government and by} every means available, the relatives and friends of the victims} in Italy must be made aware of the fate which overtook their} loved ones. | Against the Mussolini government of Italy, where labor unions are suppressed, where the press is muzzled by black shirt thugs, where the peasants are persecuted and where the whole country has been made into a prison for the masses, from which | jd jx was ER ON THE COLORADO BATTLE FRONT By Fred Ellis Rockefeller’s “Cavalry” Begins to Operate. (Continued from Last Issue.) } Then came Robert W. Chambers, {and he was more clever than Crane, Vil. the was really naughty, but always h ™ | Sugared with a moral coating; his “Dis i i texquisite heroes and heroines would Episcopal T i ue |drink and gamble and dally with ele- EW writers arrived. There came} gant temptation for a hundred thous- Stephen Crane—and I did not ad him, because they told me he “bad.” He wrot about a “girl Money Writes boarding-schools | Chambers.” | In those days I had no inside in- formation, but I can understand now —Mr. Chambers was one of the vic- tims of what was known as “the Collier set.” Robbie Collier was a fashionable young millionaire with a taste for literature and polities in be- tween his drinking bouts. Young writers and illustrators would appear |and words and then in a final thous- jand would be saved for virtue. The of the eets,” quite boldly and frankly, and that was against all the |young ladies in rules of literary America. Of course thrilled at this delicious danger, and/on the scene, and the generous Rob- kept the latest Chambers novel under} bie would invite them to dinner and |their pillows, and wrote him “mash”| give them a contract with his mag- letters—I know, because it happened! azine and a card to his country club; escape is possible only in such death-traps as the Mafalda, the whole might of the world’s labor movement must be directed. Events in the Colorado miners’ struggle are moving wi dramatic swiftness as the men and women of the mining camp h j we knew there were “girls of the | streets,” you could not go for a walk {in the evening without having half a | dozen offer themselves at bargain | prices; but if this were told about in novels, the moral scheme of the bourgeois world would be upset, for the ladies of refinement read novels and it was to keep the ladies of re- finement in ignorance about sex Ss that the lady who is now my wife §vas then a pupil at a boarding- school on Fifth Avenue, one which boasted in its catalog that the pupils had opportunities to meet the Goulds and the Vanderbilts; and one of thé young ladies wrote to Mr. Chambers, telling him how she adored his last hero; and there came in reply a note make further inroads into the “Rockefeller plan” and raise the standard of revolt in districts where for 13 years it has never flown. Colorado, a Standard Oil principality, is being shaken to i foundations. State and county officials rally to the call of their liege lord. Chambers of commerce and the American Legion are lined up with the coal companies. In Fremont county these two organiza- tions have ruled that no member or sympathizer of the Industrial Workers of the World may set foot upon its sacred soil. | The governor’s proclamation is nothing more or less than an invitation to hangers-on of the Rockefeller interests to do any- thing necessary to break the strike. If the county officials can not mobilize sufficient forces, the | governor stands ready to send them troops. The meaning of this, in practical terms of the Colorado strug- gle, is that every sheriff is advised to swear in as a “peace officer” every thug who can handle a club or gun. and turn them loose upon the miners and their families. This in turn means that the ingredients out of which were brewed the bloody broth at Ludlow in 1914 are being collected by Colorado’s rulers. Gunmen of the coal companies, sworn in as members of the militia, murdered Louis Tikas and the wives and children of the striking miners at Ludlow. This same kind of a force is being recruited now. It is clear that the strike has enlisted the active sympathy and support of the great majority of the coal miners of Colorado. The “Rockefeller plan” of company unionism, the plan upon which so many company unions have been based, has been smashed to smithereens, not by leaders of the official labor movement, such as Green, Woll and Lewis, with their offers of still greater production, but by Communists and I. W. W.. militant workers whom a patriotic Rockefeller | governor brands as “un-American.” | Furthermore, it is evident that the strike has the support of large sections of the non-mining population——-portions of the lower middle class which feel the weight of the Rockefeller en- terprises. Without some sympathetic support of this nature the strike would meet much greater difficulties. The tradition of struggle that:is the heritage of Colorado workers is another important factor in this strike. Cripple Creek and Leadville where the Western Federation of Miners fought a quarter of a century ago, Ludlow with its martyred dead—these are memories which become weapons in the present struggle. What will the outcome be? if Colerado labor makes the fight of the miners its own, they will win this skirmish. For a skirmish it is, preliminary to the truly gigantic struggle that lies |, in spite of its deeds of heroism. The great battle for organization of all the Rockefeller properties, iron, steel and water power, lies ahead. Success for the miners in this drive means that a basis will have been laid for a state-wide organization campaign. The slaves in the smelters and steel mills of Pueblo and Trinidad, the workers of the Denver & Rio Grande railroad, the metal miners—all can he brought into the ranks of the labor movement if there is \@iy of purpose and action in support of the miners. It would be a tremendous stimulating force for the whole American labor movement if in Colorado there could appear in this struggle a real united front against the Rockefellers and ent. Ss | against the Soviet Union for another, that the girls of\the street were sold so cheap—a great English historian, reading in substance as follows: | “Dear Miss.. .: Do not have any| Lecky, had explained that to us in ajadmiration for my novels. There is passage of justly celebrated elo-|no sincerity in them. I write for quence. money. Yours truly, Robert W. Oil Contracts, Standard Oil and Its Rivals and the Drive Against the Soviet Union Two phases of the world struggle for oil and oil markets en- ter into the New York Times story, published Oct. 26, telling of the conclusion of three large new contracts by the Standard Oil of New Jersey. The most important of these contracts, estimated to call for the delivery of 4,000,000 barrels of oil annually, is with the Cunard Line—British-owned. Not only has the Standard Oil, the chief rival of Royal Dutch Shell been given this huge contract for a big} section of the British mercantile marine in ports of the United} States but it is to supply the Cunard Line in Canadian and other British empire ports. | British Patriotism evidently could not withstand the appeal! of a lower price agreed to by the Standard. { While the figures submitted by other bidders are not made| public, it is probable that the Standard made a rock-bottom price in order to squeeze the Royal Dutch Shell—and other smaller rivals—out of the field so that the performance of the Royal Dutch Shell in underbidding Standard for the big Manson line contract on the Pacific coast could not be repeated. Another important feature in connection with the Cunard contract is that it has been held since 1915 by the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company—-A DOHENY CONCERN. It is obvious that the Standard Oil is utilizing the Teapot Dome steal and the legal and financial difficulties growing out of it for Doheny and Sinclair to force them out of their most prof- itable markets. It certainly was not sheer altruism which prompted Standard Oil senators such as Walsh of Montana to take the lead in the fight to recover Teapot Dome and other government oil reserves. Had Standard grabbed them there would have been a different story to tell. Standard Oil of New Jersey is headed by Walter C. Teagle, the “friend” of Sir Henri Deterding of Royal Dutch Shell, and re- cently returned from Germany where he successfully eased Royal Dutch Shell out of its share of the Bergius process for recovering oil from coal and shale, and out of a large section of the central European markets as well. We are by no means ready to say that the Cunard contract points entirely to a widening of the breach between Standard and toyal Dutch. It is on the other hand quite possible that the Cunard contract signifies that a concession in this market has been made to Standard of New Jersey by Sir Henri in return for a letting down of the fight on his:concern in certain European markets and for an agreement by Teagle of Standard to take a| ' sharper attitude toward the Soviet Union and oil contracts with the Moscow Naptha Syndicate, If Walter C. Teagle, within the next few days, repeats his famous statements relative to the “moral question” involved in business dealings with the Soviet Union, it will mean that he and Sir Henri have made peace—-for a time-—on the basis of the Cunard contract for one thing, and a renewal of the offensive The world struggle for oi] today is principally a struggle republic, against the first workers’ and peasants’ . 4 they would spend their afternoons sipping cocktails in the Hoffman House bar, and in a year or two would know nothing to write about but sports, motor-cars, women’s dress and fashionable fornications. I could name a dozen men to whom this hap- pened; some of them died at fifty of congested livers, and others are liv- ing on in a fashion I am too chari- table to describe. Then came Winston Churchill, and the fortifications of his books in the department stores out-towered both |Mr. Chambers and Mrs. Ward. Mr. Churchill was an American gentle- man of the old school; he wrote about America, and not about the Long {Island smart set, and that was to the |geod. If his novels were big and {rather crude, that seemed all right, | because he was writing about a big |and crude country. He started with |the beginning of our history, and | brought us forward to the present \day, one novel every two years, as |regular as an astronomical event. Mr. Churchill talked about “democracy,” | and no doubt really thought he meant jit; but he revealed that there was a | propertied class in America, and this class governed, and somehow it al- ways happened that Mr. Churchill’s heroes and heroines belonged to that In one case, “The Crossing,” if I remember the theme required that the young hero be a pioneer, but somewhere in the story it was deftly conveyed to us that his ancestors had been real ladies and gentlemen, and so it became all right for him to marry the genteel and lovely heroine at the end. We didn’t have intelligence tests in those days, and lacked the con- venient phrase, “mental ages.” Among my papers I find a review ‘for a socialist paper, discussing Mr. Churchill’s novel for the year 1910, and I find myself complaining of the “intellectual and spiritual immatu- rity” of his work, He had got down to modern times by then, and his characters were riding in motor-cars and playing bridge and getting di- vorced. It was this last custom which troubled Mr. Churchill, and his novel. “A Modern Chronicle,” was a tract on the new practice. I am go- ing to quote my review because I can find no better way to tell you about Mr. same time exhibit to you what passed for thinking among those Episcopal church circles in which both Mr. Churchill and myself were brought up. “When you wish to write a novel dealing with divorce you have al- ways one situation: a man or woman has in some way been led into an unworthy marriage, and later on in life the man or woman discovers the true soul-mate; and then what is to be done? The old solution was to have em renounce and suffer many agonies until the concluding chapter, when the novelist mercifully disposed of the superfiveus member of the trio, leaving the hero and the heroine to live happy ever after. That is the solution of ‘Jane Eyre’; and I remem- ber how it thrilled me when I was a boy as old as the American people are now, I rather took it for granted that this would be Mr. Churehill’s polution, As I Fai a ner greatly to my surprise I discover that the hero and the heroine were * a Churchill’s novels, and at the; By Upton Sinclair Japparently going ahead to get a di- vorce in spite of everything; and I put the book down and stared about be that Mr. Churchill was going to write a book in defense of divorce. He had made his hero and heroine such very sensible people that it seemed he was closing every other |gate save that one. However, I real- |ized that this could not be the case, because when the heroine went ahead |to get the divorce Mr. Churchill gave such a repellent picture of Reno, Ne- vada. Of course, it is true that the people who go to Reno, Nevada, and get divorces are many of them un- pleasant types; and doubtless the political judges who grant the di- vorces are also unpleasant types. Ap- parently Mr. Churchill does not real- ize that neither the hero nor the heroine nor the demon divorce are to be blamed for this. There is no rea- son why, if we are going to grant divorces to New York people, we should not grant them in New York; and there is no reason why we should assign the duty of granting the divorces to vulgar political judges. “I went on with the story and fin- ally got to the solution which Mr. Churchill has worked out. His heroine gets her divorce, but against her con- science, so that she is properly and |vespectably miserable afterward, and marries the hero and, of course, makes them both miserable. go to live in a narrow little New England town and the heroine insists on going to a respectable society because nobody speaks to her. She also makes the, unfortunate husband angry by her attitude, and when one} of the insufferable pillars of the res- pectable society church insults the hero, the heroine takes the side of | the pillar of the church. She makes | her husband so unhappy that he fills | up his house with a collection of dis- | reputable Newport divorcees and goes off riding on a half-crazy horse and is killed. “Apparently nobody is expected to perceive that all the unhappiness which grows out of this divorce is ‘owing to the fact that the heroine gratuitously places herself at the mercy of the opinions of the respect- | able bourgeoisie. You feel this at, the very moment where the divorce! begins to be talked about. The hero | and the heroine have previously been | sensible American people, talking | about things in sensible ways; but | when ‘they begin to talk about divorce, neither of them points out to the other any of the obvious facts which make the divorce and re- marriage between them not only a perfectly proper thing, but even a social duty. Their conversation is confined to their blind craving for ‘happiness’, and, of course, when we have met that word ‘happiness’ a dozen or more times we understand that the blind craving is destined to jlead them to destruction—since every {17-year-old moralist knows that the | desire for happiness is a wicked thing which must under no circumstances be indulged. They never mention the fact that there are more intelligent people in other portions of the world, among whom they could perform work of social usefulness and importance. Instead of going abroad for a year or two as such a couple naturally would they settle themselves in a town and proceed to let the town make them miserable. We are given to under- stand that among the Newport set with whom Mr. Churchill’s novel deals there are only two classes of people— those who are horrified by the getting of the divorce, and those who have got divorced tore or less frequently and have nothing else to do save to get drunk, “Of course it would never do for |me, wondering if it could possibly | They church and having her feelings hurt | In Texas Oil Towns By SAM. HOUSTON, Tex., Oct.. 25. (By Mail).—I “smelled oil” a few miles before I approached Bay Town, which is the first of the three towns (from Houston) comprising the Goose-Creek Oil territory. The other two are Goose Creek and Pelly. Distinctly Different. Even though all three towns lie just within a mile distance from each other, they are just as distinctly dif- | ferent as are the lower East Side and Riverside Drive. Bay Town, which is the youngest { of the three is chiefly populated by the Mexican laborers. From 6 to 10 you will see them standing in and chatting in that lively xican language, or listening to a Mexican song on a victrola. One gets the impression of being in Mexico, so predominant is the Mexican in Bay Town. . ™m. é And just about a mile away, seems like the same town, same two blocks of business houses, but a different element entirely. This is Goose- Creek. Here they are more business like. Most of the faces. are black. |The predominant element is the Ne= |gro, and also the younger, unskilled, ’ shifty white laborer. Pelly is the “Aristocrat.” There ~ |live the bosses, and skilled workers jof the oil fields. Here most every- jone “owns his home and _fliyver,® | Both are worth about $800.00. There jis no place for the “dirty niggers” jhere in Pelly. They can be seen here >| only at work. Rich Oil Fields. Between Bay Town and Goose Creek lies the biggest oil refinery I ever saw As far as I could see there were stretches of tanks, pipes, pumps, some kind of machines and jegain the same things. For miles it | spread, And just outside of Pelly, right |by the road, are located the oil wells. | Working three shifts. No stops. The | oil is transferred directly to the re- fineries thru a system of underground pipes. A great deal of the oil is spilled all around the wells. Just by the road. Forming large brown-black pools. Treacherous it seems. I do not know how deep they are. There is only one odor around; the stench of petroleum. Heavy. Leaving its stench on everything. Conditions of Work. Conditions of work are far from being good. The oil magnates’ greedi- ness for profits, is evident all around, The lives of the workers are not pro- tected. Instead, a system. of insur- ance is established. It is compulsory, and the insurance fee is deducted from the salary. There is mo organization, at all among the oil workers. And the American Federation of Labor seems to be too busy fighting the militants in the trade unions, to even think of organizing the oil workers. Wages. The majority of the oil workers are unskilled laborers. Mexicans and Negroes mostly. They receive from $2.00 to $3.50 a day. Or night shift. Same hours for night shift. The highest skilled workers receive up to |$150.00 a month. Day or night shift, The laborers live in constant bond-!| age, due to debt, to the local petty sharks (store keepers) who see to it» | that the laborers get the least for the most. They live from-pay-day to pay- day (twice a month) and keep on paying the ever-increasing debts, Women Terribly Exploited. There are hardly any women ems ployed in the oil fields. While the men are working in the oil fields the women try to get any sort of ems ployment in the towns. I spoke to a few girls working in the laundry in Goose Creek. Here are some of the conditions as told by the girls. Nine-hour day without rest One dollar thirty-five cents per day Conditions intolerable. Several of the 36 girls employed faint every day. The company deducts from the wages the fainting time. I asked them why don’t they organize and get bette conditions. Did not care much; jus@ worked temporarily, they said. The local stores often (at pay- days) employ a number of girls, di hy. ing sales, and pay them $6.00 to $8, 00 a week, For an 11-hour day. Si ‘ful days. These are the conditions of the “Jiquid gold” workers, and their ilies. There is only one way to h- prove their conditions, Organization. How soon? 1 stretcher from his insane! horse-back vide. There must be a happy ending. So away back at the beginning of the story we are made acquainted with a man who has worshipped the heroine from boyhood who has been her friend and consoler in distress, and who has sternly rebuked her for getting the divree and remarring. This second hero comes forward and the heroine is made blissfully happly in his arms, The absurdity of which conclusion i). apparently not realized by Mr, Churchill. The divorced ex-husbanc is still alive, so the heroine’s third marriage is under the baleful cloud == of divorce quite as much as was tha second one. Is the 17-year-old moral« iat to understand from Mr. Churchill that divorce and one remarriage con- stitute a social crime, while a divorce and two remarriages constitute a Mr. Churchill to end the novel with| >@Ppy ending?” on the hero being brought home on a (To Be Continued) — y : ‘: