The Daily Worker Newspaper, November 5, 1927, Page 8

‘now the machinations of the Burns detective agency, the jury- Page Hight a of * be THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1927 THE DAILY WORKER) }4N2s Across THE SEA Published by the DAILY WORKER PUBLISHING CO. Daily, Except Sunday 82 First Street, New York, N. Y. Phone, Orchard 1680 e Address: “Daiwork” SUBSCRIPTION RATES 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 $2.50 three months $2.00 three months ‘Address and mail and out checks to THE DAILY WORKER, 33 First Street, New York, N. Y. oe BDITOR.. ROBERT MINO WM. F. D ASSISTANT EDITOR... ew York, N. R E an Y., under mail at the ffic the act of March 3, 1879. Hntered as second- Calvin Coolidge---the Sole Survivor of the Battle of Teapot Dome Across the trail of theft, bribery, spying, corruption and con- y which leads from the Teapot Dome case to the White where sits Calvin Coolidge, falls the shadow of Warren Gamalie] Harding, the president who died mysteriously and whose place Coolidge took, of Jake Hamon whose mistress shot him to death, of Jesse Smith, the welcome guest in the little green house on K str “committed suicide” in the apartment which he shared y Daugherty. It is beginning to be clear why Calvin Coolidge says he “does not choose to run.” The Hz g-Coolidge regime was a branch of the Burns de-}| tective agency and a clearing house for Sinclair-Doheny interests. | The Burns agency, by recent developments is shown to retain much of the power it had under Harding. A little history is always valuable in acquiring a clear per-! spective in such situations as now make the atmosphere of Amer- ica reek with the odor of oil and of corruption. Harding was chosen by a combination of industrial capital- ists—Rockefeller, Sinclair, Doheny, representing oil—to defeat Woodrow Wilson who had abandoned his first allegiance to them; and had gone over to the House of Morgan, with the result that the United States went into the world war. | The industrial capitalists wanted not only to defeat the Wil- son administration but to defeat it by an overwhelming majority. | For this purpose concessions were made to elements but little above the level of the cattle rustlers, dance hall proprietors, gamblers and claim jumpers of the old frontier days. Here came the Hamons and the Falls, the Jesse Smiths and the Daughertys —elements closely allied with the underworld and the greatest, gambling game of all—oil. They controlled votes, sometimes en- tire states, and they were needed for the landslide that was to, wipe out the Wilson administration. Harding, the small town rounder, careless and characterless, was made to order for the bandit crew that forced his nomination and followed him into the White House. With their purpose accomplished, Standard Oil had no fur-| ther need to protect its shady aides and the Teapot Dome scandal broke. which was creating a dangerous skepticism among masses relative to the sanctity of the White House, but its allies had acquired| some loot that it wanted. \It is by no means a mere coincidence that Senator Walsh of Montana—a state which Standard Oil owns outright—aided by Senator Wheeler, from the same state, took the lead in exposing | the Teapot Dome scandal and the Harding administration, acting as prosecutor for the senate committee. The moment these two senators stepped into the fray it was certain that Standard Oil was about to perform another great public service—by exposing the most dangerous of its domestic competitors. | The exposure has been complete—the looters lost the booty! they grabbed so brazenly. and the millions of Sinclair and Doheny are being spent like water | to keep their tools out of jail. It is probable that Standard Oil is not anxious that Fall, a former cabinet officer of the Harding administration, become a convict. While Doheny and Sinclair have been trying -to keep out of jail Standard Oil has been quietly grabbing up their mar- kets. Only the other day the Standard Oil took from the Pan- American Petroleum Company—a Doheny concern—the largest contract it had—that with the Cunard line, which it had held since 1915. The r n why the Teapot Dome scandal, the Fall trial and bribing and the obvious fixing of high officials in the depart- ment of justice, are allowed to stream across the front pages of the metropolitan press, is that in the course of the whole expo- sure no one has pointed the finger of denunciation at Standard Oil, that it is able to appear as a stainless lily growing in mias- matic swamp. ~~ Further, the House of Morgan and the Rockefeller dynasty have much more in common than they did ten years ago. Finance- capital is not displeased by the fact that smaller fry like Sinclair and Doheny are being shoved off the oil map and out of the com- posite picture which contains the countenances of the real rulers of the United States. For the hangers-on of the American plunderbund in house and senate, on the bench and in editorial offices, here is a splendid chance to prove to the masses that “our government” is “on the) up and up’—that it protects the “property of the people” and| punishes those who try to steal it without due legal process. Good old Uncle Sam is on the job—this seems to be the gen- eral tenor of the press. Through it all Calvin Coolidge sits silent. What is there for him to say? He was a leading member of the Harding cabinet when Hamon and Forbes were putting their feet on the Harding table and dropping cigar ashes on Mrs. Harding’s best carpet. Standard Oil was not only anxious to get ‘rid of a gang! ; It is now a question of punishment) ;. By Fred Ellis , The long arm of the fascist government of Italy has reached across the ocean to direct the conspiracy thru which Mussolini in conjunction with the capitalist government of New York hopes to mete out to the Italian workers, Cologero Greco and Donato Carillo, the same fate that was visited on Sacco and Vanzetti by the capitalist hangmen of Massachusetts, > © Money Writes (Continued from Last Issue.) XIV. { Incense to Mammon JULING classes have existed for a K long time in the world and have built themselves a mighty structure of prestige. Reverence for the great d noble ones of the earth is im- t in all the fairy tales of child- and sanctified by a monarchist religion. Literature are full of it—I have never count, but I would wager that nine-tenths of the heroes and hero- nes of all fiction and drama are per- s of social importance: the classics thout any exception, Greek, Ro- and French; Shakespeare, and hing in English literature, ex- g the comic parts, down to ite recent times. It would be in- sting to take a list of the best ellers for the past twenty years, British and American, and study the social status of the heroes and hero- ine In the British case, you would find the noble titles exceeding by ten housand per cent the actual propor- of such‘ titles to the living popu- n; in the case of America you would find that fifty per cent of all heroes are wealthy at the outset, and another forty-nine per cent become so before the end of the story. . You might safely offer a prize of ten thousand dollars for the discovery of a best-selling hero who was wealthy at the beginning of the story and poor at the end. “~The average author is, fundamen- tally, a naive and trusting creature— half a child, or the make-believe im- pulse would not survive in him. Like all children, he believes what the grown-ups tell him, and is impressed by the princes of real life, just as by those in the fairy tales. So in this opulent capitalist era, a great many writers do not have to be purchased, but serve privilege gladly and with spontaneous awe. Chief among them is a celebrated lady whose work I have been watching for twenty-three years, carrying on with her all that time a sort of literary lover’s quarrel off again, on again, gone again, as negan puts it. Just now we are n,” but I can’t be sure what will pen when this chapter sees *he light. In the year 1904 Gertrude Ather- ton (she forbids me to call her “Mrs. Atherton”) published in the Atlantic | Monthly an article asking why Amer- ‘ican literature was so bourgeois. She was using the word in the old French sense of “middle class,” rather than the modern Russian sense of “capi- | talist.” She found our literature {tame and conventional and dull, ply hoi } big and bold and noisy. I wrote an | answer, which the great Atlantic re: Coolidge was vice-president when Jesse Smith “committed suicide,” when the $100,000 went into the black bag, when William ‘J. Burns and Harry Daugherty were running the’ department of justice and when Harding died of ‘“‘ptomaine poisoning.” iected but which Collier’s published. jl said: | “The bourgeoisie is that class whereas she thought it ought to be|dors of modern civilization, of steam | which, all over the world, takes the sceptre of power as it falls from the {hands of the aristocracy; which has} the skill and cunning to survive in} ‘the free-for-all combat which fol- | jlows upon the political revolution. Its | dominion is based upon wealth; and hence the determining characteristic | |of the bourgeois society is its regard | for wealth. To it, wealth is power, it is the end and goal of things. The } aristocrat knew nothing of the pos-; sibility of revolution, and so he was) bold and gay. The bourgeois does} know about the possibility cf revolu- tion, and so it is that Gertrude Ath- | erton finds that American literature | lis ‘timid.’ She finds it ‘anaemic,’ simply because the bourgeois ideal | knows nothing of the spirit, and tol- erates intellectual activity only for the ends of commerce and material welfare. She finds also that it ‘bows before the fetish of the body,’ and she is much perplexed by the discov- | ery. She does not seem to under- stand that the bourgeois represents | an achievement of the body, and that all that he knows in the world is body. He is well fed himself, his wife is stout, and his children are fine and vigorous. house, and wears clothes; his civ’ zation furnishes beyond that the bourgeois under- stands nothing—save only the desire to be entertained. . . “So we come to literature—and to the author. The bourgeois recognizes the novelist and the poet as a means of amusement somewhat above the prostitute, and about on a level with the music hall artist; he recognizes the essayist, the historian and the publicist as agents of bourgeois re- pression equally as necessary as the clergyman and the editor. To all of the bourgeois life, a bourgeois home with servants who know their places, and a bourgeois club with smiling and on state occasions, become acquainted with the bourgeois magnates, and touch the gracious fingers of the magnates’ pudgy wives. There is only one condition, so obvious that it hardly needs to be mentioned—they must be bourgeois, they must see life from the bourgeois point of view. Beyond that there is not the least re- striction; the novelist, for instance, jmay roam the whole of space and | time—-there is nothing in life that he may not treat, provided only that he be bourgeois in his treatment. He may show us the olden time, with noble dames and gallant gentlemen dallying with graceful sentiment. He may entertain us with pictures of the modern world, may dazzle us with visions of high society in all splendors, may awe us with the won- ‘and electricity, the flying machine and |the automobile. He may thrill us | with battle, murder and Sherlock ; Holmes. He may bring tears to our leyes at the thought of the old folks | Coolidge is president now when William J. Burns is terror-| engaged with the help of the United States Supreme Court in izing and bribing jurors, “fixing” government officials and try-| smashing the labor movement, no word to say about corruption, ingsto keep Coolidge’s former cabinet-mate out of jail. Has the president who sends Dwight Morrow, a partner in the House of Morgan as ambassador to Mexico, no word to say about oil? Ha:, Has the president who sends marines to invade Nicaragua with theughter hundreds of Nicaraguans, no word to say about , “Pajam the president who journeys to Pittsburgh to laud Andrew s° “ve open enemy of the masses, the patron of Vare, and the | “ “5 of the electorate of an entire state, no word to say ry drruption? ‘and its sources? Chinese workers and peasants. ’ Certainly not. But Calvin Coolidge, the coldly silent pro- tector of capitalist corruption, can warn, by his own utterances, /and those of his secretary of labor, Davis, against foreign-born, workers, denounce Communists, refuse recognition to the workers’ | she disapproved the ending of the! and peasants’ government of the Soviet Union, murder Nicaraguans, battleships to bombard and slaughter send troops to He lives in a big| latest thing in| these to every one—at least to every | one who amounts to anything; and} them he grants the good things of | obsequious waiters. They may even, | its | By Upton Sinclair at home, or at his pictures of the honesty, humility and sobriety of the common man; he may even go to the slums and show us the ways of Mrs. Wiggs, her patient frugality and beautiful contentment in that Al of life to which it has pleased God | to call her. In any of these fields | the author, if he is worth his salt, may be ‘entertaining’-—and so the royalties will If there is any one whom this does not suit— who is so perverse that the bourgeois do not please him, or so obstinate that he will not learn to please the bourgeois—we send after him our literary policeman, the bourgeois re- viewer, and bludgeon him into. si- lence; or better yet, we ply leave | him alone, and he moves into a gar- ret... 6 “These are the conditions under which our literature is produced, and which account for all the qualities in it which Gertrude Atherton has per- ceived but cannot explain. A better witness than Gertrude Atherton could not be had, for she herself is one of the most bourgeois of our writers. We have no writer more readily im- pressed with bigness than Gertrude Atherton, more ready to accept it as veatness. It was the opinion of Shel- \ley that ‘poets are the acknowledged legislators of mankind’; in Gertrude Atherton’s opinion the ‘Rulers of Kings’ are not poets, nor are they prophets and saints, with their visions and aspirations; they are simply the extra-heavy bourgeoisie. Gertrude Atherton measures the greatness of a man by the standard of the Indian chief—by the number of squaws he has; she knows nothing of the facts of life which make it true that one woman can be more to a man than ten !women can possibly be—which simply means that she is not acquainted with the phenomenon of spirituality.” Thirteen years passed, and Gertrude | Atherton, horror-stricken by the war, | published a novel called “The White | Morning,” dealing with an imaginary revolution in Germany. I had my own magazine then, and reviewed the book, pointing out an interesting sign of the times: for the first time in her life this novelist was willing to ap- prove a revolt against an aristocracy. But her prophesy was unscientific. | “The heroine is a rich German lady, and she kills rich German men, which is in violation of an elementary prin- ciple of revolutionary economics. Without meaning to be dogmatic, I will venture to say to Gertrude Ather- ton: When the revolt in Germany }comes—and it is very nearly due— you will not see rich German women killingwich German men; you will sce rich German women killing poor Ge: |man women, and calling on rich Ger- | {man men to help.” ‘That prophesy was made in June, 1918; and the Spartacist revolt came a year later. I welcomed Gertrude Atherton as 'a new recruit to the ranks of social reconstruct But alas, President Wilson began his private war on the | Russian revolution. and I began my war on him, and Gertrude Atherton |flew into a towering rage with. me, jand wrote me that I was “no better | | than a Bolshevik,” and she would have | nothing more to do with me. Se even wrote an article for that most odious ‘of publications, the “Natinal Civic! Federation Review,” attacking me for | having used her favorable opinion of immie Higgins,” after I knew that | | | | |book. That had happened by accident | « opinion had already been pub- | | sked, and was reprinted as a matter | of office routine; really I thought I to have had a request to cease Against the Coolidge administration and all it stands for, the | ought workers and farmers of the United States must organize their forces and prepare to launch a labor party for the 1928 elections which will be the beginning of a mass movement challenging capi- s the president of a country where coal, oil and steel ons have grabbed all valuable natural resources and are now + talist oppression and capitalist corruption in every field. ing it, instead of a slashing in Ralph jasley’s snarl-paper., Mord years passed, and I ran into Gertrude Atherton at a dinner of the P. E. N. Club in San Francisco. It was just after the publication of “Black Oxen,” and I asked the author ot this “rejuvenation” novel some per- sonal questions about “the cause of her youthful appearance, and she re- plied that it was none of my damn business; which caused great hilarity mong the assembled gentlemen and lady authors. But my enemy came to hear me lecture on “Mammonart,” and id so many nice things that I couldn’t quote them, and invited me to tea at the St. Francis. I had an idea that if that tea-party could have lasted a month, instead of an hour, I could have told Gertrude Atherton so much about her heroes, the “Rulers of Kings,” and the mess they are making of their world, as to shake gust a little her life-long trust in them. She is honest, and has a conscience; it is the facts that are lacking in her equipment. After thirty-five years of offering incense to Mammon, Gertrude Ather- ton has apparently not found spiritual peace with her deity. “Black Oxen” cémes as a kind of life-confession; the novelist puts herself into the soul of an elderly woman, rejuvenated by a miracle of science, and comes back from Europe to inspect New York so- ciety. A more devastating picture of waste, futility, and above all, bore- dom, could not be drawn by a muck- raker’s pen. It is difficult, in dealing with “realistic” fiction to be sure just how much of this impression is in- tended. What, for instance, does Ger- trude Atherton think of the libations of liquor which are poured out be- fore the throne of Mammon in his metropolis? There is hardly a chap- ter of her book in which somebody doesn’t take a drink of something alcoholic, and all the great cere- monials and crises of the story are preceded by and accompanied by a number of rounds of all varieties of booze. The old people drink, and the young people drink, and likewise they all hate one another—except when they are making love; and sometimes they do both at the same time. To me, of course, the most interest- ing part of the novel is its com- mentary on political and social theories. Quite casually, in passing from tea-party to dinner-table, and {from dinner-table to grand opera, Gertrude Atherton solves the . prob- lems of our distracted age. For ex- ample, the problem of war, and the ace settlement which is worse than war. The novelist admits that our statesmen are blunderers and nin- compoops, but she explains that our disillusionment, after the glorious ; thrills of wartime, is a mistake; we must go on having wars, and wait for evolution to bring us to a state! of development where we will stop having wars. Those foolish people who have the idea of stopping wars now, without waiting for evolution, will feel themselves properly rebulced by Gertrude Atherton, and will sub- side into their places; and likewise all revolutionists and Socialist agitators, whom the novelist completely anni- hilates with her sarcasms. She makes clear how dangerous it is to let the ignorant mob, which can undersiand nothing except revenge, have anything to do with trying to remedy social | injustice. We must wait a thousand years, until our ruling classes have acquired sufficient intelligence to do things better; and if we want to see how they are learning to do things hotter, all we have to do is to read “Black Oxen,” and watch them gamb- ling and drinking and idling and dressing up, and going from tea- parties to dinners, and from dinners to grand operas, murdering one an- other’s reputations, seducing one an- other’s wives, and always and every- where being what they consider bril- liant and fascinating and wonderful and prominent and famous and great. (To Be Continued.) Aas a weel:’s indisposition, the author finally brought forth a new title for this column. The chief objec- tion to “Current Events” was that it was rather misleading,—the title, not the column. Another reason was that a Methodist journal used it to title a page of editorial comment. A similar misfortune happened to, “As We See It” with the exception that it was misappropriated by a left wing Pres- byterian organ and not by a funaa- mentalist sheet. We hope “Red Rays” will have better luck. Note that the change is made on the eve of the Tenth Anniversary of the Soviet Union. Ce OW to our task. Here is some- thing you cannot afford to miss. It is the November number of the La- bor Defender, official organ of Inter- national Labor Defense. It appears on the 40th anniversary of the murder of the Chicago labor leaders who suf- fered the fate meted out to Sacco and Vanzetti because like the latter they were leaders in the movement to or- ganize their fellow workers into unions and because they were bitter foes of the capitalist system. The current number of this bright ‘little magazine is in my opinion the best j yet and this is saying a good deal. You must get a copy and see that it gets as wide a circulation as possible. csieyt | * pes years ago, the earth shook with the impact of the struggle between the new social order and the old, waged in the streets of Lenin- grad, Moscow, Karkov, Odessa. and unruout the mighty empire of the Czars. The worid looked on with in- terest.. What would be the result? Would the revolt be crushed in the blood of the workers as was the re- jvolt of 1905? Few were so sanguine as to expect that ten years later representatives of the revolutionary workers from every part of the worid would be gathering in Moscow to join in the celebration of ten years of So- viet rule, of ten years of remarkable progress on the road to the socializa- tion of all industry in the former Rus- sian empire. * ase ae wat was once considered a utopian dream is now a cold reality and |tew radical workers now doubt the possibility of building up socialism in the Soviet Union. |The chief points oi disagreement are over the methods by which socialization can be speeded up. The inauguration of the seven- hour day on the Tenth Anniversary of the establishment of the Workers and Peasants’ Government is the best answer the Soviet Union could make to the scoffers and the lying enemy propagandists, and constitutes a chal- lenge to the workers in countries whose productive machinery is more advanced than in a land long over- ridien by the most corrupt and so- cially rotten ruling class known in the annals of human history. eet are opportunities in this great landsof ours that do not exist in the Soviet Union. Let us take the case ample. This young man who is only 25 years of age is negotiating to pay $270,000 for a stock exchange seat. Young Stewart graduated from the University of Pennsylvania three years ago. He could never have made that much money in Moscow in three years. * NEVERTHELESS all is not sunshine in the United States. There ig Pat Crowe who worked his way up from the bottom and was a big head- liner some years ago. His rise in the financial world was almost — as meteoric as that of Mr. Stewart. Crowe like Stewart did not believe in putting in ten hours a day for a liv- ing. He was a go-getter, took short cuts. A favorite method of his was to visit a bank after the president went home and help himself. In less than no time he amassed $100,000 but the legitimate and more clever robbers took it away from him on the stock exchange. * ana UT Pat had his health and his wits and like the blind war hero in the “Seventh Heaven” he looked up and never looked down. While looking up one day he had an inspiration. He decided to kidnap Edward A, Cudahy of the meat-packing family and hold m for ransom. This net Mr. Crows $25,000 but Cudahy was never tl same again. And as if to give livii proof that crime does not pay, Cro jas picked up last Thursday night, jthe police begging alms under an elevated structure. The trouble with Crowe was that he reformed and de- cided to devote his life to urging the young to hew to the straight line, let the chips fall where they may. He should have purchased a seat on some stock exchange with his earnings. * * * ELVES reactionary Mexican mules are said to have saved some coun- ter-revolutionists frém a disastrous defeat at the hands of federal troops when they—the mules—deserted to the enemy with twelve loads of am- munition. ©. Henry told of a South je when somebody kicked the mule that carried the coffee supply in the belly and killed the animal, destroying tha coffee, but this other mulé story is the most remarkable war tale we have —T. J. O'FLAHERTY. ‘ ’ of William D. Stewart, Jr. for ex-, heard since a French bull turned bae!s a Germany army corps. i ‘ Red Rays | yer, it must be admitted that there American revolution that got lost : RRR ETERS | a : eee