The Daily Worker Newspaper, November 9, 1927, Page 6

Page Six THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, NOV. 9, 1927 Published by the DAILY WORK PUBLISHING CO. Daily, Except Sunday Add 82 First Street, New York, Cab SUBSCRI By Mail (in New York only): $8.00 per year $4.50 six manth 2.50 three months Address and THE DAILY WORLE 3. EDITOR.. TANT EDITOR. the nd-class mail at the post-office act of } Phone, Orchard 1689 ress: “Da!work PTION RATES By Mail (outsi New York): ns $6.00 per year: $3.50 six months $2.00 three months and make out checks to 3 First Street, New York, N. Y. ..ROBERT MINO ...WM. F. DUN at New York, N. Y., rch 3, 18) Wilk m J. Burns--the Enemy of the Labor Movement. THE DAILY WORKER William J. Burns, the petted darling of the 100 per cent Amer- ican open shoppers when he I, W. W.’s and cooking up sed against them, Burn. agency and the ri industry, has been caught att Instead of putting union jail Burns i g is now tryi But Burns is working for to hunt down workers guilty o bor movement and the working cla tion of the American capitalist cle the head of a prosperous hthand man of the union-hating was spying upon Communi ition and criminal syndicalist cases ate detective 90sses of big empting to corrupt a federal jury. men and revolutionary workers in to keep rich criminals out of jail. the same class who employed him f no crime except loyalty to the la- s. Burns is —oil capitalists—whose v working for a sec-| and} ciousness and brutality toward unorganized American oil work-! ers and the workers and peasants of Mexico is almost unparalleled. During the war and afterwards, these oil interests tried to rail-} road dozens of members of the I. W. W. to prison, inflicted upon) them thru their agents the most revolting cruelities. Gathered together in the Burns’ organization is one of the| most depraved set of spies and thugs in the world. band of detectives is one of the most dangerous instruments of] It preys upon the labor movemént con-| American capitalism. stantly. The Burns If a labor official is to be compromised or corrupted, if a/ union organizer is to be slugged, if the lords of industry want to| know what workers have joined a union or are sympathetic, if a/ picket line is to be smashed and a strike broken, if stoolpigeons | are to be placed in a union—the Burns organization is ready with | its services—for a price. The offscourings of the underworld of a hundred cities do| the bidding of Burns. This master criminal has groups of capitalists. He will been caught in a fight between two try to blackmail his way out. Surely the whole labor movement can unite in the demand that Burns shall not escape. that he and his paymasters have shown to hundreds of innocent workers Burns has helped to send to jail—or to their deaths. The labor movement sho the demand that the Burns de uld take this opportunity to press tective agency be disbanded and he} himself so thoroly exposed that his power for evil will be destroyed -orever. More sinister than even the slippery Sinclair, more menacing} nan the cringing Fall, mor e dangerous than the discredited Joheny, Burns, the master of an army of modern mercenaries, must have his fangs drawn by termined that this instrumen smashed, The Russian Opposition The course of the opposit the power of a labor movement de- t of American capitalism shall be Takes a Dangerous Course. ion in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Trotzky and Zinoviev, has recently taken an extremely dangerous turn. In its struggle against the principles of Leninism and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the opposition has reached a stage which borders very closely upon objective support of the forces of capitalist counter-revo- lution. Intentions do not count. Although the leaders of the oppo- sition are of course against the counter-revolutionary elements, the policies and tactics of the opposition clearly reflect the an- tagonism of the new capitalist elements in the Soviet Union to the dictatorship of the prolet: ariat and to the leadership of the ‘Communist Party. The conduct of the opposition is actually en- couraging counter-revolutiona ry organization and action. The objective meaning and logic of the course of the Russian opposi- tion is to hurt the working clas s revolution and to help its enemies, Time and again the opposition has been warned of the in- herently dangerous nature of its course. Time and again the er- rors of the opposition had been examined by various congresses of the Russian Party and of found to be a departure from of view of the petty-bourgeoisi the Communist International, and the line of Lenin towards the point e and the treacherous social-democ- racy. Patiently and over a long period of time the Central Com- mittee of the Russian Party and the Executive of the Communist} International have striven to open and secret efforts to org the Party and within the Com: But the opposition disreg fact that the Communist Par mous)y and repeatedly rejected the point of view of Trotzky and| dissuade the opposition from its anize and mantain a faction within munist International. yarded the warnin: Despite the ty of the Soviet Union had unani- | | Zinoviev as non-Leninist, demanding the dissolution of their fac-| tion, and the cessation of the the opposition, while promisir will of the Party, proceeded i and continued in their old cou of the Communist Internation, mittee of the Communist Party of the Soviet T the Opposition, the latter proc ties into the other Communis such renegades of Communis 2s Maslow in Germany, Souvar The inevitable is now happening. The Trotzky-Zinoviev op-| position have actually establis tion, printing plant and distributing agency for a new party in the Soviet to challenge the dictatorship of the proletariat, @ the leadership of the Commun step the followers of the oppo: ir faction fight against the Party, | ng at the moment to abide by the n reality to violate these promises rse. Despite the unanimous actiqn al, in support of the Central Com- Union and agains ded to extend its factional act t Parties receiving the support of and enemies of the Soviet Union rine in France, ete. € hed in Moscow an illegal organiza s laying the basis tive meaning is eI And in this dangerous sition combined with various intel- Union, whe nist Party. SEVEN LEAGUE BOOTS By Fred Ellis Money Writes (Continued from Last Issue.) XVI. The Ivory Tower {ye struggle of the disinherited of the earth against their oppressors has been going on for a long time; and history makes clear that it is no Let him be shown the same mercy | joke to be on the side of the oppres- seg. The masters will crucify you, as they did Jesus, or stab you to death as they did the Gracchi and Wat Ty- ler. If you are a great writer they will exile you with Dante and Hugo, or throw you into prison with Tasso and Dostoyevski and Ernst Toller and Ralph Chaplin. Since it is difficult to be sure which side is going to win, there is a tendency on the part of writers to say, “A plague on both your houses,” and withdraw into an ivory tower of art. And since. whatever men do, they {have to make it seem noble and sub- lime, there arises a cult of haughty periority to political problems; the artist becomes a semi-divine being, | engaged in an activity of permanent | significance, and the polishing of one of his phrases becomes more import- ant than the fate of an empire. Such an artist will be an exponent of tech- nique, a painter of the outsides of things; and necessarily, he will work to please the rich. Ivory towers cost money, and the artist must find pa- trons enough to pay the upkeep, and the wages of the cook and the gard- ener and the chambermaid and the chauffeur and the doctor and the den- tist and the bootlegger. The tallest ivory tower United States is known as “Dower House,” and is located near the town of West Chester, Pennsylvania, an ultra-fashionable suburb of the opu- lent city of Philadelphia. And if I take you inside this “Dower House,” and introduce you to the master and mistress and the servants, and tell you what they do and what they say and what they eat and what they wear, do not suspect me of violating the laws of hospitality, or of spying upon a fellow-craftsman: no, the owner of the tower has invited the public inside, and what I tell you is what Joseph Hergesheimer consents for you to know. It is a book called “From An Old House,” advertised by the publishers as a work upon Amer- ican colonial furniture and landscape gardening, but in reality the spiritual confession of an ivory tower artist. My acquaintance with Mr. Herge- sheimer is confined'to the exchange of a few sentences in a hotel lobby; just enough to know what he looks like. It is not my fault if I see his short and solid figure encased in bro- caded pajamas of burnt orange and cerulean and glass green; because he opened up one of his magazine ar- ticles with a picture of himself mak- ing such a purchase in Chinatown of San Francisco. Such things are part of your equipment, when you get your training in an art school, and are obsessed by coler and form and the external details of things, and devot- ing your life to fixing them in words, to be printed on book paper and bound in expensive form and sold to rich ‘people, in order to teach them how ———— SSS SS busily engaged in counter-revolutionary activities preparatory to the war on the Soviet Union planned by Great Britain and other imperialist powers, speculating on and encouraged by the strug- gle of the opposition against the Communist Party. Also, that some of the non-Communist sympathizers of the opposition were in contact with these counter-revolutionary elements. Trotzky and Zinoviev, leaders of the opposition who bear full responsibility for its conduct, have been expelled from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This drastic act, as well as the previous expulsion of Trotzky and Vuyovich from the Executive Committee of the Communist Inter- national, was made necessary and inevitable by the recent actions of the opposition. 4 This act will serve notice on the opposition that it had al- ready reached the limit consistent with membership in the Com- munist International, and that any move along the old lines will place the opposition in the carmp of the enemies of the revolution. in the}; to spend their money upon color and form and the external details of things, in order that you, the ivory tower artist, may have great sums to spend in the same way. And do not think that I am being mean am merely summarizing the artist’s own statement of his interests and activities. How shall I convey to you a sense of the ineffable exclusiveness of the fashionable society of West Chester? The gentlemen dress themselves in pink hunting-coats and the ladies in riding habits, and before dawn on au- tumn mornings they ride out to chase foxes over the country, to the music of horns and the bellowing of hounds from the West Chester Hunt Kennels. They even have “gentlemen cricket- ers” in the neighborhood. And into this sacred circle comes an impecuni- ous artist trying to be a writer, and he marries a daughter of the élite— her name is Dorothy, and her rela- tives are sniffy at the wedding cere- mony. But he makes good, oh, most gloriously; a sort of refined and high- brow Horatio Alger story. He buys an old Dutch farm-house, and camping out uncomfortably in it, practices putting color and form and the external detail of things into beautiful words; he watches the fash- ionable society of West Chester, and puts their manners and morals’ into colonial and revolutionary costumes, and West Chester society is so fas- cinated that it buys the books, and the impecunious artist who once stood outside the building of a great maga- zine, lacking the courage to go in, now has the editors coming to visit him. Yes, he lives only an hour’s mo- tor ride from the estate of Colonel Lorimer—that was hardly playing fair with the rest of the writers of America, to go to the colonel’s own hunting-ground and marry a daughter of one of the reigning families! And to bribe the colonel with a precious piece of antique furniture, a walnut sideboard—surely that is cheating at the game of selling serials! Anyhow, here is the money; and the proprietor of “Dower House” tells with semi-playful charm how he fell under the spell of ancient things, and how the architects and builders and landscape gardeners conspired with Dorothy to turn an old Pennsylvania Dutch farm-house into “the estate of Joseph Hergesheimer”; how they at- tended auctions, and _ bought - this treasure and that, and how the house was all built over, and decorated in the fashion of our ancestors, and fur- The revolutionary workers of the world have a great stake in/Mished with their relics; so that now the suce the fir: ful development of the Sovict Union. They are vitally | \interested in the continued building and growth of socialism in} t republic of workers and peasants. They firmly believe, | |the same as the toiling masses of the Soviet Union, that the con- | ised through ‘ lectuals, non-Communists, and some of them enemies of the Soviet | Government. _test of loyalty to the revolution. The Trotzky-Zinoviev opposition | ¥85 ditions of the masses there are continually improving, that the, seven-hour work-day proclaimed recently by the Soviet Govern-|the plutocracy of Philadelp! notwithstanding the lack of faith) fashion to which ment will soon become a reality; of the Trotzky-Zinoviev opp cialism in the Soviet Union ion, and that the victory of so- s assured, if world imperialism is | pro the artist can sit in any corner of any room of his establishment, and see these ancient people moving about their tasks, and make books out of their imagined doings. It is necessary that many books should be written, because of the need of eo taining in the it is accustomed. You must not imagine that you can marry a daughter of West Chester pod society for nothing! Nor im- prevented from attacking and crushing the dictatorship of the|agine that any quantity of antiques proletariat. The revolutionary workers of the world are fully aware of | the danger confronting the Soviet Union at present. They follow with the closest scrutiny the maneuvers of the British government! never to perfect an imperialist combination for a war against the work-! scented extracts, colognes; but now srs’ republic, and are preparing to defend the Soviet Union as|her dressing table-—the walnut low- will preserve your ivory tower from the inroads of change! Says Mr. Her- gesheimer: “In years gone by Dorothy had perfumed her person with their Socialist fatherland by all means at their disposal. At this | DY carved ith shells from Virginia time, absolute and unreserved loyalty to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its Central Committee constitute the main/ let or green vials, from Paris; there Now the news comes from the Soviet Union that various ele-| must be made to see and accept this cardinal Leninist truth, or _ ments of the White Guard, former officers of Kolchak, were|the proletariat will sweep them aside. : 4 ( had its oddly shaped bottles with ornamental stoppers, its slender vio- carmine lip stick, compact powder, in the various bags that everywhere accompanied her. This ‘was a universal custom; § had ar- By Upton Sinclair rived, after brief protests against al mere change, at the understanding that she couldn’t, in her feminine sphere, be peculiar; but I wondered how, no longer than ten years ago, I} women had been so successfully se- ductive without such aids. Perhaps it was that the affair of seductive- ness had in itself, as an end, grown more important. I could see that the competition had become sharper, the rules were notably relaxed; lips today must be red, charm carried abroad on scent, at any price.” In this tallest of ivory towers in America our artist lives, surrounded by lowboys and highboys, field beds and hunting. boards, Chippendale sofas and Windsor chairs, rat-tailed spoons and a Philadelphia silver tea- set. He tells us how he sits and gazes upon these objects, and dreams stories that are not stories, but merely characters to “hold together” the cup- boards and pewter, the William and Mary chairs and Phyfe tables. What stories come from such a source? “The Three Black Pennys” —a novel about three generations of Pennsylvania ironmasters, and how they loved ladies of that charm which ivory tower artists require in ladies, and how their line thinned out into elegant sterility. Here, at the begin- ning of his writing career, we dis- cover Joseph Hergesheimer as a “real” artist; he is going to bring his lovely characters to ruin—or, as he himself phrases it, be “a merchant in unhappy endings.” He doesn’t be- lieve in the power of the human will to master circumstance, and he doesn’t thing it matters much anyway. “I didn’t much believe in the triumph or importance of the individual.” What is the origin of this curse laid upon the leisure class, an evil spell binding them, so that they can do nothing but go down with mournful dignity to their ruin? And then “Cytherea,” a picture of the fashionable free-spending set, moved from West Chester to Long Island as a matter of courtesy to Dorothy’s folks. These people live, not by producing wealth, but by speculating in paper titles to wealth; therefore they have no creative pur- pose, and no moral resistance, and corruption gnaws in their bones. A young stock-gambler bored with his own wife, conceives a passion for his friend’s wife, and runs away to Cuba with her and sees her die amid tropical horrors, corresponding to those in her own soul. A familiar enough theme, but with a new fea- ture derived from Mr. H«rgeshcimer’s custom of gazing at articles of furni- ture and objects dart, and writing his stories around them. Perhaps it was Christmas time, and one of Dorothy’s friends had sent her a “kewpie” doll, one of those comic figures that are set up on mantles in the nurse’ anyhow, the hero of this novel bring home a painted doll and gazes at it omtil the creature becomes Cytherea, the ancient Paphian goddess of sex license, and he falls under her spell. This is what is called “high art” in the present-day high art world. And don’t think it is meant with any hu- mor—no, we are standing at the tip- top of the tallest ivory tower in America, and being as solemn as ever we know how. On the ‘cover of the “Dower House” book we encounter an opinion from ihe very highbrow “Saturday Review,” calling it a “stately book”; and that is the word to describe Mr, Hergesheimer and his reputation. That is how he takes him- self; to my friend George Sterling he said, “I am as big a man as Dreiser.” (To Be Continued.) (2 |. RED RAYS ye I J. BURNS, the noted de- ive (correct) was very indig- nant when testifying before the grand | jury on a charge of jury fixing. The sleuth had good reason to boil in- rdly. He was not doing anything, | he insisted, that is not quite legal and in a ance with precedent. Is it ‘not just as proper for the head of a | private fink agency to fix a jury for {a wealthy defendant as it was for |him to fix juries against labor de- |fendants? The gentleman’s logic is | unanswerable. * * * ee frame-up system is not in- digenous to the United States. I ;am not one of those who believe that the ruling classes of Europe are less hesitant about “polluting” their own judicial wells when it suits their pur- pose than are the less polished rulers jof this country. But in no other land | has the frame-up been more generally | indulged in than in this, and it surely is a reflection on the government of the United States that one who sent o many radical workers to jail with ch artistry should be humiliated by aving to appear before a grand jury mply because he fixed a jury for nelair instead 8f for John D. Rocke- feller. ® * * See. this cloud that now hangs over Burns has its silver lining. The publicity is worth something and should bring in more business to the agency. Burns, as perjurer, jury- fixer and frame-up artist needs no introduction to a well-informed pub- lic. But there must be thousands to whom Burns’ exploits are a Closed book. His success in dynamiting a federal jury will enhance his reputa- tion and the pain his sensitive soul may suffer at the hands of his pro- fessional opponents, will be assuaged by the increased volume of business which should flow into his office as a | vesult of his latest feat. | * * * 1s | | | | HE ,splended demonstration of the military strength of the Soviet gov- ernment aroused the enthusiasm even of capitalist correspondents who were obliged to pay a grudging tribute to the efficiency of the Red Army. The bedraggled, hungry and indisciplined army of 1917 has been transformed into a mighty weapon for the defense of the Revolution which has been chiefly responsible for the hesitancy of the imperialist powers to wage open war against the Workers and Peasants government. The first bugle note heralding an imperialist attack would be a signal for the mobilization of millions of workers ready to defend the socialist fatherland against its enemies. * * Tr Fascist League of North Amer- ica has taken the place formerly occupied by the Ku Klux Klan as the greatest regalia-peddling organiza- tion in the United States. What the white pillow case was to the klan, the black shirt is to the fascisti, A bum count by the name of Revail, who was of no account in Italy having a title but nothing to go with it, is now living in luxury here in New York on the proceeds of his haber- dashery business. * * * OUNT Revall, did not have-a second pair of pajamas to his name when he was made head of the American Fascisti by Mussolini, according to a reliable source. A long coat which he wore constantly, except when in bed, duu UNG Bayiug uve uu cne seat of Ms pants thru which a not spotless shirt insisted on peeping thru without warning. Now, the count has as many suits as an East Side gangster, and more shirts than you could col- lect in a Chinese laundry on a Satur- day morning. * * * eee count stops at a swell hotel when in New York and travels around the country inciting ignorant Italian workers against their more in- telligent and radical brethren. The count does this with impunity since his boss Mussolini is held in high re- pute by the United States govern- ment. This noble bum is now engaged trying to legally murder two Italian workers, Greco and Carillo, who are as innocent of the crime charged against them as were Sacco and Van- zetti of the death of the Braintree paymaster. Every American worker should rally to the defense of those two marked victims of Fascist and American capitalist vengeance and show the tip of a heavy hoot to the aristocratic panhandler who is livin in luxury at the expense of the It lan masses. * a * * LEVELAND exporters are anxious to get their share of Soviet trade. They held a foreign trade conference jlast Tuesday and being willing to hear both sides of the question, tened to Ivy Lee, press agent for ndard Oil, who spoke in favor of trade relations between . the © countries and Matthew Woll, la- | bor faker who spoke for worse. Both like Soviet Russia and everything it stands for, but Ivy is getting paid for one attitude while Matthew is get- ting paid for another. * * * dite public library has heen used by vendors of narcotics as a distribu- tion points for their wares, according to a federal agent who arrested four drug peddiers in the big book nouse. Sherlockian in their deductions, the salesmen assumed that habitues of the public library with a taste for Harold Bell Wright and Will Durant literature would be prospects for any- thing that could be injected into their systems without mental effort om their part. ‘ —T. J. OFLAHERTY. . : A