The Daily Worker Newspaper, November 16, 1927, Page 6

Page Six THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, NOV. 16, 1927 THE D AILY WORKER “THE EYE THAT NEVER SLEEPS” Published by the DAILY WORKER PUBLISHING CO, Daily, Except Sunday $9 First Street, New York, N. Y. Phone, Orchard 1680 Cable Address: “Daiwork” “SUBSCRIPTION RATES — ; By Mail (in New York only): By Mail (outside of New ore) 3 $8.00 per year $4.50 six manths $6.00 per years $3.50 six mont! $2.50 three months $2.00 three months ‘Address and mail and make out checks to THE DAILY WORKER, 33 First Street, New York, N. ¥._ POBDICOR o> ...ROBERT MINOR A ANT EDITOR. WM. F. DUNNE mail at the post-office at New York, the act of March 3, 1879. Entered as second-class Militant Company Unionism the kind of company unionism which appears as a rival to the American trade unions in such industries as New York City traction and the coal mines of West Virginia, basing itself on the “yellow dog” contract forced upon the workers, is by no means of a passive character. militant company unionism. It can be combatted and defeated only by a militant policy and tactics on the part of the labor movement. We pub ; Monday, Nov. 14, a cut of a leaflet distributed recently to traction workers by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. This leaf- let is signed by Frank Hedley, president and general manager of the Interborough. A perusal of this document discloses the fact that Hedley is speaking to the traction workers as members of a union—the Brotherhood of Interborough Rapid Transit Company _ Employes. His language is almost identical with that of a union official engaged in a jurisdictional conflict with a rival union. It says: This is One paragraph deserves special mention. “You have exercised your constitutional right to organize by joining the Interborough Brotherhood. It was a wise choice be- cause the Brotherhood through home rule gives better protection fe and complete collective bargaining between yourselves and the management without ‘any interference by out-of-town labor lead- ers.” (Our emphasis.) Hedley, president and general manager of the 1 R. E18 speaking as a union organizer. The union of course is a com- pany union but its leadership has decided to use trade union cal tics—and does use them, militantly. , In the capitalist press Hedley even speaks of calling a strike of “loyal employes” against the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employes. For workers who have had little or no experience with the labor movement it will be somewhat difficult to plumb the full depths of viciousness in the tactics of the I. R. T. It will be impossible for them to understand the vital issues involved if the leaders of the labor movement continue,their policy of trying to appear more patriotic than the Interborough, more devoted to the “interests of the public,” if stress continues to be laid upon the higher efficiency of A. F. of L. unions as against company unions. To fight a company union whicli issues leaflets, holds mass meetings and puts on all the trappings and regalia which trade unions have considered distinctively their own, which even uses trade union terms in speaking to workers it is trying to deceive, something more is necessary than old line trade union policy and tactics. The Amalgamated Association must, as must all unions in similar situations, see that workers understand that it will fight for the interests of the workers. To continue to deny any intention of striking, to tone down or deny the necessity, of struggle against the traction barons, in- junctions, the courts and police, is to play into the hands of the company union of the traction barons. Especially is it dangerous ed on the first page of The DAILY WORKER, | | i | | | Money Writes (Continued from Last Issue.) XXII. An American Victory 'FHEODORE DREISER is another} man who has told us his own story. In “A Book About Myself,” he makes himself known to us on page one, and |we observe that the child is father to the man. Wandering about the reets of Chicago, a homeless, job- jless, miserable youth, he reads a newspaper column by Eugene Field, jand “this comment on local life here jand now, these trenchant bits on lo- eal street scenes, institutions, char- acters, functions, all moved me as {nothing hitherto had.” That was thirty-seven years ago, and Dreiser is still interested in the local life of America; he is interested in life here jand now, no other time or place; he watches “street scenes, institutions, | characters, functions,” and stores | them up in the note-book of his mem- |ory, and when he has a few million of them, he weaves them into a vast pattern. | He wanted to be a newspaper man: | he had no idea how to begin, but he | hung around a newspaper office, like ja poor stray dog, until people got mental notes — you will find that magazine world of fashion in “The | Genius.” I used to meet Dreiser in those days, a big silent fellow. I liked to talk, and he liked to listen. In his early days he wrote a novel, “Sister Carrie,” telling the story of a girl of the sort he knew, one who had no wealth and family prestige to protect her, and who therefore lived with a man of the business world; it seemed to Carrie quite natural to do that, and aiso it seemed that way to Dreiser. But the bourgeois world of a generation ago was performing a kind of incantation upon itself, in- sisting that such things didn’t hap- pen; an elderly maiden aunt of Doubleday, Page and Company read this wicked book just after it appear- ed, and caused the remaining copies to be locked up. Dreiser was poor and unknown and friendless, and might have landed in jail if he had tried to make any protest. So that was the end of “Sister Carrie’—until it be- came a classic. A clear-sighted and truth-telling man has to have a tough hide to sur- vive in such a world. As I think Dreiser over, the quality which im- presses me is stubbornness. He knows what he wants, and he will wait as many years as necessary, but in the end he will get it. He is like an old bull elephant, shoving his way tion and hygiene, the socialization of production and the abolition of para- sitism, are means of raising the new race. But to Dreiser all this world of science is non-existent; nobody ever heard of it in the newspaper of- fices where he got his education. The nearest he has come to it is Christian Science, with which the hero of “The Genius” dallies in his period of de- feat and despair. Human beings can- not live on pessimism, however nobly felt and eloquently expressed; if they are not permitted to study the sci- ence of Professor Lankester, they will adopt that of Mrs. Eddy. Dreiser is the idol of our young writers today; a better divinity than others I have named, for the reason that he has not abdicated to snobbery. He has portrayed both poverty and wealth, and held the balance true; the great magazine world of fashion did not overwhelm him with awe while he lived in it. Now he has a best- seller, and has made two hundred thousand dollars, and that is an American victory. What will he do with it? A cruel joke upon our young By Fred Ellis By Upton Sinclair intelligenzia, if their big quiet idol were to turn into an old-style Chris- tian preacher! There are signs of it. “An Amer- ican Tragedy” is a Sunday-school ser- mon all complete; the church folks have only to expurgate the story of the seduction, which goes into more detail than is customary in Sunday- schools. But everything else is there, the early religious training, the fond mother praying for her wandering boy, the wicked world of wealth and fashion, the primrose path of vice, the pangs of guilt and fear, the temp- tation and the dreadful crime, the de- tection and conviction—and then the fond mother with her prayers again, and the clergyman. kneeling in the prison, repentance and forgiveness and the everlasting mercy of God. Fifty-six years Theodore Dreiser has had to look at life with his own in- dependent eyes, and report his own original unbiased opinion; and it turns out to be this novel and start- ling doctrine: “The wages of sin is death!” (To Be Continued). 1 i By ART SHIELDS (Fed. Press). Where Striking Miners Fight out of a woman, almost in her child- Red Rays |e denouncing compulsory military training at the College of the City of New York, two students were in- definitely suspended from _ their classes. The students thot such a thing as free speech existed in this democracy and while suffering from this delusion expressed their views on the question in an open meeting. What do those fellows think our mas- ters are running colleges and uni- versities for? . * * IBERALS and near-radicals who gag at the open dictatorship of the workers and peasants in Russia should take the action of the C. C. of N. Y, authorities as a little lesson in capitalist democracy. All class gov- , ernments are essentially dictatorial | Whatever liberties they permit to ti. subject classes under their jurisdiction are those they can afford to grant without endangering their own exist- ence. It is quite obvious from de- velopments thruout the world that the capitalist system in every country is rushing madly towards an open dictatorship. The workers have no choice between a dictatorship or a democracy. They have a choice as to which dictatorship they shall have, their own or the employers’. ‘HE Polish minister at Washington promptly denies that, Poland has hostile intentions towards Lithuania or is preparing for war against that country, as suggested in a Moscow dispatch to the New York Times, from Walter Duranty. The minister pays a tribute to the peaceful inten- tions of Marshal Pilsudski, the Polish dictator. Whatever other charges may be legitimately made against Pilsudski, pacifism is not one of them. Only last week he gave the legislators! elected by the people to make laws for the bourgeoise the bum’s rush out of the assembly. If he refrains from making war on Lithuania or on the Soviet Union, it will not be be-| | cause he has not the will, but because he has not the means. * . * = PUB USaNe alleged authentic ;" documents is not such a sure-fire thing as this favorite newspaper sport. was a few years ago. The forgery |business developed into the propor- tions of a leading industry since the end of the war. It fed on Soviet Russia in the early days, but now the forgers are turning to more virgin fields. Hearst is the champion| forgery-peddler in the United States. He is the most shameless liar in the newspaper business. His filthy rags feed on everything vile, from his sexy supplements which retail the per-' versions of the parasite class to for- geries, such as he is now putting out about Mexico. * * * [T= Mexican government has denied |* the authenticity of the documents published in the Hearst press. But even if it were established that the |Mexican government actually aided ‘the liberals in Nicaragua in their ef- jfort to overthrow the Wall Street | junta led by Diaz, surely there would be more justification for such a course |than there was for the action of the | United States government in occupy- |ing Nicaragua and enabling a min- to give the slightest impression that the traction workers will| tired of kicking him out, and finally |gave him something to write. So 2 rgani 5 y uni vi striking. | be able to organize and smash the company union without st ig leten Wav eaer AGREES CacENe et cE: | PITTSBURGH, Nov. 15.—Visit the! birth agony. Mrs. Shala herself was ority to enforce its rule on the people through a jungle; nothing diverts | in the interests of a band of America mn him, he goes on pushing and push- | battacks colonies at Russellton if you | sick when the deputies came, and her » oe It can be said with complete certainty that the only circum- |side. “I began to see how party coun- stances under which this could occur would be an agreement by the Amalgamated Association that it would do no more for the workers and just as much for the traction barons as the company | union does. If traction workers feel that this is what trade union policy under its present leadership amounts to, they will see no reason for fighting for this kind of an organization. They have one already—the traction baron’s company union. The traction workers can be organized as a part of the Amer- jean labor movement but not by union officials creating the im- pression that the union for which they speak differs from com- pany unions only in name. Neither can the traction workers be convinced of the ability of the labor movement to fight for them if union officials attach more importance to the meaningless words of capitalist party politicians, expressing “sympathy” for the traction workers, than they do to intensive organization work. The traction workers have to be told that if they depend] upon a Governor Smith or a Mayer Walker for sympathy as a substitute for organization and struggle, then they court disaster. In the event of a strike the state authorities, the police and the courts of the state and city, will be found, as they always have, on the side of the traction barons and their company union. | “The right to organize” has no legal basis in the United States. by the power of the labor movement. Organization campaigns earried on against militant company unions and powerful capi-| “ talists, will meet the solid opposition of all branches of govern-|; ment. Once this is clear to workers who face big struggles, there It means nothing unless the will to organize is backed! cils and party tendencfes were manu- |factured or twisted or belied, and it still further reduced my estimate of humanity. Men, as I was beginning to find—all of us—were small, irrit- able, nasty in their struggle for ex- istence.” An editor says to him: “Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacher- ous game, and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of every thou- sand are bastards.” That is news- paper talk, and that is the newspa- per man’s world, in which Theodore Dreiser spent his formative years. The men of that world had very few of them what we call ‘“educa- tion”; they had learned reading, writ- ing, arithmetic, and geography, and then gone to work. They knew noth- ing about the past, and had no vision of the future, no science, no under- anding of the causes of anything. What they knew was the world about them, its external aspects which they wrote up” day by day; when they id “inside” knowledge of anything, it meant the intrigues and rascalities of men of power, “bastards” like themselves, except that they had wealth, or the greed and energy to | prey upon the wealthy. Newspaper | of fic were dirty, and ‘newspaper men ked under terrific pressure, with the aid of narcoties and stimu- ; they lived in a blue smoke of and kept a bottle of whiskey desks, and paid a visit to the saloon every time they left the azine world, and became a man- ing. When he gets out, his hide will be scarred and knobby, but he will be want to meet the most stubborn spirit | eldest daughter was in the hospital | capitalists, in the Pittsburgh mining region. Here a thousand men, women and children, evicted by the Republie Iron & Steel Co., are crowded together in long one- story pine board shacks that they as- ‘sembled in a day and night race the same old elephant. Dreiser in “An American Tragedy” is exactly the same as in “Sister Car- rie.” He has had twenty-five years in which to observe “the local street ; scenes, institutions, characters, func- | peaonek the ouster date. - tions” of America; and so he knows | WARS Doers emai coon ey more detail about them, but he does |*#¢ distrtct_miners’ union, the men as worked in the rains of late October not, Understang eng veer. Row they j while their women brewed coffee and came to be, or how they may become isle otherwise. His heart aches for the |*®# t? keep them warm. Eviction day waste and suffering, he broods over his characters like a fond mother, ex- cusing them for everything they do! --how could they do otherwise? The | grim stubbornness which made Theo- ! dore Dreiser one of the worid’s great | novelists is too much to be expected | of Carrie- Meeber and Jennie Ger-/ hardt and Eugene Witla and Clyde, Griffiths—they are all weaklings, | grist for the inexorable mills of fate. | The philosophy of Dreiser is the same as that of Thomas Hardy. Both of them see human beings as the sport of natural forces never to be* comprehended; and the sublimity of | both rests upon your willingness to) accept their philosophy of moral) nihilism. Hardy has choruses of var- | ious kinds of spirits and superior be- | ings to explain to us the blind trag-| edy of the dynasts; but Dreiser serves | ~ as his own chorus, his pity and grief | is like a monotone of muted strings | underneath his narratives of futility | and false glory. I am not quarreling with this! great-hearted writer because he is not | from an unsuccessful operation for appendicitis. Women Active. Neither rough stuff nor soft speech is availing the boss in his efforts to split the ranks. His latest move, said the women, has been to come as their friend and offer them the use of com- pany house water that he cut off in the early days after evictions. But now he’s too late, for the union has bored several wells where they get | Miners’ Barracks at Russellton. Drawn by Don Brown. can be no demoralization created by disappointment resulting | from the fact that governors and mayors who were looked upon as “friends of labor” appear as deadly enemies mobilizing gov- ing editor of Butterick publications, as Dresier was for many years, you found a world externally different, ernment forces against the workers. The Soviet government cannot be recognized by the American Federation of Labor and the United States government, according to John Frey, secretary of the Metal Trades Department of the A. F. of L., because “they are a government of the working class and because of it we cannot grant them recognition.” And con- sistently enough Mr. Frey is not conducting a campaign for with- drawing recognition from the fascist government of Italy because ,it is not a working class government. Neither is Mr. Frey a working class leader. { | but spiritually the same; you had a ; clean office, with rugs on the floor jand a shiny desk and a potted palm in the corner, but the members of the | staff were the same “bastards,” risen by virtue of their ability to judge with greater accuracy what the nameless millions outside would spend their money for. Dreiser possessed that ability, and might have been a man- aging editor yet, but there was some- thing else in him, as in Sherwood An- derson. But he did, not let it wreck him: he hided his time. ang made. t a socialist in the narrow sense. tific socialism is only a part of man’s big job of understanding the blind forces of nature and subordineting them to his will Read a little book by a true scientist, Ray Lankester’s “The Kingdom of Man,” and learn what is the matter with our world. We have partly suppressed the na- tural process of selection and elimin- ation of the unfit; and we have either to go on and take rational control of the improvement: of human stocks and the environment in which they grow, or else see our culture degen- erate and perish. Birth control and eugenics are the merciful ways of eliminating the unfit: while sanita- Scien- | came before doors and windows were sweet water, ever so much better than fastened and hammers were still busy the filthy mine-run yellow stuff that the day I called at the two settle-\runs through the company house} ne and the other in a wood on the ll. union striker. ““That’s 100 percent for the men; 100 percent for the woman and 100 percent for the chil- dren.” Bob MeVicker, the superintendent, tried to break the spirit of the strik- ers, but merely stirred them up to Frente resistance. Mrs. Shala and ie other women told of the pe | ments, one by the roadside near the) faucets, The women’s auxiliary is busy run- ning dances to raise money. They | “This strike is just 300 percent,”|took in more than $190 at the last said Mrs. Wallas Shala, president of! affair, bringing friendly folks from the women’s auxiliary and wife of a; New Kensington where lives Mr, Mil- ler, the shoe merchant who gives them shoes at cost—45 pairs for $83, last purchase-—and Fred Broad, banker, and son-in-law of Fannie Sellins, the woman organizer for the United Mine Workers whose brains were beaten out by thugs a few days before the ed of the great steel strike in * * * HAVE been informed that “The Belt” which was recently reviewed several times in The DAILY WORK- | ER is now turning crowds away from the doors of the new Playwrights Theatre at 36 Commerce Street. This miracle has been accomplished by energetic canvassing as well as be-« |cause of the interest aroused in the |play by the difference of opinion as to its merits expressed in this paper. When two fairly prominent indi« viduals express divergent views on such an intriguing thing as a play, it is to be expected that people should jlike to learn for themselves who ia right. And since The DAILY WORK. | ER will be benefited by the sale of | tickets, the more curious people that |go to see it, the better it will suit this column, * * * ae Honorable Dudley Field Malone, of Paris, London and New York divorce that retails at approximately/ | $2,000, cannot be much good for any- |thing except for a cheap lawyer. In other words it must be a dud. Mr, Malone’s ire was aroused when he into court the rather hefty cognomen of Senor Arturo del Toro, hung out his shingle in the state of Sonora, | Mexico, and hinted that New Yorkers with fat purses could enjoy a southern ‘exposure below the Rio Grande, whila being emancipated from their con- |nubial fetters for almost as little as \it would cost them for a first clasg trip on an ocean liner to Paris whera Mr. Malone performs his acts of mercy, fi LESt it might be suspected that Mr Malone’s observations could be construed as the prejudices of a busi- ness man fearing unfair competition he was careful to give the Sonora divorce mill the benefit of the doubt, “The Sonora divorce laws don’t sound exactly all right” he said, “but they don’t sound all wrong either.” Tq which Senor del Toro can blow up tha dust by way of acquiescence. TJ. OFLAHERTY. | is of the opinion that a brand of Fi! reard that a gentleman who carries } } | | |