The Daily Worker Newspaper, November 19, 1927, Page 7

4 | psychology and the Communist down- | ordinary everyday constructive work, =A Art for th ITERATURE, the theatre, the cin- ema, painting,—all the arts which in capitalist society bear the Cain’s mark of bourgeois ideology are being emancipated by the November Revo- lution and transformed from instru- ments for lulling to sleep the work- ers by “lovely dreams” into a power- ful weapon of class struggle and art education of the workers. Such a transformation does not of course happen in a day or even a year, it happens gradually as the proletariat itself begins to produce its own writers, artists, actors, etc. ‘In the first years after the revolu- tion workers who began to build up| their life anew could not create an} art as beautiful in form as the ol e Workers Grand Opera, the Little (dramatic) Theatre, and others, have the well- earned reputation of being the best in the world. The November Revolution has given a chance to a number of new revolutionary theatres: the Meyerhold theatre, the theatre of the Moscow Gubernia Trade Union Coun+ cil, the theatres of Revolu- tion, of Satire, of the “Blue Overalls” and many provincial theatres. Many theatres including the Academic (State) theatres produce their best plays frequently for working class audiences only whose visits to the theatre are properly organized ~(all the workers of a factory or members of a trade union come to the theatre). A veering to the Left is noticeable THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, SATURDAY, NOV. 19, 1927 which they inherited from the past.|in the repertories of all theatres in- Proletarian literature is bound to be| cluding those of the old culture; the in the beginning a “literature of|requirements of the toiling masses manifestoes, programmes and ap-|are taken into consideration. As an peals,” says a critic of modern litera-| example of this we would like to ture. But these juvenile efforts of; quote such plays as “Liubox Yaro- proletarian poetry were followed by| Vaya” in the Little Theatre and the other efforts which were a testintony| ballet “Red Poppy,” in the Grand Page Seven [| BOOK R EVIEWS@ AN OUTLINE OF A PHILOSOPHER TRANSITION: A Mental Biography. By Will Durant Simon & Schuster. $3. ESTING from the arduous labors of his Story of Phil- esophy, Will Durant, in his off-hours as a co-partner | of a summer camp in Pennsylvania, wrote the story of | how he actually became a great man. If any there were | who may have been beguiled by the sweet persuasions of | his previous volume, the present performance will reveal |sharply and convincinglythe nature of his mind and the | depth of his spirit. | Will Durant first appeared on the sociological horizon |as a public lecturer, and then as director of the Labor Temple in New York. Swift and dazzling was his rise }as a “scholar” who could jecture on any phase or aspect of the world of knowledge. Sweeping in his intellectual interests, the scope of Durant’s disquisitions to breathless |audiences in the Temple of Learning, conducted by the |New York Presbytery revealed a knowledge unrivalled | by the educational series offered in the Haldemann-Julius “Blue Books.” * * . éf its growing maturity. Maybe that even now the verse and prose of pro- letarian writers lacks the purely out- ward qualities which distinguish the representatives of the preceding | jiterature, but to make up for this} they have an unlimited influence on! the working class because of the| sincerity of their feelings, their, thorough knowledge of workers’ rightness in everything they have to say. . * * Side by side with proletarian writers we have writers known py the name of “companions” who have ac- cepted the revolution and are placing their talent at its disposal, although not without vacillations and errors. “Companions” are generally called writers who have not joined any of the proletarian literary organizations, but who are in some way or other connected with the work done by the November Revolution and are its chroniclers. Peasant writers coordinated in a special organization (Union of Pea- sant Writers) and several other Left groupings. are allies of the prole- tarian writers. In its general character contem- porary Russian literature reflects the the constructive pathos of our days and also all that we lived through in the years of civil war. A very original mass proletarian literary organization is the All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP) which has in its ranks over. 8,000 working class writers through- out the U.S.S.R. The VAPP and the Writers’ Union (an organization of companions) have established the; Federation of Soviet Writers which @eordinates almost all the writers. of the US.S.R. The literature of the Soviet Union ghows what talent is to be found ‘among the masses and how the Revo- ‘ution has released this talent from its bonds. . * * The state theatres of the U.S.S.R., such as the Moscow Art theatre, the Theatre, ete. Prior to its first of- ficial performance, “Red Poppy” was put on the stage for the workers’ correspondents and the “Peoples Ar- tiste” Geltzer, who plays the heroine in this ballet ,introduced changes into her role in accordance with the hints of the workers’ correspondents. Where apart from Russia is such collaboration between prominent ac- tors and working people possible? Art has ceased to cater for the gourmand tastes of the select few. It caters now for the workers. First of all theatres now are less expensive. Up to 40 per cent of the total number of theatre tickets are distributed at reduced prices through factory and employee committees. Secondly, scenic art has assumed a mass char- acter, it has established itself in clubs (there is hardly any club with- out a stage, without a dramatic circle) and on ordinary platforms. The best platform theatre created by the working youth is the Moscow’ “Blue Overall” which has many imitators in the provinces. Art in all its forms is becoming more accéssible to workers. This ap- plies particularly to the «inema,— “The most important of all arts” to quote Lenin. Film production in the U.S.S.R. which has given to the world such chefs d’oevre as “The Armoured Cruiser “Potemkin,” “Mother,” and others, is growing from year to year. For instance in 1928, 32 artistic films were produced in the U. S. S. R, whereas in 1926-27 the number of such films was 125, ie. four times as many. The cinema which is throughout the world a powerful instrument for the dissemination of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois morality and an in- strument of the class policy of the propertied classes, produces in the U. S. S. R. vivid pictures of the civil war and Soviet construction highly artis- tic in form and instructive-propagan- dist in substance. Art is “permeating” gradually the life and habits of the workers, it is becoming one of the essentials of the new social order, the new life. Wrecking the Labor Banks The Collapse of the Labor Banks and Investment It is a story of money. A most astoundin, Companies of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers By WM. Z. FOSTER Here is a record of trade. union treachery without equal in\yAmerican Labor history: crooked leadership; disas- trous policies; looting of the treasury; rifling the union insurance funds and pension ,/ g account of events that nearly wrecked one of the great American trade uniong and resulted in the loss of over twenty million dollars wy By A. B. MAGIL. The skeletons of Ludlow are marching again, Their bright keen bones glitter in the sun. Through Colorado canons the bony tread Of every staring skeleton Joins with the voice of Ludlow’s passionate dead, Calling to Ludlow’s living men ‘And learn bitterly to be strong. L Gunmen, scabs and state police. (The law, the law doth shelter the weak.) We are brothers, Christ is the prince of peace. Miners, turn the other cheek To the bullet’s kiss or the caress Of the fist of gunmen friendliness. We are brothers... tl. Ludlow’s Easter Sunday yells aloud. “We'll show that lousy goddam Polack crowd!” TI. Go back, life. Crawl and lie down like a used up thing. A hole waits to bury your whimper, A noose to hang your rebellion, And for your hunger There is your own dirty clotted blood. Do you want music? Listen to the pounding in your brain. Do you want love? The rats are faithful. Go back, go back, life: The almighty Rockefellers own you here. Ty. Imagine a miner’s face: .| Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair. STRIKE! (To the Heroic Colorado Coal Miners.) To stand up in darkness and remember their bitter wrong, Christ that day was a scarecrow sticking in a field. It was funny to hear how the women and children squealed! Christ was the prince of scarecrow sticking in a field. Not for long, however, was it given that the great sage should continue his pure and Socratic life, dispens- ing light to the weary and heavy-laden. For with the publication of his Story of Philosophy (a volume of quaint and pleasant anecdotes about various philosoph- ers), Durant found that the attacks on the cultural Phil- istines of sordid America were a libel and a slander, en- tirely unjustified. With great joy and thanksgiving the |intellectual virtuoso discovered the Great Awakening. Tho his book sold for the sum of $5 over 175,000 people purchased it from the publishers who, in their own right, had become wealthy on the sales of the successive edi- tions of Cross Word Puzzles. “One hundred and seventy- five thousand minds, here and now,” runs the publisher’s announcement, “have shared Browning's convictio ‘Life has a meaning—to find it is my meat and drink.’ ” The Labor Temple is now without the great scholar. | Barren indeed must be the spacious auditorium without |the nasal and ingratiating voice of the Man Who Knows Everything. No longer dazed by his meteoric success, Durant has taken his facile pen in hand to write the story of a phil- osopher. Happy at the tremendous sale of his first book, and made mellow by the charming receptions he received at the hundreds of Women’s Clubs where he jlectured on various aspects of Life at a fee of $300, Durant’s Transition is naturally quite free from that |gloomy outlook which prevails among many contempo- rary writers, called by some “Prophets of Despair.” * . . Ushered in by the dedication “To a Tender Mother and a Perfect Father,” the present volume under proper ad- vertising auspices should have as happy a sale as The Story of Philosophy. The book “tries to show the effect, upon one growing mind, of the profound transformation which modern science and research have brought in the faith of the western world. Also to trace the evolution of a fairly typical rebel from Utopian aspiration thru \a cynical despondency to some measure of reconciliation jand good cheer,” Will Durant was born the son of a worker in a cement factory in Readsboro, Vt. He went to Catholic schools; studied for the priesthood; read Darwin, decided not to become a priest for that (and probably many other) Teasons, was subsidized by a rich acquaintance during a period of European travel and several years of study at Columbia where he was finally decorated with a Ph. D. During one brief period he was a reporter for the New York Journal, but a curious tendency on the part of the city editor to assign Durant to rape cases caused the latter to resign his job. Then, too, he “found the life too fast for a philosopher and retired to the slower pace of professor at Seton Hall College, So. Orange, N. J.” A sharp nostalgia for the fast life of journalism must have possessed Durant some years later, for he returned to the profession and applied the divining rod of the higher philosophy to the mysteries of the Snyder-Gray murder case, and wrote an expensive series of articles for the New York Telegram. 1 ° * . | Durant had some political disillusions, too. In a chap- | ter called, “I Play Politics” the philosopher tells how he joined up with J. A. H. Hopkins and his fraternity of jernment for the people.” Tho the political lessons to be gleaned from the narrative are few and lean, the light which it casts on the great philosopher himself are many and fortunate. “At bottom I am as romantic and sentimental as | Successful lawyers in a bold efforft to “capture the gov" a high-school girl or an old maid ant, “I think I shall never and charming! How utte He tells h n Ju the Farme camp when it was disco convention had agreed to his friends had been arg and “labored for d to confesses Dur- How coy vy he went to Chicago wi how his group was ea had dreamed of the time tule the world, now foun npleasant to ride alongside them in tl t whatever enthusiasm I might dictator- ship of the proletariat, or even the rule of the people.’” * * * There were other reasons for despair, too. The phil- ,osopher discovered that life itself was a delusion and & snare. “I was left empty and de the age of the Great Sadne @ pretty story when I was y hopes were false; all things + heart must break.” « * * e. I belonged to They had told me g, All man’s ld die; afid every ed to be short Envoi! Durant’s despair was dest lived, however. Have you alre: sed it? Tee- hee! It seems that when the ¢ r was in his early thirties he had married, under lyrical auspices, one of his pupils, a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl. “...As I looked into her eyes I felt myself in the presence of life itself. These brown eyes danced and burned as if behind them all the forces of creation surged; this tense body, even when still, trembled with action and desire.” And then little Ethel came. Thus, “It is right that my story should end here; for since Ethel came my world has revolved about her rather than about me, and I have had the happiness of the nation that knows no history. I should never have expected to be so easily con tent, and to resign so readily my ambition to re- make the world.” —SENDER GARLIN. Comment ee volumes in the Vanguard Studies of Soviet Russia have already appeared. The Economic Or- ganization of the Soviet Union, by Scott Nearing and Jack Hardy is a careful study of the economic back- ground inherited from the czar’s regime, the economie functions and relationships in the Soviet Union, and the central economic plan for agriculture, industry, internal and foreign trade, finance, labor, and the cooperative movement. In the series is also a book by Robert W. Dunn entitled Soviet Trade Unions. This will be a description of the trade union mechanism in the U. S. S. R., what it has accomplished for the workers, and its relationship to the government, Art and Culture in Soviet Russia is being edited by Joseph Freeman, in cooperation with Ernestine Evans, Louis Lozowick, Babette Deutsch and Lee Simonson. This volume will be a compilation of studies of various aspects of art and culture in the Soviet Union: literature poetry, painting, the theatre, the movies, BOOKS RECEIVED: REVIEWED LATER Benito Mussolini. Doran Co, Village Life Under the Soviets, By Karl Borders. Vanguard Press, The Right To Be Happy. By Mrs. Bertrand Rus- By Jean Bordeux. Geo. H. sell. Harper & Bros, An Unmarried Father. By Floyd Dell. Doran & 0. Cities and Men. By Ludwig Lewisohn. Harper & Bros. Escape. By John Galsworthy. Chas. Scribners Sons. The Problem of Lay-Analysis. By Sigmund Freud. Brentano. : The Outline of Man’s Knowledge. Wood. Lewis Copeland Co. Postponing Strikes: A study of the Canadian In- dustrial Disputes Act. By Ben M. Selekman. By Clement I see in your book review section Russell Sage Foundation, Frank Harris’ Novel, “The Bomb” A Letter from a Haymarket Widow from the funds of the railroad workers. 25 CENTS Send one dollar for five copies RAILROADERS' NEXT STEP By Wm. Z. Foster ..,.... .26 THE WATSON-PARKER LAW By Wm. Z, Foster ....... 5 THE WORKERS LIBRARY PUBLISHERS Imagine it laughing, eating, drinking, sleeping, Showing joy, anger, pain, tenderness. Imagine it kissing other faces, being kissed. (Your face, my face.) Imagine it, damn you! . Vie Milka Sablich name of nineteen-year-old girl. Milka Sablich talking to men at meetings, rousing, imploring, whipping to action. Milka Sablich leading picket lines, shouting a bright defy out of a young bright defiant throat. Milka Sablich beaten, trampled upon, bleeding, lying in hospital, one side paralyzed. i Milka Sablich talking to men at meetings, rousing, imploring, whipping to action, leading picket lines—again, again. What do I know of miner girls? Movies of mining camp queens, dancehall dollies. Stories. Dirty jokes. Bunk. What do I know of miners’ daughters, miners’ sweethearts? Milka Sablich name of nineteen-year-old girl. VIL STRIKE! Stick this in your hats for a lamp. Ludlow’s Easter Sunday yells aloud. The crying of women and children in hovels, in tents is making you strong, And the skeletons of Ludlow are marching again, The skeletons of Ludlow are singing a song. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!” Louis Tikas. Milka Sablich. The living men of Ludlow are marching and singing a song. “Arise, ye wretched of the earth!” 39 East 125th Street New York, N. Y. Sink your picks into the darkness—break it. The lamp: > eae, = | STRIKE! of November 12, 1927 that your re- viewer states that Frank Harris’ “‘The Bomb’ is a fairly accurate de- scription of the actual incidents.” These “actual incidents” refer to what led up to the Haymarket bomb throw- ing. Allow me space in your paper to protest against and refute Frank Harris’ bombastic fulmination known as the “Bomb” which your reviewer endorses. Furthermore allow me to state the actual facts of the case as I know them. This “history” of the Haymarket meeting is a fraud from cover to cov- er. Why, Frank Harris doesn’t even know the topography of Chicago! He gives us an “East Side.” Unfortun- ately he does not even know Lake Michigan’ is our “East Side.” Frank Harris and those who are publishing and endorsing his book are convicting our comrades under the rulings of the judge who tried them. The judge stated specifically that in following the laws of the state of Illinois if one of the defendants at bar had been instrumental in throw- ing the bomb at the Haymarket meet- ing, ALL were equally guilty. For- tunately for our martyred comrades the records of the trial proves them absolutely innocent of any connection whatsoever in the bomb throwing at the Haymarket meeting. Gov. John P. Altgeld in his masterful state- ment of the case in releasing three of the victims who had been commuted to life sentence States that there is not one scintilla of evidence connect- ing any of the defendants with the bomb throwing at the Haymarket meeting. Frank Harris’ “history” is built upow the alleged “facts” that Lingg made the bombs and forced Rudolf Schnabel to throw it at the Hay- market meeting and in a very drama- tic way got Rudolf Schnabel aboard a train in Chicago by getting said Schnabel beastly drunk. Then in some other mysterious way unex- plained, Harwis digs Schnabel up in Mannheim, Germany and there Schnabel makes his “death-bcd con- fession” revealing the above plot which was the exact contention of the state. But unfortunately for said rel to my absolute knowledge is stil! alive, LUCY E. PARSONS rank Harris’ beautiful plot Schna-| The facts cited by Mrs. Parsons are extremely interesting and im- portant. She errs, however, in as- suming that the reviewer was un- der the impression that Frank Harris had written a “history” of the Haymarket riots. The book was recommended merely as a graphic description of the par- ticular atmosphere of the time, re- membering, of course, that “The | Bomb” is a work of fiction. The | reviewer did not imply that “Lingg made the bombs, or Schnabel threw them.” That part, of course, is fiction. Because of Lucy Parsons’ great |courage and her relationship to the | actual she certainly mefits greater credence than Frank Harris —especially concerning the factual as- pects of the case.—S, G. events Eighty-Year-Old Woman Peddler Tells Court Story of 36 Years of Struggle in America An 80-year old woman, who has managed to make a living by hard immigrant worker, forced by circum. stances to earn a living for her hus- abor for 11 children and a sick hus-| band and large family. >and, for 36 years, was summoned For six years she washed windows to the Tombs Court charged with a|but broke down under the work™and minor violation of the Health De-|she became a peddler. Several hun- partment ordinance by a policeman |dred dollars saved toward her old age in her district. {were lost in a bank failure. Her hus- Mrs. Bessie Less ha¢ been selling | band and ten of her children are now pretzels and candy in Battery Place | dead. The one remaining child is @ but to Patrolman David J. Donnelly | patient in the State Hospital on it appeared that she was not keeping | Ward’s Island. her wares properly covered. She was! Magistrate Simpson discharged het forced to lose a day’s profits going to | and a charitable donation of $15 was court. \given her. She was then turned out Mrs. Less told the magistrate the ‘of the court room to resume her dn- story of her long exploitation as an certain trade. i