The Daily Worker Newspaper, December 12, 1927, Page 6

Page Six THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, MONDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1927 Tai DAILY WORKER Published by the NATIONAL DALLY WORKER PUBLISHING ASS’N, Inc: Daily, ept Sunday York, N. Y. Ca Add 83 First Street, New Phone, Orchard 1680 York, N. ¥., under Trust” Laws iovement welded into an effi- s and consolidation of VOSA Gove nt and the La led anti-trust laws have been The s cient instrum the power of capitalis industry in this per’ Ba d by their government, the coal barons are striking ter- rific blows at the United Mine Workers. The injunction against the entire American ation of Labor sought by the traction interests in New York City is a direct offshoot of the capitalist drive on the unions, and interwoven in the whole fabric whose . folds are being cast over the unions, are “yellow dog” contracts, company unionism and speed-up systems. The Wall Street Journal has the following to say on the A. F. of L. officialdom opposition to legal restraints imposed on. the unions: “Once the boycott on goods produced by non-union labor were established as legal, unionism could create no end of trouble for employers who produce them, no matter how contented their own direct employes might be. It is no exaggeration to say that it could then put many of them out of business and leave them no redress, as the cut stone cases in the federal courts have shown. | Tf, likewise, the “yellow dog” contract, in which the employe agrees not to join any union except the association of those work- ing for the same employer, can be sufficiently discredited or even barred by statute, first blood will be won against the ‘‘company | And with that form of industrial accord disposed of, the | union.” national unions tied together in the Federation will offer worker: practically their sole opportunity for co-operation or collective ac- tion in their own interest.” “Obviously,” the Wall Street Journal continues, “these would be long steps toward the establishment of an effective labor mo- nopoly. The Journal goes on to state that “barring specific errors of judgment, the use of the injunction by the courts has been in the prevention of acts of forcible restraint against the GENERAL good.” (Our emphasis.) Deploring the fact that the Interborough Rapid Transit Com- pany’s reputation is not such as to rally the broadest possible sup- port for its injunction war on the labor movement, The Wall Street Journal concludes nevertheless that the fight must be supported. At the recent sessions of the Mining Congress, Gilbert H. gue, an expert loophole finder for big business, told the del- ..es that the Coolidge administration was the greatest friend ombinations of big capital which had ever been parked in the jouse. He commended the supreme court, the department tice and the federal trade commission for their warm inter- welfare of corporations and the delegates, managers and gineers applauded loudly. The same “anti-trust” measures whose application to unions brings these plaudits from the agents of capitalists and the cap- italists themselves, were once the target of bitter criticism from the same source. o But a method has been worked out whereby it is only the organizations. of. workers which today come in conflict with the provisions of these laws. The Standard Oil Company, for instance, is cleared of all guilt in connection with restraint of trade or the ill-fortune which overtakes its competitors, but the supreme court outlaws the United Mine Workers’ Union for organizing workers, forced to sign “yellow dog”: contracts, because this interferes with the production of coal—an article of interstate commerce. Consolidate capitalism—this is the motto of the Coolidge ad- ministration. Montague, the corporation lawyer, told the Mining Congress: . “Never in the history of the anti-trust law has their interpre- tation by the supreme court and their administration by the gov- ernment been so sympathetic as now to the present and future needs of American business. “Business men are only just beginning to realize what a va- riety of new and effective methods for stabilizing business at home and for extending business abroad have become available in consequence of recent decisions and rulings by the supreme court, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. “More and bigger consolidations among producers, manufac- turers and distributors, under proper conditions and with adequate fega! safeguards, are permitted and indeed invited by the present attitude of the court and the government. * * * More and bigger consolidations may soon be expected in a number of indus- tries that are now the worst sufferers from these conditions.” The officialdom of the American Federation of Labor is foreed reluctantly to recognize the breakdown of its whole policy of class peace, efficiency unionism, trade union capitalism and slavish submission to the policy of Wall Street’s labor and state departments, insofar as its ability to secure enough concessions to keep the masses quiescent is concerned. In the current number of the American Federationist, there- fore, it is no coincidence that the three leading editorials deal with injunctions in general, with the injunctions against the United Mine Workers of America and with the injunction sought by the traction barons against the whole labor movement. Pres t Green says, in the first se 2 of the first edi- torial: de Unionists are face to face a condition that iy u life of ¢ iz is is the frankest V the of the s facing the} as ever been made and because it is mz ce Los Angeles conve one of the influential y some six we adjourned it is «oubly significant. the government is smashing the unions. This is the main line of the Coolidge program at home in relation to the working class. For the capitalist class it means, as Montague, the corpo- ration lawyer, says, ‘‘more and bigger consolidations.” The labor movement must discard its middle class “con- sumer” attitude toward trustification. It must understand that this is part of the imperialist program for suppression of the Masses at home and conquest abroad and not merely a scheme for raising prices. ‘ The official leadership of the labor movement has no argu- ment left against the proposals for militant organization cam- paigns, the establishmentgof a labor party, mass violation of in- A FASCISMO PROSECUTES By Fred Ellis ry “All offenders against Fascism either inside or outside of Italy shall be punished.”—Mussolini. | (Continued from Last Issue.) XXXII. | Art and the Trader | EVERY artist is a double personality, | living two lives. The impulse is in its very essence altruistic, bountiful as Nature, unselfish as God, But also, alas, the artist is a creature with a stomach that must be filled and a |skin that must be covered; he is apt to want a wife, or a husband, and ‘children, and these also must be fed |and covered, and the wife must have |a social position among the other wives. So the godlike impulse of spir- litual overflow is checked and cen- |sored; there are copyrights and con- |tracts and royalties and foreign and |dramatic and second serial rights. This dual nature is shared by every \form of art product. A book is what Milton calls it, the precious life-blood jof a master-spirit, embalmed and | treasured up on purpose to a life be- | yond life. | book is a piece of merchandise, upon which toll must be paid to lumbermen jand papet-mills and railroads and printers and publishers and jobbers and retailers. So it comes that at jevery minute of his life the artist is ‘at war with himself. “I feel two |natures struggling within in me says | the sculptor Barnard; and maybe he | doesn’t know how this happens, but |I can tell him, having supported my- \self by my art for thirty-three years, land been practically never out of ‘debt in one form or another. As pub- |lisher of my own books, I face the | conflict every time I have a new one |veady. Shall I put the price lower, and reach some thousands of addi- tional readers? Or shall I put it higher, and reduce my unfavorable balance' at the printers? It was my fortune many years ago te sit in the sumptuous work-rooms of Mr. David Belasco, while Arch Selwyn, then a play-broker, was en- : in selling the script of my he Millennium.” Both these | gentler en belong to a race which has been in trade for many thousands of ars; you may watch their technique along the curb where the suspender- merchants assemble. In this case the object of the barter is a work of ‘art; ana, strange as it may seem, loth traders have a keen apprecia- | tion of art qualities. “Yes, delightful, I know,” says Mr. Belasco, “but oh, | my God, think what it’s going to cost to produce--and all that Socialist | stuff in it—I’ll be bankrupt if I have | pay more than two hundred and | te | ‘ifty advance.” I sit and listen—it is | my chance to write other plays that is being decided. Also I have been present while le | Chaplin was selling the fruit “4 us to the tr rs; at least, aven’t actually been there, but harlie has enacted the scene for me, i To be sure; but also a! Money Writes and that is the same thing. He is under contract to make a two-reel picture, and out cf his spiritual over- flow he has made eight or ten—it is “The Kid.” And the traders come, great hulks of flesh rolling out of their limousines, and they sit slouch- ed in their chairs, and the recls are unrolled before them, and the sensi- tive artist sits quivering—he can’t keep still while his reels are being unrolled, his hands become frantic, he must hear you speak. *“What do you think of it? good” But the traders do not speak, they understand how to wring the artist soul. How Charlie loathes them— his form swells to greater bulk as he enacts them, his face becomes a grim mask; there comes a grunt, from un- der the chest, and one great hog looks at the next great hog, and at last a verdict: “One million is enough, huh?” and the other grunts, is too much.” Such is the life of artists under capitalism. And do not think that am lacking in pity for any artist— my harshest words are merely an ef- fort to goad him into class conscious- ness. For it is not merely his in- dividual life that is at stake, not merely his art, but civilization. “If the salt have lost its savor, where- with shall it be salted?” The successful artists are those who learn to put a shell around them, and live like a tortoise, inside. The trouble with this procedure is that in the course of time the creature is apt to become all shell and no tor- toise; the art impulses die, and only imitation and pose are left. I re- member once at Helicon Hall we had a visit from a newspaper poet—I nave forgotten his name, and would- n’t give it anyhow, because he was a poor devil, and I am after the rich mes. He sat in front of ovr fire- place for a couple of hours and talked rbout his art, and it turned out to be the art of marketing verses, and the personalties of the various edi- tors, and what they paid, and what kind of “stuff” they preferred. “I sold him a poem once, but they don’t buy much from outsiders,” and so on and on. At the same conference sat two ladies, whom I knew well. They were taking care of themselves and a couple of children by their pens, and it was a perfectly cold-blooded business proposition, and no non- sense. Tn some months of acquaint- ance, I do not think I ever heard either of these ladies express an opinion of a book unless it had to do with what the author had got for it, and for other beoks, and how that magizine or publisher compared with others, I had contempt for such an attitude; until it happened that the younger of the ladies, a jolly soul, recited quite casually how she had Is it sought a position on the greatest of New York newspapers, and had been “| junetions, mobilization of the labor movement for resistance to | the imperialist program. | This leadership, in refusing to do more than feebly request modification of the anti-trust laws, must base its program on “loyalty to American institutions” and “non-partisan” election campaigns for candidates of the capitalist parties—a slogan and a tactic which appear already as false, hollow and dangerous to thousands of workers. The capitalist class, the government, its instrument, and the official labor leaders, its agents, are creating rapidly the condi- tions for a militant mass movement. In the creation of this mass movement our party will play a leading role. Its program offers can working class. i bt ‘l the only way out for the Ameri- pulled down onto the lap of the wealthy and famous publisher. So then I realized a new point of view: the fact that this young woman could turn out a regular, standard product, good for two or three thou- sand dollars a year, meant the ability to slap the face of the great newspaper proprietor and walk out of his cffice. Twenty years ago a leading actress on Broadway remark- ed to me, “I know practically all the successful women of the stage, and I know only one who did not sell herself to get her start.” And it happened that quite recently the very same remark was made to me by one of the leading film stars of Hollywood. No, you can’t blame the women for becoming commercial! I was for a while a member of the executive body of the. Author's League of America, and we met for luncheon now and then to decide the fate of American letters. A fellow member was Rex Beach, and I hap- pened to ask him: “Why did you start to write?” The answer came in a flash. “Because I found I could make more money than by mining gold.” We may say that this proves Mr. Beach an honest man; but also it proves him not an artist. If he had been the latter, he would have re- plied, just as promptly, and just as honestly. “Because I have something to say, and all the money in New York couldn’t hire me to do anything else.” And it is a fact that when business men, however honest, are permitted to crowd the real artist out of ex- istence, culture dies. It is neces- sary to exclude business men from the writing field, and also from the selecting of writers, and the control of the channels between writers and public. What, exactly, is the differeace be- twee literature and journalism. The maker of literature strives te say a thing once and for all ume; while the journalist says it over and over, with slight variations, every day or week or mouth. And since ninety- nine per cent of the money paid éut By Upton Sinclair for written words is paid for journal- ism, it follows that ninety-nine per cent of the writers must be journal- ists, no matter what capacity they may have to produce literature. I charge the big commercial maga- zines with applying to the written word the American methods of standardization and mass production, and you think perhaps that 1 am playful; but that is only because you don’t face the facts. A modern edi- tor is the head of a department in a large manufacturing plant; he has to have so-and-se much copy at regular intervals, to fill up the spaces be- tween advertisements of soaps and cigarettes and automobiles; so much bait to lure the public into his ad- vertisement-trap. And when he finds that a certain kind of bait does the business, he orders more of that kind, and offers a price so high that no authors wife can resist. it. Once upon a time Finlay Dunne wrote a sketch about a shrewd and witty Irishman; and what happened? Why, simply that Mr. Dunne was commanded to write fifteen hundred such sketches—‘Mr. Dooley” every Sunday for thirty years. In the same wav Montague Glass has been commanded to write fifteen thousand paragraphs, in every one of which Potash or Perlmutter says “Gott sei Dank,” cr Gott soll huten.” In the same way Milt Gross has been com- manded to be a “Nize Baby” for the next forty years. In the same way Jack London was commanded to re- peat a hundred times his brief jour- ney over the Alaskan snows, and Conan Doyle was compelled to bring Sherlock Holmes back to life after having mercifully killed him. And if you ask the question, would any of these writers have produced great literature anyhow, the answer is that every living thing does bettcr in a good environment than in a bad one. If you let a garden run wild, you will have ill-smelling weeds; while if you tend it with love plus intelli- gence, you may have flowers of greater beauty than the most op- timistic seed-catalog has predicted. (To be continued,) MORE CRUISERS (President Coolidge urges naval increases in his annual message to Congress.) “More cruisers and more submarines,” he said, “Is now our country’s need” A warlike monster lifts its ugly head And spews out hate and greed. More cruisers—I can see them swiftly steam To battle or to shell Defenseless towns. I hear projectiles scream, I hear the wounded yell. More submarines—I see a big ship heel And sink beneath the wave, While thousands, caught and drowning, squeal, The coward and the brave. “More submarines and cruisers,” is the ery, To make wars as of old!” While profits rule shall wage slaves die To save the masters’ gold! —HENRY REICH, Jr. ROBBING THE MINERS By ED FALKOWSKI. ct December first the “loader bosses” working for the Philadel- phia and Reading Coal and Iron Co. —a gigantic anthracite corporation— found themselves transferred to dif- ferent jobs, or jobless. Loader bos- ses were hired to look to the loading of cars from running chutes, and keep time records of the workers in their gangway. A “new” system of checking up on workers has been installed by the P. & R. C. & I. Co. by means of whieh it is hoped to keep the miner at his work for the full 8-hour day. Many times before similar efforts have aroused the miners’ dissatisfaction; now it is being tried again, and prob- ably foredoomed to failure as before. Stealing Miners’ Gains. Efforts to hold the miner under- ground for 8 hours at a time when hard coal begs for markets can be explained only as another effort to increase the efficiency of hard coal production by stealing away from the miner the handful of privileges he lit- erally tore out of the grasping fists of a stubborn corporation, “Effici- ency” is only a mask under which the ancient slaveries return to saddle on the worker the deplorable conditions against which he fought bitterly dur- ing the entire period of his organiza- tion. Whether the union will cooperate with this coming slavery, or whether it will challenge the mechanization of its members is to be seen. Anthra- cite miners have always been stub- born in resisting all forms of slavery, The union has up to this time clung to a fighting policy, challenging the companies at every step. Grieviance committees are on the alert to guard against drastic changes in methods of work, and rates of pay. But in spite of these’ fences efficiency comes as a new, insidicus force tareatening to wreck the conditions gained in the industry, as well as to squeeze out thousands who are now employed in the production of hard coal. Pay Cut; Time Extended. Timber men set the legs and col- lars of timber which prop up gang- ways to prevent the roof of rock from falling, or the sides from pushing in. Timber forms the miner’s protection against falling objects which cause most of the fatalities in hard coai. These men are paid a definite rate for a “set” which consists of two legs and a crosspiece or “coilar” which is set on top of the legs, spanning the width of the gangway. The rate on timbering is usually between five and six dollars for a set. As three men form a timbering gang, at least four sets must be put up if each man is to earn a “reason- able” shift. It had been the custom for years to collect an extra allow- ance for hauling timber whcaever it was necessary to drag it up iong man- ways to the place where it was need- ed. This allowance for hauling tim- ber has in many collieries been taker off, with the resuit that the timbe- must often be dragged three hundred feet up a step-piched chute, anu nothing received for it. Noise Makes Men Deaf. Stricter rules operate in the break- er which is a great hulking mons- trosity of sheet iron and wood filled with whirling machinery. The coai is here ground, and numbers of smaii boys and humpbacked men lean over chutes all day long picking rock out of the coal as it slides on its way to immense pockets, thence to raiircad cars. Picking slate is the most mon- otonous and one of the lowest paid jobs in the field. Not only do the pickers soak in the coal dust which often saturates the air for hours at a stretch, but the noise of the ma- chinery makes many of them deaf. Seldom a day passes but a rope snaps, or an axle gets hot, or a jig gets clogged with slate, causing a pause in operation. This is the only rest most slate-pickers get in the course 6f a day’s work. Yet some companies are making efforts to com- pel the breakers to operate without stopping for lunch if the breaker ‘stops for fifteen minutes at any time during the morning. Since the din- ner hour is thirty minutes long, wa see the breakerboys sacrificing tif. teen minutes to the company. J Unions Must Fight Move. This is an effort to restore the old scheme of things which once reigned here. Once upon a tima if the break- er stopped for any length of time for repairs, it was kept running overtime to make up for time lost and no one got paid for the extra time. The union eliminated these practices, and plainly the time is approaching when the union must step into the situa- tion, once again, and demand the worker's right to his lunch, and the right not to be penalized for acci- dents that occurr to machinery ‘for which he cannot be held responsible. Striking Coal Miners Are in Need of Money All money and clothing for the striking miners of the Colorado or the Pennsylvania and Ohio field: may be sent to the Miners’ Relief ommittee, 799 Broadway, Roo 33 (Stuyvesant 8881).