The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 28, 1928, Page 7

] | | | | | | Page Seven THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 1928 “l DRIVE, A CAB” |Right turn, left, reverse—stick out |through to the bone! By A. C. | It looked like a cinch! Big money mm it! Sitting behind the wheel of a taxi, cow-boying people around town. These New York hackmen seemed to that hand, dumbbell! Roll up against the curb—easy, good, the curb, not the building! Quick, gas! Step on it—-don’t stall her, snappy now— Christ! If you ain’t a dumb nut! | Didn’t we have fun! After I crashed in a horse doctor stripped me below the waist, cracked wise and OK’d me physically. The head clerk pedigreed me. The lower have lots of time to Spend gabbing in | Stalled again!” Learning to drive was |clerk took the finger prints and the coffee-pots, or knocking ivory balls | around in pool rooms. No red tape about references in getting a job, All | a fellow has to do is learn to run a} car, get the hack and chauffeur’s li- | censes, take his pick of cab in any | garage near home, turn on the, gwitch, step on it—and out on the street ernising for pick-ups. Nothing The largest and scabbiest cab com- pany in the city, the Yellow Taxi Cor- poration, holding most railway, ferry and hotel concessions, about a year and a half ago, operated a free driv- ing school in a desperate effort to get enough cow-boys to man all its hacks. | oO itl So I signed up for the ten days of learning to ‘shift gears on a wheezy | old instruction cab. School—and the | jbook and badge and I’d be “sitting | 'pretty.” {lots of fun! | More Bad “Breaks.” | The toughest part, breaking in, was | over. So I figured when I got the chauffeur license. Now for the keys to that adventure chariot--the hack It was winter. Jobs were | hard to get. I mu © have been sitting } so pretty that the uack bureau police | figured me too pretty to disturb. So | they let me sit three months before | granting my application. And that | line shivering before the precinct doors at West 20th Street, close to the Hudson, blowing like the bellows of hell! What a pleasure it was lining up |for five days from dawn to dark, be- lowest clerk slipped me a hack book, badge and large card. In one corner |of the card was a convict mug of me and the number with the full name. |In the center this recommendation to | the general run of drivers to the trust- ing public: “Notice to passengers: Keep a record of above name and number of this card. This is a photograph of the authorized driver. If another person is driving this cab notify a policeman. This card must be placed in a conspicuous place in the cab at all times. Failure to do so means revotation of license. George McLaughlin, Police Commissioner.” Pictures Good Old Days. In the days before pictures and po- guerilla instructor seated alongside |fore I got inside, the coppers either |lice control, a driver knew who regis- me with an iron jack-handle to crack | the hand or leg that made a mistake. li “Clutch—first, second, high, neutral! |a jsnarling at you or pushing you back | in line when the press was too great | and that devil of an icy wind cutting | tered a complaint and the reasons for doing so. It was considered tough to cough up a saw buck ($10) fine in case of a bum break with the decision. But the good old days when the com- plainant might have a right cross to the chin to add to his complaint are dead as the swinging saloon doors which spun many a good customer into the arms of the waiting hackey. Today you don’t stand a chance be- fore the commissioner. before you explain. Almost any of- abuse the driver and gets away with it) to refusing a call (when there may |be plenty of reason to) means “bye |bye, hack badge.” |fense from insulting a fare (who does | $25 worth tip, a week’s wage and the passenger is “so sorry” you get the ticket. The nervous old lady riding home from shopping is “nervous, driver, nervous, please drive slowly.” So you crawl through traffic—clock register- ing little for the time lost and the old | | | You're licked |irl gets out and says, “Thank you,” and skumps you, no tip. to 11:30, when the shows break, Broadway is kept clear of all empty cruising taxis. out and push a leg off chiselling to |A convenience to anyone so minded jedge of the driver, his number and |name and turn him in via letter. In- |dependence of cab drivers? Hell, they {don’t stand a chance with prejudiced e-man dictator control running the hack bureau now, | Hell On All Sides. And you catch hell from all sides. One guy must make a train—‘Step on it, Johnny, good tip if you make ” Good tip if you make it!—and gz so/get upped Sy a speed cop. This is the picture inside the cab. | |to get, without argument or knowl- | eut into Broadway (and some loads are no feathers to push around) but {traffic must be kept clear—for High Haf and the Mrs. whose limousine is choking up Broadway with private car traffic, When you grab the call it’s step on it and to hell with the |pedestrian, The rate is cheap, 20 cents a mile. The hound who owns the rig is expecting a minimum of $15 per night and $20 over Saturday and Sunday. So you put in the hours, damned long ones, from 4 until 4. And you’ve got to travel fast. Sometimes you hit somebody. They’re down and \you’re in the can, |have too many exits and entrances to | The best hour of the night, 10:30 |suit a hackman. ers don’t give you a rumble only fight the court suit. bankrupt or wouldn’t help if so you borrow or take out of the s ings to pay the bondsman and lawyer. | |Funny I never thought much about ten “ain’t v a cab driver is always cha (Som or Canadian you.) it's got nothing on hac blow quick-and often, The insurance fak- jan A NEW YORK TAXI MAN'S TRUE STORY OF SERVITUDE Hack regulations forbid The boss is |the use of a e door and demand he could |az. open windshield in bad weather. It ’t the normal ar of rain, hail Id that beats through the wind- and open sides against a man’s ly when the weather is bad. It is one of the Three Happiness Boys cked up by a wind resistance in the 5 miles per hour speed when They |blows out. dents before I went hacking. Some Dead Losses. Buildings and hotels very often Every once in awhile you’re on the fly. You damn soon |a swell steps in one and out the other lose that school boy complexion and leaving his bill in figures on the clock ‘he skin you love to touch is unto You pull your arms |to tell the driver that he can whistle |able after a twelve hour battle with for his money. Here’s a better one, |cold rain o: indstorms. yet. and his f; op in the Rat's Yous Had ab, tel Roosevelt, Bu steps out at the hotel. “Sorry rings on the cab wear down the smallest I’ve got—chang of | ding over en?” Forty-five cent fare st longer buy for the ten and you're out the t it ought ¢ are | ly a tin lf d quarter that they imes you ess it is on lights eyes ag k ing the day: when it is hard to get used to sleep- the sun is up. After a few ng a cab a guy feels needs an overhauling. Iron work is a tough racket, Thomas Hardy: : By A. B. MAGIL. | I SUPPOSE it is proper to speak of Thomas Hardy as the last of the great Victorian writers, though in many ways he was strangely, stub- | bornly un-Victorian. Yet he was the | last literary representative of the | period in which the English bourgeoi- | sie, appropriating for itself the tech- | nique of the new industrialism, suc-| ceeded by means of plunder, murder | and astute concessions (when neces-} sary) both at home and abroad, in| placng the bloody seal of empire | over a larger portion of the globe} and a greater number of people than | any nation of modern times. It was! also the age which saw the rise of Derwinism, which the British bour-| geoisie also appropriated for itself| while it fed the working class on) religious dope and the standard | household virtues. In the swell gathering of well-| groomed literary stars Hardy was al lonely, uncouth, inexplicable figure. | He didn’t belong. Yet so many of | these writers, despite their suave ex- | teriors, felt uncomfortable inside, and for a Victorian to feel uncomfortable was the height of agony. Most of them were wrestling with the problem of how to marry Charles Darwin to no less a person. than’ God. Ten- | | | THOMAS HARDY nyson made peace with his: soul by covering all the sharp points of the new science with highly decorative religio-mystical padding. Browning | intellectual. | gentleman, conformed, Dickens fond | accepted the fundamental jtions of naturalistic | grafting on it a philosophy borrowed ‘have many serious defects, +mistake to call him an ironist. The Peasant Mind roses and made him a sane, athletic Thackeray, being a salvation in social reform, Swineburne Ss ed to Vranlem, Né medale evalism, Wilde and his satellites to | estheticism and perversion, and Mor- ris, with his ears to the ground, to sem imental guiid socialism with medi- eval trimmings. Only Thomas Hardy implica- science, and from Germany, declared that all life | is an ironic tragedy ending in death— “a thwarted purposing.” And for | many years the voice of Hardy was a voice crying in the wilderness. * *.-Ff Both the prose and poetry of Hardy | It is a} of his ironic effects are the result of crude plot manipulation. And here| lies Hardy’s great artistic error: he mistook plot for form and plot mani- pulation for the inevitable workings of ironic fate. “A thinker of crooked thoughts upon Life in the sere,” as he once described himself, Hardy wrote solidly and awkwardly, his effects being substantial rather than surgically removed all of God’s neu- An Impression A chorus of sixteen girls in Orien- tal costumes moves through the rhythms of a sacred dance of the East. An old Lama drones on a plat- form; a burly Russian Communist with a sense of humor, an American roughneck aviator who admires the marines, an oil explorer and a million- aire’s son from Wall Street watch the strange fateful ceremony. They are hypnotized by the danc-'} ing, the chanting, and the Orient, and then they are bound with cords. The East is resisting the imperialistic de- signs of the West. And then the stage manager yells “curtain,” the | young curly haired man at the piano | rises to stretch his legs, and the scene dissolves into groups of young people | chatting and laughing in Americanese. It is a rehearsal of “The Interna- tional,” at the New Playwrights’ Theatre in Commerce street. Every- one-was busy as I wandered through the compact little arena where five radical young writers have been work- F ing this year to establish a modern theatre in New York. eae Hard work it is, and about fifty young people are doing it cheerfully, twelve to fifteen hours a day, under | the severe discipline of a theatre. As I walked about, it seemed to me strange that so few of#the radical workers and intellectuals have fully |4 appreciated the significance of a thea- tre of this kind in America. Like all first attempts, it has crud- ities and immaturities. These crudi- | ties, which anyone can spot, seem to | have loomed more significant in the | eyes of the labor intellectuals than have the virtues of the plays. The | workers have not come in big enough crowds to put the theatre as yet on any kind of sound financial basis. But in Sovict Russia the dramatic \“The Belt,” by Paul Sifton, the first | play given by the group this year, is eupiley and ina eae that is as lively Most | | “He Wrote and flexible as that of a college pro- fessor of Latin. And above all, Hardy lacked social understanding. His was the stolid, ‘peasant mind, in so many ways. the unawakened, conservative peasant mind, recoiling from a cruel, anti- peasant capitalist Turning his back on the outposts of the new age, Hardy saw in “the idio- cy of rural life,” the, hopeless indi- vidual tragedies of the English vil-| lage, the typical and inexorable ex- pression of all life everywhere. It is true he wrote of the life that he! knew best, but by constructing a uni- | versal philosophy on the basis of| what he observed in a decaying Eng- |lish town, he showed the meagreness, the parochiality of his social and in- | tellectual outlook. * * * Yet with so many important defects | and limitations, why is it that Thomas | Hardy remains one of the chief Eng- lish writers of the past hundred years? I have said that his writing was solid and substantial. There was in him the gnarled sober strength of the oak digging deep and intimate roots. In “The Mayor of Caster- bridge,” for example, in which plot manipulation is particularly obvious, he succeeds in building up slowly an industrialism. | the Outline of Capitalism’s Epitaph. = natural continuance: it has been and | will be always. His style, which is ponderous and latinical, is so only when he is writing formal English. When he reproduces through the mouths of his characters the dialect of his native Wessex, his writing be- comes supple and savory and full of \the strong simplicity, the richness of folk-speech. Thus the lament of Mar ty South in “The Woodlanders” is a | profoundly beautiful prose poem. And with all his lack of understand- iing of the social forces at play about | him, Hardy was something of a social | rebel and in advance of most of his | colleagues. In books like “Tess of the D'Urbervilles” and “Jude the Ob- seure” he challenged official British respectability, and the British bour- geoisie replied to these mild indict- ments of its rotting morality by set- ting upon him its choicest literary bloodhounds, * . * And perhaps Hardy’s greatest con- tribution was in his role as intellec- tual pathfinder. He anticipated to and nihilistic despair that has par- alyzed the intellectual bourgeoisie of the world Sprenenaue most of the of the New Playwrights Theatre at Work against the pessimism, anarchism and cynicism of the Menckenites and sim- ilar groups now holding the American literary scene. * * * William Gropper, brilliant labor cartoonist, is now in Moscow. He has recently written a letter to the New Playwrights in which he tells them of the recognition their work is re- ceiving over there. He further sends the news that to be produced at one of the large | revolutionary theatres in Moscow. Em Jo Basshe’s play, “The Cen- | \turies,” is also being translated and | | will likewise find a producer. Meyerhold, greatest of all the Sov- | iet theatre directors, and recognized | all over the world as the leader and pioneer of all that is new in the thea- been bought for Reinhardt’s Theatre in Vienna, and will soon be produced. In another field Michael Gold, an- other director of the theatre, has had a similar experience. His volume of short stories, “The Damned Agita- rv,” was translated and published in Moscow by the House, and has sold over 10,000 copies. In America he cannot find a publisher, except the Vanguard Press, State Publishing‘)! which has offered to print the stories at his own cost. John Dos Passos, of course, has been extensively translated in Soviet | Russia and Germany, and Upton Sin- | lar American author among the work- | ing masses of Europe and Asia. There is nothing peculiar about this clair, whose “Singing Jailbirds” is to | be produced at the New Playwrights | tater in the season, is the most popu- | j By DON BROWN WN lack of recognition by the American bourgeoisie of such radical pioneers in the arts as make up this group. |But the radicals should not adopt a ‘similar attitude. It is a part of the cultural task of the revolution to foster such theatres in each country. Some of the radicals in this city had seen this fact clearly, and thou- jsands of workers have given their loyal support. You Still Have a Chance to Transfer Your Money to a Cooperative Institution, Without Any Loss of Dividends Dividends Are Being Paid From the First of January. tre since Reinhardt, has announced’) that he will produce “Processional” | next year. This is a labor play deal- ing with a West Virginia mine strike, by John Howard Lawson, one of the New Playwrights. 1 “Pinwheel,” by Francis Edward | Faragoh, another of the group, has | HEALTH COMES FIRST Guaranteed dividends are being paid DO NOT BE DECEIVED BY CHEMICALLY BLEACHED AND POISONED FOODSTUFFS We sell you only NATURAL and UNADULTERATED food prod- ucts, delivered to your door Free, SEND $1 For Box of Assorted Samples. 1928 ENLARGED CATALOG REQUEST. and literary groups who follow Amer- |. ican affairs are hailing this group as | the first significant dawn of a new phase in American literature. 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Dwellings of the Cooperative Workers Colony. (Bronx Park East, at Allerton Avenue j Sta, Bronx, N. Y.) ] Second Block of / $100 a large extent the mood of pessimism | entire city that has quality of preter- | present century and particularly since the World War—a mood that is a significant reflex of the period of the! |imits of a small English town and stabilization 1 capitalism. when world capitalism was impetu-/ Jously on the ascendant, Thomas | Hardy, setting his vision within the and collapse of world, turning his back on capitalism, cast Years before, at a time!the eloquent shadow of its doom and wrote the outline of its epitaph. Masterwork Series ™ The Great Players MASTERWORKS SET NO. 74 Ravel: Ma M VOye (Mother Goose) Suite for Orchestra. “Ty Walter Damroach. and New York Symphony Orchestra. In Five Parts, on Three 12-inch Double Disc Records, with Album. $4.50 Complete. 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