The Daily Worker Newspaper, February 25, 1928, Page 5

' } a, THE DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1928 Page Five THE BLACK HOLE OF GALATA IN RUMANIA By HENRI BARBUSSE. ° The following account is the re- sult of investigations made by Henri Barbusse and a gfoup of European associates into the white terror conditions in Rumania. The investigation was carried out under extreme difficulties, the Rumanian fascist government throwing gvery possible obstacle in the way of the investigators, The subsequent re- ports which showed a systematic persecution of workers and peasants almost unequalled in the history of bourgeois repressions appeared sub- sequently in L’Humanite, the French Communist daily. Henri Barbusse is the celebrated French revolutionary novelist, best known as the author of “Under Fire,” “Chains,” “Light” and a spirited appeal to the French in- tellectuals, “The Knife Between the Teeth.” He is the sponsor of the Clarte group of revolutionary writ- ers and intellectuals. * * «# ‘ ‘ERE is worse still, yes, worse than the hammer strokes on your bones and the tearing and cutting of your skin, which stop just a little be- fore they kill ,you (because yonder they find means of killing you several times consecutively), there is the di- sease which they give you.” ‘The cage and the gherla guaran- tee you against tuberculosis,” eaid Spridieu and Jon, “I wish to speak of the disease which is directly distributed, as the bastinado is distributed. I wish to speak of one of them, exantematic typhus, to give it its true, dreadful name. Yes, that is also an instrument which is used in order to tame Rou- manian political prisoners,-an instru- ment which one does not see, and which creeps in everywhere. “There is a prison which is im- pregnated and rotten with this disease: it’s Galata prison. For the rest the bourgeois newspapers have said it; when a newspaper is bour- geois and has said such a thing, it’s because it could not help saying it. At Galaca it sweats, it oozes, it rains typhus. It lurks under the crust of the soil, under the skin of the walls, in the coats of filth on the doors, even in the marrow of the pillars. s ° . “The typhus patients are, of course, mixed with the other prisoners. The lice which gorge themselves on their. blood have nothing to do when their client is buried, as they like warm blood, so they apply themselves to the survivors. “You see the trick for evading the Roumanian law which has suppressed the death penalty. What would you wish them to do to. the lice, each of which is a microbe merchant? And they are on you at once, layers of ’em, and as to your skin, it’s like a news- paper in which the print is crawling. “There was one-eyed Simion who lay alongside of us’ for three weeks, unconscious,’ He writhed queerly and was delirious from morning till eve- ning and so round the clock. “It is abdominal convulsions, that is to say, nothing,’ said the doctor. “And he gave him camomile and a purgative. . “We twenty-five prisoners shut in the same cell with him knew very well what it was, during the hours which we used to pass looking at this heap of rags which writhed and writhed and made the last of human strength groan on a mattress of dung, * ¢ ‘Ms you may imagine that it was never changed, still less when it was taken to the small tub. He was surrounded by a stench so dense that it seemed as if you could touch it. “A week before someone had ven- tured to say to the head warder, ‘Sup- pose Simion were given a bath?’ “The face of the chief warder had become as red as a volcano in erup- tion. ‘A bath! well for five years without taking a bath!’ bellowed the potentate in an- swer, and went on to bawl: ‘Others in the prison have done very well with- out taking a bath for seven years. And besides, what’s it to do with you?’ “You see the problem: wearing elothes which had been bequeathed to us by prisoners who had disappeared under the earth, fed with a little; warm water called tea, with ice-cold pap and a lukewarm soup of rotten beans, unwashed and with a doctor who refused to be a doctor, sucked by poisoned vermin and heaped on top of each other, the question was how to escape deadly contagion. “Sometimes we hoped: one has such strange dreams! But above all we were afraid. Our teeth chattered more atid more and we felt our bellies embraced us like death itself. es eee TO KNOW made to take off our clothés to have | them exposed to the vapour of an en-} gine boiler, caress, when it would have required fire and flood to cleanse this single cell! |ders and all the prison staff ceased to come to us, way. ice was performed by soldiers who, as you know, are good for anything. iously intoxicated for the occasion, who removed Simion from his bed, sprinkled him with lime, then buried him, day: one after the other, Vasili the robber, “Simion died one night. “On the following day we were What was the use of this “It also came to pass that the war- They kept out of the! They disappeared. The serv-| “Still it was the prisoners, ingen- “Finally this happened, this same Fedor the pickpocket, and HENRI BARBUSSE. Describes Prison Tortures He has held out quite | officials. shout, Right is Good Right! ‘ance, complained with missioner, the sharing out. earceration.) our heads “There were at typhus serious; and he Workers’ land Colorado. the “Liberator.” much by fear, “THE BRASS CHECK” By UPTON SINCLAIR The One Complete Expose of Capitalist Journaliem New Edition With Complete Index in Press, Wasja the politician fell sick. “No one troubled about them, have said that we no longer saw the They, the spiders, waiting in shelter at the ends of their webs for the prisoners. . « he only had The evening Aid the Miners For the striking miners of Pennsyl- .vania, Ohio and Colorado $672 was collected at an enthusiastic mass |meeting, held recently at the Arena Gardens, Detroit, Mich., under the auspices of the Workers Internaticn- al Relief, with national headquarters at 1 Union Square, New York City. | Genevieve Taggurd, famous Amer- iean poet, has donated $36, the royal- ties on her book “May Days,” to the International Union Square, New York City, which is condueting an active campaign to provide relief for striking miners and their families in Pennsylvania, Ohio were “The state of the three stricken men became rapidly worse. the cell three delirious men began to They each bawled some es- sential scrap of their earthly destiny. Wasja, who had been condemned be- cause a functionary had wished to rob him:of his little field and he had re- sisted (that sort of thing is called polities, and perhaps not wrongly), bawled at the top of his voice: ‘Good And in “Vasili thought that he was sur- rounded by the gendarmes and he struggled with loud shouts and sum- moned the robbers’ god to his assist- “As to the pickpocket, Fedor, he bawling against his comrade, the police com- with whom he thought that he was sharing the stolen booty as was his custom, as many of his like were accustomed to, do in Rou- mania—and who had swindled him in (It was the settle- ment of this affair, not the affair it- self, which had brought about his in- “Then the shouters became calm, and fer a very good reason: at the end of the sixth day they were all three in the lime, and three white 1 the con- iemnation which comes from within. this time sixteen other cases of typhus in the various black holes of Galata, It was Spiru who told me, and he only said what he had seen and was sure of, “A white-haired peasant was watch- ing the fifteen days of detention which he had yet to serve, diminish- ing slowly, so slowly. Fifteen days wasn’t much, but all the same the matter was urgent . . three more days to go. but one before the day of his release, he was lowered into the white paste which burns even to the bones. “The commandant Constantine Cer- nat, director general of the prisons of great Roumania, was returning from his domain of Bessarabia, when he was informed of the spread of the epidemic—which he known for a long time. “He shuddered: That was becoming hurried, putting everything on one side to telegraph these simple words to Galata: ‘Until further orders, no more convicts from Galata for work on my fields.’ “As he knew that precautions must be taken against contagion.” had Relief, The Pennsylvania - Ohio - Colorado Miners’ Relief Committee is co-oper- ating in this campaign. Miss Taggard, who is a member of the national committee of the Work- ers’ International Relief, will also turn over to the organization all fu- ture royalties on the book, The book, “May Days,” edited by her, is an an- thology of radical poetry that ap- gripped and the stench of Simon’s bed | peared originally in the “Masses” and 450 pages Paper-bound Cloth-bound $2.00, postpaid ‘i $1.00 | UPTON SINCLAIR sa _ STATION B : LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA | Fighting the Frame - Up By MAX SHAGHTMAN EHIND the walls and bars of San 1 Tom Mooney. In Represa, Calif., is his comrade Warren Billings. Further north, in the Washington _peni- tentiary at Walla Walla are a num- ber of I. W, W. from Centralia. All of them are a part of the long list of ciass war fighters who have been captured by the ruling class and held prisoners against the movement of militant labor. Their cases are the worst, for not only are they innocent of any crime but their activities in the cause of the working class, but they must expiate this “crime” of loyalty with life-long sentences, For Rest of Lives. To the very last day of their lives they are to remain confined in bleak prison cells. The last breath of life prison cot. Their world must remain hemmed by four narrow stone walls and their sight of the sky marred by the strong sieel gratings of a tiny window. That is what the judges de- creed. The law of capitalism has. spoken with dignified majesty and there is no further recourse in the courts, UT if there is no recourse in the halls of capitalism’s courts, the blocks were put into the earth. working class, for whom _ the ‘ ike cae me Mooneys, Billingses, Barnetts and ‘And we, we were ever awaiting,|McInerneys are imprisoned, have other means at their disposal. workers have a weapon that is un- matched broken solidarity of labor. intelligent and against the infamous frame-up sys- tem which has taken these fighters alive in its penitentiaries. The ‘work- ers can smash this anti-labor insti- tution, which imprisons and murders the active fighters in the movement, by grouping their forces with deter- mination and clarity. The Interna- tional Labor Defense, which has al- the fight against the imprisonment join prisoners confirsd in the tentiaries of American capitalism. James P. Cannon, the national will not only serve to make clear the character and work of the frame-up atcion to combat it. The first sec- tion of the tour begins in Pittsburgh, Wednesday, Feb. 29, and will take him to ‘the Pacific coast and back again to Chicago. {JOM MOONEY, Billings, Matt Schmidt and a number of the Centralia men have already written that they are glad to learn of the tour, for in the course of it, Cannon will visit these old fighters and dis- cuss with them plens for a new cam- paign for their release 1 worker can help to mato successful tem and show that he has separated from “the apathetic throng—the cowed and the meek” and joined the militant army of fighters that has decided to fight obstinately with all its power for the vindication of the vietims of vicious class “justice.” Quentin prison in» California sits | must come from their bodies on a! The in the whole arsenal of their enemies, and that is the un- paver can- free the class war prisoners if it will undertake an stubborn fight ready accomplished a great deal in of scores of workers who are arrested every year for their activities or opinions in the labor movement, has made an appeal to every worker to in a country-wide campaign egainst the frame-up system and for the release of all the class war peni- ‘OWARDS this end, the tour of secretary of International Labor De- fense, has been organized. The tour system, but will offer a program of ‘HE support of the tour in every eity where a meeting is held is one of the means by which every this fight agains! the frame-up sys- Dunn’s “Company The Mechanism of the Class Struggle COMPANY UNIONS. By Robert W. Dunn. Vanguard Press. Fifty cents. 'VENTS which have followed on the heels of one another during the past few months give a timeliness and importance to the subject of com- pany unions such as has not hitherto been the case. The labor movement may be said to have waked up rather union. The officials of the trade unions, in spite of their verbal at- issue” for the well-known reasons. But in the meantime the company union may pass through another stage and become an incorporated factor of industrial development. Evidence brought out at the recent |hearing on the proposed anti-strike jlaw at the Bar Association indicated very clearly, if such a law is passed the company union with its hand- maiden, the “yelow-dog” contract, } will become respectable. There are | also a number of signs that the labor | officialdom will not hesitate to seek | shelter under the cover of this new respectability either to abandon alto- gether the struggle against the com- pany union or to climb upon the em- ployers’ band wagon wholeheartedly as directors of the entire parade. | The faint-hearted attacks which the labor officials have made on the com- pany-union are capable of ready con- version into accents of qualified sup-| port and finally they will not shrink| from open support of the company union, provided they themselves are jtaken care of. * * What does the company union real- ly mean for the labor mcvement? Even the militants, those who are en- gaged actively in fighting the com- pany union, should understand this |more clearly. | The author of this volume provides |the answer to this question in the jfullest manner. Dunn, who is the outstanding student of the mechanics of the class struggle in America has | gathered material here which will un- doubtedly remain a permanent con- \ tribution in labor history. Incident- ally, it might be said that these stud- ies of the newer methods of employ- ers are providing the basis for the wide-seale: attack which the workers will soon have to make against their open shop employers. Considerable of Dunn’s efforts are directed to showing that whatever the employers’ claims, the basic reason for the company union is to prevent organization of the workers. The em- ployers make no bones about their intentions: “After all what difference does it make whether one plant has a ‘shop committee,’ a ‘works council,’ a ‘Leitch Plan’ . or whatever else it may be called? These dif- ferent forms are but mechanics for putting into practice . . the open shop.” (“Industrial Manage- ment,” Feb. 1920.) This is the gencral purpose of the | company union which embraces all the others. Its two chief subdivisions are wage .reductions and speed-up. The company union is valuable for | these ends—and how! . * Dunn reports that “the wage-cut- ting campaigns of 1921 revealed the company unions as effective instru- ments. ‘Some textile company unions voted themselves as much as 30 to 40 percent cuts in wages.” Fresh in our minds is the recent publicity given to | the methods by which. the Inter- borough Rapid Transit Company union was able to put over a 10 per- cent wage cut when all the locals of} the “Rrotherhood” voted against it. As for speed-up, the constitutions of practically all company unions al- most uniformly have their references to “qualify and quantity of produc-| tion,” “for the good of the industry,” | lete. And these references are no/| | mere formality but actually the flesh | end blood of the worker-employer re- | lationship. A million and a half workers are SKETCH I looked into the eyes of a ragged dishevelled old man in the subway train, breathing his last bitter years in agony... There I read: \ { Hunger Poverty late to the menace of the company | tacks, still continue to “sleep on the , jappreciate the League of Nations—in | BOOKS and COMMENT _ ‘= Unions” Analyzed\ A Tepid “Liberal” Writes a Novel SILENT STORMS. By Ernest Poole. The Macmillan Co. $2.50. | JJAVING found that he could earn a | |*4%omfortable livelihood by flattering | the rich, Ernest Poole, who once wrote that unusual novel of the class struggle called, “The Harbor,” has been a liberal for a number of years. Regularly he turns out novels which jare widely reviewed as books dis- leussing the “great problems of our age.” “Silent Storms” is his latest. To Poole, the “regretable thing” about a Wall Street multi-millionaire is that he doesn’t see the “valuable work” the League of Nations, “that strange new laboratory of peace,” has |done. ‘ | When Poole is not filling his book | with New York World editorials, he deals with a great modern marriage | problem: why a middle-aged Amer-| ican millionaire, who is shown to be as clean as a newly-washed pair. of diapers, cannot get along with a flip-| pant French wife half his age who likes to dance with young men and who came to America to raise $100,- | 000 for the French fascists by iectur- ing at women’s clubs. - 6 Poole’s conclusion is that a young man who can dance and who can more | other words the financier’s nephew— could be more able to get along with | the fascist countess. Never once does the renegade Poole, like a truthful historian, point out that while the fastidious fascist French wife squanders fortunes on seores of “radiantly beautiful” eve- ning gowns, thousands of children go} hungry in the Ghetto a few blocks | away. Poole breathes sympathy for Ker- ensky, praises Mussolini and “revolu- tions of the rich against the poor,” and rants about the “Communist men- ace.” I really cannot get mad about this novel because it is too poorly written. | —WALTER SNOW. | now in bondage to the company union. There has been a steady growth of | this institution during the period when | the American Federation of Labor lost two millions of its membership. What | will happen in the wake of the coun- | try-wide drive on the trade unions, in| the presence of a deepening economic crisis when the organized labor-move- ment usually loses in membership. may well be imagined. On this account the methods of fighting the company union here elaborated are of the greatest import- ance. These will repay the most care- ful study. “Company Unions” is a book of the moment in the present struggle of the working class. JOHN L. SHERMAN. Announcing! No. 5 of the WORKERS LIBRARY! The Trotsky Opposition Its Significance for American Workers By Bertram D. Wolfe A keen analysis of the role of the Opposition in the Rus- sian Party, and a cutting expose of its counter-revolu- tionary supporters in Amer- ica. 100-Page Pamphlet Order Today From WORKERS LIBRARY PUBLISHERS : 39 E. 125 St. New York 50 And Hate... --ABRAHAM WARSHOPFSKY. HAT GOOD NEWS! Annual Inventory Sale 20% Discount on all Books 20% é (Including International Publishers’ Titles) FOR A SHORT TIME ONLY. JIMMIE HIGGINS BOOKSHOP 106 UNIVERSITY PLACE, NEW YORK CITY. No Mail or C. 0. D. Orders. Is It Coffee Or Is It Not Nothing like a stiff cup of coffee after a long watch in the crow’s nest; say sailors. But if you like your java | strong avoid the Katrina Luckenbach, one of the big coast to coast freight- “rs of the prosperious Luckenbach line. A sailor just back from a round \cruise to Seattle told the Federated Press how the ship’s coffee is made. “The captain drinks postum so he doesn’t worry what the rest of us ise The two first mates have @ percolator. And for the other 46 members of the crew the steward |boils up one pound of coffee. Hach | man averages four cups a day, so you |can figure the strength of the brew.” | Good coffee is supposed to give 35 |to 40 cups to the pound. On the Luckenbacker a pound makes 184 |cups. And yet some folks wonder |why American boys don’t want to ga Scott Nearing, author and lec- turer, has just returned from the Soviet Union, after having made a study of conditions in China. Near- ing was also a delegate at the re- cent session of the general council of the International League against Imperialism at Brussels, Nearing’s latest book, “Whither China,” will be reviewed soon. to sea as they used to, REVEILLE Early Morning: (The giant burly Cop Drives His murderous club Into The soles Of the jobless workers Snoring On the benches In the park.) —ABRAHAM WARSHOFSKY. I ASK FOR A VOTE Comrades! Men of the streets! Sweatshop workers! Subway diggers! The aged, the poor and the starving— I ask for a vote by the upraised fist. You who know the bony hand of hunger, you who sleep in cold hallways, you who walk with our brothers face to the storm- I ask for a vote. Harvest hands! Mill, hands! Dock workers, farm hands, working stiffs! J-ask you for a vote by the shaking hand of terror. You who know their contempt for the poor, you who have seen them in their comfort, you who have felt how they can be hard and cruel in their power— I ask you for-a vote, I, too, know how our brothers beg at their doors— I, too, have seen our worn-out comrades hidden away in pineslab coffins. —LEBARBE. — Serie By Walter Damrosch ani Beethoven: Leonore Overtu) » No. 3. 67350-D. By Albert Sammons. In Four Parts, on 17002-; fwo ~-17003-D. 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