The Daily Worker Newspaper, March 17, 1928, Page 5

\A STORY OF LIFE IN THE WORKERS’ ARMY By A RED SOLDIER. pea is usually followed by polit- lessons, The boys take an interestsin poli- ties.. To make these lessons interest- ing we adopt the direct method. For instance, if-the lesson is on. discip- line we organize a mock triaj of ,un- disciplined Red Army men. I preside over the tribunal and we have a pub- lic prosecutor, witnesses and counsel for the defense. Gradually the whole squad is drawn into these lessons. Simonov acts mostly as the public prosecutor. He is a regular Mry- lenko when dealing with an undis- eiplined Red Army man. But some- times the counsel for the defense is also full of go and a regular battle {s fought out. In connection with these mock trials we deal also with the subject of military secrets, the necessity of taking care of things, ete, Somet'fes a village meeting is impersos ed on. some question or other. lis gives fullest opportunity to air 7@:’s views, The skirmishers are as a rule, on ‘the one side;”Sim- onov, and on the other side, Salni- kov, and a regular battle takes place, everyone is as active as can be. : ° We also have the polit-roulette and are preparing pclitical contests be- tween squads. Peasant. questions predominate at these polit-lessons, Everyone comes to the lesson with questions which he considers very urgent although they have perhaps nothing to do with the set subject. ; “Why does not the chairman of our rural soviet give help to the families of Red Army men?” asks Andreyev (a very stoud lad) indignantly. “You say that peasants are now better off than before, but I had formerly three cows and now I have only two,” declares smart little Zverev. There are heaps of questions, they all crop up at the polit-lesson and continue to be discussed in the Lenin corner in the evening. After: verifi- cation they are the subject of endless conversations in bed. But not all sre active. There is, for instance, Cherkov, who declared emphatically that he doesn’t understand politics. When he is asked any question he keeps mum and shakes his head ob- stinately. But there are not many like Cher- ov. The number of Simonovs is vrowing from day to day. Rabiner does not attend polit-les- sons. He sits mostly in the Lenin corner contriving all sorts of wonder- ful things. According to Ilyitchenko’s plan 1 contrived together with him a poli- iical rifle range, We painted on card- board the figures of Chamberlain, vilsudski, Mussolini and provided them with springs. These figures are our target. If the rifleman hits it, Chamberlain im- mediately disappears and another piece of cardboard comes up with a text relating Chamberlain’s latest achievements. The political rifle range attracted the notice of the whole squad. Target shooting went on continuously. ~ Tlyitchenko is delighted—no. other squad has anything of this kind. ¥ eof @ TODAY is a festive day in the regi- ment. Today the champions of the world proletariat have come to the Red Army men. Today, delegates of the Communist Internationa! paid a visit to our regiment. We were able to see those about whom we read so much in our newspapers and period- icals, about whom we speak so much in the Lenin corner and when we have retired to bed, about whom the Red Book on the little table in the corner of the reading room has so much to say. Our band played festive music. Del- egates from fiery Spain and cold Norway, from France and far-away Cuba mingle with the men of our regiment. I saw the Cuban delegate having a lively conversation with Salnikoy, 3 What could these two who do not understand each other talk about, and why was Salnikov so excited? Per- haps he asked the delegate of Cuba about the construction of socialism. Perhaps he was able to understand the unknown tongue of the harbingers of world revolution. Yes, the delegates’ speeches were understood in spite of the unfamiliar language, Their gestures were elo- quent enough, The best interpreter was the fact that they are leaders and delegates of the world proletariat who are now in the heart of the Soviet country, In Red Moscow among us Red Army men, ‘ They visited the barracks, they took an interest in everything. “Do your soldiers get beatings?” asked a Bul- garian in broken Russian, Loud and unanimous laughter greeted his ques- tion. Salikaev, a man from the Mari- {sk region began to explain, also in broken Russia, to the Bulgarian how| we live. They inspected «ll the barracks, the dining rooms and conversed with the Red Army men, After that the dele- gates assembled in the big club hall and speechifying began. The covi- mander of the regiment, Dmitrievsky, welcomed the delegates who replied to him. The first was the Bulgarian delegate. He was pale and excited and a flood of semi-Bulgarian semi-Russian Words inundated the hall. “We have come not only to attend sessions but also to see what you have done, to see Comrade Lenin’s greatework . I am here for the first time and I can see that Russia is marching towards socialism. IT have seen the great Red Army. In our barracks soldiers are oppressed by their officers, whereas your command- ers are clever comrades. “Our workers are ready to help you. We will tell our workers and peasants our impressions. Long live the Red Army!” ‘The German delegate said: “You are soldiers of the world revolution.” “You know why you bear arms,” said the representatives of Holland, Spain and Canada. When the time came to reply to them there appeared cn the platform |. our old friend little Vanya Purazh- kin and expressed the thoughts of us all: - “We think not only of ourselves hut also of other countries. We wil] show by deeds and not words that we are soldiers of the world revolu- tion.”, | Then the band played, the hall was iNed with the mighty sound of the “International” sung in _ several languages of the terrestial globe. This was a grand day for the regi- ment. Sinee-that day the Simonoy policy got the upper hand at the polit- lessons and the opponent, Salinkov, could no longer make a show. Strangled in a Fascist Dungeon ee has just come to light the most abominable crime committed by fascism since the murder, at Mus- solini’s command, of the Socialist Matteotti. This is the murder by strangling Of the well-known Com- munist, Gaston Sozzi, in the prison at Perusa. Comrade Sozzi was arrested three months ago by the police in Milan, and since then all trace of him was lost and all information on his fate refused until a curt notice that “Gas- ton Sozzi had died in his cell at the military prison, Perusa;” was sent to his parents. The fascists would not allow his father to take the body or to have a post-mortem to state the cause of death. Now the Italian ambassador in Paris blandly causes the usual of- ficial lie that Sozzi committed suicide to be published. The truth, however, has now leaked out. This atrocious murder has caused an immense stir in Italy. Comrade Sozzi enjoyed great popularity among the workers for his heroic conduct in the: struggle aainst fascism. Only a young man, his devotion to the work- ing class and the Communist Party had already givefi him a reputation for fearlessness in attack on the mon- strous regime of tyranny erected by Mussolini and his bands. Comrade Sozzi in turn has fallen a victim to that tyranny, but the work of organization and leadership to ‘which he contributed so much in his short life will not be long in bearing fruit in the overthrow of the whole abominable system now weighing so heavily on the Italian masses. William Ellery Leonard Author of “The Locomotive God,” an autobiography. The book is con- cerned mainly with describing the development of a neurosis caused by fright at a passing train when he was a child. Leonard, a profes- sor of literature at the University of Wisconsin, has written a number of erful proletarian poems, in- e eS Rene and “The Ke ‘ | Gustavus Franklin Swift, founder of “THE DAILY wv YORK, SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 1928 Page Five John the Baptist Goes to Heaven Mephisto sat on his throne of flames counting the prickly yellow points cf heat that curled unhindered around the red-hot seat on which John D, (the senior) lay a-roasting, Majestic was Mephisto, with his black beard curling outward from his chin like steel, his glittering eyes hurling daggers of pain, For a crown, whirling round his temples was a belt of flame, yellow, red, green, as the heat rose and fell. (Surely Dr, Farenheit had not considered hell when he gave the world his thermometer.) Mephisto exulted. A devil’s life is a good life, a life of heat and leisure, a devil’s life for me! Then he yawned, a salacious lusty yawn, (a yawn in which was contained lewd, lecherous, lascivious and disgusting matter) but this was hell and hell is not New York (fortunately) the devil mused and therefore he escaped thirty days at the Tombs and his lechery continued unabated. Mephisto, cried John D., I will give you palaces of old Italian marble, Mephisto, scimitars studded with diamonds, robes cut of scarlet velvet and thick silk from Japan. I will conjure a rain of amethysts from the heavens, rubies and sapphires, Mephisto, and white ivory. For your brow I will forge a crown of silver studded with bright new dimes, Mephisto, only let me go! But Mephisto smiled a mephistophelian smile. And T. S. Eliot in London town . while London bridge was falling down adjusted his spats and took up his cane and gazed with friendly interest upon the twain and basked for a moment in hell’s reflected heat as suddenly into the window came a hoof-like beat. (King George parading down the street.) Eliot took his britishcitizenshippapers tore them to tatters and hurled them in platters at King George’s feet, And Mephisto shouted BRAVO! And Mephisto said: bring me a flagon of burgundy Mephisto said: bring me my ebony dice (Mephisto smacked his lips, great pre-war stuff, that burgundy) Mephisto rattled his dice and watched them roll Alvan Fuller, cried Mephisto, damn! you, turn the current on! Come seven, come eleven, And John D. went to heaven. —EDWIN ROLFE. A NEW LIVELY SHOP PAPER “Wright Propeller” Edited by Workers Reviewed by N. HONIG. ITH its current number, the | “Wright Propeller,” the little shop | paper published by and for the pro- | gressive workers in the Wright Air Corporation at Paterson, N. J., com- pletes its first year. It is gotten out by the Wright Shop Nucleus.of. the Workers (Com 1unist) Party. “The Propélier” “has developed into a breezy, six-page monthly, always on the alert to fight every attempt of the Wright Corporation to squeeze more out of its employes. Every bit of bunk in the “Vest Pocket Maga- zine,” the Wright house organ which advises the workers to be good slaves, comes in for scathing satire. With the corporation flooding its shops with printed matter designed to make the workers satisfied with their. slav- ” i oye acy ga has mee re treated by father. But whenever I [invaluable in developing the class | have been familiar with, the facts, Se eS s *{they have been all on the employer’s side,” Louis F. Swift, the employer, writes. Swift & Co, today takes pains in its 1928 yearbook to brag about his com- pany union and its welfare work. The big packing concern claims 50,000 workers in various parts of the world, the majority, however, probably con- {centrated in the yards of Chicago, Kansas City, etc. Plant assemblies, the Swift form of company union, exist in 19 of the larger. packing plants. that employee who felt himself badly “The Propeller” does not stop at fighting conditions in the Wright shops, but also brings to the atten- tion of the workers there the signi- ficance of the presence of American marines in Nicaragua and China, and the brave fight of the miners in Penn- sylvania and Ohio. Thru it and the Workers Party shop nucleus in the Wright shop, valuable miners’ relief work has been done. It is thru the Wright Propeller that so many of the Paterson workers have learned to know The DAILY WORKER and! what The DAILY WORKER means ; to them. | In “The Propeller” the Wright workers have found an outlet for their grievances. Every issue con- tains letters from the shop workers. The building up of shop papers like |the “Wright Propeller” will play e leading part in arousing the class consciousness of the entire working population of the United States. SON EULOGIZES PLUTE FATHER ESTHER LOWELL. Bywittderated Press. TRIKE-BREAKING and hard-boiled, .“ sarcastic driving of his workers by the packing firm, is praised in the biography his son and a collaborator have written. Louis F. Swift, the son |. and present head of Swift & Co., has written “The Yankee of the Yards” (A. W. Shaw, $3) with Arthur Van Vlissingen, Jr. In the ’eighties old Gustavus Swift | fought a packing workers strike. In the ’nineties he butted into the Pull- man workers’ strike in which Eugene V. Debs was a leader. The biograph- ers assert that Gustavus was not spe- cifically concerned as an opponent of the strikers’ demands, in either case, “but when the strikes came and he saw that tact would no longer serve, he swung: into the job of fighting with every resource he had.” The writers’ claim there would have been no strikes if conditions involved were under the control of Gustavus, “He was the driver, the dynamo of the business,” the son and biographer state plainly. “He worked his men hard and treated them fairly,” they can add unblushingly. “From time to time I have heard rumors of this or 4 Trachtenberg.” ' TO 450 pages Cloth-bound $2.00, postpaid STATION B HARDY: WRITER WHO DESPISED PRETENSES By T. A. JACKSON. ! ie ever the gods laughed it must have been when Thomas Hardy was | given a “Christian” burial in West- | minster Abbey. It was as though of- ficial bourgeois society had conspired to execute just the very ritual cere. monial which would best vindicate the ironical pessimism which forms the | ground-strata of the whole of Hardy’s | work. | Only bourgeois society, too _in- | grained in hypocrisy to have retained | any sense of sincerity or congruity, | could have conceived in all solemnity | the pantomime of burying “in the | sure and certain hope of a glorious | resurrection” the man whose whole | PARNAPRUREARARARRRARERVEREA RARER PEN The Miners’ Call will prove to be a historic document of the first mag- nitude in the judgment of the editors of the Communist who have printed it for preserving in permanent form in THE MARCH ‘ Communist Other articles you will want to read and save: AMERICA AND RUSSIA, by Marx and Engels. RUTHENBERG AS FIGHTER AND LEADER, by Jay Lovestone. THE PROLETARIAT AND WAR, by Lenin. MARX, LENIN AND THE PARIS COMMUNE, by Alexander AFTER THE-CANTON UPRISING, by John Pepper. CAPITALIST EFFICIENCY ‘SOCIALISM,’ by William Z. Foster. ATHEISM AND EVOLUTION, by Bertram D, Wolfe, LITERATURE AND ECONOMICS, by V. F, Calverton. THE DAILY WORKER read “THE BRASS CHECK” By UPTON SINCLAIR The One Complete Expose of Capitalist Journalism ’ New Edition With Complete Index in Press. UPTON SINCLAIR LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA | life’s work testified that he neither pgssessed nor desired any such “hope”—the man whom they had de- nounced as “pagan,” “atheistieal,” “immoral” and “obscene,” whose works they had belittled and banned (so far as they could) from public circulation—the man whom they had forced by their never-failing abuse to abandon novel-writing for peetry and who gained commendation in their eyes solely by living long, ceasing to annoy them openly, and becoming a “success” in the “best circles.” Complete the picture with a vision of London fashionables flocking to the grave-side of the man who had | scorned them with a life-long scorn, and flocking there because it was) the “right thing, you know,” add the | official representatives of those “Dynasts,” the tragedy implied in whose existence he had taken-as the theme for his one great poem-drama, and the irony is complete. Hardy was in fact honored by of- ficial society almost wholly because he had lived so long that the propa- gandist force of his earlier (and more obviously intelligible work) had be- come blunted by sheer lapse of time. It is difficult now to envisage the time when Tess and Jud e the Ob- secure were regarded as obscene. Had they been obscene in reality they would, nowadays, have been reprinted in millions. Hardy had the misfortune to write them in the days when the Noncon- formist Conscience had established its deaconesses’ dictatorship, and he suf- fered accordingly. That age has passed; it melted into Brummagem imperialism, and that in turn into post-war imperialism absolute, im- perialism tensed in all its sinews to meet the imminent day of the prole- tarian revolution. What was felt as a blow full in its face by the timidly truculent Nonconformist conscience is less than a fleck of dust to the im- perialist aware of a crisis in its fate. oo 8 @ Hardy scorned bourgeois society. He had nothing but bitter contempt for the comfortable optimisms of orthodox religion, morality and phil- osophy. He could see no cure for the evils—there was, he felt, nothing to do but bear up as bravely as one could; but he had this great and com- pelling virtue—he would not pretend that life was other than the grimly tragic thing that his own sight and sense showed it to be, ise MACHINE GUNS IN N. Y. New York gunmen yesterday held up the office of Peter Clark, manu- facturer of stage equipment, with a portable machine gune and revolvers, and escapg¢d with a $4,400 payrool de- livered 15 minutes earlier by an armored truck, ‘ Paper-bound $1.00 7 RS AREA Se seta maaan Sr THOMAS HARDY Imperialism in Santo Domingo! By Federated Press. LACK West Indian mainly from Haiti, and the worst| paid labor in the western hemisphere, | labor} Arthur Ransome’s Book on China Gives Typical Liberal View | etic |THE CHINESE PUZZLE,” Arthur Ransome by (Houghton, ticle Guardian, gives u outlook upon: the € A large part of it is devoted some’s personal experiences, travels to Hankow and of his meetings ers of the revolution as E t Cs Wu These de: are extremely vivid and excellent itt ay, but when he attempts té a e the social forces at work be+ hind the revolution or to dabble in economies, the result is failure. On the second page of the book one is met by the extraordinary state® ment that the troops which were sen€ to Shanghai were sent as a “sop” to the “die-hard” Tories and that, “the British troops, though illegally in to | China, are a part of Sir Austen Cham= berlain’s conciliatory fpolicy.” (Out emphasis.) And later on we find the Shanf#hai Defence Force praised, ag “its presence brings the north nearer to compro: h the south.” It igs | which sees “conciliation” in the land» ing of any army on the soil of @ friendly power, and. then justifies such action because it may in the dim future help to unite China against the according to Melvin M. Knight, is the boon of American profit-seekers in Santo Domingo. “The Americans in| Santo Domingo” is the title of Knight’s study of imperialism in this West Indian island. It is the first of the Vanguard Press series on Amer- | ican imperialism and is priced at $1. Common labor in Santo Domingo is| paid 60 cents a day. Besides during | the sugar harvest season 100,000/ Haitians and other West Indian work- ers who earn at the most 30 cents a day American money at home, are brought in. Land is cheap in Santo Domingo, the Americans buy up a lot, establish big sugar plantations and bring in machinery to do most of the work, says Knight. Then in addition the National City Bank and others, who participate in the sugar com- panies too, loan the Santo Domingo government money at high rates. And American customs collectors are in- stalled to be sure the banks get their interest promptly. “The Bankers in Bolivia,” by M. A. Marsh, and “Our Cuban Colony,” by Leland H. Jenks are two succeeding titles announced for the series. Harry Elmer Barnes is editor of the im- perialism studies. foreigner! One can, however, make some als ment on the part of it comes to a deli nterpra- tation of the plainest facts, no fors giveness is possible. The book is Jamusing and makes an (‘interesting evening’s entertainment, but on@ wishes that Ransome had ‘confined himself to descriptions of men-and places, rather than to dabbling im pseudo-social analysis. Costes and Le Brix En Route to Japan SAN FRANCISCO, March 16. — Continuing their commercial world+ girdling voyage, Costes and Le Brix, were aboard the liner Korea Maru today, bound for Japan. The French aviators plan to take cff at Yokohama for a return flight to France by way of French’ Indo- China and Italy. Two Trainmen Injured’ HARRISBURG, March 16.—Two jtrainmen were injured, one probably fatally, and passengers on the Balti- Are you a “DAILY WORKER” worker daily? more local of the Pennsylvania. Rail- road were shaken up early today when the local plaughed into the wreckage of two freight trains which were \wrecked at Marsh Run, near New )}Cumberland, Pa., early today. the $10 and $12 eye glasses th a savings of from $7 OPTICAL a e Whene are the 5 stylew you can choose from, Cut out this adv, and Why Pay More? The only difference between my FREE EYE GLASSES and GLASSES FREE! A TREAT TO THE PUBLIC 81st ANNIVERSARY DR. HERRMANN’S 236 East 14th Street, Bet. 2nd & 8rd Avenues. 5000 Pair of $10 and $12 Kriptoks, Bifocles and complicated glasses not included, Eye Glasses in 5 Styles for men, women and children. Guaranteed! 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