The Daily Worker Newspaper, July 24, 1929, Page 6

i q Page Six ™ “"E DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 1929 3 ¥, Central Organ of the Communist Party of the U. S. A. Published by the Comprodaily Publishing Co., Inc. Daily, except Sunday, at 26-28 Union Square, New (City, NT Telephone Stuyvesant 1696-7-8. Cable: “DAIWORK." SUBSCRIPTION RATES: . By Mail (in New York only): $4.50 six months $2.50 three months By Mail (outside of New York): $3.50 six months $2.00 three months Worker, 26-28 Union Square 2 $8.00 a year $6.00 a year 4 mai] all checks to the Daily ere New York, N. [Boron Ba | Ymperialist Interventionists Mobilize White Guard. : That the present imperialist drive against the Soviet Union is for the purpose of trying to destroy the workers’ and peasants’ republics and initiate a reign of white guard terror is evident from the world-wide mobilization of this ezarist scum colonized in the world capitols, In Riga, War- saw, Vilnis, Paris, Berlin, New York, these nests of con- spirators are intensely active in fomenting provocations and lies against the Soviet Union. Former czarist military of- ficers, who in their day were professional assassins of the workers and peasants of czarist Russia, who were organizers of pogroms, are advisors to the imperialist military leaders planning armed intervention against the Soviet Union. In Manchuria there are 40,000 of this riff-raff, in the armed bandit forces concentrating on the Siberian border. The Chinese government has placed czarists in the posts on the Chinese Eastern Railway which, until the arrests and deportations of Soviet officials, were in the hands of the latter. This fact proves all the pious statements of the imper- ialist powers, the United States, France and Japan, regard- ing their grave concern about the peace of the world, to be nothing more than imperialist duplicity. It is these identical powers, along with the British “la- bor government” of Ramsay MacDonald that incited the Chinese and Manchurian bandit governments against the Soviet Union. These facts are understood by the masses of the Soviet Union who have shown that they stand united as one man xgainst those who are conspiring to turn that vast country ito a slaughter house, where the white guard czarist hire- lings of imperialism would direct a campaign of extermina- tion of the very flower of the men, women and children— the workers and peasants. It is the plain duty of the working class of the United States and the whole world to mobilize all their forces for strikes and demonstrations for the defense of the Soviet Union on August Ist. The reply of the working class to the imperialists and their white-guard lackeys must be mighty demonstrations of international solidarity against imperialist war. Reading’s “Socialist” Mayor Joins Hangmen of Workers ene alleged socialist administration of Reading, Pa., that, on assuming office promised to carry out capitalist pol- icies, is living up to its promises. Not only has it made no effort to encourage organization of the unorganized masses of the city of Reading, but it openly fights against attempts to defend the right of workers to organize. When representatives of the International Labor Defense requested the mayor of Reading, elected on the socialist ticket, to grant a permit for a tag day to raise defense funds for the: victims of the Gastonia conspiracy, he refused to grant their request. When informed that funds would be collected anyway he threatened police action. The mayor of Reading is a fit representative of the so- cialist party of America and of the second international. Just as the leaders of the second international throughout the world have joined the bourgeoisie in their preparations for an imperialist war against the Soviet Union, just as they carry on a murderous struggle against the working class in the various countries in which they participate in the gov- ernment, so the picayunish mayor of Reading joins the hang- men of the working class in the United States, who are try- ing to send to their deaths fifteen workers who were leading the organizational drive in the Southern textile mills. The thoroughly rotten socialist party still tries to conceal its treachery and perfidy to the working class behind the name of ,the late Eugene V. Debs. But by their very act they tearhice the memory and befoul the name of Debs who, all his life, fought to the limit of his splendid abilities in be- half of the victims of capitalist vengeance, and to the day of his death was a member of the International Labor Defense, the organization prohibited by the “socialist” mayor of Read- ing from collecting defense funds for working class prisoners facing death at the hands of the capitalist class. Surely Rosa Luxemburg was right when she called such scoundrels “stinking carrion.” “The Soviet Union strives to avoid every conflict in order to continue its economic construction work unhindered. In the past you have been offered a thousand proofs of the patience and the will to peace of the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union knows that it is surrounded by a world of hatred, passion and violence and is under no illusion about this state of affairs.” — MARCEL CACHIN, Communist Deputy, in speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, Dec. 4, 1928. WEAVING THE FRAMEUP rr wi eee ee, Ce : By Wm. Gropper By VERN SMITH. The Wheatland hopfields case started out as just the usual frame- up: a group of the employers’ gun- men, most of them only very thinly Cisguised as officers of the law, at- tacked a crowd of workers with force and arms; some workers struck back in self defense, officers | were killed; there were many ar- | rests; prisoners were tortured; most of them were finally released, and those thought to be the chief leaders were tried in a prejudicd court in |an atmosphere flaming with the bosses’ | period of the Haymarket to that of |Gastonia. Some times it fails, and some times it succeeds. | But the thing that particularly (distinguishes the Wheatland case, |and the most striking lesson to the | workers there, is the second trial of | Ford, the principal defendant, 12 | years after he was paroled from the life term he got at the first trial. And the thing to learn from this is |the employing class is absolutely | merciless completely murderous. The | bosses’ legal bloodhounds never vol- untarily quit the trial of a labor | leader they are set upon. Greed Rampant. In August, 1913, the Durst Brothers, of Wheatland, California, owners of a large hop plantation | (“ranch” they call it there) had by |false and lying promises caused 2,- 800 migratory workers, - | them bringing their families, to as- semble to pick hops. They were called to the ranch before the hops were ready; twice as many were called as could get jobs; the wages | were lower than represented; the vines were trained on high poles and no men provided to take them down, jand sanitary conditions, though simply indescribably bad, are chiefly |known to labor history by certain |main grievances connected with | them. breeze might blow. from Durst’s concessionaire. ‘Why? Propaganda, and part of | trict them convicted. This is the most | ordinary type of frame-up from the | some of ! There is never a cloud in the sky |of the Sacramento valley of Cali- fornia in August, and the sun blazes down with an unholy glare. Tem- peratures go every day well above a hundred, a hundred and twenty in the shade has been known. And the hop vines on their poles threw no shade; they only broke whatever In this kind of cpen air inferno, Durst had thought- fully removed every possibility of the pickers getting drinking water. Not a drop was allowed you in the field, unless you also bought a meal To make good business for a nephew of the Dursts who had from them a concession to sell poisonous, citric acid, artificial lemonade to the work- How the A Twelve Year Blood Hunt Hopfield Bosses Tried to Get Ford and Suhr Out of the Way lenge. They were holding a real] strike meeting by five o’clock that afternoon, Ford was standing on an} improvised platform, holding up a child whose face was flushed with fever caught on Durst’s ranch, and was saying, “It is for such as these we fight,” when Ralph Durst, Dis- Attorney Manwell, Sheriff George H. Voss, Constable Ander- son, and a crowd of would-be Western “bad men” picked hurridly from the saloors of Marysville, the county seat, and deputized, came down on the meeting. The constable had two illegal war- rants. The attackers were in two automobiles, all got out but Durst, who lo!led back to see his minions | subdue a slave revolt. Durst was | the employer, and this is what capi- talist government is for. The Officers Shoot. The officers swung their clubs, and clubbed shot guns, clearing a path with blows and curses toward the speaker, who made no attempt to escape. But some of the crowd | pressing away from the clubbing, pushed the stand, and it fell with a crash. Deputy Sheriff Henry Dakin needed no other excuse, and cut loose with his shotgun; other slightly deputized gunmen followed suit, and inextricable confusion re- sulted. But in. the mdist of it, an un- Known hero, described always merely as “The Porto Rican,’ rushed Durst’s killers, tore a weapon from one of them and shot Manwell, Vose, Anderson, and a deputized gunman, Riordan. _ Manwell and Riordan died; the- others recovered. As the Porto Rican threw down the gun and started to walk away, Rankin killed him with a’shotgun, and then took careful aim at a young English boy .who. was coming up with 4) bucket of water from a distant: well, and shot off his arm. Many ‘work- crs were wounded, their names are mostly unknown. The crowd scattered; hundreds of migratory workers were arrested ali over California, and carried to Maryville and nearby jails. They were horribly tortured by confine- ment in cells exposed to the sun and without air, by beating, by having their feet burned; “sweating” is the usual California police term for the third degree. One man after tor- ture was found dead in his bunk with his throat cut. Blackie Ford, of course, as the leader, was picked for framing, and with him Herman Suhr, somewhat prominent, and two other men, Beck and Bagen. ‘The trial was in Marys- ville, in January, 1919, before Judge E. P. McDaniel. The defendants were members of the I. W. W. or had recently been members, and the I. W. W. secured Austin Lewis as | defense attorney. The “Damned Furriner” Argument. Money for defense was scarce, most of the publicity had to be con- | ducted by Lewis himself, by the im- | poverished I. W. W., by two or three liberal bourgeois papers in the larger cities. The prosecution was able to create a feeling in Marys- ville that “our beloved district at- torney” was killed by a “gang of damned hoboes and foreigners and anarchists,” who didnt even speak the English language. ‘What does this word ‘solidarity’ mean, any- way,” the prosecutor shouted trium- phantly “You can’t find it in the dictionary!” (In those days you couldnt but now you can.) It was all very much like the bosses’ propa- genda in the present Gastonia frame-up. A Qualm of Conscience. Even the ‘packed jury, however, had conscientious scruples » about Killing these men. They found’ only‘ the two leaders guilty, on the same old Haymarket theory of complicity by their treachings, and freed Beck und Bagen. They found Ford.and Suhr guilty of second degree murder only, and recommended leniency. McDaniel had fewer scruples; he read “limit” for “leniency” and sen- tenced them for life. Eleven years of consistent agita- tion, eleven years of ~ strikes - in which the word “Wheatland” was a rallying calls, eleven years which brought a labor boycott that ruined the Dursts, and cut profits on Sacra- the California Defense Committee of order the jury to report disagree-| | brought in a verdict of “not guilty.” mento Valley hops to a minimum, convinced the governor of the state that he ought to parole Ford. He did, Sept. 11, 1925, and the Marys- ville sheriff arrested him at the prison door and took him back for | trial January 4, 1926, for the “murder” of Riordan. His, first trial was for Manwell. 3 The Judicial Pooh-Bah. McDaniel had boasted so openly of what he would do this time to Ford that the governor thought it better to appoint a new judge. He picked Busick, the most notorious foe of labor that ever sat on the California bench. “Injunction” Busick, he was called. He had framed Tom Connors, secretary of the I, W, W. for tampering with a jvry, because some. prospective jurors got defense literature through the mails, in a general distribution to add addresses in the phone book. Pusick in the Connors case was both judge and prosecution witness, | testifying, for the record and the | jury, directly from the bench. Busick did his best to frame Ford again, but the eleven years of pub- licity had accomplished something. The jury was not s0 easily packed. The prosecutor, Ray Manwell, was the son of the former district at- torney, and the case had an atmos- | phere of personal vengeance about | it. The judge’s prejudice was so flagrant that it had the reverse ef- fect from that intended. Frequently, during the trial, he told the jury that the defense, “has presented no case.” When the jury reported dis- agreement, he forced them back and demanded a verdict—until his un- derground informers told him that those voting guilty at first were be- ginning to swing over, whereupon he sent a bailiff every half hour to tent. They now refused, however, and after 77 hours deliberations, When the verdict was brought in, the judge exploded in wrath, de- nounced it as “un-American” and sentenced to jail for “contempt of court” one spectator who dared to applaud. ~ Suhr, also, was later released. » Their Lesson and Ours. ‘This is how the employers of Marysville tried for 12 years to kill a strikeleader. That they failed was not due to any breakdown in the frame-up system, but merely to the crudeness vf its instruments, plus the persistent agitation and educa- tion‘of the workers to the facts in the case. If a hanging verdict had By FEODOR Translated by A. S. Arthur and C, Ashleigh All Rights Reserved—International Publishers, N. Y. ¢ was Khapko, the Food Commissar, who first caught him listening at the door. Tskheladze had no time to step aside—Khapko had guick bird-like step. So he stood face to face with Khapko. “Hullo, you!” Khapko eyed the Georgian from head to foot. “What's all this? What are you doing here, dog-face? spying? Give me your Party card! Quick!” Tskheladze flushed deeply. His eyes became round and bulging, malicious. He stooped still more and bared his teeth. ‘ “What do you mean—Hullo, you?’ Who are you questioning What are you doing here, anyway? What game are you up to? Tell me, please.” Khapko, looking just like a fighting-cock getting into action, seized him by his blouse and promptly set to work on him with his hands. Tskheladze, hampered by his wide pantaloons, made a sudden half-turn and bumped up against the wall with his chest and head. i “To hell with it!. We’re not living under the czar, you filthy scoun) drel. For these tricks, you bastard, I'll have you thrown out of the. Party. I'll not allow you to carry out counter-revolutionary activities under the rule of the proletariat. No!” Are you * * * INNED to the wall, with arms stretched out, deafened, Tskheladze, infuriated and bewildered, gazed at Khapko; he was breathing heavily and his bloodshot eyes would not stop rolling; it seemed they would jump out of their sockets into the air like balloons. Badin came out of the room, stepping heavily, with his hands in his pockets. He came and stood very close to Tskheladze, “What's up?” “Just a son of a bitch of a spy. Ah, you’re not in Menshevik Georgia now! Arrest him on the spot and send him to the Cheka. Do you think, you swine, that the Soviet Government exists for you to spy upon responsible Soviet workers, who work all hours and don’t sleep at nights? Comrade Chairman, take his Party card away from him and give him one in the jaw!” * * . Lanest looked closely at Tskheladze with eyes black as night. “I know you well enough, Tskheladze. Khapko is lying. He has drunk too much spirits and has made a fool of himself.” Khapko, astounded, squeaked like a bird, choked and beat hig head with his open hand. “What—! Chairman: The hell——!” “Speak, Tskheladze. I know beforehand what you will say. Speak out straight, honestly and firmly.” Tskheladze’s lips trembled and his face was covered with swea' from the strain and the suffering. “Yes, I went—went and listened, yes! I went and watched, to see! you building up working class policy. . . . What were you doing? & Why are you always with scoundrels? What were you doing for the worker? What do you know? D’you know hunger? Do you know bloodshed? Do you know misery? Have you no shame? Oh, my Comrade!” * * * le stood like an image before Tskheladze, attentive and grave. Khapko was laughing drunkenly, with a squeaking whistle. Badin placed his hand on Tskheladze’s shoulder and spoke—his voice came from his whole body. “Comrade Tskheladze, go home. Tomorrow you will receive an order to go to a rest-home. You must get a bit stronger. You see, I make no secrets of my actions, and you have no need to keep a watch on your Comrades. In this respect we have our work very well organized and we do not need your amateur assistance. Go!” He turned his back on him and returned to Shramm’s room. Khapko surveyed Tskheladze again severely from head to foot, imitating Badin; then he put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, growing still shorter and rounder. “All right, then! Well, Brother, I shall get you! Damn it all!” Stooping, confounded, Tskheladze went along the corridor, stag gering as though he were ill, his shoulders rubbing against the plaster. At Shidky’s door he stopped. He did not know whether he himself. had opened the door, or if it were already open; he only felt a han seize him by the arm and draw him into the room. At the threshol ke stopped and saw the little lamp over the table, behind the dim shadow, suddenly go out. Silently the shadow walked by him, and the little lamp flashed again, lighting up the sordid bareness of a small hotel room, whose walls were covered with spots of mouldy dampness. “Well, come in and sit down for a while. Tell me what has hap- pened there. What the devil are you doing round here at midnight, anyway?” GHIDEY again took the Georgian by the arm and Jed him to the table. He seated him on a stool but himself remained standing before him, slightly astonished, his nostrils pale, his eyebrows lifted with a faint derisive smile. Tskheladze threw him a glance full of anger and appeal. He sighed and his eyes filled with tears. In the weak electric light his hollow cheeks under the projecting cheek-bones seemed to be deeper than ever. He brought his fist down furiously on his knee, He jumped up and through his tears looked fixedly at Shidky; then he sat down again, contorted with despair and fury. “Comrade Shidky, they must be shot. We must shoot—you have to.shoot—. What is happening? How shall we look after the workers’ welfare? I shed blood—I have ten wounds. Where’s my blood? And hunger? - And ruin? Where’s the Party, Comrade Shidky? But what are they doing?—They are making a s€andal, shameful! Oh, shoot me, Comrade Shidky—I cannot live among this filth and mean- ness. I can’t bear it!” Shidky walked past Tskheladze silently, pacing up and down. He was troubled and his eyes tired with thought. Constantly he put his hand to his head, rumpling his hair nervously at the back. He came up close to Tskheladze, placing his hand on his shoulder. He would have liked to have soothed him, affectionately, without words, but did not know how. . And this unaccustomed tenderness brought a shy smile to his lips. “You're a funny chap, Tskheladze! Why do you cry about trifles?, To hell with them! Go on with your work and know that you’re el valuable to the Republic than all of them put together. Spit on the: if you can’t knock ’em down; or go for them along Party lines.” * * * bi J epi aye oe again looked despairingly and entreatingly at Shidky; he made a vague gesture and dropped his head on to his hands. Shidky began to walk up and down the room, not looking at Tskheladze. He was thinking and biting his nails, first on one hand ‘and then the other, * “And here’s another thing, Tskheladze, not your case, Your case is too petty. There’s a terrible whirlpool, and we're all in it. We're going to be subjected to a dreadful trial, worse than civil war, ruin, famine and blockade. We're in the presence of a hidden foe who is Can Daily Survive? funds vital if our press is to live Respond immediately to the abpeal of the Daily Worker for aid in its present crisis! heen obtained at that first trial, it would have been a perfect frame- up. We may take it for granted that employers all over the country, in Gastonia especially, have learned their lesson from Wheatland. Here- after they will make supertuman efforts to get a death sentence in the first trial. The workefs too, must make equally strenuous efforts |, SAOYS PUBweyMA AOZ ‘7e7qInbow 107 them that the vengeance of a master toward his rebellious servants is a thing that neither time, nor tide nor Greumstance can assuage. — ers. There were no toilets in the field, and only two for 2,800 people at the camping ground. The place was filthy. Slapped in the Face, Richard (“Blackie”) Ford was elected chairman of a workers’ com- mittee to present demands to the Dursts for more wages and’ better conditions. Raiph Durst told. them to come back later, and meanwhile called up the constable, and brought him to the ranch. When Fotd:came, back for the answer, Ralph: Durst was standing with a heavy -pair of riding gauntlets held in his hand, and the constable stood close behind not going to shoot us, but will spread before us all the charms and temptations of capitalist business. We control the whole of the econ- omic system. That’s certain enough. But the petty trader is crawl- ing out of his hole, He’s beginning to get fat and re-incarnates in various forms. For instance, he’s trying to instal himself in our own ranks, behind a solid barricade of revolutionary phrases, with all the attributes of Bolshevik valor. Markets, cafes, shop windows, delica- cies, home comforts and alcohol. After the war atmosphere people begin to throw off the fetters. That’s something we should be afraid of. There is panic, lassitude, revolt. - . . It’s not from tiredness—no: it’s a healthy revolutionary protdst, coming from an over-developed class instinct, from the romanticism of the war period. Here we hay the old methods of struggle—but precisely these old methods are n@\y longer of use. The foe is mean, cunning and difficult to catch. We must forge a new strategy. It’s impossible to win just by indigna’ tion.and revolt; that would merely mean reaction and hysteria, In “The fact that many millions’ of the best and most wapable workers had been withdrawn for over four. years 44914-1918) from the normal process of production, the fact that industry as a whole had been adapted to the production of war materials and finally, the devastation caused by the ‘war, produced in the most important belligerent countries a general economic decline and the general impoverishment of the toiling masses. The world economic system as a whole ‘was very much weakened.”—J. SIGUR: “The Victim of the ‘Imperialist War 1914-1918.” The Daily Worker, 26-28 Union Square, New York. ‘ After reading the appeal for aid in the Daily Worker I am’ sending you the enclosed amount, $ ~ “Together with the Communist Parties of all other coun- es, the Communist Party of Germany is taking all: the him with his gun. Durst testified Name ...... The Gastonia Textile Workers’ trial starts July 29! Twenty-three this case we have radically to change ourselves, harden ourselves, for- the Bolshevik in ourselves for a long, lingering siege. The romance lures necessary to make the International Red Day inst War,’ oP workers too} ri : later that he “just flicked Ford worl face ition. or | of the tumultuous battle-fronts is finished. We want no roman inst War a day of the broadest working class and peasant |scross the face with the gloves,” Address Menoge terms! Rally all forces to | now. What we need now is quiet, cold and resourceful adintniateatons es in town and country against imperialist war and for | “There's your answer, now get off Lente he save them. Defense and Relief | and hard-headed laborers with strong teeth, the muscles of a bull and @ defense of the Soviet Union.’—WALTER GOLLMICK: | the plac a! Names of contributors will he published yeek July, 27—August -3!: Sign |~healthy nerves, One must be a Bolshevik all the way through, e Preparations of the, Communist Party of Germany for The glove tn the face! The ancient delay, ' : Protest Roll! Rash funds. ‘skheladze. Calm yourself, Comrade, and let us think together over : tional Red Day eran formula of a challenge! International Labor iy these variou yas. which demand a good deal of * Defense, 80