The Daily Worker Newspaper, November 29, 1930, Page 4

Page Four Riding the Rods to St. Louis Convention By CYRIL BRIG 1O one who attended the St. Louis convention of the= League of Struggle for Negro Rights and heard the determined speeches of rank and file delegates from the South and from other parts of the country can doubt the determination of the Negro masses for struggle or mistake the impatience and disgust with which they view the betrayals of their strug- gles by such treacherous organiza- tions as the N. A. A, C. P. and Urban League. Such is the présent spirit of the Negro masses that several of the del- egates at the St. Louis convention “rode the rod” to get to it. Eighteen- year old Joseph Burton rode freight all the way from Birmingham to Chattanooga because he wanted to attend the Southern Anti-Lynching Conference and “join up in a real fight against lynching.” Burton had learned of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (at that time the American Negro Labor Congress) through a contact in the Birmingham Laundry in Birming- ham, where with a number of other workers he slaved six days a week, 12 hours a day. As a wringer Burton got $2.25 a da 13.50 a week. A pitiful wage for a worker whose pa- rents had 11 children and himself the main support, for the others are now unemployed. He told the convention how Negro women and girls were driven 12 hours a day for 75 cents in the same plant, and how the work- ers were often robbed of a day's wages through the bosses switching finished work to somebody else, | claiming it had not been finished. Burton’s family of 13 lived in a 3 room shack, no gas, no electricity, no sanitary arrangements, outhouse in the yard. For this they paid $18 a month. Burton never attended school. He had to go to work at the | age of ten. His father told him not to return home if he mixed with “the radicals who are fighting lynching.” At Chattanooga he made the most militant speech of the southern con- ference and was elected a delegate to the St. Louis convention, He came to St. Louis with Mary Dalton and | other white and Negro delegates from | breaking down;: held up by police, | threatened with jail on vagrancy War and during the crisis of 1921, the St. Louis convention of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights affords a sharp contrast between the militancy of the Negro masses, who | are clamoring for courage- | ous lead > in the struggle against their terrible conditions and fright- ful oppression at the hands of the | white ruling class, and the belly-| crawling exhibition of the Negro | petty bourgeoisie (preachers, land- lords, shop keepers, etc) such as| these misleaders are even now per- | forming in a fake anti-lynching con- | ference at Washington, D. C. undér | the leadership of the Equal Rights | League of Boston. | actually Y leo as during the riots, it was the | Negro workers who met the boss- inspired, boss-led mobs with guns in their hands and beat down the terror by grim notice to the mobs that Negroes were ready to defend them- selves, so today it is again the Negro | masses who give militant voice to} their protests against the wrongs in- flicted upon them by the imperialists | of this country, against wage cuts, | lay-offs, unemployment, mass starva- | tion and misery. Just as during the riots, the so-called leaders from the petty Negro bourgeoisie betray the masses the Negro workers are mob- ilizing for militant struggle against the imperialists and are voicing their demands for the right of self-deter- mination for state unity of the Black | Belt, for confiscation of the land for | the Negro workers who work the land as the only solution of lynching and Negro oppression. | Civil War in W. Virgini THE DEVIL’S BRIGADE, by John L. Spivak, Brewer and Warren, New York. 326 pages. Price $3.50. A isosiae SPIVAK is the reporter who found the print shop where the| Whalen Forgeries were made. | lishmen in the world war, that the | enemy population might be exter- | minated as a means of ending war | finds a precursor in the argument of Jim Vance, uncle of Anse, when the Hatfields had their leading foes surrounded, and were about to de-| clare a truce: “This'll go on again, Anse . . . Let’s shoot ‘em an’ stop all/| these hyar hard feelin’s.” You'll hear that argument also, in the next] world war. | The forms of capitalist democracy | are part of capitalist society, They meant nothing in the feudal period | in West Virginia, any more than they do in the present general period of approaching fascism. Both McCoy’s| in Kentucky, 1:d Hatfields over the, DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, SATURDAY. Building Workers’ Cooperative Dwellings NOVEMBER 29, Soviet Coal Miners article please write us again, and this time give a name and address |the summer months the hours of so we can keep in touch with him. |labor are from twelve and fourteen | P@r¥. Four young lads from up here| there were in Gary some fine homes per day in the tobacco and corn|D#Ve been working away from home| and buildings, fine streets and parks, fields. It is not uncommon to see |i" Pennsylvania, they just recently| stores and restaurants, but these —Editor. (By An Ex-Serviceman.) HAVE lived in Elliott county for |SiX up, hoeing corn, cane, and tobac- | thirty-five years. Bruin, the place Poor Farmers Are Rising in Kentucky Will the author of this unsigned |today. It is even worse now, for all | ‘he next capitalist war. Few of us| precious store, never closer to his jour good land is worn out. During the father, mother and children from co, the whole family in their bare It seems also that Spivak, in his| Tg river in West Virgioia, controlled | where I was born, is twelve miles | ‘eet. the south. Two days, two nights ©" |vouncer days, got himself an as-|the local governments. Anse dictated the road in a car that insisted ©n | signment in West Virginia at the |rominations oy force of the Win- ffom the railroad. We live a very primitive life up here. I hope it will have no paved roads and in winter time we haul our groceries time of the marching miners. ‘The | Chester rifles he could muster to back | interest Daily Worker readers to|over muddy roads 12 miles from the |Logan County march was caused by | UP his candidate. Even the gover-/learn about our life in this part of| nearest paved road. charges, refused service in white res-/ the refusal of the coal operators’ |Nors of the two states were involved |the United States. taurants, not always able to get to| the Negro sections, starving, cold, | uncomfortable, but never whimper- | ing, the southern delegates forced | their way to the convention, Negro | and white suffering alike when the | jim-crow restaurants refused service | to the Negro comrades, refusing them even the use of the conifort stations! . @ baad Dalton told the convention of | the enthusiasm of ‘the southern | workers, white and colored, for the | sheriff, Don Chafin, a Hatfield rela-| tive, to allow the miners to organize | there. It was precipitated by the| assassination of Sid Hatfield, elected | by labor and loyal to it as chief of | police of Matewan in the adjoining | county of Mingo. In the course of| his investigations Spivak dug up the curious, bloody story of the Hatfield- McCoy feud. ‘The book tells how these two pro- lific tribes of mountaineers, with their relatives and allies by birth and by in the partisan war. Then came the exploitation of the | coal fields. As Spivak points out: | “The teeming civilization was in- different to faction and family. A McCoy could dig as well as a Hat- field, and feudists and sons of feud- ists found themselves burrowing in the bewels of the earth. A job to stave off hunger knew no distinction of klan.... “Hatflelds and McCoys who owned coal found that their interests were My ancestors settled in this part of Kentucky four generations ago. Both of my grandfathers and grand- I live nearer to the railroad than the majority, as I live at the edge of the couuty line. When I went to schevl we had 6 months of school and I had 2% 1930 Drawings by Bill GROPPER | more patriotic than I was. So imme- diately I enlisted in the army and went to France with the first brigade of the first division. Both of my | brothers were killed in France, I was | Seriously wounded. After the war I | tried to get a compensation but the veteran bureau says I am still able to work and refuses to give me anything. None of us up here are going to jever heard about the Communists. I have never met a member of your {came home and they brought several copies of the Daily Worker and some of your pamphlets back with them. I have read your paper and some of your pamphlets. A,boy came back from the navy this fall, he told me he was going to enlist in the army and I asked him what he had to fight for. He said “freedom.” I asked him how was he jgoing to fight for freedom in the army. He sald, “in the next war we are going to turn our guns on our real enemy, and that is the moneyed man. When I am in the army I'll jhave three meals a day and I can’t {get that on the outside because the average workingman only gets one sixth of what he produces, and with the machinery we have today one man in a civilized country can pro- duce enough to feed a hundred.” There are many people in this part By BILL COOPER 1 Frank Vikukel came to America| about three years ago. Behind him, permanently he was hoping, was Te- mesvar, Czecho-Slovakia. ‘Temesvar | was the memory of a continuous | battle against every misery of the} workers life; slaving, hunger. Te-| mesvar, he put behind him. | As the boat steamed into New York | harbor, steerage passenger Vikukel realized the objective fulfilment of years of saving, hoping, planning. | Here at last was America, the one} sustaining hope, the one beckoning light in a dark life of slavery and struggle. Here was the promised land where workers lived like men; lived secure from the miserable want, got money, could store it. Ah, he would work, he would store money, preci- ous money which would buy freedom and bring to his side the young wife and the child still in Temesvar. All was promise of happiness, It was/ almost within his grasp. He should | have been warned by the sight of the massive forbidding lady who looked down on him from her pedes- tal in the bay. Vikukel had no trouble getting through Ellis Island. He was big, | broad, strong looking. America and | its owners knew his type; the type which built the wealth of the coun- try and kept it alive and vital. He wound up in Gary, a puddler in the steel mills. His fresh enthusiastic energy was quickly seized upon and utilized in replacing the older, Within a short time Vikukel had lost his strongest, deepest illusions. He worked long six and seven-day | weeks. Ten to twelve hours a day |he sweated and strained in hells of | heat and molten metal. Weeks and months passed by and skimp and jdeny himself as he might, he was never encouragingly closer to that |loved ones. The town itself smoth- jered the brightest rays of hope. True |were not for the workers, Vikukel |and his fellow toilers lived in another town, apart within Gary. They lived in a transplanted Temesvar, in poverty and squalor. Vikukel turned his energy in a- nother direction. He became an act- ive Communist stirring to organize his fellow workers for the struggle for freedom and their rights to live. He helped build up workers organiza- tions and devoted all his available moments in their behalf. He fought tooth and nail against the local Hungarian Fascists, the imported weapon of the mill bosses. He ©x- posed and foiled them at every AN AMERICAN FARMER Vikukel Fights On, Ousted for Militancy sible opportunity, He became a marked man. After a while his energy and de- velopment became so marked, he was elected National Organizational Secretary of his Hungarian Workers Educational, Sick and Benevolent Society and was sent to New York. From there he went on a speaking tour for the National Hungarian Workers School. Gary was on his tour schedule. The police, at the instigation of the Fascists, arrested him on the trupm- ed up charge of illegal entry into the country. This was easily dis- proven by his passport and first nat- uralization papers. But the rats were not to be balked, and they per- petrated one of the rottenest framee ups in a long history of rotten antie working class frame-ups. The court interpreters deliberately lied, trans~ lating Vikukel’s statements of his views as aiming at the assasination of high government officials, On these grounds he was deported as an undesirable alien. Protest meetings were held all | over the country. The I. L. D. fought desperately for an appeal, but he was smuggled off and deported in sec- recy. He is now on his way back to Europe but not to Temesvar. Through postwar complications he will beconsidered a Rumanian sub- ject. On his entry there he will be seized and consigned to a death by torture in the dungeons of King Carol. American bosses are doing this to Frank Vikukel, they are doing this because he would not submit pas- sively to their exploitation and op- pression of him and his class; be- cause he fought and led the workers in struggle against them. They are killing him in vain. The blood of Frank Vikukel will only dye the workers’ flag a deeper red. Other leaders will take his place and the fight he fought in will go on until that banner waves on high in tri- umph, EPITAPH , (From Canadian Railway Employes? Monthly) Here lies Matthew Woll, With worms That creep and crawl Now you can't Tell at all Which is worm And which Was Woll, Any more Than you could tell Which was which ‘When Woll was well. movement. How every delegate at | marriage, fought a brutal clan war- the Chattanooga conference wanted | fare which lasted 40 years. It is a| to come to St. Lowis%6 help carry | flaming history of rising quarrels, | | of the country that have never seen | § | N 6 S AT THE P L 0 W an automobile nor been ten miles| from home in 20 years. Lots of grown | not the same as those of their clan who dug it. A Hatfield operator had more in common with a McCoy op- on the fight; how the: workers sup- ported Bell, a Negro <worker nom- mated on the Communist ticket for | U. 8. Senator, how in six Tennessee | counties they gave-Bell-640 votes, in| spite of the widé-spread stealing of | the boss parties, how the boss press raved when Bell was nominated, and how the Communist Party is steadily breaking down the barriers of race prejudice and hatred built up by the imperialists to split the working- class and weaken its struggles. Ben Careathers of Pittsburgh spoke | of unemployment in that city, of the | misery and starvation of both Negro | and white workers, told of the coal | and iron police breaking up meetings of the League of Struggle for Negro | Rights. He told of the fighting) spirit of the Negro miners and steel workers, of their determination to carry on against boss oppression. | Kingston of Philadelphia gave a) detailed report of the experience of the League in that city, its efforts to ‘work within the Garvey organization, its success in creating five function- ing locals and a City Committee, its leadership of the every-day struggles of the Negro masses. Not all of the delegates were as clear upon the class nature of Negro oppression as were Kingston, Mary Pevey, Careathers, Mary Dalton and others. But one and all were aware of the need for organized struggle, of the need for unity between the black and white workers. Most of them realized the fundamental difference between the oppressing imperialist governments and the first workers Pitched battles, clever ambuscades, desperate heroism and cowardly murder in which women and children | were not always spared. It also tells | how the industrial system came smashing in at last, not ending} bloodshed, far from it, but substitut- ing for the tribal war a class war. In the class war poor McCoy and miner Hatfield united against cap- italist McCoy and mine owner Hat- field. In both wars there were traitors. In the class war some of the poor Hatfields and McCoys sold out; the sons of the Hatfield leader, mighty fighters in the clan war, are found acting as detectives for the companies. In the clan war, the ‘Hatfield wrath was unlimited against “750 a day men” (detectives) sent by McCovs and state to hunt Hatfields. During the bitterest part of the clan : McCoys were led by old Randall McCoy, a man in his sixties and seventies. The Hatfields were led by “Devil Anse” (Anderson) Hat- field, nearly as old. Both lived to see the beginnings of that industriali- zation that changed the world for them, and Anse lived well into it. Anse, watching the first train load of coal leave his wilderness, turned to a henchman and said: “Thet load 0’ coal's bringin’ the north an’ the south together, an’ thar'll be new things a comin’ to pass as the preacher says.” 2 eer Yeager LL these mountaineer fighters seem to have been formally religious. They were always singing hymns. You gather that they believed any- way in Jehovah of Hosts. They never republic, the Soviet Union. All lustily cheered as William Brown, a Negro steel worker of Detroit and returned delegate from the Fifth Congress of the Red International of Labor Unions, took the floor with the open- ing remark: UnionsS .-“I am just returned from a coun- try where all men are equal regard- Tess of color, creed or nationality. I bring to you the greetings from the workers of the Soviet Union.” And they cheered again when Brown told of the explusion from the Soviet Union of. the two Americans who attacked a Negro worker in the Stalingrad Tractor plant. “Soviet Russia will not tolerate the ways of Bourgeolse America,”.Brown quoted the Soviet press, and the convention went wild yith applause. In every way the delegates and the organizations they represented showed their willingness for strug- gle, their recognition, in fact, of the vital need of . organized militant terror and oppression, Like the race riots after the World proposition put forward by some Eng- V/orker. let anything interfere either with |drinking or fighting. Elias Hatfield said to Devil Anse, while they were |planning cold blooded murder of helpless prisoners: “The bible done / |says them as kills kin never enter |the kingdom o’ heaven.” And Anse answers him with a chuckle: “‘Lias, |don’t you know thet thet thar’s ben put in thar fur a bugaboo!” Then | they proceeded to take for a ride the |three captive McCoys (one of them a young boy) into the enemy terri- tory, tie them to bushes, and shoot them to death. This is your good old American stock. And so much for the Hearst idea that gangsters mur- der is a foreign importation! ‘The Hatfield-McCoy warfare, like the wars of tribes and the wars of nations, was based on economic causes, here the ownership of pigs, and the stealing of women. Once the essential antagonism was developed, artificial “incidents” fanned it. It went on to a pitch, as is usual too in the wars of nations, where it was a losing thing for both sides. But there was no way out. The cold blooded jmine guards, erator than with a Hatfield miner.” A good many of the worst of the feudal killers be;.a to wors for the Beldwin-Felts Detective Agency, the operators’ private army. Among those who killed for coal was “Cap” Hat- field, the hero of the clan in the war with the McCoys. Organizers were beaten up and murdered right and left. Finally the Baldwin-Felds tried, with Lee Felts himself leading them, to kidnap and kill Sid Hatfield on a fake warrant. Sid's crime was that he openly stated he would let the mine union organizers in. Miners rallied to the defense of this Hatfield. When the) five-minute battle was over, there) were thirteen dead. And a little later Sid and another man were politely summonsed to answer a fake charge in another county, Sid was still unrealistic enough, still enough of a clansman, to think that because he had been given safe conauct by the Hatfield who was sheriff in the other county he could go safely. Sid and his friend came unarmed to the court house of McDowell county, and were riddled with bullets by Baldwin- Felts gunmen the Hatfield sheriff had hidden in it for that purpose. If “blood is thicker than water,” then gold is thicker than blood. IPIVAK’S book, beautifully printed tersely written with an eye for drama and a real understanding of the sociological factors, has one fine chapter at the end on the Logan county march (1921), that much overlooked bit of American labor his- tory, where the eventual revolution is foreshadowed. It is a description of incidents in the battle of nearly 10,000 miners, moving in military formation against almost as many ¥ fighting for several days duration on a front miles long, and winning. When the federal troops got there and stopped the fighting, the operators’ outfit was in retreat with a loss of 47 killed and over a hundred wounded—the miners had lost six dead and two wounded. Spivak does not do full justice to this struggle, but then, nobody does, and the book is mainly on the feud. Neither does space allow for more of it here. ‘The clan war ts over, and clan loy- alties have failed. In fact, things have gone much further, and the United Mine Workers, for which the miners marched, has failed them just as badly. But the class war remains, and under new leaders will go in. Don't miss the full story of circu- lation gains in Wednesday's Daily Hoeing the Corn, mothers were born in eastern Ken- tucky. My mother’s father was born and lived all his life in a large log house that is still standing. It was built by my great grandfather in 1824, a hundred and six years ago. I was born in 1895. My parents owned a hillside farm. I can re- member working in the cornfield when I was four years of age. We arose every morning at four o'clock winter and summer. When I was a boy I carried eggs and butter fif- teen miles to market riding horse- back. In the summer we would get ten cents a dozen fcr our ecgs, fif- teen cents a pound for the butter. I have made this trip many times, thirty miles round trip, with less than one dollar's worth of commodities, We also had to work fourteen hours to produce. —By Irwin. miles to walk to school. Several chil- dren had further to walk than I. Men are glad to get work 50 cents a day. $13 a month was their wages here in the :ummer as long as they could work 14 hours a day and evi, day in the month. In the winter a good many men worked for 25 cents a day. This was the condition of this country from 1900 up to 1917. Conditions are really worse today. | Many able-bodied men today are working for farmers for their board. ;Conditions were slightly improved here during the war, but have been getting worse in recent years. Many men and women are unable to read and write. When I was a boy all of the young boys were crazy to join the army, but they are not so patriotic today. When the war broke out I had two broth- ers already in the army, and there people in this country never rode on| a train nor been in a town above 1,000 inhabitants. When the world war broke out I was 22 years of age. ‘The day I enlisted was my first time to ride on a train. I saw my first street car in Ashland that day, but I never rode on a street car until the day I was discharged 28 months later. We never had any telephones up here, few of us if any ever talk over ____|@ telephone, nor have ever listened to a radio. automobile, There are men my age up here that |never rode in an automobile. Lots of poor families up here have not had money for several winters buy shoes for their children to go school. It is not uncommon to see children running around in their bare feet in the snow during the winter months. A good many families live }on cornbread and turnips here, this | being all the food they have. There \is no meat to season the turnips, the |corn bread is made of cornmeal, salt and water. They have killed all the wild game, there is scarcely a rabbit |left, the fish have all been caught. |So these people are becoming dis- | contented. We wish workers in other parts of | the country success in their struggle |against capitalism, I am with you |for a world-wide revolution between I have never driven an We still live the same primitive life was not an American in Kentucky ' capital and labor. Workers’ Hovels, Bosses’ Mansion and Old Salve Market in St. Louis, Mo. Upper right-hand is a photograph of a mansion of wealthy family. Lower right-hand, type of homes in working class section. Upper left-hand shows a shack of four rooms for which a Negro family has to pay $12 a month; no gas, no electricity, no heat, no sanitary arrangements. Lower left-hand: Photo of old Ford Court House where chattel slaves were sold and where today modern wage slaves offer their bodies for starvation wages. but I am not alone.) RED RENAISSANCE, by H. H. Lewis, with an introduction by Jack Conroy; B. C. Hagglund, Publisher, Holt, Minnesota. Price 25 cents. . (Reviewed by Henry George Weiss.) ST when one is about to scuttle the good ship Poetry and let it go down with all the unholy crew and give the sharks a nightmare of tummy-aches, along comes a poet like | H. H. Lewis and proves in a pamphlet of thirty odd poems, packed with social dynamite, that perhaps after all that good ship Poetry is worth | keeping afloat and only some of the asinine crew need be drowned, or hauled up to the yard-arm, or what- ever is too good a fate for them. Let me state that if I were com- missioner of poetry, H. H. Lewis is one of the few poets whose head I wouldn't have struck off at sunrise jas a menace to humanity. In the first place, let there be no mistake about this, Lewis is a genuine poet with something dynamic to say—and not afraid to-say it in understandable language and rhythms. A pox on the poets who get so bewitched with can't be intelligible! I have asneak- ing suspicion that Time will erase them with a wet sponge. But be that as it may, art is not afraid to be simple and direct. Beauty, worth, when genuine, need little adornment. Lewis senses this under- lying truth, and, as a result, eschew- ing all literary affectations and “rad- ical” art deviations, he produces @ poetry that can be read and un- derstood by the masses, poetry with beauty, punch, satire, poetry that | bites deep into the:hollow myths and | shams of present day society, poetry | with pathos, poetry that bellows a battlecry of slaves in the face of ex- ploitation and greed. . IN his introduction to Lewis’ pam- phlet of poems, Conroy says that Lewis modestly calls himself an American peasant. But Lewis is more than this: he is an articulate peasant, @ peasant speaking for millions of his more inarticulate fellows, a singing Red of the soil, a working-stiff who follows the plough and dreams of emancipation, not alone for himself but for all other exploited serfs and slaves. One senses this in his poetry. “Love can wait till after the world’s renewed.” What a splendid line! What understanding and determina- tion in a line! But the stature of Lewis as a poet is triumphantly achieved in “Gone West,” a poem first appearing in New Masses, and one of the few really fine poems to appear in that magazine: soe the form of the Lady Muse that they | “Then came two ‘foreign fellers’ act- ing droll With a look-thru dingus and a painted pole. Then numerous choppers clearing out a gap. Then hosts of Irish fond of exercise, Filling the lows and ditching thru the highs Twelve hours a day beneath a boss's yap. Then spike to rail. And then, with a harsh squall | And a hot hiss and a mighty turn of wheel— The loco-motive brute, the Age of Steel! Like clangorous Caesar farcing into Gaul. Until the hoary settlers learned again The ways of money with the ways of men... .” . . . e 'H1S is vivid, this is worth reading, and creates an unforgettable pic- | ture of what actually took place when the railroads pierced the American west. Lewis has the faculty of creat- ing an atmosphere of reality. He does it again in “Bumdeath,” “Mid- night Mission,” “The Wail.” He does it in all of the poems in this pam- | phlet. And as a consequence all of the poems are worth reading—and if I am not mistaken will be read—but probably not by the soulful bards of Greenwich Village, or by the blase |souls who meet in Grub St. basements and are quantity decadent and oh, so sophisticated and bored. No, Lewis will find himself increas- ingly read by honest-to-god working- stiffs, toilers inarticulate themselves, j yet longing to see their own hopes, aspirations, rebellions, sufferings put lin memorable rime—and this will please Lewis. The high-brow intel- lectuals will hardly know that a mighty good poet is in their midst | until the acclaim of the mass wakes them up. For this, since time im- memorial, has been the way of high- | brow intellectuals. But we working- | stiffs hail Lewis now, and I for one | one ery: Fellow workers, here is a | proletarian poet not balled up in the | mazes of “radical” art futilities, one of ourselves, an artist we can take to our bosoms and cherish... . Let us show our appreciation by buying the pamphlet of poems and sowing them broadcast. . . . ‘O much for the poems and the poet. But in closing let me state that I hope the »publishers will issue more of those pamphlets in popular 25-cent form, But only of strictly working-class poets and poems. A. B. Magill has written some mighty fine stuff, Myron Chaffee, and there are others, Conroy, Cheyney,’ Trent. Let the voice of the workers be heard!