The Daily Worker Newspaper, May 26, 1931, Page 4

FRAY Published by the Comprodaily Publishing Co., Inc, daily except Suvday, at 50 Fast h Street, New York ¢ 795 Page Four & 1 Telephone Algonq 7 7, Cable N. ¥ t ly Worker, st 13th Street, New York, N Dail Central ALWOR ? PTMEFT SUBSCRIPTION RATE: Rr en een \ ea & By mail everywhere: One year, $6; six months. $3 {© of Manhattan and Bronx, New York Ctiy. Foreign: one year, $ ‘wo months, $1 ¥eepting Boroughs \¢ six months, $4.50. Save the Daily Worker! Raise the $35,000 Fund! “{ MERICAN labor is probably in for the fight of its life, The demand for the cutting of s is a part of a campaign which is*now only wag beginning.” 1 new ac send-off di 1,000,000 1 ne orke bi g e place every day 9 worker rease, and their c more deplorable—then the need of the ry press becomes more imperative nmer ncies the more urgent. h wants the Daily Worker troyed. nd Green want to se But the workers want Graft and Gangsters ‘This is the second article in this series. The first dealt with the part of the Chicago police in the wholesale gang executions. It traced the origin of gangsterism’ and graft in the United States, showing the motives behind the cunmen and grafters are similar to those of the capitalists—a gory struggle for profit —Ed. By HARRY GANNES One of the first American capitalis gangsters in the struggle for industry te profit was none other than J. P. Morgan, the elder. In 1869 a furious struggle developed for the control of the important Erie Railroad and the Albany & Susquehanna Railroad. On the one hand there was the Jay Gould and Jim Fisk financial ring seeking to take control; on the other, J. P. Morgan and Joseph H. Ram- At first the courts and the legiSlature s were used. They were easily bribed by either side. When Morgan bought one judge who issued an injunction favoring his rule of the railroad, Jim Fisk bought two others who de- cided the other way. Working for Fisk, w Boss Tweed, the patron saint of Tammany Hall grafters. Tweed’s total graft during his ad- ministration is known to have amounted to over $200,000,000. But the Morgan group was zble to buy enough judges to outweigh the Tweed ri powerful as it was. Then came open warfare and the introduction of gangsters and gunmen on both sides to take forcible pos- session. of the railroads. Their Gunmen In Action. Jim Fisk forcibly took possession of the Al- bany & Susquehanna depot at Binghamton, New York, with the armed Erie employees as- sisted by the local sheriff. Fisk then proceeded to Albany, accompanied by his hired gangsters to seize possession of the Albany & Susque- hanna offices there. He ordered his gunmen to rush in and take possession of the place. The superintendent ordered them to get out. Fisk said that this was his twenty-seventh raid and he proposed to keep the place with the help of his gangsters. Writing of this attack, Lewis Corey, in his book, “The House of Mor- gan,” says: “Two armed groups were now in possession of the Albany & Susquehanna, Receiver Fisk operating the Binghamton end of the road and Receiver Pruyn the Albany end. Ramsey superintendent determined upon an of- fensive, and with 450 men marched upon Bing- hamton while an Erie-Fisk Fould army (of gunmen) prepared to invade Albany.” Bloody battles ensued in the struggle be- tween the rival financiers and railroad mag- nates for the control of the road, the courts being evenly divided between them, the graft- ing politicians lined up on both sides. It was an open war with gangsters doing the job for the capitalists. Klan Killers, In the South, the slave owners had the power of life and death over their slaves, with but little interference from the state. Following the Reconstruction days 41865-1876), the Ku Klux Klan was organized through a number of secret societies representing white large landowners in the South, A reign of terror was started against the “emancipated” Negro masses, to drive them into new forms of slavery. The Klan developed a weird type of organ- ization but its main weapons were lynching, beatings, shootings and other forms of terror. In many instances the Klansmen became open bandits, and when the southern landowners achieved their ends, they disbanded the orig- inal Klan, retaining its methods of gangsterism and terror to be used, whenever occasion arose to oppress the Negro masses and to keep them in the new forms of slavery. The Klan with all its gangster methods was revived after the World War with the sharpening class struggle. Its traditions are still carried on by the capi- talists and landowners of the South. As capitalism consolidated itself after the Civil War, the individual ideas of terror and use of private armies that had grown out of the pioneer days were grafted on to the more shiy develoned capitalist state. Along with this went the wild graftipg in the city, state The Morgan- | 1 i} the Daily Worker to continue to bring the mes- of struggle wage cuts and speed-up; nd insurance; against n-born; for mobiliza- and Negro workers to fight for e the nine Scottsboro Negro inst the Soviet Union! he Daily Worker to help the str e for organization to fight! ant the Da Worker to lead them in the hey want the Daily Worker to expose the capitalist and socialist press workers and poor farmers, against WILL SAVE THE DAILY ant their fighting organ to WE WILL SAVE THE WORK WE WILL MOBILIZE THE TO SAVE THE DAILY WORKER! ize committees in the unions, anizations, to e funds to save ‘The unemployed and the Red send out their forces to col- ‘The hundreds KERS 1 the Daily Worke: housands of workers who sympat with | t Party, who see in the Party the | nterests, who answer the call | ne mass demonstrations, will ave the Daily Worker everywhere! Collectors of the | 000 to the Daily Worker. Take ganization—form your commit- to work! And above all—com- shops to collect the dimes, quar- from the workers to SAVE THE ER. At mass meetings, shop gate collect funds to SAVE THE | » in your ¢ em The workers of New York have never failed the Daily Worker. They will not fail now when {| d their tools work feverishly for | n of the Daily Worker. r signal flies—the Daily Worker jon! All hands on deck—every- ‘The DAILY WORKER WILL BE the bosses a District Committe District New York Communist Party, U.S. em of city grafting had become a more dig- ed process, though gangsters were used to dvar But in cities like Chicago, which had a more rapid development, the use of gang- | sters proved of inestimable value to the capi- | n winning elections, in beating down and in tetrorizing the workers. Breaking Strikes. rapid growth The following the Civil War saw the growth of the labor movement and strike struggles. With of American capitalism tk came the introduction by the big com- jes both in the East and West, of gangsters nd provocateurs to break strikes. At - first, pecial agencies were formed to organize and drill the gunmen-strikebreakers for the bosses. Among these were the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, the William J. Burns Detective Agency. The Pinkertons supplied gangsters, gunmen and stool-pigeons to break the great Homestead steel strike. One of Pinkerton’s famous gun- en, James McFarland, plotted a murder in order to wipe out the Molly Maguires, one of the early American labor organizations, com- posed of Irish miners in Pennsylvania. Mc- land's deliberate murder frame-up led to ne hanging of ten workers, members of the Molly Maguires. The same Pinkerton Agency supplied gunmen for the International Reaper Works, later the International Harvester Com- pany, the owners of which also published the Chicago Tribune of Al Capone fame. In 1914 the Rockefeller interests hired a whole rmy of gangsters, who together with the state | militia, massacred 30 miners and their wives during the course of a strike in Ludlow, Col- orado, Bill Haywood, one of the foremost militant and dramatic leaders of the American labor movement, in his autobiography, Bill Haywood’s Book, gives a graphic picture of the use of gangsters and gunmen by the bosses in every important strike in the United States. He tells of the wanton and brutal murder of thousands of strikers; the deliberate killings by company gunmen, and then the framing-up of militant union leaders, The same gangsters travelled from strike to strike. They were a part of the bosses’ apparatus in breaking down struggles for wage increases and for better conditions. The leading gangster-recruiting agencies such as Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts disappeared from the field when the large corporations dis- covered they could organize their own armies of gunmen. Industry was increasing in size; exe ploitation and speed-up becoming more severe. ‘The gunmen working with the bureaucracy in the American Federation of Labor and other reformist unions proved to be just as valuable tools as the Pinkertons and the McParlands. Gunmen and gangsters became a part of the organization o° industry, though some of them | put on co: nniforms, while others were paid by the state umder the guise of state police, (TO BE CONTINUED.) - Uncover Starvation and Misery The capitalist press, the agents of the ruling class, has been publishing less and less news about unemployment. It hides the starvation of the unemployed workers’ families. We must constantly expose the miserable treatment of families of the unemployed by the city governments and charity institutions. We must uncover all cases of starvation, un= dernourishment, sickness. We must pub= lish these cases in our press, in the Daily Worker, in Labor Unity, tell them at all workers’ meetings. Un- employed Councils should publish ny bulletins to inform all workers of 4-. > the sigrvation and misery of the - “= "4 gnemployed ‘ THE MAKE-UP fee Lynch justice is ut ig the attacks of the misleaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) By BURCK the yellow socialists and the liberals of the Garland Fund Committee against the Scottsboro Committee to justify the legal lynching of the nine Negro boys in Alabama prison. By GEORGE E. POWERS. 'HE recent strike of the 1,600 steel workers at the Empire Steel Corporation mill at Mans- field, Ohio, is an important event in the grow- ing struggle of the workers in the steel industry against the sharpening campaign of the steel barons to reduce the living standards of the | workers. When a ten per cent wage-slash was announced by the Empire Steel Co. on May 1, there was deep discontent and it broke loose when an ad- ditional five per cent cut was ordered. Follow- ing this the workers walked out on strike on May 12. They marched from department to department through the mill making the shut- down complete from the start. The Ohio State Hunger March had passed through Mansfield just before the strike started and one of the largest meetings in the history of this city was held. The steel workers, many totally unemployed and most of the rest working part time for starvation wages, gave full sup- port to the struggle for immediate unemploy- ment relief and unemployment insurance. This was further shown by the fact that when they went on strike, a committee sought the leaders of the hunger march . The strikers’ committee was not able to get in touch wtih the hunger march leaders and instead was directed to the leading labor fakers of Mansfield, Watkins and Antrican of the A. F. of L. central labor body, the Trades’ Council. Through them the notorious strike breaking “Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers” was drawn in. In a short time Miller and other “organizers” of this treacherous outfit were in Mansfield try- ing to get control of the strike in order to sell-out the Mansfield workers as they betrayed thousands of steel workers in the past. Chase Out Amalgamated Many of the rank and file steel workers on strike realized the real nature of these fakers as agents of the bosses and conducted an en- ergetic campaign against them which eventually drove the Amalgamated out of the strike after they had collected considerable sums of money in initiation fees from the strikers. With the usefulness of the Amalgamated as a strike breaking instrument destroyed, the local misleaders, headed by the Watkins-Antrican gang, working closely with Henkel, president of the Empire Steel Co., took over control of the strike. From the outset the committees from ~ The Strike of the Manstield Steel Workers | the various departments forming the strike | committee, had been carefully hand-picked, in some cases elected representatives of the work- ers being removed from the committee by the fakers acting under company direction. A son of the superintendent of the mill was placed at the head of the strike committee and early in the strike, the local chief of police was invited to address the strike meeting, but was howled down by the strikers. No Wage Cuts At the Thursday, May 14 mass meeting the strikers voted unanimously against accepting any wage-cuts, demanding a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour for unskilled workers, return to the wage-scale in effect before May'1 involy- ing complete rejection of the 15 per cent wage- cut. Other demands were payment for “sec- onds,” for which workers have not been re- ceiving pay though the “seconds” are the result of faulty process and not the fault of the work- ers, improvement of working conditions, that day men cannot be required to. work more than 10 hours and night men 12, that the bi-monthly sliding scale of pay be resumed; that no man be called to work for less than eight hours. At this meeting when some strikers at- tempted to get the floor in order to urge that Cc. B. Cowan, leader of the State Ohio Hunger Marchers be asked to speak at the meeting, these strikers were put out of the hall by the Watkins gang. It was very evident that the company and the labor fakers had made care- ful preparations to prevent speakers from taking the floor who would expose the maneuvers of the attempted sell-out. This and other strike meetings were rushed through and cut short, little or no discussion from the floor being allowed. ‘The strike was peaceful and lasted only/ four days. Very little picketing was done, no scabs tating the places of the strikers, though Henkel, president of the Empire Co. claimed the company had strikebreakers in reserve in case the strike | continued, “aga, | Friday noon the “Strikers’,Rank and File Or- ganizing Committee” distributed leaflets calling upon the strikers to throw out the fakers, stop the sell-out and continue the struggle against all wage-cuts, urging that rank and file workers take over full control of the strike through large representative committees. The leaflet also called for a mass meeting early in the afternoon. Later in the day, the strike meet- ing that was to receive the report of the settle- ment committee was scheduled. Unleash Terror Neither of these meetings took placé. With the issuance of the leaflet of the organizing committee a reign of terror was started by the company and A. F, of L. forces. Over a dozen automobiles filled with men, most of whom wore American Legion buttons scoured the city, breaking up even small groups of people stand- ing, talking on the sidewalks. Groups of police and company thugs surrounded both halls which were locked by police orders. In spite of these | suppressive measures, as 2 p. m. approached the strikers responded to the call of the leaflet, many attempting to get into the hall. Negro as well as white workers showed keen interest in the message of the “rank and file committee.” A group of 45 Negro strikers and unemployed workers marched to the hall in a body. Several workers and organizers were seized manhandled, among them Matt Miovae, who was jailed without charges. Pat Cush and John Meldon, organizers of the Metal Workers’ In- dustrial League jwere taken in automobiles out of the city and threatened with violence if they returned. As it vas but for the presence of a number of railroad workers nearby, they would have been victims of a brutal attack. Heading this fascist band of company thugs, legionnaires and police, was Watkins, head of the local A. F. of L. These acts took place with the knowledge and approval of Mayor Moore, before whom the organizers were taken and then delivered into the hands of the gang: The local capitalist press immediately poured forth a flood of lies, claim- ing that the strikers themselves had ejected the organizers, These desperate measures were taken to pre- vent the rank and file of the strikers from dis- cussing and acting on the proposals of the com- pany, which were 100 per cent endorsed by the small committee. While some of the strikers’ demands were won (restoring the wage-rates of the skilled workers), one of the most important, the demand for a minimum of 40 cents an hour for unskilled workers was compromised at 36 cents an hour. In addition, the company suc- ceeded in getting the strikers back unorganized, giving as a substitute for a real union, the com- pany union modeled after the Bethlehem Steel plan, A representative of Bethlehem is expected soon in Mansfield to help install the company “union.” i Despite the attempts of the Empire Steel Com- pany campaign and their tools, the workers con- tinued to carry on the organization campaign. On Sunday, May 17, a meeting of the Unem- ployed Council took place in the headquarters of the Trades’ Council. The main business was the report of the Ohio State Hunger March made by Subich and C. B. Cowan. Other speakers were George E. Powers, acting national secretary of the Metal Workers’ Industrial League and Mich- ael Hallabrin of the German Workers’ Club, An executive committee was elected *to bring in a plan of work and organization. Several new members. were drawn in, among them Negro workers, ‘ The outstanding weakness of the Mansfield strike is in the fact that the workers were un- organized before the strike. This shortcoming still remains. It will be necessary for the Metal Workers’ Industrial League to carry on regular, systematic, daily organization work in connec- tion with the many grievances of the steel work- ers, building real department and mill commit~ tees as the basis of a fighting industrial union capable of leading the steel workers in strike ° PARTY LIFE Conducted by the Org. Dept. Central Com- mittee, Communist Party, U. S. A. Working In the Shop By I. WINN (Unit 505, Chicago) || bea are some of the experiences we had in building a May Day Shop Committee and building it into a shop grievance committee. 505 has in charge a certain factory for the last one and a half years. Occasionally we destrib- uted some Daily Workers and leaflets. No sys- tematic distribution with the view of getting contacts was carried on. Last fall the section got down to business and demanded an account of Unit 505 of our work in this shop. We as- signed a concentration committee of four to sell the Daily Worker at least three times a week. At that we also got in @ member to the Party who was working in there, who was very energetic in getting con- tacts for us but due to the economic depression the factory closed down for three months. It reopened in January with a general wage cut of 10 per cent. We wrote up the whole thing for the Daily Worker and sold the copies in front of the factory. -In March we issued a shop bulletin which made a big hit with the workers. In our plan of work adopted in April we set ourselves the task of organizing a May Day Shop Committee at the shop. This we did and sent three delegates to the United Front May Day Conference. We also issued our monthly bulle- tin. In order to get the maximum results the Sec- tion Committee assigned a comrade from the section to that unit, holding him responsible for the work in the building of a shop committee in conjunction with the comrades from 505. The Section also put that question on the agenda of its regular Section Committee meetings where detailed report was made and valuable discussion took place with concrete recommendations how to improve the work. The report was also made at the unit which raised the enthusiasm of the comrades who pledged to do more energetic work. One comrade went out the next day and got five names (three Negro workers and two white) which will be maa in building the shop grievance commit- tee All this can be attributed to the fact that once we convinced the comrades of the unit that this work can be done they went out and did work and to the fact that the comrade working inside was not a Thursday 8 to 10 p.m. Bolshe- vik but was working inside day in and day out. This in short goes to show what a unit with one comrade working inside a factory can do pro- vided they do not try to find all kinds of im- aginary barriers. In this connection I would like to make com- parison with two other shop units in the section which were for the last three years with at least three comrades working there constantly and with no organizational results because there was no work carried on inside the shop on the part of the comrades working in there. struggle and winning the demands raised in the struggle. In spite of the present weakness of the M.W.1.L., which is reflected in Jack of pre+ viow organization in the mills and slowness in ‘ Workers! Join the Party of Your Class! Communist Party 0.8 A. P. O. Box 87 Station D. New York City. ies Please send me more information on the Cum- munist Party. Name Se eee eee eeeemeeeaeesesseeseeeeeeseeesenes Address City . « Btate ....seeeeee OBoupation .o.ccecscessceccorsceress ABC .evere Mai) this to the Central Ofce. Communist Party. P ©. Box 87 Station D. New York City getting into action in the strike, an effective at- tack was carried on against. the Amalgamated Association which was driven from the field. A beginning was made to expose the alliance of the company, local labor fakers, politicians, law- vers, clergy, etc, against the steel workers, - . By JORGE ae Do We “Exaggerate”? Comfortable folks, and those too much blinded | by the glitter of this “imperial city of New York”—as Mayor Walker calls it, not without reason, Often accuse us of “exaggerating” when we of the Daily Worker talk about “people starvy ing” or “the starving masses.” ‘Well, a comrade whose wife thought like tha! caifte into the office the other day, with a lettel” His wife, whose old home was in Oklahoma, went back there for avisit. At his suggestion, we give a part of this letter which illustrates how any- one who learns the facts, gets a new view of things: “This part of the country would make any one red. I am absolutely disgusted with a gov ernment that would let its people, the people that actually produce, get in the condition that people are in her, I thought that the Daily Worker wag exaggerating when they told about what the Arkansas farmers had to eat, but it sure is no lic. “The farmers here, where not actually on starvation, are next door to it. None of the farmers here have a dime or any feed for thei livestock nd no credit are eight cents dozen, cream 18 cents, (take note of the: hens 14 cents a pounc prices, you New Yorkers wt pay 39c for eggs for butter and 35c a pout for hens—Jorge); yet everything the farme buy from the stores is the same old price “There is no kind of work here, so I can’t see | what the farmers are going to do. C... stands to lose everything he has. He made $27 out of his cotton crop last year, after picking and chop- ping. He didn’t pay a debt he owed, so I can't see but what the bank will have everything he has next year. “It is pitiful, really. It makes me boil over. I want to come back to New York and I am go- ing to school and learn something about the fundamentals of Communism. More and more I believe the reds are the only really bunch.” What Lenin Said “God is primarily a complex of ideas which result from the overwhelming oppression of mati through external nature and c! slavery—oi ideas which fasten this slavery to him, and whith try to neutralize the class struggle. Even the most refined, well-intentioned defense or jis- tification of the idea of God is a justification of reaction, a justification of the slavery of the masses, “In reality, it was not the idea of God whicl curbed ‘animal individualism’; this was done bj the primitive herd and primitive commune. Thi! idea of God has always weakened and dullec the ‘social sentiment,” .substituting the dead fq{ the living, for it was always on the side slavery (of the worst and most hopeless kind « slavery), The idea of God never ‘tied the in dividual to society,’ but always kept the op Pressed classes in bondage through the belie which it spread in the divinity of the oppres sors.” The above is taken from Lenin’s book “Ma terialism and Empirio-Criticism,” and in com ment upon the above, A. Deborin, who wrote th: introduction to the book, says: smar “The ‘religious socialists’ now preach thes: reactionary, anti-scientific and clerical idea with fervent zeal; they are supported by th Social democratic (socialist) party in every way while the curative power of these doctrines o salvation are defended in innumerable ‘learnec Philosophie treatises.” Now read what: Scott book, “Social Religion”: “His doctrine (that of Jesus) might appe: thus: “I—The ‘Theory of Social’ Religion: (1) Be lief in God; (2) Belief in Men. “How divinely simple; how wonderfully grand We are to found our lives on God—good— spirit that must be worshipped in spirit and i truth, We are to believe in God—that is, are to believe in Good, ‘Truth, Beauty—in all th great beneficient forces of the universe. Thi however, .is not enough. God is a spirit, an man, made in His image and likeness, is a spirt too. Hence we are enjoined to love our neigh bor as ourselves. We are to believe in man “The practice of Social Religion, like charit begins at home, in the individual life. Whe the individual life is clean, or, indeed, while is being cleansed, it may, through Social Servic assist in erecting Social Justice.” This, someone will doubtless*say in excus was written many years ago (Nearing’s was published in 1916). But Lenin wrote sever: years earlier than that. And what has har pened? Lenin became the leader end teacher of the victorious proletarian revolution. Nea: ing, we learn, after a step or two towards Com munism, is now a devotee of theosophy and investigating the “science” of crystal-gazing. This, of course, does not deny the contribi tion which Nearing has made to the worker: movement in research and exposure of capital ism and imperialist oppression. It has. been : real contribution and we hope that he! will d even more in the future, But no worker ca close his eyes to the fact that for leadershi in the struggle against capitalism ‘the workin class must follow the materialist Lenin and tr Leninists who reject all philosophic idealist nor sense about “social religion.” New Yorkers That—“Newyorki: is said by J. Elmer Mo gan, chairman of the National Committee ¢ Education by Radio, to be the great evil i) fluence in American life. He says in part: “There are those in America who profess fear the influence of Communistic doctrin upon our people. We are in vastly great danger es a people from Newyorkism than y are from Communism.” ‘Well, that’s interesting. yorkism? He defines it ‘“There is more danger that the trivial, t) Sensual, the jazzy, the confused notions of ‘li which are bred in the hothouse metropolis w sap the ideals and the vision of the outlyiz regions which have been the stable centers our national life.” Well, we agree that “Newyorkism” is a wor “peril” than Communism, which, indeed, is 1 peril at all, but on the contrary is the only sit cure for the disease he defines as “Neiwyor ism.” For Newyorkism is only another way saying capitalist. degeneracy. Capitalism is ve ting, and in New York it stinks @ bit mo than in the rest of the country, Nearing wrote in hi But what is Ney