The Daily Worker Newspaper, February 19, 1935, Page 5

— By MICHAEL GOLD HE richest girl in the world was mar- ried last week. She is 22-year old Doris Duke, daughter of the tobacco profiteer. Her daddy, when the famous leveller named Death called around, left his poor little rich girl the sum of fifty-three million dollars. I know an overworked clinic that doles out a bottle of milk eyery day to kids suffering from “malnu- trition.” It could use some of this easy money. But there it goes again, the mean, nasty, jealous spirit in which we Communists look at the rich. Doris, the newspapers tell us, is not the usual kind of a rich girl. She really has no use for all that money. Why jape or criticize? She does the best she can. Says the liberal N. Y. Post, in hushed, admiring tones: “The girl who could have had the fanciest wedding in America eschewed lace and satin, organ music and crowds to be married very simply in the presence of a few relatives.” Thanks for that, Doris. And the groyelling Post goes on: “Even as a 14-year old, she mourned the publicity that followed her. She wanted, she said, to he left alone. She wanted nobody to pay any attention to her. She wanted her friends to forget she was the richest girl in the world.” In 1980, the Post continues, Doris made her debut in Newport. Only 600 guests were invited. ‘There were hogsheads of champagne and mountains of roast pheasant. Three orchestras and a lot of other flumdubbery ran the cost up into the thou- sands of dollars. This was one of the ways Doris employed to help her friends forget she was the richest girl in the world. Thanks, again, Doris. . * . Out of the Sweat of Workers 0® HOW the big liberal heart of the New York Post bleeds and bleeds for this poor little rich girl. Over a million people in New York are on the relief rolls, which means that they must liye, with their families, on the average of $7 a week. Spa- ghetti, potatoes and tea is the normal diet for kids and grown-ups, and the relief people grudge you that. Nobody can describe the suffering in New York and America; the dull, daily, routine starvation that goes on in millions of dark tenements. But the New York Post knows it exists; it has written editorials on the subject. Where is its sense of proportion, therefore, in asking its hungry readers (yes, hungry, if you know what the word means) to feel sorry for Doris Duke? “Her clothes are quiet, never stupendously ex- pensive. She travels in ordinary steamer cabins, passing up Presidential suites. A pretty girl, with beautiful skin, she has a firm Duke chin, and cor- respondingly, she has a stern Duke interest in the value of goorls. She is known as a thrifty bargainer. “She lunched frequently at the Colony, danced at night clubs, did most of the usual things. She’s @ very good dancer. She likes to swim. She also takes a serious interest in the responsibilities of her wealth... .” But why go on? She did all the usual things, and she has five enormous estates, with an army of seryants, and her fifty-three million dollars comes out of the sweat of white and Negro slaves in the tobacco fields and factories of the Piedmont. I have seen the slums they live in. And now I know where the money goes to. * t . Watch This Young Man! HE lucky bridegroom who gnarried the fifty-three millions and the girl is one Jimmy Cromvell, a stepson of a J. P. Morgan partner, and another youth who ‘takes a serious interest in the respon- sibilities of his wealth.” Watch this young man. He is smart and am- bitious, and with his fifty-three millions and other connections may go far. He has put his feet on the first rung of the ladder of American fascism. Cromwell is an intimate friend of Father Cough- lin. Recently the good capitalist Father quoted Jimmy in one of his fake attacks on Wall Street. It made a little stir. Cromwell is an organizer of the “Sound Money League.” He has written a book on finance and Politics, called, “The Voice of Youth.” He wants the Federal Constitution shelved. He urges that a “Liberal” or “Young American” movement be started to put his ideas into effect. He attacks “privilege,” and wants “youth” or- ganized, and the constitution ‘shelyed.” How familiar all these ideas ring in the ear. How they remind one of the demagogic “radicalism” of a Hitler. Thus, today, are the rich defending their robber wealth by spreading fascist ideas. It is the Father Coughlins and his Wall Street allies like this Jimmy Cromwell, who are the most serious menace to the life and liberty of the American people. They smear the bayonets with honey. ’ ’ * T= young couple sailed at once on the Conte de Savoia for Italy. They had conducted their courtship through all the summer and winter re- sorts of the rich, said the Papers. Now they would Spend their honeymoon in Egypt. And when they return to cold, hungry America, may we assume that the fifty-three million dollars will be put to work to help Father Coughlin feed his opium to the masses? TUNING IN Representative Hamilton Fish, Republican of New York, Will attack the Communist Party tonight over the WARC. Columbia Retwork, from 11:18 to 11:20 p.m. Workers. are urged to send protests to the Columbia Bi 485 Madison Avenue, New York. 9 Broadcasting System, 1:00-WEAF—Three Scamps, WOR—Sports Resume—Stan nice Claire, Soprano 8:30-WEAF—Wayne King Or- wht od HP ane cherie Te —Amog rs i Wage ae and Marge— | Woe —tewrence Hineh, jaritone; Concert Orch. Ww Orchestra; he Pe Soar Smith, uum and Abner— Vivienne 80} 5 hate: Oliver Smith, tee 9:00- —Ben Bernie or- chestra WOR—Hillbilly Music kBC—Just Pi WABG Bin; nae ag a WABC—Just lain Bill— ing Crosby, Songs; Petsrriniaa d Matt Stoll Orch.; Mills ora WOR—The Street Singer 9:30-WEAF—Ed Wynn, Come- WJZ—Edgar Guest, Poet; dia Charles. Beate ‘Tenor; n WOR—Dark Enchantment— Concert Orch Woe o leveland Orch, Artur wi jerry Cooper, Bari- Rodzinski, Conductor ie iugiiees or bal 1s joss Orch.; Frank ':45-WEAF—Simplification , Tenor A al eriment—-Sea- 10:00- eretta—The bury ©. ‘Chair eo ‘Waltz mai State WOR—Michele Orchestra oa oe oe Sars ee one Orchestra of Ta s; Howard P. net ansha eee aceeicr: fational Walter O'Keefe 3 Aeinibipel Lessa hiss WOR—Comedy an: WABC—Boaxe Carter, Com- mertator $:00-WEAF—Reisman Orches- tre M8 EE YOR— current Eyents— Bs E. Rea 10:30-WOR—Wallenstein Sin- fonietta WJZ—To Be Announced WABC—Emery Deutsch, WOR-—-Borrah Minnevitch, Viglin imanics Band; Henry | 11:09-WEAP—Talk—Btanley urbig, Comedy High Wiz—The Frightful Silence | WOR--News Ww neert Orc! W3Z—Lyman Orchestra | rank Munn, Tenor; Ber- WABC—Dailey Orchestra LITTLE LEFTY DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 19 Seeing Red! by del OUR UNIONS GETTIN’ HOLY SMOKE / BOY OK Boy / 6k Tek! L, [Look HERE, sNooPy) a e 7 eM ALONG SWELL PATSY! | | ALL You NEED // Ma. crust ys \ WE'VE Got —10 ~, \ ea te bales WE'VE Gor a CovPLe f | \S awrpe/ SRS “THiS “Hine }) “THE UNION REDS/ OF NEWSBONS ~T0 JOIN GUN So You : epatigas Cet BEFORE IT GETS { f UP AND Now we Have || CAN MOW DOWN IN“GPITE mars ) STARTED/ ) A SECRET PASSWORD ANYONE WHO OF THe Bre $ ‘ | COMES NEAR “TH' SECRET S 3 \ | PaSSworo | NEWS OF THE UNION GETS | AROUND | AND GIVES “THE OWNER, | OF “HE | EVENING SraR | } SOMETHING = | WORRY AaBovy. THEATRE |, A Splendid Actor But Mediocre Group REVISOR (Inspector General), by | Gogol: S. Hurok presents Michel Chekhoy and the Moscow Art Players, at the Majestic Theatre. Reviewed by LEON ALEXANDER OME of those who witnessed the | opening performance of the | | Moscow Art Theatre were probably a little disappointed. The name as- sumed by this organization must | | have led many to expect a certain | | excellence of ensemble playing. But | there is a wide gap, an unbridgeable | gap almost, between the perform- ance of this company of actors from Moscow—via Gzecho-Slovakia, Ber- lin, Paris, etec—and that of the Mos- cow Art Theatre. According to reports, it is eight | Years since Mr. Chekhov has left the Soviet Union; some of the other members of the cast must have been gone for a still longer time. At the | Same, we have not heard on this | side of the ocean of any sort of| | Russian Theatre in Paris, Berlin or | | other points west of Moscow for! | years. There is-a definite feeling| | that these people have never played | together before as a group; that they have been gathered together | |for this occasion, and to furnish a| | background for the star, Mr. Michel Ghekhoy. But the weaknesses of the produc- tion, some of its almost amateurish crudities, are bridged over by the actng of Michel Chekhov. Mr. Chekhov is an extraordinary artist. His movements are all fluidity; his | performance is a dance. His wit is | in a grace of motion unpossessed by any actor we know. He captures the stage and the audience from his | | first entrance. | He begins with an interpretation | of the false Inspector General as of | a stupid fop, a penniless son of a} petty landowner, a lamb sheared by | | gamblers.- His step is mincing; his piping voice is doll-like; he is a pup- {pet pulled by invisible strings—a | hungry puppet, bewildered and | | mildly protesting. | Before long, he is Puck, and he is| Ariel—goblin or sprite in the body of the stupid Shlestakov. Every movement of his is perfect, etched, luminous and flows into the next gracefully and inevitably. He soars like music, he imagines a hundred variations, he embroiders unerringly | upon his themes; he has dropped | off all earthliness and carried us all into an ethereal realm of phantasy. No actor has ever had his incom- parable lightness; we are reminded | of the airy, malicious, witty Italian | marionettes, the “Piccoli.” Here is | the perfect instrument, the puppet- | actor, or actor-puppet, Gordon Craig once called for. Catia tee R. CHEKHOV is not so success- | ful as a director. He has directed Gogol’s play in the terms of broad- est farce, without a subtlety equal to} his own acting. The stupidity, the | |me.. jand poet, How Would Not Compromise With His Communist Principles By WALTER HART ERLIN, February, 1933, The Swastika flags are on all public buildings. Hitler’s Storm troops are marching through the streets, the new masters have entered eyery- where, All the contracts in the State Theatre have been cancelled. Walter Ullbricht, the new director, was as- signed the job of breaking old engagements and making new ones. Only some of the actors were to be re-employed, only those who are in agreement with the new spirit ruling in Germany. Hans Otto, one of the most talented actors on the European stage and one of the best loved, was also called into the office of the new chief. “You + Well, you see, Mr. Otto,” said the new director, “how can I explain. . . well. . . to be exact... I believe. . . you are too short . « simply a little too short... .” Hans Otto takes out his military passport and answers smilingly: “Height, judged by the military doctor, is 5 ft. 7 in.” “Perhaps that 1s true,” Ulibricht remarked, “but we need . . . well + heroic figures . . . strong men... you know. . . even the Women are going to be massive pow... i? young, before the little stuttering Nazi, who at last managed to find @ reason for firing him, “Anyway you agree with . that you wear spectacles.’” Hans Otto takes them off just as he always does on the stage and his beautifully expressive face looks at the director, “Oh, maybe you can see without glasses . . . but I can’t. . . really can’t employ you again. . . I'm very sorry... .” rater ee) ‘ANS OTTO leaves the room and goes towards the stairway, but Johst, Hitler's new stage director, the author of “Horst Wessel” and ‘Schlageter.’ He asks |the famous actor to come into his private office and have a drink with ; him, “It is very unpleasant for me.” says Hans Johst “that a talent such as yours can find no place with us... I am myself personally in- terested in your case, and will look around among my acquaintances for something you can do... .” “Don’t bother, Herr Johst,” Otto says, “you know as well as I do, that as a Communist I will never be employed in any German |theatre . . . talent doesn’t matter poy... .” “Geod Lord,” the national stage director sighs, “when one thinks meanness, the venality of the Rus- | sian official, merchant and land- owner of the old regime is there; | they are brutal, incompetent, thiev- | ish, lying, superstitious. They fall | on their knees to pray to a god in, the image of their own ignorant, | drunken priests to protect them, from the calamity that has come! upon them in the shape of this In- spector General. But one feels that the director | has tried to dictate the acting of | the rest of the company in terms of | his own, lighter-than-air move-| ments; their spirit, however, is earth | bound, heavy, gross; they become caricatures not only of the parts they are trying to portray, but of the star they are trying to echo. Their performance begins to degen- erate into that prevailing on the American burlesque stage, with overtones of “Bozo” Sneider and Miss Fann Tazie, the fan dancer | from Flatbush. Well-Known Writers | Contribute Articles to ILD Annual Journal A 50-page Annual Defense Jour- nal, containing articles and state- ments by literary writers and revo- lutionary working class leaders, will be published by the New District Teuians Labor Defense on Wednesday, Feb. 20, on the opening day of its. defense bazaar. Literary contributors include Mal- colm Cowley, Isidor Schneider, Grace Lumpkin, Walter Wilson, Ed- ward Dahlberg, Henry Hart, Paul Peters. The Journal will contain. articles by Charles Krumbein, who wrote just prior to his imprisonment for 18 months in the Federal Prison, Lewisburgh, Pa.; by Angelo Hern- don, James W. Ford, Alfred H. Hirsch, Anna Damon, I. Amter, Ben Gold and others. There will be more than a of letters from class-war prisoners, including one from J. B. McNamara, serving his 24th year in San Quen- in. A special cable will be published in the Journal from William L. Pat- terson, National I. L. D. secretary, now recuperating from serious il- ness in the Soviet Union, “Great and Tumultuous Spectacle Taken From Nature” Here is projected a kaleidoscopic jfilm. Before your eyes there unrolls, for you who are the workers of hand and brain, for you who suffer, who struggle for your bread and for the future—you who may be in the shop, in the field, in the office —there unrolls before your eyes a greak and tumultuous spectacle taken ‘rom nature. These are not merely photo- graphs, but better than that, these are the designs conceived and ereated by an artist who knows how to see and to show to you what he has seen. A photograph presents only an arrested instant of life. A drawing gives you that vision of the whole which is quite as exact but more complete. The pencil of a true artist is a perfected machine which, at a single stroke, creates the synthesis and the general as- pect of individual portraits, and which embraces many meanings implicit in a few lines, That which you see here unrolling before you is at the same time drama and comedy. It is at once a frightening adventure and a gro- levable, a oy bat faccar an if tragi-comedy is a reality eyen to- day. It is the drama of all dramas. It is not only something which takes place at a remote distance from your own body, it also touches you and trails after you, and which forces yoy, for good or for evil, to |play your role in this sad, collec- tive melee—the role of ‘prime mover, the role of mere instrument, and often, dear comrades and friends, even the role of victim. Hans Otto stands up tall and | someone calls him back. It is Hans | Burek’s ‘Probing, E Drawings Praised by Barbusse 6 ~ about that . . . you are quite right + + » you can’t play a Nazi-role on the stage - + you don’t want. to y Schlageter . . . that’s agains ; your convictions. I know you woul be glad to murder Hitler... .” Hans Otto answers, smiling, that a good actor can play even when his ideas are very dif- ferent from those of a Nazi poet. “And about that . . . ‘murdering of Hitler. -’ I am very much surprised at how little you know, you the leading German playwright Lora Hans Otto (at the right) in the role of Engineer Flint in Friedrick Wolf's “Kolonne Hund,” as pre- sented by the Hamburger Spiel- haus. of the theory and practice of your | enemies. You have told me that you have even read ‘Kapital’ and some |years ago studied Lenin . . . per- {haps you can still remember that | Communists sharply disagree with any theory of individual terror, that Communism is a mass move- jment. Our battle is néver against | single Persons but always against jour class enemy... .” | “When you are in power your {worker actors wouldn't employ Nazis in their theatre either . . . | anyway?” | “When we are in power we will open wide the doors of the theatre. | We will create a real people’s the- | ater, and they wouldn’t close down | one theatre after the other . . . like | your masters. The best and most | will never ask what they think pro- | vided they don’t attempt to do any- | thing to hurt our cause . . . but if | they do that . . . we'll not only fire | them... we will bury them... .” | © tase ve so this historical talk goes on | 4% over an hour between Hans Otio, | the best reyolutionary actor of Ger- | many and Hans Johst, the director and poet of the dying bourgeoisie.. | And then Hans Otto leaves. Again and again he was tele- any role, | what would you do with the theatre | xpressive Hans Otto, Great German Actor, Was Murdered by Nazis Murder Recorded As Pneumonia” and “Suicide” a | with Dr. Goebbels, the new pres mt of the theatre union, Ot Laubinger wrote him several times. But Hans Otto can’t be bought. He} had been for several years a mem- ber of the German Gommunist Party and for years led the workers’ theatre organization of Germany. He had learned that there is no compromise with the class enemy. | He woyked in his street nucleus and led the illegal opposition in the} theatre union, But one day he didn’t come to an important meeting. We had waited three minutes on a street corner and had to leave. (Three minutes more, in the countries of fascist terror, might mean great danger) Hans had always been punctual to the minute. For days we heard nothing ahout him, even his wife didn’t know what had happened. Later, from a comrade that had been arrested with him, we heard / that Otto had been so badly beaten that he could not be recognized anymore, even by those comrades with whom the Nazis confronted him, He had only one eye left. A few weeks later Hans Otto's wife was called to the hospital. We had all hoped that she could at last speak with him. But she could ask her husband nothing. He was dead. | | With a double fractured skull he | |was lying on a hospital bed and |near him stood the chief doctor, | who gave her a death certificate to | sign. The cause of death was given | as ‘fatal pneumonia.” The wife of our dead comrade refused to sign Sele Bae | ‘i THE day of his burial, a piece of paper hung in the hall of the State Theatre, with a black border. | “A former niember of our ensemble, |the Actor Hans Otto, committed suicide by leaping from a window. ... It is forbidden to take part at the funeral.” It was a rainy day when they | buried him in a little cemetery. | | There were a few S. A. men there, his wife, two or three friends and a little old woman, one of the check | women of the State Theatre, who had come to bring the hero the! last greetings of the technical per- sonnel, even though unofficially. talented artists will play for us. We | The casket was lowered quickly. It was also quickly covered, so no one would know to what extent the Reich’s stage director and his mas- | ters had been interested in the case | |of Hans Otto. The truth, however, penetrated into all the countries of Europe. In the great theatres, in Paris, London, | Zurich, Prague, in all the centers | |of culture, the death of this great man was the signal for an awaken- ing of all actors and artists. A} |Hans Otto Committee was founded |and ‘the friends of the new theatre phoned and offered tempting jobs. | movement came together to con- Werner Kraus intervened for himtinue his work. 9 }and that in no place in the world | WORLD of | MUSIC Shostakovich and the Critics By CARL SANDS | (Continued from yesterday.) HAVE pointed out a few respects in which two of the most promi- nent New York music reviewers (Gilman and Henderson) their demnation of Sho vieh’s of Lady Macbeth of Mzensk,” recently performed at the Metropolitan Opera House. signally failed to measure up to the stature of the man whose work they de- nounce. Coming now to Olin Downes of the Times—his reckless word-sling- ing means only one thing, indeed, it fairly shouts it, namely: “Nothing good can come out of Soviet Russia ~except what goes out on its ear.” The bias is best shown by a few quotations. Says Mr. Downes: “It was time for Mr. Shostakovich to strut his hour. His opera cannot last, for it | has no real music to make it last.” It is a “flimsy, lurid and callow score.” Compare Stravinsky and Shostakovich—‘the one is the ex- treme of a decadent and, in his case, superimposed culture; the other is of the dire, the squalor, the ‘ideol- ogy,’ the satire, the blazing resent- ments of the last revolution,” "It is a revolution that would fling not only earth, but manure in the} face of the past.” This is a lie. Mr. | Downes knows as well as anyone that there are things in the past— “our” past—that merit even rougher | treatment than that. He also knows Perfectly well that there are things in our past that everyone agrees are | to be prized, honored and preserved, are they in safer and more reverent | hands than in the land of this same revolution. To pass out this lie, this outworn propaganda of czarism, under the guise of music criticism is | the hasest sycophancy,—a blatant prostitution of intelligence, itself a foulness that invalidates any judg- ments printed along with it. poate Tas OMPARED to Stravinsky (whom Mr. Downes would undoubtedly have greeted with similar verbiage a short twenty years ago), Shosta- kovich is “a schoolboy. And a dirty and ill-clad (!) schoolboy to boot. A schoolboy in whose home there was no ease or good manners—only | savage revolt and contempt for his elders. The schoolboy flings taunts, and a group of onlookers laugh, at his superior.” Ozarist Russia any-| body's superior! Which is better: to! have groaned under it or to find oneself in the amazingly fortunate position of being able to laugh at it? Perhaps, however, it is Mr. Olin Downes of the New York Times who is the schoolhoy and is qutraging| thus, or rather trying to outrage, his superior—one Dmitri Shostakovich | —who has written an opera as dif- ferent from the sterile fertilizer of | the New York Times’ review as is the socialist construction of Soviet Russia from the incredibly stupid and vile decadence of the profit- system in whose defense the review is written. There is a lot more about “cock- | sureness,” “artistic unscrupulous- | ness,” “incredible effrontery,” “‘taste- less smut and swagger.” Hew often | do we not see a man pillery in others the very faults of which he himself is possessor! The history of music is one long record of such things. Mr. Downes knows it. And| he goes ahead committing the same | | old ineptitudes, revealing the depths | |of his own baseness with the same | old dogged persistence. Why? They | still serve journalistic unserupulous- | HENRY BARBUSSE | | | i these pages is exaggerated. It seems that cone has here the study of monstrous beings who are not of the human species. But it is exactly thus, however, that these things come to pass; and all that you read So clearly in these probing and expressive drawings, is confirmed by the accurate news, which in spite of the censors, the distortions and the transpositions of the great press sold to the tyranny of wealth, comes partially to our knowledge. It is necessary that you penetrate to this reality, that you see the truthful core of these presentations, until, with more and more ardent Nothing of that which you see in| partisanship and more and more 4 y | anger, you unite together. I hear all the workers, of every different kind, of each country; the workers of all countries of the world—in an army of resistance, insurmountable by its grandeur, which will hasten the logical moment when all these bloody absurdities will have their end, and when all the iniquities, which are the sinister characteris. tics of contemporary history, will | change, by the force of things and | by the force of the conscious masses, into a justice that is rea- sonable and brotherly. HENRI BARBUSSE. [From Iniroduction to “Hunger and Revolt; Cartoons by Burck,”] » « ‘ ness! haa ‘ ISTEN to this. “Whereas Timo- | theus, the Milesian, an immi-| grant in our state, despising the| music in use since the days of old, having abandoned the_ seven- stringed lyre and introduced a mul-} | tiplicity of tones, has ruined the ear of our youth, and, whereas, by the great number of his tones and the wretchedness of his harmonies he has ‘converted our simple and well-ordered music into an ignoble and confused art . .. whereas, fur- thermore . .. he has treated the subject (of sacred myth) with im- propricty and has fostered irrever- ent beliefs in our youth, therefore the assembly of the people has charged the Kings . . . to censure Timotheus and to banish him, and to cut out from among the eleven Strings of his lyre those which are superfluous, so that the seven old strings may remain.” Thus, in the Sparta of 450 B. C.—almost 2,400 years ago—the revolutionary musi- cian was “criticized”! Sarto found, avout 1735, that Mozart's C-major quartet was “un-| bearable.” Beethoven's and Wag- ner’s finest works were heralded with the same “criticism” with which these highly-paid and stupid | men — Gilman, Henderson and| Downes —haye greeted Shostako- | vich’s work. Did these ancient “crit- | | ics’ have an economic, political and | social motivation? It is not un-/| likely. Did they admit it? No more} than the New Yorkers do. j But a vigorous protest, addressed | to the editors of the papers con-| cerned may do something! And re-) member—it is not just the music | that made these reviewers write as | they didt ~ i Page 5 Questions and Answers This department appears dafiy on the reavee page. All questions should be addressed to “Ques tions and Answers,” ¢/o Daily Worker, 50 East 13th Street, New York City. Soviet Diplomatie Relations Question: Why do Soviet divlomats have to ot serve the social rules of capitalist diplomacy as attending functions, entertaining, etc.? —UNEMPLOYED WORKERS Los Angeles. Answer: Soviet diplomats are the representas tices of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union. They are sent to further the interests of the Soviet masses through the channel of dipio- matic relations with capitalist countries. By means of these relations they force the capitalists to give them commercial and other eoncessions which ere of value in the building of socialism in the U. 8, 8. R., in the maintenance of peace and in further the cause of the international working class, It is their adherence to this principle that is important is this that is at the basis of So- viet revolutionary diplomacy The Soviet Union uses the forms of di tic relations to win ade van from the lists, and thus further the interests of all the toilers of the world It is thi u ortant whether they carry out this princ s fours or leather jackets. They v ie customary diplomatic forms, because 1 for their work and cannot be evaded oviet Union is to reap the greatest ade vantages from its relations with capitalist coun- tries. In this connection, Lenin once said, when asked why Soviet diplomats wore frock coats, that if frock coats, then we would all put on frock coats, Consequently when Soviet diplomats entertain it furthered revolutionary diplomacy to wear or attend diplomatic affairs, they do so because it enables them to better utilize the relations of the Soviet Union with capitalist countries, to the advantage of the U. 8. 8, R. Lenin once shook hands with a Freneh monarchist, at the conclu- sion of an “agreement” to preyent the advance of German troops against the Soviet workers. He shook hands, although both of them, to use Lenin's words, “knew that each of us would readily hang his ‘partner’.” In the same way Soviet diplomats observe the usual diplomatic forms, because it en- ables them the better to carry out the revolution- ary diplomacy of the U. S. 8. R., which in turn plays its part in building socialism in the Soviet Union and strengthening the base for the con- tinued development of the world revolution. Literature to the Masses Chicago Gets Busy Proceeding in earnest with the campaign to REACH THE MILLIONS, Chicago is setting a fine example for the rest of the districts to follow. The District Literature Department there has ordered 25,000 copies of the five-cent edition of “Why Com- munism.” At the same time, Chicago is taking steps to prepare the distribution of these 25,000 copies. A bulletin has been issued outlining the tasks in our campaign to REACH THE MILLIONS. The byle letin sets quotas for all the sections in the district, Concrete directives are given to enable the sections and units te carry out their quotas. Fiye thousand stickers are being printed and will be pasted up at strategic points to popularize literature. The Chicago bulletin also sets itself the tasks of (1) completing the distribution of its quota of “Foundations of Leninism” (7,000 distributed. 3,000 more to go), (2) imereasing the sale of “Party Or- ganizer” from 600 to 1,500, and (3) increasing the sale of “The Communist International” from 300 to 700. All these tasks are to be completed by May 31. Quotas are set for sections on these tasks also. Chicago should now add to its campaign the distribution of the four other pamphlets being is- sued in editions of 100,000: “State and Revolution” by Lenin (10 cents); “Marxism versus Liberalism,” the Stalin-Weils Interview (2 cents); “The Commu- nist Manifesto” by Marx and Engels (5 cents); “A Letter to American Workers” by Lenin (3 cents). ed Good Steps Elsewhere San Francisco takes a quota of 10,000 copies of “The Communist Manifesto” to be distributed in three months. Milwaukee sets its quota of the same pamphiet at 1,500, and takes a quota of 2.000 copies of “Why Communism”—to be distributed by May 1. Section 3. Cleveland, sets its quota of “Why Communism” at 1,000. How to Prevent Reaching the Millions The St. Louis district orders five copies of the five-cent edition of “The Communist Manifesto.” Also five covies of “Constitution and Regulations ~ of the Unemployment Council.” Buffalo orders 16 copies of “How Do We Raise the Issue of a Labor Party” (3 cents). The Hancock section in District 27 (Upper Mich- igan) orders five copies of the Labor Party pamphlet and five copies of “The Assassination of Kirov,” asking that these be shipped at once in time for the district convention of the ¥. C. L. (This part of the column, “How te Prevent Reaching the Millions,” is going to be a weekly feature. Ayoid getting your name into it.) Milwaukee Challenges Chicago and Denver Throwing down the gauntlet to Chicago and Denver, the District Literature Department of Mil- waukee challenges these two districts to revolue tionary competition. “We will have,” states Milwaukee in its chal- lenge, “‘a greater percentage of increase in sales per month over the previous month than either of the above districts and by May 1, the Milwaukee district will have a larger percentage of increase of sales over January 1, than either of the above districts.” Now hop to it, Chicago and Denver. Let's have your replies. And from all three, we want te know what plans you are making to Garry oh this oa. petition energetically, what plans are you making to increase and broaden literature sales? Con- eretize your challenge. Set figures. How many eepies of “The Communist” and “The Communist International” will you sell each month? Hoy many two-cent and 3-cent pamphlets will you sell? How quickly will you establish literature committees in every section and literature agents in every unit and mass organization? Set quotas for yourselves for the five-cent editions of “Why Communism” and “The Communist Manifesto.” These concrete figures you set yourselves will enable us to detere mine the size of our editions, etc, 4 v w t 4