Kids Die Fast in Squatter Camps of California
Kids Die Fast in Squatter Camps of California Filth, Starvation, Lack Of Clothes, Kill Quickly fy JOHN STEINBECK Anther of Tortilla Flats, Of Mice and Men, and The Long Valley. PART n IK the...
...And this despite the fact that the financial power of every great industry and bank in the state backed Colvin while Bone, returning all campaign contributions, conducted his campaign on $407 spent on gas and oil for his automobile ,on hotel bills, and telegraph tolls...
...There is more filth here...
...Now he has lost even the desire to talk...
...When the drought set in, there was no trade for the store any more...
...In a few . months this family will slip down to' the lower class...
...who permitted tile railroads to loot Alaska...
...The father and mother now feel that paralysed dullness with which the mind protects itself against too much sorrow and too much pain...
...Several letters taken from the bodies of dead Italian officers ¦within the last six weeks and seen by The Sun correspondent show that the Italian soldiery, if not the British Government, is thoroughly •ware of the situation...
...His top wage, when he can find work now, which isn't often, is a dollar a day...
...Sound the loud timbrels, for the Depression is over...
...WHY SAVE MONEY...
...This family has been on the road longer than the builder of the paper house...
...Back of them all is the control of the world's trade with subjugated, obedient labor on a subsistence basis and such power and such profits to make more power as mankind has never known...
...He had had no milk for months...
...Then, heading the Other way, the other children lie, the littler ones...
...The busband was a share-cropper once, but he couldn't make it go...
...Silver Shirt movement...
...In one state, Washington, the victory of progressive liberalism was so overwhelming that many newspapers actually suppressed the election returns...
...It will require a national drive for cohesion of all the liberal elements of the nation aad the acceptance of leaders who will lead an offense instead of such a pallid defense of progressive legiahvtion as was attempted in the face of the most determined and criminailly-lying onslaught ever made by reactionary elements in American politics...
...He sits on the ground in the sun in front of the house, and the little black fruit flies buzz in circles and land on his closed eyes and crawl up his nose until he weakly brushes them away...
...in Ohio, a staunch New Deal Senator is defeated for reelection by Robert Taf t, a chip off the old block of a G.O.P...
...Too many things have happened to him...
...THEY knew pretty well that it was a diet of fresh fruit, beans and little else that caused his death...
...Elsewhere there is complete anarchy...
...And in the little church on the cornor they held a jubilation service, because the gangsters had been appeased, and peace had been maintained...
...The first year be had a little milk, but he has had none since...
...ether hand, voted rather progressively when he was in the Senate before, and there was more than a little suspicion in Washington that President Roosevelt referred to men bice Barbour when he announced, some time ago, that he preferred progressive republicans to reactionary democrats...
...Pennsylvania apparently provided a real disaster for the New Deal, and the la bo rite aspect of the New Deal...
...And everybody said what a good man Mr...
...x And in the wheat fields of Minnesota, the republicans adopted the Wisconsin tactics...
...They squat where they are and kick a little dirt...
...in Oregon, the people seem to hate the labor movement so heartily that they elect an anti-labor republican slate...
...Harold EL Stassen, the republican candidate for governor, roamed the state with the story that the Farmer-Labor Governor, Elmer Benson, was using his alliance of farmers aad labor to help labor put not the farmers...
...dullness shows in the faces of this family, and in addition there is a sullenness that makes them taciturn...
...This is the lower class of the camp...
...Was it true that the Minnesota State Republican Committee had charge of all subpoenas available to Congressman Dies for the Minnesota inquiry which seared the voters into the belief that Benson wss linked with the Communist Party and the under- . world...
...Rot has set in on the canvas so that the flaps and the sides hang in tatters and ?held together with bits of rusty baling wire...
...GOP Victories Show Need For Realignment ^% Anti-New Dealers Resurgent in \^^Jj Many Key States Throughout U.S...
...senator bomb gets record vote "THE disaster last Tuesday was by no means * complete...
...For a few weeks they had noticed that he was kind of lackadaisical, that his eyes had been feverish...
...Holmes preached a beautiful sermon about peace and the nice, good gangsters...
...When this finale can no longer be concealed, it will be interesting, if the disillusioned are not too bitter, to ask them to reprint same of the eulogies recently adorning their pages in regard to Ductile Chamberlain, Apostle of Peace...
...Armed bands under chieftains who still are faithful to the Negus still are running rampant m Shoe Gojjam and Semien provinces...
...It was one step down...
...Will any such facts slow up the gleeful chorus from a well-kept press...
...This child seems to have the reactions of a baby much younger...
...The sleeping arrangement is clever...
...The other children may sur• vive...
...The children do not even go to the willow clump any more...
...A few branches are placed over the top to keep oat the noonday sun...
...To go to bed the members of the...
...The tent is full of flies clinging to the apple box that is the dinner table, bussing about the foul clothes of the children, particularly the baby, who has not been bathed nor cleaned for several days...
...Four nights ago the mother had a baby in the tent, on the dirty carpet...
...CHE does not wash clothes any more...
...It would not turn water at all...
...Three burly gangsters were trying to rob a frail little man who was stoutly defending himself...
...Although the republicans won, both in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the positive labor vote in both states will warn the victors—if they are wise against taking any liberties with' anti-social legislation...
...This woman's eyes have the glased, far-away look of a sleep walker's eyes...
...our throat next ABOUT the middle of the night, an uproar in the street disturbed our quiet neighborhood...
...He will not look directly at you, for that requires will, and will needs strength...
...PART n IK the faces of the husband and his wife, yon begin to see an expression you will notice on every face...
...Conservative to the bone, the average farmer, especially in the Middle West, cannot be "sold" on labor and high wages by duginatk pamphleteers...
...VIE outstanding labor victory of the entire * country is in California...
...He has the swollen belly caused by malnutrition...
...They had given him the best place in the bed, between father sad mother...
...And as the Association failed to point out, the ruin of the foreign commerce would mean the projection anon the nation of such a load of unconsumed and unconsnmable surplus as would break its economic back, and end its economic and therefore its political autonomy...
...in Wisconsin, the traditionally progressive LaFollette organization is tossed out of control...
...The last baby, born less than a year ago, lived -a week...
...Positive answers to these questions would be likely to bring such a revulsion of sentiment in America that the attack of hysterical reaction might be turned into something quite different...
...Back of Scaramouche Scaramoucne % - and Cap-and-Bells is the concept of an industrial empire so colossal that beside it the greatest political empire ever known upon this earth shrinks to a shadow...
...His success, in split*-1---¦ ting the farm and labor vote, will be fairly easy in this country while labor leaders and labor's political allies continue the present ostrich-like performance of sticking their heads fas the sand whenever they come up against the farm problem...
...In certain sections of the country, liberalism won even where republicans were elected...
...Let's examine some of these republican victories a little more closely...
...The better-dressed children shout and jeer, the teachers are quite often impatient with these additions to their duties, and the parents of the "nice" children do not want to have diseasecarriers in the schools...
...HE next door neighbor family, of man, wife and three children * of from, three to nine years of age, have built a house by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds, tin, old paper and strips of carpet against them...
...But one night he went into convulsions and died, and the next morning the coroner's wagon took him away...
...So they robbed him and cut his throat and left the body to the wolves and vultures...
...Was it true, for example, that the republican machine of Michigan bad charge of the Dies Committee subpoenas at the Detroit hearings...
...g.o.p...
...There is no bed...
...But he will only do things like that this year...
...bett fy bryce OLIVER News Commentator at WEVD, New York IF the progressive liberals of this country will * profit by the lessons of the smashing defeat they suffered at the polls in the 1938 national elections, they may turn that defeat into a 1940 rout of reaction...
...It was a clear-cut fight to break the political power of labor, and it succeeded, by a narrow margin...
...in Kansas, the farmers who were saved by the New Deal, rise against it and go back to do-nothing republicanism...
...PEACE WITH THE BARONS 'THOSE that read the daily news with their * minds as well as with their eyes cannot have failed to notice that as soon as the Administration had Muniched to the Power Trust, the loyal press started to whoop it up for good old Prosperity again...
...And so it seems as though the tide baa turned back toward stern control of the wage earners and the unemployed, as a contrast to the Roosevelt policy of helpfulness and cooperation with the labor movement...
...The fact is that fighting is still taking place over wide areas in that country and that Italian rule h) even flimsier than it was before the rains came this summer...
...Reaction set in elsewhere, to judge by the great gains of the Republican Party...
...Victories based upon such hysteria might very easily appear then as the high tide of reaction instead, of .a solid movement toward conservatism...
...in Michigan, a great social-conscious Governor, who settied one of the country's worse strikes without the letting of blood, is defeated because he didn't call out the Guard and kill a few hundred strikers...
...CL< faultless ref r i geration even in the face of such a showing...
...After electing republican governors for the last forty-five years, California reversed the trend of the rest of the country and elected a democratic governor, Culbert A. Olson, who is considerably left of the New Deal, and a democratic Senator, Sheridan Downey, to take the seat of New-Deal-taikfng but Oki-Deal-voting Senator William TJ...
...QNLY a few days ago it was ^ learned that no less than 214 ¦inor chiefs were in revolt in the province of Begemeder, which extends from the Sudan frontier to Fiche, eighty miles west of Addis Ababa...
...In the midst of the journalistic jubilation, some items that might sound discord to the bubbling joy landed in obscure corners of the market page...
...This is a family of six...
...Somebody in ' the Association has had the wit to perceive that it isn't Hitler and it isn't Mussolini, but something far more formidable...
...in Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party Governor, strong supporter of labor and the farmers, gives way to republican reaction and the fascist...
...Somewhere the family has found a big piece of old carpet...
...And this father will not be able to make a maximum of four hundred dollars a year any more because he is no longer alert...
...But the interesting fact of the warning remains...
...This he did by pinioning the little man's hands so that the gangsters could rob him more easily...
...Said the republicans: "Well force the New Deal to manipulate higher prices for dairy products...
...victories strike DOWN ubbrals IN Pennsylvania, a strong pro-labor state ad* ministration goes down to defeat before the pappsis of republican special privilege...
...There was another republican victory—in little Connecticut, but even there the reactionaries cannot draw much comfort, because the victory of the republican candidate for Governor, Raymond E. Baldwin, over democratic Governor Cross, was due to one of the greatest laborite, liberal, progressive showings in the nation...
...This man has tried to make a toilet by digging a hole in the ground near his paper house and surrounding it with an ill piece of burlap...
...The three-yearold child has a gunny sack tied about his middle for clothing...
...He will die in a very short time...
...They have one quilt and a piece of canvas for bedding...
...The same impressive demonstration of the strength of organised labor as a political force was shown in Michigan, where Governor Frank Murphy was opposed not only by the powerful republican machine but by thousands of old-line democrats driven into republican ranks by Murphy's championship of labor rights...
...So it seems on the surface...
...Just at this moment, however, the aspects of the election results would' indicate that New York, California and Washington State are the only remaining citadels of liberalism, progressivism, and the rights of organised labor...
...her own diet will not produce milk...
...The appeal to maddened nationalism, the lust for territory, the play-acting about the Versailles treaty, the re-awakening of old cave-man passions about race and religion, the manufactured fear of Russia and, Communism, the play upon the dull minds of the dull English .aristocracy, the struttings and mouthings at Godesberg, are all mere spotlight artistry...
...Barbour, on the...
...Such are the superficial indications which today caused reactionary, special privilege newspapers to rejoice and predict that the brakes would now be put on the policies of President Roosevelt...
...It makes a national figure of him, Ethiopians Still War on Duce Troops PARTS—At the very moment * when British politicians are defending the forthcoming recognition of the Italian Empire on the grounds of "realism," private reports from the rugged wilds of Ethiopia indicate that the actual subjugation of that country by the Italians is still far more a fiction than a reality...
...With this death there came a change of mind in this family...
...IN New Jersey, a republican victory was recorded when former United States Senator W. Deal"—yes—but he also admitted that he was a "yes man'' for Boas Hague, one of progressive labor's bitterest foes...
...One of the Power commanders emerged from the White House conferences perfectly "appeased," his benignant face wreathed in smiles, and declared that all was now well because the executive atmosphere was "entirely different" from the prevailing low temperatures heretofore...
...Next year he will be like his next door neighbor...
...She is up today, tottering around...
...This showing was the astounding veto far Jasper McLevy, the Socialist Mayor of Uridyl port...
...a man, his wife and four children...
...Thorough apprehension is the keynote...
...what the man in the paper house with its peaked roof will be in a - year, after his house has washed down and his children have sickened or died, after the loss of dignity and spirit have eat him down to'a kind of sub-humanity...
...It takes him a long time to make up his mind, so he is always late in moving and late in arriving in the fields...
...An * investigation of the Dies Committee, either by the LaFollette Committee of the Senate, or later on by a joint congressional committee, might reveal startling reasons for the defeat of Governor Frank Murphy in.Michigan and Governor Elmer A. Benson in Minnesota...
...in the decision of the American Labor Party of New York to have no further "truck" with mesalliance...
...It appears that we had rather pay the Power Trust 8 cents than pay ourselves onehalf a cent, but of course for the 7Vi cents we get a fine line of "appeasement," and that ought to spread joy around like syrup on a pan cake...
...Two weeks ago there was another child sick, a four-year-old bay...
...It is evident in the call for a Washington conference next week sent out by New York's Mayor LaGuardia...
...One of the chain stores reported a loss of nearly $500,000 in sixteen weeks...
...They live in a tent the color of the ground...
...There in conservative rock-ribbed Connecticut/ a strict, hue-to-tim-line Socialist received nearly Hfc^Mt votes as against 226,000 for Cross aad BtBfiOe) for Baldwin...
...INCIDENTALLY, about the time that oar * Munich pact was being signed, the Bonneville power plant, publicly owned, put forth its rates for electric service, the highest being 2Vk cento a kilowatt hour, and from that down to OneHalf Cent...
...His spirit is losing caste rapidly...
...The McLevy-vote wan tenesrlenal because it indicates that if the Progi sashes « Connecticut really want to defeat the Republican Party next time out, they must bet solidly behind the Socialist...
...benson defeat blow to labor *T*HE defeat of the LaFollette organisation in * Wisconsin is due, at least in part, to the contention of the Wisconsin republicans that they were just as progressive as the Wisconsin progressives...
...It will when there's good skating on the burning lake...
...Sometimes they will start the older children off to school, but the ragged little things will not go...
...in the reputed decision of the Senate Civil Liberties Committee to investigate the Dies Committee of the Honse...
...McAdoo, who was defeated by Downey in the primaries...
...Mother and father lie down together and two children lie between them...
...not worry, but absolute terror of the starvation that crowds in against the borders of the camp...
...It was born dead, which was just as well because she could not have fed it at the breast...
...The resolute and fatuous optimism that is our chief national characteristic can be trusted for a i.u.junat Vila...
...By Charles Edward Russell International News Reel IhJO one need believe that the pungent warn• *^ ing of the Foreign Trade Association about the significance to America of the Munich Swindle will win too much heeding here...
...He knows the children will get it on their bare feet...
...Some reported a slump in business of ss much as 95 per cent...
...That was the campaign...
...And in California, was it true that the Dies witnesses were bought and paid for by the Associated Farmers, a fictional association owned by the railroads, banks and utilities, and headed by Philip Bancroft, the republican (defeated) candidate for the Senate...
...In fact, the farmers were informed that the republicans were even more progressive...
...Such as this: The net profits of 275 important corporations in the month of September show a total net loss of 63 per cent compared with a year ago...
...Goodman was...
...This is what the man in the tent will be in six months...
...And the neighbors were sure that all this was just lovely and making for righteousness...
...they hide themselves in ditches or wander off by themselves until it is time to go back to the tent, because they are scorned in the school...
...The drive that makes for cleanliness has been drained out of her and she hasn't the energy...
...As the Trade Association reasonably points out, this will mean the virtual annihilation of the foreign commerce of this country...
...He is a newcomer and his spirit and his decency and his sense . of his own dignity have not been quite wiped out...
...Whereupon appeasement and peace and righteousness and loveliness and several other things began to look quite different around the neighborhood...
...But he hasn't the will nor the energy to resist...
...After it was born and she had seen that it was dead, the mother rolled over and lay still for two days...
...And Dr...
...According to reports reaching London from thoroughly reliable sources the Italians hold the principal towns 'here they have established fortifications, and control main highnays between those towns to the extent of being able to send heavily guarded caravans over them...
...Dignity is all gone, and spirit has turned to sullen anger ^^lore it dies...
...The New Deal went down to defeat in state after state, especially in the really key states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kansas...
...There is one in the family and that is a big tick lying on the ground inthe tent...
...It is on the ground...
...But even in Pennsylvania, the clear-cut labor vote for Geovgv H. Earl, running for the Senate, was probably the most impressive labor vote rolled up m the nation...
...he isn't quick at piece-work, and he is not able to fight clear of the dullness that has settled on him...
...The same may be said of the victorious republican candidates in Ohio...
...This is the middle class of the squatters' camp...
...Goodman looked out of his window, and hastening to the scene, restored order...
...The father is •vaguely aware that there is a culture of hook-worm in tike mud along the river bank...
...Then the neighbors, looking out of their windows, said it was a good job and a triumph of piety...
...If the mother ¦tad father sleep with their legs spread wide, there is room for Che legs of the children...
...Until the gangsters turned to and began to rob the applauding neighbors...
...President, William Howard Taft...
...There is no toilet here, but there is a clump of willows nearby where human faces lie exposed to the flies—the same flies that are in the tent...
...They try to get at the mucous in the eye-corners...
...bus committee did r oem an WORK •¦'HIS last should bear immediate fruit...
...True, the Roosevelt Administration retains control of Congress, but the gains of the republican opposition are so great— over 75 seats 5n the House of Representatives and eight in the Senate—that the party which we have come to regard as the party of reaction, of anti-labor legislation, of special privilege, of anti-social philosophy, has been reborn as a challenge to social and economic progress...
...These were the returns showing that the progressive Senator Homer T. Bone was a two-toone victor over his republican opponent, Erwing Colvin, in the greatest landslide of the nation...
...Liberal cohesion—call it a unitel front if you will—is already oq the horizon three days after the debacle...
...family lie on the ground and fold the carpet up over them...
...At this glad news, the headlines shouted the general glee and 25,000 idle men were about to be put to work in the automobile industry...
...The father of this family once had a little grocery store and his family lived in back of it so that even the children could wait ¦ on the counter...
Vol. 21 • November 1938 • No. 46
