The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
The Home Front By WILLIAM E.BOHN IN The New Yorker of the week before last Victor Wolfson hu • sketch that will make any old Socialist grin. But with the grin will go a touch of regret...
...The directors of the bus company consulted Negro leaders...
...But to get bach to Alfred Baker...
...He it waa who told the squirming youngsters all about the Cave Dwellers...
...The whole story is there—the foreignness, the uuaintness, the ridiculousness and—underneath— the steady, saintly ideslism...
...Dangler bravely wipes her eyea and carries on...
...He waited on the table...
...But the storie* never made clear that: (1) Nowy Swiat, a reactionary paper, has vigorously attacked the present exiled Government for its liberalism...
...The Awful Ap** TJF/E seem to have learned to do theae things better now., At least that thought comes to me as I leaf over Alfred Baker Lewis's little book, United Animal* Town...
...f You will have guessed by this time that this yarn about animals in Africa is a sort of fable...
...aquabble going on in the War Production Board with Donald Nelson ranged against the heads of the various metals divisions...
...the proposal, if made, is a dangerous one There is a strong rumor that the document was obtained through Soviet espionage...
...The Island Press persuaded him to put one of his tales into a book and, to add to,our good luck, Bernard Seaman drew the pictures...
...No, Harry hasn't switched on the party line...
...But, far more important, there was the Socialist idealist, the little "Gene Debs" whom we were sure to have in every group...
...With buxom enthusiasm she stuffs him with good food...
...Harry L. Hopkins, Frances Biddle, Paul V. McNutt...
...Ed, of course, had hia facts...
...It's that several West Coast warehouses which were shipping goods to Russia were erganiaed by Dave Back's AFL Teamsters, and if there is one person Bridges can't stand, it's Dave Beck...
...I shall, too, steal aa much as I have space for from South Today, Lillian Smith's topnotch journal...
...They took the lead in embracing Badoglio, who led the Fascist troops in Ethiopia and Greece...
...Dangler firmly drills the youngsters in a pageant of the flowers...
...PM and Journalism AROUND town /'Af has been getting a reputation for yellow journalism on the "left" When it comes to smear campaigns, especially against those who are anti-Communist aa well as anti-Fascist, in other words those who won't say Stalin Halleluja, I'M takes all prizes...
...I learn that he is a regular Pied Piper when there are any children about...
...Peed frem the big house could easily be transferred...
...But there is another angle to this whole issue...
...But PM has not printed that story...
...Here is the ultimate touch of reality...
...In this case the punishment is realy arranged to fit the crime...
...Ht is, you see, leading a double life...
...We do not know if the story is true...
...Father was a German atheist With beery good-humor he met the problem, the Socialist*, too, had their school on the Sabbath day...
...The Big Business boys want civilian production to start on an even basis...
...Aa Lillian grew older she became curious...
...Those selected were in order: General Marshall, Cordell Hull, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Admiral King, Donald Nelson, Charles E. Wilson, Bernard Baruch, Harry S. Truman, Jesse Jones and Harold Ickes...
...The Negroes had a way out They said: "Let the two races ride in alternate buses.'' That arrangement was made, and now everybody jolts along merrily...
...I've got myself Into the darnedest debate you can imagine...
...But PAf has not yet printed the fact, revealed by Luia Araeuistan last week in The Now Leader, that the Spanish Communists in London have announced the formation in Spain of a "Supreme Council of National Union" which includes the very Monarchists and Catholics who incited and financed Franco's armed revolt This manifesto was printed by "The Spanish Home," a CP front in London, Even Juan Negrin, the former Loyalist Prime Minister who worked closely with the Communists, was ashamed of this latest maneuver and denounced it as a Communist trick...
...The other story cornea to me from Lillian, who is of an old Savannah family...
...On the least useful, the liberals ganged up and named Rankin and Fish, but the other eight are all New Deal figures...
...But the keeneyed kids prove to be more wide-awake than the democratic forces of Germany—so the plot fails...
...This Alfred Bsker is the very same man who writes for us super-serious articles on the race problem and now and then sheds floods'of light on economic planning...
...The whole business is rather ridiculous...
...The second psge attacked a group headed by M. Wegxernyk and Col...
...The Detroit Newt characterised the party as "floundering through a state convention fantastic in .its leaderless ineptitude...
...Appropriately costumed the young performers sing: "I'm a Socialist flower, growing up to power...
...On Sunday, I'M carried two artielea againat the Polish Government-in-Exile, despite the fact that the government majority is composed of Peasants and Socialists...
...I took for granted that practically all decent folks were against it Aad now I get long letters—and gentle, well-reasoned letters—which are ia favor of it...
...In some defense town down there they had a let of trouble about buses...
...Prieto, however, has continued to denounce the Monarchists...
...There was the inevitable managing woman, Mrs...
...But with the grin will go a touch of regret down inside...
...Whites snd Negroes were stepping on one another's toes and sticking elbows into one another'* ribs...
...Harry Bridges has stopped the movement of goods to Russia- It's true...
...He quietly stands up for his faith snd goes off to jail...
...The persons deemed the least useful were Frances Perkins, Henry Morgenthau, Claude W i c k a r d, Henry Wallace, John E. Rankin, Jose oh F. Guffev...
...Would it be so surprising to find the Communists in alliance with the Spanish Monarchists in a national front...
...But Peter would have none ef it"* Every night, with quietdignity, he marched away to Niggertown...
...One page attacked the Poles because they maintain an Information Center her* which publishes magaxine* and leaflets...
...It is the Isst sickness of a decaying society...
...He tells stories and they follow him as if he were a circus parade...
...The important point ia that the Negroes themselves suggested a more thorough segregation than the usual one...
...The saintly Walter is taken home...
...She would "make Walter fat like a capitalist...
...The Socialist saint is, of course, against war...
...For a philosopher ha has wonderfully wideopen eyes and ears...
...There is a g>eat flutter, The sick society is on its deathbed...
...The Seafarers International Union has issued a withering blast against the party-line NMU because Blackie Myers, Communist seamen's leader, agreed to cutting the seamen's war risk pay...
...He really leads a triple life...
...Now this Peter waa the oldest of the servants He had been there since childhood...
...At a rehearsal comes news that America has declared war on Germany...
...Take the issue of Spain...
...Just take a look at Adolph the Awful Ape, Benito the Big Baboon or Goering Gorilla and you will see what I mean...
...Buttha argument must be postponed till next week...
...But the Big Business representatives are holding back because their factories are choked with fat war contracts and they cannot get back to civilian production...
...All of this happened in Brooklyn...
...Who . Who ia Washington I OOK magaxine asked 68 Washington writers to name the 10 most useful men in Washington...
...What's true of the goose should hold true of the gender...
...The mistress gave advice and medical care just aa she had done ia the oM days of slavery...
...The issue of trsnsfer of populations in Europe is not a new one...
...H»a ef appeasing the shipowners and the...
...The convention vainly sought to find a candidate for Governor and then gave to Frankensteen the job of seeking a nominee...
...But turning back to PM—and Victor Bernstein— what it leads up to is this...
...His anawer is something to be pondered by all whites...
...It's part of the CP...
...2) every Government-inExile maintains an Information Center here...
...This colored man who was so close to all of them disappeared every night She couldn't understand it So, in the end, she put the question to him...
...The solution proposed was the trsnsfer of the population and the creation of a Jewiah state in Eastern Europe...
...Concrete proposals along this line have been advanced by President Benes of Czechoslovakia regarding the Sudeten Germans and other minorities in the Czechoslovak nation...
...Off to the bare meeting place above a saloon marched Victor and Gregor...
...Will PM attempt to investigate the Soviet propaganda apparatus here?* Later in the week PM reprinted an article from the Jewitk Day which purports to have a document from a Polish underground leader to the Polish Government regsrding the Jewish problem...
...The heroes are three American kids, Roger, Michael and Sister Susie...
...The thug is entitled Wonderful World That'* Coming...
...In fact, I wss practically flabbergasted...
...Matushevski, who edit Nowy Swiat...
...Debate on Jim Crow |>QN'T miss the next issue...
...He waa closer to the whites than any other black man...
...From big Elias Elephant down to little Sammy Springbok the animals live happily until the Awful Apes and the Big Bad Baboons become race-conscious and set out to establish an elite guard...
...One hss brought home to him what we did not quite realise when we were in it, the religious atmosphere of the old Socialist movement...
...But Walter, who was too thin and who has been fattened up with pancakes, disappears...
...The two kids in the story, Victor snd his brother, wanted to go to Sundsy School—ss their conventional neighbors did...
...Mother may not have been strong on Marx, but she made wonderful pancakes...
...Maritime Board...
...The poll reveals, if anything, only that the majority of the men who made the selections were of a conservative temper...
...Tempers were getting short...
...The ways of dealing with animal Nazis which Alfred Baker devises should be carefully studied by the high command of the United Nations...
...Richard T. Frankensteen waa the keynote speaker at the party convention held in Detroit and seems to have emerged as the top dog in the set-up...
...More important on the second list of ten most useful we haver Senator Byrd, James Byrnes, Senator Taft, Congressman Martin (of Martin, Barton and Fish...
...Then there was Victor's mother...
...Hamilton Fish...
...But the dry and conventional little saint is, in the end, not ridiculous...
...The document as read, reveals a fumbling sincerity but an amazing shortsightedness...
...Donald Nelson feels its in the public interest to make these items now...
...So Bridges threw a picket line around the warehouses...
...Yet PM never considered the issue when it was proposed by Benes...
...The religion of countless women has found expression in feeding the preacher...
...Why, Miss Lillian," he said, "when it cornea night I jess want to be somewhere where I don't have to hear a white voice...
...His name was Walter...
...Eduard Lindeman returned recently from a stay ia Texas...
...All my life I have been against the segregation of Negroes...
...When Indalecio Prieto and Diego Martines Barrio announced the formation in Mexico City of a Liberation Junta which included a majority of the democratic parties, but excluded the Communists, PAf began a smear campaign charging Prieto is pro-Monarchist Despite the fact that Prieto during all his political life has been anti-Papal and anti-Monarchist, the smear continued, PM sent Victor Bernstein to Mexico and he repeated the smears...
...He has cited the uprooting and transfer of Greek and Turkish populations in 1921 as a profitable exampe...
...We might light about what this story means...
...What could be done...
...Dangler...
...That is, they all did except Peter, There were advantages in living there en the place...
...I didn't know...
...There are some surplus materials available, particularly in steel, which small manufacturers want to use for flatirons and similar items...
...When it comes, to making a moss back reactionary look ridiculous he can do a betIfi job than anyone else who smokes his pipe'before a drawing-board...
...Telling a lot of kids this or that piece of social history— the guilds, the invention of the steam-engine—snd having a sublime faith that out of this teaching would emerge human beings fitted to transform the world...
...Inside and Out By HUHHAY EVERETT Wfl Doe Fleet •THERE has been an interne...
...It all sounds rather dry, rather formal...
...Next week I shall give you samples...
...At the end of the year comes the spring festival...
...He has been arrested making a speech against the war at the corner of Onderdonk Avenue and Palmetto Street...
...Lebor Notes * . | EADING United Auto Workers officials have entered the Michigan Democratic Party, one of the major purposes apparently being to bead off the newlyformed Michigan Commonwealth Federation...
...One of his opening remarks to me went like this: "Do you know, there are aease Negroes who actually prefer segregation...
...There was danger of riots...
...Of the ten "most useful" you find s preponderant number of conservative and business figures...
...Sometime I shall write a column about other New Leader duplicators...
...Today there is space for only one little opening idea...
...It is a scene enacted a million timea in every little church...
...She observes thst he is thin, undernourished...
...yet if the document is authentic, it is cause for grave concern...
...Just how all this happens you will enjoy reading for yourself...
...It would show that the nationalist section of the Polish Underground has learned little over the past five years and that they would make difficult the attempt of the Jews to take their rightful place in the postwar Polish nation...
...I might begin with my colleague, List >u M. Oak...
...In turn the Communists denounced Negrin...
...Barney is our favorite cartoonist...
...Despite what people may say or think up north, they get along comfortably...
...When ahe was a child the Negro servants lived in a cot tag* in the backyard...
Vol. 27 • May 1944 • No. 20
