THE CHATTER BOX
THE CHATTER BOX IT SEEMS so strange to debate what a Socialist's attitude toward Soviet Russia ought to be. There are a great many of us here in America who find cause to hurl hatred at her...
...A few years later the workers of New London, Connecticut, sent three workers to the legislature, one to the Senate, and in 1834 they carried ten towns in Massachusetts...
...JN THE INTERESTS OF ECONOMY no receipts will be sent by The New Leader and The Leader-Appeal for subscription renewal remittances, except when specificall requested...
...its day in court...
...Inspiration is gone...
...article on old age dependency occupies an enure page...
...It to the considered opinion of the Committee, after consultation with economists, engineers and research men...
...And if the day comes, when by ballot or barricade, the deed to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is actually transferred from the coupon-clippers to an entire people, there .-will be a splendidly organized system of production and distribution, and a world of raw material te take hold of and operate for the greatest common good...
...A working class informed, determined, and relying on its own numbers and power, could scatter this peace of gentlemen by sending troops of their own Con{jressmen to Washington...
...The workers were successful in electing a third of their candidates in the city election of 1829, although some of them were officially supported by the other parties...
...I HARRY W. LAID LEE, Acting Secretary, Csmmittee en Coal and Giant Fewer N. Y. C...
...Congress used to be jealous of its powers and many an oratorical battle has been waged over its prerogatives, but even the minority members sit like dumbells in the chamber without a protest...
...It's a great idea that may be passed on to the professional bandits of our own cities...
...Our own nobility of corporate cash is an admirer of Mussy's morons and from hjs seat on a hot cinder wc are sure that Judge Gary is cheered by this latest announcement from Fascistland...
...The hearing on the writ as to whether or not it should be made a temporary injunction took place Tuesday...
...Some former powerful organizations have actually declined and great basic ' industries are not organized...
...Federalists and Republicans had become so much alike that there was no opposition to the re-election of Monroe in 1820...
...The only socialization thai has been accomplished with any effectiveness, is'Chat of poverty...
...Instead, the trade unions stand cap-in-hand waiting for the brokers to assemble and asking if they will not toss a few crumbs their way...
...One important thing to watch for is any attempt of the transit lines to foist off on the public the wretchedly equipped and unprofitable elevated lines, hanging on to the profitable subways for themselves and assuring us that by owning and operating the antiquated elevateds we are enjoying real public ownership...
...Public oil, and mineral and forest remained public property...
...They have no eye toward the future...
...But even to the humblest of us is given at time the power of precise sight...
...The assumption to that we should not worry about old age dependency till fifty per cent of old men are to need of help...
...The Judge says that he wants to give the I.R.T...
...We suggest that Mussolini head the Royal House of Castor Oil and that all lesser nobles and princelings be prohibited from infringing in any way on his title...
...These will be recovered when the movement follows the course pursued by the organized workers ta other countries of the world...
...The old movesjjent was alive and inspiring...
...Perhaps...
...Having thin glorious pioneer record, the movement forgot its traditions and achievements in the post-war hatreds following the emancipation of the slaves...
...In New York they sent one man to the legislature...
...Therein lies the end of all Bolshevik empire...
...These proletarians and worker-intellectuals have their vision trained to the future...
...Now and then there is a protest, as in the case of Senator Wheeler in Cleveland last week, but there is no fighting group raising the issue of a war waged without the consent of Congress...
...The figures will indicate the month and year, respectively, of the expiration of your subscription...
...Ogden, Utah...
...This union of the gentlemen leaders of the two parties was blown up when Jackson entered Washington in 1828...
...And they all point to one ' sound conclusion, namely that private ownership, unregulated, and indulging In cutthroat competition, to Incapable of running coal...
...The selfsacrifice, the devotion to Communistic principles, and the Spartan fortitude of these Russian comrades are the saving graces in an otbesw/ise graceless and futile posturing...
...that no other solution to this pressing problem offers adequate relief for the consuming public...
...and the workers...
...The hoof of Eaaley sticks out of every paragraph while the caption to a picture of comfortable old gentlemen in lines at a bank to draw upon their accounts gives the case away...
...That's all...
...They nave Kept me pcbmuiu...
...The Job, however, to far from being a clever one...
...Montotair, N. J. Neither does the Civic Federation.— Editor...
...Coolidge and Kellogg have been waging war in Nicaragua without so much as reporting it to Congress, to say nothing of asking its consent...
...In the meantime the public provided with coal from the non-union fields'south of the Ohio River, remains indifferent to the struggle, which to merely one In a long series of industrial strikes that have marked the history of coal-mining to this country...
...The Committee to devoting Itself to the preparation of a detailed program for public control along the lines indicated above, and invites suggestions and criticism from those who are interested...
...I know, my friends hew presumptious it is for a nonentity like myself to shoo off with one sweeping gesture this vast turmoil of life and hope that occupies one-third of the world in land space, and entails almost a fifth of its population...
...Here the first central labor body and the first labor party were organized in Philadelphia, nearly twenty years before the Communist Manifesto appeared...
...One would think that in an article of this kind some spaee would be given to the work of Mr...
...There are a great many of us here in America who find cause to hurl hatred at her head, and quite a number who are just undetermined one way or the other for praise or condemnation...
...As Senator Cope land declares, we at present have between 3,000 and 4,000 more mines and over 300,000 more miners than we have markets for their coal The result to only part time employment of miners, part time utilization of mines and Increased operating costs—since the unit oasts of mines working only two sad three days a week are from 30 to 40 per cent more than those operating full time...
...There Is an atwalafy between the legendary sokhsrs J who sprang up from the field sown with the teeth j of the shun mqnshfr, kad the Bolshevik dtotatorshto i that leaped up Out of fjbe Russian mess of 1917...
...Under such circumstances, the obvious way out of such a tragic dilemma as la presented by the coal fields today is for the public to take from the incompetent hands of private owners the management of this all-important Industry, and put it where it belongs—namely with the three parties most directly concerned with the production and distribution of cheap and abundant fuel—the public, technical men...
...FOB NATIONALIZATION Editor, The New Leader: The strike of the bituminous coal miners in Pennsylvania, northwestern Virginia, and Ohio drags inconclusively along,' while the miners and their families, many of them evicted from their homes, suffer from hunger and exposure, and the operators lose profits and markets...
...Then the slavery issue entered politics and the workers forgot their special interests as a class...
...And if they have not succeeded by this time in converting the farmer to Socialism, it has been because the philosophy that fits with dovetail nicety Into a highly industrial system is an awkward and untenable thing to a land of primitive husbandry...
...Here there is stagnation...
...Officially it clings to two parties of the possessing classes with consequent spirihial death as the penalty...
...Abraham Epstein's article last week, "When Bats See Light," in which he attacked the National Civic Federation investigation of old age dependency...
...A Peace of Gentlemen 'J'HE dead calm of the two leading parties at Washington is evidence of their complete merger...
...With this impending revolutionary debacle in mind, what else can a Social Democratic Party do except stand by with some sort of reverent sorrow...
...And can I help it that ever since I have given thought to Russia of these years there has appeared over the horizon of hope, like a pall cloud of ominous disaster, the face of the moujft—vast, thin-lipped, slant-eyed and sinister, like the presence of a pagan god whose creed is selfishness, tribute sad...
...squabble around in the courts...
...one by Skidmore a few years later and a third by Stephens in 1836...
...flinging Russia back into a reactionary dictatorship of the Horthy type...
...The public has already paid for many such costly investigations, notably that of the United States Coal Commission of 1922...
...It won an extension of the suffrage, the abolition of imprisonment for debt, a legal status for trade unions after forty years of prosecutions, the abolition of forced drill in the militia for a certain number of days in the year, and contributed much to the destruction of the system of raising public funds by the sale of lottery tickets which had helped to feed the debtors' prisons with working class victims...
...One was distinctly agrarian in its philosophy, that of Skidmore's, which is not surprising considering the fact that it was written in New York where great feudal estates had come down from the days of the Dutch grants and where even the manufacturer was considered an underling down to the middle 'twenties...
...Watch the date alongside of your name on the address label at the top of page one...
...It deserves the largest credit for the establishment of tax-supported public schools...
...One of them for example is the tenet that Socialism can come and develop healthfully only where industrial growth has expanded and become so topheavy with danger to the well being of the exploited masses beneath, that public ownership and control of these industrial monsters alone can save everything from chaos and destruction...
...In the first place, their only source of solid wealth, the land, was never communized...
...Some years ago Llppmann wrote a "profound'* book on Public Opinion, the thesis being that we are living in such a maze of forces that it is Impossible for the human mind to register an accurate picture of what transpires...
...What will happen in Russia, happened in France one hundred and twenty years ago...
...Even then, without a developed industrial productivity, I doubt whether Russia under a Kerensky or some sort of Menshevik Democracy would have travelled any further toward the Socialist State than did the Communist Dictatorship...
...Congress is now investigating the bituminous industry...
...This is a case of glaring usurpation on the part of the executive branch of the government...
...Nothing like it has appeared in our historv since the two administrations of James Monroe...
...It is isolated from its brothers of the old world and it clings to archaic forms of organization and methods that have brought it to a standstill...
...As one glances over our American scene with any sort of clairvoyance the imposing truth of this appears quite forcefully...
...Full bodied men that spring from the soil in some sort of wizardry make Jftretty and inspiring stuff for Jagends...
...They have done well with whatever they had at hand to work with.' Baronial and royal estates were turned into schools, museums, and sanitariums...
...The industry to overexpanded...
...The future is dull and prohuselees for our ideal in every land...
...While there was a small group of Federalists in Congress one could not identify them by their votes...
...O. A. KENNEDY...
...Socialists, at least, know what is what and can afford to educate and wait till the mass begins to move...
...A material faith like our own has a few of these solid truths to withstand the shock of accident and the erosion of despair...
...It belongs to individual peasants...
...In many respects the "liberal" World has become more of a sycophant at the feet of reaction than any other New York paper...
...There might have been a chance of some sort of orderly progression toward our ideal...
...There are some rules in any philosophy that allow for no change under any circumstance...
...For all of the lack, the sorry bousing conditions, the primitive sanitation of the cities, the actual poverty in material, machinery, and food, the Communist regime has accomplished a semblance of order, at least for transition if not for permanent progress...
...One hundred and fifty million landowners are about to crush the dream out of ten million industrial idealists...
...New Leader Mail Bag MAKES AMENDS Editor, New Leader: I have had occasion to criticise The New Leader—once or twice and want to make amends now by telling you what a fine, soul - satisfying paper you are putting out...
...Other titles are not wanting for members of the ministry and representatives abroad...
...Really, there is nothing we can do now to save the present day Socialism of Russia, anymore than we could help it toward permanence in the beginning...
...The great badge of accomplishment for the Bolshevik regime is that everybody in Russia, with the exception of the peasant, is poor...
...It was a Socialist Manifesto," the name Communist being used to distinguish the movement from a variety of sects and societies that called themselves "Socialist...
...On this particular issue it has never given old age pension advocates a fair opportunity to present his case and now Llppmann seems to have yielded to the affectionate advances of Eaaley...
...Of course, the movement was crude and indefinite in its Ideas, but it exhibited a class-consciousness as high as was to be expected at this early stage in the history of the American working class...
...Don't you know that bats never see light...
...Socialism is not dying in Soviet Russia, nor will it strut about with any imposing glory for decades to come...
...The Committee on Coal and Giant Power is concerned with the Immediate issues of this particular strike...
...Jeffersonian members of the Supreme Court had become Federalized...
...We can only say that we suspect any photographs which the firm of Uppmann and Eaaley place on the market...
...If a democracy had been established and preserved opinion been kept free, and dissension allowed to bod over and simmer down...
...With the V. 8. S. R. however, the road toward any sort of Socialism has been brutally head...
...The facta are to be had without much further research...
...Appropriately enough this order was signed at night and in Yonkers by Judge Francis A. Winslow...
...Mario Carli, one of the editors of LTmpero, should be next in line because his paper suggested the need of this new aristocracy...
...It is now marking time, hoping to hold its own...
...Lippmaknn's Friend Ralph N. Y. Vorid and Civic Federation Celebrate Companionate Marriage With Attack on Old Age Pensions i rppOSB who are interested Is the (Be should not overlook the uifsstkig union that unites Walter TI|i|smsiiii of tin New York World sad Raspb aC ¦aeley at the National Civic T~iianslMi The nuptials were celebrated to the Worsfl last Sunday where a li siiaa...
...Somehow this is a world that rolls on ball-bearings...
...Everything should be regulated to fit the new race of gentlemen and their children should be required to learn the use of castor oil, the stiletto, the sand bag and other noble instruments of Fascism...
...In the past quarter-century it does not exhibit even a memory of its splendid past...
...They want machinery, cloth, shoes, luxuries, now...
...Some day, very shortly now, with the way things are moving, the people of New York will wake up to the fact that the only solution to the transit problem is genuine public ownership and operation of the lines by the parties most concerned with giving real service, namely the technical men, the representatives of the public and the workers through their own organizations, having some say as to their wages and conditions...
...Marquis of the Sand Bag, Prince of the Slugging Squads, Knight of the Strangling Corps, Baron of the Faithful Yeggs, and so on...
...Tta i fruit of all mlraesa, yaniahes at the touch of reality- • 1 S.A.deWl£ I The American Labor Movement in Retrospect JJIGHTY years ago the Communist Manifesto heralded the birth of the Labor and Socialist movement...
...The mines of the country can today supply a billion tons where only about a half billion tons are needed...
...In Albany a number of wards were carried...
...He is said to be in quite a rage over the action of the Interborough in sneaking up to Yonkers to get their writ, but the balmy winds of the Southland may well soothe his ire and in the meantime we are left to struggle along, fishing out more money for less service...
...Only the present intrigues them...
...Between these two views I find myself blundering about for position...
...Then a code of murder might well be worked out for observance by the members of the aristocracy...
...They were soon following the corrupt machine headed by Van Burcp or the Whig aristocracy of merchants and the new capitalists, represented in New England by Daniel Webster whose capitalist backers contributed no less than a hundred thousand dollars to him personally as their political spokesman in politics and Congress...
...Congress has become a morgue of party brokers dead above the ears...
...The rest to Easley's stuff worked over and served for readme at the Sunday dinner...
...SNAPPY ANSWER Editor, The New Leader: As a student of boo logy I want to protest against the heading on Mr...
...They have done much with the little that Cxarism left behind...
...An honesty to government such as we Americans never will understand has saved Russia millions of dollars that ordinarily go into channels of private gsaft and political corruption...
...Give them a combination reaper and binder today and they will immediately open up their hidden granaries and pour forth tons of the wheat and corn and rye, the product of their labor...
...Members of the Committee who have been in long and Intimate contact with the developments of this basic Industry are convinced that the present situation in the bituminous field indicates the faSare of private ownership and management to supply the public with this basic necessity and at the same time provide its workers with decent American wages and standards of living...
...It is proposed to infuse new blood into the old Italian aristocracy from the young Fascists in imitation of Napoleon's creation of a new aristocracy...
...Duke of the Stiletto would be appropriate with a coat of arms showing a Fascist sticking a voter in the back...
...Unless Trotsky's mirage of world revolt turns to ponderous reality within a ten-year stretch of miracle, all that the Communist' Party of Russia has sweated and slaved and sinned for will Just wane and vanish into history with the Agrarian Revolt of Old Rome and the Paris Commune of 1848...
...The cooing dove and the bat fraternise to the same nest, a free unto* of souls In a piece of propaganda that to as false as it to igogiisllia What is done in that article to to take the propaganda of the Civic Federation against old age pensions and weave it into an artists which presumes to give an intelligent survey of the problem...
...The idea appeals to us and we offer our contribution to the glorified bandits who rule Italy...
...is shouting...
...Editors have gone, seen and come back either with cynicism or with little less than despair...
...It should not be necessary for the American public to choose between the feudalism which prevails In the non-union fields and the recurrent warfare which characterizes union operation...
...And as for the human element, the repetitive incidents of one revolution and the other range in sad and disillusioning parallel...
...The Slav peasant and the Asiatic Kulak have no spark of idealism in their makeup...
...The other two works were devoted to a merciless criticism and, in some respects, to a keen analysis of the new capitalism with its exploitation of men, women and children by power-driven machinery...
...It had also produced a literature that will compare favorably with the working class literature of Europe before the appearance of the Communist Manifesto...
...He hints darkly that he may order the police to tear up the tracks, if necessary to prevent the Interborough from increasing its fares...
...Committees of labor men and liberals have gone, seen and been vanquished by the apparent vision of the New Day there...
...The imperialist bankers and concession magnates have annexed the two parties as their private property and they might just as well merge as the two parties did in the election of Monroe in 1820...
...Capitalist power is more supreme in the republic than planter property was in the ten years before the Civil War...
...There are no big issues raised in Congress, so alike have the parties become, and the members are compelled to shovel speechless speeches into the Record and ship them in tons back to their dupes...
...Universal education became public and compulsory...
...There will be no rejuvenation of the American Labor movement till the organized masses strike out as their grandsires did, abandon old moorings, and assert their spiritual emancipation from the dominion of the possessing classes...
...Majority of men past middle life do not need charity," reads the caption...
...In the factories, in the universities, men and women stand over crude machines, old apparati, and wornout equipment trying to spin, turn and concoct a Paradise on earth for mankind...
...The soul has fled...
...Your vision of a Co-operative Commonwealth tomorrow isn't worth a pinch of buckwheat flower to them now...
...They asserted theneed of the cooperative principle in industry, affirmed the conflict of interest between workers and owners, and represented a near approach to the ideal of a Socialist world...
...The next decade will see the Communist dream passing into a sort of quasicapitalistic regime, wherein old sacrifices and old ides la will fall before the peasant's demand for worldly comforts and goods in exchange for his soil products...
...It to even more, however, concerned with its underlying causes...
...There were local successes in other states and this period showed that the new class thrown up by the development of the factory system was as intelligent, despite the lack of a general system of popular education, as the workers in Europe nearly fifty years later...
...When these passed into history the word Socialist came to express the ideals of the working class-movement in all countries...
...They see nothing but a tortuous transition from a theoretical impossibility into a reactionary reality...
...This political and economic movement of the American working class has important achievements to its credit, more than the modern movement can claim in the past twenty years...
...Mayor Walker chooses this particular time to go South for another one of those vacations, which are so popular with New York Mayors...
...Hail, Socialist Russia, I say you, and FarewaB...
...This peace of gentlemen is evident in Washington even in the year of a presidential campaign and at a time when the minority party has an opportunity to raise an important issue...
...Three important books had also appeared, one by Byllesby in 1826...
...But this is just a whole lot of noise...
...If this is granted we may begin paying seven cents on the Third of March next, the time the company set for the increased fare, while the lawyers for the city and the I.R.T...
...Transit in the Courts ^HII.E the injunction gang of late is not having everything its own way in the field of labor disputes, nevertheless the Interborough Rapid Transit in N. Y. C. has obtained an order in the Fetleral Courts staying all city and State proceedings against the seven cent fare for which the I-R.T...
...Abraham Epstein, of the American Association for Old Age Securitly, who has given years of study to the problem, but the article carries Just fifteen words quoted from Epatetn...
...For mechanical progress and agricultural efficiency, there is little enough to choose between the Paris of 17S3 and the Moscow of 1928...
...Socialism, when it does come to this land of ours, will have no new economic policies to formulate, and certainly no worry of white blockades from the outside...
...possession, end whose narrow brow has never bass circled by the halo of an idealistic dream...
...The result to financial failure, waste of underground coal, bad methods of ooai utilisation, bitter warfare between worker and operator and, bearttrcaring oonrttttnre among the wives and children of the miners...
...The ox-cart wheels that still creak and slobber to the mire of the Russian provinces augur little for even the near future...
...Socialism is dying an hour after its birth...
...With a* admirable idealism they have kept down the encroaching danger of bourgeois self-enrichment, and have created a sort of beggared aristocracy of the working class...
...Give them a library full of economic literature and manifestos, and all you will get in return is a sullen reminder that print paper does not even make a decent fertilizer...
...A Fascist Aristocracy jyiMPERO, one of the wildest Fascist publications in Italy, is now urging the creation of an aristocracy of Fascist nobles which is said to appeal to the young morons of the castor oil squads...
...WIN FIELD O. THOMPSON...
...What it sotaaHy does to to use the material of Easleys yes-men in a way to give the luuiiisshiii that there to no old-age dependency problem to this country...
...The movements abroad that accepted the ideals of the Manifesto, which is now being celebrated by progressive workers in all countries, are advancing...
...It established the first daily labor papers to appear in any nation which were supplemented with many weeklies...
...Strangely enough, the United States gave birth to the political and economic movement of the working class before it was ripe abroad...
...Whatever there was of shop and mill became socialized or cooperative...
Vol. 7 • February 1928 • No. 10
