ALL OF WHICH I SAW'

...The Sun and the rest of the carriage trade papers are not interested in humans who kick against injustices, not if it's a matter of dollars and cents to the bosses...

...A lot of them are out on the picket lines now...

...But I'm sorry you can't join the Union League...

...I've been throwing away your stuff, because I like my job here and I have a family that likes to eat three times a day...

...For anyone with a metropolitan newspaper training, there was plenty of work in his spare time in those May Days of the radical movement...

...The only line we knew was to contribute each "according to his ability" to the need for workers to organize in forward-looking unions of their own choosing, and thus advance the cause of democracy in every phase of the economy...

...It came to me as I heard the story that this "greenhorn" from a little Bavarian village knew far more about "my own, my native land" than did I, whose folks had come to New England in 1675...

...I was making from $80 to $90 a week...

...force in America...

...There were men and movements back of those sunsets I must get to know about...

...Before he devised his formula of "pure and simple unionism" for the American Federation of La* bor, Gompers had been a Marxist Now he was loudly repudiating the idealism of his youth, assuring the bosses that if they would sign contracts covering his sheltered crafts unions there would be no trouble with those he called the "intellectuals...

...Social Registerites put on a meeting at the exclusive Colony Club in support of the strikers...

...Between you and me and the lamppost, this Taft is a fat-head...

...Ironically enough, just as the strike became what Time would call "newsworthy," I was taken off my police assignments and set to writing about whimsical characters on the East Side and the Bowery in what I was told was the traditional Sun style...

...Since this article was written, the New York Sun, a pitiful remnant of the great Sun of the early century, was extinguished by its merger with the New York World-Telegram...

...But get on to yourself...

...The Scandinavians, with their cooperative enterprises...

...As in the case of ILGW, he tried to keep the Federation's role confined to lip-service...

...There, for the first time in my comfortably sheltered, upper West Side life, I saw real hunger on the faces of my fellow Americans in the richest city in the world...

...My pay was raised to $40 a week...

...III With a bit more leisure time, I took up the invitation of the Call editor and began my 40 years' felicitous connection with that paper, to which I still contribute regularly...

...For their part, union leaders looked on reporters from the conservative press as natural enemies and quite often threw them out of union headquarters...

...Speaking of the hard way of making a living, if there's any harder way than working for the labor, progressive, or Socialist press I will give the legislature of the State of New Jersey, a fleet of Mack trucks, and a clipping from the eye-brows of John L. Lewis to the bright boy or girl who can name it...

...The first Socialist speech I ever made was at a Negro YWCA on "How to Read Your Newspaper...

...the disappearance of the socialite school-girl, Dorothy Arnold, a mystery unsolved to this day...

...I had been a full-fledged Sun man for five minutes, and the thought of it made my hand shake a little as I lighted a cigaret...

...the Italians, coming in great numbers into the needle trades and into the party as well...

...He swept me up, "cane, derby hat and all," joshed me about working for the kept press and, after an intimate talk, then and there won in me a devoted follower, a youthful convert to the noble dream of a world of brotherhood which so possessed Gene...

...And the one-man organizing campaigns this man of many Americas had carried on in the Valley of Democracy, the same Mississippi Valley region where Oscar's hero Debs was born in pioneer Terre Haute in 1855...

...Though 12 years had passed since that acerbic soul had written his last misanthropic editorial, there were men on the staff of the old morning paper who, in the words of the jingle by Eugene Field, had "worked for Dana on the New York Sun," the "newspaperman's newspaper," housed in the little red brick building, the former headquarters of Tammany Hall, on Nassau Street, across the way from City Hall...

...The girls, headed by teen-age Clara Lemlich, described by union organizers as a "pint of trouble for the bosses," began singing Italian and Russian working-class songs as they paced in twos before the factory door...

...What about your own paper...

...We talked about the strike, and he told me how the International, despite the fact that it had a charter in the American Federation of Labor, was receiving only faint-hearted "moral support" from Sam Gompers and his skilled membership...

...Stand fast, girls," called Clara, and then the thugs rushed the line, knocking Clara to her knees, strik- ing at the pickets, opening the way fox a group of frightened scabs to slip through the broken line...

...And how Ameringer had gone down to the Southwest and made Socialists out of small ranchers, one-gallus farmers, and even cowhands...

...In 1912 its mem...

...And I vastly enjoyed my discovery of so many other small towns than the upper West Side, all within the limits of the Greater City All the while I had the feeling, however, that our visitors from the Mid-West were right when they pointed out that the New York movement, sensitive to every repercussion from across the seas, was not in touch with the grass roots beyond the Hudson...

...No doubt, I mused, among the better informed of those hurried clerks, stenographers, and bank runners, there would be some who would look up at me and say: McALISTER COLEMAN, descendant of one of the oldest and most conservative families of New York, has been on the firing line for labor, progressivism, and the Socialist Party for four hectic decades...

...When he read them, he thawed a little, but he handed them back...

...He grinned when I told him of the fate of my Zolaesque masterpieces and of the advice of the copy-reader...

...I like to quote the words of Oscar Amering-er, dean of labor editors and the best friend, comrade, and boss I ever had: "Running a labor paper is like feeding melting butter on the end of a hot awl to an infuriated wildcat...

...There I talked to the union organizers (the "agitators" of the "respectable" press), men and women who had gone from workbenches and sewing machines to spend long non-union hours when their regular work was done, to bring word to the rank and file that only through union could their sweated trade win the elementary decencies of life...

...ing into municipal reformers, suffragists, all sorts and conditions of up-lifters and do-gooders...

...They would tell me the story about Oscar's arrival here as a sensitive, laughter-loving "greenhorn," his heading for the Mid-West with a flute from which he summoned sweet music, and a box of oil paints which his teachers at the Munich art school had taught him to use so skilfully...

...I must send word home to my new-found friends, city-set on our island in the Atlantic, how it went in the West...

...Now when my capitalist friends say to me, "You would never have got these Socialist ideas if you had had to go out there and make money the hard way," I think of the most fiercely competitive rat-race in all New York, the jocosely named reporting "game" before the Newspaper Guild came along to civilize the profession...

...Protesting my sympathy with the strikers I handed the editor carbon copies of my strike stories, without telling him of their rejection...

...bership was close to 100,000...

...I promised to find out for myself some day just what made men like Bob LaFollette and George Norris and the other Mid-West progressives and radicals tick...

...The editor came with me to the door, saying, "Come around whenever you feel like it, and you'll be welcome...

...Our readers know all about the strike...

...Of a sudden, around the corner came a dozen tough-looking customers, for whom the union label "gorillas" seemed well-chosen...

...Guided by the fiery little Rose Schneiderman, herself a garment worker and an organizer of the Women's Trade Union League, Frances Perkins and her shy, modest friend Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary Dreier and Margaret Johnson, officials of the League who were arrested for picketing, Helen Marot, the economist and author, who organized relief stations—these and many others, whose names city editors respected, came regularly to the garment district to help with relief and publicity, to see for themselves what the strikers were up against...

...Now I was watching the scarlet flares of the sunsets above the Jersey Palisades across the Hudson with a new interest...

...The article in this issue is part of the story of his life he is now writing...

...Maybe real grievances, rather than the oratory of the agitators, kept desperate workers on the windswept streets...

...I wrote down what I had seen on the streets and in the halls and courts, and still no line of mine appeared in print...

...Though my salary had been set at $15, I looked on that pay as a velvet trimming on the golden privilege of being a member of the staff of a paper that was the admiration of city rooms from coast to coast...

...One memorable day there came striding into the office the long, lean Eugene Victor Debs, whose smile did indeed, as Max Eastman once remarked, light up a whole room...

...VI Now and then I would hear Ameringer's name spoken by men who smiled affectionately as they pronounced it...

...There a relief station had been set up where one bottle of milk and a loaf of bread were given to strikers with small children in their families...

...V We newcomers took courses in the history of the American foreign labor movements at the old Rand School on East 15th Street, and then went out and organized adult education classes...

...I was in on such front-page stories as the sinking of the Titanic, the murder of Herman Rosenthal, the big-shot gambler, that shook the town to its lower depths...

...I soon found that the maneuverings of stand-pat "Good Government" Republicans were genuinely pure and simple compared to the anything-but-pure and decidedly complex politics of right-wing laborites...

...Surveying my jaunty costume, he added, "Cane, derby hat, and all...

...The thugs ran off as the cops pushed Clara and two other badly beaten girls into the wagon...

...we hope to publish other installments in early issues...

...As winter approached, influential outsiders, for the first time in the history of the garment trades, came to the aid of their sisters from the sweat-shops...

...In Gompers' view, labor sympathizers like myself, who accepted the Socialist program of the organization of the rank and file into nation-wide industrial unions, were disruptive "outsiders" to be kept well beyond the sacred confines of the Federation...

...I would read LaFollette's Magazine as though it bore news from a strange country and then decide that Debs with his Hoosier tang and his appeal to old American characterestics of tolerance, mutual aid, and neighborli-ness, sentimental as that sounded in our city ears, was more effective for our cause than any cold Marxist analysis of the function of the class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and the like...

...While moderates and extremists might bicker about tactics, it was not necessary to call up party headquarters to find out what our "line" would be for the day...

...To be sure, there was factional fighting within the radical movement itself which has lately been emphasized by historians of this period...

...I was glad to leave behind the stuffy security of the GOP career planned for me by my father...

...There was no way for me to judge the accuracy of the paper's claim to objectivity so far as its reporting of national events, but I began to have serious doubts of its impartiality towards local happen mgs when, in the fall of 1909, an array of battered and bandaged prisoners poured into the Essex Market police court, in the heart of the East Side, which I was covering...

...But it would help if they were printed in the capitalist press...

...Though dizzied with this success, I managed to keep in touch with the strike...

...Oswald Garrison Villard, the great-hearted liberal editor, and a handful of other liberals, progressives, and Socialists started the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People, in 1910, to stress the implication of life in a democracy for Negroes...

...Soon I had a group of alert-minded youngsters organized for informal discussions of current events from the viewpoint of city workers...

...The comrades enjoyed this comment of a native New Yorker...

...In that year, just graduated from Columbia University, I stood on the front steps of the Sun building, tilted my flat-brimmed straw hat to a cocky angle, and watched, with what I hoped would be taken for an air of bored sophistication, the crowds of white-collar workers streaming towards the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge...

...IV There were no labor reporters in the modern sense of the term in those days...

...I'll tell the comrades you're to have the run of the office...

...They backed away from the militancy of the garment workers, whom they regarded as radical "greenhorns...

...Fancy ladies from the Allen Street red-light district climbed out of cabs to cheer on the gorillas...

...These were strikers in what labor historians call "The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand," the first large-scale walkout called by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union...

...In the meantime I had finished my East Side apprenticeship on the Sun and reached the giddy heights occupied by the space-writer, i.e., top-level reporters paid by the column and assured good assignments...

...A hot summer of chasing after obituary notices in remote sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx, of cov-ering smoky fires, small-time shootings, magistrates' courts and police stations disabused me of the fascination of "the game" and also of the complete accuracy of the brash, mast-head of my paper, "If You See It in the Sun It's So...

...The situation was further complicated by the long-standing feud between Sam Gompers and the Socialists...

...Though Gompers announced that his only political...

...When I was inducted into the Debs branch of the Workmen's Circle, the Socialist-dominated sick and death benefit association, I rose, after elaborate ceremonials carried on in Jewish, and spoke my piece . . " 'S schwer zu sein a goy in New York...

...In the Call office I met the brilliant, austere Morris Hillquit, Socialist leader and labor lawyer who sent me back to George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and other British leftists with an eye to the socialist programs I had missed in my undergraduate days at Columbia...

...When, in 1911, I told him that I had joined the Socialist Party, he sighed a little, hid his disappoinment, and said finally, "Well, you know I never did swallow all those articles about LaFollette and Debs and Hill-quit and the rest...

...The strikers, for the most part young girls, many of whom had been receiving $3 to $4 a week for working on shirt-waists 56 hours, had been badly mauled by "gorillas" hired by sweat-shop owners and club-swinging Tammany cops...

...One night in the city room a copy reader took me aside...

...It was a singing, laughing, loving world into which I was going, despite all the bitterness of the struggle...

...To my father the names of Robert Marion LaFollette and George Washington Norris, the leaders of the revolt against the Old Guard, were fully as foreboding as they were to the Sun's editors who classed "Fighting Bob," and John Peter Altgeld, Eugene Victor Debs, and William Jennings Bryan as conspirators bent on overthrowing the Republic's pillars...

...I could still chuckle, though, over the barbed editorials in the Dana manner light...

...It was evident that a young visitor from a hostile camp was an object of the liveliest suspicion...

...But of one thing we were fortunately free—the skulduggery of Communist politicians...

...He is the author of several books, Including a biography of Eugene Debs and a study of John L Lewis and the coal-miners...

...I did a lot of home work on the American movement, reading Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Equality, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Hillquit's History of Socialism in the United States, Richard T. Ely's pioneer history of American labor, the labor histories of John R. Commons and his associates at Wisconsin, Robert M. LaFollette's A Personal Narrative, the writings of Jacob Riis, Robert Hunter, and Henry Demar-est Lloyd, the novels of Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Henry Blake Fuller, the poems of William Vaughan Moody, Edwin Markham, Sarah Cleghorn, and the other rebel singers...

...It has the old human interest that we are always yelling for...

...Social ists sponsored more than 200 public cations, from daily newspapers such as The Call and the powerful Jewish Daily Forward, and Victor Berger's Milwaukee Leader, to "theoretical" reviews, and the Appeal to Reason, with its circulation in the hundreds of thousands...

...the Germans with their social democratic backgrounds—these needed the services of a professional newspaperman for writing pamphlets, press releases, and articles to be translated for the foreign language press...

...I followed the rest of the retreating pickets to the union hall, a few blocks away...

...Fearing that I might have broken the rules about objectivity when I wrote my court story, I went down early one morning to watch a picket line form in front of a struck shirtwaist-factory...

...There was a confused melee of scratching, screaming girls and fist-swinging men and then a patrol wagon arrived...

...Gee, I'd like to get into that gamei It must be fascinating...

...To my naive surprise the story was left out of next morning's paper which carried, instead, the official police version of the strike news in which howling mobs of strikers, instigated by labor agitators, wantonly attacked the blue-coated custodians of law and order...

...However, he was also leader of the staunchly Republican upper West Side Congressional district and campaign manager for the Old Guard Republican Congressman whom the "silk stocking district" sent regularly to Washington...

...They won't pay you for them, but you can get them off your chest...

...Soon the carriage trade papers changed their anti-union tune...

...Indignant, I went back to the Sun office to pound out a piece describing' the court-room scenes...

...Why don't you take some of your stories over to The Call...

...II My reception at the offices of the Socialist daily which had started shop in a loft building back of Park Row in 1908, was not warm, to put it mildly...

...There's one of those Sun reporters going out on an assignment...

...The result, of course, was to give middle class readers the idea that the chief function of labor officials (pictured as tough, slot-mouthed "walking delegates" by the Westbrook Peg-lers of the time) was to raise hell with peaceful citizens, especially non-union workers...

...On my days off, or after work at the office, or in the long, dull hours of waiting for an assignment, I did my Jimmie Higgins stint at my typewriter...

...The Socialist Party, in the short 12 years since it was organized by Debs, Hillquit, Victor Berger, Seymour Stedman, and the other pioneers, had become a signs ficant social, political, and economi...

...So, but for the grace of the garment workers, I might be sitting in the window of the Union League listening to my arteries harden, whereas I can hear them just as clearly today in the office of a labor paper whose circulation is as low as my own...

...So my father could forgive the Sun for its gibes at local reformers because of its Gibraltar stand against what he and his friends regarded as the wild radicalism of the Mid-West insurgents in Congress...

...Look, sonny," he said, "I've been reading your strike stuff and it isn't bad...

...They were then hustled off to the workhouse in the company of thieves, drunks, and prostitutes, there to serve 30 days at hard labor...

...And I do agree the workers are getting a raw deal...

...In the Sun's vocabulary of derision of the democratic decencies, my own father was a "Goo Goo," that is, a member of the Good Government clubs fighting Tammany corruption...

...philosophy was "to reward labor friends punish labor's enemies," fife Federation's hierarchs everywhere were in open or secret alliance with the political machines that had brought about what Lincoln Steffens, in 1905, termed the ''Shame of the Cities...

...Sorry we can't use these pieces," he said...

...After listening to tirades by the Tammany magistrates on the sanctity of property rights and, as one of the petty judges put it, the wickedness of "striking against God," the prisoners were found guilty of disturbing the peace...