MUSIC FOR THE MINERS
Coleman, Mcalister
Music For The Miners By McALISTER COLEMAN IRAN into a coal miner, a buddy of Oscar Amering-er's and mine the other day, up from the Pennsylvania fields on personal business in New York. On his...
...Francis of Assisi having himself a time with his feathered friends...
...Now it's your turn to go see a psychiatrist...
...On his face was an expression of rapt exaltation which made me suspect at first that he had been doing a little pub crawling...
...After all, why drag in economists and charts and trade unions and such ? Hath not music charms ? When you can so exalt a working coal-digger like my buddy Joe with a few bars of Berlioz, why bother the War Labor Board...
...The personnel manager calls up the boss...
...Gentlemen, I move we rise and give three cheers for the poor...
...Tell him to dedicate it to the brave workers of the Prefabrication Industry with especial reference to our branch of the business...
...Give them a token of our appreciation...
...Yes," said he...
...No...
...Tell him to go to town with some soothing chamber music...
...Tell me it ain't so, Joe...
...When did that come up in this cock-eyed election...
...There is the old story of the garment manufacturers' banquet here in New York at the end of a highly profitable season...
...Churchill and Comrade Stalin for the formation of an underground international order for the creation of a permanent peace, that you look like St...
...There was nothing like that down our way...
...And I certainly do appreciate it...
...And wasn't that white of them...
...As for me, I voted, as usual, for Thomas...
...said he, "you better go to some of these whack specialists...
...No mandate then on isolationism ? No surging march towards the sunlit heights of American participation in future global brawls...
...We better do something quick...
...Berlioz Is More Exalting When great industrialists hire.the most expensive bands in the nation to make sweet sounds over the radio in honor of coaldiggers, dock-wallopers, and other working stiffs, we have indeed reached a point in our industrial relations for which the adjective Utopian would seem meager indeed...
...Boss, the boys are getting restless...
...The fellers I know voted for Roosevelt because he was the lesser of two evils...
...They're liable to waHc out any minute...
...However, the price of hooch in this man's town being what it is, and my buddy, like the overwhelming majority of coal-diggers, staying far away from the hard stuff, I hastily revised my first opinion and asked him...
...That'll fix 'em...
...He then said a short and ugly word not fit for publication in any family's paper and went on: "You want to know why I look so good ? It's because I have been dedicated to by none other than the Boston Symphony Orchestra...
...The only thing we heard in the camps was that now that Roosevelt was getting old, the Republicans could take over and do it better...
...And that, besides, Dewey was a liar...
...The present Allis-Chalmers program may well set a pattern for postwar relationships...
...s,aidI...
...Symphony For The Miners "I don't know what you're talking about, Mac," says this humble hewer...
...But according to Sammy Grafton of the New York Post, the people rose in their dignity and might and declared themselves to be finally mature...
...Get Koussevitsky on the phone...
...Boy...
...I think we should do something about them...
...become disaffected over some minor grievance such as a wage cut of 50 per cent...
...Finally a little fellow way over" in the corner got up and said: "I have listened with great interest to all the speeches and I certainly think we done good this last year...
...What do you mean, international order...
...And sure enough, so it was...
...My old buddy looked at me with some alarm...
...How come ? Are you so uplifted by the re-election of Mr...
...The Allis-Chalmers outfit that makes, among other things, pumps and screens for coal mines, dedicated a whole evening of the symphony to the mining industry...
...Let's say the hired hands in the Prefabricated Chick Sale Mfg...
...Last night over the radio, the Allis-Chalmers Company hired the Boston Symphony under the direction of Koussevitsky to play Berlioz' 'Childe Harold in Italy' for my benefit in Symphony Hall in Boston...
...Roosevelt and the sweeping mandate which the majority of the American people has given him to go on meeting with Mr...
...Have you fallen off the wagon again ? I gave no mandate to nobody...
...Sammy says that at long last we have shaken off the childish notions of the colonial revolutionaries, the adolescent concepts of the Founding Fathers, and now stand unified before the world, Well-rounded, full-fledged internationalists, whose dinner table talk resounds with discussions of the disposition of the Resistance Movement in France and who, homeward plodding their weary way, speak earnestly of the Yugoslavian impasse and the need for the American delegate to the forthcoming Security Council to have full powers to declare war before breakfast without bothering Congress about such tiresome details...
...However, there is one thing we have overlooked, and that is our workers...
...It is easy to see how effective it could be...
...One speaker after another arose to congratulate his fellow operators *on how much folding money they had made during the year...
...You look it up," he said in parting and went off, still with that out-of-this world expression on his face...
...Didn't this lad with the mustache okay everything that Roosevelt has done in Teheran or wherever...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 49
