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<div type="issue">
<div type="front"><ab>
The MASSES
AUGUST, 1914
10 CENTS
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<div type="images"><ab>
Drawn by Maurice Becker.
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<div type="front"><ab>
MID SUMMERS FACTS NUMBER
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<div type="miscellaneous"><ab>
[pgbrk] THE MASSES
Contributing Editors
LITERATURE
EUGENE WOOD JOHN REED ELLIS O. JONES MAX EASTMAN HORATIO WINSLOW MARY HEATON VORSE LOUIS UNTERMEYER WILLIAM ENGLISH WALLING HOWARD BRUBAKER ROBERT CARLTON BROWN FLOYD DELL
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<div type="advertisements"><ab>
CHALLENGE
By Louis Untermeyer
''Louis Untermeyer's credo is that a poet must not get his poetry from other poems; he must be faithful unto 'things.' Vistas,
¦; events, people, the touch and go of life concern him, not a patterned, preconceived
. 'imagery about them. . . . 'Challenge' sends us back to the commonplace and the familiar to find the fullness of life."—The Review of Reviews.
"Louis Untermeyer's book is called 'Challenge,' and the mass of the poems abound in the belligerent philosophy of 'On the Birth of a Child.' . . . He has here set down with brevity and the utmost exhilaration what Pericles feels over the new-born children of his state, and what the simplest peasant father feels as well. To achieve these common denominators without being cheap is one of the goals of democratic poetry."—Nicholas Vachel Lindsay in Ôhe Chicago Evening Post.
"Untermeyer is essentially a maker of lyrics; he lets nothing stand in the way of a sonorous and lashing line. But to this purely aesthetic impulse he has added a rising interest in the purpose and fate of man, a definite attitude towards the great problems of being. . . . The philosophy he inclines to is that of the ja-sager; he sees life, not as an empty dream, not as a meaningless horror, but as something to be challenged and brought with- in bounds—as an experience that man may condition and ameliorate, at least enough to make it bearable, by his own strength and courage."—H. L. Mencken in The Baltimore San.
"Mr. Untermeyer is a militant prophet of humanity; his lines ring with the clangor of a noble strife. Yet the nature poems show the poet's affinity for the riot of spring, the poignant mystery of night and the balm of silence. . . . His ardor is contagious; the volume is an inspiration as well as a challenge."—Louisville Courier.
ADVERTISING MANAGER THE MASSES
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<div type="miscellaneous"><ab>
THE MASSES
A FREE MAGAZINE
THIS Magazine is Owned and Published Co-operatively by its Editors- It has no Dividends to Pay, and nobody is trying to make Money out of it. A Revolutionary and not a Reform Magazine; a Magazine with a Sense of Humor and no Respect for the Respectable; Frank; Arrogant; Impertinent; Searching for the True Causes; a Magazine Directed against Rigidity and Dogma wherever it is found; Printing what is too Naked or True for a Money-making Press; a Magazine whose final Policy is to do as it Pleases and Conciliate Nobody, not even its Readers— there is a Field for this Publication in America.
Help us to find it.
SUBSCRIPTION RATES
Yearly, $1.00 Half Yearly, 50 Cents
Bundle Rates and Newsdealers
5 Cents Non-Returnable—7 Cents Returnable Not less than five Copies.
Published Monthly by the Masses Publishing Co., at
87 Greenwich Avenue, New York City. Entered as second-class mail matter, December 27, 1910, at the postoffice of New York City, under the Act of March 3, 1879.
MAX EASTMAN, Editor FLOYD DELL, Managing Editor MAX ENDICOFF, Business Manager
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<div type="advertisements"><ab>
VISIT PANAMA
EXPOSITION
Everybody's going to the big Panama Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. You can't afford to miss it. Half the pleasure in going will be in seeing the country to and from. We'll tell you how you can go in easy stages, making sojourns at all points of interest, enjoying every minute of the time, pay all your expenses, and get a big profit besides.
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Will take you. This unique metal camera, the most wonderful of all photographic inventions, takes official size post cards, 5 sizes, and button photos, without films, dry plates or dark room. Just click the bulb and deliver the pictures--takes one minute--it's easy; 8c profit on every dime.
$25 a day easy
Write for big illustrated circular and full details of Special Panama Exposition offer to
INTERNATIONAL METAL & FERRO CO.
D 852 CHICAGO, ILL.
</ab></div>
<div type="miscellaneous"><ab>
Contributing Editors
ART
JOHN SLOAN ARTHUR YOUNG ALICE BEACH WINTER H. J. TURNER CHARLES A. WINTER MAURICE BECKER GEORGE BELLOWS CORNELIA BARNS STUART DAVIS GLENN O. COLEMAN K. R. CHAMBERLAIN
The Masses
CARTOON SERVICE
Socialist and Labor Newspapers and Periodicals
Write for further particulars to
BUSINESS MANAGER
The Masses Publishing Co.
87 Greenwich Avenue NEW YORK
[pgbrk]
THE MASSES
3
JOHN SLOANS ETCHINGS
artist's proofs
TITLES:
The Women's Page The Show-case Turning Out the Light Fifth Avenue Critics
Connoisseurs of Prints The Man Monkey Man, Wife and Child The Little Bride
Girl and Beggar
Roofs, Summer Night Fun, One Cent The Picture Buyer Night Windows
The Masses Publishing Co. is authorized to offer any two (2) of this Series of Original Etchings by JOHN SLOAN and One Year's Subscription to The Masses for $5.00.
This is the usual price for one proof.
If so desired the etchings will be sent to one address and The Masses to another. Pick out the subjects you prefer.
If you would like to make new selections after you have seen the proofs you may do so.
SEND FOR ILLUSTRATED BOOKLET
The Masses Pub. Co., 87 Greenwich Ave., New York
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<div type="images"><ab>
[pgbrk] Drawn by K. R. Chamberlain.
A LITTLE EMPHASIS
"The riot gave emphasis to the need for certain reforms in prison conditions."—News Item.
It is sometimes necessary to behave like beasts in order to gain the right to be treated like men. Without prison riots there would be no prison reforms.
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<div type="articles"><ab>
[pgbrk] The
MASSES
Vol. V. No. 11: Issue No. 39.
AUGUST, 1914
Max Eastman, Editor.
KNOWLEDGE and REVOLUTION
Max Eastman
Inevitable Dynamite
IT APPEARS that the freedom of speech guaranteed by our constitution had been denied to Arthur Caron and his young associates in Tarry-town, Í. Y., just as the right of assemblage had been denied to them earlier in the year during the agitation of the unemployed in New York City. The press was filled with intolerant hatred of their idealism, and no one having authority or power stood up for their right to speak. They were in jeopardy of going to jail for their opinions. The result, so far as we can judge from appearances, was the manufacture of a bomb. The bomb exploded accidentally and Caron and two of his associates were killed.
In this connection I quote a paragraph from "Knowledge and Revolution" in the June number of The Masses :
"Every time an established principle of popular liberty is transgressed by the executives or the courts, in the determination to 'get' an agitator, the wires are set for an explosion. Such transgressions are at present the primary incitements to violence. And the papers which condone or ignore such transgressions are the high accessories before the fact in most of the violence that occurs."
There is little else to say except to mourn the loss of the courageous, and to add that if they did intend— which is not wholly improbable—to sacrifice life to the progress of liberty, they could hardly have guided their bomb more effectually than fortune did. For certainly if they had killed three "respectable citizens," the chief result would have been to scare out a great many working-people who are coming to a genuine revolutionary position. Possibly the assassination of Rockefeller himself, or General John Chase, or Linderfelt, or Ham-rock, of the Colorado militia, would not produce this result. But any more refined retaliations would. Most people are not able, except in scenes of actual war, to mix murder with their ideals. But nothing mingles more effectually with ideals than martyrdom.
And whether these boys died by their own bomb, or by a bomb planted in their apartment for purposes' known to the police, in either case there is a flavor of martyrdom in their death.
Anarchy and Rockefeller
To many of us anarchy appears reactionary both in doctrine and method. In doctrine it is more than reactionary, it is atavistic, for it jumps the whole industrial era and returns to that philosophy of "natural right" which voiced the spirit of liberty in the age of handicraft and small trade. In that age men conducted the business of life individually, and liberty merely required that they should be let alone. Liberty was a
negative idea. Certain "inalienable rights" should not be invaded by the political power—that was all. And present-day anarchy is but an extreme rendering of this idea.
I do not say that even for those times of individualism anarchy would not be so extreme an ideal as to be self-contradictory. Anarchy is the raw material of despotism. But I do say that the philosophic assumptions of the anarchists are identical with those of the philosophers of natural right in that time, and are as little effectual for guarding liberty in a period of organized social production.
That principle of the "freedom of contract," for instance, upon which John D. Rockefeller is grounding his bloody depredations in Colorado, is a part of this old doctrine of natural right. And Rockefeller's anarchistic tormentors, in their creed of pure personal liberty and disorganization, are more near to that position of Rockefeller himself, than to the position of his industrial enemies who have revolted against "freedom of contract" in the name of organized collective power.
They are more near to Mr. Rockefeller in their theory, and also I think in their method. For while it is a natural, human and civilized thing to wish to destroy Rockefeller, or make him slink, it is not very radical or revolutionary. It is the old-fashioned method—the method of praise-and-blame, which Rockefeller himself uses, with a reversed gear, in the Bible class.
Undoubtedly the Rockefeller personality—expressing to perfection the cold hypocrisy of Christian Big Business—is a symbol of immense value in militant propaganda. Nobody in touch with reality can want to dispense with flagrant personalities as points of attack, or bleed the revolution of personal anger. But to see in this man, who is only after all a relatively weak and warm representative of the white-hearted tyranny of the whole capitalistic business, to see in him a material cause, to spend life and genius trying to kill or cure him, that is to waste power upon measures long outworn and discredited. The moment Rockefeller dies, his value as a bloody embodiment of the slave-driving system is gone. Nothing stops but his heart. The slave-driving system is all the stronger for his death, and the labor movement all the weaker for the uproar and hanging of some heroic boy or girl who killed him.
I do not mean to imply that killing is peculiarly the anarchist method. A great many anarchists do not believe in it, and a great many who are not anarchists do. But the practice of individual praise-and-blame, the old-fashioned business of moral evangelism (of which assassination is perhaps only an extreme instance) seems to be the essence of their method, and it belongs almost as properly to the past as their philosophy, which is in reality a dying scream of the eighteenth century attempt at human liberty.
In Defense of Criminals
A WORKER'S defence conference was launched in **¦ New York this spring with a mass-meeting in Carnegie Hall, and as chairman of the meeting I was appointed to express the general purpose and philosophy of the conference. This involved a candid discussion of the relation of law to the struggle for industrial liberty. Since when so much editorial ink has been shed against me in various quarters that it seems as though I must have said something important. When Mr. Edward S. Martin, for instance, slips so far down from the ever circumspect if not gentle satire of his editorials in Life, as to call a man engaged in the same employment as himself a "professional hobo," the indication is that something distinctly uncultivated, or perhaps even true, has been said. And for that reason I am going to set down here exactly what was said, or so much of it at least as I think led him to list me in that distinguished company with Bill Haywood and Pancho Villa. It will show the reader what we are trying to do in our Defence Conference, and perhaps it will stir someone to help us in the immediate problem of securing five hundred dollars to pay Frank Tanenbaum's fine and save him that extra year and a half of unjust imprisonment.
"I have to remind you for a moment of the history of the growth of what you call democracy. It was the history of a class-struggle—the struggle of a growing class of commercial property-holders against those privileged by the possession of land and hereditary nobility, a struggle which issued in the triumph of the property-holders, the abolition of the privilege of nobility, and the establishment of political equality.
"We all acknowledge and envy the greatness of that struggle, and we are taught in our school books to worship the names of its high criminal heroes, Hampden, and Cromwell, and John Pym,—and John Elliott, who was three times committed to the Tower of London for fighting the king's tyranny over the House of Commons, transgressing the law of his land to the limit of high treason, and who was described by the powers of royalty and respectability in his time as 'an outlawed man, a man desperate in mind and fortune!' And that is what he was. For convicted of conspiracy to evade the king's order and fined $10,000, he refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of the court that convicted him, and he was thrown into a dungeon, denied even the privileges of a common offender, and compelled to rot there until he should formally submit to the will of the king and his ministers. And he never did submit, but instead of that he wrote four more 'desperate' pamphlets before he died, and although to the very last he was offered his liberty and health at the price of submission to the
[pgbrk] 6
THE MASSES
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<div type="images"><ab>
Drawn by Arthur Young.
SUGGESTIVE THERAPEUTICS
doc wilson: "you're all right! you're all right! there's absolutely nothing the matter with you."
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<div type="articles"><ab>
king, he died a voluntary death of cruelty and confinement in the Tower of London.
"Those heroes, the social criminals of old, are the subject of songs. And so is that class-struggle in which they fought—because the victory in that struggle is already won.
"But of the class-struggle of our own times—the struggle of the working class against those privileged by the possession of hereditary capital, of that struggle we sing no praises in our public schools. And its heroes, the social criminals of to-day, are still to the respectable exactly what John Elliott was to the king's court, Outlawed men,' desperate in mind and fortune.'
"I ask you to pause and realize how those men of old fought against all respectable society and the power
of established law, not selfishly, but with an ideal that
was approximately our ideal of political liberty.
"And then also realize that these men of to-day, the same men and women, are still fighting against respectable society and the power of law, not selfishly, but with an ideal, the ideal of industrial liberty, the abolition of class rule for ever. And they are saying to the working-men among whom they go as agitators exactly the things that John Hampden said to the Burghers in the House of Commons in the year of 1630—
" 'To have printed liberties and not to have liberty in truth and realities is but to mock the kingdom.'
" 'Shall it be treason to debase the king's coin though but a piece of sixpence and not treason to debase the spirits of his subjects, to set a stamp and character of servitude upon them?'
"That is what they are saying. It is the same old
struggle, the struggle of the people against the powers that exploit them. And standing in the forefront as a servant of those powers is the majesty of the courts and the established law.
"We cannot expect that a law created for the defence of property-holders will be respected in all its ramifications by those who are convinced that most of the property-holders are no longer entitled to the property they hold.
"And that is one reason for organizing a defence conference. Undoubtedly we shall oftenest use the funds we collect in protecting agitators and working-men falsely accused, and whom the powers of capital are trying to railroad to prison, as they have railroaded Frank Tanenbaum, but let us candidly state that we shall also use them in the defence of men whose offences against law have been deliberately committed in the interest of the social revolution.
"It is the first big mass-meeting ever held in this country for the defence of crimes. We are not here to advocate or encourage illegal acts. That is not the purpose of our organization. But we are here to recognize that illegal acts have been committed, and will be committed, by the working people in their struggle, committed with high motives and in the interests of the democracy of the future. And we hold that just as it became necessary in the revolution of the past to distinguish a political from a civil offence, so it has become necessary in the revolution of to-day to distinguish an industrial from a civil offence. We have established this conference for the protection of those, whether innocent or guilty, who are accused of such offences."
The Ultimate Tory
WE seem to have struck bottom at last.
The political reaction that began with the year struggle for silence, that was fought and won ten six months has reached its climax.
The standpatters have obtained the greatest victory of the last quarter century.
They have at last persuaded a President to whitewash Big Business.
After a consultation with J. P. Morgan, and the appointment of a member of the firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company to the most powerful commission ever instituted in this country, the President declared that—
"the vast majority" of the representatives of Big Business are "incorruptible" and deserve well of the nation.
In January our benevolent despot warned us that he was preparing "the constitution of peace."
In July we are told with utmost precision what this means. The attack on Big Business is to cease. The Money Trust is to step into the Federal Reserve Board and regulate itself. The President has formed an "alliance" with Big Business, to quote the thoroughly reliable New York Evening Post—which represents both parties to the transaction.
There is one bright side to the situation. Nothing worse can happen.
William English Walling.
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<div type="images"><ab>
[pgbrk] THE MASSES
7
Drawn by Maurice Becker.
SOJOURNERS AT THE OCEANSIDE HOTEL REPORT A COOL SUMMER
Women workers in hotel kitchens do not receive the protection of the ten-hour law or the fifty-four-hours-a-week law. They are often compelled to work ninety-eight hours a week in vilely unsanitary surroundings with no ventilation.
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<div type="articles"><ab>
[pgbrk] 8
THE MASSES
Staying After School
TN PASSING Jefferson Market Court the other day I was reminded that several months had passed since I had dropped in to see Justice as it is administered in America. I wondered if there were any new dispensers behind the bar and just what the latest fashion in sentences might be.
To keep up to date I mounted the gloomy granite steps which my feet hadn't caressed since the day the case against The Masses editors had been thrown out of the police court. I thoughtfully threw away my cigarette without noticing the glaring "No Smoking" sign and wasn't tempted to loiter in the hallway in spite of the "No Loitering" invitation in both English and Italian. I took my hat off on approaching the door to the court room and would have crossed myself or dipped my hands in the holy water finger bowl if that had been the convention.
Walking on tiptoe so as not to disturb the Court I moved noiselessly across the threshold. A grim attendant with the amiable eye of a turnkey thrust his rigid arm across the portal, barring my entry. He didn't deign to tell me why, but stood glowering at me as though I had committed a breach of etiquette or murder.
"What's the matter?" I whispered, so nobody in the court room would be distracted.
"You can't come in," he said gruffly.
"Why not?" I asked in hushed wonderment.
"That ain't any of your business," he replied.
Trying to be perfectly respectable and live up to what the community expected of its average citizen I asked with a politeness he must have considered effeminate, "Isn't this a public court?"
"Don't go askin' me !" he snapped. "The Magistrate . don't want nobody comin' in. See! Why don't you ask Him?"
"I will, if you'll let me in."
"Sure, I'll let you in for that," he answered with malicious readiness. I knew he could see me shriveling up before a grilling from the Magistrate. I saw he thought he'd clubbed me into quietude by his offer.
I walked in. He followed me heavy-heeled as I tiptoed to a seat in the rear and sank quietly and inoffensively into it. He walked majestically to. the front, slammed the little iron gate behind him quite officiously and said something to a clerk.
When the case before the Court was disposed of the clerk leaned forward and spoke to His Magistrate, who looked sharply at me and, his jaw sticking out, motioned the attendant to bring me forward.
With the quiet dignity of a domesticated house cat I padded down the aisle, winced a little as an attendant
</ab></div>
<div type="images"><ab>
Drawn by Arthur Young.
O JOY!
Sir! I am insulted!
Drawn by Arthur Young.
senator poindexter accuses mr. root of associating with trusts.
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<div type="articles"><ab>
slammed the door behind me and raised my eyes to my Judge.
"Well, what do you want here?" he bellowed.
I began stating my case and he cut me off sharply with, "Speak up, louder!"
I stepped a little forward and continued in my usual voice, "The door-keeper let me in to ask you if this is a public court and if I have the right as a citizen to sit in the audience and listen to cases."
"No, you haven't," he said abruptly. "Unless I let you."
I was about to thank him and depart when he growled, "Wht's your name?" I told him. "Where do you live?" "What's your business?" When I answered "magazine writer" to the last an expression came into his face which reminded me of Mr. Hyde changing back to Dr. Jekyll, or vice-versa. I couldn't tell which, but he maintained his puzzle-picture expression and became more magisterially explicit.
"I have the right and power to exclude everybody from this room if it please me, or hear all the cases in private in my chambers if I want to," he said.
After a pause, in which he noted the effect on me of his declaration of independence, he snapped, "Now do you understand? Sit down, quietly!"
As I stumbled to a seat, thinking that Teacher must have a headache and might keep me after school if I crossed my legs, I wondered if he'd have given me ten days instead of information if I'd answered that I was a ditch digger instead of a magazine writer.
Robert Carlton Brown.
Signs of Progress
The civilizing of Mexico is now practically com-plete. Prize fighting is firmly established in the affections of Vera Cruz and poker chips are circulating as small change in Tampico.
VICE-PRESIDENT MARSHALL pointed out in a recent college commencement address that perhaps one cause of the present industrial unrest is that, whereas sixty years ago labor got one-fourth and capital three-fourths of the wealth they created together, now labor gets only one-fifth and capital four-fifths. They gave him a degree for this discovery.
A NEW YORK newspaper recently raised money for the relief of a woman who had offered her baby for sale. Now, so great has been the quickening of the social conscience, there is talk of a permanent fund for all such cases.
THE New Haven Railroad has asked for extra guards against train-wreckers. For an outsider to try to cause a wreck on the New Haven would seem to be painting the lily.
JUSTICE is getting soft and sentimental in Alabama. A negro who was given fifty years for stealing fifty cents has been paroled by the governor after serving only twenty.
ADOLPH, Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe, complains that the women of his court are apeing Berlin fashions and covering up their arms and necks more and more. He has issued a decree demanding full decollete in future. Properly enough Adolph's traditional term of address is "His High Princely Transparency."
SECRETARY DANIELS gave the officers of the navy until July 1st to dispose of their stock of liquor in the wine messes. Let us be thankful that the country was not attacked by a foreign foe on the night of June 30th.
DR. F. C. RICHARDSON of Boston says that the diaphanous dress of American women is far more responsible for the downfall of young manhood and womanhood than all other agencies combined. Up to press time women's fashions have been held responsible for everything except the boll weevil and sun spots.
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<div type="fiction"><ab>
[pgbrk]
"BUTTE NUMBER ONE"
Frank Bohn
[Editorial Note: We print this story of the Butte controversy, by. one long familiar with the situation there, not as an expression of the convictions of the editors, but as a sincere contribution, from one point of view at least, to the small knowledge the public has of that controversy.]
IN November, 1912, on the night of the election, I saw a Butte mob try to wreck the City Hall. It was fired by the enthusiasm of victory and was trying to give expression to its opinion of the Socialist municipal administration. It arrived at the City Hall, a thousand strong, at exactly one o'clock in the morning. Outside the building were several hundred miners assembled for the purpose of listening to the election returns. There seemed to be some sort of understanding between the two crowds that guns should not be used. But fists pounded noses and jaws and heavy boots which had trod, the mine were driven hard in many a kick. Blood dripped here and there. I saw just one man draw his automatic Colt. He was speedily disarmed, whereupon he had the man who took his gun arrested "for carrying a concealed weapon."
The next day over a hundred miners were discharged for taking a part in the campaign distasteful to Amalgamated. Had the "Progressives," as the radical unionists in Butte Number One call themselves, been in control of the union, anstrike would have been called to force the reinstatement of the hundred. But the union offices were filled by the friends of the Amalgamated Copper Co. So the discharged went their way with fists clenched and teeth set. I met twenty of them in a saloon.
"Just wait," they said. "We'll have our innings yet."
They have waited nearly two years. Their day has come. They are having their "innings."
It would take a volume to explain fully what has happened in Butte. But a paragraph will suffice to indicate the main causes. Butte Number One, of the Western Federation of Miners, is numerically the most powerful local labor union in the world. It has been for two years, say the "Progressives," controlled by the agents of Amalgamated. These union officials for the first time in the history of the W. F. of M., have instituted the "show your card" system for those seeking employment in the mines. Now there have been some three thousand miners, mostly "Progressives" or anti-Amalgamated men, out of employment during the dull period of the immediate past. As the mines put on full force again these began to "rustle for jobs."
"Show your cards," said the walking delegates.
"We must draw our first pay before we can settle up for back dues," replied the men.
"Then you can't work in Butte."
"Can't we !"
Presently two thousand "Progressives," some with jobs and some without, marched down the street toward the union office. The office of Butte Number One looks like a prosperous bank in an Eastern city of a hundred thousand population. The mob came to the door of the office and an "Executive Committee" of a hundred stalwarts entered. They proceeded to make their purpose clear to the president of the union, a certain Mr. Sullivan, late of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. The "committee" seized that gentleman, choked him nearly to death and kicked him out of the door into the street. Whereupon they proceeded to remove to a secret place all of the valuable effects of the office building, including $3,000 in cash. "We are the union," they said. Later came President Charles Moyer, from Denver, on a mission of peace. He called a meeting in
Miners' Hall. Again came the mob, that "mightiest judge of all," to break it up. Deputies fired upon the mob and were fired upon. Several men were killed and wounded and President Moyer made a hurried escape in an automobile.
Knowing the personnel of this mob as I do, let me insist upon one point not without interest. It contained literally scores of men abundantly able to defend their cause by quotations from Aristotle and the Bible, from Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx.
Industrial America has come upon, strange times. Butte is and has been for years the strongest citadel of union labor in America and probably in the world. Ninety-eight per cent, of all its working people are organized. While the miners of the Colorado coal fields are fighting and dying for the "closed shop," the radical wing of the Western Federation of Miners in Butte are fighting and dying for the "open shop" principle. What is the public mind East of the Rocky Mountains to make of this? Let us give Butte the floor and permit her to tell her story.
Butte has, including its immediate suburbs, a population of 50,000.. But Butte is not at all like other American cities of like size. It is entirely a mining town and has more "character" than any other community in America. There is just one other mining town in the world larger than Butte and that is Johannesburg, South Africa.
To begin with, there is a. hill in Butte, barren and desolate enough, but without which Butte would not exist. This hill is, in fact, of much more importance to the modern world than Bunker Hill, Olympus, or Mt. Sinai. Out of that hill com3s $30,000,000 worth of copper and other metals annually. With the exception of a small and comparatively unimportant area this hill is owned by the Amalgamated Copper Co., a tentacle of Standard Oil. But in Butte the claws of the beast have been trimmed so close that out of the thirty millions, twelve millions, or forty per cent, of the gross product, goes into the pockets of the ten thousand men who dig, mill and smelt the ores.
How can this happen? Has the great philanthropist perhaps selected Butte as a fitting place to exhibit the practicality of the brotherhood of man? Hardly. The cause lies in just this—the ten thousand men of the Butte mines are the strongest body of men, mentally and physically, collectively as well as individually, which the forces of modern industry have gathered together in one place. To see this army of toilers assembled in public meeting is to take renewed hope in humanity. No degeneracy here. These men know what they are about and understand the conditions of their living.
The remarkable history of the Western Federation of Miners can be understood only as a part of the history of the American Frontier. Here are the descendants of the men of Kings Mountain, of Jackson's defenders of New Orleans, and of the contending armies of the Mississippi Valley in the Civil War. For ten generations this stock has been escaping slavery by moving west. Hemmed in at last by a settled country it has its back to the wall and its fight for civilized conditions has drawn the attention of the world for twenty years. True, Standard Oil dominates Butte and Montana. But in Butte are eight thousand Americans who do not disdain to wield the pick and shovel. As they receive four dollars a day for seven hours and twenty minutes of actual work they are enabled to satisfy their appetites on solid food. In Butte alone have the two distinguished gentlemen from Pocantico
been forced to meet their workers face to face and compromise with unionism.
As Butte is centered about its mining industry, so are the unions of Butte dominated by the Miners' Union. Girls in restaurants and laundries receive from fourteen to eighteen dollars a week and work a maximum of eight hours a day. Here the barbers actually refuse tips. This is possible because the miners can, within forty-eight hours, destroy the business of any recalcitrant institution.
As in all locals of the W. F. of M., every worker in and about the mines belongs to a single industrial organization.
This includes the engineers who run the hoist-
ing engines, the timbermen and the ropemen (who make and repair the great metal ropes used to lower the cages into the mine shafts), and the surface laborers. In this industrial form of organization, more than in anything else, has lain the fighting strength of the organization.
Another element of their strength has been derived from the organized educational work of the Butte unions. I recall meeting with, as far back as 1905, a joint committee of the W. F. of M. locals in Butte, elected,for the purpose of establishing a club house and reorganizing their educational and social work. On that occasion I wrote to a member of the faculty of an Eastern university that that group of miners were more intelligent and infinitely more capable of dealing with the matter of the education of the working class than any similar number of professional educators with whom I had ever come in contact as student and teacher. When the "Progressives" were in control of Butte Number One they voted large sums of money each month for the support of their reading room, for the free distribution of papers and magazines among the union members and for free lectures.
There has not been for twenty years a serious strike in the mines of Butte. Yet, underneath the generally peaceful surface there has raged a conflict as bitter and relentless as any fought out anywhere in America.
The peculiar form of this conflict is not by any means confined to Butte. In some measure it appears wherever labor is powerfully organized. It has, as yet, no specific name, and we should not attempt to label it here. It is the struggle between the employer and the employee for the internal control of the latter's union. In Butte this curious conflict has raged more openly than in any other city of the country. Nine years ago I had occasion to observe the local we are discussing when it was entirely controlled by the Amalgamated. The W. F. of M. was then voting upon the resolution passed by its convention and submitted to its membership, to join the Industria Workers of the World. I had been sent to Butte as an organizer of the I. W. W. to place the position of that organization before the membership of the W. F. of M. On a regular meeting night of Number One, accompanied by Mr. C. E. Mahoney, a member of the Executive Board of the W. F. of M., I went up to discuss the I. W. W. with the membership. Before setting out, Mr. Mahoney placed a revolver in his pocket, declaring that he feared personal injury to himself. When we arrived at Miners' Hall we found it dark and the door locked. Later we learned that its officials had called the meeting to order with exactly twenty-three out of its then six thousand members present and hastily passed a motion for adjournment. During those years in which the Amalgamated elects the officers the general meetings are seldom attended by more than a score. The mem-
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THE MASSES
Drawn by Maurice Becker.
"this is a gay world! yacht races, tennis tournament, polo-match, all at the same time!"
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hers ordinarily active in the union continue to pay dues, but otherwise they ignore the organization.
Year after year, in May and June, a struggle occurs over the election of officers. Once in, an Amalgamated official machine is as hard to put out as was Tammany Hall twenty years ago. Efforts of the "Progressives" to participate in the business of the union when controlled by the machine are totally unavailing. Of course such efforts from time to time are made by a few bold spirits, whereupon the rules of parliamentary procedure are superseded by fists, clubs, and automatics.
By what methods, one naturally asks, do members of
the working class permit themselves to be so misled as to surrender the control of their union to their employers? The answer is simple. In that union are a large number of that new variety of trust retainer— the hired spy. During strikes members of this type serve as gunmen. During times of peace they serve quietly and often successfully within the union. In Butte a few of these gentlemen are employed steadily in the mines. But most of them go under ground just enough to keep their standing as union members. Among their number are men of exceptional ability. Two years ago Butte Number One was supposed to
contain about forty of them. Just preceding the election of the union officials or during political campaigns they are permitted to distribute the slush funds which are provided for the occasion. The union election of 1912, at the outset of the national state and county campaign, was considered of great importance and Amalgamated is said to have spent $30,000 to insure victory for its ticket. Even so, the "Progressives," who had controlled the local for two years previously, would have won but for a surprise on the part of their opponents. The election of officers lasts a whole day, thus giving each of the three shifts ample time to vote.
[pgbrk] THE MASSES
II
The ballot-boxes, as well as all other details of the election, are in the hands of a committee selected at a regular meeting of the local. On the evening of that meeting Amalgamated let those members of its working shift whose votes could be depended upon leave the mines and attend the union meeting. Amalgamated gained control of the elections committee which counted the votes, and thus recaptured control of the union.
The bitterness of this struggle as well as the methods pursued will be understood as soon as the purposes of the "Progressives" are made clear. These "Progressives" are mostly socialists and industrial unionists. Through their efforts the Butte municipal elections have been twice carried by the Socialist party. Their Socialism is of the most uncompromising kind. They declare, in season and out, that, given the. requisite power, they will confiscate the mines. Their immediate program includes two propositions which Amalgamated will fight to the bitter end. These radicals argue that as soon as they have possession of sufficient political power they will strike for the six-hour day. Already they are advocating the six-hour movement in the union hall, on the street corner and in the mines. The other measure is equally dangerous to the interest of Amalgamated. The mines are located just outside the city limits of Butte and so are untaxed by the municipal government. Furthermore, though valued at $200,000,000, they are assessed for county and state taxes at only $8,000,000, or about one-half of their net product.
In the sparsely settled state of Montana, Butte occupies much the same position as does Boston in Massachusetts, or New York City in New York State. Industrially and politically the fears of Amalgamated are well grounded.
Following the union election of 1912, a number of policies were adopted by the incoming officials, which, in the W. F. of M., have always been considered reactionary. To the student of the labor movement East of the Mississippi, as well as to the general public, it will seem strange indeed that the most hated of these was the "Closed Shop." For to the conservative, old-fashioned unionist the "closed shop" stands for all that is most vital in unionism. It seems to be so conclusive that if the employer can hire only members of the union the advantage lies with the members of the organization. This view is often wholly wrong.
After the famous trial and acquittal of Haywood, in 1907, the W. F. of M. began to grow more conservative. It permitted time contracts. In the teeth of most violent protests by the radical element it began to make arguments establishing the "closed shop" practice. This means that the union officials recruited their membership by making use of the power of discharge. More dues came into the union coffers, but in return for this favor by the employees, favors, of course, must be granted by the union officials.
And so the conflict came to a head. . . . Butte in the days of the riots was a fit place for Kit Carson, but not for Mother Grundy. Any one who has seen that crowd face to face knew the result beforehand. Among those who laid the plans and executed them were old fighters from the Coeur D'Alene and Cripple Creek and Goldfield. In that mob were scores who had seen service in the Philippines, in China, in Mexico. Their acts were their reply to years of fraud and trickery."
Coming six weeks after Ludlow this newly written chapter in the history of industrial America is not at all encouraging to the advocates of compulsory arbitration and "industrial peace."
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The Bubble Reputation
D0 you remember "Death Valley" Scott? He came to New York some years ago, and splurged about, handing ten-dollar bills to the bellboys and talking to newspaper men about a wonderful gold mine he had discovered, from which pure gold was being taken by the carload. Presently it was found that he was a romantic prospector with a couple of thousand in his jeans. But while it lasted he was a great man.
Pretty soon we will have to remind you of William J. Burns, whose vogue as a "great detective" is already passing. A clergyman in the South has just confessed that some of Burns' men hired him to make a lying affidavit in a murder case, with the object of sending a Negro to the gallows in place of a client of Burns'. And John Kenneth Turner, charging him with framing-up the evidence on which the leaders of the California hop-pickers were sent to prison, calls him in passing "a jury-fixer, a kidnapper, a compounder of felonies, . . . a blackmailer, a thief, a grafter of many grafts," and pleasantly asks the "great detective" to sue him for libel if he dares.
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GODS ACRE
BECAUSE we felt there could not be
A mowing in reality So white and feathery-blown and gay, With blossoms of wild carroway, I said to Celia, "Let us trace The secret of this pleasant place !" We knew some deeper beauty lay Beneath the blooms of carroway; And when we brushed these blooms aside We came to paupers who had died : Rough wooden shingles row on row, And God's name written there—"John Doe."
Witter Bynner.
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Drawn by Mary Gruening.
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THE THREE WHOSE HATRED KILLED THEM
THESE wild, bitter men, whose iron hatred burst too soon,
Judge them not harshly, Ï comrades. Forgive them their sin, for they loved much. They hated, but it was the enemy of man they hated. They lusted for man's blood, but it was the blood of
those who shed man's blood they lusted for. They sought to spoil God's clay, but it was to save
much more of that sacred stuff that they sought
this.
Think of them, dear comrades, as fellow soldiers too
impatient to await the signal. Undisciplined warriors, aflame for battle and loath to
bide the issue Until came reinforcements, fresh troops by love and
reason recruited, Singing as they came to join us, the Army of the
Brotherhood of Man.
Irwin Granich.
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Have You a Little Supreme Court in Your Heart?
PROFESSOR TAFT has. Discussing the Standard Oil and Tobacco decisions he recently said at Minneapolis :
"No man who has read these decisions need be doubtful when making a business arrangement, whether he is violating the law. By searching his own heart he can tell what his purpose is and what the effect of the act will be."
THE altitude record for frankness is held by a successful London business man who lately retired at the age of 81. "I attribute whatever success I have had," he says, "to my cowardice. I always feared to wade in so deep that it was difficult to wade out."
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DECORATION DAY
THE troops are down in Mexico,
The Lord is with the fleet— And like a blade the bright parade
Comes glittering up the street. The banners dip and from each ship !
Thunders an echoing hail. . . . And yesterday a man who spoke
On "Peace" was sent to jail!
"Hurrah—hurrah—we bring the jubilee; Hurrah—hurrah—the flag that makes us free!"
The troops are down in Mexico,
A badly-governed land; With warlike speech we go to teach
The things we understand. Are not all men our brothers,
And are we not alike? . . . And yesterday we shot a man
For walking out on strike.
"Hurrah—hurrah—we bring the jubilee; Hurrah—hurrah—the flag that makes us free!"
Louis Untermeyer.
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[pgbrk] 12
THE BEATING
Floyd Dell
A SIXTEEN year old girl sat on the bed undressing. It was in one of the two upstairs Dormitories in the Training School for Girls, otherwise the Girls' Reform School. The room held a double row of hastily made beds. · Across the wooden headboard of each bed was stretched a piece of clothesline, on which hung a towel and a nightgown. Beside each bed was a white-painted washstand. On the whitewashed wall at one end of the room, hanging from a nail, was a little framed motto: "God Is Love." High up in the thin whitewashed partition behind the bed on which the girl was sitting was a little window, barred against the other dormitory. In the opposite wall were a number of similar windows, barred against the world. In the fourth wall was the door, which was now locked.
: Minnie was getting ready to be whipped. She was undressing slowly, because she knew she had about half an hour. They had not yet whipped Jeanette, and Jeanette had been the first over the high picket fence in the break for liberty the night before. Minnie had followed, and so she would be whipped afterward. Minnie, who understood little of the ways of Miss Hampton and Miss Carter, and those other people who "ran" the Reform School, could understand that. She would have resented being whipped first. Besides, she wanted to hear how Jeannette would take her beating.
Jeanette had sworn to her that she would "never let them devils lay a hand on her again"; she would kill herself first, she said. Minnie did not take that very seriously. She knew Jeanette was in for a beating all right, and a good hard one. But there was one funny thing. Jeanette had had one beating in the month she had been there, and the girls said that "They"—meaning Miss Hampton and Miss Carter—couldn't get a whimper out of her. They had taken turns, and beaten her until they were tired, but she wouldn't make a sound. Well, they would see that she hollered this time!
Minnie would be able to hear it all—and perhaps even see, for there was that window in the partition right above her bed. The first day Jeanette had been there, a girl named Anna had been beaten in the other dormitory, and she and Jeanette had hidden here to listen. Jeanette had seen this window, and climbed up on the headboard of the bed to get to it. She had "gone up there like a cat," and caught hold of the bars of the window, and looked through. Minnie was not so tall as Jeanette, but she might see too if she was careful.
Minnie smiled, remembering how Jeanette had acted that time. She had turned—like the heroine in a show Minnie had seen—and told what was happening on the other side of the partition. She did that for a while, and then jumped down—anyhow. It was lucky she lit on the bed. She didn't care what she did, it seemed like. She just seemed to go crazy.
The way she had raged around that dormitory frightened Minnie now to think of it. She had beat on the walls with her fists, and kicked at the beds, and flung herself on the floor and rolled and writhed, screaming and kicking.
They had put her in the "strong room," which existed for just such cases. She could kick and
scream there all she wanted to—she would get tired of it after a while.
The thought of all these things agitated Minnie as she undressed. It made her fumble as she unbuttoned her dress in the back, and it made her pull one of her shoe strings into a hard knot. She sat there jerking at it savagely and stupidly, drawing it tighter and tighter. She cursed, in a vicious monosyllable; and then, her nervous tension seeming to find relief in this, all her excitement flooding this channel, there poured out a stream of vile words. A stranger to her kind, hearing her, would have felt her words like a blow in the face. They would have seemed to him horribly and unthinkably foul. But she did not have any idea of that. She had learned those words when she was fourteen years old, at the box factory, and they had seemed "smart" to her then. She knew they were considered "bad," and she did not let Miss Carter or Miss Hampton catch her saying them. But it made her feel good to do it, and so now she spat them out, a putrescent stream. Then her unnonscious lips smiled sweetly, as she caught the right end of the string and pulled the knot loose.
She went on undressing, faster now, for she could hear sounds in the other room. They were dragging out the bed from the wall, so that someone could stand at each corner and hold the girl who was being whipped. Minnie kicked off the last of the soiled and ragged underclothing furnished her by the state, and reached up for her coarse nightgown, thinking. She had very little of that physical charm of adolescence in which a mother might take pleasure. Her chest was narrow, and her breasts, with their pale nipples, were barely rounded out on her bosom; she sat ungracefully, her back bent, her feet twisted under the edge of the bed—an undernourished, undeveloped little woman-child.
As she sat there she bit her under-lip a little. It was a trick she had caught from Jeanette, who always did it when she was thinking. Minnie's thoughts were half-defined, and intermixed with vivid memories that flowed through her mind in an uneasy stream.
She thought of the night before, when she had tried to run away. She hadn't much wanted to try—she didn't believe they would succeed—but she had to go with her chum. She knew all the time it would only end in a beating. But she had been beaten at home often enough to know what a beating was. She didn't care much.
She had shown Jeanette her back and legs, on which, at that time, the marks of her last beating still faintly remained—little purple bruises. She was rather amused at the way Jeanette took it: she turned white. Jeanette said she had never been beaten in all her life. "Just you wait," Minnie told her, "you will be." And Jeanette had been. But she hadn't made a sound. It was game of her, all right.
There were a lot of queer things about Jeanette. The time they had waited to hear Anna get whipped Jeanette had stretched herself out languorously on the coverlet. Lying there, Jeanette had asked, "Why do they call us delinquent?" Minnie had said, "It means bad, doesn't it?" And then Jeanette had laughed and said : "No, I know what it means. It
means that we came along too late. I ought to have lived a thousand years ago. . . . I'll bet they wouldn't have put me in a stockade and learned me to sew and cook and scrub. . . . Sew and cook and scrub! ... I wonder if I'll ever get what I want?"
And when Minnie asked, "What do you want?" she said: "What every girl wants—to wear nice clothes, and talk to men—and make love."
Minnie thought she meant the "red light district," but found out that she was mistaken. Jeanette had never heard of it. She had lived seventeen years in a little country town, and did not know what prostitution meant. Minnie explained. Jeanette was disgusted.
"Well," Minnie said, "you needn't try to make out that you're so good. How about those drummers?" And Jeanette flushed and said: "Oh, that was different." Jeanette had told her about the things she had been sent to the Reform School for ; when she talked of them, a light came into her eyes. Jeanette was a queer girl. She thought that such things were beautiful. . . . Jeanette was queer.
Minnie did not understand. Minnie was not "queer." She would have made, under other circumstances, a dutiful wife for the same reasons that now made her an inmate of a Reform School. She had never been other than passive and acquiescent. She had never wanted to be "bad"—and wouldn't have been, if they had only let her alone. But the boys at the box factory and the tablet factory, who took her to the parks and nickel theaters, were insistent. She had never encouraged them; she had been merely apprehensively submissive. There was nothing beautiful about that.
Minnie meant to be "good" when she got out, so as not to run the risk of being sent back to this place again. But Jeanette wasn't going to be "good" she said; and she wasn't going to come back here, either. Minnie couldn't understand what she meant. She only remembered that right after that they had had a quarrel. Jeanette had a curious set of circumlocutions, which she used instead of the simple and vulgar terms which served Minnie's needs in these discussions. Jeanette had objected with a sudden fierceness to Minnie's terminology. Minnie's lips moved unconsciously as she rehearsed what they had said to each other.
A sound came from the other dormitory, and Minnie jumped up and came over close to the partition. There was noise of scuffling—and she knew they were dragging in Jeanette to be whipped.
Minnie jumped up on the bed. She seized hold of the top of the headboard, and drew herself up. She made an ineffectual clutch for the sill of the little window high above, missed and fell, scraping her knee against the sharp edge of a panel in the headboard. She rose, panting, and seized hold again. More carefully this time, she drew herself up, supporting one foot on the tiny eighth-of-an-inch panel edge on which she had scraped her knee. She reached up, biting her lower lip cruelly, and caught the sill of the window with her fingers' ends. She steadied herself, pulled herself up once more, and in a moment was safely clutching the bars of the window, while her feet rested on the top of the headboard.
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[pgbrk] THE MASSES
13
Drawn by John Sloan.
"CHARITIES AND CORRECTIONS"
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She was sorry she was not so tall as Jeanette. She could not see through the window while standing on the headboard. But she must have a glimpse. So she pulled herself up by main strength, and rested with a forearm flat on the sill while the other hand gripped a bar in the window. Hanging there, here body hunched awkwardly against the wall, her neck craned uncomfortably, she gazed through into the other dormitory. The scuffling had ceased, and there was Jeanette lying on her face on the bed, with one of the "goody-goods" —meaning the girls who were going to be let out soon,
and who curried favor with "Them" rather than be kept longer—at each corner of the bed. Each "goody-good" held an arm or a leg, held it tightly with both hands, while the girl lay a limp, exhausted thing on the sheets, panting audibly. Only her nightgown, which should have been slipped up to her shoulders, was not on her body at all. Minnie saw with a thrill, before she slipped down the wall and rested her feet again on the top of the headboard, that it was lying scattered all over the floor, in shreds and threads.
Minnie was sitting on the edge of the bed, listen-
ing dully to the regular sound of blows from the other side of the partition. She had grown tired of hanging there, and had climbed down. She had not been able to see very much, after all. She could see Miss Hampton and Miss Carter, as they stood between her and the low window, and she could see first Miss Carter for a while and then Miss Hampton stoop as she brought down the piece of hose on Jeanette's bare back and legs. But she could not see Jeanette, and could not tell whether she flinched and writhed or not. Certainly she did keep silent. The "goody-goods" said
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THE MASSES
nothing, and there was no sound, except the hysterical laugh of Miss Carter and the cold tones of Miss Hampton, and the dull impact of the hose against the girl's flesh.
Minnie had been disappointed. She hardly realized it, but she had been expecting some spectacular action on the part of Jeanette. And here was Jeanette merely lying still and letting them beat her. Minnie listened. There was a little pause in the thud, thud, thud, and then it commenced again. Miss Carter was doing it now. Miss Carter struck more quickly, and with less strength; sometimes her blows went wild. .
Suddenly Minnie realized what was happening; it flashed on her mind like a vision. She had seen the thing, and had been unmoved, because she had not realized it. But now the mere sound of it had somehow brought realization. First she felt—with a keenness greater than she had ever felt it in her own body—the pain of those blows on Jeanette's flesh ; and more than that—a sensation she had never experienced—the humiliation of them. She felt the pain, the shame, and wanted to cry out; and then she felt
with a shock the violent mastery which Jeanette had put upon herself to keep from crying out. The realization shook her from head to foot. She drew her breath heavily, and her heart labored painfully in her breast. As she listened, time seemed to have commenced to run more slowly, so that the blows fell at a longer interval. She waited for each blow, she braced herself in imagination to meet it; she felt it fall, and suffered the exquisite torture of the fire that ate fiercely into the flesh, burned red-hot for an unendurable moment, and then died slowly down. She caught her breath, braced herself anew for the next blow, suffered its pangs; and the next, and the next, and the next.
Her wide open eyes saw, as though no partition were there, the quivering body on the bed; her mind, more appreciative than it had ever been of the emotions of another, viewed the struggle with pain, the terrible struggle for silence, that was fought and won ten times in every minute—won and almost lost, renewed and won again, endlessly.
Minnie put her fingers in her ears, but she heard her
heart keeping time to the blows, and took them out again. There was a little pause, and Minnie gasped with relief; but the blows commenced again, more steady than before; Miss Hampton was taking her turn again. Minnie began desperately counting them; but she stopped at ten, and again put her fingers in her ears for a moment. Then she began to walk up and down the aisle, between the beds, lingering as she neared the window through which the sounds came. Twice she went back and forth, walking and running, and then she flung herself sobbing on the bed. But in a moment she was up again, and transformed. She rushed down the aisle, striking blindly both ways with her clenched hands, wounding them on the wood and iron of the bedsteads.
At the other end of the room she saw the little sign, "God Is Love." She stopped short. Trembling uncontrollably all through her body, she threw back her head, and uttered a hoarse, agonized cry. As she did so, the sounds in the other room ceased. There was silence for a whole minute, and then the key turned in the lock, and the door of the dormitory opened.
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Drawn by K. R. Chamberlain.
"l used to be interested in the suffrage movement, before it got mixed up with those labor agitators and socialists !"
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<div type="articles"><ab>
[pgbrk] THE MASSES
15
The Church and Colorado
IN order that there may be no misunderstanding as to the position of the Church in the Colorado situation, we quote from the Watchman-Examiner, an authoritative Baptist publication :
If all the facts have been revealed we unhesitatingly support Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his associates in the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in their determination to stand by their non-union employees to the end. The effort to compel all workmen to join a union and to force those who do not wish to do so out of their jobs is un-American and tyrannical. [Italics ours.]
In the same issue appears also the following editorial :
A disgraceful scene took place in Calvary Church, Borough of Manhattan, New York, last Sunday morning when Bouck White and a dozen of his followers interrupted the worship and insisted on the privilege of discussing the immorality of the possession of wealth, and on the further privilege of denouncing publicly Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The church ushers and detectives had to use force to eject the mistaken zealots who were interrupting the service, and eleven of these lawbreakers were thrown into prison. It is a pity that they cannot remain there until they learn some sense of decency. Entirely apart from the questions at issue in the Colorado coal mines, what moral right have men to try to break up the service of worship in the house of God? We deeply sympathise with Mr. Rockefeller in the persecution to which he is being subjected, and we deeply sympathize with Pastor Woelfkin and the people of the Calvary-Fifth Avenue congregation that their worship is being interrupted by these noisy citizens, who think to help laboring men by their lawlessness. [Italics ours.]
It only remains to be added that the same issue contains an article by Rockefeller's Pastor Woelfkin, "A Tribute to C. Sylvester Horne," in which this remarkable passage occurs :
Dr. Horne always held before his soul the aim of his ministry in one epigrammatic sentence: "The unaccomplished mission of Christianity is to reconstruct society on the basis of brotherhood." [Italics ours.]
In the light of the remarks quoted above, the conception of "brotherhood" cherished by Rockefeller's Church becomes blindingly clear.
In this spirit of Christian brotherhood, Bouck White and his companions have been hounded to prison for entering a church to ask a question. It is in the same spirit of Christian brotherhood that the machine guns of Rockefeller's militia riddled the tent-colony at Ludlow.
"Onward, Christian soldiers,
Marching as to war ! With the cross of Jesus
Going on before !"
PRIZE PRESS PEARL
SHOWING the distinction between "workingmen" and "citizens": "Marysville feels that its side has not been properly presented in Harpers Weekly. Mrs. Gillmore's account of the strike which was tried in that city presented the point of view of a labor sympathizer. This reply, written by Mr. Edward B. Stanwood, District Attorney of Yuba County, presents the feeling of the citizens of Marysville."—Harper's Weekly. Italics ours.
Honorable Mention
"EMMA GOLDMAN is better known as a propa-gandist for Socialism on the stump than as a writer on artistic subjects."—New York Dramatic Mirror.
DESIGN FOR A PULPIT
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Drawn by Morris Hall Pancoast.
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<div type="articles"><ab>
Proving the Prophet
BACK in the '50s a man named Marx pulled off a lot of fool prophecies that would never have got anywhere at all if it hadn't been for the capitalists. One of them, of course, was that industry could some day be managed by wholesale through the State. The Morgans and Mellens and Carnegies of those days guyed him a bit; industry, they said, never could be managed on any such scale. Then they went off and produced national trusts and cartels.
But the best of the lot was one about growing class distinctions and the aristocracy of wealth. Now where is the good American who hasn't rejoiced that this at least isn't true?—not true, at least, in America! Of
course, we've got wealth over here. And we're proud of it, by God ! But Hereditary Nobility ?—we leave that to Europe.
Well, let's all turn to pages 623 to 634 of the current World Almanac. There's the Burke's Peerage of America—listing the founders and descendants, even unto the fourth and fifth generations, of the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Astors, Rockefellers, Morgans, Mackays, Havemeyers, Fields, Belmonts, Whitneys, Leiters, Goelets, Loullards, Carnegies, Armours, Harrimans, and du Ponts.
Any Congressional lineages? Any literary lines? Any doctors' descendants? Not a one. Either we don't regard such notables as belonging to our aristocracy, or else those aren't the fields where accidents of birth insure the status of the descendants.
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<div type="poetry"><ab>
[pgbrk] Poems-by james oppenheim
PRIESTS
PRIESTS are in bad odor,
And yet there shall be no lack of them . . . The skies shall not lack a spokesman, Nor the spirit of man a voice and a gesture . . .
Not garbed nor churched, Yet, as of old, in loneliness and anguish, They shall come eating and drinking among us, With scourge, pity, and prayer.
CIVILIZATION
CIVILIZATION !
Everybody kind and gentle, and men giving up their seats in the car for the women . . . What an ideal ! How bracing!
Is this what we want?
Have so many generations lived and died for this?
There have been Crusades, persecutions, wars, and majestic arts,
There have been murders and passions and horrors since man
was in the jungle . ..,·.'" What was this blood-toll for?
Just so that everybody could have a full belly and be well-mannered?
But let us not fool ourselves :
This civilization is mostly varnish very thinly laid on . . . Take any newspaper any morning: scan through it . . . Rape, murder, villany, and picking and stealing: The mob that tore a negro to pieces, the men that ravished a young girl :
The safe-blowing gang and the fat cowardly promoter who stole
people's savings . . . ¦ . Just scan it through : this news of civilization . . .
TASTING THE EARTH
IN A DARK hour, tasting the Earth.
As I lay on my couch in the muffled night, and the rain lashed my window,
And my forsaken heart would give me no rest, no pause and no peace,
Though I turned my face far from the wailing of my bereavement ...
Then I said : I will eat of this sorrow to its last shred, I will take it unto me utterly,
I will see if I be not strong enough to contain it . . . What do I fear? Discomfort? How can it hurt me, this bitterness?
The miracle, then!
Turning toward it, and giving up to it,
I found it deeper than my own self . . .
Ï dark great mother-globe so close beneath me . . .
It was she with her inexhaustible grief,
Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters,
and the roar of tempests, And moan of the forsaken seas,
It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the
dark-hearted animals, It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies,
in the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man . . . It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken
hearts,
Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers, And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne, And the dreams that have no waking . . .
My heart became her ancient heart :
On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself : Wisdom-giving and sombre with the unremitting love of ages ....
There was dank soil in my mouth,
And bitter sea on my lips,
In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.
Away then, with soft ideals:
Brace yourself with bitterness :
A drink of that biting liquor, the Truth . . .
Let us not be afraid of ourselves, but face ourselves and confess what we are : Let us go backward a while that we may go forward : This is an excellent age for insurrection, revolt, and the reddest of revolutions ...
THE RUNNER IN THE SKIES
WHO is the runner in the skies,
With her blowing scarf of stars, And our Earth and sun hovering like bees about her blossoming heart?
Her feet are on the winds, where space is deep,
Her eyes are nebulous and veiled,
She hurries through the night to a far lover.
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<div type="fiction"><ab>
[pgbrk] 17
JIMENEZ AND BEYOND
John Reed
ALL the long afternoon we ambled slowly south, the western rays of the sun burning as they struck our faces. Every hour or so we stopped at some station, shot to pieces by one army or the other during the three years of revolution; there the train would be besieged by vendors of cigarettes, pinenuts, bottles of milk, camotes, and tamales rolled in cornhusks. Old women, gossiping, descended from the train, built themselves a little fire and boiled coffee. Squatting there, smoking their cornhusk cigarettes, they told one another interminable love stories.
It was late in the evening when we pulled into Jimenez. I shouldered through the entire population, come down to meet the train, passed between the flaring torches of the little row of candy booths, and went along the street, where drunken soldiers alternated with painted girls, walking arm in arm, to Dona Louisa's Station Hotel. It was locked. I pounded on the door and a little window opened at the side, showing an incredibly ancient woman's face, crowned with straggly white hair. This being squinted at me through a pair of steel spectacles and remarked, "Well, I guess you're all right!" Then there came a sound of bars being taken down, and the door swung open. Dona Louisa herself, a great bunch of keys at her belt, stood just inside. She held a large Chinaman by the ear, addressing him in fluent and profane Spanish. "Chango!" she said, "Cabron! What do you mean by telling a guest at this hotel that there Wasn't any more hot cakes ?" With a final wrench she released the squealing Oriental. She nodded apologetically toward the door. "There's so many damned drunken generals around to-day that I've got to keep the door locked. I don't want the -·-- Mexican - in here !"
Dona Louisa is a small, dumpy American woman more than eighty years of age — a benevolent-New-England-grandmother sort of person. For forty-five years she has been in Mexico, and thirty or more years ago, when her husband died, she began to keep the Station Hotel. War and peace make no difference to her. The American flag flies over the door and in her house she alone is boss. When Pascual Orozco took Jimenez, his men began a drunken reign of terror in the town. Orozco himself—Orozco, the invincible, the fierce, who would as soon kill a person as not—came drunken to the Station Hotel with two of his officers and several women. Dona Louisa planted herself across the doorway—alone—and shook her fist in his face. "Pascual Orozco," she cried, "take your disreputable friends and go away from here. I'm keeping a decent hotel !" And Orozco went.....
I wandered up the mile-long, incredibly dilapidated street that leads to the town. A street-car came past, drawn by one galloping mule and bulging with slightly intoxicated soldiers. Open surreys full of officers with girls on their laps rolled along. Under the dusty bare alamo trees each window held its senorita, with a blanket-wrapped caballero in attendance. There were no lights. The night was dry and cold and full of a subtle exotic excitement; guitars twanged, snatches of song and laughter and low voices, and shouts from distant streets filled the darkness.
In one quiet stretch of street near the bull-ring,
where there are no houses, I noticed an automobile speeding from the town. At the same time a galloping horse came from the other direction, and just in front of me the headlights of the machine illumined the horse and his rider, a young officer in a Stetson hat. The automobile jarred to a grinding stop and a voice from it cried, "Haltoie!"
"Who speaks ?" asked the horseman, pulling his mount to its haunches.
"I, Guzman!" and the other leaped to the ground and came into the light, a coarse, fat Mexican, with a sword at his belt.
"Como le va, mi capitan?" The officer flung himself from his horse. They embraced, patting each other on the back with both hands.
"Very well. And you? Where are you going?"
"To see Maria."
The captain laughed. "Don't do it," he said; "I'm going to see Maria myself, and if I see you there I shall certainly kill you."
"But I am going, just the same. I am as quick with my pistol as you, senor."
"But you see," returned the other mildly, "we both cannot go !"
"Perfectly!"
"Oiga!" said the captain to his chauffeur. "Turn your car so as to throw the light evenly along the sidewalk. . . . And now we will walk thirty paces apart and stand with our backs turned until you count three. Then the man who first puts a bullet through the other man's hat wins. . . ."
Both men drew immense revolvers and stood a moment in the light, spinning the chambers.
"Listo! Ready!" cried the horseman.
"Hurry it," said the captain. "It is a bad thing to balk love."
Back to back, they had already begun to pace the distance. "One!" shouted the chauffeur. "Two!"
But quick as a flash the fat man wheeled in the trembling, uncertain light, threw down his lifted arm, and a mighty roar went soaring slowly into the heavy night. The Stetson of the other man, whose back was still turned, took an odd little leap ten feet beyond him. He spun around, but the captain was already climbing into his machine.
"Bueno!" he said cheerfully. "I win. Until tomorrow then, amigo!" And the automobile gathered speed and disappeared down the street. The horseman slowly went to where his hat lay, picked
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Drawn by G. Golder.
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<div type="fiction"><ab>
it up and examined it. He stood a moment meditating, and then deliberately mounted his horse and he also went away. I had already started some time before. . . .
In the plaza the regimental band was playing "El Pagare," the song which started Orozco's revolution. It was a parody of the original, referring to Ma-dero's payment of his family's $750,000 war claims as soon as he became president, that spread like wildfire over the Republic, and had to be suppressed with police and soldiers. "El Pagare" is even now taboo in most revolutionary circles, and I have heard of men being shot for singing it ; but in Jimenez at this time the utmost license prevailed. Moreover, the Mexicans, unlike the French, have absolutely no feeling for symbols. Bitterly antagoniste sides use the same flag; in the plaza of almost every town still stand eulogistic statues of Porfirio Diaz; even at officers' mess in the field I have drunk from glasses stamped with the likeness of the old dictator, while Federal army uniforms are plentiful in the ranks.
There, at the side of the plaza, I came upon a little group of five Americans huddled upon a bench. They were ragged beyond belief, all except a slender youth in leggings and a Federal officer's uniform, who wore a crownless Mexican hat. Feet protruded from their shoes, none had more than the remnants of socks, all were unshaven. One mere boy wore his arm in a sling m|ade out of a torn blanket. They made room for me gladly, stood up, crowded around, cried how good it was to see another American among all these damned greasers.
"What are you fellows doing here?" I asked.
"We're soldiers of fortune!" said the boy with the wounded arm.
"Aw—!" interrupted another. "Soldiers of-!"
"Ye see it's this way," began the soldierly looking youth. "We've been fighting right along in the Brigada Zaragosa—was at the battle of Ojinaga and everything. And now comes an order from Villa to discharge all the Americans in the ranks and ship 'em back to the border. Ain't that a hell of a note?"
"Last night they gave us our honorable discharges and threw us out of the cuartel," said a one-legged man with red hair.
"And we ain't had any place to sleep and nothing
to eat-" broke in a little gray-eyed boy whom they
called the major.
"Don't try and panhandle the guy!" rebuked the soldier, indignantly. "Ain't we each going to get fifty Mex. in the morning?"
We adjourned for a short time to a nearby restaurant, and when we returned I asked them what they were going to do?
"The old U. S. for mine," breathed a good-looking black Irishman who hadn't spoken before. "I'm going back to San Fran, and drive a truck again. I'm sick of greasers, bad food and bad fighting."
"I got two honorable discharges from the United States army," announced the soldierly youth proudly. "Served through the Spanish War, I did. I'm the only soldier in this bunch." The others sneered and cursed sullenly. "Guess I'll re-enlist when I get over the border."
"Not for mine," said the one-legged man. "I'm wanted for tw*o murder charges—I didn't do it, swear to God I didn't—it was a frame-up. But a poor guy
[pgbrk] 18
hasn't got a chance in the United States. When they ain't framing up some fake charge against me, they jail me for a 'vag.' I'm all right though," he went on earnestly. "I'm a hard-working man, only I can't get no job."
The major raised his hard little face and cruel eyes. "I got out of a reform-school in Wisconsin," he said, "and I guess there's some cops waiting for me in El Paso. I always wanted to kill somebody with a gun, and I done it at Ojinaga, and I ain't got a bellyful yet. They told us we could stay if we signed Mex. citizenship papers; I guess I'll sign tomorrow morning."
"The hell you will," cried the others. "That's a rotten thing to do. Suppose we get intervention and you have to shoot against your own people. You won't catch me signing myself away to be a greaser."
"That's easy fixed," said the major. "When I go back to the States I leave my name here. I'm going to stay down here till I get enough of a stake to go back to Georgia and start a child-labor factory."
The other boy had suddenly burst into tears. "I got my arm shot through in Ojinaga," he sobbed, "and now they're turning me loose without any money, and I can't work. When I get to El Paso the cops'll jail me and I'll have to write my dad to come and take me home to California. I run away from there last year," he explained.
"Look here, Major," I advised, "you'd better not stay down here if Villa wants Americans out of the ranks. Being a Mexican citizen won't help you if intervention comes."
"Perhaps you're right," agreed the major thoughtfully. "Aw, quit your bawling, Jack! I guess I'll beat it over to Galveston and get on a South American boat. They say there's a revolution started in Peru."
The soldier was about thirty, the Irishman twenty-five, and the three others somewhere between sixteen and eighteen.
"What did you fellows come down here for?" I asked.
"Excitement!" answered the soldier and the Irishman, grinning. The three boys looked at me with eager, earnest faces, drawn with hunger and hardship.
"Loot!" they said simultaneously. I cast an eye at their dilapidated garments, at the throngs of tattered volunteers parading around the plaza, who hadn't been paid for three months, and restrained a violent impulse to shout with mirth. Soon I left them, hard, cold misfits in a passionate country, despising the cause for which they were fighting, sneering at the gaiety of the irrepressible Mexicans. And as I went away I said, "By the way; what company did you fellows belong to? What did you call yourselves?"
The red-haired youth answered, "The Foreign Legion!" he said.
It was late night when I finally got back to the hotel. Dona Louisa went ahead to see to my room, and I stopped a moment in the bar. Two or three soldiers, evidently officers, were drinking there—one pretty far gone. He was a pock-marked man with a trace of black mustache; his eyes couldn't seem to focus. But when he saw me he began to sing a pleasant little song:
Yo tengo un pistole Con mango de marfil Para matar todos los gringos Que viennen por ferrocarril! (I have a pistol with a marble handle With which to kill all the Americans who come by railroad!)
THE MASSES
I thought it diplomatic to leave, because you can never tell what a Mexican will do when he's drunk. His temperament is much too complicated.
Dona Louisa was in my room when I got there. With a mysterious finger to her lips she shut the door and produced from beneath her skirt a last year's copy of the Saturday Evening Post, in an incredible state of dissolution. "I got it out of the safe for you," she said. "The damn thing's worth more than anything in the house. I've been offered fifteen dollars for it by Americans going out to the mines. You see we haven't had any American magazines in a year now."
After that what could I do but read the precious magazine, although I had read it before. I lit the lamp, undressed, and got into bed. Just then came an unsteady step on the gallery outside and my door was flung violently open. Framed in it stood the pock-marked officer who had been drinking in the bar. In one hand he carried a big revolver. For a moment he stood blinking at me malevolently, then stepped inside and closed the door with a bang.
"I am Lieutenant Antonio Montoya, at your orders," he said. "I heard there was a gringo in this hotel and I have come to kill you."
"Sit down," said I politely. I saw he was drunk-enly in earnest. He took off his hat, bowed politely and drew up a chair. Then he produced another revolver from beneath his coat and laid them both on the table. They were loaded.
"Would you like a cigarette?" I offered him the package. He took one, waved it in thanks and illumined it at the lamp. Then he picked up the guns and pointed them both at me. His fingers tightened slowly on the triggers, but relaxed again. I was too far gone to do anything but just wait.
"My only difficulty," said he, lowering his weapons, "is to determine which revolver I shall use."
"Pardon me," I quavered,'"but they both appear a little obsolete. That Colt forty-five is certainly an 1895 model, and as for the Smith and Wesson, between ourselves it is only a toy."
"True," he answered, looking at them a little ruefully. "If I had only thought I would have brought my new automatic. My apologies, senor." He sighed and again directed the barrels at my chest, with an expression of calm happiness. "However, since it is so, we must make the best of it." I got ready to jump, to duck, to scream. Suddenly his eye fell upon the table, where my two-dollar wrist-watch was lying.
"What is that?" he asked.
"A watch!" Eagerly I demonstrated how to fasten it on. Unconsciously the pistols slowly lowered. With parted lips and absorbed attention he watched it delightedly, as a child watches the operation of some new mechanical toy.
"Ah," he breathed. "Que esta bonita! How pretty!"
"It is yours," said I, unstrapping it and offering it to him. He looked at the watch, then at me, slowly brightening and glowing with surprised joy. Into his outstretched hand I placed it. Reverently, carefully, he adjusted the thing to his hairy wrist. Then he rose, beaming down upon me. The revolvers fell unnoticed to the floor. Lieutenant Antonio Montoya threw his arms around me.
"Ah, compadre!" he cried emotionally.
The next day I met him at Valiente Adiana's store in the town. We sat amicably in the back room drinking native aguardiente, while Lieutenant Montoya, my best friend in the entire Constitutionalist army, told me of the hardships and perils of the campaign.
"Antonio," I said, "I am going a long journey across the desert to-morrow. I am going to drive
to Magistral. I need a mozo. I will pay three dollars a week."
"'Sta bueno!" cried Lieutenant Montoya. "What-, ever you wish, so that I can go with my amigo!"
"But you are on active service," said I. "How can you leave your regiment?"
"Oh, that's all right," answered Antonio. "I won't say anything about it to my colonel. They don't need me. Why, they've got five thousand other men here."
In the early dawn, when yet the low gray houses and the dusty trees were stiff with cold, we laid a bull-whip on the backs of our two mules and rattled down the uneven streets of Jimenez and out into the open country. A few soldiers, wrapped to the eyes in their serapes, dozed beside their lanterns. There was a drunken officer sleeping in the gutter.
We drove an ancient buggy, whose broken pole was mended with wire. The harness was made of bits of old iron, rawhide and rope. Antonio and I sat side by side upon the seat, and at our feet dozed a dark, serious-minded youth named Primitivo Aguilar. Primitivo had been hired to open and shut gates, to tie up the harness when it broke, and to keep watch over wagon and mules at night, because bandits were reported to infest the roads.
The country became a vast fertile plain, cut up by irrigating ditches which were overshadowed by long lines of great alamo trees, leafless and gray as ashes. Like a furnace door, the white-hot sun blazed upon us, and the far-stretched barren fields reeked a thin mist. A cloud of white dust moved with us and around us.
That night we made camp beside an irrigation ditch miles from any house, in the middle of the bandit territory.
After a dinner of chopped up meat and peppers, tortillas, beans and black coffee, Antonio and I gave Primitivo his instructions. He was to keep watch beside the fire with Antonio's revolver and, if he heard anything, was to wake us. But on no account was he to go to sleep. If he did, we would kill him. Primitivo said, "Si, senor," very gravely, opened his eyes wide, and gripped the pistol. Antonio and I rolled up in our blankets by the fire.
I must have gone to sleep at once, because when I was awakened by Antonio's rising, my watch showed only half an hour later. From the place where Primitivo had been placed on guard came a series of hearty snores. The lieutenant walked over to him.
"Primitivo!" he said.
No answer.
"Primitivo, you cabron !" Our sentinel stirred in his sleep and turned over with noises indicative of comfort.
"Primitivo!" shouted Antonio, violently kicking him.
He gave absolutely no response.
Antonio drew back and launched a kick at his back that lifted him several feet into the air. With a start Primitivo woke. He started up alertly, waving the revolver.
"Quien vive?" cried Primitivo.
The next day took us out of the lowlands. We entered the desert, winding over a series of rolling plains, sandy and covered with black mesquit, with here and there an occasional cactus. . . . Night gathered straight above in the cloudless zenith, while all the skyline still was luminous with clear light, and then the light of day snuffed out, and stars burst out in the dome of heaven like a rocket.
Toward midnight we discovered that the road upon which we were traveling suddenly petered out in a dense mesquit thicket. Somewhere we had turned off
[pgbrk] THE MASSES
19
the Camino Real. The mules were worn out. There seemed nothing for it but a "dry camp."
Now we had unharnessed the mules and fed them, and were lighting our fire, when somewhere in the dense thicket of chaparral stealthy footsteps sounded. They moved a space and then were still. Our little blaze of greasewood crackled fiercely, lighting up a leaping, glowing radius of about ten feet. Beyond that all was black. Primitivo made one backward leap into the shelter of the wagon; Antonio drew his revolver, and we froze beside the fire. The sound came again.
"Who lives?" said Antonio. There was a little shuffling noise out in the brush, and then a voice.
"What party are you?" it asked hesitantly.
"Maderistas," answered Antonio. "Pass !"
"It is safe for pacificos?" queried the invisible one.
"On my word," I cried. "Come out that we may see you."
At that very moment two Vague shapes materialized on the edge of the firelight glow, almost without a sound. Two peons, we saw as soon as they came close, wrapped tightly in their torn blankets. One was an old, wrinkled, bent man wearing homemade sandals, his trousers hanging in rags upon his shrunken legs; the other, very tall, barefooted, youth, with a face so pure and so simple as to almost verge upon idiocy. Friendly, warm as sunlight, eagerly curious as children, they came forward, holding out their hands. We shook hands with each of them in turn, greeting them with elaborate Mexican courtesy.
At first they politely refused our invitation to dine, but after much urging we finally persuaded them to accept a few tortillas and chile. It was ludicrous and pitiful to see how wretchedly hungry they were, and how they attempted to conceal it from us.
After dinner, when they had brought us a bucket of water out of sheer kindly thoughtfulness, they stood for a while by our fire, smoking our cigarettes and holding out their hands to the blaze. I remember how their serapes hung from their shoulders, open in front so the grateful warmth could reach their thin bodies—and how gnarled and ancient were the old man's outstretched hands, and how the ruddy light glowed upon the other's throat, and kindled fires in his big eyes. ... I suddenly conceived these two human beings as symbols of Mexico —courteous, loving, patient, poor, so long slaves, so full of dreams, so soon to be free.
"When we saw your wagon coming here," said the old man, smiling, "our hearts sank within us. We thought you were soldiers, come, perhaps, to take away our last few goats. So many soldiers have come in the last few years—so many. It is mostly the Federals—the Maderistas do not come unless they are hungry themselves. Poor Maderistas!"
"Ay," said the young man, "my brother that I loved very much died in the eleven days' fighting around Torreon. Thousands have died in Mexico, and still more thousands shall fall. Three years— it is long for war in a land. Too long." The old man murmured, "Valgame Dios!" and shook his head. "But there shall come a day-"
"It is said," remarked the old man quaveringly, "that the United States of the North covets our country—that gringo soldiers will come and take away my goats in the end. . . ."
"That is a lie," exclaimed the other, animated. "It is the rich Americanos who want to rob us, just as the rich Mexicans want to rob us. It is the rich all over the world who want to rob the poor."
The old man shivered and drew his wasted body nearer to the fire. "I have often wondered," said he mildly, "why the rich, having so much, want so much. The poor, who have nothing, want so very little. Just a few goats. . . ."
His compadre lifted his chin like a noble, smiling gently. "I have never been out of this little country here—not even to Jimenez," he said. "But they tell me that there are many rich lands to the north and south and east. But this is my land and I love it. For the years of me, and my father and my grandfather, the rich men have gathered in the corn and held it in their clenched fists before our mouths. And only blood will make them open their hands to their brothers."
The fire died down. At his post slept the alert Primitivo. Antonio stared into the embers, a faint glorified smile upon his mouth, his eyes shining like stars.
"Adio !" he said suddenly, as one who sees a vision. "When we get into Mexico City what a baile shall be held ! How drunk I shall get ! . . ."
</ab></div>
<div type="images"><ab>
Drawn by Maurice Becker.
FROM THE ASH HEAP
</ab></div>
<div type="poetry"><ab>
SONG OF THE FREE POET
I'LL be a devil in my verse—
I'll talk about the boldest things ! I'll sing of bums and thieves and worse, In fierce and vivid canticlings ;
I'll speak of whores in all the stanzas Of my brave, up-to-date romanzas !
I'll rave at God and at the Church, I'll curse my parents and the flag; And never end my desperate search For wicked words that snarl and snag; I'll paint a world where only lust is, And spit upon the courts of justice!
I'll stand in lonely fellowship
With Self—the only god that wins ! In words, at least, I will not skip One of the red forbidden sins ; But in my life no sin I'll feature ; I'll be as proper as a preacher !
Clement Richardson Wood.
Verdicts
LIEUTENANT LINDERFELDT—Unsoldierly conduct—reduced five files.
Captain Kidd—Unsailorly conduct—pirating license suspended for one week.
John Wilkes Booth—Breach of professional etiquett-? —reduced from "star" to "featured player."
Gyp the Blood—Infraction of "honor among thieves" —deprived of joy-rides for one month.
Dick Turpin—Unfair competition—ordered to divide 50-50 with the coaching trust for one year.
</ab></div>
<div type="articles"><ab>
Bird Law
ANYONE wishing to shoot migratory birds may do so if he follows them to Jonesboro, Arkansas. But he must not do it in Sioux Falls, S. D. The Federal bird law is unconstitutional in the Arkansas district but constitutional in South Dakota—same law, same constitution, same birds—but different judges. Other districts will decide the matter for themselves. In 1946 the Supreme Court will hand down a decision that will clear up all the old doubts and make a lot of new ones. Meanwhile a bird in South Dakota is worth two in Arkansas.
The Outcome Tax
WHAT this country needs is a little rebate levied on the salaries of congress when the outcome of one of its panaceas, like the Underwood tariff, doesn't come up to the scratch.
ANYBODY who has a surplus supply of poverty might learn something to his advantage by communicating with Irving Bachelier.
"We do not need more wealth," says Mr. Bachelier in the New York Times ; "we need more poverty. Those who clamor for the distribution of the riches of the world are wrong."
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<div type="images"><ab>
[pgbrk] 20
THE MASSES
Drawn by Stuart Davis.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPTHS
"Gee, but women are lucky—born with a job."
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<div type="poetry"><ab>
[pgbrk] THE MASSES
21
THE PLAIN CLOTHES MAN SPEAKS
I AM a plain clothes slugger. I love my work. I do it better than I am told. The money is good, property pays it, The people pay property, and I slug the people. I am a working man. They call me Judas, But they are wrong:
I love the money, but I love my work still more. No wolf ever tore a hare that loved more the blood Than I love to club the quivering flesh of the weak. I have no fear of a ragged creature faint with hunger; Let him strike back—if he dare. I love a carnival of blood,
But it is not safe to club one's fellow citizens Unless the City of New York gives me a star To hide beneath my civilian coat. Then no anguished eyes need look to me For mercy.
I love to see a victim struggle, small though he be,
In the grip of a bluecoat,
And then slug him with my bare fist—
To silence.
One day when I did this,
Saturday, April the fourth,
On East Sixteenth
Near Union Square,
A fellow called me a coward
And then, with a trusty assistant on each side, I hit him.
So help me God, I did. Richard Coe Bland.
</ab></div>
<div type="articles"><ab>
Mohammedanism "Goes Wet"
REPORTS have it that the Turkish government, in order to break the opium habit of its people, has decided to abandon that part of the Mohammedan faith which demands the prohibition of the manufacture and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Inducements
are being offered to several Austrian and German breweries to establish plants in the Ottoman Empire. If the drastic condemnation of the English "pubs" continues, we may expect G. K. Chesterton and other literary advocates of alcohol to abandon their country to its frightful fate, and remove to Constantinople.
Social Legislation
TWO girls, eighteen and twenty years old, were found sleeping in Central Park by the police. They had been out of work for months, had slept in the park and hallways for two weeks, and had not eaten for three days. When this case is properly brought before the city authorities, we may no doubt expect prompt action—in the shape of an increased appropriation for park policemen, so that homeless young women found sleeping in the park may be ordered out at once.
To Ensure Proper Respect
THE courts, after having ruled out free speech against Rockefeller, have now undertaken to suppress "free silence" against him. Judge Crain in the court of general sessions upholds the conviction of Upton Sinclair for peaceful picketing in front of 26 Broadway. "No citizen has a right to rebuke another citizen by subjecting him to ridicule and insult," said the Judge. We suggest that a symbolistic bronze Oil Can be erected in Union Square, and a policeman stationed there to see that all citizens take off their hats to it as they pass by.
A NEW YORK paper is just printing the "true story" of the deal whereby the United States obtained the Panama Canal in 1903. As this news is only eleven years old, we may congratulate ourselves on the enterprise of American journalism.
</ab></div>
<div type="poetry"><ab>
CIVILIZATION
WHY do I sing a civilization that martyrs singers? Think you I am a traitor to the queen of song, a spy within the realm of poetry?
No. . . .
'Tis because its hands, gnarled with toil, have bandaged
with a bloody rag the wounds of many; Because its face, sotted and seamed, offers still some
kindling for the dying soul; Because its breath, thick with discord, is also hot with
wrath over the murdered beauty of the world; Because its shoulders, knotted and bowed down, hold
yet the strength to lift the world up ; Because its breasts, shriveled and shrunk to a scar,
still have milk roots that can swell with joy ; Because its smile, crucified within the heart, lies waiting
for the resurrection day:—· That's why I sing a civilization that martyrs singers. Oh, I am no traitor to the queen of song.
Edmond McKenna.
</ab></div>
<div type="images"><ab>
Drawn by Maurice Becker.
AIRSHIPS!
</ab></div>
<div type="poetry"><ab>
HAGGERTY
[First Man Killed at Vera Cruz.]
THEY say that he was brave and game,
That's how the navy billed him, They say it was a rush of flame, A lump of lead that killed him.
I say it was a rush of oil,
That overflowed Tampico's wells,
Or else a lump of golden soil,
Mined from the peons' dripping hells.
And if I owned a mine or well, And had a God to whom I prayed,
I'd know who killed him when he fell, I'd know whose game the bullet played.
He did his duty as he saw,
And wasted not a thought for me—¦
But if there is a higher law, Thank God, he hasn't fought for me !
Edmund R. Brown-
</ab></div>
<div type="articles"><ab>
Turn Out the Light
THE words are by Filson Young in the Pall Mall Gazette; write your own music:
"Ladies, who nightly go forth in lovely array, sparkling with jewels—a word in your ear.
"Do you not think that you might, in consideration for the people who have no jewels and no lovely array, switch off the lights in your motor cars when you pass through the streets? The gulf between rich and poor grows not less, but greater; and imagine, if you can, the feelings of a mother who has not enough for her children to eat, and who sees you glide by, in a lighted house of glass, and covered with fabrics and jewels the price of which would be a perpetual endowment for many such families as hers.
"Loveliness should give pleasure, and not pain ; so turn off, I beg you, the lights in your car, and reserve your glory for those whom it cannot harm."
</ab></div>
<div type="fiction"><ab>
Force of Habit
THE noise subsided and Fagin was asked if he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon him. He had resumed his listening attitude, and looked intently at his questioner when the demand was made ; but it was twice repeated before he seemed to hear it, and then he only muttered that he was an old man—an old man, a very old man-—and so dropping into a whisper, was silent again.
"Discharged," said the Judge absently, who was a large employer of labor on the side, "we always let our men go when they get old."
Bolton Hall.
To Taxpayers
WHEN inclined to worry over the expense of this Mexican affair, remember that armed peace through all the years has co?t more
</ab></div>
<div type="advertisements"><ab>
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POETRY
A MAGAZINE OF VERSE
Edited by Harriet Monroe 543 Cass St., Chicago
POETRY, at the end of its first year, is no longer an experiment, but an assured artistic success, a publication whose importance is authoritatively recognized, not only in this country, but in Great Britain and France as well. The field it has opened up is full of brilliant possibilities, encouraging the editors to hope for the enthusiastic support of a discriminating public.
POETRY endeavors to present the best verse now being written in English, quality alone being the test of acceptance.
POETRY is an effort to create an organ for the art. While the ordinary magazines must minister to a large public little' interested in poetry, this magazine appeals to and will develop a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, potentially the highest, most complete human expression of truth and beauty. Thus it offers to poets a 'chance to be heard by their own audience, in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazines. And to lovers of poety it offers each month a sheaf of new verse in delicate form uninterrupted by prose articles demanding a different mood.
If You Love Good Poetry, Subscribe. $1.50
Here's a sentence we never use in our advertising in the "kept" press: "The Public is a national journal of fundamental democracy and a weekly narrative of history in the making." 'Ô would fall hopelessly flat.
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"Although I am a socialist of the deepest dye, if I could not have access to more than one paper or periodical I should choose "The Public."
Suppose you try it. Mention "The Masses," and we will send you a free copy of "Progress and Poverty" * by Henry George. Send your dollar to-day. We will refund the full amount, if, later, you regret your haste.
THE PUBLIC
Ellsworth Building :: Chicago
International
A Magazine of Life and Letters
Edited by George Sylvester Viereck
Associate Editors: · ·'
Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, Richard Le Gallienne, B. Russell Herts.
Contributors include:
George Moore, Arthur Symons, Hugo Muensterberg, George E. Woodberry, Benjamin De Casseres, Havelock Ellis, Rabindranath Ta-gore, Arthur Schnitzler, George Brandes, Witter , Bynner, George Sterling, Madison Cawein, Clinton Scollard, John M. O'Hara, Skip-worth Cannell.
—It has just printed the newly discovered Sapphic "fragment.
—It is printing the best poetry written to-day by the younger poets in America:
—It will present in the August issue an unpublished Stendhal story.
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<div type="images"><ab>
[pgbrk] Drawn by Alice Beach Winter.
Country Life in America
</ab></div>
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