VICIOUS PRACTICES RESPONSIBLE FOR HIGH LIVING
COST, WILSON TELLS CONGRESS
I saw them
I saw them
Down in the
Deep dugout
The Camera Eye (41)
arent you coming to the anarchist picnic there’s going to be an anarchist picnic sure you’ve got to come to the anarchist picnic this afternoon it was way out at Garches in a kind of park it took a long time to get out there we were late there were youngsters and young girls with glasses and old men with their whiskers and long white zits and everybody wore black artist ties some had taken off their shoes and stockings and were wandering around in the long grass a young man with a black artist tie was reading a poem Voilà said a voice c’est plûtot le geste proletaire it was a nice afternoon we sat on the grass and looked around le geste proletaire
But God damn it they’ve got all the machineguns in the world all the printingpresses linotypes tickerribbon curling irons plush-horses Ritz and we you I? barehands a few songs not very good songs plûtot le geste proletaire
Les bourgeois à la lanterne nom de dieu
et l’humanité la futurité la lutte des classes l’inépuisible angoisse des foules la misère du travailleur tu sais mon vieux sans blague
it was chilly early summer gloaming among the eighteenth-centuryshaped trees when we started home I sat on the impériale of the third class car with the daughter of the Libertaire (that’s Patrick Henry ours after all give me or death) a fine girl her father she said never let her go out alone never let her see any young men it was like being in a convent she wanted liberty fraternity equality and a young man to take her out in the tunnels the coalgas made us cough and she wanted l’Amérique la vie le theatre le feev o’clock le smoking le foxtrot she was a nice girl we sat side by side on the roof of the car and looked at the banlieue de Paris a desert of little gingerbread brick maisonettes flattening out under the broad gloom of evening she and I tu sais mon ami but what kind of goddam management is this?
Newsreel XL
CRIMINAL IN PYJAMAS SAWS BARS;
SCALES WALLS; FLEES
Italians! against all and everything remember that the beacon is lighted at Fiume and that all harangues are contained in the words: Fiume or Death.
Criez au quatre vents que je n’accepte aucune transaction. Le reste ici contre tout le monde et je prépare de très mauvais jours.
Criez cela je vous prie a tû-tête
the call for enlistments mentions a chance for gold service stripes, opportunities for big game hunting and thrilling watersports added to the general advantages of travel in foreign countries
Chi va piano
Va sano
Chi va forte
Va ’la morte
Evviva la libertá
EARTHQUAKE IN ITALY DEVASTATES
LIKE WAR
only way Y.M.C.A. girls can travel is on troop ships; part of fleet will go seaward to help Wilson
DEMPSEY KNOCKS OUT WILLARD
IN THIRD ROUND
Ils sont sourds.
Je vous embrasse.
Le cœur de Fiume est à vous.
Joe Hill
A young Swede name Hillstrom went to sea, got himself calloused hands on sailingships and tramps, learned English in the focastle of the steamers that make the run from Stockholm to Hull, dreamed the Swede’s dream of the west;
when he got to America they gave him a job polishing cuspidors in a Bowery saloon.
He moved west to Chicago and worked in a machineshop.
He moved west and followed the harvest, hung around employment agencies, paid out many a dollar for a job in a construction camp, walked out many a mile when the grub was too bum, or the boss too tough, or too many bugs in the bunkhouse;
read Marx and the I.W.W. Preamble and dreamed about forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
He was in California for the S.P. strike (Casey Jones, two locomotives, Casey Jones), used to play the concertina outside the bunkhouse door, after supper, evenings (Longhaired preachers come out every night), had a knack for setting rebel words to tunes (And the union makes us strong).
Along the coast in cookshacks flophouses jungles wobblies hoboes bindlestiffs began singing Joe Hill’s songs. They sang ’em in the county jails of the State of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, in the bullpens in Montana and Arizona, sang ’em in Walla Walla, San Quentin and Leavenworth,
forming the structure of the new society within the jails of the old.
At Bingham, Utah, Joe Hill organized the workers of the Utah Construction Company in the One Big Union, won a new wage-scale, shorter hours, better grub. (The angel Moroni didn’t like labororganizers any better than the Southern Pacific did.)
The angel Moroni moved the hearts of the Mormons to decide it was Joe Hill shot a grocer named Morrison. The Swedish consul and President Wilson tried to get him a new trial but the angel Moroni moved the hearts of the supreme court of the State of Utah to sustain the verdict of guilty. He was in jail a year, went on making up songs. In November 1915 he was stood up against the wall in the jail yard in Salt Lake City.
“Don’t mourn for me organize,” was the last word he sent out to the workingstiffs of the I.W.W. Joe Hill stood up against the wall of the jail yard, looked into the muzzles of the guns and gave the word to fire.
They put him in a black suit, put a stiff collar around his neck and a bow tie, shipped him to Chicago for a bangup funeral, and photographed his handsome stony mask staring into the future.
The first of May they scattered his ashes to the wind.
Ben Compton
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. …
The old people were Jews but at school Benny always said no he wasn’t a Jew he was an American because he’d been born in Brooklyn and lived at 2531 25th Avenue in Flatbush and they owned their home. The teacher in the seventh grade said he squinted and sent him home with a note, so Pop took an afternoon off from the jewelry store where he worked with a lens in his eye repairing watches, to take Benny to an optician who put drops in his eyes and made him read little teeny letters on a white card. Pop seemed tickled when the optician said Benny had to wear glasses, “Vatchmaker’s eyes… takes after his old man,” he said and patted his cheek. The steel eyeglasses were heavy on Benny’s nose and cut into him behind the ears. It made him feel funny to have Pop telling the optician that a boy with glasses wouldn’t be a bum and a baseball player like Sam and Isidore but would attend to his studies and be a lawyer and a scholar like the men of old. “A rabbi maybe,” said the optician, but Pop said rabbis were loafers and lived on the blood of the poor, he and the old woman still ate kosher and kept the sabbath like their fathers but synagogue and the rabbis… he made a spitting sound with his lips. The optician laughed and said as for himself he was a freethinker but religion was good for the commonpeople. When they got home momma said the glasses made Benny look awful old. Sam and Izzy yelled, “Hello, foureyes,” when they came in from selling papers, but at school next day they told the other kids it was a statesprison offence to roughhouse a feller with glasses. Once he had the glasses Benny got to be very good at his lessons.