You can watch your Ninety-seven roll
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POLICE KILLER FLICKS CIGARETTE AS
HE GOES TREMBLING TO DOOM
PLAY AGENCIES IN RING OF SLAVE GIRL MARTS
Maker of Love Disbarred as Lawyer
Oh the right wing clothesmakers
And the Socialist fakers
They make by the workers…
Double cross
They preach Social-ism
But practice Fasc-ism
To keep capitalism
By the boss
MOSCOW CONGRESS OUSTS OPPOSITION
It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville
An’ a line on a three mile grade
It was on that grade he lost his average
An’ you see what a jump he made
MILL THUGS IN MURDER RAID
here is the most dangerous example of how at the decisive moment the bourgeois ideology liquidates class solidarity and turns a friend of the workingclass of yesterday into a most miserable propagandist for imperialism today
RED PICKETS FINED FOR PROTEST HERE
We leave our home in the morning
We kiss our children goodby
OFFICIALS STILL HOPE FOR RESCUE OF MEN
He was goin’ downgrade makin’ ninety miles an hour
When his whistle broke into a scream
He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle
An’ was scalded to death with the steam
RADICALS FIGHT WITH CHAIRS AT UNITY MEETING
PATROLMEN PROTECT REDS
U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE URGES CONFIDENCE
REAL VALUES UNHARMED
While we slave for the bosses
Our children scream an’ cry
But when we draw our money
Our grocery bills to pay
PRESIDENT SEES PROSPERITY NEAR
Not a cent to spend for clothing
Not a cent to lay away
STEAMROLLER IN ACTION AGAINST MILITANTS
MINERS BATTLE SCABS
But we cannot buy for our children
Our wages are too low
Now listen to me you workers
Both you women and men
Let us win for them the victory
I’m sure it ain’t no sin
CARILLON PEALS IN SINGING TOWER
the President declared it was impossible to view the increased advantages for the many without smiling at those who a short time ago expressed so much fear lest our country might come under the control of a few individuals of great wealth
HAPPY CROWDS THRONG CEREMONY
on a tiny island nestling like a green jewel in the lake that mirrors the singing tower, the President today participated in the dedication of a bird sanctuary and its pealing carillon, fulfilling the dream of an immigrant boy
The Camera Eye (51)
at the head of the valley in the dark of the hills on the broken floor of a lurchedover cabin a man halfsits halflies propped up by an old woman two wrinkled girls that might be young chunks of coal flare in the hearth flicker in his face white and sagging as dough blacken the cavedin mouth the taut throat the belly swelled enormous with the wound he got working on the minetipple
the barefoot girl brings him a tincup of water the woman wipes sweat off his streaming face with a dirty denim sleeve the firelight flares in his eyes stretched big with fever in the women’s scared eyes and in the blanched faces of the foreigners
without help in the valley hemmed by dark strike-silent hills the man will die (my father died we know what it is like to see a man die) the women will lay him out on the rickety cot the miners will bury him
in the jail it’s light too hot the steamheat hisses we talk through the greenpainted iron bars to a tall white mustachioed old man some smiling miners in shirtsleeves a boy faces white from mining have already the tallowy look of jailfaces
foreigners what can we say to the dead? foreigners what can we say to the jailed? the representative of the political party talks fast through the bars join up with us and no other union we’ll send you tobacco candy solidarity our lawyers will write briefs speakers will shout your names at meetings they’ll carry your names on cardboard on picketlines the men in jail shrug their shoulders smile thinly our eyes look in their eyes through the bars what can I say? (in another continent I have seen the faces looking out through the barred basement windows behind the ragged sentry’s boots I have seen before day the straggling footsore prisoners herded through the streets limping between bayonets heard the volley
I have seen the dead lying out in those distant deeper valleys) what can we say to the jailed?
in the law’s office we stand against the wall the law is a big man with eyes angry in a big pumpkinface who sits and stares at us meddling foreigners through the door the deputies crane with their guns they stand guard at the mines they blockade the miners’ soupkitchens they’ve cut off the road up the valley the hiredmen with guns stand ready to shoot (they have made us foreigners in the land where we were born they are the conquering army that has filtered into the country unnoticed they have taken the hilltops by stealth they levy toll they stand at the minehead they stand at the polls they stand by when the bailiffs carry the furniture of the family evicted from the city tenement out on the sidewalk they are there when the bankers foreclose on a farm they are ambushed and ready to shoot down the strikers marching behind the flag up the switchback road to the mine those that the guns spare they jail)
the law stares across the desk out of angry eyes his face reddens in splotches like a gobbler’s neck with the strut of the power of submachineguns sawedoffshotguns teargas and vomitinggas the power that can feed you or leave you to starve
sits easy at his desk his back is covered he feels strong behind him he feels the prosecutingattorney the judge an owner himself the political boss the minesuperintendent the board of directors the president of the utility the manipulator of the holdingcompany
he lifts his hand towards the telephone
the deputies crowd in the door
we have only words against
Power Superpower
In eighteen eighty when Thomas Edison’s agent was hooking up the first telephone in London, he put an ad in the paper for a secretary and stenographer. The eager young cockney with sprouting muttonchop whiskers who answered it
had recently lost his job as officeboy. In his spare time he had been learning shorthand and bookkeeping and taking dictation from the editor of the English Vanity Fair at night and jotting down the speeches in Parliament for the papers. He came of temperance smallshopkeeper stock; already he was butting his bullethead against the harsh structure of caste that doomed boys of his class to a life of alpaca jackets, penmanship, subordination. To get a job with an American firm was to put a foot on the rung of a ladder that led up into the blue.