The Threat to the Labor Movement/Section 9
The United Front of Reaction—The Official Socialist Press.
THE united front of these elements against the workers who are fighting for militant unionism can be shown to exist beyond reasonable doubt. Their own utterances convict them.
In the public justification of the campaign against fighting trade unionism, there is a unanimity of expression in the socialist, capitalist and official trade union press that can spring only from a common policy.
The New Leader, "a weekly journal devoted to the interest of the socialist and labor movement," used a column of editorial space in its December 2 issue for an attack on the left wing. Said the New Leader:
It is because ALL THE OTHER POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS GROUPS STOOD TOGETHER against this exotic menace that there is any union left at all and any hope of recovering lost ground. (Emphasis mine.)
That "all the other political and religious groups" constitute a minority of the membership of the New York section of the I. L. G. W. and are supported by the bosses and the capitalist press did not cool the holy ardor of the New Leader. It proceeds to incite its readers, by what is a finished example of official socialist demagogy, in preparation for the national conference of the "Committee for the Preservation of the Trades Unions" on December 21:
Yet in the presence of the disaster they have wrought, Foster's league announces that it will hold a national conference of its shock troops in the needle trades in New York York City Jan. 1 and 2. Families of union members are today suffering privation because of the dual allegiance brought into the union by this league and now it is proposed to rub salt into the gaping wounds. The measureless insolence of this proposal is amazing. Its sponsors might at least have the grace to beg forgiveness of their victims. Instead of this they have the impudence to gather at the scene of their bungling and propose further meddling in the union.
The above sounds much like the provocative statements published by the patriotic press against socialists during the war. It was plainly designed to incite gangster violence against the meeting of the Trade Union Educational League after which the New Leader would claim that the work of hired underworld elements was the spontaneous reaction of honest union men.
The New Appeal, in its issue for December 18, publishes an article by Morris Seskind of Jewish Daily Forward fame, in which he describes the breaking up of meetings of the left wing of the Chicago I. L. G. W. by gangsters, police and detective squads co-operating with labor officialdom, as a magnificent protest of the masses against the Communists. Seskind says:
The trade unionists of Chicago are determined not to permit the Communists to come here and demoralize the unions the way they did in some of the New York needle trade unions. They have resolved to oppose them in and out of the unions, wherever they attempt to come and bring in their demoralizing influence.
Inasmuch as the national headquarters of the Workers (Communist) Party is in Chicago, as the Joint Board of the I. L. G. W. in Chicago has a majority of Communists and left wingers elected by the usual trade union procedure, as there are several hundred Communists in the Chicago trade unions, as a number of them are regularly elected delegates to the Chicago Federation of Labor, the zealous Mr. Seskind seems to have overplayed his hand somewhat in trying to picture the recent rise of gangsterism against the militant rank and file in Chicago as an effort to repel a Communist invasion from New York.
The official trade union press, and the public statements of prominent trade union officials are even more definite if less vituperative than those of the socialist press.