By Gregory Clark, April 3, 1926.

In Canada, here, we have ringside seats for one of the greatest spectacles in history.

For the next couple of generations, we are going to witness the drawing of the Melting Pot.

The United States, by restricting immigration almost to the vanishing point, has mixed in the last of the crude ore into her gigantic crucible. Now she is dropping in pinches of British, a dash of Scandinavian, a gram of German, as the chemist drops in traces of refining chemicals to flux the molten mass.

And we shall watch the great drama of the final drawing of the Melting Pot, the sparks, the pyrotechnic flames and at last the flow of gold, if any.

The first of the flares in this most colossal chemical enterprise is already lighting the sky low down on the horizon.

Round and around a fifteen-foot red brick wall marches a procession of two thousand men, women and children, two by two.

In the high wall are iron barred gates. In the gates stand squads of policemen armed with clubs. Past the policemen you can see a huge, silent, one-storey factory.

At the head of the straggling procession march a score of young men and half a dozen girls wearing brand new steel helmets and second hand gas masks.

The remainder of the motley parade are unarmed and unpicturesque in any way save by the fact that they represent thirty-seven different races of humanity.

As the helmeted head of the parade passes the main gate, the young men raise their voices and shout:

“Boo!  BOO!”

The insulting sound is instantly taken up along the straggling procession and a ribald roar passes around the tall brick wall.

“My country ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty…”

The young men in helmets and gas masks at the head of the procession burst into ironic song,

“My gondree tees off dee,

Svee land da da da da…”

That is what broad-faced man with a yellow mustache makes of it as he surges past in the endless shuffle.

What is all this? Is it an Olympic games parade of the nations of the earth? Is it a demonstration in behalf of the league of nations? No, it is just a picture of the big textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey.

Thirteen thousand workers are out. Seven great spinning mills stand practically idle. Freelance labor organizers from New York are in charge of the strike and are performing the newest stunts of high-class university trained industrial revolt. The mill owners will not have a word to say to the “outside agitators” who are leading the strike. Washington has agreed to an “investigation.”

New Kind of Labor Leader

In broad outline, the situation is this: textile workers are not highly skilled. There are about a million of them in the United States, only a small fraction of whom are organized into unions – the higher ranks, the few skilled artisans. In and around Passaic, New Jersey, an hour out of New York city, in Lawrence, Mass., Manchester, N.H., and in Philadelphia, hundreds of thousands of the simpler orders of textile workers earn their twenty-odd dollars a week. Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs and Italians, in the main.

The great textile industry in the United States has never had any trouble with its labor. For there was always an endless supply surging, sweeping like a tide through the wide open gate of the immigration ports. It only takes three or four weeks to make a textile worker. For the thirty-five years that the Botany Worsted Mills in Passaic have been functioning there has never been any lack of European peasants to be taken on and converted into textile workers in a fortnight.

But now the tide of peasants has ceased!

Last October, because its earnings had fallen from two million eight hundred thousand in 1923 to one million seven hundred thousand in 1924 and then to one million four hundred thousand in 1925, the Botany Mill made a wage cut of 10 per cent. This affected 6,400 workers.

There had been three strikes in Passaic since 1907. All had failed. Time after time labor organizations had tried to organize in Passaic – the Amalgamated Textile Workers, the United Textile Workers, the I.W.W., the Hungarian Workers’ Federation, the W.I.I.U. All had failed.

In November Albert Weisbord, a Harvard graduate, a Phi Beta Kappa, a twenty-five-year-old Jew who has publicly embraced the most advanced Labor theories up to, if not quite to, Communism, came over from New York and began organizing the United Front Committee. He called the strike. He organized the workers. He originated the stunts which have gained the strike world-wide publicity. If he succeeds in organizing a union in Passaic, it means that the million other unorganized textile workers in Lawrence and Manchester and Philadelphia will be organized. A new and powerful group will enter the stage of American labor politics.

“I wish to heaven,” said one of the mill owners of Passaic, “that we had helped some of those other more moderate unions to organize years ago, instead of fighting them. Now we have to contend with a man who reads messages of sympathy from Moscow to his meetings!”

The strike did not take long to get more than front page position in all the New York newspapers and half the papers of America. As soon as the strike was called Weisbord organized mass picketing of the big mills. He called meetings and after fervid and inflammatory speechmaking in English, Hungarian, Italian and half a dozen other languages, formed processions and marched through the streets of Passaic, Paterson, Lodi and Garfield – these textile towns run one into the other in that vast human map that surrounds New York city – and began to march around the buildings.

Steel Helmets and Gas Bombs

The idea was to excite those workers who had not yet struck into coming out. Two by two the strikers marched around the buildings, singing, booing, or in ominous and picturesque silence.

Politics, of course, plays a part in this strike as it does in all things American. The police officials are appointed by the party which is friendly to the large mill owning interests of the district. When this strike of Weisbord’s failed to dissolve as all other strikes had done, there was alarm and the association of textile manufacturers called on the police to control the demonstrations. On March 2, in the seventh week of the strike, when mass picketing had succeeded in bringing out thousands of workers who could no longer face the booing and singing and derision of the paraders, the police in Passaic at last made a forcible effort to halt the ever-growing processions.

The chief of police of Passaic on that day turned out his full force and tried to stem the parade as it marched to the Botany Mill. He may have been genuinely alarmed that this parade would attempt to do violence to the premises. At any rate, he threw two tear gas bombs which he had in his motorcycle sidecar with him. Then he ordered out the fire department and ordered the hose turned on the strikers. The police also obstructed the advance of the strikers and, according to affidavits, used their clubs freely.

Albert Weisbord – knowing that publicity was worth more to his cause than any other factor – immediately got over a supply of steel helmets and gas masks from New York. If the police clubbed heads, the heads would wear steel helmets. If the police would use gas bombs, the strikers would wear gas masks. If the police turn fire hose on the parade, the strikers would put women shoving baby carriages at the head of the procession.

The following day, March 3, the newspaper camera men of New York went wild. Here was a story the like of which had not been seen since the war for dramatic human interest. All the cameramen and movie men in New York were on hand in Passaic that next day for the parade of the strikers in steel hats and gas masks with baby carriages in the lead. What would the police do now?

It was, in a sense, comic what the police did. They attacked the camera men. The New York newspapers estimate the damage to still and motion picture cameras that day at $3,000. The police of Passaic had hired a number of rather humorous truck horses as mounts and rode the cameramen down. It was the worst error of a number of errors committed by the police, for it turned the sympathy of the New York papers definitely away from the police and the mill operators. “Cossack” and other strong words appeared in the newspaper headlines. What Weisbord wanted he got. The police were effectively stopped from any further forcible interruptions in the business of mass picketing. They arrested several people on a charge “of singing without a permit in the public streets.” But the strikers promptly retaliated with charges against Police Chief Cober and two constables for striking unoffending citizens with clubs. If nothing is done about the clubbing, it is more than likely nothing will be done about the singing in the streets.

Picketing by an Army

This mass picketing is a new thing in America. The police claim it is disorderly. But when the strikers neither sing nor boo, but simply march – at noon and closing hour – stolidly and in silence around the mills, they claim they are not disorderly and cannot be interfered with. And this mass of men, women and children has a profound moral effect on the couple of hundred workers who might still be in the mills on maintenance work.

So far the strikers are away ahead on points.

Now for the other side of the argument.

“The strike will not succeed – there will be no effective union formed – simply because there are thirty-seven races of people involved,” said Col. Charles F. H. Johnson, vice-president of the Botany Mills and principal figure amongst the mill owners.

Col. Johnson came into the textile business via the war. The Botany Mills as well as a number of other textile mills in the district were founded twenty to thirty years ago, by great German textile interests. They were controlled by Germans at the outbreak of the war, and the Botany Mill was taken over by the United States government when the war was entered and Col. Johnson was put in to take charge for the government. When the war ended, Col. Johnson was instrumental in securing for the former German owners the right to purchase back the property and with a syndicate of other Americans bought a considerable interest in the mills. At the same time, he and his syndicate acquired other textile properties in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Latvia and Holland. It is now an international concern.

“This affair at Passaic,” said Col. Johnson, “is not a strike but a Communist demonstration. We will not treat in any way with the outside agitators who have fomented the strike.”

Albert Weisbord is more than amused by the stand of the mill owners.

“I cannot understand this unreasonable antipathy of the proprietors towards outside agitators. Surely the proprietors are all from outside. Some of them come from New York but others come from as far outside as Germany. Then why object to the workers calling in outside help in the management of their affairs?”

“A friend of my family,” said one of the directors of the Botany Mill, “is a young woman who does social work teaching in poor districts. She came to me reproachfully, after the strike had taken on its spectacular proportions, and told me of the children of one of the families employed in our mill who were underfed, half clothed, dirty and uncared for and begged me to look at that one example of what I was doing as a proprietor of the mill. I have a good deal of this to bear. I cannot tell that young lady that the conditions in our mill are governed absolutely by the general conditions prevailing throughout the textile industry – that I have to compete with Lawrence and Manchester just as the workers have to compete with the workers in those textile districts. However, I did investigate this one outstanding instance. We found that the parents of these children had put aside some five thousand dollars in the bank and were preparing to return to the Old Country.”

Two tremendous facts, nevertheless, stand out from the Passaic strike.

American industry has been safeguarded for a great many years by the safe and sane organization of the American Federation of Labor. The radicalism which has deeply affected the political life of all the rest of the world in the past ten years through new philosophies of labor has been kept out of America. Now, even if this strike in Passaic fails, it is unquestionable but that the textile industry will have to be organized. The unlimited supply of raw labor which made the industry unorganizable has ceased. Therefore, on to the stage so long dominated by the A. F. of L. comes a powerful new body, thoroughly drilled in the new philosophies of labor and life.

That is one important thing.

The other is the Melting Pot is on the last, great boil.

“We have had no idea,” said Col. Johnson in a private interview, “to what an enormous extent the expansion of American industry and the creation of wealth has depended upon the constant flow of raw new labor into the country. That supply is already limited. Now, I do not at all admit the charges of the agitators who have seized upon our mills as the first demonstration of the new state of affairs in industrial America. Our mills are modern, up to date in every respect. Our wages are the equal of any other wages in the industry. When orders are slack, how can we employ workers full time?

“But I am aware – and I am not sure but that my discovery is shared by a very large number of industrial managers in the United States – that a revaluation of all values is imminent in America that the simple factor of the supply of workers having ceased is certain to create fundamental changes in industrial relations. And there has to be a lot of thinking done on all sides.”

America – where the cops have more personal power than peers of the realm of Britain -well, the cops got a set-back the day the Passaic strikers donned the steel helmets and gas masks.

America, with its twenty-five thousand new war millionaires, its colossal wealth produced endlessly by the tireless army of inspired workers flooding in all her gates – and now the army is in and wants to know, like Cromwell’s, about the rates of pay.

A Tremendous Industrial Problem

unlimited

In one hall in Passaic we saw a Hungarian speaker take the platform and start to address the meeting in his queer “nick-nock-nuck” language, to be greeted by a volley of hisses.

“What’s that?” we demanded of Margaret Larkin, the girl directing publicity for the strikers.

“Those are other nationals who want to hear their own language spoken.”

The Melting Pot is on the, boil. The crucible is full. The bellows are blowing the fire to silver heat.

“Hundreds of our workers,” said Col. Johnson, “have not yet drawn their last pay. They think that holds their job open. They tell us that as soon as the demonstrations die down, they will be overjoyed to come back to work for us at any old conditions.”

In one grey painted frame house, divided into three room family compartments, we found Daki Prizka sitting in his shirt sleeves facing his family, wife and six children. (His boy, being born in Passaic, may be a future president of the United States.)

Daki, frightened by the strike, frightened of the strike rations which friendly unions contributed – one New York bakery sent over six truck loads of bread – had just returned from New York, an hour away by bus, where he had secretly been looking for work.

New York had terrified him. Those tall temples in the sky, symbols of power and wealth illimitable – those thunderous streets – millions of cold-eyed, hasting tollers – Daki had gone into grim, terrible by-streets where he thought a job might be hiding in some sort of shame. But he found no man who knew his language. There were no jobs. He came home to the strike-broken town where his countrymen knew him.

“Bad!” said Daki. “Bad, bad, bad!”

One of his babies coughed rather terribly.

Daki is worried, Colonel Johnson is worried, Albert Weisbord has been worrying ever since he went to Harvard and began thinking about things.

“Are you a Communist?” we asked him.

“Twenty-five thousand war millionaires in the United States of America,” replied Weisbord, his cold eyes stilled behind scholarly spectacles. “The American Legion came into my meeting last night with a Stars and Stripes. They crashed their way up to the platform and held the flag up to me. In the tumult, I bent down and took it and held it to me. Everyone was still. The strikers were astonished. The Legion men were dumb. ‘Thank you, comrades,’ I said, in the quiet, ‘thank you for this flag. I accept it in the spirit in which it is given – symbol of the spirit of revolution in which it was born!’ Then they all went out.”

We have ringside seats for the most spectacular pyrotechnic display of the ages – the running off of the gold from the Melting Pot.

Editor’s Note: This story is in reference to the 1926 Passaic textile strike, the first Communist-led work stoppage in the United States.