Unemployed

Up the Capitol steps at Washington last week tramped a delegation of 150 jobless under Communist leadership. Quietly they marched past police guards into the House corridors to petition Speaker Longworth for Unemployment insurance. He would not see them. Some of them straggled up into the House gallery. From that vantage point one Fred Kearns of Pittsburgh arose, began to shout: "I protest! I protest against the arrest of --." Over his wide-open mouth was clapped the hand of Chief Doorkeeper Bert Kennedy. Angry cries from the House floor: "Throw him out! Shut him up!" Two policemen ejected him while other Reds were shooed off the Capitol grounds.

Late one afternoon jobless demonstrators stormed into the Minnesota House of Representatives at St. Paul, took possession of the chamber after the speaker had declared a 30-minute recess. For two hours Red orators bellowed and inveighed from the rostrum against the legislators, demanded Unemployment relief. "Chair warmers! Yellow fakers!" screamed an 18-year-old girl at House members who tolerantly cheered her gusto. During the chamber demonstration, 50 Reds slipped down to the basement, entered the Capitol restaurant, gorged themselves on baked apples and crackers.

When Reds held an Unemployment meeting on Boston Common without a permit, mounted police charged the crowd, broke up the demonstration. Arrested with ten others were two clergymen--Congregationalist Robert A. Bakeman, Episcopalian Smith O. Dexter--who protested the police's "high-handed methods against free speech." The Socialist party bailed out the ministers.

Of all last week's Red demonstrations on Unemployment the most startling and significant occurred in Reading, Pa. Only city in the U. S. with a Socialist Government, it afforded students of political economics a striking example of the clash between moderate and extreme Radicalism. Socialism obviously had solved the riddle of Joblessness no more successfully than the conservative governments of Washington, St. Paul or Boston.

In 1927 Reading voters put into office a thoroughgoing Socialist Government headed by tall, handsome native-born Mayor John Henry Stump. By trade a cigarmaker, by conviction a Socialist, he had served a dozen years as business man ager of the weekly Labor Advocate.

Businessmen thought him a pleasant, level headed, reasonable person despite his theories. The Reading Times, unable to stomach the regular party candidates, helped elect him.

The Stump administration has adopted none of the orthodox methods of unemployment relief, claiming the problem was national, not local. It has refused to inaugurate an emergency construction program on the ground that it would only tax the poor. Its $450,000 community chest was exhausted last November. It has claimed credit for relief furnished by the non-Socialist school board which is outside its control.

Last week jobless hundreds, led by Reds, paraded to the City Hall, demanded municipal relief from Mayor Stump. They asked that everybody in town be given $15 per week plus $2 per week per dependent plus free rent, free gas, free electricity. Funds, they thought, might be raised by a local tax on incomes of $5.000 and up. Mayor Stump ushered the leaders into his office, where they harangued him thus: ". . . You who call yourself a Socialist, must realize the workers are creators of all commodities and yet the workers are starving."

Suavely the Mayor replied: "I'll tell you boys nobody is more in sympathy with you than the Mayor and Council of Reading. We're no novices. We know what Capitalism does to the workers and hope that Capitalism will be overthrown. . . . We've kept men on we'd ordinarily lay off. I've organized Unemployment relief and it's doing a darned good job. But . . . you don't know the law, that's all. How can we tax the rich? If I could, I would. . . . Show me a starving worker. I'd dig down into my own pocket to prevent it. Your Communist sheet, the Daily Worker, has been doing a lot of lying. . . ."

The best Mayor Stump could offer the Reds was the use of the municipal auditorium where they gathered to denounce him.

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