The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

AUGUST, 1915

Published Monthly

15 cents a copy

MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO

$1.50 a year

Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago

The Little Review

Vol. II

AUGUST, 1915

No. 5

Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson

The American Family

Ben Hecht

The dead fingers of spent passions, spent dreams, spent youth clutch at the throat of the rising generation and preserve the integrity of the American family. Not that there is a typical American family. There is only the typical struggle between the dead and the living, between the inert and hideous virtue of decayed souls and the rebellious desires of their doomed progeny.

The ambitious and educated American mother is a forceful creature, a strong, powerful woman. As an individual she is dead. Once she knew and had the desire for beauty. Dead fingers reached into her heart and killed it. The force of which she was doomed to become a part crushed her. The conventions of the world are stronger than its natural destinies. Those conventions—the conventions of the family—are not of the man’s making. Woman attends to her own subjugation. She preserves the spirit of the family, struggles and labors to keep it a unit, to keep its members alike. Moaning with the tyrannical lust for possession she enfolds her daughter in her arms. There are certain things in her daughter which must be killed. There is a dawning of love for “impossible” things in her daughter’s heart. There is an awakened mental curiosity, a perceptible inclination to break from the oppressiveness of the surrounding dead. In the night the daughter wonders and doubts. She would like “to get away”—to go forth free of certain fiercely applied restrictions and meet a different kind of folk, a different kind of thought. She would like to be—to feel the things she is capable of. It is all vague. Always revolt is vague and intangible for the daughters of women. Revolt is for souls still living, and the living are weaker than the dead. The living soul is a lone, individual force, its yearnings are ephemeral and undefined. The mother knows what they are. The dead always know what it is they have lost. And in this knowledge the mother is strong. But the living cannot say to itself what it wishes to gain, what it reaches to attain. Only in the stray geniuses of time has the individual soul fought desperately and triumphantly for its preservation. And there is no genius in the daughter. There is merely the divine and natural instinct for self-realization. Once the mother felt it and it was killed. Now the daughter has caught the dread disease—the contamination which starts a cold sweat under the corset stays of society; the thing which brings down upon it for its destruction the phalanxes of fierce fatuities—the moribund mercenaries employed by the home for its defense and preservation.

Something happens to crystallize the revolt. It is a man outside the pale, a good man, a bad man. It is a book. It is a friend. Often the struggle is fought through little things too numerous to mention and the struggle itself too casual to classify. Sometimes it wages without a word; at other times there are blows. And at such times the enshrouding veils are torn aside. One can see the dead rise up, their pasty limbs dragging with the mould and slime of their couch. One can see them reaching their dead arms out, with the bloodless flesh hanging from them in shreds. One can watch them crawl on their bony feet and as they come close—these dead—the foul odor that issues from their sightless, twisted, rotted faces hangs like a grey smeared canopy above them.

They come. They take their stand at the mother’s back. And the pitiful struggle is on.

It is the mother who strikes the blows. Her first weapon (she uses it like a poison) is her love. She calls it that. “You are my only happiness,” she cries. “I have given you everything, a part of me, all you have needed. I have sacrificed everything for you. All my dreams have been for you. O, how can you permit anything to come between us?”

The daughter listens. There is a selfish ring to it. But love must be forgiven for selfishness. In the schools and the churches the preliminaries of the struggle have been insidiously fought. Children owe duties to their parents and not to themselves. It was what the daughter learned at school. It is what she read between the lines of her books and heard from the lips of all around her. And now it is the murmur that rolls into her ears. It is the odor of the dead.

Day after day the mother strikes with this weapon. Her red, furious eyes dripping tears, she moans it out. Her voice is like the yelp of a frantic animal. Her voice is like the whine of a woebegone fice. Her voice is cold and hard and hollow like the echo in a tomb.

The beauty that has come to her daughter is a fragile thing. The lovliness she visioned is the most delicately mortal of life’s treasures. Fiercely the mother hurls herself against it, hurls the reproaches of her dead soul, the recriminations of her entombed spirit—the odors of the dead.... And her weapons are tangible things. They are sentences. They are the moral perversions with which the family unit always has fought for its preservation. They are tried things, prophetic precedents. And the beauty in the normal being is an indefinite force—a vagueness. It has no weapons with which to strike. Triumphant revolt is only for martyrs and artists. It is the losing force in normal existence.

Gradually it becomes clouded in the daughter’s soul. She feels unclean. She imagines it is the beauty which is unclean. She does not know that it is the uncleanliness of the dead—the uncleanliness of her mother revealed to her in her heart by the divine light that is dying within herself. An agony comes into her. The struggle narrows to pain. Cold things reach at her heart. It leaps and flutters. She stands, her face white and a look of uncanny suffering about her eyes. The dead fingers grip fast.

The mother, moaning, shuddering, her eyes gleaming, enfolds her daughter in her arms. “I dare you to take her from me,” she cries out to the man, to the friend, to the book, to the world of beauty, whatever it is toward which her daughter inclined for the divine instant of awakened soul. “I dare you. I dare you.”

“Nothing can ever take me from you,” the daughter weeps. Death.

Tears, a form of decomposition now, roll from her cheeks. The struggle is over. The unit has been preserved and now one may look at the unit and see what it is. The rotted figures of the dead have dragged their shredded flesh back to the graves.

There are different kinds of families. Only in the struggle between the dead and the living do they become the same even when the contestants differ. I will describe only one type. Perhaps it is the American family; perhaps it is not.

It is the family which considers culture a matter of polished fingernails and emotional suppression and dinner table aphorisms, puns and the classics in half morocco. It has bound volumes of The Philistine or some other mawkish philosophical twaddle on view in the bookcase. It—the spirit of this family—knows the titles of books memorized from literary reviews in current magazines and will discourse bitingly on the malicious trend of these radical volumes from the sweeping knowledge she has of their titles. In the matter of music the spirit of this family “plays safe.” It will characterize as “tinkly” or “syrupy” anything melodious which secretly pleases it. The rather humorous falseness of its culture is inexhaustible.

Introspection is an indecent as well as impossible thing to the spirit of this family. To look into her soul and see the diseased and dead things that fill it is naturally impossible and naturally indecent. Dostoevsky calls man an animal who can get used to anything. And a man’s adjustment to hideous things is not so final as a woman’s.

For the spirit of this family to reveal an honest reaction when it is contrary to the approved artificial demands of a situation is as heinous an exhibition of bad taste as to uncover a thigh. But luckily, this concealing of honest feeling is not often required. The spirit of this family is incapable in the main of honest feeling. That is a part of the beauty killed long ago in her, a part of the beauty she killed in the daughter, a part of the beauty the daughter will strangle in her own children. And one of the compensations for dead souls is that they naturally feel dishonest feeling and do not have to suffer with a realization of hypocrisy.

This family thinks of virtue in terms of legs. This family regards art and truth with a modulated leer. It is crudely cynical of everything outside its range. It sneers and pooh-hoos, it ostracizes and condemns. It is vulgarly contemptuous of the factors in life superior to it. The spirit of this family would have shrieked in outrage at the presence of Verlaine in its home—unless he could have reflected social distinction on it. It would have closed the doors to Ibsen,—except for the social distinction,—to every triumphant soul that had escaped the dead fingers and realized itself. And by some inexplicable trick of self-adjustment the spirit of this family looks upon thought as an undesirable affectation.

Social success means to this family a speaking acquaintance with any wealthier unit which originally considered itself “above” this family. Moral success means to this family an exemption from the prosecution of the forces it has reared for its own protection—keeping out of jail, out of scandal-mongering newspapers, out of the malicious after-dinner gossip of its friends.

Of an evening you will find this family in the living room. The husband and father reads a newspaper. He has worked in his office all day and is tired. Life long ago ceased to mean anything to him. He is an animal husk in fine linen. He has his little prejudices and his little conventions. Indeed, he is a part of the system of the unit but not much interested in it. He never was possessed of the capacity for beauty which his women folk once had and which they found it necessary to kill in each other. Man is a more natural part of the world’s ugliness. He is coarser stuff in general. For him it is not necessary to wage any struggle. He accepted matrimony because of a concentrated physical curiosity in one woman, and because it was the thing to do at his age. Love suffered epileptic dissolution in the nuptial couch. Honor toward his woman expired when the mysteries of her flesh paled. Obedience is his natural state—that is, long ago he established a line of least resistance and inoculated his women folk with the fable that adherence to this line was the obedience and respect he owed them. If a latent instinct awakens suddenly in him he indulges himself. He finds it rather difficult to be immoral, but as he hesitates a latent strength overcomes his fear and thus he is able to be immoral and unfaithful to his own convenient restrictions in a natural manner and with no great loss of sleep.

One man in ten thousand inherits the beauty of the woman who bore him and he becomes an artist. It is not necessary for him to revolt. His fathers have taken care of that. There is an assured place in the world for him—not in the living room here in front of the fireplace but elsewhere, in places of which poets sing.

The family man keeps posted. He knows what is going on in the world but does not understand it. He is not capable of understanding. But sometimes understanding and reason coincide with his prejudices and he is then as liable to hold minority views as not. He is dry, sometimes clever. But always he jogs, jogs, jogs along. He can even sleep night after night in the same bed with his wife without feeling annoyance. His bluntedness is complete. Dostoevsky is right.

His wife and the mother of his children is a part of the furniture of existence for him. In his own way he is quite dead, but it was not necessary to kill him. If his son revolts the instinct of his mother is communicated to him and he fights. He borrows the mother’s weapons and he blasphemes in a half-hearted way about the duty to parents. But the beauty which the mother found easy to kill in the daughter usually discovers a hardier citadel in the son and usually he carries it safely into the world.

The room—this living room—is dimly and “artistically” lighted. The fire in the grate glows. The daughter sits in a corner speaking to a friend. At the other side sits the father—reading blankly. The wife enters. She surveys the scene from the doorway with a feeling of warm satisfaction. She comes in and sits down. They talk about nothing, they think about nothing. The daughter and the young man, beneath the smooth surface of the artificial moments, are playing at the eternal indecency. The mother leads the conversation. Neighbors are discussed. Friends are derided. Social inferiors are laughed to scorn. Social superiors are spoken of with adulation and veneration. At last the father climbs to his bed like an ox. He is tired, poor fellow. The mother follows him into the bedroom. A victor, utterly triumphant, she hugs her dead soul to herself and smiles. The daughter retires after being desperately kissed by the physically curious young man, and she lies awake a while wishing in moments of provoked sex that she too was married and meditating in calmer spaces upon the advantages of the family unit, the fireplace, the party calls. O, this daughter! She is the one who had the vision of beauty. She is the one whose soul sang for a day with the capacity for all the world’s lovliness. Honesty, purity, fineness burned in her with their divine radiance. The lights are turned out. Death reigns supreme.

Patterns

Amy Lowell

I walk down the garden paths,

And all the daffodils

Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.

I walk down the patterned garden paths

In my stiff, brocaded gown.

With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,

I too am a rare

Pattern. As I wander down

The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,

And the train

Makes a pink and silver stain

On the gravel, and the thrift

Of the borders.

Just a plate of current fashion,

Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.

Not a softness anywhere about me,

Only whale-bone and brocade.

And I sink on a seat in the shade

Of a lime tree. For my passion

Wars against the stiff brocade.

The daffodils and squills

Flutter in the breeze

As they please.

And I weep;

For the lime tree is in blossom

And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the splashing of waterdrops

In the marble fountain

Comes down the garden paths.

The dripping never stops.

Underneath my stiffened gown

Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,

A basin in the midst of hedges grown

So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,

But she guesses he is near,

And the sliding of the water

Seems the stroking of a dear

Hand upon her.

What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!

I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.

All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,

And he would stumble after,

Bewildered by my laughter.

I should see the sun flashing from his sword hilt and the buckles on his shoes.

I would choose

To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,

A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,

Till he caught me in the shade,

And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,

Aching, melting, unafraid.

With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,

And the plopping of the waterdrops,

All about us in the open afternoon—

I am very like to swoon

With the weight of this brocade,

For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom

In my bosom,

Is a letter I have hid.

It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.

“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell

Died in action Thursday sen’night.”

As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,

The letters squirmed like snakes.

“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.

“No,” I told him.

“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.

No, no answer.”

And I walked into the garden,

Up and down the patterned paths,

In my stiff, correct brocade.

The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,

Each one.

I stood upright too,

Held rigid to the pattern

By the stiffness of my gown.

Up and down I walked,

Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.

In a month, here, underneath this lime,

We would have broke the pattern;

He for me, and I for him,

He as Colonel, I as Lady,

On this shady seat.

He had a whim

That sunlight carried blessing.

And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”

Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk

Up and down

The patterned garden paths

In my stiff, brocaded gown.

The squills and daffodils

Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.

I shall go

Up and down,

In my gown.

Gorgeously arrayed,

Boned and stayed.

And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace

By each button, hook, and lace.

For the man who should loose me is dead,

Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,

In a pattern called a war.

Christ! What are patterns for?

The Piano and Imagism

Margaret C. Anderson

Once I said something vague about the piano music of the future. There is something very definite to be said about it. I think the next music written for the piano will have in it a high concentration of clear color-sound and that the new pianist will focus his technique to just one end: to the clearest expression of this color-sound identity. Sea mist, for instance, has certain colors and certain smells; if you are keen-sensed it has certain sounds. You may say it has been the aim of all composers and musicians to put nature into music. Well, it has been the aim of most poets to put nature into poetry, but the Imagists have done it: their medium is not only a more direct one: the point is that they seem to have dispensed with a medium. Their words don’t merely convey color to you; they are the color. The new musician can do this—and I believe he can do it on the piano better than on any other instrument. His music will be all these things:[1]

Sea orchards, and lilac on the water, and color dragged up from the sand; drenched grasses, and early roses, and wind-harps in the cedar trees; flame-flowers, and the sliding rain; frail sea-birds, and blue still rocks, and bright winds treading the sunlight; silver hail stones, and the scattering of gold crocus petals; blackbirds in the grass, and fountains in the rain; lily shadows, and green cold waves, and the rose-fingered moon; pine cones, and yellow grasses, and a restless green rout of stars; cloud whirls, and the pace of winds; trees on the hill, and the far ecstasy of burning noons; lotus pools, and the gold petal of the moon; night-born poppies, and the silence of beauty, and the perfume of invisible roses; white winds and cold sea ripples; blossom spray, and narcissus petals on the black earth; little silver birds, and blue and gold-veined hyacinths; river pools of sky, and grains of sand as clear as wine....

It will be made of dream-colored wings, and whispers among the flowering rushes; of moonlit tree-tops, and the gaiety of flowers; brown fading hills, and the moving mist; sea rose, and the light upon the poplars; shaken dew, and the haunts of the sun, and white sea-gulls above the waves; bright butterflies in the corn, and a dust of emerald and gold; broken leaves, and the rose and white flag-stones; sea iris with petals like shells, and the scent of lilacs heavy with stillness; scarlet nasturtiums, and dry reeds that shiver in the grasses; slim colorless poppies, and the sweet salt camphor flowers; gold and blue and mauve, and a white rose of flame; pointed pines, and orange-colored rose leaves; sunshine slipping through young green, and the flaring moon through the oak leaves; wet dawns, and a blue flower of the evening; butterflies over green meadows, and deep blue seas of air, and hyacinths hidden in a far valley....

It will be of harsh rose and iris-flowers painted blue; white waters, and the winds of the upper air; green wine held up in the sun, and rigid myrrh-buds scented and stinging; the lisp of reeds, and the loose ripples of meadow grasses; mists on the mountains, and clear frost on the grass blade; frail-headed poppies, and sea-grass tangled with shore grass; the humming brightness of the air, and the sky darting through like blue rain; strewn petals on restless water, and pale green glacier-rivers; somber pools, and sun-drenched slopes; autumn’s gold and spring’s green; red pine-trunks, and bird cries in hollow trees; cool spaces filled with shadow, and white hammocks in the sun; green glimmer of apples in an orchard, and hawthorn odorous with blossom; lamps in a wash of rain, and the desperate sun that struggles through sea mist; lavender water, and faded stars; many-foamed ways, and the blue and buoyant air; grey-green fastnesses of the great deeps; a cream moon on bare black trees; wet leaves, and the dust that drifts over the court-yard; moon-paint on a colorless house....

It will be pagan temples and old blue Chinese gardens; old pagodas glittering across green trees, and the ivory of silence; vast dark trees that flow like blue veils of tears into the water; little almond trees that the frost has hurt, and bitter purple willows; fruit dropping through the thick air, and wine in heavy craters painted black and red; purple and gold and sable, and a gauze of misted silver; blue death-mountains, and yellow pulse-beats in the darkness; naked lightnings, and boats in the gloom; strange fish, and golden sorceries; red-purple grapes, and Assyrian wine; fruits from Arcadia, and incense to Poseidon; swallow-blue halls, and a chamber under Lycia’s coast; stars swimming like goldfish, and the sword of the moonlight; torn lanterns that flutter, and an endless procession of lamps; sleepy temples, and strange skies, and pilgrims of autumn; tired shepherds with lanterns, and the fire of the great moon; the lowest pine branch drawn across the disk of the sun; Phoenecian stuffs and silks that are outspread; the gods garlanded in wisteria; white grave goddesses, and loves in Phrygia; wounds of light, and terrible rituals, and temples soothed by the sun to ruin; the valleys of Ætna, and the Doric singing....

... The moon dragging the flood tide, and an old sorrow that has put out the sun; whirling laughter, and the thunder of horses plunging; old tumults, and the gloom of dreams; strong loneliness, and the hollow where pain was; the rich laughter of the forest, and the bitter sea; the earth that receives the slanting rain; lost treasure, and the violent gloom of night; all proud things, and the light of thy beauty.... Souls of blood, and hearts aching with wonder; the kindness of people—country folk and sailors and fishermen; all the roots of the earth, and a perpetual sea....

[1] I have omitted quotation marks for the sake of appearance, but every phrase in the next five paragraphs is taken from the Imagists.

War Impressions

Florence Kiper Frank

The Moving-Picture Show

We sat at a moving-picture show. Over a little bridge streamed the Belgian refugees, women, children, boys, dogs, horses, carts, household goods—an incongruous procession. The faces were stolid, the feet plodded on—plodded on!

“See!” said my friend, “sometimes a woman turns to look at a bursting shell.”

I murmured, “How interesting!”

And my soul shuddered. It shuddered at sophistication.

The man who had taken the pictures told us about them. He had been not more than three weeks ago in Belgium....

“Huzza!” sang my ancestor of five thousand years back. He led a band of marauders into an enemy’s village. They ripped things up and tore about the place singing and looting. There was nothing much left to that village by the time they got through with it.

But the people many miles away did not behold his exploits. Alas, there were no moving-picture shows in those days!

The Modern Woman With a Sense of Humor

There was a Modern Woman with a sense of humor.

“I shall,” she said, “teach to women the absurdity of bearing children to be killed by cannon.”

“The absurdity!” exclaimed the men of the State, aghast at levity.

“Yes,” answered she, “it isn’t worth the trouble!” And she lifted her eyebrows and smiled, but in her eyes there was Knowledge.

And the men of the State were more terrified by the phenomenon of The Modern Woman with a Sense of Humor than by any phenomenon that had before confronted them.

The Incredible Adventure of Spring

The year was again a-foot on the incredible adventure of Spring. The earth broke into blossoming, and the nights were moon-drenched and astir with the whisperings of wet winds. It was a really thrilling time of the year to be alive—and therefore, besides all these breathless and miraculous adventures of the grass and flowers, many innocent and unsuspecting souls had started out on the incredible adventure of being born.

But the war-writers kept on writing that for man to reach true exaltation and vibrancy of spirit, he must blow out the brains of as many people as possible.

Man and His Machines

He has builded him machines—man the Maker—using great cunning of hand and of brain. And has not Bergson told us that thus has he evolved that tool, the Intellect—through the dim ages of his making!

He has builded him states, politics, all the intricate architecture of institutions.

Now who would think that what he himself has builded—builded through the thousands of years of endeavor—should thus turn about, ungrateful, to destroy and to rend him?

The Annual Banquet

“We shall not, this year,” said my rich friend—a Lady—“while the people of Europe are starving and fighting—we shall not this year have our large annual banquet.”

But had she walked not a mile from her home, she would have seen in her own city men starving, and fighting because of the terrible dread of starving. And not this year alone had they been doing it, but for many years of large banquets.

However, if all Ladies and Gentlemen felt acutely all these matters, what would become of our institution of Large Banquets—or, indeed, of the Divine Privileges of Monarchs!

What a Veneer Is Civilization

“War,” wrote the journalists, “reveals what a veneer is civilization. Man’s real emotions, instinctive, primitive, brutal, leap to ascendency.”

But I did not believe the journalists, because I knew better men’s emotions. Indeed, what tore asunder my heart was the depth and beauty of the emotions of men and women. There was nothing—at least very little—the matter with their emotions.

But with their thinking apparatus—ah, that is a different story!

Lawson, Caplan, Schmidt

Alexander Berkman

I don’t know of anything more tragic and pitiful than the superstition that “Justice will triumph.” What this metaphysical conception of “justice” really signifies, how it is to be expressed in applicable terms, is impossible to determine in view of the multiplicity of individual antagonisms and class interests.

But somehow we all believe in “justice”; yet the criterion of each is the degree of the attainment of his own purpose.

From time immemorial we humans have been clamoring for “justice,” divine and earthly. Hence our slavery. And Kaiser and Czar both claim justice on their side, and millions are slaughtering each other to attain the particular justice of their respective masters.

In this blessed land of ours, justice is ranked high, and labor is constantly basing its appeals and demands on justice. But perhaps—let us hope—the John Lawson case has somewhat jolted the popular faith in the metaphysical conception, at least so far as it manifests itself in the Colorado courts. It is safe to say that there is no intelligent man in that state who does not know that the stage for Lawson’s conviction had been set long before his trial. He was an intelligent, active agitator. He sought to crystallize the rebellious dissatisfaction of the miners into effective action:—sufficient reason for the Rockefeller-controlled state to eliminate, most emphatically, such an undesirable element.

In Colorado, as well as throughout the rest of the country, most people know that a great “injustice was done Lawson.” What are the people of Colorado doing about it? Not a thing. The cheerful idiot, otherwise known as the good citizen, cares for justice only in the degree in which it affects his own pocket. And the masses of labor who do feel themselves and their cause injured by the railroading of Lawson to prison—they call the verdict a “miscarriage of justice”—applaud Professor Brewster who wired Lawson: “Unbelievable. Counsel friends keep cool. Justice will be done.”

And the people of Colorado remain inactive, in the belief that the Supreme Court, the Governor, or maybe the Holy Ghost will see to it that justice is done.

Yet the Lawson lesson has not been entirely lost. It is possible that it has shed a light that will reflect itself on coming fights between labor and capital. It is more than probable that the lesson has already borne fruit in the more aggressive attitude of labor in some parts of the country. It has helped ever-growing numbers to realize that to expect “justice” in the struggle between labor and capital means to doom the toilers to defeat.

It will be highly interesting to watch the effect of the Lawson outrage upon the approaching trial of David Caplan and Mathew Schmidt, the aftermath of the McNamara case, in Los Angeles, California. The history of this case is illuminating of our legal and social “justice”:

The labor unions in California have for the last nine years fought a bitter fight against the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, the Western branch of the Steel Trust. Every means, legal and illegal, has been used by the employers to exterminate the unions and paralyze the workers. And they have practically succeeded in breaking every labor organization in the Steel Industry from New York to San Francisco.

Where twenty years ago we had a powerful union—for instance, in Pennsylvania: the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers—today nothing but a pitiful remnant is left. Only one union in the steel industry has survived: the Structural Iron Workers. They survived because they contested every inch of ground against the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association. The result of that fight was a long war between capital and labor on the Coast. Every form of persecution and violence was used against labor, and labor was forced to defend itself. In consequence the Structural Iron Workers increased their wages from $2.40 a day to $4.40, and reduced their hours from ten to eight. Organized capital resorted to every trick to strangle the workers, and in Los Angeles a special law was passed prohibiting picketing. But the union defied the law, and five hundred men went to prison during the general strike of the metal trades in Southern California in 1910. During this fight the Los Angeles Times, the most relentless enemy of labor and of humanity, was destroyed. The brothers McNamara were arrested, as a result, and then the masters made the solemn promise that the war would be stopped and that all further prosecutions of labor men would cease if the McNamaras would plead guilty. It was only on the strength of this promise that the McNamaras were finally induced to plead guilty.

Hardly ten days passed, when the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association broke every promise they made. They began the prosecution of labor men in Los Angeles and Indianapolis, and did everything in their power to railroad to prison the most effective members of the unions. And now, four and a half years later, they have arrested David Caplan in Seattle and Mathew Schmidt in New York, and brought them across the country to Los Angeles to put them on trial for complicity with the McNamaras.

This perfidious activity of organized capital has made labor in California realize that the courts are controlled by the employers, and that labor cannot expect justice. They now understand what a fatal mistake was made in the case of John Lawson. The workers depended on the innocence of Lawson for his acquittal. They failed to act, expecting justice to be done.

At least some of the labor elements on the Coast are awakening to the situation. They feel that they cannot expect justice from the courts of the exploiters. They have now determined that more aggressive and militant action is necessary, if labor is not to be submerged by the oppression of capital. They are beginning to see that throughout the country the masters are picking out the most effective and intelligent fighters from the ranks of the workers and railroading them to prison, to terrorize labor and stifle the spirit of liberty and independence. The Lawson case, the case of Ford and Suhr, of Rangel and Cline, of Joe Hill, and the many other cases now pending in the courts of New York and elsewhere, all show what capital intends to do to labor.

Is labor really going to keep quiet and submit to this persecution and slavery? The unions on the Coast have determined that they will not. They are calling upon every one in sympathy with labor to join the great movement to stop the aggression of capital. They have decided on strong militant tactics to defend the workingman, his family and his union against the tyranny of the bosses.

They have issued the call to every central body, affiliated unions and radical organizations, to join hands at this most critical moment. This is not a question of theory or of philosophic ism. It is the great war of labor against capital, a struggle of life and death. In this struggle all local and theoretic differences may be safely forgotten, and all friends of labor make common cause.

I have been sent as a special delegate by some of the California unions to help organize the solidaric and militant forces of labor throughout the country. It is evident how significant this case is for the workers in general. It is imperative that they combine in solidaric unity in this vital matter, to register in mighty accents the sentiments and determination of the oppressed. Thus were Haywood, Moyer, and Pettibone torn from the clutches of the jungle beast. Thus were returned to liberty Ettor and Giovannitti, Carlo Tresca, and other fighters for the better day. But whenever the workers failed to sound the tocsin of solidarity and make their gesture of protest, their prisoners of war have invariably remained the hostages of the enemy.

Organizations and individuals who are willing to give us their moral and financial assistance, should immediately send resolutions and funds to Tom Barker, Secretary Building Trades Council of Los Angeles, and Treasurer of the Caplan-Schmidt Defense Fund. Address, 201 Labor Temple, Los Angeles, California. My own address for the present is 917 Fine Arts Building.

Father and Daughter

Edgar Lee Masters

The church is a hulk of shadow,

And dark is the church’s spire.

But the cross is as black as iron

Against the sunset’s fire.

The shops and sheds and hovels

Are massed with the church’s shade;

And a girl with a face like a lily

Is plying her wretched trade.

And a drunken man reels homeward

With a sullen leer in his eye.

And the street is filled with children,

That play and wrestle and cry.

A broken hurdy-gurdy

Rattles a hollow tune,

And a light as yellow as fever

Shines from the vile saloon.

Two men are talking together,

They pass where the children are;

And one wears a robe of sable,

The other a silver star.

And one of them goes to vespers

And one of them makes a search,

And one of them enters the groggery,

And one of them enters the church.

And a shot is fired by the drunkard,

And the girl falls dead in the street;

And God is peaceful in heaven,

And all in the world is sweet.

Edgar Lee Masters
Copyright, 1915, by Eugene Hutchinson.

Poems

(from the Greek of Myrrhine of Mitulene, and Konallis; translated by Richard Aldington)

I

Hierocleia, bring hither my silver vine-leaf-carved armlet and the mirror graven with two Maenads,

For my heart is burned to dust with longing for Konallis;

And this is the silver armlet which pressed into her side when I held her,

And before this mirror she bound up her golden-hyacinth-curled hair, sitting in the noon sunlight.

II

I, Konallis, am but a goat-girl dwelling on the violet hills of Korinthos,

But going down to the city a marvellous thing befell me;

For the beautiful-silver-fingered hetaira, Myrrhine, held me nightlong in her couch,

Teaching me to stretch wide my arms to receive her strange burning caresses.

III

Fair young men have brought me presents of silver caskets and white mirrors,

Gold for my hair and long lemon-colored chitons and dew-soft perfumes of sweet herbs.

Their bodies are whiter than Leucadian foam and delicate are their flute-girls,

But the wild sleepless nightingales cry in the darkness even as I for Konallis.

IV

We, Konallis and Myrrhine, dedicate to thee, Proserpine, two white torches of wax,

For thou didst watch over our purple-embroidered couch all night;

Was it thou who gavest us the sweetness of sharp caresses?

For at midday when we awoke we laughed to see black poppies blooming beneath our eyes.

V

The doves sleep beside the slow-murmuring cool fountain, red-five-petalled roses of Paestum strew the chequered marble;

A flute-girl whispers the dear white ode of Sappho, and Hierocleia by the pool

Smiles to see the smooth blue-sky-reflecting water mirror her shining body;

But my eyelids are shunned by sleep that is whiter than beautiful morning, for Konallis is not here.

VI

O reeds, move softly and make keen bewildering music,

For I fear lest Arkadian Pan should seize Myrrhine as she comes from the city;

O Artemis, shed thy light across the peaks to hasten her coming,

But do thou, Eos, hold back thy white radiance till love be content.

VII

Last night Zeus sent swift rain upon the blue-grey rocks,

But Konallis held me close to her pear-pointed breasts.

VIII

Sappho, Sappho, long ago the dust of earth mingled with the dust of thy dear limbs,

And only little clay figures, painted with Tyrian red, with crocus, and with Lydian gold,

Remain to show thy beauty; but thy wild lovely songs shall last for ever.

Soon we too shall join Anaktoria and Kudno and kiss thy pale shadowy fingers.

IX

When Myrrhine departed I, weeping passionately, kissed her golden-wrought knees, saying:

“O, Myrrhine, by what god shall I keep the memory of thy caresses?”

But she, bending down like golden, smiling Aphrodite, whispered to me;

And lying here in the sunlight among the reeds I remember her words.

X

Hierocleia, do thou weave white-violet-crowns and spread mountain-haunting lilies upon my couch,

For Konallis comes! and shut the door against the young men for this is a sharper love.

XI

This is the feast of Iacchus; open wide the gates, O Hierocleia;

Fill the kraters and kuathoi with sweet unmixed wine and snow; bring thyrsus-wands,

And crowns of pale ivy and violets; let the flute-players begin the phallic hymn

While the ten girl-slaves, drunken with the god, dance to the young men.

XII

Hedulia now lies with Myrrhine who aforetime was my lover,

But seeing Hedulia she forgot me, and I lie on the threshold weeping.

O marble threshold, thou are not so white nor so hard as her breasts, receive my tears