ere May Day was born By HARRY FREEMAN Hog-butcher for the world, Tool-maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads andthe nation’s freight handler, . Stormy, husky and brawling, City of the big shoulders. o wrote the noted poet Carl Sandburg of Chicago, the city in which he lived and worked for many years. Chicago was and is all that Sandburg said of it in his poem **Chicago.’’ But it was and is more. This sprawling industrial giant on the southern shore of Lake Michigan symbolizes not only the growth of American imperialism, but also the brutal- ity of those who rule it. It symbolizes not only the de- velopment of the American work- ing class, but the heroic tradi- tions of American labour strug- gle. Chicago is probably known best to people throughout the world as the birthplace of holiday of international labour solidarity and brotherhood. And Chicago today remains the core of America's industrial heartland, sensitively reflecting the sharp class tensions of Am- erican society and the innum- erable problems growing out of them. rhs Chicago has many things to boast of and many things to be ashamed of. It is not only known as a steel-maker, tool-maker, hog-butcher and key transporta- tion centre. It boasts of an ex- ~cellent symphony orchestra and art museum. It is known, too, for its miles of dismal slums, for its gangsters and high crime rate, for its dens of prostitu- tion and gambling, for its mas- sacres of striking workers. Few workers in Paris know that the Chicago area has a steel capacity of about thirty mil- lion tons a year, but almost all know that May Day had its origin in Chicago, In free Havana, some econo- mists know that 21 major rail- way lines enter the ‘‘windy city”’ and that Chicago’s O’Hare air- port handles more traffic than, any airport in the world. But most Cubans know, as they pre- pare to celebrate May Day, that this holiday was born in a great industrial city of acountry whose government now seeks todestroy them. : That Chicago in 1961 slaught- ered almost two million cattle, one and three-quarters million hogs and about three hundred thousand sheep and lambs is a matter of little interest to the peoples of the world. But they are interested in Chicago as the sac- red shrine of May Day. This is Chicago's real glory. This is what put Chicago ‘‘on the map’”’ for workers in Hanoi and Berlin, for peasants in China and Chile. When Chicago’s workers pour- ed into the streets on the first May Day—that glorious spring — May Day in 1886, demanding an eight-hour day, they sang: Toiling millions now‘are waking, See them marching on, All the tyrants now are shaking, Ere their power is gone. Storm the fort, you knights of labour, Battle for your cause: Equal rights for every neigh- . bour, Down with tyrant laws. Albert Parsons, August Spies and other organizers of this his- toric march paid with their lives for their heroic militancy. They were hung on aframed-up charge after a farcical trial, But they did not die in vain. The move- ment which they started could not be strangled by the hangman’s .in American history as attempted, in the tradition of Chicago’s rulers, to crush a strike of the steel workers by brute force, On May 30, 1937, “Memorial Day,’’ a day honour- ing those who died in the Ameri- can Civil War, the millowners launched a civil war of their own, Their policemen and gunmen - opened fire on a strikers’ picket line, killing ten workers and wounding many others. This bloody episode has gone down the ‘‘Memorial Day massacre.’’ But the workers were not cowed. They: fought on and won. No doubt Carl Sandburg had _this heroic record of labour Workers and their families demonstrate for the 8-hour day in the first May Day demonstration in Chicago in 1886. : rope. The workers of Chicago were determined to achieve the eight-hour day and to organize Chicago’s ‘‘open shops,"’ despite the terror of the bosses, Industry after industry in Chi- cago was paralyzed by massive strikes in 1886 and in the years that followed, In 1894 railwaymen struck and the Federal gov- ernment sent troops to Chicago in an effort to quellthem. Strikes tied up Chicago’s slaughter- houses in 1894 and 1904. The teamsters struck in 1905, And so it went. Through pain- ful struggle, Chicago’s workers compelled the city’s industrial barons to recognize their unions and shorten the working day. The last to yield were the lords of the steel industry in 1937. They struggle in mind when he wrote in his poem ‘‘Upstream’’: The strong men keep coming on, They go down shot, hanged, sick, broken, — They live on fighting . The strong men keep coming on. a Today Ghicago is a ‘funion town’’, perhaps the most highly organized city in America. The gains made by Chicago’s workers — were the outgrowth of the strug-. gles of 1886. But if the workers of Chicago and other American cities have won the right to organize intrade unions, they have not realized the aim of those first May Day marchers’ to abolish ‘‘tyrant _ COMMUNIST PARTY OF B.C. Extends May Day Greetings to all Working People “Unite for Peace, a New Constitution, for Economic Progress”’ PROVINCIAL OFFICE, RM. 503, FORD BLDG., VANCOUVER - American laws’’ and assure ‘‘equal rights for every neighbour.’’ The old ty- rant laws remain on the statute books and new ones, like theSmith and McCarran laws, have been added. The rights of neighbours in Chicago are as unequal as ever, Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais, in their history of the labour movement, wrote of the Chicago of 1886: “The local. barons of beef, pork merchandize and farm ma- chinery, the Armours, Swifts, Medills, Fields and McCormicks, walked Chicago’s earth with royal pride.’’ The police were their minions. And they regarded every May Day marcher, every fighter for equal rights, as a ‘‘foreign agent.’’ It would seem at first glance that Chicago’s toilers have for- gotten the great traditions of their forefathers and have become an inert and selfish mass without a sense of true class conscious- ness, But on second thought, this , is a shallow and shortsighted es- timate. I recall how often in his- tory a seemingly inert working class has sprung to sudden life. Freidrich Engels himself was amazed by the May Day marches of 1886. In a letter to his Am- erican friend Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky, dated June 3, 1886, he wrote: ‘‘The way in which they (the American workers) have made their appearance on the scene is quite extraordinary. Six months ago nobody suspected anything, and now they appear all of a sudden in such organized masses as to strike terror into the whole capitalist class.’’ The people of America learn largely from their -own exper- iences, And the experiences of ‘American May Day marche ingly locked minds, 8 AM | ALBERT R. PARSONS of Haymarket Square *"" was one of the leaders of © Chicago movement ‘or am &® hour work day, havin dressed an eight-hou stration of 25,000 on the »7 day preceding May Day, J Four days after May Day ing a provocation by P? against workers assem Haymarket Square, a bomb ploded and killed a police i geant. Parsons, together w) seven other leaders of / workers, was arrested. — conviction, he ang three of convicted men were ane Noy, 11, 1887, the moment — especially © threat of nuclear war, the & ing burdens of, the mounting aments race, mass unemp™ ment — are stern teachers. — But the American people; the people of other counttl also learn from the experien@ of others. The tramping fe 1886 were heard in London, A sterdam and St. Petersburg: achievements of the U.S.S.R. becoming known in America pite all iron curtains designed t shut out the light of socl truth. Events slowly but su” are beginning to unfreeze Se® America will some day © their proud heritage and fu the dreams of Parsons and SP for an America without tyr@” and tyrant laws, for an Ame” ica living in peace and broth hood with the other nation> © the world. ie WHATIS A GOOD BOOK? “A good book is a book that does not leave the reader intact; it is a chal lenge hurled at us to change something in ourselves and in the world. Roger Garaudy, French Marxist scholar. CAPITAL by Karl Marx Marx, Engels and Lenin GOOD BOOKS ON SOCIALISM Volume 1, A critical analysis of Capitalist Production Volume 2, The Process of Circulation of Capital Volume 3, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole Theories of Surplus-Value, Part 1, (Volume 4 of Capital) FUNDAMENTALS OF MARXISM-LENINISM, edited by O. Kuusinen, 735 page, Cloth. A one-volume popular and all-round exposition of the ideas 50 MARXIST PHILOSOPHY, by V. Afanasyev, 393 pages. Cloth. A popular outlin dealing with philosophy as a science, the conflict between materialis™ and idealism, rise of Marxist philosophy, dialectical and historical mo -terialsm, the role of class struggle, nations, state, social revolution af social consciousness in the development of society FUNDAMENTALS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, by P. Nikitin, 404 pages. Cloth. An Academy of Sciences of the USSR award-winning popular text-book dealing with pre-capitalist modes of production, Monopoly Capitalism— __ Imperialism, Socialism and Communism $1.25 341 W. Pender St. 2 $1.25 VANCOUVER 3, B.C.