THE THREAT TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT
ing under the same auspices, with Ben Gold as the principal speaker, was broken up by the same combination of forces. The manager of Hertzl hall was bought up by the right wing after he had demanded a deposit of $1,000 from the Needle Trades Committee, and the hall turned over to the Amalgamated officials, who were in charge of the fight.
The left wing went to another hall and held a meeting, which the gangsters tried their best to disturb.
3. On Tuesday, Dec. 14, a meeting of the Furriers' union, regularly authorized by the executive board, with International President Shachtman present ,at the time, was held in the Odd Fellows hall at 12th and Albany to hear Ben Gold.
This meeting was likewise broken up by police and gangsters, including officials from other than needle trades unions.
The day before the meeting Edward Nockels, secretary of the Chicago Federation of Labor, called the police department, told them that "a Communist agitator by name of Gold" was "disrupting" the labor movement and that he wanted him taken care of.
In Boston, Hochman of the executive board of the I. L. G. W., with the assistance of gangsters and democratic politicians, broke up a left wing meeting.
The national character of the right wing campaign is clear. It is necessary now to determine two things:
1. If other sections of the labor movement outside of the needle trades, in which Communists are active, were affected.
2. The immediate reason for the launching of the campaign at the time and its connection with the rapid sweep to the right of the official labor movement.
Background of Present Struggle.
A NUMBER of recent events in the labor movement have occurred which are strictly at variance with the "worker-employer co-operation" program mapped out for the labor movement by officialdom. It will be wekk here before listing the events which have disturbed the even tenor of life in official labor circles, to enumerate some of the actions and utterances of labor officialdom which furnish a background for the reactionary campaign and which gave notice of this offensive.
Writing in The DAILY WORKER for September 30 in the second of a series of twelve articles entitled "From Portland to Detroit," I listed a number of reactionary developments in official labor circles from the Atlantic City convention of the A. F. of L. up to that time. These are:
1. The failure of President Lewis to call out the maintenance men in the anthracite strike, the acceptance of a five-year agreement, abandoning the union shop, the acceptance of arbitration in principle, failure to utilize the violation of the bituminous agreement by the coal operators to bring them out in support of the anthracite workers.
2. Legalization of the "worker-employer co-operation" policy by the enactment of the Watson-Parker law, supported by labor officialdom and railway managers.
3. Failure of railway union officials
7
