PROPAGANDA BY DEED

HE capitalists believe in propagandaby word of mouth, by printed matter and by deed. Millions of dollars every year are spent to influence "public opinion." Ninty-nine per cent of the "opinions" that the dear public holds are machinemade. The main purpose of the bourgeois press, however, is not to "put something over," so to speak, but to keep those who read it in a perpetual state of mental slavery, which state is looked upon as the

normal intellectual outlook of the populace.

But sometimes conditions arise which require that sterner and more effective meth

ing away of the old order of things in general.

On June 18 the German mark is reported to have reached the record level of 160,500 to the dollar. This is followed by a panic.

Many of the banks and stores close their

doors. The workmen realize that their real wages have been still further reduced below the starvation line on which they have been living, and threaten to call a general strike. In the Ruhr district the French invaders have practically handed the work

ingmen an ultimatum either to work, fight,

or starve.

The monetary system has crumbled ut

class do the bidding of their masters. For instance, during strikes. Propaganda by deed is then resorted to. As witness what happened to some of the fellow workers who were unlucky enough to fall into the hands of the San Pedro police during the recent waterfront strike.

According to the sworn affidavits of a score or so of men, chief of police Oaks personally beat up three arrested strikers;

several others received brutal treatment at the hands of other police officers. Also, almost a hundred prisoners were herded into a tank in the city jail and the windows shut air-tight, as a result of which the air became so foul that many of them fainted.

Yes, the master class believes in propaganda by deed. At present the state of California and the Ku Klux Klan are its chief exponents in America.

DOLLARS AND MARKS

HE eyes of the whole world are today centered on Germany. What takes place there is laden with profound meaning. It used to be said that some people can see the grass grow in the spring of the year. In Germany things are happening so fast nowadays that by observing her closely we can see with out naked eyes, so to speak, the disintegration of capitalism and the pass

Teentered on Germany. What takes place

italism. The "living wage," or any slightest approach to it, has disappeared; it at least keeps workers in some other countries temporarily contented. Personal initiative, thrift and perseverance can no longer get anything for anybody in Germany; and these constitute almost the whole of the moral background of capitalism. Truly, in Germany, the end of the world is close at hand-the world of capitalism.

The lesson that the German workers are learning from their untold suffering and agony is that in order to extricate themselves from their present predicament and become masters over life they first have to become masters over industry.

THE SANCTIMONIOUS STEEL TRUST

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HE Steel Trust has decided that the twelve-hour day is a good thing for the souls and bodies of its employes, as well as for the general welfare of the "public." Incidentally, we take it for granted that it is not such a bad thing for the pockets of the stockholders, either.

Judge Gary, Charles M. Schwab, and that whole gang of industrial super-pirates who fatten on the sweat and blood of their thousands of slaves who toil in those hellholes of smoke, heat and molten metal known as the steel and iron mills, are

strong for the teachings of the Bible, the beauties of the Holy Land, and the wholesome effects of the 12-hour day.

And yet there are some people left who still believe in all sincerity that this country is "the land of the brave and the home of the free." Free, indeed, to slave your life away for the enrichment of a handful of parasitical overlords!

Never before has production in the steel and iron industries reached such a high peak, and never before have the profits been so enormously great. Steel is now being manufactured at the rate of approximately 44,000,000 tons a year, an increase of 4,000,000 over the previous high mark. Still these magnates are not satisfied.

Even the federated church bodies, representing some fifty million Protestants, Catholics and Jews, have joined in the protest against this barbarous action of the Steel Trust. The Federated American Engineering societies have taken like action, after a careful careful two-year investigation. "Our committee found indisputably," says their report, "that the 12-hour shift is not economically necessary and that continuous industry can be run at a profit with the shorter working day."

We entertain grave doubts that the steel workers will get this shorter work day until they organize industrially at the point of production.

THE BULGARIAN "REVOLUTION"

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NOTHER country has fallen victim to the reaction in Europe. Fascism can add another feather of victory to its cap. The peasant government which ruled Bulgaria since the armistice has been overthrown, Premier Stambouliski has been murdered and a military dictatorship set up. All true and trusty reactionaries-all those who believe that the "lower classes” ought to be "shown their place"-are greatly overjoyed.

Of course, there was nothing much about the Stambouliski regime for the industrial workers to fall in love with. It represented the material interests and aspirations of

JULY, 1923

the peasantry. And the idealism of the peasants is not of the kind that soars over the mountain tops. The city workers were given hardly any consideration by the government. Still, peasants are producers of wealth; they are not to be put in the same. category with the feudal and industrial lords and parasites who are shoving Europe to the brink of utter ruin.

As usual, the Bulgarian counter-revolution was accompanied by violence and bloodshed. The "new reaction" believes that might is right, and it practices what it preaches. Today the mailed fist rules supreme in Italy, France, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria. The doctrine of "brotherly love" has been pigeon-holed, at least for the time being, as being either a backnumber or an unattainable ideal.

What will be the fate of the working class, of the liberals, of the radicals of various complexions, under the new regime? Will they be tortured and slaughtered by the thousands, as was the case in Hungary after Admiral Horthy and his "white" henchmen took over the reins of power? There can be no doubt that both the peasants and the city workers will be made to suffer greatly.

The only hope for bleeding, unhappy Europe is a united working class determined to throw overboard all the militaristic parasites, to take over the functions of production and distribution, and to bring order out of chaos by operating industry for use instead of for profit. A big job!-but sooner or later it will have to be done.

BOXE

SHOOT EM IN"

I

AM thinking of moving to the city. What would you say are the advantages of city over country life?-John F.

Our answer to the above question would be that when it comes to advantages of various kinds, the country ain't in it-any way you look at it. Take such a little matter as doing chores, for instance. Why, there's hardly any chores to be done in the city, cows being few and far between, and instead of horses we have automobiles. You can feed a tin lizzy a couple gallons of gasoline any time of day, so there's no reason to get bumped out of bed at four o'clock in the morning to attend to the feeding. As for the milking-well, most of that is done by slick guys who hang out downtown, and it's mostly fellows that are new in the ways of the city that get milked. So you see somebody else does the work.

There are many other advantages, but we can only enumerate a few of them here. One of them is that you don't have to have anybody call you in the morning, the street cars will wake you up long before day-break. In some parts of town they will also keep you from falling asleep so you see all the time you save, which otherwise you would sleep away for nothing.

According to statistics twenty-five thousand people commit suicide every year in the United States. Those that live in the country must have a hard time of it, as the facilities there for making a trip to the happy hunting grounds are very few. In a city all you got to do is go down to the business section, shut your eyes and start out to walk across a busy street. By the time you get over to the opposite sidewalk you will have a harp in your hands and a halo around your dome, or else—well, you know as much about the other place as we do. Oftentimes you will get there even without shutting your eyes.

Another way of committing suicide is by eating in the Greek and Jap restaurants and other cheap joints. That takes a little more time but to the best of our knowledge it's never been known to fail. Slow but sure.

Living quarters in the city have it all over the country. There are thousands and thousands of swell apartments in the fine hotels and better parts of town-some of them renting for as low as hundred and fifty plunks per month. If you get a job making twenty or twenty-five a week and if you save your money, in just a short time-say, ten or

fifteen years-you will have enough money saved up to rent one of these apartments for a month.

Then think of the great variety or diversity of things in a large city! A million things to see, feel and experience. Have you ever been thru the East Side of New York City? Well, you ought to go there. You will find miles and miles of brick tenement houses-very few of them are exactly alike—countless heaps of garbage in various stages of putrefaction, a million or so dirty kids having the time of their lives playing hide and seek in between speeding automobiles, and innumerable push-cart peddlers sporting the choicest assortment of whiskers to be found anywhere on earth. It's a great sight! There you will find impersonified the wonderful progress that the human race has made in less than twenty centuries of continuous upward march toward the heights of perfection.

Some people say that there are not enough trees and other signs of real nature in the large cities, but that's a darn lie. Take, for instance, Chicago. No matter where one might live an hour's ride on the street car will bring him to a square or park where there's a few trees and perhaps even a patch of grass. What more does anybody want?

Then again, if one likes trees, let him go to the art museums. There are lots of trees there-on canvas. Of course, it might take him a good long while before he will be able to distinguish, let us say, between "a little girl chasing a butterfly" and "a cherry tree in blossom." Futuristic art is one of the greatest exercises for the mind that we know of. Another advantage that the city has over the country. In the country they still call a cow a cow and a spade a spade-don't know any better.

We hope that by this time you see where the country gets off at, when pitted up against the city- it's out of the race altogether. If you want to get more points on this write us again in the future.

I have often wondered why so many working people when they go into restaurants order hamburger steak or Irish stew, instead of T-bone steak or half spring chicken with all the trimmings. Could you enlighten me on this subject thru The Question Box?-Genevieve Louise V.

This is a question that has been a great puzzle to the deepest students of psychology, scholars in ethics and anthropology, and other learned men for a long time. Why will a man prefer pork and beans

to broiled tenderloin steak with mushrooms au gratan and shoe-string potatoes? To extend the same question to other fields, why will a man buy an old shabby suit of second-handed hand-me-downs when the stores are chuck full of the finest all-wool suits cut in the latest patterns?

That part of the question dealing with T-bone steaks we would advise you to refer to T-Bone Slim. Very likely he will be able to throw some light on the subject, since he is reputed to know all about that variety of the steak family.

But to get back to the original question: Various solutions have been advanced by our great and learned men. For example, there is Professor Wisenacer, head of the department of experimental psychotherapy of the House of Morgan University, who has won world-wide fame by his ingenuous "Irish stew complex" hypothesis. It's supposed to work like this: A working stiff that's been heaving coal the whole day long goes into a restaurant for supper feeling all tired out. While waiting for the hash-slinger to grab his order he figures as follows: Jack Dempsey is Irish; Irish stew is Irish; ergo, if I eat enough Irish stew I will become as strong as Jack Dempsey. So he hollers out to the waiter: "Irish stew on one, heavy on the Irish potatoes!" While under the influence of this "complex" it never occurs to the poor guy that he could have ordered just as easily a porterhouse steak with hash-brown potatoes and a side of sliced tomatoes.

Professor Wisenacer has made his mark in the world by putting forth the above hypothesis, but Doctor Servtherich of the Steel Trust University is not far behind. He has made announcement recently of his epoch-making theory that working people eat hamburger steaks because the shape of the steaks remind them of the mud-pies they used to make when they were kids. These people want to live over again the happy days of their care-free childhoodand so they feast their eyes on hamburger steaks. Them were the happy days-eh? No income tax reports to fill out, no automobile repair bills to pay, no silk dresses to buy for the dear girls that's getting the finishing touches put on at the Young Ladies' Finishing School!

JULY, 1923

By way of parenthesis, we might also mention that some hare-brained crank who ought to be sent to the state psychopathic hospital has made the crack that some people order hamburger and stew because these cost less than the other things. Can you imagine anything as foolish as all that? What's a few dollars a day more or less spent on grub, when the people of this nation are the proud possessors of wealth estimated at five hundred billion dollars? The idea is ridiculous on the face of it!

What is your explanation why styles in clothes change so often?-J. P. L.

Changing styles in wearing apparel every few weeks is a highly effective method of raking into the coffers of the clothing manufacturers what loose coin the so-called people have left after they have satisfied the rest of their demands.

It merely goes to show that there is no limit to the cleverness of some men. If the young ladies are slow in buying dresses with short skirts, make the skirts a couple yards longer and they will have to buy, or be adjudged back-numbers by the fashion experts. No self-respecting, conventional-minded young thing-especially of marriagable agewants to be told that her glad rags are a hundred years behind the times, and so she, or her papa, coughs up enough kale to buy a few new dresses. The clothing manufacturers and merchants pocket the profits.

The same thing applies to men's clothes. If pinchback suits are the style now, three months later "sack effects" will be all the go. There is no end to the variety of combinations that coat buttons lend themselves to. One, two, three and four button suits come and go with lightning rapidity, Business is stimulated. The capitalists who control the clothing industry heap up the profits; that's all they are interested in, anyhow. They don't give a hang whether the new style is artistic or not.

But this whole question, from our point of view, is a side issue. We are primarily concerned with fighting the master class at the point of production.

F

OREWORD by Editor: In the May issue of The Industrial Pioneer was printed an article dealing with the Electronic Reactions of Abrams. While the intentions of the author were undoubtedly of the best, it cannot be denied that the contribution savored of unwarranted partiality to the claims of Dr. Abrams and his disciples. We have received many criticisms of the article, written by medical men and students of health culture and allied subjects. Of especial interest to us have been the points raised in their friendly letters by T. H. Bell and Alice Chase of Los Angeles and Dr. Benzion Liber of New York City.

The Industrial Pioneer believes in square and fair dealing with its many thousands of readers and well-wishers, especially in regards to as vital a question as the conservation of health and the curing of disease. If in our May number the author of the Abrams article has not treated his subject as impartially as he should have done, we stand ready to be corrected. Owing to lack of space we cannot print more than one of the criticisms sent us. The sender of the letter printed below is Dr. Benzion Liber, editor of "Rational Living," a radical health journal published monthly in New York City, and author of "The Child and the Home."

Editor, "The Industrial Pioneer," Chicago, Ill.

Dear Fellow Worker:

In your May issue you printed an article on the Abrams methods. It was one-sided, biased, and altho painted red at the end by the mention of "exploitation of man by man," it was, in my opinion, out of place in a radical labor magazine. Its author seemed to forget that the real primary causes of disease among workers lie in poverty, overwork, insufficient rest, ignorance, improper food, congested living conditions, too many children, wrong posture at work, poisonous gases, fumes, vapors in the shops, inhaling obnoxious dusts, etc., and that these causes cannot be removed by the operation of an electric apparatus, no matter how clever it is. The author claims that "sickness is unknown among animals which have not become domesticated." The assertion is wholly unfounded. As a matter of fact all wild species of animals have their diseases and most wild plants are infested with sickness. The belief to the contrary may have an unnecessarily discouraging effect upon your readers.

While I have criticized and exposed the medical profession more than anybody else, I cannot tolerate any fraud and humbug anywhere. The fact that some "healers" are opposed to regular doctors does

not mean that they are more honest than the latter. And it is certainly not true that "the great bulk of the doctors who rely upon drugs and surgery realize that if a definite method for actually curing people has been found, many of them will find themselves out of jobs." On the contrary, they would have only to gain by accepting the Abrams theory: there is more money in it than in our regular practice!

I have studied the Abrams methods at first hand and have seen many patients treated with them and I can say: Not only is it untrue that "many thousands have been cured" by them, but I have not seen one case really and permanently cured by them.

He says: "So far I have not read or heard anything which in my opinion invalidates the claims of Dr. Abrams."

I wonder whether he has read my article on the Abrams method in "Rational Living" for January or the letter of an Abrams student in the February issue, or the article of the same student, a Chicago physician, in the March issue of the same magazine? Is he or any other Abramite able to refute one by one the facts packed into those articles? If he is, why does he fail to do it? Is it perhaps because they were published in a small journal, with a limited circulation?

It would also interest him to learn that the author of a series of articles favorable to Abrams and published in The New York Call-one whose quotations are still peddled around by the promoters of the new cult-has recently confessed his mistake, as can be seen in the March issue of "Rational Living."

Most physicians or pseudo-physicians who have adopted the Abrams methods belong to one of the following two types of men or to a combination of both: Half-baked, superstitious persons, inclined to the miraculous and ready to believe anything without the need of really and absolutely convincing proofs, or those who will accept any new theory which may bring in quick and easy money, at least until it is found to be erroneous.

The writer of these lines was open-minded and willing to learn, but remained unconvinced by Abrams himself, his pupils and his patients, or rather became convinced thru them that the elec tronic reactions are of no use whatever in the cure of real human ailments.

Hoping that you will not misunderstand the spirit of perfect friendship and devotion to your ideals with which I am writing, I am,

Yours for honest enlightening of the workers,
BENZION LIBER
Editor "Rational Living."