Wonderful.

‘Passaic Strike Children Outwit Police Thugs’ by Esther Lowell from the Daily Worker. Vol. 3 No. 79. April 14, 1926.

PASSAIC, N.J., April 12-Passaic children are sturdy pickets. Not even the attacks of police on horses and motorcycles and with clubs can scare them. They know why their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers are striking 13,000 strong and picketing the great woolen mills so persistently. When the police came charging their special chlidren’s parade, the kids were clever. They dodged and scattered and then reformed their lines and marched all over the textile towns singing and shouting.

12-Year-Old Pickets Threaten School Strike.

Now they threaten to strike themselves! They say they won’t go to school when the police make the streets so dangerous.

The children don’t hesitate to tell the police what they think of them. And how mad it does make the cops! They tell reporters that they don’t beat the youngsters, but the peppy pickets of 10 to 16 give a different story. The police did hit the older brothers and sisters and mothers accompany the six-to-nine-year-olds in the children’s parade. And some of the older ones were arrested and thrown into jail, too.

The day before the big march of 20,000 children five kids of 9 to 13 came crying home in the morning. The Passaic police had kept them in jail over night without giving them even a crust to eat! The boys and girls had been picketing Police Chief Zobre’s house when they were arrested. In court the judge wouldn’t go thru with his sentence of spanking and sent the kids home with a severe scolding.

Bright little Anna, a 12-year picket for her father and mother and older sister and brother, told me as we were marching to Lodi to picket the United Piece Dye Works that a “cossack” had clubbed her in front of the Gera mills. “If he hadn’t hit the tassel on my cap, I’d have had an awful bump. I didn’t dare tell my mother.” Anna and her girl friend, both of Polish parents, hurry after school every day to join the picket line. It’s the most dramatic event of their young lives but they know how serious it is for their families and neighbors to win a better living thru union organization. They can tell you and they defend strike leaders from the attacks of their teachers in school.

“You come to the strikers’ meetings and picket lines and you’ll learn all about it,” Anna told her teacher when she was not allowed to talk about the strike as a current event in history class. “You’ll see why we need outsiders to help us fight and win. The mill owners are outsiders, and they hire all the smart people they need to fight for them.”

Sister Loses Finger.

Anna’s mother broke Her finger in the mill just before Christmas and it still hurts. Anna’s sister lost her finger in the steel monster of unguarded machinery the last day of December. Since then Anna’s father has been more than ever insistent that she go to high school and not go into the mill. She is the brightest girl but one in her class and her schoolmates like her best because she is so peppy.

“She learns so quickly, she ought to go on,” says her girl friend loyally. “I’m slower. It would be all right for me to work but not for Anna.”

The children had great fun making the signs for their big parade. The leading banner said: “You bosses, you murderers! Fifty per cent more children die in Passaic than in any other part of New Jersey. Why? Night work of the mothers kills them. Lack of food kills them. Low wages kills them. You kill them.”

Shout For Union.

On the picket line Anna and the other youngsters shout: “One, two, three, four. What are we here for? Union, Union! Five, six, seven, eight. Whom do we appreciate? Weisbord! Weisbord!” And then they sing “Solidarity Forever” and some new songs the strike leaders have written. They’re hard to resist, these kids. They are the most active reporters for the Textile Strike Bulletin tabloid newspaper put out by the United Front Committee every week.

The list of donations to the Strike Relief Committee, published regularly in the bulletin, shows how workers far and near and their friends are helping the fight against feudal mill conditions.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1926/1926-ny/v03-n079-NY-apr-14-1926-DW-LOC.pdf