A cathartic read as a Russian-born worker puts two fingers up to the United States and heads back to a homeland in revolution. Tens of thousands of radicals were deported during the first Red Scare.

‘Goodbye America’ by Ivan Ivanovitch from The Ohio Socialist. No. 90. October 22, 1919.

Well, goodbye, fellows! Yes, I am leaving, going home, going back to the first workingman’s country in the world Soviet Russia.

For seventeen long years you and I have been toiling side by side. Together we cussed and swore about the lousy bunks and punk grub in the rain-soaked logging camps of Washington and Oregon; together we “humped” lumber and railroad ties in the California seaports; together we “mucked” in the tunnels and grading camps of Nevada and Utah; together we hayed in Colorado and harvested in Kansas and the Dakotas: together we smelled the stink of Chicago stock-yards, hustled in the machine-shops of Cleveland and the steel mills of Pittsburgh, sailed on the Lakes; together we worked in half a dozen ship-yards, all along the Eastern Coast.

We know each other, you and I. And now let me tell you why I want to go back.

Somehow you fellows have got it into your heads that this is the best country in the world for a workingman to live in, and that it will remain the best. More than that. You say that this country, as it is now, is good enough for you and you’d just as soon have it as it is for ever and ever. Anybody who disagrees with you is unpatriotic, or an ungrateful knocker.

“If You Don’t Like Your Uncle Sammy.”

It is a hundred to one bet that an American-born worker’s answer to a dissatisfied foreigner will always be: “If you don’t like this country, get to hell out of it. Nobody invited you to come here; who’s keeping you now?” Many American-born workingmen think that this is a very smart answer a regular knock-out; in reality, it is the silliest sentence in the world to be spoken by a working man.

Let me show you why.

Who owns this country, the great shops, the railroads, the big banks; the forests, rich mines and fertile soil? Do the workingmen own them, or a handful of millionaires with their comfortable and well-paid managers, foremen, superintendents, guards and private detectives?

Who make the laws, who enforce them, who appoint the judges, police and jail-keepers? The workers or the bosses?

True enough, every little while the politicians paid and controlled by these same bosses and millionaires come around asking for your votes. And you swallow all their bunk, vote for them, and think you’re ruling the country. Then you go on strike. A Judge (the one you voted for) issues an injunction forbidding you from picketing. A Sheriff (you voted for him) gives deputy badges to scabs and private detectives. A Governor (you helped to elect him) calls in the militia to break the strike.

A band of thugs hired by John D. Rockefeller shoot down striking coal-miners in Colorado, and burn their women and children to death–nobody’s punished. A band of thugs hired by the Phelps-Dodge Company at Bisbee deport five hundred striking copper miners into the desert at the point of a gun-nobody’s punished. A servant of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, a District Attorney named Fickert (you helped elect him, too) sends Tom Mooney to jail for life on a frame up nobody’s punished except Mooney.

Yes, you rule the country–like Hell!

Millions of you don’t know yet that it doesn’t make a particle of difference whether Republicans, Democrats, Progressives or “Independents” win the election. It’s nothing to you whether this or that “friend of labor,” whether this “good” man or that “great” man gets a soft political job.

How many more times must you be fooled before you begin to see it? The great industrial and financial barons of this country hold every politician in the hollow of their hands. If the politicians do as they are told to, they get promoted; if they do what they promised you to do, they are down and out.

As for us working men you American-born and we foreign-born get work if they can make money out of us; if they can’t, we can go hang ourselves. When we have jobs, we get barely enough to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves. When we have jobs, we get barely enough to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves and our families. When we are out of work we face starvation. And when starvation comes, they tell us: “Don’t make trouble, or you’ll get your head cracked by a cop’s club. Stand in line. Patronize the soup-houses. Charity will take care of your family if there’s enough to go around. Shut up, and be thankful for the slops!”

America, at this moment, is the biggest gold-mine for the capitalists that ever existed in all history. The capitalists of America have made so many millions of dollars (yes, they skinned it out of you and me), that they are searching all over the world for places to invest it; for countries in which to build new shops, mills and railroads, to dig new mines, and skin more millions out of the workingmen of other countries Mexico, China, Siberia…But when it comes to pay the war-debts, these hundreds of millions of profits are scarcely touched. Instead. the wise men in Washington, D.C. (your Government), have the nerve to tax the workingman, to take it out of the children of the poor.

One cent tax on each ice-cream cone! One cent on each nickel ticket to a moving-picture show! Twenty cents on the poor man’s dollar! A blind man ought to see by whom and for whose benefit the laws are made!

Of course the capitalists are satisfied with this country as it is now. Of course they want to “kick to hell out of this country” every foreign workingman who sees and doesn’t like the great skin-game that is going on.

And the American-born worker who slings the same words against his fellow-worker born in another country, is simply echoing the sentiments of the boss who robs him, beats him and breaks him.

For seventeen long years-the best years of my life–I have slaved for the American money-bags. All I got for it was a bare living, like a farmer’s mule or a contractor’s team-horse.

So did you, my American friends and fellow-workers–Yankee of New England and Native Son of the Golden West. The only difference between you and me is that I understood it and felt it every day and every hour, while most of you don’t understand it and don’t feel it even now.

When wages were $15 a week, we bought pork chops for 10 or 12 cents a pound. Now we get $30 a week, and the same kind of pork chops cost us 45 cents a pound. Wages have doubled; pork chops cost almost four times as much. Where do we gain when in the face of the unheard-of cost of living, our wages don’t increase in proportion, but fall more and more behind the price of necessities?

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Our jobs are getting more uncertain every day you know that as well as I do. If we are too old, if we can’t work fast enough, if they can get cheaper men, if we give back-talk to a cranky straw-boss, if we open our mouths in Union meetings, if we kick for better conditions then we get fired. Isn’t that right?

But the most pitiful figures are those workingmen who think they are well-off; by scraping, saving, working themselves to the bone, have managed to get a two-by-four house and lot on a ten-year installment plan. Being afraid to lose their jobs in that vicinity, they cease to be men, and turn into worms. They are afraid to kick, afraid to protest. afraid to strike; they do not dare to open their mouths.

On top of all this, when, on account of the speeding up of production, or unsettled industrial or financial conditions, the millionaire bosses have on hand too many unsold products, or they can’t sell them at a big enough profit then they shut down mills and whole industries, and millions of workers are turned out on the street.

By all the signs it looks as if the workers of America will get one of those vacations in the near future not only a good long one, but a lean one.

Is there any help for it? Is there any way out?

Yes, there is! And not a theory, either, but a practical scheme that is row working.

Every one of you has been reading for the past two years the fake newspaper stories about Russia, and the hair-raising tales of the “terrible Bolsheviki.” The bigger the lie, the better it is paid for by the capitalist papers, who are owned and controlled by the same millionaire bosses who own the industries.

Why?

Because the working men and soldiers of Russia, hand in hand with the farm-hands and the poorest farmers, overthrew, not only the bloody Tsar and his slave-drivers, but also the shyster Kerensky, behind whose coat-tails the millionaire bosses of Russia expected to keep on skinning the workers.

Because these same workers organized their own Workers’ Government. Because the Bolsheviki Soviet Government took away the factories, mills, mines, banks and land from their millionaire owners did not pay a cent for them and turned them over to the workers, farm-hands and poor farmers.

Because in spite of all difficulties, the workers of Russia are learning how to manage and run the industries for the benefit of all who work.

Because the workers of Russia are succeeding, and are defending their own Soviet Government against all attacks from the capitalist Governments of Japan, England, France, Italy and America, who are assisting the old. millionaires and the Tsarist generals in their attempt to restore the Russian workers to slavery.

Because the American millionaire bosses are shaking in their stolen shoes for fear you American-born workers learn something about the real conditions in Soviet Russia. They are afraid that you might begin to think that the way of the Russian workers is a good way out of the present capitalist swamp toward industrial freedom,

They fondly hope that you American-born workers will believe all the lies they tell you, that you will forget your own conditions and join in the hunt for Bolsheviks in America.

They are trying to split the workers into an American-born and a foreign-born section. set them fighting each other, and thus skin both of them.

They are not afraid of the foreign-born workers. They know that the few foreign-born rebels cannot harm their looted money-bags. But they fear worse than fire that you American-born workers will become revolutionists. And they are right. The future of America, the future of the working class of America, rests in the hands of the American-born workers. If you turn revolutionists, the American millionaires and their flunkeys are doomed.

As for me, I am getting weary of slaving for any millionaire; I am sick and tired of being at the mercy of a bone-headed straw-boss for a job; I am disgusted with lots of things that you are still proud of.

I want to live and work among free workers. I want to spend the rest. of my life working for a better future for mankind, liberated from all the parasites. Yes. I would prefer to die fighting against the enemies of the New Social Order in Workingmen’s Russia, than to spend the rest working for American millionaires, and then, Worn out die by the road side here in America, leaving behind me sons and daughters to go through the mill that I went through.

But I believe that time and experience will change your minds, fellow- workers born in America. Then you will act as the working class of Russia acted.

And when do you perhaps some of you remember that the “damned Polak or the crazy Russian, as you so often called me, wasn’t so “damned” or so “crazy” after all.

Yours for a free world for the workers,

IVAN IVANOVITCH.

The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from January, 1917 to November, 1919. It was edited by Alfred Wagenknecht Wagenknecht spent most of 1918 in jail for “violation of the Conscription Act.” The paper grew from a monthly to a semi-monthly and then to a weekly in July, 1918 and eventually a press run of over 20,000. The Ohio Socialist Party’s endorsement of the Left Wing Manifesto led to it suspension at the undemocratic, packed Socialist Party Convention in 1919. As a recognized voice of the Left Wing, the paper carried the odd geographical subheading, “Official Organ of the Socialist Parties of Ohio and Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and New Mexico” by 1919’s start. In November of that year the paper changed to the “labor organ” of the Communist Labor Party and its offices moved to New York City and its name changed to The Toiler, a precursor to the Daily Worker. There the paper was edited by James P. Cannon for a time.

PDF of issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/ohio-socialist/090-oct-22-1919-ohio-soc.pdf