‘Us, The Hoboes’ by Covington Hall from International Socialist Review. Vol. 14 No. 10. April, 1914.

WE shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the world in awe,
We shall trample on your customs and shall spit upon your law;
We shall come up from life’s desert to your burdened banquet hall,
We shall turn your wine to wormwood, your honey into gall.

We shall go where wail the children, where from your race killing mills
Flows a bloody stream of profits to your cursed insatiate tills;
We shall tear them from your drivers in our shamed and angered pride
With the fury and the fierceness of a fatherhood denied.

We shall set our sisters on you, those you trapped into your hells,
Where the mother instinct’s stifled and no earthly beauty dwells;
We shall call them from the living death–the death in life you gave,
To sing our class’s triumph o’er your cruel system’s grave.

We shall strip them of their epaulets, the panderers who fight
Your wars against the workers for a bone on which to bite.
We shall batter down your prisons, we shall set your chain-gangs free,
We shall drive you from the mountainside, the valley, plain and sea.

We shall hunt around the fences where your ox-men sweat and gape
Till they stampede down your stockades in their effort to escape;
We shall steal up through the darkness, we shall prowl the wood and town
Till they waken to their power and arise and ride you down.

We shall send a message to them on a whisper down the night,
We shall bid the warrior women drive the ox-men to the fight;
We shall use your guile against you–all the cunning you have taught–
All the wisdom of the serpent to attain the ending sought.

We shall come as comes the cyclone–in the stillness we shall form,
From the calm your terror fashioned, we shall hurl on you the storm;
We shall strike when least expected–when you think toil’s rout complete
And crush you and your hessians ‘neath our brogan-shodded feet.

We shall laugh to scorn your power that now holds the world in awe,
We shall trample on your customs and shall spit upon your law;
We shall outrage all your temples–we shall blaspheme all your gods,
We shall turn the old world over as a plowman turns the clods.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v14n10-apr-1914-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf