6,000 attend a Lenin memorial service addressed by Charles E. Ruthenberg and Dennis Batt at Detroit’s Arena Gardens.

‘Detroit Holds Huge Meeting in Honor of Lenin’ by Stanley Boone from The Daily Worker. Vol. 1 No. 332. February 6, 1924.

Detroit workers, with great songs and great words, gathered in the largest auditorium in Detroit to pay a special tribute to Lenin. Six thousand men, women, and children assembled in Arena Gardens behind the combined Russian and Ukrainian choruses in a memorial service without precedent here. Hundreds were turned away.

C.E. Ruthenberg, Secretary of the Workers Party of America, and Dennis E. Batt, editor of the Detroit Labor News, organ of the Detroit Federation of Labor, were the speakers. On one side of the platform light played on a portrait of the dead leader, draped in red and black. Outward from the platform stretched the deep rectangle of unquiet faces, rising at last where the gallery cut upward to the roof.

Ruthenberg followed Batt on the program and was greeted with three successive choruses of applause that he had difficulty in quieting. Outbursts of emotion came again and again when the speakers were telling of Lenin and his place in history.

Former Revolts Were Blind.

Ruthenberg traced the efforts of the world’s exploited millions, since the ancient Greek slave state, to cast off oppression and achieve freedom, first pointing out that a knowledge of this background was essential to an understanding of Lenin’s life. Previous revolts had been emotional and blind, he said. Slave and serf revolted when their suffering grew unbearable. It was Lenin’s work to adjust revolutionary effort not only to desire and principle but scientific plan.

The point was stressed by Batt that whereas Lenin saw effects take place in his own lifetime at least equal to those seen by Napoleon, Washington, Caesar, and Alexander, the effects with which he had to do were not dependent on the presence of his own personality. Lenin, the Marxian, could not give his life to a plan which he did not believe would survive him.

Need of Communist Vanguard.

Though his immediate revolutionary tactic was hinted in the slogan that swept Russia, “All Power to the Soviets,” Lenin saw that there must also be developed a revolutionary vanguard in the Communist Party, a body of the most enlightened men and women of the movement, to advise and to guide and to lead and to carry their discipline to the point of facing imprisonment or death if so ordered, Ruthenberg said. And now we could turn to any country of Europe or Asia and find there, whether in England or Bulgaria, the party of Lenin leading the struggle of the workers toward the ideal of freedom. It was so in Japan and China.

“And we must not forget that here in America we have a Communist Party, the Workers Party, the party of Lenin…”

Join Workers Party!

Those present who felt deeply the significance of the gathering, the purpose and the admiration and the hope which had brought them together, could do no better in passing out the door to their homes than to apply for membership in the Workers Party, by filling out an application that they might obtain there, Ruthenberg added. He defined also the purpose of the Communist International and its relationship, in Lenin’s mind, with the Russian Revolution and the revolution of the workers everywhere against capitalist exploitation by imperial states.

As Comrade Batt explained, Ruthenberg concluded, Lenin began early in his life to plan and work for the revolution. To this ideal and this plan he gave his great intelligence, his great courage. He was always a soldier on its fighting front, demanding, planning, and looking toward the dictatorship of the proletariat. Let the thousands who were present follow in his footsteps.

A Finnish band played intermittently, sometimes an accompaniment to the voices of the magnificent choirs. Full throated human voices and sounded brass opened and closed the services with “The International” and “The Funeral March of the Russian Revolution.”

“Long Live the Revolution.”

A resolution, read by Edgar Owens, District Organizer of the Workers Party, chairman of the meeting, written by the Detroit Lenin Memorial Committee and adopted with a crash of hand clapping, conveyed to the Central Executive Committees of the Communist International and the Communist Party of Russia the following condolence “in the loss of our beloved leader”:

“We, the workers of Detroit, do on this solemn occasion offer our heartfelt tribute to the memory of the great leader of the international working class, Vladimir Ilich Ulianov–Lenin. In accord with the conscious workers of the world we express our sorrow for the loss of our beloved and incomparable leader and pledge ourselves to struggle unceasingly for the victory of the workers’ revolution. Comrade Lenin is dead. But his ideas, as expressed in the Communist International, live and are leading the toiling. masses of the world to freedom from the yoke of capitalist slavery. Eternal glory to the memory of Lenin! Long live the workers’ revolution!”

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.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v01-n332-feb-06-1924-DW-LOC.pdf