Ed Falkowski, a miner from Shenandoah, Pennsylvania turned radical working class journalist, continues his walk through Weimar Germany.

‘Notes of a Ruhr Miner’ by Ed Falkowski from New Masses. Vol. 5 No. 7. July, 1929.

I. RUHR IN FLAMES.

The days are pale and gray with the smoke of a million chimneys. This smoke hangs over huge mushroom cities, over crumbling ancient villages, as permanently fixed as though it were the sky itself. Beneath this murky veil the Ruhr carries on its feverish existence.

But it is the night which brings out the significance of the Ruhr in tongues of golden flame wavering against the dark. Its thousand steel mills throw out signals of fire to the sky. From its innumerable coke ovens flames leap in giant spurts. And there is the endless jazz band of industrial music audible—starting and quitting whistles, engines dashing into the night leaving trails of hot cinders to mark their course; the throb of mills and factories, the bustle of mine shafts. Hearing this variety of sound one realizes the tremendous significance of the Ruhr.

But for workers there are no nights and days here. Industries grind on week on week without pausing from their mighty toil. Hollow-cheeked workmen may be seen going to work at 10 o’clock at night, at three A.M., at six, at all hours. The shuffling of feet on the sidewalks is as tireless as the whirr of wheels in the shop.

And in the tiny brick shacks which are the homes of the workers, wives rise at 3 A.M. to “fix supper for their men.” Huts fast in slumber before midnight become filled with yellow brilliancy of kerosene lamps. The men are home from their shift. They are now eating a hot supper. The lit windows are festlights of silent joy at the man’s safe return from his shift. For it often happens that a man departs for his work, and never returns any more.

II. THE GREAT UNDERWORLD.

The eye is fascinated by powerful surfaces and skylines in the Ruhr. Massed steel furnaces, forests of smokestacks resembling canon aiming at the heavens; the maze of huge, dim structures which form the complex of a machine factory; cities caught in the spell of sudden importance, dreaming of growth.

But underneath this hurly-burly of important activity lies another world whose 360,000 inhabitants are, to the public, congealed into a tight and ungraspable–solidity featured as a “problem.” For the coal miner here, as everywhere else in our economic system, plays his tragic role of being “problematic” and “incomprehensible.”

He is a “problem” because he protests against starvation. He is “incomprehensible” because he insists on fighting for the things that belong to him—his share of existence.

The life of a coal miner, lived thousands of feet below the earth’s surface, takes on the mystery and color of a strangely fascinating calling. The public is acquainted with his appetite for beer, his ragged clothing, his humble shack, and his “rough” manners. He is of the proletaire, a proletarian, for his trade seems to be the last of all desirable callings. In Germany as in the United States, he is the hardest worked, and the lowest paid of all workers.

It is often denied that mining is a “learned” trade at all. It is rather a fate, a sag in one’s curve of destiny which flings one thousands of feet below the sunlight to dig for one’s crust of bread. In this idea there may be much truth indeed. Yet there is a strange fascination to that underworld which cannot be compared to anything known in the outside world. Few miners, after their years of initiation are once over, would care to exchange with a carpenter or a factory hand in the world of sunlight and rain. In a peculiar way these men “belong.” The secrets and silences of the mines are theirs. Theirs is indeed an inscrutable wisdom.

III. ACADEMIES OF HURRYUP.

All industries are at present suffering the invasion of the academician. Germany has a surplus of engineers who are compelled to accept straw-boss jobs. It is common to find a university trained man doing work which, years ago, was performed by “promoted” workers.

“Promotion” for the common toiler in Germany would be an insane dream if it were dreamed at all. But the worker is too aware of this to permit himself such a dream. Corporations prefer the university-trained man to fill the tiniest positions. The “attitude” of the akademiker is “safer.”

The miners find themselves surrounded by bulldog-looking men almost bursting with self-pride and scorn for the working class. Inspectors, directors, state overseers, foremen, firemen, weathermen, bosses—a horde of officials enter the mines each day. Each in turn dutifully “bawls out” the miner. This starts with the early insults from the strawboss, and continues at intervals during the day. The more important the official, the louder his voice, the more terrific his abuse.

The miner dimly aware of 2,000,000 unemployed workers on the outside, feels the lump in his throat, but dares no utterance. He is thankful he can work at all.

Each day some effort is made to increase his pace. Production, in spite of acknowledged overproduction, seems never to be high enough. “We must get 11 cars per man out of here instead of 10,” is the boss’s “good morning” to the crew.

They shorten their lunch period; they knuckle into it, they bore into the seams of coal, scooping madly, they remove all of their clothes, and the bad air is soured with the smell of sweat. Eleven cars is their goal today. Next week it must reach twelve. The strawbosses congratulate themselves on being able to squeeze down the men.

They don’t know what fires are burning inside of these smeary figures, greasy with hot sweat.

IV. REVOLT IN THE RUHR?

The academician is the new strawboss, thinner blooded and more brutal than his forerunners who usually worked their way up to the top, and had some notion of a worker’s hardships.

But these schooled men never had tried this work before. Their ideas are based purely on school theories. Hurry up systems are efficient systems even if they break down their victims. There are no more old miners in the Ruhr. Under the pressure of intensified speed-up, the life of the miner is decreasing rapidly.

Can the Ruhr miner revolt, fling off his chains of masters, and claim his portion of life? Those who remember the flaming days of the revolution in the Ruhr know how deep is the miner’s hatred of his masters. It is even so in the steel mills, machine factories and hundreds of other colossal works concentrated in the tiny Westphalia corner.

The masters, aware of this, use every weapon available. Poverty wages, company houses and stores, to churches and schools, high salaried staffs of overseers, welfare newspapers, patriotic activities, even secret black-listings, all directed against possible revolt among the workers.

Encouragement of large families by paying premiums on tenth children, free insurance, and aid toward the attainment of a home, is a successful instrument, for once the worker is burdened with a large brood of offspring, his ear is shut against his own better judgement.

But the speed up increases. The mark drops in value. Butter has given way to margarine, and malz coffee has replaced the expensive Java which, to carry the comparison to the Untied States, costs four dollars a pound. This life on the ragged edge threatens to be still further reduced.

The Ruhr miner endures and says little. But he has been seared in the smoke and cinders of 1919-20. He knows what barricades look like, and the war has taught him the frequent insanities of governments, and their instabilities. In the back of his head is a dream formed out of the bitterness and pain of his experience. And he knows that he may yet have to bide his time, but that in the end the day of reckoning for his masters must come. And he will be included among the judges.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1929/v05n02-jul-1929-New-Masses.pdf