Vern Smith on Hoover’s deportations, an attack on the labor movement.

‘Stop This!’ by Vern Smith from Labor Defender. Vol. 6 No. 4. April, 1931.

A WAVE of deportations spreads over the country!

It is as serious as the “deportation delirium of 1921,” but significantly different from it.

In New York Tao Li is facing deportation to China. His case is on appeal to the Department of Labor in Washington.

Eduardo Machado, a Venezuelan, arrested at the office of the Trade Union Unity League, faces deportation and medieval torture. Guido Serio, an Italian worker arrested at Erie, Pa., with evidence against him largely that he is an enemy of fascism and the Catholic church, is threatened with death. The government determinedly insists on deporting him to Italy. It refuses to let him voluntarily depart to any land where they do not have the rifles already loaded in the hands of a fascist firing squad.

August Yokinen, a Finnish worker, is also being railroaded to deportation. Why? Because, at a mass trial called by the Communist Party, he admitted that he was guilty of acts of white chauvinism and promised to fight for the complete equality of Negro and white workers there- after.

Bebritz, editor of “Uj Elore,” Hungarian Communist daily, is slated for exile.

In Boston: Bill Murdock is headed for deportation to Scotland; Edith Berkman to Poland; Pat Devine to Ireland. These are all leaders of the National Textile Workers Union in the partially successful Lawrence strike, and their deportation is demanded by the American Woolen Company.

In Boston also: Benjamin Saul and Goldie Waldman are held for deportation. They led the February 25th unemployment demonstration.

A. Pinto, arrested in the New Bedford strike is being kept in this country only thru the vigilant efforts of the International Labor Defense.

John Peltzer, a German, was taken off the boat where he was working in Galveston, Texas, and held for deportation. They are trying to find his family in order to deport them too.

Most of these cases are on the Pacific coast. Ed Wing, a Chinese worker, has been held in Los Angeles jail for nine months. He was granted voluntary deportation, but then they refused him a passport. The authorities plan to send him to Chiang-Kai-Shek’s torturers and stranglers. Ten workers are held in jail in San Francisco, facing deportation.

Seventeen workers lie in jail in Portland, Oregon, waiting for ships to scatter them among the fascist lands of Europe, where many of them will be hanged.

This flood of deportation cases is not accidental. The Fish Committee has been talking about more and easier deportations for a year. The instantaneous action of the Department of Labor in the Lawrence, Mass. and Yokinen cases shows that their policy is ready made, that their agents are instructed and watching closely. It is not yet a policy of widespread “Red raids,” of a frontal attack on the workers’ main organizations. That will come later.

The whole policy of the government is one of flank movements just now. They do not yet suppress the Daily Worker, they snipe off the less well known papers Vida Obrera, Young Worker, Young Pioneer. They do not yet drive underground the National Textile Workers Union, they snipe its active strike leaders. Right now, they do not eliminate the principal leaders. of the revolutionary movement, they bushwhack Yokinen, a rank and file member. They do not yet attack the main offices of the Communist Party; they raid and smash up the Los Angeles and other district offices. They do not kill the better known leaders of the unemployed movement; they kidnap and flog two local leaders in Dallas, Texas.

Now this is a campaign with a strategy which is becoming plain enough. The capitalist ruling class of America learned something from the Palmer raids and the deportations of 1921. That sort of stuff did not succeed, for in the main it made a lot of noise and roused sympathy for those persecuted. The present campaign is an encircling movement, aimed to isolate and then crush the main centers of militant labor action in America. All the more dis- tant points are attacked first, the lesser known publications, the weaker sections of the working class. Shorn of its limbs, the capitalist rulers think they can more easily destroy the main body later.

The whole wave of deportations is obviously part of the program. The Negro and foreign-born workers are in a peculiarly exposed position. So the Negro is lynched and meanwhile the masses of white workers are deluged with the propaganda of race prejudice. Likewise the foreign-born workers are harried and terrorized. The terror begins with individuals, and is worse in the inland industrial centers. All the deportations, the terrorizing of the foreign born, are part of the encirclement of the whole militant labor movement, leading to more ruthless wage- cutting and speed-up of the entire working class. They think this will be easier if the large section of foreign-born is cowed, silenced.

Already large lumber concerns of the Northwest have perfected elaborate check-up systems on militant workers. Directly imitating the police, with their Rogue’s Gallery, the employing class is keeping perfected Bertillon records for a Militant Workers Gallery. This is spreading over the country. Finger-printing of all workers–equally with criminals, is the aim of the bosses. Will the workers stand for this?

They start first with the foreign-born and Negro. Next they get the native-born. And that’s how they want to encircle and attack the entire working class.

The workers must be on guard against all these stratagems and trickery. Part of the attack against the foreign born workers involves the simultaneous campaign to divide them from the native born, to rouse American nationalistic prejudices against them, to make a pogrom, just as the lynching of Negroes is accompanied by a campaign of race prejudice.

But the whole working class must see this movement in its entirety. Each of these flank attacks on the working class leads up to an attack on the mass organizations of native as well as foreign born workers. This is foreshadowed plainly in the Fish Committee reports and indicated in the bosses’ own press, the financial organs which the workers do not read. And any injury that could be done these mass organizations (for they can not be crushed) would lead directly to wage cutting, lengthening of hours, speed-up and unemployment of which the present samples are only dim beginnings.

The fight of the foreign born is the fight of the native born-it is the first round of the fight of the whole working class for the right to live. March 28, “Solidarity Day,” has been chosen for mass nationwide demonstrations against deportations and against the persecution of the Negro masses. Make this the beginning of a mass movement that will give the capitalist campaign a sharp check at the very start.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1931/v06n04-apr-1931-LD.pdf