Dividing and disciplining labor through anti-immigrant bile and deportations. The boss’s grift with lots of suckers to grift. Born in Poland, textile worker Edith Berkman emigrated to Cleveland in 1921 where she soon became involved in the labor and Communist movements. She did not become a citizen. Organizing textile workers and writing for the Daily Worker, comrade Berkman was active in many strikes, becoming a field organizer for the National Textile Workers Union. In 1931, Berkman was arrested during a strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There she was held for seven months as the federal government tried to deport her to Pilsudski’s Poland, and potential death. A mass campaign helped to win her release. Berkman’s daughter was the radical filmmaker Roz Payne.

‘Deportations and Wage-Cuts–The Case of Edith Berkman’ by Martin Russak from The Daily Worker. Vol. 9 No. 68. March 21 1932.

It is now over five months that Edith Berkman has been imprisoned in the immigration pen at East Boston, Mass. Originally arrested by the immigration authorities while leading the Lawrence strike of February, 1931, she was released on bail soon after that strike ended with the workers winning their main demands from the American Woolen Company.

When the Lawrence workers struck again, this time 23,000 strong, on October 5, 1931, one of the first acts of the government was to revoke the ball of this outstanding and courageous leader of the Lawrence workers who was once again in the front ranks of the struggle. She was again imprisoned in the East Boston pen.

The great strike ended on November 11–betrayed by the American Federation of Labor officials and their Musteite assistants. But Edith Berkman was kept in jail. She is still there, ostensibly held “for deportation.” And the authorities refuse to admit her to bail.

This unprecedented outrage is the work of the American Woolen Company, which in this case is using the federal immigration department to prevent any possible “interference” with its current campaign to make its Lawrence mills more profitable–at the expense of the worst exploitation ever yet imposed upon the workers of Lawrence.

It was not just a 10 per cent cut that millionaire mill-owners put over when they succeeded in defeating the general strike through Riviere, Gorman, Muste and Co. When the workers went back to work they found themselves confronted by cuts that ranged to 30 and 35 per cent–just as Edith Berkman and other leaders of the National Textile Workers Union had predicted. In the spinning department of the Wood mill wages were cut as much as 50 per cent.

The efficiency men–who were driven out of the mills pell-mell by the stormy February strike–are now back in all the huge Lawrence mills. Speed-up and further wage-cuts are planned. Rumor has it that the infamous 9 comb system, which precipitated the February strike, is now again slated for introduction in the combing departments. The Woolen Trust and the Wall Street bankers behind it demand rich profits and regular dividends from their Lawrence mills. This they can get only by imposing a killing speed-up and a starvation wage upon the workers. And to accomplish this they must crush the National Textile Workers Union and give the workers U.T.W. “leaders” like Riviere, MacMahon, and the socialists Blakely, Schulman and Salerno.

Therefore Edith Berkman is held in fall without bail. Therefore Riviere is still in Lawrence, hobnobbing with his friends among the politicians and police; and President MacMahon of the U.T.W. comes to Lawrene for the first time in ten years to speak to his good pals of, the Central Labor Union about the value of “organization.” Speed-up, wage-cuts, U.T.W. fakers, Musteite betrayers, and attacks upon the National Textile Workers Union go together.

The National Textile Workers Union, however, is stubbornly carrying on the fight in Lawrence. New leaders, from the ranks of the Lawrence textile workers, have taken the place of Edith Berkman. Organizational activities are being carried on in all the great Lawrence mills.

The unemployed are being mobilized in the struggle. 2,500 workers demonstrated on the Lawrence Common on National Unemployment Insurance Day, February 4.

In spite of shortcomings in the work of the Union, the situation this time is quite different from what it was after the February strike of last year; the National Textile Workers Union. has consolidated its position even after the loss of the general strike. New struggles are coming fast against the American Woolen Company in Lawrence and elsewhere in New England.

An essential preparation for these struggles must be an effective present fight against the deportation drive.

The textile barons in the Northern mill centers have especially adopted the agents of the immigration department as a “shock troop” in their attempts to terrorize the large numbers of foreign-born workers in their mills.

Agents of the immigration department are active in Lawrence, New Bedford, Pawtucket, Central Falls, Paterson, and other places, but these cities particularly because it is there that the N.T.W.U. is most active. Arrests of militant textile workers for deportation as “Reds” and “Communists” have occurred in all of these cities. Everywhere this line of attack has been supported by the fascist A.F. of L. and U.T.W. officials who have openly called for deportation of the revolutionary workers and the creation of jobs for “American citizens.”

On March 8 twenty-five foreign-born dye workers in Paterson were taken right out of the mills and arrested for deportation in a wholesale attack upon the workers in these large strategic plants for the stated purpose of “making jobs for loyal American citizens.” In this case, the attack is also part of war preparations. The dye plants of Paterson and Passaic are to be used for manufacture of war chemicals in war-time; they must therefore be manned with “loyal American citizens.”

All workers should note that in spite of the numerous arrests for deportation of militant textile workers and their leaders, actually, only two deportations have taken place: the deportations of William Murdoch and Pat Devine, leaders of the National Textile Workers Union, to Scotland. And despite the anti-Communist propaganda made by the government and boss press in connection with these two deportations, Devine and Murdoch were in reality deported on purely technical grounds, i.e., so-called “illegal entry” into the country.

Edith Berkman cannot be deported. She came to the United States legally and her father was naturalized while she was still a minor. Though born in Poland, she is not a Polish citizen and cannot be deported to that country. She is being kept in jail only because the American Woolen Company is still in the midst of a special drive to starve and speed-up the Lawrence workers.

Textile workers will remember that the American-born Assistant National Secretary of the National Textile Workers Union, Ann Burlak, was arrested and held for deportation last summer, during the strike in Central Falls and Pawtucket, R.I. This, too, was an attempt to deprive the workers of militant leadership under the cloak of the “deportation” attack. Edith Berkman must be released.

The workers of Lawrence must lead in the fight for her freedom. It is part of their fight, to stop wage-cuts and win better conditions. The attempts of the capitalist Immigration department to terrorize the textile workers into ever greater hunger and slavery must be answered by rapid building of a mass National Textile Workers Union for a smashing fight against every wage-cut, rotten condition of work, and speed-up, and for Unemployment Insurance,

A solid United Front of all textile workers–native and foreign-born, young and old, employed and unemployed–against the black fascist line-up of mill-owners, deportation frame-ups, U.T.W. officials, and yellow socialist Musteites will bring victory to all textile workers.

MARTIN RUSSAK, National Secretary of the National Textile Workers Union

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/1932/v09-n068-NY-mar-21-1932-DW-LOC.pdf