Clarissa S. Ware, perhaps the most senior women Communist Party in its first years, was the Party’s spokesperson on immigrant and immigration issues. The death Clarissa ‘Cris’ Smith Ware (she was ex-wife of C.P. agricultural spokesperson, and son of Ella Reeve ‘Mother’ Bloor, Harold Ware) shortly after this article was published remains one of the ugly secrets of the early Communist Party. According to Ben Gitlow a destructive relationship developed in the top leadership of the C.P. as Party leader C.E. Ruthenberg and his top ally Jay Lovestone were rivals in a love triangle which, for added drama, also had Comintern representative John Pepper pursuing comrade Ware. A pregnancy ensued and Ware, almost certainly under some pressure, died tragically on Sept. 27, 1923, of an infection contracted during an underground abortion. The Party published that her death was from a botched ‘operation for pancreatitis’ with the National Office affair, of course, unmentioned.

‘Selective Immigration’ by Clarissa S. Ware from Labor Herald. Vol. 2 No. 7. September, 1923.

ON the immigration question, the last Congress “passed the buck” along to the next, with its good advice and blessing. The general lines of the legislation that will probably be passed, when the new Congress meets, can be forecast. Various bills were introduced into the House and Senate to change the basis and percentages of the quota law. The smoke-screen of “Free vs. Restricted Immigration” was thrown out. Evidence registering all points of view was taken down at length, and published at even greater length. All the usual motions were gone through, and the administration arrived at its policy. The Colt Bill, sponsored by the employers’ associations, was introduced into the Senate. “Selective immigration” became the watchword. Gompers and Gary were both satisfied. The lion and the lamb lay down together.

Free immigration, from which the employers would run away even faster than Gompers, was traded for selective immigration. The administration, to prove its friendship to Labor, then went so far as to request Judge Gary to abolish the 12-hour day in the steel mills. The canny Judge had studied “selective immigration”; he had tapped the supply of unorganized Negro labor in the South; he had even conversed casually with Signor Mussolini. He promised to consider the request. And soon after Mr. Grace, President of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, stated:

“We feel that those who are eager to see us abolish the 12-hour day should use their influence to urge a change in immigration laws making it possible for industries to obtain immigrants of the best type, selected on the other side, in quantities as they are needed.”

Which, translated into plain language, means: We will give up the 12-hour day (which we have found does not pay, anyway), if you will give us a contract-labor immigration law.

Today the situation is clarified still further. In order to “protect” the American workers from an influx of bootlegged immigration, all foreign-born workers are to be catalogued, registered and distributed. Secretary of Labor Davis has announced that he has a bill ready for the next Congress authorizing the Department of Labor to conduct an annual registration and enrollment of the foreign-born. This is perhaps as dangerous a piece of “protection” as was ever offered to the workers. When the capitalists start “protecting” one group of workers from another, even the most trusting should beware of these “Greeks bearing gifts.” The truth is, of course, that it is a vicious espionage act, to deliver the foreign-born helpless into the capitalist hands for use as strike-breakers and union smashers. And if today the foreign-born workers can be finger-printed, photographed, and registered, then tomorrow it will be the turn of the native workers.

Mr. Gompers, representing our trade union officialdom, would have us expect “protection” from immigration laws made and administered by the tools of capitalism. He should look a little more closely into the actual workings of the present law. The workers are told that it protects the American workers, their wages, working hours and union organization, from the effects of unrestricted immigration. These illusions are smashed by noting the words of Mr. Grace, of the Steel Trust, who stated:

“As to the Mexicans, we started to bring them in only about the first of the year. One of our operating officials said that he believed we could get good workmen by going after them in Mexico, to which the immigration quota laws do not apply. It has been possible to obtain them in large numbers. The law has been observed and we have recruited the men chiefly from border towns.”

Mr. Grace also mentions casually that, with the help of the American consuls, his company has brought in 3,000 Mexicans since the beginning of the year. In fact, this is the importation system that has worked so well that it is now to be applied to Europe, under the contemplated Selective Immigration Act.

In the working-out and administration of the immigration laws, and in the proposals for the next Congress, the workers of this country have a splendid illustration of the manner in which the governmental power in the hands of the capitalist class is used against them. Only when the American workers, and not the employers, have the making and administering of the laws, will the immigration acts be in the interests of the workers. Then the American working class can join with the workers of other countries in guiding the migrations of the workers in the interests of the entire working class. The first step toward this goal is to break away from the political parties of capitalism, and join in independent political action, in a Labor Party, the goal of which is the Workers’ and Farmers’ Government.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborherald/v2n07-sep-1923.pdf