Well, well. Invented to suppress opposition in its Cuban colony, the inventor of an electric glove travels to the heart of the empire in a sales trip to the New York City Police Department.

‘Plan New Torture for Strikers’ by Herman Wolf from Socialist Call. Vol. 1 No. 15. June 29, 1935.

Police Hail ‘Glove’; Invention Guaranteed To Paralyze Strikers

Notice to All Strike Pickets: Beware of Patent 1,915,721.

That is the number officially given Cirilo H. Diaz for his electric glove by the United States Patent Office in Washington.

Senor Diaz, construction superintendent for Frederick Snare Co.  Havana, Cuba, has devised this new weapon for the use of police or private company guards in their boss-duty of dispelling strike pickets.

In his office at 16 Beaver Street, in the heart of the Wall Street district, ingenious Senor Diaz demonstrated his electric glove to a CALL reporter.

“The policeman can quietly slip the glove on when he wishes,” explained Diaz, “for the wire from the battery ends in a wrist strap. Contact points from the strap fit into the glove. He could even wear a wristwatch on the strap to avoid any suspicion.”

Diaz claims the glove can’t kill anyone, although the current can be stepped up to 5,000 volts, enough to shock or paralyze any person, and to cause the more jumpy to faint.

AGAINST PICKETS

The patent, as issued by the U.S. Government, claims the glove, is intended for use by police against drunken and insane people, often hard to handle peaceably. That this is not the most important use for his invention was admitted by Diaz, as he showed this reporter a copy of Hearst’s yellow New York Journal containing pictures of cops beating up relief pickets.

“Police can use this against radicals and strikers,” said Diaz. “Now take this case here (pointing to a picket just slugged by a cop). Why use a club when this electric glove would do the trick. Easier for the police and no broken head for the rioter.”

Cops O.K. Glove

“Or this here,” Diaz continued, pointing to a photo of a woman who was none to eager to enter a police van. “One touch of the glove and she’d jump in mighty quick!”

Complete outfit sells for $10 and New York police department has already asked for reduced price on quantity order. The weapon was highly praised by Deputy Commissioner Meaney, police department purchasing agent, “Acting Deputy Chief Inspector Lyons, and Inspector Donovan at a demonstration on June 14.

Police in other cities and states, as well as companies which hire their own private thugs to break strikes and stop union organization, are expected to buy huge quantities of these electric gloves. They will supplement clubs, guns, horses, tear gas and vomit gas in dispersing strikers.

Cops can follow orders now and handle ’em with “gloves”

Patent No. 1,915,721 may bring capitalist fame and fortune to Senor Diaz, but it is only a new kind of hell to American workers.

Socialist Call began as a weekly newspaper in New York in early 1935 by supporters of the Socialist Party’s Militant Faction Samuel DeWitt, Herbert Zam, Max Delson, Amicus Most, and Haim Kantorovitch, with others to rival the Old Guard’s ‘New Leader’. The Call Education Institute was also inaugurated as a rival to the right’s Rand School. In 1937, the Call as the Militant voice would fall victim to Party turmoil, becoming a paper of the Socialist Party leading bodies as it moved to Chicago in 1938, to Milwaukee in 1939, where it was renamed “The Call” and back to New York in 1940 where it eventually resumed the “Socialist Call” name and was published until 1954.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-call/v1n15-jun-29-1935.pdf