Newspaper Page Text
STARVATION AND FREEZING FACE THESE 5,000
STRIKERS, BUT THEY STAND FIRM
By a Staff Correspondent.
Philadelphia, Nov. 28. For 19
weeks now 5,000 men and women-
here have been holding out agairist
hunger and privation in one of the
most remarkable industrial fights this
country has even known. ,
They are members of the Ladies'
Garment Workers', Union, on strike
in this city. And they face at least
10 weeks more of suffering from cold
and starvation, of violence at the
hands of the police. Yet there is not
one trace of wavering in their atti
tude. "How long can you stand it?" I
asked Isadore Neibauer, 20, chair
man of his shop, a lad who earned
an average of $9 a week last year,
and who has a wife and child!
"Two years, ' he replied.
"You must have money."
"I have pawned everything."
"Suppose'it conies to starvation
would you let your baby starve rather
than go back as a strikebreaker?"
"Yes," he answered grimly. "I have
5,000 babies They are, you know,
5,000 of us on strike."
"You think I not care for family?"
he continued, mistaking my-silence. '
"Look!"
He pulled up his sleeve,, showing a
long, deep scar in the crook of his el
bow. "My mothersick," be said. "She
near death. The doctors say she
need blood. I let my mother have no
blood but mine. She get well, I get
well. Now Ihave a little brother
born after that."
Mrs. Louis Donievski is the mother
of six children; the oldest is 12. Her
husband, a skirt maker, earns $8 a
week on an average
She said to me:
"We have every day one loaf at 5
cents, one loaf at 4 cents, a little
sugar, a little tea, sometimes two
pounds of potatoes for 3 cents. That
is all. Never in 19 we,eks have we
aten meat. Twice in a week we
have a bucket of coal. I sell the bed -guilts
to buy shoes for the children ft.
At night I cover them with rags. "'
They shiver. He have never had
enough to eat never."
"Don't you want your husband to
go to work?"
"As a 'scab'? No! We starve and
freeze first."
Little smiling Celia Rodin, a Rus
sian revolutionist, paused in her
picketing. She had had no break-
fast. Her clothes were threadbare.
"Six times here the police arrest
me for picketing," she told me. "It
is nothing. I am used to arrest.
Four times in Russia have I been in
prison.
"When I was 15, six of us tunneled
into a prison" to rescue a friend. A
gendarme interfered. He died
quick. They caught me, and charg
ed me with murder. I escaped, and
the great Tolstoi took me into his
house. Two weeks I was there.
Then he Bent me to friends at Frankfort.-
At Paris I went to school. I
am here one year. Look here is
Tolstoi's photograph that he gave
me.
Under it Leo Tolstoi, the famous
Russian novelist, had written, in Rus
sian: "So long as you live, you will
be a socialist; and if need be, you
will give your life for the cause."
"Would you give ytfur life for this
strike?" I asked.
"Sure!" she smiled. "What is
life?"
And the spirit of ihese is the spirit
of all.
It is a fight against the sweatshop,
chiefly. There are demands of bet
ter wages, shorter hours, cleanliness,
recognition of the union, etc., but the
abolition of the vicious contracting
system is paramount
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