Free Food, Fracas & Frank

It is less hazardous to give food to the hungry striking coal miners of Kentucky's Bell County if you do not make a speech about it. It is even more prudent, if you live in New York City and are a writer with a flair for succoring the oppressed, not to try either. One who knows this now is Waldo Frank, 42, globe-trotting lecturer, critic (Our America), novelist (City Block), journalist (for the New Republic and New Masses).

Mr. Frank belongs to a group of zealous metropolitan literati who organized themselves into the National Committee to Aid Striking Miners Fighting Starvation. Last autumn another group, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, made a sortie into bloody Harlan County, adjacent to Bell, to "investigate conditions." Author John Dos Passes, chairman of the N. C. A. S. M. F. S., went along and so did Theodore Dreiser. In Pineville rural constables swore they caught Author Dreiser in some sexual mis- behavior and if he ever revisits the neighborhood it will be at the risk of reopening a statutory charge against him. Last week the N. C. A. S. M. F. S. descended on the district to operate in conjunction with the Workers International Relief (Communist).

Leader of the group was Waldo Frank. Notably absent from the entourage was Author Dos Passes, who was off in Mexico. Corliss Lamont, philosophy professor at Columbia University and son of Banker Thomas William Lamont, said he had expected to go along but was too busy. However, Mr. Frank's party mustered Edmund ("Bunny") Wilson, literary critic; Editor Malcolm Cowley of the New Republic; drowsey-eyed Mary Heaton Vorse who reports labor troubles better than she writes novels; Playwright Harold Hickerson; Charles Walker, admired for a book called Steel; a 60-year-old Greenwich Village doctor named Elsie Reed Mitchell and a handful of scriveners for the Liberal and Radical Press.

At Knoxville, Tenn. they bought 1,000 bottles of milk, hundreds of pounds of bacon, flour, beans and loaded it all into three trucks. First objective was Pineville, in Bell County. After that they planned to proceed to bloody Harlan, distributing the food at miners' mass meetings. Before they left Knoxville, Mr. Frank received a telegram from the mayor of Pineville to the effect that there were no mines near his town, that Pineville did not need Mr. Frank's food and that no mass meetings would be tolerated. The party chose to go on despite this cold welcome. Off through the cedar-clothed hills and up past Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee meet, pushed Mr. Frank and his band. Sheriff Blair rubbed his palms, announced that Cell 13 of the Harlan County jail was happily empty, and that he would "not hesitate to fill it with New York writers."

At Pineville, the municipal authorities escorted the trucks to the edge of town, appointed deputies "to help" dispense the food. Malcolm Cowley, in charge of the food distribution, fell to rowing with one of the deputies. Mr. Frank's band was promptly led off to the court house for disturbing the peace. Two others were locked up for stump speaking on the outskirts of the town and charged with criminal syndicalism. Judge Joe Page dismissed the complaints against all save the stumpsters. Mr. Frank's small mustache bristled when he was advised to pack up and get out of the State.

To hasten their departure prominent Pineville citizens, feeling proud of themselves for resisting the temptation to ride the "Yankee Rednecks" out of town on rails, escorted the Frank party back through the night to Cumberland Gap.

There is confusion as to what happened next, but when Messrs. Frank and Allan Taub, Manhattan lawyer who had been in the neighborhood as counsel for the miners, arrived at Knoxville next day, their heads were swathed in bandages. They said that after crossing over into Tennessee all lights in the motorcade were extinguished, Taub's nose was smashed with an automobile jack, someone lacerated Mr. Frank's scalp. Identified by them as one of the assailants was Herndon Evans, Pineville editor. He suggested that the men hurt themselves "alighting from the autos."

From Knoxville. indignant Waldo Frank and his delegation made off to Washington as fast as they could go. They poured their stories into the willing ears of Senators La Follette, Costigan and Cutting. Kentucky's unsympathetic Logan was also present when Lawyer Taub testified that conditions among Kentucky miners were "virtually that of peonage."

Beside his cracked pate, Mr. Frank had brought along two other exhibits for the Senatorial interview. One was a Mrs. Julius Baldwin, who said her husband had been killed by a deputy sheriff while tending a strikers' soup kitchen at Swimming Hole, Ky. The other was Christine Baldwin, aged 14 months, who played with the slug that had sung through her father's head and embarrassed Messrs. Cutting, Costigan and Logan by publicly milking her mother.

Meantime, the citizens of Pineville put their own plea before Congress: "We have for six months been pestered to death with Communists disguised as writers from. New York whose purpose was to obtain publicity for their doctrines and for books they intended to write."

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