Labor Speaks

Labor Speaks TALK UNITED STATES!--Robert Whit-comb--Smith & Haas ($2).

From the day, 68 years ago, when a bourgeois German Jew published his antlike researches in the British Museum and called it Das Kapital, his book has been gathering a Biblical reputation. Almost unmentioned in polite U. S. society before 1929, and still largely unread. Das Kapital now figures at piecemeal third-hand in many a topical argument, news story, sermon, book. The swelling spate of "proletarian novels" is a form of Marxian exegesis. Often too obviously propaganda for Marxian dogmas, they are apt to make dull if uncomfortable reading for non-Marxians. But last year Robert Cantwell's The Land of Plenty, last week Robert Whitcomb's Talk United States! showed readers of every shade that a novel could be first-rate as well as proletarian.

Author Whitcomb writes his book in straight U. S. lingo, and the happy result is authentic U. S. reality--as far removed from literary realism as from the dreary violence of yellow journalese. Hero-narrator is one Matt Williams, U. S. bricklayer in his middle 30's; his story, told straight from the side of his mouth, is typical of hundreds of thousands but he tells it so freshly that it does not seem like an old tale. He starts in with a bang that never fades out to a whimper:

"The minute you start remembering back you realize what a slew of things you been through and you gotta pretend you are telling someone so you can pick out what you remember the best, like my old man fighting with my mother.

"My old man was a brilliant guy, very mechanical, he was, and once he has a job with Thomas A. Edison working on phonographs. When he up and left my mother he always acted like a gentleman and told her where he was and sends her some money sometimes. We comes from good stock, Yankee Americans, we are, away back, and I know we got a minister in the family somewheres."

Matt grew up in New York and might have settled down there: he had a girl and a job on a newspaper delivery truck. But he wanted to see some of the country before he got too old, so he had a run-in with the union, said good-by to his girl, and went out to finish his education on the road. Slowly he hoboed his way to California, taking jobs by the way when he felt like it or had to. Before he got there he saw his pal cut in two by a freight car. After one voyage as a sailor he decided it was time to learn a trade, fixed on bricklaying. ("But there's diffulgultees getting into the bricklaying game, what I mean. You should of seen the runaround they hands me.") Eventually, in Chicago, he wangled his way into the union, learned the trade and began to make steady money. He married a pretty Polish waitress and felt everything was fine.

When the U. S. entered the War Matt enlisted. He came home two years later cured of glory and minus a thumb-joint, to find his wife and his job better than ever. In the post-War building boom he was paid the union rates of $18.75 a day, got the idea that labor was king and a bricklayer the aristocrat of labor. He bought a house, a car, a radio (all on in-stallments), joined the Elks; his wife began to play bridge and put on other airs. Because he felt so prosperous Matt thought he would knock off work awhile, take his family on a tour around the country. It was an entertaining trip. "Another thing we done in Washington is to go into the Senate and look in on those damn fools with goatees and funny coats arguing about this and that just like they was arguing about something serious, the damndest fool thing you ever seen, the way them boys act like they was running the country and the country not paying no attention atall to them."

The crash caught Matt with his pants down. Soon there was no work for aristocrats of labor. Puzzled, angry, discouraged, Matt had a final quarrel with his wife, a bust-up with the local of his union, and took to the road again. This time it was not so much fun as when he was younger. He wandered all over the country, taking any job he could get, bumming most of the time, gradually completing his education. Once, with another desperate bum, he held up a gas station, an A. & P. store. But Matt did not become a criminal: adversity and its pals taught him radical economics instead. He came to the conclusion that "politics always creeps in," that what he and his kind needed was a political party. "Trade unions ain't enough, general strikes ain't enough, you got to have a political party, and it has got to be a Labor Party. . . . Only the American Labor Party has got to talk United States, it has got to reach 'em by the million and tell them what it is all about." With a plain purpose to his life at last, and plenty of work (though not at $18.75 a day) Matt went back to Chicago to organize his bricklayers, fight the System.

The Author, A native of Brooklyn, Robert Whitcomb, 32, comes from "good stock, Yankee Americans" with a dash of Dutch. He has studied forestry, worked in a lumberyard; been a bank-runner, newshawk on a country weekly; hoboed in every State but Idaho. On a hobo trip in 1930 he met "Matt Williams," based his novel on Williams' story. Author Whitcomb has had little to invent: as a hobo and interviewer in agencies for the homeless he has talked to 10,000 unemployed. His literary gods are a queer trinity; Thoreau, Ring Lardner, D. H. Lawrence. At present Author Whitcomb is in St. Paul getting material for his next book.

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