Thirty Weeks

In Passaic, N. J., 16,000 textile workers are now quietly celebrating the 30th week of their strike.

Violent Children. The children of the strikers thoroughly enjoy the industrial situation: they get sufficient free food, they scurry to an occasional riot, they join but do not understand the Young Pioneers of America (Communist organization), they frolic at the game of "Strikers and Scabs" in the Victory Playground. This gentle pastime requires baseball bats, assorted clubs, rocks, tin cans, etc. The Strikers, with a tough 13-year-old in the role of "Hero" Albert Weisbord exhorting them to be brave, meet the Scabs or Cossacks (representing the police) in realistic Armageddon. The Strikers are always supposed to win. The children dearly love violence. Said a boy of ten years: "I nearly got arrested twice. Gee, I gave the Cossacks a lot of trouble. I wish they would arrest me. My mother threw a rock at a Cossack and raised a lump on his head. Gee, I laughed! I'd like to stab a Cossack!" Albert Weisbord. Last week a threat signed by the "Black Hand Society" was sent to "Albert --Communist." It said that he must leave Passaic within 48 hours or his headquarters would be bombed and he would find himself six feet under the earth. He ignored it, no terrestial upheaval smote him. Who is this "Communist" Weisbord who has become "the hero of 16,000 inarticulate but devoted followers, and the devil of most of the respectable element?" He is only 26; frail, nervous, bespectacled, a well-above-the-average college Jew and radical intellectual. In Manhattan and Brooklyn he had once plied the trades of newsboy, grocery clerk, clothing factory worker, soda jerker. C. C. N. Y. taught him letters, gave him a Phi Beta Kappa key; Harvard schooled him in law. Said he, "But I never intended to practice. I only studied law so as to better understand the system. I wanted to know all the tricks of the capitalists." Suddenly this lean dynamo broke from obscurity, captured the hearts of Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Lithuanians, just plain Russians, Italians; organized their strike. His United Front Committee has kept the strikers alive and united, built playgrounds for the children, stood firm on its terms of settlement in the face of numerous idealistic and dog-in-the-manger peace proposals, is prepared to fight all summer if necessary. The Citizens' Committee of Passaic would like to see Albert Weisford out of the way, so they bellow "Communist" at him. Communist though he may have been; he keeps silent about it. He is a clever organizer rather than a demagog, a cynic rather than a blithering reform zealot. Yet on the platform he can twist the emotions of the masses with his vibrating voice, his puny, gesticulating hands, his restless pacing up and down.