Indianapolis Times, Volume 41, Number 142, Indianapolis, Marion County, 24 October 1929 — Page 7

OCT. 24, 1029

‘PAY OR STAY OUT,’ WAS EDICT OF HOSPITAL TO MILL STRIKE WOUNDED

TfcU l tbr fourth of a series by Sinclair Lewis, noted author of "Main Street, *' •n strike cnndlt'ons at Marion. N. C... In which six have been killed and twenty wounded. Lewis was sent to Marion by The Times and other Scripps-Howard newspapers. BY SINCLAIR LEWIS (Copright. 1929) PERHAPS the strangest thing I found In "the dugout,” headquarters of the strikers in Marion, N. C.. was that there was absolutely none of the corn liquor which has made the southern mountains famous. These men were serious. They were not drinking. They were not even particularly angry. Oh. there were men among the strikers, not among their leaders, who did seem to be angry. There was a brother of one of the men who had been killed by the deputies of Sheriff Adkins. He said, rather gently, “This court proceeding ain’t the end of this here.” There was another who said, "I’d rather murder ’em up than than have ’em murder us up.” Eut mostly they were so quiet, so quiet. They went away from the hovel of the strike headquarters with their pour over their shoulders and said nothing. After the battle with Sheriff Adkins and his men, the wounded strikers were taken to the Marion hospital. Now this is supposed to be a community hospital. At least, when they were building it, the workers in the mills were invited to contribute to its building, and most of them did so. But when the men who had been shot dow r n by the sheriff’s posse were taken to this hospital, they were informed that they could not stay there unless they paid

These men had no money with which to pay. So there w’as a somewhat unpleasant situation in the hospital. Bill Ross, the local labor leader, had to telegraph to New York to beg money so that the men would not be turned out. But all that has been solved now, because most of the men who were taken to the hospital after the little fracas with the sheriff are dead. We’re Not Responsible The head nurse of the hospital explained to us that under normal conditions she would call the Duke Power Company, which would be very glad to provide for any charity patients. “But,” said she, “of course, if these men want to go and get into a scrap we’re not responsible, and they must take care of themselves.” I am coming to an end of this series—only there is no end. I could go on in Marion for a lifetime—that is, unless I happened to be shot down, in which case my lifetime would be very brief indeed —writing about the conditions in southern mill towns. I am rather sorry that I am coming to an end, because normally I live in a Vermont farmhouse, and do not have a very close connection with actual men and events. But now, for four days, 1 have been out with men like John Peel and Frank Gorman and Bill Ross and Ben Stolberg. It has taken me out of myself so much that I hope that I am going to do it again. Before I finish, I want to describe what I myself have seen of living conditions in Marion, N. C. Looks Like Italy < From the courthouse in which the sheriff and his deputies were on trial, there is a view' which recalls Italy. If you disregard a few littered backyards in the foreground, you can lose yourself in that smiling vista of hills and valleys, with a distant group of houses that are obviouly plaster Italian villas. Well, they aren’t. They are houses in the East Marion mill village and, seen closer, they are atrocious. It is about two miles from the actual town of Marion to the two mill villages, which, along with the farmer-trade, support Marion and glorify it. Marion itself has a book shop, two movie theaters, and shops in which gents can get furnishings. But the 100 per cent American mill operatives do not often travel that long two miles—partly because they do not own motor cars, and partly because they haven't much to spend in the way of furnishing gents. On a w r age which averages less than sl3 a week, you furnish yourself and your family mostly with overalls. No. the town of Marion proper Is left to merchants, lawyers, doctors, and the like, most of whom just now are busy with the dead and dying and wounded after the sheriff's recent Jest,

Here Is the Mill But, going out the two miles, you come to East Marion, and to the mill of the Marion Manufacturing Company, which makes plain white cotton cioth. the sort of cloth that is used in cheap pillowcases. The mill is the center of the village, and to its 600 employes this mill is the most interesting thing to be seen. Its clamorous shuttles, its dirty floors, its roar and utter ghastly fatigue, take the place, for some 600 men, women and children, of the quiet mountain glens from which our civilization has rescued them. Now, since the first strike at Marlon, these 600 are working only fiftyfivp hours a week, but in the good old days, before “foreign agitators" came to disturb the peace of this idyllic village, they worked twelve hours a day or twelve hours a night, and had no time to think about such un-American ideas as how to get more than sl3 a week. The Marion Manufacturing Company provides houses for its employes. - I have examined these houses with considerable care. They are rented to the employes at the incredibly low cost of 20 cents a room a week. That means that a fourroom house rents for $3.20 a month on the basis of four weeks to the month. None of these houses has running water. Their water supply comes from pumps. The houses are of the cheapest possible construorion. I have tried to pry the boards of these houses apart and have found that it could be done with my little finger. A four-room house, in which twelve people may be living, is just this. It is a box with an unscreened porch. It has three living rooms and a kitchen. In each of the living rooms there are, normally, two double beds. In these double beds there sleep anywhere from two to five people, depending on their ages. Eat “Best” of Food In the kitchen is being cooked the family food, which consists largely of flour biscuits, hominy, fatback—the cheapest sort of salt pork—and coffee which will be served without cream or sugar. The sheriff, Oscar Adkins, who was a grocer up to the time he was

elected sheriff, told me that the mill people insist on eating the finest of food. “Why,” he said, “they eat Palace flour, and that’s good enough so that I eat it myself.” I want, therefore, in fairness to give the report of the other side—to say that there are authorities who assert that these 100 per cent Americans of the American mills eat flour good enough for Sheriff Adkins. But I must say that their babies, undernourished and dirty, playing about in the blazing red mud, do not look as though they ate food good enough for Sheriff Adkins. This box of a four-room house is set up on piles. All East Marion is up and down, and the piles are fairly high, to accommodate the slope of the hills. There is not the least vestige of plumbing or any other kind of w T ater pipes in the houses. Not Much Gardening The yards are adorned only with rich North Carolina red mud, except where some worker has grown a flower garden—and when you are working, and your wife and the children of 16 upwards are working, from ten to twelve hours a day, you do not give a great deal of attention to gardening. This packing-box on stilts above a welter of red clay is the refuge, the castle, the whole home of most of these workmen at Marion; it is their reward for their work of ten or twelve hours a day; it is the way in which we teach them that in this blessed country the results of honest labor are a splendor unlike that of the hovels of the Old World. Governor Max Gardner of North Carolina, himself a mill owner, has said in a recent report on the Carolina textile industry that North Carolina has been misrepresented grievously ih the matter of wages, because a part of the mill workers’ pay is taken out in houses—such admirable houses I have just described —which are provided by the company at a low rent. hnd it is true that the rent is low. In Marion, it is only 20 cents a room a week. That is low, isn’t it? But unfortunately it happens that precisely such bonny homes, owned by private persons and let for a profit, in Marion, vent for $lO a month, so that all thot the mill is giving to the workers in the way of free rent, to be added to their earnings of from $5 to sl3 a week a person, is $6.80 a month. And when who divide $6.80 a month among two to twelve people living in each cottage, it is not a tremendous increase. Governor Gardner’s own mill in Shelby, N. C., is among the model mills of the south. The houses which he himself gives to the workers are not at all the type I have described. But nevertheless, mill owner and Governor though he be. I suggest that his arithmetic is a little twisted. And I suggest that he, who has done nothing as yet about appointing a committee to investigate conditions at Marion, might go there and try living in one of those pasteboard boxes under which the wind howls in winter. One for the Governor If a man is to accept the responsibilities of so high an office as that of Governor of the state, it would seem to me to be noblesse oblige for him to share the lot of his humblest constituent. There was a time, be-

Indiana mother proves her idea is right ... ‘]\1 Y little son was bilious and upset,” IVA says Mrs. James McHugh, 810 Woodlawn Ave., Indianapolis. “He had no appetite, his breath was bad, his tongue was coated, and he was nearly always tired and sleepy. “He seemed to have trouble with his stomach and bowels and I had an idea California Fig Syrup would help him. He brightened up marvelously with the first few doses. At the end of a week, he was a different boy. I have used California Fig Syrup with both my boys every time they have had a cold or upset, and I give it a lot of credit for their wonderful condition.” California Fig Syrup never fails to cleanse the system of bilious, headachy, feverish or constipated children, quickly and gently. It never gripes or sickens. Children love its flavor. A pure vegetable product with the highest endorsement of doctors. It helps nature give tone and strength to the stomach and bowels. All drug stores have the generous bottles. The name ‘‘California” marks the genuine. CALIFORNIA FIG SYRUP THE RICH. FRUITY LAXATIVE AND TONIC FOR CHILDREN

fore w r e became modernized and efficient, when kings prided themselves upon their willingness to bear sword and share meat with his humblest subject. There were even, a long, long time before that, a Man in Galilee who lived with the poorest and humblest. It is doubtless too much to expect anything so quixotic from the Governor of a state. But if Max Gardner will go to Marion, with his family, and live in one of Mr. Baldwin’s mill cottages all winter, and work, under normal conditions—and this, of course, implies that all of his family will also work—in the mill, then I think that the Carolina situation will be solved before spring! It must be stated that, in addition to this tremendous decrease in house rent, the worker at Marion and other southern mill villages gets free electric light. So far as I have been able to find out, this free electric light costs the company $3 a month a house, at the most. I should think it would cost very much less, because when you have worked from ten to twelve hours a day—when you are looking forward to arriving at the mil! at 6:45 each morning—you ordinarily do not sit up very late reading detective stories and consuming electric light. Not So Good / One of the most important things about the mill cottage situation in Carolina is that every prosperous and reasonable man to whom you talk about it, north or south, says, "Well, perhaps their houses aren’t so good when you take it from the standpoint of people like you and me. I guess we wouldn’t like it so well to live there. But you gotta remember that the folks In those houses are just down from the mountains, where they have been living in log cabins, and to them these houses are a luxury.” In the first place, this comforting theory happens to be entirely inaccurate. The mill cottages are not better than the mountain log cabins of Tennessee and Kentucky and the Carolinas. I asked several minor officials of the Marion Manufacturing Company wherein the cottages are definitely better. They said that the mill cottages were superior to the mountain log cabins in three respects, tint they have electric lights, in that they are painted, and in that they have board floors instead of floors of beaten earth. The general theory, you see, is that the mill companies, in bringing dowm this “cheap and satisfied labor” from the mountains, are giving the barbaric mountain horde a splendid leg-up on the way to general American prosperity. Therefore, such is their theory, however primitive the mill cottages at such places as Marion, it is at least a splendid beginning, and the workers should be grateful for it. Want the ‘Best’ But the unpleasant truth is that—aside from the suggested fact that these cottages are actually not quite so good as the mountaineers’ log cabins—once you take a man and his family from the seclusion of the wilderness to what jocularly is called a “civilized community,” then he will not be satisfied unless he can have everything that every one else in that community has. “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” In the mountain community the man who has a puncheon floor and a glass window in his log cabin is incredibly rich. But when you take a man and his family from a skyland district, where a glass window spells riches, down to a place like Marion, w r here the father of the family sees the houses of the mill owners, where his wife and daughters see women in New York frocks, where the whole family sees, a world riding in motor cars costing from SSO to $5,000 while they walk in the alternate mud and dust of the mill village, then they do not feel altogether satisfied to have for sole reward for the labor of all of them, ten to twelve hours a day, a wooden floor to their house! Next: Sinclair Lewis will discuss “Luxuries” in Marion. Dogs Quarantined By Times Special CONNERSVILLE, Ind., Oct. 24. All dogs in Fayette county are under quarantine as a result of a conference of state, county and city health officers here, in which it was decided the step should be taken to prevent spread of rabies.

IyE| jgjfc: HR Jg I ...vqc.

Ifs easy to see from their wonderful condition that the mother of these youngsters knows what to do when their stomach or bowels go wrong. No drugs for her! Nothing but pure vegetable California Fig Syrup. At least a million families are never without a bottle of it i the home!

THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES

BLOCKS BASEMENT STORE

Women’s and Misses’ $16.50 to $19.50 Dress or Travel Very Specially Priced Tim The season’s most attractive styles and colors at a great llllllitf/ reduction. Every garment in HM Mj this group was meant to sell ]§M W % ® for a much higher price. The Bm ' styles are authentic and in- IfmMu t elude the new flares, drapes and modified silhouettes. \ f M There are tweeds for sports y! llllf and the new longer coats for * Li . j |||| dress. Materials are of broad- Ijf \W cloth, suedecloth and duv- dgi j \W

A Special Friday Feature /or Women and Misses FULL FASHIONED SILK HOSE For Women and Misses '\ Ganmetal, Dusk -f IIC Dawn, Atmosphere, Brown, Tan, Sum jjm Tfflrajf Bronze, Nude Tan, Mist, Gray J These hose are irregulars of $1.50 quality. When you see these values you will want to buy a season’s supply.

Friday Sale of Women’s and Misses’ Footwear Specially Dozens of Priced ** New Styles 0 The thrifty woman or miss will appreciate these values in new fall shoes. The styles include straps, pumps, oxfords and novelty ties. Materials are of patent, hid, suede, simulated reptile and combination of leathers. Women’s Arch Support Low Shoes, Special at 52.79

Men’s All-Wool Suits Topcoats and Overcoats Friday Only A special one-day sell- j.jjf |||||l 1 ing of suits in colors yy. R||V| 1 and fabrics appropriate pllrL'^ to the season! Quality, style and service at the extraordinarily low price of $10! Men’s All-Wool s*l 4 .95 Blue Overcoats.. For Friday only! Long, collegiate or doublebreasted models. &£’..] SsL. $2-89 Made to Government Gossamerette A A Specifications Raincoats

Men’s Genuine Leather Coats *6.95 Blue Corduroy SheepLined <£7 QC Coats v I ••/D Belt all ardund: 4 pockets Beaverized Collar. Genuine Horsehide Leather d0 QC Coats vO.tFO Blanket Lined Tan Duck *7Q Coats Blanket Lined Blue Denim 1 A A Coats Blanket Lined d* 4 *7A Corduroy Coats. • ** Men’s Hunting AA Coats Four large bloodproof pockets.

Men’s Part Wool Sport Sweater Coats Special for Friday Only % J 1.95 Heavy ribbed, garments with button front ® ll jim m and V neck, and twc wlv 1 St' pockets. An ideal coat for the chilly fall days. W* W>®i3r Every one of these coats ' were meant to sell for a V r \ , ' / higher price.

PAGE 7

1,000 Pairs of Men’s Ail-Wool Trousers *3.59 In a wide variety of suit patterns. “Auto Brand” $4.00 and Corduroy \ $5.00 All-Wool Trousers !; Trousers $2.69 $2.50 skm Trousers Drab Corduroy $1.79 I; Trousers S 1 .79 ner&Marx Trousers Work $4.98 j: Trousers Men’s All- ~ '! Men’s CorduKnlckers roy R| d j n g $2.79 Breeches Men’s 1; Whipcord ’ College-cut Breeches i,rht lan Corduroys $2 - 29 $2.89 Men's Work || ( wide bottoms) Trousers ; '~ <C 1 DO All-Wool I .Ol? Bi U e Serge French backs, Trousers checks an and pencil stripes. < $2.98