﻿There’s Peace At Home Pa Gets a Raise
By T-BONE SLIM

The American working class may as well stop fooling around with unions and build a union. Unions, many or few, cannot move as a unit. Two brass bands cannot offer side by side a successful symphony in Merry Widow simultaneously under two separate leaderships; neither does a band give a concert without the baritone; they’ve all got to be there.
The difficulty is real. Preachers cannot do a thing as long as conditions are bad. (Just now they are rotten.) So it is up to us, more serious minded workers, to remedy those conditions.
The situation is precisely this: Rotten conditions have demoralized the people and they are sulking in their tents, (multiply that last crack, I’m holding myself in cheek). Improved conditions and people will become almost angelic in their deportment. Husband and wife do not fight on the day the husband gets a raise in pay; it makes for peace—hand me the Noble Prize for “I’ve got something here”—we ought to try that on our belligerent women folk. Note; I do not want credit for making this great discovery.
The wages are so low that I marvel we have escaped with our lives so far; that the women haven’t gone completely berserk and devastated us.
Let the rotten conditions remain and the people will continue to scowl; worsen the conditions and the people will become more depraved and the preachers will start cutting their own throats out of pure discouragement.
Not only is the difficulty real, it is urgent—that is, it, requires immediate action if we would preserve our sanity.
Unionism then is a gift of Thought to mankind and we are monkeys indeed if we do not avail ourselves of these powers of our own generation (anti-simianism is another matter and not an alibi).
But it is not the intention of nature that the working class should give birth to a litter of unions, multitudinous, multicolored, and hybrid; nor did nature intend that the working class should give birth to a gigantic Frankenstein that would devour of its substance and dissipate of its wealth. But nature most certainly did Intend that labor shall build a one, big union —big as itself, and that it shall be of scientific construction, each part in its place and functioning.
The I. W. W. is such a union, but the workers have not yet all embraced it.
Thoughtless workers pretend to find this and that fault in it. As to that I can offer a rule to go by: Good cake needs no frosting. 
Ordinary unionism cannot cut the mustard, it requires industrial unionism; not only that, it requires something else and the I. W. W. has just what it takes—SOLIDARITY. No other union in the world has it.
All right, nature intended for us to build a one, big union of the working class, that’s plain—so let’s get at it. The best way, of course, is for the workers to hunt up the I. W. W. and join it. The next best way is for the I. W. W. to hunt up the worker and organize him. These two are the only ways.

“O my gorsh, you can’t do that, the workers are ignorant, bubbles a compatriot.
Hm. We can well dismiss that with a warning, for the person who so speak is himself crazy and should be put into a booby-hatch before he does violence to himself. All the sense that is, comes from the working class. A crazy person always thinks himself in fine fettle and all the rest of the world mushy—they should be humored.
Scientists are toiling day and night to lentghen our lives. We don’t want it, we want it thickened; it’s too damned thin now and if they stretch and stretch it, ‘twill break in the middle. We want it thickened with a few porkchops, veal steaks smothered in tomatoes and so on; higher pay, better burlaps, and revival of Eddie Cantor—in other words: we want the whole damn smear, all that’s coming to us and . no chiseling.
We want a rosier life; life that will smile at us and at which we can smile in return. Too long already have we been prancing around with rose-colored glasses on our nose, hoping to fool ourselves that all is hunky-dory, that all is good and will get better still. Things don’t “get better”, they are made better. Rose-colored glasses are not a part of the operation—eyes is all we need and a taste that can tell the difference between a porterhouse steak and an imaginary sandwich.
Worn out shoes do not improve themselves and the further we go the weaker they get. Wishing won’t patch them; it takes action and sole-leather. But we do not need to start wrestling with worn out shoes, we can join the I. W. W. and get a new pair of florsheims.
No use dreaming of these things; they have already been dreams times without number, since ages immemorial and the answer always was the same—action.
Action it is then, and the only question that arises is: What is the first move?
The first move is join the Industrial Workers of the World, generate the Power. (We go nowhere without steam). That’s the answer—and if you’re to far gone, too weak do the sensible thing, too dumb to walk up and be organized, and you’ve got to nave an army of delegates to escort you to Real Unionism and Pure-D Solidarity, then you are cutting your own throat, for the cost of getting you comes out of your own pockets and the pockets of millions just like you who can ill afford it.
Save then by walking up like a man.
