﻿It’s a Question of Groceries in Love or Unions
By T-BONE SLIM

Love today is pretty much a matter of groceries. Love doesn’t go any further than that in unionism. In others words, if your union can produce the goods, has produced the goods, or does produce the goods, then your union is beloved by mankind.
But unfortunately it happens nine-tenths of man’s time is spent in individual struggle for existence and only one short tenth is spent in organizing of unionism—the thing that eventually will, does, and must bring the groceries. Unionism is being gypped. The class struggle is like that.
Keep the Office on the Ground Floor
Union to be at its best, though, must of necessity be built from the ground up and the offices must be on the ground floor. Baseball pitchers are notoriously poor hitters and it’s the total of the activities of the whole team that shows so engagingly in the box scores.
Skyscrapers, seemingly, are built from the top down—that is, when they hang the false-work onto the steel that already stands. The I. W. W. is the steel upon a good foundation, the Preamble.
It seems the builders of a successful skycraper spent many weary hours in the hole preparing the foundation before they ever attempted to stick up a piece of timber or a network of steel. Seems then that these builders were sensible and that those totalitarians who are advocating the building of a union from the top down are either deceptive or half-baked.
A union built from the top down loses all sense of activity in its ranks and its members become ingrown and look on high, or on Washington, for relief. A situation in which a giant suckholes around dwarfs—and there never was a time when Samuel Gompers wallowed around as head of the A. F. of L., that the charmed circle of craftsmen were not whining for pie a la mode. Sammy’s hokum was short on both ends and the membership was trained to do nothing without permission . . . I won’t argue the gains’ you have made—just show me the pie a la mode. If the pie doesn’t show you have no power.
Get Better Groceries
Love is purely a matter of groceries and a union that brings the caviar is beloved of mankind. Why then waste your affections on unions that are determined to put you on swill diet?
It’s a shenanagan, my lord. Can it be the rank and file is dead? As dead as its leaders—going nowhere? A funeral procession and they aint even headed for the graveyard!
Come on boys, let’s snap out of it. Let’s us citizens of the labor world start a little entertainment for the employers. They are drowsy from the promises of brother Lewis and brother Green—brother Woll hides in the fence and comes out only once a year like a groundhog . . . Naw, I don’t know if he sees his shadow, but I do.
The I. W. W. is the place for every man, woman, and child that
answers the time-clock. It’s there that activity finds its best outlet. There you do not consult a beetle-browed leader or politician; you consult yourself and start the ball rolling. And you’ll be surprised at the many able and willing hands that help you to roll it. In fact your ideas are the very thing this organization needs to round out the picture of the homecoming of our old friend FREEDOM and the thoroughly disgraced SLAVERY slinking its way along the hedges into the twilight of days well spent.
We Can Control the World
If we can feed the world we can organize the world; when the boss organizes us he does it for personal gain. When we organize ourselves we do it to salvage the fruits of our production.
The bosses’ house is top-heavy— let’s move out of it before the big wind hits it. Into the cellar, men, I just now saw a cow come sailing over the roof!
See the delegate right away.
Hot Off the Griddle
New commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard will be given a dinner at the Biltmore, October 27. Paper doesn’t say how long he’s been without eating. Hope he can bear up that long.
New York’s motto is, “No deserving man need go hungry.” That holds good also for Brooklyn.
When I consider the tremendous amount of capital it takes to blow New York’s whistles, (every little tugboat has a whistle like the REX), it causes me to wonder how they have steam enogh left to announce their alibis in the dark and drab tomorrow.
Without doubt the politicians are wasting an awful lot of steam for the amount of boiler they carry, the insignificance of which is emphasized by the size of the whistle. Why it’s getting so that tugboats are all smokestack and whistle; hardly any boiler or propeller—no wonder the tide has to do all the towing while the captain blows the calliope.
Leaders they call these tugboats (they lead the monsters of the deep out to see the sea, hanging on for dear life on a six-inch hawser and blowing the whistle. The tide brings ‘em back—but, I understand the scientists in Princeton University are working on a system of tide-control . . .
Keep Smiling and Organize
It’s really touching to see those dinky politicians beaming in front of the chief beamer in Washington and one would have to be an outright iconoclast to suspect anything but good intentions in that wide expanse of heartfelt smile.
Smile, durn you, smile! Smile with ‘em; not against ‘em. Laugh, laugh, with ‘em or at ‘em, if and as you will. But don’t forget one thing: Get yourself a red card, for there may not be a return tide. We don’t want to go on a one-way ride and then have the ocean greyhound desert us; join the One Big Union (the one that has a name) so that we all may have a One Big Laugh and sorrow nevermore.
