﻿Boss Class Is To Blame for Lack of Unity 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
Best headache: Centralized control. 
If all the people living in skyscrapers rushed for cover in shelters and subways, by common consent in case of an alarm —umh! there would be some panic and plenty of bruised patriots. 
Centralization has its drawbacks. 

New York—Spanish SS Magallenes dropped four typhoid cases here. Some sanitation, hey? 
One deckscow burned in the great Greenville fire. Unemployment was not disturbed; the captain burned up, too. 
Twenty grain barges burned in the Jersey City fire. Twenty captains are looking for berths. 
With all our tools and acumen, unemployment dogs our steps again. Looks like a fade-out. 

Drug stores sell razor blades and shoe trees, so why shouldn’t the army, marines and coastguard have a sideline of airplanes? 
Banks, too, could make money by half-soling shoes in their spare moments. 
There’s some talk of lengthening the hours of bankers as a defense measure and of putting the Lord High Chief Supreme Executioner on double shift and no overtime. We’re going to do it “all ter onct,” so help me lud. 
“Looft-Voffa” and Whoof-waffle are synonomous and they spell “creeps” in free-hand copy book language. 
A fellow suggested we “lend-lease” Knox and Stimson to Great Britain for the duration. 
Then what would we do for entertainment? I say, nix; let them pop off right here. 
It’s one-half pound of baloney no mater how thin you slice it. There was a time, fellow workers and friends, when pigsfeet was pigsfeet. Now they are little more than toenails. 
Editor’s note: Evidently Slim mourns the fact that pigsfeet were abbreviated from the good end. 

A cosmopolitan nation is an ideal spot for masters to put into practice schemes engendering race hatred, such as having one race walk through a picketline of another or several. 
It is not a common practice, but common enough, considering the size of labor’s stake involved. 
Employers have for years been propagating and fostering race hatreds and now that an “unlimited emergency” approaches, they weep bitterly, “there is no unity.” 
Political prestidigators are unable to unite these nationalities under the dominance of any one of the several breeds, so effective has been the employers’ preachments of disunion—verbally and by action. 
Conflict of race interest has been generated and is now crystalized into all but petrified substance of the mind. 
Understandably, unity between these will be artificial and of short duration, no matter what force or skullduggery be used, for the condition is now second nature. 
There is, then, no chance to get all these nationalities together on any program (as nationalities), us many there are that refuse to repudiate the faith of their mothers in favor of a geographical subdivision. So it would appear our statesmen are barking into the wrong rainbarrel. 
They can be united as workers and only as workers in a One Big Union— not real estate; and the rest, who are not workers, shall be foredoomed to wander the face of the earth, ostracized until they find a job. 
As workers they have interests in common and it doesn’t take liquid glue to stick them together. 

FDR in a letter to Chester W. Cuthell (News) quotes the saying that “Obedience to law is liberty.” 
That may all be, at least that’s the way it works in Germany and Jersey City. And look at all the liberty that sprouted here during Volstead’s Liquor Gag Act. 
By the same token, “A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.” So? Even if the weakest link is at the end of the chain on the drum and behind friction of the running gear? It seems we have no premise. 
The presumption that law is omniscient is not well taken and it can be no stronger than its frailest error. 
Let us reason together: Lawmakers are as variable as baseball pitchers and the winds of the heavens. However, there is no guarantee that they formulate laws only in their lucid moments, or even when sober—not that dissoberliness disqualifies the law. We can pass it off as dissoberly conduct, a minor infraction. 
Baseball pitchers do well if they win half their games, hence it follows that their efforts are half baseball. No one argues that losing games is baseball. 
Lawmakers, because of their infirmatives, can only produce half-laws; and that is giving them a wonderful break, inasmuch as baseball pitchers are the more carefully selected by superior selectors. 
Under such circumstances democracy must of necessity be variegated, speckled and of low-pressure. Democracy, then, is confined to only a few phases of our life, and not at all to production. 

“Cooling-off” period has insincerity on the face of it, in addition to an insinuation that labor doesn’t know what it is doing at all times and has to be coled-off. (I’ve been cooling off for the past nine years.) Further, it is enforced labor as opposed to enforced unemployment. 
“Cooling-off period” should be said with a smile, for they are “fighting words” that discredit labor-wisdom and sanctify master insanities, real or pretended 

The other day my friend chided me for not working and said, “There is jobs to be had.” Encouraged, I immediately confronted half-dozen bosses. “You don’t work,” they said, “it’s all a mistake, there are no jobs to be had.”