The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1932-07-04
The Jungle
BY ABE MINTZER


uated on the northeast corner of
West and Spring Stsq in miserable
shanties and holes in the ground, the
whole place being confusion of
refuse, tin boxes rusty with age,
broken boards, heaps of garbage, the
two hundred and fifty workers de-
scribed in q pervious article in the
Daily Worker, have been driven even
out of this primitive shelter by the
police, the jungle now being enclosed
by wire fence, barbed on the top.
Very little remains of what was
only short time ago, a small city
of the unemployed, and the whole
place appears as if steam-roller
had gone over it, smashing the shacks
and running the holes in the deserted
cellars.
Men Scattered.
The men have scattered to all parts
of New York City, the big industrial
center, known throughout the world
for its towering buildings, and i'm
mense wealth, have gone to starve
more obscurely in the Railways, the
breadlines, the parks, and the wretch
ed lighthouses. And this is the work
of the police, the bribed thugs of the
ruling class, who had been trying for
months to break up the colony, for
fear that such a glazing eye-sore,
would lead to protests on a mass
scale
Many of the workers are still in
the vicinity, on the piers along West
ST., bordering on the Hudson River,
and around the fruit market. Near
the produce terminals of the Penn
sylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio,
and the Lehigh Valley Railroads and
all along the water front, are hun
dreds of unemployed, in the main,
Negro workers, most of whom have
not drawn any sort of wages for ex-
tended periods of time and who exc
out bare existence, far below the
most minimum standards.
Forced vacations.
About 8 o'clock in the afternoon,
the whole district huns with activi-
ty: trucks filled to the top with farm
products rattle through the streets,
big muscled express men = lucky
enough to have retained their jobs
handle huge crates with ease, while
across the river the smoke belcheS
forth, from big factory chimneys.
This is in distinct contrast to the
men along the pier, lying in every
Imaginable posture, inactive in the
midst of all this motion, toilers di-
vided from the industries, from the
trucks the factories, the freighters.
| And there is another contrast yet,
more startling one, one of the chief
contradictions of capitalism: Not far
from West st. there is huge ware
house, twenty or more stories high,
bullying with food, with all the neces-
saries of life, with all sorts of meats,
fresh fruits, vegetables, with enough
| food to feed thousands. At the very
| foot of this warehouse, at the very
entrance in fact, about ten workers
are lying, practically Frustrated by
the heat and hunger, not having had
a square meal in months.
An Insane System.
| 1kl eto baaai1cp
there is too m UGH food, we sleep in
the parks ard flop houses because
there are too many buildings, and we
dress in rags because there is too
much clothing. This is the insane
system we are fighting to change.
Growing Resentment.
Speaking to the men, we find there
is a growing and bitter resentment
against the fellows who control the
state, against the rich, against the
police, and against the lousy charity
slop. A couple of the men had been
sailors on tramp steamers, others had
been longshoremen, few Negro
workers had come from the South
in the vain hope of finding work
quite few had toiled for years in
factories, and now they were all
stranded without jobs and many OF
them without shelter
When we mentioned the Unem-
ployed Councils, and their work in
organizing the jobless to struggle for
unemployment insurance and for the
lettering of their conditions, they
expressed keen interest. They be-
lieve something should be done about
their miserable conditions, and in
many cases are ready to join revo-
lutionary mass organization.