The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1934-02-20
East Side Fire Snufs Out
LiUes of 8 Workers and Kids
Tenement Blaze Occurs in Slum Area Typical OF
Every City in Capitalist World

smoke, ran with her husband to the
front room Of their apartment, where
she might have been rescued by fire.
men who had already set up their
ladders; but she ran back into the
flames to rescue her two children,
and persisted with them.
This fire. while more spectacular
| than others which do not find their
way into the front pages of the capt.
taliSt press, is but one of hundreds
which occur with tragic frequency in
the working class sections of Amer
ica's big cities. Such and similar
tragedieS-as a glance through the
files of any newspaper will verify
are common in the Stun areas thru
out the world.
That this was not an isolated hap
pening and that such tragedies daily
| threaten the lives of workers
throughout the city was glaringly re-
| vealed on Saturday afternoon when
Langdon w. Post LaGuardias Tene-
ment House Commissioner, speaking
at the Hotel Pennsylvania at the
eighth annual luncheon of the United
Neighborhood Houses, said:
1T is tragic coincidence, but
think perhaps providential symbol
that on the day of this luncheon
there should have been one of the
worst and most tragic tenement
house fires in recent years. thought
of the fact that Is per cent of the
dwellings of Manhattan Island were
built just as that building was
built"
THE only chance they (the
workingclass yictins) had to get out,
Post admitted, was to go to the
front of the building and wait for
| firemen to come with ladders. In
those houses, built as the one which
| burned down this morning, there is
practically nothing We can do to pre-
vent recurrence unless We dc
something instant, courageous ane
complete"
Mr., Post did not mention what this
instant, courageous and complete
action was to be.
Capitalism cares nothing about its
| workers lives. 1t dooms them to
squalid, filthy, crowded and disease
ridden areas. 1t keeps them suffo-
eating in summer, freezing in win
ter. Adequate housing, surely, Is not
the concern of a government which
does everything in its power to steal
even the miserable and paltry SCRAP
of food it throws to its working class
Only one country in the world
the U,S.SR., where the workers are
triumphantly building Socialism -
gives its main attention to the safety
and health and well-being of work
ers and their wives and children
One need only to read Stains mas
terly speech, delivered late last month
before the Seventeenth Party Con-
gress in Moscow, to realize this.
"The face of our large cities and
industrial centers has changed"
Stain reported to the Congress.
IAN inevitable attribute of large
cities in bourgeois countries are
slums, so-calIed workers districts
in the outskirts of cities represent
ing heaps of dark. damp, half
ruined quarters, mostly cellars,
where usually poor people live, wal
lowing in mud and cursing their
fate. The revolution in the U. S.
). Il. brought about the disappear
ance of these slumS in our coun-
try. They have been replaced by
newly built, good and light workers
| districts having better appear
ance than the centers of the Cities
| Let workers who know intimately
che annual loss of proletarian lives
in Slum sectionS-whether from fire
| or starvation or tuberculosis-read
this account of workers lives in the
Soviet Union, and let them, having
read this, turn back to the struggle
\ their own cities, against the bank
controlled administration Guar
dia in New York, Kelly in Chicago
etc.-to demand their rights as work
ers in their day-to-day battles, and
to fight for proletarian dictatorship
which alone can win these rights, In
fthe United States.