NEW-YORK TRIBUNE, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1912.

U. S. NAVY REOPENS
NICARAGUAN RAILWAY

Admiral Southerland Re-establishes Communication Between Corinto and Managua.

AMERICANS ARE IN DANGER

British Government Makes Appeal for Protection of Its Subjects—Fear of Famine and Pestilence in Granada.

(From The Tribune Bureau.)

Washington, and telegraphic communication between Corinto and Managua, has been re-established by United States marines, and the American forces are now in control of the situation in Nicaragua, except the coast to the capital, according to Rear Admiral William H. H. Southard, who was in command of the force.

The trains are being operated under the supervision of marines, and the railroad is now in operation. The train is now so that further serious disturbances are not expected by officials of the Department of state and the New Department. The train will be provided with a heavy force to Managua to open the southern extremity of the railroad to Granada.

The supply ships Prometheus and Glaster, which arrived at Corinto from San Juan, have proceeded northward to Amapala, on the Gulf of Fonseca. This is the cable station, which has been destroyed, so that three-fourths of the railroad is disabled.

The steamers, 710 strong, being brought to Corinto by the cruiseCAL MARITZEN, have made a total American force of 1,160 there. Colonel Penderell's force open up the southern extremity of the railroad to Granada.

In dispatches to the State Department Minister, Mr. Penderell, states that the trains are now particularly busy, and that there is a possibility of famine and pestilence. The inhabitants, he says, are now in a condition of absolute government, but have been fortified by General Mensa, who holds the tortor and military supplies, and has brought about a condition of almost total suffering.

Minister Penderell also reports that President Menzies has issued a force of federal troops to Matagualpa, which is about eighty miles east of Managua, but the supply ships have not been able to reach the point. There has been much concern over the safety of about 125 Americans living at that point. The British governments also has made an appeal for the protection of its subjects at that place.

General Mensa's violating of the truce which were arranged through the Salvadoran Minister has so incensed President Diaz that he has refused to enter into another armistice. The Caraga peace commission has abandoned its efforts and returned to Costa Rica.

Red Cross to Supply Feed.

The American Red Cross to-day allowed $1,000 for the purchase of food supplies for the suffering people in Nicaragua. Through the State Department the Red Cross has received reports telling of almost unbearable conditions facing the non-combatants in the present rebellion. At the present stage it appears from the reports that fighting hunger is an even harder battle than a siege at the hands of the rebels.

The first part of last month the Red Cross allowed $1,000 for the purchase of supplies for use in Nicaragua, but the scarcity of money and fuel in the public, coupled with the failure of crops, made the amount of supplies bought with this money look small when the number of persons to be fed was considered. The supplies were bought from the government commissary on the Panama Canal side.

A continuance of the present famine conditions is likely to aggravate the res- bellen states of affairs already existing in Nicaragua. To avoid this it is believed the Red Cross and the State Department will do all in their power to al- low the rebels to suffer in the most scurvy of manner.

San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, Sept. 3 (Delayed)—Fifty American marines reached Managua to-day. Rear Admiral Southerland, commander in chief of the United States Pacific fleet, controls the situation. American naval contingents are garrisoning the principal towns along the railroad. The rebels have suspended op-

A detachment of marines from Corinto reached Leon on Sunday. The population showed signs of indignation at the coming of the Americans, but their leaders kept them well in hand. At the small towns along the railroad from Corinto to Leon the people generally were friendly to the Americans. At numerous points the marines found the road impassable and were forced to build bridges. The United States cruiser Denver is lying at anchor here.

THE WORLD: WEDNES

KNOX POLICY THE
CAUSE OF TROUBLE
IN LATIN AMERICA

Nicaraguan Liberal, Gen. Alt-
schul, as Full of Fight as
Ever Against U. S.
"Dollar Diplomacy."

SAYS PRESS PUBLICITY
BALKED ADMINISTRATION.

Expects Work of Congressional
Committee Will Open Eyes
of American People.

(Source to the World.)

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 2—Gen. Francisco Altachul, representative in the United States of the Liberal party of Nicaragua, has returned to New Orleans as full of fight as when he departed for Washington a fortnight ago, and again represents his charge that the Administration's policy and "Dollar Diplomacy" is responsible for all the trouble. "The Administration has occurred, in Latin America, since Mr. Knox became Secretary of state." "When the American fleet will have a policy which is promoted and worked out, and will help the financial interests of a few, and those few belong to Wall street and the channels," he declared.

"The committee named by Congress to investigate the American affairs of the country will be able to do nothing in the way of clearing up the American Congress," said Mr. Altachul. "The revolution in Nicaragua will be set one way or another a great work of administration." "However, that committee and its work was not a great work, but a work of looking after real American interests." "It only means more nor less than the financial interests of a few York bankers," he said. "The American committee has brought about not only the retirement of a number of marines from Latin America."

The publicity which the American press has given the interference and intervention of the Department of War, coupled with the along expressions of cooperation, with the along expressions of Congress, has brought about not only the retirement of a number of marines from Latin America."

He then paid a tribute to the Ameri-
can press which the American press
has given the interference and in-
tervention of the Department of War, coupled with the along expressions of cooperation, with the along expressions of Congress, has brought about not only
the retirement of a number of marines
from Latin America.

Practically all the bridges between Corinto and the town of Matagualpa, eighteen miles from the capital, have been destroyed, so that three-fourths of the railroad is disabled.

American forces in Nicaragua, and Ma-
nagua, the capital of the country, has
been re-established according to a de-
ecree from Rear Admiral Southerland.

The railroad and telegraph lines are being operated by American marines. The engines are man-
ned by American marines while the con-
ductor is men of the same organiza-
tion.

In addition to these trains
Rear Admiral Southerland has stationed
detachments of marines along the route
of the railroad between Corinto and
Managua.

Major Butler and a force of marines yesterday left Leon, which has been in the hands of the rebels for several days, and went to Managua. Upon the arrival of the California to-morrow, part of the 190 marines aboard her will be sent to the California to-morrow, and the supplies ships Prometheus and Glaster have arrived at Corinto.

The supply ships Prometheus and Glaster have arrived at Corinto, and the 1,000 troops with the California to-morrow and the supply ships to-day means that the Americans will start a campaign in a few days to open up the southern part of Nicaragua, which has been under rebel dominance. Col. Penderell of the marines will have command of the force which will start to conduct the campaign against the territory which is contiguous to Granada.

Departures from Minister Welter re-
ceive conditions growing worse in the
vicinity of Granada. The Minister's
departures confirm reports of suf-
fering of the people, practically without
food supplies. Unless the Government
forces sent to the relief of Matagualpa
have been defeated or checked. It is
undesirable that the large foreign colony
in the vicinity, which so strongly ap-
pealed for help, has already been re-
domated.

and bluejackets from Nicaragua but has
not been responsible for a recall of the
accorder for the Tenth Infantry. The Tenth
Infantry has returned. In a word, the
Congress and the press of the United States
have been responsible for the State Department fol-
lowing a less favorable campaign against the
assumed, although other different attitude,
from that indicated at the beginning of
the revolution. It is continued.

"My only fear now is that an encoun-
ter may at any time take place between
marines and the revolutionists. Should
that occur, a great sentiment
would be created in the United States
and a strong anti-foreign sentiment
arise in all Latin America."

interest for such matters as the President's daily life, as
told by the President's secretary, or the Caesarian sulk-
ings of Mussolini and other exponents of the American
Spirit according to George F.

Then, about the Country. A Jeffersonian can hardly
avoid noting that Every American's endorsement of
Progress, Peace, and Preparedness is a combination of
phonetics in defiance of the facts. Thus far our Progress
has brought us to a point where .0029% of the population
pay 95% of the income-tax, while 82% have incomes too
small to come under the law. The narrow concentration
of wealth and the wide impoverishment thus indicated
are leading to progressively greater exports of wealth
and progressively greater need for foreign markets.
Imperial collisions must result with other Progressive
interests, and what then will happen to the dove of peace
is a foregone conclusion, whether Preparedness obtains
or not. Meanwhile the Progress of concentration is
transferring the Babbittry by mobs into the wage-work-
ing class, the prospect for which seems to be forced
service under the Nation's Rulers in war and peace. It
goes without saying that the road we travel today, and
the thin tissue of Every American's complacency as we
go, are from the Jeffersonian viewpoint wrong in every
major respect.

Thus, from a traditional American viewpoint, fares
the American Spirit owned and propagated by George
F. Babbitt, indubitably in the ascendancy today. It
seems, as I have indicated, to represent the creation of a
class at once buffaloed and bribed—buffaloed by a power
it fears to oppose, and bribed by the desperate hope of
maintaining its present precarious position between the
upper and nether millstones. In fundamental historic
Americanism, it assays something less than zero. Per-
haps one of Babbitt's Universal Americans will disagree
with this. For my part I should be pleased to have him
do so, and act on his opposition. It would be worth
while to see a vociferous self-appointed exponent of the
American Spirit in the throes of hornswoggling a Found-
ing Father into a loan on the current crop of underbrush
around the family tree.

MURRAY GODWIN

SLAVERY IN VENEZUELA

There is still hope for mankind when the staid Cabinet
head of the most powerful nation of the world can
offer us the stimulating spectacle of donning the wash-
basin helmet of Don Quixote and mounting the Rosi-
nante of his moral indignation to go forth killing
wicked sheep, even if they are little skinny Liberian
sheep. Of course, to change a figure of speech, Mr.
Stimson killed several sheep with one stone: he has
eliminated officials displeasing to Mr. Hoover's friends,
the Firestone rubber interests, and has diverted atten-
tion from labor conditions on their million-acre plan-
tation; and he has given an indirect buffet to Soviet
Russia, thereby, we may assume, scotching that slight
inferiority complex observable in Mr. Stimson ever
since Mr. Litvinov stuck his tongue out at the Knight
Errant of good causes when he was tilting down Man-
churia way.

We may regret that Mr. Stimson's natural modesty
reasserted itself so quickly, and that we shall be de-

nied the pleasure of witnessing a good tilt with a size-
able windmill; for he has hastened to declare that he
is not concerned about forced labor or slavery outside
of Liberia and contemplates no action against other
countries. Can it be that some of the 5,000,000 unem-
ployed have written to Mr. Stimson asking how they
can be sold into Liberian slavery? Or perhaps it has
suddenly occurred to the hero of the Inn of Blood
that the deplorable economic, political and moral status
of Negroes in this great free Republic should now re-
ceive some of his zealous attention.

Mr. Stimson really should not lay down his lance so
soon. Is he going to do nothing about forced labor
in American-owned mines in Bolivia, Peru and Chile?
Has he not read the masked forced-labor clauses in
Central American concessions to certain American
companies? Above all, Mr. Stimson, how about Vene-
zuela? How about the forced-labor conditions under
Dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, who was ushered into
power in 1908 with the blessing of American gunboats
(sent at his request), and who ever since has enjoyed
the fervent moral support of the State Department?

Can it be that Mr. Stimson is as ignorant of Vene-
zuela as he was of Brazil and Guatemala? Is it pos-
sible that he has heard only of the stable finances, the
good roads and the blooming prosperity of this great
empire, larger than France and Germany combined;
that he knows nothing of the five thousand political
prisoners in the Rotunda hell-hole and the various
fortresses, undergoing the most torturing conditions
existing anywhere in the modern world; nothing of the
ten thousand prisoners and workers, conscripted at the
whim of the Dictator, who are toiling on his private
plantations, on the roads and on port-works—driven
under the lash, loaded with chains? Liberia is still
close to the jungle, and slavery is a traditional insti-
tution of the Black Continent, not so easily uprooted
by a flourish of the pen in far-off Washington; but Ven-
ezuela was the home of the great patriot, Simón Bolí-
var, the George Washington of a continent; Venezuela
was the cradle of all Spanish-American liberties.

My first contact with Venezuela occurred vicariously
through a prominent American geologist, employed by
the Standard Oil Company (which with the Royal
Dutch Shell controls most of the oil of the second
largest petroleum-producing country in the world). On
his arrival in the mountain-fringed *plaza* of Caracas,
he was greeted by the sight of two political prisoners
hung up by meat-hooks through their jaws to die. Next,
I met that noble and disinterested patriot, Dr. Carlos
León, a lawyer and former Minister of Education, who
had been arrested without warrant, incarcerated with-
out trial and kept at hard labor for seven long years,
with a seventy-pound ball and chain on his leg, living
on maggoty rice—because he refused a Cabinet posi-
tion with the Dictator.

Since then, I have talked with dozens of Venezuelan
exiles who have passed through the Venezuelan dune-
geons, or who were impressed as forced laborers, and
who subsequently have joined the thousands of Vene-
zuelan émigrés fled abroad to escape the terror. Prob-
ably Mr. Stimson has not heard of these atrocities or
of the "forced labor approximating slavery" which is
the very basis of the Gómez tyranny. Perhaps that is
why these United States presented a monument of

the new FREEMAN

469

Henry Clay to Venezuela on the centenary of Bolivar. Our Minister, James R. Sheffield, already schooled in cynicism in Mexico, was probably quite unaware that he dedicated the monument on a spot stained with the blood of men hung up by meat-hooks and but a few steps away from the Rotunda torture chamber and a few miles from the grim prison fortresses of Maracaibo and Puerto Cabello and from the roads to Ciudad Bolivar and Palenque, built by the same sort of slavery Stimson is decrying in Liberia. Minister Sheffield congratulated the puppet President, Juan Bautista Pérez, and the "rocking-chair Tzar," General Gómez, on their enlightened government and declared:

> Clay's unquenchable spirit still lives in the policy of our State Department toward our neighbors and friends in the republics of South America. In speaking of the people of Venezuela, I am trying to interpret to all the republics of South America the friendly attitude of my country and its faith in the complete triumph of free institutions and governments in the Western World.

Were our diplomatic representative and our State Department ignorant of the fact that before this ceremony was held, a new governor was installed in the Federal District to suppress with an iron hand all expected anti-Governmental demonstrations; that a general telegraph strike was impending because nearly a hundred operators had been arrested and put to work on the roads in chains for having protested against their superiors pocketing part of their wages; that hundreds of arrests were made in order to celebrate the memory of the two great lovers of liberty? Are they ignorant of the fact that on the day of the presentation, hundreds of women, praying in the temples for their imprisoned loved ones, were dispersed by armed force? Perhaps President Hoover never turned over to Mr. Stimson the pitiful memorial of the Patriotic Society of Venezuelan Women, describing the persecutions in that country and the treatment of political prisoners. Can it be that Mr. Stimson has overlooked the Congressional Record of June 3 and June 24, 1930, wherein is contained extensive documentary evidence of forced-labor conditions in Venezuela? Mr. Stimson can easily get mountains of such sworn evidence; or if he would merely have some one clip the newspapers, from Mexico to Buenos Aires, he would soon discover how our great Republic is universally damned for its support of the blackest tyranny in the modern world, he would soon be in possession of sufficient documentary reprints to permit him to shine once more as an international Knight Errant and save another American protectorate from evil.

Of course, from the narrow viewpoint of the State Department, the Gómez Government is ideal. Gómez, since 1908, thanks to oil "dumping," has wiped out the national debt; he has put down every insurrection by wholesale executions; he makes a pretence of observing Constitutional forms; he has built roads, and he has divided up the property of the country among himself (his fortune is said to exceed $300 million) and a small clique, and has turned over national resources to the amount of $200 million to Americans, and probably an equal amount to Britishers.

A Venezuelan exile, G. Lugo Escobar (whose cousin Eloy Escobar, a sixteen-year-old university student, was put, along with three hundred other students, to

forced labor under the lash on the roads, and whose sixty-three-year-old uncle of the same name was riveted to an iron bar in the Rotunda and allowed to die of hunger), thus addressed himself to the American Congress:

> If you have perchance read the laudatory articles that Mr. Preston McGoodwin, United States Minister to Venezuela . . . used to print in the New York Times . . . praising the administration of Gen. Juan Vicente Gómez on account of the excellent system of roads that he had built throughout the country, when you stop to think that the mortar of the pavement of those roads was mixed with the flesh and blood of hundreds of Venezuelan college boys belonging to the best class of society who were taken out from the jails and put to work under forced labor to build that excellent system of highways, a fact which Mr. McGoodwin could not possibly ignore, you have an opportunity to ponder on the truth that underlies some reports of the modern press.

On July 15, 1922, a group of reputable Venezuelan exiles addressed themselves to the American Congress and to all of the national legislative bodies of Latin America, accusing one of our former ministers of being directly in the pay of Gómez, so that by means of this and other favors, he rose from the status of a poor provincial politician to that of a personage of enormous wealth. This charge was never even investigated. Why not?

The officials of the American State Department never miss an opportunity to laud the Gómez Government. When the insignificant American citizen, James Edward Welch, cheated out of his property, illegally imprisoned for forty-three days, and robbed of his child, appealed to the Department for redress against Gómez, he was told he should have stayed at home; and on March 24, 1930, Undersecretary Cotton wrote to Senator Borah of the Foreign Relations Committee, anent Welch's case, "Foreign interests in Venezuela have, in general, not failed of legal protection."

## II

Who is this eighty-year-old man who sits in a rocking-chair under the trees of his plantation in Maracay, surrounded by fawning servitors who kiss his hand, and drives a nation under the lash? An amazing man. who sits above hidden lakes of petroleum and whose word is the supreme law of Venezuela, who decrees all taxes, supervises all concessions, orders all human life. He seizes native property at will, naming the price he will pay; and woe betide the owner who refuses to sell. He has driven thousands of settlers from thousands of miles of fertile land in order that his own cattle might grow fat in bucolic tranquillity. In the plashing ponds of his Maracay estate, Las Delicias, are assembled the rare birds of the earth. The far corners of the globe are combed for exotic luxuries. His concubines are innumerable; he is the father of over ninety known children, most of whom hold important governmental posts.

Originally an ignorant mountaineer, scarcely able to read or write, Gómez rose in the army, and in December, 1908, seized the reins of power from President Castro. Through the Brazilian Minister, Gómez made a request for American battle-ships (which were sent), and announced that he would respect the Constitution and pay off the foreign debt. Oil made it possible for him

470

the new FREEMAN

to do the latter; the former, he has used as a ping-pong ball for his personal ambitions. For twenty years he has ruled with an iron hand.

During the period of his rule, he has altered the Constitution at will to make it answer his personal needs. In August, 1913, Gómez staged a sham rebellion, declared martial law, suspended the elections, arrested opposing candidates, and created an assembly of plenipotentiaries to amend the Constitution so that the President thereafter would be relieved of the command of the army. The new office of Commandant in Chief of the Army was created, with full control over personnel of army, navy and air forces, and their size, with final authority in the appointment or removal of Cabinet officials, the calling of extra Congressional sessions, the government of the Federal District, the declaration of war or martial law, the right to remove governors, etc.

Gómez then had his hand-picked Congress name Dr. Victoriano Márquez Bustillos, President, and himself Commandant in Chief. In 1922, having previously abolished the office of Commandant in Chief, and created two Vice-Presidencies, Gómez again assumed the Presidency and the command of the army (1922-9), and installed his brother Juan Crisostomo as First Vice-President, and his son Juan Vicente, as Second Vice-President. In 1929, the Constitution was again remodeled, and the offices of President and Commandant in Chief were again separated. Gómez was chosen President by his Congress, but he declared with comic modesty that he could not again accept the high honor; he would be content to become only Commandant in Chief. He was so named; the puppet, Dr. Juan Bautista Pérez, was made chief Executive (1929-36).

From political prisoners in the Rotunda and the Castles of Maracaibo, San Carlos and Puerto Cabello (estimated at 5,000 at the present moment), from the tens of thousands of human beings who have been rounded up to work in chains on farms, in industries, portworks and roads, from the 100,000 Venezuelans driven into exile, the testimony regarding prison torture is voluminous. Prisoners are shackled to an iron bar, riveted to the ankles, weighing (according to the punishment) from fifteen to more than one hundred pounds, a weight they must support while laboring. When the bar association of Caracas protested against the shooting and imprisonment of students, the association was disbanded, and the lawyers were likewise thrown into prison. They were in the Rotunda torture chamber when Minister Sheffield eulogized Venezuelan liberties.

Four prisoners who escaped alive from the Rotunda signed a sworn statement (published in the *Times*, San Juan, Porto Rico, August 1, 1930):

> By orders of Juan Vicente Gómez they [the irons] weighing from 30 to 100 pounds, are riveted on to a human being without so much as a trial or defense, one, two, three sets of irons. The physical resistance of [many of these] men cannot withstand these pains for more than a few days ... gangrene sets in, and suffering indescribable pain and torture, the prisoner passes from the jail to the cemetery .... The students of the University of Caracas—about five hundred in number—have been condemned by Gómez to hard labor on the highways, without clothing, hungry, maltreated by the lash of the hangman, weighted with chains.

When the American mentioned above, Mr. James E. Welch, called upon the State Department, he was told "You should have stayed at home, for then you wouldn't have got into trouble."

Will the State Department say the same to the American oil men when the inevitable revolution sweeps over Venezuela, and an outraged populace destroys the statue of Henry Clay and takes vengeance for twentyodd years of tyranny patronized by the American government? Will Mr. Stimson say to the millions of dollars invested in Venezuela, "If you had stayed at home, you wouldn't have got into trouble"? Why is forced labor unholy in Liberia, Mr. Stimson, and holy in Venezuela?

CARLETON BEALS

## DRAMA

## LEWIS AND O'NEILL

And had you chosen Eugene O'Neill, who has done nothing much in the American drama save to transform it utterly in ten or twelve years from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and greatness, you would have been reminded that he had done something far worse than scoffing, that he had seen life as something not to be neatly arranged in a study, but as terrifying, magnificent and often quite horrible, a thing akin to a tornado, an earthquake or a devastating fire.—SINCLAIR LEWIS, in his Nobel Prize address to the Swedish Academy.

Among the items in Mr. Lewis's disquisition which have come in for sarcastic comment, both printed and oral, at the hands of American writers who didn't get the prize and who are consequently displeased with the intelligence of the Swedish Academy, this presents itself as perhaps the most riddled target. Facetiousness over both Mr. Lewis's rich encomium and the measure in which O'Neill has justified it, or rather not justified it, has laboriously insinuated itself into at least one-half the clippings patiently scissored by the indefatigable Dr. Romeike. There is derision for Mr. Lewis's "world of splendor, fear and greatness," and for O'Neill's tornados, earthquakes and devastating fires. There is a mocking of Mr. Lewis's faith in the transformation of American drama, and of O'Neill's share in that transformation. There are amused hisses and boos and catcalls, and not a few senile eggs and pre-Raphaelite tomatoes. In the midst of the ironic din, a critic of the drama may be privileged to retire for a moment to the peace of his *atelier* and there determine what sense there is to the business.

After about a quarter of a minute's prolonged and studious meditation, the critic comes to the conclusion that, despite the pardonable smiles induced by Mr. Lewis's extravagant conviction that the American drama has been transformed utterly in ten or twelve years from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and greatness, there nevertheless is a pretty fair relative degree of truth in his statement, and that certainly if anyone is responsible for any sort of transformation in the American drama, O'Neill is that person. The American drama may still be very far from what one might desire it to be; but that in the last decade it has got much nearer to that desideratum than ever it got before, must be obvious to anyone not wholly blind

the new FREEMAN

471

or a professor at Princeton. It would be pleasant to believe that this great change for the better had been of slow, steady, and relentless growth, that it had come as a result of gradually seeping revolution, and that O'Neill was simply the man who had grabbed the flag from the hands of the forces that step by step had paved the way for him and had then accompanied him shoulder to shoulder on the valiant march. But, pleasant though it would be, it wouldn't be true. For the truth of the matter is just what Mr. Lewis announced it to be to the Swedes, to wit, that O'Neill alone and single-handed waded through the dismal swamp-lands of American drama, bleak, squashy and oozing sticky goo, and alone and single-handed bore out of them the water-lily that no American had found there before him.

I do not argue, in my somewhat dubious and poetical metaphor, that O'Neill, since first he invaded the swamp, has always come out of it bearing the gift of a water-lily. There have been times, as in the case of "Welded" and "Dynamo," when what he has brought to shore has resembled rather more closely a cauliflower. But I do argue with Mr. Lewis that to O'Neill alone must go the credit for transforming the American drama, if not quite entirely into a world of splendor, fear and greatness, at least into a world at length wholesomely free from fear and, thus freed, possibly on the way to splendor and greatness. When O'Neill came upon the playwriting scene, the American drama—even at its least hypocritical, at its least sentimental and at its bravest—had still the air of a female impersonator removing his wig and implying his perfect masculinity in a movement of his jaws on an imaginary hunk of chewing tobacco. Such antecedents of O'Neill as Augustus Thomas ("dean of American playwrights") with his interpretation of life in terms of osteopathy and thought transference, as Charles Klein with his stenographers outwitting actors in the rôles of Rockefellers and Morgans, as George Broadhurst with his boy politicians putting an end to municipal corruption by the exercise of what are today known as wisecracks, as Eugene Walter with his Rector's restaurant tragedies and William Hurlbut with his studies of New York in terms of the violation of an *ingénue's* virtue and his Ibsen distillations like "The Writing on the Wall"—such antecedents surely left no inspirational legacy to O'Neill. Life, as he saw and wrote of it when first he began to take pen in hand, may not always have been akin to a tornado, an earthquake or a devastating fire, but at least it was never akin to a Belasco conservatory, a Liebler drawing-room or a Broadway supper café.

With O'Neill's acceptance and success in the theatre, American playwrights suddenly took courage and proceeded, as best as in their fashion they could, to set themselves to a species of drama far removed from that to which they had been devoting their efforts. The newer and younger writers, led by O'Neill, threw off the shackles at once and tried to write honestly, faithfully and truthfully; the older ones—men like Owen Davis—at least abandoned the further confection of mush dishes and tried to follow the changing taste with imitations, very pathetic, of the O'Neill drama. Even criticism, long tied to the apron-strings of sentimentality, moral cowardice and dramatic falsehood, began slowly to get onto its own legs, to wag its tail independently and to bark loudly and defiantly in behalf of the new order. And audiences,

growing steadily in receptivity and intelligence, joined in the barking.

The result is apparent. Where once—and not so long ago as the great clock ticks—the American stage, even in its then most reputable aspect, was occupied by such stuff as "The Witching Hour," "The Lion and the Mouse," "As A Man Thinks" and "The Man of the Hour," it has in the last ten years gained respectability with plays like "The Great God Brown," "Strange Interlude," "Craig's Wife," "Street Scene," "Chicago," "Desire Under the Elms," "Hell-Bent Fer Heaven," "What Price Glory?," "Saturday's Children," "The Hairy Ape," "The First Year," "Ambush," "Rain," "Sun-Up," "A Man's man," "Veneer," "The Front Page," and numerous others. Sinclair Lewis may have been guilty of second degree hyperbole, but down under it he knew pretty blamed well what he was talking about.

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

## LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

### Out of the Frying Pan—

Mr. Herbert J. Seligmann, Director of Publicity of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a letter which was published in the new *Freeman* for January 14, seems to regard my article on "Lynching the Negro," which appeared two weeks before, as inadequate because I did not register myself in favor of a Federal anti-lynching law. Well, I do favor such a law and also wish to set myself down as in hearty sympathy with the aims and activities of the Association Mr. Seligmann represents. But, not being a liberal, I am very sceptical of the value of a Federal anti-lynching law to the Negro race. I doubt if it would materially reduce lynching. True, trials of lynchers in Federal courts would not be the farce that they are in Southern State courts, but the juries would be drawn from much the same sort of Southern citizenry.

Probably fear of Federal prosecution would prevent lynchings from being the town picnics that they now are. Their entire technique, in fact, might be radically changed. Bucolic "vigilantes" might replace large mobs in putting undesired Negroes "on the spot," and the killings would therefore be recorded as "unsolved murders" instead of lynchings—a practice not unknown even now. In brief, there might be fewer jails stormed, and fewer doomed Negroes who would get to jail.

Assuming, however, that a Federal statute would reduce lynchings in fact, I submit that the white race would benefit more than the Negro. Here I speak as a white man who can think of nothing in the category of criminality more cowardly and contemptible than for a mob of moronic bullies to do away with another human being who has no chance either to fight or to flee. Race wars, ignoble as they are, at least give the Negroes some chance to fight back.

Nevertheless, abolition of lynching would not alter the status of the Southern Negro as a brutally oppressed "untouchable." He would continue to be legally lynched on the same charges for which mobs now shoot, or burn, or hang him. Except in so far as legal execution may be less painful than that meted out by mobs, it can not make much difference to a Negro accused of rape in the

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