AUGUST 7, 1934

15

I answered many questions concerning the Negroes in America. It was dusk when we walked across the fields to the cluster of buildings that formed the center of the kolkhoz. They were preparing the nursery as a guest-room for us, moving back the little chairs and tables of the children and spreading beautiful hand-woven rugs on the floor that we might sit down.

Soon guests began to arrive, teachers from the village school came, and then the men who had been out on the irrigation works all day, and among them musicians. They came in twos and threes and larger groups until the room was full. One oil lamp on the floor was the only light, and as they sat around it, their tall hats cast tremendous shadows on the walls. Chainiks of tea were brought, and a half-dozen bowls were shared by all. As the tea-pots emptied, they were passed continually back and forth from hand to hand to the door where a man replenished them from the water boiling over an open fire outside in the dark.

Many stories were told to us there in the nursery by the men who shared their little bowls of tea; stories of the days when women were purchased for sheep or camels or gold. If you were rich enough—young women; or, if you were poor, you worked three to five years in the field to receive an old wife that

some rich man had tired of. Stories were told of the boys who once controlled the water, and whose land you must till in order to moisten your own poor crops. Stories were told of feuds, and tribal wars, Tsarist oppression, and mass misery. And all this not a hundred years ago, but only ten or fifteen years past. These men in the tall hats had not read about it in history books. It had been their life. And now they were free.

Then the boys began to sing to the notes of their two-string lutes. The high monotonous music of the East filled the room. Two singers sat cross-legged on the floor, face to face, rocking to and fro. One was the young man who, during the day, learned to be a time-keeper. The other, a peasant who, between verses threw back his head and made strange clucking sounds with his throat. They sang of the triumphs of the Revolution. Then they sang old songs of power, of love, and the beauties of women whose faces were like the moon. Sometimes they played, without singing, music that was like a breeze over the desert, coming out of the night to the cotton fields.

A sheep had been killed and, from the fire outside, great steaming platters of mutton were brought which we ate with our hands. Most of the men left at midnight, but several remained to keep us company, and slept

on the floor with us. For a while I sat up by the single oil lamp writing into my note book.

I visited several other cotton kolkhozes in Turkmenia and Uzbekistan, and one sovkhoz. I filled two note-books with figures and data: the number of hectares under cultivation, the yield per hectare, the percentages fulfilled according to the plan—some not always good—the method of irrigation, the amount the state pays for cotton in rubles and wheat and cloth and tea. I stayed for two days at the mechanization station for farm machinery near Tashkent; and another day at the seed selection station where a number of American Negro chemists are employed at work they would seldom be allowed to do in the United States. I saw the cotton college. I visited the big building of the Cotton Trust at Tashkent. I looked at statistics. I studied charts.

The figures, sooner or later (important as they are) I shall forget. Maybe I will lose the note-books in my travels. But these things I shall always remember: that the peasants themselves have told me: "Before, there were no schools for our children; now there are. Before, we lived in debt and fear; now we are free. Before, women were bought and sold; now no more. Before, the water belonged to the beys; today, under the Soviets, it's ours."

# What Has the Great War Taught Me?

## THEODORE DREISER

I COULD limit my reply to one slang American word—plenty.

It made changelessly clear that the entire social order that preceded that war was decayed, and worse, rotten to the core. The organized religion of that day and since, what a farce it proved to be. The boasted democracy of England! What a trashy material scheme for bolstering up and maintaining a decadent and disgraceful leisure class at the expense of the masses! They fought and died, and the remainder were given a dole.

And then the antiquated King and Emperor business of the rest of Europe:—The Kaiser, for instance, with his cracked notions of a place in the sun for the Imperial Hohenzollern family. But who else? The Czar, neurotic and mentally defective, yet dominating Russia through a neurotic and defective court and leisure class! And in Austro-Hungary, the Hapsburgs, a collection of defectives out of an asylum, yet masquerading as Dukes and Princes and Princesses and supported by a brutal shameless and disgraceful church. And Spain with its frayed and defective King and a religious hierarchy so antiquated and mentally threadbare as not to be able to recognize its own unbelievable lunacies which were

destroying the very body of the people on which it depended for its existence.

Italy the same.

Roumania the same.

Loafers, wasters, sybarites, enthroned as Lords and Kings and all bolstered by armies and navies and statecraft and priestcraft, maintained by the almost unrewarded labor of the masses, who at the same time were taught that their masters were divinely ordained!

And then America! Wilson shouting about making the world safe for democracy and believing that by wasting forty billions of American money, he had done so. And yet as they said of Mary's little lamb after it arrived in Pittsburgh, "Now look at the Goddam' thing!"

And afterwards, here in America—its democracy made "safe"—for what? Only consider our Trusts and Holding Companies, the Standard Oil Company, Telephone Trust, the Power Trust, the Railroad Trust, the Steel Trust, the Aluminum Trust, the Food and Textile Trusts, holding everything that they had and exacting, as might any tyrant in any part of the world, all that the traffic will bear, all that the man with fifty cents an hour can pay and more. Yet shouting of Democracy,

of maintaining American standards—doing things in an American way. And worse, while borrowing a few ideas from Russia—the only decent ones they have—the minimum wage and the thirty-hour week, denouncing Russia as an unbelievable tyranny. And you ask me what has the great war taught me?

Well it has taught me this—that fifty cents an hour and thirty hours a week for labor won't make up for unmeasured privileges and monopolies bestowed upon our entrenched money aristocracy whose one dream is not the advancement of the mass—nor even the superior mental development of a class, but aimless, meaningless, social leisure and show. And until these monopolies are broken, the masses properly rewarded and the so-called "classes" aligned with the masses as workers and nothing else, I will not believe that, except for Russia and the hope that it still holds out to the world, the Great War accomplished anything. And that is what the Great War has taught me.

P. S.—Not that I believe that human beings are going to be made angels by law, but that by law, for a time at least, they are going to be prevented from being downright devils.