RUSSIAN INFLUENCE

Indications at the present time point to the possibility of a wide-spread textile strike throughout the South. Labor is inflamed, and justly so, over housing conditions, hours of employment, and the low wage scale prevalent in the textile mills of the southern states.

But were it merely a case of "growing pains" in industry, not many people would regard the situation as a menace to American economic life. It is the shadowy connection with the Communist organizations of Russia that alarms the average American, and he sees in the Marion and Gastonia riots a threat of the violence that may spread to every section of our industrial life. The very thought of red Russian influence in American industry is a bugbear to the normal business man.

The same problem has presented itself in a different form before in this country, and the same influence of Moscow was feared and condemned throughout, the land. During the war, when the I. W. W. first showed it's head in the northwestern states, it's members were promptly termed communists, menaces to organized society, and deserving of immediate exportation. It's tactics were denounced on every side. Yet those familiar with the labor conditions in the northwest, both before the war and of recent years, cannot deny that the situation, from the point of view of the worker, is much improved. In almost every said of large scale industry, conditions of living, wages, and hours of employment have been bettered for the working man.

The history of the last century and a half has shown that whenever a large proportion of the lower classes have risen up to demand better conditions, the prosperous classes have cried "communism". History has also shown that desire for true communism is not compatible with a good living. The textile worker in the South is not really a communist of the Brook Farm or Bolshevik type. It is merely the American love of labels that makes him one. When the level of living conditions in the South has been raised to that of the rest of the country, the cause of imitation will be removed, and automatically the worker will be freed from the stigma of communism.