Page:William Z. Foster, James P. Cannon and Earl Browder - Trade Unions in America.djvu/36

 The outlaw strikes in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania at the close of 1924 and beginning of 1925 are but symptoms of the deepening resentment at the systematic betrayal that grows more intense daily thruout the miners' union. Leading the struggle there as everywhere else are the T. U. E. L. militants with the program of the Progressive Miners' Committee.

Living and glowing manifestations of how deeply the left wing movement has penetrated the masses are now being given in trade union elections wherever these are taking place. Outstanding among these, and constituting one of the greatest achievements of three years of struggle and organization, is the results of the election in the United Mine Workers.

In the election, running against Lewis and Murray the reactionary bureaucrats who control unlimited financial resources and the machinery of the union, were three unknown rank-and-file Communists, George Voyzey, Arley Staples and Joseph Nearing. The Progressive Committee was so poor that it couldn't even send out an organizer or speaker. It had to content itself with circulating 65,000 copies of its program—among the 400,000 members of the union. It was up against the most notoriously corrupt election machinery in the labor movement.

In spite of these and a thousand other handicaps, the progressive forces were so strong and their vote so big, that even the official returns, certied to by the reactionary bureaucrats themselves, are as follows:

Lewis, 136,209; Murray, 126,800; Green, 138,977.

Voyzey, 62,843; Staples, 66,038; Nearing, 51,686.

It was a tremendous achievement for this ticket of Communist rank and filers to force the corrupt Lewis to count more than one-third of the total vote for it. There is no question that thousands of left wing votes were stolen, and experience has demonstrated many times the ability of these bureaucrats to cast the vote of hun-