Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea?
American populism is consistent with and can be-
come a force for world-socialism.
It can also be de-
flected by the enemies of the masses into something
exactly opposite. It cannot develop socialism out of
itself.
Intellectually and spiritually it needs the
Marxist
analysis of social forces to complete it;
just as, politically, the farmer-class needs the organ-
ized workers to lead it. Populism can behold its task
and its future clearly only within the mirror of the
revolutionary Marxist
understanding of capitalist
contradictions.
It must augment its good will and its
instinctive grasp of the desires and requirements of
the great masses of the people with disciplined intel-
lectual research.
In poetry, the fusion of social accuracy with social
impulse would open up new perspectives.
It would
rid poetry of the reactionary backwash which Whit-
man so detested in his own day. Had it been evident
in America twenty years ago it would have given
direction to Lindsay,
and would have saved such
high peaks of his poetry as the
A braham Lincoln,
Factory Windows Are Always Broken, Here's To
The Mice,
from drowning in isolation within a froth
of false legend and guitar-trifles.
Vignettes from
China
AGNES
SMEDLEY
A MAN passed along the Shanghai streets today,
and by chance he was a Japanese.
This was chance
only, but what transpired was symbolic.
For he
threw away a cigarette stub and two ricksha coolies
saw it and rushed forward to get it. Their long,
heavily-veined scrawny hands reached toward the
street at the same time. They struck at each other.
Then they fell to fighting, and they fought like dogs.
They fought for a, cigarette stub thrown away by a
Japanese.
Of course, it was but a chance that the
passer-by was Japanese,
but this lent intensity to
this degraded scene.
On this same day, in another part of the city, this
happened:
A young ricksha coolie, perhaps blinded
by the fearful
heat, stumbled and fell, and was
struck by a passing tram car. It seems he was killed
instantly,
for he lay motionless,
his face upturned
to the sky. The shafts of his ricksha were crushed
under the wheels of the tram.
These shafts worried a Japanese policeman who
walked over and, without touching the ricksha coolie
to see if he were dead or alive, began removing the
broken shafts from under the car. After successfully
removing the broken wood from the track, the J ap-
anese policeman turned to the prostrate ricksha
coolie, grasped him by a leg, and dragged him over
to the curb, motioning to the tram that all was well.
The car proceeded and the perspiring Japanese
stood looking after it. Not once had he bent down
to feel the pulse or the heart of the man at his feet,
to see if he were alive or dead. It was the tram
car and the profit it brings to its owners, that was
important.
The prone ricksha coolie was young and strong,
a lad of some nineteen or twenty summers. Perhaps
he was a peasant from the country, recently come to
Shanghai.
For youth and strength were still on his
body and it seemed that tuberculosis or heart sick-
ness had not yet decimated him. Perhaps he came
down from near Soochow where the hungry peasants
have again revolted against the high taxes and the
looting of the landlords-and
where the Nanking
Government
has sent troops to force them to pay
or to die. Many of these peasants have
coine
to
Shanghai as ricksha coolies, stevedores,
or have be-
come beggars.
Now this lad is dead, and a police-
man did not even consider it worth while to bend
down and see if his heart has ceased to beat.
Today this happened in Shanghai:
Two motor vehicles rolled along a street. The
front one was a Japanese truck, with two Japanese
marines standing in the back. The truck drove slowly
and impeded the progress of a private car in the rear
in which sat a foreign white man and a Chinese
chauffeur.
Irritated by the slow pace, the foreigner in the
private car bent forward and said to his Chinese
chauffeur: "Drive around and go home."
The chauffeur answered:
"That's a Japanese
truck."
"Well, what if it is?"
"I can't pass a Japanese truck."
"\Vhy not?"
"I can't. They would be angry."
"Well, let them be angry! Pass! Drive around, I
tell you !"
InsteJ d of pas~.ing, the chauffeur drew the private
car up to the curb, got out, sat down on the curb
and began to cry. He cried like a baby.
Later the foreigner said: "A Chinese chauffeur
will never pass a Japanese car or truck, or a police
car. For generations the common people have been
subjected and taught servility and degradation.
They
must never be presumptuous enough to pass a police-
man, an official, or a military man."
Recently I personally experienced this:
I went up to a motor car station in Shanghai and
ordered a taxi. No other person was in the station.
There was no taxi at the moment and the Chinese
clerk in charge told me I would have to wait for
about five minutes. I waited. Within a few minutes
a Japanese came up and ordered a taxi. Soon a J ap-
OCTOBER,
1936
