A Very Tribune Christmas
In 1937, Tribune ran a Christmas editorial paying tribute to workers imprisoned in the struggle against fascism and capitalism – and calling for a renewed fellowship of labour across the world.
Tribune‘s first Christmas in 1937 was a tumultuous one. The paper had struggled financially in its inaugural year and the Unity Campaign, through which it was founded, had failed in its ambitions of building a broader left-wing front against fascism – forcing Tribune‘s patron, Stafford Cripps, to dissolve his own Socialist League under threat of expulsion from the Labour Party.
But the weekly paper kept its socialist perspective throughout the chaos. It had been one of the leading voices in the English language world in covering the events of the Spanish Civil War, a fact marked by International Brigadiers who posed with copies of Tribune in a Madrid hospital. It has also chronicled the development of fascism in Italy and Germany, and the crimes of the British Empire around the world.
But its most striking contributions were found in its coverage of the workers’ movement itself, ranging from compelling portraits of the suffering in deprived industrial areas to vociferous defences of trade unionism and industrial action. On Christmas 1937, it dedicated its front page to the workers imprisoned in defence of that movement across the world – featuring photographs of Ernst Thaelmann, Mick Kane and Tom Mooney. We republish that editorial today.
Tribune editorial, December 23, 1937
FOR the mass of people the reality of Christmas is human kindliness. Ordinary men and women welcome the holiday—unpaid though it be—because it provides an opportunity to give free play to the fellowship which is the best part of them.
Workers who throughout the year are engaged in the bitter struggle to make ends meet, who slave for bare survival, still retain the fundamental quality of fellowship.
At Christmas the economic tension is not ceased. It may be forgotten for a few days. Workers’ homes, however poor, become living “centres of the peace and goodwill” which all rational people know to be the aim and end of human endeavour.
Because expensive wine is absent from the workers’ tables there will be no lack of sincere toasts to “absent friends”—for the workers, who have the greatest need of friends, are blessed with the greatest numbers of friends whose loyalty emerges unimpaired from ordeals of imprisonment, torture, and death.
AT thousands of firesides this Christmas men and women of the British Labour movement will remember with gratitude the heroic sacrifices of friends at home and abroad.
All who are conscious of the debt owed to these fighters in International Labour will be inspired and fortified by the panorama of heroic friends that will pass through their minds.
From Spain a host of working class dead will arise at the beckoning of memory —young men, old men, women, and children—not sad and reproachful in their past suffering, but still breathing the unquenchable spirit of their cause.
When British workers toast the Spanish dead they not only pay a tribute to a host martyred in the international cause of Labour, but affirm their own determination to carry on the work of the dead here, until the final victory is won.
THE dead pass, and we are left with the living martyrs, victims of the Fascist and capitalist terrors. In Nazi Germany the silence of the grave broods over the inspiring figure of Ernst Thaelmann, the German Communist leader, who was swept into a Nazi jail in the spring of 1933.
The world will never know to what tortures this working class front-fighter has been subjected by the barbarians who have trampled German workers’ liberties underfoot. Battered and tuberculous, Thaelmann still lives to prove that neither physical torture nor political defeat can break his spirit.
And suffering with him, but unbroken in spirit are thousands of Socialists and Communists whom Hitler fears.
In America the gallant Tom Mooney, falsely charged with murder and illegally sentenced to death in 1916, enters his twenty-second year of imprisonment. Only a world-wide Labour protest saved him from the electric chair, but who can say that the living death he has lived for the past twenty-one years was preferable to execution?
He entered prison as a young man, filled with glowing health and ardent Socialist conviction. Of that Tom Mooney only the Socialist conviction remains. The rest of him is prematurely aged, white-haired, sick. No conscious worker will forget him this Christmas.
During the past few years Fascist and capitalist reaction has reached out and victimised scores of men dedicated to the workers’ cause. There is the Finn, Antikainen, sentenced to serve the rest of his life in the hell of a Baltic prison, on a now admittedly false charge of incredible cruelty when he led the Red armies in 1921—a charge invented by the Finnish Fascists.
Antikainen will be included in the toast of ” absent friends.” So will Uriah Butler, leader of the Trinidad oil strike, who was this year sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, after putting up a desperate struggle to secure higher wages and shorter hours for the five thousand workers he led.
Prestes, the Brazilian Labour leader, recently sentenced to life imprisonment for working in the cause of his people, will be remembered as a hero who dared uphold the working-class standard against Fascist tyrants. And from Italy and Austria the cry of the martyrs for freedom rises this Christmastide.
TO THESE—and to the thousands of other victims of capitalist injustice in the five Continents, especially in India—grateful tributes will be offered, before passing on to the memory of those at home.
Mick Kane, leader of the Harworth miners, is still in prison for “watching and besetting” and “riotous assembly.” With him are three other courageous guards of industrial liberty—G. A. Chandler, J. H. Smith, and W. Carney.
Workers may think of them with pride and have good reason to look forward to Labour victory while the movement breeds such men. Thus may British workers at their own Christmas firesides pay their respects to all true friends in the greatest dominion of all—the dominion of Labour, which covers the whole world and embraces all peoples.