Vincent Ferrini's 'No Smoke'

NO Smoke: By Vincent Ferrini, Curious Traveler Press, (34 Blackburn Circle, Gloucester MA 01930 ($16 postage paid).

In recently watching the movie Cradle Will Rock one is struck by how much the ruling class feared the power of class struggle ideas in the 1930's.

In one scene, Congress seeks to close down the entire National Theater Section of the Works Progress Administration on the grounds it is too radical. In another scene, ruling class figures (including one Nelson Rockefeller) actually conspire to fund and promote a new school of painting called "abstract expressionism" as a counterweight to the socialist realism that was fostering such powerful works as the play Cradle Will Rock.

One hungers to know more about this little known aspect of art history, as well as to learn more about what concrete works of "communist influence" struck such fear in the hearts of the ruling class.

Vincent Ferrini was a GE factory worker and a former WPA worker in 1941 when his first book No Smoke was published. Its republication this year by Curious Traveler Press is a cause for celebration for all those interested in working class cultural work. It powerfully depicts the historical period portrayed in Cradle Will Rock - a period of mass unemployment and homelessness and hunger, but also mighty strikes and struggles for justice by working people. Together with other recently reprinted works like Philip Bonofsky's novel The Burning Valley, it is must reading for those seeking to build a 21st century working class culture.

No Smoke presents dramatic monologues of 75 persons, all drawn from life. One first thinks of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, but whereas Masters had his characters speaking from beyond the grave, Ferrini's factory workers, homeless, industrial magnates, newspaper owners, broken down ward heelers, and chamber of commerce secretaries, are all living, having survived the Depression, and locked uneasily into production for the coming war.

His poetry is a good example of how a work of literature, by being rooted in its time, can become for all time. In a series of monologues Ferrini deftly handles with equal facility the voices of Lynn's ruling class, its desperate middle strata, and its industrial proletariat.

Here are the voices of the bosses, full of praise for the "free enterprise system," when they are not busy blaming the poor and working people of Lynn, who "starve in the shadows of dead factories." Many are introduced by fellow bosses, encouraging the reader to explore the interconnections between them. (Originally, Ferrini sought to publish the book with the real names but purportedly the publisher relented, fearing a law suit.)

In the hands of Ferrini, these bosses are revealed for what they are, members of a dying capitalist class, representatives of a system that has outlived its time. Frequently their monologue betrays an unconscious irony, as in the case of sweatshop owner "Sarah Katsenclimer,"

"I hire and fire as I please.

No government is going to tell

Me how to run my factory.

And no union is ever going to order me!

This is a free country.

I buy the mayor, the police and the senators!"

For the most part, though, these figures rely on a crew of motley figures to administer the town. They depend on Arthur Lour, "brain of the Gas and Electric, and the Shoe Manufacturers, a genius for puncturing the boils of labor troubles," as well as "Attorney Kitkirt Sullivan, "slippery as an eel, prop of corporations," who "engineers the right people into office." Mary Mohr, "special police of the WPA" has eyes that "haunt workers, foreboding as a warrant to appear in court. No wonder she is elevated by those who know how to use her.

In this section Ferrini examines the myriad ways in which workers are divided from each other - whether through the use of racism, national chauvinism, and the threat of unemployment, or through the use of Democratic Party politics and the ideology of middle class "professionalism."

Perhaps my favorite poem in this circle is "Francis Halen." He is the owner and editor of the Lynn Evening Telegraph, a central political institution in Lynn life.

"Sits next to the mayor,

the brains behind the news.

The paper is safe,

runs it in his wife's name.

Kept editors feed

citizens a steady diet of dirt.

Blackmails with headlines.

No one can question him.

Prints only what advertisers like.

Owes money to everybody

and pays off in space.

Sells priceless knowledge for 2 cents.

With one hand shams support for the unions,

with the other stabs them.

Readers don't see him much

but read him daily.

He practices tactics that psychologists teach

and hoodwinks citizens into believing

the Evening Telegraph is their paper."

The blurbs on the back of the book justly compare Ferrini's poetry to the lyrics of the legendary songwriter Woody Guthrie and the writer John Steinbeck, and there are many searing portraits of lives wrecked in the 1930s by the system of production for profit.

But unlike those other more well known figures, Ferrini, a member of the Communist party at the time, places special emphasis on the working class - not only in portraying our daily lives, but in portraying our necessary fight against the causes of unemployment, war and homelessness, the capitalist class.

In the mid-twenties there were over 160 factories in Lynn. In the next fifteen years Lynn's industrial base would be decimated by layoffs. The battle for unionization, such as the massive General Electric plant by IUE, was the struggle by workers to survive. Here is "George Alkaluvious," laid off after 20 years at the shoe factory. It is quite simply one of the finest poems ever written about an industrial layoff.

"These tools know only my hands

and the machine intimate as my wife's body.

And now, "Sorry we can't use you

any longer. Too old. Too slow."

Can they take the calluses out of my hands,

make me see with these opera glasses;

iron the hill on my back

and the twist in my side

and wipe the ache of it off

and pay me back what I really earned?

They can't rob the best years of my life

and then throw me out in the gutter

like a dirty rag.

This machine and this job belongs

to me more than it does to the Boss."

There are many poignant poems about the plight of women workers and the oppression of women - whether through institutional sexism of the bosses or male chauvinism within the ranks of the working class. To my knowledge this is rare for a working class poet of this time.

There are a number of moving poems about workers who are members of the Communist Party in Lynn, as well as poems about several intellectuals organized the Party banner. This is a reflection of the hard work and rootedness of the Party in Lynn at that time. It is also due to the international crisis of capitalism worldwide, when millions were turning worldwide to the Party for answers.

What unites all the characters in Lynn is what Lenin called a prerevolutionary situation, if not yet a revolutionary one. The old cannot go on living in the old way, the center cannot hold, and the new is struggling to be born.

As the economic crisis deepens, each reacts in his or her own way. When "Leon Ireson" is disturbed by workers listening to the "filth of foreign ideas" at his WPA worksite, he turns to the "holy instructions" of Father Coughlin, a well-known proto-fascist and viciously anti-communist preacher of the time. "Oh Father, give now the word for our Christian fronts to act," he asks.

Other working people turn to the Communist Party in Lynn, containing as it does militants like "Hugo Arodian," "axle of the Communist Party." "Love flows out of him, flowering in others, and his enthusiasm is a fire fed by the oppressors' attacks against the people."

It is out of this landscape - the dying factories, the bread lines amid the rich growing richer, the new struggling to be born out of the shell of the old, capitalism in its death agony - that animates the great final poem of the book," The Factories."

Small press readers may remember Antler's great poem "Factory of the early eighties" which dealt with his own experience at Continental Can company. But unlike that poem Ferrini does not call for the destruction of the factory as an inherent "death machine." He sees the terrible suffering under capitalism, but also he sees its potential - if only workers would take hold of the means of production and wield them in their own interests. In the midst of the depression, it is a call for workers to not just "fight the power," but become the power. This is a call for socialism.

This question posed is the question still with us, as we face the deepening crisis of capitalist overproduction worldwide. (Change the name of "George Alkaluvious" and a few of the details and the Lynn shoe factory could just as easily be the Domino Sugar Plant in Brooklyn, where workers are presently waging a life and death strike for their jobs against the multinational corporation Tate and Lyle.)

Mike Gold in the Daily Worker once called the poems of Vincent Ferrini as "genuine as a soldier's wounds or a row of stamping machines." Walter Lowenfels hailed Ferrini as the last "proletarian poet." Wouldn't it be "poetic justice" if 60 years later No Smoke serves a bridge to a new generation of working people and cultural workers seeking to create a literature based on the working class?

Long ignored by the poetry establishment, No Smoke stands as one of the finest books of working-class poetry yet produced in the U.S. And now it lives again.

- Chris Butters