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Afterward the farmers held a mass meeting in Owensboro's public square, passed some resolutions. Most important were: 1) no crop to be planted next year; 2) a committee to go to Washington to confer with the Federal Farm Board on a tobacco pool. The farmers expected aid from the Board since its stated purpose has always been "to further co-operative marketing." Besides this, the Board's much-criticized chairman, James Clifton Stone, once organized southern tobacco growers into the Burley Tobacco Growers' Co-operative Assn., saw it become inactive, would know from experience what the Kentuckians were up against. After the demonstration in Owensboro, auctions were broken up in Henderson. Russellville, Franklin. Other imminent auctions were postponed.
Red Readers. The late great Samuel Gompers started life as a cigarmaker's "reader." Cigarmakers long ago found they could work better if their minds were occupied by having one of their number read aloud to them, the workers making up by pro rata contributions the cigars the reader would have made. Sam Gompers used to read from Dickens, Thackeray, John Stuart Mill, and for a time from Karl Marx, though he got over that after he founded the A. F. of L.
Last week 8,000 cigarmakers struck in Tampa, Fla. Their "readers" had been dismissed. Plant managers had caught them slipping bits of Communistic literature into their offerings. The workers struck in protest, claimed that only they could dismiss the readers since they paid them. The strike got serious when the workers went back, found the factories locked as the operators had warned they would be. Now deadlocked, the cigar industry is Tampa's biggest. Normal daily output is more than 1,000,000 cigars, the monthly payroll above $1,000,000.
* Very rapidly: "Thirty-two dollars bid; 32 dollars bid: 32, doo, doo, doo, diddy, doo dollars bid. . . . Thirty-eight dollars bid; thirty-eight dollars bid; 38, nate, nate, nate dollars bid. . . . All done—sole to. . . ."