The Dollfuss regime took a rap on the knuckles yesterday from tens of thoudands workers, Socialists and Communists whose collective protest against the treatment accorded militant Socialists in Austria made Madison Square Garden resound with a demonstration the like of which New York City has not seen in a generation.
Feeling ran high in condemnation in Austrain but although this was the dwarfed by fratricidal strife among the factions of trade unions and other labor groups which manifested itself in several hours of bitter argument and recriminations and which finally ended in a near riot. Police, ordered to keep their nightsticks, were practically helpless.
About 500,000 workers in the city had received instructions to quit work at 3 o’clock and, and a considerable number, commandeered by charman of various trade unions, marched to the Garden which houses a mere 23,000 persons. Loud speakers were installed for the overflow crowd.
The Garden was for a good many hours yesterday the arena for verbal skirmishes which led to the inevitable conclusion that although the workers many be united in their hostility to the Dollfuss methods in Austria, they are far from having the faintest semblance of union in any other province of thought.
Besides the Mayor and Mr. Woll, the speakers, were Dr. Jhon Haynes Holmes, Jacob Panken, David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Germant Workers Union; Luigi Antunini, leader of the Itatian dressmakers in the city, Joseph Schlossberg, general secretary of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers; Salvatore Ninafo, vice-president of the I. L. G. W. U.; Abraharn Caban, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward.
Also Julius Hochman, manager of the dressmakers’ union; Max Yaritsky, general secretary of the Millinery Workers Union; Isidore Nagler, manager of the joint board of the cloakmaers’ union; Jacob Baskin, general secretary of the Workmen’s Circle; of the Socialist party; Maurice Finestone, secretary of the United Hebrew Trades, and Abraham Miller of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
