You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross and he’ll be all right.

You tell poor people they don’t need any more money on pay day, and even if it’s fierce to be out of a job, Jesus’ll fix that all right, all right—all they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say.

I’m telling you this Jesus guy wouldn’t stand for the stuff you’re handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers and corporation lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus wouldn’t play their game. He didn’t sit in with the big thieves.

I don’t want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.

I won’t take my religion from a man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes a memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar.

I ask you to come through and show me where you’re pouring out the blood of your life.

I’ve been out to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha, where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is straight it was real blood ran from his hands and the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted out where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.

The Eastland

Let’s be honest now

For a couple of minutes

Even though we’re in Chicago.

Since you ask me about it,

I let you have it straight;

My guts ain’t ticklish about the Eastland.

It was a hell of a job, of course

To dump 2,500 people in their clean picnic clothes

All ready for a whole lot of real fun

Down into the dirty Chicago river without any warning.

Women and kids, wet hair and scared faces,

The coroner hauling truckloads of the dripping dead

To the Second Regiment armory where doctors waited

With useless pulmotors and the eight hundred motionless stiff

Lay ready for their relatives to pick them out on the floor

And take them home and call up an undertaker . . .

Well I was saying

My guts ain’t ticklish about it.

I got imagination: I see a pile of three thousand dead people

Killed by the con,* tuberculosis, too much work

and not enough fresh air and green groceries

A lot of cheap roughnecks and the women and children of wops,

and hardly any bankers and corporation lawyers or their kids,

die from the con—three thousand a year in Chicago and a

hundred and fifty thousand a year in the United States—all

from the con and not enough fresh air and green groceries . . .

If you want to see excitement, more noise and crying than you ever

heard in one of these big disasters the newsboys clean up on,