1919 (58 page)

Next morning at nine he went down to Morris Stein's office with his suitcase in his hand. He'd made Fanya promise not to come. He had to tell himself several times he was going to jail, he felt as if he was going on a business trip of some kind. He had on a new suit of English tweed Fanya had bought him.

Lower Broadway was all streaked red, white and blue with flags; there were crowds of clerks and stenographers and officeboys lining both pavements where he came up out of the subway. Cops on motorcycles were keeping the street clear. From down towards the Battery came the sound of a military band playing
Keep the Home Fires Burning.
Everybody looked flushed and happy. It was hard to keep from walking in step to the music in the fresh summer morning that smelt of the harbor and ships. He had to keep telling himself: those are the people who sent Debs to jail, those are the people who shot Joe Hill, who murdered Frank Little, those are the people who beat us up in Everett, who want me to rot for ten years in jail.

The colored elevatorboy grinned at him when he took him up in the elevator, “Is they startin' to go past yet, mister?” Ben shook his head and frowned.

The lawoffice looked clean and shiny. The telephone girl had red hair and wore a gold star. There was an American flag draped over the door of Stein's private office. Stein was at his desk talking to an upperclasslooking young man in a tweed suit. “Ben,” Stein said cheerily, “meet Stevens Warner . . . He's just gotten out of Charlestown, served a year for refusing to register.”

“Not quite a year,” said the young man, getting up and shaking hands. “I'm out on good behavior.”

Ben didn't like him, in his tweed suit and his expensive looking necktie; all at once he remembered that he was wearing the same kind of suit himself. The thought made him sore. “How was it?” he asked coldly.

“Not so bad, they had me working in the greenhouse . . . They treated me fairly well when they found out I'd already been to the front.”

“How was that?”

“Oh, in the ambulance service. . . . They just thought I was mildly insane. . . . It was a damned instructive experience.”

“They treat the workers different,” said Ben angrily.

“And now we're going to start a nationwide campaign to get all the other boys out,” said Stein, getting to his feet and rubbing his hands, “starting with Debs . . . you'll see, Ben, you won't be down there long . . . people are coming to their senses already.”

A burst of brassy music came up from Broadway, and the regular tramp of soldiers marching. They all looked out of the window. All down the long grey canyon flags were streaming out, uncoiling tickertape and papers glinted all through the ruddy sunlight, squirmed in the shadows; people were yelling themselves hoarse.

“Damn fools,” said Warner, “it won't make the doughboys forget about K.P.”

Morris Stein came back into the room with a funny brightness in his eyes. “Makes me feel maybe I missed something.”

“Well, I've got to be going,” said Warner, shaking hands again. “You certainly got a rotten break, Compton . . . don't think for a minute we won't be working night and day to get you out . . . I'm sure public sentiment will change. We have great hopes of President Wilson . . . after all, his labor record was fairly good before the war.”

“I guess it'll be the workers will get me out, if I'm gotten out,” said Ben.

Warner's eyes were searching his face. Ben didn't smile. Warner stood before him uneasily for a moment and then took his hand again. Ben didn't return the pressure. “Good luck,” said Warner and walked out of the office.

“What's that, one of these liberalminded college boys?” Ben asked of Stein. Stein nodded. He'd gotten interested in some papers on his desk. “Yes . . . great boy, Steve Warner . . . you'll find some books or magazines in the library . . . I'll be with you in a few minutes.”

Ben went into the library and took down a book on Torts. He read and read the fine print. When Stein came to get him he didn't know what he'd been reading or how much time had passed. Walking up Broadway the going was slow on account of the crowds and the bands and the steady files of marching soldiers in khaki with tin hats on their heads. Stein nudged him to take his hat off as a regimental flag passed them in the middle of a fife and drum corps. He kept it in his hand so as not to have to take it off again. He took a deep breath of the dusty sunny air of the street, full of girls' perfumerysmells and gasoline from the exhaust of the trucks hauling the big guns, full of laughing and shouting and shuffle and tramp of feet; then the dark doorway of the Federal Building gulped them.

It was a relief to have it all over, alone with the deputy on the train for Atlanta. The deputy was a big morose man with bluish sacks under his eyes. As the handcuffs cut Ben's wrist he unlocked them except when the train was in a station. Ben remembered it was his birthday; he was twentythree years old.

in British Colonial Office quarters it is believed that Australian irritation will diminish as soon as it is realized that the substance is more important than the shadow. It may be stated that press representatives who are expeditious in sending their telegrams at an early hour, suffer because their telegrams are thrown into baskets. Others which come later are heaped on top of them and in the end the messages on top of the basket are dealt with first. But this must not be taken as an insult. Count von Brochdorf-Ranzau was very weak and it was only his physical condition that kept him from rising

 

PRIVATES HOLD UP CABMAN

 

Hold the fort for we are coming

Union men be strong;

Side by side we battle onward
,

Victory will come.

 

New York City Federation Says Evening Gowns Are Demoralizing Youth of the Land

 

SOLDIERS OVERSEAS FEAR LOSS OF GOLD V

 

CONSCRIPTION A PUZZLE

 

Is there hostile propaganda at work in Paris?

 

We meet today in Freedom's cause

   
And raise our voices high

We'll join our hands in union strong

To battle or to die

 

FRANCE YET THE FRONTIER OF FREEDOM

 

provision is made whereby the wellbeing and development of backward and colonial regions are regarded as the sacred trust of civilization over which the league of nations exercises supervising care

 

REDS WEAKENING WASHINGTON HEARS

 

Hold the fort for we are coming

Union men be strong

 

the marine workers affiliation meeting early last night at no. 26 Park Place voted to start a general walkout at 6
A.M.
tomorrow

 

BURLESON ORDERS ALL POSTAL
TELEGRAPH NEWS SUPPRESSED

 

his reply was an order to his followers to hang these two lads on the spot. They were placed on chairs under trees, halters fastened on the boughs were placed around their necks, and then they were maltreated until they pushed the chair away from them with their feet in order to finish their torments

four hours we casuals pile up scrapiron in the flatcars and four hours we drag the scrapiron off the flatcars and pile it on the side of the track      KEEP THE BOYS FIT TO GO HOME is the slogan of the YMCA      in the morning the shadows of the poplars point west and in the afternoon they point out east where Persia is the jagged bits of old iron cut into our hands through the canvas gloves a kind of grey slagdust plugs our noses and ears stings eyes      four hunkies      a couple of wops      a bohunk      dagoes      guineas      two little dark guys with blue chins nobody can talk to

spare parts no outfit wanted to use

mashed mudguards busted springs old spades and shovels entrenching tools twisted hospital cots      a mountain of nuts and bolts of all sizes      four million miles of barbedwire chickenwire rabbitfence      acres      of      tin      roofing      square      miles      of      parked trucks      long parades of locomotives strung along the yellow rails of the sidings

KEEP THE BOYS FIT TO GO up in the office the grumpy sergeants doing the paperwork dont know where home is lost our outfits our service records our aluminum numberplates no spika de Engliss no entiendo comprend pas no capisco nyeh panimayoo

day after day the shadows of the poplars point west northwest north northeast east      When they desoit they always heads south the corporal said      Pretty tough but if he aint got a soivice record how can we make out his discharge KEEP OUR BOYS FIT for whatthehell the war's over

scrap

it was a gala day for Seattle. Enormous crowds not only filled the streets on the line of march from the pier but finally later in the evening machineguns were placed in position, the guardsmen withstanding a shower of missles until their inaction so endangered them the officers gave the order to fire. WOULD CUT OFF LIGHT. President Lowell of Harvard University has urged the students to serve as strikebreakers. “In accordance with its tradition of public service, the university desires at this time of crisis to maintain order and support the laws of the Commonwealth.”

 

THREE ARMIES FIGHT FOR KIEW

 

Calls Situation a Crime against Civilization

 

TO MAKE US INVULNERABLE

 

during the funeral services of Horace Traubel, literary executor and biographer of Walt Whitman, this afternoon, a fire broke out in the Unitarian Church of the Messiah. Periodicals, tugboats and shipyards were effected. 2000 passengers held up at Havre from which Mr. Wilson embarked to review the Pacific fleet, but thousands were massed on each side of the street seemingly satisfied merely to get a glimpse of the President. As the
George Washington
steamed slowly to her berth in Hoboken through the crowded lower bay, every craft afloat gave welcome to King Albert and Queen Elizabeth by hoarse blasts of their whistles

 

CRUCIBLE STEEL CONTINUES TO LEAD MARKET

 

My country 'tis of thee

Sweet land of libertee

Of thee I sing

When Wesley Everest came home from overseas and got his discharge from the army he went back to his old job of logging. His folks were of the old Kentucky and Tennessee stock of woodsmen and squirrelhunters who followed the trail blazed by Lewis and Clark into the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope. In the army Everest was a sharpshooter, won a medal for a crack shot.

(Since the days of the homesteaders the western promoters and the politicians and lobbyists in Washington had been busy with the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope, with the result that:

 

ten monopoly groups aggregating only one thousand eight hundred and two holders, monopolized one thousand two hundred and eight billion, eight hundred million
,

[1,208,800,000,000]

square feet of standing timber,. . . enough standing timber . . . to yield the planks necessary [over and above the manufacturing wastage] to make a floating bridge more than two feet thick and more than five miles wide from New York to Liverpool;—

 

wood for scaffolding, wood for jerrybuilding residential suburbs, billboards, wood for shacks and ships and shantytowns, pulp for tabloids, yellow journals, editorial pages, advertising copy, mail-order catalogues, filingcards, army paperwork, handbills, flimsy.)

 

Wesley Everest was a logger like Paul Bunyan.

The lumberjacks, loggers, shingleweavers, sawmill workers were the helots of the timber empire; the I.W.W. put the idea of industrial democracy in Paul Bunyan's head; wobbly organizers said the forests ought to belong to the whole people, said Paul Bunyan ought to be paid in real money instead of in company scrip, ought to have a decent place to dry his clothes, wet from the sweat of a day's work in zero weather and snow, an eight hour day, clean bunkhouses, wholesome grub; when Paul Bunyan came back from making Europe safe for the democracy of the Big Four, he joined the lumberjack's local to help make the Pacific slope safe for the workingstiffs. The wobblies were reds. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan's ascared of.

(To be a red in the summer of 1919 was worse than being a hun or a pacifist in the summer of 1917.)

 

The timber owners, the sawmill and shinglekings were patriots; they'd won the war (in the course of which the price of lumber had gone up from $16 a thousand feet to $116; there are even cases where the government paid as high as $1200 a thousand for spruce); they set out to clean the reds out of the logging camps;

free American institutions must be preserved at any cost;

so they formed the Employers Association and the Legion of Loyal Loggers, they made it worth their while for bunches of ex-soldiers to raid I.W.W. halls, lynch and beat up organizers, burn subversive literature.

 

On Memorial Day 1918 the boys of the American Legion in Centralia led by a group from the Chamber of Commerce wrecked the I.W.W. hall, beat up everybody they found in it, jailed some and piled the rest of the boys in a truck and dumped them over the county line, burned the papers and pamphlets and auctioned off the fittings for the Red Cross; the wobblies' desk still stands in the Chamber of Commerce.

The loggers hired a new hall and the union kept on growing. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan's ascared of.